In this episode, Russell Brand takes a deep dive into why Donald Trump is so popular with the public, and why the establishment is failing to deal with it. He speaks to Martin Goury, who has written a new book, The Revolt of the Public, about Trump's rise to the top of the polls, and what it really means to be a populist and a disruptor. He also takes a look at the rise of independent media, and the role of the internet in shaping the way we think about politics, and how it can be used to create a world where the old elites are dying, and new elites haven t been born yet to take their places. Russell Brand is an American comedian, actor, writer, and podcaster. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, CBS, and NPR, and is one of the few people in the world to hold a PhD in American politics. His work has been widely acclaimed, and he is a frequent contributor to publications like The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, and Rolling Stone. He has also been featured in The New Republic, The Daily Caller, and The Guardian, among many other publications. He is the author of several books, including The People s Guide to the Trump Era, and has been featured on CNN, NPR, The Weekly Standard, and many other media outlets, including Playboy, The Hollywood Reporter, The Hill, The New York Magazine, and Playboy, among others. Russell Brand explains why he thinks Donald Trump s rise to power is a good thing. and why he should be re-elected to the White House. Stay free with Russell Brand should be the next President. Stay free, and stay free, stay free with the truth, and don t care what people think about Donald Trump and much more! Stay Free, . - Russell Brand Thank you for listening to this episode of Awakenings Wondering What's Good, WTF? Subscribe to our new podcast? Subscribe to Awakening Wonders? Subscribe on Podulters Anonymous? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about Russell Brand's new podcast, Like, Share, Share and Retweet this Podcasts on Insta-Friendship, and Subscribe on Instapod, and subscribe to our podcast, or share it on your favourite podcasting platform, wherever else you re listening to the latest episode of AWALTERING WORD?
00:00:00.000Hello there you Awakening Wonders on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you download your podcasts.
00:00:05.000We really appreciate you, our listeners, and want to bring you more content.
00:00:08.000We will be delivering a podcast every day, seven days a week, every single day.
00:00:13.000You'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.
00:00:42.000Hello there you awakening wonders, thanks for joining us on our voyage to truth and
00:00:55.000A voyage where hopefully people from across the political spectrum and across the world with a variety of political views can come together to look at how the establishment is beginning to fall apart and eat itself.
00:01:04.000I think significant in this new dynamic is the emergence of independent media.
00:01:09.000For example, look at Vivek Ramaswamy's performance at the Republican Party primaries.
00:01:13.000Someone that says January 6th was a conspiracy, maybe even 9-11 was a conspiracy.
00:01:18.000Conversation that even Two to five years ago existed on the margins of the internet would be conversations that you'd have to go to Alex Jones for.
00:01:26.000I believe that independent media has meant that conversations talking points from the periphery have entered into the center and the establishment cannot Deal with it.
00:01:35.000Donald Trump epitomises this trend more than anybody.
00:01:38.000I know some of you absolutely love Donald Trump and think he's the solution to America's problems.
00:01:42.000There will of course be people that think that Trump is a populist and a demagogue.
00:01:45.000So what is it really that Donald Trump is doing to the establishment and who better to turn to than the writer of the book The Revolt of the Public, Martin Goury, who ahead of everyone said the arguments of left and right are collapsing, The communications miracle means that politics is going to change forever.
00:02:00.000The old elites are dying and new elites haven't been born yet to take their places.
00:02:08.000Believe me, he wrote this book way, way before other people were talking about this stuff.
00:02:11.000And he's written a new article about Donald Trump and the hysteria in the neoliberal establishment.
00:02:17.000We want to look at the rise of populism across the world.
00:02:19.000We want to look at the rise of independent media.
00:02:21.000We want to look at the situation where someone like Conor McGregor could stand for president in Ireland.
00:02:26.000We are looking at a world where the establishment can no longer maintain control over the minds of the public.
00:02:32.000The more Donald Trump is indicted, the more popular he gets.
00:02:36.000People hate the establishment so much That we are going to see resurgent populist movements and figures across the world.
00:02:42.000It's been happening probably since 2008, but it's reaching a critical tipping point now.
00:02:47.000And extraordinarily, Donald Trump is still at the forefront of it.
00:02:51.000Firstly, let's have a look at the legacy media hysterically claiming that Trump is like Hitler, Trump is like Putin, Trump is like Mussolini, Trump is like Mao.
00:02:58.000He will exile people, he will execute people.
00:03:00.000And is there a real argument for that?
00:03:02.000And if there isn't a real argument, why are they doing it.
00:03:05.000Overnight during a tape town hall in Iowa, former President Trump mocking questions about
00:03:10.000turning the presidency into a dictatorship.
00:03:12.000He says, you're not going to be a dictator, are you?
00:05:05.000It's going to be great for In addition to the fact, and I would say this is an important addition, that they are unwilling to alter their policies that ultimately allow them to service elite interests rather than democratically serve ordinary Americans.
00:05:19.000We all know now that the Democrat Party works for the military-industrial complex, works for Big Pharma, In cahoots with legacy media, that the deep state is penetrating social media, that they are unable to go, do you know what?
00:05:30.000You'll be better off if you voted for our party because we will ensure investment in American infrastructure, less foreign wars, we'll curtail corruption in Congress, we'll ban policies of donation and lobbying, because they will never do that.
00:05:41.000As you can see within the Democrat Party establishment, Bernie Sanders, no thank you.
00:05:45.000What we're witnessing now is the end, I believe, of a certain type of democracy.
00:05:49.000We are moving towards authoritarianism.
00:05:51.000But not the kind of populist demagoguery that they believe Trump represents, but a kind of autocratic, technocratic, digital, technological dictatorship where the establishment claims that it's protecting you and the vulnerable, but ultimately it is restricting freedom.
00:06:05.000And I could point to many, many surveillance laws, like the laws that were introduced after 9-11 but haven't been rescinded, and many, many new censorship laws, not only in the United States but across the world, You've said we are sort of sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States.
00:06:38.000You do sound it quite lightly, because you can't really trust Liz Cheney unless she were willing to address the institutional and systemic abuses of power that currently exist, or to spend five minutes talking about how her father generated the conditions for the Iraq War and exploited it personally, financially.
00:06:54.000How can you trust Liz Cheney until she's offered a complete mea culpa for the Cheney family on that subject?
00:07:14.000And I actually think that this is a legitimate point.
00:07:17.000We do think of dictatorships as belonging to the last century.
00:07:20.000We do think of them as being militarized.
00:07:22.000I think we're unable to conceive of what a global bureaucratic technological dictatorship might look like.
00:07:28.000Although we shouldn't struggle because we've just been through a piloting program, I believe, in the last three years where the legitimization of authoritative measures was experimentally trialed.
00:07:38.000I don't mean that in a conspiracy theory way, even if you just say the best thing to do in the event of a pandemic is to lock everyone in their The best thing to do in the event of a pandemic is to get everyone to carry digital passports.
00:07:47.000The best thing to do in the event of a pandemic is to shut down all oppositional discourse and close down all dissenting voices.
00:07:54.000What that shows you is what dictatorship will look like now.
00:07:57.000It's not going to be like jackboots and badges and medallions and flags.
00:08:01.000It's just going to be a gentle squeezing of your rights.
00:08:49.000To push Americans to understand the threat and the way both democracies and dictatorships operate.
00:08:56.000It's why historians are now comparing It's weird that they're just rotating those... Mussolini mouth, Mussolini mouth, Mussolini mouth, it's Trump now!
00:09:04.000It's why historians are now comparing what Donald Trump is saying in public on the campaign trail to dictators like Mussolini when he dehumanizes our fellow citizens in this country as, quote, vermin.
00:09:17.000But hysterical rhetoric is a two-way street and hysterical rhetoric is literally taking place in this very news segment.
00:09:28.000Deprogramming, basket of deplorables, MAGA, extremist.
00:09:32.000January 6th was an insurrection when we now know that it was infiltrated by all sorts of deep state agencies and that there were certainly provocative events indeed.
00:09:40.000Vivek Ramaswamy is now using independent media rhetoric able to say that on a wide stage, on a big platform.
00:09:48.000And that kind of rhetoric is appealing because it's true.
00:09:51.000Not for any other reason, because now the mainstream discourse can't be managed in the way that it used to be.
00:09:57.000You can't say the Ukraine war is good, shut up, just get on with it.
00:10:00.000You now have to face a barrage of questions, which means that the process of controlling a population is impeded.
00:10:05.000You can't just say we want more and more tax dollars for that war, there's going to be boots on the ground.
00:10:09.000There are too many opportunities for oppositionism.
00:10:12.000And Cheney, who staked her career on this, is saying this threat is now here.
00:10:18.000You never ever hear them say, although we should have been a bit more gentle when we said that people that like Trump are MAGA extremists, we probably overdid it when people didn't want to get vaccinated and we shamed them and said they shouldn't get hospital treatment.
00:10:35.000The media, legacy media in particular, are prone to hysterical discourse on both sides.
00:10:39.000They are hysterical about Trump and then condemning him for grandiose rhetoric.
00:10:45.000So unless they're able to acknowledge that they are participating in that polemicism, you can't take them seriously and you certainly can't trust them.
00:10:53.000That if he does win next year, based on everything she's learned, and remember the high level of the Republican Party that she reached, Is it me or does the future feel more insecure and uncertain?
00:11:09.000For those who are in the United States, there is a way to secure your hard-earned nest egg.
00:11:15.000American Heart for Gold make it easy to protect your savings and retirement accounts with physical gold and silver.
00:11:21.000With one phone call, they can have physical gold and silver delivered right to your door or inside a qualifying retirement account like your IRA or 401k.
00:11:30.000American Hartford Gold is the highest-rated firm in the U.S.
00:11:33.000with an A-plus rating from the BBB and thousands of satisfied clients.
00:11:37.000Right now, they will give you up to $5,000 of free silver on your first qualifying order.
00:11:57.000Get up to $5,000 of silver and protect your future in this crazy, crazy world with some solid, precious metals literally made in stars.
00:12:05.000She is now certain, based on the evidence, he would try to then stay in power forever.
00:12:13.000One of the problems with the idea of saying he's got to stay in power forever is forever is quite a long time and Donald Trump is relatively elderly.
00:12:20.000It's like, at worst, got to be about 10 years.
00:12:23.000Do you believe if Donald Trump were elected next year that he would try to stay in office beyond a second term?
00:13:12.000I firmly believe, knowing Donald Trump, that if you said to Donald Trump, Mr. Trump, in order to become Putin, in order to stay in office forever, in order to loot this country, you have to do X. He is capable of doing wherever your mind can take you for X. A thousand percent.
00:14:27.000as a species and make some real changes and not changes that always seem to be beneficial to the
00:14:32.000elites and punitive to ordinary people but maybe the other way around maybe we have to have a
00:14:35.000radical look at America and giving people as much power as possible decentralized power you know
00:14:39.000use the federalism that America was built upon to empower individual states yeah we could do that
00:14:43.000or we could say that Trump's like an evil Jesus Hitler Jesus yeah Hitler Jesus that's right
00:14:47.000the tendencies many many tendencies like Adolf Hitler yeah I said it throw me off the air okay
00:14:54.000so whether you like Trump or you don't like Trump the fact is he has a form of communication that
00:14:59.000many people like and I can understand why he's He's amusing, he has already been president and he did leave office, he's complained about it, but the Democrats complained about it when they left office as well.
00:15:11.000And why are the neoliberal establishment media condemning Trump with such fierce rhetoric and not acknowledging their own failings?
00:15:17.000This is an article by Martin Goury who probably more than any author I think about when I'm trying to understand the dynamics of contemporary politics and how it relates to technology and communications as opposed to ideology and how those things are in a sense inextricably linked.
00:15:44.000The word most often associated with Trump is authoritarian.
00:15:48.000From the New York Times, Atlantic and Economist to The Guardian, Bantifair and Politico, We are told with ritual repetition that Trump is the second coming of Hitler or Mussolini, an aspiring dictator eager to herd his opponents into the great American gulag.
00:16:03.000That, I feel, is in order to not address domestic issues within their own organisations, within our own institutions and systems, they are just amplifying the external threat, in this case Donald Trump, rather than having a reckoning about the state of democracy, the economic crisis, the energy crisis, the increasing demand for censorship, All of these things are legitimized and certainly of secondary importance to the emergency of some sort of, well, Antichrist.
00:16:28.000He's being portrayed as a kind of Antichrist, which is an oddly religious idea for a materialist and secular culture.
00:17:13.000If you expect to become an authoritarian, you have to wield absolute control over a key institution of government, such as the military, like Franco, Perón or Pinochet, or a mass movement with a paramilitary wing, like Lenin, Mussolini and Mao.
00:17:28.000If you haven't got a paramilitary wing or an army, you can't achieve the kind of coercion that is necessary.
00:17:34.000I would say the kind of dictatorship we live in is no longer using that modality, but is instead about cultural and social and psychological conditioning that's so immersive that people don't feel free.
00:17:44.000That we're so atomised and despairing and trapped in consumerism that we're controlled in a completely novel way.
00:17:49.000That the idea that someone with a paramilitary force is going to, like, kick off.
00:17:53.000I don't sort of feel that that's going to happen.
00:17:55.000I'm really glad that Martin Guri's starting to relax me on that front.
00:17:58.000Neither condition applies to Trump. Every federal institution is set ferociously against him.
00:18:03.000What would happen if Trump ordered the FBI or the 101st Airborne Division to start shooting Democrats?
00:19:14.000Very rarely an exceptional person, such as Caesar, is granted literal dictatorship.
00:19:19.000The Romans invented the whole idea in his early 50s.
00:19:22.000In a clear case of ageism, however, no septuagenarian has ever been offered the job.
00:19:28.000The authoritarian personality favours clever manipulations and conspiracies.
00:19:32.000Best in class was Stalin, who held the purely administrative job of first party secretary, but seized total power by seeding loyalists everywhere.
00:19:40.000Trump, who is a builder of buildings, a task with a beginning and an end, can scarcely think ahead from breakfast to lunch.
00:19:50.000This is a life playing out of the short attention span theatre.
00:19:53.000I think what Martin Gurry is offering us is an alternative lens to view Trump as a character and the reasons why Trump might be popular, which I would offer is Trump popular because the alternative is so dismal and he doesn't actually seem like a dictator.
00:20:07.000It just seems like if you're not going to alter the conditions that led to Trump, because those are the conditions of our institutionalized and corrupt democracies, you have to escalate using hysteria and rhetoric, the language that condemns Trump.
00:21:31.000Maybe it started with Reagan, perhaps it's always been present, Some of the financial changes that took place under Clinton, people say, are hugely significant in losing the ability to regulate the financial industry.
00:21:41.000Maybe it was the New Deal was the last time there was good faith governance of America.
00:21:46.000I don't know enough about your country's politics to say, but what seems clear is that at some point there was a sort of a slide towards centralised authoritarianism and technocracy within American government.
00:21:56.000It became corrupt and totally co-opted by financial interests.
00:22:00.000And they're not willing to change that, because why would they?
00:22:02.000And so in order to just preserve it, they'll say anything to keep it together.
00:22:06.000At this point even, the problem's gone beyond Trump, because now you have populists like Bobby Kennedy and Vivek Ramaswamy, and they can't be kept down forever.
00:23:04.000And that's what makes him, I think, such a valuable contribution to our conversation.
00:23:08.000You won't hurt Trump by calling him an authoritarian.
00:23:11.000He's like one of those bull elephant seals covered with hide, inches thick and full of scars.
00:23:15.000Authoritarianism won't even reach his sensory apparatus.
00:23:19.000It's just like something getting murmured outside of a space helmet.
00:23:23.000Tens of millions of Americans voted for the man.
00:23:25.000If you insist that Trump is an authoritarian, if you continue to maintain that he's the greatest threat ever to our democracy, then you're portraying these voters as goose-stepping bigots, and you know full well that they're not.
00:23:35.000They're your family, friends, and neighbours.
00:23:38.000People in those categories may not be as reliably helpful as, say, a good dog, but only rarely are they involved in overthrowing constitutional norms.
00:23:46.000What he's pointing out is the hysterical language became so deracinated, uprooted and untethered from reality that we're invited to accept that 71 million people had gone crazy.
00:23:56.000And I think all sides of these current political conversations have to acknowledge that it's no longer a left versus right argument that we're having, but a deep suspicion of the way that our institutions are operating.
00:24:07.000With one side saying, if it was to fall in the hands of Trump, he'll ruin it forever.
00:24:10.000The other side saying, But things are already ruinous for us.
00:24:13.000We feel the contempt of elites in our everyday lives.
00:24:17.000The only solution, it seems to me, is already stitched into the fabric of American political life.
00:24:22.000Decentralised power, as little state interventionism as possible.
00:24:26.000States run in accordance with the democratic will of the people within that state or boroughs within that state.
00:24:32.000Make democracy as close to the people affected by it as possible.
00:24:35.000That is the solution and I think that that's what's being resisted here.
00:24:38.000And I actually think that what Trump is doing, Trump is a wrecking ball for the old order and they don't want to change because they're corrupt.
00:25:00.000I promise it will make you clearer of mind and healthier of body.
00:25:03.000And it will free us to begin to call our politicians by those vile names that actually fit.
00:25:07.000So I think what Martin Goury has offered us there is an assessment that is reasonable.
00:25:10.000He's clearly a discerning person and elsewhere has written that what the real problem is is that our models of governance, our models of media, our models of political funding, our models of censorship are now inept and inadequate for the way that technology has changed the world, specifically the internet.
00:25:25.000And the ability for us all to instantaneously communicate.
00:25:27.000I think independent media is a great thing.
00:25:29.000I think it's changed the political landscape.
00:25:31.000There's no question that a certain type of populism has re-emerged, but we're not at the end of the road.
00:25:36.000New things might emerge, and I hope what those new things might be are decentralised social movements closer to the type of tribalism, and I don't mean tribalism as in oppositionalism, I mean local government, localisation, that we evolved with for many, many thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even longer, of years, And now people are trying to corral us together in groups of 300 million or 1.5 billion or 60 million and expecting us to have the same culture, the same ideas and censuring us according to their own whims that seem to be more about preserving their own power rather than, as they continually claim, protecting the vulnerable.
00:26:09.000And of course populist nationalist figures are cropping up all over the world because deep down inside us we don't trust the government anymore.