It's Guy Fawkes Night, and we're celebrating it with a special episode of Stay Free AF, hosted by Russell Brand. This week, Brad Evans, philosopher, poet, snazzy dresser, raconteur and writer joins us to talk about surveillance, the book 1984 and The Year by everyone else. Plus, here's the latest news about Rishi Sunak, W.E.F. Stooge, Richard Van The King, and Rishi's relationship with Infosys. And, of course, there's an item about Madonna's new album, Desperately Seeking Susan. Stay Free! is a podcast by hosted by . and produced and produced by , and . Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Build Buildings Records, and our ad music video is by Blonde on Fire. We'd like to learn a little more about you, the listeners. Please take a few minutes to fill out this brief survey. We'll see if we can figure out how much you know about you in the comments section below. Send us your thoughts and suggestions on what you'd like us to be included in the next episode! Stay Free and we'll get back to you in next week's mailbag! Thank you! Stay free! - stay free! xx - Russell Brand Timestamps: 0:00: 00:00 - What's your favourite thing you've been watching on the internet? 1:30 - What do you think of it? 2:40 - The Year? 3:15 - What are you looking for? 4:00 5: Is it a good book? 6:00 | The Year | 1984? 7:10 - What would you like to hear from me? 8:35 - What is your favourite book club member? 9:20 - What kind of book club club? 11:00, what do you want me to be? 12:30 | What's a good one? 13:30 15:00 + 7: Is there a book you're looking at? 16:00 / 16: What s your favourite type of meal? 17:00 // 17:30 +16:00 & 17:10 18:40 +17:40 19:30 & 18:20
00:04:01.000And I remember one time, me and another, it was Jonathan Ross, a British TV talk show host, one time we did something a bit silly really, we made a mistake, and I was burned as an effigy!
00:04:16.000To their credit, they do a bloody good effigy.
00:04:19.000Thankfully it wasn't voodoo, otherwise I wouldn't be here right now to tell you that we're looking at V for Vendetta as a kind of thematic device to study, are we already in the dystopia?
00:04:31.000That they rendered in that movie, and do we need the kind of global uprising that was put forward in Alan Moore's graphic novel as the only solution to centralised corruption?
00:04:43.000And while we're on the subject, Brad will be with us.
00:04:46.000Brad Evans, philosopher, poet, snazzy dresser, raconteur, will be joining us to talk about 1984.
00:04:53.000So if you want to talk about surveillance, if you want to talk about... The book.
00:05:56.000Well yeah, instead of looking up what Madonna was doing in Desperately Seeking Susan, in an attempt to derail me and Brad's excellent item and brilliant book club that you can be a member of if you're in Stay Free AF.
00:06:08.000For example, other things that come if you're a member of Stay Free AF, that's our locals platform.
00:06:12.000I stream there live all the time, don't I Subi?
00:06:15.000I just pop up on there, just in the middle of nowhere.
00:06:17.000Just like, I could be doing BJJ, that's a type of cuddling and fighting.
00:06:21.000Or I could be like, well... Eating lunch.
00:06:40.000It's a disgusting concept, and let me tell you, the dish weren't that different from the concept.
00:06:45.000If you're a member of Safer AF, right, you can watch our Jordan Peterson chat right now.
00:06:50.000It was a fantastic conversation and I think the kind of conversation we're gonna have to have if we don't want the culture war to divide people so that we can never unify and focus our attention on centralised power like These bloody WEF stooges that keep turning up, running countries, lovely hair, give them their credit.
00:07:12.000When he cut his hair, that's what nearly ruined it.
00:07:15.000But what we need is genuine democracy, real empowerment, which I think will occur through decentralisation, by allowing people to run their own community schools and hospitals, even though Gareth, a communist, He doesn't think it will work properly because he loves Jeremy Corbyn so much.
00:07:31.000Jeremy Corbyn was a leader of the British Labour Party.
00:07:34.000That's not the equivalent of your Democrat Party, because you wouldn't let Bernie Sanders have a fair crack at the whip.
00:07:40.000But we let our one have a go, and it didn't go well because there was all sorts of intervention, propaganda, meddling from the secret services, some alleged.
00:07:55.000First of all, we're looking at the midterms in your country, America, there, and how the polarising rhetoric ultimately distracts us from our true cause, uniting against centralised power.
00:08:07.000We're going to be having a look at Trump's speech.
00:08:10.000In fact, I'd love to have a look at Trump's speech already.
00:08:12.000Say what you like about Donald Trump and say it in the comments and chat now.
00:08:28.000Because there's a phrase he uses somewhere in like, very likely, very likely.
00:08:32.000I don't think anyone else could make very likely, which as an idiom is just a sort of pretty anodyne, sound so potentially incendiary and exciting as Donald Trump does here.
00:09:32.000How it felt on the day that she was born, where I felt the presence of God in a real and vivid, not remotely metaphysical way, when I saw things that blew my mind, literal childbirth, obviously, and felt things that changed my neurology forever, and now by the time she's six, it's just like, you know... Pokemon.
00:09:49.000There's two, yeah, Pokemon, like, she likes Pikachu quite a lot, and then just, like, dealing with a quarrel between, you know, like, because the other one, like, you know, probably should learn her name, that'll help them to feel...
00:10:00.000That'll probably help them to feel like there's a bit more of a level playing field.
00:10:02.000Now, Peggy, my two kids, like, when it's one's birthday, the other one's, like, you've got two kids, haven't you, Sue?
00:10:38.000That'll downplay the tension, I imagine.
00:10:42.000It's like, when I looked at it, it's got an infrared sight on it, it's actually probably not so... You know they'll use that against you, don't you?
00:10:51.000I've made mistakes like this in the past, when I once had a girlfriend who had teenage sons, and in order to curry favour with them, I'm afraid I did arm them.
00:10:59.000and uh like that's what kids teenage boys they only want weapons that's all they want luckily i'm in the uk so it wasn't like you know that you know it's like pretty pretty relatively safe kind of you know air rifles couple of hunting knives and stuff but when i saw them with the weapons i thought of the relationship i had with their mother i thought i was possibly creating a Potential problem for down the line.
00:11:22.000Unfortunately, the relationship didn't last long enough for that to blossom.
00:12:34.000He's riding the applause with very probably as well.
00:12:36.000That's one of the things that Trump's detractors refuse to acknowledge is his rhetorical skill and his power of persuasion.
00:12:46.000And nothing really seems out of place when he says it.
00:12:48.000You know, even the use of the word glory, that's not a...
00:12:52.000Common word, I think, to have used in the context of, like, political language.
00:12:57.000You know, it's, uh, he's thrown something in there that sometimes I think he knows exactly what he's doing and sometimes I think he's just operating on a different... he doesn't know at all what he's doing.
00:13:06.000Is he an intuitive populist genius or is this sort of carefully staged?
00:13:13.000I know that a lot of you really dislike Donald J. Trump and, like, as you know, I believe That we have to look for political solutions that transcend both the left and right and that true populism will always lead to the empowerment of ordinary people.
00:13:27.000The ability for us to run our own lives free from corporate intervention and even free from purely mechanistic and materialistic ideals that our life should mean more.
00:13:38.000...than what you earn and what you do.
00:13:40.000These sort of modalities, I think, are at least a century old, and we have to look beyond free market capitalism, state communism.
00:13:47.000We have to start looking at some new ideas.
00:13:49.000But that's not as catchy as... Very probably.
00:17:48.000Except I'm much more about decentralisation, loving, absolute acceptance of people for who they truly are, and absolute love, and maybe you believe Trump is for that.
00:17:57.000You tell me what you believe, because I don't mind, because I love you anyway.
00:18:00.000Let's have a look at what, what's he called again?
00:18:41.000And also, like, the thing is with wokeness and the Soviet Union is... Do you know the other thing that's blowing my mind about this?
00:18:50.000It's like the sort of like... Because I like... By the way, you know, I'm not... If you like republicanism or Trump or whatever, this is my belief.
00:19:32.000I don't know that they're that pro a lot of the central woke issues in Russia.
00:19:37.000No, and I really like the way that he like threw in fiscal irresponsibility, like that was part of a rant.
00:19:43.000I can't think of a rant that would involve fiscally irresponsible.
00:19:47.000Because if you were having an argument with your life partner, and you're like, listen, I don't like how you talk to me, I'm sick of you, I think you're a bad influence on the kid.
00:20:51.000There's a few things I wanted to mention before we get into sort of polemicism around the midterms and how the Democrats are spending a bunch of money to get people to focus on sort of hot-button topics like pro-choice, pro-life.
00:21:05.000The Republicans are spending a bunch of dark money in particular, is it?
00:21:08.000I think dark money's in both parties now.
00:22:39.000I'm just in an argument, I can't really remember why now, just keep spending money.
00:22:43.000And when it gets to the point, we've made content about this before, that the Democrats are funding MAGA candidates in primaries in order to bend the perception of the Republican Party as a whole, so that when Joe Biden says, this is a unique time, this is a vote to save democracy itself, Oh man.
00:23:04.000Yeah, and Hillary Clinton likens Trump supporters to Nazis.
00:23:18.000helpful, they wouldn't do it. They're deliberately creating divisiveness because the simple truth
00:23:22.000is a significant number of people don't vote, the people that do vote are interested in
00:23:26.000these kind of tribalised issues and more broadly, this is something I'm guessing, I sort of
00:23:32.000became aware that Brad Evans was listening, right, and I thought oh no, Brad Evans knows
00:23:35.000so much more about it. Don't you ever find yourself, like Brad Evans is our guest, he's
00:23:38.000doing our book club later, we're talking about 1984, if you want to join us on Stay Free
00:23:41.000AF you'll get a sort of more in-depth version of that but it's on the show a little bit
00:23:46.000But I often, because I'm a passionate orator, I often find myself telling people about stuff they know more about than I do.
00:23:54.000Like, you know, like it's happened to me my whole, like not my whole life, but for a lot of my life, I find myself sort of sitting next to or in front of like a world-class musician or whatever.
00:24:02.000No, but the thing is, what you do, see that, mate?
00:24:06.000I mansplain, or musician-splain, or philosopher-splain to them.
00:24:10.000Anyway, my point is, is that what's happening is that we're in such a sort of a frenzied and over-emotional state around the polemicism that we've forgotten, actually, what our fundamental reality is about.
00:24:24.000That we're not talking about Massive corruption like the stories I'd like to draw your attention to is like the FBI provided support to Ottawa police During the convoy protest that's mental.
00:24:35.000Yeah, and I would have thought Illegal, so during those trucker protesters the FBI provided support to the Ottawa police sources.
00:24:42.000Yeah Well that includes like financial support as well, so I think what that shows what that shows is that the FBI I like American You know, federal institutions were almost as worried about what was going on in Canada as anyone else.
00:24:59.000Because what was happening was, this was starting to spread.
00:25:12.000Plus there's the Sri Lanka farm protest, the ones in the Netherlands, and like, that's why I love Vandana Shiva, because she'll tell you these things are all, it's all the same issue.
00:25:19.000That centralised edicts coming down from unelected global bodies, WEF, WHO, IMF, World Bank, are affecting National democracies and ordinary people.
00:25:31.000You can't do anything through political process, so you have to protest, but the right to protest is being impeded.
00:25:37.000They can freeze your bank accounts and all that stuff.
00:25:38.000Now we know that the FBI are lending financial support to the Ottawa.
00:25:45.000It's a weird word to say in my accent.
00:25:46.000Oh yeah, because you don't pronounce the T's.
00:26:31.000And when we had Jeffrey Sachs on here, and it was brilliant, and you can watch that interview right now.
00:26:35.000Not right now, though, because I need you here with me.
00:26:36.000One of the things that I really liked was the way that he explained, even around just one issue, the Ukraine-Russia war.
00:26:44.000How it didn't begin when we are told it began.
00:26:48.000He says, look, look, this happened in 2009, this happened in 2014, this is well documented, and when you see Jeffrey Sachs, he's so adorable, another great academic, and he does that face.
00:27:44.000This is just an underwritten academic fact.
00:27:46.000I'm not going to put this on for a while because actually I'm quite pleased with how my hair's looking.
00:27:49.000Now on the subject of globalist agendas, let's see a little, let's look a little more deeply into the relationships that Rishi Sunak, current British Prime Minister, how long has it been?
00:28:34.000I mean, do you get on with your... Yeah, Bernard, me and BG, professional golfer, you should see us on the 19th hole, which is what we golfers call the bar after.
00:29:31.000Klaus, mate, I've been... Why do you make these videos where you reductively condemn us some sort of conspiratorial mouthpiece for all of your various interests?
00:29:42.000Before you say anything else, swallow that spit in your mouth because a lot of it's ended up in my eyelashes and I don't like feeling my eyelashes weighed down by other people's spit on Christmas Day.
00:29:53.000Not on Christmas day in the morn, and we'd have to have it at his house, wouldn't we?
00:31:51.000Let's see if they're globalist or not.
00:31:55.000Another story, of course, about globalism and about another WEF stooge, trainee, acolyte, crony, making it through the ranks, all the way from being a billionaire to being a political puppet of powerful forces.
00:32:12.000Let me know on the chat whether you think Rishi Sunak, Justin Trudeau, Macron, all these WEF boy band leaders are put in the interests of their nation first and the
00:32:22.000inhabitants of their nation, or their strong ties to globalist bodies that are unelected.
00:32:28.000In the case of Rishi Sunak, there's some astonishing information that I'm just longing to tell you.
00:32:33.000Rishi Sunak has family ties to a technology partner of the World Economic Forum.
00:32:39.000So, this is not conspiracy theory, this is conspiracy fact.
00:32:42.000You might say, oh the WAF, really it's just, you know, they're just put on these conferences.
00:32:47.000Well look at who attends those conferences, look at the goals and the agenda of the institutions and groups that attend that conference, and look at what's happening in the world.
00:32:54.000See if you see a corollary that has advocated for a Chinese Communist Party style economy complete with trackable digital identities and currency.
00:33:02.000So already, he has literal ties to a technology company that advocates for something that I imagine most of us would be resistant to, regardless of what we claim our political persuasion is.
00:33:14.000You might be on the left, you might be on the right, you might be pro-Brexit, pro-Trump, you might be anti-Brexit, anti-Trump.
00:33:19.000Do you want social credit scoring up the wazoo so that your every transaction, your medical decisions, and indeed your currency, we made a video about that recently, have a look at that one, All become increasingly centralised.
00:33:32.000Surely you can see that's the way it's going.
00:33:34.000Surely you can see the way that new protest laws are being ushered in in our country, the UK.
00:33:39.000The way that the trucker protests were shut down.
00:33:41.000The way that they were smeared, slurred, had bank accounts frozen.
00:33:44.000That centralisation and control being exerted through the state somehow, because it's compassionate and anti-Nazi, appears to be the way things are going.
00:33:53.000Well, what does this Prime Minister mean?
00:33:58.000The father of Sunak's wife, Akshata Murthy, is the founder of Infosys, an Indian information technology company that provides services to a host of Fortune 500 companies and banks.
00:34:09.000Infosys is listed as an official partner of the World Economic Forum, the WEF, which has been accused of seeking to develop the technological infrastructure to implement a global social credit score system.
00:34:21.000Now, I don't even think that they think they're evil.
00:34:26.000I think that it's a form of new technocracy that will find itself ultimately expressed in the form of technological dictatorship, where the data does the thinking for you.
00:34:36.000Sorry, we cannot permit you to travel.
00:34:38.000Oh, it seems you're responsible for wrong-think.
00:34:40.000I'm afraid that you will not be permitted to travel.
00:34:43.000Infosys president Mohit Joshi has penned articles for the site in favour of digital banking, which provides the technological framework for the social credit score system the WEF has come under scrutiny for attempting to effectuate across the world.
00:34:57.000There's a deliberate definitive tie between Rishi Sunak and the WEF in the form of Infosys owned by his wife's father.
00:35:06.000That's before we get to Rishi Sunak's financial life and financial history.
00:35:10.000Experts say Sunak has not been transparent with his finances and that his hedge fund background raises questions about his commitment to fighting tax avoidance.
00:35:18.000Again, these are ordinary, normal practices in the world of finance.
00:35:24.000It's certainly not anything that is criminal.
00:35:26.000We're just talking particularly about a man who is now charged with the social responsibility of running a country and doing what's best for a country, the vast majority of whom are not multimillionaires or billionaires or investors,
00:35:39.000what does his background, his class, and his affiliation with certain organizations tell you?
00:35:46.000Sitting on a combined wealth of £730 million, Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murthy
00:35:53.000have a fortune which is around twice the estimated wealth of King Charles III.
00:35:57.000That's the person who's in charge with helping the poor people of this country.
00:36:02.000Oh, also, he's heavily tied to the WEF.
00:36:04.000So, to paraphrase Butch and Sundance, if the fool don't kill ya, the drowning will.
00:36:09.000The Chancellor's extensive property portfolio is just one source of his wealth.
00:36:13.000After studying at Oxford University, Sunak went on to work for US investment bank Goldman Sachs for four years.
00:36:18.000He left to pursue a business degree at Stanford University in California, where he said influential figures in the multi-billion US tech industry left a mark on him.
00:36:35.000Because if there were true forms of democracy, where you could run your own community, schools, hospital, where there were voted for assemblies, where people democratically discussed what to do with community budgets independently, where laws were formed locally, Acted upon communally and consensually, it wouldn't be possible for Oxford and Stanford graduates, former employees of Goldman Sachs, affiliates of the WEF by design and by interest and by shared agenda, to rise continually to power all over the world.
00:37:05.000Nothing good can come out of these systems now.
00:37:07.000It doesn't matter if the people in charge change their tie colour or even the colour of their skin or their sex.
00:37:15.000If you listen to Jeffrey Sachs in our brilliant interview talking about the military-industrial complex, what he calls the war machine's agenda, being pursued for the last 30 years, it's clear that it transcends party politics.
00:37:26.000You can watch it for yourself, you can listen to it for yourself.
00:37:29.000What you can see From there, Sunak had a stint working at a hedge fund back in London.
00:37:32.000He was a partner at the Children's Investment Fund.
00:37:34.000address and change the institutions themselves if we're to interrupt this process.
00:37:38.000That's just what I think, let me know what you think in the chat.
00:37:40.000From there, Sunak had a stint working at a hedge fund back in London.
00:37:44.000He was a partner at the Children's Investment Fund.
00:37:46.000Which sounds like a good thing, doesn't it?
00:37:49.000But I hear, Children's Investment Fund, well, you're investing in children, you're helping children, it's not to, like, somehow mess with children, right?
00:38:13.000It was one of the best times of my life!
00:38:16.000Soaring gas prices, falling home prices and rising unemployment.
00:38:21.000Sunak then left to co-found his own firm, Thaleem, which had an initial fund of £536 million and is also registered in the Cayman Islands.
00:38:56.000Keep saying it to yourself till you have it for the operations of these powerful forces.
00:39:00.000Blind trust that the WEF, this big tech company, hedge funds, Goldman Sachs, political power, Oxford University, all these institutions of power, these same words that you hear again and again and again all over the world, don't have any connection to your life and your poverty.
00:39:15.000If you wanted to define the WEF in the least conspiratorial terms, You could call it a smokescreen that helps billionaires present themselves as philanthropists with funds that are one day going to help people when in fact their money is held in blind trusts and offshore tax accounts while they talk about how we have to change and treat people fairly and respect individuality which by the way I totally believe that we should mean while they keep all their money in blind trusts and Cayman Islands
00:40:17.000Legal ways of not playing by the rules.
00:40:21.000Sunak has refused to disclose whether he will profit from a surge in the share price of the COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer Moderna, one of the biggest investments held by the hedge fund he co-founded before entering Parliament.
00:40:34.000I suppose he's refused to disclose because the information's so good, So good, the information about what went on with that Covid vaccine, that if we knew, it would just blow our minds.
00:40:45.000During the pandemic, billionaires such as Enon Narayana Murthy, which is his father-in-law, of course, saw their wealth increase.
00:40:52.000Murthy's fortune was up 35% to 2.3 billion in 2021, while inequality between the richest and the poorest grew.
00:40:58.000Don't worry though, because we can all come together to protest legally.
00:41:02.000Britain, like the United States, has a long history of civil rights and opposing power.
00:41:07.000And luckily, in a democracy, you can always be sure that you'll be able to oppose power freely.
00:41:12.000Same way they got their Cayman Islands funds and their blind trust, we'll always have the right to take to the streets and make our voices heard.
00:41:18.000As PM Sunak reappointed Sweller Braverman as Home Secretary, Braverman, before resigning for a breach of ministerial rules, pushed through a last-minute amendment to a widely criticised anti-protest bill that would allow her to apply for injunctions against anyone she deemed likely to carry out protests that could cause a serious disruption to key national infrastructure, prevent access to essential goods or services, or have a serious adverse effect on public safety.
00:41:43.000The proposal would also give police the power to arrest anyone they suspect of breaching such an injunction.
00:41:48.000Which is a law so vague they could include anything.
00:41:55.000Also, a protest is meant to be disruptive.
00:41:57.000It's good if it doesn't annoy the very people that it's trying to get onside, I would contest, but it has to be a disruption, otherwise it's not a protest.
00:42:05.000Essentially, what they're saying is, shut up!
00:42:07.000According to Liberty, the amendment will effectively give the Home Secretary the power to clamp down on protests as and when the government chooses.
00:42:13.000Well, I'm sure they wouldn't misuse that power.
00:42:15.000Just look at Canada, where they didn't misuse that power.
00:42:18.000National emergency now to end the trucker protests.
00:42:21.000This will have devastating consequences for dissent.
00:42:24.000The only option we have now is dissent outside of ordinary political spheres.
00:42:29.000Within political spheres, power has been co-opted and captured.
00:42:33.000Within media, power has been co-opted and captured.
00:42:35.000Our only chance is to organize together to look beyond cultural differences and unite against centralized power and demand real democracy.
00:42:43.000Other measures proposed in the bill include giving courts the power to issue serious disruption prevention orders which can ban individuals from attending protests.
00:42:51.000Amnesty International said the proposed law would go further than similar legislation in Russia by giving courts the power to issue them without a conviction.
00:43:00.000Bypassing judicial process, bypassing jury, magistrates, any ability to form a conversation beyond even what, wait for it, Russia, led by that Maniac, that cancerous, cadaverous, insane imperialist Putin himself.
00:43:16.000And I'm not saying he's not any of those things.
00:43:19.000But also, this is worse than what they do in Russia.
00:43:22.000The range of conditions that can be imposed on individuals under the orders include 24-7 GPS monitoring and restricted internet usage.
00:43:29.000Control, power, the ability to regulate with a stranglehold, the actions of a vast population in order that you can pursue your globalist agenda more freely.
00:43:40.000Police would be given powers to stop and search people or vehicles even if they have no reasonable grounds to do so, even if a senior officer believes protests, offences are likely to take place in an area.
00:43:50.000I believe a protest could take place in this area.
00:43:58.000So what we observed in Canada and were disgusted by, legitimate trucker protest, which is now admitted were not violent and never supposed to be violent, were just used to bring about the possibility to introduce emergency laws, although that was blessedly blocked, is not just Isolated to that region anymore.
00:44:15.000It's truly becoming a globalist agenda.
00:44:21.000Are they doing the same thing all over the world?
00:44:24.000So, shutting down protests, WEF style leaders, financial tyranny, social credit scoring, a global agenda.
00:44:33.000Oh my god, all those people that we thought were conspiracy theorists and whack jobs, and hey, so maybe some of them were, a little while ago, said a lot of things that are starting to become just things that should be in the news, because they're actually happening.
00:44:47.000Why do you think they're not in the news?
00:44:49.000Let me know in the chat, let me know in the comments, let me know what you think we should do about it.
00:47:11.000So, um, Gareth, I mean, you've got some stuff about these WAF-style connections, or have you got stuff on these protest laws that seem all well-in, which is why I was shouting to Brad during that.
00:47:22.000I give him an approving nod, so I'm really getting it.
00:47:25.000Well, yeah, we'll save the protest laws for Brad, then.
00:47:27.000I thought I'd look a bit, because we were talking about you going around Klaus's for Christmas, I thought I'd look into how much that might, it might cost you.
00:49:52.000Well, yeah, I think the last time we covered the idea of, you know, the dystopian present in which we live, surveillance, the increasing power of big tech and the way that influences our lives, some of the aspects in which Orwell got it wrong.
00:50:06.000I think that's, you know, worth kind of considering.
00:50:08.000And how we're kind of living in a moment where I guess, you know, this channel is a good example of this, where we think the fundamental freedoms we took for granted are now becoming true.
00:50:18.000And as you say, what we used to consider as conspiracy theorists actually looks like evidential fact.
00:50:24.000And I think that's what we kind of discussed in the last period.
00:50:27.000So it's interesting to see how this conversation carries on in terms of, you know, particularly with the light of the things you've been talking about recently.
00:50:34.000Even in today's show we're talking a lot about sort of centralized power that is able to circumvent what we would have regarded as democratic process.
00:50:44.000We're talking about the influence of lobbying money.
00:50:47.000Even in our item there, Here's the News, we talked about the protest laws that were snuck in During the time of fluctuation in British politics just a couple of weeks ago.
00:51:03.000It's almost like you can track the emergent symptoms that lead to the full-blown disease of dystopia.
00:51:09.000Yeah, well, I think we live in an age of dystopian realism.
00:51:12.000And I think this is the thing which Orwell was really trying to push about, you know, is what does it mean when dystopia becomes the lived condition?
00:51:21.000And this idea of, you know, thinking through these kind of catastrophic moments in which we live in, where in which governments can basically take hold of a catastrophe and do what they want in terms of government policy.
00:51:32.000And I think the trucker example is a good example of that in response to the pandemic.
00:51:36.000It was revealed that those truckers were entirely peaceful during that time, and that there was an internal memo within the Canadian government that suggested that even as they were applying for emergency powers, they knew that the protests were largely non-violent.
00:52:31.000So, what I thought was really interesting when we were talking about the protest and also we're talking about 1984...
00:52:38.000Is this element to the anti-protest bill that would allow Sweller Braverman, who's the Home Secretary, to apply for injunctions against anyone she deems likely to carry out protests?
00:52:50.000So we're not even basing protest laws anymore on whether people do or do commit protests.
00:52:57.000It's now whether you are likely to commit them.
00:52:59.000So we're moving to a new phase of essentially kind of anticipating people's behaviors and ascribing our own ideas as to what those behaviors would be.
00:53:08.000Well Orwell talks about this in terms of thought crime, right?
00:53:10.000And thought crime in itself is, you know, crime in anticipation of a potentiality.
00:53:15.000And the thing about a potentiality is you can never disprove it.
00:53:42.000If I always had those powers to arrest people for likely crimes, this guy, I'd arrest him right now.
00:53:47.000Because you never know when he's going to come up and say 1984, Tiswas was the most watched TV show, or JR, or the whole of America was concerned about Bobby Ewing or something in Dallas.
00:53:58.000You could say something like that at any moment, couldn't you?
00:54:04.000Since about that time, war had been literally continuous.
00:54:07.000Though, strictly speaking, it had not always been the same war.
00:54:10.000For several months during his childhood, there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly.
00:54:18.000But to trace out the history of the whole period to say who was fighting whom at any given moment would have been utterly impossible since no written record no spoken word ever mentioned any other ailment apart from the existing one oh my god that's already happening
00:54:35.000Few street crime is such an amazing like turn of phrase and don't you feel that with the pandemic and the sort of ephemera around it whether it's regulatory or medical is already being sort of posited as the sort of the yesterday news and now we're We're invited to focus our attention on this current conflict which, when we spoke to Jeffrey Sachs on this show, has dubious origins.
00:55:00.000It's somewhat understood that NATO infringement on the Ukraine and Georgia was a sort of a factor in Putin's eventual aggression, but he talked too about dabbling in elections, the complexity of members of the Ukrainian fighting forces being explicitly Nazis.
00:55:17.000Do you feel that that has a sort of a Well, what is the conflict?
00:55:23.000And I think the lesson from Orwell is that the conflict doesn't matter.
00:55:32.000So the nature of the conflict itself is irrelevant as long as there is conflict.
00:55:37.000And I think that's the key lesson from there and something which we see again in terms of you know with the pandemic there's a war against the virus and it doesn't matter what the war is as long as we can structure society in that way and I think that's one of the key lessons.
00:55:50.000You think that the objective is to induce these hierarchies and systems of power rather than to address the apparent object?
00:56:01.000And it's about creating the very conditions through which governments can create states of emergency.
00:56:06.000And if you're in a state of emergency, you can bypass any normal laws, any normal systems of governance, because you're in this emergency condition.
00:56:15.000But we're in an age today of unending emergency.
00:58:09.000You have triumphed where others have failed.
00:58:10.000You will be elevated to the status of a deity.
00:58:13.000You will have this wonderful piece of art sent to you, which I think will only increase in value.
00:58:18.000And I suppose, do you know what I'll tell you?
00:58:20.000That's what capitalism has done to me.
00:58:21.000I see everything in terms of its value.
00:58:23.000And I'm meant to be against this stuff.
00:58:25.000Like someone told me that they had a chateau, I said chateau, in France and that they opened a wardrobe door and that the house had previously belonged to Francis Bacon and he'd sort of scratched some painting on the inside or like etching on the inside of wardrobe and straight away I thought, what's that worth?
00:58:40.000I wasn't able to think of like the beauty of it.
00:58:50.000Bacon's priceless now, so I hope you kept all of it.
00:58:52.000Well, whoever it was, like, yeah, it's a priceless work of art they've got there.
00:58:58.000But this idea of having your thought policed, your private intellectual and conscious spaces monitored, formulated and shaped happens in ways that, I mean, sort of obvious.
00:59:11.000Other than the sort of set of systems that we all have a consensus around.
00:59:15.000But when it becomes like when the entire framing is unquestioningly and unconsciously accepted, even in the manner that I just Also, the question is, what is the purpose?
00:59:29.000And Orwell just says, the purpose of 1984 is no purpose.
01:00:06.000Right, like where I tell people about stuff they know more about than I do.
01:00:09.000This is what I would say, is that on some level Orwell was writing about this kind of collapse of values even beyond what was happening politically in the post-war era as materialism and rationalism reached a point where it was beginning to erode meaning in a way that was even beyond the geopolitical consequences of the huge loss of those successive wars.
01:00:34.000The materialism, post-enlightenment rationalism, the kind of loss of purpose, perhaps that's what he was able to prophesize and envisage, that love itself is being annihilated, everything is being measured, everything is being desacralized and banalized to the point where there is no legitimate purpose.
01:00:53.000Purpose, love, in the end we start to see that these are correlatives.
01:02:28.000Now, our next book is Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, which we're not even going to be able to introduce because we've run out of time.
01:02:38.000So we're going to have to, Brad, you're going to have to give up your job as a lecturer in both Bristol and wherever the hell it is in Germany, you're lecturing, disappearing mysteriously for weeks on end, and commit yourself full time to being in this armchair, illuminating and edifying us.
01:04:13.000So, once we recognize that, why are we judging people for desperately seeking to escape states of extreme emotional distress, isolation, disconnection, pain?
01:04:24.000So the addiction is not the primary issue.
01:04:26.000The primary issue is the trauma that induces the mind state from which the person needs to escape.
01:04:35.000I've told you before and I'll tell you again, there ain't no such thing as aliens, but is there though?
01:04:39.000We'll be talking to Jeremy Corbell at some point, who claims that he can bring these extraterrestrials right into the fold of our very families.
01:05:51.000And how does his Twitter agenda interfere with the unipolar objectives, you'll like this Brad, unipolar objectives of American hegemony through their sort of proxy agencies like NATO and all that kind of stuff.
01:06:39.000The same course where I first heard of you, Brad, where I did a university course for about an hour and a half, but in it I learned about Edward Said and Foucault and Brad.
01:06:47.000And like, in it, there was this bit where they read this short story by that, isn't he Argentinian?
01:07:32.000She will fix it, but with less subtext.
01:07:36.000Jordan Peterson is going to be on on Tuesday.
01:07:39.000Jordan Peterson is going to be on Tuesday, and we're going to talk to Dr. Joe Dispenza, which you can watch first and in full 7.30am PT, 10.30am ET, 3.30 GMT. When I'm
01:07:51.000saying that I don't know what it means. No. Don't know what it means. Not a clue. And
01:07:55.000sign up to StayFreeAF to get direct access to me. I do stuff on my phone all the time on there.
01:08:00.000It's like 33 quid a year. We give all the money to junkies. Well, one junkie. Me. And
01:08:04.000like, and like, you get proper access to me. Where do you think you'll go next with it? Thinking
01:08:09.000of going, er, I'm thinking of going to do a little trip to Kilimanjaro.