Stay Free - Russel Brand - December 24, 2023


Here’s the News: Are We Really Heading To Civil War?


Episode Stats

Length

20 minutes

Words per Minute

180.52913

Word Count

3,752

Sentence Count

193

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

3


Summary

In this episode, Russell Brand takes a look at how the mainstream media and political establishment are using the idea of civil war as a way of delegitimizing Donald Trump, and how they are using it to delegitimize the Trump administration and its attempts to elect a Trump-like figure as the next president. And why we should be worried about civil war, and why it s a threat to democracy, not just in the short term, but in the long term. And, of course, why we need to be worried at all about it, because it s not just a threat. It s a real possibility that we re all on the brink of Civil War, and we should all be prepared to fight it out in order to keep our democracy and our liberty intact. Stay Free with Russell Brand. Remember, there s an episode every single day, 7 days, to educate and elevate our consciousness together. Stay Free, and enjoy the episode: No, Here's the Fucking News! No, here's the fucking news! Subscribe to Awakening Wanderers on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you download your podcasts. We really appreciate you, our listeners, and want to bring you more content. We re bringing you in depth conversations with guests like Jordan Peterson, RFK Jr., Sam Harris, Veena Shiva, Vandana Shiva, Gabor Maté, and many more. Once a week, we bring you in-depth conversations about topics that should be delivering a detailed breakdowns of current topics that the mainstream press should be covering, but if they are covering, they re amplifying establishment messages and not telling you the truth, you re not telling the truth. And we re delivering a podcast every day, you ll get a podcast delivered a podcast about that, right here, seven days, 7-days, 7 a week. Enjoy this episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand, right single-mindedly. - stay free, stay free with me, I m talking about it! - I m your host, I love you, my dear friend, I know you, I understand you. . - Thank you, There's a lot of stuff like that's going to help elevate your consciousness and elevate my consciousness and make you feel free, I can t wait to elevate your experience, too, I get it, too much more. -- -- Thank you Awakening Wanderer, I'm your guide to truth and freedom.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hello there you Awakening Wonders on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you download your podcasts.
00:00:05.000 We really appreciate you, our listeners, and want to bring you more content.
00:00:08.000 We will be delivering a podcast every day, seven days a week, every single day.
00:00:13.000 You'll get a detailed breakdown of current topics that the mainstream media should be covering, but if they are covering, they're amplifying establishment messages and not telling you the truth.
00:00:23.000 Once a week, we bring you in-depth conversations with guests like Jordan Peterson, RFK Jr., Sam Harris, Vandana Shiva, Gabor Maté, and many more.
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.
00:00:42.000 No, here's the fucking news!
00:00:51.000 Hello there you Awakening Wanderers, thanks for joining us on our voyage to truth and freedom at a time where it seems possible to launch propaganda almost simultaneous to its counter-narrative.
00:01:00.000 What I mean by that is during the Covid pandemic, however much pushback, however much discernment, however much questioning there was of official narratives and mainstream media narratives, There was sufficient centralised power to repress dissent to ensure that, broadly speaking, there was compliance.
00:01:16.000 Now what you have is a greater ability to almost immediately challenge any emergent centralised or state narrative as soon as it emerges.
00:01:25.000 Like, for example, we're being told that America is potentially on the brink of civil war, that this is a time of fissure and fracture.
00:01:33.000 We've been told that a second Donald Trump term would be a kind of dictatorship, that America might descend into tyranny.
00:01:39.000 And more and more we're seeing people talk about civil war.
00:01:42.000 Alex Jones says that this is a way of legitimising authoritarianism and the exertion of control.
00:01:48.000 And it seems that there is a good point being made there.
00:01:50.000 Look at this post from Tim Pool, where he observes that just posting US civil war returns the result Donald Trump off Colorado ballot.
00:01:58.000 What is happening with American democracy?
00:02:01.000 Is it now impossible for the centralized legacy media establishment and the state establishment to launch a narrative and for it to stick?
00:02:09.000 Precisely because now of independent media spaces where we're involved in an immediate direct discourse with you.
00:02:16.000 So as soon as an idea like Trump's going to be the worst dictator since Hitler is out there, people are able to say, wait a minute, he doesn't have a paramilitary or what about the kind of abuse and overreach of power within the Biden administration?
00:02:28.000 And aren't they using the threat of Trump as a dictator to avoid culpability for their own slide towards different types of authoritarianism?
00:02:37.000 And this threat of civil war is almost immediately being met with counter
00:02:41.000 narratives.
00:02:42.000 You'll see this all the time, like with the UFO stories.
00:02:44.000 The UFO stories launch and people go, oh, this is fascinating.
00:02:46.000 A Congress and the Senate finally taking UFOs seriously.
00:02:49.000 Oh, this is just to distract us from the Hunter Biden hearings.
00:02:52.000 It's such an interesting media space.
00:02:54.000 And this civil war narrative is, I think, the latest example
00:02:58.000 of how the Trump-Biden story is playing out and the inability to control the public sphere.
00:03:06.000 And of course, Hollywood are making a movie about it.
00:03:08.000 19 states have seceded.
00:03:09.000 The United States Army ramps up activity.
00:03:12.000 The White House issued warnings to the Western forces as well as the Florida Alliance.
00:03:16.000 The three-term president assures the uprising will be dealt with swiftly.
00:03:20.000 Let me know if you want to try anything.
00:03:22.000 I'm just aware there's like a pretty huge civil war going on all across America.
00:03:26.000 We just try to stay out with what we see on the news.
00:03:29.000 Seems like it's for the best.
00:03:35.000 And of course, the legacy media are amplifying the idea that war, the language of war, and the framing of war is appropriate.
00:03:42.000 Have a look at this section from Morning Joe where confederalism is discussed.
00:03:47.000 And immediately, as soon as you start thinking about war, particularly civil war, you have to consider a state of emergency and the kind of actions and measures that could be undertaken and legitimized in a state of emergency.
00:03:57.000 To the Republican candidate's argument that this should be, the voters should have the say and not the courts.
00:04:05.000 Why are you standing with Confederates who betrayed this country?
00:04:13.000 And this is what they're standing with, is the spirit of those Confederates, rather than the Americans who came together after a long and brutal civil war that was fought to keep the Union together and saw, clearly saw, a threat.
00:04:34.000 That's a fascinating piece of framing.
00:04:42.000 A softball question is lobbed up.
00:04:44.000 Why shouldn't the voters be able to decide whether or not to elect Donald Trump?
00:04:49.000 Why should we just go along with a piece of legislation?
00:04:51.000 And the pundit dutifully says, why would you stand with Confederates, insurrectionists, and then claiming that it's in order to protect democracy?
00:05:00.000 Indeed, when we're discussing dictatorship, which we frequently are on this channel, I think it's important to hold in mind that the type of dictatorship that seems more likely to me is a kind of technological, bureaucratic dictatorship that presents itself to us, the electorate or the consumers, however we're regarded now, as a kind of safety measure, a protective prophylactic from the ever-present threat of populist demagogues and dictators.
00:05:25.000 We would have been having an election, but bloody hell, these insurrectionists, they get in there and ruin it.
00:05:30.000 Well what's your excuse in Florida, where Joe Biden is the only candidate on the primary ballot?
00:05:35.000 Or Massachusetts, where Marianne Williamson, is she also a terrible populist dictator?
00:05:41.000 It's becoming increasingly clear that any dissenting voice, whether it's Bobby Kennedy, or Marianne Williamson, or Donald Trump, or Vivek Ramaswamy, or people in the culture, Elon Musk, myself, Joe Rogan, Any time that there are dissenting voices that get, you know, any traction at all, I'm certainly not putting myself in the same category as those heavy hitters on a global stage, there's a massive response and the legitimization of shutting down that voice.
00:06:05.000 What would be required to shut that voice down?
00:06:07.000 And then they answer that question.
00:06:08.000 Well, if this person was guilty of this, and we just rushed straight to the conviction part of the process, if we can just say someone's an insurrectionist, if you actually see Donald Trump on that day, he literally says, I'm sure you will go over now to the Capitol and peacefully and patriotically protest.
00:06:24.000 I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building.
00:06:31.000 That word peacefully is always extracted from the analysis because what would you have to say?
00:06:38.000 Oh he was being sarcastic.
00:06:39.000 Trump with his known capacity for irony.
00:06:43.000 Just drop the word peacefully in there with a nudge and a wink.
00:06:46.000 Whatever Donald Trump is or isn't, he's Not the leader of an armed insurrection.
00:06:50.000 As Martin Guru pointed out, insurrection means armed.
00:06:54.000 There's never been an unarmed insurrection in history, because that just amounts to asking if you can run the country.
00:07:00.000 Many people have said that January 6th was a riot.
00:07:03.000 OK, it was a riot.
00:07:04.000 But what it wasn't was an attempt to take over America.
00:07:08.000 And people that are saying that it was are doing that to extract the threat of Donald Trump.
00:07:12.000 And indeed, the massive demographic that supports Donald Trump.
00:07:16.000 And that is why I think the war narrative becomes important.
00:07:19.000 Because once before in America's history, it was necessary to say, half of everyone's just crazy.
00:07:25.000 And in retrospect, it's easy to say, well, because of slavery and racism.
00:07:29.000 But the Democrat Party were famously the party of slavery.
00:07:32.000 And that seems to have been extracted conveniently from the narrative in the same way that peacefully has been extracted from the January 6th narrative.
00:07:40.000 So let's have a look at what we're dealing with here.
00:07:42.000 Is it war, or is it a new tool for propaganda?
00:07:45.000 All empires fall.
00:07:46.000 That's the ominous tagline for Civil War, a Hollywood movie to be released in April.
00:07:50.000 As the title suggests, it depicts a second American war of the states.
00:07:54.000 A bombastic trailer clip hints at the chaotic violence and destruction unleashed in the wake of conflict between the federal government and some vague rebel faction, the unimaginatively named Western forces.
00:08:05.000 It's an unrealistic and frankly absurd political fantasy of the near future, but that hasn't stopped much of the liberal commentariat taking to the proverbial fainting couch after watching it.
00:08:14.000 Chilling and scary, said Entertainment Weekly.
00:08:17.000 Shocking, said People.
00:08:18.000 Dare you to watch Civil War trailer Already when it's been framed in that way, you start to see, oh this is a cultural artefact that's being used to mobilise fear.
00:08:29.000 Even if you take away the agent of fear, it could be a foreign war campaign, it could be religious tension and conflict around the world, it could be ideological and cultural conflict between people with progressive or traditional perspectives on identity and culture and the family and a whole raft of issues.
00:08:45.000 The important endpoint is fear.
00:08:47.000 The more that we're afraid, I'm speaking from personal experience, the less able we are to be kind of discerning, stoic, calm, perspicacious, communicative, trusting.
00:08:58.000 Fear is a sort of trauma state that part of civilization was meant to have helped us progress beyond.
00:09:05.000 But it's interesting that while we're off at the spoils of civilisation, it's accompanied with an incessant jolting back into that fear zone.
00:09:12.000 Oh, there's gonna be a civil war!
00:09:13.000 Oh, bloody hell, there could be an attack!
00:09:14.000 Oh no, there's gonna be a cyber attack!
00:09:16.000 Oh, there's a new contagion!
00:09:17.000 There's a new pathogen!
00:09:18.000 Quick, have a shot!
00:09:19.000 Like, I'm sure validity to all of the geopolitical and health crises that are Being discussed in all these instances.
00:09:25.000 But what I'm interested in is how the media and systems of power utilize these threats to keep us continually afraid.
00:09:32.000 And it seems that this civil war narrative is one such agent.
00:09:35.000 But what's really interesting is it's being shot down almost as soon as it comes out.
00:09:39.000 Straight away.
00:09:39.000 Hey, this could be a civil war.
00:09:40.000 You know what this is a bit like?
00:09:41.000 It's a bit like the American Civil War.
00:09:43.000 And Trump, that's the Confederates, you know, MAGA, they're all racist.
00:09:45.000 Come on.
00:09:46.000 But people are like, hang on a second.
00:09:47.000 Could this be about economics?
00:09:49.000 Does this seem like a desperate establishment, unable to cope with the new independent media space and the emerging grassroots political movements from the Tea Party in your country onwards, and even leftist movements like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn here in this country, shutting it down, flattening it down, always able to grab some convenient reason why this person should be extracted from the conversation?
00:10:08.000 Isn't that what's happening?
00:10:10.000 And isn't the Civil War narrative just the latest example of that?
00:10:12.000 Let us know in the chat.
00:10:13.000 It's another sign of the topsy turvy times we live in.
00:10:16.000 Apocalyptic fears of the end of America used to be the calling card of the religious and militia loving far right, but now it's the liberals trying to keep up with the Alex Joneses by screeching loudly that the end is near.
00:10:27.000 So it used to be the left that was peace loving and anti-war. You remember that,
00:10:32.000 it's not actually that long ago. But now the left, the Democrat party in the United
00:10:35.000 States, if you want to call them the left, are very pro-war. They're supporting a
00:10:39.000 number of wars and suggesting ongoing support.
00:10:42.000 Similarly, it used to be the right that were apocalyptic, like the end is nigh, armed militia
00:10:47.000 as cited in this article. But now the left are doing that and it makes you wonder what,
00:10:52.000 if anything, they stand for at all.
00:10:53.000 If they're pro-war, if they're using rhetoric that belong to the right, what is it that they actually do represent?
00:11:00.000 In a sense you'll start to glimpse the nihilism that's just beneath the veneer of protectivism which ultimately stands for authoritarianism.
00:11:08.000 There were no real principles there because Look, they don't care about war anymore.
00:11:12.000 They're saying the end is nigh.
00:11:13.000 They're about to legitimise authoritarian measures, I would suggest.
00:11:16.000 That's what's behind this.
00:11:17.000 We certainly saw a good degree of authoritarianism that has been subsequently delegitimised during the pandemic era, whether that was surveillance, censorship, proposal for digital ID.
00:11:26.000 All of these things are not freedom.
00:11:28.000 They're not Liberalism, are they?
00:11:30.000 This month, the line being espoused ad nauseum by the progressive media is that we're all collectively sleepwalking into a Trump-led fascist dictatorship.
00:11:39.000 It's this sort of rhetoric that makes legal action against a former president seem proportional, even when it's bound to backfire, as yesterday's Colorado ruling seemed to demonstrate.
00:11:47.000 It begs the question, how did we get to the point where a large segment of the population, the serious rational ones who follow the science, believe that a contemporary Civil War movie is a preview of our future, although a second Trump term could be worse than Nazi Germany?
00:12:02.000 How has that happened?
00:12:03.000 What kind of climate has been created and who created it?
00:12:06.000 For one, it's the media who cried wolf.
00:12:08.000 This is year seven of liberalism's Trump-fuelled panic attack, and the volume of discourse from corporate media, politicos and social mediates has been turned up to ear-piercing levels for so long.
00:12:20.000 That only the most bombastic pronouncements have a chance at breaking through all the noise.
00:12:23.000 God, it could actually just be a way of reaching an audience.
00:12:26.000 That's part of it.
00:12:27.000 It's escalating in order to stand out.
00:12:30.000 That's the only direction of travel now, in this kind of hyper-normalisation space that we all find ourselves living in.
00:12:36.000 Recall that 2016 was once declared the worst year ever in American history.
00:12:41.000 The belief that the sky was falling didn't stop that December the 31st.
00:12:44.000 It snowballed to the point that each year since has supposedly usurped its predecessor.
00:12:49.000 Next, 2017 was said to have been on the darkest timeline.
00:12:53.000 The bad news kept on coming.
00:12:55.000 Putin hacked our elections.
00:12:56.000 Trump is the new Hitler.
00:12:58.000 The Handmaid's Tale is actually a prophecy coming true.
00:13:01.000 Where else to go if not to the end of America?
00:13:04.000 Was January 6th, as the Atlantic claimed, only a warm-up to some new stage of domestic evil?
00:13:10.000 At the heart of all this fatalistic wailing and gnashing of teeth is a profound detachment between the danger, destruction and death experienced first-hand versus merely consumed.
00:13:21.000 As our everyday lives become increasingly mediated through our digital misery machines, the lines get blurred between reality and a simulation of it.
00:13:28.000 Doom scroll on your phone enough and eventually you'll feel doomed.
00:13:31.000 It's an interesting point that we've become abstracted from the realities that we were evolved, designed to live within, to such an extreme point that we're now happy to live in a simulation, or perhaps even a simulacrum, a repeated image again and again that we are bombarded with, until we can no longer discern its validity.
00:13:51.000 We can no longer verify what's real.
00:13:53.000 We're not engaged in the growing of our own food.
00:13:56.000 The maintenance of our own homes, the protection of our own families, loved ones or groups.
00:14:03.000 We've become, in a sense, entirely endomed by propaganda and external stimulation.
00:14:10.000 This is why I think even the point about Tim Pool's tweet was interesting.
00:14:15.000 If you put a US civil war into a search engine, the reality that you're given is Trump, Colorado.
00:14:21.000 We've done stories and spoken to experts about how Google promotes certain news stories and therefore provide a version of reality that is often favourable to the interests of the powerful.
00:14:31.000 We're not living in an absolute reality.
00:14:34.000 No one could live in a reality of 300 million American citizens.
00:14:38.000 It's inconceivable.
00:14:40.000 It might as well be 20 billion.
00:14:42.000 It might as well be the universe.
00:14:44.000 We can probably conceptualise a couple of hundred relationships.
00:14:47.000 Decentralisation is a possibility.
00:14:51.000 Community sovereignty is a possibility.
00:14:53.000 It's interesting that the escalation, or decline in fact, of people's optimism about the times, as it said here, 2016, worst year ever, 2017, even worse, 2018, It's getting worse and worse.
00:15:04.000 Mirrors what Martin Gurry said about the publication of information from 2001 onwards.
00:15:09.000 As more and more information becomes available, of course, there are enclaves of people getting more and more clever, more and more communication, but there is an amplification of hysteria and a kind of fissuring and fracturing To the point where war seems inevitable, but in fact it's a simulation of war.
00:15:25.000 It's an awareness of a philosophical distinction, a partition of ways of life, and that could be mapped onto reality without the necessity of war.
00:15:34.000 You could say, oh, it seems that some people really have strong beliefs that are of this type,
00:15:39.000 and others have strong beliefs that are of this type.
00:15:41.000 As long as we don't engage in some territorial mayhem about which bits of land each side owns,
00:15:46.000 it would be entirely possible to use this technology to have decentralized community sovereignty, wouldn't it?
00:15:53.000 Some journalists have remarked lately on what the New York Times deemed the great disconnect,
00:15:57.000 the yawning gap between our perceptions of the economy under Bidenomics and the lived experience of it.
00:16:02.000 Yet the disconnect that's unpopular to talk about is between the actual preconditions of a 2020 civil war
00:16:08.000 and the anticipation of one erupting.
00:16:10.000 Call it a vibe-pocalypse.
00:16:12.000 The facts on the ground are sobering.
00:16:14.000 Even with the recent heated rhetorical battles over the Israel-Palestine war since October, there hasn't been a marked increase in political violence in the United States, just a wave of interpersonal conflict since the Covid-19 pandemic.
00:16:25.000 Elections are being safely held all over America and the Colorado Supreme Court decision is unlikely to change that.
00:16:31.000 Our governing bodies and institutions are relatively stable and new laws are being created in red and blue states alike without a shot fired.
00:16:38.000 If anything, 2023 has been marked by a turn towards apathy.
00:16:42.000 Not a violent revolution.
00:16:44.000 For most of this year, American news consumption and political donations decreased dramatically, social media feeds began to go dark, and people increasingly tuned out of the world beyond their doorstep.
00:16:53.000 Prepare then for a 2024 in which politicians and the media play Paul Revere for this phantom civil war even harder leading up to November's election.
00:17:02.000 After all, coaxing Democrats to wake up and grab their proverbial bayonets is good for clicks, donations, and votes.
00:17:09.000 It might sound contradictory, but we should be alarmed about this kind of alarmism from Democrats and Republicans alike.
00:17:15.000 Fear of domestic war can fuel more government overreach, a kind of counterinsurgency strategy against Americans that relies on demonization, over-surveillance, and even incarceration in the name of public safety.
00:17:28.000 These are definitely observable trends.
00:17:30.000 Demonisation, that's taking place on both sides, a kind of hysteria and condemnation.
00:17:35.000 MAGA extremists.
00:17:36.000 From the basket of deplorables moment onwards, there's been the demonisation of 50% of the population.
00:17:41.000 And I'm sure this is something that's on both sides when it comes to the cultural war debate.
00:17:46.000 Oversurveillance, this is being Further legitimised, lobbied for continually and even incarceration.
00:17:51.000 You know that there are numerous people still imprisoned as a result of protests that would perhaps not withstand serious scrutiny.
00:17:59.000 So it's the normalisation of measures that would previously be seen as extreme, which is part of a broader strategy.
00:18:05.000 It could be contested.
00:18:06.000 You need to legitimise and normalise consumerism as a way of life, fear as a state of mind, division and condemnation as an ordinary stance.
00:18:15.000 Even in our lifetimes, we've gone from, oh, my uncle was a bit right wing, to we can't speak to that.
00:18:21.000 But it's become militant, militarised and catastrophised even in like a decade.
00:18:27.000 So clearly something is happening.
00:18:29.000 In Atlanta, fear of left-wing activists protesting the construction of a new police academy led to draconian measures from the state, such as the arrest of concertgoers at a music festival for domestic terrorism.
00:18:40.000 Those measures were taken by a Republican-controlled state and a Democrat-run city.
00:18:44.000 My sense is, as this example shows, Republican state, Democrat city, that both political establishment parties benefit from this increased state of fear and tension.
00:18:56.000 And in making a choice between the Republican and the Democrats, you're making a choice about as serious as you are when you choose between Pepsi and Coca-Cola or McDonald's and Burger King.
00:19:04.000 In an increasingly commodified culture where the results are all sewn up, where you're a consumer consuming bad food and sugary drinks and essentially facile political ideas.
00:19:15.000 I'm furiously this one.
00:19:17.000 I'm religiously that one.
00:19:19.000 When in fact, as that example shows, and as many bipartisan movements towards war and war funding demonstrate, ultimately you're voting for the same thing.
00:19:30.000 Ultimately, however, it's fine to go to the theatres to watch a fantasy war play out on the big screen.
00:19:34.000 It's America's pastime.
00:19:36.000 Just keep in mind that this one will likely be about as relevant to current day politics as Marvel's Captain America Civil War.
00:19:42.000 So it seems that the idea of civil war It seems to me that whenever a word starts to be proliferated throughout a culture, it's a demonstration of an idea or a trend.
00:19:54.000 I suppose that's obvious.
00:19:55.000 yet further, whether it's of a Republican or Democrat persuasion, the electorate to
00:19:59.000 some limited degree, will determine.
00:20:01.000 It seems to me that whenever a word starts to be proliferated throughout a culture, it's
00:20:05.000 a demonstration of an idea or a trend.
00:20:07.000 I suppose that's obvious.
00:20:08.000 And what we're seeing now is a movement from Trump as dictator, who there is a war burgeoning.
00:20:14.000 And it perhaps says more about the way that the media behaves, the way the social media
00:20:17.000 behaves, the desire to create immersive experiences for us that in a way distract us from reality
00:20:25.000 rather than engaging us with it.
00:20:27.000 That is beneficial to a centralised authoritarian state that requires as its kind of fuel our
00:20:33.000 ongoing fear.
00:20:34.000 Otherwise we might become apathetic, despondent, disgusted and move away and start demanding
00:20:41.000 Serious models of real democracy, real personal sovereignty and real freedom.
00:20:47.000 But that's just what I think.