Max Blumberg joins Russell Brand for a conversation about censorship and the Israeli media's role in the censorship industrial complex. They discuss the role of the non-profit and government-funded "Third Reich" in stifling dissent and stifling freedom of speech, and how they work in tandem with the globalist globalists who want us to be less intelligent and less critical about third-rail issues, such as the Israeli conflict with Hamas and the Palestinian conflict in the Gaza Strip, as well as how they exert control over the media and other outlets that report on them. Russell Brand is the host of the popular podcast Stay Free With Russell Brand, hosted by Russell Brand and featuring regular guests Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald and Veena Shiva. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships/StayFreeWithRussellBrand and use the promo code: stayfree at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase when you enter the offer ends on November 1st, 2020. To support Stay Free with Russell Brand: bit.ly/support-us/Stay-Free-with-RussellBrand. To learn more about our sponsorships and to become a supporter of the show, go here. We'll be giving listeners access to special limited-edition T-shirts, hoodies and hoodies, plus a chance to win $10 off their first purchase of $50 or more! To find out more details about our upcoming limited edition limited edition T-edition hoodies & hoodies that retail for $100 and $150,000 in total of $200,000 or more? Stay Freebie and get a VIP discount when they become a patron! Get your own T-freebie when you sign up to the Keep Freebie! Subscribe to stay-up-and-get 10-get-a-shirt and get 10-of-the-final-edition-only deal! Learn more about the T-shirt & hoodie embroidered and hoodie design, plus all other goodies, plus an ad-free version of Stay Freezing in-depth pricing, plus they'll get a discount of $10-only $50 and a freebie, plus the chance to receive $50 off the whole-edition and shipping discount, plus VIP shipping and a VIP membership, and all other VIP membership offer, and a $25-day shipping offer, plus 7 other prizes throughout the world!
00:00:08.000We'll be talking about censorship as well, because Elon Musk is taking on the Ireland hate speech bill, and it's a vital thing that he's doing there.
00:00:33.000When you get there, give us a like, subscribe, join us.
00:00:36.000And then, if you want to, become a supporter.
00:00:38.000Then you get access to our conversations with Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald, Vandana Shiva, and you can join those conversations live and pose actual questions to people that will give you serious answers.
00:01:18.000We've got to talk about the censorship industrial complex.
00:01:21.000We've got to talk about the level of control that's being exerted around the reporting on the numerous wars, whether it's Ukraine, Russia, the conflicts across the Middle East and the significance of that.
00:01:35.000Our recent investigations that I've been privy to suggest that there are numerous non-government organizations that nevertheless receive government funding that have been involved in censoring, surveilling, deamplifying, monitoring my content and providing quotes to traditional media sources or legacy media sources to choose a term.
00:01:57.000Are you familiar with these types of agencies that provide the cartilage often between the state and private sector and crush dissent by proxy?
00:02:08.000I'm intimately familiar with them because they're targeting me as we speak.
00:02:13.000What issues do you find that you are most penalized for discussing and what do you infer from it?
00:02:21.000How do you use it as a diagnostic tool?
00:02:23.000How do you use it as a kind of understanding of how power is operating when you experience censure?
00:02:31.000Well, the censorship industrial complex works through the media, and it exists as an appendage of the so-called intelligence community, which is neither intelligent nor particularly communal, and actually wants us to be less intelligent and less critical about third rail issues, whether it's COVID or Western imperialism intervention abroad.
00:02:58.000So at the gray zone, you know, we do investigative journalism.
00:03:02.000I've been focusing on this issue of Israel Palestine for 15 years or more.
00:03:13.000Hamas attacked Israel from the besieged Gaza Strip, an attack by an occupied militant group, and this unleashed a globally cataclysmic event.
00:03:27.000And now, you know, we're what, 118 days later, Israel has slaughtered close to 30,000 people,
00:03:39.000And it's used the October 7th attack, and not just the attack, but the number of dead
00:03:45.000and a lot of atrocities to justify what a Essentially, the International Court of Justice has essentially ruled to be genocide, and I consider their assault to be genocidal.
00:03:57.000Now that's sort of, I'm just trying to set the stage to explain an attack that we're facing from the censorship industrial complex.
00:04:05.000And so, we dug into what actually happened on October 7th, and for sure, atrocities took place against Israeli non-combatants.
00:04:12.000As well as hundreds of other soldiers who are enforcing the siege.
00:04:15.000But we found, and this is now being confirmed in blockbuster investigations in Israeli Hebrew media, that friendly fire orders were given to the Israeli media to attack vehicles and homes that contained not only Hamas militants, but Israeli civilians, Knowing that many Israelis would be killed.
00:04:37.000And so we now know many Israelis were killed by friendly fire on October 7th.
00:04:41.000We also know many of the most heinous accusations of atrocities, like for example, beheaded babies are completely false and were spread by organizations that are fundraising off of these tall tales.
00:04:54.000This has all now been exposed in Israeli media.
00:04:57.000We exposed it first at the Gray Zone along with a few other independent outlets and were attacked.
00:05:03.000The Washington Post approached us About two weeks ago, through its Silicon Valley reporter, her name is Elizabeth Dwoskin, and she's the social media reporter.
00:05:15.000So all of these Silicon Valley reporters from legacy media, corporate media, they're all folk, they're basically stenographers for the censorship industrial complex, which exists to control Silicon Valley and all of the social media platforms.
00:05:31.000And she said, we want to talk to you about minimizing October 7th atrocities.
00:05:36.000I called her, but I actually called her during our live stream and held her to account for her bogus accusation and her whole record of being a pro-Israel partisan, which is a sort of a separate issue, but she's someone who's dedicated to supporting Israel and pretending to be an objective journalist.
00:05:55.000She publishes a smear piece about us And her entire piece is based on research from something called the National Contagion Research Institute.
00:06:05.000And we've written about this place before, but it's one of many, many intelligence cutouts founded by a former researcher from the Anti-Defamation League.
00:06:15.000Which is a extortion racket for the Israel lobby, but which also works with law enforcement, has hundreds of people in Silicon Valley pressuring Facebook, Meta, Twitter, and everything else.
00:06:26.000It's running a whole operation to basically dislodge Elon Musk from X because he's allowed too much free speech.
00:06:33.000And they lied about us, claimed we said most Israeli casualties on October 7th were caused by friendly fire, and basically accused us of being anti-Semites.
00:06:43.000She also turned to the Atlantic Council, which is a think tank here in Washington, which is funded Not by some independent donors.
00:06:52.000They're not doing any thinking in there.
00:06:55.000They're funded by the arms industry, by pro-Israel donors, and by NATO, as well as the Gulf states.
00:07:02.000It's basically just another front organization for imperial and military interests.
00:07:11.000But none of that was told to Washington Post readers.
00:07:15.000than Bill Maher, who poses as some real politically incorrect, uh, He's an atheist who stands above it all.
00:07:24.000He goes on his show and he cites this article uncritically, and basically the article links us to Holocaust denial, QAnon, and says that we are October 7th deniers, when all we've done is expose facts which are now corroborated by Israeli mainstream reporters about a day, one of those days, you know, 9-11, January 6th, October 7th.
00:07:50.000That is still poorly understood and has not been sufficiently investigated by any independent commission.
00:07:59.000Now, listen, if you're watching this on YouTube, we can't go any further because Max has got some pretty strong views on, let's call it, Middle Eastern conflict that I wouldn't feel confident putting up on YouTube.
00:08:10.000But it's really worth hearing these perspectives.
00:08:21.000What then does your reporting propose?
00:08:27.000What are you saying has been corroborated?
00:08:30.000How is that plain and distinct from QAnon theories?
00:08:36.000Holocaust denialism. Tell me what it is, plainly, that you're saying that some deaths were caused
00:08:42.000by friendly fire, some of the more egregious accounts were untrue, the beheadings and the
00:08:49.000rape charges and the mass... What was untrue? And are you suggesting that there was a sort
00:08:57.000of a coordinated media effort to ensure that October the 7th was reported in a particular
00:09:04.000way? And how do we, when we are reporting in a stance that is oppositional to even the
00:09:13.000immediately received wisdom on an event almost as it's unfolding...
00:09:17.000Prevent ourselves from out of, you know, this is probably something I have to be more cautious of than you, becoming immediately allied to sort of lazy conspiracy theory, pre-existing tropes.
00:09:33.000How do you create You know, how do you create clear distance between your reporting and antisemitism?
00:09:42.000Is it possible or is it impossible because there's almost an attempt to fill that gap by, you know, the people that oppose the type of reporting you're engaged in?
00:09:52.000Well, it's unfortunate that The Israel lobbyists who accuse everyone who opposes the atrocities that Israel's been committing against Palestinians for, not just since October 7th, but for 75 years or more, they accuse them all of anti-Semitism.
00:10:09.000People who are principled opponents of the ideology of Zionism all get labeled anti-Semites now, so they've cheapened the idea of anti-Semitism to the point where the real anti-Semites feel emboldened and feel like they're the real truth-tellers.
00:10:24.000So, in many ways, they need anti-Semitism to persevere and expand in order to justify Israel's existence as a sanctuary for Jews.
00:10:36.000And we can see from October 7th, it's not a very good sanctuary.
00:10:39.000It's definitely not keeping them safe by holding some 7 million people under occupation, discrimination behind de facto prison walls.
00:10:50.000So, when October 7th erupted, There was no doubt that people were killed in horrible ways who were Israeli civilians by Hamas militants and others.
00:11:07.000I mean, we never denied that they were shot, for example, but what Israel needed to do Which is the same thing that, for example, the American national security state, the Bush administration, the Dick Cheney's needed to do after 9-11 or what the Democrats needed to do after January 6, which was a riot.
00:11:29.0009-11 was a horrible attack that killed 3,000 people.
00:11:32.000They need to get us to decontextualize the event, to become traumatized, and to turn off our critical faculty so we surrender to their solution, which is Uh, you know, massive national security dragnet, huge military assault, not just on one focused area, but across the Middle East and a giant defense buildup and profits for themselves.
00:11:57.000And we're not allowed to ask critical questions.
00:11:59.000And so what we did on October after October 7th was not only explain the context for this, which was political, Hamas did have clear political goals, the main one being capturing as many Israelis as they could to force Israel and the West, which funds Israel, gives it unlimited weapons to negotiate with them because they have no diplomatic channels at all and they're under siege.
00:12:23.000But beyond that, we showed how the death toll was inflated.
00:12:30.000About 690 civilians were killed and hundreds of Israeli soldiers.
00:12:35.000But more than that, there's this gigantic scandal, which Israelis are up in arms about, about friendly fire.
00:12:42.000And we were one of the first English language publications to expose this, to highlight the testimony of actual witnesses to tanks firing on homes filled with Israelis because they were being held captive by Hamas, knowing that Israelis were there.
00:12:59.000We were among the few independent publications that everyone should be reading right now, Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss, that exposed the testimony of these survivors, which was only known to some Hebrew-language Israeli media consumers, and we brought that into the English-language realm, and now we're being punished for this.
00:13:22.000wrote about the Hannibal Directive, which is actually a once-secret directive within the Israeli military that authorizes Israeli, for example, helicopter pilots or Israeli soldiers to kill other Israeli soldiers or Israeli citizens if they're being held captive in order to deny The militant faction of the Palestinians, the possibility of a prisoner swap, because politically that's so damaging for Israel as we now see.
00:13:52.000We wrote about, we debunked a lot of the sexual assault allegations which were rolled out actually not after October 7th, but in late November, early October at the United Nations.
00:14:08.000And an event in the Israeli mission at the United Nations featuring Sheryl Sandberg and Hillary Clinton.
00:14:15.000Hillary Clinton, who lied about Iraqi WMD.
00:14:18.000Hillary Clinton, whose State Department under Obama falsely claimed that Qaddafi's soldiers were hepped up on Viagra and going out and mass raping women in Libya in order to justify a NATO intervention that not only destroyed Libya, but large parts of Africa.
00:14:35.000This was a clear PSYOP campaign to continue to shock the Western public into submission to prevent us from thinking critically, prevent us from calling for a ceasefire, which would actually allow for the release of the hostages in the Gaza Strip.
00:14:51.000And to allow this genocidal assault to continue, and, you know, we're being punished for it, but more and more we're actually starting to see that we're also being vindicated.
00:15:02.000The New York Times ran what was supposed to be the gold standard of stories alleging that systematic sexual assault was employed on October 7th, and now the New York Times itself has refused to run a video report at its daily show about that because so much of the New York Times staff has actually paid attention to our debunking and the debunking by other independent outlets of their own article and they no longer gauge it to be true.
00:15:33.000They believe they're actually being misled by an Israeli government which is furnishing them with witnesses and dodgy dossiers in order to manufacture international consent for this hideous assault that we see unfolding before our eyes.
00:15:48.000So, as long as we can think critically, whether it's about October 7th, January 6th, 9-11, or any of these dates that are rammed down our throats, we're constantly told they're the next Pearl Harbor, the second Holocaust, as long as we can think critically about that, we can actually come to rational solutions that save lives.
00:16:08.000And that was actually If you look at Julian Assange's last statement before he was silenced, he was basically saying that and he was also, he actually referenced, and this is before the Covid event, he actually referenced pandemics.
00:16:25.000So what you are saying is that Your reporting is focused on the decontextualization of that event.
00:16:36.000It was extracted from historical events and the ongoing dynamic in that region between the Palestinian people and the Israeli security forces.
00:16:48.000The numbers inaccurate, friendly fire was extracted, more egregious events were added, amplified, and I certainly can see that in some of the online punditry around those events, I was alarmed to note that the nature of October the 7th, the nature as initial reporting described it, and I feel as one must I should caveat this with any people being, you know, I'm an anti-war person.
00:17:22.000I don't think that that should ever be a solution.
00:17:24.000I think non-violent solutions should always be sought.
00:17:27.000I think that the diplomacy should always be prized and heralded and sought.
00:17:35.000Nevertheless, I saw many online pundits say that the reason that the response to these events can be so aggressive and will involve the death of many citizens is because there is a unique inflection to the type of violence and therefore the character of the people that inflicted that violence that means you cannot employ almost even a western mentality when deciding how to address or respond to those events.
00:18:14.000So I can certainly see that there was utility in characterizing those attacks in ways that you're reporting shows or you know, depending on where you stand on your
00:18:25.000reporting Max, obviously I know you stand by it, that some of the aspects of those attacks that were
00:18:30.000used to legitimize the nature of the response have, were untrue. Not that there wasn't an attack but so
00:18:37.000yeah, I can see how it was used, I can see how it was helpful. Well, you know, I want to explain
00:18:44.000something to your audience because I think, you know, they understand how the, sort of this lockstep
00:18:55.000COVID response developed and that it, you know, it was sort of, it was, I'm not talking about
00:19:04.000COVID but the response was kind of developed in a lab before the COVID event began.
00:19:09.000They understand, they, they understand how it became profitable.
00:19:16.000and how it was exported from certain think tanks and institutions to other countries.
00:19:21.000What we're seeing with Israel right now is very similar, and this is a large component of Israel's economy.
00:19:37.000And it determines where Israel is based on the areas of its security control.
00:19:44.000It controls the entire West Bank through the direct occupation of its military or through an occupation subcontractor, which is known as the Palestinian Authority.
00:19:53.000Then the Gaza Strip is basically an open-air prison, a high-tech prison that it controls from the outside through the Panopticon model.
00:20:03.000And this is unique in contemporary history.
00:20:08.000Along with Israel's whole experience, where basically it controls millions of people but refuses to allow them to be citizens or even residents of its state because they're not Jewish.
00:20:21.000In order to be a Jewish state, it has to maintain a majority of Jews under its direct control and within its citizenry, but it doesn't know what to do with the rest of them.
00:20:30.000So the Gaza Strip is basically a human warehouse or a panopticon-style prison, and the Israeli leadership never knew what it could do with those people.
00:20:40.000And after October 7th, they've decided, hey, we can finally get rid of them.
00:20:43.000We can basically destroy all of their hospitals, all of their schools, the whole northern area of the Gaza Strip.
00:20:52.000There are no functioning hospitals or schools.
00:20:56.00085% of homes have been destroyed in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, where most of the population lives, where all of the administrative, government offices, the intelligentsia live.
00:21:06.000And then we're just going to keep pushing them south until the border opens into Egypt, and we just push them out and we get rid of these people who are a demographic threat to us.
00:21:15.000And we're testing new methods Both legally, we're changing the parameters of international law, and we're testing new methods with our advanced spy tech, surveillance systems, and new weapons.
00:21:31.000And then we're going to go around the world and market those weapons and that technology that we use to carry out this hideous act.
00:21:40.000And we're going to send out our legal experts to advise other governments because we're not going to be the only ones who are going to do this in a world where people are getting poorer, people are getting angrier, there's a migration crisis sweeping the West, and we are going to be the leaders and we're going to profit from it.
00:21:58.000Yotam Feldman is an Israeli journalist who made one of the, I think, one of the most important documentaries.
00:22:06.000Unfortunately, I don't think it's online.
00:22:08.000It's called The Lab, and it's all about how Israel, through its experience with controlling a restive indigenous population, dominating them, and often slaughtering them, has fueled its economy by taking all of its weapons and saying, we've tested our weapons, you haven't, so our weapons are the best.
00:22:28.000And according to Yotam Feldman, 100,000 families in Israel, not people, 100,000 families in a population of about 6.5 million rely on that industry, that industry of arms and spy tech, surveillance, I mean, look at the Pegasus system from the NSO group.
00:22:50.000That's the most advanced malware and comes out of Israel.
00:22:53.000The drone itself was invented by Israel.
00:22:56.000And Israel's surveillance technology is so advanced because it's been testing it and using it again and again to control people that cannot be part of its state.
00:23:07.000That it was granted a sweetheart deal by Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer.
00:23:13.000He cut a sweetheart deal with Netanyahu to test The mRNA vaccine on Israel.
00:23:20.000Israel was the first country to get universal vaccination under this deal with Pfizer.
00:23:25.000Because their surveillance, they were able to report back on the effectiveness of the vaccine more than any other country could, along with Albert Bourla's own commitment to the project of Zionism.
00:23:36.000And that's how I knew that the vax wasn't going to work.
00:23:39.000It wasn't going to prevent infection or transmission because I looked at what first happened in Israel, where they all got it.
00:23:52.000So, I think that's how we need to understand Israel.
00:23:57.000And when they say this is about some values and it's about Jewishness or something, no.
00:24:03.000This is about raw Corporate genocidal capitalism at its most extreme in a unique way because very few other states are able to get away with this.
00:24:18.000Increasingly Max, it becomes evident that there are perhaps innumerable, but plainly two streams of reality.
00:24:28.000In recent congressional hearings, Senate hearings, the inquiry into social media and the online safety of children, it becomes plain that there's an agenda to present the threat of Child pornography, child bullying, child safety as a problem that requires government intervention and additional regulation of social media spaces.
00:24:57.000We've discussed for some time how across the world now there are censorship laws being introduced that are eerily similar in spite of emerging from independent nations.
00:25:07.000And it seems that Ultimately, whenever one discusses a geopolitical issue such as war, certainly pandemics and the matter of public health, the revelation of a set of relationships via these non-government agencies, philanthropic groups, think tanks, starts to emerge.
00:25:32.000Is it, do you think, is that what's going to define independent media space?
00:25:37.000The ability to report on groups like the Atlantic group that you said?
00:25:43.000Excuse me, Atlantic Council, or comparable organizations, which I was talking to Michael Schellenberger recently, and he said that there are these, you know, often deep state, but sometimes privately funded groups that Crop up a prominent for a while, then they sort of disappear.
00:26:00.000They're somewhat anonymous and amorphous and difficult to track.
00:26:05.000Logically, AI is one of the groups that has been observing, tracking me, gave a bunch of quotes for watching me for a long time, taking a bunch of money from the British government, the Department of Culture in particular, who have sponsored the online safety bill.
00:26:21.000Do you think that the space that you're going to be operating in is going...
00:26:25.000In a sense, isn't it going to become a type of war anyway?
00:26:30.000Because almost by the nature of what you're doing, you're not often going to be saying, and on this issue, we have consensus, the legacy media have got it right, and this is what we should, that's like increasingly unlikely.
00:26:44.000And do you sometimes feel The kind of angst that legitimate investigative journalism that finds itself at odds with the agenda of the powerful is starting to share spaces with peripheral groups.
00:27:01.000You know, like when you said that thing about QAnon or whatever, I wonder how many There's sex trafficking going on.
00:27:14.000There are famous people making sure the information gets redacted.
00:27:18.000Jeffrey Epstein was probably a Mossad agent, was a CIA agent.
00:27:23.000How are you going to navigate this space?
00:27:27.000It's going to become increasingly about conflict, is what I'm saying.
00:27:32.000It's going to become increasingly dangerous.
00:27:34.000What kind of preparation are you making and what kind of prognosis are you offering?
00:27:44.000I mean, there is no QAnon organization at this point, and when we were lumped in with that, it was just a means of smearing us.
00:27:53.000The reporter might have peeled off a few random Reddit comments, but they couldn't actually identify a real movement.
00:28:00.000To me, QAnon is basically, it may have actually been a national security state trap, much like January 6th, to play on the legitimate but free-floating anxieties of people across the West, but particularly in the U.S., and to force them into a kind of political cul-de-sac where they're taking their legitimate justified resentment of the political establishment and elites into such a bizarre place that they can easily be discredited and they have nowhere to go except to be sort of nihilistic.
00:28:33.000So that's what I think people need to be cautious of, is that they're being led into a sphere of political hopelessness and nihilism where everything is so hopelessly corrupted that you just become alone and isolated from other people.
00:28:49.000There's no reason to actually forge alliances with people who actually might be different from you along common bonds like the fact that you're working people who are being economically immiserated and to actually fight the elites.
00:29:04.000So that's what I think we need to be cautious of, and we can see.
00:29:07.000I mean, if you want to see the abuse of children, it's happening right before our eyes in the Gaza Strip.
00:29:13.000We don't need to be conspiratorial about it.
00:29:18.000Phone call you can listen to online by a 15-year-old girl named Layan Hamada who is in a car with her entire family.
00:29:29.000She's trapped in the car along with her seven-year-old sister and she's calling an ambulance service from the Palestinian Red Crescent and they can't rescue her because her car is surrounded by Israeli tanks.
00:29:43.000I don't need to be conspiratorial about that.
00:29:47.000We can see it all happening right in front of our eyes.
00:29:51.000We don't need to be conspiratorial about all the leaks that we've received at the Grey Zone, which we've published, which provide an inside accounting.
00:30:01.000of the corruption of elites, particularly in the UK, national security elites.
00:30:07.000And this is continuing in the tradition of WikiLeaks, whose founder is jailed, being tortured right now at Belmarsh Prison, may be extradited to the US, Julian Assange.
00:30:17.000And We now see new laws coming into effect in the UK to basically punish journalists for publishing true, verifiable facts like we have done, simply because they were leaked on the grounds that those leaks may have been obtained by the Russians.
00:30:35.000This is called the National Security Act in the UK.
00:30:38.000It was gestating in Parliament for 18 months, and it's being justified on the grounds of protecting innocent lives.
00:30:45.000They claim that Wikileaks got innocent people killed by, you know, leaking their personal information.
00:30:52.000The Pentagon itself has said that nobody was killed as a result of any leak published by WikiLeaks, but this is the justification, and it's basically taking the Espionage Act, the 1918 U.S.
00:31:04.000law, anti-free speech law, and updating it, polishing it off, and then imposing it on the British public.
00:31:13.000So we've already had one of our writers, contributors, Kit Clarenberg, detained, interrogated by the British counter-terror police when he returned home to visit his family, he's a British citizen, and they were asking questions about me, asking about the grey zone, you know, they wanted to kind of They wanted to find some means of destroying us.
00:31:46.000I don't know if I would be able to visit the UK or what would happen to me, but this is the world that independent journalists who deal with real national security scandals, and yes, conspiracies, like we deal with conspiracy analysis, not conspiracy theories.
00:32:03.000This is the world we're now living in where laws are being passed to criminalize our work.
00:32:10.000To your question, we don't see political assassinations like we had in the past during the 1960s, 1970s.
00:32:22.000I know there was an attempt on President Reagan, but that seems to have been by kind of a psychopath.
00:32:27.000So the last one I can really think of might have been George Wallace in 1972.
00:32:32.000We don't know the truth behind that, but he was a threat to Nixon's reelection.
00:32:38.000But we're not seeing that happen right now.
00:32:41.000It's because the digital assassination is more effective and clean.
00:32:50.000for the national security state and so we can be digitally assassinated through our Wikipedia pages, through a series of allegations launched at us in tabloid media, or the Washington Post can run a smear piece on us and they can print any lie they want and I have no recourse against that.
00:33:10.000But increasingly that's not working and now we're seeing the state take off the velvet glove and start to pass new laws to basically criminalize what we're doing.
00:33:21.000Yes, we're seeing... I get the feeling frequently, and I spoke to Greenwald about this, that there is a sort of real-time race, or as Alex Jones might characterize it, an info war, that there is the realization that we are approaching the point Where so many people are suspicious, cynical, outraged by state power, by legacy media malfeasance, by deep state interference that, you know, and Donald Trump is perhaps the chief beneficiary and yet the chief target of all this, that the more that a person is vilified, the more that it elevates their appeal.
00:34:02.000There was a survey of 40,000 people in our country, the UK, that said who would you prefer to have as Prime Minister Current incumbent, Rishi Sunak, leader of the opposition and presumed next Prime Minister and Davos affiliate, Kirstarma, or Vladimir Putin.
00:34:22.000Like by 90%, like the people, like even with everything we know about Vladimir Putin, people recognize that what the state is.
00:34:32.000And it seems in a country like ours, it seems risible to imagine that the two constituencies Are the people that support the policies and party of Rishi Sunak and the people that support the policies and party of Keir Starmer rather than that's essentially a unit and then there's everyone else like what what the hell are we supposed to do?
00:34:55.000Obviously I have personal experience of digital assassination and how that can be undertaken and also though now I have experience of By and large, how little impact it's had.
00:35:09.000Like, I'm out and about and talking to people.
00:35:52.000Even when you watch something like this recent Congressional or Senate inquiry into social media safety or child safety, you no longer just have an organic sense of, oh thank God that the government are doing something about online safety.
00:36:06.000As soon as they suggest an initiative, you're almost trained to think, well what's this really?
00:36:13.000Yeah, and obviously it was, you know, of course, Martin Goury that first pointed out they are no longer able to reliably control populations using their old model.
00:36:24.000They don't know how to adjust to the new model.
00:36:27.000They are seeking to impose mass regulation and authoritarianism when an obvious alternative
00:36:33.000would be more decentralization, more devolving of power, greater ability to communicate,
00:36:40.000achieve consensus, greater access to information, new possibilities, whether that's in the field
00:36:47.000The possibility for change is beginning to exist and they are strongly trying to resist
00:36:54.000the trajectory of what would be inevitable change, decentralization, freedom of information
00:37:00.000with its exact opposite, a new form of tyranny using as one of the curious techniques the
00:37:07.000constant shadow and spectre of old school tyranny.
00:37:11.000These populists like Donald Trump, they're like Mussolini.
00:37:15.000And it's a brilliant sort of smoke and mirrors bait and switch, because new dictatorship doesn't look like that.
00:37:22.000It's kind and banal and benevolent and talks about convenience and safety and protecting your children and locking you in your homes to prevent you from getting a disease and helping you to be remain safe from terrorists and all forms of terror and I again wonder how this is going to unfold because at some point it's going to require The galvanisation of a significant number of people and mass disobedience, or at least non-compliance.
00:37:48.000And I don't know, we might be in an unprecedented place, right Max?
00:37:56.000I think we have, first of all, people need to see through the marketing ploys of the new fascism, which it's marketed behind the guise of liberalism in many cases.
00:38:12.000You know, it's in We're going to have a more diverse collection of drone operators.
00:38:18.000The Pentagon is employing DEI to have more female drone operators and gender-fluid naval commandos blowing up pipelines.
00:38:28.000So that's something we need to see through.
00:38:30.000We see video in destroyed Palestinian neighborhoods.
00:38:35.000Israeli soldiers have held informal gay pride parades waving rainbow flags.
00:38:42.000So people can easily start to see through the marketing ploys of the new fascism and it's, as you said, it's not going to be presented to us as nakedly as the old fascism was with goose-stepping uniformed officers with swastikas, you know.
00:39:03.000There are new laws to crush free speech being marketed under the guise of child protection.
00:39:08.000We talked about the National Security Act being marketed to take down WikiLeaks and other organizations for harming, you know, innocent people, which is bogus.
00:39:16.000But then how hard, I mean, it's much harder to argue with the law to protect children from pedophilia or protect people from revenge porn.
00:39:27.000There's a website I know about because a close friend of mine lost a family member to suicide and this website had had an influence on them.
00:39:35.000It actually encourages people to commit suicide and the feds could have easily shut it down.
00:39:42.000I don't know if they need new laws to shut this site down or to arrest the people behind it, but it seems to me that they might actually be using these kinds of sites as a kind of honey trap or to surveil people the same way that they would allow organizations like Al-Qaeda to fester.
00:40:02.000So that they could penetrate them and gain intelligence.
00:40:07.000It's about shutting down the speech of people who dissent and who actually pose a real threat to power behind the guise of protecting children.
00:40:15.000Actually exploiting children to shut down people who actually care about their future.
00:40:21.000And just one quick story to illustrate another point you made, Russell, about how people who are demonized so aggressively become sort of inadvertently popular or at least become objects of fascination by a kind of silent majority.
00:40:43.000I don't know how many indictments or how many indictments have been made against Trump, but he's pulling neck and neck or ahead of Biden despite that.
00:40:51.000And he's basically frozen out of most media.
00:40:55.000He's the ultimate evildoer in the United States.
00:40:59.000And we've written about this so I can tell this story.
00:41:02.000But, you know, my colleague at the Gray Zone is also my wife, Anya Parampil, had gone to a a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement, which is countries
00:41:12.000who are not aligned with the West, mostly from the global South. They met in Venezuela, and
00:41:17.000she was able to interview the deputy foreign minister of Russia there. So, Tucker Carlson
00:41:25.000wanted to interview Vladimir Putin, because he interviews you, he interviews all kinds of
00:41:31.000people who are just objects of fascination, as any journalist should do.
00:41:36.000And Anya said, you know, I'll see if I can help.
00:41:39.000I'll go to the deputy foreign minister I met, see if anything can happen there.
00:42:15.000What and when the real scandal was the fact that this or this spy agency, which is only supposed to surveil foreign people who are wishing harm on the United States was surveilling U.S.
00:42:32.000journalist who wanted the American public to just be able to hear the voice and thoughts of the person who is presented to them as the devil.
00:42:42.000And so that really speaks to the fear and the criminality, just the wanton criminality and disrespect for the rule of law.
00:42:53.000of our national security elites, but it's really about fear.
00:42:56.000The fear that the American public, or the British public, will be able to decide for themselves.
00:43:02.000Now, given what you were saying about Kit Clattenburg there, do you think that there's something happening in the UK, that there's something particular happening here, and if so, why?
00:43:15.000Yeah, we talked about Kit Clarenberg being detained in the UK a month before he was, and Kit is our sort of UK correspondent, one of the best critical national security journalists working today.
00:43:31.000But you know, a month before that, a French publisher Sort of a fairly mainstream figure was detained by British counter-terror police on the grounds that, you know, they asked him about his role in protests against Emmanuel Macron, a foreign leader.
00:43:50.000Joanna Ross, who's a lesser-known reporter who had worked for Sputnik, which is a Russian state-affiliated site.
00:43:59.000She was detained on her way back to her home country.
00:44:03.000They're detaining people left and right in the UK for their political views.
00:44:09.000And this has to do, first of all, with the fact that there are no formal free speech protections in the UK.
00:44:15.000It also has to do with the UK's role as sort of the anchor of US imperialism, kind of the US pit bull on the European continent.
00:44:24.000And the fact that It's deployed by the U.S.
00:44:30.000to carry out harsh actions that the U.S., especially with its First Amendment, may not be able to get away with.
00:44:37.000And just the paranoia of the British elite about Russia, particularly.
00:44:43.000The British elite has been obsessed with Russia.
00:44:46.000It goes back to the Imperial competition with the Romanovs and the Russian Empire.
00:44:53.000It goes back to the Crimean War, and it's just a festering paranoia.
00:44:58.000But it also has to do with the crumbling state.
00:45:01.000of the British society right now, which is, I mean, I haven't been there in a while.
00:45:08.000I'm actually postponing various invitations to the UK because of what I think could happen to me.
00:45:16.000But I've heard that the situation is at an advanced state of decay.
00:45:21.000So I mean, what we're looking at in the UK in many ways is a preview of other Western countries that haven't gone this far, and they clearly see the speech of dissidents as a major threat.
00:45:41.000Both the historical analysis, but also what role the UK now has on the world stage.
00:45:48.000I was struck by in Canada and Australia, both countries that I thought were defined by kind of laissez-faire liberal attitude to Cultural and the issues and the intervention of government were both so aggressive and assertive during the pandemic period.
00:46:04.000I'm beginning to feel that there is a type of piloting that takes place in anglophonic countries that may be utilized later in the United States.
00:46:22.000population is just much more naturally rebellious and more diverse.
00:46:27.000And Canadians tend to be more compliant and trusting of power.
00:46:31.000And it really took the trucker convoy, which sort of came out of left field for the Trudeau liberal government, to shut that all down.
00:46:38.000They would have kept it going for as long as China did until China's own population began to rebel.
00:46:44.000The United States Our culture is just different.
00:46:51.000And so it is really important when you sense that you're being psyoped, that your rights are being taken away, even though you are going to be the first line to be taken down like World War I soldiers jumping the trench, you have to do it.
00:47:06.000And we saw what happened to the first people that protested COVID tyranny in the U.S.
00:47:11.000They were basically portrayed as terrorists.
00:47:17.000I wouldn't call it a false flag operation, but basically in Michigan, Michigan's a very diverse state politically.
00:47:27.000It's a red state and a blue state, like an extreme red state and a blue state mashed into one.
00:47:33.000And in the rural areas, people were up in arms about the COVID measures, the COVID restrictions.
00:47:39.000The lockdowns were destroying everyone's small business.
00:47:41.000They're preventing farmers and guys who just like to, you know, work do DIY projects at home from going to the garden section at Home Depot or going out even outdoors at Home Depot so some more extreme figures
00:47:58.000protested the state capitol carried weapons into the state capitol affiliated with a kind of militia.
00:48:04.000They didn't realize they had been infiltrated by the FBI.
00:48:07.000The FBI was paying their ringleader and that the state police of Michigan was given a stand-down order at the Michigan state capitol.
00:48:17.000I believe this was March 2020 right when the whole lockdowns began.
00:48:22.000A stand-down order to allow them to go in and create this ferocious scene, which would then be blamed on Trump.
00:48:30.000And then they were set up, ultimately, months later, in a plot devised by the FBI to kidnap the governor of Michigan.
00:48:41.000So basically, the FBI was trying to portray all people protesting the COVID measures in the beginning as militant terrorists who want to kill leadership.
00:48:53.000But at that But there were so many decent people out in the streets in Michigan, and so that's sort of the price for rebelling at first, but the U.S.
00:49:02.000really saw the initial wave of protests that eventually found its way across the Atlantic, even to Germany, where the unvaccinated were demonized as like the unter-vaccinated, like unter-mentioned, all the way to China.
00:49:17.000And that's something, you know, I learned about the U.S.
00:49:20.000that I never had Really fully understood as an American that I think makes us special along with the First Amendment.
00:49:28.000Yeah, I'm beginning to understand a lot.
00:49:30.000I'm beginning to feel that given how dastardly and outrageously theatrical some of the actions of these deep state agencies are, particularly with regards to what you just said about those protests in Michigan and how they were funded and how they were organized and how they were directed and the eerie similarities that bears to events on January 6th that is clearly part of the MO of the deep state, that The reckoning that could be brought about as a result of Covid is a deep and thorough one.
00:50:02.000For the first time we're starting to see figures emerging out of independent media spaces or at least social media spaces that are saying disband the FBI or dismantle the CIA or that we need to completely re-evaluate the way that social media is regulated and run.
00:50:19.000There should be no relationship between the state and social media.
00:50:23.000There are now at least appetites and there is at least a conversation that really shows how limited the various Covid inquiries are and how shallow they are and how impotent they ultimately must be because any proper inquiry into probably any one of the issues we've discussed today, events in the Middle East, we've not got round to Ukraine, Russia, But any genuine and thorough COVID inquiry would reveal such corruption and ineptitude that nothing short of a top-to-bottom systemic review and radical reform would be sufficient to amend it.
00:51:05.000Where are the real serious investigations on what happened to us over the past several years?
00:51:20.000even doing enough to force the discussion?
00:51:22.000I see him being basically co-opted by powerful corporate elites.
00:51:28.000And I don't feel like he is playing the role I thought he would play.
00:51:35.000of at least disrupting the campaign enough so it becomes difficult to just take away our rights so quickly based on a complete distortion of science to make everyone think they're going to die And destroy businesses.
00:52:27.000But the kind of murders that are purposeless, I think, are influenced by the fact that youth were told, who had nowhere to go other than school, that they had nowhere to go for at least a year.
00:52:40.000And then there was no Then they were never told why.
00:52:44.000They were never given any mental health care or any counseling.
00:52:48.000And this is the experience for people all across the world.
00:52:53.000Entire societies were severely damaged.
00:53:00.000You've seen coups rock West Africa, for example.
00:53:04.000And that has a lot to do with the destabilization campaign waged by the U.S.
00:53:09.000starting in Libya, which led al-Qaeda forces to creep into West Africa and created a security vacuum, and the French were either collaborating with those jihadists or doing nothing, and their forces were there, so people kicked them out.
00:53:23.000There are many more political reasons, but another reason that isn't discussed is just the anger of the population about having been under lockdown, the debt trap they were placed in, the pain that they felt in such a poor society where people, for example, would rely on fishing or live hand-to-mouth as vendors and they can't go out and feed themselves.
00:53:47.000And this has just never been addressed.
00:53:49.000I mean, it just feels like we've completely moved on and there's this historical amnesia around this entire event.
00:53:59.000With everything else that took place, for example, the 9-11 Commission, we know that was a complete joke, but we're still living with 9-11.
00:54:07.000It completely changed our society and put the security state on overdrive.
00:54:11.000So many Americans lost limbs in the post-9-11 wars, lost lives, and a million Iraqis died.
00:56:12.000Stuff's going on in Ireland that's fascinating because you can't treat Ireland like a conventional European nation because they themselves have been subject to colonialist oppression themselves.
00:59:08.000So it's only a small number of people, so we can ignore it.
00:59:12.000It's only a small portion of the population that participate in these things, so it's not necessarily reflective of public opinion.
00:59:17.000And also we're wise to the fact that very often submissions are organised and campaign groups will organise responses, so we're clear with that too.
00:59:24.000Even the bloke in the background, whose job it is to agree, like, he's laden with doubt.
00:59:30.000It's like, that doesn't make sense, hold on a minute.
00:59:32.000Like we're literally in real time watching someone who works for the system go, Wait a minute.
00:59:37.000Is that red pill in my mouth right now?
00:59:41.000But why hold the consultation if the end result is just going to be disregarded on the basis that it's not representative of public opinion?
00:59:49.000Well the point is that we're a democracy and in Ireland we have elections.
00:59:53.000Well, the point, oh, I'm glad that you've asked me that, because the point is we're a democracy and that's why we do elections and ask people's opinions.
01:03:03.000Well, to protect Ukraine and democracy.
01:03:05.000But they don't allow elections, and there's no opposing parties, and there's a lot of dissent within Ukraine, and they've started to shut down state media.
01:03:14.000Uncomission is calling for those who see hate speech or other illegal content online to report it to the platforms or to unguard the Sheikhanah.
01:03:22.000And then we'll decide if it's hate speech that we can utilise to control the conversation, then we'll act on it if it's convenient hate speech, and we'll ignore it if it's hate speech that we can't really utilise to manage the flow of information.
01:03:34.000So we'll keep this all nice and vague, but the end result will be we've got control of social media and therefore the public conversation, and we can then essentially facilitate globalism, which you know is the agenda, because we've asked you what you wanted, you told us no, they told us yes, we're doing what they want.
01:03:47.000So there'll be a lot more of that coming down the line.
01:03:49.000And I don't know if there's anything in Irish history about informing on your community in order to facilitate an external colonial imperialist oppressor, and whether or not you have any taboos against that or anything, or the black and tans, but there's going to be a lot more of that also.
01:04:02.000This is important, but even more so important next year, because once Uncomissioned is fully operational next year, People will be able to report to them directly if they think a platform has ignored or wrongly rejected their complaint.
01:04:17.000And these reports can then be used by Cumasú na mBan to decide where to focus their oversight and investigations and ultimately their enforcement action.
01:04:25.000A lot of this goes on in the world now, doesn't it?
01:04:27.000We can use people to grass, snitch, spy on one another.
01:04:31.000Ooh, people were going out during the lockdown.
01:04:33.000Well, in retrospect, there was nothing wrong with them doing that, it turns out.
01:04:37.000Turning us all into little agents of the state.
01:04:40.000Finally, Uncommissioned's first online safety code, as provided for under the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act, will be adopted in early 2024.
01:04:49.000A draft code will be published very shortly for stakeholder consultation and this will hold the video sharing platforms accountable for how they protect their users online and will deal with extremist content like hate speech and incitement to violence.
01:05:04.000There's already laws about incitement.
01:05:24.000Elon Musk has said his social media company X, previously known as Twitter, will fund Irish legal challenges to forthcoming hate speech legislation.
01:05:31.000Musk warned of risks associated with laws that aim to curb free speech and said there was a need to challenge them.
01:05:36.000In an online interview with Gripped, Musk said X's default position is that it will challenge any laws it believes would infringe upon someone's ability to say what they want to say.
01:05:45.000He was speaking in relation to Ireland's pending criminal justice incitement to violence or hatred and hate offences bill, which Minister for Justice Helen McEntree said would be progressed early this year.
01:05:56.000And we will also fund the legal fees of Irish citizens that want to challenge the bill as well.
01:06:00.000So Mr. Musk, whose ex-platform has its European headquarters in Dublin.
01:06:04.000So we'll make sure that if there is an attempt to suppress the voice of the Irish people, that we do our absolute best to defend the people of Ireland and their ability to speak their mind.
01:06:13.000He said there should be concern if the Irish Parliament defined hate speech in its own terms.
01:06:18.000People should be extremely concerned about that.
01:06:20.000We're just at the mercy of the ruling party and whatever bureaucrats they put in place.
01:06:25.000And they can just define something that is really not hate speech as hate speech just because they don't like it.
01:07:50.000In relation to misinformation and disinformation, he said unlike in newspapers, X had a community notes function which allowed its users to add responses and comments on people's tweets.
01:07:59.000The biggest lie in the media is the choice of narrative because they can simply ignore anything they don't like and they can overly focus on things they do want to talk about, he said.
01:08:07.000Yes, that is what the legacy media does.
01:08:09.000It amplifies stories, it creates stories, it ignores information that's detrimental to the interests of the powerful.
01:08:16.000for whatever failings there may be within any institutional organisation doesn't do that.
01:08:22.000And it allows and facilitates potentially epochal events like the disruption of our trajectory to World War 3
01:08:28.000because of the Tucker-Elon axes. It's really the best shot we have currently of free speech and maybe even freedom.
01:08:36.000Further critiques of the proposed law labelled as authoritarian point to the lack of a legal definition of
01:08:41.000hate and the potential overreach of authority such as the
01:08:43.000seizure of personal electronic devices and prison sentences for possession of supposed hateful content.
01:08:49.000Last year, Musk committed to covering legal charges for ex-users who unfairly faced employer retribution due to their activity on the platform.
01:08:57.000Even corporations during his ire due to the unfair treatment of ex-users were not safe from potential legal consequences.
01:09:04.000In a case involving X, the company's legal team defended an Illinois student threatened with disciplinary action by his university over posts made on the platform.
01:09:11.000An advocate for freedom of speech writes, Musk posted, What we're told we live in are democracies.
01:09:22.000What we're told we fight for are democracies.
01:09:24.000Kind of a version of freedom, or the best way of achieving freedom, is through the consensus of an electorate.
01:09:29.000It's our myth, in a way, because it's not what we live in.
01:09:32.000As you just saw in that example, the polling data suggests that people are opposed to that.
01:09:37.000And even if they were in favour of it, you'd have to question how are these contexts So if we don't live in democracies because democracies are about representation and the right to govern your own life and control your own community through referenda and through consent, what do we live in?
01:09:50.000One theory is we now live in anarcho-tyrannies.
01:09:51.000I was holding them in, how does this benefit me? I could just go, oh that was hateful,
01:09:54.000I'm not going to look at that platform anymore. Like that's always an option, isn't it?
01:09:57.000So if we don't live in democracies, because democracies are about representation and the
01:10:00.000right to govern your own life and control your own community through referenda and through
01:10:05.000consent, what do we live in? One theory is we now live in anarcho-tyrannies. Let's look
01:10:10.000at what anarcho-tyranny is. Anarcho-tyranny is a system of government that fails to protect
01:10:14.000its citizens from violence while simultaneously persecuting conduct that would typically be
01:10:20.000The experience of living under such a system may be familiar to you, even if the term itself is not.
01:10:25.000A state of anarcho-tyranny might, for instance, see career criminals walk the streets murdering women mere days after being released from prison on license, even while offensive limericks, online poetry, and dogs trained to perform comical Nazi salutes are treated with the utmost seriousness by our criminal justice system.
01:10:41.000The result is a disorienting combination of two different kinds of fear.
01:10:44.000Fear of rising violent crime combined with a fear of arbitrary criminalisation, including the criminalisation of citizens who complain about what is being done to them by their government.
01:10:55.000Systems of anarcho-tyranny rely especially on laws that criminalise speech that would ordinarily be regarded merely as rude or controversial.
01:11:02.000In Ireland, the Verac government is currently fast-tracking just such a law.
01:11:06.000The Criminal Justice Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences Bill, which will criminalise any person who prepares or possesses material that is likely to incite violence or hatred against a person or group of persons on account of their protected characteristics.
01:11:27.000Now that's a word that a vengeful prosecutor could really make hay with, particularly given the usefulness of that additional word, likely.
01:11:35.000With the new law in place, the authorities could easily decree that all sorts of politically inconvenient speech is likely to incite hatred against particular groups.
01:11:42.000We are restricting freedom, said Irish Senator Pauline O'Reilly of the Bill, but we're doing it for the common good.
01:11:48.000Categories such as misinformation and disinformation have recently emerged, and mal-information is, even by the definition of the tyrannical bureaucrats that impose it, information that's true, but likely to create disobedience.
01:12:02.000For example, during the pandemic period, if you said, hey, there are different ways of treating this other than the proposed and near-mandated measures, that would be regarded as malinformation.
01:12:12.000Because it's true, but likely to generate dissent, further dissent, maybe even disobedience.
01:12:17.000It would also be regarded as malinformation to say, hey, Vladimir Putin and the former Soviet Union said that if you encroached on former Soviet territory, it would lead to an escalation of hostility, particularly between them and Ukraine.
01:12:32.000And the 2014 coup, where a legitimately elected government was replaced, has also escalated tensions in that region.
01:12:40.000And Vladimir Putin might be interested in a peace deal were Ukraine not to join NATO.
01:12:46.000That might be regarded as mal-information.
01:12:48.000Hate speech, similarly, could be utilized and deployed according to the will of whoever is holding that law as a weapon.
01:12:56.000I know now that the law can be used as a weapon.
01:12:59.000In fact, the term lawfare is casually entering our discourse because so many dissenting voices are shut down using legal means.
01:13:12.000Laws like this are being created to further empower centralised authority, often derived from globalist or at least continental organisations like the EU, which are ultimately a globalist organisation if you ask me, in order to further shut down dissent and impose control.
01:13:29.000You'll see a lot more of this, particularly if bills like this one are allowed to pass.
01:13:33.000It's the sort of thing that we should oppose, and it's pretty fascinating and exciting that Elon Musk is willing to put his money where his mouth is when it comes to backing free speech.
01:13:43.000We'll be following this story in more detail, and I hope that you will continue to support our right for free speech.
01:13:48.000Because in a sense, what you're saying is, if you don't agree with that, is, yeah, we shouldn't be allowed to say what we want.