On this episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand, Russell Brand reflects on the stunning victory by Donald Trump in the Iowa Caucuses, and reflects on how the legacy media are falling apart, assuming that a Trump victory in 2020 is an inevitability. He also reflects on why the mainstream media should be giving Donald Trump a more unfiltered platform, and why they should be worried that he might turn out to vote for someone other than Hillary Clinton in 2020. And, of course, he takes a look at how the establishment media are trying to delegitimize the Trump movement, and how they're doing it in order to keep us from voting for Donald Trump, who they know is going to win the 2020 election. Stay Free with Russell Brand wherever you get your podcasts, and remember there's an episode every single day to educate and elevate your consciousness together. Stay free, and enjoy the episode. Stay Free, and Stay Woke! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus Whitehead. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Art by Ian Dorsch. We do not own the rights to either of these songs, but we do have a song written and performed by Skynet, which you can buy for free on SoundCloud, if you search for "Stay Free" on Soundcloud, we'll send you a free download of the song "Coming Soon" and it will be available on that too. . Thank you for listening to Stay Free! - Your Song of the Week: "A Good Day" by SONGS, "Coming Home" by The Good Vibes, "Let's Talk About It, "Good Vibed" by Shadydave, "Solo, Bad Vibez, "Gonna Goofy" by Ferg & Other Things (feat. & "I Don't Know What's Good? " by Squeep, "No One's Wrong, We'll Figure it Out How To Say It Out" by Mr. , "Thank You" by Gabor Mate, "Outro by Fade, "The Good Vaynerchuk, "Bennie & Gabor, " " by Gotta Have It Out, " by Vellum, " & "Let Me Say That?" by Sondor, "Alyssa & Gabbie, "Feat. " by Jeezy, " & "
00:00:00.000Hello there you Awakening Wonders on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you download your podcasts.
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00:01:21.000The legacy media are falling apart, assuming that Trump 2024 is an inevitability.
00:01:26.000How can they maintain that Joe Biden, visibly waxing and cadaverous before our eyes, can oppose this force?
00:01:34.000Iowa seems to be the beginning of the end for Biden.
00:01:37.000Ten months to go yet but it seems like an insurmountable surge of popularity.
00:01:42.000Is Trump the biggest threat American democracy faces or is he an inevitability of institutional corruption, banality and hypocrisy?
00:01:50.000Interjector I'm sorry I just have to do a little bit of business just for a second.
00:01:53.000Certainly one person who seems to be terrified of a Donald Trump victory and even Donald Trump verbiage is Rachel Maddow who says that Donald Trump's speeches cannot be broadcast presumably to protect us or just in case he does a misinformation or he slips out a malinformation or an untruth but of course anyone that knows anything about MSNBC knows that they regularly broadcast misinformation whether that's around the pandemic the medications that grow Throughout that era, the Russiagate hoax, the Hunter Biden laptop, it's just which flavour of misinformation and which flavour of authoritarianism you, or indeed they, prefer.
00:02:27.000When you watch this, does this make Trump less appealing to you?
00:02:30.000Or does it make him feel like some sexy elixir that can't even be shown on TV?
00:02:34.000Particularly if you actually watch the speech where he's just like, Nikki Haley, nice lady, we understand this, well done.
00:02:40.000I want to congratulate Ron and Nikki for having a good time together.
00:02:46.000We're all having a good time together.
00:02:48.000And I think they both actually did very well.
00:02:52.000Very smart people, very capable people.
00:02:54.000It's not like he's saying, smash the state, fight the power, blah, blah.
00:02:58.000At this point in the evening, the projected winner of the Iowa caucuses has just started giving his victory speech.
00:03:10.000The projected winner, he that must not be named, has got, oh my god, 51% of the entire vote!
00:03:16.000Anyway, we can't broadcast his speech in case he's so damn charismatic, even dyed in the wool, liberal voters turn over.
00:03:24.000The best thing that their liberal establishment could do right now if they wanted to damage Donald Trump is say, let me tell you something, I like Donald Trump.
00:05:41.000And I also feel that why would you not analyse, why would you not scrutinise, with the same degree of disdain, the activity within the Biden administration?
00:05:49.000Why would you not say, possibly the reason that people are against politics, policy, the function of Congress, is because there has been so much corruption, so much deception.
00:05:58.000How do we feel about the ongoing vilification of Donald Trump because, like, oh, those kids in cages?
00:06:03.000Let's find out that Barack Obama built those cages.
00:06:05.000How can we deal with the constant vilification of Trump because build a wall, build a wall, build a wall, when Joe Biden's gonna build that wall anyway?
00:06:12.000The whole thing seems like hysteria, tribalism, favoritism, an inability to face the emergent id of the angry working American people.
00:08:11.000And isn't it more likely Basically, the reason that Trump is so appealing is because of his vitality, vivacity, rhetorical skill, ability to reach the emotional heart of Americans everywhere, and because what the Democrats are telling you the solution is a waxen cadaverous near-zombie in the form of Joe Biden, who had this to say.
00:08:30.000Looks like Donald Trump just won Iowa.
00:08:32.000He's the clear frontrunner for the other side at this point.
00:08:35.000This election was always going to be you and me against extreme MAGA Republicans.
00:08:39.000It was true yesterday and it'll be true tomorrow.
00:08:41.000In short, the legacy media and the establishment themselves are doubling down on the idea that this is an extremist movement rather than a populist one.
00:08:50.000It means it's spread out across a vast population.
00:08:54.000If we are worried about the rise of authoritarianism in this country, we are worried about the potential rise of fascism in this country.
00:09:00.000We're worried about our democracy falling to an authoritarian and potentially fascist form of government.
00:09:06.000It's all black people that have worked within the Democrat Party, all people that are clearly affiliated with the Democrat Party, sort of pretending to be the sort of goodies, and this is the sober, sombre analysis.
00:09:17.000But really, this is just more hysteria, more propaganda.
00:09:22.000What they are doing is making the situation much, much worse, continually.
00:09:27.000And the American electorate is made up of two major parties.
00:09:31.000One of those parties has been flirting with extremism on the ultra-right for a very long time.
00:09:37.000They've brought them in in a way that they haven't been central to Republican electoral politics ever before, and I know because I've been studying this.
00:09:44.000It's very interesting to make such sweeping statements about taxonomies and use terms like extreme right while simultaneously indulging post-structuralist ideas like there's no such thing as identity or masculinity or femininity, all ideas that I'm absolutely open to in the infinite morasses and molasses of space.
00:10:00.000But if you say there is an absolute thing called extreme right rather than democracy, because what's just happened is a Republican candidate has gone up against a bunch of other Republican candidates in Iowa and every single district has gone, that guy!
00:10:14.000And yes, Trumpism is sometimes what we call it.
00:10:17.000MAGA movement is probably a better way to do it.
00:10:19.000But there is an authoritarian movement inside Republican politics that isn't being bamboozled by Trump.
00:10:25.000They are pushing Trump to get more and more extreme, because the more extreme things he says, The more they adhere to it, yeah.
00:10:33.000And that is coming from a very large proportion of the American right that adheres to the Republican Party.
00:10:39.000And that's why this is a Republican Party problem more than it is the problem of one man and his leader.
00:10:43.000Doesn't that tie together the— Prior to Trump, we had four years of Obama.
00:10:48.000Since Trump, we've had four years of Biden.
00:10:51.000If Trump is as extreme as the legacy media are saying, surely we will have seen extreme fluctuations and extreme changes.
00:11:00.000Let's compare some of the data between these administrative periods and see if there's another reason why the Democrat Party might have gone into decline.
00:11:08.000Looking at the three years before COVID-19 made a mess of things, the US economy under Trump performed about the same as it had during the last three years under President Obama.
00:11:16.000The last three years of President Obama's administration saw an increase of 8.1 million jobs and a 2% point drop in the overall unemployment rate, decreasing from 6.2% in 2014 to 4.9% at the end of 2016.
00:11:28.000Under Trump, the number of jobs increased by 6.5 million in his first three years and unemployment dropped from 4.4% to 3.7%.
00:11:39.000Not a massive swing in either direction.
00:11:42.000So whether you're fervently pro-Donald Trump and you love him and his charisma and his easy style, or if you love Barack Obama and his classiness or whatever, you have to say that looking at these numbers, it's not that different, is it really?
00:11:55.000After losing the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton variously blamed WikiLeaks, Bernie Sanders, misogynistic voters, white women, former FBI Director James Comey, and above all, the Russian government for her defeat.
00:12:08.000And certainly the legacy media that won't show Donald Trump's victory speech in Iowa supported all of those stories pretty vociferously.
00:12:16.000Many of her supporters, not least those in the media, leapt to embrace her excuses.
00:12:20.000Just as many of Trump's supporters convinced themselves that the Biden campaign stole the 2020 election from their candidate, Democrats have found comfort in explanations for their failures that place the blame on others.
00:12:31.000But Clinton's 2016 defeat, in fact, was the culmination of a slow decay that first took hold within the Democratic Party half a century ago.
00:12:40.000So, none of these problems are being addressed.
00:12:42.000None of the scrutiny that's being applied to Trump, and even if Trump goes, and is he authoritarian, and what will he do if he wins in 2024?
00:12:49.000No one's saying, should we have a look at this party that we're unquestioningly supporting 24 hours a day?
00:12:57.000If this guy's so bad, why is it that we have to ban him in order to defeat him?
00:13:01.000Surely you would just go, do you want this guy?
00:13:03.000Or, you know, like, apparently he's so bloody charismatic, intoxicating and alluring, you can't even show him giving a polite appraisal of an Iowa caucus without all of us sort of losing our minds and following him into the forests.
00:13:15.000The Democrats today are increasingly becoming a party of upwardly mobile professionals and creatives.
00:13:20.000The party has shed much of its traditional working class base, which has started to show up in its legislative priorities.
00:13:26.000When you look at that panel of people, do you think, oh, these are working class Americans, these speak to ordinary working class people.
00:13:34.000You see Rachel Maddow or Jen Psyche, I don't know anything about their backgrounds.
00:13:36.000They might be from blue collar backgrounds, they might.
00:13:38.000But they don't appear to be talking about, I don't know, fuel costs or infrastructural failure
00:13:43.000or the deterioration of American society or many of the issues that, from what I gather,
00:13:59.000In 2020, less than a third of white working men, the very backbone of the old New Deal coalition, voted for Biden.
00:14:06.000And that was an improvement over the meagre 23% of white working men who backed Hillary in 2016.
00:14:10.000In the 1990s, the Democrats were in free fall.
00:14:14.000After losing the biggest landslide election in American history to Reagan, they had suffered 12 straight years of Republican control of the White House.
00:14:21.000Much of their industrial white working class base had defected to the GOP, alienated both by the cultural radicalism of the new left professional activists who had commandeered the party's intellectual infrastructure, and by a democratic economic ideology that was increasingly indistinguishable from that of the Republicans.
00:14:38.000I think we all remember that Bill Clinton primarily became out, look it's going to be basically the same steps, I've got a saxophone and there's going to be some crazy stuff going on in the Oval Office kids!
00:14:49.000Desperate for a new strategy, Democratic operatives formed a centrist pro-business network called the Democratic Leadership Council to build the Democrats back into a nationally competitive political party again.
00:14:59.000Similar things happened in our country under Tony Blair.
00:15:02.000And similarly, it's created a kind of homogenized political space where no one feels that they really identify, I think, with either party.
00:15:09.000I don't think there's anyone that's passionate about like, I really love them.
00:15:12.000There is no British equivalent to Trump, even, where you'd go, oh, this guy really is speaking to ordinary British people.
00:15:18.000It's just a banalised space of career politicians who you feel would prefer to be at Davos than in Parliament.
00:15:24.000The DLC sought to co-opt the Republicans on economic growth and free trade while countering the New Left's radicalising influence on the party's social and cultural agenda.
00:15:33.000The DLC found a perfect champion in Bill Clinton, when he wasn't on holiday.
00:15:38.000Clinton was a free market true believer with enough affinity to the politics of the 60s to bring the new democratic intelligentsia under his wing.
00:15:45.000As a candidate that corporate CEOs and former student revolutionaries alike could get behind, Clinton forged a new electoral majority and brought the Democrats back into the White House.
00:15:55.000And from an outsider's perspective, it seemed like, oh, this guy is really charismatic and good in front of a camera and people seem to like him, rather than this person is invested in serving American people.
00:16:05.000It was part of the show businessification of American and subsequently British politics.
00:16:11.000Where, oh, as long as you've got someone who's good on camera and sounds alright, it doesn't really matter what they believe in.
00:16:16.000And I think that Clinton was like that, Obama's like that in our country, Blair's like that.
00:16:20.000They say a bunch of stuff and seem kind of lovely when you're looking at them and listening to them.
00:16:24.000And then it comes to, like, the 2008 crash and they're like, Wall Street, we're on your side, baby.
00:16:29.000And that has made ordinary people think...
00:16:45.000All of her donors is using me like oh my god this is amazing if you can't see
00:16:49.000why that would be appealing after the preceding 20 or 30 years then that's a deep
00:16:54.000strain of myopia that is a much more likely the problem than Donald Trump's evident charisma.
00:16:59.000In office however Clinton bungled his careful balancing act.
00:17:03.000In his campaign he had purported to speak for the forgotten middle class.
00:17:06.000But as president, he seemed to speak more loudly for Wall Street.
00:17:08.000He pushed for NAFTA, the founding of the World Trade Organization, financial deregulation, and permanent normal trade relations with China.
00:17:22.000But his new Democrat rebrand did nothing to bring white working class voters back to the party.
00:17:27.000Eight years later, Barack Obama met and even surpassed Clinton's electoral success, but likewise failed to stem the blue-collar bleeding for the long term.
00:17:35.000And again, in office, doubled down on the betrayal of ordinary people, legislated for and governed for elite and establishment interests.
00:17:43.000The kind of perspective that you probably have and that I have is of like, you can't trust these people.
00:18:20.000People are just like, oh, is this what we've got to deal with?
00:18:22.000That's why RFK is polling so spectacularly, because there's a significant number of people in your country, in my country, and I think across the world, that want something actually different.
00:18:31.000Obama twice ran on an even more explicitly populist message than Clinton, but like Clinton, staffed his cabinet and administration with Wall Street ideologues.
00:18:40.000We've seen that happen again and again.
00:18:42.000We've seen people under Biden from Big Pharma getting jobs, from Wall Street getting jobs, from Big Tech getting jobs, and all these contracts being awarded.
00:18:50.000This is why I think Rachel Maddow and the legacy media have to amplify their hysteria, because so many of us now go, Yeah, but it doesn't really make any difference.
00:19:08.000They have to sort of invest it with meaning because the meaning is drained out of it because of conduct, because of behavior, because of history, because of what we've all seen.
00:19:14.000This betrayal was even starker than it was with his predecessor, coming as it did in the immediate wake of the global financial collapse.
00:19:21.000Obama prosecuted no high-level financial executives for the crimes that led to the meltdown, and allowed his Wall Street advisors to mismanage his economic recovery plans.
00:19:29.000Unlike Clinton, he succeeded in creating the Democrats' long-sought universal health insurance program, but the law was a barely coherent patchwork of regulations written by healthcare lobbyists, which provided inadequate subsidies and drove up premiums for millions of middle-class Americans who weren't covered by their employers.
00:19:45.000Again and again you hear pledges and promises made.
00:20:12.000And that's why the results are in every single district in Iowa against Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, Donald Trump all the way.
00:20:18.000And based on that, he's going to be the candidate.
00:20:21.000And I would say similarly, based on that and looking at the total lack of trust in Joe Biden, even among Democrat voters, 69% of them say that Biden does not have the mental sharpness to be president.
00:20:32.000It's unlike It's likely that Biden can beat Trump fairly.
00:20:36.000Hillary Clinton shared Obama's reverence for Wall Street, but none of his talent for pretending to be a populist.
00:20:42.000Instead, she ran a campaign that was explicitly scornful of white working-class voters, maligning them as racists and misogynists.
00:20:48.000In sharp contrast to Obama's unifying message, Clinton directly appealed to the identity-based grievances of various constituency groups largely centered in the prosperous post-industrial metropolitan regions of the country.
00:21:00.000While accusing her opponent Donald Trump of campaigning on hate, she ran the most polarizing campaign in living memory.
00:21:06.000Clinton rallied the educated professionals of the new American knowledge economy to her side by leading their culture war against the denizens of the dying manufacturing towns and agricultural rural and ex-urban swathes of the country that had been emptied of jobs and stripped of community and social purpose by decades of
00:21:22.000de-industrialisation championed by both parties. In that paragraph you get an
00:21:26.000economic understanding of the social realities that have led to Donald Trump's rise and the
00:21:33.000And in a character like Clinton with her inability to reach people through charisma,
00:21:36.000the problem becomes calcified because prior to her there was Obama and Clinton, Bill Clinton,
00:21:42.000who knew how to perform on camera and Donald Trump knows how to do that.
00:21:46.000And if you look at even his Iowa victory speech, it looks like he's adopting a more conciliatory tone, and I would suggest learning the lessons of the Robert F. Kennedy campaign, that there's a lot of anti-establishment people out there that aren't down with the high revs type of aggressive populist politics but open for a kind of convivial,
00:22:05.000conciliatory, statesman-like return to anti-establishment populism that's somewhat more
00:22:11.000inclusive. Certainly that seemed like a different side of Donald Trump in that speech. She couldn't
00:22:15.000have been a more useful foil for Trump if she had tried. While frequently spilling over into
00:22:20.000hyperbole or even outright bigotry, Trump merely played the other side of the culture war
00:22:24.000Clinton was waging. He lambasted the professional class's moral crusades on immigration, race
00:22:29.000and criminal justice as cynically as Clinton celebrated them. But he also excoriated the free market
00:22:35.000orthodoxies of both parties, a critique that resonated with every working and middle-class
00:22:40.000voter who had lived through the Great Recession. Trump embraced
00:23:20.000They don't describe the circumstances of his rise, they don't describe his appeal, they don't describe their own culpability, they don't describe why they cannot amend and adjust because of their affiliations and funding and because of lobbying and because they're ultimately owned by financial interests comparable to the financial interests that have traditionally owned the Republican Party.
00:23:38.000They can't have those conversations so there's nothing they can do except continually condemn Donald Trump, continually Lambast anyone who might be interested in Donald Trump's appeal without ever addressing the causes of this problem.
00:23:50.000It was principally Trump's mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic that led to his loss to Joe Biden, who in his campaign distanced himself from the avant-garde professional class social justice politics that had come to dominate his party.
00:24:02.000Democrats hoped that Biden's everyman appeal might win back some working class voters to the party.
00:24:08.000In fact, now the Democrats are losing non-white working class voters.
00:24:13.000Every election cycle, Democrats lose more and more of this demographic.
00:24:16.000Despite his virulently anti-immigrant rhetoric between 2016 and 2020, Trump gained support among Latino voters.
00:24:24.000Joe Biden did 16 points worse among Latinos than Hillary Clinton had four years earlier.
00:24:28.000The Democrats have an increasingly tenuous hold on the Asian vote, and their support even from black non-college educated voters has begun to slip.
00:24:36.000As of last summer, Biden fell short of earning the support of a majority of non-white voters without a college degree.
00:24:44.000Today, the Democrats and the Republicans are virtually tied in voters' perception of which party is best for the middle class.
00:24:51.000Americans as a whole no longer take the Democrats for granted as the party that fights for ordinary people and are just as likely to regard the Republicans as such.