In this episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand, Russell talks about how the mainstream media are covering Donald Trump's arrest on 37 federal charges, and how they're covering it in a way that makes no sense. Plus, we find out why Kid Rock thinks Kid Rock has a secret map of the White House, and why it doesn't make any sense to him. And why he thinks it's a good idea to make a firework. Stay Free with Russell Brand is out there on Rumble, and you can catch us on Locals, where we'll be covering all the latest news and gossip. Stay free, and stay free, wherever you get your news. Stay free! - Russell Brand Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. The theme of this episode is Come Alone by Suneaters, and the album art for the album is by Fugue, which is out now. Our theme song is by The Weakerthans, courtesy of Lotuspool Records, and our ad music is by Build Buildings Records, which you can find us on SoundCloud here. Please rate and review the album on Apple Podcasts, and tell us what you think of it! We'll be looking out for you in the comments below! Thank you for supporting Stay Free, and spread the word to your friends and family about this beautiful work! - Thank you, you're amazing! Love Light, Hazel, Hazel Halite, Jack, Jack and Gav, Kayla, and Good Morning, and Thank You, Gave us your support! - EJ, and thank you, and keep on Keep On Keep On Fire! - Rosie, and Keep On Tweet Me Out There, and Don't forget to send us your thoughts, and we'll keep On Fire, and We'll See Us Sending Us Love, and Stay Free! xoxo. - P.Breezy, Jack & Gwyneth, AKA:) - Jack, Gav & Gweny, Jacky, and Gave Me A Rain! - Thank You! - Gav and Gareth, Jacklyn, Gareth & Jacky & Gareth Roy, and Jackyotch, and Jadynne, and Matt Taibbi, Matt, and Katie, and all the rest of the Crew, and so much more! - And so much More!
00:01:50.000Oh look, he's got an aeroplane, he's in a cab, he's in a golf buggy.
00:01:54.000If you're watching us on YouTube, we're going to be covering live Trump moving about on different vehicles, talking about the legitimacy of the case, talking about what it tells us about democracy, partisanship, then We go over exclusively onto Rumble because freedom of speech matters to us because there is a censorship industrial complex that doesn't want us openly communicating and they'll say whatever they need to say to legitimize their censorship.
00:02:21.000They'll claim that there's hate speech and of course there's hatred in the world and bigotry and prejudice.
00:02:35.000And later on the show, to tell us exactly why it doesn't make sense, a so-called journalist, Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi, the scourge of congressional hearings, they are appearing live with me in an event I'm doing in London.
00:02:50.000Me, Matt Taibbi, Shellenberger, I'll be interviewing them about the censorship industrial complex, but why don't we first see how the mainstream media are covering Trump's arrest.
00:02:59.000Trump is being arrested on federal charges, 37 federal charges, but if Kid Rock's to be believed...
00:03:06.000It's been showing, like, I think it's worse that there are that many documents that have been censored.
00:04:00.000Well, let's say what it actually says.
00:04:02.000Trump reportedly showed a classified map related to a military operation to someone who did not possess security clearance.
00:04:08.000In a 2022 interview with Tucker on Fox, Kid Rock claimed the former president asked his advice and showed him what he believed to be secret information during a visit to the White House in 2017.
00:04:19.000Did he have Kid Rock at the White House?
00:05:57.000In though, do you see how the mainstream media confines us to particular topics?
00:06:02.000Everywhere, and have you noticed this, we'll be talking about how outrageous and egregious it is that Trump's in possession of these documents.
00:06:09.000On some platforms, you'll see people saying, well Joe Biden, he's just as bad.
00:06:12.0001,800 boxes of documents from when he's a senator.
00:06:15.000And then people say, yeah, but he was in Loudoun when he's a senator.
00:06:17.000But then people say, he had 20, and they were in his garage.
00:07:03.000If you're watching this show and you've got access to these documents, let us know, particularly if you're one of the FBI whistleblowers like our mate Stephen Friend, who every single one of his siblings has a stick figure of Ol' Russ tattooed, this is a fact, you can take this to the bank, Frank, of me, on their reproductive genital members.
00:07:24.000That'll do, same thing, fake news, freedom, it's all the same.
00:07:27.000Let's see how they're covering arraignment day over there.
00:07:30.000Former National Security Advisor John Bolton worked in the Trump White House.
00:07:34.000This was a risk to national security beyond calculation.
00:07:38.000Bolton told CBS News special handling suggests a special access program which can be so secret the government doesn't acknowledge its existence.
00:07:48.000Something so secret you won't even... Does it exist?
00:08:23.000We've got battleships in American waters.
00:08:25.000Kid Rock is floating a weather balloon high in the sky.
00:08:28.000Kid Rock and Donald Trump are frankly not the problem.
00:08:31.000The problem is deep systemic abuse that we're living on a prison planet that we can't break out of this damn matrix unless we're willing to overcome cultural conflict and unite against establishment elites.
00:12:00.000Then they got Leon to do a voice, clearly, and Leon keeps saying, I don't want to do it, I don't want to do it, but he always does them, doesn't he?
00:12:05.000Louis Leon, one of the producers, he loves it.
00:12:07.000And then, you should have reminded me that it's called Plains, Trump and Automobiles, but let me know what you think of it in the chat.
00:12:12.000This is, after all, unlike America or the United Kingdom, this is a real democracy.
00:12:17.000If you want us to use it again, we will.
00:12:39.000It's 400 years, but you're probably, you're 77.
00:12:41.000Tomorrow is Trump's birthday, but let us know in the chat, do you think there's anything Trump would rather do than be arraigned on his birthday?
00:12:48.000He's the sort of person who would like that, wouldn't he?
00:12:50.000He's a pugnacious fighter of the establishment.
00:12:52.000He's not one to recline on his birthday.
00:15:47.000But at the same time, they're kind of aiding his ascent or his kind of soaring poll numbers
00:15:55.000So it's really difficult for any other... Everyone's trapped in the Trump paradox because we live in a world of corruption and hypocrisy where Trump, even if you believe him to be a gargoyle outlier of corruption, he still is like a one-man tornado, elevating CNN, getting executives sacked with his town hall wonder.
00:16:14.000Let's have a look at him landing in Florida.
00:16:52.000No, your seat's still not quite up, sir.
00:16:55.000Appearance in the Southern District of Florida.
00:16:58.000Trump has referred to the 37 count indictment as a joke and over the weekend called the special counsel... Show like the interior of that plane because I'd love to look around that, wouldn't you?
00:17:09.000If we interview Trump, I want to interview him on that plane.
00:17:12.000There's going to be a bedroom area, isn't there?
00:18:24.000I guess by the same token, if Biden's got classified documents, if Mike Pence has got classified documents, that is the argument that other people have done it.
00:18:31.000And what about my more advanced argument which is that power and governance ought to be transparent except in matters of true national security.
00:18:44.000I think that Kid Rock's improved since he's seen the documents and I think we should all have a look at them.
00:18:49.000I think your point about the classified documents I think is really interesting.
00:18:53.000You know, we're told that national security is at risk by people having access to these
00:19:00.000classified documents in the case of, for example, Julian Assange.
00:19:03.000But if what Julian Assange is revealing is in the interest of the American public, doesn't
00:19:08.000that then diminish the authority of the classified documents?
00:19:12.000You know, I think that is an important point.
00:19:14.000It's not to say that it's right that Donald Trump has these or that Joe Biden has them.
00:19:18.000LadyGrey312 says, the Q is, would anyone else be charged under the same things?
00:19:22.000Do you think Donald Trump is being unfairly treated?
00:19:27.000Well, you lot think that Trump is being persecuted because he is a powerful political force, likely to succeed in his attempt to win the Republican nomination, and then likely to win a presidential election next year.
00:19:42.000The Democratic Party are afraid of that.
00:21:12.000You really get to see what the allegations and all the folks who are saying, well, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and Mike Pence also, you know, had incidents with classified documents.
00:21:22.000Read this and you'll get a very different picture.
00:21:24.000You know, what's interesting about the Republicans who are coming out, thus far you have Christie, Barr, H. Hutchinson, Lindsey Graham, they all have backgrounds in some way either as lawyers or prosecutors.
00:21:34.000Graham and Asa Hutchinson back in 1999 were Bill Clinton impeachment managers.
00:21:39.000Obviously Barr's background and Chris Christie's.
00:21:42.000But now look, I'm not saying that every Republican Plenty of small differences, isn't it, ultimately?
00:22:41.000None of us really believe that there's any legitimacy to the integrity of other political figures.
00:22:49.000And when it comes to the coverage of CNN right now, you can't watch it Imagine for a moment that they're going to come to any conclusion other than what Trump has done is worse than anyone else.
00:22:59.000This should bar him for standing for presidency.
00:23:02.000They're participating in a propagandist endeavour.
00:23:05.000That's plain whether you like Trump or not.
00:24:09.000That's why on the left and right there are emergent anti-establishment figures.
00:24:13.000Whether it's RFK, Who will be dismissed as an anti-vaxxer?
00:24:17.000Marianne Williamson, who will be dismissed as, like, woo-woo and a spiritualist.
00:24:21.000Cornel West, who they'll find some reason to discredit.
00:24:24.000Donald Trump, who is a kind of berserker with his drain the swamp rhetoric.
00:24:29.000Anybody who speaks out against establishment interests will be smeared and brought down, whether that's within the media or within politics.
00:25:05.000I think, you know, the reason why what we're seeing is like Trump's popularity go up at this time, and people, I think 80% of people saying that it doesn't make a difference to them, you know, whether he's still a nominee, obviously shows that this whole thing of classified documents isn't a narrative that is resonating with the public who Don't trust the establishment.
00:25:27.000So we're talking about a set of establishment classified documentation belonging to a system and a government, a government system that people just don't trust anyway, you know.
00:25:37.000And again, coming back to the point about Julian Assange and the recent revelations about the Ukraine war through that, um, Teixeira, Jack Teixeira, you know, when people are saying, seeing that classified documents are yielding information that they feel they should have access to, that is relevant to them, they think, well, classified documents, We should have access to anyway.
00:25:55.000Why would you be on the side of their censorship?
00:25:59.000Why would you be on the side of them censoring you while denying you access to that information?
00:26:04.000I know there's a nuanced argument to be had about national security and military matters, but there isn't an argument to be had about A trustworthy, centralised authority and honouring protocols.
00:26:16.000Here's an interesting point being made.
00:26:18.000This person says Trump was against the jab.
00:27:04.000Well, I think that it creates a problem of partiality in the administration of justice.
00:27:10.000And this is, you know, the most important criminal case in our history, really.
00:27:15.000And her rulings before weren't just favorable to Trump.
00:27:20.000She actually stated in her rulings that she believed that because he is a former president, he should be treated differently, that the normal rules don't apply to him.
00:27:30.000She also demonstrated a pretty cavalier attitude towards classified information.
00:27:36.000She did not want to return those documents to the government, and the government had to appeal that, and she was overruled on that point by the 11th Circuit.
00:27:44.000So I think on both of these points, it creates a potential problem, not only because she's going to be overseeing a trial of a former president who she thinks should be treated differently, but she's going to have to navigate really tricky issues regarding classified information A lot of you saying it makes no difference to me, that's Rabfan, Trump or RFK for me so far.
00:28:03.000So figures from across the political spectrum garnering support in a relatively unique way.
00:28:09.000And what I think it indicates more than anything is that no one has the moral authority to adjudicate now.
00:28:16.000When someone says it's illegal that Trump has these documents, the response from the wider public is, well, who says so?
00:28:25.000Of course, if you're a person who already dislikes Trump, you see this as further evidence of Trump's corruption.
00:28:29.000If you like Trump, you see this as further evidence of the persecution of Trump.
00:28:33.000So what you have now is an entirely bifurcated political space and beyond that, I think an untenable American experiment.
00:28:43.000I think that what's required is a new radical system of organisation that's not based on domination in the same way the last couple of hundred years have been.
00:28:52.000Hey, listen, some people say this whole thing's just a distraction from the last few years.
00:28:57.000I guess you're referring to the pandemic there.
00:29:01.000I didn't say plandemic, I said prandemic.
00:29:03.000Clashes, clashes break out at Trump arraignment courthouse after a suspicious package sparks
00:30:57.000Fox News Wednesday notified Tucker Carlson's lawyers that the former primetime anchor violated his contract with the network when he launched his own Twitter show on Tuesday.
00:31:06.000A breach of contract claim sets Fox News up to explore potential legal action against Carlson, a move that would intensify the already thorny public battle between the two parties.
00:31:15.000The first episode of former Fox News host Tucker Carlson's new show on Twitter has had more than 100 million views in less than two days since its launch.
00:31:22.000He has since released another episode.
00:31:24.000So does Tucker's move signify the end of an epoch for cable news?
00:31:27.000Certainly if CNN's apparent collapse is anything to go by, it does.
00:31:32.000Certainly if Fox News' legal pursuit of Tucker is anything to go by, it does.
00:31:36.000Certainly if your ongoing dissatisfaction and distrust of the mainstream media is anything to go by, it does.
00:31:41.000Let me know in the chat and the comments what you think about this story and let's have a look at Tucker Carlson's first episode to see if he still has his finger on the pulse in spite of moving to a new platform.
00:31:51.000So if you're wondering why our country seems so dysfunctional, this is a big part of the reason.
00:32:30.000Secrecy is a powerful tool of control.
00:32:33.000Tucker's point about secrecy is important.
00:32:36.000Who controls information necessarily has a great deal of power.
00:32:39.000We've long believed that the movements and changes in this space are as a result of our shared ability to collaborate on creating new narratives.
00:32:48.000You help us all the time with your posts in the comments, with the information you give us.
00:32:52.000When we've made mistakes with our takes on stories, You've helped to correct us.
00:32:56.000I would add to Tucker's comment on race that it's not enough to just dismiss those stories, but to recognize the significant truth that if we form new alliances, if we refuse to bait one another, if we refuse to row on the subjects of identity and culture, then their tools of control are diminished.
00:33:14.000These ideas about the control of information and censorship and the newly emergent censorship industrial complex, which by the way I'll be talking about with Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi when they come to this country, we're gonna have a host of specials on Rumble talking about exactly this subject, are important.
00:33:29.000For a long time it's been argued that the state has a monopoly on violence.
00:33:33.000The state is able to be violent towards you, to incarcerate you, to control you.
00:33:37.000I know many of you that have strong views around firearms are essentially reaching towards the idea that But why ought the state have the ability to inflict violence on you and you not have the right to defend yourself from the state?
00:33:48.000We know those are complex arguments and people have a variety of views but this control of violence and this control of information could potentially break down if more and more independent voices start to dominate these type of spaces.
00:34:01.000That's why we are seeing the emergence of the censorship industrial complex because the media, the state, Big business are working cooperatively to prevent these new power structures, which are much more diffuse, shared, and collaborative, from emerging.
00:34:46.000Whether you agree with Tucker Carlson or not, it's plain from the viewing figures that he is a powerful voice and that he's contributing to radical change in the way that media is consumed.
00:34:55.000It makes sense that Fox wants to curtail and even shut down that ability.
00:35:00.000Shortly after Carlson posted the first episode of his news show on Twitter Tuesday evening, Fox's News General Counsel Bernard Guga sent a letter to Carlson's lawyers saying Carlson is in breach of his contract agreement.
00:35:10.000The source told Axios that Carlson was told by a senior Fox executive that the network's goal is to keep him sidelined until 2025.
00:35:18.000So Fox plainly understand that Tucker Carlson's voice is direct competition to their business and with cable news evidently in a great deal of trouble this conversation becomes vitally important and you can see why they're leveraging legal means because CNN are in a great deal of trouble not least because of their decision to grant Donald Trump a platform on the now infamous town hall meeting which garnered them their best viewing figures in a long time but Well, Chris Licht is officially out at CNN after a chaotic run as chairman and CEO.
00:35:53.000The network announced this morning that Licht is leaving immediately.
00:35:56.000He took over the job just about a year ago, but his time at CNN has been marked with a series of high-profile controversies and tanking ratings.
00:36:05.000Let's learn a little bit about how cable news started and why it cannot cope with new emergent independent media voices without conspiring with the state to shut them down through censorship and smearing.
00:36:16.000And by God, we know a little about that personally.
00:36:20.000Yep, the cable news channel has seen ratings plummet, attracting fewer viewers than right-wing minnow Newsmax in May.
00:36:25.000Its newsroom was in open rebellion and staff morale was at rock bottom.
00:36:29.000The cable news era that Ted Turner launched is drawing to a close and while the cultural and political consequences of that fact consume public attention, this is also a story about the demise of one of media's great business models.
00:36:40.000The most troubling feature of Lick's 13-month reign was not his decision to interview Trump in front of an audience of jeering supporters, it was that CNN's average primetime audience fell to just 535,000 in the first quarter, down from 1.7 million in 2020.
00:36:55.000Shrinking audiences are not unique to CNN, nor to the US.
00:36:59.000Pay TV audiences are getting smaller and older.
00:37:01.000This has been true for a while, but in commercial terms, it barely mattered.
00:37:05.000Through the magic of retransmission fees, in which distributors pay content owners to air their channels, revenues and profits held up.
00:37:11.000CNN's annual revenues doubled to $2 billion in the decade to the 2020 US election, and it made roughly a billion dollars in profits every year of the Trump presidency, according to the New York Times.
00:37:21.000That tide has turned, with revenues falling.
00:37:23.000With annual profits still a reported $750 million last year, the business is not falling off a cliff.
00:37:28.000But as CNN's parent company, Warner Brothers' Wile E. Coyote, could tell you, gravity exerts itself eventually.
00:37:33.000News and sports channels were supposed to be the features that persuaded viewers to keep their cable subscriptions, giving their owners negotiating power with distributors.
00:37:41.000But more subscriptions are being cancelled and media owners have failed to replicate that model online or on streaming platforms.
00:37:47.000The old model has been so lucrative that cable news operators have had little incentive to establish themselves as big brands in digital news, allowing others from legacy newspapers to brash podcast hosts to take the lead.
00:37:58.000It may be too late for them to catch up now.
00:38:00.000When the first 24-hour channels launched, they filled a clear gap in the news market.
00:38:04.000Whatever leaked successors do, they are unlikely to repeat that trick.
00:38:08.000Journalistically, it's not the end of the world, but the end is in sight for a news media business model that will not be replaced by anything nearly as lucrative.
00:38:15.000Power structures across the board are beginning to implode and collapse, whether they are democratic institutions or apparently democratic institutions like the American government or the British government.
00:38:26.000You can feel that they are starting to quake under the weight of the ability to communicate immediately in nuanced ways and to house and frame a variety of voices because of the way that technology has changed.
00:38:39.000The media is already feeling the pinch.
00:38:41.000The inability to communicate nuanced information to a large audience because now, if you're watching CNN, you're a CNN person.
00:38:49.000If you're watching Fox, you're a Fox person.
00:38:51.000And both of those organisations are housed by business models that will not ultimately allow power to move in the direction it threatens to, i.e.
00:39:00.000to become more decentralised and more diffuse.
00:39:03.000Both of those business models are ultimately part of conglomerates that have traditional, conventional relationships with state and corporate power upstream.
00:39:12.000Both of them are owned by organisations like Comcast or News International that have the type of affiliations and political partners that, whether they're on the blue side or the red side or the donkey side or the elephant side, will ultimately require the state to regulate and legislate in their favour to prevent new business models and new independent media voices emerging.
00:39:32.000Tucker Carlson, as we actually predicted, is the first to demonstrate how radical the change has become.
00:39:37.000Joe Rogan is the impreture, someone who emerged in this space and was able to withstand significant media attacks, notably around the horse paste scandal.
00:39:47.000His ongoing willingness to house, in retrospect, valid voices during the coronavirus pandemic.
00:39:53.000Tucker Carlson is from conventional news media.
00:39:55.000Tucker Carlson is going on TV saying, I regret the way I reported the Iraq war.
00:40:00.000The way that old school media is funded means it can never be balanced and nuanced.
00:40:04.000Trust me, I know that these news channels are not reliable.
00:40:08.000I believe, and this is because of you, that what we're going to see now is a war Between mainstream media, supported by the state, and independent voices, supported by you, that will mean that new alliances simply have to appear.
00:40:20.000That's why the thing I agree with most from Tucker Carlson's episode one is we have to put aside the arguing around cultural issues.
00:40:27.000Not that those issues aren't important.
00:40:28.000All of us are affected one way or another around value systems that coalesce around traditionalism or progressivism.
00:40:34.000But what we're going to need to find are new ideas around which to form alliances in order to support the emergent potential for conversations like this to continue in spite of the fact that the state and the censorship industrial complex would like to shut this down.
00:40:51.000We welcome you, whatever your previous political affiliations were, whatever media channels you used to watch.
00:40:56.000We want to ensure that your voice is heard, that you are part of the conversation.
00:41:00.000We want to ensure that independent voices continue to be housed.
00:41:04.000That means there will be new alliances.
00:41:06.000That means there will be new conversations.
00:41:08.000What's fascinating about this time is we're able to witness the establishment's attempts to maintain something that is dying.
00:41:15.000Whether it's conventional democracy, isn't working anymore, is it?
00:41:18.000Whoever wins the next election, the other side are going to say it was a corrupt election.
00:41:21.000And in the media spaces, we're similarly going to see them desperately scrap to maintain their territory, even though their marketing and advertising models simply won't retain it.
00:41:30.000That means they're going to resort to dirty tricks.
00:41:32.000That means you're going to see Fox trying to shut down Tucker.
00:41:34.000That means you're going to see CNN grasping and groping for new audience members.
00:41:40.000So what they're going to have to do is hobble and stymie the attempts of their opponents.
00:41:45.000Algorithms are going to be adjusted to shut down independent news voices.
00:41:48.000You're going to hear more talk of right-wing conspiracy theorists and smearing independent voices like this one.
00:41:54.000I absolutely believe that if you're red or blue or Republican or Democrat, you're on the wrong side.
00:42:00.000This is a time for new independent voices.
00:42:03.000You can see that in the political space.
00:42:04.000That's why there are candidates that a couple of years ago were a laughingstock, like RFK, getting serious traction and serious attention.
00:42:10.000Because there is a partnership between independent political voices and independent media voices.
00:42:15.000This is something we have to cultivate.
00:42:17.000In order to do it significantly, we're going to have to get past the oppositionism that defines the culture war.
00:42:23.000We're going to have to get beyond the agenda of the censorship industrial complex, which simply wants to shut down conversation in order to keep things exactly the same.
00:44:14.000What were you doing that was more important than bringing down the censorship industrial complex that you claim to care so much about?
00:44:22.000Absolutely nothing is more important, but I think Matt, Taibi and I are happy to announce that we just broke maybe one of the biggest stories In recent memory, which is that we have on good information that the coronavirus did originate from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that the first three people who were sickened by it were the scientists working to modify coronaviruses as part of gain-of-function research.
00:44:54.000So it's a pretty blockbuster story and we're happy to To be here and talk about why censorship was a problem in this case and in so many others.
00:45:11.000There is the story being broken by the self-publicist Michael Schellenberger.
00:45:19.000Narcissistic Woodward and Bernstein of our day, breaking these important stories.
00:45:25.000So if the first people that got coronavirus were working in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what conclusions might we draw from that, Matt?
00:45:37.000Well, it's a major story for a couple of reasons, but first it completely obliterates the early official story that the explanation for coronavirus was that it was transmitted by an animal, maybe a bat or a pangolin, at the wet market in Wuhan.
00:45:58.000This explanation more definitively ties it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and raises the question, was this story suppressed because there might have been involvement by the United States in funding the research that led to the development of what they call the fern cleavage site, which is the element of the virus that made it so transmissible.
00:46:22.000So this is, you know, it's an explosive story and we should note that there are other journalists who are working on this and we're glad for that.
00:46:30.000That's, you know, that's something different from the Twitter files and it's a good thing to see.
00:46:36.000I can't believe that that's not a conspiracy theory.
00:46:39.000I can't believe that that is legitimate journalism.
00:46:42.000I can't believe that we're being forced to confront the truth that that virus began in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
00:46:50.000Is it possible that those scientists, they had been for lunch down the wet market.
00:46:55.000They'd had a little bit of pangolin and a little bit of bat soup or whatever.
00:46:59.000I'm not judging people for having a different culture.
00:47:03.000And then they went back to work and by coincidence... Maybe they went via a bat cave?
00:47:09.000You pop into a bat cave because, I don't know, your parents were murdered and you're looking for inspiration for what vigilante identity to adopt in your ongoing fight against crime.
00:47:21.000Michael, I think as a journalist it's important that you cover every single aspect of this case.
00:47:27.000Now both of you are two of my favourite journalists, that's why we are appearing together at an event named
00:47:34.000the Censorship Industrial Complex Exposed in London on Thursday
00:47:38.000the 22nd of June. We'll be covering a variety of topics then. Today though
00:47:41.000we're talking somewhat about Donald Trump's indictment, impeachment, whatever it is he's going for, arraignment, a
00:47:48.000variety of polysyllabic and perjurative terms.
00:47:52.000Why shouldn't Donald Trump have those documents?
00:47:56.000What is the classification of documents, the control of information by institutions that no longer have our trust?
00:48:04.000Seems to be a more important issue than this one.
00:48:06.000Michael, what do you think about the current case?
00:48:10.000Yeah, I mean, look, I think that this case, like a lot of others, raises some serious questions around the abuse of power by government officials.
00:48:20.000I don't know the specifics of it, but I think that when we look at sort of the cases that we've been following, whether it's the COVID origins, whether it's the Hunter Biden laptop, Russiagate, Many other issues we're seeing the institutions and we've seen now in Britain that they were that the UK government was engaged in similar censorship activities as the US government.
00:48:42.000We've been also talking about the FBI whistleblowers.
00:48:44.000I mean, we are seeing significant abuses of power.
00:48:49.000Disinformation censorship coming from our governments around the world.
00:48:58.000These government institutions are being run by people who act like they own them, or that they have some special privilege, but we need to reassert our democratic rights.
00:49:09.000Over these very powerful institutions because I think the evidence is growing that we've been lied to for many years and that the people that have been lying to us have also been trying to censor us.
00:49:20.000You're both coming to the UK next week for the event that we've discussed that we'll be showing on Rumble in the days to come.
00:49:28.000Clarenberg was interrogated for five hours when he was travelling.
00:49:31.000Matt, you were threatened with arrest subsequent to your congressional appearance.
00:49:36.000Are you not concerned that you'll be detained and what are your feelings about latex gloves and have you been acquainted with them previously?
00:49:45.000Not recently, although thank you for planning that image in my mind.
00:50:08.000I mean, we have reason to be worried about it.
00:50:11.000We had a ridiculous incident where the IRS visited my house.
00:50:15.000I was investigated after one of the Twitter file stories.
00:50:22.000And, you know, Kit Clarenberg is part of an organization that was on a list that we saw in the Twitter files was delivered to Twitter from the Ukrainian security agencies through the FBI.
00:50:38.000So it's hard not to, you know, wonder, you know, are we next?
00:50:43.000I mean, you can get on those lists for any number of reasons, and that's very concerning.
00:50:48.000Fear sometimes makes me seek out alliances.
00:50:52.000A lot of the people watching this now on Locals, you can join us on Locals by pressing the red button, feel that what's happening around Donald Trump, who gave you a name check the other day of course, Matt, is little more than a witch hunt.
00:51:07.000Are you able to maintain your impartial perspective as journalist when it seems clear that when it comes to the censorship industrial complex, it's primarily an issue that seems to be undergirded and exacted by the Democrat Party?
00:51:26.000Yeah, I mean, I think this is part of the thing that we're worried about, which is that we're seeing potentially double standards being used along with this abuse of power.
00:51:36.000So we're seeing, you know, here we are.
00:51:38.000We now, I think there's pretty good evidence, or at least there is evidence that's been presented of potential criminal bribery involving President Biden when he was vice president.
00:51:50.000The FBI withheld that document and that information from Congress for many weeks.
00:51:54.000Congress had to threaten contempt of Congress against the FBI director, and so now we're seeing the prosecution of a former president.
00:52:04.000I mean, some of those charges are very serious, so I don't want to suggest that there isn't something serious there, but all of us that have lived in other countries—you know, Matt spent a bunch of time in Russia, I've lived in Latin America and been in Asia, and you see former heads of state going to prison and a kind of Constant cycle of retribution, and I worry about that.
00:52:25.000I worry that we're becoming a banana republic, both in the abuse of power by policymakers and politicians and unelected officials, but also in this kind of desire to persecute and prosecute your political enemies.
00:52:39.000It seems that there's no legitimacy to the authority once wielded by these institutions.
00:52:47.000I don't imagine that any of us suppose that whatever the outcome of next year's election, the side that loses will gracefully concede.
00:52:56.000What's likely to ensue is a series of allegations of corruption or foreign involvement or meddling.
00:53:04.000Is that Not an indication that the institution of democracy itself needs to be radically altered, that there needs to be significant change within the duopoly that currently endures?
00:53:23.000I first noticed that as a campaign trail reporter, probably two election cycles ago, I started to hear a lot of complaints from people, frankly, on both sides of the aisle, who were saying they were losing confidence in institutions like the Fed, Congress, absolutely. Then it became the FBI. Then
00:53:47.000it was just the criminal justice system in general. Everybody was upset at the intelligence
00:53:53.000agencies because of the Snowden revelations, the surveillance revelations. Now, with the
00:53:59.000censorship stuff, in addition to the general distrust of government institutions, we have
00:54:09.000almost total distrust in the liberalizing institution of media.
00:54:14.000Nobody knows what to think anymore about anything because almost all the information that comes out now is politicized and not terribly reliable.
00:54:23.000And that is a terrible situation for a country to be in because you can't trust anything.
00:54:27.000I mean, you know, even the results of elections Forget about the 2020 general election.
00:54:33.000I was there for the Iowa caucus in 2020, and I still don't know who won that election, you know?
00:54:41.000I mean, it's impossible to know now, and that makes it very, very difficult in a democracy for people to know how to act if they're not informed.
00:54:52.000Somehow this uncertainty appears to be beneficial to the centralised authority and the doubling down of authoritarianism, particularly with regard to the issue that is going to be uniting us on June the 22nd.
00:55:05.000It seems to legitimise censorship somehow.
00:55:08.000This constant talk of corruption, misinformation, fake news is legitimising publicly funded media organisations like the BBC in their endeavour to censor and adjudicate which information Take a figure like RFK, who's a radical outsider, one assumes, in spite of the surname.
00:55:28.000When he came on our show, he said stuff about the pandemic, its funding and its aims and it's Execution that even for me, a hardened old conspiracy theorist of yore, to listen to.
00:55:42.000Do you ever think of going... I mean, it's difficult to imagine how much further you could go, the pair of you.
00:55:47.000I mean, I saw you... I basically agree with Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
00:56:15.000Yeah, I mean, look, I was going to say, too, I think that, look, we have a really great system of government in the United States, but it does need to be periodically reformed and refreshed.
00:56:26.000And we saw about 50 years ago, the church committee hearings, which basically demanded significant reform by FBI and CIA.
00:56:36.000We also saw a flowering of journalism in that period.
00:56:40.000We are not seeing that flowering of journalism coming from the big newspapers.
00:56:45.000It's not coming from the Washington Post or New York Times.
00:56:48.000In fact, they've been perpetuating misinformation, including around Hunter Biden's laptop, the COVID origins issue, the Russiagate.
00:56:56.000But I think that you see a bunch of new players, Matt and I. I mean, the benefits of having been sort of attacked by Debbie Wasserman Schultz in early March, as Matt and I were, is that we've had a number of whistleblowers come forward and they don't trust the big newspapers.
00:57:13.000They would rather work with Matt and me, who have proven that we will protect our whistleblowers and our sources and our witnesses.
00:57:21.000So I do think we have the potential to enter into a new age of journalism, a new golden age, but I don't think it'll be coming from the establishment.
00:57:27.000I think it'll be coming from people at places like Substack and at Twitter.
00:57:33.000I also think, though, that we still need a bipartisan sort of truth and reconciliation commission to get to the bottom of, you know, frankly, this terrible abuse of whistleblowers.
00:57:43.000You know, we've seen basically it's not just that the people that are lying to you, that it's not just that these government officials are lying.
00:57:50.000They're also trying to censor people and defame them.
00:57:54.000And so just on the COVID origin story, they accused these very reputable scientists of spreading conspiracy theories by pointing out that actually many viruses in the past had escaped from labs and that they were conducting precisely the risky research In the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that was the research with the closest viruses to the coronavirus.
00:58:23.000So, you know, I think there's a lot of bullying that's been going on.
00:58:48.000We had those FBI whistleblowers, and they exclusively revealed that each of their siblings had stick figure tattoos of me on their genitals.
01:01:29.000I just wondered your thoughts on where the kind of censorship is kind of permeating every area of discourse now.
01:01:37.000Do you feel that there's kind of no end to where it's going to lead?
01:01:43.000I think that's one of the major revelations of the Twitter files was the scale of what they were looking at was so enormous.
01:01:51.000It was kind of a bait and switch because what happened was they started off Basically coming to the platforms like Twitter and saying, well, we have a problem with Russian interference and we just want to clean that up.
01:02:06.000And that's how they got their foot in the door.
01:02:08.000And next thing you know, they're getting their hands on all kinds of topics ranging from from COVID to election interference to the war in Ukraine.
01:02:20.000And, you know, Essentially, what they did in the United States, I think, was very clever, because the United States has a legal tradition that doesn't allow intelligence agencies to meddle in the information environment domestically.
01:02:36.000So they call all of this, you know, interdiction of foreign interference.
01:02:42.000But what they're actually doing is they're looking at, in some cases, really small follower accounts of people who are just making political jokes online.
01:02:52.000And the problem is the new laws that are being proposed, you know, in Canada, the Digital Services Act, you know, there's a restrict act in America.
01:03:01.000If these things pass, they'll be able to look at everything and censor everything with no problem at all.
01:03:08.000I mean, Michael, do you agree with that?
01:03:10.000Yeah, that's part of what we're concerned about is that the EU is trying to impose new censorship tools that they would then apply to Twitter and Facebook globally.
01:03:22.000But we're seeing a crackdown on Free speech happening around the world at the same time.
01:04:03.000Our societies are more tolerant of racial, religious, sexual minorities than they've ever been, and the evidence shows that.
01:04:11.000So I find it very creepy because I think what's happening is the elites are losing legitimacy and they are constantly trying to find some new crisis, some new urgent thing as a justification for censorship and demonizing their political opponents.
01:04:27.000And to see the BBC participate in this And putting forward somebody who is a completely inexperienced reporter as though they're going to be the expert on what's true and false in general.
01:04:40.000It's the kind of stuff you would expect to see out of a George Orwell novel.
01:04:43.000And, you know, it's sort of shocking because we've seen this in other countries.
01:04:49.000I didn't think, I didn't ever expect to see it in the United States.
01:04:53.000But I think the point of us getting together in London is that we wanted to bring people from around the world.
01:04:57.000They're going to be coming from around the world.
01:04:59.000Because we do feel like we got to go on the offensive and we need to be demanding more free speech rights around the world.
01:05:06.000We shouldn't be defending what we have.
01:05:08.000We should be expanding freedom and we need a global movement to do that in order to counter the censorship industrial complex.
01:05:16.000And I want to add that there's just been, and this is a scoop of my own, there's a new UK law that would grant certain authorities the right to check at Heathrow Airport whether or not visiting journalists have stick figure tattoos of a much-loved British icon on their genitals.
01:05:32.000And I think actually that law, that's actually quite sensible.
01:06:40.000If there's any of that bullshit, I will Wassim and Schultz you so hard.
01:06:45.000I think to next week a lot of people in the comments are saying
01:06:47.000lil peep 666666 said long question gareth barry john fox all right gareth stop milking it then
01:06:56.000some people saying that you're sort of adorable and stuff but most of it was real harsh judgments
01:07:02.000Thank you very much Matt and Michael for joining us.
01:07:05.000That was already a fantastic conversation.
01:07:07.000If you want to join us and the attempt by this couple of chuckling goons to start a global anti-censorship industrial complex movement In London, using me on a poster, then join us, join us in London, 22nd of June.
01:07:23.000Matt and Michael will be back on the show, newly tattooed.
01:07:26.000Get your tickets at censorshipindustrialcomplex.org.