Russell Brand is joined by Branko Marticic to discuss Prince Harry's new role in the royal family, BlackRock's takeover of Ukraine, Joe Biden's new job as US Speaker of the House of Commons, and the deep state involvement in the Ukraine crisis. Stay Free With Russell Brand is on all of the social medias, if you search for Stay Free, you'll find us. Stay Free with Russell Brand wherever you get your news, and wherever you listen to your favourite podcast. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, and we'll read out your comments and thoughts in the coming weeks. Thank you so much for your support, stay free, and spread the word about this podcast! - Your continued support is so appreciated, we'll make more episodes like this one in the future. - Sincerely, Saul R. Richer and Saul Rooker - Stay Free! And if you like the show, please tell us what you thought of it and what you think of it in the comments section below. We'll be looking out for new episodes in 2020. Thanks again for all your support and your continued support. Love ya'll, bruce - EJ & Saul - Rachit, xx - SAVAGE - A.K. & R.J. & J.P. ( ) (A.M. . (P.B. ) (CRYTS) (NSYCH ( ) (ABOUT THIS EPISODE ) (COMING SOON SOCIAL MEDIA) & P. (AUTHORIAL) (PRODUCER) (RADIO) (PODCAST) (COMEDY) (CHECK OUT THE PODCAST AND OTHER LINKS) (THE PRODUCING THE FUTURE OF THE DECADE (AUGMENTATION) (SALYSES) (INTRODUCED) (COURSES (COULD WE SEE THE FOREVER?) (FAST AND OTHER THINGS WE'LL BE AVAILABLE IN THE FASTEST AND FASTER THAN THAT'S TALKING ABOUT THIS WILL BE DOUBLES AND OTHER PLACE THAN THIS?) (A VOCABULARY) (VOCAL)
00:02:20.000I'm the host of Stay Free with Russell Brand, live on Rumble.
00:02:23.000We're also live on YouTube, but we won't be live on YouTube for long because some of the content coming up would literally get us banned from YouTube.
00:02:33.000We simply can't talk about it on this platform, not because it's in any way spreading hate or misanthropy or anything other than love and a deep faith that within you is all the power you need to change the world.
00:02:44.000Thankfully, that power is not fossil fuel.
00:02:46.000Otherwise, they would think of a reason to go to war with you and nick that fossil fuel.
00:02:51.000Gareth Royce, the producer of the show, we make it together with a dedicated team of radicals with a variety of beliefs.
00:02:57.000It's inconvenient, actually, how much variety there is in the beliefs.
00:03:01.000Now, in 2023, the stories you'll be interested about, and the story we're going to give you a different take on, are McCarthy.
00:03:06.000He's the Speaker of the House now, after lots of little mini-mini elections, after Donald Trump's name appearing on a phone, after someone happened to be sort of mouth gag handled like that.
00:03:14.000I didn't like them having to do that to that poor little fella.
00:03:17.000Dragging it backwards like that from a melee.
00:03:19.000We'll be talking a little bit about that.
00:03:21.000We're going to be talking about Prince Harry.
00:03:22.000You probably care a little bit about that, don't you?
00:03:24.000Is it an indication that there's some deep state involvement in the interest of powerful institutions and the way that media relays information?
00:03:33.000Let us know what you think in the chat.
00:03:34.000This we're going to be taking a deeper look at today.
00:03:36.000BlackRock are going to be buying up much of Ukraine.
00:03:39.000It's astonishing to learn that there's going to be an investment firm of that degree of notoriety and potency involved in the reconstruction Of Ukraine.
00:03:47.000It's extraordinary to me how unilateral the data is that's available on mainstream media about this conflict when there's evidently a good deal of complexity.
00:03:56.000But that's one of the things we're going to be asking you about.
00:04:02.000We're going to tell you a little bit about that.
00:04:03.000It's not what you think it's going to be.
00:04:05.000We're going to be looking at different flavours of New Year propaganda, whether it's Joe Biden's propaganda, Rishi Sunak's propaganda or Russian propaganda, which is sort of amazing.
00:04:26.000We're going to be looking at the Canadian truckers and the redefinition of the word violence and the way that language is being mobilised, utilised, metastasised and altered in order To fit the intentions and incentives of the powerful.
00:04:39.000And of course, we've got a guest on the show.
00:04:41.000It's Branko Marticic, who we're going to be talking about.
00:04:47.000We're going to learn a little bit more about that by simply by asking people who know more about it than we do, of which there is an abundance.
00:04:55.000But first, I want to assure you that the system is fine.
00:04:58.000Don't collapse into existential despair.
00:05:04.000And the reassurance can be offered on the basis of, like, did you see that now the powerful are so keen to do well on TikTok that all of their propaganda is being managed and manipulated into sort of, like, nice little 30-second pieces?
00:05:20.000Now, I was of an understanding that if the deep state wanted to control a social media platform, they simply infiltrate it with their agents, like Elon Musk has revealed has been happening at Twitter.
00:06:54.000Ridiculous that they've even bothered to do that.
00:06:58.000Similarly, Biden still doesn't seem to understand how fentanyl is affecting America.
00:07:04.000Now, I think fentanyl originated from America.
00:07:06.000Certainly the Sackler family were heavily involved in the opioid crisis.
00:07:10.000Bedevilled and destroyed the lives of millions of Americans.
00:07:14.000Now, Joe Biden seems to think the main reason that there's fentanyl in America is because it's coming from Mexico, even though he somewhat underestimates the potency of a lethal drug.
00:07:26.000Stay with us if you're watching this on YouTube.
00:07:27.000We're just going to be with you a few more minutes, and then on the other side of the line, only on Rumble, we're going to be going into some depth about this propaganda.
00:07:34.000Let's have a look at Joe chatting about fentanyl.
00:07:36.000For example, since August of last year, Customs and Border Patrol has seized more than 20,000 pounds of deadly fentanyl.
00:07:46.000That's enough to kill as many as 1,000 people in this country.
00:08:30.000Then you could just lob the fentanyl over the top of that wall.
00:08:34.000It's not like he's saying the word deadly as if it's become deadly since it was in Mexico.
00:08:38.000It's not like they've put chilies in it.
00:08:41.000Right, when we said, what have you done to this fentanyl?
00:08:43.000And when we sent it over the wall, it was delicious.
00:08:45.000It was definitely when it was part of OxyContin, which Purdue Pharma were producing, which they gave money, and then they gave money to the US government in lobbying.
00:08:52.000The problem with fentanyl is not Mexico.
00:08:54.000And before you think that there is no racism or certainly no negative classification of Mexican folk still ongoing, Look at this.
00:09:04.000Migration issues cast long shadow over Biden's visit to Free Amigos Summit.
00:09:08.000They're literally calling it the Free Amigos Summit.
00:09:11.000Don't call something Free Amigos Summit if Justin Trudeau's involved.
00:09:51.000They're buzzing their little tips off.
00:09:54.000So don't call it something like The Three Amigos because you know that Trudeau will be looking to get a costume on and be trying to recreate this little move.
00:10:07.000At least when Chevy Chase did it, he didn't apply any facial makeup, is what I would say.
00:10:12.000But these stories... I was going to say, it's kind of rife with hypocrisy, this whole thing, isn't it?
00:10:17.000Because you've got Biden there talking about, you know, deadly fentanyl, when we've just spoken about the kind of relationship between the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma and the deals that they've done in order to not be, you know, I think they've paid out six Billion or something when they've made 30 billion out of the oxycontin thing in the first place.
00:10:34.000Did they do that thing where they went, we ain't got a company no more.
00:10:41.000They were always pulling that little move, weren't they?
00:10:43.000They said, well, we weren't Purdue Pharma.
00:10:44.000That was a company, yeah, alright, it was something to do with us, but the other sackler was running that.
00:10:48.000All those bastards at Purdue Pharma, like Johnson & Johnson.
00:10:51.000Whenever Johnson & Johnson allegedly, allegedly get Allegedly.
00:10:55.000For carcinogens in baby powder, which they've never been done for because they've always settled out of court.
00:11:01.000They always go, that's not us, Johnson & Johnson, that was Johnson, preferred Johnson, like a middle titty, a middle titty of bad baby milk and wretched baby powder.
00:11:12.000And then the other kind of hypocrisy within this is that, you know, he's talking about this happening at the border wall, that, you know, this deadly fentanyl is coming in at this border wall, that when he was being elected, he spoke so much about the wall, then I won't build not another foot of the border wall.
00:11:28.000And yet actually news is that he has restarted building elements or parts of the border wall.
00:11:33.000So it's just these inaccuracies and hypocrisies within lots of the things that we're hearing coming from Biden in this case.
00:11:39.000So if you're watching this in YouTube, we're going to have to leave now because we are going to show some content from Russia today, which is, I think, absolutely banned on YouTube.
00:11:48.000And even on this platform, Rumble isn't allowed in some countries.
00:11:51.000I think there's ongoing action between Rumble and the country of France.
00:11:54.000We're not showing it in any way because we're in support of Russia.
00:11:57.000We think this is crazy propaganda the same way as US propaganda is crazy, UK propaganda.
00:12:02.000All propaganda has the same end, to distract you from reality, to bludgeon you into a hypnotized state so you're more compliant.
00:12:09.000We're not supporting Russian propaganda, but we're going to show you it so we can laugh at it together.
00:12:14.000Now, if you're watching this on YouTube, go on over right now to Rumble so you can enjoy us ridiculing a little bit of Russian state propaganda, which I think is a bit better and more enjoyable in some ways than US propaganda, but still propaganda.
00:12:26.000We'll never show that on this platform.
00:12:27.000If you're part of the six million awakening wonders over there, join us on Rumble right now.
00:12:31.000So let's have a look at this propaganda on Russia.
00:12:35.000Russian television propaganda has got a different Flavour.
00:12:38.000You can certainly see recognisable archetypes and figures.
00:12:42.000Flavour was about 40 years ago, isn't it?
00:12:59.000Today's toast will be somewhat unusual.
00:13:02.000In the outgoing year, the West tried to destroy Russia, without even thinking that in the construction of the world, Russia is not a subject.
00:13:14.000Also their rhetoric is a bit more, I would like to say, sort of blunt and brutal, like that Russia is the load-bearing structure and they talk about resources.
00:13:24.000There's a sort of pragmatism and a plainness to their propaganda that I actually find a bit unnerving.
00:13:34.000I suppose maybe because I've grown up on UK propaganda and US propaganda that I recognise it as sort of saccharine and dumb and stupid and turds rolled in glitter, whereas this stuff's like a turd rolled in spikes, so it has a sort of, I don't know, sort of balls to it that I find a little threatening.
00:13:57.000I mean, Mitch McConnell was talking about Ukraine the other day.
00:14:01.000And he literally said, the most basic reasons for continuing to help Ukraine degrade and defeat the Russian invaders are cold, hard, practical American interests.
00:14:09.000Like being so overt about the fact that Well, this is the reason we're in it is for American interest.
00:14:15.000It's so bold and it's something that I know it seems a little different when you see it from Russia, but it's not a million miles off.
00:15:06.000If we got unbiased news reporting in the mainstream media, if we had news that was not fundamentally a television show, then we would be aware of the complexity that's led to this conflict and we would be able to note the Corollary between this conflict and previous conflicts, many of us remember, obviously most of us remember, recall or have learned about the Iraq war and how ultimately it ended up servicing a lot of corporate and economic interests.
00:15:33.000So it's startling to learn But BlackRock, the world's biggest investment company, are going to be heavily involved in the reconstruction projects in Ukraine that inevitably will follow this war when the military-industrial complex of Adler go.
00:15:49.000Again, none of this is to say that Putin isn't a tyrant or Russia's invasion of Ukraine is not an incredible imposition that's causing a galling humanitarian disaster.
00:16:51.000And when you look at what's happening currently with firms like Raytheon and Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems, there's an enormous amount of profit being gleaned from this conflict.
00:17:02.000Remember Assange's edict The point of the Afghanistan war is not to end the conflict, but to prolong it because it's profitable.
00:17:10.000Remember, that can still be true while saying that Putin is a malign figure and that Ukrainian people are suffering needlessly.
00:17:18.000All you have to look at is history and recognize that there is a pattern.
00:17:24.000I mean, is there any comparisons that could be made between the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia and the West's invasion of Iraq, which is now widely accepted to have been undertaken with malign intentions?
00:17:37.000So, with that in mind, we bring you the top five ways that this is definitely nothing like the Iraq war.
00:17:43.000At number five, of course, one difference is the Iraq war was undertaken because he had to depose an evil leader in Saddam Hussein.
00:17:51.000I don't remember if at the time they were always saying, oh, Saddam Hussein's got bad health.
00:17:55.000He coughed the other day and a bit of his bum fell out.
00:18:26.000He was widely regarded as being a puppet, was ridiculed and mocked for his sort of R. Shucks mannerism and cowboyish dance.
00:18:34.000And now, of course, we have Joe Biden, who, I mean, if he is a puppet, who's operating the strings for heaven's sake?
00:18:39.000Have you seen that man try to teeter off a stage?
00:18:42.000Number two, here's another way that it's different.
00:18:45.000The Iraq war cost you, if you're an American, two trillion dollars, although I'm sure most Western nations contributed in some way, and this current conflict has cost a hundred billion plus over in Ukraine.
00:19:20.000Of course in the Iraq war, Halliburton, who Dick Cheney was heavily involved with, became the benefactors.
00:19:25.000And now we know that BlackRock, unless they're doing this philanthropically, like Pfizer said, they would undertake the development of a vaccine in the pandemic, you know, in exactly that manner.
00:19:35.000It looks like BlackRock will at some point financially benefit from the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
00:19:41.000Also, it kind of tells you that they're pretty confident in the outcome.
00:19:45.000Like, you know, because my understanding is BlackRock are not in a position to make giddy, hysterical, Risky investments.
00:19:51.000So presumably this war will continue for long enough for the military industrial complex to make a suitable profit to continue to take these, although McCarthy's election means that military budgets, Pentagon budgets, have been cut by 75 billion dollars.
00:20:05.000Let me know if you think that's a good thing.
00:20:09.000Let me know, let me know, let me know.
00:20:10.000So that's just five ways that you can see clear correlatives between those two conflicts without suggesting that, again, the suffering of Ukrainian people is anything other than terrible.
00:20:21.000There's also an inherent link between BlackRock and the US government.
00:20:27.000It says here, BlackRock's Managing Director Eric Van Nordstrom was hired straight into the senior advisory position in the Biden Administration's Treasury Department just this past August, explicitly to shape U.S.
00:20:38.000economic policy on Russia and Ukraine.
00:20:41.000And of course, one of the worries about this is that BlackRock is essentially going to privatize the Ukraine.
00:20:46.000That's now what's going to happen, much in the same way that BlackRock have done with the housing market in the U.S., like buying up huge swathes of the housing market and essentially Forcing a lot of Americans into never being able to buy their homes.
00:20:59.000So this is like a trend that's already happening in the U.S.
00:21:04.000government saying that's something that we've seen and we don't want repeated, it's now joining with BlackRock in pushing this agenda in the Ukraine.
00:21:13.000And much like when you were talking about the colliery between Iraq, Hillary Clinton said at the time, in 2011, just at the end of the war, she said it's time for the U.S.
00:21:22.000start thinking of Iraq as a business opportunity.
00:21:26.000JP Morgan was selected by the US government to run a key import-export bank in Iraq.
00:21:31.000In 2013, it plans to expand its operations in the country.
00:21:34.000ExxonMobil signed a deal to redevelop Iraqi oil fields.
00:21:38.000Coincidentally, JP Morgan collectively paid the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation at
00:21:44.000ExxonMobil donated over $1 million to the family's foundation.
00:21:48.000So these links are everywhere between these corporations who stand to benefit from being, you know, taken into these countries, whether it's Ukraine or Iraq.
00:22:00.000So elsewhere in the world, democracy continues to feel unstable.
00:22:06.000This I mentioned in connection to the hundreds of who've been arrested after Bolsonaro supporters stormed Brazil's Congress in what's being regarded as Brazil's January the 6th, even though they'd done it on January the 8th, two days later.
00:22:21.000Supporters of former president invade federal government headquarters in the capital, Brasilia.
00:22:26.000Which is one of them cities that they just made up to be a capital.
00:22:28.000I don't like it when you go to a country and the capital city is not the main city.
00:22:35.000It should be, like, one of their main cities, I think.
00:22:39.000Police are accused of colluding with the rioters.
00:22:41.000Hey, this is really similar to the January 6th reporting.
00:22:45.000The riot, an apparent attempt to overthrow President Luis Infecio Lula da Silva, just one week after he was inaugurated, caused significant damage to the headquarters of three branches of federal government.
00:22:55.000Let's have a little look at that storming.
00:23:39.000Yeah, he's going to be in his cell because I think he's serving a lumpy sentence for that skullduggery that day, thinking, man, you've nicked my whole look, my image, my stance.
00:23:50.000The whole thing seems to be, you know, when people sometimes suggest, talk about the idea of controlled opposition, that sometimes, well, we know that they are.
00:23:59.000We know that the FBI, for example, funds groups that they can then sort of arrest and go, oh, you're a terrorist.
00:24:06.000Actually, it's a sort of a long history.
00:24:08.000I'm not suggesting that's what's happening certainly on the capital or in Brazil, but I mean they are using sort of an identifiable template there and Glenn Greenwald, friend of the show, fellow Rumble commentator, has posted this picture of Bolsonaro not doing a very good job of eating KFC.
00:24:30.000Remember that Jair Bolsonaro himself left Brazil on the last day of his presidency for the US where he's living in the house of an ex-MMA fighter in Orlando.
00:24:53.000Okay, so listen, we've taken a deeper dive into matters of democracy and the veils that present themselves as democracy only to be revealed as the agenda of globalist interest in our look at the Canadian trucker protests and, in particular, the redefinition of the term Violence to mean violence against economies.
00:25:16.000Like, once language is messed with in these kind of ways, you can find yourself in peculiar situations.
00:25:20.000Let me know in the chat and the comments what you think about the sort of manipulation of language and words and how that's being used by power to alter reality itself.
00:25:28.000We're having a look at that with regard to the Canadian trucker protest.
00:25:42.000Justin Trudeau has said that the Canadian truckers are tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorists and the word violent now has been expanded to include violence against money.
00:26:48.000During a recent interview with CTV News, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau doubled down on his remarks regarding the trucker protest of 2022, referring to some of the activists as tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists who engage in disinformation and misinformation.
00:27:02.000You did a bit of disinformation, but then worse than that, you did some misinformation and you did that while wearing a tinfoil hat.
00:27:08.000Well, at least I wasn't wearing blackface.
00:27:10.000When someone believes that your government is trying to inject a vaccine into you to control your mind and track you, and there's a microchip in it, that's almost the definition of a government conspiracy theory.
00:27:19.000I would say when governments are closing down bank accounts of people that are donating to a protest, that is a conspiracy theory.
00:27:26.000When a government is evoking emergency powers to shut down a legitimate protest, that is tyranny.
00:27:32.000When a government is accusing its own population of being misogynist and racist simply to shut down dissent, that is tyranny.
00:27:39.000Now I don't think there are many people that are saying that the vaccine is put in microchips, and one of the things that the mainstream does is elevates fringe ideas to dismiss legitimate dissent.
00:27:49.000And if there is dissent, if there is opposition to their corporate globalist goals, they simply Amplify certain voices within it.
00:27:56.000If you get a protest of 100,000 people, like if you get a sporting event with 60-80,000 people at it, you're going to get people that get drunk, people that shout crazy stuff.
00:28:04.000As long as you can continually condemn and criticise individuals within an ordinary population, you don't have to address the real issues.
00:28:11.000And this is what I would say the real issues are.
00:28:13.000National governments have been co-opted by globalist interests.
00:28:16.000We have increasing surveillance, a march towards centralising currencies, a march towards preventing individual freedom, controlling your ability to have meaningful democratic traction in your community.
00:28:28.000These are real problems that go beyond left-right type arguments.
00:28:31.000Remember, here on this channel, what we believe the problem is, is that we're being turned against one another by centralising, globalising interests, and Justin Trudeau, I believe, used the mask of wokeness to distract you from the fact that he's operating on behalf of globalist interests.
00:28:48.000However, this statement by the Prime Minister differs from his remarks during the onset of the protest when he referred to the demonstration in its entirety as a fringe minority.
00:28:56.000So first of all, you say it's a small number of people, but if it's only a small number of people, how can you invoke emergency actions?
00:29:04.000It can't be a small fringe and a necessity to invoke emergency actions.
00:29:07.000So you have to say, God, there's only a small number of them, but by God, are they racist.
00:29:11.000I think in all my communications, in the frustration that Canadians were feeling, not just around that, but around the pandemic in general, there was a sense that Canadians really stepped up for each other.
00:29:24.000People went out and got vaccinated to a higher degree than just about any other country.
00:29:28.000Also, you might argue that Canadians coming together to protest mandates is an example of Canadians sticking together.
00:29:35.000Unless what you're saying democracy is, is everyone believing the same thing and the impossibility of a public discourse and conversation.
00:29:42.000Unless that's what democracy means now, is that everyone has to believe one thing.
00:29:46.000And to argue with that is undemocratic.
00:29:49.000The fact that there were some people out there who were actively spreading Harmful disinformation and misinformation.
00:29:59.000It's very interesting to conflate the idea of spreading the information with spreading the infection.
00:30:05.000It's a very curious linguistic trick that's being practiced there, that you're spreading disease, that there's something malign and malevolent about it.
00:30:13.000The fact is, if you're going to have a nation state where you're going to say there's a centralised government authority that represents 50 million people or 100 million or 200 million people, then you're going to have to have diversity of opinion.
00:30:25.000If diversity is a good thing, and I believe that it is actually, then that means different communities are going to have different beliefs.
00:30:30.000Some people are going to be traditional, some people are going to be progressive, some people are going to be religious, some people are going to be materialistic.
00:30:35.000We can't have one uniform expression of what it is to be Canadian.
00:30:39.000And if you shut that down altogether, then you don't have democracy anymore.
00:30:44.000So you have to, of course, smear and malign any dissenting voices to say that these particular voices have no right.
00:30:50.000Because if indeed people are deeply racist or deeply misogynistic, then those voices shouldn't be amplified.
00:30:56.000I don't believe in racism or misogyny, but I also don't think that those truckers were misogynistic or racist.
00:31:01.000I think what they were protesting was the thing that they were saying that they were protesting.
00:31:45.000It's already implicit in the tone, timbre and content of what he's saying, what he believes the relationship between the government and people to be.
00:31:51.000We've been so patient with people that are hesitant.
00:32:54.000You can't call it just science when it is corporatized and commercialized to the degree that it has been.
00:33:01.000Until you have a model where pharmaceutical companies are meaningfully regulated by an independent body and where their profits are at least not so outrageous, You can't pretend that that's science and not a subset of a commercial hierarchy.
00:33:44.000Do you mean ordinary people's economy?
00:33:45.000Or do you mean the economy of certain centralised global corporate interests?
00:33:50.000Now, in trying to justify the government's behaviour, senior Canadian officials appear to be trying to redefine the meaning of physical violence to make sure their actions fit within that definition.
00:33:59.000The most controversial ones undertaken to stifle the protest, such as deploying riot police and freezing participants' bank accounts, were done by evoking the Emergencies Act, in itself a move controversial enough to warrant a Commission inquiry.
00:34:11.000The Public Order Emergency Commission has issued a summary of a panel interview of four senior officials from the Prime Minister's office, while the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and several others were interviewed by the Commission separately.
00:34:23.000The summary shows that the panel identified areas that they hoped the Commission could comment on.
00:34:27.000One of them being threats to the economic security of Canada, which carry with them a threat of tangible physical harm and violence.
00:34:34.000One of the PMO officials, the Prime Minister's Senior Advisor on Strategist and Policy Issues, Jeremy Broadhurst, is cited as saying that economic disruptions can cause real direct and personal harms in people's lives.
00:34:47.000This is saying, well, in a way it's violence, because if this were to happen and then that were to happen, That's not what we mean when we say violence.
00:34:54.000There was a really violent protest, was there?
00:34:59.000That's not what people mean by violence.
00:35:00.000By violence you mean they were throwing stuff and smashing things up and that they were rioting.
00:35:05.000The reorganisation of language in order to create the conditions to use more power is tyrannical trickery.
00:35:13.000The truckers whose work and livelihoods were first disrupted by covid vaccine mandates and other restrictions and then by the government seizing their bank accounts would no doubt agree but they had no government to protect them in this matter.
00:35:25.000So in a sense, the policies of mandating vaccines were considered an infringement on the human
00:35:30.000rights of those truckers by those truckers.
00:35:33.000But no one wanted to have that conversation.
00:35:35.000And when we've spoken to representatives of that protest on this channel, what they pointed
00:35:40.000No one wanted to have a conversation because it was important to convey a unipolar perspective
00:35:44.000and not to allow any conversation or dissent.
00:35:47.000Whether you agree with the truckers or you don't agree with the truckers, the word democracy
00:35:50.000is supposed to mean an open discourse where you have representatives of the views of the
00:35:54.000public in congressional or parliamentary spaces so that the will of the powerful is
00:35:58.000not just arbitrarily inflicted on ordinary people without opposition.
00:36:02.000Instead, the government appears to have focused on protecting itself from political dissent back in February and continues to do so today, as Broadhurst suggested that a threat to jobs, free movement of goods caused by protest, is a threat impossible to separate from the threat of violence, including physical violence.
00:36:18.000Just go, that's physical violence and that's a potential economic disruption.
00:36:23.000By this mentality, people will be prevented from protesting or striking.
00:36:27.000What do you think had a bigger impact on the overall population?
00:36:31.000Pfizer having their record year of profits, or some truckers bibbing their own in Ottawa.
00:36:36.000What had the bigger impact? What could be more easily classified as violence?
00:36:40.000Do you think that there are other types of violence that could have been practiced?
00:36:43.000Who is benefiting from the reordering of words?
00:36:46.000From what is presented as disinformation, misinformation, and what is presented as violence?
00:36:50.000The question of what passes off as violence these days in Canada is important because
00:36:54.000in order to justify using martial law like the Emergencies Act, the government must meet
00:36:58.000the requirement of facing an unmanageable threat to Canada as defined by the country's
00:37:02.000Security Intelligence Services Act, Section 2. The Emergencies Act relies on the CSIS Act definition.
00:37:08.000In a previous exchange between a Freedom Convoy lawyer and the Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner, however, the former stated, to your knowledge, there was no credible threat to the security of Canada as defined under Section 2 of the CSIS Act.
00:37:20.000To which the Commissioner replied, that would be my understanding, yes.
00:37:23.000So, legally, there was no threat of violence, unless you change the meaning of the word violence.
00:37:27.000In November, True North reported public safety Canada officials admitted in internal updates that the Freedom Convoy protests were peaceful and that no violence was taking place despite claims by Minister Marco Mendicino.
00:37:39.000The Freedom Convoy so far has been peaceful and cooperative with police, an internal memo stated on January 27th.
00:37:45.000Up until February 11th, officials monitoring the situation stated there were no major incidents, that no violence took place, that disruption to government activities was minor, that there were minimal people on Parliament Hill, and the situation remained stable and planning was ongoing.
00:37:57.000In contrast, Liberal cabinet members including Mendocino and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau So now we know that when people say conspiracy theorists what they actually mean is dissenter and that your opinions and your views are not valuable and if there's a requirement to introduce more state power in support of corporate interests they'll find a way of doing it.
00:38:11.000calling them extremists who don't believe in science.
00:38:15.000So now we know that when people say conspiracy theorists what they actually mean is dissenter
00:38:19.000and that your opinions and your views are not valuable.
00:38:23.000And if there's a requirement to introduce more state power in support of corporate interests,
00:38:42.000It seems that language and the meaning of language is being altered and changed to accumulate more power, to centralise authority and to justify more and more draconian measures.
00:39:47.000And Branko is joining us now from Jacobin magazine, a regular contributor to that magazine covering like war and nuclear tension and censorship.
00:39:55.000And I now see has a damn fine head of hair.
00:40:01.000What is that, by the way, that you brought?
00:40:04.000What it is, Branko, is part of the arm of this rather expensive microphone, which was made by Lockheed Martin, who they actually sponsor the show.
00:40:52.000Why are we hearing nothing about diplomacy?
00:40:54.000Why are we only continually having highlighted how egregious Russian actions are and were and how awful and physically ill Vladimir Putin is?
00:41:08.000And I'm going to have to give you a very complicated answer.
00:41:10.000So, I mean, I think the Biden administration is divided on this question.
00:41:15.000You've got someone like Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
00:41:19.000He said, you know, a few months ago, basically, Ukraine has finally reached this position of strength from which it can negotiate.
00:41:26.000But there is, he got a lot of pushback, as did, you know, the dozens of progressives that put forward a letter that said, basically, you know, it's time for for the Biden administration to kind of push for diplomacy
00:41:38.000a little more. And I think part of it is one, it's that some segment of the Biden administration
00:41:44.000views this war as a way to weaken Russia, and not just the Biden administration, but
00:41:50.000the entire Washington establishment. And that's not me making stuff up or putting words in the
00:41:55.000people's mouths. I mean, people like Leon Panetta, for instance, former CIA director, he's called it
00:42:02.000Adam Schiff, one of the most hawkish Democrats in Congress, he's talked about, you know, before this war, using Ukrainians, you know, they're fighting the Russians so that we don't have to fight them.
00:42:14.000There was actually just an op-ed recently in the Washington Post by Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates, you know, former national security figures in the Bush and Obama administrations, basically saying, well, you know, the good thing is we have this willing partner in Ukraine that is willing to bear the consequences of war so that, you know, we don't have to fight this battle later on.
00:42:38.000And I'll also point to the comments by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who Uh, way back, uh, you know, many, many months ago said, um, you know, the goal here is to weaken Russia so they can't do these kinds of things.
00:42:50.000So I think there's a segment of the Washington establishment that, that, you know, uh, this, this gets called Russian propaganda and all this kind of stuff.
00:42:59.000But again, I'm telling you things that are coming straight from the mouths of us administration officials themselves, uh, that, that views this as an opportunity to kind of weaken Russia.
00:43:08.000I think the other part of it is I think there's been this kind of, it's the result I think of 2016, and you know, Putin bears responsibility for this because he did that completely pointless hack, which ultimately just inflamed public opinion in the United States.
00:43:25.000But because of that, it has, you know, it's been very difficult to talk about a sane and rational policy towards Russia and the United States and other Western countries.
00:43:36.000I think in large part because of that.
00:43:39.000The climate that has erupted since this invasion, you know, of course, the invasion is terrible and criminal.
00:43:45.000And, you know, the longer it goes on, it just gets worse and worse.
00:43:49.000But it's been a sort of almost September 11 like political climate that has come up.
00:43:56.000And when you get into these kind of jingoistic environments, it's very difficult to talk about anything
00:44:42.000So I think it's multiple things going on, all of it leading to a very bad place in my opinion.
00:44:49.000Yes, it seems, Branko, that what you're saying ultimately is there is no negotiation for peace because US interests ultimately do not want peace.
00:44:59.000That is not the desired outcome, whether it's for economic reasons, for strategic geopolitical reasons, that is not the desired outcome.
00:45:07.000And yet Kevin McCarthy's recent assent to Speaker in the House
00:45:12.000was somewhat predicated on a deal to diminish Pentagon budgets by $75 billion
00:45:17.000at the insistence of what would formerly have been regarded as the harder right edge
00:45:24.000of the Republican Party, Trump supporters et al.
00:45:27.000So what does that mean, Branko, when the only anti-war voices
00:45:33.000are coming from that political destination?
00:45:36.000And is that a kind of benevolence or financial prudence?
00:45:56.000I mean, I'm on the left, you know, Jacobin is a socialist publication, traditionally, you know, wanting to cut the military budget and kind of wanting to look for diplomatic solutions, instead of waging in this war, as you say, that was a traditionally left wing position.
00:46:10.000And to be clear, many voices on the left voice that position.
00:46:13.000But I think unfortunately, when it comes to Congress, Because of the climate that has come up, particularly on the liberal side, I mean, it's mostly liberals, again, because of 2016, that came to view Russia as this kind of existential evil.
00:46:31.000And so, you know, even these left-wing congresspeople, because they have to work within You know, liberal public opinion.
00:46:40.000They're kind of accountable to liberal institutions.
00:46:42.000I think they don't want to be seen as, or they don't want to be attacked by these, you know, outlets or think tanks or, you know, commentators.
00:46:50.000That's basically what happened with the withdrawal of that letter, the pro-diplomacy letter back in November.
00:46:56.000You know, it was this army of kind of liberal commentators saying, you know, what are these people doing?
00:47:08.000But, you know, I mean, I talked about this, you know, even before the start of the war.
00:47:13.000I, you know, I noted that that you had people like Tucker Carlson making, you know, I think Tucker Carlson is abhorrent in so many different things that he believes.
00:47:22.000But, you know, he happened to have this one sane position on the war.
00:47:27.000And there were a few other right wing voices that had similar positions.
00:47:30.000And I said, you know, you can't It's not a good thing.
00:47:33.000It's not a good thing for the left to cede that ground to the right, you know, for them to be the only anti-war voices, because then, you know, they may start getting purchase from viewers who go, well, you know what?
00:47:48.000Maybe they're right about some of these other things as well.
00:47:51.000So I think it's a really Disappointing thing is the only way I can put it.
00:47:57.000And I think the other disappointing thing about it is that, you know, I mean, because of the political polarization in the US, you have on the democratic side and the liberal side, you have this kind of gung-ho, you know, let's have this civilizational war against Russia attitude.
00:48:12.000And then the right says, no, we don't want that.
00:48:14.000But then what does the right want to do?
00:48:16.000They want to have the same civilizational fight and, you know, go to nuclear brinkmanship, but against a different country, China.
00:48:24.000So, you know, I think what would be good is if there were voices that were consistently against, you know, military escalation and war against, you know, both of these kind of American adversaries, rather than having this kind of bifurcated situation that we have now.
00:48:42.000Seems that there's the same appetite for a unipolar world ultimately behind both wings of the American administration.
00:48:51.000And when it comes to war reporting, if it was more... I sometimes wonder, Branko, if they were even more overt about the nature of their agenda, i.e.
00:49:01.000like, you know, we consider Russia to be an existential global threat, we have to have this proxy war.
00:49:06.000I don't know, even though that would be less than ideal, at least it wouldn't be hiding behind the kind
00:49:12.000of humanitarianism and peculiar and novel jingoism that's emerging.
00:49:18.000And when it's contrasted with a subject about which I know you know a great deal, the US stroke Saudi involvement
00:49:26.000in the conflict in Yemen, just hear us a few facts, which I'm sure you're more than familiar with.
00:49:34.000The war in Yemen has killed an estimated 377,000 people through direct and indirect causes and 33,000 people have died is an estimate in Ukraine as a result of this war and of course all of those deaths are unimaginable tragedies to the people involved.
00:49:53.000So why is there such a diversity in the nature of reporting on these two conflicts?
00:50:03.000How do the interests differ and how do the conflicts significantly differ in terms of the way the media report on them, Branko, primarily?
00:50:12.000I mean, it's not a groundbreaking point to make that, well, in any country, but especially in the United States, you know, the media tends to kind of take its cues from whatever administration is in power.
00:50:26.000I mean, you know, the establishment media, you know, people call it that not as a sort of pejorative, but because there's a very real link.
00:50:32.000I mean, a lot of these people, because of access, they have to sort of rely on and to some extent, you know, Right the stories that people in power want them to it's part of the whole Transactional nature of reporting and so what you end up getting is the people that report on all this stuff You know very much.
00:50:50.000I think start adopting the worldview of the people in power and actually in some ways I mean And I think again 2016 had a lot to do with this I mean journalists the media has shockingly been kind of some of the most aggressive and gung-ho From the start of this war you know I mean They were reporters at the White House press corps who were pushing Biden to go into a no-fly zone at the start of the war.
00:51:16.000There were a few videos of this of just reporters saying, well, why aren't you sending more military?
00:51:21.000So incredibly, it's actually, to some extent, Biden and some of the people around him who taken on this kind of a more restrained approach in the
00:53:02.000It makes me feel that the media has been co-opted now to a degree that is untenable and that we
00:53:09.000might be in a a media environment where independent voices will be continually marginalized, maligned and ignored, and certainly won't be allowed to be proliferated to a degree where the counter narratives will be relevant.
00:53:26.000Do you find it difficult to undertake the type of reporting that you do?
00:53:31.000I know you met with quite a lot of condemnation and criticism, for example, for the way that you've reported on this conflict.
00:53:38.000Oh yeah, I mean, you get all sorts of crazy people saying all sorts of things about you, but you can't really care that much about that because your job as a journalist is not to be popular or to be well-liked.
00:53:50.000It's to try and shed light on things that aren't being talked about.
00:53:54.000It's to cover stories that would otherwise go amiss.
00:53:59.000It's to challenge conventional narratives if they happen to be flawed in some way.
00:54:05.000A lot of the times when I'm writing stuff, I'm just reporting accurately what the facts are.
00:54:14.000I think there's a kind of demand almost from people that journalists like myself and other people who are more critical of some of the stuff to basically lie and to pretend that we don't know things that we know.
00:54:27.000I'm supposed to pretend that, for example, the Azov battalion really has reformed.
00:54:31.000is no longer a neo-Nazi regiment, or that the Ukrainian far right wasn't a problem.
00:54:37.000And so I'm supposed to pretend that NATO expansion had no role in this war whatsoever, even though
00:54:43.000there's copious evidence, and that anyone who knows anything about the subject has been
00:54:49.000reading for decades and hearing from decades from a variety of experts.
00:54:53.000So it's kind of a ridiculous situation.
00:54:55.000But again, it's the same with your show.
00:54:58.000You're going to say the stuff that you believe and the stuff that you know is true, or at
00:55:06.000And you can't cater your coverage or what you believe to what the overriding climate
00:55:17.000I mean, I think actually when it comes to something this important and when things are kind of this crazy, I think it's actually very important to be a voice that's kind of challenging and saying, hey, well, hold on, let's hold up a little bit and let's maybe think about this.
00:55:54.000We looked a little while at an article from the Guardian in 2014 where it talked about the escalation escalation in Ukraine and of course it was prior to the
00:56:03.000Trump administration and it was entirely and the events in 2016 that you keep returning to
00:56:08.000Branko and it was obviously an entirely different and I would say a more unbiased take
00:56:13.000available in a legacy media outlet where they said we've got to stop provoking Putin
00:56:17.000through the actions of NATO and it talked about the complexity of Ukrainian politics and the sort of
00:56:23.000the far right element and then just, you would not get something like that in the
00:56:29.000There's a kind of a degree of self-censorship that seems to be taking place.
00:56:34.000That's partly what frightens me, as a matter of fact.
00:56:38.000What we're trying to do, obviously in a more conversational and sometimes more populist way, is to look for alignment between figures on the Right and left and increasingly the meaninglessness of those categories when it comes to creating significant shift or at least a conversation around a significant shift in the way that in particular American politics and their globalist interests are organized.
00:57:04.000It seems that via the culture war and the kind of censorship and type of reporting that you're talking about, it's becoming increasingly difficult to find ways to bring people together to find some optimism That's really become our focus, although sometimes I feel a little delirious in the face of that task.
00:57:28.000I think it's really important to know that when I talk about US interests, I'm talking about The elite of the country and what they see as American interests.
00:57:38.000And I actually don't think there really is a U.S.
00:57:40.000interest in trying to, you know, make this war, to sort of Afghanistan for Russia and to, you know, even collapse the Russian state.
00:57:49.000I think that's incredibly dangerous, actually, for ordinary Americans.
00:57:53.000But it's important to know that there's a distinction between, you know, the elite and what they see as the interests of the country and the actual people themselves.
00:58:01.000And I think it is important That a lot of surveys show, actually, you know, I mean, obviously, there's going to be disagreements on a variety of policy issues between Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, so on and so forth.
00:58:12.000But actually, Americans in the whole approve of a more restrained foreign policy.
00:58:18.000They don't actually support these, you know, these wild adventures that American politicians have taken the country on over the decades.
00:58:27.000And this particular war, surveys have also shown that there is bipartisan, cross ideological consensus around needing to negotiate, needing to find a diplomatic solution to, if not come to some sort of Permanent peace settlement at least stop the fighting and have some sort of stability.
00:58:50.000I'm not sure totally what the surveys say about policy towards China, but I would love if there was some more crossover of that.
00:58:59.000I would love if there were And there are some figures on the right who are saying this, but I wish there were more right-wing or conservative voices who were telling the audiences, by the way, hey, if you think what's happening with Russia and Ukraine, if you think that's dangerous, if you think that's bad for the people of Ukraine, if you think it's all these things, well, it's very much a similar case with Taiwan and China.
00:59:19.000We should take a similarly pro-diplomatic, restrained, less militaristic approach to
00:59:25.000that particular crisis as well, because that could also erupt into all manner of chaos.
00:59:31.000It's such an important revelation and point, Branko, that when we're talking about the
00:59:37.000US, we're not talking about US influence.
00:59:40.000We're demonstrating that the interests of the elites that ultimately dominate American foreign policy are entirely at odds with ordinary American people, and that most American people would like diplomatic solutions to the current conflict, and as you say, likely to any potential forthcoming conflict between the U.S.
01:01:42.000Hey, listen, if you're watching this on Locals, which is our Stay Free AF community, We're not doing the additional 15 minutes after the show anymore.
01:01:52.000Oh no, we're going to do one special, one hour long show just for members of our community each week, as well as so many other opportunities, including a forthcoming stand-up special, which will be available to view on local.