Russell Brand is joined by Russell Brand to talk about Kid Rock's new album, the Trump/Russia scandal, and the censorship industrial complex. Plus, a look at how the mainstream media are covering Trump's arrest, and why it doesn't make sense anymore. Stay Free! - Russell Brand Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. All rights reserved. Used by permission. No remixes, unless otherwise specified. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It helps us to keep bringing you high quality, high profile guests and shows that matter. Thank you so much to everyone who has helped make this podcast possible. Stay Free, Stay Free. - Your support is so appreciated, it really means a lot to us and we are forever grateful. We hope you enjoy this episode, stay free, stay safe, stay strong, and keep coming back for more! Stay free, and stay free! - Eternally grateful, always xoxo - EJ & Jack xx - P.S. - Ej & Gareth R. BK - Thank you for supporting this podcast. - Jack, Jack & Gareth, Ej and EJ and Ej is a big thank you for making this podcast so much better than you could do it. - KIDROCK - we really appreciate it! - PRAISE YOU! - Jack & EJACKETS! - BOBBYEJ, EJ, P.J. & EKIDS, BABY! - PODCASTING, PENNY, POTTER, MATT & MATT TAYLOR, RYANCHES, RAY & GARRELLY, SONGS, JORDY, JAY & KIDROLLE, KID ROCK, MALAYA, KIDS ROCK, JUICY, DADDY JAY AND KID RUMBLE, JOSEPH, JACOB AND MATTORNEY, JOKAY? - JOSES, JAMES AND KELLY, BRIAN BONDS, MAMO & JOSIE, DANIE, BAYO AND JAYE BOWLS, DOGS AND KIDS RUSSIE AND KAYLE DUMB!
00:01:10.000Like, oh look, he's got an aeroplane, he's in a cab, he's in a golf buggy.
00:01:13.000If 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.
00:01:41.000They'll claim that there's hate speech and of course there's hatred in the world and bigotry and prejudice.
00:01:55.000And 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.
00:02:04.000They are appearing live with me in an event I'm doing in London.
00:02:09.000Me, Matt Taibbi, Sheldon Berger, 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.
00:02:19.000Trump is being arrested on federal charges, 37 federal charges, but if Kid Rock's to be believed...
00:03:20.000Well, let's say what it actually says.
00:03:22.000Trump reportedly showed a classified map related to a military operation to someone who did not possess security clearance.
00:03:28.000In 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.
00:03:38.000Did he have Kid Rock at the White House?
00:05:02.000Tossed on a storage room floor are among the nation's most closely held secrets.
00:05:07.000Of the 31 charges for the willful retention of national defense information, 21 involve top secret documents.
00:05:14.000Then though, do you see how the mainstream media confines us to particular topics?
00:05:18.000Everywhere, and have you noticed this, we'll be talking about how outrageous and egregious it is that Trump's in possession of these documents.
00:05:26.000On some platforms, you'll see people saying, well Joe Biden, he's just as bad.
00:05:29.0001,800 boxes of documents from when he's a senator.
00:05:32.000And then people say, yeah, but he was in Loudoun when he's a senator.
00:05:34.000But then people say, he had 20 and they were in his garage.
00:05:48.000Why have you nominated a patriarch elite class that allowed access to information that you're not?
00:05:54.000Now, I'm not suggesting that all of us on an individual basis want to be immersed in the bureaucracy of government, but the category of classified should be abolished, except in matters where it's strictly necessary.
00:06:08.000Do you know, did you know that there are 1.3 million Americans that have access to those boxes?
00:06:13.000Kid Rock, Probably already had those boxes in his own house.
00:06:17.000I've already been consulted on North Korea.
00:06:19.000You, if 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.
00:08:11.000What were you doing that was more important than bringing down the censorship industrial complex that you claim to care so much about?
00:08:19.000Absolutely nothing is more important, but I think Matt Taibbi 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.
00:08:51.000So 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 so many others.
00:09:07.000There is the story being broken by the self-publicist Michael Schellenberger.
00:09:16.000Narcissistic Woodward and Bernstein of our day, breaking these important stories.
00:09:22.000So if the first people that got coronavirus were working in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what conclusions might we draw from that, Matt?
00:09:33.000Well, 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.
00:09:54.000This explanation more definitively ties it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and raises the question, you know, was this story suppressed because there might have been involvement by the United States in funding the research that led to the development of, you know, what they call the fern cleavage site, which is the element of the virus that made it so transmissible.
00:10:19.000So 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.
00:10:26.000That's, you know, that's something different from the Twitter files, and it's a good thing to see.
00:10:33.000I can't believe that that's not a conspiracy theory.
00:10:36.000I can't believe that that is legitimate journalism.
00:10:39.000I can't believe that we're being forced to confront the truth that that virus began in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
00:10:47.000Is it possible that those scientists, they had been for lunch down the wet market.
00:10:52.000They'd had a little bit of pangolin and a little bit of bat soup or whatever.
00:10:56.000I'm not judging people for having a different culture.
00:11:00.000And then they went back to work and by coincidence... Maybe they went via a bat cave?
00:11:06.000You 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.
00:11:18.000Michael, I think as a journalist it's important That you cover every single aspect of this case.
00:11:24.000Now, both of you are two of my favourite journalists.
00:11:27.000That's why we are appearing together at an event named The Censorship Industrial Complex Exposed in London on Thursday the 22nd of June.
00:11:36.000We'll be covering a variety of topics then.
00:11:38.000Today though, we're talking somewhat about Donald Trump's indictment, impeachment, whatever it is he's going for, arraignment, a variety of polysyllabic and perjurative terms.
00:11:49.000Why shouldn't Donald Trump have those documents?
00:11:52.000What is the classification of documents, the control of information by institutions that no longer have our trust, seems to be a more important issue than this one.
00:12:03.000Michael, what do you think about the current case?
00:12:07.000Yeah, 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.
00:12:16.000I 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.
00:12:29.000We're seeing the institutions, and we've seen now in Britain, that the UK government was engaged in similar censorship activities as the US government.
00:12:39.000We've been also talking about the FBI whistleblowers.
00:12:41.000I mean, we are seeing significant abuses of power Disinformation, censorship coming from our governments around the world.
00:12:55.000These 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 Over 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.
00:13:17.000You'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.
00:13:24.000Kit Clarenberg was interrogated for five hours when he was traveling.
00:13:28.000Matt, you were threatened with arrest subsequent to your congressional appearance.
00:13:33.000Are you not concerned that you'll be detained?
00:13:36.000And what are your feelings about latex gloves?
00:13:39.000And have you been acquainted with them previously?
00:13:41.000Not recently, although thank you for planting that image in my mind.
00:14:04.000I mean, we have reason to be worried about it.
00:14:08.000We had a ridiculous incident where the IRS visited my house.
00:14:12.000I was investigated after one of the Twitter files stories and 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, so it's hard not to, you know, wonder, you know, are we next?
00:14:40.000I mean, you can get on those lists for any number of reasons, and that's very concerning.
00:14:45.000Fear sometimes makes me seek out alliances.
00:14:49.000A 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.
00:15:04.000Are 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?
00:15:22.000Yeah, 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.
00:15:33.000So we're seeing, you know, here we are.
00:15:35.000We 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.
00:15:46.000The FBI withheld that document and that information from Congress for many weeks.
00:15:51.000Congress had to threaten Contempt of Congress against the FBI director.
00:15:57.000And so now we're seeing the prosecution of a former president.
00:16:01.000I mean, some of those charges are very serious, so I don't want to suggest that there isn't something serious there.
00:16:05.000But all of us that have lived in other countries—you know, Matt spent a bunch of time in Russia.
00:16:11.000I've lived in Latin America and been in Asia.
00:16:13.000And you see former heads of state going to prison and a kind of Constant cycle of retribution, and I worry about that.
00:16:22.000I 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.
00:16:36.000It seems that there's no legitimacy to the authority once wielded by these institutions.
00:16:44.000I don't imagine that any of us suppose that whatever the outcome of next year's election, the side that loses will gracefully concede.
00:16:53.000What's likely to ensue is a series of allegations of What do you think about that Matt?
00:16:59.000meddling, is that not an indication that the institution of democracy itself needs
00:17:05.000to be radically altered, that there needs to be significant change within the
00:17:11.000duopoly that currently endures? Well what do you think about that Matt? What do you
00:17:16.000both think about that? I think that's definitely true.
00:17:21.000I 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.
00:17:56.000Now with the censorship stuff, in addition to the general distrust of government institutions,
00:18:03.000we have almost total distrust in the liberalizing institution of media.
00:18:11.000Nobody knows what to think anymore about anything, because almost all the information that comes out now is politicized and not terribly reliable.
00:18:19.000And that is a terrible situation for a country to be in, because you can't trust anything.
00:18:24.000I mean, you know, even the results of elections, forget about The 2020 general election, I was there for the Iowa caucus in 2020, and I still don't know who won that election, you know?
00:18:38.000I 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.
00:18:49.000Somehow 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.
00:19:02.000It seems to legitimise censorship somehow.
00:19:05.000This 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 Is viable.
00:19:19.000Take a figure like RFK, who's a radical outsider, one assumes, in spite of the surname.
00:19:25.000When he came on our show, he said stuff about the pandemic, its funding and its aims and its execution that even for me, a hardened old conspiracy theorist of yore, to listen to.
00:19:39.000Do you ever think of going I mean, it's difficult to imagine how much further you could go, the pair of you.
00:20:12.000Yeah, 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.
00:20:22.000And we saw about 50 years ago, the church committee hearings, which basically demanded significant reform by FBI and CIA.
00:20:33.000We also saw a flowering of journalism in that period.
00:20:37.000We are not seeing that flowering of journalism coming from the big newspapers.
00:20:41.000It's not coming from The Washington Post or New York Times.
00:20:44.000In fact, they've been perpetuating misinformation, including around Hunter Biden's laptop, the COVID origins issue, the Russiagate.
00:20:53.000But 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.
00:21:10.000They would rather work with Matt and me, who have proven that we will protect our whistleblowers and our sources and our witnesses.
00:21:17.000So 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.
00:21:24.000I think it'll be coming from people at places like Substack and at Twitter.
00:21:29.000I 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.
00:21:40.000You know, we've seen, basically, it's not just the people that are lying, it's not just that these government officials are lying, They're also trying to censor people and defame them.
00:21:51.000And 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.
00:22:20.000So, you know, I think there's a lot of bullying that's been going on.
00:22:39.000We've had several whistleblowers on this show, notably, what's he called, Grady O'Boyle and Stephen Friend.
00:22:45.000We had those FBI whistleblowers, and they exclusively revealed that each of their siblings had stick figure tattoos of me on their genitals.
00:22:58.000Now, when we're doing our big conference on the censorship industrial complex in London, 7pm BST on Thursday, June the 22nd, which we will be covering on this show subsequently.
00:25:26.000I just wondered your thoughts on where the censorship is permeating every area of discourse now.
00:25:35.000Do you feel that there's no end to where it's gonna lead?
00:25:40.000I think that's one of the major revelations of the Twitter files was the scale of what they were looking at was so enormous.
00:25:48.000You know, it was kind of a bait and switch because what happened was they started off Uh, 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.
00:26:02.000Uh, and that's how they got their foot in the door.
00:26:04.000And next thing you know, they're getting their hands on all kinds of topics ranging from, uh, from COVID, uh, to election interference, um, to the war in Ukraine and 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.
00:26:33.000So, they call all of this, you know, interdiction of foreign interference.
00:26:39.000But 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.
00:26:49.000And 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.
00:26:58.000If these things pass, they'll be able to look at everything and censor everything with no problem at all.
00:27:05.000I mean, Michael, do you agree with that?
00:27:07.000Yeah, 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.
00:27:18.000But we're seeing a crackdown on free speech happening around the world at the same time.
00:27:35.000I mean, it's Canada, United States, Britain, the EU, Ireland is proposing to be able to go into people's homes and search their computers without warning.
00:27:44.000Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, they're trying to get into people's private text messages.
00:27:49.000That's also something they want to justify in Britain.
00:27:51.000And they always come up, they just keep coming up with new justifications for it, and they make stuff up.
00:27:55.000They say that there's an increase of hate.
00:27:59.000Our societies are more tolerant of racial, religious, sexual minorities than they've ever been, and the evidence shows that.
00:28:08.000So I find it very creepy because the it's almost 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 and 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.
00:28:36.000It's the kind of stuff you would expect to see out of a George Orwell novel.
00:28:40.000And, you know, it's sort of shocking because we've seen this in other countries.
00:28:45.000I didn't think, I didn't ever expect to see it in the United States.
00:28:49.000But I think the point of us getting together in London is that we wanted to bring people from around the world.
00:28:54.000They're going to be coming from around the world.
00:28:56.000Because we do feel like we got to go on the offensive and we need to have we need to be demanding more free speech rights around the world.
00:29:03.000We shouldn't be defending what we have.
00:29:07.000And we need a global movement to do that in order to counter the censorship industrial complex.
00:29:11.000I certainly agree with that and 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.
00:29:29.000I think actually that law, that's actually quite sensible.
00:30:37.000If there's any of that bullshit, I will Vasim and Schultz you so hard.
00:30:41.000I think next week a lot of people in the comments are saying Lil Peep 666666 said
00:30:47.000long question Gareth Barry John Fox all right Gareth stop milking it then some people saying
00:30:53.000that you're sort of adorable and stuff but most of it was real harsh judgments
00:30:59.000Thank you very much, Matt and Michael, for joining us.
00:31:02.000That was already a fantastic conversation.
00:31:04.000If 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.