Stay Free - Russel Brand - GoFundMe Freezes Donations with Max Blumenthal

Max Blumberg joins us for a chat about the 9/11 attacks and Elon Musk's actions in preventing a Russian attack on Ukraine. We also hear about the growing threat of cyber-sabotage in the space, and how the government is using technology to spy on its own citizens. And we hear about a conspiracy theory about GoFundMe funding a Goverment drone strike on a government drone base in the skies above Australia. We're part of the Robots Radio Podcast Network. See all the great network shows at RobotsRadio.net. Episode Music: "Space Junk" by Borrtex "Goodbye Outer Space" by Cairo Braga "Outer Space Warning" by Fauci & Co. "The Dark Side Of" by The New York Times Subscribe to our new show Robots Radio on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your favourite podcast releases. Subscribe, Like, and Share to stay up to date with the latest robot news and trends. We post polls, questions and thoughts on all things robot and robot-related topics on both socials, and we'll be looking out for your responses in the next episode of Robots Radio. on Tuesday, September 18th. Send us your answers to these questions and more on Robots Radio and other cool things! on our new podcasting platforms! Subscribe and comments on this podcast! in the comments section below! Thanks for listening to Robots Radio & other awesome things you like! Timestamps: - your feedback is helping us make the podcast better! Thank you for your support is so we can keep making the podcast bigger and more awesome! - thanks you, again and again, more importantly, we appreciate your support matters more important than you get a chance to help us make a bigger podcast. - Tom and more of your feedback helps us make it bigger! - Tom gives us better listening, more of our podcast better, more people listening to our podcasting experience - more of you can help us spread the word out there more of this stuff more of that! - Timestep - thank you, thanks for listening out and more and more listening out! - your support really helps us out there! - thanks, Tom and thanks, thanks, again, thank you! xoxo - Tom & Max Blumblanc and good night! - bye - bye, bye, your continued support is much appreciated!

00:00:00.000 Hello there you Awakening Wonders!

00:00:01.000 Over the month of September I'm doing a handful of live shows that are a combination of spirituality, breathwork, individual awakening, community building and challenging authority.

00:00:11.000 How do you bring down the system while bringing up children?

00:00:15.000 Go and sleep! Go and f***ing sleep! Sleep while I have inventive all gutted now! 0.99

00:00:20.000 How do you try to bring down Bear Grylls while you're on Running Wild with Bear Grylls?

00:00:24.000 And Bear Grylls is much better at that stuff than you.

00:00:28.000 How do we find new ways of challenging authority while trying to live normal lives?

00:00:33.000 So I'll be doing stand-up, breathwork, meditation, as well as conducting polls and votes because I believe democracy works.

00:00:40.000 Are you happy with your current government?

00:00:41.000 No.

00:00:42.000 With you live in theatres like Hayes on the 12th of September, that's a little intimate London gig.

00:00:48.000 I'm at Wembley Park Theatre on the 16th of September.

00:00:51.000 Windsor on the 19th of September.

00:00:53.000 Plymouth on the 22nd.

00:00:55.000 And Wolverhampton on the 28th.

00:00:57.000 To get tickets go to russellbrown.com forward slash live.

00:01:00.000 That's russellbrown.com forward slash live.

00:01:02.000 The link is in the description.

00:01:03.000 Stay free.

00:01:06.000 Hello there, you Awakening Wonders.

00:01:08.000 Thanks for joining me on our mutual voyage to truth and freedom.

00:01:12.000 Together, we can create new systems, new communities.

00:01:16.000 We can analyse these extraordinary times together, independently.

00:01:21.000 Those of you watching us from the United States of America, take this opportunity to reflect honorably with you on the lives of those lost on September the 11th in particular as someone who behaved so astonishingly at the time because that's what I was a crazy young man back then and some of you'll be aware of my mad behavior on MTV way back in those days and now I'm able to share with you in acknowledging the horror of those events and actually

00:01:47.000 Look at them from a new perspective, how it changed history, how it altered our perception of the world, how it was utilised, how the Patriot Act was mobilised, how the war in Iraq came about as a result of those tragic events.

00:02:02.000 We're looking also today at the new revelations that Musk prevented a Ukraine attack on Russia last year because of his, what's it called, Skylink, Skynet?

00:02:12.000 Starlink. 0.59

00:02:13.000 Sounds too much like a train.

00:02:13.000 Starlink.

00:02:15.000 I struggle to accept it as such a significant technological advancement.

00:02:19.000 Sounds like Starlink.

00:02:20.000 I also think of an attack on Crimea, which is a clear distinction there.

00:02:24.000 You know, as in Musk's point is that when Crimea is a red line of Putin's, that could lead to nuclear war.

00:02:30.000 Then he's got a bit of a bigger point there.

00:02:32.000 Let us know in the chat if you agree with Musk's actions.

00:02:36.000 If you're watching us on YouTube, give us a like, give us a comment.

00:02:39.000 If you're watching on Rumble, you can't rumble us no more.

00:02:42.000 Our rumbling days are over.

00:02:44.000 It's like the like has usurped the rumble.

00:02:47.000 as the way of acknowledging your approval and registering your content with us.

00:02:54.000 We'll be talking in more detail about the, like Musk's actions in preventing an attack on Crimea.

00:03:00.000 And later in our, and here's the news, we'll be talking about Fauci being questioned

00:03:05.000 by CNN on masks and a new take on some of the data that emerged from that period,

00:03:10.000 which I will not discuss with you, you 6.5 million awakening wonders on YouTube,

00:03:14.000 because you know how that platform is regulated and we love you and we adore you,

00:03:18.000 but in a few minutes, we're gonna want you to click the link in the description

00:03:21.000 to join us for a conversation with Max Blumenthal, who will be talking to us, presumably at length,

00:03:27.000 about that conflict and revealing stuff that simply wouldn't be safe to talk about

00:03:32.000 in heavily regulated mainstream spaces.

00:03:35.000 Mmm.

00:03:38.000 Max, hello, mate.

00:03:39.000 Thanks for coming on.

00:03:40.000 Great to see you.

00:03:41.000 How are you doing?

00:03:42.000 Yeah, you know, man, we're operating in a beautiful space.

00:03:47.000 I'm sure you'll agree that working in this independent media space is free from consequences.

00:03:53.000 It's a giddy, buccaneering affair, and you never get the sense that the forces of evil are co-aligning and coalescing to, for example, shut down your GoFundMe.

00:04:02.000 Can you tell us a little bit about that story, mate?

00:04:05.000 Yeah, well, it's a giddy buccaneering affair for independent swashbucklers like ourselves and our ship was targeted by...

00:04:16.000 Apparently national security state pirates.

00:04:19.000 We have no idea who they actually are because they hide behind the veneer of these supposedly private Silicon Valley based companies like GoFundMe.

00:04:31.000 As you said, you were saying before in the run up to this interview, the FBI has honeycombed its places like Facebook or Meta and Twitter with its own operatives.

00:04:42.000 You even have former CIA people there.

00:04:44.000 But these crowdfunding sites do the same thing, and it's poorly understood.

00:04:51.000 So I'll just tell you what happened to us, and I think your audience will better understand

00:04:57.000 how dangerous it is for them to work with, to try to raise money for anything remotely political

00:05:04.000 when you have the national security state operating behind the scenes,

00:05:08.000 telling them that they may have to sanction people if their political views go against their own objectives.

00:05:15.000 So we launched a crowd funder for three of our contributors.

00:05:19.000 You've had one of them on named Kit Clarenberg.

00:05:21.000 Three of our most dedicated contributors to provide them with long-term positions.

00:05:27.000 And so, for our audience, it was a chance to just support independent media that they like.

00:05:31.000 We went through GoFundMe.

00:05:33.000 People are now calling me naive.

00:05:36.000 And GoFundMe was failing to transfer the money.

00:05:40.000 We had raised about $90,000 in three weeks.

00:05:42.000 in three weeks.

00:05:45.000 And I went over to GoFundMe's form to ask them what happened to the money.

00:05:52.000 And it took a while.

00:05:54.000 And I finally received a message from a trust and safety officer, only named Sabrina.

00:06:00.000 I had no idea who she was.

00:06:02.000 And she said that due to some external concerns, they have frozen the money

00:06:07.000 and they're not transferring it to us because they need to verify it.

00:06:12.000 That's all I heard from her.

00:06:14.000 And so our donors didn't know that this had happened.

00:06:19.000 So eventually I had to announce it, which means that I was basically,

00:06:22.000 when you announce this and go public, you're sabotaging your own fundraiser

00:06:25.000 because no one's gonna wanna donate if the money's being frozen.

00:06:30.000 But they wouldn't explain why.

00:06:32.000 And eventually, we had to force GoFundMe to refund all the money to everyone and move to a different fundraising site called SpotFund, which has been much more trustworthy and responsive.

00:06:45.000 We were able to get their chief technology officer on the line who promised us that they would transfer the money immediately, and they've done so.

00:06:52.000 But with GoFundMe, It's obvious that they're working hand-in-glove with the national security state and applying financial sanctions on outlets and causes that threaten the imperatives of the powers that be.

00:07:05.000 And I'll point directly to the Canadian truckers, the Freedom Convoy.

00:07:09.000 You know what happened there.

00:07:10.000 Back in early 2022, GoFundMe froze their $10 million that they had raised, $10 million US dollars they'd raised, and then announced that they were transferring it to, quote-unquote, established charities.

00:07:24.000 So they were stealing the money from donors to the Canadian truckers protesting Justin Trudeau and the Liberal government's vaccine mandates and the lockdowns, and just giving it to charities of their choosing.

00:07:37.000 And they eventually had to relent because this was a violation of U.S.

00:07:40.000 law.

00:07:41.000 Several attorney generals in the states were going to investigate them.

00:07:45.000 But they wanted to steal the money.

00:07:47.000 And why were they doing that?

00:07:48.000 Because that liberal government of Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland had declared emergency law in Canada, had told GoFundMe to do that, and they were telling the banks to basically Take people's money who are donating to this because the protest was threatening their policy.

00:08:05.000 And so that's what we think happened with us.

00:08:07.000 And we weren't going to let them reroute the money somewhere else.

00:08:11.000 So we just shut it down.

00:08:12.000 And the crazy thing is now they're telling journalists like our friend Matt Taibbi, who actually called them at GoFundMe, that this was a totally normal procedure and that we voluntarily shut it down as though we were just going to sit there and allow them to continue this complete Banking fraud forever.

00:08:33.000 It's astonishing.

00:08:36.000 Like Lee's story, we're talking about the relationship between Elon Musk and the American government, and how Elon Musk is able to intervene in the military imperatives of, in this case, the Ukraine.

00:08:50.000 I know your views on that war have been pretty well and widely expressed.

00:08:56.000 Here we have a story where, once again, the relationship between big tech and the government becomes Quite curious.

00:09:03.000 It's interesting and exciting when there's an obvious adversarial component, such as in our last story.

00:09:09.000 But when you see this kind of cohesion, this kind of collaboration, like you cite with the Canadian trucker story, and obviously now you've been a personal, oh my gosh, should we say victim of it?

00:09:20.000 You've certainly experienced it.

00:09:21.000 It makes you realise that ultimately what we're sliding towards We are more and more normalised, centralised, authoritarian models, centralised currency, ability to close down people.

00:09:34.000 We're hearing more and more stories about the intervention in people's financial affairs.

00:09:39.000 It's something that's becoming more prevalent and I'm not surprised that you're a prominent and high profile organisation to be subject to that kind of obvious corruption. What does it make you feel about the

00:09:54.000 future of the grey zone and your ability to report independently, for example, on the ongoing

00:09:59.000 conflict between Ukraine and Russia?

00:10:02.000 Does it make you feel that you are being persecuted? Does it make you feel that it's

00:10:07.000 kind of a threat? Or do you think that in this new space, everything is sanitised, technocratic,

00:10:16.000 and yet a digital tyranny pervades invisibly like a binary gas where there's no baddie to locate,

00:10:25.000 but just an ideal that can be conveyed and a new type of oppression without clear villains?

00:10:30.000 You know?

00:10:32.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:10:33.000 I interviewed an author and satirist who's based in Germany, who's American, named C.J.

00:10:39.000 Hopkins, who you might know.

00:10:41.000 He did a book called The New Normal Reich, which is just a send-up of the Covidian regime that prevailed in Germany, across Europe, and across the West.

00:10:50.000 His book cover features a play on William Shire's The Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich.

00:10:56.000 It features a swastika embedded within a mask.

00:11:01.000 And for that book cover, Germany, the German court has found him guilty of glorifying a national socialist organization and sentenced him to 60 days in prison or $4,000 fine.

00:11:13.000 And the way, I mean, he's facing kind of a jackboot in the face, the hard censorship.

00:11:17.000 Germany doesn't really have freedom of speech, although it pretends to be a liberal democracy.

00:11:23.000 But what we're facing in the US, which has a First Amendment,

00:11:26.000 is kind of the national security state, which we never elected,

00:11:30.000 bunch of faceless individuals who are able to meddle in elections across the world,

00:11:35.000 including in our own, meddle in politics, is this kind of soft totalitarian model.

00:11:43.000 Sheldon Wolin, the late sociologist, called it inverted totalitarianism,

00:11:47.000 where liberal democracy is used as cover for a more authoritarian project.

00:11:52.000 And you can get quietly shadow banned from behind the scenes by some operative in an air-conditioned office and disappeared or suppressed or censored without having any recourse or due process because it's being done ostensibly through a private corporation, which just is saying, hey, we're just enforcing our terms of service.

00:12:14.000 And so that's an insidious, it's dangerous, it's deeply anti-democratic.

00:12:20.000 And the public, whether it's us or anyone else who's been censored financially, like our friends at Mint Press News or Consortium News, they never know who actually pulled the trigger and censored them.

00:12:33.000 So who's responsible for this?

00:12:35.000 Was it the US government?

00:12:37.000 Or could it have been the Ukrainian government?

00:12:39.000 Because we know For a fact, because of the Twitter file that my colleague Aaron Maté obtained, that the Ukrainian Security Services, known as SBU, called the FBI, sent them messages containing a list of Twitter accounts they wanted banned.

00:12:58.000 And the FBI went to Twitter and told them to ban these accounts.

00:13:03.000 And these accounts included Americans and Canadians.

00:13:07.000 Like Aaron Maté.

00:13:08.000 And it was solely on the basis of their political views that they were disrupting the official narrative that Ukraine was just fighting this glorious war for democracy.

00:13:16.000 And Twitter, this is in the pre-Elon regime, actually refused because it was too extreme for them to just ban Americans and Canadians on the basis of foreign government telling them to do so.

00:13:28.000 But who told GoFundMe to do that?

00:13:30.000 Who were these external concerns?

00:13:31.000 Was it the Ukrainian government?

00:13:33.000 Was it the British government which detained and interrogated our contributor, British citizen, Kit Clarenberg?

00:13:41.000 I know you've interviewed him about that.

00:13:43.000 Or was it the U.S.

00:13:44.000 government?

00:13:44.000 We will probably never know.

00:13:47.000 And so we're existing in this inverted totalitarian model behind the guise of liberal democracy, where most of the public still believes that they have due process and free speech.

00:14:00.000 They don't, as long as we're relying on these private companies managed by the national security state as our digital commons, as our kind of speaker's corner.

00:14:08.000 God, man, there's so many points I want to pick up on there.

00:14:11.000 There were sort of Orwellian images, of course, with the boot on the face of the man who used that image in a mask in a plainly satirical way.

00:14:18.000 the sort of when satire and comedy gets challenged to that degree. You know, bloody hell, Germany, 1.00

00:14:23.000 they should be encouraging. Robin Williams' famous line, why are Germans so unfunny? 1.00

00:14:30.000 And he said, because you killed all the funny people. But I'm also minded of Huxley,

00:14:36.000 like being the sort of sanitized version of tyranny, this inverted tyranny that you describe,

00:14:43.000 as well as the kind of Kafka-esque idea, which I'm sure, I guess, was more of a critique of

00:14:49.000 Stasi-style, Soviet-style, communist oppression, bureaucracies that were masked and oddly

00:14:58.000 diaphanous and impossible to locate. This now seems to have migrated to our countries, the

00:15:06.000 United States, the UK, as well as when you were talking about this inverted tyranny, I'm sort of

00:15:12.000 minded of a moment in my conversation with Sam Harris last week.

00:15:15.000 It was a point that the great philosopher and friend of the show, actually, Brad Evans first made, I believe, that we've been sort of trained to regard jihadist violence or certain type of violence as extreme.

00:15:28.000 And of course, you know, I'm not sort of obviously endorsing any type of violence, but he made the point that he imagined jihadists to be in ecstatic states and sort of That, for him, made the violence all the more nefarious.

00:15:41.000 but the kind of violence that's carried out, for example, under Obama,

00:15:45.000 who we made a really good item about earlier today, are these sort of sanitary, as you say,

00:15:50.000 air-conditioned rooms, where either your funds are shut down

00:15:53.000 or a wedding adjacent to a potential terror suspect is bombed, where progress, technology,

00:16:00.000 rationalism themselves are used to mobilize a type of tyranny that, to misquote Wilde,

00:16:06.000 dare not speak its name, tells us that it's liberal and democratic

00:16:10.000 all the while gently closing in on our freedom.

00:16:14.000 And in one more Orwellian tag, Max, what do you feel about the war, good, peace,

00:16:20.000 bad NATO members' concerns that any opposition to a proxy war

00:16:27.000 might drive Ukraine to pursue, oh no, peace talks with Putin?

00:16:32.000 Well, there are a number of obstacles to peace talks because it's obvious now that Tony Blink in the US.

00:16:44.000 Secretary of State, was recently in Kiev for a more extended period than usual to probably put the idea of negotiations on the table.

00:16:55.000 And this is because of the colossal failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which the U.S.

00:17:00.000 has been heavily involved in.

00:17:03.000 They failed to capture any real territory.

00:17:05.000 They were supposed to cut off the land bridge between Russia and Crimea.

00:17:09.000 It's not going to happen, and soon there's going to be rain in the eastern regions, the eastern plains of the Donbass region, and it's going to be impossible to get armor through there.

00:17:22.000 So it was a total failure.

00:17:24.000 Why can't they negotiate?

00:17:25.000 Number one, why should Russia negotiate at this point when the West has just completely cut off the possibility of negotiations and sabotaged negotiations at every turn leading to this proxy war?

00:17:38.000 Back in April 2022, the U.S.

00:17:41.000 cancelled negotiations between Zelensky and the Kremlin and said, keep fighting.

00:17:47.000 And they sabotaged the Minsk Accords before that, so why trust the West? 0.69

00:17:51.000 And why negotiate when you could actually start capturing more and more territory, given this terrible state of Ukraine's military, and the hundreds of thousands of casualties they've suffered?

00:18:03.000 They don't have much left, apparently.

00:18:05.000 So there's that factor.

00:18:06.000 Then there's the factor of Tony Blinken himself.

00:18:10.000 This guy has major skin in the game when it comes to continuing this war.

00:18:14.000 He founded a firm called West Exec Advisors, which finesses contracts for the arms industry and big tech through the Pentagon and the State Department.

00:18:25.000 Him and his former colleagues from the Obama administration got together and started this firm to basically profit off their connections With the major winners of the Ukraine proxy war, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Palantir, all the Beltway bandits as we call them here in Washington.

00:18:43.000 And so if Tony Blinken leaves government, he could make a lot of money off of this war as long as it's still continuing.

00:18:51.000 And that could be either through a kind of frozen conflict where Ukraine is transformed into what Zelensky has called a big Israel, and it's just constantly at war with Russia and its entire society is securitized and mobilized.

00:19:04.000 The tech industry will love that as well, because everyone's going to be under surveillance, you know, drones and cameras everywhere.

00:19:12.000 And so, you know, you have all these people who, why would they want to end this conflict?

00:19:17.000 They're the real winners of this war.

00:19:20.000 And then finally, you have the ideological investment, just the hatred of Russia that prevails, particularly among the Democratic Party foreign policy elite, but also within the Republican Party.

00:19:34.000 The idea that we just can't lose this war and that this is about democracy.

00:19:39.000 So there are all these obstacles to negotiations, but obviously the war isn't going.

00:19:44.000 There's no progress for Ukraine in this war.

00:19:47.000 They should have negotiated over a year ago, but they've been drunk off of these delusional fantasies spun out of Washington that they can somehow win when victory is never even defined.

00:19:57.000 Oh man, those are the kind of home truths that you do not want being funded under any circumstances.

00:20:05.000 do avoid going to spot.fund forward slash defend the gray zone again and donate in to

00:20:13.000 max blumenthal's incredible endeavors there at the gray zone we'll post the link in the description

00:20:18.000 now they've got to do it all over again precisely because the news they convey is a threat to

00:20:24.000 mainstream narratives and look what happens astonishing astonishing the price you pay for

00:20:29.000 telling the truth max that's exceptional Thank you so much for that.

00:20:34.000 We're always grateful to spend some time with you.

00:20:37.000 Thanks for your contributions.

00:20:38.000 I'm going to make a donation myself.

00:20:39.000 It's a GoFundMe, right?

00:20:41.000 Couple of hundred pounds.

00:20:42.000 Guy, just give it to someone.

00:20:44.000 Give it to someone you think I'd like.

00:20:46.000 I don't know what I want. 1.00

00:20:47.000 I'm an idiot. 1.00

00:20:48.000 You decide for me who I should support. 1.00

00:20:50.000 Well, none of it's going to me.

00:20:52.000 The $1 is going to me.

00:20:54.000 It's going to three of our bravest, most dedicated contributors.

00:20:58.000 Wyatt Reed right now, our managing editor, he is in the Donbass region.

00:21:04.000 He's in the conflict zone right now.

00:21:06.000 And he's been cut off from Venmo and PayPal for his reporting.

00:21:09.000 He's basically financially sanctioned.

00:21:12.000 It's going to kick Klarenberg, who you've interviewed before, and his bombshell expose on 9-11.

00:21:18.000 It is 9-11 today on how the CIA actually recruited two of the hijackers, completely factual report based on public court documents, recruited two of the hijackers and then refused to tell the FBI about their plot as it developed.

00:21:33.000 He was interrogated about that article.

00:21:36.000 By British counter-terror police when he arrived to his home country in London.

00:21:41.000 So, I mean, these are the people that deserve to be supported.

00:21:44.000 These are the journalists that deserve to be supported, and that's who our fundraiser is for, to provide them with long-term support.

00:21:50.000 Amazing.

00:21:50.000 That is a way to fund real news, real truth.

00:21:54.000 We'll post that link.

00:21:55.000 You guys there should support that.

00:21:57.000 Thanks once again, Max, for joining us.

00:21:58.000 It's fantastic to see you, as always.

00:21:59.000 Make sure your donation is not anonymous, because we'd love to have it up there.

00:22:05.000 All right, let's leave a donation under my name.

00:22:07.000 I'm looking around, like if someone's going to solve that for me, like The Dog or Gareth or someone.

00:22:11.000 I will.

00:22:12.000 We'll do it.

00:22:12.000 I'll leave a donation.

00:22:13.000 Someone nodded.

00:22:13.000 Young Putin, of course.

00:22:15.000 Of course he would nod.

00:22:16.000 Of course he would.

00:22:17.000 He's a sympathiser.

00:22:19.000 Thanks, Max.

00:22:20.000 Cheers for joining us, mate.

00:22:21.000 Appreciate the support.

00:22:31.000 Man, you're switching.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - September 12, 2023

GoFundMe Freezes Donations with Max Blumenthal

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