Shane Gillis is back on SNL, and Dave Chappelle's special, and the Jon Stewart/Tucker Carlson mashup, all of which tell us how America is shifting. And what does this tell us about culture, cancelled culture and the requirements of the mainstream, and its inevitable hypocrisy as it struggles to stay relevant while getting rid of all of its best performers? On this very special episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand, we re talking about culture and cultural war, using Shane Gillis' appearance onSNL, Dave's special and Tucker's mashup on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, as examples of why cancel culture can t be trusted, and why comedy itself cannot be trusted. And, as always, thank you for choosing Fox News. Now, join the movement that cares about you, and you can cancel at any time. Become part of the movement, become part of our movement, and get 1 month free of all the usual crap you get from the mainstream media, and watch the world through a new kind of media you can't get anywhere else. You'll find it easily and you'll love it easily, and I hope that you will love it. - Russell Brand Stay Free with Russell Brand. Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. All rights reserved. Used w/ permission. If you like what you hear on this episode, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and we'll be sure to give you a rating and review it on iTunes. Thank you! - John Rocha, if you re a review and review us a five star review, we really do appreciate it, we're listening to you, too! - Thank you for listening and sharing this episode on social media, we'll see you in the next episode of RUMBLE, and we're spreading the word out there about what you're listening and posting it around the world, and so on Insta! -- Thank you, Russell Brand and all of your support is so much love, and it's a big thank you, you'll find us out there, so please spread the love and support us everywhere else, everywhere else in the world. XOXO, GURU, Gurgle Dot, Geezer, Gurls, and Gabor Mate, Gorms, Gabble Dot.
00:00:00.000Hello you Awakening Wonders there on Spotify, Apple, Stink Whistle, Gurgle Dot or wherever you download your podcasts these days to remain at least peripherally connected to some tendril of truth in a bewildering miasma of lies and propaganda.
00:00:28.000We decipher the latest news stories, we break down current topics that the mainstream media should be covering, and if they aren't, Then we critique why they're not and what they are covering.
00:01:16.000Thanks for joining us for this very special episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand where we're talking about culture and cultural war using Shane Gillis' appearance on SNL, Dave Chappelle's special and the Jon Stewart v Tucker War.
00:01:29.000All fantastic subjects, subjects excuse me, that tell you how America is shifting.
00:01:33.000Now for the first 15 minutes, yes of course, we'll be Streaming very broadly, we want you to join our broad church of opposition to globalism.
00:01:41.000But after that 15 minutes, we'll be exclusively available on that sweet stream of freedom that we call Rumble.
00:02:31.000Shane Gillis has done SNL after SNL cancelled Shane Gillis.
00:02:37.000So what does this tell us about SNL, cancelled culture and the requirements of the mainstream and its inevitable hypocrisy as it struggles to stay relevant while getting rid of all of its best performers?
00:02:51.000SNL, just a few years after sacking Shane Gillis because of stuff he said in his podcast that weren't, I don't know, woke enough or right on enough, has had to bring Shane Gillis back as host of SNL.
00:03:02.000Now my feelings about Shane Gillis is he's probably the best American stand-up comedian since Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock.
00:03:09.000That he's on point, he's radical, he's easy, he's accessible.
00:03:13.000And I would say, in America 10, 15 years ago, What you would have in Shane Gillis and the way he would have been used and operated by the culture would be somewhere between John Candy and John Belushi.
00:03:23.000A little less cuddly, perhaps, than John Candy and a little less, well, let's face it, drugged than John Belushi, but a skilled character comedian, a brilliant stand-up comic, someone who takes an on point in a difficult cultural moment.
00:03:37.000but since those kind of figures have died, the culture has changed,
00:03:40.000has become unable to accommodate, in some cases, literally, comedy itself.
00:04:44.000In the cultural moment that you and I are experiencing right now.
00:04:47.000What I will say is that Shane Gillis, in a sense, is a perfect vessel for us to analyze and understand what's happened in our culture in the last 10 years.
00:04:56.000Someone who would have once just walked straight through the door into a bunch of national lampoon movies, would have been seen as a star and celebrated, is now an odd chaotic mercurial figure precisely because the culture doesn't know what it's doing anymore.
00:05:09.000Let's have a look at Shane Gillis' performance and appearance.
00:05:10.000It doesn't know what its principles are, primarily I would say because it's become a utensil
00:05:15.000of the establishment rather than a radical anti-establishment entity, which is what it
00:05:20.000would have been in the days of, I don't know, Eddie Murphy, Mike Myers, all of the great
00:05:24.000comics that all of us that love comedy grew up on and adore, even if we're not actually
00:06:08.000And even that is, I suppose, a marker of the challenges in our culture.
00:06:14.000Have you seen the South Park episode where those other geniuses that refuse to be chained by a peculiarly puritanical culture, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, argue that the pejorative form of gay is not connected to the sexual identity usage of gay, that it can be separated from it.
00:06:44.000When you're invited to look at culture in the way that Google AI asks us to look at culture now, like, yeah, why not portray George Washington as a person of colour or Vikings as having a variety of hues and pigments in their skin?
00:06:57.000Is it not possible that you could use the word gay without it being a hate crime against gay people?
00:07:03.000Do we really believe that Shane Gillis has malice in his heart when he uses that term in the same way that kids from his background presumably use that word to this day without hating on people that have sexual preferences for people of the same gender?
00:07:17.000And this kind of deliberate myopism that leads to censorship, that leads to communities of people that doubt themselves and doubt one another, Where people get all uncertain, we're all in a McCarthyist frenzy against one another.
00:07:28.000I think benefits the establishment in subtle cultural ways.
00:07:31.000America can't have the robust certainty that it had in the 70s and 80s, and God knows America had its problems then, if it's uncertain about the use of language and the intentions of its individual members, or cultural artifacts, or comedians, or artists.
00:07:43.000If it's uncertain about where it stands on those issues, if it's forever heading towards more division instead of more union.
00:07:49.000Like most men, I know exactly when me and my mom stopped being friends.
00:07:52.000It was, uh, it was the first time I whacked off.
00:07:55.000Before that, you're like, oh, where's my mom?
00:07:58.000One nut, you're like, when's that bitch gonna leave the house?
00:08:02.000In a sense, these are recognisable stand-up comedy tropes.
00:08:04.000Your mother, masturbation, and there's a whole Freudian angle to leap into right here.
00:08:09.000But in a way, isn't what Shane Gillis is doing there exactly what a comedian should be doing?
00:08:13.000Gently approaching taboos in a way that's celebratory and amusing and joyful and mischievous and playful.
00:08:19.000And when you can see him as an individual, it's pretty clear that this is not a man who runs on malice and hate, who you imagine Festering alone in some room, hating on people because of some minor cultural difference, he has the mind of a comedian that assesses information solely on whether or not it's amusing to him and then takes the risk of publicly exploring those ideas as comedians are supposed to.
00:08:38.000Now when you live in a puritanical culture that seemed to have as one of its predicates
00:08:42.000create division, create hatred, create kind of a dull low expectation of what our social
00:08:47.000discourse is permitted to be, then figures like that who 20 years ago would have just
00:08:51.000been "oh he's funny that guy he's funny" become like "whoa that's not Lenny Bruce"
00:08:55.000in fact Shane Gillis is pretty clear that he's not a Bill Hicks type comic. Shane Gillis
00:08:59.000is not about "I hate the establishment, I want to destroy it" he just wants to make
00:09:04.000people laugh and for a comedian what better goal could there be?
00:09:07.000But it shows you, doesn't it, where the establishment is when the sanctioned comics of a culture are only allowed very particular perspectives.
00:09:16.000Challenges are met when it is a person of colour like Chappelle or Chris Rock who do not play ball and have the skills to not play ball.
00:09:24.000Bill Burr, or now most specifically, Shane Gillis venturing into those territories.
00:09:29.000What you've got is a peculiar lens to look at a culture that no longer knows what it wants or who it is and is operating, I think most of all, on ungrounded principles.
00:09:37.000I wonder if you'll see the kind of comics that are sanctioned by the culture exploring ideas like the current Forever Wars.
00:09:43.000The culture's comics won't offer you that, so it's not like they went the direction of Bill Hicks or Lenny Bruce or Pryor.
00:09:48.000It went in the direction of some kind of anodyne flat, non-controversial, non-interesting iteration of comedy.
00:09:56.000But people like you and me like people like Shane Gillis, so I guess you gotta make the booking.
00:10:02.000I do have family members with Down syndrome.
00:10:11.000It's lovely to hear that actually the audience are uncertain as to whether or not Down Syndrome is a topic you're permitted to laugh at in New York City liberal establishment circles.
00:10:21.000So the claim of a artefact, a cultural artefact like SNL to be popular and populist is challenged there because it's Clearly governed by a paradigm that's strictly establishment left these days.
00:10:34.000I mean left in terms of Clinton, Blair, authorities and censorship.
00:10:37.000I don't mean left as in, you know what, working people are getting a bit of a rough deal at the hands of corporate.
00:10:44.000You can hear that the people in that audience are uncertain as to whether or not it's permissible to laugh at Down Syndrome.
00:10:50.000Well, what Gillis has done, because he's a brilliant comedian, he's told you, I've got more right than you to laugh about it because I've got family members.
00:10:57.000So allowing them, he's rolling out a carpet upon which he can walk into that joke, but they're still nervous.
00:11:14.000How we could get back together as a culture without people making jokes about race, about sexuality, about mental health, about war, about despair, about the conditions we find ourselves in.
00:11:46.000It's always about curating and orchestrating the audience response.
00:11:50.000But that can't organically occur in a pre-cultivated and pre-bunked environment.
00:11:55.000That's what's dangerous about the culture war, that the kind of things we would joke about and laugh about together that would bring us closer are now being designated as points of avoidance culturally for all of us.
00:12:04.000And it takes a comedian like Shane Gillis to guide us back into that space.
00:12:08.000They're doing better than everybody I know.
00:12:10.000They're the only ones having a good time pretty consistently.
00:12:14.000They're not worried about the election.
00:12:20.000My sister, my niece's mother, she didn't know she'd get pregnant so she foster cared and then adopted three black kids and then she finally got pregnant and now she has a kid with Down syndrome and her husband is from Egypt.
00:12:41.000This is... What you can actually see is that, well, those of us that are not American, that talk about America, are mostly impacted by America's wars and America's influence on the culture.
00:12:49.000Shane Gillis reminds you that America is this kind of cultural melting pot where that most ordinary and maligned of beasts, the white American male, is actually a rather enjoyable entity.
00:13:01.000He is not a product of the metropolis.
00:13:34.000Also, the nuances, the nuances of culture.
00:13:44.000Think of the kind of analyses that surround MAGA and Jan 6th and Trump.
00:13:49.000The idea that there's this homogenous blob of Americans that are racist and hateful Well, let's peer into that blob a little and see who occupies it.
00:14:02.000Because, like you, you know people that have different sexual identities.
00:14:06.000You know people that have mental illnesses or genetic conditions or different religions.
00:14:12.000It's a media creation and the media creation that led to the cancellation of Shane Gillis is now having to backpedal because through the merit of his skill and the way that the media landscape has changed, let's face it, he's a creation of independent media, podcasts, Joe Rogan, all of the stuff that exists in the Similar channels that we're in right now.
00:14:43.000When a little more exploration, a little more conversation might reveal that perhaps people have a greater hope of integration, peace, ease and evolution than the culture will ever let you believe.
00:15:00.000Here's another take on Shane Gillis' appearance.
00:15:02.000So the man deemed morally untouchable, unworthy to be in SNL's regular week-in-week-out line-up, just a few years ago, returned to host an episode of his own, one of American Entertainment's most coveted guest spots, usually occupied by Hollywood A-listers.
00:15:15.000Gillis' fall and rise is a reminder of how brutal cancel culture can be, and how spectacularly it can backfire.
00:15:21.000I know a lot of people in the movie space are starting to say that the success of Barbie and the success of Top Gun Maverick is also an indication that if you make movies for an understood demographic, in the case of Barbie, presumably in the majority females, and vice versa in the case of Top Gun Maverick, you get Success.
00:15:38.000Whereas if you take genres that are traditionally or conventionally, whatever word suits you, intended to, the fact is 65% of people that go and see superhero movies are male.
00:15:47.000And if you try to turn those products into something that carries a particular message, and I believe there are really important messages that need to be carried through movies, but when those messages are at odds with the story, when those messages don't make sense and they're disingenuous, what you're gonna get is a hodgepodge of odd Disingenuous crap instead of successful movies like Barbie or Top Gun Maverick and also what he exposes is that it's an illegitimate endeavor I don't actually know what they're trying to achieve with all this stuff when he was named as a new SNL cast member in 2019 Gillis was unknown beyond the stand-up circuit within days of him being handed the opportunity of a lifetime alumni include Bill Murray Eddie Murphy and Tina Fey
00:16:23.000A journalist dug up a clip of him using the racial slur chink on an old episode of Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast, a podcast he does with fellow comic Matt McCusker.
00:16:31.000While Gillis was, he says, impersonating a white racist when he said it, saying it was enough to damn him.
00:16:36.000That's precisely the kind of explanation that should be taken into account.
00:16:38.000Well, I was doing an impersonation of a racist.
00:16:41.000That impersonation was so good, you cannot have a career now because of the quality of the impersonation and our inability to assess nuance, which is Absolutely necessary in comedy.
00:16:49.000It was all over before he had taped a single episode.
00:16:52.000SNL briefly tried to ride out the controversy before unceremoniously dropping Gillis.
00:16:56.000A statement described the language in his previous work as offensive, hurtful and unacceptable.
00:17:00.000But again, if you were to perhaps look at the work of Bill Murray or Mike Myers or Tina Fey through the lens of today's cultural rules, you might find similar adjectives being required.
00:17:11.000In fact, if you look at comedy at any time, cruelty is sort of literally a necessity in much of comedy.
00:17:17.000Gilles refused to issue a grovelling apology, nor did he refashion himself as a conservative culture warrior.
00:17:24.000He put out a brilliant special on YouTube, Live in Austin, which currently has 24 million views.
00:17:28.000He put out viral sketches, he toured what you might call the Joe Rogan circuit, the hugely successful, decidedly un-PC podcast orbiting the 56-year-old comic-turned-podfather.
00:17:38.000Meanwhile, Matt and Shane's secret podcast exploded in popularity.
00:17:41.000It's currently the biggest pod on Patreon, with tens of thousands of paid subscribers.
00:17:45.000Following his 2023 blockbuster Netflix special Beautiful Dogs, Gillis is now on the verge of arena act status.
00:18:11.000A child of Fox News watching lower-middle-class suburban America.
00:18:15.000In the post-2016 age, Gillis is the imagined villain of the liberal elites and the living, breathing antithesis of all their deadening pieties.
00:18:22.000Brought up in central Pennsylvania, Gillis was a high school football star turned Army College dropout.
00:18:27.000He looks and talks and jokes like someone's older brother from back home.
00:18:30.000He says gay and retarded with abandon, but largely to mock his own meat-headed tendencies.
00:18:34.000He'll send up his new woke Brooklyn friends, whose every social media post boils down to, see I'm not racist, just as much as he does his conservative, somewhat dysfunctional family.
00:18:41.000His material about his dad watching Fox News every night until he's too drunk and or outraged to continue is a wonderful case in point.
00:18:47.000Fox News is basically black church for old white dudes, Gillis observes in Live at Austin as he watches his father vigorously agreeing with absolutely everything the anchors say.
00:18:59.000Gillis has had some of the best Trump material you'll hear precisely because he isn't blinded by any Trump fury.
00:19:04.000He gets how funny, intentionally and unintentionally Trump is, his outrageousness, his bizarre tics and cadences.
00:19:09.000But nor does he serve up endless pronoun gags and tirades against the Dems and SJWs.
00:19:14.000Gillis says he didn't vote for Trump, although he has joked that he has early onset Republicanism, given he's a history buff.
00:19:19.000There are plenty of people who are unhappy that Gillis has been re-embraced by the mainstream entertainment biz.
00:19:23.000His SNL rehabilitation proves how effortlessly the comedy industry forgives racism, reads one typically breathless Vox column.
00:19:31.000But you can't help but feel that those kind of people are becoming more shrill precisely because they know they're beginning to lose ground.
00:19:36.000The triumph of Shane Gillis reveals that there is a vast ecosystem of platforms and shows that can outstrip the reach of the dwindling mainstream.
00:19:43.000An episode of The Joe Rogan Experience reportedly reaches twice as many people as your average edition of Saturday Night Live.
00:19:48.000And now some of the gatekeepers are beginning to realise the talent and the viewing figures they can miss out on when they confuse the mob for the country.
00:19:55.000It seems that four years after sacking him, SNL needed Shane Gillis more than Shane Gillis needed SNL.
00:20:01.000Often we talk about how journalists like Chris Hedges and Glenn Greenwald could be used to monitor the decline of the legacy media.
00:20:09.000Both of those men won Pulitzer Prizes and worked for organisations like the Guardian, a legacy media British newspaper, or the New York Times in the case of Chris Hedges.
00:20:16.000And now those reporters do all of their reporting online because the legacy media has become an amplification device for the establishment and a tool to normalise its agenda.
00:20:27.000If you watch late night talk shows or SNL, it's pretty clear that they operate in lockstep with the agenda of those kind of print organisations.
00:20:34.000And similarly, perhaps they are suffering as a result of the inability to include genuine diversity of opinion that is It's easily accessible to those of us that operate entirely now in independent media spaces.
00:20:46.000So I suppose the appearance of Shane Gillis on SNL does, as the author of that piece indicated, show you that the balance of power is changing.
00:20:54.000It will be interesting to see how that reality plays out in political spheres, how it plays out in terms of censorship, how it plays out in terms of cancel culture and the culture's ability to rehabilitate or reclaim its discarded icons.
00:21:05.000The thing is this, of course, As the dynamic and relationship between independence and establishment continues to alter, many more people won't want to be involved in the establishment and its accessories, precisely because they are tools of an agenda that independence and freedom are ultimately opposed to.
00:21:21.000But I'm glad to see a comedian of Shane Gillis's quality getting the opportunity to host a show that remains a comedy institution in spite of its obvious current frailties.
00:21:43.000Have you noticed that recently clusters of respiratory illnesses in northern China and what's been referred to as white lung syndrome in the United States are scattered across the headlines?
00:21:53.000They're drawing attention, I believe, to the importance of being prepared for medical emergencies.
00:21:58.000With close to 90% of pharmaceuticals in the US being produced outside of the country, what will happen when the inevitable next global crisis strikes?
00:22:06.000Countries will clamp down on exports, they'll stockpile, the price of drugs will rise, and the pharmacy shelves in America, they say, will empty.
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00:23:15.000Now before we get even deeper into this, I have to tell you that if you're watching this anywhere but the sweet, sweet stream of Rumble and you want to know what we've got to say about Dave Chappelle, what we've got to say about Jon Stewart versus Tucker, you're going to have to click the link in the description.
00:23:29.000Look, you've only got a few seconds left.
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00:23:33.000You should consider getting a bit of this glorious merch. 25% Off this week.
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00:24:26.000But why do the legacy media continually remove nuance and dilute joy?
00:24:31.000How do they benefit from people being caught in constant conflict?
00:24:37.000Dave Chappelle's special is obviously incredibly popular and maybe marks a transitional moment in the culture wars.
00:24:43.000Certainly what it does mark is that when it comes to it, if something is profitable, people will back it.
00:24:49.000This is going to be an interesting thing that plays out over the next 12 months, I would imagine.
00:24:52.000How can you still deploy the rhetoric of wokeism while acknowledging that there are growing markets for people that are critical of some of the ideals within it?
00:25:02.000One of the things I think is particularly interesting is while Dave Chappelle clearly makes jokes in the special about trans folk or disabled people, he's obviously joking.
00:25:11.000And also, significantly, there's a point in his stand-up special where he talks admiringly of trans people.
00:25:19.000And none of the news outlets that are critiquing him mention that because I believe to include that nuance would dilute their own arguments. In short, they enjoy their own
00:25:31.000outrage. They're high on the smell of their own gaseous outrage. They don't want to go, "Well,
00:25:36.000actually, Dave Chappelle's probably joking about that." So let's have a look at some moments from Dave
00:25:41.000Chappelle's special and talk about the way that the mainstream media likes to use deliberately denuanced
00:25:47.000attacks on cultural artifacts in order to stoke tensions and conflict. "And the
00:25:52.000only thing that got me out of that space was a comedian friend of mine, the late, great Norm MacDonald."
00:26:38.000And in this movie, Jim Carrey was playing another comedian I admired, the late, great Andy Kaufman.
00:26:44.000Yes, and Jim Carrey was so immersed in that role that from the moment he woke up to the time he went to bed at night, he would live his life.
00:27:33.000Now, in hindsight, how fucking lucky am I that I got to see one of the greatest artists of my time immersed in one of his most challenging processes ever.
00:28:41.000And I sometimes feel that the new Puritanism that's at play in our culture is deliberately trying to extract aspects of our nature that are rather beautiful.
00:28:48.000the ability to playfully ridicule, the ability to joke.
00:28:52.000The areas that are seemingly most under attack include humor, sexuality in an extraordinary way.
00:28:58.000And I think that's about shutting down natural impulses, making people feel constantly concerned, twitchy,
00:30:20.000So in the case of Dave Chappelle, that result is just ongoing tension, conflict,
00:30:24.000creating disorientation around where people are supposed to stand with their social roles.
00:30:29.000Most people from across the political spectrum are generally speaking, if they're living lives where they're free from agitation and oppression, broadly kind and polite to other people.
00:30:38.000I think it's very rare that you see people hyped up into states of hatred.
00:30:42.000Indeed, I think it requires a degree Of instigation to create it.
00:30:46.000But if your cultural environment is one of uncertainty, censorship, doubt, denial, removal of nuance, removal of humor, it, I think, increases the problems that these legacy media outlets are claiming to address.
00:30:58.000He's plainly joking when he says, I love Punching Down.
00:31:01.000All of the stand up around disabled people is ironic and layered and nuanced and sophisticated.
00:31:06.000And this nuance and sophistication is going to be necessary if we're going to continue to navigate territory like this.
00:31:12.000What is the ultimate end of the cultural Do you think that one side's going to win and one side's going to lose?
00:31:16.000You're going to eliminate all people that are traditional, eliminate all people that are conservative, or eliminate all people that are progressive?
00:31:24.000It's more or less a kind of, I don't know, it may not be 50-50, I don't know, because one thing I've learned is professional metropolitan biases are loud voices but potentially small demographics.
00:31:35.000But nevertheless, the obvious answer is we're going to have to become tolerant of one another, tolerant of people that live differently, even if that living differently means conservative, or traditional, or taking time with one another to understand that at the deepest possible level, a level that can indeed be attained by using the sophisticated type of thinking and analysis deployed expertly by a genius like Dave Chappelle, that we actually can find common ground with one another.
00:32:02.000Who do you think has a better, more open-hearted perspective on cultural issues?
00:32:06.000Oppression, personal change, personal transition, corruption, bias, prejudice, bigotry?
00:32:11.000Dave Chappelle or a legacy media hack that's plainly there to generate and amplify hatred?
00:32:20.000But what's required is more of this kind of comedy, more exploration around the complexity around sexuality, power dynamics, different emergent cultural groups.
00:32:29.000For hundreds of thousands of years we've lived in tribal groups that wouldn't have known very much about the cultures and customs of other groups.
00:32:35.000For hundreds and thousands of years we've known that members of communities have different ways of identifying that don't fit within narrow biological parameters and it hasn't been cause for Outrage or aggression or condemnation, there's no question that there's prejudice and bigotry across society, but by continually highlighting a particular type of prejudice and bigotry, you once again veil and marginalise a greater set of inequalities that are practised at the economic and class level.
00:33:00.000And rhetoric like Dave Chappelle's, again, offers us the kind of gelignite to reimagine the kind of territories that we live within.
00:33:07.000And also gives us all a degree of interpersonal and social freedom to engage in discussions and conversations with one another in good faith.
00:33:14.000So I would say that comedy and good humour like this is a necessary tool.
00:33:19.000And the censorship of it, and indeed were it not for the financial success of Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais and the success of their shows, they would be cancelled and shut down.
00:33:27.000Netflix would cancel it, but they've looked at Oh, people like this stuff.
00:33:30.000You know, when you get Dave Chappelle on Rotten Tomatoes, 3% critic score, 97% audience score, they start to notice in the end, oh, OK, we're going to have to let this pass.
00:33:39.000We're going to have to let this succeed.
00:33:41.000And what we're getting now is a culture that's fracturing all over the place.
00:33:48.000There are new independent media forces, whether it's Oliver Antony or Sound of Freedom.
00:33:52.000It's clear That new markets are appearing, and beyond markets, because I don't think it is just economics, and I hope it gets beyond economics, because what needs to be served is complexity and nuance itself.
00:34:02.000The fact that we can live alongside one another if people are Republican or Conservative or Liberal or Progressive or Leftist, it doesn't actually matter that much, particularly not once you recognise this key idea.
00:34:17.000To aggregate power centrally to the degree where whole nations are being subjugated by globalist ideology.
00:34:24.000I think that the culture war is utilised in order to generate conflict and division to distract us from issues that are more significant.
00:34:32.000And when I say more significant, I don't mean that identity issues or the struggles of oppressed people across the world are not important.
00:34:38.000What I'm saying is, is the people that are using these arguments don't care about them and they care Even less about developing movements that could generate actual change, that could prevent Congress being so beset with corruption that you can't do anything to stop people investing in stocks and shares of companies and organisations that they regulate.
00:34:57.000There's no possibility of developing meaningful cultural change as long as we're all at war with one another under the most bogus of pretenses.
00:35:05.000In this case, the pretense being that Dave Chappelle is a malign and malignant force.
00:35:09.000I don't think anyone who watches that special could come away thinking anything other than, You know, he has respect for trans people and he's making jokes.
00:35:16.000He's simultaneously joking about the culture, the reaction to a previous special, the ludicrousness of the situation that Jim Carrey was in, playing with the idea of identity itself.
00:35:29.000He's clearly interested in creating conversation and a dynamic set of circumstances.
00:35:35.000And that's what good comedians are able to expertly do.
00:35:38.000And if you watch that special, that's what you'll see happen.
00:35:40.000What you won't see happen is the generation of division and hatred.
00:35:43.000Where you will see the generation of division and hatred is in the legacy media outlets that are claiming to be policing, curtailing, controlling it.
00:35:52.000No, what you're here to do is to amplify the message of the powerful,
00:35:56.000disempower ordinary people, primarily by turning them against one another,
00:36:00.000and not highlighting the many, many thousands of issues around which we could be galvanised, mobilised and united.
00:36:08.000Now Jon Stewart and Tucker Carlson are two significant figures in the media landscape,
00:36:19.000They're both powerful, they're both very funny in their ways.
00:36:21.000I know loads of you don't like Jon Stewart no more because you see him as a person who just essentially amplifies the narratives of the establishment.
00:36:28.000But I know Jon Stewart to be a brilliant, funny man and a great professional.
00:37:00.000But in this phony polarisation and culture war, are we missing the real message here?
00:37:05.000That both these anti-establishment figures have more to teach us than anyone from the homogenised, uniparty, authoritarian centre.
00:37:14.000Surely this is an important moment where a figure like Tucker Carlson, despised and loathed on the left, but adored by many, and Tucker Carlson, let me say it outright out front, I consider him to be my friend.
00:37:26.000And the reason I like Tucker Carlson is because I see him as like an old school conservative, Maybe.
00:37:30.000Who is willing to just come out and say I'm a free speech absolutist.
00:38:07.000He understands comedy, he understands delivery, he understands character.
00:38:11.000He's an exceptionally gifted comic and I think a vital, incredible voice in our cultural space.
00:38:16.000That's why I think it's fascinating to see the two of them at Loggerhead.
00:38:20.000But are we going to miss a real opportunity here?
00:38:23.000When Tucker Carlson is a figure of the right, let's say for simplicity's sake, who is virulently anti-establishment, John Stewart is a figure of the left who is very pro-ordinary working people, who is critical of the establishment and yet is confined to certain areas of topicality and we'll point them out as we go.
00:38:43.000But is there more to There's more to learn from both of these figures, their popularity and their ability than we could ever learn from the centralised, homogenised, authoritarian, centralist figures that dominate our cultural space these days.
00:38:57.000Jon Stewart is whip funny, fast, amusing and right on.
00:39:02.000Tucker Carlson understands how to reach a wide audience with ethics and morals that clearly resonate with vast, almost incomparable numbers of people.
00:39:12.000This is show us in a way that politics and media have changed since Jon Stewart was last on TV and if we were to find an energy and a charge between these two poles rather than repulsion in that magnetic power we might find the source for new political movements that could be a genuine challenge to the American war machine and global corporatism.
00:39:56.000But what I'm interested in is why Why Jon Stewart never points out that Tucker Carlson is consistently anti-war.
00:40:03.000Watching Jon Stewart deconstruct and attack Tucker Carlson on the basis of his interview with Putin is interesting but I also would argue this was a really important interview and that in attacking Tucker Carlson Even though he does it brilliantly and amusingly, he is, to a degree, doing the job of the establishment, because if the Democrat Party could press a button and prevent that interview from happening, they would have pressed that button, because I think millions of people who never would have had access to it before saw Vladimir Putin clearly conveying a very particular perspective which could be called, easily, propaganda, but certainly includes things like, we are interested in a diplomatic solution, we always made it clear that if Ukraine joined NATO it would be a problem,
00:40:41.000And not only that, these are things that we were all aware of and discussing prior to the interview.
00:40:46.000The 2014 coup in Ukraine and the way that's played out.
00:40:48.000And subsequently, even newspapers like the New York Times have published that the CIA have bases inside Ukraine and have been agitating and provoking a war.
00:40:56.000So you can't call it an unprovoked war anymore.
00:40:58.000So what I'm saying is, I wonder, is it possible that you could feel, as Jon Stewart does, a kind of antipathy and even disdain for Tucker Carlson, and yet acknowledge Tucker Carlson's right, and therefore his audience's right, to share the views that they clearly do.
00:41:11.000And to oppose the opinions of Jon Stewart, but find common ground when it comes to a general agreement that you can't trust the American military-industrial complex, a subject upon which Tucker Carlson is very strong and to which this interview is integrally related, because isn't the big establishment fear here that we'll hear Vladimir Putin say stuff that makes us not want to fund an When you're sitting there interviewing Putin, and you don't plan to challenge his utter bullshit, but you don't want to really be that obvious, what do you do with your face?
00:41:38.000might be better than continuing to allow Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, et cetera,
00:42:13.000For instance, like you're constipated while jerking off to a Sears catalog.
00:42:19.000This, I suppose, shows you the power of comedy, because that's an entirely constructed idea designed to ridicule, and it's a successful one, and it's the kind of thing that comedians should be able to do, and clearly do rather well.
00:42:31.000And it's one of the things that's slowly getting extricated from our culture, the ability to be cruel in good faith.
00:42:37.000Although this is, of course, not a well-intended bit, this is a polarising bit.
00:42:42.000I maintain, Jon Stewart ...is an anti-establishment figure when it comes to being critical of corruption.
00:42:47.000Did you see his interview with that Pentagon official when it came to the subject of failing audits?
00:42:52.000An $850 billion budget to an organisation that can't pass an audit and tell you where that money went.
00:43:00.000I think most people would consider that somewhere in the realm of waste, fraud or abuse because they would wonder why that money isn't well accounted for.
00:43:09.000What I'm trying to drive us towards here is the possibility of a kind of acceptance that there's a space that's neither Democrat or Republican in the former sense, but is a more decentralized, autonomous, truly democratic, anti-establishment position.
00:44:36.000But what we're missing here in this polarity is the opportunity to identify, acknowledge and move into new cultural spaces rather than let this just sink into the morass of the culture war as just tit-for-tat spat that don't really go anywhere.
00:44:49.000Perhaps if your handlers had allowed, you would have seen there is a hidden fee to your cheap groceries and orderly streets.
00:44:59.000Ask Alexei Navalny or any of his supporters.
00:45:02.000In Vladimir Putin's Russia, political repression is everywhere.
00:45:08.000And hundreds have been arrested for daring to honor Navalny so publicly.
00:45:39.000Because the difference between our urinal caked chaotic subways and your candelabraed beautiful subways is the literal price of freedom.
00:45:49.000But also the literal price of freedom is America's ongoing imperialist projects around the world.
00:45:55.000The escalating tensions in the Middle East.
00:45:57.000Some people are calling it a genocide in Gaza.
00:46:00.000The increasing tensions in the South Pacific between China and the agitation of Russia that's been continually framed by the media that I'd love to see Jon Stewart hold to account in the
00:46:09.000same way, continually advocate for as an unprovoked attack
00:46:12.000that needed addressing, when increasingly we now know, from New York Times reporting that the CIA had bases in
00:46:18.000Ukraine for ten years and were agitating for that war,
00:46:20.000and we know that NATO also understood that if Ukraine were ever to be granted membership of that organisation,
00:46:26.000it would lead to an escalation of tensions between Ukraine and Putin.
00:46:29.000So when it comes to imperialism, colonialism and the management of information, the establishment,
00:46:34.000the neoliberal left establishment, because in my view there is no left anymore, have a lot of questions to answer
00:46:40.000And I think that as long as you have Tucker Carlson, It's much more critical of both parties than Jon Stewart, who still appears to be somewhat tribally affiliated with a Democrat organization, in spite of being willing to criticize Biden.
00:46:52.000And there was a hell of a lot of blowback when he did, even on something as risible as his age.
00:46:56.000If Jon Stewart were to apply his comedic wit and incredible abilities to addressing the hypocrisy within the Democratic Party, I think it would relieve a great deal of tension.
00:47:06.000I know I felt excited just by seeing Jon Stewart attack Joe Biden and attacking Donald Trump.
00:47:11.000I thought, yeah, this is what I I don't want to hear.
00:47:14.000Now, my satisfaction scarcely needs to be prioritised, but I think that what is being revealed by these two cultural orators, two polemicists, two polarised figures, is that the uniparty space is becoming increasingly less relevant and movements and individuals from the periphery have a lot more in common with one another ultimately, even if there is a variety of cultural issues that may separate us.
00:47:38.000I figure that if you were to acknowledge that on the subject of war, the military-industrial complex, deep state involvement, the establishment of a censorship-industrial complex, all of which has been underwritten by both the Obama administration and the Biden administration, all of which Tucker has reported on extensively, if we were to see those issues discussed in these spaces, we would start to recognise, hang on a minute, there is an affinity here.
00:47:58.000But you don't tend to see those issues discussed.
00:48:01.000Because it seems to me that the establishment's primary weapon now, maintaining control of political institutions is to
00:48:06.000continue to portray Trump as a terrifying tyrant and dictator in waiting hysterically
00:48:13.000rather than ever addressing the failures of their own organization
00:48:16.000and their own party particularly when it comes to economic inequality.
00:48:20.000John Stewart is a figure of the left that I continue to admire precisely
00:48:24.000because he does reach out to what you might call ordinary Americans.
00:48:27.000His work with the first responders after 9-11 and his affinity with ordinary American people is one of the things, and let me know how you feel in the chat, that makes me still feel affection for Jon Stewart and makes me still feel hope that out of this incendiary space of this type of cultural conflict, new alliances may yet emerge.
00:48:44.000But the goal that Carlson and his ilk are pushing is that there's really There's really no difference between our systems.
00:48:48.000In fact, theirs might be a little bit better.
00:49:04.000But now, they think the battle is woke versus un-woke.
00:49:08.000I think the emergence of woke owes a lot more to the fact that the Democrats now operate on behalf of metropolitan elite and have abandoned ordinary working people and therefore have to emphasize the cultural areas where they are more inverted commas progressive in order to distract us from the fact that now truckers are pro-Trump.
00:49:24.000To regard Trump as the source of the problem rather than a response to the failings of the American left is I think a similarly myopic perspective and also conveying a kind of go and live in Russia if you love it so much.
00:49:36.000That's exactly the sort of thing that you would have heard from And in that fight, Putin is an ally to the right.
00:49:40.000John Stewart in his spats with Bill O'Reilly, there was a kind of conviviality and a sense
00:49:45.000of hope that somehow there was a shared vision of America that might lead to mutuality, respect
00:50:01.000Unfortunately, he is also a brutal and ruthless dictator.
00:50:06.000So now they have to make Americans a little more comfortable with that.
00:50:10.000I mean, liberty is nice, but have you seen Russia's shopping carts?
00:50:15.000I suppose at this point you'd have to estimate for yourself how much of the United States' military-industrial complex and your tax-dollar resources are being expended in the Ukraine-Russia conflict because of a humanitarian crisis, and how much of it is being expended because, as Julian Assange said, The goal is to create long unending wars rather than successful ones.
00:50:53.000And I haven't been for I really haven't been since I got back from Baghdad at the beginning of the Iraq war.
00:50:58.000And I realized that The Republican Party, which I'd voted for, you know, my whole life to that point and had supported in general, was like pushing this really horrible thing that was going to hurt the United States, which in time it really did.
00:51:15.000I am a figure that came out of what you might call the cultural left.
00:51:18.000I've got a lot of friends that feel much more affiliated with the politics and ideals of Jon Stewart than Tucker Carlson.
00:51:23.000One of the things they continually say about Tucker Carlson is he's interested in things like displacement theory.
00:51:27.000never heard him talk about Tucker Carlson's continuing opposition to war, from the Iraq
00:51:31.000War to contemporary wars, his willingness to interview people that are truly anti-establishment
00:51:35.000on a variety of subjects, and even a memorable piece where he spoke to Ben Shapiro, those
00:51:41.000were the days when them guys were communicating, on the subject of AI and whether or not he
00:51:45.000would pass laws to ensure that trucks could never be driven, for example, automatically
00:51:50.000because of the impact that would have on that particular sector of American working people,
00:51:54.000where he spoke in favor of government regulation of private corporations in a way that you
00:51:58.000would never hear anyone from inside the Biden administration talking in support of ordinary
00:52:44.000You can't trust corporations than people that appear to be advocating for one side of a broken political system.
00:52:50.000For me, by continually being hysterical about Trump and Trump's impact, you're failing to acknowledge that the Democrats in your country or the Labour movement in our party have failed ordinary people to the point where populism, nativism are But I would just say this, Jon Stewart's a defender of power.
00:53:06.000feel there is a global agenda, there is a cartel of interests and institutions
00:53:12.000that are impervious to the democratic will of ordinary people and for me
00:53:15.000Tucker Carlson has been brilliant at attacking and addressing exactly those
00:53:20.000subjects. But I would just say this, Jon Stewart's a defender of power, like Jon
00:53:23.000Stewart has never criticized, like what's Jon Stewart's view on, you know, the aid
00:53:29.000we've sent to Ukraine, the hundred billion dollars or whatever.
00:54:01.000But don't pretend to be something else.
00:54:03.000What I'm struck by when watching these two figures communicating, presumably primarily to their own audiences rather than each other's, is surely at this point there is a growing constituency that quite like Jon Stewart, quite like Tucker Carlson, and hate the establishment, hate the Uni Party.
00:54:20.000That's what I think is being exposed by this era and by the great Stars of this era is that the establishment and its institutions are failing.
00:54:30.000And what we're living through now is their frantic attempt to reassert control that used to be possible and plausible when you had centralised media.
00:54:42.000And back into that space you have one of these, not Old Guard, I don't mean this in a dismissive way, Very, very brilliant comic who could succeed in any environment because of his skill adapting to what has changed since then.
00:54:54.000Because I feel, and I hope in a way, that there are more of us that think, not the Democrats, not the Republicans, something else, please.
00:55:01.000than are just like thirstily and happily backing up our chosen opponent in a culture war
00:55:06.000that does all of us a great disservice.
00:55:08.000'Cause guess what? While we're culture warring and clapping and applauding our preferred pugilist
00:55:13.000in this phony battle, the establishment is business as usual. And business as usual
00:55:18.000is ongoing war. And it's this subject, beyond all others, that led me to understand
00:55:23.000that what Tucker Carlson is doing is significant and important.
00:55:26.000The measure to me is, are you taking positions that are unpopular with the most powerful people in the
00:55:33.000world, and how often are you doing it?
00:55:54.000The big things, this is my estimation of it, others may disagree, the big things are the economy and war, okay?
00:56:01.000The big things government does can be, I mean a lot of things government does, government does everything at this point, but where we kill people and how, and for what purpose, and how we organize the economic engine that keeps the country afloat, those are the two big questions.
00:56:17.000And I hear almost no debate about either one of them in the media.
00:56:22.000And I have dissenting views on both of them.
00:56:24.000I mean, I'm mad about the tax code, which I think is unfair.
00:56:27.000And the fact that we're creating chaos around the world, like, is the saddest thing that's happening right now.
00:56:37.000These are valuable questions to ask about the establishment media.
00:56:39.000Are they willing to interrogate war expenditure?
00:56:42.000Are they willing to interrogate and provide the reckoning that the pandemic period surely demands the The disease is the same name as the lab.
00:56:48.000There's been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania.
00:56:51.000a significant mainstream figure who said there's been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness
00:56:55.000in Pennsylvania with regard to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the ridiculous coincidence of the emergence
00:57:14.000Maybe a steam shovel made it with a cocoa bean."
00:57:18.000Or, "It's the (bleep) chocolate factory."
00:57:21.000So what I'm saying is our culture needs both of these figures.
00:57:24.000It represents the end of these systems.
00:57:27.000Is it possible that we have in the figures of Tucker Carlson and Jon Stewart, even while they're in the middle of a highly publicised spat, the kind of A fusion that's required for solution.
00:57:38.000Is this conversation and this polemic an indication that our old institutions are dying, new institutions are required, new conversations will have to take place in order for that to be achieved, and perhaps a conversation between Jon Stewart and Tucker Carlson could certainly contribute to that solution.
00:57:59.000Thank you for joining us for this Culture Special.
00:58:02.000Now, on Monday we've got Dr Latipo, the Floridian Surgeon General, a man who stood up to the establishment throughout the pandemic, who's written a new book called Transcend Fear, which is fantastic.
00:58:13.000You can watch it right now if you want, simply by clicking the link, becoming a Locals member and use the code GODISGREAT.
00:58:20.000To get one month free, you'll also get early access to interviews, a weekly book club that you'll love, meditations, and a free exclusive weekly here's the news just for you.
00:58:29.000I'd like to welcome our new members like Laxta, Victoria Gold, StayFree7, Wilhelm8886.