Have you wondered what a Scottish mystic might make of all of these bizarre globalist events unfolding right now? Extraordinarily, mysteriously, potentially occultistically? Well, Neil Oliver s got some perspectives on how global power will shift and manoeuvre after the Trump- MAGA ascent. Are there things he s disappointed in? Are they things he's excited about? And how will it affect the UK and the rest of the world? Because if globalism means one thing, it means the entire planet and centralised systems of power. How does it affect Christianity? How does that affect the farming protests? And those of us that once were content to look at the world from an entirely material and rational perspective, to start to recognize that it seems that dark power is at work? Well, well, Neil Olave has some thoughts on that. And he s not alone. In this episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand, he s also joined by Jack Posobiec and Jonathan Peugeot to discuss how a resurgent Christianity will affect and impact politics, not the other way around, but how it will impact and impact on politics. And, of course, the election of Donald Trump is a victory for the alternative, independent media, and the rise of the internet, and how that could have a big impact in the UK, and around the world. And, as it turns out, it s a win for the anti-establishment, and anti-authoritarian right-wing media, too. . Stay Free With Russell Brand by Neil Oliver. Stay Free From It All by Russell Brand and Neil Oliver Stay Free by You re gonna see the future. by waking up to the future by being free by being woke by the light of the light, by being awake by the dark side of the universe by being unafraid to see the light at the darkness by becoming woke by it by listening to the truth by becoming aware of the truth. Stay free by the truth, by doing what s good by being kinder, by listening by being loud and unapologetically loud by being bold by being open by being honest by being yourself by being vulnerable by being unfiltered by your truth by being authentic by speaking out loud and loud by letting people know that you can trust in your truth, and by being your truth and letting the truth be heard by your voice be heard in your words and your voice heard by the voice by your actions and actions by your words.
00:02:07.000How does it affect those of us that once were content to look at the world from an entirely material and rational perspective, to start to recognize that it seems that dark power is at work?
00:02:17.000If you've not watched Neil Oliver before, you might know him from GB News.
00:02:20.000You might know him as the Coast Guy on X.
00:02:22.000He is an excellent and brilliant commentator, beloved by many people in power in secret, and I would say one of the most significant broadcasters to emerge out of the pandemic period.
00:02:31.000For the first 15 minutes, we'll be on YouTube.
00:02:34.000After that, we'll be exclusively streaming on Rumble, where we can speak freely.
00:02:38.000If you want to speak as freely as I speak, you've got to be on Rumble.
00:02:40.000That's why you should consider getting Rumble Premium for a frictionless experience of Rumble.
00:02:46.000And if you're not on Awake and Wonder yet, become one now and see my conversation with Jack Posobiec, as well as a fantastic conversation coming up with Jonathan Peugeot, where we talk about Christianity from a variety of perspectives, but mostly how a resurgent Christianity will affect and impact politics, not the other way around. but mostly how a resurgent Christianity will affect and impact But without any further hullabaloo or senseless nonsense, let's welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand, Neil, I think my name is, Neil Oliver.
00:03:15.000I know that you're sort of in a state of bewilderment, I know that our country, the UK, seems sort of like chaotic and creepy and that there are sort of like high profile stories about the murder of children.
00:03:29.000Where there's the sense that not all is being revealed to the public.
00:03:33.000I also know that sort of the election of Trump is kind of one of the Clear positives is it demonstrates the power of independent media versus what you might call centralized, you know, legacy media.
00:03:46.000Whether you like Trump or don't like Trump, what is clear now is that the axis between state and media is no longer sufficiently powerful to control the outcome of elections.
00:04:00.000Something that we start to suspect, you know, may be with Napster.
00:04:04.000Then the Occupy movement, then the Arab Spring, then Brexit, then Trump 2016, and now Trump 2024. And whatever these powers are that seek to prevent these kind of popular online movements gaining traction, they must now be terrified that in the UK there could be...
00:04:21.000Popular, dissenting, disobedient uprisings that could get political traction.
00:04:26.000Across the world, everyone must be feeling that.
00:04:29.000How do you feel, in particular, Neil, that the election of Trump, and I know there are aspects of that that you'll have questions about, some of his appointments, for example, but how is that affecting directly the area in which much of your political expertise is spent?
00:04:54.000The form of words you used, I hadn't thought about, or it hadn't crystallised for me, that the election of Trump is a victory for, or a demonstration of the power of the alternative independent media.
00:05:11.000I think I knew that, but I hadn't actually the thought crystallised for me.
00:05:16.000But that in and of itself is a victory, because I'm sure the deep state or whatever wanted and intended the election to go in another direction.
00:05:30.000There's absolutely a rising awareness in the UK, a rising tide of discontent.
00:05:39.000It's being felt, manifest among more and more people.
00:05:44.000On the 19th of the month, just a day or two ago, there was the first of the big farmers' protests in London.
00:05:55.000Tens of thousands, let's say, of the disaffected, of those affected by the imposition of the inheritance tax on family farms and all of the rest of it gathered in London.
00:06:06.000People are definitely, you know, sounding off on social media.
00:06:11.000To the extent that the judiciary, which is in somebody's pocket or under somebody's influence, is sending to jail people who are posting unwanted opinions on social media, while space is made for those people in those prisons by the freeing early of Often violent criminals.
00:06:33.000There is without a doubt a tide rising, and I think it's unstoppable.
00:06:41.000We've seen the increased vote for so-called populist parties from east to west across Europe.
00:06:50.000And the increasingly futile, blatantly futile attempts by the incumbent legacy politicians to thwart the intentions of more and more of the people.
00:07:04.000There has been a change in the wind, and you can feel it.
00:07:13.000Just thinking then that you're a person like me that's gone from having a relatively comfortable role in the culture.
00:07:21.000Some people might not know that your early popularity was based on quite pastoral and folkish broadcasting around fascinatingly rendered stories about ghosts and the supernatural and British landmarks and British history.
00:07:40.000And that you are a patron of significant ecological organisations in your country, Scotland.
00:07:48.000And now, when I talk to you, like that brilliant clip in that Scottish comedy show demonstrated, we're like druid hysterics on the edge of the culture.
00:08:03.000Me, I was a sort of a harmless and hapless Hollywood hero for want of a better alliterative construction.
00:08:12.000And now, an attacked, maligned, outspoken, smeared and much disgust and in some course deeply loathed online pundit and whack job.
00:08:24.000Although I did see on the front of private eye, I'm being considered for Archbishop of Canterbury.
00:08:29.000So like, at least for one of the candidates, one of the candidates, Neil, so.
00:08:37.000At least you've accepted Christianity, which is something that the previous incumbent of the Post did not seem to have done.
00:08:48.000Yeah, I mean, I'm an upgrade in regard that I believe in Jesus Christ, which you would think would be the minimum requirement for the Archbishop of Canterbury.
00:09:00.000So, Neil, I wonder how you, like me, are coping as you, you know, while you're affiliated with and very successful on GB News, which is a sort of a growing online British media platform, How are you continuing to cope with this position?
00:09:20.000And now that we've touched on the subject of Christianity, how are you bringing together your previous experience, which was always excellent at bringing together mythical themes, historical themes, and contemporary meaning and challenges?
00:09:34.000How are you going to bring together, and how do you continue to bring together those kind of sometimes arcane, and I don't mean that pejoratively, ideas with the ongoing political discourse?
00:09:46.000Say, when it comes to something like farmers' protests and the power of agriculture, or why those movements are global.
00:09:56.000Well, the kind of television, documentary television, soft pastoral television that I was involved with for years, decades, I suppose if it had a unifying theme, there was something celebratory about it.
00:10:14.000You know, it was about encouraging people to pay attention to the landscape Pay attention to the depth of history and archaeology.
00:10:24.000There was always supposed to be a note of awe.
00:10:29.000Trying to inspire people to look again at landmarks and stories from history that they might have vaguely known, largely forgotten, but it's always timely to look again at some of those things.
00:10:42.000That was the idea that underpinned a lot of what I was trying to do.
00:10:48.000In unlikely, in this unlikely way, this unasked for way into the role of contrarian and, you know, as you say, you know, dismissed and ridiculed, you know, in the pages of national newspapers and my ethics questioned, my sanity questioned and all of the rest of it.
00:11:08.000In order to try and make sense of that, I continue to reflect on the past and on the landscape.
00:11:15.000We're just mentioning the farmers and farming.
00:11:18.000I come from an archaeological background academically.
00:11:23.000I've been telling stories for the longest time about the advent of farming in this part of the world.
00:11:30.000We've been farming this part of the world one way and another for several thousand years.
00:11:37.000And so many of the landmarks with which people are familiar in this part of the world, Stonehenge and Avebury, the Chamber Tombs, so much that people celebrate in the British landscape, were the work of farmers.
00:11:51.000And when I think about the fact now that farmers are being driven off the land, the resident government, the resident A quasi-communist regime is seeking to grab the land, drive the people off the land who've been there from a time beyond the reach of memory.
00:12:13.000It becomes so moving because it is of course of huge significance to the people there now, those people who expected in due course to hand on the farms and the traditions to their children and their children's children.
00:12:27.000It's intensely important and moving and But when you know that it comes on the tail end of thousands of years of occupation of the land by people who have used that landscape to feed the people, today's generations of farmers become part of something much grander, much bigger, much more deeply rooted.
00:12:51.000And the idea that here today, gone tomorrow, politicians would seek to uproot all of that, when all of the recent history of our species, certainly in the 20th century, has shown that any regime seeking to displace the farmers, to collectivise farming, to centralise the creation and distribution of food, is murderous.
00:13:13.000You've only got to look back at what Stalin did in Ukraine and in that part of Russia.
00:13:20.000You know, that led to the deaths of millions.
00:13:23.000And not by accident, but deliberately.
00:13:25.000It was a deliberate campaign to destroy the so-called kulaks, the slightly better off farming community there.
00:13:37.000Centralised and collectivised farming, leading to a mountain of corpses, and that Keir Starmer, leading a Labour Party, a so-called Labour Party in Britain, would seek to uproot all of that by this inheritance tax, which will inevitably drive people off of the land and, God knows, drive many of them to suicide and everything else.
00:13:56.000It takes on a depth of wickedness that, frankly, is hard to process.
00:14:03.000But that way that I feel about that comes from the fact that I did spend decades celebrating the landscape, not seeking to push people off of it.
00:14:13.000We can't do any more of this conversation on YouTube.
00:14:17.000Now, if you want to hear me and Neil talking about a variety of subjects that simply cannot be permitted on a platform like YouTube, where the Trusted News Initiative censor and control, where big state agencies are able to infiltrate, then you're going to have to click that link right now.
00:14:39.000Do you think that the reason there's farming protests all over the world is because there's some global concerted effort to gain control over the land?
00:14:48.000And how do we, like, reconcile, like, watching clips on the BBC of farm protests ripping up London, or stuff we've seen on French news are the same, or stuff in Sri Lanka or India, or, you know, just happening all over the world, with, like...
00:15:05.000What appears to be a global agenda, isn't this exactly the reason that, you know, like until God, the obvious changes that are taking place in media, independent media, and the obvious supremacy of the latter, aren't these the very kind of tropes, Neil, that get men like you and I labeled conspiracy theorists and worse?
00:15:26.000Like the idea that there's an attempt, that the inheritance tax, you know, if you see Victoria Derbyshire talking to Clarkson, what she's saying is the inheritance tax is to generate revenue so that people's GP appointments come round in a more timely fashion.
00:15:41.000By the way, she's saying that on a taxpayer-funded state-run media organisation, the BBC, is there's one little tax cut that could be made.
00:15:51.000I just wonder how you reconcile something as practical, bureaucratic, tedious, if punitive as the inheritance tax with what seems to be a broader global agenda.
00:16:05.000Well, it's facile by Derbyshire that you mentioned, the BBC journalist, but she's only repeating what Chancellor Rachel Reeves, whatever, has been given a bit of paper with a script on it to read out.
00:16:22.000But by 2030, the inheritance tax might have raised 500-odd million pounds.
00:16:29.000Which is enough to keep the NHS running for one day and two hours.
00:16:35.000You know, if you compare it, if you look at the costs of the NHS at the moment.
00:16:41.000So that basic financial justification for the inheritance tax is utterly, utterly meaningless.
00:16:48.000And so you can set that aside and then you have to ask yourself the question, then why else would you do it?
00:16:52.000Why else would you seek to undermine the farming community that has been on the land, managing and looking after the landscape and feeding the people generation after generation for thousands of years?
00:17:20.000That conclusion is becoming inescapable.
00:17:24.000The creation and the distribution of money was robbed from the people in America just over 100 years ago.
00:17:35.000In Britain, at the end of the 17th century, the same thing happened with the creation of the Bank of England.
00:17:41.000So that was the taking away from the people of the control of the creation of and the distribution of money.
00:17:47.000Energy is being centralised, energy supply, this ridiculous fantasy of renewable energy.
00:17:54.000That's just a way to profit from the creation of energy.
00:18:00.000And now, clearly, there's an attempt to centralise the...
00:18:05.000The growing of crops and the husbanding of flocks and herds, because to let the people be in control of that provides them with a level of independence from the state.
00:18:18.000It's becoming inescapable to draw the conclusion that the intention is to make the mass of the population dependent in every conceivable way upon the state.
00:18:32.000You will need to look to us for the education of your children.
00:18:35.000You will need to look to us for the stability of your communities.
00:18:39.000You'll need to look to us for energy, to us for food.
00:18:43.000Because it's coming from a mindset of a minority of, frankly, psychopathic, or at the very least sociopathic, individuals Who can't sleep at night for wanting to control not just what people do every moment of every day, but what people think and say.
00:19:01.000And that's manifesting itself in the censorship and the silencing of opinions that don't suit I mean, call me, I've been called a conspiracy theorist, I've been called a lot worse.
00:19:18.000One of the characters from Jumanji that's in a safari suit and that, that might get caught up in some sort of escapade with Kevin Hart and The Rock.
00:19:29.000We can't make this content without the participation of our partners.
00:19:34.000Hello, Christmas is almost here, and if you'd like to focus on what truly matters this season, then you should check out Hallow and their new Advent Pray 25 Challenge.
00:19:42.000I talk about Hallow all the time, don't I, and how much I love using the app.
00:19:45.000I do the rosary on there pretty frequently with Jonathan Rumi, Jesus is my body double.
00:19:49.000They're the number one prayer app in the world, and their Advent Prayer Challenge called For God So Loved the World will help you grow closer to God and make the lead up to Christmas really transformative.
00:20:02.000In the challenge, my friends Bear Grylls and Jonathan Rumi from The Chosen guide you through the book, A Severe Mercy, a remarkable story of a couple's encounter with God.
00:20:12.000You'll also hear from Hasta Francis Chan and my buddy, Hello, I'm Jeff Cavins, as they take you through Reflections on Scripture and Kevin James, the actor, will be part of the challenge to discuss the spiritual classic, Divine Intimacy.
00:20:27.000You'll even hear Advent music from award-winning artists like Gwen Stefani, Laura Daigle, Matt Martin, more.
00:20:33.000So, get three months free when you sign up at hallo.com forward slash brand.
00:20:37.000Don't lose sight of the real reason for the season.
00:21:28.000The requirement is always to create a crisis that legitimizes that flow.
00:21:33.000What seems interesting though, Neil, is concurrent with these sort of rapacious sets of control-oriented systems that Is the possibility for their opposite.
00:22:09.000We have no guiding ethos because we have, as a culture, abandoned God.
00:22:16.000And into that tumbling vortex and mad void has also fallen family, gender, sex, reason, right, wrong, history, all of it in a mad, chaotic, berserk havoc.
00:22:31.000And what's being plucked out of it is, here are your new rules.
00:22:35.000Now, one thing I was sort of struck by, and tell me if you agree with this, Is, like, Tucker Carlson reckoned that when Orwell was giving us a depiction that ultimately led to that famous image of the stamping boot on the face of humanity was a dystopia that grows not out of Soviet communism, which was already, you know, 20, 30 years into play at the time he wrote it, but that Orwell's fear was this would come out of social democracies.
00:23:04.000Now, even though Orwell was, I figure, an atheist, what seems...
00:23:09.000Pretty clear to me is that if you are going to prevent the state from laying claim to godly powers that it can only do once it's created a vortex into which all meaning is tumbling, a kind of chaos that gives you that Olympic opening ceremony, the kind of chaos that leads you to not know what a man is, a woman is, who can give birth, who can't give birth...
00:23:32.000A kind of chaos that undermines the very virtues that would afford any of us, certainly any follower of Jesus Christ, to love anyone that said, oh, I actually don't identify as a man, I identify as a woman.
00:23:45.000You're a brother and sister in Christ!
00:23:47.000Like, minor issues, not for the people going through them, I'm sure, but minor issues to socially and culturally deal with.
00:23:54.000As long as you have a God, as long as you understand God.
00:23:58.000And somehow we found ourselves in these maddening bureaucracies over here led by weird centrist materialists like Biden, Kamala, remember her?
00:24:09.000And over in our country, Keir Starmer.
00:24:13.000You know, like these odd bureaucrats that don't even have, you know, that don't have, and I think it's deliberate that they don't have, the intensity and charisma of your good old school Mussolini's, Stalin's and Hitler's, but instead these soma-schlacked bureaucratic figures that will Bore you into technological feudalism.
00:24:36.000That will bore you into funding another five or ten years of unwinnable Ukraine-Russia war.
00:24:42.000How is it that when Starma is confronted by someone saying, Lee, what are you going to say to the people about the idea that, you know, Russia might retaliate for these strikes that Biden just sanctioned inside Russian territory by attacking Russia?
00:25:47.000The adage about let sleeping dogs lie might be opposite because what has been done during the last four years, the extremism of the blatant attempt to take control of every aspect of people's lives has awoken.
00:26:06.000I mean, we talk all the time about awakening, but it inadvertently awoke sleeping dogs who were slumbering away peacefully.
00:26:17.000But now, because of this shameless, blatant, no-holds-barred attempt finally to seize every vestige of control, a whole unexpected layer stratum of the populations of the world have been roused from sleep and are annoyed, not least at having been woken up.
00:26:42.000You know, that English Arthurian legend of Arthur sleeping under a hill somewhere until his country needed him, at which point he would awaken and stand up.
00:26:54.000What this madness of the last few years has done is awaken millions of Arthurs who would have just continued to dream on Well, things changed.
00:27:08.000And there is no doubt that they have, amongst other things, awoken to the necessity of meaning in their lives.
00:27:18.000Many, many people have either awoken for the first time to the need for God or for some manifestation of spirituality, or they have been reminded that once upon a time they cared to think in that way and to understand the cosmos in that way, to know that there was some aspect of everything that was out of reach and ought to be out of reach.
00:27:44.000You know, that laws were not just something that we made for ourselves, but they were something inviolable from a transcendent realm that we had no power to alter, that we could only acknowledge and obey or ignore at the very most.
00:28:00.000All of that I think has been the unintended consequence of this final mad dash from the finishing line by people who want everything.
00:28:18.000It's thousands and thousands of them have written to me.
00:28:21.000Dozens of people sometimes in a single day stop me in the street to talk to me.
00:28:25.000The number of them that talk about faith, either discovered for the first time or faith that they've been reminded of.
00:28:32.000You know, they've gone back to something.
00:28:34.000And that will be the undoing of any centralising force, because people have been awakened to what it is to be human and alive.
00:28:47.000And part of being human and alive is knowing that there's more to life than just the acquisition of wealth, the upgrading of phones, the taking out of a lease of a second Range Rover or whatever.
00:29:03.000So many people have been awoken to the futility and the emptiness of that.
00:29:09.000And that consumerism, that kind of dependency, that kind of submission to and acceptance of nothing more than convenience, don't you worry a pretty little head about that, I'll do it for you, in return for your freedom, in return for your rights, has been exposed as empty, as a void.
00:29:32.000Those that are seeking to do the final damage have in the process woken too many people up.
00:29:39.000And the resultant change that will beat our betterment is inevitable.
00:29:45.000In order to make this show, we have to have the contributions of our sponsors and partners.
00:29:50.000Here's one carefully selected for you now.
00:29:52.000When it comes to nutrition, we want what's best for ourselves and our loved ones.
00:29:57.000But what about our little four-legged friends and their nutrition?
00:30:01.000Dog food, did you know this, is dead food.
00:30:03.000But Rough Greens brings their food back to life near miraculously with live vitamins, probiotics, enzymes, omega oils and antioxidants in their tasty formula that your dog will love.
00:30:15.000All the It's improving their digestion, their coat, their breath, energy, and more.
00:30:20.000Your dog can try it before you buy it.
00:30:22.000Simply go to roughgreens.com and use the promo code RUSSELL and get a free Jumpstart trial bag.
00:30:30.000Normally a Jumpstart trial bag is $20, but use my promo code and get the bag free.
00:31:22.000she's a person I reckon we'll be working with in the future, Neil.
00:31:26.000She's one of them people, a bit like Whitney Webb, who I know you've found yourself plastered on the front page of the Times for speaking with and colluding with.
00:32:06.000Now we've got this mad situation where Bobby Kennedy, who's like book on Anthony Fauci, when I read that, like, I don't know, 2020, 2021, I don't know, like, you know, sort of seems like a long time ago.
00:32:30.000It's like it's, you know, coming down the pipe at least in January.
00:32:33.000Now, what's interesting is that there's that kind of those matters of dominion, how sort of big pharma and their regulatory agencies in conjunction with government are able to enjoy malfeasance and certainly malpractice.
00:32:48.000But what Not so much Whitney Webb, although she gets dark when it comes to the sex trafficking, the islands, the paedophilia, all that stuff.
00:32:58.000Lara Logan went full deep on the connection to this stuff and the hundreds of thousands of children that go missing in America.
00:33:07.000And somehow, I don't know, even though I'm pretty deep into this sort of territory, which you might call independent peripheral media, we're out in our own wildernesses now, you and I, Neil, and seeing if this wilderness is going to formulate into something new, if there's going to be some coming kingdom, I still feel pretty scared when people start talking about satanic...
00:33:27.000I mean, of course, I suppose you would.
00:33:38.000No wonder, you know, David in particular is sort of in that state of perpetual fury when he sees stuff that he's been talking about for years and he's been derided for sort of edging curiously into the mainstream.
00:33:50.000And what it seems like we're attempting to manage is like these rather baroque and peculiar ideas migrating out of the mad spaces of the conspiracy theorists and into the mainstream.
00:34:03.000An obvious example being the one I gave a minute ago, Bobby Kennedy's writing about Anthony Fauci.
00:34:08.000That's now, you know, the roles have flipped.
00:34:10.000Now, Anthony Fauci's the outsider and Bobby Kennedy's in government.
00:34:15.000So, I wonder how you feel, like, when talking about them and their power and the error they made in awakening us by pushing it too far, about the idea, Neil, that this isn't just...
00:34:28.000A material proposition as much of the conspiracy theory stuff spoken about by your Lara Logans, your Whitney Webbs, and one of a number of online journalists and commentators of varying credibility, but even that credibility, who gets to say who's credible and who's not these days, appears to allude to the idea, as does the Bible, that the reason all this stuff's happening is not just because people are rubbing their hands together and trying to get hold of gold and power and resources, but because there is,
00:34:58.000as it says in Ephesians, dark power in high principalities. as it says in Ephesians, dark power in high principalities.
00:35:02.000As it says again and again in the Bible, this is Satan's realm.
00:35:06.000Satan is working on us through worldliness, through the flesh, and through the mind.
00:35:11.000So it doesn't become a matter of these guys slipped up.
00:35:14.000It becomes like they're agents of some dark, higher, demonic, even worse than demonic potentially, force.
00:35:23.000Because remember earlier, I talked about your own background with supernatural stuff.
00:35:27.000So now that is actually coming into these conversations about power.
00:35:32.000When I talked about them having, you know, their actions had unintended consequences, I don't for a moment subscribe any longer.
00:35:39.000And I did for a while, but I haven't for the longest time accepted the notion that it was mistakes made, that the whole people were only doing their best nonsense.
00:35:49.000I've consigned that absolutely to the dustbin.
00:35:57.000You know, human frailty and just, you know, misjudging situations.
00:36:01.000It was deliberate and choreographed and pre-planned and everything about, you know, malice aforethought and guilty mind and mens rea and all of the rest of it is all there in what was conjured into being and what was then applied.
00:36:15.000But what I think, what I've come to accept is that in the centuries in which we were invited to dismiss everything but science, To worship science.
00:36:28.000We were gulled into thinking that everyone, everyone had stopped believing in God.
00:36:38.000Apart from, you know, we were invited to look at other cultures and other people and frankly to consider them a little bit silly at best with all their various worshippings and all their various appeals to the transcendent.
00:36:51.000But we had grown up and we were now secular and we knew that there was nothing but that which we make for ourselves.
00:36:58.000But I think what I've come to realise is that the group that foist that Fallacy upon us continued absolutely to believe.
00:37:33.000It's there in black and white that, you know, there was the notion for the longest time that that which openeth the womb belongs to me.
00:37:43.000The firstborn, not just of the sheep and the cattle, but of the people themselves, that the firstborn, that which openeth the womb, belonged to God and was to be sacrificed there.
00:37:58.000And the idea, we invited ourselves to believe that the misuse, the sacrifice of children in that way was something that was in the distant past.
00:38:09.000I don't think it was ever in the distant past.
00:38:13.000That kind of behaviour has always been there.
00:38:17.000But for the couple of two, three hundred years of scientism and the worship of science and being persuaded that only science mattered and science was the explanation for everything, elsewhere other people with power and control on their minds continued to believe in dark things that they had always believed in and always will.
00:38:40.000Yeah, they offer us secularism, materialism, consumerism, and you contest that they themselves still continue to believe in dark forms of sacrifice to their Deuteronomic law, and it was indicated by what you would say.
00:38:59.000It appears to me that that is a recurrent scriptural theme.
00:39:04.000And obviously it plays out in the Old Testament in the Abraham and Isaac unenacted sacrificial moment that has its partner in the sacrifice of God's Son, our Lord and Saviour.
00:39:23.000So, and what I feel like the principle is, is the principle of sacrifice, and sacrifice is the highest principle, and the supernatural, the divine, the spiritual and the holy, being preeminent and preordinate, and at the apex of all our systems of meaning and our systems of governance.
00:39:43.000I wouldn't take that as advocacy for human sacrifice, because the theme of human sacrifice is explored, deplored, and denounced biblically pretty significantly.
00:39:55.000But there's no doubt that historically and totemically, that kind of sacrifice plays a significant role in our past.
00:40:05.000And like you, I agree that it's a moment ago on the clock that God bears upon God's face.
00:40:15.000What I feel, Neil, is that that might be part of the real battleground now in this warfare.
00:40:23.000And I'm even coming to look at subjects like abortion and control over life from a spiritual perspective and starting to see a new simplicity in scriptural edicts around such matters.
00:40:47.000And like when Mary Shelley and the Romantics start exploring, dabbling in God's domain and revivifying and carrying out resurrection, previously the purview of Christ, that was an early indicator of the monster that would be created and the monster that has now taken our culture in its grasps, I would say.
00:41:06.000So I know you've got a lot to say, so you crack on, mate.
00:41:10.000Well, I mean, yeah, Frankenstein or the new Prometheus, you know, amongst much else a warning about what happens to mortals when they assume the divine power to create life.
00:41:28.000You know, I've often thought about that.
00:41:32.000The youth of Mary Shelley, when she ever dreamt or in whatever way conceived of that idea, I find astonishing that she was able to come up with that idea at that point in her life.
00:41:52.000I do wonder, you mentioned abortion, and I know it's such a difficult topic for so many people, but I did wonder, I think a lot of us wondered why the Kamala Harris campaign It seemed to boil down almost to the necessity to have access to abortion.
00:42:17.000And so many people in the aftermath, so many women in the aftermath of the Trump win that Kamala Harris lost, their great cry of grief Was that either their 12 and 13-year-old daughters were going to be denied access to abortion rights,
00:42:39.000and others who don't even have children yet, the first thing they could think about was how sad they were that were they to have daughters in the future, that they would not be able to have abortions.
00:42:51.000That struck me as an extremely strange, first of all, primary policy by a would-be president of the United States of America.
00:43:00.000But the response, the response to that, the preoccupation with that, as though that was the be-all and end-all of existence, was having access to that procedure.
00:43:14.000I just find that there were so many other conversations to be had around fertility and around family and around reproduction that the great grief that was expressed always and only around the topic of abortion I found very difficult to process.
00:43:34.000And I think, not only that, and not just that, but it seemed to be emblematic or a manifestation of an emptiness, an emptiness in an entire way of thinking.
00:43:50.000You know, the whole point of being alive is life.
00:43:56.000The whole reason for being here is life.
00:44:03.000At the end of Ulysses, James Joyce, whatever you think about that work, what I would call a work of art, it ends with Molly Bloom embracing life.
00:44:25.000The whole point of being here is to choose life and to further life.
00:44:31.000People talk about a death cult, people talk about a preoccupation with death, but there's undoubtedly a movement towards an emptiness, a sterility, metaphorically and literally.
00:45:46.000It's the opportunity to hear a heartbeat.
00:45:49.000Or are you talking about something else?
00:45:52.000It probably is certainly comparable, but I think in this instance it might be a visual scan.
00:45:56.000And I was interested by my wife's reaction to it.
00:46:01.000But if you're having a conversation like this, like you're saying, why is it that that's so central?
00:46:06.000Now, from a material and rational perspective, you could argue that there are so few points of meaningful difference around When it comes to the claims that the Democrat Party are able to make on the ethical grounds that they once presumed to be their purview, all those people that are still Democratic voters, aren't they sort of saying, we're the party of like Martin Luther King and civil rights and fairness and justice and the stone wall and the movements that are about fairness and kindness, right?
00:46:34.000But now, even within that aspect of governance and government, because they are so sort of swamped, and I use the word deliberately, with the interests of the powerful, all they can really offer up are points of difference.
00:46:45.000So there's one sort of rational argument, but the super rational argument, which I don't believe to be beneath rationale, but potentially beyond it, is because in the same way that I know people that have moved against me believe themselves to be participating in something righteous is because in the same way that I know people that have Righteous and just...
00:47:04.000They don't know that what they're doing is operating in the services of a global entity that seeks to shut down any vocal opponent and any pawn, like a little pawn, I'm not claiming I'm a big deal, that gets in the way of that thing will just be annihilated and crushed by its behemoth poor.
00:47:25.000Maybe the reason the Democratic Party are so focused on that issue is because of what it actually on some level is.
00:48:22.000I'm going to bring those ones to the forefront when it comes to the Christianity of Russell Brand.
00:48:26.000But when chatting about scripture and why a particular political issue might have so much weight and freight and get given some airtime...
00:48:34.000If it doesn't, as you've just said, make rational sense, and I tried to offer you a rational argument, is it because of this points of difference thing?
00:48:41.000Maybe it's because something potent and occultist is aligned with that issue.
00:48:47.000Because where are the intersectional points between these occultist ideas that we're increasingly starting to think might be real on some level, and what we hear come out of their mouths and the way they legislate?
00:49:04.000I can't rule out and don't rule out the possibility that there is a deathly anti-human, anti-life motivation behind some of what's going on.
00:49:31.000That has been rising, but that is being confronted and being challenged, or at the very least people, as in a conversational it is, are asking questions about it.
00:49:44.000And again, I say it's provoked or it has inspired more and more people to think about what life is, which is surely an unintended consequence For any group that I would contend is anti-life, that wants fewer of us, that is in favour of infertility and sterility and babies not being born rather than being born.
00:50:12.000I try to be open-minded, but I find it harder and harder to swim away from the conclusion that there is something anti-life, something profoundly and deliberately consciously dark going on.
00:50:27.000But that it has made people step away from the superficial and the material and contemplate the eternal verities, I think is a positive and a good thing, even if it has been the unintended consequence of something dark.
00:50:45.000You know, I like to contemplate, I mean, you said at the beginning that I was, you know, I'd been all about history and the landscape and archaeology and, you know, I love contemplating and making space for how long our species has been literally looking upwards.
00:51:07.000You're looking into the sky in search of meaning.
00:51:12.000And trying to make sense of its place, of the place of the species in the bigger cosmology.
00:51:47.000People assumed that that brightest light in the sky and its repeating patterns was some kind of deity, was something deserving of worship.
00:51:58.000And there are fascinating esoteric traditions about Jesus Christ having come to my part of the world, to Ireland.
00:52:08.000In search of the wisdom of the people that we now describe as Druids, but that great reservoir of ancient wisdom that amongst his wanderings into Egypt, elsewhere, that he came here because it was well known at that time that there was great learning, a great depth of learning and a great depth of understanding.
00:52:29.000Curiouser and curiouser, some of what he then returned to the Holy Land To preach and to make part of his mission was actually the product of conversations that he had had with people here.
00:52:42.000The great depth of appreciation of something transcendent, of there being more to life And that people whose lives thousands of years ago were not just unimaginably different from ours, but in most senses, unimaginably harder, they still miraculously found time to notice the patterns of movements, recurring patterns, circles and cycles that were drawn in the sky.
00:53:07.000I think to myself, I would never have noticed any of that.
00:53:09.000If I had been born and lived and died on a desert island, the recurring patterns in the sky would never have come into my awareness and consciousness.
00:53:20.000And that somehow, at this point in the early decades of the 21st century, the campaign or the race for the position of the most powerful human being in an elected position on earth It came down to conversations so pessimistic and so dismissive of the value of life.
00:53:45.000It absolutely made me question, how on earth did we get to this point?
00:53:50.000After all of this time here, after all of the achievements, after all of the wisdom, how did the conversations around becoming the most powerful person on earth I love your perennial and somewhat Campbellian perspective,
00:54:22.000Neil, and it's something that I've had the good fortune to hear you unpack over a glass of wine.
00:54:28.000You, not me, and your brilliant sort of Jerusalem, shall we call it, related analytics, dialectic rather, I suppose, around the sort of potential that Jerusalem would be positioned elsewhere.
00:54:43.000And I love hearing all of that, and there are so many ways of telling the story, and I suppose that sort of moved me from the position, a comparable position, and I'm certainly not claiming it's a progression or that I'm in any way advancing you, and it's so evident in so many ways I'm...
00:55:01.000What happened is a kind of When you were describing the idea that, you know, had I lived in those days, I would have not observed cosmological meanderings and the constellations dancing in their rhythms across time.
00:55:19.000I feel like, well, in a sense, we can't even make that claim because we don't know, you and I, Neil, what it's like to live outside of the fugue of a continually polluting culture.
00:55:32.000Anchoring us in the material, forbidding us to venture forth beyond the terrestrial limitations of the archipelago of materialism and rationalism and into the vast oceans where Christ alone walks upon water.
00:55:49.000But somehow when I went beyond the kind of sort of rational construction of a pantheon of which Christ was but one part, And into, wait a minute, it's literally true, look at the book of Acts, everyone went all mad, like 50 days after he was killed and rose again, and the culture never recovered from it, civilization never recovered from it.
00:56:19.000Something can happen to me when I work on it like a mandala, although I know it's not through my work at all that I achieve understanding, but maybe I might achieve the peace beyond understanding, precisely because it's beyond the limitations of rationalism.
00:56:42.000And when God died as a man to achieve the atonement that's always been required, the first of the womb, God recognizing that God had to somehow honor that pact with us, his beloved.
00:56:55.000Something happens that goes like love beyond space and beyond time.
00:57:01.000And Molly Bloom's That the pinnacle is life becomes an acceptable yet somehow more potent synonym.
00:57:31.000And somehow when the metaphor and the history are able to sort of in the cross collapse, it does something to me that I didn't have happen before it.
00:57:45.000For all of my new age musings, for all of my psychedelic wanderings, something like, you know, I can't believe it.
00:57:59.000These are the conversations that I think we've drifted away from as a species in the West, and they're so enriching to have.
00:58:09.000Before, and even without the necessity, whether you subscribe or believe or submit or obey or whatever, it's still the context for an astonishingly wondrous conversation.
00:58:22.000You know, when you talk there about the incarnation, the coming into flesh of God, It's the basis for a really, really rich conversation, at the very least.
00:58:36.000You know, because obviously, as you know, embedded within it is the idea of kenosis, which is that before incarnating Jesus, the Word, the Logos, divested himself of all traces of divinity, became utterly and only a man, so that he could absolutely and only experience what it was to be human and alive.
00:58:58.000You know, that's powerful and profound all on its own.
00:59:01.000And you mentioned Abraham And you have wondered about that and listened to people talk about that.
00:59:09.000And is it God rehearsing through his creation what it would be like to lose a son?
00:59:16.000Watching the pain of a father right up until the moment when the son is about to die and pulling back at that point.
00:59:38.000You could say that that was what was going on there.
00:59:41.000And how inescapably fascinating it is that everything about Jesus Christ, what little we know about him, as we are told in the scripture, you know, his birthday on the 25th of December, which is the same as Mithras, that he was born to a carpenter and a virgin, which is the same as Krishna.
01:00:07.000That his birth, his coming, was foreshadowed by a star rising in the east, the same as Osiris.
01:00:16.000You know, that he would feed the multitude from a basket of bread and fish like Buddha and walk on water.
01:00:23.000You know, so that everything about what became manifest in Jesus Christ, for believers in Jesus Christ, was all foreshadowed.
01:00:34.000And then if you like and if you believe and if you want, it all comes together in that one personification.
01:00:41.000You know, so all of that is, you take on board some of that information and whether or not you're a believer, it's surely the basis for fascinating speculation and rumination.
01:00:56.000Orion, the constellation, which is the constellation in the sky that most resembles the shape of a man, At least it begins to look like what it's supposed to be, which is more than you can say for most of the named constellations.
01:01:12.000And he rises in the horizontal position, and then in the fullness of summer, he's in the upright position.
01:01:19.000And it's in the upright position that he dies.
01:01:22.000He dies and he sinks into the forever.
01:01:24.000He drops below the horizon in the upright position.
01:01:27.000And that tradition is there again in the legend of Cúchallán, the greatest of the Irish heroes.
01:01:34.000Who at the moment of his death, he knows it would be unbearable because he's a hero to be seen by his followers to fall.
01:01:41.000He ties himself to a stone so that he dies in the upright position.
01:01:45.000In the same as Hiram Abath, who is the architect of Solomon's temple, You know, when he is dispatched by the three ruffians, you know, he's dispatched by three wounds and he dies in the upright position.
01:01:58.000And you start piecing together all of these things from our shared appreciation of the cosmos across all of the faiths, across all of the great religions, and most importantly, across all of time.
01:02:11.000And you think, how have we ended up having the empty conversations that we're invited to have about bollocks, We could be having these conversations and speculating and wondering and drawing our own conclusions as living, breathing, sentient human beings.
01:02:33.000Don't think it's an accident, Neil, that we end up talking about bollocks when there are so many things we could be talking about.
01:02:41.000And the only counter that I would offer is that when we remain on the realm of speculation and rumination, the challenge that we are left with is we have not departed from the framing afforded by literal rationalism.
01:02:56.000Neil, I've got to go because I've got to go to do some other stuff.
01:03:03.000I know, but it's really good, isn't it?
01:03:04.000It's really good whenever we have conversations, because what I felt like is, I'm speaking to Neil Oliver, we'll have a sort of an idea that there are things happening politically and materially in the world, but what I hope is we'll fling ourselves into the abyss as two brothers fleeing Gog Magog, looking for new territories, looking for new realms of awe to together explore before finding where the horizontal and the vertical inevitably mesh.
01:03:34.000It's always a glory and a joy to speak with you, Neil, and I just hope that we get further opportunity to do this more thoroughly and at greater length.
01:03:44.000Can you please ensure that you keep talked up on your vitamin D, your vitamin K and your vitamin C because I can see that you're suffering somewhat from some other allergy.
01:04:22.000Thank you so much, Neil, for a magnificent conversation.
01:04:25.000And more than that, thank you for joining us for this brilliant episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand.
01:04:29.000If you want to join me for a live stream where I talk about deep ideas like these nourishing ideas that will awaken you and enrich you, become an awakened wonder, there's a link in the chat right now telling you how to do that.
01:04:41.000On the screen, there's the information telling you how you can become an awakened wonder and join us for a live stream every single week that will change you, inform you and nourish you in exactly the way you need to be nourished and formed and changed because you can't change yourself.
01:04:54.000You have to be changed by a great and higher power.
01:04:56.000That's surely one of the things you must at least be pondering as a result of that conversation between me and Neil Oliver.
01:05:01.000Thank you very much for joining me today.
01:05:02.000Tomorrow I'll be back with a conversation with Lara Logan that is going to knock your knickers off if you'll forgive the expression.
01:05:08.000We move around in some extraordinary territory and you will love it.