MSNBC refuses to broadcast Trump's post-arraraignment speech because it would be "irresponsible" to do so, according to Rachel Maddow. What does that mean? And why is it so important that we don't see Trump's remarks after his arraignment on federal felony charges? Russell and Gareth take a look at what could be the real reason why this is happening, and what it could mean for the future of our understanding of the truth about the Trump administration and how it relates to the Iran situation. Stay tuned for Russell's full interview with Michael Schellenberger, host of Conspiracy Theories, on this week's episode of Awakenings Wonders. Stay free, you're not going to want to miss it! You can get the whole show on Rumble, wherever you get your shows, by joining the RUMBLE FB group. And if you're watching this on Rumble right now, press the red button and join us on Locals. You'll get access to the entire show, and a chance to see all of it, on all of the social medias, if you search for "RUMBLE" and "Awakening Wonders." Subscribe to "Rumble" on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, Like, and Share! Subscribe, and tell a Friend about what you're listening to "Awakening Wonders" on your favorite streaming platform. Subscribe and Share the show wherever you re listening to your favorite podcast. If you like it, please tell a friend about it and share it on your social media platforms so it can spread the word around the wide world. and spread it everywhere you can spread it far and wide. . Thank you for listening to everyone else! - Russell Brand and Good Morning America - Thank you, Russell Brand, - Love, Kristy, Gave Me a Big Thank You, Big Bear, Cheers, Gotta Have It Out There - - P.S. - Krispy Ketchup, Sarah, Megan, P. & Cheers - Emily, Gorms, Gage, Megan Kuchta, Brad Pitt, Jake, Natalie Barbu, and Sarah, Sarah, Caitie, Rachel, Natalie, and Rachel, - Evan, Rachel, and Ben, Jake, and Jacklyn, Michael, and Glynis, etc., etc., - Rachel, etc.
00:00:10.000Because Michael Schellenberger will be joining us here in this room with a surprising array of information on censorship, surveillance, UFOs, and in particular, we're going to be talking about the Trump arraignment.
00:00:24.000One of the things that is not being discussed enough is what's in those boxes.
00:00:29.000Let me know in the chat if you've considered the significance of what the boxes themselves contain.
00:00:34.000Some people believe that what is in there reveals that the US had plans for a war with Iran.
00:00:43.000And part of what's happening now is an attempt to distract us from that significant fact.
00:00:47.000We'll also be talking to you on the other side, on what some people would call the dark side, but others would see as a portal for great and limitless light on Rumble about how the lockdown and other regulatory measures affected the victims of heart attacks.
00:01:01.000Obviously, we can't talk about that on YouTube, but I think a lot of the questions that we're going to ask Michael Schellenberger would simply be subject to censorship, which is ironic because he spends so much of his time exposing censorship and the censorship industrial complex.
00:01:11.000In fact, he's in the country to participate in a talk that I am, what am I doing?
00:01:31.000And this first story that we're covering is fantastic because it's a media story.
00:01:35.000The MSNBC are refusing to cover Trump's post-arraignment speech because MSNBC says Rachel Maddowell, who you know I have no axe to grind with.
00:01:46.000I think Rachel Maddowell seemed like a really nice person.
00:01:51.000I feel like, um, that Rachel Maddow says it would be irresponsible of her to broadcast Trump's post-arraignment chat because he will say things that are disinformation, malinformation, and yet we know that MSNBC have broadcast so many examples of misinformation in the past.
00:02:07.000Let me know in the comments in the chat what examples you come up with.
00:02:28.000Look at Rachel Maddow on MSNBC saying that they have to censor Trump for... I don't actually know why because there used to be a time when we were considered capable to discern for ourselves the nature of truth and fiction.
00:02:42.000Now tonight, after his arraignment on federal felony charges, he's speaking again, this time to an audience of his supporters that's gathered for a campaign fundraiser tonight at his golf club and summer home in New Jersey.
00:02:55.000We knew heading into this that he was planning to make these remarks.
00:02:58.000We are prepared for his pre-fundraiser remarks tonight to again be essentially a Trump campaign speech.
00:03:05.000Because of that, we do not intend to carry these remarks live.
00:03:08.000What I think is interesting is it's now become overt.
00:03:11.000The process of censorship has become explicit and is being legitimized as it happens.
00:03:16.000We cannot show you Trump because he's going to be campaigning.
00:03:19.000But America is supposed to be a free country.
00:03:22.000We're supposed to be able to ascertain for ourselves whether or not we want to take Donald Trump seriously,
00:03:27.000to dismiss him, to arraign him, to lock him up.
00:03:31.000But of course, the great hypocrisy at the heart of this is we know that MSNBC has previously published
00:03:38.000And remember, and let me know in the chat if you agree with this,
00:03:40.000part of what we feel is significant is that we're not talking about the contents of the boxes.
00:03:46.000Did Trump have vital information that proves that the US have been planning a war with Iran.
00:03:54.000Let me know in the chat what you think about that.
00:03:55.000Let's have a look at the rest of this from Rachel Maddow before demonstrating other clear examples of MSNBC broadcasting untrue information which shows, look, If they won't broadcast some information because it's untrue, that's the reason they're giving it, and yet they broadcast other information that we know to be untrue, that shows you there's an agenda.
00:04:15.000I guess our key point is, what is the agenda that MSNBC are carrying?
00:04:54.000Instead of the virus being able to hop from person to person to person, potentially mutating and becoming more virulent and drug-resistant along the way, now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person.
00:05:10.000A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus.
00:05:16.000The virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else.
00:05:20.000As of today, that information is still on YouTube.
00:05:23.000As of today, MSNBC have not retracted that information.
00:05:27.000Now, if that were one isolated example, you could say that we're cherry picking, and indeed, to a point, we are narrativizing.
00:05:34.000But let's move now to the subject of war.
00:05:36.000Many people say that the Democratic Party have become the de facto party of war.
00:05:39.000That's why Tulsi Gabbard, who's coming on the show soon, says she left the Democrat Party.
00:05:43.000Now, another thing we've done content on before is MSNBC's framing of military industrial complex employees as experts without declaring their ties and relationships with organisations like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin who obviously benefit from ongoing war.
00:06:00.000Many of the retired military leaders employed by MSNBC are paid contributors and have secondary affiliations that are rarely, if ever, mentioned Leaving viewers in the dark about whose interests they're promoting, none of the leading networks, including obviously MSNBC, makes a regular practice of announcing its military analysts' financial ties to the Pentagon, connections that could colour their on-air comments.
00:06:19.000As documented in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series by The Times in 2008, the Pentagon orchestrated the commentary of 75 former officers who served as radio and TV analysts.
00:06:30.000and then the most I know what you lot are typing in the comments now and if you're not joining us on locals yet
00:06:34.000press that red button and join us there now Russiagate that's what you're gonna be talking about you're
00:06:38.000gonna be talking about the way the MSNBC and the mainstream media at large covered the allegations that Trump was a
00:06:45.000Russian asset which we now know was completely untrue and understood to be true by the deep state and the government
00:06:50.000themselves from very early on in the process Stay free with Russell Brand
00:06:55.000See it first on Rumble Be calm, be still
00:06:58.000Surely the reason you've become so priapic, so prehensile, so mobile, oh microphone of mine, is because you have understood that in the studio with me right now, oh yeah, Michael Schellenberger is present.
00:07:37.000The biometric devices failed on me, so I had to get through the people, but it worked great.
00:07:40.000Michael, before we get into our interview, tell us why you are here at the moment in London.
00:07:47.000I'm here to launch the campaign against the censorship industrial complex with you and Matt Taibbi this Thursday 7pm Central Hall Westminster.
00:07:56.000How are we going to create a campaign and a movement around such a complex system that has the obvious advantage as conveyed in its name of being able to shut down opposition?
00:08:24.000And then I think the other part of it is just to make fun of it.
00:08:26.000It's just absurd that here we are, 250 years after the Constitution of the United States puts as our First Amendment free speech, that we're having to defend free speech and make the case for free speech in our societies.
00:08:40.000It's not just in the United States, it's in Britain, the EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Ireland, are all places where we see an attack on free speech.
00:08:50.000There's a global war on free speech, we need a global resistance movement.
00:08:53.000And it's not just a rhetorical attack on free speech, is it Michael?
00:08:55.000It's a legal and regulatory attack on free speech.
00:08:59.000First, ideologically, free speech is being conflated with a whole host of nefarious ideas.
00:09:05.000Such as racism and the subcategory, I suppose, of antisemitism and hatred.
00:09:11.000But I've noticed lately a tendency, when there is an appetite within the establishment to control or shut something down, that the first thing they do is conflate it with something that is demonstrably evil.
00:09:24.000Is that why it's important to have free speech as a principle that is somehow unencroachable?
00:09:30.000I mean, we saw, I mean, for years, right, we had cancel culture.
00:09:32.000So we had a culture that said people should self-censor.
00:09:35.000We see people trying to get cancelled their comedy acts or their speeches in the university.
00:09:40.000Now we see the censorship industrial complex using that sort of woke culture and tapping into it to suggest that people are engaged in hate speech.
00:09:54.000So they just keep finding more justifications, more reasons to censor you.
00:09:58.000I think we have to remind people that our societies have never been more tolerant of racial, religious, and sexual minorities than they are today.
00:10:05.000Over 95% of Americans support the right of black and white people to get married, up from just about 4% in the 1950s.
00:10:12.000I mean, compare how much more tolerant we are to how people were 50 years ago, 100 years ago.
00:10:18.000So this idea that there's more hatred in the society is itself a hateful idea.
00:10:23.000It stems right out of the Hillary Clinton idea that there's these deplorables, these terrible people that support Trump, that there's somehow some rise in these hateful attitudes.
00:10:36.000We're more loving as a people than we've ever been.
00:10:38.000In the way that free speech is being framed as a right-wing issue, it sometimes feels to me, like within the spaces in media that we all operate in, like here on Rumble, you know, click the red button, join us on Locals, that there is almost a A tendency and a trend for the right to actually to be advocating on behalf of these issues so but you don't strike me as a person that would be traditionally affiliated with the Republican Party or right-wing movements you strike me as I guess you would be old-fashioned metropolitan liberal type of a person I mean these are just guesses I'm basing on having spoken to
00:12:34.000Or is Trump being curtailed and controlled precisely because he's a kind of berserker bull in the china shop?
00:12:41.000And also, if you could cover in this rather corroming question, What do you, not what do you imagine is in these boxes?
00:12:47.000Branko Marković has said that they potentially contain US plans to attack Iran and is that in particular part of the problem here?
00:12:57.000And more generally, when dealing with whistleblowers, shouldn't we be talking about the content of what they're conveying rather than the individuals themselves?
00:13:03.000I mean, what I think people have to understand is that we have this amazing system in the United States.
00:13:10.000When people saw the riot at the Capitol on January 6th, which was a total disaster, it was terrible, you have to remember that that's not the same as a coup.
00:13:24.000It's when they take over the newspapers.
00:13:26.000The idea that our system is so fragile that a president who denies the results of the elections, if that's what you think happened, or expresses skepticism, the idea that that somehow would result in the overthrow of the government is bizarre.
00:13:39.000So there's some sense among a lot of progressives in the United States right now that our system is fragile.
00:13:45.000And so we've seen that in the culture, too.
00:13:47.000This treatment of children is fragile.
00:13:52.000And I think we have to get back to the sense in which we're resilient, we're strong.
00:13:56.000Our country is capable of dealing with different opinions.
00:13:58.000That's the heart of what it means to live in a liberal democracy.
00:14:01.000There's an interesting piece of cultural diagnosis that you've just offered there.
00:14:05.000The Romantic period, perhaps, was defined by art and poetry that portrayed nature herself as a vital goddess that could hold, herald, contain, destroy, us all and then nature too has become subject to this
00:14:22.000framing of fragility and perhaps deeper psychic wounds are being worked through at this time.
00:14:30.000Now when the news cycle starts to seriously carry stories about UFOs, which I know a lot
00:14:35.000of our viewers think are false flags, that think we're being fed these stories to distract
00:14:43.000For me, it feels like this is something seismic, this is something epochal is happening.
00:14:48.000Our framing of reality is starting to glitch and alter, even if the stories are being used somehow as a distraction.
00:14:55.000What's your take on these stories, Michael?
00:14:57.000I mean, what I'll say, so I wrote a Twitter files thread about the Hunter Biden laptop, and what we saw was a genuine operation by retired CIA people, retired or so-called retired FBI people, spreading disinformation about the Hunter Biden laptop, suggesting that it was a result of Russian disinformation.
00:15:14.000Same thing with Russiagate around Trump, the idea that he was somehow a Russian asset despite no evidence for that.
00:15:19.000What you're seeing with UFOs is the exact opposite.
00:15:22.000The whistleblowers are themselves fearful and persecuted.
00:15:27.000The people that I interviewed, The people off the record, they were terrified to talk.
00:15:33.000They did not want their names being used.
00:15:35.000They were not part of some orchestrated disinformation campaign.
00:15:38.000We should never rule out that there's some possibility that's what's going on.
00:15:41.000Certainly the military has used UFOs in the past to sort of distract people's attention from secret spy activities.
00:15:48.000But what we've seen here is the whistleblower that came forward, this person David Grush, Very highly rated, had top secret clearance.
00:15:56.000He went to the Defense Department office to study UFOs called Aero.
00:16:01.000They were not passing the information on to Congress.
00:16:03.000He then went to Congress because they had set aside a special whistleblower program for him.
00:16:24.000I'm just reporting what people have told me and these are people that were very fearful this was not coming from official sources in contrast to Russiagate and the Hunter Biden laptop where it was official people publicly saying this is Russian disinformation.
00:16:38.000That's not what's going on here with UFOs.
00:16:39.000Right, so to you these seem like legitimate stories and I suppose the real- like prior- it's interesting Michael because we're talking to you already we can see how there's been cultural shifts around what have been regarded as Almost defining issues.
00:16:58.000I just sort of assumed free speech, that's a left-wing thing, because free speech, because of alternative lifestyles, alternative forms of identity.
00:17:05.000Free speech, the right to speak out against power.
00:17:08.000This peculiar reversal of the magnetism that, no, no, no, your free speech is dangerous and it's threatening and it's the role of the state to shut down this hateful speech.
00:17:20.000Now that the state has plainly rejected any role to oppose corporate power, globalist hegemony.
00:17:27.000Let me know in the chat if you think that that shift has occurred.
00:17:29.000Similarly, we're seeing a shift in a subject like UFOs, which was the preserve of nut jobs, crackpots, potheads and crack house denizens, becoming something that's seriously discussed by credible journalists like me and amateur hobbyist journalists, by credible journalists like you.
00:17:46.000So what do you, do you ever, Yeah, for sure.
00:17:49.000I mean, I think that what we saw with the Twitter files is that it wasn't just about sort of woke culture demanding censorship.
00:17:56.000same way that you've suggested that fragility appears to be an underlying idea when it comes
00:18:36.000It was the election of Trump and the establishment got very freaked out that they were going to see basically an unraveling of the liberal world order of NATO of the Western Alliance Britain pulling out of the EU.
00:18:48.000And they panicked and they said, we've got to turn these very powerful weapons of disinformation and censorship that we've been using in other countries against the American people.
00:19:00.000So the censorship itself is not often just about preventing us from seeing the information.
00:19:05.000It's also about spreading disinformation.
00:19:07.000So the Hunter Biden laptop, It wasn't that people didn't hear about the story, but it's that people like myself, because I thought, I believed it, I thought it was Russian disinformation, because that's what Twitter said, that's what Facebook said, that's what all the mainstream media said.
00:19:19.000So what you're seeing is an orchestrated influence operation, they call it, they used to call it PSYOPs, or an information operation, being waged against the American people.
00:19:31.000They were censoring true stories of vaccine side effects because they were worried it would lead to an outcome they didn't want, which was vaccine hesitancy.
00:19:38.000So what we're seeing, experiencing and living in is a highly curated public space where the principle of freedom, not only freedom of speech but freedom itself, is being incrementally eroded.
00:19:53.000We're seeing a rise of authoritarianism.
00:19:56.000But with a new aesthetic and in a sense it's quite obvious after the despotism of the previous century that it wouldn't be a militaristic veiled version of fascism or the centralized authority that we would see but this new emergent phenomena where we're being told that we're being cared for that there's this sort of extraordinary aesthetic of protection that's Yeah, you got it.
00:20:47.000Not 5,000 times, not 5 million times, shared five times because they are clearly throttling us on Facebook about this.
00:20:55.000So, you know, it's, I mean, if Elon Musk hadn't taken over Twitter, and people have a lot of criticisms of Elon, some of them fair, some unfair, but if he hadn't taken over Twitter, we wouldn't have known about the extent of the censorship.
00:21:05.000And now we're able to get this information out about COVID origins, about vaccine side effects, a whole set of other issues.
00:21:27.000And this is why it requires a movement that's across borders.
00:21:30.000We have to fight on all fronts because they are actually cracking down everywhere at the same time, including on YouTube.
00:21:36.000How can this movement Deny and in fact countenance the charge that it is one-sided without ensuring that there are voices from across the political spectrum and in particular around the issues and movements that are being used to legitimize censorship.
00:21:59.000Isn't it important that the presentation of this movement necessarily includes voices from across the spectrum?
00:22:05.000Because In this sort of highly tribalized environment, I feel like just with you, our audience, and let us know if you agree, that there's almost an appetite to turn it into a us versus them war, to sort of lean into a sort of something that's simple, like the argument around Bud Light or the argument around what is a woman, where like me personally, I don't care how people identify.
00:22:26.000I feel like people should be able to do whatever they want.
00:22:29.000It's when it comes down to censorship and the inability of people to have opposing views that I feel like we're in difficult situations.
00:22:36.000So The Guardian yesterday reported that the head of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas in Britain, had been surveilled and watched for her tweets on COVID.
00:22:47.000We know that also they're cracking down on critics of the war in Ukraine.
00:22:51.000So it's not a left-right thing, but it's definitely an elite populist thing.
00:22:56.000What you're seeing is really a big concern from the establishment, from elites, to control the information that we're able to receive and also to control whether we perceive it as accurate or inaccurate.
00:23:05.000It's interesting that you use the term populism at this point, Michael, because I have a sense that what's required is a new mass movement more broadly that's international, trans-political, and is indeed populist.
00:23:20.000But populism has become something of a dirty word.
00:23:23.000politics. But for me the idea that ordinary people ought be able to
00:23:29.000democratically decide for themselves how their communities are run, what kind of
00:23:33.000legislation they're subject to, without the assumption that there is the
00:23:36.000requirement for a technocratic cadre to legislate, to control information.
00:23:43.000It's determined that there is an expert class that ought be able to control information.
00:23:48.000And when they use one dialectic to shut down discourse, like, oh, these people are right-wing, that's why we have to censor them, then a figure like RFK emerges.
00:23:59.000Ah, well, you see, he's anti-vax, so we have to shut him down.
00:24:02.000And in the end, what you see is that there's only a very narrow window within which we're allowed to converse at all.
00:24:10.000And when they're engaged in a cover-up, like they were doing around the lab leak, they say anybody who says there's a potential lab leak is engaged in a conspiracy theory.
00:24:19.000You have to see it all as a kind of psychological projection.
00:24:23.000The people that are conspiring are accusing others of engaging in a conspiracy theory.
00:24:26.000The people that are waging campaigns of disinformation are accusing others of disinformation.
00:24:48.000The people that created the United States of America, there were some people who said, hey, you need free speech so you can have a democracy and you can have free markets.
00:24:54.000But there were other people, and I think they really got more into the spirit of it, who said, To have free speech is to be fully human.
00:25:01.000It's to be able to breathe and to eat and to live.
00:25:03.000You're not fully a human being without your ability to express your own views.
00:25:09.000I mean, often we don't know what the right answer is until you have a chance to have an argument.
00:25:14.000You need to be comfortable, and this is the saddest thing with woke culture, you have to feel free to be wrong and express some half-baked idea in order to get your head right.
00:25:24.000And you can't do that without, you often can't be right without being wrong.
00:25:28.000Even though within the woke culture, if it's fair to use that term, I sense ideas that are really valuable about protecting people's rights to be who they are and nurture and care and even a term as broad and potentially unhelpful as love could be identified as what's beneath this movement.
00:25:50.000The problem is, of course, is that it extracts the ability for salvation, redemption, forgiveness, communication.
00:25:56.000It becomes, ultimately, a bad faith argument.
00:25:59.000The assumption that people are negative and ought be maligned and ought be shut down, and that the answer is increasing control.
00:26:06.000I'm sure you're familiar with, in fact, you're probably the person who introduced me to Guri's book there, The Revolt of the Public, and his broader perspective is, as you just outlined, these old establishment models are under threat, whether it's NATO, or CNN, or the BBC, whether they're media, government, or global organizations, they are becoming untenable because of the miracle of the communications miracle that's taken place In the last 20 years, one pathway leads to more self-organization, more democracy, an ability to curate from a variety of different views, a good faith conversation.
00:26:45.000I almost sort of sometimes contemplate an alternative recent past, where at the beginning they were able to go, oh Joe Rogan's got some interesting stuff to say, and he's bringing on this guy Robert Malone, and he did invent this particular aspect of it, and these people have got an interesting view about lab leaks.
00:27:01.000But It seemed like authority itself was the aim.
00:27:08.000Even something as plainly observable as the profits of Pfizer, the increased power of big tech, the wealth transfer of trillions, don't seem to be the master plan, merely tendrils that hang from its undercarriage.
00:27:24.000It's the beast of authority itself that's slouching towards it.
00:27:28.000I mean, the big debate over the last 48 hours on Twitter was because a vaccine advocate named Peter Hotez criticized Joe Rogan for having Robert F. Kennedy on, and then later said something to the effect of, well, science isn't about having debate.
00:27:42.000Well, science is absolutely about having debate.
00:27:44.000I mean, that's how you figure out the right answer.
00:27:46.000You have hypotheses, you test them, you subject them to argument.
00:27:50.000If you're afraid, I mean there's a weird mixture of arrogance and insecurity here.
00:27:55.000On the one hand it's arrogance to say, I know the right answer and you should not be allowed to express your opinion.
00:28:00.000But there's also some insecurity that you're so fragile that you can't actually subject your ideas to some sort of debate.
00:28:07.000Joe Rogan, like he hosts podcasts that go for like three hours.
00:28:10.000There's plenty of time in three hours to be able to surface your ideas.
00:28:15.000And so really, again, once again, you see this idea that the public or that democracy is too fragile to allow debate is itself a kind of projection from, I think, very fragile people.
00:28:27.000Also that neglects to acknowledge that when we're talking about science, you can't just have that as like an orb of language that conveys veracity, experimentation, double-blind clinical trials.
00:28:39.000Science often is a subset of a deeper ideology, particularly and observably science was utilised, and let me know if you agree with this in the chat, science was utilised as a sort of a measure of authoritarianism.
00:28:53.000That you cannot argue with this particular bit of science.
00:28:56.000My God, Gareth and I do this show five times a week.
00:29:00.000It's almost impossible to track the number of arguments that began at position A, which legitimised authoritarianism, and we found our way all the way to Z, not Z, where you cannot countenance these arguments.
00:29:39.000If you just look at the COVID crisis, at the vaccine, the COVID variants kept evolving and changing and the
00:29:47.000vaccine had changing efficacy with different variants over time and ultimately was the Omicron variant that
00:29:54.000resulted in really the end of the pandemic.
00:29:56.000So we had a very, it was a very simplistic picture at the beginning, which was we're going to lock everybody down, and then everybody will get these vaccines, and then we'll have herd immunity.
00:31:04.000Otherwise I'm going to revert to the side of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and see you as
00:31:07.000so-called journalists, Flybernites, Twitter exploiters and charlatans.
00:31:12.000How does this become something that plays out over time?
00:31:16.000How does it become something that essentially opposes the legislation that's being passed in the Five Eyes countries to penalise platforms that house free speech?
00:31:25.000And how do we ensure that we are able to say free speech is everybody's free speech?
00:31:29.000Is the free speech of people that are all over the spectrum when it comes to even issues of identity politics?
00:31:37.000With this being, I believe, the 10th anniversary of Snowden being charged with espionage, with Trump being charged with espionage right now, with free speech seeming to be under more threat now than ever before, with Snowden himself saying that the measures and surveillance capabilities that are available now dwarf what was going on when he made those exposures, how robust and inclusive must a movement to oppose it be?
00:32:04.000Well, I think the most important thing is that we need to go on the offensive.
00:32:08.000And so we're tired of defending our strong First Amendment protections of free speech from other countries.
00:32:13.000So what we want to do is work with these new friends.
00:32:27.000So we're going to help them to change their laws around the world to expand free speech so that it's closer to the very high golden standard of First Amendment rights in the United States.
00:32:40.000The second thing is that we just have to expose these organizations and defund them and then dismantle them.
00:32:47.000Many of these organizations are... Matt Taibbi created a report of 50 of the most important censorship organizations.
00:32:56.000These are non-governmental organizations, government contractors.
00:33:00.000He created a report of them so we know their names, we know where they are, so we can just go to lawmakers in the United States and other countries and say, please stop funding this group.
00:33:09.000Or if this group is doing other good work, as it may be the case, then fund that, but tell them they must no longer engage in censorship activities.
00:33:19.000Even in that case, I think people thought at the time that it was just about surveillance.
00:33:23.000But what we've seen that the surveillance, it doesn't stop with surveillance.
00:33:26.000The surveillance continues, and then it turns into censorship. So you're monitoring somebody, monitoring
00:33:31.000it seems innocent enough, I'm just reading their tweets. Well, no, then quickly you're going
00:33:35.000to Twitter and you're saying, "Please, you need to stop that Russell Brand social media
00:33:39.000post from going viral," or "You need to make sure that Michael Schellenberger is on a blacklist
00:33:43.000so that anytime he posts something, it doesn't go viral, it doesn't get fed into
00:33:47.000other people's feeds." So we need to build that global movement, demand greater free
00:33:52.000speech rights, expose the censorship industrial complex, and then defund and dismantle them.
00:33:57.000God, you have got a manifesto. That's good that you've done one of those.
00:34:00.000Also, I think we should defund and disband Matt Taibbi himself.
00:34:04.000Disband him, defund him, break him up into all his component parts and release him back into the wild.
00:34:09.000It will be unfair, Michael Schellenberger, to bring you all this way to the United Kingdom to conduct our conference in London.
00:34:16.000There's a link in the description and in the chat if you want to get tickets.
00:34:18.000Without exposing you to Britain's best investigative journalist who needs no introduction, except perhaps this one.
00:34:30.000I just wondered what you thought about the policies around disinformation in terms of how they relate to the lack of populist policies around economy now.
00:34:41.000I read an article by Li Fang this week about Obama taking advantage of tax
00:34:48.000loopholes that he campaigned against and during his presidency spoke about
00:34:54.000against and is now using them to pay half the amount of tax that normal
00:34:57.000everyday Americans pay. So it's interesting that at a time when we go
00:35:01.000through the pandemic and a wealth transfer that occurs, when we go through
00:35:05.000the Ukraine war at the moment where companies are making you know record
00:35:10.000The way that people are being shut down around disinformation, and Obama himself is someone who was, as Lee Fang writes himself, stopped populist economic arguments altogether in favor of talking about disinformation.
00:35:22.000That seems to be his thing now, disinformation the same way that Joe Biden's doing it.
00:35:26.000I just wonder if you think that there's a kind of correlation with the idea that we need to be shutting down people around Disinformation and not remotely talking about economic populist theories and arguments anymore, redistribution of wealth, about what to do, about the fact that all these companies during the pandemic made ludicrous and record profits.
00:35:47.000Do you think that's something that plays into the use of disinformation policies?
00:35:52.000I would say they're just two sides of the same coin.
00:35:53.000I mean, so you saw that one of the threats that the censorship industrial complex emerged to combat was Brexit and the labeling.
00:36:01.000So you saw with Brexit, the labeling of the supporters of Brexit who wanted greater control over Britain's future, but it was the labeling of supporters of Brexit as racists, as nationalists.
00:36:12.000You see this strong emphasis on anti-Semitism, a clear attempt to sort of call everybody fascists who support
00:36:20.000So I do think there's a very strong relation. Same thing with Trump.
00:36:23.000The idea was that it's not populism, it's actually fascism.
00:36:27.000But no, it's clear, I mean, the beneficiaries of globalization overwhelmingly were the upper 1%, top 10%.
00:36:34.000Those were the folks that were pushing back against Brexit, that won the globalization.
00:36:39.000There's a lot of benefits to globalization.
00:36:40.000I've certainly benefited, you know, many of us have benefited from many aspects of it.
00:36:45.000But I think it got to a point where we started to lose control over it.
00:36:49.000We didn't really feel like, in all of our countries, that we had much say in it.
00:36:53.000And it became clear with the censorship that the elites didn't want us to have much say over it.
00:36:58.000And when we did have say over it, we were saying all the wrong things.
00:37:02.000Any form of aggregation centralizes power and will require some form of distribution and potentially redistribution.
00:37:10.000We've seen already that most systems of government do incorporate redistribution of assets and wealth through Subsidy for maintenance of dead systems.
00:37:22.000The phrase zombie capitalism is one that describes an economic system that's already in decline and perhaps has already experienced collapse.
00:37:28.000So ultimately, the censorship industrial complex itself is simply a tool to maintain the power of the elite.
00:37:34.000So Gareth's question was an excellent one that brought together the incentive for the censorship industrial complex.
00:37:43.000Why the fuck to have this thing in the first place?
00:37:45.000Well, in order to maintain those systems, right?
00:37:47.000Well yeah, I mean, look at this issue of the moving of the... Obama, to his great credit, banned gain-of-function research in 2014.
00:37:55.000Okay, Cambridge, there's a Cambridge working group, they said this is really dangerous, we can't see any clear benefits to this kind of research.
00:38:06.000Yeah, well, yeah, so, I mean, exactly.
00:38:08.000So, yeah, but then Fauci and Collins and this guy Peter Doszak with Equihallow Lines, they moved it to China.
00:38:14.000They then said, oh, it's not really gain-of-function research, it's chimeric research, and they made up some justification for it.
00:38:20.000These are unelected officials who are making decisions that ultimately affected everybody on Earth.
00:38:25.000So I think that's the kind of arrogance, the lack of accountability, You're suggesting that that gain-of-function research that was conducted in China because it was banned in the US had some consequences that we might be aware of.
00:38:37.000I thought you were going to say Fauci, Daszak and Collins, they moved it to China where they conducted some research in Wuhan and that was the last anyone heard of it.
00:38:47.000And now, if you get a bat coronavirus, you can go to bed at night safe in the knowledge, as Rachel Maddow said, you take one jab and that's it.
00:39:14.000I mean, when I first heard him talking about it, I thought he sounded like a conspiracy theorist, and now I'm finding that he was spot on from the beginning to be alarmed about this.
00:39:22.000So, we do have dangerous things in the world that we have a lot of care to manage.
00:40:00.000Thank you, Michael, for pulling together such a vast array of complex subjects, from UFOs, from the microbial, from the microscopic, to the cosmic and cosmological.
00:40:09.000Michael Schellenberger can be relied on to create true narratives.
00:40:13.000And alongside his oppo, Matt Taibbi, who can't be here for... What's he doing?