Stella and Julian's wife Stella make a plea for clemency in the wake of her husband's arrest. Plus, a surprise appearance from Tim Robbins! Plus, an interview with Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger. And, of course, we have a live shot of the future. We re back on Rumble, the home of free speech, where we re diving even deeper into the censorship industrial complex and offering solutions to the problems we re all facing. Once we re off YouTube and exclusively on Rumble - we re going to be talking about the arbitrary, distancing laws that were introduced, and how many of the lockdown decisions were political rather than scientific. What happened to freedom of speech? Well, it was lost because there was no conversation, because the discourse was shut down by the censorship Industrial Complex. In my conversation with Matt, Matt and Michael, we began to discuss actual solutions. How, together, through community, boldness, bravery and bravery, we begin to discuss solutions that have been somewhat lost. And, let me know where you think those kind of values and ethics have gone. Let me know in the comments, where do you think this stuff is going. See you in a minute, where are you thinking this stuff going? - see you in the chat, where you're going to see the future? In this video, you ve got a live set-up. We ve got it! - we ve got the whole thing! RUMBLE (RUMBLE is a home of Free Speech and Free Speech. - welcome to Rumble - the home to everything you need to know about free speech and the future of the internet. You ve got your chance to be a part of the conversation, your chance at the future, your voice, your opportunity to be heard everywhere you turn it. You ve been given the chance to have a say what you want to hear about it, and you ve been invited to be part of it. Thank you for being part of something bigger than you think you ve ever heard of it, right here at Rumble. . You re not just one of the movement, you re a community of like-minded people who care about it and your voice matters, you have been given a voice and you get a say in the conversation that matters and you have a voice to make a voice that matters, and that s your voice heard by the rest of the world.
00:01:06.000If you're watching this on YouTube, we can only do the first 15 minutes here because we're diving even deeper into the censorship industrial complex and actually offering solutions.
00:01:15.000Once we're off YouTube and exclusively on Rumble, the home of free speech, we're going to be talking about the Arbitrary distancing laws that were introduced and how many of the lockdown decisions were political rather than scientific.
00:01:29.000Well, it was lost because there was no conversation, because the discourse was shut down by the censorship industrial complex.
00:01:35.000In my conversation with Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger, we began to discuss actual solutions.
00:01:41.000How, together, through community, boldness, bravery, solutions that have been somewhat lost, press the red button and join our conversation in Locals, and let me know where you think those kind of values and ethics have gone.
00:01:52.000We actually start to present and discuss solutions.
00:01:55.000Plus, unbelievably, a surprise appearance from Tim Robbins!
00:02:02.000Cropping up in the holy name of free speech as well as Stella Assange making a heartbreaking plea for clemency and indeed justice for her husband Julian who's still in Belmarsh now.
00:02:14.000Do not let Julian Assange become a martyr.
00:02:16.000Let me know in the comments in the chat where you think this stuff is going.
00:03:06.000My sense is that something seismic happened at the point of Assange's revelations and arrests, and the legacy media became in some way simultaneously castrated and indoctrinated, unable anymore to alloy themselves to principled journalism of integrity.
00:03:27.000There was a requirement to adopt a kind of aesthetic of cultural piety.
00:03:35.000And when you say religion, as Nick Cave said, it sometimes feels like religion but stripped of forgiveness, redemption,
00:05:00.000And the fact is that within our small team, there are people with quite strongly opposing views on Issues that define our conversation, not something like the ability to communicate freely in good faith.
00:05:14.000I think most of us believe in the absolute necessity for that, as you indicated in your rather statesmanly opening speech.
00:05:22.000It's perhaps one of the crucibles of a necessary value system for true democracy, you could argue.
00:05:31.000So I'm lucky that I work with Gareth, Roy and Leon and people that put a lot of effort and work into ensuring that there is rigorous journalism in the source material and in our presentation of it.
00:07:19.000I'm not a good person at math, but he explained the statistics of it.
00:07:23.000But they did a whole YouTube, and he had to be very careful in how they talked about the efficacy of the vaccine.
00:07:30.000And I was curious, have you been censored?
00:07:34.000Has it changed how you do your approach?
00:07:38.000Do you do some things on Rumble that you don't do on YouTube?
00:07:42.000Well, absolutely we must because the advantage of Rumble is that they have made an absolute commitment to content creators not to censor.
00:07:54.000The assumption that this commitment is afforded only to facilitate hate speech is precisely the kind of sociopathic framing that has been touched upon already.
00:08:07.000The idea that you would only use free speech to hate people.
00:08:16.000Of course, finding myself in new territory with new alliances has been at times confusing
00:08:25.000But I have found very helpful the analysis offered in Martin Guri's book, which I think you turned us on to,
00:08:32.000who is a former CIA analyst, to recognize that the diagnostic tools we were using
00:08:38.000were no longer appropriate, and even our vocabulary had to shift.
00:08:42.000And this is all from, as best I understand it, not from an ideological perspective,
00:08:46.000but from the perspective of a data analyst.
00:08:49.000He says you can no longer use the terms left and right.
00:08:51.000You have to think of power dynamics in terms of the center and the periphery.
00:08:57.000There are centralized authoritarian forces within media and within government,
00:09:01.000and then there are peripheral voices that are advocating for values
00:09:05.000that transcend the traditional affiliations that we have with left-wing and right-wing thinking.
00:09:10.000But as Matt already outlined, there's been this peculiar inversion of those values anyway.
00:09:16.000The idea that free speech would become a bastion of, let's call it, the right is sort of surprising, and that pro-war rhetoric and not being patriotic would be tropes that you would see emerge out of the left, where questioning the necessity for violence seems to be a moral position transcendent of any potential party-political affiliation.
00:09:41.000So the way we make our decisions is that we I estimate that we can be entirely open on Rumble, and on YouTube we have to skip like Nijinsky around minefields and pitfalls, which has created this system of entendre and innuendo, but also a kind of intimacy with our audience who know.
00:10:01.000Because the reason that Martin Goury offered this analysis is because he said technology has changed, the ability to communicate has changed, Centralized authoritarian structures recognize they cannot control the population in the same way that they used to be able to because there are no longer the gatekeeper relationships with either state or privately funded media outlets that will more or less toe the line, other than rare instances where their interests don't converge.
00:10:25.000And as we have been taught by George Carlin, where interests converge, there is no need for conspiracy.
00:10:32.000And on this subject of conspiracy, I would like to ask you, Now that so many of the ideas that have left the realm of conspiracy to become verified fact, how can this continue to be used as a smear?
00:10:47.000And do you both, as credible journalists, that are well-educated, that have done things like...
00:10:51.000Lived in Iraq and stuff during wars and proper hardcore journalism, flak jacket journalism, ducking as a bomb goes off in the background journalism, the sort of thing that used to be credible and admired.
00:11:03.000How do you cope with having such a sort of slanderous term daubed across your door, along with letters from the IRS, I understand?
00:11:16.000I mean, you know, my own personal journey started to take a really dark turn when the Trump-Russia story started to happen.
00:11:26.000And I had lived in Russia for a long time, so I got a lot of phone calls from colleagues and wanted to know what I thought about it.
00:11:33.000I didn't really say anything that hardcore at first.
00:11:35.000I just said, well, we should, you know, given what happened with WMDs, we should probably wait to see what the evidence is before, you know, we make any conclusions about this.
00:11:46.000And suddenly, you know, old friends stopped calling me.
00:11:50.000And before I knew it, I was out of the business.
00:11:55.000The weirder thing, though, is when, you know, I turned out to be right about this, people hated me even more.
00:12:01.000And, you know, when the Twitter files happened, it wasn't just, I mean, I knew going into it, I think we all knew that No matter what we found that it was not going to be covered by NBC, CBS, CNN, The New York Times, Washington Post, no matter what the content was, they weren't going to take that stuff and really digest it and do anything with it.
00:12:29.000In the old days of journalism, you would always, when you did an important story,
00:12:35.000you were kind of always hoping the cavalry would come afterwards and that the story
00:12:40.000We knew that wasn't gonna happen, right?
00:12:43.000But what I didn't expect was the level of vitriol and hatred, which was like sincere.
00:12:51.000Like, people were really, really angry that we were just putting emails out on the Internet.
00:12:58.000And, you know, there was information that I thought was in the public interest, clearly.
00:13:04.000I mean, it seemed like the public would want to know that the FBI and The Department of Homeland Security and what they call other government agencies, you know, the CIA maybe, is meeting on a weekly or monthly basis with
00:13:18.00020 or 30 of the biggest tech companies in America.
00:13:34.000And I think that's why I was trying to talk about the psychological aspect of this, because they successfully constructed a kind of A news consumer who only feels sort of, you know, enthusiasm for the cause and then total disgust.
00:13:53.000Like, they're the only emotions that people feel.
00:13:56.000And that can be very dispiriting to deal with, you know?
00:13:59.000I mean, it does, even after the Twitter files, you know, we thought we might make some headway a little bit there with some of those stories, but it really didn't, you know, make much of a dent with traditional media and I don't know I mean what do you I was
00:14:17.000gonna say the response was it's not censorship and there should be a lot
00:14:22.000more of it right yeah exactly you know that was I mean that was in front of
00:14:26.000Congress it was I mean you we just had you know sorry to say Democrats who
00:14:31.000were like we need more censorship basically
00:14:34.000I mean, they couldn't quite, I think part of the anger was they couldn't quite say we want more censorship.
00:14:40.000And that was part of the thing is that like, because at first when, if you start to use, I mean, this is the other thing that Orwell teaches us is that words are so powerful and that when, it's like, we're just fighting disinformation.
00:14:51.000Like, how could you be against fighting lies?
00:14:54.000Um, and and then you're like, well, isn't disinformation just like another word for like things you disagree with?
00:15:01.000And, you know, that was when it was like, I think that I think they realized that they were in that situation and and then externalize their anger at us about it.
00:15:10.000Just really quickly, there were there were other things about the Twitter files to the, you know, I thought were People were coming at us with this legalistic argument.
00:15:19.000Oh, well, that's not technically a First Amendment violation, so this story's bogus.
00:15:27.000Why don't you care that the FBI is sending emails to Twitter about somebody in Arizona who's got eight followers and is making a joke, basically, like that?
00:15:38.000And I thought that was a significant piece of news, because what does it tell you?
00:16:23.000It's curious how many times the template that appears to be described involves the reversal of a type of charge, that things are being inverted and flipped curiously.
00:16:40.000Perhaps it is significant that in this technology, backed by the right ideology and the correct values, we now actually have the potential for unprecedented levels of cooperation, democracy, autonomy, decentralized leadership, discourse, debate, almost as if the tools of for an entirely different social, economic, and political model have been created.
00:17:08.000And it has become necessary to colonize in the way that imperialistic powers have always colonized new territories under the guise of benevolence.
00:17:18.000You wouldn't know what to do with those diamonds.
00:17:42.000It requires a moral charge and that will be designated by and determined by the powerful.
00:17:49.000Sometimes I wonder when I'm listening to you describe this These terrifying emergent phenomena, if it's as simple as the way that the economic model is shifting, with mainstream media outlets now bundling and dispatching data with more profligacy than even porn sites, I gather.
00:18:06.000This is just academic research, Matt, you understand.
00:18:10.000And of course, the fact that their advertising models have collapsed as independent media now has a greater access and ability to promote goods and services more effectively than their rather clumsy, centralized, behemoth models.
00:18:28.000We're going to take some questions from the audience.
00:18:31.000If you have a question, Please raise your hand.
00:18:34.000Although we have been chatting to the star of everyone in the world's favorite movie, the Shawshank Redemption, Mr. Tim Robbins with a question.
00:18:42.000A round of applause for the great Tim Robbins!
00:18:57.000Well, I wonder what all of you feel about the way forward.
00:19:04.000As far as communicating with people that perhaps felt a different way in the past three years, and how do we reach out to these people in a healthy way to start a communication again in such a tribal environment?
00:19:36.000Well, what I'm planning to do is to continue to be open-hearted and loving and faithful in the conversations I have with other people, particularly people that I disagree with.
00:19:47.000I suppose this is a unique opportunity, a divisive time that seems to be defined by conflagration, conflict and opposition, and yet, as we touched upon, In the earlier part of our conversation, the facility for an entirely different society already exists.
00:20:02.000Sometimes I think what's required is a gratitude for the institutions that we have been imbued with.
00:20:09.000Now we have the facility for great media, we have the institutions for wonderful health, we have incredible technological and scientific advancement.
00:20:16.000And even in the opposition that we have with others, we have to, I suppose, if we're approaching things in good faith, assume that people we disagree with have comparable values and principles to us.
00:20:27.000I suppose that, in particular, my worldview is undergirded by spiritual principles, and I don't mean that in a deracinated, woo-woo way.
00:20:36.000I mean that kindness, service, a willingness to forgive and be forgiven seem to me to be an absolute Necessity, if we're going to progress.
00:20:49.000It's more that it's morally correct to be forgiving and loving to other people.
00:20:54.000It's that it is a necessity of the necessary victory, in order that we do not yield to centralized authoritarianism.
00:21:03.000Of course, for me, it seems like that's where this is going.
00:21:06.000It seems that it's almost like you can see the shapes forming of, hold on a minute, the American government are using taxpayer dollars to acquire private data of its citizens from private companies in order to bypass its own legislation.
00:21:21.000The military-industrial complex appears to require forever wars in order to underwrite its economic model.
00:21:28.000We're going to find ourselves literally somewhere between the twin dystopias of those great literary prophets, Orwell and Huxley, and already the name has been evoked, of course, of Orwell by Matt Taibbi.
00:21:42.000Of course, though, Michael Schellenberger's references are usually the Bourne identity, and he's going to give a ten-minute speech in a minute based on part two of John Wick.
00:21:53.000So I think good faith, good humour, good grace, and a willingness to acknowledge that we've all made mistakes.
00:21:59.000How are we going to get anywhere together?
00:22:44.000The best people want to be of service.
00:22:48.000I guess the last thing I would just say is, I mean, this whole thing came because I was feeling really drawn to London right now.
00:22:56.000And particularly earlier this year, there's so many people here who I admire.
00:23:00.000And Francis, who gets up here, does this incredible podcast that's very...
00:23:05.000psychologically rich and very humanistic and I knew I wanted to come but I didn't have any reason to come until we figured out that there was the censorship industrial complex and then when we put out the call to come and we see people that we know We see their faces and so there's something that's been missing and then you feel like you you're coming back to it when you're together.
00:23:28.000So I hope that I thought that during the pandemic that there would be this moment when we would have sort of the pandemic is over day.
00:23:36.000You know where it'd be like, it's, you know, September 1st and the pandemic is over and everyone burned their masks, you know, you know, in mass and that never happened.
00:23:46.000And and it feels like everybody wants to get back together and they want to travel and they want to be together.
00:23:51.000So I hope this is the beginning of a series of international in-person gatherings of people
00:23:58.000that love freedom and that love community, because I think we really all, I know I need
00:24:02.000it and I think that other people really need it too.
00:24:10.000Yeah, all I would say is I remember, I've told this story before, but I remember in
00:24:19.000August of 2016, the New York Times came out with an article that was called, Trump is
00:24:25.000testing the norms of objectivity in journalism.
00:24:29.000And it was a column by a guy named Jim Rutenberg.
00:24:31.000And basically the premise of it was that journalists no longer needed to worry just about being true, but had to worry about being true to history's judgment.
00:24:42.000And what I think they meant by that basically was the old version of what we do for a living, which was we just gather facts and give them to you and trust you to do the right thing with that information.
00:24:55.000That doesn't work anymore because we don't trust you.
00:24:59.000So we are going to shape the information in such a way that you do the right thing with it.
00:25:06.000And I think this is just deeply off-putting and Inevitably unsuccessful.
00:25:14.000And I think the only thing that you can do if you're in media, for instance, is to continue to invest in that relationship with your audience and say, I do trust you.
00:25:30.000Whatever I see, I'll pass it along to you.
00:25:33.000And I don't need you to behave one way or the other.
00:25:36.000I don't need you to draw one conclusion or another.
00:25:39.000And I think people can sense that, what's a genuine attempt to connect versus what's didactic and directional and ordering and using techniques of fear to try to manipulate.
00:25:53.000I think those things are inherently unpopular.
00:26:19.000I've been very encouraged by how often during this conversation we've returned to a subject matter that feels interpersonal and emotional, that it's not entirely about cybernetics and networked power and the way that machines integrate and interact with one another.
00:26:40.000It's encouraging to deal with it on an emotional level.
00:26:43.000It occurred to me then when dealing with that sort of great chimera and weathervane that is Donald Trump that with both of the recent, two recent examples of whistleblowing have demonstrated again One example of whistleblowing and another the story around the classified documents that Trump has in his possession.
00:27:08.000And the other story that I'm referring to is a young buddy boy, Texera, I call him, the lad that did the Pentagon Papers that revealed that there was an entirely different perspective on the Ukraine war within American military circles than was being conveyed through
00:27:22.000media and the stories around the Narrativization around the story was all about the
00:27:29.000individual and the morality and virtues of the individual and similarly with Trump who?
00:27:34.000Obviously is a much more divisive figure. No one is talking about what the
00:27:39.000Censored material is and there's at least one article by a Branko
00:27:44.000Marketage based on fairly reliable sources I understand they indicate that the plans for a war with Iran
00:27:49.000Is some of the censored information and it's like we've become unable to
00:27:53.000identify What information is important?
00:27:58.000And also the idea that people want to be subject to censorship.
00:29:02.000I have a question for Michael, actually.
00:29:04.000I know you ran for governor in Nuisance Recall, I did vote for you, and I was wondering how much You experienced during that time of whether it's this, you know, the censorship industrial complex or any sort of forces of people being kept away from each other.
00:29:25.000I look at this room and we all seem to kind of come from different places, different political backgrounds.
00:29:29.000But one thing I've noticed in this country, where I've lived for 20 years, as well as when I go back to California, is kind of the old school liberals getting together with some of us on the center right, shall we say, And saying, OK, let's forget these pet issues because we're not going to have a country or countries unless we get the basics right.
00:29:51.000Obviously, free speech, free movement of money, civil liberties, all of that.
00:29:56.000How much did you experience when you were running for governor?
00:29:59.000And do you have any hope for California going forward, seeing as that, you know, the statement
00:30:04.000as goes California, so goes the rest of the nation?
00:30:12.000One thing that one benefit for running for political office is that you are supposed
00:30:17.000to have somewhat more protection of your speech.
00:30:21.000And so I'm not a fan of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.' 's position on vaccines or his position on nuclear power.
00:30:29.000But I admire him actually responding to the call and speaking out for freedom of speech, and I'm disturbed that he's having his videos taken down from YouTube.
00:30:42.000This is, I mean, a very significant form of censorship, and I'm troubled by it.
00:30:49.000I'm very troubled by my adopted state of California.
00:30:53.000I mean, we had a woman on the streets.
00:31:05.000They amputated her legs and they put her back on the streets.
00:31:09.000I don't understand how anybody can think of that as the humane, compassionate thing to do.
00:31:16.000We're letting ideology overtake just basic human response and You know, those of us that have been in recovery or are in recovery and understand that all addiction requires a form of intervention.
00:31:32.000And so, yeah, for me, I think California requires an intervention.
00:31:37.000You know, we need to stand up and say this is not, this is at some fundamental level not right when you're not intervening in the lives of people who are destroying themselves in the downtown of your cities and you're destroying your cities.
00:31:50.000You know, businesses are now fleeing San Francisco, Westfield Mall.
00:32:11.000And now I think a new study came out today that shows that it's like of 170 cities in the country, San Francisco is considered the worst managed.
00:32:20.000Not like you needed a survey to show it.
00:32:23.000So I'm afraid I don't have a lot of optimism about it.
00:32:25.000I think that reform may need to be reversed and that reform may need to start in the East and sweep West rather than the other way around.
00:32:34.000It seems to me likely, possible, perhaps even necessary, that independent media will, by virtue of the role it will play in this issue among others, become politicized.
00:32:48.000In fact, it already is and will necessarily become activated and organized in ways that I think are becoming clear and in fact that you're perhaps expediating through your actions and through your foresight in holding this event.
00:33:04.000I saw some hands... Oh no, Stella Assange is in!
00:33:06.000in which case please ladies and gentlemen how about a round of applause for Stella Assange
00:33:10.000I'd like to thank you guys for making me nervous again Because I speak all the time, but for some reason right now, probably because you guys are on stage, I'm really nervous to speak.
00:33:34.000But anyway, as you... Would you feel more comfortable coming up here and join me?
00:34:05.000Most of you are probably aware that my husband Julien is in a very precarious position right now.
00:34:16.000This High Court of England has made the completely inexplicable decision to not even allow him to appeal to the High Court.
00:34:36.000He made an application to appeal in September last year, and it took a single judge ten months to issue a three-page decision, which, without engaging in any of the arguments, said that Julian is not allowed to appeal.
00:35:05.000He still has one final opportunity to go to two different high court judges, but the situation is now critical.
00:35:18.000You might say, well, this is different to the censorship industrial complex, but it's not.
00:35:27.000Whereas all of you have experienced and seen the censorship that occurs on social media, this kind of unseen You know, effect kind of turns you a bit paranoid.
00:36:22.000An intelligence analyst who witnessed, who was reading reports showing information about civilian killings, and there are tens of thousands of civilian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan, evidence of war crimes, including a video that was released, collateral murder in 2010, showing how a helicopter gunship mowed down civilians, literally picking them off.
00:36:54.000Including two journalists and critically injured two children.
00:37:02.000And mowed down the rescue vehicle who came to try to bring one of the dying journalists to a hospital and killed them all as well, except the two children survived because their father threw his body on top of them and they were severely injured, but they survived.
00:37:25.000It's age-restricted on YouTube because it might hurt your sensibilities to witness a war crime.
00:37:34.000Well, Julian and WikiLeaks put that into the public domain.
00:37:40.000And the record of tens of thousands of civilian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan and evidence of torture and evidence of how the U.S.
00:37:48.000government was using its embassies to inhibit and derail the investigations in Germany and Spain and Italy of CIA renditions to stop the people who were responsible for being brought to trial for having their day in court because it is an enforcement of impunity.
00:38:15.000And the case against Julian is of impunity against accountability.
00:38:23.000And the fact is that Julian is in prison because he published the truth.
00:38:29.000Because he exposed the criminality of the country that is trying to extradite him.
00:38:38.000And that country also plotted to assassinate him when Pompeo was head of the CIA.
00:38:46.000How can this country, the UK, possibly extradite him to the United States?
00:38:55.000The country that plotted his assassination, the country that he exposed committing war crimes for whom no one has been held accountable.
00:39:05.000There has been a campaign of smearing Julian for years in order to pave the way to his incarceration.
00:40:07.000We have to organize because the other side is organized and they're abusing Legislation, they're abusing the complacency of the public in order to get their way.
00:40:58.000On Saturday, there's a concrete thing you can do, which is to come here at one o'clock.
00:41:10.000There's going to be a statue here in Parliament Square, there, somewhere, of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Julian, and there's an empty chair next to them.
00:41:23.000They're standing on chairs, these statues, and there's an empty chair.
00:42:17.000Especially over the last five years is just totally inexcusable.
00:42:22.000It's one of the things that turned me off to quote-unquote mainstream media is their inability to recognize not only the cruelty of what's going on, but the The significance of Jillian's case for the future of journalism, it shows their total myopia and blindness.
00:42:53.000And, you know, we should, this is the sort of analogous figure from the 70s.
00:43:00.000Once, much celebrated by, quote-unquote, sort of liberal America, in fact, they very recently made a hagiographic movie, The Post, celebrating the heroism of The Washington Post in bringing the Pentagon Papers out and defying the government that would censor it.
00:43:21.000The reality is something we found in the Twitter files.
00:43:24.000There was an episode that we discovered where A number of journalists got together.
00:43:32.000This was connected to the tabletop exercise that Michael talked about.
00:43:38.000Stanford University academics, members of the US government, for a year preceding that exercise, planned to overturn what they called the Pentagon Papers principle.
00:43:53.000They wanted to change this idea that journalism was about bringing dangerous truths to the public.
00:44:00.000They believed that they wanted to reverse that whole concept, that journalism was actually about protecting the public from things that it didn't need to know.
00:44:10.000And so we see this dramatic shift in values Where even the Washington Post, which again was taking credit for the Pentagon Papers as it was doing this, so they're about to try to send Julian Assange to jail for 170 years.
00:44:25.000for 170 years, is that how much it is? 175?
00:44:30.000And at the same time, they want to turn journalism into this thing that is about keeping people
00:44:59.000Do you want to add anything to what Matt said regarding Stella and Julian?
00:45:03.000Just that I'm totally moved by the case and I have a lot more learning to do and I look forward to getting educated and speaking out on it.
00:45:13.000Stella, I'm very grateful to you for bringing that spirit to our conversation.
00:45:20.000And he's very fortunate to have you as an advocate and an ally.
00:45:26.000And we are fortunate to be reminded that this is not a hypothetical conversation about a foreboding and potential problem.
00:45:36.000It is a tide that has already risen and claimed some territory has already been yielded and seeded and it is I'm very grateful to you for explaining that so articulately and with such evident and obvious emotion as a campaigner and as a lawyer but also as a wife and as a mother.
00:45:58.000Thank you very much for bringing that.
00:47:01.000We've seen the beacon of truth that is illustrated by Julian Assange as a permanent reminder of the heights that we may not reach to, but now we even have a bar within these technological platforms that we know we cannot cross, so we dance and we walk the line, or we go to a desexualized platform, Odyssey, Rumble, which offer us the opportunity to speak our truth, but to a smaller audience who perhaps are where we're preaching to the converted or the choir already.
00:47:27.000So how then do we tackle The likes of Facebook and YouTube and these other mainstream platforms without another moneybags who's free spirit to come and buy up all these channels.
00:47:37.000How do we fight back because there are thousands of broadcasters around the world right now
00:47:41.000who are unable to speak the truth because the line has been set and we can only dance
00:47:45.000around it or go to another platform where we can't reach the matters who need to hear
00:48:32.000There's censorship on every platform, including Twitter.
00:48:38.000And we can debate how much of that is the fault of its current owner, how much of it he can control, how much of it he can't control.
00:48:45.000You may have seen that Elon Musk was just in Europe this week and basically made the same agreement that he did with Turkey.
00:48:53.000My own view is that governments should mandate the owners of all the social media platforms to be transparent about their censorship decisions and give the right of response.
00:49:04.000Our own laws make it very difficult to require a social media platform to carry particular forms of speech, because compelled speech is considered a violation of the First Amendment.
00:49:17.000That may be different in different countries, but I think it's going to be very hard to compel them to host different speech.
00:49:23.000That means that you need multiple platforms.
00:49:26.000When Facebook censored Seymour Hersh, We denounced it on Twitter, and we did see a response, a lessening, not an elimination, but a lessening of the censorship.
00:49:39.000I'm personally being censored on Facebook right now.
00:49:42.000To give you a sense of it, the story that Matt and I broke on the first three people to get COVID had 5 million views on Twitter, and even though I posted it on Facebook at the same time, it had only five people sharing it.
00:49:56.000Not 5,000, not 5 million, five people.
00:49:59.000So I think we have to be like water and just move to where we can move in this very dynamic environment.
00:50:06.000I mean, I never thought I have the similar concern with rumble as anybody going there, but Russell's there now.
00:50:12.000I think we're interested in going there now.
00:50:14.000We need to be able to go to these places where we can find openings and opportunities.
00:50:19.000But I also think we have to get out of this thing of like you were.
00:50:22.000I think you were intimating of appealing to these powerful billionaires for mercy. We need
00:50:28.000to demand that our governments require that they be transparent in their
00:51:17.000But even more importantly, I think, is the example of Julian Assange.
00:51:22.000What they want to do with cases like Julian is prevent the next person from trying that, right?
00:51:28.000That's the whole point of being as cruel and as heavy-handed as they are in that case, is the next person who gets collateral murder, they want them to think twice about publishing that video.
00:52:21.000You alluded briefly to recovery earlier, Michael, and because I live within a template of personal requirements where I have to observe my own tendency to want to control, My own tendency to be competitive or petty or trivial, I recognize I have a personal responsibility that I see other people tackling far more gracefully, even on this stage, an ability to be open-minded, an ability to be intrepid and investigative, and the contribution from Stella reminds us of the necessity for sacrifice.
00:52:55.000The thing that I have continual recourse to that inspires me continually, actually, is that I marvel at the endeavor involved in creating these systems of control.
00:53:09.000The shutting down of protest, the endless surveillance, the censorship, the legal tools that are deployed, the technological tools that are deployed, the willingness to overrule democracy, national sovereignty, to smear even the most truthful endeavors as being somehow mendacious Or duplicitous.
00:53:34.000It also reminds me that there is a necessity to overtly, obviously, and plainly refute the claims that are often made, to be clear about inclusivity, to be absolutely open-hearted and loving towards people of all forms of identification, all forms of religious, cultural, national identification, have to be openly embraced.
00:53:55.000There has to be As we saw there, when one man at least favoured another person's free speech above their own.
00:54:03.000When we have recourse to simple, I call Sesame Street values, kindness, service, sweetness to one another, I feel then that we have a great power.
00:54:15.000a great power that they wouldn't be working nearly so hard if they did not fear us.
00:54:21.000And while we have in the figure of Julian Assange a potential martyr,
00:54:26.000we don't have to allow that to be the case.
00:54:29.000We have to bond and bind and be vocal together and willing to sacrifice
00:54:36.000and willing to support the great work and bravery of journalists where we find them
00:54:40.000and be forgiving of other people who don't have those values.
00:54:44.000It's difficult to be outspoken. It's difficult to be brave.
00:54:47.000Sure as hell it must be difficult to endure life without trial in Belmarsh
00:54:53.000or the potential of 175 years without trial in a country he may yet be exiled to.
00:55:00.000We must learn to recognize heroism when we see it.
00:55:03.000We must be willing to forgive fallibility in ourselves and others.
00:55:06.000We must recognize that we have a deep and powerful resource within us and it is available to all of us in this instant now.
00:55:16.000Thank you all very much for your personal contributions.
00:55:44.000Meanwhile, a UK expert said politicians intervened to establish the concept of lockdowns.
00:55:50.000So where's this science that we're supposed to be following when it's arbitrary and political?
00:55:57.000Chris Whitty, who was the UK strategist and scientific expert whose guidance was followed during the lockdown period here in this country, has revealed that he would not have recommended lockdowns without political intervention.
00:56:11.000Meanwhile, in the United States, a former FDA commissioner has said that social distancing rules were arbitrary.
00:56:18.000So remember how that whole discourse was conducted.
00:56:41.000I don't think this is a conspiracy theory.
00:56:43.000I think what we are starting to be able to observe is either the conscious or unconscious biases of powerful interests and how they led to a set of measures and legislation that was either financially favorable to the corporate class or politically expedient to those already in government.
00:56:59.000Scientists would not have proposed lockdowns without ministers suggesting them, the UK's most senior doctor said.
00:57:07.000Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, told the COVID inquiry he would have been surprised if scientists had included national shutdowns as part of the planning for a pandemic.
00:57:17.000It's interesting that lockdowns were a key component of the strategy when it wasn't derived from science.
00:58:27.000Well, I'm going to go firstly into my imagination.
00:58:30.000And once I'm in there, I'm going to start leaping and bounding like a poet rather than an administrator who's supposed to use taxpayer dollars or pounds in order to administrate favorably for the people that I was elected to serve.
00:58:42.000That's what they're meant to be doing.
00:58:43.000He's not leaping about in their imagination.
00:58:45.000He also claimed that a lack of radical thinking had hindered the country's planning for the pandemic.
00:58:50.000Of course what this pertains to is the idea that potentially lockdown in some ways may have caused more deaths than they prevented.
00:58:55.000If not specifically related to the pandemic, then related to heart disease, people missing cancer treatments, people ending their own lives, the impact on mental health and addiction more broadly, diabetes, operations being missed, the list goes on and on and on.
00:59:07.000It's not a leap He became the latest senior figure to admit that the UK had a longstanding bias in favour of influenza when it came to pandemic planning and admitted there should be a separate plan for other types of viruses.
00:59:16.000So what's the other reason? Tell me in the comments.
00:59:40.000As Jordan Peterson says, never assume malfeasance when ineptitude will do.
00:59:45.000So perhaps these people that we're paying are just inept, rather than malfeasant, and didn't recognize that this is not influenza, it's not behaving like influenza, and measures that are required for influenza will not be successful in this instance.
00:59:56.000But, given that we know it wasn't scientific anyway, what else could it have been?
01:00:00.000Asked about some of the interventions used during the pandemic, Sir Chris said social measures such as quarantine and individual isolation were not new and some went back to the middle ages.
01:00:10.000Could we maybe put leeches on their skin?
01:00:13.000And maybe some of these people are witches.
01:00:15.000So if they float, I think that means they are a witch.
01:00:19.000And if they sink to the bottom, they wasn't a witch.
01:00:24.000You can't say that something was scientific and followed the science when the ideas come from the medieval days when people didn't even understand stuff like germs and Atoms!
01:00:48.000It's my favorite one of my lucky demon sticks.
01:00:50.000However, he said that lockdown had not been considered in advance and that scientific committees would rarely plan for such extreme measures unless asked to by a minister.
01:00:58.000So what many people thought is that political objectives were being masked under the orthodoxy of science and that the science itself was particular sets of scientific data utilized in order to undergird political thinking.
01:01:11.000That some information was included, some information was rejected.
01:01:14.000So it was unfair and and disingenuous even to use the word science to describe
01:01:18.000something that was plainly a political agenda. That's the theory that I'm offering you, or
01:01:23.000hypothesis to be more accurate. The very big new idea was the idea of lockdown. I'm talking here very,
01:01:28.000very specifically about the state saying people have to go home and stay home except under
01:01:36.000So Chris Wheat, he's sort of not circling back on that because he said he didn't think it was a good idea in the first place.
01:01:41.000What it seemed to me, just as a, like you, a person that was just affected by the pandemic and the subsequent measures, was China, as a very authoritarian, centralised state, tyrannical country, were able to use a lot of stand in your house, like, you know, get out of Tiananmen Square otherwise we're going to run you over type stuff.
01:01:57.000And we went, oh, should we do that then?
01:01:59.000But we're not Men are be like that, aren't we?
01:02:01.000Aren't we always claiming freedom, liberty?
01:02:05.000Well, they're like liberty and freedom and we love it, as you know.
01:02:08.000So when we see other people not doing it, we kill them.
01:02:10.000Particularly if they've got, I don't know, oil over there or if we could sell some weapons off the back of it.
01:02:14.000But the main thing always has been liberty and freedom.
01:02:17.000People have the first opportunity to bang people up in their houses when it's not scientifically necessary and there's no evidence to suggest it's something you should do and the ideas come from the Middle Ages.
01:02:25.000Starts to challenge the whole model, doesn't it?
01:02:28.000I would have thought it would be very surprising without this being requested by a senior politician or similar that a scientific committee would venture in between emergencies into that kind of extraordinarily major social intervention with huge economic and social impact ramifications.
01:02:42.000That's the dude that was in charge of the science now saying something that six months ago would have basically made you Joe Rogan's schizophrenic cousin.
01:02:52.000So let's say again, it would be very surprising, without being requested by a senior politician, so someone basically like the leader of a country, a president or a prime minister, the scientific committee, right, that means people that are just interested in data, would venture in between emergencies into that kind of extraordinarily major social intervention with huge economic and social impact ramifications.
01:03:13.000The very things that we were talking about.
01:03:42.000So Chris was asked about written evidence from Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, as to whether there was focus on worst case scenarios.
01:03:56.000He was the health minister at the time.
01:03:58.000He was one of the people that was in charge.
01:03:59.000A bit like our, not like our Fauci, but he was in a guiding, leading role during the period.
01:04:04.000He said that lockdown would not have worked against many previous outbreaks or pandemics such as HIV, swine flu, plague and cholera, but was adopted around the world as countries struggled to stop COVID.
01:04:14.000It was kind of like a mass panic and a mass hysteria and that's being kind about it because many of you will point out, won't you, in the comments that they've planned for events such as these.
01:04:22.000Event 201, those things that happened in 2016 that gamed out this stuff.
01:04:26.000You'll probably be interested in what happened in those scenarios.
01:04:29.000Let's try our best to be kind and compassionate and say, well, everyone just sort of panicked and went into a hysteria.
01:04:34.000But all the while that the rhetoric was around science, shouldn't we have been saying, well, is this working?
01:04:40.000And what's happening in countries where they're not doing it?
01:04:42.000We should have used the data to reach conclusions that had the maximum benefit, risk-benefit mitigation strategies incorporated, and then regulate on that basis.
01:04:51.000The inquiry also heard from Sir Patrick Vallance, the former chief scientific officer, who said he regrets how long it took papers from SAGE, that was the body that was coordinating the response, to be made public.
01:05:02.000Oh, are you surprised by how long it takes for information to be made public?
01:05:05.000The real problem is Donald Trump and his little box of secrets, isn't it?
01:05:08.000Whereas regularly information is kept back.
01:05:10.000To protect us or could there be some other reason the information is kept back?
01:05:14.000I think, in principle, the science advice, unless it's national security related, should become public, he said, adding, the advice took longer than it should to be published.
01:05:21.000So now we know it's political, it's not scientific, and it was, if not censored, it was contained and kept back.
01:05:28.000Professor Dame Sally Davis, who was Chief Medical Officer for England from 2011 to 2019, before Professor Sir Chris Wee, bloody hell, how many names has this guy got?
01:05:35.000Professor, Sir, Your Highness, Chris Whitty.
01:05:45.000Scientists from Johns Hopkins University and Lund University examined almost 20,000 studies on measures taken to protect populations against COVID across the world and said their findings showed that the draconian measures had a negligible impact on COVID mortality and were a policy failure of gigantic proportions.
01:06:01.000But of course, the nature of the pandemic is it had an international impact.
01:06:04.000There were many, many suggestions that were made and enforced, proposed, put forward aggressively, where people were shamed, shut down if they didn't toe the line.
01:06:13.000Another one was social distancing, right?
01:06:16.000And again, if this is in order to save lives, if this is scientifically verifiable information that's come from scientists, then of course we're happy to obey, right?
01:06:23.000Because human life is sacred and we're all here to protect each other.
01:06:26.000That's the way we run the world, right?
01:06:28.000In December 2021, one of former President Trump's commissioners of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, told CBS's Face the Nation, the six-foot social distancing rule created to slow the spread of the coronavirus was arbitrary and has decreased confidence in the pandemic response.
01:06:43.000Yes, when you present something as science that is in fact arbitrary, that will decrease the authority of the people that make those suggestions.
01:06:50.000If you say, do not stand any closer than six feet, that's scientifically because of the vapor you see and the spores, what they do.
01:07:05.000That will decrease people's trust in the authorities.
01:07:07.000The six-foot rule, Gottlieb said, was a compromise between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which had recommended 10 feet, and an unnamed political appointee in the Trump administration who called 10 feet inoperable.
01:08:10.000Many people assume they're all traces to some old studies on the flu, which found droplets won't travel further than six feet, Gottlieb said.
01:08:18.000Well, I got these old studies on the flu, and they say droplets don't travel further than six feet.
01:08:36.000The six-foot rule was probably the single costliest recommendation that the CDC made, Gottlieb said, because the whole thing feels arbitrary and not science-based, which lowers public confidence.
01:08:45.000Well, in our country, we're locking people in their house for the same reason.
01:08:47.000Feels like the sort of thing you might do.
01:08:57.000These various anti-vaxxers and these conspiracy theorists and nutjobs that are not respecting science of numbers that we've made up and measures that we've gleaned from the medieval times.
01:09:08.000These idiots, these nutjobs, obviously ain't very patriotic and they deserve everything.
01:09:20.000As we continue to review the impact of the last three years, the general medical, psychological, ecological, economic impact of that time, we now have further evidence to suggest that the scientific experts did not have the authority that was claimed.
01:09:34.000In fact, many of these decisions were political, some of them were arbitrary, some of them