Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-Winning journalist, truth teller and Conspiracy Theorist, joins Russell Brand to discuss his new podcast, "Systems Update," hosted by Russell Brand. They discuss the current state of American politics and how the deep state is trying to delegitimize the Trump administration, and how they plan to make sure that Donald Trump does not become the next president of the United States. They also discuss how the Deep State is planning to subvert Trump's presidency, and what they are planning to do if he does become the president, and why it's going to be so hard to stop him. Russell Brand is the host of the popular podcast Stay Free With Russell Brand, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, CBS, NPR, and many other media outlets. He is also the co-host of Systems Update, and hosts a live show on RUMBLE, a new show on which he hosts a chat with Russell Brand where they discuss the events of the past, present, and future of the American political system and how it intersects with the technology and political landscape. You can expect weekly episodes every available as Video, Podcast, and blogpost, every Friday at 7 PM ET/PT. Subscribe to stay free with Russi Brand wherever you get your news and information. You can also become a supporter of his work by becoming a patron of his channel, RUMBLERUP.org/StayFree. Stay free with RussellBrand. Thank you for listening and supporting his work. RATE 5 stars! Rate/subscribe in Apple Podcasts! Rate, review, comment and subscribe to stayfree with RUMERUP! Subscribe on iTunes and subscribe on Podcoin.fm/RUMBLEttr/RUNNERDSRUPTER? Learn more about Russell Brand's new book, RATE FREE on Audible and other great books we're listening to this podcast on our new episodes on our podcast, RAY MCCARTNERDSYTHON BONUS CONTENT: FREE PRODUCING HERE PODCAST: The Best of the Week: Watch us on Amazon Prime Video and more than $5,000 in paperback and paperback Subscribe & Reviewed on Podulphia? Subscribe for a chance to win a copy of his new book out in paperback or paperback? FREE FASTEST TRAINING TRAINER?
00:02:39.000Let me know if it was a surprising Davos for you.
00:02:41.000Maybe Javier Mele surprised you somewhat.
00:02:43.000Let me know in the comments on Rumble.
00:02:45.000And if you are an Awakened Wonder, please let me know what you think in the chat over there.
00:02:50.000If you're watching us on YouTube, the first 15 minutes of our conversation with Glenn Greenwald, world educator, true journalist, truth teller, Pulitzer Prize winner, and of course now conspiracy theorist, will only be available on Rumble.
00:03:07.000We'll do the first part with you on YouTube because we love you and we respect and appreciate your awakening, but We will have to wade into that stream of freedom that is Rumble in order to speak freely about ideas, policies and actions that are antithetical to the interests of the powerful.
00:03:24.000And if that's a trajectory that's interesting to you, you will want to become a subscriber over on Locals.
00:03:29.000We'll post the link in the description on Rumble right now for that and let you know how you can become part of our movement, support us and support this ongoing fight against the corruption that you rightly Loath.
00:03:40.000Glenn is of course a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist.
00:03:43.000He co-founded The Intercept and I think then they threw him out.
00:03:46.000He got an award for breaking the Edward Snowden story.
00:03:49.000He hosts Systems Update live on Rumble weeknights at 7 p.m.
00:03:54.000And some of this conversation was available on Locals.
00:03:58.000In fact, it was available in its entirety unedited.
00:04:02.000So if you are a legacy media journalist and you're spending your time scrambling around finding ways to try to oppose a movement that does have you in its sights, then You can join us on Locals as well.
00:04:13.000It'll be helpful for you to get more stories on us.
00:04:15.000But let me tell you, it's going to be hard to stop this movement now, baby.
00:04:19.000So, without further ado, Glenn, thank you so much for joining us today.
00:04:23.000It's an honour to have you, as always.
00:04:26.000Always a pleasure to see you, Russell.
00:04:29.000It seems like the landscape of American politics has been irrevocably altered.
00:04:34.000There is no chance that the Republican Party will ever be recaptured by what might have been regarded as conventional or traditional interests.
00:04:43.000And yet there is an appetite to homogenize the central space of the American political system.
00:04:50.000Do you think, bearing in mind we're broadcasting this after New Hampshire, it seems that Trump's ascendancy to the nomination is assured and that even within the Republican Party and beyond it, within the American representative democracy more broadly, there is still no antidote for this phenomena and that they are still flailing and conflicted in how to address this, both within media and political circles?
00:05:18.000I think the key truth that people have to realize if they want to pay attention to politics on a kind of deeper level than just what pundits say on cable news shows is the understanding of power works.
00:05:29.000And how power works for me as the first law is that establishment forces that wield power not only don't give it up easily, they will fight to the death to hold on to it.
00:05:42.000You can look at pretty much every historical event where people are fighting over who will build power.
00:05:47.000And if you try and take power away from status quo institutions, whatever you want to call them, they will do everything and anything, like cornered rats, to keep it.
00:05:57.000So you see, first of all, pouring $250 million into Nikki Haley's campaign to stop Trump from the presidency.
00:06:04.000Obviously, if that doesn't work, which it likely will not, Then you have all these prosecutions.
00:06:10.000I mean, they're serious about forcing Trump to run from prison as the leading presidential candidate from a jail cell or from a courtroom, which is, you know, such an extraordinary recipe for civil unrest that they don't care about because they're so desperate.
00:06:26.000And then even if he overcomes all that and wins, we're going to have the kind of subversion of his elected presidency that we saw in 2016, where the U.S.
00:06:37.000security state, the deep state, working hand-in-hand with the media, went to work to try and destroy and sabotage him in every single way, to even encourage people in his administration, generals and the like, to ignore and subvert his orders In order to neutralize whatever he wants to do.
00:07:29.000It was interesting to see the guy, is he called Diamond, who's from JP Morgan, sort of at Davos, casually advocating or at least assuaging fears around a potential Trump presidency.
00:07:45.000Certainly he was using some populist language.
00:07:47.000It seems to me Unlikely, Glenn, that something as plausible as a Trump presidency could be allowed to go ahead without some contingency in place.
00:07:58.000Do you think when you hear high profile figures from the financial world cautiously backing Trump, or at least being open to a Trump presidency, that's an indication that they can accommodate his ascent Even without the kind of obstacles that you've indicated could be put in place, i.e.
00:08:13.000to some degree, could a Trump presidency ever be co-opted by the same globalist interests that you say are now cowering like rats at the emergence of such a popular figure?
00:08:25.000I think it's very difficult to imagine Jamie Dimon, of all people, the head of JP Morgan, the person who was so enamored of President Obama that he treated him like the second coming of Christ and Obama.
00:08:44.000Suddenly embracing populist sentiments and trying to say, hey, you know what, they kind of have a point.
00:08:49.000I think what he was doing there instead was offering strategic advice, which is one of the ways that establishments can co-opt anti-establishment sentiment is by ceasing to be overtly hostile to them, not insulting them, not telling them they have nothing valid to believe, telling them that they're all racist, telling them that they're going to be in prison, And instead kind of throwing them some crumbs to keep them a little bit satiated, to keep them placated.
00:09:18.000That's really been the history of the United States and the capitalist society we have.
00:09:21.000The way we've been able to tolerate massive inequality is occasionally you have things like the New Deal, things to ameliorate the edges of harsh capitalism just enough to keep people Not quite willing to go out onto the streets and risk their lives to protest.
00:09:38.000I saw Jamie Dimon's little speech in Davos more as a way of saying, look, what we're doing isn't working.
00:09:44.000We're fueling all these anti-establishment and populist movements, not just in the U.S., but throughout Western Europe.
00:09:50.000I think we need to change our tact and start talking to them and about them with a little bit more respect so they start believing we understand their sentiments and aren't completely hostile to and at war with them.
00:10:04.000The last time we spoke, you said that in previous times of mass inequality, there were tokenistic moves, you said, from the likes of the Rockefellers who might cast dollar bills from a passing limousine as a plutocratic gesture to the proletariat.
00:10:22.000And then you said, but these days, with the rise of the militarisation of the police force, anti-protest laws, ongoing surveillance measures, it seems less necessary to even mitigate these rising tensions. And I've felt with
00:10:36.000speculation around a second pandemic, the disease X, with fear mongering around potential cyber
00:10:44.000attacks, with the escalating wars around the world, with the unique configuration of
00:10:50.000global elections this year, that there is something precipitous happening, that it is
00:10:57.000possible and plausible that the prognoses of giddy, shamanic outlier figures in the dark web are
00:11:07.000closer to being accurate than the kind of of care.
00:11:12.000Casual dampening down of expectations that you might read in ordinary mainstream media.
00:11:19.000Do you think that we are on the precipice of moves towards a more globalist authoritarian regime?
00:11:28.000Do you feel like the pieces are observable?
00:11:34.000Do you think it can be averted or do you think that that's a sort of a hysterical perspective?
00:11:41.000There's no doubt that that's happening.
00:11:43.000I mean, you don't have to be a remote conspiracy theorist, you don't have to be particularly insightful not to impugn the high quality of your observation, but I don't even think it requires that much insight to see that when you have things like one country after the next, Adopting brand new laws to provide really extreme powers, unaccountable, unreviewable, extreme powers to governments to censor the internet and punish people for failing to remove content that these governments deem dangerous or false.
00:12:19.000You see this law in the EU, in the UK, in Canada, in Brazil, in Ireland, in all parts of the democratic world now, and you've seen it already in places like the Persian Gulf long ago, that give these states enormous power over the instrument that was supposed to be The thing that guaranteed us the ability to communicate with one another and to organize.
00:12:43.000They decided after 2016, when they had these dual traumas of Brexit being approved and then Hillary losing to Trump, that they simply could no longer allow a free internet and free discourse over the internet because it's too out of their control.
00:13:00.000And ever since then, they've clamped down on free thought and free discourse, on the right to protest.
00:13:06.000I mean, I think the thing that happened in Canada with the trucker protest, I even think some of the things you're seeing now with these pro-Palestinian protests throughout Europe and in the United States, where the reaction has been to crack down, because whatever your view on that war is, those protests are against the policy of the EU and the United States that supports Israel.
00:13:25.000You're seeing with the right to protest, the right to free speech, the right to organize, the right to use the internet, increasingly repressive systems of control that are designed to curb some of these kind of wild excesses that elite see people engaging in, and they're trying to regain control of how people think, how they behave, and put limits on what they can say and do.
00:13:47.000You and I have both had in a peculiar way comparable journeys from darlings of different aspects of the establishment.
00:13:54.000You obviously as a very highly regarded and decorated journalist to apostate and attacker of the establishment.
00:14:02.000I have from being a Hollywood insider to being very much an outsider and extremely publicly Maligned.
00:14:11.000I always assumed, particularly perhaps around the time of Occupy, that radical movements such as you are describing, or at least you're describing the potential for with the communications miracle that is being addressed through these highly sensorial measures, that it would bear the hue of a kind of culturally progressive Leftist revolutionary movement.
00:14:38.000Plainly that's not the case with the cultural left aligning itself with authoritarianism.
00:14:46.000What type of aesthetic is it going to be?
00:14:49.000Particularly when I speak to some journalists who say that even figures like Javier Mele or indeed Donald Trump are ultimately aligned with economic interests that are not Anti-establishment in practice.
00:15:06.000What kind of inflection do you imagine that these movements might bear?
00:15:11.000Is this something that you think about?
00:15:14.000Glenn, I'm gonna have to stop you before I pose the next question because we are going to leave YouTube now.
00:15:19.000If you're watching us there, have a look.
00:15:23.000Right now, that tells you how you can become an awakened wonder.
00:15:25.000But you can continue to watch this absolutely free on Rumble right now.
00:15:30.000Not only can you watch it for free, the speech will be free and mellifluous, flowing effortlessly as if there is an invisible thread connecting all things available to us now, granting us Great power, the very power that you're going to need to change your life and that we are going to need to change the world together.
00:15:58.000You can join the likes of Ashella, SensitiveHearts25, all of these people, members of our community, trusted and adored, safe aboard the Ark, Waiting for the next movement of this glorious evolving revolution that we are part of together.
00:16:17.000Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question because in the 60s and the 70s the primary threat posed to American power and American domestic stability largely came from the American left, from the anti-war movement, from the civil rights movement, from a lot of black radical groups like the Black Panthers, Malcolm X and all those sorts of movements that were largely, not entirely, but largely left-wing.
00:16:42.000As a result, all of the weapons assembled to combat them—the CIA, the FBI, the U.S.
00:16:47.000security state, all these laws, infiltration—became an enemy of the American left.
00:16:52.000That's why the American left, for decades, had always had a very jaundiced view of these security state agencies, of the U.S.
00:16:59.000federal government, And then what happened in the era of Trump and the emergence of right-wing populism, not just in the United States but around the world, is the security states switched.
00:17:08.000They no longer think that left-wing radicalism is harmful.
00:17:38.000I mean, you look at their doctrine and they say the greatest threat to United States national security is not Iran or Raqqa.
00:17:44.000or Russia or Al-Qaeda or Hamas or Hezbollah.
00:17:48.000It's right-wing extremism here at home.
00:17:50.000They've made right-wing extremism, namely the anti-establishment populist right of Donald Trump, the greatest threat.
00:17:59.000That's why they needed to call them an insurrectionary movement to justify all the surveillance on them and the criminalization of them.
00:18:05.000And of course it switched so that now most of the liberal left sees the U.S.
00:18:09.000security state as their ally against Trump and right-wing populism.
00:18:13.000And especially that's true because the culture war has now become so important on the liberal left.
00:18:18.000You know, LGBT issues and trans issues and abortion and all that and women's rights and minority rights.
00:18:24.000And, you know, the CIA and the FBI are very happy to go along with that.
00:18:28.000You know, every week they're posting like, hey, happy Indigenous Day and take a look at our bipolar trans, you know, operative in the field.
00:18:38.000And it's really done a great job of persuading, you know, they sold the war in Ukraine that way, also the war in Israel, like, hey, this is good for LGBT rights.
00:18:45.000So the kind of establishment has done a very good job of branding itself as left-liberal from a culture war perspective and aligning itself with the liberal left by making their primary enemy the same enemy that the left has, which is right-wing populism and Trump.
00:18:59.000And it has completely reversed the political dynamics in this country of who trusts those agencies and who doesn't, who cares about free speech and who doesn't.
00:19:09.000And the reason is, is because these Western power centers do now view right-wing populism, anti-establishment politics, even from the left but also from the right, to be their greatest threat.
00:19:23.000I'm astonished at how effective that modality has been in rebranding deep state interests and formerly assumed bad actors such as the CIA, as well as globalist corporate interests.
00:19:34.000We saw this, of course, during the pandemic, where the formerly loathed pharmaceutical industry were welcomed with open arms as saviors.
00:19:43.000And it's astonishing to me that in such a relatively short period of time, such an effective rebrand can be enacted.
00:19:50.000It leaves me though with questions about the depth of anti-establishment feeling that was ever present in the left and perhaps it was a brief cultural hiatus that just took place in that sort of post-beat cultural revolution moment of the 60s and immediately receded into, you know, that perhaps The left has always been authoritarianism, certainly it's been centrist, and centrism and authoritarianism might easily be aligned with one another.
00:20:18.000And the other question that leaves me with, Glenn, is what type of, other than libertarianism practiced at the level of the individual, Aligned with some principles gleaned from Christianity and patriotism, what kind of movement is likely to emerge out of this new feared MAGA Trump populist movement?
00:20:42.000If we've already had four years of it, where is a true anti-establishment movement, if you agree that what's happening on the right isn't one, is likely to emerge?
00:20:55.000Well, I think one of the problems with the anti-right populist movement is that there's a lot of doctrinal ambiguity and even a lot of doctrinal conflict.
00:21:04.000So, you know, you might have seen people like Steve Bannon saying things like, oh, we need economic populism in this country.
00:21:10.000We need to go to war against the bankers and the globalists and protect Social Security and Medicare and raise taxes on the rich.
00:21:18.000And that was Donald Trump's campaign rhetoric in 2016, but then he gets into office in 2017 and one of the first things he does is he cuts corporate taxes for the wealthiest, increasing the debt, feeding all the corporate donors in the swamp that he said he would drain, actually one of the best presidents they could possibly have had, making Mitch McConnell and his donors and lobbyists very happy.
00:21:38.000And I don't think there's been a kind of coherent anti-right populist, anti-establishment politics that has fully emerged.
00:21:45.000If you look, for example, at the way economic populism works on the right, if you look at people like Donald Trump, who say we're never going to let them touch Social Security and Medicaid, and you look at Marine Le Pen, who actually ran to the left, Pretty much every party in France, including the socialists, when it came to things like raising retirement benefits and opposing increased retirement age, these things, you know, the idea of right-wing populism is let's close the borders, get rid of the people who don't belong here, but then make life better for our own citizens.
00:22:17.000If you don't get somebody like Malay in Argentina or even Bolsonaro in Brazil who kind of gets grouped into anti-establishment right-wing populism just because they kind of rail against the same elites that everybody hates, That has nothing to do with those people.
00:22:31.000I mean, Bolsonaro hired, you know, kind of like an austerity-mad University of Chicago economist, Paolo Schetti, to be his minister of the economy.
00:22:41.000Mollet is a really hardcore libertarian, you know, like, let's deconstruct the government, get rid of social programs that help the poor, just let the free market run wild.
00:22:52.000So I don't think there's a clarity of thought yet, but I think the important nugget that does tie it together that is important and that can be worked with They've identified correctly who the enemies are, who the people are who are wielding power, and the ways in which that power is being wielded correctly.
00:23:09.000There is obviously a tendency to conflate a divergent range of interests in the way that you've just described because of the way that media functions now and of course politicians in places like Hungary and Brazil and Argentina are going to be at odds with one another and dealing with a sort of a different range of challenges and problems even though the enemy is likely to be the same because globalism is real and if even within the sort of right when all of these sort of figures these populist figures are Is it necessary that the opposition to globalism is in itself global?
00:23:49.000And is this even something that there can be a contingency for, Glenn?
00:23:52.000Or is it that we simply have to continually identify corruption and hypocrisy in the manner in which you do?
00:24:01.000And allow whatever movements emerge as a result of that, because I see independent media clearly relating to independent political movements, just if you take the example of RFK.
00:24:13.000It's unthinkable that that would have happened 20 years ago, that he would have, you know, without the support of legacy media, been able to rise to the prominence that, you know, who knows where it will lead, but at least he's popular.
00:24:24.000And a few years ago, he's someone I wouldn't have on a podcast because he's, you know, he was just a pariah.
00:24:29.000So, yeah, I wonder then, are we at risk of, because of the nature of globalism, simplifying what type of form opposition to globalism might take because it is a ubiquitous phenomena but that may not require a ubiquitous response?
00:24:48.000I do think it's important to have a positive, coherent agenda that people by and large who are part of the same movement more or less agree on.
00:24:56.000Obviously, you're going to have differences and some, you know, debates on the margin.
00:25:00.000Because anti-establishment hatred gets you only so far.
00:25:05.000You know, you can kind of get rid of certain establishments, certain groups of authority, but then if you don't have a clear idea for what replaces them, you're gonna have a lot of people within that movement that did that, that think those people didn't go far enough.
00:25:23.000Then you're going to have people in that movement who think it went way too far, and you're going to have people who think, no, it just needs to be on a completely different path.
00:25:33.000You look now at the America First ideology, which speaks a lot about things like non-interventionism, about focusing on America before we start financing foreign wars, and yet suddenly you have a lot of people who identify that way, as wanting to fund the war in Israel, wanting to deploy American troops to the Middle East to get involved in all these Middle East wars that I thought we were supposed to be done with to protect Israel.
00:25:57.000You have a lot of people wanting to confront China and kind of turn everything into a Cold War, which of course is going to only fuel the intelligence agencies and the arms industries that a lot of people say that they're against.
00:26:09.000So I'm seeing a lot of ideological incoherence that at some point is going to have to be resolved in some way.
00:26:19.000Otherwise, you're just going to have this mishmash of ideas that I think is going to end up replicating or won't have the focus necessary to overthrow establishment doctrines, even if you put different people in place.
00:26:32.000Yes, because if ultimately these movements are undergirded by, if not the same, but comparable economic interests, there's a trajectory that can be predicted.
00:26:43.000Ultimately, the resources will be directed to operate with and move within the lines that are established, always within that kind of framework.
00:26:54.000I suppose that's why it's Interesting and such a hideous phantom from the past to consider those truly ideological movements that were to some degree not materialistic, i.e.
00:27:06.000the great movements of the 20th century.
00:27:10.000We'll acknowledge the horrors that they led to.
00:27:12.000But when you start to establish ideals that are not about materialism, and it seems that much of the populist America First or, you know, many of the ethno-national, even if they're not explicitly ethno-national, even if they're sort of patriotic or nostalgic, Many of these movements seem to me to be trying to revitalise and establish a kind of a sense of purpose, a sense of tribe, a sense of unity, a sense of coherence, a sense of meaning that goes beyond we're just going to let the markets decide or we're going to let globalists or, you know, in the case of the region of the world I live in, sort of EU bureaucrats determine what our life and lifestyles are going to be.
00:27:51.000It seems to me that that's kind of what's burgeoning, that's what's, you know, waiting to be born,
00:27:57.000something that is explicitly anti-materialist perhaps, or certainly anti-establishment
00:28:03.000is, seems like a step in the direction of movements that are not able
00:28:08.000to be housed within the current rubric. Yeah, I mean if you look at, let
00:28:14.000me just give you a If you look at Vivek Ramaswamy's campaign, that was, I think, very difficult to pigeonhole ideologically.
00:28:22.000One of its principal themes, I would say, its central theme, was that the main problem with the United States is not that we have too much debt or social spending or this or that, that we've lost any kind of purpose greater than ourselves.
00:28:35.000And so everybody wakes up every day and focuses on their little job in their cubicles, People don't have religion, they don't have spirituality, and that's why everybody's on antidepressants, everybody's depressed, everybody has, you know, all kinds of mental health struggles.
00:28:48.000Because if you don't have a, you know, we're social animals, we're meant to be part of something bigger than ourselves.
00:28:55.000And if you lose that as a country, and I think this is a big part of right-wing populism, Then you lose what it means to be human, you know, this kind of connective tissue that makes us feel like we are part of something.
00:29:08.000The other issue is, you know, if you look at what Steve Bannon was saying in 2016, I once got in trouble because I said, I think Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson are both more socialists than a lot of people who identify that way.
00:29:21.000And if you listen to what Steve Bannon was saying during the 2016 campaign, or if you listen to what Tucker Carlson in 2018 did one of the most anti-capitalist segments on Fox News that I've ever seen in my life.
00:29:32.000It was kind of like, what are all these hedge fund managers who are billionaire overlords actually doing for our country?
00:29:38.000They suck out wealth, they de-industrialize our country, and then all this wealth is just banker wealth.
00:29:48.000And I think Steve Bannon has a lot of that sense, too.
00:29:51.000You know, this kind of idea that what you need actually is greater empowerment of American workers.
00:29:56.000Now, that has to be paired in their view with the idea that you can't have millions of people
00:30:01.000flowing over the border into the country, especially illegally every year,
00:30:05.000otherwise we'll lose the ability to, you know, kind of have a healthy society
00:30:11.000where people can live fulfilling, economically prosperous lives.
00:30:15.000But a lot of that ideology is focused on the need to get away from corporatism,
00:30:20.000this kind of extreme view of capitalism, and return to a sort of sense of
00:30:24.000What is the welfare, prosperity, and happiness of the ordinary citizen?
00:30:28.000Similarly, Tucker notably opposed that other great myth of our time, progressivism.
00:30:35.000And I don't mean cultural, but the idea, of course, that we are broadly progressing along technological and medicinal lines, Reaching Icarus-like, and we all know how he ended up, into New Apolline territories when he said that he wouldn't hesitate to ban AI truckers and automated work in order to facilitate greater negotiating conditions for American workers and drivers.
00:31:01.000And it seems to me that those kind of principles, when espoused by someone who identifies with conservatism, Likely come from many of the principles of fraternity that would be found in Christianity, and it's often said of British socialism that it owes more to Methodism than to Marx.
00:31:20.000That having a set of social principles, I don't mean socialist principles, but the idea that people oughtn't only be regarded in terms of their utility, and when their utility expires, so do they.
00:31:32.000These values, these ideas, which, you know, I can see why they might be coupled with anti-immigrant pro-boundary type politics, it seems to me,
00:31:40.000have a kind of a certain value to them and they're certainly values that appear to be popular and
00:31:48.000ultimately I figure that even if these views are at odds with many of the sort of contemporary
00:31:55.000ideas around battle, you know, no boundaries and immigration is beneficial.
00:31:59.000I suppose these things, kind of, if people have the right to hear those views, don't they?
00:32:03.000And have the right to entertain them and even vote for them.
00:32:11.000In the 2022 French election, when Macron was re-elected, It was right around that time, maybe it was a little bit after, when the French were riding the way they always do, but this time it was over Macron's attempt to increase the retirement age by two years from, I think, 62 to 64, which obviously for the United States, where it's been 65 for a long time, seems like a big luxury.
00:32:34.000But in Western Europe, they've always valued more this idea that you retire earlier, you have more workers' rights.
00:32:56.000How much utility do you have to a corporation?
00:32:58.000How much utility do you have with your labor?
00:33:00.000How much utility do you have to the economy?
00:33:02.000So that the minute you lose that, you kind of lose your wealth, your value as a person, as you were just saying.
00:33:08.000And he was saying that this ability to work your whole life, 40 years of hard labor, and then get to, you know, 62 and maybe have like 10 years based on life expectancy, where you kind of get to reflect and ponder and like read and do what you want, this kind of human freedom that you don't have when you're working hard jobs five days a week, 40 hours a day.
00:33:32.000is of such great human value, especially at the end of your life, to kind of rob that in order to empower the IMF and the World Bank and European elites in Germany.
00:33:44.000And I think this is something that you could hear and resonate just as much on whatever is called the far-right or the populist-right, this kind of attempt to get away from this dehumanizing, mechanizing form of capitalism that's globalist, that's spirit-crushing, that's human-crushing, and find ways to once again re-emphasize what human connection and what human fulfillment are.
00:34:07.000I had a set of wonderful conversations with my friend Adam Curtis.
00:34:12.000A few things that have always stayed with me is once when we were doing something live, he was saying, you don't know what you want, he said to the audience.
00:34:25.000Adam Curtis, I think, sort of identified quite early on, as he often does in his filmmaking, what actually is happening.
00:34:32.000And at the beginning of our conversation, Glenn, when we talked about sort of it's plain that we are at a precipitous point, not because of sort of evangelist, shamanic figures, the prognosis of like zealous figures like, you know, Alex Jones or whoever saying, look, because of observable legislation, does it seem to you too possible that a counter movement could emerge?
00:34:58.000I sometimes sense that there was like that.
00:35:01.000The Assange, Snowden and indeed Greenwald moment, something got frozen in time there.
00:35:30.000And the culture has sort of kind of reformed around it.
00:35:33.000And they're still there, those guys, like Telltale Hearts or Pictures of Dorian Gray,
00:35:38.000exiled away in Shadowlands, and the problems are unaddressed.
00:35:42.000And the culture has sort of tried to morph itself around, this is why this is okay.
00:35:46.000And yet, like, Assange's name in particular can't even really be spoken.
00:35:52.000Do you think that the media and the establishment more broadly had to reconfigure itself because of what was is indicated by the punishment of those two men and because of the nature of what they revealed that it's them that have to be impugned and condemned For sure.
00:36:08.000I mean, I think it is still underestimated the extent to which Julian Assange is a true visionary of our time.
00:36:19.000I think easily the most consequential You know, journalists of this generation, for whatever people want to say about me, I mean, I feel like Julian's impact is so systemic and so broad that it's really not even a close competition.
00:36:39.000And the reason for that is that he was the first person to really I realize that in the digital age, these institutions of power, I mean the main ones, like the big ones, had a huge vulnerability, which is that by storing all of their secrets, the secrets that show their lies and their crimes, in digital form, it becomes much easier to take it.
00:37:02.000You know, to, like, find a way to suck it up.
00:37:04.000One of the things that's so interesting to hear Daniel Ellsberg when he talks about the Pentagon Papers leak was one of his biggest challenges was just, like, how do you Xerox 40,000 top secret pages without being detected?
00:37:15.000You know, you, like, go to the grocery store, you go to the drugstore, they have these big Xerox machines, you have to put a diamond for every page, and he actually did that sometimes.
00:37:25.000Whereas when Chelsea Manning wanted to download the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs,
00:37:30.000she did it in about 20 minutes, just by pretending she was listening to a Lady Gaga album
00:37:35.000by downloading it onto her thumb drive and then sending it to WikiLeaks.
00:37:38.000Same with Snowden, he planned it, but it didn't take that much time
00:37:42.000Julian was the first one to realize, to create WikiLeaks as a kind of anonymous way to do that.
00:37:47.000And then of course, the Snowden leak, which was by far the biggest national security leak,
00:37:51.000came from the most secretive agency inside the world's most powerful government.
00:37:55.000And both of those created a lot of support and popularity.
00:38:00.000And like I was saying before, when you're the establishment, when you have establishment power, you will do anything to figure out how to protect your power.
00:38:10.000And right away, you know, the smear campaign against all of us that were involved in those things began.
00:38:17.000But more than that, like, trying to put Snowden in prison for life, putting Assange in prison for life.
00:38:23.000But then also, you know, right away, what happened was when these things happened, It was already 10 years since Al-Qaeda had attacked the United States.
00:38:30.000Nobody thought about Al-Qaeda anymore.
00:38:34.000It wasn't really a useful force to scare people any longer.
00:38:37.000And then within like a year of the Snowden reporting starting, then it became, oh, ISIS is worse than Al-Qaeda.
00:38:43.000And then a year later, it became, Russia is an existential threat to democracy, and then Trump, of course.
00:38:51.000And these institutions of power successfully re-scared everybody into believing that unless they put their faith and blind trust into these agencies, They would not be safe.
00:39:05.000And you see the polling data that now shows that these agencies are viewed far more favorably, especially by left liberals, than they were a decade ago.
00:39:13.000So this is part of this cycle where you push them, you attack them, but they attack back.
00:39:19.000And if you're not Aware of that fact that if you attack establishment power successfully, they're going to attack you in at least ways that are at least as harsh.
00:39:34.000I mean, indeed, isn't that the initial contract between the governing and the governed right down to sort of feudal system?
00:39:42.000You give us your taxes, we will keep you safe.
00:39:45.000And if people start thinking, but I don't need to be kept safe, we could keep ourselves safe.
00:39:49.000Like once that dynamic starts challenging, the whole thing falls apart.
00:39:52.000So how do you think The culture has sort of reformed, metastasized, like when you see a wire in a tree and the tree kind of grows around it.
00:40:02.000How is it that, you know, the Guardian and various European and American newspapers that were advocates of Julian's have sort of regrouped and said, oh, yeah, it's OK that he's in Belmarsh without trial and it'll be all right if he's extradited to America.
00:40:19.000How is it even maintaining the pretense of I think one of the things that establishments need, and especially security states need more than anything, is a villain, is a scary villain that they can convince people they should need to be scared of and want protection from.
00:40:44.000So of course during the Cold War that was communists, the communists were coming to take your god away, were coming to take your church away, And it sustained, you know, this five-year, five-decade massive growth of the security state, of wars all over the country.
00:40:57.000And then once the Berlin Wall fell, we were supposed to have, oh, this peace dividend.
00:41:00.000But right away, we started getting new enemies with, like, Milosevic and, you know, having to go to war in Yugoslavia.
00:41:07.000And then right away, 9-11 happened and suddenly we had a 20-year war on terror.
00:41:12.000And then along the way as well, we got these new enemies like Russia and Trump and the threat of right-wing fascism.
00:41:19.000And now suddenly all these people who are scared of those things are convinced that these are the good guys.
00:41:25.000You know, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, these major corporations, these major media outlets who are protecting people from these threats.
00:41:36.000Trump did change everything by, you know, if you look at what people say about Julian Assange now, the main reason why people are happy he's in jail is because they think he's a Russian agent, which is, you know, it's such an insane accusation that it doesn't pass the most minimal scrutiny of anyone who knows anything.
00:41:54.000But it seems like if you're afraid of Russia, if Russia is what you're told is contaminating every part of your society, ruining all things decent, Anyone remotely connected to them is an enemy, is someone who is a danger and needs to be crushed.
00:42:08.000And that's how you turn a population authoritarian.
00:42:11.000Because much of what you do is about bringing together complex information and telling stories using that data.
00:42:18.000It's interesting to me when one discovers in conversation that still the modes and methods of the powerful involve quite arcane ideas like just flooding a population with terror.
00:42:33.000That the issue of Julian Assange's imprisonment seems just less significant relatively if you feel like you're in an existential crisis.
00:42:45.000It also helps me to see now the value, importance and power of independent media almost in real time.
00:42:52.000If you take something like the Nord Stream pipeline, it was almost like it seemed ridiculous When it was reported that it was Russian sabotage, when it was clear what the dynamics and effect and point of that pipeline was, people could quickly say, no, it's more likely that this is a sort of a Navy SEAL op, maybe Poland were involved potentially.
00:43:15.000That's why it's interesting to discover, for example, Lee Fang, the journalist, did some reporting on Moderna's surveillance and the amount of money Moderna are spending on tracking and de-amplifying dissenting voices like Alex Berenson and Jay Bhattacharya.
00:43:31.000But, you know, obviously, I was targeted by them.
00:43:35.000It's interesting to see How independent media voices will be smeared, maligned and attacked in order to preserve these interests.
00:43:43.000And I afforded myself a wry smile and a slightly terrified chuckle when you said, if you want to attack establishment power, do be ready for them to attack you a lot more seriously because of what's happened to me recently.
00:43:57.000It's a sort of a recognisable playbook, is it?
00:44:00.000And now that independent media is so influential and effective, it's something that we're likely to see more of, I suppose.
00:44:07.000I think people forget, because of everything that happened in the Julian Assange case, that the very first thing they did to him after that 2010 leak of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and the diplomatic cables, beyond trying to convene a grand jury to criminally prosecute him, and they ultimately found they couldn't find anything, but what they really tried to do was use allegations of sex crimes against him.
00:44:32.000Suddenly, these two women in Sweden appeared together.
00:44:36.000They didn't really claim he had raped them, but it became a rape charge because they said that they were having consensual sex with him.
00:44:43.000They asked him to use a condom and he didn't, which under Swedish law is rape.
00:44:48.000It ended up, you know, they were clearly not interested in investigating it.
00:44:51.000They could have gone and interviewed him at the embassy.
00:44:55.000They pretended they had to get him onto Swedish soil, but he wouldn't go there.
00:44:58.000The Ecuadorians protected him because they knew if he went there, they would give him over to the Americans.
00:45:03.000The whole thing was a farce, but that was what led to the entire process, first of creating a big cloud around Julian Assange, and then You know, forcing him to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy and not be able to leave for nine years, and then ultimately bullying the Ecuadorians out of asylum and going to arrest Julian Assange.
00:45:22.000The thing that always amazes me, Russell, I always go back to this, is when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers.
00:45:28.000What the Nixon administration did was they ordered a break-in of his psychoanalyst's office to try and find out what are his psychosexual secrets, to release them, so that you kind of hear about Daniel Ellsberg's sexual fantasies or deviations or whatever, and everyone's like, ew, I don't want to have anything to do with Daniel Ellsberg or his Pentagon Papers.
00:45:49.000It always struck me as such a non-sequitur when I was young and naive.
00:45:53.000Like, why would you break into a psychoanalyst's office as a response to the Pentagon Papers?
00:45:59.000And if you can create kind of a personal sexual scandal around a dissident, which is almost always done, you can get a lot of people to just instinctively turn away and say, oh, this person is someone who's kind of scummy, who I shouldn't trust, who I just kind of want to avoid.
00:46:14.000And that is something that you see over and over and over happening to people who end up in those positions.
00:46:21.000I suppose it's difficult for me to entirely indulge that because it feels self-aggrandizing to put myself into that kind of category when really what we're doing... I'll say it for you!
00:46:30.000I mean I've said it for you so you don't have to.
00:46:33.000But it seems like that by putting videos online where you're critical of the deep state or corporate interests or COVID policy or the origins of the war in Ukraine, or the increasing
00:46:44.000power of organizations like NATO, WFWHO. It's like, I know how it will be reported on outside
00:46:50.000of these spaces. They'll go, conspiracy theorist Russell Brand claims, then that's
00:46:56.000You know, but it's, there is a precedent, it seems, for that.
00:47:00.000Russell, think about this. The people who call you a conspiracy theorist, and of course,
00:47:06.000I've been called that, you know, everybody who's a critic of the establishment gets called that.
00:47:10.000These are the people who went around for four years claiming that Vladimir Putin had secretly
00:47:17.000seized control of the United States by having a PP pornographic tape of President Trump urinating on prostitutes in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.
00:47:27.000They were constantly claiming that Russians were hiding under every bed, were controlling our country, even while Trump did exactly the things that would be most harmful to the vital interest of Moscow, like Blood Ukraine with lethal arms and trying to sabotage Nord Stream 2.
00:47:43.000He was trying to bully the Germans out of buying natural gas from the US and not from Russia.
00:47:48.000I mean, what a weird blackmail victim to go around doing the worst possible things to Putin.
00:47:55.000These are the real conspiracy theorists.
00:47:57.000And, you know, all the stuff with COVID, the minute you tried to question whether or not this was done through a lab leak and not through a natural occurrence.
00:48:05.000Oh, that's a malicious conspiracy theory they published in Lancet.
00:48:09.000These are the ways that they control dissent.
00:48:12.000They're free to disseminate the most ins- Remember, The Hunter Biden laptop came out right before the 2020 election, and what did they say?
00:48:45.000At his most recent White House press dinner, Biden talked a lot and passionately, within the limitations that he always appears to experience, about the importance of the free press and how it's a foundational principle and our site in Jefferson and stuff.
00:49:02.000Gonzalo Lira predicted his own death, And why is it important?
00:49:08.000Why is it not reported on in the legacy media where you know when they would talk about other journalists that were behind bars and it'd be something they would sort of celebrate and magnify?
00:49:18.000The way human rights concerns work is very simple.
00:49:22.000Human rights concerns are weaponized against the countries we dislike and want to destabilize.
00:49:26.000So you hear constantly about the mistreatment of LGBTs in Iran or the mistreatment of women in Iran, but you almost never hear about the mistreatment of LGBTs in Egypt or in Saudi Arabia or women in those countries or at the UAE or Or Bahrain or Jordan, because these are all American allies.
00:49:48.000We have no interest in destabilizing those countries, so we don't care about the human rights abuses of them.
00:50:21.000So when you have somebody like Gonzalo Lira, an American citizen, Clearly, not just being arrested and imprisoned for his criticisms of this war that he has every right as an American citizen to criticize since his government is financing it, but to kill him in prison through mistreatment and negligence.
00:50:38.000It's the kind of thing that ordinarily the United States government would be screaming bloody murder over.
00:50:42.000It's their obligation to protect their citizen.
00:50:45.000But Ukraine is our puppet government, and we have no interest in criticizing Ukraine, and so The idea that Gonzalo Lira was a critic of the war means in a lot of people's minds, like Julian Assange, that he's a Russian agent and therefore he got what he deserved.
00:52:48.000Luckily, we have access to some reliable sources of information that we will be using throughout this video.
00:52:53.000And of course, as always, while on this platform, we studiously maintain that we are making no definitive claims about what's causing these deaths.
00:53:37.000But one of my favorite moments was, of course, the clumsy piece of cultural appropriation that you might be reminded of simply by this gesture.
00:54:18.000As always, it's about centralising power, making the agenda of the powerful seem like it's beneficial to ordinary people, making the actions of ordinary people seem like they're a problem, not answering proper questions, making out that Bill Gates cares about nothing except your health rather than his profits in spite of the peculiar raft of investments into media companies and vaccine organisations and the World Health Organisation itself.
00:54:37.000It's an extraordinary festival of corporatism and globalism.
00:54:41.000It is indeed Globalist Christmas up in the Alps with Klaus Schwab as Santa.
00:55:05.000You know, people don't like that phrase.
00:55:07.000And it's also not good to say that phrase when you're literally in front of a 666 that can easily be discerned in the World Economic Forum's logo.
00:55:54.000Our conversation with Glenn Greenwald's really interesting.
00:55:57.000He said, what we are in now is an era, not like a hundred years ago, where plutocrats like Rockefeller and Rothschilds would send dollar bills out of their limousine into the hands of peasants gathered outside.
00:56:07.000Now, with the militarization of the police force, anti-protest laws, online surveillance laws steadily gaining a pace, now The globalists are starting to recognize, you can openly say, New World Order, we're in charge.
00:56:35.000We have the capacity to shape what that looks like.
00:56:39.000And at the heart of it will be many of the core principles and core institutions That's good, because we don't want to radically alter any of those systems that seem to be forming a yoke across the shoulders of many of the world's people, making us feel that we're living in total spiritual decline, watching the infrastructure of our nations fall apart, a kind of total existential crisis where meaning seems to have been totally extracted.
00:57:03.000We want to protect those institutions of power at all costs.
00:57:06.000Adapted for the challenges that we face today, and that's a lot of what I tried to lay out in my remarks.
00:57:13.000Some of that goes to geopolitics and how we build or update the international economic order in ways that address the needs of working people, address the climate crisis.
00:57:23.000The needs of working people always a priority.
00:57:26.000Tedros Ghebreyesus talking about the WHO treaty which will give unprecedented power to the WHO and how you can be protected from the mysterious disease X. And then the other key in order to have better prepared and to address the disease X is the pandemic agreement.
00:57:44.000The pandemic agreement can bring all the experience, all the challenges that we have faced and all the solutions into one.
00:58:17.000Even though Tedros actually seems like a sweet person and doesn't have the same glow of evil that seems to surround many of the participants at Davos, I still have some concerns about bringing all that experience together when it was such a bloody awful experience.
00:58:31.000And that agreement can help us to prepare for the future in a better way, because this is about a common enemy.
00:58:52.000You know, we will face the same problem as Covid.
00:58:56.000And deadline for the pandemic agreement is May 2024.
00:59:00.000Put it in your diary, sign some petitions, because that's what democracy is now, signing a petition online.
00:59:07.000And member states are negotiating, this is between countries.
00:59:11.000And I hope they will deliver this pandemic agreement by that time, on the deadline.
00:59:18.000That pandemic agreement, just to remind you, includes clauses such as your country, if it's a member, will give 5% of their health budget to the WHO.
00:59:28.000If the WHO say there will be lockdowns, there will be lockdowns.
00:59:31.000If they say a certain medication will be mandated, it will be mandated.
01:00:11.000Here is Jens Stoltenberg, the head of NATO, at the WEF, telling you, literally, why war is peace.
01:00:17.000Now, if any of you are students of George Orwell, and I know I am, you'll be familiar with the Orwellian trope that language and its meaning will become reversed.
01:01:03.000The missiles go in and they explode all of that war, and underneath all of that war is peace.
01:01:08.000So you might think, if you're an idiot, that giving money to Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, that there might be some other agenda behind that.
01:01:14.000What if the Pentagon failing six consecutive audits and two trillion dollars are seemingly wasted in Afghanistan?
01:02:52.000Do you think when sort of funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation crops up in some part of India or some African nation thing, helps are coming?
01:03:00.000What I've learned, getting perspective from people inside those former colonial territories, they don't want that type of help.
01:03:05.000What it seems to be is, are you hungry?
01:03:09.000We'll give you some money as long as you comply and help us do this sort of study on biometric data which, by the way, we will be implementing in a western country down the road saying, oh it worked really well when we did it in this place in Africa where they had no bloody choice because they wouldn't give you any medication or food if you didn't participate.
01:04:24.000One person, of course, bucked the trend of Davos by turning up there with some minerals, with some stones and with some lyrics.
01:04:31.000Even if you don't entirely agree with Javier Millet's solution to global problems, it's pretty clear that he's taking an oppositional stance to the general flow of information from those alpine peaks.
01:04:46.000Today I'm here to tell you that the Western world is in danger.
01:04:53.000Unfortunately, in recent decades, motivated by some well-meaning individuals willing to help others, and others motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste.
01:05:37.000My saliva's drying up. Get him off the stage. Ixnay with the anti-globalism-ay.
01:05:43.000Now I happen to be a person that's quite sympathetic to indigenous cultures, shamanism,
01:05:48.000accessing the great and divine mysteries that undoubtedly lie the material world, that demonstrate
01:05:53.000perhaps that we're all connected by a limitless consciousness and perhaps consciousness preceded
01:05:57.000matter and through ceremony and ritual we can access these deep powers.
01:06:00.000What I also think though is people at Davos don't care about that stuff and they just want to look sort of a bit woke and like they care about indigenous people when we all know they have an agenda that's about the preservation and protection of power and increasing dominion rather than how can we help the native people of Guamala?
01:06:19.000What she's praying there is, I hope Larry Fink and Blackrock don't discover that my forest could be turned into natural assets and sold on the stock market, because if they do, they will do it.
01:06:29.000We've got a video coming on that soon. In a couple of years we've gone from social distancing rules,
01:06:45.000which we now know were made up, to having someone blow directly into the mouths of every single
01:06:51.000delegate attending the WEF in an attempt to seem like they care about indigenous people whose lands
01:06:56.000they would happily claim in an instant if they thought there was a dollar bill in it somewhere,
01:07:00.000particularly if they had a good ESG score.
01:07:13.000What that would be about, that incantation and that ceremony, would be about achieving some sort of cohesion, unity and good faith and being of service to the highest good, wouldn't it?
01:07:21.000If you read an analysis of what that ceremony represents.
01:07:23.000May this debate bring about the highest good.
01:07:25.000May the spirits that inform all material reality be present with us today.
01:07:30.000They already know what Davos is going to mean.
01:07:32.000Davos is going to mean can rich, powerful institutions and interests carry on doing what they've always done without it ever appearing terrible?
01:07:39.000So that's what they're doing when claiming to care about the planet and the world.
01:07:41.000So the whole thing is like a ludicrous pantomime.
01:07:44.000I am actually quite reverential and respectful and excited and interested in a variety of cultures and I believe in them and value them.
01:07:51.000What appalls me is that you would just trot someone out to blow on people's foreheads before doubling down on, yeah that's why we need to mandate vaccinations, that's why there needs to be 15 minute cities, that's why people should have their biometric data stored.
01:08:08.000People saying that you need a form of social credit scoring?
01:08:10.000People telling you there's a new world order coming?
01:08:12.000Perhaps a one or two dissenting voices?
01:08:15.000A ceremony that exploits the cultural history of a group of people that would be ground up into powder if they thought they'll be useful in the manufacture of cell phones?
01:08:23.000An advocacy for a WHO treaty that will mean less freedom, less democracy, and more expenditure coming directly out of your pocket and in To theirs.
01:08:32.000So is globalism a good thing about the preservation and protection of this planet?
01:08:36.000Or is WEF and the globalism that it espouses a means for continuing, as that delegate said, with the old institutions in a slightly new tweaked way and ensuring that national democracy and independent individual sovereignty never have a chance of being expressed?
01:09:06.000Remember, become an awakened one that if you can you get exclusive content like our video on excess deaths, you get early access to content, you get to be part of a community that meditates together, reads holy scriptures together and will awaken together and oppose these forces that are determined to keep us tyrannized and incarcerated.
01:09:24.000Click the red button now to join the community.
01:09:26.000Michael Schellenberg is coming on the show next week.
01:09:29.000You'll be able to see that 10 to 11 ET, 3 to 4 GMT, as well as we read the holy books.
01:09:35.000The great books are all available here, as well as, as I've told you, exclusive and early episodes of Here's the News.
01:09:41.000Now one on excess deaths only available to Awaken Wonders.
01:09:45.0008% rise in the death of children in the last couple of years.
01:09:50.000If you want to find out, join us on Locals like Toddy Lee and Eric0317, GrandPuba1, Lebriza, HeathAb, and no doubt some legacy media journalists trying to find a way to weavel their way into our movement, but they will be welcomed.