In this episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand, we're streaming live from RUMBLE HQ, where we're getting the breaking news and talking to Lee Fang, breaking a story that could be the most important story of the 21st century, about nepotism in American politics. We're also talking about porn on trains, and why you shouldn't be allowed to watch porn on a train. Stay Free with Russell Brand is streaming exclusively on Rumble, exclusively on YouTube, where our 6.4 million wonders live. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and use the promo code: "ELISSA" to receive 10% off your entire purchase when you enter the offer code: STAYFREE at checkout. This offer ends on December 31st, 2019, so make sure to be sure to check it out at the checkout before then! Stay Free, you won't want to miss it! Stay free, you're not getting any more of the same. We're streaming on all major podcasting platforms, including Vimeo, Podchaser, Podcoin, and The Huffington Post, where you can watch the whole thing live on your favourite streaming platform, and subscribe to stay free with us wherever you get your favourite podcaster and get 10% discount code: stayfree. We'll be looking for you! And if you like it, we'll be giving you a shout out on our socials! and we'll send you an ad-free version of the show, too! . And we're looking for the best of the podcast you're listening to us on Apple Podcasts, too. . And we'll even send you a review of the best vlogged version of this podcast you can listen to the show. , and you'll get a free copy of our latest episode, and it'll be featured on the next episode, so you can be notified when it's available in your favourite podcasting platform so you get the best possible listening experience, and you can tell us what we're watching it on your feed, and we can send us what you're watching and listening to it on the most of your favourite place in the world, and more of it, and the rest of the world can do that's the best thing you can do the most influencers are listening to the most amazing thing you're going to get the most like it.
00:02:04.000Hold on, he's listened to the voice note.
00:02:06.000Does it mean they've listened to it if it disappears?
00:02:07.000I don't know, they've gone blue ticks.
00:02:10.000We will get you, Tucker, by the end of this show, so help me God.
00:02:14.000And also, exclusively on Rumble, you know we're on YouTube right now, well we won't be in a minute, because of the, you know, we love YouTube.
00:02:21.000YouTube's where our 6.4 million wonders live, and we love every single one of their million.
00:02:26.000Every one of their million, six million, point four, we love them.
00:02:29.000But, We've got to go on to Rumble to talk to Lee, Fangs for the memory, Fang, about, and he's breaking a story on our show, so this could be our most important show ever, he's breaking a story, new Pfizer revelations about some Pfizer funding stuff, that is going to knock your pants down around your ankles, or possibly if you're in a comical mood, put them on top of your head, no matter what the hygiene consequences of such an action should be.
00:02:57.000We're talking about institutional corruption.
00:03:02.000The kind of nepotism that leads a man, a certain little man called Joseph Jojo Biden, to possibly visit Ukraine to grease the wheels of his son's employment at Burisma Rhymes with Charisma, a Ukrainian gas company.
00:03:17.000And this kind of nepotism exists throughout Congress because there's evidence of significant insider trading.
00:03:54.000This is from the United Kingdom, which is where you get your language and where the Queen, God rest her soul, used to live until very recently.
00:04:01.000This is, uh, Northern Railway asked passengers to stop watching porn on trains.
00:04:06.000Now, you might think, perfectly reasonable request.
00:04:45.000Well, look, at least they're not in transit, I suppose.
00:04:49.000They're static in a parliamentary building.
00:04:51.000But what we want to point out, it's not the puerility.
00:04:53.000of this story, but the fact is, the fact that they'll use something that all of us will agree on, we don't think that people should be watching pornography and engaging in the accompanying uh, onanistic activity, to legitimize, look at the last, look at the last bit of it, uh, they've advised customers to refrain from searching offensive topics and inappropriate jokes, ah, and stop from search, stop them from searching explicit material and bad language on their wi-fi.
00:05:21.000So what this will become about, Is to censorship.
00:05:24.000Now I know this is a frivolous story but sometimes you can see in a fragment the whole.
00:05:30.000You can see in a fractal the way that these patterns repeat themselves.
00:05:33.000Let's have a look at the kind of broader corruption that sits at the top of American politics power pyramids in the form of lovely old Joe Biden who's expected any second now to announce that he's going to be running again even though mild perambulation for him seems like a challenge.
00:05:49.000Let's see how the mainstream media are reporting on Joe Biden right now.
00:05:56.000His re-election campaign as soon as tomorrow.
00:05:59.000So, if he wins, America's oldest president could stay in office until he's 86 years old, and that may not sit well for a lot of Americans.
00:06:08.000According to a new NBC News poll that shows 70% of Americans do not think Mr. Biden should run again, including 51% of Democrats.
00:06:18.000Now, half of those who say he should not enter the 2024 race cite his age as a major reason why.
00:07:08.000And the so-called political processes of fraud our elected officials like our bureaucratic functionaries like even our judges are largely the indentured servants of the commercial interest.
00:07:17.000Now this is where one story about a potentially corrupt President, I mean, let us know in the chat right now, if Joe Biden strong-armed the CIA into delegitimizing the Hunter Biden laptop story, would you call that corruption?
00:07:35.000What about the stenographer that says that he heard Joe Biden and Hunter Biden chatting about the deal with Burisma and fracking and stuff?
00:07:44.000We're starting now to accumulate a story of If not extraordinary corruption, it's appalling that it's not extraordinary.
00:07:50.000It's the level of corruption that we accept within American politics, but politics in our country, the UK, too.
00:07:56.000It's an acceptance that really our political leaders are, broadly speaking, serving commercial interests.
00:08:02.000Yes, because their personal interests align more with financial, commercial and corporate interests than with the interests of the electorate.
00:08:10.000Have a look at the SVB story now and the number of Congress folk who sold shares around the time that that banking crisis took place.
00:08:22.000On March the 10th, Silicon Valley Bank collapses.
00:08:26.000Also on March the 10th, children of Democratic representative Jared Moskowitz sell shares of Seacoast Banking Corporation worth $65,000 to $150,000 after Mr. Moskowitz attended a bipartisan congressional briefing on the bank in Tumult.
00:08:43.000Then the very next day, Three days later that is, yeah.
00:09:01.000Yeah so I mean this is the case so obviously what was going on at the time this example of Mr Moskowitz is after that congressional briefing obviously had insider knowledge I mean I guess it's allegedly but it seems pretty obvious you think that during the bipartisan congressional briefing you would imagine so they went listen you tell you something Seacoast Banking It's gonna go down.
00:09:24.000But obviously it can work the other way as well.
00:09:26.000So March 17th, Republican representative Nicole Malliotakis buys shares of New York community Bancorp after private discussions with New York State Bank regulators.
00:09:36.000Are you suggesting that that conversation with the New York State Bank regulators contained information that led Nicole Malliotakis to buy those shares?
00:10:16.000Yeah, so it doesn't matter whether they're buying or selling, they're making all the right choices over there in Congress.
00:10:21.000Nepotism and corruption, systemic and institutional.
00:10:26.000Well, how can we get it up For another four years of octogenarian Joe knowing that it seems at least that he is corrupt, that he used deep state facilities to crush a story that could prevent him from winning an election against Donald Trump.
00:10:44.000And that also, furthermore, what's more, that he's getting his son little deals over there in the Ukraine.
00:10:51.000I mean, if it was Donald Trump, do you think the mainstream media, the NBCs, etc., will be reporting on this more?
00:10:57.000Do you think they'll be saying, hold on a minute, Donald Trump took Don Jr., our friend over at Rumble, over to Ukraine, got him a gig with Burisma, and he's using the CIA to repress information that could be negative?
00:11:09.000Trump right now being hauled through the courts of New York City on the basis of a hush payment that came from potentially legal fees or campaign funding.
00:11:17.000I know it's a sort of a complex legislative and bureaucratic case, but we all know that whatever they're saying really is to take Trump out of the race.
00:11:25.000And what I'm saying to you is that whether it's Biden or Trump, as long as the systems and institutions remain as corrupt
00:11:31.000as they are, and they sit on a bedrock of corruption, because look at
00:11:47.000People in Congress that have connections as a result of their job
00:11:51.000to certain stocks and shares and corporations have been involved in sales on those very stocks and shares.
00:11:56.000That means it's deep deep in the institution doesn't it Gareth?
00:12:00.000And obviously, this is a situation at the moment where, especially with the Biden stuff that's going on, is things are coming out, but there isn't transparency around it.
00:12:08.000And this occurs at the same time as the Biden administration is poised to increase internet surveillance in response to those Pentagon papers that we have kind of talked about the last week or so, and the restrict act that they're bringing.
00:12:20.000There's all ways of censoring and shutting down discussions, shutting down truth, when we're not able to glean any truth from the things that have been going on with them.
00:12:28.000Centralising authoritarianism at a time where we do not trust authority at all.
00:12:34.000We believe in democracy here at Stay Free.
00:12:45.000Lobbyists trading money for government favours?
00:12:47.000Members of Congress owning stocks and shares in the companies that they regulate and legislate?
00:12:52.000Four, or against, government censorship on free speech.
00:12:54.000Which of those three things, and I reckon in future we should put A, B, C, and make that look sort of nice and clear, you know, like sort of a clear thing and look at the language a bit better.
00:13:50.000Right, listen to what Tim Robbins said.
00:13:52.000Recently, independent journalists like Matt Taibbi, Shellenberger and Barry Weiss have all been exposed in a massive censorship operation by the US government to control content on social media and eliminate any dissenting voices.
00:14:03.000Have you read their reporting or are you listening to the embarrassed, compromised hacks from the media that are covering their tracks?
00:14:11.000Could be the most important story related to our personal freedoms in the US and it's being buried.
00:14:15.000Mainstream media have not only ignored the story, but now attack the journalists, effectively serving as a thuggish censorship arm of the government.
00:14:22.000Meanwhile, then a bunch of politicians threaten journalist Matt Taibbi with jail time.
00:14:27.000What an embarrassing, shameful time for the Democrats and the free, inverted commas, press.
00:14:31.000You are losing any shred of credibility you had, you effing fools.
00:15:50.000Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, you're gonna be getting... Cover it up!
00:15:53.000Get ready for that, getting pinged off your little old body as quick as an ex-wife!
00:15:57.000Like, I reckon that, yeah, you're gonna love that story, but let's have a look at Rand Paul exposing, if that's the right word, some of the ludicrous expenditure that the pharmaceutical industry lays out on experiments that I don't think are worth undertaking.
00:19:07.000Li Fang is doing what journalists are supposed to do, convey difficult, challenging, truthful information to the rest of us so that we can make informed decisions for ourselves rather than being deluged in untruths, censored to within an inch of our lives and surveilled all the way to Belmarsh.
00:19:26.000So we're going to leave you now because there's a lot of stuff that Lee Fang's going to say and this is an exclusive conversation with Lee.
00:19:30.000I believe he's about to simultaneously release the article on Substack in an exciting moment.
00:19:36.000Very exciting on the day that Tucker resigns.
00:20:07.000Thank you for your humility and your grace.
00:20:11.000Mate, we want to start with the exclusive story.
00:20:13.000As I understand it, Pfizer are attempting to sort of set up grassroots organizations that are lobbying for COVID vaccine mandates.
00:20:21.000I'm sure I'm mangling that somewhat, but it sounds like Pfizer are spending money to create apparently authentic voices advocating for vaccine mandates.
00:20:32.000Well, look, this story basically takes a look in 2021 when in the United States, we had multifaceted mandates, you know, mandates enacted by I live in California and San Francisco.
00:20:44.000There were very restrictive mandates here.
00:20:46.000But, you know, across the country, including the Biden administration in September of 2021, enacted a very kind of strong mandate with no exemption for prior immunity or, you know, kind of natural immunity or prior infection, natural immunity.
00:21:03.000And, you know, Pfizer was not playing a kind of visible role here.
00:21:08.000They didn't comment on any of the articles.
00:21:10.000They weren't really talking to the press.
00:21:12.000You saw consumer groups, civil rights groups, patient groups, doctor groups, you know, public health organizations all saying, you know, these mandates are necessary.
00:21:22.000Even though there wasn't a lot of scientific evidence to support the basis that, you know, we needed these mandates, that, you know, they were sold to us with The claim that they would stop transmission of the virus.
00:21:34.000You had this coalition of community groups saying we need the mandate.
00:21:39.000Well, I'm taking a look at new disclosures that show that many of those organizations, these third-party organizations with a lot more credibility than a pharmaceutical company with a lot of money to gain, were taking funds from Pfizer while lobbying for these controversial policies.
00:21:59.000It's a story I just published right before coming onto your show on my Substack.
00:22:03.000We're very excited to receive this exclusivity from you, Lee, and at the risk of diminishing your contribution, you're getting a lot of love in the chat.
00:22:12.000Notably, Pride Faults, who says, simply, babe alert.
00:22:18.000That's an objectifying comment, I believe, about your physical appearance, but we'll probably get some more on that.
00:22:47.000Pfizer CEO Albert Baller is the treasurer of the Pharmaceutical Lobbying Group, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
00:22:54.000Pharma spent a total of $140 million over that, in fact, on lobbying between 2019 and 2022, as well as the pharmaceutical industry being the largest single advertiser on mainstream media.
00:23:07.00075% of all their ad revenue comes from the pharmaceutical Industry Lee.
00:23:11.000So we're talking about an almost immersive omnipotence.
00:23:14.000They've got power in every direction as well as it appears as a result of your exclusive there to be investing in apparently organic and authentic voices that are, you know, pro-mandate or pro-vaccination.
00:23:28.000What chance do we have of real democracy?
00:23:31.000What chance do we have of legitimate open conversations when an organization can exert that much power over that Well, look, you know, the figures you just cited were the ones that have to be disclosed.
00:23:46.000You know, that's when they hire, you know, a former member of Congress or a staffer to go and wine and dine, you know, a policymaker or regulator.
00:23:54.000They have to disclose most of that funding, that spending.
00:23:58.000But So much they don't have to disclose, how much they're spending on television, how much they're spending on TikTok ads, how much they're giving to these front groups or these doctors groups or these public health groups that kind of set the nature of the debate.
00:24:11.000They kind of appear in the news media, they create events.
00:24:15.000And they created a discourse that looks authentic, that looks organic, but it benefits the bottom line of their benefactors, of companies like Pfizer.
00:24:24.000And, you know, the vaccine debate is, you know, I think it's fraught.
00:24:27.000It's interesting because this has shaped our lives in the last three years of the pandemic.
00:24:32.000But it's, you know, it's also not that unique in the sense that every major pharmaceutical company in the United States engages in these practices.
00:24:39.000They pressure regulators, they spend so much money on direct-to-consumer advertising, and really they kind of just dominate the entire public policy debate.
00:24:50.000So, you know, we can talk about a lot of other special interest groups, but pharma is unique in just the raw amounts of money they spend to control the entire public sector On regulatory, on policy, on really everything in terms of how it affects medicine and as it's practiced in the United States.
00:25:09.000Lee Fang, what specific groups did they fund, mate?
00:25:26.000You know, in Chicago, there's a very kind of controversial vaccine mandate.
00:25:31.000There are also discussions about vaccine passports.
00:25:35.000And, you know, a large percentage of the African-American, the Black community in that city was not vaccinated in 2021.
00:25:43.000And one of the oldest African-American civil rights groups, the Urban League, Chicago Urban League, went out into the media and was asked, you know, would this mandate hurt the African-American community?
00:25:55.000Would it kind of push them to the sidelines?
00:25:58.000And she was very clear in lobbying and pushing back against that, saying, no, the mandate's worth it.
00:26:05.000She never mentioned that, you know, just prior to that interview, a few months prior to the interview, she received a $100,000 check from Pfizer, not mentioned during the interview, not mentioned on the Urban League's website.
00:26:17.000It's not disclosed until this morning, until right before appearing on your show.
00:26:21.000The Consumer's League of America, I mean, this is another Consumer advocacy group that's kind of famous for standing up to corporate power, you know, founded over 100 years ago fighting against monopolies.
00:26:33.000They're a group that kind of mysteriously endorsed the mandates In 2021, again, they received big money from Pfizer and even has a Pfizer lobbyist on its board.
00:26:44.000You know, these are intricate relationships that aren't disclosed to the people reading these press releases who are getting pressured by these groups, and it's affecting the entire debate.
00:26:52.000It's affecting how regulators see these issues, and it also affects how the public sees this.
00:26:57.000When they see these third-party groups That have some credibility.
00:27:01.000You know, these are kind of famous organizations that are known for standing up for the public interest when they're saying, hey, these mandates are a good idea for the American public.
00:27:10.000They're just not disclosing the Pfizer money, which I think, you know, is a relevant factor here when you're talking about a policy that compels Americans to take this product.
00:27:19.000Yeah, I think that should be at the beginning of the endorsement.
00:27:22.000Eventually, African-American people should take these vaccines.
00:27:26.000Also, earlier, a minute ago actually, I just got $100,000 from Pfizer, who I think they do sell vaccines and they would potentially financially benefit.
00:27:36.000If it can't be explicit, you can't have democracy, I think what the danger we have now, Lee, is we've reached the point where there's such Mass distrust in government, mass distrust and mistrust of media, and there seems to be no attempt to rectify that through authenticity and morality and principled action, but through the increase of censorship, through the increase of control.
00:28:04.000With Matt Taibbi, your mate, your fellow Twitterphile journalist, he's being threatened with jail now, I understand, and I don't know how much traction that's got, and I pray that it isn't something that happens.
00:28:18.000Matt Taibbi's a friend of ours, we love him, the croaky-voiced, drum-kit-perched, cap-wearing, so-called journalist sweetheart that he is.
00:28:28.000Do you worry yourself that we're reaching a point that free speech is actually something that you could be in prison for?
00:28:37.000And if you're Julian Assange, you're already in prison for it.
00:28:40.000I mean, I've looked at, I've covered Congress for the last 15 years.
00:28:46.000And there are a lot of Uh, experts and people brought in to testify, uh, who mislead, who get the facts wrong, who, you know, they engage in all kinds of kind of scurrilous behavior.
00:28:57.000And I've never seen behavior like this in terms of a member of Congress in response.
00:29:01.000And Matt Taibbi, for the record, I don't know if your audience has seen this letter.
00:29:06.000I exclusively obtained it and published it last week on my sub stack.
00:29:11.000But after testifying on March 9th, Matt Taibbi had a back and forth
00:29:15.000with one of the members of Congress, Democrat named Stacey Plaskett.
00:29:20.000She's the one who called her, Taibbi and Schellenberger, a so-called journalist.
00:29:24.000You know, very aggressive kind of questioning.
00:29:28.000But, you know, that's par for the course in politics.
00:29:31.000You know, you can get aggressive with a witness.
00:29:33.000What's unusual is this letter afterwards that took a quote from Matt Tybee saying that an arm of the Department of Homeland Security had worked with one of these disinfo NGOs that's, you know, partially backed by Stanford University as they were pressuring Twitter on content moderation policies.
00:29:52.000Uh, that Twitter did not distinguish between the private sector and the public sector when they were receiving these censorship requests.
00:30:13.000These government agencies that are exerting incredible levels of pressure on social media firms, including today, although we don't have the same kind of purview, the same kind of visibility that we had under the Twitter files, but it's certainly happening to other platforms as well, including Discord and Facebook and others.
00:30:30.000Um, but yeah, I've never seen this letter taking a true quote, an accurate quote from Matt Taibbi and saying this was an example of perjury that you could face up to five years of imprisonment for, for telling the truth.
00:30:44.000It's also true, I understand, that Facebook have been censoring Seymour Hershey's reporting on the Nord Stream pipeline.
00:30:51.000This value of free speech, according to our poll, let's have another look at that poll.
00:30:55.000I think a lot of our audience are deeply concerned about free speech and it seems that the free speech argument is increasingly being connected, I think, through centralised media narratives with, you know, right-wing extremism.
00:31:10.000And it seems that there's an attempt to, yeah here it is, like 60% of our audience that we're currently polling say that free speech is the issue that concerns the most out of a whole bunch of significant little issues there.
00:31:23.000Do you think that we're reaching some kind of tipping point where credible, lifelong Pulitzer Prize winning journalists like Seymour Hersh are being sort of shut down and censored?
00:31:34.000What do you think, how do you think, do you think there's like new alliances that we can make to ensure that we can continue to speak freely?
00:31:41.000Well, look, you know, I grew up in the Washington, D.C.
00:31:43.000area in the suburbs, Prince George's County, and the war in Iraq kind of radicalized me and motivated me to get involved in media and politics, just seeing kind of the entire mainstream media basically in lockstep Repeating the Bush administration's drive to go to war and their claims about weapons of mass destruction and a war on terror.
00:32:04.000And I, you know, I had such great hopes for the promise of the open internet as a corrective to government censorship, that with more voices we'd have a better chance of getting to the truth, especially when it comes to these life and death foreign policy issues.
00:32:19.000I mean, there's nothing bigger And the war in Ukraine is kind of an example of how I was wrong.
00:32:24.000The internet is quickly becoming different.
00:32:29.000We're getting organized into little walled gardens.
00:32:31.000We're getting pushed into just a small number of platforms.
00:32:34.000Those platforms are coordinating with government.
00:32:37.000And they're attempting to squelch the truth.
00:32:40.000At the same time, we have, you know, because of these big social media firms draining the advertising revenue from legacy newspapers, we just have less journalists too.
00:32:50.000You know, I did a story last year looking at how a whistleblower from the Department of Homeland Security basically told us that the Department of Homeland Security Their next big agenda item is working with social media companies to correct quote-unquote disinformation about the war in Ukraine, Russia.
00:33:09.000I mean, this is an issue where we don't know the truth.
00:33:12.000You know, we see a lot of war propaganda.
00:33:14.000We see a lot of claims about, you know, the readiness of Ukraine or, you know, what have you about Russia.
00:33:20.000But there's not a lot of independent reporting.
00:33:22.000There's not a lot of skeptical reporting.
00:33:24.000We need more voices, but how do you reach those voices if we're only on a few platforms and those platforms are coordinating with the government to squelch out voices of dissent?
00:33:35.000Yeah, we've been talking a lot about the restrict act that appears to be being sort of caressed into the public debate.
00:33:44.000What was that public news article we read, Gareth?
00:33:59.000But Leighton Woodhouse was talking about how in order to legitimise censorship, you have to create the problem of misinformation, disinformation, malinformation.
00:34:10.000Because without it now, there are too many independent voices, too much capacity for investigation.
00:34:15.000It's for one narrative to dominate in the way that it could have done sort of, you know, before the advent of these technologies.
00:34:23.000So while there was sort of briefly this utopian possibility of free speech, open communication, thorough investigation, it's being, you can see now, it's being sort of legislated against.
00:34:34.000There's smear campaigns against independent voices.
00:34:37.000People are being threatened with prison.
00:34:42.000Do you think that this Restrict Act, which we had explained to us, is like the Patriot Act after 9-11?
00:34:50.000It's like using, for example, the recent Pentagon Papers to underwrite this censorial legislation.
00:34:58.000Do you think this is the sort of thing that will go through, mate?
00:35:02.000Well, just again to compare it to the War on Terror and the Bush administration, they used the claim that, you know, you were in league with terrorists, you know, you were a jihadi or whatever to polarize the debate, to, you know, stigmatize any voices of dissent.
00:36:01.000I went independent for the first time in nine years.
00:36:06.000And with my first story out, you know, out the gate, I had an MSNBC host saying that, you know, I was just writing about the Department of Homeland Security, you know, accusing me of being a bigot or something.
00:36:16.000I mean, this is the strategy for marginalizing independent voices of dissent.
00:36:22.000Lee, I'm really glad that you've moved to Substack.
00:36:26.000We recommend that everyone who follows our work follows Lee Fang.
00:36:31.000He's a fantastic journalist and if you were willing to introduce perhaps photographs of yourself with your top off or just in some Bermuda shorts, I think you might gain more followers.
00:36:40.000That's just advice based on what some of the things I'm seeing in the chat here from our locals community that people can join to essentially objectify our guest.
00:36:50.000Thank you for joining us and providing people that are sexually attracted to men with some free midday pornography.
00:36:57.000Even though we did a story today about people masturbating on public transport, from the perspective of... it wasn't a good thing.
00:37:04.000I wonder how they'd feel about masturbating to Lee's Substack.
00:37:07.000Let's do a poll on do you think it's acceptable to masturbate over Lee Fang's substack imagery of him in his vacation wear, or do you think that's wrong?
00:37:18.000We'll do a poll on that, Lee, and we'll send you the results, and perhaps you can do an article on that.
00:37:22.000Well, you've got to be the top-level tier for that, but like and subscribe, you know.
00:38:39.000But before we move into the hot world of sex contests, do you sometimes worry that you're being prepped for another bloody international conflict, this time with the superpower that is China?
00:38:54.000There are US defence contractors, I think they're in Taiwan right now, hawking their wares is how I'm going to describe it.
00:39:05.000And we've got to ask you in this deep investigation that we've conducted, are the US solely interested in protecting Taiwan from a giant aggressor, or are they the aggressor themselves?
00:39:33.000Would they make any money out of potentially causing World War 3 with China?
00:39:41.000Right now the American defense industry, aka the military-industrial complex, are sending representatives of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, etc.
00:40:38.000The planned arms industry trip to Taiwan comes as the US is looking to ramp up arms sales and general military cooperation with Taiwan, which will further exacerbate tensions with Beijing.
00:40:49.000This is the problem with their economic model.
00:40:50.000It needs to continually escalate and grow.
00:40:53.000Whether it's energy companies or now the military-industrial machine, it requires limitless growth.
00:40:59.000Growth in this instance means people always buying weapons.
00:41:02.000So that's, I think, just a really simple analysis of what's happening.
00:41:05.000Which means you have to create the conditions in which people will buy weapons.
00:41:08.000And people don't buy weapons if there are treaties and peace deals and armistices
00:41:13.000and a general sense of goodwill to all mankind, individual personal awakening, good community
00:41:27.000Yeah, Taiwan, they're under all sorts of pressure.
00:41:29.000Should we get over there and just see if, I don't know, maybe they want some answers?
00:41:32.000Or do you think it's, we've got this business model, this is what's happening in the next quarter, this is what's likely to happen when eventually the Russia-Ukraine situation peters out, why don't we get this lined up so we can tell our shareholders, you know how the world works, don't you?
00:41:44.000The delegation plans to meet with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, who recently provoked major Chinese military drills by meeting with US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in California.
00:42:04.000I don't know if there's more complexity to the relationship between Taiwan and former European colonial powers like Spain and Portugal.
00:42:11.000I don't know if Taiwan has formerly been colonised by Japan, a historic enemy of China.
00:42:16.000I don't know if China have strategically had to occupy Taiwan in the past to prevent colonial and imperial powers impeding on their territory.
00:42:24.000What I will tell you is that the US literally have China surrounded by military bases.
00:42:29.000So if China do feel insecure and threatened, you could argue there is some legitimacy to that, in the same way that you could say that NATO expansion provoked Russia.
00:42:39.000Without saying that Russia's war is not criminal, you can still say Russia's actions in Ukraine are criminal, the deaths are unnecessary, Putin is a monster.
00:42:46.000All of that can be true, while simultaneously saying, hey, hang on a minute, America appear to have been, through NATO expansion, agitating for that conflict.
00:43:25.000Do you not really believe that it's possible that Ukraine are ever going to regain this territory?
00:43:29.000Is there no hope for a peace deal in 2023?
00:43:31.000All stuff that's being denied and not discussed was revealed.
00:43:34.000Those revelations are never discussed because what the media do, as you will see in this story, is they convey to you the preferred narrative of the powerful.
00:43:41.000Not a counter-narrative, which surely should be at least part of their job.
00:43:45.000Let me know in the comments in the chat if you agree.
00:43:47.000And today, the Taiwanese president held her highest level meeting with a powerful ally,
00:43:53.000It's the first time a meeting like this takes place on US soil since 1979.
00:43:58.000This comes as tensions in the Taiwan Strait continue to escalate.
00:44:02.000Tensions don't just escalate like eczema or asthma, they are being agitated now, probably
00:44:08.000through this media campaign, probably through this defense contractor visit, probably by
00:44:13.000by encroachment of bases all around China.
00:44:16.000China aren't just like, oh right, let's do this shit now.
00:44:19.000That's what we're told, in order to legitimise and justify these actions.
00:44:23.000Elsewhere you'll see Biden talking about, we're going to shut down this trade deal, we're going to control this, we're going to introduce these sanctions.
00:44:29.000It's a sort of a global approach to creating the conditions in which the system can continue to flourish.
00:44:35.000It's beneficial if there's tensions, it's beneficial if there's wars, beneficial if there's arms sales, beneficial if you have domestic populations terrified of ongoing war.
00:44:42.000There's no loss for them because they live in a different world to you.
00:44:45.000And it works to bolster its military readiness amid fears they could face the same fate as Ukraine.
00:45:34.000Is the warship a provocation or a counter-provocation?
00:45:38.000If it was a Chinese warship down the Gulf of Mexico or along the side California or whatever or sailing into Manhattan, oh well, you know, we were doing drills.
00:46:20.000We got these routines where routinely we provoke superpowers in order to create tension so the military-industrial complex who we give 50% of the Pentagon budget to, not that you'd know from an audit because we've not completed the last five, and then we can routinely have an unnecessary war where like Taiwanese people will die so everyone's a winner.
00:47:45.000The answer is there's no reason, except it makes good sense for the military-industrial complex who have armed America now so that it's broadly speaking an impenetrable fortress that spends as much money as the next nine countries combined on military expenditure.
00:48:00.000So now you have to tout for business elsewhere.
00:48:02.000Please tell me I'm wrong, because if it's right, it's terrifying.
00:48:05.000This tropical island, from its ultra-high-tech semiconductor factories... Those semiconductors that we need to stop China becoming more and more powerful.
00:48:13.000...to its rural highlands, where tea is still picked by hand.
00:48:33.000We don't care about these pee-picking motherfuckers one bit.
00:48:36.000We care about those semiconductors and we care about that money.
00:48:39.000And agitating other superpowers into potential conflicts is a new strategy that we're suddenly willing to consider when in the old days it was just little countries that you had to pretend it was kind of a fair war between some country you'd never heard of before and America.
00:49:35.000That's a decent-sized town worth of military personnel thousands of miles away from the country that they're from in order to do what exactly?
00:49:45.000You'd really have to believe in the righteousness of the American project.
00:50:13.000That extend from Hawaii In recent years, the US has been faced with the reality that its apparent singular power is being challenged economically by several countries such as China.
00:50:25.000To contest these challenges, the US began to rebuild its military force structure through its allies and more of these smaller but no less lethal base structures.
00:50:34.000has pushed its allies, including those organized in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to strengthen their military power while increasing its techno-military power and reach by establishing smaller bases across the world and producing new aircraft and ships with greater territorial reach.
00:50:48.000This military force was then used in a series of provocative actions against those it perceived as threats to its hegemony, with two key countries, China and Russia, facing the sharp edge of the U.S.
00:51:01.000began to provoke Russia through Ukraine and provoke China through Taiwan.
00:51:05.000These provocations over Ukraine have now resulted in a war that has been ongoing for a year, while the new U.S.
00:51:11.000bases in the Philippines are part of an escalation against China, using Taiwan as a battleground.
00:51:16.000In recent years, Taiwan has become a flashpoint for tensions between the United States and China.
00:51:21.000At the root of this simmering conflict are the country's diverging perspectives over Taiwan's sovereignty.
00:51:26.000The Chinese position, known as the One-China principle, is firm.
00:51:30.000Although the mainland and Taiwan have different political systems, they are part of the same country, with sovereignty residing in Beijing.
00:51:36.000Meanwhile, the US position on Taiwan is far less clear.
00:51:39.000Despite formally adopting the One-China policy, the US maintains extensive In fact, under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, US law requires Washington to provide arms of a defensive character to the island.
00:51:55.000So there you are, there are essentially two conflicting narratives.
00:51:58.000China sees Taiwan as part of China, and I'm sure there are numerous perspectives available on that.
00:52:03.000And US will use whatever perspective is amenable to the sale of future arms and watch the flexibility of defensive character altering in the same way as we saw aid become lethal aid become just have some weapons now guys the taxpayers are funding it anyway so what do we care which we saw of course in Ukraine and that's what this writer is suggesting that this template will be repeated in this escalating conflict
00:52:24.000The US justifies its ongoing ties with Taiwan by claiming that they are necessary to uphold the island's democracy and freedom.
00:52:32.000Democracy and freedom are pretty abstract ideas, and if democracy and freedom are indeed the priorities of the United States of America, I've got a country where you can start practicing those principles.
00:53:52.000Use some of that surplus, surfeit money that we don't need for our own homeless crisis, overcrowded prisons, desperate communities, broken small businesses, destroyed moral fabric.
00:54:19.000or any other Western country accept a situation where China provided military aid, stationed troops, and offered diplomatic support to separatist forces in part of its internationally recognized territory?
00:54:31.000In November at the G20 Summit in Indonesia, Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden held their first in-person meeting since Biden was elected president.
00:54:39.000At the meeting, Xi strongly reiterated China's stance on Taiwan, telling Biden that Taiwan is the first red line that must not be crossed.
00:55:00.000It is clear from the US's track record that Washington is intent on provoking China and disregarding its red line.
00:55:06.000In Eastern Europe, a similarly reckless approach, namely the continued expansion of NATO towards Russia's border, led to the outbreak of war in Ukraine.
00:55:13.000As progressive forces in Taiwan have declared, to maintain peace in the Taiwan Strait and avoid the scourge of war, it's necessary to stop US interference.
00:55:23.000You now have some more information with which to form your own opinion.
00:55:27.000Do you imagine that the 25 defence industry representatives are in Taiwan in order just to help Taiwan for humanitarian reasons?
00:55:34.000Or do you imagine it somehow relates to the bottom line?
00:55:37.000Have America built an economy the success of which is contingent upon And if that is indeed the case, as I and many other people believe, what is the incentive to bring about peace?
00:55:47.000How are we ever going to break out of these structures of endless agitation, now increasingly with opponents that have the ability to wreak havoc and to seriously oppose the American agenda, unless we, as individuals, start to awaken to the reality that we're living in and start to demand political representation that includes discussions on American foreign policy, on globalism, on veiled imperialism, On a nation that's supposed to represent American people, but in fact significantly represents the military-industrial complex.
00:56:15.000Remember, a significant portion of your federal taxes, about 50%, ends up going to the military and 50% of that goes to defense contractors like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.
00:56:25.000Meanwhile, actual military personnel, heroes, they are To the tune of 60% of them unable to have decent housing and 25% of them are using food stamps and 11% of the American homeless population are former veterans.
00:56:37.000There's some facts and figures to mull over while thinking about what the incentives of the American war machine might be.
00:56:43.000And if you are American, I'm certainly not attacking you.
00:56:45.000And if you're the American war machine, I'm not attacking you either because frankly, I couldn't afford to.
00:59:17.000The right-wing network just announced the two have parted ways.
00:59:24.000Watch to see if there's any emotion or mood.
00:59:29.000I predict that they'll start saying stuff like it's because of the Fox News payout.
00:59:38.000They say that Tucker Carlson uses dog whistle racism on the show when he's talking about population demographic stuff.
00:59:46.000What else do you think that they'll I don't know what they'll say but I mean in terms of what Tucker's been saying recently obviously there was the stuff around Fox and the court case but you know he's been talking a lot about independent journalism and one of the things he said recently was about his regrets over the Iraq war and some of the reporting that he was involved in himself and he seems to be saying a lot and he kind of said a few things to us privately about the way in which independent journalism is like the way forward now.
01:00:10.000We can never reveal the things he said privately.
01:00:40.000It's interesting, isn't it, I suppose, because the media is devouring itself in a way.
01:00:46.000This Euroboris image, the serpent devouring its own tail, is an end days symbol.
01:00:53.000We are watching live the mainstream media falling apart like other centralised organisations.
01:01:00.000It's losing its legitimacy, authority and trust.
01:01:04.000What Tucker Carlson has, I imagine, realised is that he is powerful enough to leave Fox News as well as being disillusioned with mainstream media.
01:01:12.000As we've consistently said, we don't trust Fox News, we don't trust MSNBC, we don't trust CNN, we don't trust the Republicans, we don't trust the Democrats.
01:01:34.000Last week you remember Fox News settled this massive defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over the election lies that it promoted in the wake of the That's where they are attempting to narrativize it.
01:01:47.000Because this is what I've come to realize, is that the whole sort of mojo of center-left liberalism is predicated on the small differences between them and other corporatized, commercialized political interests.
01:02:02.000All that the liberals, or let's call it the Democratic Party media machine, have got is We're a bit better in these areas.
01:02:10.000Those of us that say you're not significantly different, you work for the same corporate interests, you work for the same financial interests, are a real threat to them because that's all they've got.
01:02:48.000But earlier on this show, we revealed to you that the biggest, the majority, 75% of all
01:02:54.000advertising revenue comes from Big Pharma.
01:02:58.000The Big Pharma lobbyist group is headed up by Pfizer's Albert Baller.
01:03:03.000Pfizer have had to settle to the tune of billions out of court.
01:03:07.000So whatever Fox paid the Minion, it's dwarfed By what Pfizer have paid out in out-of-court settlements and these dudes go to the bat for them the whole time.
01:03:17.000Pfizer agreed to pay 2.3 billion, the largest healthcare fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice, to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from the illegal promotion of certain pharmaceutical products.
01:03:27.000That did not stop the mainstream media.
01:03:30.000Advocating intensely for Pfizer and the pharmaceutical industry during the pandemic.
01:03:37.000And as Li Fang just revealed, even grassroots organizations that are connected to civil rights were being paid secretly by Pfizer to advocate for their products.
01:03:51.000Let's have a little bit more, a little look at CNN and then we're going to flip over to being exclusively available on Locals on our membership community.
01:03:59.000You can join us there, there's a button somewhere on your screen that helps you to click through.
01:04:03.000Let's have a look at a little more of this CNN stuff.
01:04:43.000This is where Don Lemon said you should shame people that are hesitant about vaccines.
01:04:47.000This is CNN, where they said ivermectin is a horse medicine.
01:04:51.000This is CNN, where you can still now go on YouTube right now, because for all the stuff they're banning, what they haven't banned is Rachel Maddow saying, if you take this vaccine, it stops with you.
01:05:10.000And also tomorrow on the show, we've got Saga Njeti, co-host of the YouTube show Breaking Points and author of The Populist Guide to 2020 and New Right and Left are Rising.
01:05:32.000Look for it, grope for it, search for it, press it with your tongue.
01:05:34.000Pretend Lee Fang's still on the screen.
01:05:37.000If you join our Locals community, you get access to weekly podcasts, recordings, meditations, exclusive news, as well as this valuable content.