Stay Free - Russel Brand - LIVE: Matt Taibbi & Michael Shellenberger (Exposing Censorship)

00:00:00.000 Hello there, you Awakening Wonders!

00:00:01.000 Thanks for joining me for an extra special Friday show.

00:00:05.000 You know that we participated in the Censorship Industrial Complex event with Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger.

00:00:12.000 It was a fantastic conversation with incredible participants, surprise guests, and more importantly than any of that, vital information around how a new, unelected series of institutions Are coordinating an attempt to shut down free speech worldwide.

00:00:29.000 If you're watching us on YouTube, we're only going to be available for the first 15 minutes, then we'll be exclusively on Rumble.

00:00:35.000 Why?

00:00:36.000 Because Rumble is the home of free speech, and we can't speak freely on a platform, which I love.

00:00:41.000 I love you 6.4 million Awakening Wonders.

00:00:44.000 By God, I love you.

00:00:45.000 He's still governed, in part, by the WHO and that has commercial and corporate interests that literally prevent free speech.

00:00:52.000 I know, increasingly, that Rumble's work is going to be vital.

00:00:56.000 First of all, though, let's have a look at this live event in London.

00:01:00.000 Me, Matt Tybee, Michael Schellenberger, those so-called journalists, those that were so vital in breaking the Twitterphile story, Hello!

00:01:07.000 speaking openly in an incredible environment about the censorship industrial complex.

00:01:11.000 If you're watching this on rumble, click the red button and join us on locals and

00:01:14.000 there's no way you think we're going to end up.

00:01:16.000 Hello. Please let's have a warm round of applause for Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi.

00:01:24.000 Who hates the speech? 0.93

00:01:28.000 It's the elites.

00:01:29.000 There's this relentless effort to sort people into categories.

00:01:33.000 Around the world, we see censorship.

00:01:37.000 We're meeting for the first time because we believe that free speech isn't just an enabling condition for civilization, for democracy, that it's a fundamental human right.

00:01:47.000 And this is, I think, more than a speech crisis.

00:01:50.000 It's a humanity crisis, and I just hope we're not too late to fix it.

00:01:55.000 What is the nature of these organizations?

00:01:58.000 How have they been granted a power that to any rational, ordinary person would require consensus and democracy to achieve it?

00:02:06.000 How have those safeguards been so expertly bypassed?

00:02:11.000 That's a great question.

00:02:12.000 And actually, this is, well, of course, yeah.

00:02:15.000 [laughter]

00:02:17.000 Plus the shirt.

00:02:18.000 [laughter]

00:02:18.000 [music]

00:02:20.000 [applause]

00:02:22.000 Hello.

00:02:25.000 I'm so excited that you've made the effort to come here to see Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi.

00:02:31.000 If, yeah, if our age is to have a Woodward and Bernstein, ethical

00:02:44.000 journalists that care about truth and narratives and represent in the truth to the people

00:02:51.000 that matter most, willing to talk truth, (electronic beeping)

00:02:55.000 Yeah, bar-ba-da-bar.

00:02:56.000 Who's on this?

00:02:57.000 Bar-ba-da-bar.

00:02:58.000 I mean, this is the censorship issue we're discussing.

00:03:01.000 You can't even do a vaguely flattering intro to two fine journalists without the censorship industrial complex.

00:03:11.000 Stepping in, in this hallowed territory established by the Methodists, who had to revivify Christianity after that orthodoxy became draconian and oppressive, to re-evoke once more the divine, to ensure that we can speak freely and openly, for it's our only tool against corruption and hypocrisy. 0.57

00:03:30.000 When Michael invited me to participate in this as a facilitator, because watch a minute, it's going to blow your mind how quiet I'm going to be in a second, this is it.

00:03:38.000 I'm going to say this, then I'm going to self-censor like you wouldn't believe.

00:03:41.000 Matt Taibbi is shattered.

00:03:44.000 He's just arrived here.

00:03:45.000 These people care about what they do.

00:03:47.000 Michael Schellenberg and Matt Taibbi are precisely the journalistic voices that we require because, like Wesley's Methodist movement, our movement already has martyrs.

00:03:57.000 I believe we have supporters of Julian Assange in the room right now.

00:04:01.000 [Applause]

00:04:09.000 We already have people that are willing to sacrifice themselves for a higher good in exile.

00:04:16.000 Edward Snowden is a supporter of course of this event and recognises the significance of the work that Michael and Matt in particular are doing.

00:04:23.000 This is a conversation that we are facilitating for two men that I believe in, who I believe are working very hard to do a necessary job.

00:04:31.000 Some of the topics that we're covering are What is the nature of this new centralising authoritarian system?

00:04:37.000 How long can we allow convenience, safety and security to enable centralised authoritarian systems to shut down communication and free speech?

00:04:47.000 What is the misanthropy that lies at the heart of a discourse that believes our speech needs to be controlled?

00:04:54.000 Where is the moral authority that is entitled to make those decisions on our behalf?

00:05:00.000 Thankfully, there are people in this room that can answer those questions tonight.

00:05:04.000 Please, let's have a warm round of applause for Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi!

00:05:08.000 Thank you, brother.

00:05:15.000 Thank you.

00:05:17.000 Thank you.

00:05:18.000 What a pleasure.

00:05:23.000 Thank you, guys.

00:05:25.000 Wow.

00:05:26.000 Thank you so much.

00:05:29.000 People say there is no censorship industrial complex.

00:05:34.000 People say the idea that there's a censorship industrial complex is a conspiracy theory.

00:05:41.000 It's disinformation.

00:05:43.000 And yet, we know that Facebook censored what its own executives called often true stories of COVID vaccine side effects.

00:05:56.000 We know that Facebook censored the New York Post in February 2020, when it published an opinion piece that said, maybe COVID came from a laboratory.

00:06:11.000 And we know that Twitter and Facebook censored an entirely 100% true, accurate story about Hunter Biden's laptop just two weeks before the U.S.

00:06:23.000 elections.

00:06:25.000 Now, people say it's not really censorship, because censorship is when the government censors you.

00:06:33.000 And the government was just flagging misinformation.

00:06:39.000 They were just being helpful, helping Twitter executives and Facebook to correct the misinformation out there.

00:06:49.000 And yet Matt Taibbi and his colleagues at Racket have identified 50 large, powerful organizations around the world that take government funding that are staffed by former government employees that work hand-in-hand with the US government, the UK government.

00:07:11.000 The Brazilian government, the Canadian government, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, around the world we see censorship.

00:07:21.000 And censorship at the behest of governments is a violation of the First Amendment and a violation of your laws, too, in the great nation of Britain.

00:07:33.000 So we're here tonight to get into it.

00:07:35.000 What is the censorship industrial complex?

00:07:37.000 How did we allow this monstrosity to take hold in our societies?

00:07:43.000 It's every time we think we get to the bottom of this story, the floor drops out from under us.

00:07:49.000 Most recently, just a few weeks ago, we started getting emails from people around the world.

00:07:54.000 From Australia, from New Zealand, from Canada, the United States, saying, did you know that there's a piece of legislation going through our Parliament, our Congress?

00:08:07.000 It's not being covered by the news media.

00:08:10.000 What is it?

00:08:11.000 In the UK, there's legislation that would allow the government to read your private direct messages on WhatsApp, Signal, Telegraph.

00:08:21.000 In Brazil, a single judge on the Supreme Court is demanding the right for the government to read and censor private text messages.

00:08:32.000 In Canada, they're seeking legislation that would promote official government media sources over independent news media sources on social media platforms.

00:08:44.000 In the United States, they've been trying to sneak through legislation that would criminalize the use of VPNs, or virtual private networks, to gain access to forbidden websites.

00:08:58.000 In Ireland, this is the most shocking thing of all.

00:09:02.000 They're trying to get the right to go into your homes, into the homes of people in Ireland, including the staffs of social media companies, search their phones, search their computers without authorization, and presume people guilty until proven innocent of spreading hateful material.

00:09:25.000 Hateful speech should be condemned.

00:09:28.000 We should use our freedom of speech to condemn it.

00:09:32.000 But our societies are more tolerant of racial, religious and sexual minorities than they have ever been.

00:09:40.000 Think about the attitudes of your grandparents and great-grandparents.

00:09:44.000 In 1958, four percent of Americans approved of the rights of whites and black people to be married.

00:09:52.000 Today, over 95 percent do.

00:09:56.000 Who is driving the hate speech?

00:10:00.000 Who is demanding the censorship of hate speech?

00:10:04.000 I would say it's some of the most hateful people in our society.

00:10:08.000 Who hates the speech? 0.93

00:10:10.000 It's the elites.

00:10:11.000 And they want to censor the people.

00:10:13.000 They want to censor the authentic voice of the people.

00:10:16.000 And I tell you tonight, they will not succeed.

00:10:19.000 And I know they will not succeed because all of you are here as lovers of freedom to demand your rights to freedom of speech.

00:10:26.000 We have already won.

00:10:29.000 We have put a stake in the ground in this hallowed, sacred space.

00:10:35.000 There's always been a debate about whether or not you need free speech to make democracy work.

00:10:40.000 We know we do.

00:10:41.000 You can't choose your elected representatives if you cannot freely debate who they are, what they stand for.

00:10:48.000 People make the case that you need freedom of speech in order to have free markets work.

00:10:54.000 You can't know what to buy or sell if you aren't allowed to discuss those products freely and openly.

00:10:59.000 We have very few restrictions on our freedom of speech.

00:11:03.000 You can't lie to people to steal from them through fraud, and you can't incite violence against people in the immediate term.

00:11:11.000 But beyond that, our rights are very strong.

00:11:14.000 They're the strongest in the United States of anywhere in the world, but they're very strong in Britain, and they should be stronger.

00:11:21.000 We are here to launch a campaign, a new free speech alliance.

00:11:25.000 We've brought people from around the world.

00:11:30.000 I just met many of them, and these are people who I only see online.

00:11:34.000 These are people fighting for their freedom in Brazil, in New Zealand, Australia, Canada.

00:11:40.000 We're meeting for the first time because we believe that free speech isn't just an enabling condition for civilization, for democracy, that it's a fundamental human right.

00:11:50.000 Free speech is what makes us human.

00:11:53.000 It's tantamount to our ability to breathe and to eat and to love who we want to love.

00:11:59.000 And so I say to you tonight, this is the moment where we start to fight back against the censorship industrial complex.

00:12:06.000 We intend to defund it, dismantle it, and demand a new standard for freedom of speech worldwide as strong as the one that we enjoy in the United States of America.

00:12:17.000 Thank you all for coming.

00:12:18.000 Thank you. Thank you all.

00:12:21.000 [Applause]

00:12:29.000 The most painful thing, and there's a lot of painful things that one goes through,

00:12:34.000 is losing almost all of your friends as a consequence of using your speech.

00:12:42.000 [BLANK_AUDIO]

00:12:43.000 The only positive thing that's come out of that has been to make new friends.

00:12:48.000 And it's not the most obvious thing in the world to lose all your friends in your late 40s.

00:12:56.000 The ones you keep are so dear, and the ones that you make, dearer so.

00:13:01.000 And there's few people in the world that I admire more than Matt Taibbi.

00:13:04.000 I've admired Matt Taibbi for almost 20 years, I think.

00:13:15.000 I think.

00:13:16.000 When I was invited in to work on the Twitter files, meeting Matt Taibbi was one of the most special moments in that adventure.

00:13:26.000 And when we testified in front of Congress, at that moment that we were testifying, the Internal Revenue Service, which is our tax police, visited Matt Taibbi's home and attached a note to his door, which is completely, completely against the standard practice of the Internal Revenue Service.

00:13:47.000 This is a person who has sacrificed significantly and he's seen what life is like for journalists in totalitarian societies.

00:13:54.000 He knows and has been friends with people that have died for the cause.

00:13:58.000 I have few greater pleasures than the opportunity tonight to introduce you to the great Matt Taibbi.

00:14:04.000 [Applause]

00:14:13.000 So let me say one more thing.

00:14:17.000 It is an equal pleasure to be up here with Russell Brand.

00:14:21.000 [LAUGHTER]

00:14:25.000 [APPLAUSE]

00:14:27.000 You can't look.

00:14:28.000 Truly, truly, one of my favorite, favorite comedians and someone that has demonstrated

00:14:36.000 great courage in his own personal recovery and courage in speaking out against the orthodoxy

00:14:42.000 on so many issues.

00:14:44.000 Whether it's COVID or free speech, he's here tonight like we are, without asking for anything in return.

00:14:53.000 We're so blessed to have Russell Brand with us.

00:14:55.000 So please join me again in thanking both of them.

00:14:57.000 [APPLAUSE]

00:15:09.000 Thank you.

00:15:09.000 I'm going to remain seated because Michael tricked me, actually.

00:15:15.000 Before the event, he texted me and said, we're going to do prepared remarks to begin the event.

00:15:22.000 And I'm not an orator.

00:15:24.000 I'm a writer.

00:15:25.000 So what did I do?

00:15:26.000 I spent the last 48 hours meticulously writing an essay, which I'll publish tomorrow.

00:15:31.000 You can all read it.

00:15:33.000 It's very carefully argued.

00:15:35.000 I think it's pretty eloquent in places.

00:15:38.000 I'm not sure it entirely holds together.

00:15:42.000 But once we get here, Michael tells me, no, I'm just going to wing it.

00:15:48.000 I'm going to go up there and talk extemporaneously.

00:15:50.000 So out of spite, I'm not going to read that entire speech that I had written, but I'll read excerpts of it because there are a couple of important points that I do think we want to make before we get to the larger discussion with Russell, which I know you're all anxious to get to.

00:16:10.000 I originally started by talking, saying something very pretentious about George Orwell.

00:16:17.000 No, no, read it.

00:16:20.000 And then from there it led into sort of an introduction to what the Twitter file story was, and it was full of sort of unforgettable asides about Elon Musk and all these other things.

00:16:32.000 We can skip that.

00:16:34.000 And then there was a quote, and basically the idea here is that I went into the Twitter file story, probably like Michael, Bringing my old school, legalistic, kind of Enlightenment era notions of free speech with me.

00:16:52.000 And I was hoping to answer maybe one or two narrow questions about Twitter.

00:16:58.000 You know, for instance, did the FBI maybe once or twice intervene to, you know, get in the middle of a speech question?

00:17:06.000 Quickly, we all realized that it was something sort of bigger, scarier, and weirder than that.

00:17:12.000 And here's what I wrote about that.

00:17:15.000 The quote is, a sweeping system of digital surveillance combined with thousands or even millions of subtle rewards and punishments designed to condition people to censor themselves.

00:17:26.000 So we're going to get into The concrete examples of how they did use government and government did work with these companies to actually censor people, but the larger, scarier issue is the construction, I think, of this gigantic Internet age system that is designed to get people to preempt dangerous thoughts by getting people to avoid having them in the first place.

00:17:55.000 And then there was another pretentious thing about George Orwell.

00:18:00.000 And the idea here was that one of the things that Orwell focused on in 1984 was this notion of binaries.

00:18:10.000 That in the world that he described in 1984, there were no shades of grey.

00:18:16.000 All ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged.

00:18:20.000 And it wasn't necessary to have words for everything.

00:18:23.000 You didn't need to have words for warm and cold.

00:18:25.000 You could just have warm and unwarm, for instance, right?

00:18:29.000 And this is what we saw a lot of in the Twitter files.

00:18:32.000 We saw a lot of taking very complex issues where there are lots and lots of shades of meaning and finding ways to whittle it down to basically two things.

00:18:43.000 All right, and a great example of this was the virality project that was led by Stanford University.

00:18:51.000 This was basically a catch-all program where Stanford took in information from all the biggest internet platforms, Facebook, Google, Twitter, some others, and they aggregated all the things that they were hearing about COVID and their experiences about what content moderation decisions that they made, and they made recommendations to each of the platforms about how they should deal with these things.

00:19:21.000 And the really fascinating thing about this, well first let's start with the headline sort of scary moment in these emails.

00:19:33.000 There was one email in which Stanford suggested to Twitter that you should consider, as standard misinformation on your platform, Stories of true vaccine side effects or true posts which could fuel hesitancy as well as worrisome jokes or posts about things like natural immunity or vaccinated individuals contracting COVID-19 anyway.

00:20:02.000 And basically what they were doing here is they were trying to get into the minds of millions of people Through algorithms.

00:20:11.000 If a person was telling a true story about somebody who got the vaccine and got myocarditis, they didn't have to say that they got it because of the vaccine.

00:20:22.000 Even if they just told the story, even if in the next post they said, I'm all for the vaccine, the way that the Virality Project interpreted that original post was that this could promote hesitancy.

00:20:36.000 Therefore, even if it's true, it's untrue, right?

00:20:39.000 So you have, in reality, you have shades of meaning there.

00:20:43.000 There's a true story that, you know, suggests that maybe you should be cautious about the virus.

00:20:49.000 The person might be pro-vaccine, but they see it as anti-vax material.

00:20:54.000 So it's vax, anti-vax, right?

00:20:57.000 And this is Constantly throughout, they just took things that were really somewhere in the middle, and they moved them in one direction or another.

00:21:07.000 Another amazing moment was when there was a company called Grafica, which described the dangers of undermining what they called authoritative health sources, like Anthony Fauci.

00:21:22.000 They were very against even the use of puns like FAUXI, F-A-U-X-I.

00:21:29.000 And their quote was, this continual process of seeding doubt and uncertainty and inauthoritative voices leads to a society that finds it too challenging to identify what's true or false.

00:21:43.000 Basically what they're saying is questioning authority.

00:21:46.000 Who here is old enough to remember the 70s and the VW bugs that had the questioning authority stickers?

00:21:55.000 Questioning authority, which was of liberal value then, is now disinformation.

00:22:01.000 So if you apply these techniques 50, 100 million times, a billion times, a billion billion times, eventually what happens is that people see that they are either going to be defined as approved, having approved thoughts, or unapproved thoughts.

00:22:19.000 There's no middle that they can occupy.

00:22:22.000 They will just naturally self-sort and self-homogenize.

00:22:26.000 And we're doing this all throughout society with politics, entertainment, and everything.

00:22:31.000 That's how you can get somebody like Russell, who is clearly not a right-winger, but they define him as a right-winger anyway because there are only two categories of people in the current media environment.

00:22:45.000 There are people who Believe in everything true and decent and democracy and puppies and all that, and then there's right-wingers who are wrong about everything, right, basically.

00:22:54.000 And so that's what they've been doing.

00:22:56.000 They've been creating binaries over and above the direct censorship that we saw.

00:23:02.000 There's this relentless effort to sort people into categories.

00:23:07.000 And the other thing that I think is really important to point out, and is another Orwell concept, is double think.

00:23:18.000 And this is the idea, how did Orwell define this?

00:23:23.000 Basically, it's the idea of holding two ideas at the same time.

00:23:28.000 He defined it as the act of holding simultaneously two opposite, individually exclusive ideas or opinions, and believing in both simultaneously and absolutely.

00:23:39.000 Now, we do that.

00:23:41.000 We do that constantly now.

00:23:43.000 With news stories, things that were true yesterday turn out to be completely the opposite tomorrow, and people are totally fine with that.

00:23:50.000 We just completely skip the fixing process.

00:23:54.000 There's no stopping to say, oh, sorry, we got that wrong.

00:23:58.000 We just move to freaking out about the next thing seamlessly.

00:24:02.000 So just to take an example, It wasn't that long ago that we were told in no uncertain terms that the only suspect in the Nord Stream pipeline bombing was Russia itself.

00:24:15.000 And just a couple of weeks ago, we were told by the same U.S.

00:24:18.000 government that they were actually aware since last June that this was planned by Ukrainians with the assent of the highest officials in the Ukrainian military.

00:24:30.000 I don't know what the true story is, but those two stories are completely different.

00:24:34.000 And they don't stop and say, oh, well, we're sorry.

00:24:38.000 Let's resolve that.

00:24:39.000 Let's square this discrepancy.

00:24:42.000 They just want you to forget.

00:24:44.000 And there's no way for people to live normally with these contradictions and stay sane.

00:24:50.000 The only thing they can do is live continuously in the moment.

00:24:55.000 Because that way you don't have to think about the past, you don't have to think about the future.

00:25:00.000 You are sort of charged affirmatively to forget everything that you were told before, because it might turn out to contradict something they want to tell you tomorrow.

00:25:09.000 So we live in the present, continually, and in the present there are only two choices.

00:25:14.000 So we are living in this very, very narrow intellectual world,

00:25:18.000 and this is over and above the problem of authority that would come in later.

00:25:23.000 If you somehow manage to get past all these obstacles and actually be an independent free thinker,

00:25:28.000 like I think most of the people in this room are, then they're going to have censorship and other obstacles

00:25:35.000 to try to stop you.

00:25:37.000 But their aim is to prevent that from ever happening.

00:25:40.000 And we saw that over and over in the Twitter files.

00:25:42.000 I think that's the lesson that I ended up taking away from it.

00:25:46.000 And this is, I think, more than a speech crisis.

00:25:49.000 It's a humanity crisis, and I just hope we're not too late to fix it.

00:25:54.000 So thank you very much and let's hope you have a great day.

00:25:57.000 [APPLAUSE]

00:26:00.000 I think in the 20 minutes that you've both been speaking, it's already become plain that we are dealing with an issue

00:26:18.000 of considerable, perhaps even unprecedented, scale.

00:26:22.000 And thanks mostly to some of the territory that Matt outlined, there is an entirely subjective experience also that will individually affect all of us in ways that seem to be more rooted in behaviouralism than politics, even in the most dystopian technocratic version of that, that attention itself, the experience of being you, is being curated and directed in ways that could only have been theoretical at the time of B.F.

00:26:56.000 Skinner, for example.

00:26:59.000 To return to the broader framing of our conversation, Michael, seeing as how you seem to be in charge, making poor Matt write a whole essay, and then publicly redact his affiliation with George Orwell, plainly a device used to curry favour with the British, Can you tell us how something as vast as the censorship industrial complex can possibly exist and come into being when it necessarily requires the participation of numerous agencies that one would assume would not be explicitly connected?

00:27:41.000 I know Matt has done work in revealing 50 NGOs that participate in this censorship industrial complex, which I believe is a phrase that you have coined.

00:27:50.000 Can you tell us how both state And private authorities, be they media or governmental, are participating in the creation of and execution of this new idiom that you have coined.

00:28:07.000 Sure, I mean, I think we have these various moments on the Twitter files where you would just get really creeped out, like you would discover something and you would just get chills up your spine.

00:28:17.000 And for me, it was when we discovered that the Aspen Institute had organized a workshop, they called it Tabletop Exercise, that had New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Facebook, Twitter, you know, 12 to 20 people there.

00:28:34.000 All talking in the summer of 2020 about how to debunk a story about Hunter Biden and Burisma.

00:28:41.000 This is three months before the Hunter Biden laptop had come out.

00:28:45.000 And it was just like, what is going on here?

00:28:47.000 We sometimes ask, you know, is this a conspiracy or is it just a culture?

00:28:53.000 Because there is a way in which, you know, that looked like a, like, conspiracy.

00:28:58.000 That looked like a secret, coordinated effort that was obviously not public to pre-bunk a story that would come out several months later.

00:29:09.000 On the other hand, it's also a culture.

00:29:11.000 You know, these are people that are in Washington D.C.

00:29:13.000 together.

00:29:14.000 They go to the same parties.

00:29:15.000 They went to the same prep schools.

00:29:16.000 They went to the same Ivy League schools.

00:29:18.000 They got jobs at the top newspapers.

00:29:21.000 When they come to London, they hang out with the same particular, you know, group of people.

00:29:26.000 But I think we're constantly asking ourselves, to what extent is this, you know, an inorganic phenomenon of a censorship industrial complex?

00:29:33.000 And to what extent is it an organic part of cancel culture?

00:29:38.000 I mean, I thought, Russell, what you said is really to the point, which is that there's, and also to Matt's comments about Orwell, is that there's a psychological, there's something that's unhealthy psychologically about this.

00:29:51.000 And we've all become obsessed, my colleagues and I, with this totally obscure book by a Polish psychologist who lived under both the Nazis and then also under communists.

00:30:02.000 And the book is called Political Ponerology, which is this crazy word I think he invented, which is the study of evil or the study of totalitarianism.

00:30:11.000 And what he says is he says people that are in totalitarian societies, the people in charge, he says the way that you get to totalitarian societies is that psychopathological people Or what psychologists call cluster B personality disorder type people.

00:30:30.000 These are antisocial personality disorder, which is the new name for psychopaths.

00:30:38.000 Narcissist, borderline personality, and histrionic disorder.

00:30:41.000 These are all cluster B personality.

00:30:43.000 These are the folks who, when you're around them in your life, you always feel a little bit like you're walking on eggshells, because anything you say might set them off or might offend them.

00:30:53.000 And I'm also struck by that Orwell, where Orwell is saying, in a totalitarian society, it's either black or white.

00:31:02.000 And that's actually one of the characteristics of cluster B personality disorder people, is that I mean, these are people that are marked by grandiosity, self-centeredness, and then this concept that we just learned, which is called splitting.

00:31:18.000 So these are people for whom you're either with me or you're against me.

00:31:21.000 And it's just, that's the way their world is.

00:31:24.000 And so, and when we start to, you know, without naming names, you start to learn some of the characters in the censorship industrial complex, and you look at, you sort of watch them, and you realize you're dealing with people that there's something Pathological about the way that they're, you know, the way they look at the world, the way in which it's like you're either with the program or you're dead to me, you know, and there's no sense of play and of, like, humor is impossible in that situation.

00:31:54.000 There's a reason why you feel scared to make a joke around those kinds of people.

00:32:00.000 And so it's dark and I think there's like, I think it's, you know, it's, it's, I mean, these two gentlemen are so lovely to work with, and there's something so... I went to Russell's office, or his studio, not far from here, and so well-treated.

00:32:16.000 Like, all of his people are really fun and sweet and healthy, and there was no, like, Weirdness to it and everybody's enthusiastic about it.

00:32:25.000 That's a really different vibe than when you go to some of these more pathological institutions.

00:32:30.000 And so that's why I felt like, you know, getting us together and being with each other in person and being like, wow, there's some other people that we can have fun with and play with was an important part of our fight against totalitarianism.

00:32:43.000 Of course, any architecture of this nature, difficult though it is to envisage and track, must have its origins in the human psyche.

00:32:53.000 Where else could it come from?

00:32:54.000 Therefore, I suppose it's natural that it would have traits recognizable at the level of the individual.

00:33:03.000 I'm interested, Matt, to learn a little more about these 50 NGOs, and in particular, I'm interested in the way that they are frequently framed as philanthropic, and indeed, the entire Telos of the censorship argument is predicated on the idea of there being a moral authority with the integrity to execute that kind of censorship in addition to the misanthropy that I mentioned before that would require it.

00:33:36.000 What is the nature of these organizations?

00:33:39.000 How have they been granted a power that to any rational, ordinary person would require consensus and democracy to achieve it?

00:33:47.000 How have those safeguards been so expertly bypassed?

00:33:52.000 That's a great question.

00:33:53.000 And actually, this is, well, of course, yeah.

00:33:58.000 Plus the shirt.

00:33:59.000 [APPLAUSE]

00:34:05.000 This also gives me an opportunity to thank Michael and give him credit for something enormous, which

00:34:11.000 is coming up with the term censorship industrial complex, which I think

00:34:15.000 was crucial to naming this whole phenomenon and giving it an identity that people could grasp and rally

00:34:26.000 around.

00:34:27.000 Before that, I think it's similar to what the Occupy Wall Street movement did when they came up with the idea of the 1% and the 99%.

00:34:37.000 Just the nomenclature, I think, is really, really important.

00:34:40.000 And he came up with that name And the reason it struck a chord with me, and I'll just go through the chronology quickly of what happened.

00:34:50.000 In February, early February, I was looking through the Twitter files and we started to run into emails about an organization called the Global Engagement Center.

00:35:00.000 How many people here have heard of the Global Engagement Center?

00:35:04.000 Almost nobody, right?

00:35:05.000 Which is so fascinating.

00:35:07.000 So the Global Engagement Center was created in the last year of Barack Obama's presidency.

00:35:15.000 Technically, it's what they call housed in the State Department.

00:35:18.000 It's actually a multi-agency task force whose official remit is combating foreign disinformation.

00:35:27.000 And we found an Inspector General's report that said basically that the Global Engagement Center in its first year, I guess it was FY 2017, had funded roughly $100 million worth of projects, and it listed 36 different organizations, or 39, and of course 36 of them were redacted, and I got the idea that it might be a good thing to try to figure out what those organizations were.

00:35:58.000 We brought in some more people to start looking.

00:36:00.000 And the instant we started trying to figure out how many of these organizations were, the project Completely spiraled out of control.

00:36:10.000 You know, Michael mentioned 50.

00:36:12.000 The real number that we're looking at now is somewhere in the 400s.

00:36:16.000 It's like 400, 450.

00:36:16.000 You know, we've begun keeping sort of an Excel-type spreadsheet with all these organizations.

00:36:25.000 And we think even that is only scratching the surface of how many of these quote-unquote anti-disinformation organizations are that are out there.

00:36:34.000 A lot of them are receiving public money.

00:36:37.000 What are they doing?

00:36:38.000 What's the genesis of these groups?

00:36:41.000 Well, in the case of the Global Engagement Center, the real origin of this is, as was described to me by somebody who worked there from the very beginning, This started with the counter-proliferation movement in the U.S.

00:36:59.000 military.

00:37:00.000 Essentially, they were having trouble countering the messaging of ISIS, which they were finding difficulty understanding.

00:37:10.000 ISIS was somehow reaching basically white suburban kids in Britain and in America.

00:37:15.000 And of course, when something happens to white suburban kids anywhere, then it becomes a crisis internationally.

00:37:22.000 They started pouring money into it, but that was the original remit of the Global Engagement Center, and so they went from counterterrorism to basically what they do now is counterpopulism.

00:37:35.000 It's the same people, they're using the same technologies, and they're using the same techniques, To try to identify people that they consider problematic and try to find ways to diffuse that messaging by either using counter-messaging or deamplifying the messaging or removing it from platforms or whatever it is.

00:37:57.000 To them it's the same thing and that's what's so frightening.

00:37:59.000 I think people have to understand is that this all starts in a wing of the government that was looking at what they considered a terrorist threat that you could use basically any technique against and it would be legitimate up to and including droning them.

00:38:18.000 And they turned that entire mechanism inward, and that's really what the censorship industrial complex is.

00:38:24.000 It's just taking the techniques that we were using to try to reduce the impact of sort of foreign terrorist communication and turning it inward on domestic unrest.

00:38:40.000 People complaining about things, people complaining about the electoral process, people not getting vaccinated when they're told, whatever it is, there's always some emergency.

00:38:49.000 And they've learned that they can continually apply that over and over again.

00:38:54.000 And I find that terrifying.

00:38:56.000 I don't know about you, Russell, but I think it's very scary.

00:39:00.000 Yes, the idea of perpetual and never-ending crisis being a precondition for authoritarianism is by its nature terrifying, as is the shift that a mechanic designed in order to deal with an apparently external threat being inverted to deal with an internal threat, particularly using some of the Psychological critiques that have been touched upon, that indicates a kind of implosion that's difficult not to equate with pre-apocalyptic thinking.

00:39:32.000 Furthermore, to see the figures, and I'm referring directly to both of you of course, that would once have been cherished by identifiable legacy media outlets, even if they're glib somewhat, cultural artifacts like Rolling Stone or legacy media outlets like the New York Times that it's unthinkable that Matt Taibbi or Michael Schellenberg could reliably and consistently write for those kind of outlets.

00:39:59.000 This too is indication that things are changing and they're just two examples of course Chris Hedges has had a comparable trajectory and most obviously perhaps Glenn Greenwald who's gone from breaking of the seismic stories around WikiLeaks and Snowden and Chelsea Manning to being a literal exile and pariah.

00:40:17.000 These are All, I would say, significantly terrifying alterations and changes.

00:40:24.000 Might I ask, if there is an underlying ideology here, because sometimes to hear the way that Matt has described it, then it just feels like a kind of utilisation of a creation, just because it's there, it has to be used.

00:40:37.000 But I wonder, Michael, if the imperatives that undergird this new fast-moving, observably fast-moving trajectory towards authoritarianism, censorship and centralisation is primarily motivated by dominion, power, money, or is there something ideological and political taking place, or is it both, and if so, how do they intersect, please?

00:41:06.000 Yeah, I mean, This thing where I think that you guys have both just tapped into this central issue, which is that there is an authoritarian mentality among the leaders of the censorship industrial complex.

00:41:22.000 I always think of this, uh, do you guys know the Bourne movie?

00:41:25.000 Not the one with Matt Damon, but the other guy?

00:41:28.000 And they go in to kill Rachel Weisz?

00:41:30.000 You guys know what I'm talking about?

00:41:31.000 Okay, everybody remembers that scene with Jeremy Renner, right?

00:41:34.000 Do you remember the scene where, like, they go into her- I'm gonna spoil the movie for you guys if you haven't seen it.

00:41:39.000 But there's, like, I guess it's, like, CIA or FBI, and they go into the house, and they're, like, trying to be, like, empathic with her, because she's been through this trauma.

00:41:48.000 And then they sit her down and then they just look at each other like now and then like try to kill her and that's kind of the scene that has kept coming up in my mind as I like as I'm like reading these documents and listen and like reading the things that people are saying it's like I feel like there's a lot of Like, they're running an operation.

00:42:09.000 You know, you feel like you look at these people... I wrote a piece about one person who's a former CIA fellow.

00:42:15.000 I'm very sensitive about not wanting to personalize this, so I'm even hesitant to use this person's name, but I did write a whole piece about her.

00:42:23.000 And, you know, it was like her story was she was just this hobbyist, you know, and I was just concerned about anti-vaxxers.

00:42:30.000 And then, you know, and then the next thing you know, I was advising Obama on fighting ISIS.

00:42:34.000 And I just remember being like, I don't think it works like that.

00:42:36.000 You know, like, I think it's like, these are like really hierarchical military intelligence organizations.

00:42:42.000 And that this is a person who came out of, you know, and I don't know if she, you know, was recruited out of the NSA, which does all the spy satellites and whatnot, but, you know, this particular kind of a peculiar career.

00:42:58.000 And then she's been, I think, one of the most important intellectual architects of the censorship industrial complex.

00:43:04.000 And, you know, you would listen to her and it'd be like talking about like reducing harm in the real world and using very progressive language, like that's like language of compassion.

00:43:13.000 And we have to reduce harm.

00:43:15.000 I mean, that's been a big part of it.

00:43:16.000 We have to reduce hatred in the society.

00:43:18.000 And then it just feels like that moment from, you know, the Bourne movie where it's like, and then we have to, you know, fight the disinformation.

00:43:24.000 And so, you know, I have to say, I think, like, that seems to be, I mean, that seems to be, like, the undercurrent, is that I think that there's, that what brings us all together is a kind of suspicion of authority.

00:43:36.000 I mean, my dad had, not only did he have a Beetle, a VW Bug, we had the question authority sticker on the car.

00:43:44.000 I mean, that was who we were.

00:43:45.000 And so, for me, that was a part of it.

00:43:48.000 And I think one of the delightful parts of it is that there's people in this anti-censorship movement, this free speech movement, There was a guy that had blocked me because we had been in this huge fight about nuclear power, which is something that I support.

00:44:02.000 A lot of the folks that are very anti-authoritarian are anti-nuclear.

00:44:07.000 I actually asked him recently to stop blocking me on Twitter and he did because we're on the same side of this.

00:44:14.000 And so, but I do feel like that seems like that's a big part of it is that if there's an ideology, it's just some of it's like just questioning authority and, you know, being able to have a conversation and ask hard questions of people and not kind of not wanting to be in a situation of just following orders.

00:44:33.000 My concern is that the end point of this is an inability to openly communicate in good faith, in particular with people that you disagree with.

00:44:40.000 It's interesting that Matt Taibbi uses as his framework George Orwell, and you use a lesser known Bourne film.

00:44:49.000 Not even the main ones.

00:44:54.000 Do you think Matt, that this oddly mercurial shape-shifting, probably shouldn't use conspiracy theory type language, should I, in this context.

00:45:06.000 Do you think that this odd pathology might afford the possibility that many of the agencies and key figures that profess concern around misinformation and its linguistic acolytes Mal and Diss, I think, are the other ones you can have, aren't they?

00:45:25.000 Miss, Mal, Diss.

00:45:26.000 Miss, Mal, yeah. 0.97

00:45:27.000 Mal, Miss and Diss, yeah.

00:45:28.000 Like Scrooge's nephews in the Duck Tales films, which I reckon Michael will probably use as a paradigm in a minute.

00:45:41.000 Do you reckon that some of them agencies that are like, oh no, we've got to watch all this misinformation, are actually culpable for themselves spreading misinformation?

00:45:49.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:45:50.000 Yeah, but I don't think they...

00:45:53.000 I mean, Russell, I don't think they see it as disinformation.

00:45:56.000 I think they see things as politically true, even if they're factually proven untrue later, right?

00:46:05.000 I mean, Michael and I, just in the last week or so, we've gotten in the middle of this story involving the origins of COVID-19.

00:46:16.000 Now, this is really a fascinating episode in world history, because this thing happened, And immediately, before we had any answer as to, you know, the cause of the pandemic, a whole universe of possibilities was ruled out.

00:46:36.000 We were basically just told, it can't be this.

00:46:39.000 So let's not look over there.

00:46:42.000 And that is something that maybe you might See somebody in the military think, but a journalist should never think like that.

00:46:49.000 First of all, we shouldn't really care.

00:46:53.000 All the old journalists that I know would be...

00:46:57.000 They would start with indifference, you know, I'm happy to report this if this is true, I'm happy to report that if that's true.

00:47:05.000 But we were told, you know, basically, no, this is the new version of how we do information in the world, is that things are right and righteous, and that you have to get behind them emotionally as you're reporting them.

00:47:22.000 Therefore, there's this extraordinary incentive to become a believer.

00:47:28.000 It's much more like religion than journalism, I think.

00:47:33.000 I think that's kind of the same precondition you have to have to fight a war.

00:47:37.000 You have to believe in something.

00:47:39.000 You have to believe it in your gut in order to press a button to drone somebody.

00:47:44.000 I don't know.

00:47:45.000 I think it's very strange.

00:47:46.000 It's so different from how I was raised to view journalism.

00:47:52.000 What they've succeeded in doing, and I was going to ask you about this because you're in this very strange position with YouTube and Rumble and everything, where you have to be constantly thinking, what are they going to consider real and what are they going to consider off-limits?

00:48:10.000 And how do you do humor in a situation like that?

00:48:12.000 How do you do reporting in a situation like that?

00:48:15.000 If, I mean, look at the New York, the New York Times had to basically write around, you know, stories about Nord Stream, the Wall Street Journal is now having to write around Stories about, you know, the COVID leak.

00:48:30.000 There was a story last week about, you know, neo-Nazi emblems in Ukraine, and they had to frame it as this might hurt the war effort by making Russian propaganda look good, as opposed to just reporting it.

00:48:48.000 So they've turned us into believers instead of just sort of passive consumers.

00:48:53.000 You know, judges who are interested, and I just wonder, I mean, what do you do when you're doing your show?

00:49:00.000 Do you have to give in to that urge to consider it all the time?

00:49:05.000 My sense is that something seismic happened at the point of Assange's revelations and arrests, and the legacy media became in some way simultaneously castrated and indoctrinated, unable anymore to alloy themselves to principled journalism of integrity, there was a requirement to adopt a kind of aesthetic of cultural piety.

00:49:35.000 And when you say religion, as Nick Cave said, it sometimes feels like religion but stripped of forgiveness, redemption, salvation, unity, aspiration, love, glory, beauty, service.

00:49:49.000 Yeah.

00:49:53.000 And the way we undertake the content that we use on our channel is we make sure that either you or you have written it, and then we use that.

00:50:03.000 I don't know, that's dangerous, man.

00:50:06.000 No, what we do that... No, yeah, I've seen you two in Congress, you pair of so-called journalists.

00:50:11.000 How much exactly are you making from Twitter?

00:50:14.000 How much?

00:50:15.000 Let me see your bank account.

00:50:17.000 This is my time.

00:50:17.000 My time.

00:50:20.000 This is my time to shine.

00:50:22.000 It's like a real showbiz attitude from Debbie Wasserman Schultz there in a Congressional hearing.

00:50:28.000 Extraordinary performance.

00:50:30.000 Admirable, in a way, that level of narcissism for those of us that have flirted with it previously.

00:50:35.000 Obviously.

00:50:36.000 [laughter]

00:50:37.000 Oi.

00:50:38.000 I have brilliant people that work with me, like my creative partner, Gareth, who is the

00:50:47.000 first person to turn me on to your work and your work ensures that what we do, you know,

00:50:52.000 you have to sort of dance a legal tango to ensure that you're not publishing information

00:50:57.000 that hasn't been published elsewhere.

00:50:59.000 And the fact is that within our small team, there are people with quite strongly opposing views on, Issues that define our conversation, not something like the ability to communicate freely in good faith.

00:51:13.000 I think most of us believe in the absolute necessity for that, as you indicated in your rather statesmanly opening speech.

00:51:22.000 It's perhaps one of the crucibles of a necessary value system for true democracy, you could argue.

00:51:31.000 So I'm lucky that I work with Gareth, Roy and Leon and people that put a lot of effort and work into ensuring that there is rigorous journalism in the source material and in our presentation of it.

00:51:44.000 And I do feel...

00:51:46.000 Because also, obviously, my background is in entertainment, and I am a comedian, and I want to muck around and have fun.

00:51:56.000 And comedy, as well, requires good faith, and that we know that we're not trying to hurt one another.

00:52:03.000 That's a sort of a requirement of it.

00:52:05.000 There needs to be a consensus that we're playing, and that we love one another, and no one's trying to hurt anyone.

00:52:10.000 You know, and errors, of course, happen.

00:52:12.000 Oh, thanks, yeah.

00:52:16.000 I'll accept.

00:52:17.000 That's a smattering of applause.

00:52:23.000 But Russell, can I ask you a question?

00:52:25.000 Well, yeah, this is taking a turn, isn't it?

00:52:28.000 Finally, outside all these years of experience and journalistic integrity, I just find out what I reckon on hunches.

00:52:37.000 I mean, I'm curious if you have been censored or warned or given a strike by YouTube.

00:52:42.000 I think, I don't know if people have seen, but YouTube appears to be engaged in a new wave of crackdowns.

00:52:49.000 We've seen some conservative voices, you know, Jordan Peterson, I think Daily Wire is being demonetized.

00:52:56.000 And then I'm a huge fan of this British doctor, I think, John Campbell.

00:53:00.000 Do you guys?

00:53:02.000 He's lovely.

00:53:03.000 Love that guy.

00:53:07.000 And I think I watched him with Norman Fenton, who is someone that we also love, yeah.

00:53:14.000 My colleague Alex Gutentag, who's a genius on the COVID issue, introduced me to him.

00:53:18.000 And I can't understand, I'm not a good person at math, but he explained the statistics of it.

00:53:23.000 But they did a whole YouTube, and he had to be very careful in how they talked about the efficacy of the vaccine.

00:53:30.000 And I was curious if both, yeah, have you been censored?

00:53:34.000 Has it changed how you do your approach?

00:53:38.000 Do you do some things on Rumble that you don't do on YouTube?

00:53:42.000 Well, absolutely we must because the advantage of Rumble is that they have made an absolute commitment to content creators not to censor.

00:53:54.000 The assumption that this commitment is afforded only to facilitate hate speech is precisely the kind of sociopathic framing that has been touched upon already.

00:54:07.000 The idea that you would only use free speech to hate people.

00:54:15.000 Of course, finding myself in new territory with new alliances has been at times confusing

00:54:23.000 for me.

00:54:24.000 But I have found very helpful the analysis offered in Martin Gurry's book, which I think you turned us on to, who was a former CIA analyst, who recognized that the diagnostic tools we were using were no longer appropriate, and even our vocabulary had to shift. And this is all from, as best I understand it,

00:54:44.000 not from an ideological perspective, but from the perspective of a data and analysis. He says

00:54:49.000 you can no longer use the terms left and right. You have to think of power dynamics in terms of the

00:54:54.000 center and the periphery.

00:54:55.000 There are centralized authoritarian forces within media and within government, and then there are

00:55:02.000 peripheral voices that are advocating for values that transcend the traditional affiliations that

00:55:08.000 that we have with left-wing and right-wing thinking.

00:55:10.000 But as Matt already outlined, there's been this peculiar inversion of those values anyway.

00:55:16.000 The idea that free speech would become bastion of, let's call it the right, is sort of surprising.

00:55:24.000 And that pro-war rhetoric and not being patriotic would be tropes that you would see

00:55:29.000 emerge out of the left, where questioning the necessity for violence seems to be a moral position

00:55:34.000 transcendent of any potential party political affiliation. That's a deep moral choice. So the

00:55:41.000 way we make our decisions is that we estimate that we can be entirely open on Rumble,

00:55:47.000 and on YouTube we have to skip like Naginski around minefields and pitfalls, which has

00:55:53.000 created this system of entendre and innuendo, but also a kind of intimacy with our audience

00:56:00.000 who know.

00:56:00.000 Because the reason that Martin Goury offered this analysis is because he said technology has changed, the ability to communicate has changed, Centralized authoritarian structures recognize they cannot control the population in the same way that they used to be able to because there are no longer the gatekeeper relationships with either state or privately funded media outlets that will more or less toe the line other than rare instances where their interests don't converge and as we have been taught by George Carlin, where interests converge there is no need for conspiracy.

00:56:32.000 And on this subject of conspiracy, I would like to ask you, now that so many of the ideas that have once been the... that have left the realm of conspiracy to become verified fact, how can this continue to be used as a smear?

00:56:47.000 And do you both, as credible journalists, well-educated, they've done things like...

00:56:51.000 Lived in Iraq and stuff during wars and proper hardcore journalism, flak jacket journalism, ducking as a bomb goes off in the background journalism, the sort of thing that used to be credible and admired.

00:57:03.000 How do you cope with having such a sort of slanderous term daubed across your door, along with letters from the IRS, I understand?

00:57:14.000 Yeah, it's weird.

00:57:15.000 I mean, you know, my own personal journey started to take a really dark turn when the Trump-Russia story started to happen.

00:57:26.000 And I had lived in Russia for a long time, so I got a lot of phone calls from colleagues and wanted to know what I thought about it.

00:57:33.000 I didn't really say anything that hardcore at first.

00:57:35.000 I just said, well, we should, you know, given what happened with WMDs, we should probably wait to see what the evidence is before, you know, we make any conclusions about this. 0.73

00:57:46.000 And suddenly, you know, old friends stopped calling me.

00:57:50.000 And before I knew it, I was out of the business.

00:57:53.000 And That was weird enough.

00:57:55.000 The weirder thing, though, is when, you know, I turned out to be right about this, people hated me even more.

00:58:01.000 And, you know, when the Twitter files happened, it wasn't just, I mean, I knew going into it, I think we all knew that No matter what we found that it was not going to be covered by NBC, CBS, CNN, The New York Times, Washington Post, no matter what the content was, they weren't going to take that stuff and really digest it and do anything with it.

00:58:29.000 In the old days of journalism, you would always, when you did an important story, you were kind of always hoping the cavalry would come afterwards and that the story would get moved forward.

00:58:40.000 We knew that wasn't going to happen, right?

00:58:43.000 But what I didn't expect was the The level of vitriol and hatred which was, like, sincere.

00:58:51.000 Like, people were really, really angry that we were just putting emails out on the Internet.

00:58:58.000 And, you know, there was information that I thought was in the public interest, clearly.

00:59:04.000 I mean, it seemed like the public would want to know that the FBI and The Department of Homeland Security and what they call other government agencies, the CIA maybe, is meeting on a weekly or monthly basis with

00:59:18.000 20 or 30 of the biggest tech companies in America.

00:59:23.000 That seems like relevant information.

00:59:25.000 Why wouldn't you want to know that?

00:59:27.000 But they weren't just indifferent, they were angry.

00:59:31.000 And that is new, and I think that's why I was trying to talk about the psychological aspect of this, because they successfully constructed a kind of A news consumer who only feels sort of, you know, enthusiasm for the cause and then total disgust, like they're the only emotions that people feel, and that can be very dispiriting to deal with, you know?

00:59:59.000 I mean, it does, even after the Twitter files, you know, we thought we might make some headway a little bit there with some of those stories, but it really didn't, you know, make much of a dent with I was going to say, the response was, it's not censorship, and there should be a lot more of it.

01:00:22.000 Right, yeah, exactly.

01:00:24.000 You know, that was, I mean, that was in front of Congress.

01:00:26.000 It was, I mean, we just had, you know, sorry to say, Democrats who were like, we need more censorship, basically.

01:00:34.000 I mean, they couldn't quite, I think part of the anger was they couldn't quite say we want more censorship.

01:00:40.000 And that was part of the thing is that like because at first when if you start to use I mean this is I think the other thing that Orwell teaches us is that words are so powerful and that when it's like we're just fighting disinformation like how could you be against fighting lies?

01:00:54.000 And and then you're like well isn't disinformation just like another word for like things you disagree with?

01:01:00.000 And you know that was when it was like I think that I think they realized that they were in that situation and and then externalize their anger at us about it.

01:01:11.000 Really quickly, there were other things about the Twitter files, too, that I thought were... People were coming at us with this legalistic argument.

01:01:19.000 Oh, well, that's not technically a First Amendment violation, so this story's bogus.

01:01:25.000 Well, okay, fine, but why don't you care that the FBI is sending emails to Twitter about somebody in Arizona who's got eight followers and is making a joke, basically, like that?

01:01:39.000 I thought that was a significant piece of news, because what does it tell you?

01:01:42.000 They're watching everything, right?

01:01:44.000 They're not just watching a few people.

01:01:46.000 They're watching who's making likes to what accounts.

01:01:52.000 These very, very small accounts were on lists that were sent in by all kinds of different federal agencies.

01:02:00.000 And even that in alone sends a signal to people that they have to be conscious of this stuff all the time.

01:02:07.000 And that by itself is counter to the values of a free society.

01:02:13.000 It makes it hard to do things like just sit and enjoy a book because you don't feel alone when you're doing it, you know?

01:02:21.000 But nobody wanted to hear it.

01:02:23.000 It's curious how many times the The template that appears to be described involves the reversal of a type of charge, that things are being inverted and flipped curiously.

01:02:40.000 Perhaps it is significant that in this technology, backed by the right ideology and the correct values, we now actually have the potential for unprecedented levels of cooperation, democracy, autonomy, decentralized leadership, discourse, debate, almost as if the tools for an entirely different social, economic, and political model have been created.

01:03:08.000 And it has become necessary to colonize in the way the imperialistic powers have always colonized new territories under the guise of benevolence.

01:03:18.000 You wouldn't know what to do with those diamonds.

01:03:21.000 You'll hurt yourself with that oil.

01:03:23.000 Put that down.

01:03:25.000 We'll organize where you put your borders.

01:03:28.000 This was in the good old days when the British ran the empire. 0.99

01:03:34.000 Perhaps it is no different than that.

01:03:37.000 A new territory has been emerged.

01:03:39.000 The territory is neutral.

01:03:40.000 It lacks a moral charge.

01:03:42.000 It requires a moral charge and that will be designated by and determined by the powerful.

01:03:48.000 Sometimes I wonder when I'm listening to you describe this These terrifying emergent phenomena, if it's as simple as the way that the economic model is shifting with mainstream media outlets now bundling and dispatching data with more profligacy than even porn sites, I gather.

01:04:05.000 This is just academic research, Matt, you understand.

01:04:10.000 And of course, the fact that their advertising models have collapsed as independent media now has a greater access and ability to promote goods and services more effectively than their rather clumsy, centralised, behemoth models.

01:04:27.000 We're going to take some questions from the audience.

01:04:31.000 If you have a question, Please raise your hand.

01:04:34.000 Although we have been chatting to the star of everyone in the world's favorite movie, the Shawshank Redemption, Mr. Tim Robbins with a question.

01:04:42.000 A round of applause for the great Tim Robbins!

01:04:44.000 [Applause]

01:04:51.000 Can we have that mic?

01:04:53.000 [ Applause ]

01:04:57.000 Well, I wonder what all of you feel about the way forward.

01:05:04.000 As far as communicating with people that perhaps felt a different way in the past three years, and how do we reach out to these people in a healthy way to start a communication again in such a tribal environment?

01:05:26.000 Go ahead, Matt.

01:05:28.000 Solutions.

01:05:29.000 That's tough.

01:05:32.000 Russell?

01:05:35.000 All right, then.

01:05:36.000 Well, what I'm planning to do is to continue to be open-hearted and loving and faithful in the conversations I have with other people, particularly people that I disagree with.

01:05:47.000 I suppose this is a unique opportunity, a divisive time that seems to be defined by conflagration, conflict, and opposition.

01:05:54.000 And yet, as we touched upon in the earlier part of our conversation, the facility for an entirely different society already exists.

01:06:02.000 Sometimes I think what's required is a gratitude for the institutions that we have been imbued with.

01:06:08.000 Now we have the facility for great media, we have the institutions for wonderful health, we have incredible technological and scientific advancement, and even in the opposition that we have with others, we have to, I suppose if we're approaching this in good faith, assume that people we disagree with have comparable values and principles to us.

01:06:26.000 I suppose that, in particular, my worldview is undergirded by spiritual principles, and I don't mean that in a deracinated woo-woo way.

01:06:36.000 I mean that kindness, service, a willingness to forgive and be forgiven seem to me to be an absolute...

01:06:45.000 Necessity, if we're going to progress.

01:06:47.000 It's more than that, though.

01:06:48.000 It's more that it's morally correct to be forgiving and loving to other people.

01:06:53.000 It's that it is a necessity of the necessary victory, in order that we do not yield to centralized authoritarianism.

01:07:03.000 Of course, for me, it seems like that's where this is going.

01:07:05.000 It seems that it's almost like you can see the shapes forming of, hold on a minute, the American government are using taxpayer dollars to acquire private data of its citizens from private companies in order to bypass its own legislation.

01:07:21.000 The military-industrial complex appears to require forever wars in order to underwrite its economic model.

01:07:28.000 We're going to find ourselves literally somewhere between the twin dystopias of those great literary prophets, Orwell and Huxley, and already the name has been evoked, of course, of Orwell by Matt Taibbi.

01:07:42.000 Of course, though, Michael Schellenberger's references are usually the Bourne identity, and he's going to give a ten-minute speech in a minute based on part two of John Wick.

01:07:53.000 So I think good faith, good humour, good grace, and a willingness to acknowledge that we've all made mistakes.

01:07:59.000 How are we going to get anywhere together?

01:08:00.000 Or what are you going to do?

01:08:01.000 You're the one who's clearly going to try and become a politician any minute.

01:08:06.000 Yeah, I mean, obviously something like is broken, you know, with us with the internet.

01:08:11.000 I mean, there's the treatment of each other on Twitter.

01:08:14.000 We lose sight of the fact that, you know, we're all here for this very short period of time, and then we're gone.

01:08:22.000 And we lose that we're losing that humanity.

01:08:26.000 And I think we're also losing that sense in which we don't want to be ruled by the police.

01:08:32.000 We don't want to be ruled by our military intelligence and security services.

01:08:38.000 I think that most of the people in those agencies don't want to do it either.

01:08:41.000 They don't want that responsibility.

01:08:44.000 The best people want to be of service.

01:08:48.000 I guess the last thing I would just say is, I mean, this whole thing came because I was feeling really drawn to London right now.

01:08:56.000 And particularly earlier this year, there's so many people here who I admire.

01:09:00.000 And Francis, who gets up here, does this incredible podcast that's very...

01:09:05.000 psychologically rich and very humanistic and I knew I wanted to come but I didn't have any reason to come until we figured out that there was the censorship industrial complex and then when we put out the call to come and we see people that we know We see their faces and so there's something that's been missing and then you feel like you you're coming back to it when you're together.

01:09:28.000 So I hope that I thought that during the pandemic that there would be this moment when we would have sort of the pandemic is over day.

01:09:36.000 You know, where it'd be like, it's, you know, September 1st and the pandemic is over and everyone burned their masks, you know, you know, in mass.

01:09:45.000 And that never happened.

01:09:46.000 And it feels like everybody wants to get back together and they want to travel and they want to be together.

01:09:51.000 So I hope this is the beginning of a series of international in-person gatherings of people that love freedom and that love community, because I think we really all, I know I need it.

01:10:02.000 and I think that other people really need it too.

01:10:04.000 [ Applause ]

01:10:13.000 Yeah, all I would say is I remember, I've told this story before, but I remember in August of

01:10:20.000 2016, the New York Times came out with an article that was called,

01:10:25.000 "Trump is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism."

01:10:28.000 And it was a column by a guy named Jim Rutenberg.

01:10:31.000 And basically the premise of it was that journalists no longer needed to worry just about being true, but had to worry about being true to history's judgment.

01:10:42.000 And what I think they meant by that basically was the old version of what we do for a living, which was we just gather facts and give them to you and trust you to do the right thing with that information.

01:10:55.000 That doesn't work anymore because we don't trust you.

01:10:59.000 So we are going to shape the information in such a way that you do the right thing with it.

01:11:06.000 And I think this is just deeply off-putting and Inevitably unsuccessful, and I think the only thing that you can do if you're in media, for instance, is to continue to invest in that relationship with your audience and say, I do trust you.

01:11:30.000 Whatever I see, I'll pass it along to you.

01:11:33.000 I don't need you to behave one way or the other.

01:11:36.000 I don't need you to draw one conclusion or another.

01:11:38.000 And I think people can sense that.

01:11:42.000 What's a genuine attempt to connect versus what's didactic and directional and ordering and using techniques of fear to try to manipulate.

01:11:53.000 I think those things are inherently unpopular.

01:11:57.000 They will fail.

01:11:59.000 And when we see it in the way that the ratings are going in the States, and, you know, a new thing will come up.

01:12:06.000 You just have to stick with it.

01:12:08.000 And eventually, I think, you know, this thing, it just doesn't have an ability to appeal to people organically, I think.

01:12:16.000 Yeah, that's a fascinating take.

01:12:19.000 I've been very encouraged by how often during this conversation we've returned to a subject matter that feels interpersonal and emotional, that it's not entirely about cybernetics and networked power and the way that machines integrate and interact with one another.

01:12:40.000 It's encouraging to deal with it on an emotional level.

01:12:43.000 It occurred to me then when dealing with that sort of great chimera and weathervane that is Donald Trump that with both of the recent, two recent examples of whistleblowing have demonstrated again One example of whistleblowing and another the story

01:13:04.000 around the classified documents in the possession of, that Trump has in his possession.

01:13:08.000 And the other story that I'm referring to is a young buddy boy, Texera, I call him.

01:13:13.000 The lad that did the Pentagon Papers that revealed that there was an entirely different perspective

01:13:18.000 on the Ukraine war within American military circles than was being conveyed through media.

01:13:23.000 And the stories around the, the narrativization around the story was all about the individual

01:13:29.000 and the morality and virtues of the individual.

01:13:32.000 And similarly with Trump, who obviously is a much more divisive figure,

01:13:37.000 no one is talking about what the censored material is.

01:13:42.000 And there's at least one article by Branco Marketage based on fairly reliable sources I understand.

01:13:47.000 They indicate that the plans for a war with Iran is some of the censored information.

01:13:51.000 And it's like we've become unable to identify What information is important?

01:13:58.000 And also the idea that people want to be subject to censorship.

01:14:04.000 That should be censored. 0.78

01:14:05.000 Don't tell me that information.

01:14:06.000 In the post-Assange, post-Snowden world, you can't take on good faith that what's being censored is for your own good.

01:14:15.000 You can't have that perspective anymore, we've been stripped of that and I think I find your sort of easy neutrality coupled with what appears to be virtue encouraging that it's not governed by bombast and zeal and evangelism which I Rather like myself.

01:14:35.000 But a kind of, well, no, these are the facts, here's the information.

01:14:39.000 I'm enjoying the various ways that it's being sketched out.

01:14:42.000 Do we have another question?

01:14:44.000 Yes, there's a human female, I believe, over here in that area. 1.00

01:14:48.000 And here's a gentleman offering you a microphone, mate.

01:14:51.000 You can say your name if you want, unless you were also in Shawshank Redemption, in which case we'll work that out.

01:14:56.000 No, I was not.

01:14:57.000 Hi, thanks, this is fantastic.

01:14:59.000 My name is Jennifer Ewing.

01:15:02.000 I have a question for Michael, actually.

01:15:04.000 I know you ran for governor in Newsom's recall, I did vote for you, and I was wondering how much you experienced during that time of whether it's this You know, the censorship industrial complex or any sort of forces of people being kept away from each other.

01:15:25.000 I look at this room and we all seem to kind of come from different places, different political backgrounds.

01:15:29.000 But one thing I've noticed in this country, where I've lived for 20 years, as well as when I go back to California, is kind of the old school liberals getting together with some of us on the center right, shall we say, And saying, OK, let's forget these pet issues, because we're not going to have a country or countries unless we get the basics right.

01:15:50.000 Obviously, free speech, free movement of money, civil liberties, all of that.

01:15:56.000 How much did you experience when you were running for governor?

01:15:59.000 And do you have any hope for California going forward, seeing as that, you know, the statement

01:16:03.000 "As goes California, so goes the rest of the nation."

01:16:07.000 [laughter]

01:16:08.000 [pause]

01:16:09.000 The, the, one thing that, one benefit for running for political office is that you are

01:16:16.000 supposed to have somewhat more protection of your speech.

01:16:20.000 And so I'm not a fan of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.' 's position on vaccines or his position on nuclear power.

01:16:29.000 But I admire him actually responding to the call and speaking out for freedom of speech, and I'm disturbed that he's having his videos taken down from YouTube.

01:16:41.000 This is, I mean, a very significant form of censorship, and I'm troubled by it.

01:16:49.000 I'm very troubled by my adopted state of California.

01:16:53.000 I mean, we had a woman on the streets. 1.00

01:16:54.000 She was suffering from schizophrenia.

01:16:57.000 Addicted to fentanyl and meth.

01:17:00.000 They would not take her off the streets.

01:17:02.000 The lower parts of her legs rotted.

01:17:04.000 They took her to the hospital.

01:17:05.000 They amputated her legs and they put her back on the streets.

01:17:09.000 I don't understand how anybody can think of that as the humane, compassionate thing to do.

01:17:16.000 We're letting ideology overtake just basic human response and You know, those of us that have been in recovery or are in recovery and understand that all addiction requires a form of intervention.

01:17:32.000 And so, yeah, for me, I think California requires an intervention.

01:17:37.000 We need to stand up and say, this is at some fundamental level not right when you're not intervening in the lives of people who are destroying themselves in the downtown of your cities, and you're destroying your cities.

01:17:50.000 Businesses are now fleeing San Francisco.

01:17:52.000 Westfield Mall, Nordstrom's, leaving San Francisco.

01:17:56.000 I'm sorry, I don't have a more positive thing to say about it.

01:18:00.000 I think that, you know, when my book San Francisco came out in 2021, people were like, that's really rude.

01:18:08.000 You know, I can't believe you would say that.

01:18:11.000 And now I think a new study came out today that shows that it's like of 170 cities in the country, San Francisco is considered like the worst managed.

01:18:20.000 Not like you needed a survey to show it.

01:18:23.000 So I'm afraid I don't have a lot of optimism about it.

01:18:25.000 I think that reform may need to be reversed and that reform may need to start in the East and sweep West rather than the other way around.

01:18:34.000 It seems to me likely, possible, perhaps even necessary, that independent media will, by virtue of the role it will play in this issue among others, become politicized.

01:18:48.000 In fact, it already is and will necessarily become activated And organised in ways that I think are becoming clear, and in fact that you're perhaps expediating through your actions and through your foresight in holding this event.

01:19:03.000 I saw some hands... Oh no, Stella Assange is in!

01:19:06.000 in which case, please ladies and gentlemen, how about a round of applause for Stella Assange?

01:19:10.000 I'd like to thank you guys for making me nervous again.

01:19:25.000 Because I speak all the time, but for some reason right now, probably because you guys are on stage, I'm really nervous to speak.

01:19:34.000 But anyway, as you... Would you feel more comfortable coming up here and joining me?

01:19:39.000 Yeah, probably.

01:19:40.000 [applause]

01:19:45.000 You can have that seat and I'll sit over here looking sort of all vaguely prophetic.

01:19:50.000 (audience laughing)

01:19:52.000 Hi.

01:19:53.000 I'm genuinely nervous.

01:20:00.000 This is strange.

01:20:01.000 Okay.

01:20:04.000 Most of you are probably aware that my husband Julian is in a very precarious position right now.

01:20:16.000 The High Court of England has made the completely inexplicable decision to not even allow him to appeal to the High Court.

01:20:37.000 He made an application to appeal in September last year, and it took a single judge 10 months to issue a three-page decision, which, without engaging in any of the arguments, said that Julian is not allowed to appeal.

01:21:05.000 He still has one final opportunity to go to two different high court judges.

01:21:12.000 But the situation is now critical.

01:21:14.000 And You might say, well, this is different to the censorship industrial complex, but it's not.

01:21:24.000 These are two sides of the same coin.

01:21:26.000 Whereas all of you have experienced and seen the censorship that occurs on social media, this kind of unseen You know, effect kind of turns you a bit paranoid.

01:21:44.000 Am I paranoid?

01:21:46.000 Is it really happening?

01:21:49.000 We now know, thanks to you guys, that we have the evidence that it was happening and is happening and how it's happening.

01:21:59.000 But in Julian's case, this is the overt side of censorship.

01:22:09.000 This is a publisher, someone who received information from a source, Chelsea Manning, who was a U.S.

01:22:19.000 soldier in Iraq, posted in Iraq.

01:22:22.000 An intelligence analyst who witnessed, who was reading reports showing information about civilian killings, and there are tens of thousands of civilian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan, evidence of war crimes, including a video that was released, collateral murder in 2010, showing how a helicopter gunship mowed down civilians, literally picking them off.

01:22:54.000 Including two journalists and critically injured two children.

01:23:02.000 And mowed down the rescue vehicle who came to try to bring one of the dying journalists to a hospital and killed them all as well, except the two children survived because their father threw his body on top of them and they were severely injured, but they survived.

01:23:22.000 Collateral murder.

01:23:24.000 It's age-restricted on YouTube because it might hurt your sensibilities to witness a war crime.

01:23:34.000 Well, Julian and WikiLeaks put that into the public domain.

01:23:39.000 And the record of tens of thousands of civilian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan, and evidence of torture, and evidence of how the U.S.

01:23:48.000 government was using its embassies to inhibit and derail the investigations in Germany, in Spain, in Italy, of CIA renditions, to stop the people who were Responsible for being brought to trial for having their day in court because it is an enforcement of impunity.

01:24:15.000 And the case against Julian is of impunity against accountability.

01:24:23.000 And the fact is that Julian is in prison because he published the truth.

01:24:29.000 Because he exposed the criminality of the country that is trying to extradite him.

01:24:38.000 And that country also plotted to assassinate him when Pompeo was head of the CIA.

01:24:45.000 How can this country, the UK, possibly extradite him to the United States?

01:24:55.000 The country that plotted his assassination, the country that he exposed committing war crimes and for whom no one has been held accountable. 0.76

01:25:05.000 There has been a campaign of smearing Julian for years in order to pave the way to his incarceration.

01:25:17.000 Julian is a Symbol.

01:25:21.000 He's a deterrent.

01:25:23.000 He's a message to every journalist to not publish the truth.

01:25:33.000 To not publish the truth if it angers sufficiently powerful people, because they'll come after you.

01:25:39.000 That is the message, but that's also the message to all of you.

01:25:44.000 That's the general message that has been sent out and we have to push back.

01:25:53.000 We have to regain our rights.

01:25:55.000 It's not something about going back to, you know, like hoping for a pre-COVID war or pre-war on terror existence.

01:26:05.000 We have to fight back.

01:26:07.000 We have to organize because the other side is organized and they're abusing Legislation, they're abusing the complacency of the public in order to get their way. 0.56

01:26:22.000 Please follow Julian's case.

01:26:25.000 Like, get engaged.

01:26:26.000 It's critical now.

01:26:27.000 We're at the endgame.

01:26:28.000 He could be extradited.

01:26:29.000 He's facing 170 years, 175 years in the U.S.

01:26:34.000 under the Espionage Act.

01:26:35.000 There's no public interest defense.

01:26:36.000 He can't say why he published what he published.

01:26:39.000 He can't say that it was war crimes, that the U.S.

01:26:43.000 government was responsible, etc.

01:26:46.000 He has no defense.

01:26:48.000 Defense, the last defense, is decent people around the world, here in the United

01:26:55.000 States, defending the truth.

01:26:57.000 On Saturday, there's a concrete thing you can do, which is to come here at one o'clock.

01:27:09.000 There's going to be a statue here in Parliament Square, somewhere, of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Julian, and there's an empty chair next to them.

01:27:23.000 They're standing on chairs, these statues, and there's an empty chair.

01:27:27.000 It's called Anything to Say.

01:27:28.000 You can stand up.

01:27:30.000 And say whatever you need to say.

01:27:33.000 We all need to speak out.

01:27:35.000 We need to use our speech, because our speech is the only thing that can shape the world we live in.

01:27:45.000 Because otherwise, other people will occupy that space or try to silence us.

01:27:50.000 So, anyway, thank you for your attention.

01:27:53.000 Thanks, guys.

01:27:55.000 [APPLAUSE]

01:28:02.000 First of all, I want to thank Stella for everything that she

01:28:05.000 said.

01:28:06.000 Just a couple of things.

01:28:08.000 Number one, the behavior of the U.S.

01:28:12.000 media in ignoring this story Especially over the last five years is just totally inexcusable.

01:28:22.000 It's one of the things that turned me off to quote unquote mainstream media is their inability to recognize not only the cruelty of what's going on, but the The significance of Julian's case for the future of journalism, it shows their total myopia and blindness and it's just, it's horrible.

01:28:47.000 A couple other things though, Daniel Ellsberg just passed.

01:28:52.000 Um, and you know, we should, this is the sort of analogous figure from the 70s, once much celebrated by quote-unquote the sort of liberal America.

01:29:04.000 In fact, they very recently made a hagiographic movie, The Post.

01:29:10.000 Celebrating the heroism of the Washington Post in bringing the Pentagon Papers out and defying the government that would censor it.

01:29:20.000 That's sort of the cover story.

01:29:21.000 The reality is something we found in the Twitter files.

01:29:24.000 There was an episode that we discovered where A number of journalists got together.

01:29:32.000 This was connected to the tabletop exercise that Michael talked about.

01:29:38.000 Stanford University academics, members of the U.S.

01:29:42.000 government for a year preceding that exercise planned to overturn what they called the Pentagon Papers principle.

01:29:53.000 They wanted to change this idea that journalism was about bringing dangerous truths to the public.

01:30:00.000 They believed that they wanted to reverse that whole concept, that journalism was actually about protecting the public from things that it didn't need to know.

01:30:10.000 And so we see this dramatic shift in values Where even the Washington Post, which again was taking credit for the Pentagon Papers as it was doing this, so they're about to try to send Julian Assange to jail for 170 years.

01:30:25.000 for 170 years, is that how much it is?

01:30:28.000 175?

01:30:29.000 And at the same time, they want to turn journalism into this thing that is about keeping people

01:30:37.000 from knowing what the truth is.

01:30:38.000 And that's, it's completely backwards, and I can't be condemned enough, I don't think.

01:30:45.000 [applause]

01:30:52.000 Did you want one more?

01:30:54.000 No, we can do one more.

01:30:56.000 I'm being told that we can do one more question.

01:30:58.000 Sure.

01:30:59.000 Do you want to add anything to what Matt said regarding Stella and Julian?

01:31:03.000 Just that I'm totally moved by the case and I have a lot more learning to do and I look forward to getting educated and speaking out on it.

01:31:12.000 I'll then add that Stella, I'm very grateful to you for bringing that spirit to our conversation.

01:31:21.000 And he's very fortunate to have you as an advocate and an ally.

01:31:26.000 And we are fortunate to be reminded that this is not a hypothetical conversation about a foreboding and potential problem.

01:31:36.000 It is a tide that has already risen and claimed some territory has already been yielded and seeded and it is I'm very grateful to you for explaining that so articulately and with such evident and obvious emotion as a campaigner and as a lawyer but also as a wife and as a mother.

01:31:58.000 Thank you very much for bringing that.

01:32:00.000 [APPLAUSE]

01:32:03.000 We could probably do one more.

01:32:09.000 Maybe we could get someone from Britain? 0.99

01:32:13.000 Oh yeah!

01:32:14.000 I love Americans, don't get me wrong.

01:32:17.000 Though you are censoring.

01:32:18.000 We kind of take over a little bit.

01:32:21.000 Prove your Britishness by being awkward, bashful, asking a long, tangential, and confusing question. 0.98

01:32:27.000 Yes, you sir.

01:32:29.000 Like he was plainly stood up, that geezer.

01:32:38.000 We'll get a mic for you, hold on a second. 0.99

01:32:40.000 They are English because they're fucking awkward, I'll tell you. 1.00

01:32:45.000 I'm an independent broadcaster. 0.97

01:32:47.000 I run a show called The Pandemic Podcast and I've seen firsthand the implication of censorship.

01:32:52.000 We had our channel cut down from YouTube after 5 million views.

01:32:56.000 We've had endless suppression on Facebook and Twitter.

01:32:59.000 But I'm not alone.

01:33:01.000 We've seen the beacon of truth that is illustrated by Julian Assange as a permanent reminder of the heights that we may not reach to, but now we even have a bar within these technological platforms that we know we cannot cross, so we dance and we walk the line, or we go to a desexualized platform, Odyssey, Rumble, which offer us the opportunity to speak our truth, but to a smaller audience who perhaps are where we're preaching to the converted or the choir already.

01:33:27.000 So how then do we tackle The likes of Facebook and YouTube and these other mainstream platforms without another Moneybags who's free spirit to come and buy up all these channels.

01:33:36.000 How do we fight back because there are thousands of broadcasters around the world right now

01:33:40.000 who are unable to speak the truth because the line has been set and we can only dance around it or go to another

01:33:46.000 platform where we can't reach the matters who need to hear this

01:33:49.000 information.

01:33:50.000 [Applause]

01:34:00.000 That's a huge question and I'll attempt and offer some way forward but honestly that's part of the why we're here is

01:34:11.000 to figure out some answers.

01:34:13.000 I mean, the first part starts with your passion, sir.

01:34:16.000 We need it.

01:34:17.000 We need some fight in us to go after this issue.

01:34:19.000 I think the other thing is that we...

01:34:27.000 We have to fight back.

01:34:28.000 We have to fight back.

01:34:29.000 We have to be on every platform.

01:34:32.000 There's censorship on every platform, including Twitter.

01:34:38.000 And we can debate how much of that is the fault of its current owner, how much of it he can control, how much of it he can't control.

01:34:45.000 You may have seen that Elon Musk was just in Europe this week and basically made the same agreement that he did with Turkey.

01:34:53.000 My own view is that governments should mandate the owners of all the social media platforms to be transparent about their censorship decisions and give the right of response.

01:35:04.000 Our own laws make it very difficult to require a social media platform to carry particular forms of speech, because compelled speech is considered a violation of the First Amendment.

01:35:17.000 That may be different in different countries, but I think it's going to be very hard to compel them to host different speech.

01:35:23.000 So that means that you need multiple platforms.

01:35:26.000 When Facebook censored Seymour Hersh, We denounced it on Twitter, and we did see a response, a lessening, not an elimination, but a lessening of the censorship.

01:35:39.000 I'm personally being censored on Facebook right now.

01:35:42.000 To give you a sense of it, the story that Matt and I broke on the first three people to get COVID.

01:35:48.000 We had 5 million views on Twitter, and even though I posted it on Facebook at the same time, it had only 5 people sharing it.

01:35:56.000 Not 5,000, not 5 million, 5 people.

01:35:59.000 So I think we have to be like water and just move to where we can move in this very dynamic environment.

01:36:06.000 I mean, I never thought, I have a similar concern with Rumble.

01:36:09.000 Is anybody going there?

01:36:10.000 But Russell's there now.

01:36:12.000 I think we're interested in going there now.

01:36:14.000 We need to be able to go to these places where we can find openings and opportunities.

01:36:18.000 But I also think we have to get out of this thing of, like you were, I think you were intimating, of appealing to these powerful billionaires for mercy.

01:36:28.000 We need to demand that our governments require that they be transparent in their censorship demands.

01:36:35.000 It's got to be a citizen's movement because we can't just be appealing to authority.

01:36:38.000 I would just quickly say two things. 0.98

01:36:50.000 Don't suck and tell the truth, and we'll do well. 0.99

01:36:53.000 I mean, look at Russell's show, right? 0.99

01:36:56.000 I mean, it's killing other shows in the ratings because people enjoy it, because it's real, it's genuine.

01:37:03.000 You can't fake that.

01:37:04.000 That's the problem that corporate media has right now.

01:37:08.000 They're losing audience, they're desperate, and they don't have a strategy for getting it back.

01:37:14.000 So just be real and you'll get audience.

01:37:16.000 That's important.

01:37:17.000 But even more importantly, I think, as the example of Julian Assange, what they want to do with cases like Julian is prevent the next person from trying that, right?

01:37:28.000 That's the whole point of being as cruel and as heavy-handed as they are in that case, is the next person who gets collateral murder, they want them to think twice about publishing that video.

01:37:39.000 Don't think twice, do it, right?

01:37:42.000 Those things will always get attention, and they will expose the media that's not doing those stories as the frauds they are.

01:37:51.000 And I think it's just important to follow that sort of courageous example, and independent media will always do fine.

01:38:00.000 It may not make a million dollars, but it will do well.

01:38:04.000 It will require... Oh yeah, round of applause for Matt.

01:38:07.000 I sense the require for a kind of personal moral fortitude that in the end becomes a

01:38:19.000 very personal choice.

01:38:21.000 You alluded briefly to recovery earlier, Michael, and because I live within a template of personal requirements where I have to observe my own tendency to want to control My own tendency to be competitive or petty or trivial, I recognize I have a personal responsibility that I see other people tackling far more gracefully, even on this stage, an ability to be open-minded, an ability to be intrepid and investigative, and the contribution from Stella reminds us of the necessity for sacrifice.

01:38:55.000 The thing that I have continual recourse to that inspires me continually, actually, is that I marvel at the endeavor involved in creating these systems of control.

01:39:09.000 The shutting down of protest, the endless surveillance, the censorship, the legal tools that are deployed, the technological tools that are deployed, the willingness to overrule democracy, national sovereignty, to smear even the most truthful endeavors as being somehow mendacious or duplicitous.

01:39:34.000 It also reminds me that there is a necessity to overtly, obviously, and plainly refute the claims that are often made, to be clear about inclusivity, to be absolutely open-hearted and loving towards people of all forms of identification, all forms of religious, cultural, national identification, have to be openly embraced.

01:39:55.000 There has to be As we saw there, when people favour, when one man at least, favoured another person's free speech above their own.

01:40:03.000 When we have recourse to simple, I call Sesame Street values, kindness, service, sweetness to one another, I feel then that we have a great power, a great power That they wouldn't be working nearly so hard if they did not fear us.

01:40:21.000 And while we have in the figure of Julian Assange a potential martyr, we don't have to allow that to be the case.

01:40:29.000 We have to bond and bind and be vocal together and willing to sacrifice and willing to support The great work and bravery of journalists where we find them and be forgiving of other people who don't have those values.

01:40:44.000 It's difficult to be outspoken.

01:40:46.000 It's difficult to be brave.

01:40:48.000 Sure as hell it must be difficult to endure life without trial in Belmarsh or the potential of 175 years without trial in a country he may yet be exiled to.

01:41:00.000 We must learn to recognize heroism when we see it.

01:41:02.000 We must be willing to forgive fallibility in ourselves and others.

01:41:06.000 We must recognize that we have a deep and powerful resource within us and it is available to all of us in this instant now.

01:41:15.000 Thank you all very much for your personal contributions.

01:41:19.000 Thank you for attending.

01:41:20.000 Michael, well done for putting all this into it.

01:41:22.000 [APPLAUSE]

01:41:29.000 Thank you very much!

01:41:29.000 Stay free!

Stay Free - Russel Brand - July 03, 2023

LIVE: Matt Taibbi & Michael Shellenberger (Exposing Censorship)

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