In this episode, Senator Rampaul joins Russell Brand to discuss his thoughts on the Trump administration and what it means for the future of the system of government as we know it. They also discuss the role of the Supreme Court and its role in the process of determining how much power can be delegated to the executive branch.
00:00:18.000Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:21.000Wherever you're watching us, make your way over to Rumble.
00:00:22.000And if you don't have Rumble Premium yet, get Rumble Premium now.
00:00:26.000You get additional content from me, but not just me.
00:00:28.000From Tim Paul and Tim Cast and Crowder and Mug Club and Glenn Greenwald and Dave Rubin and a whole host of other Rumble content creators.
00:00:36.000If you're watching the Snakex or YouTube, you're ultimately going to have to come over here if you want to watch my conversation with Senator Rampaul.
00:00:47.000And we'll be throwing to the quarter in at the end of this show.
00:00:50.000In this conversation with Senator Rampaul, we talk more broadly about the principles of libertarianism and whether or not the systems of government as they currently are can deliver anything other than continuity for systems of power.
00:01:01.000It's a brilliant conversation and I found myself agreeing with Rampaul on a lot of issues except for using the metrics of materialism and consumerism as the metrics by which we might evaluate our own success.
00:01:13.000Let me know in the comments and chat what you think whenever anyone pulls a bunch of statistics that tell you, actually, in the old days, everyone only had a dollar a day and now life's fantastic.
00:01:27.000You can lay on your back at home lowering your own genitalia into your mouth.
00:01:32.000I don't know why that's the image I went for.
00:01:33.000As you know, I'm suffering from mental illness.
00:01:36.000Anyway, wherever you're watching this, get over to Rumble.
00:01:40.000Let's get into the conversation with Senator Rampaul right away.
00:01:45.000Thank you for joining us, Senator Rampaul.
00:01:48.000It's a pleasure to meet you in person, sir.
00:01:50.000And it's a pleasure to meet you at this peculiar junction in American political life where it seems that whatever was wrought by the unusual and anomalous emergences of Donald Trump and the reskinning of the Republican Party is now undergoing a further analysis as the second term in government sort of deviates and warps.
00:02:13.000Do you think that the big, beautiful act as it is now is what will come to define Donald Trump's presidency?
00:02:19.000Or will it be the Epstein list that which has, for me, become a kind of synecdoke now rather than an actual list that means, are you any different from the former administration?
00:02:30.000I think if we step back and we look at the Trump administration and Trump in history, the big debate will be over executive power.
00:03:23.000But if you look at tariffs, they're simply a tax.
00:03:25.000And in our Constitution, we have a very specific rule that says taxes must originate in the House of Representatives, go to the Senate, and then come back and be passed.
00:03:34.000The tariffs are never being passed by Congress at all.
00:03:36.000He's completely done an end run around Congress.
00:03:39.000I think the debate over how much power the executive has will be what he's remembered for.
00:03:44.000He's doing it in the hiring and firing, too.
00:03:47.000So the Supreme Court and the other courts are upholding his ability to hire and fire.
00:03:53.000On the issue of tariffs, I think the court will ultimately rule against him.
00:03:57.000So I think the entire regime of tariffs that is out there, there's a possibility that the legal rug is torn out from under them and that there will be a legal prohibition on what he's doing.
00:04:08.000And I don't think many people are talking about it.
00:04:10.000That is fascinating because I was unaware of the maneuvering that was required in order to execute these tariffs or that it wasn't explicit in legislation the way that it's currently being engendered.
00:04:24.000But the kind of maneuvering that we're used to in Washington, you know, as observers, comparable to I was talking to Marjorie Taylor Greene yesterday and she explained how the legislation around cryptocurrency has no initial bill doesn't afford the ability to create centralized currencies, but there's another bill that ultimately won't get passed through the Senate.
00:04:48.000And when I was listening to the sort of game of politics, as described by the Congresswoman, what you say now echoes it, that there is an ulterior and secondary politics that takes place.
00:05:02.000And I suppose, in a way, when it comes to the obviously unique figure of Donald Trump, what we're experiencing now is what the limitations of his power and personality are.
00:05:12.000And specifically on the subject of tariffs, do you regard that ultimately then as a tax on American people?
00:05:20.000Or do you see it, as he appears to frame it, as an opportunity to cudgel foreign partners and control them and assert American authority in power and serve the American people?
00:05:31.000Without question, tariffs are paid by the American consumer.
00:05:35.000Even when the business is taxed, the tax of the person bringing it in, most of the time that's Americans.
00:05:40.000So Americans make clothing in Vietnam.
00:06:16.000And the vast majority of them are paid by American companies that are importing these goods into America.
00:06:22.000And then the consumer pays this because if I am making coats, ski coats, and they were $55, They're now going to be $65 because they cost more to make.
00:06:40.000It seems like, in a way, it's very difficult to hack the system that, in a way, whether it's the Epson list or the imposition of tariffs, at least superficially, as a kind of a weapon against foreign trading partners or other powers, ultimately the system has methods for sustaining itself that mean that the forfeit is always paid by the consumer.
00:07:04.000And do you think that alludes to a deeper crisis in America?
00:07:08.000Because sometimes there's this level of conversation that seems to me like we're discussing sort of stratagems.
00:07:14.000I know it's sort of literal and legalistic, but do you sense concurrently there's a sort of crisis in the American psychic and spiritual life as people begin to recognize that the sort of populist MAGA promise can't really be delivered precisely because of what you've explained, even with this one example?
00:07:30.000I think ultimately nationalism and populism is sold by having an enemy.
00:07:35.000Some enemies are very easy to conjure.
00:07:37.000Some enemies already have some bad attributes and we can play those up.
00:08:12.000So really, instead of saying, I'm going to get China, you need to say, oh, that guy that makes $30,000 a year that has a pickup truck and two kids and barely gets by and has no money left at the end of the month, no money after rent and gas and all of that, that's the guy that's paying $2,000 more because he has to shop at Walmart because they have the best prices.
00:08:31.000But the prices are going to go up by $2,000.
00:09:35.000But how can a million people have a voluntary trade where they buy a TV from China and they're all happy because they gave up their money voluntarily?
00:09:43.000And then you draw a circle around it and say, oh, well, they're all made in China.
00:09:56.000In fact, we've become extraordinarily rich through international trade from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but really even after World War II, if you look at prosperity, prosperity has been doing this, which leads to the other fallacy.
00:10:09.000They say, oh, the middle class is being hollowed out.
00:10:11.000The middle class is being ripped off by trade.
00:11:17.000I didn't understand the 2008 global crash where they bundled together subprime mortgages to exploit the ordinary people of America.
00:11:24.000A crime that has still not seen anybody arrested or charged.
00:11:28.000What I do know, though, is that there are ways that Robin Hood organizations can get together to empower you to make sensible investments now.
00:11:36.000And that's where Allio Capital comes in.
00:11:38.000Wouldn't it be great if there was the investment app that was designed by people that understand a macro perspective and how global events affect your finances?
00:11:46.000Now you can have the power in the palm of your hand with the Allio Capital app powered by Altitude AI, which identifies shifts in inflation, interest rates, and global risk, then adapts portfolios in real time.
00:11:57.000Alio is designed for hands-on or hands-off investors.
00:12:01.000Macro investing for people who want to understand the big picture.
00:12:04.000Download their app in the app store or at Google Play or text my name, Russell.
00:12:09.000If you're like me and you don't understand technology and you want to be stinking rich and you want to take advantage of Alio app, text my name, that's Russell, R-U-S-E-L-L.
00:12:34.000This is a paid advertisement for Alio Capital.
00:12:36.000Alio Capital, making investment easy for people like me who just don't have the time to be a George Soros or a Warren Buffett or any of them guys, but would still like to be stinking rich.
00:12:47.000So text my name to 511-511 and join the Alio Revolution.
00:12:53.000If it's not true, then what is the advantage to doing it?
00:12:58.000What is being concealed by the Propagation of this fallacy, even though I would say, when you describe that, which you obviously do really well, and thanks for making it simple and using examples that I would identify with from my own business life.
00:13:12.000I'm what I would contest is about you know quite what might seem quite abstract and ontological ideas about the nature of freedom and why people are buying a TV in the first place and what America has become about and even the fact that the sort of nominal term has become consumer rather than citizen, which I guess is a step up from subject, which is, I guess, what you guys ultimately threw off when you departed from this particular accent.
00:13:39.000But what I suppose is a more pertinent question before we get into how does America identify of itself?
00:13:48.000We can't deny it just by sort of pointing to a graph and saying the average household's got more of this and more than that, because most people feel like, hey, in the 1980s, a firefighter could feed a family of four.
00:13:59.000And people don't feel like that no more.
00:14:00.000That's like, you know, none of us, all of us are, you know, operating in subjectivity, Senator.
00:14:06.000So I guess first start with what is being obfuscated by Trump's claim that the common enemy is Chinese exploitation?
00:14:13.000They have something, a fancy name is called the availability heuristic.
00:14:18.000That means that things are more available or teachable.
00:14:20.000So for example, if you turn on the news tonight on an old-fashioned television, which I don't really recommend, but if you do, you'll see mostly bad news.
00:14:28.000And so you'll see violence and you'll see crime.
00:14:31.000But really, if you say, how many of my fellow men are committing crimes, it's really 1 to 2%.
00:14:36.000So 98% of your fellow men are actually good and living peaceably.
00:14:41.000And yet we think crime is everywhere and we get inundated with its availability.
00:14:46.000It's the same way with thinking we're not doing as well as our parents or grandparents.
00:15:49.00098% of people in 1820 are in extreme poverty.
00:15:52.000In 1990, only 34% of the people in the entire world, not just America, not England, Bangladesh, India, you mix the whole world, 30% lived in poverty, 1990.
00:16:04.000Fast forward, 35 years, less than 10% of people live in extreme poverty, $2 a day, constant dollars.
00:16:12.000This is an extraordinary story, and no one's hearing it because people will get on and prattle on about the middle class is being hollowed out and we're all going to hell in a handbasket.
00:16:21.000The story of, and the optimism that should come about where we are in history, I tell the kids all the time, I speak to young people, I say, never been a better time to be alive.
00:16:40.000People are more prosperous than they've ever been, but it's the opposite of what people believe.
00:16:44.000Everybody believes we're going to hell in a handbasket.
00:16:45.000Well, of course, I can't speak for everybody.
00:16:48.000And sometimes I contest whether or not I can accurately or at least articulately speak for myself.
00:16:52.000But I must, in the strongest possible terms, afford you that I strongly believe the opposite.
00:17:01.000Whilst I can't dispute the facts of material success generated by industrialization and mechanization and our ability to maneuver matter and create consumer markets, I sense and intuit, and forgive me for not having the data sets, but we are in a time of extraordinary crisis.
00:17:23.000And I would describe the nature of the crisis thusly, that power is being centralised.
00:17:30.000When I say power, I mean the ability to make decisions globally, whether it's through bureaucracies like the WHO, who thankfully have lost a little of their power due to Secretary Kennedy and Trump's relatively recent decision, or NATO or the UN or the EU, sort of bureaucracies that are largely unelected, although I recognise there is some democratic process amidst them.
00:17:51.000In addition to peculiar NGOs about whom I know less, but I know that they are incredible resources and repositories for enormous wealth.
00:17:59.000In addition to sort of deep state power, indeed, it's difficult by the, it seems that true power has an ability to obscure itself.
00:18:07.000And I think people understand this and sense this.
00:18:10.000I think people feel that power has migrated away from them, that we don't have sovereignty in our own lives, we don't have sovereignty in our communities, and that this trend, rather than the trend you described, which sounds like sort of a glorious carnival and a march towards utopia, is not what most people are experiencing.
00:18:26.000They're experiencing a centralized authority that's obfuscating its own power.
00:19:24.000Remembering what Lord Acton said, that power corrupts, that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
00:19:29.000But also Knowing that despite the ill effects of big government and of centralization of power, despite that, the power of freedom, what freedom we have left, it's so encouraging and so beautiful.
00:19:47.000I mean, look, when I think about the times we live in, I see that picture.
00:19:52.000And I'm just the picture of the rocket coming back from space into the metallic arms and being caught by Elon Musk's ingenuity and incredible creativity.
00:20:03.000That is the time we should be proud of.
00:20:09.000In fact, our problem is too much food now.
00:20:11.000We got too much food and it isn't all good either, but we have so much food.
00:20:14.000But our biggest problem is too much food now, not too little food.
00:20:18.000We're going to have to interrupt that conversation now.
00:20:20.000If you want to stay with us, click the link for the rest of this conversation.
00:20:23.000I tried to edge Senator Rampaul towards an explicit condemnation of Donald Trump, and I think he sort of tacitly offers one.
00:20:30.000He thinks that China's being used as a kind of bogeyman.
00:20:33.000He says he would no longer arm Israel.
00:20:34.000These seem to me to be the kind of things that people are interested in, or he sort of actually he was kind of, I would say, prevaricated somewhere.
00:20:42.000But in general, it's a really brilliant conversation.
00:20:44.000In fact, in full, it's an excellent conversation.
00:20:47.000Click the link if you want to join us for it.
00:20:51.000For all of human history, there was never enough food.
00:20:54.000Obesity did not exist until almost 50 years ago, unless you were royal or of some sort of inherited money.
00:21:23.000I believe we're in a spiritual crisis, that people have lost their connection to God at the level of the individual and perhaps at the level of the entire culture.
00:21:30.000And if there is no God, then none of us have a true metric or trajectory by which to measure success anyway.
00:21:36.000If a kind of opulence, pleasure, the accruing of fat cells is to be the graph by which we evaluate our glorious kind made in the image of the Creator himself, then of course we can all marvel at carpets and armchairs.
00:21:52.000But it seems to me that America is becoming a nation where people are captivated by screens and sugar and stimulation and pornography and masturbation and false idolatry.
00:22:01.000And it seems to me that the reason I admire you, in fact, so much is because you are one of the few people in politics that seem to have this sort of gift for pragmatism and to identify this is what the problem is.
00:22:13.000I'm not saying we should all be sort of caught up in theology the whole time.
00:22:17.000But what I am saying is that if we use metrics that seem designed to anoint material success rather than an evident decline, we're not going to have the conversation that we need to have.
00:22:27.000So even if when we say why, when you say that Donald Trump is being disingenuous when targeting China as the problem, what is he doing that for?
00:22:37.000Is he doing this because he's foolish or is he doing this because he's trying to draw attention from some more serious problem?
00:22:44.000Going back just for a second to the material versus the spiritual, you know, in the 19th century, sort of the beginning of what became the existentialist, you know, there was a saying, if there is no God, all is permissible.
00:22:57.000And that's kind of what you're saying.
00:22:58.000It's the hedonism, all of this lack of spirituality, the lack of sort of oneness with God is a modern problem.
00:23:17.000But I would say from the beginning of our republic, our republic was founded in a way with the understanding that you needed virtue, basically that democracy required virtue.
00:23:28.000All of our founding fathers talked about it.
00:23:30.000If you go through a list of 20 founding fathers, there's always the words virtue there.
00:24:11.000And I think the argument for whether or not we're in a crisis of losing that, of losing our mooring to any kind of virtue or right or wrong is very valid.
00:24:20.000But I don't think that part of that argument has to be that materialism is all bad or that everything is going on is wrong.
00:24:28.000Because the thing is, is that young people need hope and they should be given hope and the hope of that my future will be brighter than the others.
00:24:44.000If you look at the statistics, particularly young males, you have more of them going and finding religion, more of them going to church.
00:24:50.000So there is more of that, more people looking for a way.
00:24:53.000But I don't think it's one or the other, that we can't admit that there is material success.
00:24:58.000And maybe the material success has gone to our head, which is part of the spiritual problem that we're having.
00:25:03.000And I forgot what the other question was.
00:25:04.000It was something about Trump on tariffs again.
00:25:07.000Yes, it was to sort of conclude the idea that if he's setting up this false notion of exploitation via Chinese economic mastery, then if that isn't true, what is it that he is obscuring us from and why is he?
00:26:35.000And that's, I'm fighting this thing, and it's an uphill battle.
00:26:38.000If you look at my Twitter account, I get a lot of hate on my Twitter account every time I talk about trade because everybody says, oh, you're wrong.
00:26:47.000We got to prevent them and do all this.
00:26:49.000And they believe in this fallacy that we're getting poor.
00:26:52.000The Chinese got richer over the last 50 years, but so did we.
00:26:56.000It was more noticeable because they started out at the peasant level.
00:27:00.000They started out with no money 50 years ago and they've grown tenfold.
00:27:04.000We've grown maybe one and a half times, but we all got richer through trade.
00:27:07.000And it's this abstract but important notion, is trade a good or a bad thing?
00:27:13.000We used to all think it was a good thing.
00:27:14.000And now people are thinking, oh, let's become insular and not trade.
00:27:19.000Well, like America, as always, I think, and you mentioned Woodrow Wilson earlier, and perhaps that was a sort of a pivotal moment in America's entry into that conflict, which again, I suppose, defined the industrialization of war itself.
00:27:30.000I suppose that America has always had this conversation regarding isolation and the emergence of making America great again is ultimately, would you agree, about putting America first.
00:27:41.000And when you talk to people about whether it's USAID or the ongoing support of wars, it seems that one of the common refrains is not solely about trade, but about putting the priorities of American people first.
00:27:53.000Now, even when dealing with the sort of giddying tangle of bureaucratic language, it seems to me evident that at the forefront of the political process, the peculiar machinations of DC, it's very difficult to put the life of ordinary Americans of what their quality of life is.
00:28:12.000And to the point where almost we have to sort of spin to them, no, no, no, look, you've got dishwashers now or whatever it is that we're sort of for whatever palliative we're offering to the American people.
00:28:24.000It seems to me that what Americans want at the moment is a kind of isolationism.
00:30:29.000I'm not for putting the Americans in the middle of that mess.
00:30:32.000But I would say to the Arab League, when you're over there talking to Saudi Arabia, I would say Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, all these countries, you guys send 10,000 soldiers and be the police and y'all start helping to rebuild it.
00:30:44.000And the new government needs to agree to live in peace with Israel.
00:30:53.000Dozens of people have been arrested around the UK at protests in support of prescribed group Palestine action.
00:31:00.000The Metropolitan Police said 55 people were arrested under the Terrorism Act at the demonstration in Parliament Square and eight were arrested at another demo nearby.
00:31:11.000Those detained are alleged to have been displaying placards in favour of the group which was designated as a prescribed terrorist organisation earlier this month.
00:31:20.000There were also arrests in Bristol, Truro and Manchester.
00:31:24.000In Britain, pick a cause that people are getting arrested for.
00:31:27.000People are protesting in Eppin, near where I'm from, because of migration-related issues.
00:31:31.000People are getting arrested in London because of Palestine-related issues.
00:31:35.000And people are getting arrested everywhere for free speech.
00:31:43.000It seems like the majority of Americans are against war, funding war and arms, trading, the machinery and bureaucracy of war.
00:31:50.000And yet it seems near impossible, regardless of what administration with whatever mandate enters office to curtail and to cease that.
00:31:59.000And I think that what that makes a lot of people feel is that there is no meaningful mandate derived from the electorate, that the sort of the inertia of power continues uninterrupted, no matter who's in office.
00:32:12.000I think the closest to anyone who was going to interrupt the military-industrial complex and the monetary gain of all these arms merchants making money was Donald Trump and still is.
00:33:11.000It's inconsistent with what Trump says he believes and what I support in Trump, is that Trump's been the best Republican in my lifetime as far as advocating for the least amount of intervention in war.
00:33:22.000What he says oftenly is as much as I could have written it, or my father could have said it many times in his speeches.
00:33:29.000But then in the application of it, he's allowed people to infiltrate around him who aren't necessarily advocates of less war or less intervention.
00:33:38.000Do you think that the Epstein list is hoopla, or do you think, as many Americans do, that it's a kind of indicator of a sort of deep, what do I want to say, rhizome of subterranean connections and corruption that transcends different administrations?
00:33:56.000I can't profess to have inside information about the Epstein tapes.
00:34:00.000What I can tell you is that the distrust of government is well deserved.
00:34:05.000That I've been poring through and trying to get records about why we funded the research in Wuhan, China that I think became the pandemic.
00:34:18.000Almost everything I know, I've started to get something now, but everything we know, and I wrote a book about this, Deception, the Great COVID cover-up.
00:34:26.000But in the book, almost all the information I got was through freedom of information from outside sources.
00:34:31.000Outside sources were better at getting information by suing the government than I was as chairman of a committee now.
00:34:58.000And I love the way, or a conspiracy, I love my favorite is, you know, people think, oh, if you believe in a conspiracy, you're an absolute nut and a fool.
00:35:06.000And I said, well, George Carlin described this the best.
00:35:09.000George Carlin said, it's not necessary to believe in a conspiracy, only to believe in a convergence of interest.
00:35:17.000So the way I imagine the COVID conspiracy is, you might have 250 people involved in the COVID conspiracy, all worked in government, and maybe they never met each other.
00:35:26.000But their convergence of interest is, holy shit, we don't need a, we funded this.
00:35:31.000If word was out that I reviewed this and I funded it, so it's like, I'm putting this at the bottom of the stack or I'm erasing this.
00:35:39.000So it was a conspiracy where some of them knew each other and some of them were involved in a cabal, but most of them had a common interest of cover up because 15 million people died and they made the foolish decision to fund this.
00:35:51.000And it's extraordinary what we have found.
00:35:54.000Almost everything is from whistleblowers and from freedom of information.
00:35:58.000There was a major Murphy who worked in DARPA, which is part of our defense industry research.
00:36:04.000He revealed that the research that led to this was applied for in 2018 by the people in Wuhan, China.
00:36:14.000They didn't get it in 2018, but it was almost exactly what COVID began.
00:36:19.000What it became was what they had applied for in 2018, but nobody came forward.
00:36:24.000So there were other people on this 2018 project.
00:36:26.000There was a professor in North Carolina.
00:36:28.000When he saw that COVID had this special furin cleavage site to let it enter into cells, why wasn't he ringing up Fauci and saying, holy crap, they did it.
00:36:56.00015 different agencies heard this proposal.
00:36:59.000And when they found out that the virus had this special cleavage site, they should have been going, holy cow, last year I heard a presentation from the same people in China wanting to do this.
00:37:10.000And now the virus just coincidentally starts in Wuhan, China, and has the special cleavage site in that they were proposing doing in an experiment in 2018.
00:37:19.000Nobody did that because there was a conspiracy of cover-up from people all had a convergence of interest that said, we don't want anybody to know that we were forewarned and we still made a stupid decision to fund this research.
00:37:32.000Yes, if you met Lee Harvey Oswald at a shooting range and he was practicing shooting from a shop window via branches and trees at a grassy knoll.
00:37:44.000Although ironically, he was likely not working alone.
00:37:48.000So this convergence of interests, I wonder, it seems to me that one can stimulate environments where interests converge near continually.
00:37:58.000And I suppose that what the again, I'm not particularly interested in the licentious aspect of the Epstein list.
00:38:08.000I'm more interested in what external forces might generate the convergence that you're describing around COVID, which this convergence again became rather broad when one examines the subsequent wealth transfer, the ability of governments to regulate.
00:38:23.000That must have irked you some as a libertarian to see this authority legitimized at such an extraordinary scale.
00:38:30.000And I wonder if really what COVID provided was a window into the ordinary mechanations of power rather than an anomalous event, i.e.
00:38:38.000it was just a concentration of what happens more broadly, continually.
00:38:42.000Yeah, and but I think it's evidence of where the distrust of government comes from and I think has built up over time.
00:38:50.000As a libertarian, do you believe that in a sense, given that the systems themselves are not really geared towards individual freedom, but towards centralized freedom and the legitimization of centralized Freedom through increasing crisis, whether that's a pandemic or war, which is sort of in a sense a self-generated crisis between human tribes.
00:39:08.000Do you feel that the systems themselves have to markedly and radically change?
00:39:13.000And do you sense that, in fact, the technologies that are emerging now could either legitimize further centralization through surveillance and forms of monitoring or could actually legitimize a sort of a libertarian paradise where there was maximal democratic control?
00:39:28.000And do you see the potential of a convergence between ideas that come from libertarianism, individual freedom, and anarchism, which are sort of, I don't mean chaos anarchism, I mean maximal democracy localized where possible?
00:39:39.000That's 16 different questions from that.
00:39:42.000I'm sorry I did that because I think we were coming to the end of the interview.
00:39:44.000I can't really remember the last four.
00:39:46.000But anyway, as far as libertarianism underlying things, if you go to the Epstein tapes and you say, is there any principle other than the licentiousness that intrigues people about who was on the island, how rich they were, and justice.
00:39:59.000Well, the one thing underlying this that libertarians have complained about for a long time is they use the RICO statute and conspiracies to gin up penalties.
00:40:07.000So what they do is they say, it's sort of like what they did to Trump.
00:40:18.000Oh, the statue of libertations went out.
00:40:19.000So we're going to change the statue of libertations, but then we're going to bundle them all together and call it a felony and give you 40 years in prison.
00:40:26.000So I don't know all the details of what Gislaine Maxwell was charged with, but ultimately it's a grouping of things.
00:40:35.000And it's sort of this conspiracy to do sexual trafficking.
00:40:39.000Well, if it did exist, there has to be a lot of evidence of who are the people purchasing this.
00:40:44.000And the only other one is Jeffrey Epstein.
00:40:46.000So it doesn't sound like much of a conspiracy.
00:40:48.000It's still bad and wrong if she was doing this for one man, but it sounds like there were other people.
00:40:53.000And I think people have a sense, they may not understand the law, but they have a sense of justice.
00:40:58.000Well, shouldn't these other people, did they escape justice because there was some special treatment going on?
00:41:03.000And I think that's what people dislike most about the law.
00:41:06.000They like the unfairness of the law fare against Trump, but then they also like the unfairness of, well, if I did this, I'd be in jail for 20 years.
00:41:14.000And now all these rich people got off because they were rich and they had a connection.
00:41:18.000So I think the unfairness of that resonates with people.
00:41:21.000But there is a libertarian principle underlying it that we don't like RICO.
00:41:25.000We would repeal RICO because we see people with minor drug offenses all get stacked up.
00:41:29.000And all of a sudden, the guy's got 20 or 30 years in prison.
00:41:32.000And four other people are selling drugs testify against this one guy and he gets 20 years in prison.
00:41:38.000You know, this has happened with a lot of different cases that libertarians get upset about.
00:41:42.000Sorry to interrupt this conversation with Senator Ram Paul.
00:41:45.000We have to include these messages from our partners.
00:41:47.000It's a fundamental part of our business model is the truth of the matter.
00:41:52.000Whoever you are, you might consider yourself a businessman or woman or person, or I don't know, maybe you don't have a gender or don't want one.
00:42:00.000That's not the key issue here, though.
00:42:02.000The key issue is 1775, a delicious coffee.
00:42:05.000Let's be honest, most coffee, all it does is it helps you to organize a stool in that inward back pocket you call the butt.
00:43:00.000Araba cadabra, I say, because it makes me feel absolutely magic.
00:43:04.000It's infused with C-A-A-K-G, which is a kind of like a rifle, you know, like an assault rifle, but it's assault in your central nervous system with delicious beans, Bebe.
00:43:13.000A compound shown to support cellular energy, metabolism, and even healthy aging.
00:43:17.000You don't want to sit deteriorating in a chair, shitting yourself, drinking Starbucks.
00:43:24.000It's built for people who take their health seriously, who want to show up with focus and strength every single day, like me.
00:43:30.000If you care about how you feel now and how you'll feel 10 years from now, this is your coffee.
00:43:35.000Go to 7cenafaCoffee.com forward slash me probably and order rejuvenate coffee today.
00:43:41.000Fuel your body, protect your future, rejuvenate you sick perverts.
00:43:49.000Yes, because in that way, I suppose, Senator, the example you gave of a scientist that would have awareness that this research had been applied for, recognise the hallmark and signature of the research in the COVID virus, then not be able to testify because of his own shame and culpability.
00:44:08.000It seems that the generation of shame and culpability is an accompaniment to the explicit systems of government, that there is an occult or at least clandestine aspect to power that ensures that people in positions of power can be leveraged.
00:44:28.000I suppose that might happen plainly through lobbying and through PACs and even through relationship.
00:44:34.000But it seems that when it comes to true power, global power, there's a set of systems that are used to almost sort of spiritually manage people through shame.
00:44:43.000So there's an inherent aspect to power that is involved with corruption and abuse of power, because I think the natural tendency of men and women is to accumulate power, but along with that comes corruptibility and also becomes the abuse of power.
00:44:59.000And then sometimes react to that abuse instead of reacting to the power.
00:45:03.000So for example, in our country, for a long time, people said money rules politics.
00:45:07.000We need to regulate how much money you're giving to politicians because rich people are giving money and they're buying the elections.
00:45:13.000My father and other libertarians would put it this way.
00:45:16.000They said, it's not so much the giving that is the problem.
00:45:53.000So they have limits to their borrowing power.
00:45:56.000And most states, even the worst of them, other than maybe California and Illinois, tend to have balance between what comes in and what goes out.
00:46:04.000But if you want to see governments that exactly balance their books, city council, county government, they all balance their books.
00:46:11.000So when we're talking about where it should be done, so let's say you want to help people and you think the government should give them food stamps so they can eat.
00:46:18.000Well, you know where food stamps should be paid for?
00:46:20.000At your county level and it should be a county tax.
00:47:59.000Feudalism offers the same pledge, by the way, of course, you know, in order that you don't get attacked by barbarians, you have a king and barons, and you are taxed and you are a serf.
00:48:11.000And I wonder if there's just sort of almost a semantic maneuvering that takes place when you change it to government rather than tyrant.
00:48:18.000I also agree with you with the principle of minimal impact, minimal government.
00:48:25.000But in a sense, do you concur that if we pulled that thread, you would ultimately unweave the flag herself that you can't have nation without centralization?
00:48:40.000So I'm not against a central government and not against having one.
00:48:43.000I just want a very small central government.
00:48:44.000I want the least we can possibly have.
00:48:47.000I want it so small you can barely see it.
00:48:50.000And if I have to be governed and if I have to give up taxes, I'd rather give it to the local government.
00:48:54.000So would I. And I would rather have them do it.
00:48:56.000It used to be this way, even in our country.
00:48:59.000Well, I started my medical practice in 1993 in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
00:49:04.000When I showed up and I opened my office and showed up, one of my patients was a woman.
00:49:10.000I was probably 30 and she was probably 70.
00:49:13.000And she was in charge of the Bowling Green Welfare Office.
00:49:15.000And it's funny, you think, well, someone in charge of the Bowling Green Welfare Office, she must have just been a huge liberal and thought nobody should work.
00:49:23.000She believed everybody should work and she patrolled it.
00:49:26.000But if your son was a quadriplegic from an accident and the people didn't have any money, she knew that we were going to take care of them.
00:49:33.000She wasn't hounding you that your quadriplegic son needed to go out and work.
00:49:37.000What she was is, if your son was a football player and he just finished high school and he's not going to college and he's sitting around on his butt all day, she would make him work.
00:50:17.000But in order to do it, I agree to work in the emergency room for free.
00:50:21.000Now, usually you don't work the hours anymore, but what you do, it used to be you'd actually work a shift.
00:50:26.000Now what you do is if you come in and you don't have any insurance and money and you got a stick in your eye, they send, they call me and I come in and see you whether you have money or not.
00:50:34.000But that happened before there was government insurance, before there were any laws.
00:50:37.000It was an obligation of the community.
00:50:39.000But it was better when it was local and then it got worse the more and more federalized it became.
00:50:43.000And now, literally, when food stamps started, it was for unwed mothers with four kids.
00:50:48.000You can understand how an unwed mother, four kids, she can't work.
00:50:51.000She's got to take care of the four kids.
00:50:54.000And now you've got healthy young males getting food stamps and it just shouldn't happen.
00:50:59.000There are jobs everywhere for young men who will work in the hot sun and willing to work hard.
00:51:05.000Now, it seems like that the principle that motivates government centralization is without this central authority, we cannot serve the people.
00:51:11.000That's the explicit claim, but it ultimately seems like the sort of accruing of power for power's sake.
00:51:17.000If there were to be sort of a true radical proposition would be to localize power wherever possible.
00:51:22.000That's like the guiding principle to that the government should sort of dismantle itself.
00:51:27.000I suppose the counterclaim is, no, the tendency of the government to accrue power is shared by corporations and commerce.
00:51:35.000They would be the ones that would accrue this power.
00:51:36.000So what regulation is required and what would become the cohesion that even ensures that there is such a thing as nation?
00:51:43.000And where are those principles derived from?
00:51:45.000So there are people who want power for power's sakes because it's a tendency of mankind.
00:52:29.00020 years for encouraging people not to sign up for the draft, basically, and giving speech in support of some socialists who were for this.
00:52:38.000One of the worst eras in our history for freedom of speech and freedom of association, freedom to be able to dissent and criticize the government was right after World War I and right after World War I. World War II wasn't so great either.
00:53:30.000The left would say, follow the science, follow the science.
00:53:32.000But it turns out virtually everything he told us wasn't true.
00:53:36.000The masks didn't work at all, particularly the cloth masks.
00:53:40.000So when they told, if you were 75 years old and your spouse has COVID and they tell you to wear a cloth mask and go into feeder, they've told you the wrong thing to do.
00:53:48.000They've told you something unhealthy to do.
00:53:54.000When they told you to stay six feet apart from people, it turns out the virus can spread 30 feet.
00:53:59.000If you're in a choir practice and it's a room a little bigger than this and there's 30 people singing, you can get it without touching the person 30 feet across.
00:54:07.000So it was actually more infectious than they said.
00:54:10.000And so they gave you bad advice there.
00:54:12.000But it should have been, if you're 100 pounds overweight and you're 55 years old, don't go to choir practice.
00:54:17.000But if you're six years old or 16 years old or 26 years old and healthy, you can go.
00:54:23.000And most of you have already had COVID.
00:54:25.000And the other thing they lied about or didn't tell the truth was once you've had COVID, you're not going to die from it.
00:54:30.000You may get it again, but even a lot of people who got it naturally never got it again.
00:54:34.000People who got vaccinated got it again and again and again.
00:54:38.000But the thing is, is that they didn't tell us that we had protection, that we wouldn't die.
00:54:43.000To this day, the government has never admitted, if you've had it, can you get it again and die?
00:55:34.000What I'm trying to understand is why Crisis is, When you were talking about war and when you were talking about the pandemic, crisis is a subjective position.
00:55:43.000It wasn't, well, as the Chinese saying outlines, it was an opportunity.
00:55:49.000But people for whom it was not a crisis have no motivation not to generate a permanent state of crisis.
00:55:55.000And I think that what we're entering into and perhaps have been in since 9-11 is a successive crises used to legitimize opportunity.
00:56:03.000And the problem is, of course, big government is what's able to legislate and create the conditions, the framing for this opportunity.
00:56:09.000But the main beneficiaries, and I would say outside of government, they're corporate and commercial.
00:56:12.000And as Mussolini said, it's this terrible alliance that we have to most fear.
00:56:16.000So how do we then manage, Senator Paul, the tension that clearly exists, that there is a requirement for some sort of organization, but that when that organization is centralized in the way that it has become, it has become almost demonically corrupt.
00:56:32.000Well, the Chinese may have first said it, but then Rah Emmanuel famously repeated it, let no crisis go to waste.
00:56:37.000A crisis is a time when government can consolidate power.
00:56:41.000The Patriot Act, which reminds me of how when something is named something, you get the opposite.
00:56:46.000So almost every name of legislation, you have to look beneath the surface to find out that the Patriot Act is the most unpatriotic of acts, that it took our freedom, that it invaded our privacy.
00:57:30.000It may be that you don't even need anything else, anymore vaccines at all, probably if you've had COVID, because they need to show what are the statistics.
00:57:37.000But what do you think Moderna's position is?
00:57:39.000What do you think Pfizer's position is?
00:57:42.000So one reform I've offered, and it's been steadfastly opposed by people, is that if you're a scientist and you're on the vaccine committee, you should have to reveal whether you get royalties from Pfizer or Moderna.
00:58:34.000Well, thank you very much for joining us today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:58:39.000We will be back tomorrow, not with more of the same, but with more of the different.
00:58:43.000If you want to stay watching for free, you can see the quarter in now.
00:58:47.000Thank you for your comments and your participation.
00:58:48.000If you don't have Rumble Premium yet, get Rumble Premium now.
00:58:51.000It helps me financially and also sort of spiritually.
00:58:54.000I don't only judge myself by the metrics of consumerism, but when I think about it, I am rather fond of luxury in a variety of areas, but I'm working on it spiritually as best I can.