Is Elon Musk really an enemy of the state? Is he really at odds with establishment interests? And is that why there are all these governmental and corporate takedowns against him? Or do his interests ultimately align with those of establishment interests when it comes to things like transhumanism and artificial intelligence? In this episode, Russell Brand and Matt Taibbi discuss these questions and much more, including the release of the Musk's leaked Twitter files, and how corporate power has now become so insidious and entrenched that governments are little more than shallow marionettes. Plus, Russell and Matt discuss the China protests and how the mainstream media have been complicit in the suppression of them, and why it s so important to remember the events of just a couple of months ago, in order to be able to move forward with the present and move beyond them in the future. Stay tuned to the Stay Free with Russell Brand show on the new environment in which we can freely discuss the subjects that matter most, and in particular, Elon Musk and the Tesla CEO's takeover of the Tesla electric car company. Stay Free, Stay Free! - Russell Brand Subscribe to Stay Free With Russell Brand on Podchaser and Matt Kennard on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your favourite podchips to get exclusive ad-free versions of the show wherever you listen to your favourite podcasts? You can also become a supporter of Stay Free by becoming a patron patron. or become a patron through Paypal.org/Stay Freebie. You get 10% off the entire service, plus a 20% discount when you sign up to stayfree with us, and get 20% off a new month when you shop through the offer starts at $10,000 or more than $50,000 gets you get a month of the service starts in two months, and we get a discount of $50 or more, and a year gets you re getting a complimentary ad-only course starting at $25,000 and a month gets you a month and a VIP membership gets you access to 7 months get $5,000, and they get 7 months of VIP access to the show starts, plus they get VIP access gets 5GBRUN THEMSELVIP access gets 4GBR and VIP access, and 7 GBR gets 4 GBR is also gets VIP access and VIP gets 4MB gets 3MB gets $4MB gets a discount, they also gets $5MB and VIP pricing?
00:01:26.000A new environment in which we can freely discuss the subjects that matter most.
00:01:30.000Today in particular we're talking about Elon Musk, his Twitter takeover and the release of the Twitter files in conjunction with Matt Taibbi, friend of the show.
00:01:53.000Or do Musk's interests ultimately align with establishment interests when it comes to things like transhumanism?
00:02:00.000Also later in the show, I'm going to be talking to Matt Kennard.
00:02:01.000He's like me, an investigative journalist.
00:02:03.000He just investigates things, then he journals about them.
00:02:05.000He's going to be talking about and describing how corporate power has now become so insidious and entrenched that, broadly speaking, governments are little more than shallow marionettes.
00:02:17.000I'm going to give examples of what are called corporate zones, where literal corporations run entire territories.
00:02:28.000We're going to be talking about the hypocrisy around the reporting of the protests in China and, in particular, the induced amnesia.
00:02:34.000We're invited to forget the events of just a couple of months ago.
00:02:39.000But, the good news is, Armageddon appears to have been averted right on the precipice of a nuclear apocalypse because Putin, as many people predicted, has shat himself.
00:02:50.000Although, sadly, that appears to be just literally.
00:02:53.000That's the kind of journalism, that's schoolyard reporting, I'd call that, Gareth.
00:02:58.000Putin fell down the stairs, soiled himself.
00:03:36.000Yeah, you think sometimes that we've become incredibly sophisticated.
00:03:39.000You look at the kind of propaganda that existed in the Second World War and it was all like, oh, Hitler's only got one ball.
00:03:45.000But here we are, nearly a century later.
00:03:48.000Putin, he shat himself on his one ball.
00:03:51.000It's like, Nothing's really changed at all, except this is something I've been, I've been thinking about this a lot lately, say from the medieval period to let's call it the late renaissance girl, don't pin me down, I'm not a historian, like in that 500 year or 400 year period the amount of written documentation
00:04:10.000that would have been on, I don't know, parchment and in the historical libraries of the world, would now be produced in half an hour of online activity.
00:04:18.000There is such a deluge of information available.
00:04:21.000Things are moving so quickly that I believe it contributes to this sense that we're not connected to anything real.
00:04:27.000And this enables people, I think, to move beyond, without accountability, the events of just a month ago, with the protests in China being an obvious example.
00:04:38.000The mainstream and legacy media can literally laud the protesters.
00:04:42.000Look at them bravely standing up to the transgressive and totalitarian state.
00:04:48.000And you're sort of invited to forget what's happening.
00:04:50.000This story around Musk and the release of the Twitter files and what it pertains to, in particular regarding electoral manipulation, is another example of how we're being asked to forget events of just a couple of months ago.
00:05:05.000It's the state leaders as well, themselves.
00:05:07.000I mean, we know that, like, Trudeau and Sunak have come out this week and have said, you know, it's authoritarianism, it's totalitarianism, this is not something that we believe in and we stand with protesters.
00:05:20.000I don't literally stand with protesters though, do you Trudeau?
00:05:22.000Because when they protest in Ottawa, you stand in opposition to them, sometimes evoking emergency powers for the first time since the Second World War in order to shut down what many people regarded as legitimate and necessary protests.
00:05:36.000And Rishi Sunak, he's the Prime Minister in our country at the moment, probably got another 20 minutes, half hour.
00:05:41.000He has ushered through a bill that makes protesting even more difficult and less likely to take place, gives the police powers to arrest you on suspicion rather than evidence of wrongdoing.
00:05:52.000They can tag you up, bag you up, restrict your internet access.
00:05:56.000So totalitarianism, I suppose, comes in many forms is what we're saying.
00:06:02.000A little bit later we'll be talking about that.
00:06:04.000But We're going to focus first of all on the Twitter files.
00:06:07.000Matt Taibbi, who comes on this show sometimes and who I like a lot and tormented a lot last time he came on here.
00:06:12.000He was meant to come on today, wasn't he?
00:06:14.000But do you think that he's been... I think there's probably a contract with Musk at the moment that means that maybe he can't go on and do interviews at the moment.
00:06:23.000This is what I'm asking you, you lot watching now, to let us know in the chat.
00:06:27.000Do you think that what's happening at Twitter right now is a kind of a propaganda campaign to distract attention away from the internal and financial troubles within Twitter?
00:06:38.000Do you think these are legitimate and valuable releases of information?
00:06:42.000Because it's hard to say her name, the press secretary of the White House, because it sounds too French.
00:06:48.000Is it Jean-Pierre or is it Jean-Pierre?
00:06:51.000If your surname is Pierre, it's difficult to know if the word in front of it is going to be Jean or not, isn't it?
00:06:59.000In America, it's this lady's name, who's the White House press secretary.
00:07:04.000When she was talking about these Twitter case file revelations, and in particular, the revelations around Hunter Biden, they've gone from considering this information so sensitive and deplorable that it had to be censored at all costs.
00:07:16.000There's now evidence of the amount of infiltration, control and manipulation that went into controlling that information.
00:07:23.000They're sort of saying, oh, it's old news.
00:07:37.000So, look, we see this as an interesting or a coincidence, if I may, that he would so haphazardly, Twitter would so haphazardly push this distraction.
00:07:51.000That is a full of old news, if you think about it.
00:07:57.000Not old news, because when it was news, it was repressed and called fake news.
00:08:02.000Yeah, do you think that's their version of fake news?
00:08:08.000It's never allowed to be the thing that it's meant to be.
00:08:11.000And also the calling out of tactics such as distraction when that is straight out of the playbook of the mainstream and the alliance that exists between the mainstream media and the government seems a little disingenuous.
00:08:25.000So we know the FBI, this is news this week, the FBI warned Twitter during weekly meetings before the 2020 election to expect hack and leak operations by state actors involving Hunter Biden.
00:08:36.000So we know that they were warning members of Twitter.
00:08:38.000And we also know from Alan McLeod, who we've had on the show before, that Twitter has hired a host of former FBI agents to work in fields of security trust.
00:09:11.000When Biden was campaigning in Iowa and was confronted about Hunter Biden's business interests, he sort of In a way, I've never seen I've never seen this clip before of Joe Biden and he was certainly got some vim and vitality about him here.
00:09:28.000Look at how vehemently these business interests are denied, which we now concretely know are legitimate and the allegation at least is legitimate.
00:09:39.000The big guy got a bit angry, didn't he?
00:10:41.000He often takes things into physical territory, doesn't he?
00:10:44.000With that fella on the golf course that was inconveniently Russian.
00:10:48.000He wanted to measure his biceps and the other fella's calves and all sorts of extraordinary comparisons were made.
00:10:56.000There was a point where he was willing to get involved in a push-up competition to prove it, to prove our little Ukrainian business interest Hunter Biden had.
00:11:07.000Now we just recognize that that's completely true.
00:11:09.000And I suppose from our perspective, remember the context of this conversation is, is Elon Musk a unique actor on the global stage?
00:11:18.000Is he genuinely representing anti-establishment interest or is he as a result of his
00:11:24.000broad range of business relationships i.e.
00:11:28.000Tesla and SpaceX ultimately another figure with such strong establishment ties that he
00:11:34.000can't legitimately and really be an anti-establishment voice. I mean when you think
00:11:38.000about him, would you compare not only Musk as a figure but also to Trump not only in the sense
00:11:49.000of his rhetoric and his sort of peculiar appeal but also in the way that he's roused such ire.
00:11:57.000When perhaps, ultimately, he can be regarded as someone that operates within a framework that's essentially, ultimately, well within the remit of conventional state and corporate interests.
00:12:12.000Yeah, so when we're talking about a distraction tactic, you know, it might be not for the reasons that, like, Jean-Pierre is talking about.
00:12:18.000You know, it might be not to kind of deflect away from the things that are going on with Twitter with him doing these firings and things.
00:12:24.000What she's talking about with hate speech, it might be more to do with potentially ties to the government.
00:12:29.000So Tesla and SpaceX have received more than $7 billion in government contracts alone, billions more in tax breaks, loans and other subsidies.
00:12:36.000In recent years Tesla has sold at least $6 billion worth of government-backed electric vehicle credits.
00:12:43.000These sales of twice in recent years made the difference between the company posting a profit instead of a loss.
00:12:48.000So these like government, this money from the government, it's extremely important to Tesla.
00:12:52.000In April, Musk was culminating a $300 million military contract to launch a classified American spy satellite.
00:12:58.000SpaceX is doing billions of dollars business with NASA.
00:13:02.000So these ties with government are very, very real.
00:13:05.000Also, you know, when we're talking about Twitter being a free speech platform, the stuff with Kanye is very interesting at the moment, isn't it?
00:13:12.000You know, Kanye originally, before Musk, Kanye was booted off from Twitter for anti-Semitic comments.
00:13:18.000Now he's been booted off for similar-ish comments.
00:13:22.000Whatever you kind of think about those comments, you could say, how big a difference is that?
00:13:26.000Ultimately, they're being dealt with in the same way.
00:13:29.000So in spite of the significant amount of noise and conflagration, perhaps things are ultimately being contained within a relatively limited space.
00:13:42.000Is it true that Macron and Elon Musk had a meeting?
00:13:45.000Is it true that Elon Musk met with Tim Cook?
00:13:47.000And if you have those kind of relationships, how much of a radical outsider are you ultimately?
00:13:54.000Yeah, so we know that Macron tweeted Musk online and talked about Twitter signing up to the Children Online Protection Laboratory.
00:14:02.000Sounds quite weird, but essentially is like a censorship tool.
00:14:06.000It's a state censorship tool to apparently make, remove harmful content on the Internet.
00:14:12.000But as we all know, when the state gets involved in removing content from the Internet, essentially censorship We've got to debate how much control they should be allowed in those kind of areas.
00:14:22.000And Moss kind of, absolument, he replied to Macron over Twitter.
00:14:31.000So, you know, we know that they've met.
00:14:34.000He also met Tim Cook recently and got showed around Apple HQ.
00:14:37.000So we know that there's a kind of relationship there and Twitter won't remove They were moved from the App Store like it was kind of rumored a few weeks ago.
00:14:44.000So we know that there are relationships.
00:14:46.000We know that Musk has relationships with the government in terms of his contracts.
00:14:51.000He's got a relationship with Tim Cook.
00:14:53.000And as we've also talked about, there are things that he's developing at the moment.
00:14:57.000For example, his Neuralink, which is essentially like chips inside of brains, that are a million miles away from some of the things we've heard at the WEF.
00:15:06.000In his way, he is, it seems at least, a technological visionary that envisages a reality beyond terrestrial life, that the human species may translocate to Mars, that technology is ultimately the solution to our problem.
00:15:23.000I see things a little differently than that, that there are numerous at-depth spiritual problems that need to be resolved here on Earth before we start rocketing off to other literal planets.
00:15:38.000His agenda around Neuralink You know, which is, I guess, one of the things for which he's most well known and something that seems like it's deeply important to him.
00:15:49.000That's curiously in alignment with the interest and agenda even of the WEF.
00:15:55.000And you wouldn't think of Musk as being like a globalist in that sense, particularly someone that's, as we've said before, They're a recipient of so much ire and condemnation so much so many overt attempts to it seems to control and manipulate what he's doing and condemn it so much again he's one of those figures who's getting so much condemnation in conventional media spaces it's odd to note that in some ways his agenda is comparable to uh you know Klaus Schwab who's like the transhuman agenda is super
00:16:25.000Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, if you're a fan of Musk, and again, all of this isn't to say that, like, we're taking a side of either Musk or the government.
00:16:32.000At the end of the day, what the government are saying is he's using this as distraction to deflect away from stuff that's going on at Twitter, and it's not relevant news.
00:16:44.000The fact that there are FBI agents inside of, on CIA agents instead of big tech, and this collusion between government and big tech exists, is very very relevant to what's going on.
00:16:55.000But at the same time, as a fan, if you're a fan of Elon Musk, you can't separate, if you're saying what the WEF and Klaus Schwab are talking about with chips inside people's brains, are completely different from what Elon Musk is talking about with chips inside people's brains, that they are the same thing.
00:17:12.000Whether or not there's any connection or not, they are talking about the same thing and there you have to be able to kind of see that there's, I don't know, that's not irrelevant, is it?
00:17:21.000I can't see that human redemption lies in that direction, that the solution is for us to become technologized I keep trying to invent that word, don't I?
00:17:32.000It seems like the more immersive technology becomes, the more materialised our reality becomes, the more it becomes based on intelligence and data, the more we become surveilled and managed and manipulated.
00:17:46.000It's difficult to envisage a future where ordinary people have access to this kind of technology, even though, like, initially, when I hear Elon Musk talk about it, like he's saying, that it's going to present solutions for people with visual impairment, physical impairment.
00:18:01.000Loads of applications that could be incredible.
00:18:04.000It's difficult to be optimistic when you know that 1,500 animals have died.
00:18:08.000I mean, God, I guess if you're pursuing a technological utopia where people live on Mars and we're all tuned into some sort of literal matrix, then what's 1,500 fucking monkeys?
00:18:19.000But when you see this poor little fella listlessly playing ping pong with his own mind for a banana milkshake, it's difficult to think that this is the solution to humankind's problems.
00:19:16.000We resolve a lot of problems with a simply play ping pong while drinking banana milkshake.
00:19:21.000Again, to sort of reiterate the potential alignment between the apparently radical Musk, who we're still very hopeful of getting on our show, and we're certainly not condemning him as a visionary, an entrepreneur, a brilliant man, a radical thinker, a person who seems to find solutions for numerous problems.
00:19:36.000I don't want to find myself on the same side as the mainstream media in just reflexively condemning this person.
00:19:42.000I certainly don't think him as a billionaire owning a social media site is any different than any of the other billionaires that own social media sites.
00:19:49.000I reckon it's really interesting that he's releasing information that's detrimental to the Democrat government.
00:19:53.000But as you know, We're not like a pro-Republican or right-wing organisation, neither a left-wing one, and begin to think those terms are absolutely outdated, outmoded and irrelevant, and certainly won't play a meaningful part in any planetary solutions that we find here on this planet, because I don't have the skill set to envisage a solution on another planet.
00:20:10.000I'm struggling to cope with what trousers to wear, frankly, if you see the ones I'm in.
00:20:14.000But it's interesting to see that Musk's apparently radical and alternative ideas align so neatly with your friend and mine, Klaus Schwab's.
00:20:56.000The advances in medicines and communications is pretty self-evident.
00:21:01.000But the idea that it's an exclusive telos that ought to foreclose on spiritual evolution at a time when it seems that what's being lost is a sense of connection to who we really are, a connection to one another, a connection to nature.
00:21:17.000When you look at the annihilation and nihilism all around, the solution to this is not going to be put a chip in your brain, suck up some banana milkshake, brew a straw, we'll be right as rain in no time.
00:21:29.000Also, it's like, isn't the World Economic Forum, it's meant to be finding solutions, isn't it?
00:21:33.000Isn't that the whole premise of the World Economic Forum?
00:21:35.000Finding solutions, and yet, what he's using this forum to, like, go on about putting brains inside of people's heads, it just doesn't seem like... I think there's plenty of other things that we could be doing, isn't there?
00:21:45.000He's getting ahead of himself, dear old Klaus Schwab.
00:21:49.000And I can immediately tell you how the people react, or I can feel how the people react to your answers.
00:22:21.000He's turned him into... He's a nervous wreck, isn't he?
00:22:23.000Oh, I can't take this conversation anymore.
00:22:25.000I think he's thinking, well, it is imaginable, but we probably shouldn't do it, Klaus.
00:22:29.000We're meant to find business solutions here.
00:22:31.000Let's just focus on having a stooge run every country in the Western world and being able to bypass democratic process with a set of edicts that are generally introduced around a pandemic.
00:22:43.000You can imagine, well, you're going to be sort of transplanted into, you know, the internet, so to speak, to live forever in a digital realm.
00:22:52.000You know, you can imagine that, you know, you just in your biological incarnation are going to live to be some, you know, very long age.
00:23:01.000We had before technology the idea that we could communicate with one another, perhaps through means that are difficult to discern and track materially.
00:23:10.000We had the idea of unity through Gaia, the idea that we live on one planet together.
00:23:15.000We had ideas that we might Connect with one another or even transcend our physical form through spiritual practice.
00:23:22.000Now all of these things are being rationalized and materialized and I don't think you can map what I believe are kind of spiritual notions onto a material model.
00:23:31.000The idea that you can become immortal by downloading your consciousness into a machine Whether or not it's plausible or not, technologically, of course, I'm not qualified to even postulate, but it certainly, I don't believe, is desirable, because part of the point of being alive is to recognize limitation, is to recognize that the self is, to a degree, a construct.
00:23:59.000If you can forego that realization by sustaining yourself as a perennial machine, An unending and eternal set of memories.
00:24:10.000You're sort of bypassing, I believe, one of the most fundamental ideas of what it is to be human, what it is to be spiritual, what it is to be alive.
00:24:21.000Now, in this state of amnesia, you may have forgotten that just a couple of years ago, people that protested about lockdowns were vilified, called anti-vaxxers, nutters, lunatics.
00:26:06.000Don't you remember, like literally a couple of months ago, that when we protested in Canada or Britain or the United States, we were condemned as lunatics, as anti-vaxxers, as fools and maniacs.
00:26:37.000Oh it seems almost like you just use these stories to advance a narrative that you're using to increase your ability to control the population regardless of what values might underscore Or underlie them?
00:26:51.000It seems we're living at a point where history is being immolated, ameliorated, entirely lost.
00:26:57.000Information is coming out so thick and fast we've got a collective amnesia.
00:27:02.000Just a couple of years ago we were all locked These figures such as Trudeau and Rishi Sunak, if you ask me, are the new faces of totalitarianism, masquerading as advanced, socially diverse, open and inclusive figures, when in truth and in fact, the authoritarianism that they demonstrate in their policies is more advanced than anything we've seen for 50, 60 years.
00:27:27.000And you know what I'm referring to back there.
00:27:29.000Let's have a look at this story in more detail.
00:27:31.000Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Tuesday that everyone in China should be allowed to protest and express themselves.
00:27:52.000Obviously everyone in China should be allowed to express themselves, should be allowed to share their perspectives and indeed protest.
00:28:02.000Do you think, for a moment there, it crossed his mind, oh no, what about when I tried to introduce the Emergency Act so that I could arrest those truckers and shut down those protests, freezing bank accounts and shutting down donation sites?
00:28:12.000How are we supposed to live with this hypocrisy?
00:28:15.000We're going to continue to ensure that China knows we'll stand up for human rights, we'll stand with people who are expressing themselves.
00:28:22.000Do you think that maybe they stand up for human rights and the ability for people to express themselves if there are no political consequences for them?
00:28:29.000Are you beginning to think that that's what this movement is?
00:28:32.000We stand up for rights as long as all you have to do is wear a badge or something.
00:28:36.000But if you have to change policies, if you have to interrupt the process, progress and agenda of powerful interests, we're not so interested.
00:28:44.000Is there a way we could just wear a badge?
00:28:47.000Anything beyond badges, they're not willing to do.
00:28:50.000Uh, we also need to make sure that China and places around the world are respecting journalists and their ability to do their job.
00:28:55.000Uh, we'll continue to make that very clear.
00:28:57.000You'll have seen in the mainstream press how much coverage there's been of Elon Musk's Twitter clear-out, for example.
00:29:03.000How plainly and explicitly they explain to you the Hunter Biden stuff.
00:29:06.000And, of course, the accountability of the media.
00:29:09.000We made so many mistakes during lockdown, we perhaps should have been a bit more circumspect We were too willing to not hold Pfizer to account.
00:29:15.000It's weird, isn't it, in this cost-of-living crisis, that energy companies are making billions.
00:29:19.000Weird that in a health crisis, pharmaceutical companies are making billions.
00:29:22.000It's almost like, what's a crisis for ordinary people is an opportunity for the most powerful interests in the world.
00:29:33.000Why are the mainstream media not writing them?
00:29:35.000Trudeau on Friday defended invoking emergency powers to end anti-government protests that paralysed the capital earlier this year, citing the threat of violence and lack of a credible plan by police.
00:29:46.000The threat of violence is another way of saying there could be violence, which is another way of saying There isn't any violence, which is another way of saying we're already in minority report.
00:31:06.000Yeah, it doesn't matter though, does it?
00:31:07.000Because if we say they're Nazis, that's the same as them being Nazis.
00:31:11.000It wasn't that they just wanted to be heard, they wanted to be obeyed, Trudeau told the Independent Public Commission looking into the government's use of the powers.
00:31:18.000I'm absolutely, absolutely serene and confident that I made the right choice in agreeing with the invocation.
00:31:24.000In attempting to sound like sort of a new age wise politician, he's actually sounding like a psychopath, because many people felt serene and confident while they committed some of the worst atrocities in living memory.
00:31:36.000A state of personal serenity doesn't mean you're doing the right thing.
00:31:40.000Sometimes it's uncomfortable to deal with people you disagree with, to get in a conversation and say, look I don't actually agree with anything you're saying, But given that this is a democracy and that that idea transcends any individual and our hunches and our serenity and feelings we might have in our bones and our waters, I'm going to have to deal with you.
00:32:00.000Otherwise, when this stuff happens in China, I won't be able to say, oh, look at the Chinese authoritarianism there and people bravely standing up to it.
00:32:06.000So I'd sound like the worst kind of hypocrite.
00:32:13.000From the intimidation and harassment of people for wearing masks to a very concerning story
00:32:21.000about folks disrupting the nearby homeless shelter What petty vilification of the truckers!
00:32:31.000Right, okay, so we're here because we don't want to lose our jobs as truckers primarily, but also let's stick it to that soup kitchen, man!
00:32:38.000Why have we got so many soup kitchens?
00:32:40.000Oh, because we impoverished everybody by closing down major industries, shaming people, insisting they had to have vaccines otherwise they'd lose their jobs?
00:33:32.000It's not like proper legislation, law, order, all the institutions that have been established in Western civilization, which some people decry as patriarchy and some people celebrate as the proud foundations of a nation.
00:33:45.000But you can't just suddenly go, we've got indications and hunches and I felt not serene and that.
00:33:56.000It often does this when I need to evoke emergency powers.
00:33:59.000Trudeau cited the threat of serious violence and local police not having a credible plan to restore order as reasons that prompted him to invoke the Emergencies Act, which has not been used in its current form since it was created in the 1980s.
00:34:11.000Civil liberties advocates argued police could have cleared the blockades using existing powers.
00:34:16.000Under Mr. Trudeau's decree, police have the authority to push back crowds on foot or with horses, use pepper spray, enter trucks and other vehicles by whatever means necessary, and make arrests en masse.
00:34:26.000Thank God though, because there was an indication that there could or might be some hateful rhetoric.
00:34:32.000Also, a whole tin of soup was nearly spilled when a truck parked nearby.
00:34:36.000Of course you'll be aware of the blossoming neoliberalist bromance between our leader in the UK, Rishi Sunak, and Trudeau over there.
00:34:44.000All of these Davos graduates come together to celebrate in how kind and sharing and inclusive they are, particularly when imposing authoritarianism and condemning the authoritarianism of other nations who they openly emulate.
00:34:57.000Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the so-called Golden Era of relations with China was over, warning that Beijing's move toward even greater authoritarianism posed a systemic challenge to Britain's values and interests.
00:35:12.000Dunno, depends what's convenient that day.
00:35:14.000Let's be clear, the so-called Golden Era is over.
00:35:17.000That's literally the first time I've ever heard of that golden era, have you?
00:35:20.000I'm really enjoying this golden era with China, ain't you?
00:35:23.000When we can't pay for our fuel, when we can't afford food, I just bask in the golden light of the relationship with China.
00:35:30.000We recognise China poses a systemic challenge to our values and interests, a challenge that grows more acute as it moves towards even greater authoritarianism, Sunak said in his speech at the Lord Mayor's Banquet in Lombard.
00:35:46.000Here at the Lord Mayor's banquet we absolutely deplore inequality and elites lording it over an oppressed class the way we did a couple of years ago plainly openly where everyone could see it.
00:36:00.000Here at this lovely banquet We believe that everyone should have rights and access to food.
00:37:06.000A spokesperson for China's embassy in London said the UK was in no position to pass judgment on China's COVID policy or other internal affairs.
00:37:15.000Brilliant efficiency of language from China.
00:37:17.000What have you got to say about our condemnation?
00:37:19.000Doesn't seem really that it's any of your business or that you're any better.
00:37:25.000Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak pledged that police will have whatever powers were required to crack down on disruptive protests.
00:37:53.000This afternoon I sat down with all the police chiefs to make it clear that they have my full support in acting decisively to clamp down on illegal protests.
00:38:18.000It is completely unacceptable Yeah, it's the ordinary members of the public.
00:38:28.000Like, when I was running a hedge fund, me and the old ordinary members of the public were saying, like, right, this Moderna thing that we're starting is going to profit hugely over the next couple of years.
00:38:36.000How are we going to benefit most of all ordinary members of the public?
00:38:40.000Or when I got fined during lockdown for being part of those parties.
00:38:55.000My view is that those who break the law should feel the full force of it, and that's what I'm determined to deliver.
00:39:01.000It gets to a point where people like Justin Trudeau and Rishi Sunak should simply put themselves in prison and shut up, and that would have made the world a better and more effective place in alignment with the principles that they're continually espousing.
00:39:12.000We are currently giving the police new powers so that they can clamp down on these illegal protests.
00:39:25.000They will have my full support in acting decisively and rapidly to end the misery and the disruption that's being caused to ordinary families up and down the country who are trying just to go about their day-to-day lives.
00:39:38.000The misery and disruption is not as a result of illegal protests.
00:39:42.000The misery and disruption is as a result of a lack of protests against the cost of living crisis, the corruption in government, the inability to clamp down and control, the profiteering from globalist entities such as Big Pharma, Big Tech, protests against a media that will not report the truth to ordinary people.
00:40:01.000Can you not see that what we're witnessing now is a globalist agenda being asserted via national institutions such as the police force without democratic due process?
00:40:11.000And I've said to the police, but whatever they need from government, they will have in terms of new powers.
00:40:15.000We're already giving them some, and I want to back them to use them.
00:40:18.000Well, if you weren't terrified before, you should be terrified now.
00:40:20.000And allow that terror to spur you into action and activism.
00:40:24.000Allow it to push you beyond any sense of division between your fellow citizens.
00:40:31.000Put the culture war to one side because there is a real war taking place.
00:40:35.000In October, a last-minute amendment to the Public Order Bill lets Home Secretary Suella Braverman apply for injunctions against anyone she deems likely to carry out protests.
00:40:44.000So during that time of chaos in British politics, where there was a new Prime Minister about every half hour, they put through a bill going, oh, do you mind if the police arrest people for looking funny?
00:40:53.000We're too busy watching the soap opera.
00:40:55.000The proposal would give police the power to arrest anyone they suspect to be breaching such an injunction.
00:41:00.000According to Liberty, the amendment will effectively give the Home Secretary the power to clamp down on protests as and when the government chooses.
00:41:06.000Oh, so next time there's a lockdown and you protest and they don't lord it like they do foreign protests, they will be able to arrest you there and then on the spot just on the basis of suspicion.
00:41:17.000Other measures proposed in the bill include giving courts the power to issue Serious Disruption Prevention Orders, SDPOs, which can ban individuals from attending protests.
00:41:25.000Amnesty International said the proposed law would go further than similar legislation in Russia by giving courts the power to issue them without conviction.
00:41:34.000In this country, that we used to do stuff like that to suspected Irish terrorists, it led to the false imprisonment of numerous people and it was one of the things we look back as a kind of dark ages policy.
00:41:43.000Internment without conviction or without trial.
00:41:46.000It's being reintroduced with politicians like, well obviously we just want to help everyone, we just want to be all kind and cosy.
00:41:53.000Worse than Russia, which we all know is the worst country that there's ever been.
00:41:56.000The range of conditions that can be imposed on individuals under the orders include 24-7 GPS monitoring and restricted internet usage.
00:42:03.000Already we're moving into the era of social credit scoring and totalitarian control.
00:42:08.000Police would be given powers to stop and search people or vehicles, even if they have no reasonable grounds to do so, if a senior officer believes protest offences are likely to take place in an area.
00:42:23.000Protest laws are being introduced in countries across the West in order to prevent us ever protesting again, even though they applauded in China, yet we're supposed to forget we took on a Chinese model of authoritarianism to introduce and implement the lockdowns that we've only just gone through.
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00:43:56.000Hello, look, you've just seen what we think of the hypocrisy that's going on in the reporting on the Chinese protests.
00:44:04.000You've heard what I believe when it comes to WEF stooges like Sunak and Trudeau.
00:44:10.000I know that there's more to them than stooges.
00:44:12.000I mean, in a sense, I mean that they have a particular mindset and I don't know, code that seems to have been inculcated somewhere along the way by these globalists.
00:44:30.000Just because we're on Rumble, you think you can get away with that madness?
00:44:34.000With us now is our first guest in our new studio space.
00:44:38.000Matt Kennard is a journalist and author, founder of Declassified UK, and we now know subject of GCHQ investigations because of the amount of clarity and truth.
00:44:49.000Matt, thanks for joining us on the show.
00:44:52.000Your book, How Corporations Overthrew Democracy, is coming out next year and I suppose the title suggests, mate, that you're talking about how the influence of corporations through lobbying and the funding of the political process has reached the sort of saturation point.
00:45:06.000Can you give us some good examples of that?
00:45:08.000Well, I mean, it's a bigger kind of time period that I look at.
00:45:12.000We basically go back to the 1950s when Decolonization was happening and empires were losing their formal control of poor countries and corporations and private capital were very concerned about this.
00:45:25.000How do we maintain control when we haven't got formal garrisons of troops to kind of, I don't know, take out a leader that nationalizes something?
00:45:32.000And they erected all sorts of systems whereby they could make sure that their power and their interests were protected.
00:45:40.000One of them that the book starts with is this shadow legal system, I don't know if you've ever heard of it, called Investor State Dispute Settlement, ISDS.
00:45:48.000Make it sound boring so people don't...
00:45:51.000Who cares about something that's in the shadows and has got a long name like that?
00:45:54.000Exactly, but actually it's majorly important and it's a system that allows corporations to sue states all over the world who enact policies that they don't like.
00:46:27.000They wanted to have a new system in place when decolonisation happened whereby they could bypass local resistance, bypass local revolutionary movements, whatever it was, there was a lot of tumult in that period.
00:46:41.000I was just thinking, mate, that prior to the colonisation model or at the advent of certain aspects of British colonialism, there was already corporatism sort of baked in when it made through, like the East India Tea Company, the army went in to support their interests.
00:46:56.000So in a sense, is it we're seeing a return to a model that preceded national colonisation?
00:47:03.000Was corporatism in a sense the foundation of colonisation?
00:47:08.000It was, but it was much easier to enforce when you had a formal empire.
00:47:11.000Because, as I said, you could just take out leaders you didn't like.
00:47:44.000When you look at declassified documents and stuff, all the stuff you hear on the TV about
00:47:48.000the government is there to protect national security and we're protecting you.
00:47:53.000In fact, what they're talking about on the inside is how do we project corporate power and how do we protect big business interests globally?
00:48:01.000And in the UK, we have BAE Systems and BP, two examples.
00:48:06.000Large parts of the British state are set up to export their interests and to maintain their interests.
00:48:13.000Tax, for example, BAE Systems is an interesting one.
00:48:15.000There's a whole department So what, it was meant to be British Airways, right?
00:48:36.000And they've given, or sold, 17.6 billion at least since the war in Yemen.
00:48:41.000But anyway, I'll just finish, like, There's a large part of the Department for International Trade which is set up.
00:48:48.000The taxpayer's department is funded by the taxpayer, which is set up to promote BAE Systems' interests.
00:48:54.000So there's no differentiation between the state and the corporation on many of these issues.
00:49:00.000It's extraordinary to discover that in various ways we think that there is a kind of secularism, that there is a separation between these interests.
00:49:10.000But we've discovered now from the degree of infiltration in social media companies that CIA and FBI agenda can be met within apparently neutral or at least private social media sites.
00:49:21.000And you're saying that corporatism has had tendrils and tentacles into all manner of governmental agencies for, in fact, It's not a bug, it's a feature, it's part of the way the system is established.
00:49:33.000Yeah, it's like a Frankenstein effect because governments initially created corporations,
00:49:37.000chartered corporations, that's what they started as in the 17th century in England, where the
00:49:42.000government would need to build a bridge, for example, so they create a chartered company
00:49:46.000which would be dissolved at the end of building that bridge.
00:49:49.000But gradually they became more exotic, the structure, joint stockholder companies, so
00:49:54.000you could invest in companies and they would last longer than the project.
00:49:59.000And then, over the last, the thesis in the book is that since the Second World War, the
00:50:04.000corporation has completely eaten the state that created it.
00:50:07.000And in fact it's wrong to think of the state acting in our interest, we don't live in a
00:50:10.000democracy because, I mean, you see a lot of conspiracy theories these days.
00:50:17.000And I think a large part of the reason is people look at the politicians on TV and say, These aren't the people making the decisions.
00:50:24.000There's something happening off screen.
00:50:25.000So without a kind of analysis, which is based in the real world, you can easily say it's this person or it's some conspiracy theory.
00:50:33.000But in fact, what it is, is corporate power.
00:50:35.000Politicians are working for corporations.
00:50:37.000And you see that even in countries which have elected liberation leaders.
00:50:41.000For example, for the book, we went to El Salvador, which was the victim of a case from a mining company, a legal case, because it didn't give an environmental permit to a Canadian mining company.
00:51:13.000When we lost a civil war in El Salvador and Capital One, the US Empire One, we were integrated into the system.
00:51:21.000We signed bilateral investment treaties, we signed aid packs, we signed all these different things which mean 20 years later, we still can't move.
00:51:28.000So we want to make, we want to, I don't know, we want to nationalize the water company.
00:51:44.000But ultimately, this thing has mutated into some nefarious and untenable monster.
00:51:50.000If in a country like El Salvador, in that region, with its strong ties to socialism and revolutionary politics and radicalism and its deeply entrenched opposition to Northern American style corporatism, you can track examples like that, God alone knows what it must be like in companies where there are deep roots of corporatism.
00:52:09.000Mate, what kind of power are organisations like Amazon able to exert over American politics?
00:52:16.000And where do you see this dynamic playing out in big tech in countries like the United States and ours?
00:52:23.000I was thinking for a minute, say that you did have a Bernie Saunders style Democrat party or a Jeremy Corbyn style Labour party and you would have got nationalisation of utilities and railways and water and all that.
00:52:34.000They'd have shut that shit down double fast, wouldn't they?
00:52:36.000Like, you don't really get those kind of options explored.
00:52:39.000So, in countries where it's all stitched up and sewn up, like ours and the United States of America, where many of our adored viewers will be right now, what level of power have Amazon got, and how do they assert it, and do they need to resort to sort of like skullduggery and trickery, or is it legalized and systemized to such a degree that they can just do it, you know, legit?
00:52:59.000Yeah, it's systemised and it's very conscious, you know.
00:53:02.000As I say, they set this up in the 1950s globally, but in the US particularly in the 60s, they were freaking out because of the tumult that was happening in terms of the left worker movements, union movements, social movements, civil rights, feminism, all these different things.
00:53:20.000There was actual real panic in Washington.
00:53:22.000There was a thing called the Powell Memorandum, which was written by Lewis Powell, who became a Supreme Court judge, where he's basically just like, look, we're losing.
00:53:37.000So from the 60s onwards, they pumped huge amounts of money into think tanks like Heritage, Cato, Chamber of Commerce, you know, there was a real conscious effort to make, to wrest back control of the narrative, to wrest back control of society, and they won.
00:53:50.000And there's that phrase that like, The left won the cultural war of the 60s but lost the right one, the economic war, and I think there's some truth to that because they put tons of resources, that's domestically.
00:54:01.000In terms of these companies, social media companies are interesting ones because you mentioned Sanders and Corbyn.
00:54:07.000I don't think we could have had them in the way we did without Twitter and Facebook because They have democratised the media.
00:54:12.000They've taken power out of the hands of legacy media.
00:54:16.000Before that, it was the businessmen who controlled the printing presses and the newspapers.
00:54:22.000They had a complete hold on the mind of the population.
00:54:25.000Then you had social media allowed us to circumvent that and to get our stuff out without needing to be part of that.
00:54:33.000And that's why you see Corbyn and Sanders.
00:54:35.000Of course, The difficulty is then, we rely on them so much and they're owned by these oligarchs who can just pull the plug whenever they want.
00:54:43.000Plus they've found ways of infiltrating it and ultimately their interests will align because they ultimately will be beholden to the same groups of shareholders and submerged interests.
00:54:53.000Bloody Vanguard and BlackRock and all that gear.
00:54:55.000That'll start cropping up sooner or later won't it if you investigate long enough and evidently you have done investigations.
00:55:01.000I am myself I'm an investigative journalist, so we're going to have a lot in common when it comes to that.
00:55:07.000From your book, I know a few things you talk about in depth that I reckon our lot will be into, mate, are things like corporate zones.
00:55:13.000My understanding of that is there's literal territories that have been sort of lifed off by corporations.
00:56:10.000They were owned by corporations that you wouldn't know but they made within it products that everyone here wears like Gap t-shirts and Nike shoes and stuff like that and I went in and talked to workers actually who were trying to unionize within this Not in the zone?
00:56:26.000No, and they were fired. And it was really like kind of a wake-up call. It was like,
00:56:31.000damn, because if you read the papers and you read the World Bank documents, these are things
00:56:36.000they promote. You know, they say that this is, you'll get economic growth out of this.
00:56:49.000Then there are these internal geographic zones within nations that can ignore the law and set up their own things.
00:56:55.000And then when Nick Hayes came on here, he wrote this book about trespass.
00:56:58.000He explained to us that, you know, you might go on a lovely walk in a British countryside and look at all these green downs and valleys and that and marvel at its beauty and its connection to the history of this country.
00:57:08.000That bit, that's owned by this United Arab Emirates Corporation, it's registered offshore.
00:57:13.000This dude is English but he don't pay no tax and his business is registered offshore.
00:57:17.000So, in a sense, we're already living in that dystopia, in that corporatised world.
00:57:22.000Democracy now is, would you say, could you go so far as to say, Matt, That democracy is just like a performance and real power has already been corporatized and if you would agree with that, would you say that what passes as leftist politics now has become a kind of demonstrative charade that is somewhat deracinated from making real economic and political change and is exchanged instead for performative politics?
00:57:45.000I think it's definitely democracy is a hollow shell now and corporations run the game and a good way of seeing that, in terms of the left movement that you're talking about, is the obsession with identity politics, which corporations love.
00:58:00.000Because then we're not talking about nationalisations, we're not talking about class issues, we're not talking about the economy, we're all arguing about... I'm not saying that gay rights, trans issues aren't important, of course they are, but if you look at the discourse now, here and in the US, it's the proportion.
00:58:15.000We talk about these social issues all the time and I don't think that's a coincidence.
00:58:20.000I think that it suits certain rich people and rich corporations and the economic establishment very well that we argue about that because we don't talk about things like nationalisation.
00:58:28.000They've shepherded us into a little enclave.
00:58:31.000Of course, like, you know, we are transcendent of ordinary political boundaries here on this channel and supportive of the individual and collective rights of all groups.
00:58:38.000Racially, religiously, sexually, I feel like that's within individual liberty.
00:58:44.000And if you're a libertarian, for example, you should support the rights of people to express themselves sexually, you know, within the bounds of consent, however they want to.
00:58:51.000But I feel that Matt is making a very interesting and important point, that they're very happy that when we're sort of locked off into these oppositionist enclaves, because it stops us talking about where real power dwells.
00:59:01.000I chatted ages ago when I was much younger to Peter Tatchell, the famous gay rights activist, And he said that his personal experience stretched over 20 years.
00:59:08.000He said that when you're talking about civil rights stuff, and of course, as a gay man, he was super interested in that stuff and getting as much equality as possible for that community.
00:59:16.000He said he noticed that there was traction and there was progress, but he said when you move towards financial power and economic power, they shut that shit down fast.
00:59:38.000We're going to have to take control of ourselves in, aren't we?
00:59:41.000In government at the moment, it's exactly what's going on with Twitter.
00:59:43.000I mean, it suits everyone's interests that the government, that you've got press secretaries for Biden talking about what's going on with this hate rhetoric at Twitter, that Twitter's able to, all the media is able to talk about it.
00:59:53.000I think the amount of things that are going on under the surface whilst this is dominating the headlines and now onto social media as well.
01:00:01.000I also think you guys were talking about Elon Musk earlier.
01:00:04.000And raising the question of, is he a threat to the establishment?
01:00:08.000My take is he's a maverick in the sense that he's not part of the democratic establishment, which most of these social media oligarchs are.
01:00:17.000But he's not a threat to the establishment, to the real deep.
01:00:21.000establishment because he's part of it and and that whole system is the reason he he's where he is and a good a good litmus test I always think is people's position on Snowden and Assange who are two people who really took on deep-seated interests and what was Elon Musk this week was saying he thinks Snowden should be punished and he said I don't have an opinion on Assange now it's quite interesting that when it went when real people who are really taking on the powers that be He's asked their opinion on that.
01:00:50.000So my take is that he's a bit of a... He's definitely a maverick, but he's firmly within that system.
01:00:56.000He's a maverick within a realm where it's still framed economically in a way that's ultimately favourable.
01:01:02.000We even said stuff like this, and many of our audience will be outraged by this, from various polls, that even a figure like Trump, divisive though he was, rhetorical mastermind though he may be, Ultimately you can now look at this was the Obama administration, this was the Trump administration, this is the Biden administration.
01:01:20.000Do you notice an ascent for some particular economic interest?
01:01:24.000Did centralised power or deep state power ultimately get affected by any of those apparent fluctuations?
01:01:30.000So that means the system itself can sustain that kind of variation while we're all killing ourselves on late night TV about what a bastard he is or lording him again as a maverick.
01:01:40.000In the sort of right-wing spaces, ultimately the same interests stay the same.
01:01:44.000So we have to find new forms of alliance.
01:01:47.000This is what interests me, Matt, is finding ways that what you would regard as the traditional left and what is being now called the populist right, how we can come into alignment and create new alliances to challenge this establishment power.
01:02:00.000So we have to get beyond this oppositionism and constant condemnation of people on these cultural issues, progressivism versus traditionalism.
01:02:59.000If you're interested in the preservation of the system, the first thing you have to do is...
01:03:04.000ameliorate any possibility for real change and so sewing up the the parent two sides argument is uh in a necessity it might seem a bit tangential mate but when we were talking about zones just then i was thinking about the city of london and how hasn't the city of london always been its own little deal like it's got dragons at the gate and all sorts of things that get ike going like you know sort of and like the queen can't go there certainly not now god rest your eternal soul mom like you know like isn't it like its own little unique setup with different tax rules and the Our government, as we might call it, the British government, can't just go in there and go, right, you lot, bedtime.
01:03:36.000And I did a story actually last year about how it's got its own, completely own foreign policy as well.
01:03:50.000It's like stepping into some kind of mafia program.
01:03:53.000Everyone's got these funny names and they have funny suits.
01:03:56.000But he basically promotes what's called neoliberalism, like privatization, deregulation all around the world.
01:04:07.000With a foreign policy that we can't even get access to.
01:04:10.000I tried to get access to any of the documents related to his foreign policy and I couldn't because it's not public.
01:04:17.000Although they act in our name, it's not a public institution, it's a corporation.
01:04:22.000So they're outside the transparency laws and a large percentage of the tax havens around the world ...operated out of the City of London, so they're draining money from the developing world, draining money from the poor world.
01:04:37.000No wonder they all want to be Mayor of London.
01:04:55.000We deplore the authoritarianism in China.
01:04:58.000Now, for God's sake, give me another turkey leg!
01:05:01.000Listen, we're going to be talking more about that Lord Mayor gear in a minute in our after show thing on Stay Free AF.
01:05:08.000If you're a member of our community, which is easy enough to do, you can join us.
01:05:10.000I can see there's hundreds of people there right now watching us.
01:05:13.000Tomorrow, will you stay with us and have a bit of a chat?
01:05:15.000I'll tell you about this brilliant activism that I've been doing in the town where I'm from, supporting the Save Our Thameside campaign run by Sam and me.
01:05:22.000We want to save a library and theatre in Thurrock, the council I'm from.
01:05:25.000We've done away with 1.5 billion quid somehow in all sorts of nefarious, peculiar schemes.
01:05:31.000Allegedly, allegedly, because it might not be true that it's nefarious.
01:05:43.000Tomorrow on the show we've got Annie Mash on and we'll be talking about the vilification of nurses who are being dubbed allies of Putin as they take industrial action for, you know, better Working conditions.
01:05:56.000On the show on Friday we've got M.I.A.
01:05:58.000or Maya as like you call her when you're actually talking to her because you can't say like initials can you when you're talking to a person.
01:06:05.000In fact I think people shouldn't be allowed to do that.
01:06:07.000Like you know that actor that's called something like T... he's in that drumming film he's called something like... well look T.S.