Stay Free - Russel Brand - Greg Gutfeld - on Tucker Carlson, War & Fox News

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00:00:31.000 Now enjoy this episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand.

00:00:34.000 Remember, there's an episode every single day to educate and elevate our consciousness together.

00:00:40.000 Stay free and enjoy the episode.

00:00:41.000 Greg, hey, thanks for joining us.

00:00:49.000 Yes.

00:00:50.000 My pleasure.

00:00:52.000 I'm very excited to be here.

00:00:53.000 I love you, Russell.

00:00:54.000 Even though we've had a checkered past, I've always loved you.

00:00:58.000 It's interesting, isn't it?

00:00:59.000 We are, in a sense, I would say, very much the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor of the world of punditry, shall we say.

00:01:08.000 I remember the first time I was aware of you, you were saying, I knew this guy when I lived in the UK.

00:01:15.000 I liked him then, and now he's become... 1.00

00:01:18.000 An asshole, I think. 1.00

00:01:20.000 Or an ass, at least. 1.00

00:01:21.000 And like, I was like, oh, what's going on? 0.99

00:01:24.000 But actually, do you think, what does this indicate?

00:01:26.000 Has the culture changed?

00:01:28.000 Because I suppose you would have once been, given that I first saw you on Fox News, associated with, you know, we all know what we associate Fox News with.

00:01:35.000 Is it libertarianism?

00:01:36.000 Is it populism?

00:01:36.000 Is it conservatism?

00:01:38.000 Is it sort of like right-wing Christianity?

00:01:40.000 There's sort of a whole That's a good question.

00:01:43.000 Fox News and then like, and I was a sort of exiled from Hollywood, brattish show-off,

00:01:50.000 you know, online.

00:01:52.000 So and yet somehow we found ourselves agreeing about a lot of issues.

00:01:57.000 What do you think's changed in the culture, Greg, for us to have found this alliance?

00:02:04.000 That's a good question.

00:02:05.000 I mean, I feel like I was always an oddball in any employment I was in.

00:02:12.000 I mean, I was the editor of Men's Health and I was smoking and drinking.

00:02:16.000 When I was at Maxim, I was engaging in mostly homoerotic humor to subvert the audience. 0.91

00:02:25.000 And at Fox, I wasn't like the other anchors.

00:02:28.000 And I was, I, I was always interested in you.

00:02:31.000 I always found you interesting.

00:02:33.000 And I knew there was something there that I identified with. 0.98

00:02:37.000 And I think that's why I was so frustrated when I don't even I can't even remember why I was shitting on you. 0.97

00:02:45.000 I can't remember why. 0.96

00:02:46.000 But this is the flaw of doing 24 hour cable news.

00:02:50.000 I probably saw a clip and I needed to fill a bucket.

00:02:54.000 And so I used that clip and then I go, this guy, who knows what you were talking about?

00:02:59.000 You probably don't even remember.

00:03:00.000 I don't remember.

00:03:01.000 But that's what we did.

00:03:03.000 And then you see it, you go, wow, why is this guy doing it? 0.94

00:03:06.000 And then you came back and then you, you said I had a face like an anus and which I, in some ways is realistic. 0.98

00:03:15.000 We, you know, there's an orifice. 0.96

00:03:17.000 That's everyone's face Greg.

00:03:18.000 That's not unique to you.

00:03:20.000 You don't look like an anus and I'd like to take this opportunity to unreservedly apologize to you for being rude and I think what the videos were it was when Bill O'Reilly was the most prominent Fox News voice and I used to I think do little videos commenting on Bill O'Reilly's content but Also, the same way that I've always done with, let's call them Fox-style pundits, over time and while watching them, developing a kind of affection, because I'm old enough to recall that when a family would contain people that were of the left and of the right, and that wouldn't be cause for actual hatred and condemnation. 0.94

00:04:01.000 You wouldn't refer to people who had different political views as a basket of deplorables.

00:04:06.000 You wouldn't say that half of the population shouldn't be allowed to vote or should be debugged.

00:04:11.000 You wouldn't escalate a kind of a populist demagogue to the sort of heights of a 20th century military dictator.

00:04:19.000 Everything has become more incendiary, more conflagratory, I would say.

00:04:26.000 So it's like then, even 10 years ago, when we were first communicating, albeit through aggressive hit pieces on one another, the world was Less filled with invective and something has become concentrated and amplified, Greg, hasn't it?

00:04:44.000 Yeah, you know what it is?

00:04:45.000 I mean you could trace it back to the phrase political correctness because that used to be a positive attribute in the sense that I'm morally superior to you and you have to reach this point but then I keep getting higher and then that turned into Well, the political became so personal, and you were supposed to keep it separate.

00:05:05.000 Like when you talk about family gatherings, you could have Bill O'Reilly as your uncle, and I could be your nephew, and it didn't really matter, and you would sit at the table, and your Uncle Bill would spout about immigrants, and you would be whatever, and then you would move on to sports.

00:05:22.000 But in this case, now everything is a moral judgment I can't sit at the same table with that person.

00:05:28.000 And then that escalated to, this person is evil and I have to cut that person out of my life.

00:05:36.000 And I think that's kind of what we're seeing now, especially in this hyper-woke thing.

00:05:42.000 It's like, we cannot have a discussion, period.

00:05:46.000 And in fact, the discussion lends itself to oppression.

00:05:50.000 Just merely questioning something is an attack.

00:05:55.000 But the response, I think there's a really positive thing going on.

00:06:00.000 The response of mockery and humor is taking that away because even Bill Maher noticed it.

00:06:06.000 They're no longer funny because of this moral hysteria.

00:06:12.000 And so all of their targets now, it's flipped.

00:06:16.000 It's now like the radicals are, I wouldn't say on the right, but libertarian, free thinking, Yeah.

00:06:26.000 Illiberal.

00:06:27.000 Maybe that's it.

00:06:28.000 Well, there's a few phrases that I think are useful around here.

00:06:28.000 I don't know.

00:06:31.000 I heard the brilliant comedian Duncan Trussell say once, people have gone from woo to cue.

00:06:38.000 Like people that were previously kind of into meditation and psychedelics have become very anti-establishment now.

00:06:47.000 There's this entirely new demographic.

00:06:49.000 And the other aspect of this is this I would say it's a media construct and potentially a movement with academia, certainly that would be the analysis of people who know more than me like Jordan Peterson or Weinstein or whatever.

00:07:12.000 It seems that At least when it comes to the political and media class of this sort of neo-liberal, let's call it woke again just for simplicity's sake, it doesn't seem that authentic.

00:07:26.000 What I question is how much they actually do care about the rights of people with different types of sexual identity or how much they actually do care about different races, cultural groups, It doesn't make sense because ultimately I think we all know that these kind of apparently neoliberal but self-regarding leftist thinkers and orators are ultimately undergirded by the same financial and corporate interests

00:07:54.000 It's still the military-industrial complex.

00:07:54.000 As everybody else.

00:07:56.000 It's still big pharma.

00:07:58.000 So whenever you see... That's why it becomes deeply hypocritical in times of war and health crisis.

00:08:02.000 Because ultimately they will advocate for the interests of the pharmaceutical companies when in a health crisis, notably and obviously the pandemic.

00:08:09.000 In a war, all of the peace and love language sort of melts away and is replaced by the kind of patriotic language that totally would have belonged to the Republicans of the, you know, in the Iraq war period.

00:08:22.000 your Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld language of like, you know, it's not patriotic to talk like that.

00:08:27.000 You're going to allow Putin, Putin will be marching on NATO countries. Like you say,

00:08:32.000 Greg, everything has flipped. And the part of the reason it's flipped is because there was no

00:08:35.000 moral, certain moral values there in the bloody first place.

00:08:39.000 Yeah, you know, it's interesting to see, like, Ukraine's the best example, I think of this,

00:08:48.000 is to see people that were so anti-war accuse you of not being a patriot.

00:08:54.000 it.

00:08:55.000 If you aren't supporting Ukraine and it's like it's not even our country.

00:09:00.000 I always look over there and see that it's a fight among relatives.

00:09:04.000 These are these are countries very and we're and we somehow I think the United States is almost like a next door neighbor or a relative that's egging it on and and for our own reasons for the for to like.

00:09:16.000 I can't remember who it was, the Secretary of State saying, like, the good news is we're getting billions of dollars into our country.

00:09:24.000 And he was talking about the upside of war is that we make profits off war.

00:09:30.000 No one really has ever said that out loud.

00:09:33.000 I don't even know if he even, Anthony, what's his, Blinken.

00:09:33.000 Yeah.

00:09:37.000 Blinken, yeah.

00:09:38.000 Yeah, I don't even know if he knew that he said it at the time, but he says, hey, we're doing great off this.

00:09:44.000 Why are you guys complaining?

00:09:46.000 Well, there's 500,000 people dead.

00:09:48.000 But I want to touch on something you said, and this is going to be a generalization, but I don't care.

00:09:54.000 I do think the reason why it's to me it's inauthentic is I do think and maybe this is like a Jordan Peterson-y thing, kind of, but there's an empty hole.

00:10:04.000 When you see a lot of The really strident voices.

00:10:08.000 There is something missing in their lives, and they fill that bucket up with this kind of purpose, which really isn't a purpose.

00:10:21.000 It's just where they place their emotional meaning for attention, so they get the attention For whatever screaming they're doing, and I think at the end of the day, they're not really happy people.

00:10:40.000 They haven't found peace in their lives, in their family life, and it might not even be their fault.

00:10:47.000 It could be our society has created a weird environment where some people can't find meaning anymore and are lost.

00:10:58.000 And so they put it in these, well, the false idols of politics.

00:11:01.000 I mean, politics becomes their religion, but the only problem with their religion is that there's no forgiveness.

00:11:08.000 So that's like the woke-ism.

00:11:11.000 Is a religion without forgiveness. 0.95

00:11:13.000 If you violate the original sin of oppression, your ancestors are guilty. 0.78

00:11:21.000 Whether it's Jews or it's whites in the United States, there's no forgiveness. 0.99

00:11:27.000 So you constantly have to take on the role of oppressor.

00:11:31.000 It is a religion without confession or without forgiveness. 0.98

00:11:36.000 But I think people treat it as a religion Until maybe, I hope that, like, there's so many young people that are into this kind of phase, and I can't help but think it's filling up something in their lives that isn't being filled by other things.

00:11:54.000 And I think it's relationships.

00:11:57.000 I think a lot of these people do not have relationships in their lives, people they can talk to.

00:12:03.000 Because, like, a friend would tell you, You know, Greg, you shouldn't be sticking, you shouldn't be gluing your hands to a painting, or you shouldn't, why are you blocking traffic of people who are trying to get to work?

00:12:14.000 Friends would actually say that to you, but it seems like that's missing in people's lives. 0.98

00:12:19.000 You need somebody to tell you you're being an idiot, even though they say, I admire the cause, but you know that in Gaza, they don't care if you're blocking traffic. 0.99

00:12:30.000 Yes it does and I have some thoughts on that as you might imagine Greg. 0.99

00:12:34.000 Just because I don't know anything about a subject that doesn't mean I won't have an opinion on it.

00:12:38.000 I think it's a kind of natural end point to obsessive individualism.

00:12:43.000 The kind of culturally immersive narcissism that of course by its nature we must all fall to a degree prey to and I would say that part of my own journey is my own wrestling with That kind of locked-in solipsism as if you're wearing an Oculus or some VR helmet where you're just obsessed continually with self.

00:13:06.000 If a culture stripped of God, stripped of community, stripped of patriotism, stripped of failure, of a family, offers you only as the only sort of the optimal experience is self-fulfillment, You fulfill your own sexual identity, your own gender identity, your own cultural or racial identity.

00:13:24.000 These are all beautiful and noble ideas.

00:13:25.000 People's sexuality is beautiful.

00:13:26.000 People's culture is beautiful.

00:13:28.000 I always take recourse to, like, you know, like to ethnographics and anthropology and think, well, how did we live for tens of thousands or possibly hundreds of thousands of years?

00:13:36.000 Small groups of a hundred or two hundred people that You know, would have interacted with other tribal groups, perhaps through trade, perhaps sometimes through warfare.

00:13:46.000 But there's nothing in our evolution that has prepared us to be confronted with a variety of cultures and being told that that culture is adverse to us.

00:13:54.000 This is something that was written about extensively, notably by Edward Said, who, like, in his book, what was that called?

00:14:00.000 Orientalism, sort of pointed out how the West was condemnatory of, like, Eastern culture, and the post-Ottoman empire, Islamic culture,

00:14:10.000 that we assumed that our cultural trajectory was better and he, as a sort of a Muslim living in the West, said,

00:14:15.000 "Well, there's different perspectives.

00:14:17.000 We're not allowing people to have a different perspective on reality." 0.82

00:14:20.000 We've reached the point now where people are happy to say there's no such thing as God.

00:14:24.000 The ration to sort of mangle CS...

00:14:30.000 Lewis, the rationalism that we use to posit that there can be no God is itself evolved from a godless set of meaningless processes.

00:14:43.000 A set of random processes led to a consciousness that is able to ascertain that there is no meaning and no purpose in the world.

00:14:51.000 And I think that when you live in a world where all that matters is the fulfilment of your own desires, the avoidance of your own fears, you end up with these odd cultural movements and artefacts which, as you say, take on the practices, aesthetics and appearance of a religion.

00:15:09.000 Zeal, evangelism, certainty, but without the important valves and checks that are embedded in religions to ensure that we don't regard one's individual identity as the summit and apex of all potential experience.

00:15:27.000 All of us are temporal expressions of something greater, and that can be used to mobilize people to fight for a nation.

00:15:36.000 That can be used to turn people into racists.

00:15:40.000 That can be used for a whole variety of things.

00:15:42.000 But what it could be better utilised for is our life should be dedicated to service and when inevitably, because of biology and because of cultural conditioning, we start thinking the only thing that matters is what Russell wants, this is a time to start employing some principles to get myself out of that illusion.

00:15:59.000 But no one will do that now because galvanised Evangelical, awakened people are a threat to the globalist establishment elites that are able to implement their goals and agenda because of this disparate and atomised population.

00:16:13.000 That's my theory, Greg Gutfield.

00:16:16.000 I agree.

00:16:17.000 I would say that I would, younger, when I was younger, I was guilty of this same thinking Two points.

00:16:26.000 One, when I was like 15 or 16, my identity was like a band.

00:16:34.000 I would sit and I would just write The Clash on everything that I owned.

00:16:39.000 I was a Clash fan.

00:16:45.000 I needed an identity because I didn't feel I had one.

00:16:48.000 And then I became a punk rocker.

00:16:50.000 I clinged on to things That as almost like as identity markers.

00:16:56.000 And you can kind of see that now because you can see it as a contagion, at least in the United States, where young women and like they were doing studies where they now identify as non-binary as though it's like doubling every year. 0.96

00:17:11.000 And it becomes like a costume because they are rejecting whatever was there before.

00:17:18.000 And I there's a this there's a theory from G.K.

00:17:23.000 It's called I think it's called the fence.

00:17:23.000 Chesterton.

00:17:26.000 It's like, don't tear down a fence until you know why it was there in the first place.

00:17:31.000 And I think what we're seeing with this kind of regressive progressivism is we're tearing down all these fences without ever understanding why they were necessary.

00:17:40.000 So it was easy as a 17 year old to make fun of religion.

00:17:45.000 To make fun of your relatives or any kind of traditional stuff was a joke.

00:17:51.000 What was I replacing it with?

00:17:53.000 I was too young.

00:17:55.000 I didn't have any wisdom, but I had the ability to denigrate things that were there before.

00:18:03.000 And of course, everything before was imperfect.

00:18:06.000 We know that the United States was a melting pot, but it also had racist elements to it.

00:18:11.000 Obviously, a legacy of slavery.

00:18:13.000 But the melting pot is way superior to this potpourri of identities.

00:18:21.000 The melting pot was about people who were different coming together and cooperating and communicating.

00:18:30.000 Now we have this thing where, no, you can't have a melting pot.

00:18:34.000 We have to be separate.

00:18:36.000 And the idea of cooperation and assimilation means that you're giving in to the oppressor, even being Like, even trusting somebody who's trying to help you is seen as oppression.

00:18:50.000 I mean, that is a new thing that I'm seeing.

00:18:54.000 Like, you know, you can't trust a white person because they're white. 0.78

00:18:58.000 And it's like, you do realize that, you know, white people, like anybody else, are here to help.

00:19:04.000 Generally, they're like, it's hard to find anybody.

00:19:08.000 I mean, most people just want to help.

00:19:11.000 But we're saying that that's not That's there's an underlying oppression going on.

00:19:16.000 That's and that's dividing us.

00:19:18.000 And then I think the melting pot idea is under threat.

00:19:22.000 And it kind of scares me because that's the only thing that really holds us together is the idea of communication, cooperation, the idea of helping others.

00:19:31.000 You know, and in what you're talking about, too, is kind of like The most dangerous thing is one's ego, feeding that ego.

00:19:41.000 And I mean, I was one of those people.

00:19:44.000 And the moment you let go of that, it's probably the most freeing thing anybody can do in their lives, is to let go of that ego and look outward.

00:19:55.000 And all of a sudden, these identity markers kind of float away.

00:19:59.000 And you suddenly see that everybody is basically in the same boat.

00:20:04.000 And that's a good thing.

00:20:06.000 And then the next step is service, being able to help people.

00:20:10.000 I sound very new agey, but it's kind of like, it's not new agey.

00:20:13.000 It's the, it's just kind of what we had before, but I don't know.

00:20:19.000 Yes, Greg.

00:20:21.000 I suppose that only a maniac would deny that there was not a vast project of colonialism and imperialism that exploited, killed, enslaved hundreds of thousands, millions, millions of people. 0.91

00:20:37.000 But similarly, only a lunatic or a fool would believe that the best way to navigate and placate the legacy of that would be through globalist conglomerates and global organisations and corporations.

00:20:56.000 So the utilization of these kind of ideas through massive corporations and global NGOs 0.74

00:21:06.000 suggests to me that the agenda is not about individual freedom,

00:21:10.000 but in fact, the opposite of it.

00:21:13.000 Now, Greg, to pivot slightly, one of the sort of great cultural moments

00:21:20.000 of the last few years, which I think has shown us how legacy media and independent media are rubbing

00:21:27.000 against one another and affecting one another has been Tucker Carlson's departure from the Fox network

00:21:35.000 and his establishment of his...

00:21:37.000 He's got his own news network or his own channel, certainly, and his own relationship with X and social media.

00:21:44.000 As a person that works within Fox, I saw and we talked about the bit, and that's when I called you in fact, Greg, when you said about, I have two words for you, Tucker Carlson.

00:21:55.000 Corporate interests will censor voices that are anti-war or anti-pharma or antithetical to their interests.

00:22:05.000 Tell me now what you think Tucker Carlson's time at Fox exemplifies and what his departure from Fox means without getting yourself in trouble because I realize you've got a job.

00:22:15.000 Yeah, what I was referring to and it's common knowledge and he's talked about it is that galvanizing advertisers against you over time is meant to destroy you.

00:22:31.000 It's meant to censor you and I think that there was This was building and building and it was, you know, Media Matters and other groups had targeted him.

00:22:41.000 And that's where I said, like, you know, I think when I was talking about two words, I was talking about that's what happened to Tucker over time.

00:22:48.000 You know, they just wore it down and for him to survive and everybody who is, I would say, interesting.

00:23:00.000 Has a an original point of view for them to survive.

00:23:06.000 It has to be untethered from advertising.

00:23:09.000 It has to be because advertisers are now the sensors and they're not they're not they're not brave.

00:23:18.000 I think this goes back to what we were talking about, this kind of the woke-ism.

00:23:22.000 They embraced the woke-ism kind of as a Trojan horse to protect themselves from their profit-making, their rent-seeking.

00:23:30.000 They can point to the fact that, look, we have DEI, we have equity hires, we're good, we have these special days in our company.

00:23:40.000 But meanwhile, they're doing exactly what a corporation does, which is the bottom line, to grow Their influence and their power.

00:23:48.000 And I think Tucker has said this, so it's not just my opinion.

00:23:55.000 It wasn't about Fox.

00:23:57.000 Fox never told him what he couldn't say.

00:24:01.000 But you could tell from the advertising and the pressure on him that that was, in my opinion, The leading pressure on his exit.

00:24:12.000 But I don't have proof that there was a meeting.

00:24:16.000 He, to this day, still doesn't know.

00:24:18.000 But I do think that Fox never told him he couldn't say anything.

00:24:22.000 No one's ever told me I can't say anything.

00:24:24.000 For example, when I said his name, people thought, oh my god, oh my god.

00:24:30.000 They were like, whatever, that's what you can do.

00:24:33.000 That's that's why we have you here.

00:24:35.000 And I think I made it clear that it was it was more about this pressure from advertisers.

00:24:39.000 And I knew this in magazines, you know, that that, you know, advertisers hate.

00:24:46.000 The customer, which is so strange.

00:24:49.000 They really hate the customer. 1.00

00:24:51.000 They think you're stupid. 1.00

00:24:53.000 They don't want to be near the editorial that the customer likes because somehow we're Neanderthals. 1.00

00:25:01.000 And that was true when I was at Maxim.

00:25:03.000 It was true when I was at Men's Health.

00:25:05.000 The stuff that sold the magazine Advertisers hated.

00:25:09.000 So you ended up with magazines like GQ or Esquire, which nobody read, but were this thick, filled with advertising, because that's what it was.

00:25:18.000 And I think you see that in broadcasting, that those with the most advertising tend to have the emptiest editorial.

00:25:27.000 There's no perspective.

00:25:28.000 There's nothing that, like, interests you.

00:25:31.000 And once you get interesting, or you dare to get outside this circle, then it flips on you, and then they come after you.

00:25:40.000 And I think that's why, so Russell, Tucker going and creating his own network, what you are doing on Rumble, what Dave Rubin is doing, what Joe Rogan is doing, what the Weinsteins are doing, that's like creating this whole new world where people can go and create their own thing.

00:25:59.000 Get their own subscriber base and make a living in a career without having to think about upsetting a soap company, you know, or a shoe company.

00:26:10.000 Meanwhile, the shoe company is having shoes made by, you know, 12 year olds, but they're lecturing you on diversity and equity.

00:26:20.000 But who's making their their shoes? 0.98

00:26:23.000 You know?

00:26:24.000 Or drug companies.

00:26:25.000 You know, the drug companies, you know, why are they advertising?

00:26:29.000 They're advertising to exert some kind of pressure.

00:26:32.000 Sometimes it's weird.

00:26:33.000 I don't know if you see these drug companies.

00:26:35.000 It's focusing on, like, one drug that, like, nobody has ever heard of or used, but they're still advertising.

00:26:42.000 Do you ever notice that?

00:26:44.000 Like, some of these drugs, you're like, are there really a lot of schizophrenics Like, you know, I mean, they'll do a drug for like a very specific kind.

00:26:52.000 I'm going, are they, is a schizophrenic watching this show and going, ah, I don't know if that's the case.

00:26:59.000 I just think it's there as a presence to say, hey, we're here.

00:27:06.000 We're here just a reminder, you know?

00:27:09.000 Yeah, it's extraordinary the way those models must function for there to be a constant ambient presence.

00:27:18.000 I understand the cable news is, and I'll check the figure at some point, is 70% funded by Pfizer, not even Big Pharma.

00:27:25.000 Pfizer specifically funds, I believe, 70% of cable news and we're all familiar with that package where it's sponsored by Yes, you're right.

00:27:38.000 Their pressure can't be the bespoke amplification of a certain product.

00:27:43.000 It's not telling a marketplace, hey, if your skin is schizophrenic, this is available for you.

00:27:48.000 It's no longer about utility.

00:27:52.000 It's become somehow more immersive than that.

00:27:53.000 We were just doing a piece on Google buying up real estate and creating company towns now, like a project that's You know, I've been tried before with Disney and, curiously, chocolate companies.

00:28:05.000 But the power of the corporation is becoming deeply immersive.

00:28:08.000 And Greg, within that, you touched upon something while talking about Tucker and talking about the relationship between advertisers and broadcasters, which is fundamentally the dynamic that is shifting with the emergence of independent media.

00:28:19.000 That I think is significant that both the marketing class and the professional journalist class, I might say, hate ordinary people.

00:28:28.000 They hate their audience.

00:28:30.000 And I feel this antipathy, and I spoke to Greenwald about it, that other great GG in the public space, Glenn Greenwald, and he said that You know, that the establishment now is no longer sort of masking its disdain for ordinary people.

00:28:45.000 That they sense that through media control, through censorship laws, through increasing authoritarianism justified by crisis, they don't need to be like a Rockefeller tossing dollar bills out of a passing limo to maintain some plutocrat mystique and affability with ordinary people.

00:29:04.000 Now they're just like we are going to have so much power you know after the next set of wars or the next pandemic or whatever the next thing's going to be that legitimizes more authoritarianism that there's no need for to maintain good public relations.

00:29:18.000 I think too that You know, as a person that's been like with what's happened to me recently and sort of over the past few years, as you sort of gently migrate out of like, oh, you know, like, you know, like there comes a point where I feel, oh, I ain't going on those talk shows no more.

00:29:33.000 I'm not going to be doing movies anymore.

00:29:37.000 And I gained in confidence and started to criticize war, started to criticize pharma,

00:29:43.000 started to attack more and more, recognizing I have direct access to an audience.

00:29:47.000 And one of the things I've noticed having been the subject to incredible attacks

00:29:51.000 and what seemed to me to be a coordinated media attack where separate media companies explicitly work together

00:29:57.000 over several years to generate anonymized complaints and allegations, and then there was a sort of

00:30:04.000 a global two week period where like it was very, very concentrated and it seemed to me at least

00:30:10.000 very deliberate to be able to observe, oh wow, there's a point where they will just attack you

00:30:17.000 and shut you down.

00:30:19.000 That there is an attempt to do that.

00:30:21.000 And one of the things I also have noticed is that the media is not the public.

00:30:26.000 That's one of the things they're terrified of is that they can create this sort of layer of hate

00:30:31.000 and bombast and attack, and then you go out and everyone's, "Hey, how's it going?"

00:30:36.000 Woo! - Yes.

00:30:37.000 Like people, like that's not, yeah, it's not, they don't have the control that they once had.

00:30:42.000 And I think that's what's terrifying them.

00:30:44.000 You could be in a news cycle for 48 hours and in your brain think, I can't go outside.

00:30:52.000 Yeah.

00:30:52.000 And then you go outside and maybe you might casually mention it to somebody and they have no idea what you're talking about.

00:30:59.000 Like, don't, I will say something on the five and it will explode.

00:31:03.000 And then I, and, uh, and then, you know, my people at work will be like, oh my God, you see what's, and then, but if you go anywhere, nobody knows what you're talking about.

00:31:11.000 Think about what happened to you, but think about, I hate to use the word weaponization because it's overused, but the weaponization of wokeism.

00:31:20.000 Has become journalism.

00:31:22.000 So it's like, so-and-so said this, so-and-so did this in the past, becomes investigative journalism.

00:31:29.000 Whereas before, like you had the Woodwards and the Bernsteins. 0.65

00:31:33.000 There are a few people now, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Michael Schellenberger.

00:31:39.000 These are guys that are actually doing real journalism, but they're being ignored by the conventional mainstream media, which has decided That the weaponized woke angle, so-and-so, said this about immigration, ergo racist, or any, pick any, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and that, and it's such an easy story to write.

00:32:03.000 It's like, you can, you can take a dartboard, or actually you can take a grid, and on one side you can go climate, economics, politics, fashion, Food, comedy, and then on this other grid you could have race, racism, homophobia, feminism, and then you could throw a dart.

00:32:23.000 And this is what journalists do, and they find a cross-section clothing, is transphobic.

00:32:30.000 And they had that story for that day.

00:32:32.000 And then they'll go, they'll do a little search, they'll find some stuff, and then they write it.

00:32:37.000 They don't have to call anybody.

00:32:38.000 They don't have to do any like, they don't have to be like a reporter and go out and actually talk to somebody with a notebook.

00:32:46.000 This is now what journalism has become.

00:32:48.000 And so what happens is, how does that end up being Dangerous.

00:32:52.000 They focus it not on just like people like you, but just regular people, the people they hate.

00:32:58.000 So if somebody on Twitter, some nobody, a plumber decides he's pro-Trump, Then somebody will pick up that tweet, go, does American Plumbing Supply realize that Joe Stevens actually said, make America great again, and they CC the company.

00:33:18.000 And then that guy gets swarmed, or this bakery had a, you know, a menorah.

00:33:24.000 I don't know.

00:33:24.000 They were like, they like focus on these things.

00:33:27.000 And then they, what they do is they amplify it.

00:33:30.000 And so, The regular people that they despise learns never to touch that stove again.

00:33:36.000 And that's the self-censorship.

00:33:39.000 And I'm just going to go back to my life.

00:33:41.000 Why did I go online?

00:33:42.000 Why did I say that?

00:33:44.000 I'm just going to shut up.

00:33:45.000 So the media has become an engine of censorship on behalf of whoever they're working for.

00:33:54.000 And also it becomes their work too.

00:33:58.000 They feel like when they get a scalp, it's actually enriching to them.

00:34:02.000 There are like the daily beast.

00:34:07.000 Like these are companies where they, that's all they do all day is they watch TV

00:34:12.000 or they watch podcasts and then they clip And they put it out there and the act is of that is

00:34:18.000 And media analysis is a form of journalism, but at least you should do the work.

00:34:18.000 journalism.

00:34:25.000 It's not just clipping, but it's weaponized wokeism to shut people up.

00:34:33.000 And it's disguised, however, as journalism when it's not.

00:34:38.000 I heard the phrase vendetta journalism recently applied to I think it might have been the case between the the royal family and the tabloids of 10 years ago or so in my country here and it's also clear that You know, you sort of talked about Bernstein and Woodward, that there's very little journalism where, for example, you can watch the reporting in the pandemic, the propaganda that accompanied the advent and release of the vaccines, the censorship around legitimate questions, the shaming of people

00:35:14.000 From whatever community.

00:35:16.000 Because there are no values at the core of it, you have to watch them adjust as they go.

00:35:20.000 Oh, people aren't taking vaccines.

00:35:22.000 Those people are not participating.

00:35:24.000 Those people don't care about society.

00:35:26.000 Then the information comes out.

00:35:27.000 It's a high incidence of African Americans that won't take it. 1.00

00:35:31.000 Okay. 1.00

00:35:31.000 Oh, shit. 1.00

00:35:32.000 Oh, no. 1.00

00:35:33.000 How are we going to pivot?

00:35:34.000 This doesn't make sense.

00:35:35.000 You know, like, you know, various conflicts around the world that don't align entirely

00:35:40.000 with this sort of odd, sort of ultra-anti-nature.

00:35:44.000 This sort of, I guess what part of it is, part of this kind of curious death cult that's

00:35:50.000 a, that's built, which is not a new thing.

00:35:52.000 Apocalyptic, you know, in a, you know, what is an apocalyptic, like apocalyptic preaching?

00:35:57.000 The end is nigh.

00:35:58.000 The world is coming to an end.

00:35:59.000 The end is nigh.

00:36:00.000 That is a sort of a pretty common trope, certainly in the last couple of thousand years.

00:36:05.000 Indeed, one could argue that even within, you know, Christianity has the apocalypse, the rapture, or many religions appear to have this sort of end time as part of their, you know, part of the paradigm.

00:36:17.000 But when there is, like, all of those things tend to point A journey of self-evaluation, a recognition that the pursuit of animalism and animal desires cannot of itself form your way of life.

00:36:34.000 And I would say that that is precisely at the core of modern neoliberalism.

00:36:39.000 The fulfillment of your desires, the avoidance of your fears and the potential to be threatened is your raison d'etre.

00:36:46.000 That is what it is.

00:36:47.000 You are worth it if you want to Be this type of person, you should be that type of person.

00:36:51.000 And these are things that I can easily agree to with a wave of a hand.

00:36:55.000 Of course, I agree with individual liberty, whether it's the issues that define the right or the issues that define the left, because I agree with individual liberty.

00:37:04.000 But I don't think that that is the apex of the human experience, because I've tried it.

00:37:08.000 That's why, because I've tried it.

00:37:10.000 I've tried.

00:37:11.000 Drink as much as you can, take as many drugs as you can, sleep with as many people who want to sleep with you as possible.

00:37:16.000 I've tried these things.

00:37:18.000 And indeed, when part of the message becomes, these things won't work for you, find a higher purpose, knowing that you will never be able to live it perfectly because you are still subject to the same kind of shackles that any human being is, that's when you start to become a threat.

00:37:36.000 Yeah, and not to get too... Well, I've noticed when people go through that journey and come out of it, they're much less judgmental politically, and they're more resistant to getting involved in this prison of two ideas, whether it's about climate or Any kind of issue where you think there are two sides, and you have to get into one pocket or this one, and that's it.

00:38:15.000 It's kind of a superpower.

00:38:17.000 I noticed this with Tucker.

00:38:20.000 I noticed it with you.

00:38:23.000 And there are other people, it's kind of like the floating above this or to the outside of it and can see what this actually is, which is a diversion from actually solving the bigger problem.

00:38:41.000 And I mean, I was in that prison of two ideas.

00:38:44.000 A good example would be, you're talking about the apocalyptic ideologies.

00:38:52.000 Climate change, because of the apocalyptic warnings, created the prison of two ideas.

00:39:01.000 I was on the other side, that this was all bogus and a hoax.

00:39:05.000 But that's not necessarily the best place to be, because you should care about the environment.

00:39:11.000 You should worry about these things.

00:39:12.000 There is evidence that there are changes going on.

00:39:17.000 But I got into my prison because the other prison was so apocalyptic.

00:39:22.000 I couldn't buy into these people telling me that I can no longer use this or that because we're all going to die in 12 years, in 15 years.

00:39:31.000 So those apocalyptic visions create, or predictions, create this kind of opposite side.

00:39:41.000 It's like the death of progress.

00:39:44.000 That's why I kind of like RFK has said some things that sounded apocalyptic, but I think he's changed.

00:39:52.000 I think that when I listen to him, he's a true environmentalist without being reliant on climate, on like Inaccurate climate models.

00:40:02.000 He just talks about the stuff that he knows, that he's been through, you know, he's been, you know, from the beginning in environment, he's somebody I can listen to.

00:40:11.000 And he listens to me.

00:40:12.000 I'm like, he listens to people like me.

00:40:15.000 He doesn't brand me.

00:40:16.000 Like there were people that used to say that if you were skeptic, if you were a climate skeptic, remember that you would use that phrase, a climate skeptic.

00:40:23.000 You should be imprisoned.

00:40:26.000 Or a climate denier, which would put you in the same realm as a Holocaust denier.

00:40:31.000 Those were the phrases they used, and that would just create a complete negative reaction.

00:40:37.000 But I think now we're getting to a place where I mean, there's a healthy meeting of the minds, where on the right, people are talking about the environment seriously, and on the left, there are people, hopefully, saying, you're right.

00:40:54.000 These climate models have been wrong, but there's still something going on here.

00:40:59.000 But I think that that's that, you know, that has always been the problem.

00:41:02.000 But the superpower is stepping out of that.

00:41:05.000 And I think that's what you were getting at.

00:41:06.000 It's like you somehow got out of that and you can look down at it or look, I don't want to say down at it, but look at it from a side and see how wasteful this prison is, this prison of two ideas is.

00:41:23.000 Yes, and there's a lot of things I'd love to respond to.

00:41:26.000 One is like where you said that there was sort of an attempt to criminalise climate denying and there was an attempt to criminalise not taking the vaccine.

00:41:37.000 There are ongoing attempts to criminalise Uh, speech, you know, through the ideas of hate speech.

00:41:42.000 In some territories, these are extremely amorphous and oddly util laws.

00:41:47.000 Like in Ireland, if they suspect you have hate speech material on your phone, the police will be able to come into your house and take your devices.

00:41:55.000 That's authoritarianism.

00:41:57.000 Now, whether it's, you know, vaccines, in the event that vaccines were stopping transmission and were effective, of course, the strong advocacy for those medications would be legitimate.

00:42:09.000 But what one starts to see is the reason behind the reason they're giving you.

00:42:15.000 They might be giving you, we have to do something to protect the planet.

00:42:18.000 And as you say, that is not a partisanal issue, whether or not we love the earth that we live on.

00:42:25.000 If you are the most MAGA cap wearing, let's shoot some deer and some ducks and some, like,

00:42:32.000 let's go crazy hunting, you love the planet.

00:42:35.000 Or if you are a vegan Birkenstock wearing individual, you'd still love the planet.

00:42:41.000 The idea of this being politicized and partisan is extraordinary.

00:42:45.000 And what's happening, because I think of the quick response time and rapid reaction of

00:42:52.000 independent media.

00:42:53.000 In real time, you're starting to see people say, hold on a minute, this Ukrainian war, it doesn't make sense because in 2014 there was a coup and NATO did renege on certainly verbal deals between the Soviet Union and US or in climate change.

00:43:07.000 How come all of these laws are penalising ordinary people And seem designed to create 15-minute cities and restrictions on people's movement?

00:43:16.000 How come these vaccines seem to be tied to ID cards and being able to normalise the idea that unvaccinated should be shamed, they shouldn't be allowed into hospitals, they shouldn't be in prison, they shouldn't get treatment?

00:43:27.000 They're starting to normalise the criminalisation of sections of the population.

00:43:33.000 You marry that to the idea That the MAGA movement, which at the last election was pretty near 50% one side or the other of the entire electorate, was like a criminalized class or a demonized class.

00:43:46.000 You're starting to use the kind of language that we all like, you know, which was reprehensible in my view around like, you know, all these people are all terrorists when talking about like entire nations of people.

00:43:58.000 You're seeing it applied to domestic classes.

00:44:00.000 Now, that's not a coincidence, because we now know that agencies that were dedicated to legitimising the pursuit of certain foreign interests that didn't go well, for example, in Iraq, are now turned in on domestic populations.

00:44:15.000 That's not just in your country, but in mine.

00:44:17.000 There are units, like Counter-Terror became Counter-Covid.

00:44:21.000 This is stuff we've done content on.

00:44:23.000 It's observable.

00:44:24.000 So if you can criminalise an entire population, of course you have to, you have to increase authoritarianism.

00:44:31.000 And that's the goal.

00:44:32.000 So I guess one of my questions, as well as whatever responses you want to have, is what kind of tyranny and dictatorship do you most fear?

00:44:39.000 The populism of Trump, which, you know, legacy media are spending a lot of time, we called it Dictator Month, like it was Shark Week.

00:44:46.000 Every CNN or MSNBC show is Trump's good like Mussolini, Trump's like Mao.

00:44:50.000 Or is it a kind of more Technical, technological dictatorship.

00:44:54.000 A kind of technocratic cadre of an aristocratic class that are telling you this is the reason we have to control you.

00:45:02.000 This is the reason you have to take these medications.

00:45:04.000 This is the reason you have to stay in your house.

00:45:06.000 What form of dictatorship is most likely?

00:45:08.000 I know you've got a lot to respond to there, Greg.

00:45:11.000 That's a lot.

00:45:11.000 Obviously, for me, it would be the latter, because when you see the media going after Trump, there's not a shred of evidence, because they have four years to look back on.

00:45:24.000 He was, in my opinion, the most transparent politician.

00:45:29.000 You knew everything about him.

00:45:32.000 He never had an unspoken thought.

00:45:35.000 Everything that was going through his head, he would say something and then the media would pick it apart.

00:45:41.000 They would also distort it.

00:45:45.000 But, you know, it's like I had Greenwald on my show in which I apologized to him for what you were getting at, which was he was warning That the kind of focusing on the entire groups of people being terrorists was going to one day be turned on Americans themselves.

00:46:06.000 And I remember laughing at that.

00:46:08.000 And I was obviously wrong.

00:46:10.000 And I had to go like, Jesus Christ, this just came true in my lifetime.

00:46:14.000 I'm watching it.

00:46:15.000 The criminalization of people for supporting a politician, for not getting a vaccine.

00:46:22.000 People like rooting for the death of people, or when they die, they say, ha, ha, ha, he didn't get the Vax, you know?

00:46:31.000 However, if anybody had done that about a different behavior that caused their death, oh, you'd be, like, if you happened to be a criminal who died, that, and you said, well, you know, you lived a life, you would be attacked, but, but if you didn't get the Vax, you know, and also the, you talked about speech.

00:46:51.000 I've noticed the description of hate speech got so big and then it kind of changed into misinformation.

00:47:01.000 Now it's misinformation and I love how they say misinformation and disinformation and then they like to go on what the difference is and it's just like basically what they're saying is if you disagree with us, That's misinformation.

00:47:15.000 If your counterpoint is disinformation, so that's actually now the same as hate speech.

00:47:22.000 You can be criminalized.

00:47:24.000 You should be banned or blocked from social media.

00:47:28.000 This is why I like what Tucker, what Elon did with X, With the community notes is exactly what you're talking about.

00:47:36.000 When the independent media comes back and says, wait, hold on a second.

00:47:40.000 Now we have that almost in real time.

00:47:42.000 You'll have somebody like Biden come on and say something that's completely false or whoever's posting for him.

00:47:47.000 And then within minutes, Community Notes comes up and just says, nope, you're wrong.

00:47:52.000 And it took that, it took the power away from their misinformation.

00:47:57.000 I'm fine with their misinformation.

00:47:59.000 I'm fine with their disinformation.

00:48:00.000 I don't want to ban it, but Don't call us out on the same thing when we call you out.

00:48:06.000 And to your point, everything is now political.

00:48:10.000 Your health is political.

00:48:13.000 They politicized the environment.

00:48:17.000 These are all things that we should agree with.

00:48:20.000 They politicized crime.

00:48:22.000 It should be, if you're a victim of crime, that should be basically the primary focus.

00:48:28.000 But when you talk about a victim of crime, and it could be a woman, it could be an Asian woman. 0.95

00:48:33.000 They go, well, yeah, but you look at the criminal, look at society.

00:48:36.000 We have to deal with this.

00:48:37.000 The prisons are oppressive.

00:48:40.000 The guy, you know, well, the guy was out on bail when he pushed the woman in front of the subway.

00:48:40.000 Bail.

00:48:44.000 And they go, well, that suddenly that becomes a political thing.

00:48:48.000 And now when you have crime going up in specific cities, that suddenly becomes a political issue.

00:48:55.000 And you have to defy your own common sense.

00:48:58.000 You have politicians that know it's unsafe in D.C.

00:49:01.000 But they can't talk about it because now it's a political issue.

00:49:05.000 To have a kind of set of clear and reliable values, and it seems so obvious that it's ridiculous that it has to be stated, you should be able to cross out the word Trump or Biden and just say, this thing happened.

00:49:20.000 Primaries were cancelled in Florida.

00:49:24.000 Is that good or bad?

00:49:25.000 And that's actually bad because it's not democratic.

00:49:29.000 won't participate in debates, or created tax cuts for the richest sector of society

00:49:36.000 while in office.

00:49:37.000 You should be able to say it without, you know, didn't deal with the pharmaceutical industry,

00:49:42.000 like continued with a bit of legislation.

00:49:44.000 It shouldn't matter because what's happened is, is we've allowed our perspective to be magnetized.

00:49:51.000 Polarity, I've heard, is a requirement for energy.

00:49:55.000 Without polarity, you cannot have energy.

00:49:58.000 And it's as if we've been sort of trapped in an odd field that makes it impossible for us to progress.

00:50:06.000 The word I keep returning to and the idea I keep returning to, Greg, It's decentralization because it's the only way, and the people I've spoken to on the right, it seems, are more amenable to this than elsewhere.

00:50:18.000 It's the only way to defuse this is if you say, look, why don't we put aside what your feelings are on, gosh, guns, abortion, the environment, immigration, whatever it is, gender identity, religious identity.

00:50:31.000 And just say, would you stand on a platform, an anti-establishment platform, that's ultimately about bringing control as close to your community and your individual life as possible?

00:50:43.000 That should be perhaps, that is perhaps one way of diffusing this.

00:50:48.000 There are some areas where a degree of centralised authority is useful.

00:50:53.000 National defence, law and order, the building of roads, hospitals, there are all sorts of areas, but There have been experiments where people have democratised, for example, the distribution of budgets, and it seems to me that what's being resisted here is, like you said when talking about the new economics that have emerged in media, what's being resisted is, hold on, look at what happened in Napster, look at what happened with the Arab Spring,

00:51:20.000 Look how we're having Brexit, Trump, Syriza, Podemos, left, right, the Occupy movement.

00:51:25.000 The technology means now that people can form consensus, people can form communities and bypass the old centralised elites, whether it's media or state or corporate.

00:51:36.000 technology exists that facilitates localism, that facilitates communities that are like,

00:51:43.000 "Oh, you might be Amish, you might be LGBTQ+, you might want to live in a racially determined 1.00

00:51:49.000 community of any hue." 0.85

00:51:51.000 And I suppose that's possible if that's your vision for your community.

00:51:56.000 What it seems to me that's impossible is marshalling communities of 100 million or 300 million

00:52:01.000 or 60 million around one idea that requires the demonization of the other 50% of the population.

00:52:08.000 How can you ever have freedom with that dynamic?

00:52:11.000 Yeah.

00:52:12.000 You know, while you were talking, I was just thinking about this.

00:52:16.000 Right now, what you're seeing is the decentralization of, I would say, of media, obviously.

00:52:25.000 And through the internet and social media, you're seeing people, it's like the democratization of voices, literally.

00:52:34.000 People have their own voice.

00:52:36.000 And so what you're talking about is probably this terrified reaction You can't have that.

00:52:41.000 You cannot have that.

00:52:43.000 And so that's when you marshal the forces of demonization using wokeism as kind of an engine or the weapon to go after these individual voices because they're outside the 100 million that they're trying to keep together.

00:53:01.000 And so what happens is they also create these little wars between identity blocks.

00:53:05.000 Maybe that will keep the democratization of voices from spreading.

00:53:13.000 One point, though, that you talked about polarity, that's the way Things like had morphed in cable news where, you know, you had Fox News and MSNBC.

00:53:24.000 MSNBC wasn't always left wing.

00:53:26.000 I mean, Tucker was on it.

00:53:30.000 And then you had CNN.

00:53:33.000 CNN kind of like Deflated because it didn't know where it was, and then it just went far left.

00:53:40.000 But what was interesting, who's the most successful cable host probably in modern history was Tucker, the most anti-polarity person.

00:53:49.000 What was interesting about his show, and you, I don't know if you were, I think you were on it, but he led the charge of breaking out of that polarity.

00:54:01.000 Like he would take, Like, he would take positions that other anchors at Fox wouldn't, or he would find himself on the other side of a lot of things, or just on no side, and just asking the questions.

00:54:14.000 He was proof that you could be anti-polarity.

00:54:18.000 And the audience would crave it.

00:54:21.000 And all of a sudden it was like, oh, I love Tucker.

00:54:23.000 And it's like, but you, and a right winger would say that.

00:54:26.000 And then a left winger would say that.

00:54:28.000 It was, it was proof that it worked for a time anyway, until the advertisers started to scare themselves.

00:54:36.000 Like they would, they would like if one advertiser dropped, then another one would drop.

00:54:40.000 They all got terrified and they ran.

00:54:43.000 But he, he proved that You could get energy.

00:54:49.000 He broke out of it.

00:54:50.000 Like you said, you get energy in this and you make money off this.

00:54:53.000 But he somehow decided, or he knew, or he always was that way, got out of it and showed that it could work, which was pretty amazing.

00:55:04.000 What is clear in Cable News in particular, and a lot of these ideas I first saw articulated well in the book The Revolt of the Public by Martin Goury, which it seems most people are kind of aware of now, was that Cable News, of course, they no longer had to... I even remember when I first worked in Hollywood, that there were famous movie stars that were Republican, and they would just keep quiet about that shit. 0.99

00:55:29.000 Like you know and they'll be sort of all cool and it'll be okay like and then sort of something happened where late night tv say they just went we're not even gonna cater to the idea that people might be watching this that anything other than what we know the entertainment industry is which is the kind of democrat Where it's sort of a vocal concern for social justice as long as it doesn't have any kind of impact. 0.93

00:55:53.000 I mean, it's clear to me that what globalism is predicated upon is, in particular through

00:56:00.000 organizations like the WEF, is like, how do we talk the talk without ever having to pay

00:56:07.000 the tax, without ever having to make the compromise?

00:56:11.000 How do we have it that you have an environmental conference to stop climate change where everyone 0.94

00:56:17.000 arrives in private jets and no one gives a shit about that or sees that as any kind of 0.92

00:56:23.000 problem? 0.98

00:56:24.000 How we never address the idea that it's the top 1% that creates over 60% of carbon emissions

00:56:28.000 and if carbon emissions are the problem, then we're the problem and you wouldn't showcase

00:56:34.000 solutions that are about impeding individual freedom of ordinary people across the world.

00:56:39.000 You would showcase solutions that are about changing institutional energy crises and various crises in the very top tiers of society.

00:56:49.000 It's just a coup.

00:56:50.000 And because of independent media, I think, Greg, and because of this new sort of this breakout voices that can appeal to people across the spectrum, It's become clear that you don't need to just limit yourself to what would once, you know, it would have been Noam Chomsky saying, you know, where both sides agree you have no choice at all.

00:57:08.000 It would have been Naomi Klein of the left saying, oh crises are induced so to legitimize authority.

00:57:14.000 All that discourse now, that's, you know, that's on the right now.

00:57:17.000 It's so odd to me as opposed to just see that, you know, the left won't touch any of that.

00:57:23.000 They'll just vote along with more war, more regulation, more authority, more establishment.

00:57:29.000 It's weird.

00:57:30.000 It has been a complete flip, you know, and I was just thinking about the no impact on themselves in terms of embracing social justice.

00:57:44.000 Seeing politicians say they're going to ban gas stoves and then they send out pictures of themselves cooking their holiday meal on a gas stove.

00:57:53.000 And they don't even see it because the assumption is they're somehow immune to the very thing that they're telling people.

00:58:01.000 You have to do this.

00:58:02.000 I don't have to do it.

00:58:03.000 Obviously, everybody's talked enough about Gavin Newsom going to the French Laundry.

00:58:08.000 But that's I mean, it's because it's true.

00:58:10.000 People were locked down.

00:58:12.000 You know, my sister couldn't see her husband in the hospital while that was going on.

00:58:17.000 And, you know, it's like they somehow they promote these social justice issues in a way to keep themselves immune from One day being under the thumb of that, they want the activists at bay so they can do it.

00:58:36.000 One thing I noticed, and this may be politically incorrect, but even in Hollywood movies, so I've watched a couple of movies this weekend, And to justify the action and violence in movies, they now have female characters who can beat up men, like women half the size, just taking out dudes, and they go like, that's just not possible. 0.82

00:59:03.000 But I understand why it's there.

00:59:05.000 It's like we We have to do this.

00:59:09.000 And it's like, well, now we can do these, you know, incredibly, the same, the same hyper violent movies.

00:59:16.000 But at least we have diversity.

00:59:18.000 We have a woman who weighs 110 pounds, tossing a 210 pound guy against the wall doing all this stuff. 1.00

00:59:26.000 And it's like, I don't buy it.

00:59:28.000 I don't buy it.

00:59:30.000 Just watch any real fight, but that's what they have to do.

00:59:35.000 Celebrities, like you were saying, in Hollywood, will reach out to me, tell me that they love my show, but will never do it.

00:59:43.000 They are surrounded by the worst type of people.

00:59:47.000 Publicists and PR folks in Hollywood are there to protect themselves from being original.

00:59:55.000 Just keep your head down, I don't care if you have an opinion, but look what happened to this person. 1.00

01:00:01.000 If you go on Gutfeld's show, you're fucked. 0.99

01:00:05.000 And it's like, I have people that will be scheduled to do my show and then cancel. 1.00

01:00:09.000 And by the way, I get it.

01:00:11.000 I mean, in general, you don't need to be doing me a favor.

01:00:16.000 I really don't care.

01:00:17.000 I just said, it might be fun to talk to you.

01:00:19.000 But then there are some that are brave.

01:00:21.000 And then the moment they come on my show, The phrases from Hollywood would be, oh, he used to be funny.

01:00:27.000 Oh, he's, you know, he's has been he's now like he's now moving towards the shortest line, which is right wing comedian.

01:00:36.000 Or, you know, they like they they will they will strip you of your of your successful career if you do my show.

01:00:45.000 That's the punishment.

01:00:47.000 It's implied.

01:00:48.000 And it's all done by journalists.

01:00:50.000 It's all done by, you know, entertainment media will make sure you get punished if you, if you veer off the, you know, the Kimmel Colbert plantation, you know, or whatever you want to call it.

01:01:02.000 It's interesting because in the end, I wonder when the economics will be impacted, that when people will go, hold on, there's an audience, there's a market.

01:01:12.000 Now, what I suppose previously existed was the presumed lack of choice and the control.

01:01:19.000 This is what you're going to watch because this is all you can watch.

01:01:23.000 Now you can watch Joe Rogan having like, you know, say for example in the pandemic period he's got Robert Malone, there's Peter McCulloch, there's a Jay Bhattacharya, there's all these legitimate voices from academia and science that are not toeing the line on a subject like the pandemic and suddenly what they sense is, oh no, we've lost control of that space.

01:01:43.000 They can continue to control what you might call sort of the institutional media complex, but it's kind of losing its relevance.

01:01:53.000 That's the trajectory at least, and unless there are sort of the successful ability to cancel, the successful implementation of censorship laws, then you can see which way it's going. 0.86

01:02:04.000 Like things like whether it's Antony Oliver or Sound of Freedom, these are sort of death knell cultural moments of like, oh shit, people can bypass it. It can be bypassed. You can have,

01:02:15.000 like you said, the trajectory and tendency would of course be towards like, you know, if you take

01:02:19.000 something that's less controversial like sport, you know, if you're a fan of the West Ham United or the 49ers

01:02:26.000 or whatever, you can like watch just that content.

01:02:30.000 You can watch that content.

01:02:31.000 There's a channel for you.

01:02:32.000 You can watch things that no one else would dream of watching.

01:02:35.000 Niche content available.

01:02:37.000 This ability to sort of become really who you are and to potentially systemize it is a massive threat to homogenous blobs of corporately funded, donor class, financially allied, military industrial complex sponsored political organizations.

01:02:56.000 If people start to Not only in recreational activities, but in their cultural identity.

01:03:04.000 Be able to form communities that are untethered from these kind of complexes.

01:03:09.000 It's the end.

01:03:10.000 It's the end of it.

01:03:11.000 And you can only maintain that, I think, through massive fear and massive control.

01:03:15.000 And I think what happened in the pandemic period is it was Like, as the great George Carlin always says, no conspiracy is required where interests converge.

01:03:25.000 We saw, oh look, media interests, state interests, big pharma interests converge.

01:03:32.000 In particular, when it comes to controlling a population, when it comes to crushing opposition, these interests all come together.

01:03:40.000 Yeah, and you know, what you're describing is true diversity.

01:03:45.000 So if there's true diversity of thought, you will have communities.

01:03:50.000 So you have to create, if you're in power, an artificial diversity to group people by identity and ascribe that idea.

01:04:02.000 They have to have a specific ideology to keep themselves together.

01:04:08.000 So they don't.

01:04:10.000 Venture into the true diversity of thought.

01:04:12.000 So to keep you from being into these these this kind of like florid, truly like thoughtful, amazing world, you have to you have to create a parallel But COVID especially saw the contamination, saw people of different races and different religions, all of a sudden you have a black NBA athlete and a white farmer on the same side. 0.53

01:04:46.000 That can't be.

01:04:47.000 You can't have that.

01:04:48.000 That's not supposed to work, you know?

01:04:52.000 And also, just watching how Fauci was so befuddled.

01:04:57.000 He was like a great symbol of this kind of morass, this blob, that like, where is this animosity coming from?

01:05:07.000 Why are people upset with me?

01:05:11.000 I'm shocked at this.

01:05:12.000 And it's like, well, you're missing out on everything, right?

01:05:16.000 You are missing out.

01:05:17.000 Those people have every right to be pissed off at you.

01:05:20.000 But he just did.

01:05:21.000 He was so removed from everything and that he found comfort in mainstream media.

01:05:28.000 He would go there and the anchors would go, Oh, you're having a rough time, you know, Dr. Fauci, all these people just don't understand the great work you're doing.

01:05:38.000 And he's like, the threats I'm getting, it's like, everybody gets threats.

01:05:43.000 Everybody gets threats.

01:05:45.000 You haven't lived until somebody said they're going to kill you.

01:05:48.000 That's just the way it is.

01:05:49.000 But for him like to go, to be there and just go like, oh my God, you know, my life is so hard.

01:05:53.000 And he goes, well, you have to understand that they don't trust you.

01:05:57.000 And they have a right not to trust you.

01:05:59.000 And they have a right to be angry.

01:06:01.000 There are people that couldn't see their dying relatives because of what you proposed.

01:06:09.000 I mean, there were people who had to hold their hands of dying relatives in the last hour because they weren't allowed to see them.

01:06:09.000 And I know them.

01:06:17.000 This was something.

01:06:18.000 And meanwhile, you expect me to believe that, like, that would have been Enforced upon somebody like a Gavin Newsom or or any congressman.

01:06:28.000 No, it was just the rest of us.

01:06:31.000 Yeah, there's a like you touched on that earlier that all of this is predicated on the like much of this authoritarianism is predicated on the principle of exemption.

01:06:39.000 Like this isn't this is for you with that's why we can censor speech because we know what ideas you should be exposed to and what ideas you should what's wrong with People are hearing some information that isn't true and going well I don't know man maybe I believe that maybe I don't.

01:06:57.000 Is it that they're trying to protect us from that information or is it that they're trying to prevent us having that information precisely because it is bloody true and is likely to generate a type of Insurgency.

01:07:08.000 You will enjoy a bit of content we did about Fauci.

01:07:10.000 He did an interview with the BBC over here in this country. 0.70

01:07:14.000 And the interview, Greg, it was beyond the puff piece and somewhere towards fellatio. 0.58

01:07:20.000 They had the guy for over an hour.

01:07:21.000 They didn't once say, is it true that the Wuhan Institute of Virology received funding from the NIH and from DARPA?

01:07:29.000 Is it true that you suppressed the lab leak theory even though you yourself suspected that it might be true and were certainly at least discussing it?

01:07:37.000 Is it true that you understood that there had been no clinical trials of the vaccine for transmission?

01:07:43.000 Is there a distinction between the various batches?

01:07:46.000 Is it true that lockdown was based on computer modelling, not empirical studies of epidemiology and how viruses behave?

01:07:53.000 Is it true that you shut down the Balfour Declaration even knowing that where it was discussed that lockdowns would not be effective and you shouldn't vaccinate during a pandemic?

01:08:02.000 None of these questions, just like, do you power walk now?

01:08:05.000 Do you work out?

01:08:06.000 Oh my god, you're great!

01:08:07.000 It was incredible to watch it take place and people are starting to sense it.

01:08:11.000 I want to add to something you said a little earlier that the other thing the pandemic revealed was a kind of unity that crossed the lines that are supposed to be in place and therefore you have to mischaracterize, for example, anti-vaxxers.

01:08:25.000 Anti-vaxxers has to become a synonym for MAGA Trump and then you have to deal with the anomaly that whole, hang on a minute, There's an unusual amount of vaccine hesitancy among African-American people.

01:08:38.000 Maybe because they've got a reason for not trusting the state?

01:08:42.000 Let's have a little look at history.

01:08:45.000 Ah yeah, this is starting to make sense now.

01:08:48.000 We did a piece like earlier on sort of a kind of FBI malfeasance and misuse of surveillance powers and in it was revealed that they had infiltrated and spied upon BLM and January 6th protesters.

01:09:02.000 So it doesn't matter, you might think you're all over that spectrum, but as far as the

01:09:06.000 deep state and the globalists, the true power is concerned, you just, some people that are

01:09:12.000 making some noise, this noise is convenient right now, we'll allow it.

01:09:15.000 This noise is convenient, we'll amplify it.

01:09:17.000 This noise is, you know, they're just using faders.

01:09:20.000 They don't care about individual freedom, they care about dominion and centralizing

01:09:24.000 authority and legitimizing that process so you can bypass national sovereignty, let alone

01:09:29.000 individual freedom.

01:09:30.000 So you've got centralized authority at a global level.

01:09:33.000 Forget like your individual community, they're taking it in the opposite direction than it's

01:09:38.000 trying to travel in, i.e. the trajectory of technology is trying to take you towards true

01:09:43.000 diversity, true community, real freedom.

01:09:45.000 Oh, you're a whole Muslim community, oh, you're a gay community, you're like, that is what 1.00

01:09:49.000 could happen. 0.98

01:09:50.000 Oh, you like to own guns, oh, you've banned guns, oh, you, abortion at this time, abortion 0.99

01:09:55.000 at, like, you know, this is, this could happen politically if people are willing to let go

01:09:59.000 of judging other people and willing to bind and oppose true power.

01:10:04.000 Yeah, I don't know if you've been following out here, there was a mayor of Boston who,

01:10:10.000 [BLANK_AUDIO]

01:10:11.000 She had to defend her non-white Christmas party.

01:10:19.000 She only had to defend it because she got caught.

01:10:23.000 They sent the email out to white people by accident, so she got in trouble.

01:10:28.000 It was a perfect encapsulation of how far we have come from The melting pot, you know, certain groups need to have their own Christmas party.

01:10:40.000 And that's how we're going to be.

01:10:43.000 The COVID lab leak, we have to remember, this is another example of how they weaponize wokeism, that if you brought up This is the in Greenwald brought mentioned this a long time ago.

01:10:54.000 If you brought up that it was lab leak, that would then be tied to bigotry, because it was the Chinese virus or whatever you would be accused.

01:11:06.000 of being racist. However, then they would blame it on the wet market, which is culturally

01:11:11.000 something that China is known for. And somehow that wasn't racist. So you could say no, no,

01:11:17.000 like in the beginning, oh no, it's the wet market. It's the wet market. That's not racist.

01:11:21.000 But if you say it's the lab, that's racist. It didn't make no sense.

01:11:25.000 No, even further because there is no true principle behind it, just an agenda.

01:11:31.000 Yeah.

01:11:31.000 Greg, ah man, thanks for coming on here.

01:11:33.000 I guess you got up kind of early to do this.

01:11:38.000 Not really.

01:11:38.000 I mean, it's, what time is it?

01:11:40.000 It's 11, 11.18 out here.

01:11:42.000 I did get up, did a little exercise and I'm going to go back and exercise after this.

01:11:47.000 What kind of exercise?

01:11:48.000 What are you going to do?

01:11:48.000 Some Fauci power walking?

01:11:50.000 Exactly.

01:11:51.000 I'm going to go to the indoor mall and just walk around with some little ankle weights.

01:11:56.000 I do Peloton because it's easy.

01:12:00.000 I hope you watch The Instructor and not your own shows when you're doing that, Greg.

01:12:08.000 Actually, you know what I do?

01:12:09.000 I do listen to podcasts when I'm sitting there, because that passes the time.

01:12:15.000 Well, I hope that you occasionally listen to ours in the same way that we always listen and observe your content.

01:12:23.000 Greg, thanks for coming on here.

01:12:24.000 Thanks for starting the new year so fantastically with us.

01:12:28.000 Thank you very much for your support and being open-hearted to me.

01:12:31.000 I really appreciate it.

01:12:33.000 Well, I'm always here for you whenever you want, whenever you're in town.

01:12:36.000 Come and do the show.

01:12:37.000 You're always welcome.

01:12:38.000 Oh, thank you, Greg.

01:12:39.000 That's beautiful.

01:12:40.000 Thanks, man.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - January 12, 2024

Greg Gutfeld - on Tucker Carlson, War & Fox News

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