Stay Free - Russel Brand - Neil Oliver - on Populism, Faith & Sprituality

00:00:00.000 Hello there you Awakening Wonders on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you download your podcasts.

00:00:05.000 We really appreciate you, our listeners, and want to bring you more content.

00:00:08.000 We will be delivering a podcast every day, seven days a week, every single day.

00:00:13.000 You'll get a detailed breakdown of current topics that the mainstream media should be covering, but if they are covering, they're amplifying establishment messages and not telling you the truth.

00:00:23.000 Once a week, we bring you in-depth conversations with guests like Jordan Peterson, RFK Jr., Sam Harris, Vandana Shiva, Gabor Mate and many more.

00:00:31.000 Now enjoy this episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand.

00:00:34.000 Remember, there's an episode every single day to educate and elevate our consciousness together.

00:00:40.000 Stay free and enjoy the episode.

00:00:58.000 How are we going to progress to one another if our hearts are closed?

00:01:02.000 We must wake up together.

00:01:03.000 I know you're going to enjoy this conversation.

00:01:05.000 Hello, Neil.

00:01:05.000 Thanks so much for joining us.

00:01:08.000 My pleasure.

00:01:09.000 Yes, I very much enjoyed our last chat.

00:01:13.000 I was, I make no, I'm sure, I don't make any preparations for these things.

00:01:18.000 I just, I'm always excited by the possibility of where the conversation, any conversation might go.

00:01:23.000 I think that's the, I think that's the joy of these exchanges.

00:01:27.000 Well, Neil, I've prepared enough for both of us, so you don't need to worry.

00:01:31.000 I've got a carefully- You've done some homework?

00:01:35.000 It's almost intrusive, actually.

00:01:38.000 It's almost a violation of any privacy acts that may yet remain.

00:01:43.000 I've been in that fireplace for the last couple of days observing you, and you have not been found wanting.

00:01:50.000 You are a brilliant and wry Gaelic poet.

00:01:54.000 I enjoyed our conversation last time and I'm interested to talk, as you might imagine, more about globalism and more about freedom and more about, you know, like what might have happened here.

00:02:07.000 Let me tell you this because I sort of ask you this because I trust you.

00:02:11.000 Now, over the time that I've been broadcasting in these kind of spaces, I've developed an affinity for what might be called populism that previously I might have been sceptical about.

00:02:24.000 I have a deep understanding, for example, why people in Ireland are so frustrated and why they may be considering Vote in for Conor McGregor.

00:02:34.000 I'm sympathetic to nations like the Netherlands where you're seeing the rise of figures like Geert Wilders, particularly while Dutch farmers are under such incredible pressure and they're exerting, I say they, and by that I mean corporate globalist forces appear to be trying to control agriculture.

00:02:55.000 In order that people do not have direct access to their own food.

00:02:58.000 That's, you know, that last bit is an assumption.

00:03:01.000 But it's very difficult to deny that centralist, globalist forces appear to be trying to regulate and control agriculture, usually under the auspices of helping the climate.

00:03:10.000 But it just seems that whenever we're helping the climate, we also penalize ordinary people and people's ability to run their own lives.

00:03:16.000 But these were just illustrative examples, Neil, to point out how You know once I would have been considered a person that was of the left who would automatically be in opposition to the kind of populist movements that I've already referred to and in some cases listed.

00:03:32.000 Have you always been someone that's affiliated with the right or conservatism?

00:03:37.000 Are you an old-school liberal lefty?

00:03:40.000 And how do you feel when you find yourself navigating a new political landscape that seems to be much more about people versus the establishment, periphery versus the centre, rather than left and right as we used to understand it?

00:03:56.000 I've never been overtly political before.

00:04:01.000 I never was.

00:04:02.000 I've never been a card-carrying member of any political party.

00:04:07.000 I was never somebody who marched or protested.

00:04:11.000 I can't honestly say why that was.

00:04:13.000 I think it was probably ultimately down to a certain kind of laziness, really.

00:04:18.000 I think I was letting other people get on with things political.

00:04:20.000 And I do reproach myself for having been Apathetic or disengaged for as long as I was.

00:04:29.000 But that said, I would never have characterised myself as being of the left or of the right or of the centre.

00:04:37.000 I didn't really think of myself in those terms.

00:04:41.000 I'm very interested, that said, in the way in which populist has become a pejorative term.

00:04:49.000 You know, it's bandied about in the same way as, you know, Hillary Clinton's basket of deplorables and whatever, white van man.

00:04:58.000 You know, there's a whole slew of terms that are used to make people feel bad, isolated one from another, as if their points of view are somehow crude or crass or base.

00:05:13.000 And I find that fascinating, to put it mildly.

00:05:19.000 Populist just means, as you know, of the people.

00:05:24.000 And the way in which that's been maligned is, well, I think it's unforgivable, actually.

00:05:31.000 And like you, I do feel a great deal of sympathy for populations all over the place.

00:05:41.000 Who, in a very short space of time in the scheme of things, have been left with no alternative but to accept major change, major demographic and cultural change that they didn't ask for and weren't necessarily ready for.

00:05:59.000 You know, weren't bought so much as a gin and tonic and a bunch of filling station croissants before certain couplings were forced upon neighbourhoods. 0.86

00:06:09.000 And why wouldn't people be alarmed by sudden change?

00:06:14.000 People generally are alarmed by sudden, unasked for change.

00:06:20.000 And I do get very frustrated at the way in which people are set against one another.

00:06:25.000 People have been moved, you know, whole civilizations all over the world have been deliberately displaced, damaged, carpet bombed, flattened, messed with.

00:06:36.000 People have been unseated and unsettled and are on the move as they would be for all sorts of, for as many different reasons as there are people.

00:06:47.000 And we are all the time invited to get angry with each other rather than where we should be angry, which is with the people up above us who punch down all the time and then encourage us to punch each other.

00:07:02.000 So I find I have a great deal of sympathy for everyone, because I think we have been collectively messed with en masse for decades.

00:07:12.000 Yeah, decades.

00:07:13.000 And I feel like that, you know, points in your answer there, you touched on the idea of migration and the cultural and social impact of migration.

00:07:21.000 Interestingly, mate, we've got a lot of topics to cover over the course of our conversation.

00:07:25.000 We'll talk about how the pandemic uniquely shifted cultural values, social attitudes,

00:07:31.000 created an acceptance of regulation that didn't previously exist.

00:07:35.000 It was a time of unprecedented international deception, I feel, and international shaming.

00:07:42.000 And those two things obviously correlate.

00:07:47.000 But before we get into the pandemic and the unique revelations of that recent period,

00:07:53.000 I'd like to sort of touch upon Ireland.

00:07:55.000 When we made some content about what happened in Ireland and how the rhetoric that was being used to condemn Irish people protesting about migration in the aftermath of several violent acts involving children and, as reported, Migrants, or, you know, members of the migrant population.

00:08:16.000 When we put that content up on various sites, YouTube and, of course, our home here, Rumble, I was struck by the number of, like, I noticed Brazilian people that were resident in Ireland, Polish people that were resident in Ireland, saying, migration has gone out of control in this country.

00:08:33.000 Like, people, Irish people feel disturbed. 1.00

00:08:35.000 There was some brilliant reporting at the time that made it clear that Ireland doesn't have the same kind of trajectory in history as a country like England or the

00:08:45.000 Netherlands or any country that has a colonial past. Ireland of course is historically

00:08:51.000 oppressed and their ethno-nationalism is a necessary part of their identity as they confronted and

00:08:59.000 opposed external oppressors.

00:09:02.000 I felt...two things I'd like to point out.

00:09:05.000 It's plain that you can have concerns about migration and not be a racist.

00:09:10.000 It's plain that people do not feel like, as you said, like they are being consulted about the direction of their nation.

00:09:18.000 And it was just something about what happened in Ireland because of the inability to sort of evoke guilt and shame in the same way you might be able to in a country like France or England or the United States, obviously.

00:09:31.000 That meant something was revealed to me.

00:09:33.000 And what I feel is, is that globalist rhetoric, it's shallow, it's manipulative, and it's dishonest.

00:09:43.000 And then when I started to sort of unpick that, I thought about a lot of the rhetoric around Brexit and a lot of the rhetoric around Trump.

00:09:49.000 and this is something you referred to in your first conversation as well.

00:09:52.000 There's a large appetite to condemn people just for having an opinion,

00:09:56.000 and the solution for this can only be democracy, because all of this anti-populist rhetoric is predicated on

00:10:02.000 the idea that there should be authoritative institutions

00:10:05.000 that dictate to people the direction of a country.

00:10:08.000 You could call that leadership if you want, but when there's been as much deception as we've

00:10:12.000 experienced lately, when there's so much contempt for the population,

00:10:16.000 when there's so much mistrust for the media, which are now essentially part of the establishment,

00:10:21.000 it's difficult not to argue that perhaps people should be able

00:10:25.000 to make decisions for themselves, that they shouldn't have information that's kept from them,

00:10:29.000 that they shouldn't be condemned and judged in the sort of way that we've kind of circled around,

00:10:33.000 even in the first 10 minutes of our chat.

00:10:35.000 I wonder what you feel about Ireland in particular and how that's relevant when it comes to this issue of globalism versus, I

00:10:42.000 won't just say nationalism, because nationalism is a pretty freighted term, but perhaps

00:10:47.000 even localism?

00:10:47.000 Well, you're so right about Ireland being a very different case than, say, England, Britain,

00:10:59.000 the Long Island of Britain, you know, a completely different experience and a completely different

00:11:04.000 means of operating in the world historically.

00:11:09.000 There is, there's definitely something very pernicious about the way in which everyone is discouraged from daring to hold multiple thoughts in their head at the same time.

00:11:19.000 You know, as you said, you can be simultaneously worried about rapid and mass immigration to your neighbourhood without being, while at the same time being a human-loving, life-affirming, welcoming person.

00:11:38.000 You can hold those two thoughts simultaneously.

00:11:42.000 We're constantly invited only to pick a side.

00:11:46.000 Yeah.

00:11:47.000 Just take a line, a single line on every issue.

00:11:51.000 And if you haven't got the time to think up one yourself, here's a laminated card with all of the pre-prepared lines that you might just help yourself to take.

00:12:02.000 And the people in Ireland who are concerned about the speed at which large arrivals are coming, They're instantly just, if they raise a voice about that, they're instantly xenophobic.

00:12:18.000 They're instantly racist.

00:12:19.000 They're instantly small-minded, close-minded people. 0.97

00:12:23.000 And it's so unfair.

00:12:25.000 And so people, knowing that that's how they're going to be dealt with, that's the way they'll be responded to, they just keep their heads down and intend and prefer to keep their mouths shut.

00:12:37.000 And it's I find that a terrible calumny that's been that's been inflicted.

00:12:41.000 But it's not just true of Ireland.

00:12:43.000 It's true of all sorts of there's there's no denying that all over the north of England, you know, communities have been radically altered by the demographically radically altered.

00:12:55.000 And people are just discouraged from so much as voicing an opinion about that.

00:13:01.000 Without being dismissed as some kind of, you know, racist xenophobes.

00:13:06.000 And I feel it's part of a direction of travel.

00:13:10.000 It's all about the way in which there's not to be any nuance in discourse.

00:13:15.000 There's not to be people having the time to air multiple coexisting points of view without instantly being shouted down for the first thing that you let out of your mouth.

00:13:28.000 I think a lot of us liked the Long Island of Britain as a phrase.

00:13:31.000 Ian Drummo just said that in the chat.

00:13:33.000 I liked that as well.

00:13:35.000 I wonder if you're familiar with the writing of Martin Goury, and in particular his famous book, The Revolt of the Public, in which he talks about how the availability of information that the communications age has brought about, particularly in the last 10 years, or he notes in 2001, there was as much information published as in all history up to that point, and it's doubled every year since then.

00:13:57.000 That it's such an enormous transformation that it in itself demands a change of all of our systems of governance.

00:14:09.000 I suppose it's kind of obvious, isn't it, that whether it's Congress or Parliament or whatever system of government, if it's a democracy in whatever country you're living in, is uh that is in a way based on a kind of pragmatism we send a representative to a central point to convey the perspectives of that community that selected him like that that in itself like the horse was the technology they were using the building was the technology they were using language was the technology they're using

00:14:41.000 He said, Martin Gurry, that now the terms left and right are redundant now or use establishment versus periphery has come about because it's a taxonomy-busting technology.

00:14:55.000 In the last few days, Neil, We've seen Elon Musk host Spaces on X, where figures that are complete pariahs like Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, and talking with a candidate for the Republican Party, Vivek Ramaswamy,

00:15:13.000 Yeah, and the world's richest man, you know, there or thereabouts.

00:15:18.000 And those are all figures that sort of, you know, in the New York Times or on MSNBC or CNN, perhaps with the exception of Musk, just because of the sheer cargo that he wields, are persona non grata.

00:15:35.000 That means now that not only do we have two cultures, or beyond two cultures, numerous cultures, and the teleology is that they're moving, the bifurcation has happened, and they're splitting and moving further and further apart.

00:15:47.000 If you can have, you know, 2.3 million people watching that.

00:15:50.000 If you have spaces like Rumble where You know, you can have uncensored speech.

00:15:55.000 And then, you know, even places like YouTube have been co-opted and are now ultimately sort of legacy media spaces when it comes down to it.

00:16:03.000 Certainly, you know, take the example of the pandemic, the WHO's laws or regulations are applied there in the form of the community guidelines of YouTube.

00:16:12.000 What we're experiencing is the inability of centralised authority to control a population, the inability to control information, and their obvious prognosis that that is going to lead to either disintegration or decentralisation.

00:16:28.000 It's going to lead to dissent.

00:16:29.000 It's already happened.

00:16:31.000 Whether it's Napster, the Arab Spring, Brexit, Podemos, Trump.

00:16:36.000 There's a long list of success.

00:16:38.000 The Five Star Movement and Beppe Grillo in Italy.

00:16:40.000 There's a long list of dissenters.

00:16:42.000 And I think what we're experiencing is that they are trying to use the leverage of crisis to reassert control.

00:16:51.000 And people are resisting it.

00:16:53.000 And I think my fear is that crises will continue to escalate until they have the means to impose that control.

00:16:59.000 Do you think, therefore, Neil, that we're at a pivotal moment?

00:17:03.000 And do you think that it's a battle that can be won by those of us that are interested in free speech and democracy?

00:17:10.000 Very much so.

00:17:11.000 I believe, you know, Christmas is, we're in the season of Advent, you know, the coming, the imminent arrival of.

00:17:19.000 And people, I've heard people more and more than I ever have before using, you know, the word apocalypse seems to be coming into people's conversation quite a lot.

00:17:29.000 And apocalypse is a Greek verb that means to take the cover off, to expose.

00:17:36.000 And I think that, as you're quoting there, this mass access to information has had unintended consequences.

00:17:47.000 I don't know what was the objective, necessarily, or all the objectives, when DARPA put together the fledgling internet back in the 50s and 60s and so on.

00:17:57.000 Maybe they genuinely didn't foresee What would be the consequences of so many people having so much, well, hitherto unfettered access to so much stuff and being able to draw their own conclusions?

00:18:11.000 And I think that collectively what has happened, I think it's happening faster and faster.

00:18:15.000 You know, there's a kind of a, there's some kind of, it's moving quicker and quicker.

00:18:23.000 That the I do wonder at the extent to which we have lived under an illusion for a long time, even an illusion of democracy and the reality with which we were presented.

00:18:35.000 It seems to be.

00:18:39.000 Falling apart as more and more people are able to access and read more and more otherwise esoteric information, you know, the old edifices like left and right and the way in which democracy was portrayed and offered up to us, it's starting to look thinner and thinner, worn out, And I just think there's no doubting that we are at a pivotal point, because whatever you want to call them, the globalists or the cabal, I think are exposed.

00:19:17.000 I think we can see them.

00:19:19.000 I don't know the extent to which they mean to be seen.

00:19:23.000 Or whether they are simply being revealed for what they are, that the mask has come away.

00:19:29.000 And next year, I think, is going to be a very interesting year going into, obviously, the US elections.

00:19:34.000 And by then, by the end of the year, we won't be far away from our own elections in Britain and all of the rest of it.

00:19:40.000 And I am fascinated by the potential of the globalists having to finally take the mask off and say, Democracy's gone.

00:19:55.000 You're not having democracy anymore.

00:19:56.000 You're going to have authoritarianism.

00:19:58.000 That's just the way it's going to be.

00:20:01.000 It almost feels as if they're going to have to fish or cut bait.

00:20:05.000 I'll tell you what.

00:20:06.000 Sorry to interrupt you, forgive me, but it feels like that is what's happening, because have you noticed how much in American media in particular they are talking about dictatorships and tyrants?

00:20:21.000 We made a joke the other day, it's almost like Shark Week in the United States, but it's Dictator Month.

00:20:26.000 Because they're continually saying, if Trump wins in 2024, he will turn America into a dictatorship, he will exile, he will execute, he will ban elections going forward.

00:20:34.000 And like you say, I feel that authoritarianism has a different hue than we'd ever anticipated.

00:20:41.000 It's not a progression of the militaristic despotism of the last century.

00:20:47.000 It's of course, technological dictatorships In the form that is the vision of Bill Gates that we should be fearful of, not the visions of the military leaders of Europe and Russia in the last century.

00:21:03.000 And I think you're right that 2024 is going to be significant.

00:21:06.000 Guys, if you're watching us on YouTube, we are going to exclusively broadcast now on Rumble.

00:21:12.000 We're going to exclusively stream on Rumble.

00:21:15.000 You'll have to click the link in the description to join me and Neil over there because I'm about to ask him about dictatorship.

00:21:21.000 Is it Trump that's a dictator or is it the current American administration that is trying to create a dictatorship?

00:21:27.000 A dictatorship on behalf of globalism?

00:21:29.000 I'm also going to be asking Neil about what was revealed to us during the coronavirus period.

00:21:34.000 We are talking specifically about the AstraZeneca jab being labelled defective, Pfizer being

00:21:39.000 sued by Texas, the lack of authority in the COVID inquiry, and new information that suggests

00:21:45.000 or even reveals that the US government paid the media to promote vaccines.

00:21:50.000 All of this, Neil, just because you said then that access to hitherto esoteric information

00:21:56.000 means that you can't hold together one consensual public sphere.

00:22:01.000 The public sphere keeps seemingly infinitely splitting.

00:22:07.000 Another thing that has taken shape.

00:22:12.000 Well, I've become aware of that.

00:22:13.000 You know, I'm I'm open about the fact that, you know, I was I was in a state of slumber for who knows how long before I properly started paying attention to all the things I'm paying attention to.

00:22:24.000 But increasingly, it feels that we're being discouraged from being seen in the same space as certain people.

00:22:32.000 Which is something that, it feels like something from another, it's medieval.

00:22:37.000 It's where people were, you know, beyond the pale, people were cast out into outer darkness, into perdition.

00:22:43.000 Do not be seen, or in the communist era, you know, where people, if you were seen in the same room as someone, it was as though you picked up their contagion of inappropriateness, whether you were interacting with them directly or not.

00:22:55.000 And for me, I've always anyway wanted At times, the company of and to talk to people with what I suppose you might be describing as outlandish ideas.

00:23:08.000 You described that X space, that Twitter space, with what a disparate, unlikely fellowship that was, you know, that lineup that you described.

00:23:20.000 Yeah.

00:23:20.000 You wouldn't have expected to see them in the same space.

00:23:24.000 And there they were, all these people, some of whom would, a lot of people would think, oh God, I can't be seen in a photograph with that person because that might affect my career prospects.

00:23:32.000 Or, you know, it might see me being, you know, debanked or whatever, whatever.

00:23:38.000 That inducement to stay away from people has the reverse effect on me.

00:23:43.000 That makes me even more determined.

00:23:46.000 If I'm being told by the state and the establishment not to be seen with that person, not to talk to that person, that only makes me ten times more desperate to fight.

00:23:57.000 Why?

00:23:58.000 What is it that you think is going to happen to me if I talk to them, if I listen to them, if I breathe the same air as them?

00:24:05.000 And I think that is part of what you're talking about that's going to fall apart.

00:24:11.000 It didn't hold together for very long, that idea that some people could be exiled, cast into perdition.

00:24:18.000 I think like me, people are thinking, well, if I'm not supposed to talk to him or her, I'm jolly well going to, because clearly the state thinks I might learn something that they would rather I didn't know.

00:24:29.000 Or that's the way it affects my psyche.

00:24:33.000 So many, I think so many things are becoming harder and harder to hold together.

00:24:37.000 And I think that's what's so difficult for so many people, because we are, we are having to re-evaluate everything, re-evaluate everything.

00:24:47.000 An old picture has just ceased to serve us anymore.

00:24:53.000 It's worn through, you know, a bright light's been shone on.

00:24:56.000 It's like one of those old masters where it turns out that there's another painting behind it because the artist reused the same canvas.

00:25:03.000 It's as if too many people can see that there's something else there that might even be much more interesting.

00:25:09.000 And that, I think, in the year ahead, and certainly in the short to medium term future, I think the authoritarians or the would-be authoritarians have no other option than to try and censure and silence and label as misinformation and keep people away from information that they don't want them to read, because the knowledge The resources, the different points of view, the alternative perspectives that people can readily and easily access and share means that that whole edifice just starts to fall away like confetti to reveal something else behind it.

00:25:49.000 Yes, even if you take a contemporary and contentious example like Andrew Tate, you have to genuinely believe that the moral outrage generated by the establishment is, as they say, motivated by his alleged misogyny and indeed the crimes that he is alleged to have committed.

00:26:16.000 Where that begins to break down is in my near certainty that there is no moral authority in the establishment anymore.

00:26:27.000 Indeed the example of Trump's rise being amplified indictment by indictment is a further indication that even if you put aside your own moral judgment of the whatever figures in question, me, Tate, Trump, Tucker, Rogan, you, whoever they eventually determine they don't like today, you have to say, up until now, what is it about their modality that has led you to believe that they care about feminism, that they care about public health, even without tying it to a condemned or exiled individual?

00:27:07.000 At the advent of the coronavirus pandemic it was my own um now deeply inculcated cynicism skepticism and fear of the establishment that guided me put into a simple uh understanding or um sort of what do i want to say framing like this hold on a minute if this is all about the sanctity of life like we've got to be locked down in our homes take these medications social distance because of the sanctity of life

00:27:39.000 Is this idea that life is sacred playing out generally across our culture?

00:27:46.000 Let's look at it in terms of economics and finance and social regulation and poverty and our moral standards.

00:27:53.000 Just take the issue of homelessness.

00:27:56.000 If life is sacred, what would be one's attitude to vagrancy?

00:28:02.000 What would be one's attitude to a whole host of subjects?

00:28:05.000 So, like you said, you get a kind of intuitive and visceral sense of a kind of glitch that you're being given one set of data and another set of data is deeply felt.

00:28:18.000 Hang on, these people don't care about me.

00:28:20.000 And then time passes.

00:28:22.000 and you learn, ah the AstraZeneca jab, they're suing them.

00:28:25.000 Pfizer's getting sued. The lockdowns were based on modelling, not empirical science. Pfizer

00:28:30.000 never clinically trialled for transmission.

00:28:32.000 They granted indemnity at the beginning. They're not reporting accurately on adverse,

00:28:36.000 adverse events. They're reporting people have died of Covid when they died.

00:28:41.000 They're not talking about sudden death.

00:28:43.000 They're not talking about like eventually your one's intuition is verified.

00:28:48.000 They don't care about the sanctity of life.

00:28:50.000 They care about control.

00:28:51.000 Let's go back and look at Trump again.

00:28:53.000 Let's go back and look at Tate again.

00:28:54.000 Let's go back and look at me.

00:28:55.000 Aha! 0.94

00:28:56.000 Control.

00:28:57.000 Are any of these figures Virulently anti-establishment in some way.

00:29:02.000 Now like you know people who watch our channel a lot know that I enjoy Donald Trump's rhetoric and I enjoy his anti-establishment positions but I don't think that without significant systemic change and decentralization and I would say the dissolution of several significant deep state agencies that America can meaningfully change.

00:29:22.000 But I recognize now that these operations care about control, not about the

00:29:28.000 sanctity of life. I'm sorry that I saw you wanted to come in Neil, I'm sorry I kept talking. Yes,

00:29:32.000 no it's, I don't believe that there's any, that the people that are, that have the temerity

00:29:38.000 to pontificate and to lecture to us about, about you know, the sanctity of life, they are in no

00:29:44.000 moral position so to do. As you, as you pointed out there, that it's hollow.

00:29:52.000 The people that we are having to listen to are sock puppet hollow.

00:29:56.000 There's nothing there.

00:29:57.000 They don't emanate any credible, any believable belief in anything.

00:30:05.000 You know, they just have all of the appearance and all of the sound of people who are just working from the contents of today's inbox, from whatever script they're working to.

00:30:16.000 None of it's coming from a place of belief.

00:30:20.000 And, of course, what happened during the course of the pandemic?

00:30:25.000 It's now apparent that there was plenty of advice to the authority figures who laid down the diktats that locking people in their homes was going to be catastrophic.

00:30:34.000 I mean, like, you needed the wisdom of Solomon to see that anyway.

00:30:38.000 But there was plenty of strident advice being given behind the scenes saying, don't do this.

00:30:44.000 You don't lock people down like this.

00:30:46.000 Don't separate families.

00:30:47.000 Don't keep children out of school.

00:30:49.000 Don't do those.

00:30:50.000 Don't do those things.

00:30:51.000 Because all of the constant, well, and so it came to pass.

00:30:55.000 That the consequences have been desperate.

00:30:58.000 Likewise, there was plenty of information out there in advance that they knew that whatever, that the injectables hadn't been tested to see if they would stop transmission person to person.

00:31:07.000 There was plenty of suggestion that there were going to be adverse side effects and all of the rest of it.

00:31:12.000 And the things were rolled out anyway.

00:31:14.000 So with three years worth of hindsight or two years worth of hindsight, it's plain that there was no real heartfelt concern for people.

00:31:22.000 I mean, I feel so, so desperate at the moment about what's happening in Israel, Palestine, Gaza.

00:31:31.000 The fact that whatever horror unfolded on the 7th of October, it then means that other babies have to die, not just by the hundreds, but by the thousands.

00:31:47.000 I can't countenance that.

00:31:50.000 I certainly can't condone it.

00:31:52.000 Anything where someone says other people's babies have to die because... I don't feel ready to hear the second half of that equation.

00:32:03.000 If it involves killing kids, I just can't accept it.

00:32:09.000 You can't do that. 0.96

00:32:10.000 I don't care.

00:32:11.000 Don't take me any further into that.

00:32:12.000 If that is what it means, the deaths of thousands, and that we're coming into the time of Christmas, where we're very focused on our kids and our family.

00:32:24.000 And we're supposed to, you know, the dissonance of that, that we celebrate our own children and our own families, while simultaneously knowing what's happening to thousands upon thousands of people in Gaza.

00:32:35.000 I find it makes me feel physically ill.

00:32:40.000 The thought of it, and there's an anti-human agenda.

00:32:45.000 Elon Musk in that space that you talked about, he talked about how he wants to see more people born, that he is pro-creation, that he thinks that the populations of the world are in steep decline and that depopulation, not overpopulation, is going to be the existential crisis that we'll face in the decades and centuries ahead if we don't get out of this tailspin.

00:33:08.000 And I don't feel that the authority figures have any love of life, that they have any love of our species at all, such that I think that so much of what is being done and will be done in the future will come from that place of thinking, people aren't worth it anyway.

00:33:29.000 We have voided God from the heart of our systems.

00:33:33.000 I think that we coasted on materialism and rationalism undergirded by clear progress in areas such as technology and medicine.

00:33:43.000 We forgot perhaps that we had neglected and allowed to atrophy that aspect of the spirit that makes all other progress notable, valuable and worthwhile anyway.

00:33:55.000 What you said before, about October the 7th and subsequent action is I suppose

00:34:03.000 what it would sound like if you had irrefutable principles and values at the core of your

00:34:12.000 system.

00:34:13.000 Now of course I think we know what the arguments are that are continually made by people advocating for Israel's right to defend herself and those kind of arguments I'm sure have a great deal of validity if you're personally affected or ideologically or religiously affected.

00:34:31.000 And I've tried throughout this to maintain a position where I can continue to be useful and I try to simultaneously hold in my mind the people that have been affected from a variety of perspectives when it comes to that issue and I try my best with all issues but what is Irrefutable is that if we don't have anywhere in our institutions the kind of simple principles like actually the sanctity of human life, like the reason that we have to preserve our society is because for us the killing of children is unconscionable.

00:35:07.000 I suppose if we don't have that within the values that we're purporting to protect or espouse then In a sense, all that's left, and I think we've touched on this before, is a kind of escalating tribalism and, you know, let the devil take the hindmost, because there is no... And so the reason that I try on this channel to continually talk about, you know, to talk about the presence of God, like there is a highest principle,

00:35:35.000 There are values that are transcendent.

00:35:37.000 There are things that are worth sacrificing our life for.

00:35:40.000 There are things that are worth sacrificing revenge for.

00:35:43.000 And it can't be enough to say that, well, if you found yourself in this position, then you would, you know, if there was an intruder in your home, if you were similarly aggrieved.

00:35:53.000 I sense that throughout our culture, and in far less incendiary issues than the conflict in the Middle East, we're being invited to pursue our lowest values.

00:36:02.000 We're being invited to engage with our lower selves.

00:36:06.000 As an addict in recovery, I cannot help but note how often the media and professions connected to commerce, marketing, advertising, continue to solicit Fear, desire, objectification of the body, or many sacred aspects of life, humor, sexuality, continually are objectified and mobilized in order to, in a sense, desacralize us and promote our animal nature.

00:36:38.000 Both fear and desire, I would say, being almost atavistic aspects of our Our pre-civilized or pre-evolved or pre-awakened nature.

00:36:48.000 We need all of that.

00:36:55.000 We've had whatever it is, 300, 400 years of science, and like a new shiny bobble, you know, our species has been transfixed by science.

00:37:05.000 All it can do, and I'm not denigrating that or running it down for a moment, it's astonishing what science and then technology have delivered unto us in the recent centuries, but it has also provided an incomplete You know, the thirst that from the soul doth rise, doth ask a drink divine and all that.

00:37:25.000 There are other questions which science cannot and does not address itself to.

00:37:31.000 And therefore there are answers that science will not give us.

00:37:35.000 And with the dark side of great works like Darwin's Origin of Species was that once and for all, The people of the West were invited to think that, well, we're nothing special.

00:37:50.000 We're not, you know, we're not the work of a creator God.

00:37:53.000 We're part of a mindless process of evolution.

00:37:58.000 And we've just kind of happened because we, you know, some of our ancestors had characteristics that gave them an advantage in an ecological niche and so on and so on.

00:38:08.000 And the dark travelling companion of that undermining of that kind of sanctifying of the human species was eugenics and all that that led to, you know, if humans are nothing but other animals, the accidents of evolution, the accidents of a process, then might we not experiment on them the same way we experiment on any other animals? 0.79

00:38:30.000 And so science Takes as well as gives, unless and until people are simultaneously invited to eat from another menu at the same time, you know, to draw upon other flavours.

00:38:48.000 Which are different and separate from what science and technology delivers, but we still need them.

00:38:52.000 You know, man cannot live by bread alone, as it says in Deuteronomy.

00:38:56.000 You know, we need more.

00:38:59.000 And my experience over the last two or three years is I've been receiving thousands of letters.

00:39:04.000 People started sending letters to me without an address on them.

00:39:08.000 People send letters to, you know, the hairy guy in Stirling, and they come to me, and so on and so on.

00:39:16.000 And the envelopes are funny, but inside the content is heartfelt and sometimes, many times, has brought me to tears.

00:39:25.000 And a lot of it's about faith.

00:39:28.000 At least three quarters of the people writing to me have declared themselves as being people of faith, that it was the faith that enabled them to, say, resist the vaccine products, enabled them to stand up to employers that were threatening them with this, that and the other.

00:39:43.000 They quote scripture to me.

00:39:45.000 You talk about the battle between light and dark, good and evil, and the sheer weight of it, the deluge of that kind of thinking from so many people from all over the world has meant that I have kind of renewed my comfort in having those conversations.

00:40:04.000 I had muted almost a conversation that I instinctively wanted to have.

00:40:11.000 And to be a part of, and I know that you talk on here about spirituality in all its many forms, everything that that means, and I feel the need of that.

00:40:22.000 And I think if you don't have that, if that component of life is not welcomed into the daily consciousness, then we are the less.

00:40:34.000 We are made the less for it, and we will function far more happily if that other aspect of our natural thinking, if room is made for it once more.

00:40:48.000 Neil, it's so beautiful talking to you, and I could talk to you for another couple of hours if I wanted to make people on my team have a mental breakdown, because we've got to go and record some other content immediately.

00:40:59.000 Loads of you joining us on lockdown, I'm sorry I didn't get to pass on your questions, I really am, but I'm just, like, there's so many good ones from Judy Denmark, Kay Kottwa, Seakeasy, Jobsdog, Viv & Carlo, Sunpatch Patriots, so many good questions, but our day got a little bit out of control, I do apologise.

00:41:15.000 Neil, do stay on because I've got something to ask you, but that was beautiful as always.

00:41:19.000 Thank you so much for bringing both poetry, reflection, gentleness, kindness to a political conversation that sometimes can feel extremely bombastic.

00:41:31.000 And I think that from bombast we won't get resolution, we won't get progress, we won't get the kind of synthesis that's required for us to move forward.

00:41:41.000 Thank you for being a gentle contributor to a complex debate, Neil, and thank you for coming on Stay Free today.

00:41:47.000 Thank you for making space for me.

00:41:49.000 I look forward to talking to you again, Russell.

00:41:51.000 If you want to see more from Neil, you can see him on GB News on YouTube.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - December 27, 2023

Neil Oliver - on Populism, Faith & Sprituality

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript