Stay Free - Russel Brand - Glenn Greenwald (The Truth About Trump)

00:00:00.000 Hello there you awakening wonders, welcome to the limitless glory that you participate in through the miracle of your own consciousness through which you can control your anatomy and indeed your life.

00:00:09.000 If liberty should ever return to a planet that is increasingly interested in centralizing authority, surveilling us, controlling and censoring us.

00:00:18.000 Not here though, well...

00:00:19.000 For the first 15 minutes, we are on YouTube, so there will be a degree of censorship.

00:00:23.000 But after that, we're going to be on Rumble.

00:00:26.000 And of course, today, we're talking about Trump's third arraignment.

00:00:29.000 And we're talking about what this means for free speech, what this means for democracy.

00:00:33.000 In our item, here's the news.

00:00:34.000 No, here's the effing news.

00:00:35.000 We'll talk a little bit about Tucker's interview with Hunter Biden's former business partner and whether or not there are significant revelations in there that ultimately amount to the criminality of the Biden family.

00:00:49.000 Once we get to being exclusively on Rumble, our home where we revel in free speech, where we bathe in the ambrosia of free speech, where we sup upon the sweet teat of free speech, we'll be talking to Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, pioneer, investigator, friend and co-conspirator over on Rumble.

00:01:11.000 First, let's talk about your free speech, my free speech, everyone's free speech.

00:01:15.000 And if you want to enjoy a little bit of free speech right now, press that red button on your screen.

00:01:18.000 You can join our locals community, where free speech is our watchword.

00:01:22.000 They're speaking in there so freely, even now.

00:01:25.000 People are talking about the federal government.

00:01:27.000 Close-up pictures of dear Dianne Feinstein.

00:01:29.000 That's from USA Now.

00:01:31.000 People want to hear an interview, huh?

00:01:33.000 They want to hear an interview.

00:01:34.000 That's Deb Hart.

00:01:35.000 You want to hear an interview with Glenn Greenwald?

00:01:36.000 Yeah, but you're going to hear one.

00:01:37.000 Ash Eller is there chatting to us.

00:01:39.000 Some people saying that they want to hear free speech.

00:01:41.000 Free speech.

00:01:42.000 Yeah, you'll be getting free speech.

00:01:44.000 That we can guarantee you.

00:01:45.000 Should we have a little... Well, let's have a look at this headline.

00:01:48.000 Biden's Department of Justice has just asked the court to limit what Trump can say, which is absurd, isn't it?

00:01:53.000 Because it's a free speech case and they want to not let him speak freely.

00:01:56.000 Is that a bit crazy?

00:01:57.000 My on-screen assistant, associate, co-writer...

00:02:01.000 Partner, friend, Gareth Roy?

00:02:02.000 Yeah, it seems a little ironic, you could say.

00:02:05.000 Is that literal irony?

00:02:06.000 Ah, who knows?

00:02:07.000 Who knows anymore?

00:02:08.000 I mean, the fact that, you know, this is all about whether Donald Trump made knowingly false claims, whether he had the right to make those claims, if he honestly believed that the election results were wrong, and that that's what this whole thing is hanging on to.

00:02:23.000 It's extraordinary because it's a high court case where a former president is potentially being indicted that hinges upon epistemology and ontology.

00:02:32.000 What does he know?

00:02:34.000 What is happening in the private hermeneutics of Donald Trump's mind?

00:02:39.000 You knew that that election was fair and yet you're saying it's not.

00:02:43.000 That's led people to say that they must have some evidence as yet not revealed.

00:02:47.000 Do you think they've got evidence they've not revealed yet?

00:02:49.000 Let us know in the chat.

00:02:50.000 My favourite bit is when your man there, Smith, what's he called?

00:02:56.000 Jack Smith.

00:02:57.000 Jack Smith said that he was sowing doubt.

00:03:00.000 Where is that bit?

00:03:02.000 Smith's indictment cites Trump's speech on January 6th as a feature of his effort to sow doubt about the election and allegedly organise a conspiracy to overturn it.

00:03:10.000 Sew doubt.

00:03:11.000 Sewing doubt.

00:03:13.000 That's such an odd, almost folkish piece of language.

00:03:18.000 Don't you dare.

00:03:19.000 Don't you ever sew doubt in me.

00:03:22.000 Because that sort of suggests you can control the consciousness of other people, that you're responsible for what other people think. It's becoming a bit diffuse, a bit tangential

00:03:32.000 and a bit abstract. One person who is never tangential, abstract or in any way anything

00:03:38.000 less than robust in his discourse is Donald Trump. Let's have a look at him addressing these

00:03:44.000 charges now. Those indictments aren't worth the paper they're written on. Former President Donald Trump

00:03:49.000 keeps fighting back after being charged with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election.

00:03:54.000 This weekend, he ramped up his attacks, railing against the man who was leading the grand jury investigation, Special Counsel Jack Smith.

00:04:03.000 Deranged Jack Smith. 0.99

00:04:04.000 He's a deranged human being. 1.00

00:04:06.000 And on social media, Trump deranged. 0.99

00:04:08.000 That's good, isn't it?

00:04:10.000 That's what he is. 0.99

00:04:11.000 He's a berserk. 1.00

00:04:12.000 He's crazy. 1.00

00:04:13.000 He's a lunatic. 1.00

00:04:15.000 Posted, if you go after me, I'm coming after you. 1.00

00:04:18.000 Which prompted prosecutors to ask the judge to limit Trump's outbursts.

00:04:24.000 That means prohibit his free speech.

00:04:26.000 The problem is, I suppose, is that with the ongoing conversation, which we'll be covering later in the show, around the Biden family's business dealings and the degree to which Joe Biden knew about and was involved with Hunter Biden's business interests, in particular with Burisma in Ukraine, If corruption becomes part of the system, not a bug but a feature, how can a charge of corruption in any way harm Trump?

00:04:51.000 You'll be aware that since these allegations have amped up, since these prosecutions have increased in intensity, so has Donald Trump's popularity.

00:05:02.000 It's extraordinary to find ourselves in a time where our trust in the establishment is so low.

00:05:07.000 Our loathing of conventional politics So charged, so heady and high, that if an anti-establishment figure is significantly attacked, we like them more, not less.

00:05:19.000 This leads us to an important question and I'd love you guys to answer it.

00:05:23.000 Do you think that the Democrat establishment are strategically attacking Trump, knowing this will increase his popularity because they would prefer to For Biden to face Trump in 2024 than any other candidate, or do you think they're making a mistake?

00:05:39.000 Let us know now.

00:05:40.000 We had a poll a little bit earlier.

00:05:42.000 Let's have a look at the results of that poll and remind me of the question, would you guys?

00:05:47.000 Do you think the Democrats' pursuit of Trump Stay free with Russell Brand.

00:05:50.000 because they want to face him a distraction from Biden family corruption.

00:05:54.000 You have resoundedly answered that, but at least 91% of you think that this is a distraction.

00:06:00.000 What about those of you on locals right now?

00:06:02.000 Do you agree that it's a distraction?

00:06:04.000 Certainly, Tulsi Gabbard says that the Trump indictment is a political hit job.

00:06:09.000 Stay free with Russell Brand.

00:06:11.000 See it first on Rumble.

00:06:12.000 Should we should we talk to Glenn straight away?

00:06:15.000 Is Glenn available now?

00:06:16.000 Is Glenn with us?

00:06:17.000 Yes, he is.

00:06:18.000 Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, icon, leader, role model to us all, dog owner and man of great beauty.

00:06:27.000 Hello, Glenn.

00:06:28.000 Thanks for joining us.

00:06:29.000 I think you're muted, either your end or our end.

00:06:32.000 Come on, Glenn.

00:06:33.000 I wanted to say that was a very insufficiently effusive introduction.

00:06:37.000 I'd like you to try that again.

00:06:39.000 I'll go again.

00:06:40.000 Why don't you re-mute?

00:06:41.000 I was like, Glenn Greenwald, a man who cannot operate a laptop, even in front of a beautiful mountain scene.

00:06:49.000 Live from a shack.

00:06:50.000 Much better.

00:06:51.000 Thank you.

00:06:51.000 Much better.

00:06:52.000 I appreciate that.

00:06:52.000 What do you think's on the line with the Trump arraignment?

00:06:55.000 Glenn, like, do you feel that, you know, given that this is a trial that's about free speech and free speech is being curtailed, where do we find ourselves now if the Dem establishment continues down this path?

00:07:12.000 I was just actually reading a very good and interesting article, uncharacteristically so, in the New York Times by the former Bush Justice Department, Harvard Law professor, Jack Goldsmith, who seems to think Trump at least acted very poorly, if not criminally, but nonetheless is warning About the widespread perception that already exists that most of our institutions of authority are corrupted and politicized and can't be trusted, which is always dangerous in a democracy.

00:07:38.000 The only institution that polls well these days is the military, meaning the soldiers and the armed forces, not the people who run the Pentagon, and that's never good for a democracy when the only thing people trust is the military.

00:07:50.000 And, you know, his argument is that no matter how you slice it, this actually is a case where the current government looks at polls, sees that there's only one person who's likely to be able to challenge Joe Biden and defeat him for re-election, and that's the person whom his Justice Department happens to be prosecuting in multiple cases, two so far and counting, and not just Cases that have been brought, but ones that rely upon highly dubious interpretations of law.

00:08:18.000 It's not like these are murder cases or rape cases or bribery cases, things people traditionally think about when they hear of criminal accusations.

00:08:25.000 They're very, you know, kind of distant and vague accusations that do depend a lot on free speech rights.

00:08:33.000 And it's just only going to worsen perceptions that the Justice Department and justice system generally can't be trusted.

00:08:41.000 Often a sense that America is a somewhat solipsistic nation.

00:08:46.000 Do you imagine that if this were happening elsewhere, it would be regarded as the kind of corrupt antics of a banana republic, a takedown of a powerful political opponent?

00:09:00.000 How much have our institutions altered that we can incrementally move into this position without identifying that that's what's happened?

00:09:11.000 As you say, not egregious criminality, but somewhat diffuse and tangential.

00:09:18.000 Amoral, immoral conduct.

00:09:20.000 Do you think that this is something, if we were seeing it in Latin America or Central America, forgive the dismissiveness of that appraisal, we would regard it as crackpot, banana republic conduct?

00:09:32.000 Yeah, I mean it's interesting the reporting that I did in Brazil in 2019 and 2020 that ultimately led to my indictment but that nonetheless freed Lula da Silva from prison was based on exactly that argument that he was in prison, Lula was, at a time when he was leading all public opinion polls for his re-election in 2018.

00:09:51.000 He had a 15-20 point lead on everybody including Jair Bolsonaro.

00:09:56.000 And what was obviously a politically inclined prosecution and a politically inclined judge, namely inclined always to be against BT, ordered him arrested, convicted him quickly, and rendered him ineligible to run, which let Jair Bolsonaro run and win in 2018 without having to face law.

00:10:14.000 Maybe he would have won, we'll never know.

00:10:16.000 And now they've turned around.

00:10:17.000 The establishment in Brazil hasn't done exactly the same thing to Bolsonaro, knowing that he's probably the only person who can defeat Lula, a court without even trying him or convicting

00:10:27.000 him of a crime has now declared Bolsonaro ineligible to run for the next eight years. So of

00:10:31.000 course, this is the sort of thing that happens in countries that don't trust democracy. It's

00:10:36.000 ironic, Russell, because when I first started writing about politics in 2005, the first

00:10:41.000 book I wrote was an argument that the Bush and Cheney administrations and the top officials in it

00:10:45.000 had committed obvious crimes, were crimes, through things like torture and rendition and

00:10:50.000 warrantless spying on Americans.

00:10:52.000 And when Obama got into office after promising to let his attorney general prosecute the people

00:10:58.000 who did that if it warrants, immediately he announced there will be no prosecutions.

00:11:02.000 He said, we have to look forward, not backward.

00:11:05.000 And the entire D.C.

00:11:06.000 class agreed with Obama, saying only banana republics prosecute their political opposition.

00:11:12.000 And that was for real crimes like torture and kidnapping and You know, killing people and spying without warrants, not these kind of attenuated theories of criminality on which the Biden Justice Department is now relying to prosecute Trump, their primary political opposition.

00:11:28.000 And yet Obama arrived in office on waves of optimism, ushered in under a banner of change and hope.

00:11:37.000 It's pretty plain that the scepticism and cynicism that many people feel for their institutions is well earned and is experiential.

00:11:47.000 We did a poll earlier and most of our audience, like 90% of our audience, Believe that the Trump prosecutions are a distraction from corruption and criminality within the Biden family.

00:11:58.000 And how effective can prosecuting an opponent be for corruption when most people think that the institutions themselves have lost all moral authority?

00:12:08.000 And in the case of the current current American government, that the Biden family in particular are criminal?

00:12:13.000 How much do you think, as Trump's lawyer, one of Trump's lawyers suggested, this case Is retaliation to and response to matters that pertain particularly to Hunter Biden and Joe Biden's relationship around his business and Burisma in particular, Glenn?

00:12:31.000 Well, I think that's the other key part of the context, and that's one of the things that Professor Goldsmith in that article I mentioned in the New York Times this morning highlighted, was that at exactly the same time the Biden administration is prosecuting Donald Trump.

00:12:42.000 They are also protecting and shielding Hunter Biden, who is guilty of far more blatant and obvious criminality, just blatant political corruption, tax evasion, a refusal to pay taxes, hiding assets, misaccounting for things.

00:12:56.000 In a way that most people go to jail for many years and Hunter Biden gets this incredibly generous deal that was so shocking to the judge that it immediately crumbled upon the slightest bit of judicial scrutiny because she couldn't believe that the Justice Department was really offering him this full-scale immunity given how many other crimes are pending and given how he was allowed to plead guilty to misdemeanors for what she has seen many times in her short judicial career are treated as serious felonies.

00:13:24.000 So when you set that aside, that kind of You know, sweetheart deal given to Hunter Biden, aside to this politicized prosecution, it becomes even worse.

00:13:31.000 And Russell, I think this is the key question that is central to everything that was embedded in the question that you asked, which is, I know, like me, you're often accused of having changed your political views or having moved from the left to the right, et cetera, et cetera, even though you haven't changed any of your political opinions at all as somebody who's listened to you for quite a while.

00:13:47.000 I know that to be true.

00:13:48.000 The reason that's happened is because what is the relevant metric now is not so much left versus right.

00:13:55.000 But it's anti-authoritarian versus pro-authoritarian or anti-establishment versus pro-establishment.

00:14:00.000 Namely, do you think the loss of trust that these institutions of authority have suffered is valid or not?

00:14:07.000 Do you think that they deserve the contempt in which they are held by a large portion of the population?

00:14:13.000 I believe it's absolutely justified to hold in contempt these political agencies, the U.S.

00:14:19.000 security state, the corporate media, big tech, for all kinds of reasons.

00:14:23.000 And I think standard classic liberals, you know, by which I mean just Democrats, ordinary Democrats, even the part of the left that claimed they were launching a revolution under Bernie Sanders and AOC and the like, have come to view these agencies as their allies and

00:14:36.000 therefore legitimate. And that more than anything is the relevant fundamental distinction that I

00:14:41.000 think defines our political spectrum, much more so than old definitions of left versus right. -

00:14:46.000 Yes, and the deserved contempt that you described appears to be accompanied with an unwillingness

00:14:54.000 to enter into a good faith conversation and advocacy for censorship.

00:15:00.000 it.

00:15:01.000 One of the defining issues of our current news cycle is this ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the manner in which it is funded primarily of course by US taxpayer dollars and yet it's not something that can be When did advocacy for war become a liberal standpoint?

00:15:22.000 When did an unwillingness to discuss the expenditure on American tax dollars become an ordinary policy?

00:15:29.000 Was it the same as this in the Bush-Cheney administration that you publicly criticised and referred to earlier?

00:15:38.000 Is it them that have shifted their position rather than people like you and I?

00:15:45.000 You know, I think the media, the corporate media, was notoriously pro-War on Terror, pro-Iraq War, pro-Bush.

00:15:53.000 The New York Times had to apologize institutionally for the lies they spread to sell the invasion of Iraq to a liberal population.

00:16:00.000 A lot of the lies came not just from Fox News and the Republican Party at the time, but also, and more importantly even, from leading institutions in American liberalism like The Atlantic and The New Yorker and The New York Times, which were battering liberals every day to believe that the invasion

00:16:15.000 of Iraq was necessary, that the excesses of the war on terror from the Patriot Act of

00:16:18.000 torture and the like were all necessary.

00:16:20.000 There was really a closed system that didn't really tolerate a lot of dissent. That's actually

00:16:27.000 the primary reason why I started writing about politics in 2005, was the reaction

00:16:31.000 to this inability for dissent to be aired. I have to say, compared to the war in Iraq and

00:16:37.000 and that whole era after 9/11, where at least we had the excuse,

00:16:42.000 really had suffered a cataclysmic attack on its soil, there is so much less dissent and so much more homogeneity.

00:16:49.000 Now, on most questions, but certainly the war in Ukraine, in the EU, where you used to be, and now I think good for you are not, but still near it, the EU at the start of the war made it illegal For any social media platform to host Russian state media like RT and Sputnik.

00:17:09.000 That's the reason why this platform, Rumble, is not available in France because Rumble refused to remove RT at the orders of the French government.

00:17:17.000 The attempt is to just close the information system completely so that the Western population is completely propagandized.

00:17:24.000 All around the world, Russell, especially in these so-called BRICS countries and developing countries, Almost everybody is against the war in Ukraine, views it as something that NATO and the U.S.

00:17:34.000 provoked, assigns 50-50 blame to Moscow and the West, if not more to the West even, for having provoked it, refuses to join in with the sanctions regime.

00:17:43.000 And yet in the West, we're constantly told the entire world, the entire international community is united behind the United States in this noble effort.

00:17:51.000 And I think now, as that polling you referenced demonstrates, that shows that a majority of Americans 55 to 45 no longer want the U.S.

00:17:59.000 to continue to fund the war in Ukraine.

00:18:01.000 They've had enough.

00:18:02.000 They're starting to realize yet again that they were propagandized at about a war, that they were convinced at the start they should support and are now coming to oppose.

00:18:09.000 And I should say, if we look at the ideological breakdown of that poll, overwhelmingly, by far, the group that most supports the U.S.

00:18:17.000 financing of the war in Ukraine are self-described liberal Democrats, 75% of them.

00:18:23.000 Support this CIA-NATO war in Europe.

00:18:25.000 If it weren't for that, the margin would be even much bigger.

00:18:29.000 It makes me wonder if people have any intuitive or essential morality at all.

00:18:35.000 Or are they rather just fielded, shepherded from opinion to opinion in accordance with the preferences of the centralist authority?

00:18:47.000 When we have the bizarre spectacle of yet another cadaverous statesperson being cajoled into compliance, this time in the form of Dianne Feinstein, do you feel that there's almost an archetypal truth emerging in the political space?

00:19:03.000 That our institutions and those denizens of it are beginning to visibly decay before our eyes?

00:19:12.000 That this will not be resolved in the typical cycles of bipartisan electoral oscillation, but will require an institutional reckoning, significant change.

00:19:27.000 In fact, the kind of things that rhetorically great political orators have always referred to, hope, change, an America where communities and individuals are empowered, whether that's Trump saying that or Obama saying it, God knows they all say it.

00:19:40.000 Do you think that figures like Robert F. Kennedy could ever flourish within the Democratic Party?

00:19:45.000 And do you think that what's required is a kind of new political mechanic emerging from these new independent media spaces that we participate in?

00:19:55.000 Do you start to feel, and I know that this is a big part of your journey and you've been an activist and an advocate and much, much more over the last 10, 15, 20 years, but you're starting to feel that independent media will become politicised as a necessity?

00:20:06.000 Yeah, I mean, it's basically the only thing about which I'm optimistic.

00:20:14.000 You know, on my show last night, my Rumble show, we interviewed The director of this documentary that was released last year, I don't know if you saw it, but if you haven't, I really recommend it, called The Orders of War, which used FOIA requests to unearth all of these documents showing how producers and directors in Hollywood of the biggest mass-marketed films work in complete partnership with the Pentagon and the CIA to the point they give them script approval,

00:20:40.000 They can only get films made if the Pentagon and the CIA approve of these films for the most part, in part because Hollywood's a huge business and doesn't want to alienate the US government, but also because a lot of these films need access to things only the Pentagon can provide.

00:20:54.000 And the film really is about how potent propaganda is, how it kind of infiltrates every component of our, not just political eyes, but our cultural eyes, where it's even more insidious when our guard's not up.

00:21:05.000 If you go to the film to see Godzilla, you don't know that the CIA and the Pentagon has helped shape the script.

00:21:10.000 And yet they have.

00:21:12.000 And so when I look at things like the history where every time the US has a new war to present, every time the ruling class of Washington has a new war to present, the population gets on board with the war at first and then turns against it, which is what happened in Ukraine.

00:21:25.000 I think it's because propaganda is very effective.

00:21:27.000 They know how to play on people's emotions, including positive emotions.

00:21:33.000 If you show somebody the victims of a war, the civilian victims of a war, the way they did constantly when it came to Ukraine, but never do for U.S.

00:21:40.000 wars.

00:21:41.000 Like, when do you ever see a victim of an American war in Iraq or Pakistan or, you know, Yemen or Afghanistan or Syria or Libya talking about, you know, the lives lost and the ambitions crushed?

00:21:52.000 Never.

00:21:53.000 You only see it when you hear from Ukrainians talking about Russian missiles that fell, and so people connect to this.

00:21:58.000 They're stimulated emotionally, and sometimes it's a good emotion, but they're being so manipulated by a propaganda science that has been developed over decades.

00:22:07.000 And then you combine that with this newfound fixation on using the internet to censor

00:22:14.000 more than we've ever been censored.

00:22:15.000 This relentless campaign to take off the internet, anything that raises questions

00:22:20.000 or dissents from the establishment narrative, and you can see why it's an incredibly potent weapon.

00:22:25.000 And I absolutely think that the only thing that matters, in my view, in terms of looking at myself,

00:22:31.000 not as a journalist, but as a citizen, is fortifying the parts of the internet

00:22:36.000 that still are devoted to permitting dissent and protecting free speech and free discourse

00:22:41.000 and free inquiry, because without that, we have nothing.

00:22:44.000 We're all humans and stop the world of propaganda.

00:22:44.000 We're all humans, and so stop the little propaganda.

00:22:46.000 Even those who think of ourselves as resisting it, you need alternative voices and it's being,

00:22:52.000 you know, rapidly removed from the internet and places like Rumble and a few others are like it,

00:22:56.000 it's kind of independent media that, you know, has emerged.

00:23:00.000 That's why I say it's the only source of optimism for me and it's why I spend so much time

00:23:05.000 protecting its prerogatives and freedoms that are constantly under assault.

00:23:09.000 So, and yet, as you've observed, Rumble is already not available in France

00:23:15.000 and perhaps elsewhere in the EU because of Rumble's refusal to de-platform Russia today.

00:23:21.000 Seems to me that forces and legislature is being marshaled to prohibit and certainly inhibit the rise of independent media spaces and that we're kind of sleepwalking into the normalization of censorship and even your cited figures on support for the Ukraine, ongoing financial

00:23:40.000 support for Ukraine in their conflict with Russia, suggest that many

00:23:44.000 people will just blindly and blithely support ventures such as this. So

00:23:50.000 whilst you say you're optimistic, I sometimes feel like pretty scared that in the

00:23:58.000 end they're gonna just say you're not allowed to have rumble

00:24:01.000 anymore.

00:24:01.000 They'll just shut it down.

00:24:02.000 And I feel like something is happening in Brazil with a significant podcast being censored.

00:24:07.000 And do you feel that there is a kind of consensus among the powerful, even though they may have conflict elsewhere, to manage emergent voices such as the ones that we're discussing in independent media spaces?

00:24:23.000 You know, what's happening in Brazil is very scary, and it's also very illuminating.

00:24:27.000 I mean, I've lived here for almost 20 years, so obviously I focus on it in part for that reason, but also because Brazil is a huge country.

00:24:33.000 It's the sixth largest country in the world, second largest in our hemisphere.

00:24:36.000 It has a lot of, you know, environmental resources like the Amazon and major oil resources.

00:24:43.000 It's a country of great geostrategic importance, and it has been part of the democratic world for, you know, since 1985 when it redemocratized.

00:24:50.000 It's been basically a democracy.

00:24:52.000 But what has happened over the last four years, first in the name of fighting Bolsonaro, just like everything in the U.S.

00:24:57.000 is done in the name of fighting Trump, like it used to be justified in the name of fighting the Soviet communism, and after that, Muslim extremism.

00:25:04.000 There's always some enemy that justifies authoritarianism to keep the population fearful.

00:25:08.000 But in the name of fighting Bolsonaro, they've essentially adopted a completely authoritarian mindset and implemented a system Uh, censorship so extreme that it's genuinely impossible for me to exaggerate or overstate it.

00:25:20.000 It's so extreme, in fact, that the New York Times, before the 2022 election between Lula and Bolsonaro, when they were obviously rooting for Lula to win, raised flags on two occasions about how extreme it was becoming.

00:25:33.000 They consolidated all the power to censor in the hands of a single member of the Supreme Court, who is very pro-PT and anti-Bolsonaro.

00:25:42.000 He has no opposition.

00:25:44.000 There's no trial.

00:25:45.000 There's no process.

00:25:45.000 He just issues decrees and orders saying this person shall hereby be removed from the internet.

00:25:50.000 This person shall be denied access to be able to speak.

00:25:53.000 He imposes massive fines if this isn't immediately obeyed.

00:25:56.000 There's that person that you referenced.

00:25:59.000 He was once called the Joe Rogan of Brazil because he's in his mid-20s.

00:26:03.000 He built this enormous audience, was the most influential podcaster in Brazil.

00:26:07.000 Millions and millions of views every show, every day on YouTube.

00:26:10.000 He got banned off YouTube, booted off YouTube.

00:26:14.000 He went to Rumble, where Rumble signed him, and now the judge has ordered Rumble to de-platform his show and has, because Monarch found a way, his name is Monarch, found a way to kind of circumvent it, he opened a criminal investigation, this judge did, fined him $300,000, which is the equivalent of $75,000, all without an accusation or a formal trial or anything else like that.

00:26:37.000 He's banned from speaking.

00:26:39.000 He can't speak in his own defense.

00:26:40.000 He can't speak about politics, even though he's been convicted of no crime.

00:26:43.000 And all the people who defend this stuff, like the influencers and the academics and the government officials, constantly are flying to Paris and Berlin and London and Amsterdam, where they have these conferences that they're studying Brazil as a test case for how far the EU and then the US can go.

00:26:59.000 The difference with the US is that there is a First Amendment that Brazil doesn't really have. 0.80

00:27:03.000 It's kind of been whittled away.

00:27:04.000 But that's what's coming.

00:27:06.000 That's what they want to do.

00:27:08.000 In general, if establishments by definition see something that threatens their hegemonic hold on power and on people's brains, they will feel a need to attack it. It's what they did to the

00:27:18.000 internet broadly. The internet was supposed to be this revolutionary tool of liberation and innovation.

00:27:23.000 They looked at that and they said, "We can't allow that." They centralized everything in the

00:27:27.000 hands of four corporations that are easily manipulated and controlled by the US

00:27:31.000 government and the corporate media.

00:27:33.000 Now they are trying to implement formal laws that control the flow of—

00:27:37.000 of information on the internet, if that really takes hold, what hope is there?

00:27:41.000 That is the thing that I do worry about.

00:27:43.000 As you said, I do think there's reason to be concerned as well.

00:27:47.000 Plus, you explained something really important to us there that I'd not properly understood before.

00:27:47.000 Oh, that's pretty cool.

00:27:52.000 That by corporatizing and commercializing a formerly truly free space, you create a meaningful and manageable ally, even whilst creating the tension between what is regarded as old media And these new emergent Titanic spaces.

00:28:10.000 But that is a much easier tension to manage than the potentially disastrous and cataclysmic scenario where there are all manner of free, diffuse oppositional voices existing online with sufficient power and ability to accumulate and grow to attack and even bring down a government.

00:28:29.000 I suppose after they saw it in corporate spaces like, you know, with Napster and political spaces, perhaps, you know, with Brexit, Trump, Even Podemos and Sarita, possibly these kind of online spaces contributed to those successes.

00:28:42.000 They had to, as you've just said, generate a large corporatist entity that could become enmeshed with and that they could have true complicity with in order to have the kind of corporate power that in the last century would have been rightly regarded as literally fascism.

00:29:01.000 Absolutely.

00:29:02.000 They cannot tolerate anything that they don't control.

00:29:04.000 And I think one of the things that's interesting to remember, especially for people who are old enough, unfortunately, that includes you and me, to remember what the internet was like in that kind of advent in the early stages when it was all euphoric.

00:29:17.000 is that it was completely decentralized and anonymous.

00:29:20.000 You could do anything on the internet and you wouldn't be tracked, you wouldn't be connected to your name.

00:29:24.000 There was a great freedom that came from it.

00:29:26.000 And the idea of the internet was supposed to be that it would be a way to empower individuals to speak with one another, to exchange information and ideas, to organize without having everything mediated by centralized corporate and state authority.

00:29:40.000 That was the vision of the internet.

00:29:42.000 A lot of the people who run these big tech companies were the pioneers of that kind of era, and they do still have this thing in them that resists this control.

00:29:51.000 But when you have a public company worth hundreds of billions of dollars, when your personal wealth is a billionaire, and your acceptance in good liberal society is dependent upon social acceptance, which all human beings are kind of constructed to crave, it's in our DNA because we're tribal animals, There's so many different weapons to control, even people who seem very wealthy and powerful, you know, like Mark Zuckerberg or the head of Google or, you know, in the previous regime, Jack Dorsey.

00:30:19.000 Where if you threaten them with enough legal and regulatory reprisals, or you print enough New York Times articles accusing them of having blood on their hands for their refusal to censor, eventually they will start to capitulate because they are, no matter how wealthy they are, susceptible to being controlled and co-opted by other institutions that are more powerful than they are.

00:30:39.000 And as you said, as long as you keep it in the hands of a tiny number of corporations, it becomes very manageable.

00:30:44.000 Monopolies, duopolies, and this kind of centralized authority, even if it's under the auspices of private enterprise, can be controlled in the way that you described.

00:30:53.000 That's pretty fascinating.

00:30:54.000 What struck me is that there are sort of historical precedents in social spaces.

00:31:00.000 Two examples that come to mind is in Orwell's accounts of Barcelona in homage to Catalonia in the first flushes of revolution, there's this genuine sense that there's syndicated, localised or consensus-derived authority that eventually coalesces into more overtly communist organisations and eventually into Franco's right-wing dictatorship.

00:31:25.000 And then in the immediate aftermath of the French There are these accounts of this rather blissful Paris, where people are giddy on sort of utopian revolutionary sensation, which ultimately becomes militarized, centralized, colonialist.

00:31:41.000 In a sense, that template seems to be one that has an almost archetypal power.

00:31:47.000 And the way that you describe the seduction of even these oligarchical, or certainly potent The figures in the tech world, Zuckerberg et al, is in a sense just a large scale version of what we're all experiencing when we're propagandized.

00:32:01.000 When we're like, oh yeah, I suppose you do have to have a war against Russia. 0.80

00:32:04.000 Oh, I guess I probably should censor people on social media.

00:32:09.000 In the end, we are all susceptible to quite primal forces and quite deep psychological stimuli.

00:32:19.000 George Orwell has this preface that was supposed to be, I think, the preface to his book about the Catalan movement.

00:32:27.000 Maybe it was Animal Farm.

00:32:28.000 I don't recall exactly which book it was supposed to be part of because it never got published.

00:32:32.000 It was right after the war, the World War II.

00:32:35.000 And it was just simply deemed too offensive to publish, where he talked about Soviet communism under Stalin and all of the obviously repressive weapons they used to control the population and crush dissent.

00:32:49.000 But he then said, we in the West are really in no position to boast about how we're so free because oftentimes The way more effective means of controlling human minds is not the overt means of putting prisoners into camps or into prison, or dissenters rather, into prison or camps, or sending people in black uniforms with guns to kill people who criticize the government.

00:33:14.000 The much more effective way is through these subtle and insidious means of controlling the means of communication, which is through mass media, And not putting people in prison, but putting the prison in their mind so that they're just never exposed to dissent, they believe they're free.

00:33:29.000 The socialist activist Rosa Luxemburg once said, he who does not move does not notice their change.

00:33:36.000 Where, you know, you can think you're free, but it's only because you're so conformist and so compliant that nobody considers you threatening.

00:33:43.000 Nobody considers you enough of a danger to try and do anything against you.

00:33:47.000 And so you say, look, I'm saying everything I want and nobody bothers me.

00:33:50.000 But that's because everything you're saying serves establishment interests and establishment orthodoxies.

00:33:54.000 I think that's very much the world in which we live.

00:33:57.000 And bizarrely and paradoxically, the Internet is making it worse.

00:34:00.000 The Internet is, you know, when I was doing the Stonehenge reporting, the Internet In my view, became the single greatest weapon of coercion and monitoring ever created in human history.

00:34:12.000 It is also now becoming the single greatest weapon of propaganda and thought control, even though it was supposed to be the opposite, because they've been so successful in commandeering control of it, centralizing how it runs in the hands of a tiny number of people, and then controlling them.

00:34:27.000 That's the reason why so many people, these people hate Elon Musk with such a passion, because even though he's been far from perfect in it, He's at least saying that he won't comply with these dictates and threatening their control over the flow of information.

00:34:41.000 And that's why they feel like he has to be destroyed.

00:34:43.000 And I think that shows you how much this control is of the most vital importance to them.

00:34:48.000 Indeed, in the documentary Citizen Four that covers your investigation and the revelations that Edward Snowden made, the way that I observed him was as if he were patient zero in a real-life Bentham Panepticon.

00:35:06.000 He is the first prisoner that recognizes that he is indeed being observed thought by thought, action by action, data point by data point, that this insidious form of control can now be enacted through the omniscience of a kind of cyber panepticon where we are all observable from every conceivable angle through recourse and observation and correlation of our actions.

00:35:35.000 Yeah.

00:35:36.000 Yeah, you know, just quickly, it's funny when Snowden first contacted me at the end of 2012, he was very worried about disclosing to me any information about him or saying much of anything.

00:35:47.000 And he kept saying, essentially, I can't because we're constantly being watched and it's too dangerous.

00:35:53.000 And of course, even though I was a critic of the NSA at the time, a harsh critic of the U.S.

00:35:56.000 security state, I was thinking to myself, this guy seems kind of crazy, like very paranoid.

00:36:01.000 And of course, as it turns out, he was right because he had in his hands the documents proving it.

00:36:06.000 He had seen it all firsthand. 0.69

00:36:08.000 And even though I thought I was kind of immune from the propaganda, I immediately started thinking, oh, this guy's kind of paranoid and crazy.

00:36:14.000 Of course, that's not true to that extent.

00:36:16.000 And only once I saw the documents was I able to really see the full extent of it.

00:36:20.000 It just shows you How, again, even those who think we're kind of resistant to propaganda are really susceptible to it because it's not just a superficial field of discipline.

00:36:30.000 It's something developed over many decades involving the study of psychology and sociology and all kinds of other fields of discipline.

00:36:37.000 It really works, propaganda does.

00:36:39.000 Yeah, even your most cliched crackpot, your aluminum foil hat-wearing nutjob, now looks eerily prescient, and so, they can read your thoughts, they know everything that I've typed, your search history, they've got access to that, they can turn on the microphone whenever they want to, yo!

00:36:57.000 Okay, well let's get you back to your ward now!

00:37:00.000 We were like talking earlier about how like stuff that almost you get disoriented by extreme conspiratorial discourse like there are nanobots in these medications and you know the earth is flat and then when they say oh there's this chrome orb that's going to read your retina and we're giving that data directly to the government and we're piloting that now in Kenya you think well that's not as bad.

00:37:27.000 Carry on!

00:37:28.000 You know, you've been primed to accept things that would have just 10 years ago seemed extraordinarily dystopic.

00:37:35.000 Yeah, it's exactly how it's done. 0.95

00:37:37.000 I mean, the thing that amazes me Russell is if you go back and look at the weeks after the 9-11 attack, when obviously most Americans were traumatized, everybody was like, look, whatever you have to do to prevent this from happening again, go fucking do it.

00:37:51.000 You know, I'm for it. 0.80

00:37:52.000 Let's go.

00:37:53.000 The Patriot Act, when it was introduced, even in that climate, was still a bridge too far.

00:37:58.000 They knew it was an incredibly radical act.

00:38:01.000 The New York Times and Washington, bipartisan Washington ruling class, had to keep coming and saying, look, we know this is radical.

00:38:08.000 It's only temporary.

00:38:09.000 The law itself says it will expire in three years.

00:38:12.000 Congress has to renew it, so it's going to go away.

00:38:15.000 Here we are 22 years later, the Patriot Act just gets automatically renewed

00:38:20.000 with no reforms.

00:38:21.000 Every time it pops up, it's a quick, not even a debate, it passes 92 to six,

00:38:27.000 and it just has faded into the political woodwork.

00:38:29.000 It's now just part of our reality.

00:38:31.000 No one thinks about the Patriot Act anymore as being this grave threat because it's been normalized.

00:38:36.000 And every time we let one of those things go, we allow a little more censorship on the internet, we allow a little more dissent to happen, we allow the EU to make it a crime for social media companies to platform Russian media if they want to and close our information circle just a little more.

00:38:51.000 Every time somebody starts having a political awakening because of their age and they start paying attention, what they're connecting to, the reality and the normality of it, is totally different than it was even 10 years ago.

00:39:01.000 And the things they're conditioned to automatically accept and not even realize they're accepting becomes more and more extreme.

00:39:08.000 And you're so deluged with stimuli that there's a kind of much commented on cultural amnesia that you almost can't be bothered to recollect that three years ago these measures were introduced, this was why lockdown was conducted, this is the reason that we had this set of regulations.

00:39:29.000 It all seems like it passes so quickly.

00:39:31.000 We're in a sort of state of hyper-stimulation and we're so overwrought and fraught and there's so much information that to be steadfast and principled becomes so superhuman that I think one would have to be devout.

00:39:46.000 That the only way that you can have principles now is if you believe in If not God, something that's so like God that it may as well fall under that term, i.e.

00:39:57.000 some values and principles that are not swayed by what you are materially offered and what you are given as information, what you are offered as truth, that ever-changing carousel.

00:40:09.000 Thank you, Glenn, for being someone that operates on that plane, for having endured what you've endured in the I'm sorry.

00:40:15.000 It's not.

00:40:15.000 I apologize.

00:40:15.000 What can I do?

00:40:16.000 I didn't create Rio de Janeiro.

00:40:17.000 I just enjoy its beauties.

00:40:18.000 But Russell, it's always great to talk to you.

00:40:19.000 investigative journalism should look like, what good communication sounds like, and what a...

00:40:24.000 That better be a false backdrop for your standing in front of. That better be green screen, Glenn.

00:40:29.000 That better not be real.

00:40:30.000 I'm sorry, it's not. I apologize.

00:40:32.000 What can I do? I didn't create Rio de Janeiro. I just enjoy its beauties.

00:40:36.000 But Russell, it's always great to talk to you. Thank you for having me.

00:40:39.000 There is Glenn Greenwald. Just come down from that mountain with a tablet with 10 edicts

00:40:44.000 that he will be sharing with us in just a moment.

00:40:46.000 You can, of course, catch Glenn on System Update live on Rumble, 7pm Eastern Time.

00:40:51.000 That's about an hour from now, wherever you are in the world, always worth watching Glenn.

00:40:56.000 Still to come this week, we're going to be talking to Vivek Ramaswamy.

00:40:58.000 We've got so many fascinating questions for this renegade Republican presidential candidate.

00:41:03.000 My friend Nick Ortner will be on the show.

00:41:06.000 You're going to love Nick.

00:41:07.000 He's going to help you disrupt your inner systems of anxiety and despair with fantastic methods that I personally use.

00:41:15.000 Click the red button.

00:41:16.000 Join us on Locals to get early access to the great interviews we do.

00:41:19.000 For example, we had Jordan Peterson on just yesterday.

00:41:22.000 You could have been watching that live as old Leather Harlequin himself. 0.58

00:41:26.000 He was wearing like a weird leather patchwork suit.

00:41:28.000 And I kid you not, a wooden tie.

00:41:31.000 Wooden tie.

00:41:32.000 Why not?

00:41:32.000 Wooden tie like to speak to Jordan Peterson.

00:41:35.000 That's a pun, but a pun I won't get to make again.

00:41:37.000 So please, you know, join us on Locals.

00:41:40.000 It's really worth it.

00:41:40.000 We're a fantastic little community.

00:41:42.000 Look at them now.

00:41:43.000 Ellen, Sophia, Imagination, SensitiveHeart25.

00:41:46.000 All the greats.

00:41:47.000 They're in there right now.

00:41:49.000 Join us again tomorrow.

00:41:50.000 Not for more of the same.

00:41:50.000 We'd never insult you with that.

00:41:51.000 But for more of the different.

00:41:53.000 Until next time.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - August 10, 2023

Glenn Greenwald (The Truth About Trump)

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