Russell Brand and Gareth Roy Sheinfeld are joined by Harvard Professor of Government and Press at Harvard University, Douglas Rushkoff, to discuss the use of the mainstream media to delegitimise Donald Trump and his supporters. They also discuss how the pharmaceutical industry benefits from the current pandemic of vaccines and other anti-vaccine propaganda, and why we should all be waking up to the fact that we are living in a world where vaccines are being pumped into our bodies by the pharmaceutical companies and the government, and how we should be fighting back against them. This episode is brought to you Live on Rumble, where you can only watch the whole show on Rumble. If you want to watch the entire show, you have to watch it live on Rumble - you can't watch it on other platforms. We're not mad, we're not lunatics, we don't want any strikes, we just want to have a good chat about what's going on in the world and what's happening in it. In this episode of Awakening Wonders, you're going to see the future, and you're gonna want to be a part of it. In this video, you'll get to meet the future. You're gonna see The Future, and in this video you'll see The Awakening Wonders. - Welcome back to Awakening Wonders! - The Awakening Wonders! - Yours Truly, Russell Brand & Gareth R. R. Sheinfeld (featuring: Russell Brand and the crew at R. Brand, R. J. Roy, and the team at The Root's "Awakening wonders". The Awakening Wonderings Podcast, hosted by R.J. He's a podcast that's all about the future and the people who are waking up the world to a better, brighter, smarter, more awake, more woke and more woke, more aware, more informed and more awake than ever before. . Join us in the Awakening Wonders? and the Awakening Woke Wonders Podcast, is a new podcast that will give you the answers to the questions you've been waiting for. , and the answers you've all been asking for, so you can have a better understanding of what it means and how to live a better world, and more freedom and a better life, and a more woke world. in the first episode of Awakenings Wonders, and so much more. Welcome to Awakening Wonders, awakening wonders.
00:01:03.000In this video, you're going to see the future.
00:01:15.000Hey, Awakening Wonders, thanks for watching.
00:01:17.000Stay free with me, Russell Brand, and my on-screen assistant, Mr. Gareth Roy.
00:01:23.000If you want to watch the whole show, you can only watch it on Rumble, of course, because some of the stuff we say, I must confess, can be a little edgy on the free speech front.
00:01:33.000Not because we're kowtowing to right-wing conspiracy theorists, not because we See, hate speech is some divine right, but because we believe that together the people of the world can confront centralised corrupt authority and create a better world together.
00:01:48.000Let us know what you think in the comments and the chat because we're doing this live right now for you.
00:02:24.000If you care about people being killed illegally in wars, then yes, but you know what the world's like, and you know how we are deluged with propaganda to such a degree that it's almost impossible to remain connected to truth, because they want you numb.
00:02:38.000They want you in the role of a solely a consumer and a subject, not an awakened citizen that you are becoming right now before our very eyes, because we're doing it together as equals.
00:03:13.000I may sound like him, but Bill and Ted are actually an adventure.
00:03:16.000I actually can't access the depth that... You know, like, Matt Taibbi's voice is... You know that voice when you're a kid and maybe you're a little bit high, and you go, uh... On suites, you mean, because we're on YouTube.
00:03:27.000Oh, yeah, that sort of high on a simple saccharine.
00:03:42.000Those conversations with Matt Tobey, Glenn Greenwald, Barry Weiss, Cornel West, they're conversations that make me think, actually, no, we're right!
00:03:50.000You know, because sometimes I think, oh no, have we gone mad?
00:05:22.000Well, no, it's just an interesting thing that's going on at the moment.
00:05:24.000There's kind of a lot of talk about the cashless society that we're heading towards, and Western governments are increasingly looking at now something that we did a story about going on in China, the digital yuan, that is, they're contemplating Uh, becoming expiring.
00:05:39.000So basically, people have to spend money at a certain point.
00:05:41.000So in this situation, and I'm not going to pretend I really fully understand it, but the European Central Bank is considering using negative interest rates, a tool that erodes the value of money.
00:05:51.000So basically, if they bring it down by 10%, the value of what you have is worth 10% less, encouraging you to then spend it.
00:06:06.000Yeah, and I suppose when we're talking at a time when Trump supporters are saying, let's do a run on the banks, because at this point... We won't be able to do a run on the banks.
00:06:12.000If you're not in charge of your own money, then it'll be more like Canada.
00:06:15.000It'll be... Is that what we want for the world?
00:07:52.000To believe that China and Russia don't have their own multipolar global objectives, that they don't have their own agenda, their own forms of imperialism, their own forms of power.
00:08:02.000Whatever's going on between Russia and Ukraine, it certainly isn't benefiting Ukrainian people much.
00:08:06.000Whatever's going on in Taiwan, Taiwanese people are better sick and tired of it.
00:08:11.000The fact is though, from the get-go, our propaganda, with all its sideways head slickness, It's just as culpable as the type of propaganda you would receive in those nations.
00:08:21.000I'm speculating because I've not been to either of them, though.
00:09:47.000Look at the definition of the word serenade.
00:09:49.000A piece of music sung or played in open air, typically by a man at night under the window of his beloved.
00:09:55.000Is that what you're saying is going on?
00:09:58.000Well, they're saying it's a peace treaty.
00:10:00.000If it is indeed a peace treaty, and I'm saying that it isn't one, then why exactly is Putin underneath Xi's balcony with a rose clenched between his teeth, singing, I love you, baby, up there at President Xi?
00:10:18.000Vladimir Putin then welcoming his, quote, dear friend of the Kremlin.
00:10:21.000There can be... I mean, look, I'm sure that this is a politically expedient relationship in order to confront American hegemony and the obvious unipolar project of globalists, whether that's in the form of unelected bodies like the IMF and WHO or ongoing American imperialism acting at the behest of corporatism, not on behalf of you, the American people.
00:10:43.000The very people we need to ally with right now, the very people that we need to participate in awakening alongside, recognising our own flaws and recognising that we can create better principles together.
00:10:53.000There isn't just one form of reality that ought to be imposed.
00:10:58.000And that's what you notice when you look at the language in this ordinary, banal news reporting, is that there are a set of assumptions that come with it.
00:11:06.000For example, in a minute, towards the end, they talk about the global balance of power.
00:11:11.000Even there, the assumption is that power belongs in a certain place.
00:11:14.000It reminds me of a moment in the life of Gandhi, from the film Gandhi, because I'm not pretending that I was in a university studying Gandhi's life.
00:11:22.000But there's a bit where the Viceroy of India, or whatever, goes to Gandhi.
00:12:02.000You do have to take kind of opinion out of it, and although it doesn't look on the surface like this is opinion, there are subtle elements of this which is guiding you in a certain direction.
00:12:41.000They were talking about the, it's not like a bagatelle to discuss solving a geopolitical conflict that involves resources, NATO impingement, Russian imperialism, the complexity of Ukrainian politics and some of its Influences, shall we call it.
00:12:59.000What are they meant to do it in like 25 seconds?
00:13:02.000They help Russia in this war in Ukraine.
00:13:05.000The White House tonight pressed... So that was speculation of whether or not China are going to help Russia in this war.
00:13:12.000We don't know, because the stated objective of China at this point, for all we know, and obviously you've already stated the caveats there, was to broker a peace deal.
00:13:21.000And on the news they're saying, are China going to help Russia?
00:13:26.000Part of the tyranny is the assumption that everything said by the centralised authority that coalesces around US corporate power is said in good faith and should be taken in the most favourable terms, and everything they say should be taken in the most negative terms.
00:13:42.000Oh, well, they're saying it's a piece still, but they're probably going to team up.
00:13:46.000For all I know it, one of them will clutch me by my chin and rotate my head 45 degrees this way.
00:16:01.000Today, President Xi arrived in Russia round the back of an old chip shop.
00:16:06.000He walked across broken glass and dog shit, where for behind some bins and trash cans for 25 seconds, the future of humanity was discussed while washing down a cup of cold spit.
00:16:19.000That wouldn't be a better way of presenting the story.
00:16:23.000And what we have to be aware of is this is propaganda, particularly if you look at,
00:16:27.000let's have a look at Bertrand Russell's speculation on propaganda first,
00:16:30.000and then indeed Chomsky's, before we flip over to being exclusively on Rumble,
00:16:34.000showing you Matt Taibbi's revelations around censorship, another aspect of state control,
00:16:39.000propaganda around the information you do receive, censorship of information they don't want you to have,
00:17:36.000Yeah absolutely and it's really interesting because we've got Thomas Paterson, Professor Thomas Paterson coming on later and one of the quotes I literally read before we came on air was, reporters these days give equal weight to facts and biased opinions.
00:18:03.000Note that we are living in a time of perpetual crisis.
00:18:05.000We lurch from one to another, and perhaps that's been happening since 9-11.
00:18:08.000Let me know in the chat in the comments if you think we live in this state of perpetual anxiety and fear and crisis, and these crises are used to generate regulations and opportunities for profit that they wouldn't otherwise get.
00:18:23.000Nobody in power, check this, has any intention of doing anything about these social and economic problems.
00:18:28.000If you look at the domestic programs of the administrations of the past 10 years, I include here the democratic opposition, there's really no serious proposal about what to do about the severe problems of health, Education, homelessness, joblessness, crime, soaring criminal populations, jails, deterioration in the inner cities, the whole raft of problems.
00:18:46.000In such circumstances, you've got to divert the bewildered herd, because if they start noticing this, they may not like it, since they're the ones suffering from it.
00:18:55.000Just having them watch the Super Bowl and the sitcoms may not be enough.
00:18:58.000You have to whip them up into fear of enemies.
00:19:01.000In the 1930s, Hitler whipped them into fear of the Jews and the gypsies.
00:19:05.000You had to crush them to defend yourselves.
00:19:09.000Over the last 10 years, every year or two, some major monster is constructed that we have to defend ourselves against.
00:19:15.000Professor Chomsky, one of the most prevalent voices of the left, presumably that was prior to the pandemic. In a minute we're going to flick over to
00:19:23.000being exclusively on Rumble, so if you're watching this elsewhere there's a link in the
00:19:27.000description because in a minute I'm going to start saying stuff aren't I Gareth? Of course you
00:19:30.000are. I'm going to start using free speech. I can't hold you back. I shall use free speech like
00:19:35.000a weapon by Jove if that's what's required. And even ordinary media like ABC, old side face,
00:19:41.000you recognise that it's laden with Everything they're saying, four hours, red carpet.
00:19:51.000They've got their own imperial project, presumably, but they are saying they're talking about peace.
00:19:56.000Recently, China did broker a peace deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
00:20:00.000Ultimately, this has to be peacefully resolved.
00:20:03.000Wouldn't that be Preferable, or do you believe there's a possible solution where Russia are annihilated, stymied, castrated, or do you think that a nuclear superpower with a rich military history and a deep, deep belief in their own vitality are likely to be subjugated by anything other than nuclear annihilation, which wouldn't be any... That's what the sensible... No audition for ABC.
00:20:27.000Yeah, but I am going to look straight down the barrel.
00:20:43.000They had a whole brand with its own little logo.
00:20:46.000And probably a little company slogan and song, and maybe a mascot, around controlling and preventing us from accessing truthful information.
00:20:55.000They admit, this is part of the Twitter files, they kept truthful information back.
00:20:59.000So not misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, although malinformation is true information that we don't like, isn't it?
00:21:28.000They've got that sort of weird DNA structure around them.
00:21:31.000It's all that kind of connective web that's going on there that kind of really starts to inform you as to the way that they did this, because it was exactly that.
00:21:41.000Even their logo's got a web of deceit coagulating around it in real time.
00:21:56.000Not lies, not hysteria, not propaganda, not the pandemic of the unvaccinated.
00:22:02.000Truthful content about vaccine side effects was flagged for censorship.
00:22:06.000Matt Taibbi's latest Twitter file revelations, that so-called journalist, have shown how the United States federal government helped to launch the Virality Project, where six big tech companies and a coalition of research agencies partnered to mass monitor COVID-related content and flag millions of factually correct posts for censorship each day, according to a new Internal Twitter documents.
00:22:27.000They were censoring truthful information because it was inconvenient for their agenda.
00:22:32.000Let's have a look at some of the criteria for content that they would censor.
00:22:36.000The way that Taibe came about it, when he was going through all these emails, he noted that Twitter employees started to echo some of the Reality Project's language.
00:22:44.000So he started to say in the emails, hang on, they're talking about the same things that they are in here.
00:22:49.000And it just became, I guess, too much of a coincidence at this point.
00:23:39.000We're here to tell you the truth so you can make your own mind up,
00:23:42.000come to your own conclusions, make your own decisions.
00:23:45.000The vaccine passport narrative, which the virality project claims had driven a larger anti
00:23:49.000vaccination vaccination narrative about the loss of rights and freedom.
00:23:52.000So they they censored stuff about that, even though it was true.
00:23:55.000Yeah well we know we know what's happened with vaccine passports and obviously like since we know about natural immunity and things like that we know that obviously vaccine passports you know... What's the point?
00:24:05.000What's the point in proving someone's got a vaccine if someone's naturally immune?
00:24:09.000But also we know that vaccine passports one of the dangers at the time when people are talking about is hang on isn't this going to be used to control people in in the future and we know now that some of the technology that was used within vaccine passports is now just being reused for a new digital ID that's going to perform in
00:25:22.000The same people that made these decisions are making those decisions.
00:25:25.000The conjecture is a necessary response to the propaganda and the censorship.
00:25:30.000You can't condemn people for saying, hey are there some connections between this raft
00:25:35.000of peculiar and authoritarian decisions.
00:25:37.000It gets harder and harder to take their measures in good faith.
00:25:41.000The narrative around natural immunity.
00:25:43.000They were saying that natural immunity was not effective.
00:25:45.000Discussions of breakthrough infections.
00:25:48.000Suggestion that COVID-19 leaked from a lab.
00:25:50.000My God, they're still at that one, aren't they?
00:25:52.000They're still introducing the crazy old dingo dog and raccoon boy and Ricky Shitmouse in order to distract people.
00:26:00.000They're coming up with new animals in order to distract people.
00:26:04.000Oh, well, anything what could have happened is Ricky Shitmouse, part mouse, part human turd, could have escaped from the Wuhan lab and ran down that wet market.
00:26:13.000We've got a Harvard professor watching this.
00:26:15.000Sir, thank you for joining us from Harvard.
00:27:17.000Ah, this is good, because yesterday we spoke at some length about the requirement for moral authority that arresting Donald Trump requires, and also that the ICC want to arrest Vladimir Putin for war crimes.
00:27:34.000If you take the position that Trump ought be arrested for the misuse of campaign funds and that it could potentially have affected the outcome of an election, similarly you'd have to investigate, as you lot know, Hillary Clinton for the Steele dossier.
00:27:47.000If Putin is a war criminal, and from the evidence I've seen he is, then I'm afraid to say there are some other war criminals who might... Quite a lot of them, and some of them are running countries.
00:28:19.000I hope the people doing these arrests have the moral authority to undertake these arrests and aren't basically criminals themselves.
00:28:29.000Donald Trump has announced that he's going to be arrested.
00:28:31.000First, he said it would definitely be on Tuesday.
00:28:33.000Then he said it might not be on Tuesday.
00:28:34.000And the ICC have issued a warrant to arrest Vladimir Putin.
00:28:38.000Two leaders that have previously been in that situation are the Sudanese leader, who's in all sorts of tricky situations currently, and Colonel Gaddafi, who's now stone dead.
00:28:47.000The important question, of course, is who has the moral authority to exact and enact these arrests?
00:28:53.000What is the central body that's able to say, you, Donald Trump, you're under arrest.
00:28:58.000To have that authority, it means you would have to be in a position yourselves that is transcendent of, at very least, the crimes that Donald Trump has himself allegedly committed.
00:29:08.000So let's have a look at what's being alleged, and let's have a look at who's alleging it, and let's see who's conducting this process, and if there's any legitimacy to their claims, and if they have the right to undertake this process if they themselves are similarly guilty of comparable transgressions.
00:29:25.000Former President Donald Trump making new headlines as he uses his social media platform to claim that his arrest is imminent.
00:29:33.000Now, of course, what is being alleged is that Trump paid Stormy Daniels money to keep quiet in the build up to the 2016 election.
00:29:42.000Loads of you will already be tapping away in those comments.
00:30:11.000He's still got the ability to stir up a story.
00:30:14.000He's also still got the ability to stir up a storm.
00:30:17.000That's part of the problem, apparently.
00:30:18.000Former Trump administration official John Bolton saying the call has echoes of January 6th.
00:30:24.000If he's calling people into the streets, this time he's seen the experience of January the 6th, and I think this is potentially very dangerous.
00:30:32.000This is a fascinating story in so many ways.
00:30:35.000A kind of new mythology appears to be being forged.
00:30:39.000January the 6th, insurrection, anti-establishment rhetoric.
00:30:43.000However significant all of this stuff is, and I'll leave it to you to determine how important it is, perhaps your opinions vary.
00:30:50.000What it is not going to do is address the function and ability to legislate of centralised power.
00:30:59.000To a degree, when you're thinking about this stuff, what you're not thinking about is, how is my community going to be organised?
00:31:05.000What's going to be done about the cost of living crisis?
00:31:07.000What's going to be done about this escalating conflict?
00:31:10.000What are we going to do about this breakdown of our social fabric?
00:31:14.000It's of course interesting when figures like Trump are in the centre of the news cycle, but it's I think really important that we maintain a connection to some true ethical values.
00:31:24.000If we have any connection or understanding of ethics at all, we can see that the Democratic Party are guilty of comparable transgressions, which we'll go into in more detail.
00:31:31.000So that shows me that, once again, this is another one of those stories where neither party are significantly different from one another.
00:31:38.000And there is no centralised force that has the authority to arrest Trump or arrest Putin because they have no legitimacy.
00:31:46.000This after a pivotal week in the criminal investigation, Daniels meeting with Manhattan
00:31:51.000prosecutors and former Trump attorney Michael Cohen testifying for about five hours in front
00:31:56.000of a grand jury about that alleged hush money payment.
00:32:00.000Law enforcement agencies are preparing for a possible indictment of Mr. Trump as early
00:32:06.000The grand jury in Manhattan has been hearing from witnesses including former Trump lawyer
00:32:10.000Michael Cohen who says he orchestrated payments to the women to silence them about sexual
00:32:14.000encounters they said they had with Mr Trump a decade earlier.
00:32:18.000Mr. Cohen claimed Mr. Trump directed him to make payments worth $280,000 to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, something the former president denied.
00:32:26.000Okay, so this is by Jonathan Turley, professor of public interest law at the George Washington University.
00:32:31.000While we still do not know the specific state charges in the anticipated indictment, the most discussed would fall under Section 175 for falsifying business records based on the claim that Trump used legal expenses to conceal the alleged hush payments that were supposedly used to violate federal election laws.
00:32:48.000While some legal experts have insisted such concealment is clearly a criminal matter that must be charged, they were conspicuously silent when Hillary Clinton faced a not dissimilar campaign finance allegation.
00:32:59.000So here we're going to unpack the similarities between presumed charges that Trump might face and the allegations already made about the Clinton campaign.
00:33:08.000Last year, the Federal Election Commission fined the Clinton campaign for funding the Steele dossier as a legal expense.
00:33:14.000Okay, so they were found guilty of doing that because they were fined.
00:33:17.000The campaign had previously denied funding the dossier, which was used to push false Russia collusion claims against Trump in 2016, and it buried the funding in the campaign's legal budget.
00:33:27.000Yet there was no hue and cry for this type of prosecution in Washington or New York.
00:33:31.000What you've got to ask then is where is power centralised and what decisions are being made?
00:33:36.000Why is this instance being pursued and investigated and prosecution being made on this basis while in this instance, the Democrat Party instance, a fine was issued?
00:33:45.000Now this is obviously speculative because I can't obviously know, but it seems like
00:33:49.000whatever Trump is, his interests are not in alignment with those forces.
00:33:54.000Because if those forces were neutral, they would be prosecuting in both instances.
00:34:34.000A section 175 charge would normally be a misdemeanour.
00:34:37.000The only way to convert it into a Class E felony requires a showing that the intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.
00:34:47.000That other crime would appear to be the federal election violations which the Justice Department previously declined to charge.
00:34:53.000The damage to the legal system is immense whenever political pressure overwhelms prosecutorial judgement.
00:34:59.000The criminal justice system can be a terrible weapon when used for political purposes, an all too familiar spectacle in countries where political foes can be targeted by the party in power.
00:35:08.000That means Trump is blameless or should not be charged in other cases.
00:35:11.000However, we seem to be on the verge of watching a prosecution by plebiscite in this case.
00:35:15.000The season opener of America's Got Trump might be a guaranteed hit with his New York audience, but it should be a flop as a prosecution.
00:35:22.000So all that journalist is analysing is the similarities between the two cases and the difference in the action taken.
00:35:28.000So obviously you will be watching this with your own personal feelings about Trump, for good or for ill, and Clinton the same.
00:35:34.000But what this dude is all about is, hold on a minute, These things are basically the same.
00:35:38.000It's a misdemeanor unless there can be an established intent to defraud the electoral system.
00:35:43.000So it doesn't seem like it's an appropriate charge.
00:35:46.000What Trump has done is brought all of this to the forefront using his panache around public relations that no one would query.
00:35:53.000But what I would say is this demonstrates to us where centralised authority lies because in the difference we can make an evaluation.
00:36:00.000If you had two children, they did basically the same thing and you treated them differently, what would that tell us about you as a parent?
00:36:06.000Probably it'd tell you that you are a normal parent and you're knackered and totally exhausted and sick and tired of dealing with them.
00:36:12.000Why can't their grandparents take them?
00:36:14.000We've seen what the tendency and preferences on the level of the nation of the United States of America.
00:36:20.000But there's, by brilliant coincidence, a comparable case taking place on the global stage.
00:36:25.000The ICC has issued an arrest for Vladimir Putin for war crimes.
00:36:29.000And for all I know, Vladimir Putin is a war criminal.
00:36:31.000Certainly, I think it's dreadful that all those Ukrainian people have been bombed and killed and had their lives
00:36:35.000destroyed as a result of Russia's imperatives.
00:36:37.000Although, you know elsewhere, we've talked about the complexity of that narrative and how we found ourselves in
00:36:49.000Are there other people that have behaved in a comparable way?
00:36:52.000Is there any evidence being withheld, for example, by the United States?
00:36:55.000Because to reveal that evidence would demonstrate that they themselves have behaved exactly the same way and all sorts of American presidents will be up before the ICC.
00:38:40.000For its atrocities in Ukraine, fearing such a reckoning could set a precedent allowing the tribunal to prosecute US war crimes, a report published Wednesday revealed.
00:38:49.000Excuse me, could you help us prosecute Russia?
00:38:51.000We're going to need all of your information about their illegal wars, claiming there's weapons of mass destruction, invading countries that are sovereign nations without due process through the UN.
00:39:00.000Oh, well, do you know, actually, I can't find any of those files.
00:39:05.000All of those files, sadly, were a lot.
00:39:11.000And that Edward Snowden, what a fucking traitor.
00:39:14.000According to the New York Times, Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin III and other Pentagon brass are blocking the Biden administration from sharing evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine gathered by US intelligence agencies with the International Criminal Court over the objections of officials in those agencies as well as in the State and Justice Departments.
00:39:31.000Neither Russia, the United States, nor Ukraine are party to the Rome Statute, the treaty governing the ICC.
00:39:37.000However, according to the current and former officials briefed on the matter who were interviewed by the Times, Austin and others are wary of the Hague Tribunal targeting the crimes of countries outside its jurisdiction.
00:39:47.000Documented and alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces and contractors in Ukraine include, but are not limited to, massacres and other murders of civilians and soldiers, indiscriminate attacks on densely populated areas, attacking critical civilian infrastructure, bombing hospitals and shelters, torture and stealing children.
00:40:09.000It's worrying, isn't it, that the United States cannot participate in the provision of evidence because it would have to confront the fact that it's done comparable things.
00:40:17.000And it's a horrible slap in the face for all of us that would like to lean into some partisan
00:40:23.000tribal allegiance that relieved us of personal moral obligation to accept that our nations,
00:40:29.000that our empires, that our colonies are similarly funded on war crimes.
00:40:33.000Whether we're looking at the Vietnam War, or the Iraq War, or the Korea War, or the
00:40:38.000Afghanistan War, or the Falklands War, war is in a sense criminal in itself.
00:40:43.000Establishing a set of rules that you have to behave in accordance with, presumably via the ICC, and then transgressing even those, shows you that our systems at a national, and international, and indeed global level, are totally corrupted.
00:40:55.000And what's required is a radical review of the way we undertake the business of being human.
00:41:00.000What people want to do instead, though, is go, there are clear baddies and baddies are people like Trump and people like Putin.
00:41:07.000If we arrest them and put them in prison, the problem's going to be solved.
00:41:10.000Well, I think you know and I know the problem isn't going to be solved, is it?
00:41:14.000We know that what's required is a deep Inner spiritual change on the level of you and me, the individual, and then a demand that our communities, nations and the planet itself are run in accordance with some values that have been washed away by years and years of commodification, consumerism, individualism, materialism and negligence.
00:41:34.000We've left our souls behind on the shore.
00:41:36.000And now we find ourselves adrift, thinking for even a moment that arresting Trump or Putin is the solution.
00:41:43.000Even if both Trump and Putin are criminal by the standards that are being described here, it means that we have an obligation to radically review the system.
00:41:51.000Putin and Trump, powerful though they may be, are symptoms of corrupt systems, of negligence, of the refusal to address the issues that affect the lives of ordinary people.
00:42:00.000By offering us the solution to that problem, what we're going to do is blow on this whistle and arrest Putin and arrest Trump, and then we'll get on with some other people being corrupt that we'll ignore for a while until they're not in power anymore, and then we'll arrest them, or won't, or whatever.
00:42:13.000What we're doing is facilitating this problem continuing.
00:42:17.000This is pointless, futile, Kafka-esque kangaroo court claptrap.
00:42:22.000Okay, so you've just heard that litany of abuses and crimes.
00:42:25.000American troops and contractors have perpetrated each of those war crimes in US attacks, invasions, occupations, and peacekeeping operations in the years since the ICC was established in 1998.
00:42:35.000I think it's particularly offensive that they did it during a peacekeeping operation.
00:42:40.000Okay, men, all you gotta do is get over there and keep the peace.
00:42:42.000I'm gonna look over here for a couple of minutes now, and when I look back, I'm just gonna expect there to be a whole bunch of peace happening.
00:42:49.000Millions of civilians have died in America's wars.
00:42:51.000Consider the terrible crime of My Lai in 1968 in Vietnam, in which U.S.
00:42:55.000troops slaughtered some 500 civilians.
00:42:58.000I think we're an MSNBC pundit at the helm.
00:43:00.000I feel like that may have been reported by Seymour Hersh, friend of the show, fellow conspiracy theorist.
00:43:05.000The US Army covered up the crime which was not publicised until a year later.
00:43:08.000Nor was Malay the only such war crime.
00:43:11.000Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon directed the sustained bombing of Vietnam which killed some 65,000 civilians.
00:43:17.000Now I know it's not happening now and it feels like it's in the past, but what that does is, in a sense, dilutes and in fact annihilates any kind of moral authority that we might have.
00:43:28.000Those days are sort of over, don't you feel that?
00:44:01.000More recent US military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq and drone campaigns in Pakistan and elsewhere also killed civilians routinely, steadily and coldly.
00:44:10.000And Washington's first reaction always was and is denial.
00:44:14.000As after the deadly Kabul drone strike in 2021 that killed 10, including 7 children.
00:44:20.000So we're now not in 1968, we're in 2021 and it's drone strikes killing children.
00:44:28.000That should be prosecuted by the ICC, oughtn't it?
00:44:31.000So I'm not saying, obviously, what does it matter, but I'm not saying that Putin oughtn't be prosecuted, but if you prosecute someone, it means you have a set of values and some moral authority, and you'd have to use those values and moral authority to prosecute all such people, wouldn't you?
00:44:46.000Indeed, the Biden administration might want to think carefully before carelessly charging Putin with war crimes, for by that standard, more than a few allied leaders should find themselves in the dock.
00:44:55.000Any war crimes trial should start with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and United Arab Emirates Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed.
00:45:03.000They initiated a brutal war of aggression against Yemen in which upwards of 400,000 civilians have died.
00:45:09.000Principal accomplices, always knowledgeable and sometimes enthusiastic of the royal killers, were Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
00:45:17.000So here we find a category where those three leaders could be put into the same camp as Putin.
00:45:24.000And even I, while I espouse this radical iconoclasm, I'm still sort of reluctant to consider that Trump and Obama and Biden are complicit in the same crimes that we're accusing Putin of.
00:45:36.000But if you think about it for a moment, What do you imagine it means to bomb Yemen or bomb Ukraine or bomb anywhere?
00:45:45.000And while there are occasions where I'd be glad to have a bit of downtime, I never want to see them annihilated by a war criminal.
00:45:51.000Take a moment to consider what the values of our systems are when Trump is facing charges for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels.
00:46:00.000When the democrat party did a similar thing meanwhile not on the table for discussion and in fact being deliberately kept off the table and Julian Assange is in prison and Edward Snowden is in exile and Chelsea Manning is in hiding presumably meanwhile Civilian deaths numbering in the hundreds of thousands have the culpability of Obama and Trump and Biden, Trump who's under investigation for hush money, Obama who has lucrative deals with Netflix and Biden who's sitting in the White House.
00:46:29.000You cannot examine these ideas for very long without coming to the conclusion that it is the system itself that needs to change.
00:46:37.000And once you reach that conclusion, you realize why both sides are so heavily invested in partisan discourse and mudslinging.
00:46:45.000It benefits them both to say, ah, Trump's done this thing, ah, the Democrats did this thing, ah, Hunter Biden this, ah, electoral fraud this or that, depending on what side you're on.
00:46:53.000The reality is we are engaged in systems of corruption that impoverish and annihilate foreign lands while actually no longer particularly or especially benefiting the ordinary inhabitants of those nations.
00:47:06.000It's not like, well, we're killing all those people in the Yemen, but things are great in Delaware or Ohio or wherever.
00:47:12.000People are suffering everywhere, probably for the same reasons and in accordance with the interests of the same ultimate groups.
00:47:19.000So you can't have kangaroo Kafkaesque crap court cases without addressing the reality.
00:47:24.000Oh, you can have those court cases, but just acknowledge it's Theatre.
00:47:30.000Unless you want to do the same thing on the other side.
00:47:32.000Unless you want to start addressing all of the deaths in the Yemen and Afghanistan and Iraq.
00:47:35.000And no one is going to do that, because to do that would be to impede the interests of the powerful.
00:47:41.000So remember, our conversations and our court cases and our media are housed within very narrow frameworks, and if you try to bust out of that, they'll smear you.
00:47:48.000That's what will happen, because they can't deal with it.
00:47:50.000Oh no, we could either deal with what Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger are bringing to Congress, or we could just say, Are you getting money for this?
00:47:58.000Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, whose administration serviced the US provided warplanes, supplied munitions used to bomb weddings, funerals, school buses and other civilian targets, gave intelligence use for targeting and for a time refueled Saudi and Emirati aircraft.
00:48:15.000US officials could not claim to be surprised at their culpability.
00:48:18.000The State Department warned that they could be held responsible for war crimes.
00:48:23.000So they did it anyway, even though they were warned.
00:48:25.000So you can't say, oh, sorry, we were caught up in the fog of stuff that was going on in Yemen.
00:48:31.000George W. Bush is another good candidate for a trial on his aggressive, unjustified attack on Iraq.
00:48:38.000Based on manipulated and fabricated intelligence, his war ended up killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, as well as triggering years more of conflict.
00:48:45.000Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair today spending his golden years profiting after acting as Bush's poodle would be an appropriate co-conspirator.
00:48:53.000So some of the most powerful people in the world that are being rehabilitated as sort of elder statesmen and father figures and wise sage voices on the sideline, I think you should do this, I think you should do that.
00:49:02.000They're war criminals as well, so they can't have that conversation.
00:49:05.000That's a conversation that has to be kept out of the way.
00:49:08.000It's convenient to have an arrest issued for Vladimir Putin, not so convenient to consider that every single President of the United States, every single Prime Minister of the United Kingdom would similarly have to be re-evaluated and potentially charged.
00:49:21.000Putin is a cruel dictator and a brutal aggressor, so the author of this doesn't disagree with that premise.
00:49:26.000But that premise requires standards and principles, and no one's got any.
00:49:30.000However, before treating Putin as uniquely culpable, Western leaders should take a long, hard look in the mirror.
00:49:36.000American aggression against Iraq and Saudi-Emirati aggression against Yemen both have killed far more civilians than the Russians have yet killed in Ukraine.
00:49:43.000The West should take war crimes seriously, but that requires starting with its own.
00:49:47.000So there you are, whether it's the potential arrest of Donald Trump or the potential arrest of Vladimir Putin.
00:49:53.000These two stories reveal that there is a lack of real values behind them.
00:49:59.000In order to arrest Trump, you would have to similarly investigate the Democrat Party and make the necessary and relevant arrests.
00:50:04.000In order to arrest Putin, you would probably get to arrest Trump, actually, but also Biden, also Clinton, also Obama, and you'd have to dismantle the entire system and radically reevaluate it.
00:50:15.000And that's precisely what we're arguing Should happen.
00:50:18.000New systems, new democracy, new ability to run your own communities, sets of ethics and principles that can be broadly agreed upon, as well as the maximum amount of democracy for you as an individual and your community.
00:50:28.000An end to the ongoing cultural mudslinging and a beginning of a new dawn that has the added side effect of maybe possibly averting a nuclear war and ending the constant droning of ecological decline and ontological loss and annihilation.
00:50:41.000Let me know what you think in the comments of the chat.
00:50:53.000MTN William, Hillary found guilty, no arrests.
00:50:55.000I suppose that's a reference to the fines issued as a result of the funding of that Steele dossier from legal funding.
00:51:02.000Sensitive Heart 25, Russell, I think if we're going to start to arrest politicians, can we free Julian Assange and Edward Snowden as well?
00:51:09.000Why trust my responses to those legitimate inquiries when on the line we have Thomas Patterson, Professor of Government and Press at Harvard University and the author of How America Lost Its Way.
00:51:19.000Thanks for joining us today, Professor.
00:51:31.000With Trump once again dominating the news cycle, how do we plot our course through a degree of objective reporting, taking into account some of the points made in our last piece about the evident culpability of the Democrat Party with regard to the Steele dossier and the Russiagate stuff?
00:51:50.000And is there any moral authority in American media or in American government to offer the kind of condemnation of Donald Trump that many people would agree with?
00:52:00.000I'm sure some people wouldn't as well.
00:52:01.000He's very popular in some quarters, of course, that's part of the problem.
00:52:04.000But from where is the moral authority derived in these plainly corrupt institutions and what And where is the media's negligence contributing to the rise of Trump and the inability to provide a better democracy that perhaps would prevent the necessity for figures like Donald Trump?
00:52:25.000Well, I think some of that moral authority evaporated the day that Donald Trump came down the escalator in 2015 to announce his campaign for the presidency.
00:52:36.000You know, if you look at the whole 2016 campaign, Donald Trump got more news coverage week by week, except for one week.
00:52:45.000That happened to be the week of the Democratic National Convention, when Hillary Clinton was nominated for the Democratic presidential nomination.
00:52:54.000And then Trump becomes president, and during the first 100 days—that's the celebrated opening of any presidency—he gets three times as much coverage as his immediate predecessors.
00:53:06.000And you have to ask, well, why is that?
00:53:11.000Cable networks particularly and then the networks found out rather fast thereafter was that you put Donald Trump on the screen and you hold the audience and you build audience.
00:53:21.000So there was a lot of money made by giving Donald Trump a lot of exposure and he pretty much sucked all of the oxygen out of the room in 2016 and to a degree still doing it today.
00:53:34.000So I suppose if there is a lack of moral authority and lack of objectivity in media, it is difficult to query the erosion of trust that we've experienced in the last few years, the rise of alternative voices, the kind of entropy that we've witnessed in the Democrat Party also.
00:53:55.000I wonder if you feel that the ownership models of modern media contribute to this problem.
00:54:03.000They are ultimately sort of subsidiaries of larger corporations.
00:54:09.000I think you can overestimate it, but ratings matter.
00:54:13.000That's where the ownership influence is felt.
00:54:16.000They pay very close attention to ratings.
00:54:19.000I do think that newsrooms try to insulate themselves somewhat from ownership pressures, but not always effectively.
00:54:27.000And, you know, if you think about Donald Trump, for example, I think a lot in the traditional media really have been trying to hold him accountable.
00:54:37.000They hold him accountable in part by giving him a lot of airtime, and then that has its own problems.
00:54:43.000So I think this is a really difficult task for journalists right now.
00:54:47.000We've never seen anybody like Donald Trump.
00:54:50.000It's like having a reality show, but it's real.
00:54:55.000I don't think journalists are prepared to cover that kind of political arena and this kind of person.
00:55:08.000And that's where the corporate ownership comes in.
00:55:10.000What about the recent congressional hearings where Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberg were confronted around their reporting around their Twitter file revelations which I suppose most notably revealed how much the deep state were involved in the censorship of Social media information, and today's breaking story that the Virality Project was set up to control information, in particular censoring truthful and demonstrably empirically true information around the coronavirus pandemic.
00:55:40.000Once again, this question of moral authority comes to the forefront.
00:55:43.000Once that moral authority starts to erode, how can we trust the institutions that these media outlets vocally support and also attempt to censor?
00:55:57.000Well, if you look at the Twitter files, I mean, it's inescapable that most of what they were shutting down was on the right, conservative voices.
00:56:07.000Now, the studies show that if you're looking at conspiracy theories, most of them really get traction on the right.
00:56:14.000So it's not all that surprising to some degree that there's more.
00:56:18.000Uh, kind of deep platforming on that side, but it clearly affected an agenda.
00:56:23.000And then when you start doing that sort of stuff, you're quite right.
00:56:29.000And once you do that, it's hard to get back.
00:56:31.000I mean, trust lost is very difficult to recover, and they're trying to now be more transparent and the like with their rules and so on.
00:56:39.000But I think I think once you go down that slope, trying to get back up, that's pretty slippery.
00:56:46.000And, you know, I think trust has been lost by the platforms.
00:56:51.000And I'm not talking about just Twitter.
00:56:53.000I think it's true of Facebook and the others as well.
00:56:56.000Professor, in one of your books you talked about how 80% of Americans are stressed over work and money.
00:57:07.000These former systems of taxonomy around left and right are beginning to feel redundant, as it seems to me at least, and I know to much of our audience, that neither of those political parties meaningfully represent their interests.
00:57:24.000Use their quote from Professor Chomsky earlier that addresses the refusal of either party to deal with the issues of inequality, job insecurity, prison populations.
00:57:39.000And I wonder if you think that the way that this dynamic is presented as being one between the left and right is contributing to this rise of stress.
00:57:49.000And the part of this stress is a sense of A despair and despondency that there is no vision for a more fair and democratic America.
00:58:01.000So I would agree with Professor Chomsky about the inability or unwillingness to address these large issues.
00:58:09.000They've been festering for a long time.
00:58:13.000I'm not sure I buy his total diagnosis as to why that's the case.
00:58:17.000We've got deadlock with our political parties.
00:58:20.000I do think there are meaningful differences between the two parties.
00:58:24.000They're so closely competitive at the moment, though, that they spend all of their time trying to destroy the brand of the other, which means nothing gets done.
00:58:33.000They look ahead to the next election with little attention to governing.
00:58:39.000Now, where this fits into the stress that Americans feel, I think the problem with stress when you think about politics is it really creates an opportunity for those in politics to play off of that, to exaggerate the differences and make enemies of the other side.
00:59:00.000A very revealing poll about Americans, you know, if you go back to the 1960s and you asked American parents, you know, would you like your son or daughter to marry, let's say, a Catholic or a Black person of the like?
00:59:14.000And, you know, large percentages would say no.
00:59:18.000But the one that's at the top right now is to ask Democratic parents, would you like your son or daughter to marry Republican?
00:59:25.000Or the reverse with asking Republican parents.
00:59:47.000Professor, with the recent reporting around the escalating conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the plain profitability that this war represents to certain interests, whilst that no one would be foolish enough to suggest that that's the sole motivation, I think many people have become cynical about the reporting of this war.
01:00:08.000around this war. Even today, the way, the cynicism that China and Russia's meeting
01:00:15.000an attempt of China to broker a peace deal, and again, no one is naive enough to suggest
01:00:20.000that China and Russia don't have their own imperialist and militaristic, and even in
01:00:25.000the case, obviously, of Russia, militaristic and aggressive agenda. But the refusal to
01:00:32.000report in a less biased way, a more open way, is similarly, I think, contributing to more
01:00:38.000outlandish theories being considered. What's your take on that? And perhaps even touching
01:00:44.000upon the idea that no mainstream media outlet explicitly declare when they have military
01:00:50.000pundits that have concrete ties to military industrial complex organization like Raytheon,
01:00:57.000Do you not feel that part of the significant change that's going to be required to de-stress America, to reinvigorate interest in, let's call it conventional politics, will be a degree of accountability and objectivity precisely when it comes to reporting on issues like the current conflict?
01:01:15.000Well, I think objectivity is always elusive when you look at the media.
01:01:20.000And I think when you have a war, it just goes out the window.
01:01:24.000And, you know, pretty much you play up your side and try to demonize the other side.
01:01:30.000I think we're seeing that in the American press.
01:04:15.000Well, you know what this is, Ross, is ultimately this is kind of punishing people who can't keep up payments with a car that they can't afford to buy in one big chunk.
01:04:24.000So you know what it's driving people towards?
01:04:47.000Hey, listen, sign up to our Locals Community.
01:04:49.000Among many, many other bounties, you'll get access to my stand-up special, Brandemic, which you can buy for a one-off payment of $20, or you can get as part of being a member of our Locals Community, where you can make comments like this one.
01:05:01.000This person, Stone Owen, says, simply, the sacred power of the vagina.