Russell Brand is joined by Edward Snowden to talk about UFOs and the deep state. Plus, a look at the demonisation of Russia by the media, and why we should all be worried about James O'Keefe. Stay free, wherever you are listening to this, and remember to give your money to RUMBLE! The whole show is available only on Rumble. Subscribe to Stay Free with Russell Brand wherever you get your stuff, and if you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! You can also join the conversation by using the hashtag , and find us on social media using and . To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and use the promo code: "ELISSA" to receive 10% off your first pack! To buy your own copy of Stay Free With Russell Brand's new book, click here. To buy a copy of the book here: stayfree.co.uk/OurStorytellers and learn more about your ad choices, go here. To support the show: bit.ly/StayFreeWithRussellBrand to become a supporter of our show and get 10% discount code: Stay Free, and get 20% off the entire book deal, plus free shipping and shipping throughout the rest of the UK, plus a free shipping offer, plus an extra discount when you sign up to $150,000 shipping offer from Amazon Prime and VaynerSpeaker and Vimeo, starting from $99 a month, plus all other places they get a maximum of $99, starting on 7 places like VIP + Vimeo and VRP, they get 10GBs, plus they get $50, and they get 7GBs and they also get VIP access to 7 days of VIP + they get 3 months of VIP access, plus VIP access and 7 GBs Plus they get an ad-only pricing, they'll get 7 days early, and a discount on 7 days and 7 other places get $99 gets 4GBs plus they also gets $5,000 off the show starts starting at $49,000, they can get $49 and they can work exclusively they get 5 GBs and VIP access? Learn more about the book: stay free, they will also get $10,000 and get VIP + VIP access.
00:01:08.000I was going on about aliens like ironically like when I was a kid I used to listen to sort of David Icke stuff and it was all like extraterrestrials are real.
00:02:01.000I wish it were aliens, but it's not aliens.
00:02:03.000It's just the old engineered panic and attractive nuisance ensuring that national security reporters get assigned to investigative balloon bullshit, excuse the language, Edward, rather than budgets or bombings a la Nord Stream.
00:02:16.000We had such a great conversation yesterday, didn't we, with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh, who told us Actually, our reporting is spot on.
00:02:26.000The Nord Stream Pipeline bombing, if indeed it was the United States of America, served so many purposes.
00:02:33.000Militarily, economically, depriving Europe of that gas means that Europe are looking for different relationships.
00:02:41.000He also did say that one of those UFOs or unidentified objects is like a meteorological thing, didn't he?
00:02:47.000He said there's a meteorological centre up there in Alaska that they can't get anybody to work at because it's too cold, and they've got balloons up there being operated remotely, and everyone knows that they're there, and no one thinks for a second that it's UFOs.
00:02:58.000They're simply under a lot of pressure to reduce their defence budgets.
00:03:01.000They're trying to get through the biggest defence budget in history, so they need to escalate hysteria.
00:03:06.000Listen, we wouldn't normally ask for a huge budget, but I've got to tell you, There are aliens, okay?
00:03:29.000The one thing they could do that's worse than antagonising Russia is antagonise China, but they're doing that as well.
00:03:35.000And across the course of the show, we're going to be talking about the ongoing demonisation of Russia.
00:03:39.000We're going to be talking about the way that the media has been amplifying the significance of James O'Keefe from Project Veritas' wrongdoing.
00:03:46.000And I'm certainly not suggesting that he hasn't done anything wrong.
00:03:49.000I understand he took a pregnant lady's sandwich, didn't he?
00:03:56.000How much bullying can there be when you're taking a whole staff with you to see Oklahoma?
00:04:01.000I've never heard of bullying, but included.
00:04:03.000The reason Project Veritas are in the news, if you're aware, because it's not allowed to be on certain platforms, it's certainly not covered on the mainstream media, is because he did a sting operation on a former Pfizer employee who made revelations about Pfizer that are unfavourable to Pfizer and their shareholders.
00:04:18.000And now, mysteriously, this guy, James O'Keefe, has been sent on paid leave.
00:04:22.000So we wondered, how have the establishment reached Project Veritas, because they're sort of like an outsider organization.
00:04:38.000Now we have a little bit of an understanding how Project Veritas have been pressured by the mainstream, by Big Pharma.
00:04:48.000Well, we don't know, but also it seems like a massive coincidence.
00:04:53.000If they haven't, it feels like it's a massive coincidence that this is happening at this time.
00:04:57.000I've been investigative journaling all day, like it's 1999.
00:05:00.000Well, Seymour Hersh has vouched for you.
00:05:02.000Seymour Hersh, he's a Pulitzer Prize winner.
00:05:04.000He says I'm one of the best out there.
00:05:06.000Now, look, if you're watching this right now on YouTube, You've got to click over and watch us on Rumble, because in a minute we'll be exclusively on Rumble.
00:05:12.000And that's when we're going to be telling you about Fauci's secret meetings on natural immunity that took place during the pandemic.
00:05:19.000I came out of it, of course, and said natural immunity, that's not a real thing that's existed throughout human evolution.
00:05:24.000In fact, without which there could be no such thing as human evolution.
00:05:27.000We'll be talking about that and revealing some interesting information, but only on Rumble.
00:05:31.000So click over and join us there when you can.
00:06:20.000Let's call it Disruptive Technologies, you nerds!
00:06:23.000And they invest funds in big pharma companies, including an organisation called Resilience, Resilience is a biopharmaceutical company that uses living organisms to create drugs.
00:07:56.000But I want you to bear in mind Pfizer's actions during the last couple of years, I want you to remember Albert Baller saying it would be unconscionable for Pfizer to profit from this two-year process, from this healthcare crisis.
00:08:14.000Now, I want you to carry all of this in your mind while looking at, uh, there's a few questions I want you to ask yourself.
00:08:19.000I want you to ask, I wonder how much profit they made.
00:08:21.000I want you to ask yourself how much money Pfizer spent on lobbying.
00:08:24.000I want you to consider the conditions of Pfizer's ongoing COVID vaccine trials, none of which I'm willing to talk about, not until we're exclusively in our safe place of rumble.
00:08:35.000I want you to ask yourself all those things, and if they did kind of receive public funding in so much as they partnered with BioNTech, who received hundreds of millions of dollars from the German government.
00:08:47.000But while you're mulling over all those questions, because I know you can do numerous things simultaneously, because I believe in your intelligence.
00:09:37.000Stop the song right I'd stop say excuse me excuse me and even that's a that's a track isn't he's not quite a Musician with him so like the music will be playing stuff and it'd be weird and they'd have to sort of turn it down Well James O'Keefe, I'd snatch that out of her hand like it was a sandwich and she was a pregnant lady.
00:09:54.000Now, of course, this is an appalling performance of Oklahoma, anyone can see that.
00:09:58.000But is it as bad as Pfizer's litany of, let's call them, successes over the course of the pandemic period?
00:10:06.000That's what, that's I guess what we're querying.
00:10:09.000Because like James O'Keefe, he might only be in your mind because of that moment where he was chatting to that lad, Jordan, who they'd honey trapped into making some, if indeed these things are legitimate... Allegedly!
00:10:20.000Extraordinary revelations about Pfizer's ongoing practices and practices in the preceding couple of years.
00:10:27.000Are we able to show that while we're still on YouTube or is that a Rumble?
00:10:32.000So if you stay with us, if you're watching this somewhere else, click over onto Rumble now because we want to show you, you know, remind you of the last time you saw James O'Keefe.
00:10:40.000And sort of bear in mind that when he's investigative reporting, a very sombre, serious dude, Yeah, I just think it's amazing that this is the best they could get on him.
00:10:49.000Can you imagine the effort they would have gone into?
00:12:28.000Well, I'm going to keep it rated PG for this particular Rumble colloquy, so I'm going to avoid getting too racey.
00:12:36.000Such that, I don't know, maybe there might be some new censorship stricture imposed on Rumble solely to do with preventing me from getting too racy for the daytime audience.
00:12:47.000Don't push this to such a limit that Rumble, that has organised itself around the principle of free speech, has to renege on that pledge because you are so disgusting in the things that you say.
00:12:57.000That would be funny if I'm just so repulsive that they have to totally abandon their stated sort of core principles for the promulgation of speech.
00:13:27.000And was it just one lone congressperson advocating for that or was it a broader movement?
00:13:31.000Well, yeah, earlier you mentioned that there was this particular Democratic congressman named Tom Malinowski who was booted out of the House of Representatives actually at the midterm elections and replaced by a Republican who pledged to be even more aggressive and antagonistic toward Russia.
00:13:48.000So that kind of well encapsulates the bipartisan consensus on this topic.
00:13:52.000But I interviewed Tom Malinowski because he happened to be a sponsor of a resolution in the House calling on the State Department to formally designate Russia a state sponsor of terrorism, so putting Russia into the same category as Syria, Cuba, North Korea, etc., Iran, and thereby kind of formally abrogating any semblance of Official diplomatic ties that could be forged between the United States and Russia, and you'd think that would have a pretty decisive deleterious impact on brokering some sort of settlement to the war.
00:14:34.000And far be it for anyone to assume that this was just some sort of rogue plan on the part of one particular Democratic congressman, Last July, the U.S.
00:14:45.000Senate unanimously assented to a resolution that was championed by Lindsey Graham, so UberHawk of all UberHawks, former, you know, chief sort of buddy of John McCain.
00:14:57.000And by the way, John McCain, for all he was castigated during his lifetime as being this kind of insane hawk and outside the mainstream, believe it or not, in death, John McCain's foreign policy disposition has become strikingly kind of subsumed into just mainstream bipartisan consensus, which I think is an undercover development of this past year or so vis-a-vis Ukraine.
00:15:25.000But Lindsey Graham championed this resolution with a Democratic colleague, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, and all 100 U.S.
00:15:33.000senators Assented to it was enacted by unanimous assent so everybody from Rand Paul to Josh Hawley to Bernie Sanders to Elizabeth Warren anyone who you might think be might be somewhat on the margins or somewhat more of a dissenting sort of standpoint on this particular topic they all weather through
00:15:54.000overt intentionality or just omission, assented to the enactment of this particular resolution,
00:16:01.000which would, I think it's fair to say, basically obliterate any hope that the United States
00:16:05.000could engage diplomatically with Russia in pursuit of some sort of negotiated resolution
00:16:13.000Now, that move actually has not been formally taken yet, despite the arded lobbying of the Ukraine government and Zelensky as well.
00:16:20.000When Zelensky was in the United States in late December for his vaunted first trip abroad since the war began, or at least the first trip that's been publicly reported that he's taken abroad since the war began, that was one of his lobbying agenda items for that step to be taken to basically nuke, to use a Somewhat ominous pun the diplomatic ties between the United States and Russia and the United States has not for whatever reason Formally gone there yet
00:16:48.000But the Biden administration tends to be a somewhat lagging indicator in what kind of aggressive steps it's willing to accede to, whereas Congress and the media kind of are at the forefront of kind of banging on for whatever the latest threshold crossing step is.
00:17:07.000You talked in our conversations offline about the seamless Congealing of folklore and myth into conventional wisdom.
00:17:20.000How, I suppose, abstract ideas that are not underwritten by facts are starting to be used as platforms, foundations and arguments, I guess, for escalated activity within this conflict.
00:17:34.000Can you give us some examples or did you just give us one, i.e.
00:17:37.000the sort of the attempt to label Russia a terrorist state?
00:17:40.000Are there further examples that have accrued around this conflict?
00:17:44.000Yeah, and there are multiple dimensions to this phenomenon.
00:17:47.000And this being the first year anniversary of the invasion starting, or we're approaching that anyway, it's a good time to reflect on how this dynamic has worked discursively.
00:18:01.000So when Russia first launched the invasion February 24th of last year.
00:18:07.000There was this instantaneous congealing of myth and folklore, as I would put it, around a sort of triumphalist narrative That showed the resilience and the resourcefulness and the heroism of Ukraine.
00:18:24.000And certainly in particular instances, there might have been cases that were legitimate of, you know, individual Ukrainians displaying valor of some sort.
00:18:34.000That's not even what I'm commenting on here, because, you know, the immediate counterargument will be, oh, you're trying to Denigrate the sacrifices of Ukrainians and cheapen their suffering.
00:18:46.000No, I mean I personally went to the border.
00:18:50.000Yeah, right up in your window Well, no, I mean actually the reason why that rebuttal or that theoretical rebuttal is so cheap is because you know an actually serious sort of moral and Assessment would have to take into account the genuine suffering of those Ukrainians who, through no fault of their own, actually have had their lives disrupted.
00:19:11.000When the war first started, I went to Poland on the border area with Ukraine.
00:19:15.000And I personally, you know, without trying to get myself set up for interviews through NGOs or through some sort of fixer or through some sort of, you know, orchestrated PR initiative, I actually personally interviewed lots of, you know, mostly women with young children.
00:19:33.000Who did have their lives genuinely disrupted through as a result of an aggressive military action.
00:19:39.000And I think there is sympathy that is justly afforded to them.
00:19:43.000So, you know, I think somebody who is a careful moral reasoner would have to take that into account.
00:19:50.000And so I'm taking that into account, but I'm also simultaneously noting that there was this onslaught of just propaganda and fabrication In service of advancing one particular triumphalist Ukraine narrative that was then arrogated for the purpose of intensifying a primarily U.S.
00:20:09.000So I don't know if you recall, but within days of the invasion happening last February, there was this anecdote that got circulated and then just beamed across the entire information kind of landscape where Zelensky was supposedly offered an evacuation route out of Ukraine by the United States, and he responded Triumphantly and boldly and audaciously by saying, I don't need ammo, I need a ride.
00:20:35.000And that became this rallying cry showing not just the valorous spirit of Zelensky, but of Ukraine as a whole.
00:20:45.000And t-shirts were immediately produced with this slogan, and it became one of the core tenets of this war mythos.
00:20:54.000And if you actually go and look at what that originated from, there was an AP story In late February, that was sourced to an anonymous intelligence official.
00:21:03.000So nobody was willing to put their name to the conveyance of this, you know, titanically inspiring quote.
00:21:12.000And that US intelligence official is the one who related apparently to the AP reporter.
00:21:18.000We still don't know who that intelligence official was.
00:21:23.000intelligence officials have a variety of potential motives for why they would want to place information out for public consumption.
00:21:31.000And then by October, one of the very few instances of an actually sort of robust journalistic evaluation of the nature of the U.S.
00:21:41.000intervention in Ukraine was published in the New Yorker.
00:21:45.000And it quoted another official kind of laughingly acknowledging that that entire anecdote, including the quote itself presumably, was just a sheer fabrication for propagandistic purposes.
00:21:56.000Which, you know, if you're thinking about it from the standpoint of the self-interest of, or the perceived self-interest of whoever those, you know, Ukraine government officials might be, you can see why they would want that information out there to kind of construct this affirming kind of noble narrative on their behalf,
00:23:19.000Now, a lot of self-styled leftists and liberals and even leftists kind of purport to be very well acquainted with the history of interventionist U.S.
00:23:38.000Maybe there are some blind spots in their knowledge, but there are certain sort of core kind of features to what they understand to be the reality of U.S.
00:23:46.000foreign policy, and it produces a rather cynical view of the utility of U.S.
00:23:50.000foreign policy, because number one, it tends to be predicated on state duplicity, meaning that the actual nature of the policy is not forthcomingly communicated to the public At first, and it tends to be accompanied by this conjoining what's called mission creep in that the scope or the contours of that US policy tend to expand and lurch out into new areas and to entail a far greater investment of both financial resources and even human resources if it escalates to the level of an actual
00:24:31.000Intervention involving boots on the ground, so to say.
00:24:34.000But all that kind of got shunted to the side with regard to this particular intervention, at least as it began in February of last year, because it was seen as advancing these kind of grandiose objectives of protecting the rules-based international order, protecting international liberalism against the encroachments of right-wing connotated Global authoritarianism as personified by Putin as the chief exporter of that insidious tendency.
00:25:10.000Even in the US, the legacy of World War II itself was specifically invoked time and time again, almost to the point of tedium.
00:25:17.000No, not almost, definitely to the point of tedium, where you get, of course, the obligatory Hitler comparisons that Putin must be stopped or else he's going to do a blitzkrieg throughout all of Europe.
00:25:30.000needs to resume its role that was articulated by Franklin Roosevelt as the arsenal of democracy by furnishing armaments all across the world, including to, you know, Britain, Soviet Union, etc., in that phase before the U.S.
00:25:43.000formally entered the war in December of 1941.
00:25:46.000Nancy Pelosi went on the floor of the House of Representatives and demanded the enactment of the Lend-Lease policy for the first time since the 1940s on account of
00:25:57.000these ideological imperatives toward protecting global liberalism from these villainous
00:26:04.000depredations of Putin and what have you, I guess also Lukashenko, who we're also supposed
00:26:13.000And so, given these ideological nostrums that got so fervently pumped out into the public
00:26:21.000consciousness, any kind of analytical, objective, impartial, rationally minded assessment of
00:26:29.000the nature of this particular US military intervention got subordinated to those wider ideological goals, such that no one really had the sense that there could be mission creep associated with this particular U.S.
00:26:42.000No one got the sense that there could be state deceit involved in the selling of the intervention.
00:26:46.000And yet we found, as could have been, I think, easily predicted by anybody who was trying to maintain a bit of a mooring and sort of rational Yeah, kind of assessment.
00:26:59.000So for one thing, I don't know if you recall, but when Biden and top administration officials were talking about the nature of US intervention post-Russian invasion on February 24th, they were almost invariably framed in terms of sort of a very narrowly confined aid mission, almost like it was just like a a strict humanitarian intervention where the aid would be
00:27:25.000mostly about blankets and food and water and basic sort of nourishment for the besieged
00:27:37.000And they specifically use the word aid, I think, because it has a particular propagandistic
00:27:44.000And this doesn't get much talked about either.
00:27:45.000But when you think of aid, like if the US is going to be providing aid to a besieged nation, what does that kind of conjure a mental image of?
00:27:52.000I don't know, like a first aid kit or something, right?
00:27:56.000Whereas by June of last year, The U.S.
00:28:00.000was basically agreeing to the demands of the Ukraine military to furnish them with an entirely new military in the midst of a hot war, which we are constantly reminded is the most wide-scale war in Europe since the 1940s.
00:28:16.000Now, is that aid as commonly understood by just the general member of the public?
00:28:21.000I don't think so, but that word was sort of very much fixated on, I think, for a particular purpose.
00:28:28.000And then it kind of escalated from there.
00:28:29.000I mean, at the beginning, the idea was just to send some aid
00:28:32.000along with maybe some small arms so the courageous Ukrainians could defend their homes.
00:28:38.000And also, a Javelin missile here and there so they could take out an invading Russian tank.
00:28:44.000Then by June, it was heavy artillery that the US would also be sending,
00:28:48.000the HIMAR rocket systems that later came, of course, the Patriot missile batteries that would then be deployed
00:28:56.000to Ukraine as was announced in December by Biden.
00:29:00.000And it kind of culminated, at least as yet, with the US saying, oh, by the way,
00:29:05.000we're gonna send our most advanced battle tanks into Ukraine, that's the next iteration of this aid.
00:29:11.000So if that's not mission creep, if that's not in keeping with sort of
00:29:16.000the quintessential trajectories that you would expect of a US foreign policy intervention,
00:29:25.000And yet, there's just not really much popular consciousness of this very predictable cycle because the overarching ideological imperatives that have been imbued onto this particular conflict have taken such primacy.
00:29:42.000Michael, you extraordinary insomniac, you great river of vocabulary, you.
00:29:46.000What extraordinary analysis you took us there on the journey from blankets to clear escalation via that word lethal aid.
00:29:55.000I remember when they made that peculiar portmanteau, that new linguistic hybrid, and as Language evolves as censorship increases.
00:30:03.000You start to recognize how power is newly operating.
00:30:07.000Michael, I could listen to you all day.
00:30:09.000Sometimes I felt like I might not have a choice.
00:30:11.000We'd love to have you back on our show for further conversations.
00:30:16.000It would be brilliant to get more of your insights and I'm really excited to talk to you more.
00:30:21.000You can follow Michael on Substack by going to mtracey.substack.com.
00:30:37.000Sometimes I get... I get worked up because sometimes I feel like I'm just... I'm channeling the absolute truth of the universe directly into the level.
00:31:36.000I thought it was amazing that thing, because when he's talking about the mission creep, it's something we've talked about the aid before, isn't it?
00:31:41.000The way it started off as aid and then it was lethal aid and now it's military aid.
00:31:46.000And you know, Biden coming on the telly, you know, towards the start of the war saying we're not going to go to war with Russia.
00:31:51.000And then it's got the point, I mean Michael's, one of the things that he's written is that America now controls virtually every rocket fired by Ukrainian forces at Russian targets.
00:31:59.000We only control virtually every rocket?
00:32:08.000You, on the basis of a lot of diligent research and aggregating a great deal of brilliant reporting and creating your own narratives, Me, because I've always felt, don't trust what you're told.
00:32:19.000Never, ever trust authority under any circumstances.
00:32:23.000Demand individual and collective freedom.
00:32:25.000Stuff that I somehow picked up as a child.
00:33:35.000He's a great friend of the show and we're very excited to have him on.
00:33:38.000Sign up to Locals to see the show behind the show.
00:33:41.000How do we conjure up this ingenuity, this chemistry, this majesty that Pulitzer Prize winning journalists like Greenwald, like Seymour Hersh are queuing up to say is the greatest little news show on the planet.
00:33:55.000I'm pretty sure you just misquoted them.
00:34:35.000Okay, well, we're back tomorrow with some fantastic guests and some ludicrous and outrageous fun.
00:34:40.000Some challenges to mainstream narratives and, I would say, access to realms as yet Foregone by a world that wants you denied the real, real truth.
00:34:51.000See you tomorrow, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.