Russell Brand talks about Aaron Bushnell's self-immolation, Google Gemini, and the censorship industrial complex, and why good sex is the key to a long-lasting marriage. Plus, what happens when two political populist figures collide? Because Xavier Millet met Donald Trump backstage, that s pretty interesting. And what's up with Javier Millet and Donald Trump? And why he doesn t want to join our Awakened Wonder community. This episode is brought to you by AwakenEDWonders, a community of likeminded thinkers and journalists dedicated to challenging the dominant narratives we're told we need to believe in order to make sense of the world and the people we live in it. If you like what you hear here, please consider becoming a supporter of AWakenedWonder by becoming an AWAKENEDWonder member. You'll get access to all of our latest shows, shows and events, as well as access to special bonus episodes, and access to our most up-to-date news and information. Subscribe to AWakenEDUCATION WEEKLY, where you'll be the first to know when a new episode is available. Stay free, stay green, stay free! and stay woke! - edible, thank you, and stay free, and thank you for being a free thinker and free human being. - The Best Fiends - Ebb and Flow by Ebb & Flow, Ebb and Flow, and Ebb, and Flow's new podcast, Stay Free, and all things you need to know about the future of the future. by Good Sex, Good Relationships, and what it means, and how to be a free thing by being free in the future, and much more. . Stay Free With Us, and Stay Free with Us! by The Good Life, and Good Sex by The Besties by the Good Life by the Bad Boys of Good Sex and Good Things by Javier Millets, and What It's Like That by Xavier Millets. , and so on, and so much more! Stay Safe, and Much More by The Bad Boys by The Real Good Thing, and So Much More! . . . and much, Much More, by the Besties, and More by Good Things, and How to be Free, by The White House by the White House, and more by The New York Times, and by The People, and The Good Guys.
00:02:35.000Thanks so much for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:02:38.000We've got a fantastic show for you today and much to discuss.
00:02:43.000Of course, the self-immolation of service person Aaron Bushnell, God rest his eternal soul.
00:02:48.000We'll be talking about how that relates to the pervasive, immersive and progressing forever wars across the world.
00:02:54.000We'll be talking about Google Gemini and its extraordinary Misinterpretation of American history and what that might indicate about the lack of objectivity and the difference between artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness and the impossibility, in fact, of artificial consciousness.
00:03:11.000Let me know if you can hear me in the chat.
00:03:13.000I want to say hello to all of you guys that are watching right now in the Rumble stream.
00:03:18.000If you're watching this on YouTube, we'll be available for the first 15 minutes, but then will we flee into the stream where we feel free?
00:03:27.000Who we appreciate for supporting our free speech and being such fine advocates for our free speech.
00:03:33.000You might want to consider becoming an Awaken Wonder and joining our friends over in Locals where you get additional content every week.
00:03:40.000Last week, for example, we did a piece of content about Amy Winehouse and the new movie and the kind of Jungian archetype of the sacrificed woman.
00:03:47.000You'll love that stuff and I have some personal insights having been friends with Amy Winehouse when she was alive.
00:03:55.000I'm sorry to hear that you are dealing with breast cancer and I wish you a speedy recovery from that and recovering wanker, I have to say the word because that is your name, and Redook, you both want to see Gareth.
00:04:06.000Well, if you want to see Gareth, you are going to have to join our AwakendWonder Locals community.
00:04:11.000Gareth is now Kept in a cube and only revealed to people that are willing to subscribe.
00:04:18.000Before we get into the rather sad story of Aaron Bushnell's death, we will be looking at a few lighter matters and later in the show we'll be looking at the federal censorship industrial complex as described and demonstrated by the brilliant Mike Benz, who says that what people mean by democracy these days are institutions rather than elections, whether that's on a global or national level.
00:04:40.000I think that's such a good diagnostic.
00:04:45.000You are not going to see Bear, or Gareth, or any of this community of people until you cough up hard cash on a monthly basis by becoming an Awakened Wonder.
00:04:53.000You'll have to simply put up with our brilliant analyses of global events derived much from Gareth's work and other members of our team, like young Putin.
00:05:21.000Aaron Bushnell is the service person who sadly set himself on fire as an act of protest against escalating Middle Eastern war or what he described as the genocide in Gaza.
00:05:52.000I think, given recent events, these guys are staying under wraps.
00:05:56.000Unless you're willing to join our awakened... No, no, no, under no circumstances.
00:06:00.000Now listen, what's interesting about watching Javier Millet meet Donald Trump is that I feel like Donald Trump is usually accustomed to being the charisma tornado in any room that he's in, you know?
00:06:12.000Like, I mean, when Donald Trump met Kanye, that was interesting.
00:06:15.000When Kanye was there, all sort of full of vibration and his Kanye-ness in a chair, in the White House as it was then.
00:09:56.000I don't know if I did I say anything that denied that I if I did I apologize and
00:10:00.000madam That was a good deal of fun analyzing that
00:10:14.000Now we have to move to the tragic and difficult story of Aaron Bushnell's self-immolation and protest burning.
00:10:23.000Now anyone who's seen these images will know how disturbing they are.
00:10:26.000We're just putting up a series of stills because having watched it myself it's not the kind of thing that I would want to promote or put in front of you.
00:10:34.000If you guys want to see it you can certainly find it for yourself.
00:10:37.000Maybe we can even post it in the chat to stop people Leaving us, but I found it very very disturbing.
00:10:43.000On the way to the event Aaron Bushnell, in fact, can you go back a little bit guys where you were on the prompter because I was happy where we were.
00:10:51.000Well earlier on in the video Aaron Bushnell describes his reasons for doing it.
00:10:56.000It's a protest about US involvement in Israel's occupation in Gaza and what he described as the ongoing massacre there.
00:11:04.000Once he's there he covers himself in a highly flammable liquid and then sets himself on fire.
00:11:10.000Now what's extraordinary is the response of the first responders and the subsequent activity.
00:11:16.000Think of the other times you've seen acts of martyrdom like this.
00:11:22.000I think Tibetan Buddhists did it, or excuse me, Vietnamese I suppose, Buddhists did it in
00:11:26.000Vietnam, yeah, cruising bun said Vietnam.
00:11:29.000But if you consider that, those were people that were devout spiritualists, specifically Buddhists,
00:11:35.000he called it a genocide, Russell says, Blue Nose Bob, fair enough. And think also of the image of
00:11:42.000the child running away from the napalm attacks or the Tiananmen Square image.
00:11:47.000There's certain sort of images that you will never forget once you've seen them.
00:11:52.000Now, I don't know how much of this you've seen in legacy media, or indeed if you lot even business with the legacy media anymore.
00:12:00.000One of the things that I think is worth noting is if this event could be used to promote an authoritarian agenda, it would be.
00:12:09.000But this is an extraordinary indictment of current US foreign policy when a service personnel member Ends their own life as a protest while Congress are advocating for further military expenditure.
00:12:28.000Let's have a... Do we have anything else?
00:12:30.000Have we got the Caitlin Johnston post?
00:12:53.000Look, 17% of Americans support the ongoing war in Ukraine.
00:12:58.000A majority of Americans would not be willing to serve in the military were the US to enter a major war.
00:13:04.000Quinnipiac polls show 84% of America worry about getting pulled into war in the Middle East.
00:13:10.000Some 65% want a ceasefire in Israel's war on Gaza, not US action.
00:13:16.000President Joe Biden will convene the top four congressional leaders at the White House this week to press lawmakers on passing the $95 billion national security package that bolsters aid for Ukraine and Israel, as well as the Indo-Pacific.
00:13:29.000So, What I think we have here is a pivotal moment in the trajectory of this ongoing set of wars that are being funded together, so perhaps have to be scrutinised and analysed collectively.
00:13:45.000It's not that long ago where it was impossible to criticize US military activity without being seen as unsympathetic to the sacrifice that service personnel make on behalf of national security, on behalf of patriotism, maybe it could even be said on behalf of community, but what's happened now is it's become unignorable that it's the agenda of the military-industrial complex that's being served in this set of wars, it's become unignorable The powers behind your nation have an agenda towards a unipolar globe where the ascent of Russia or even the relatively contained domestic power of Russia is regarded as a problem and the regional power of China is regarded as a problem.
00:14:33.000The Pentagon spent in its total over 14 trillion dollars since the start of the war in Afghanistan with one half of the total going to military contractors.
00:14:40.000A large portion of these contracts, one quarter to one third of all Pentagon contracts in recent years have gone to just five major corporations.
00:14:47.000Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman.
00:14:51.000Imagine the power of those organizations.
00:14:54.000I'm minded of Mike Benz's recent statement.
00:14:58.000In fact, post, I think he might have posted this just today, Mike Benz said that when we talk about democracy now, we don't mean an electoral process and therefore the will of the people.
00:15:08.000What we mean are A set of institutions.
00:15:11.000He said that in relation to Ukraine, who haven't had an election in three years now, and that's somewhat understandable.
00:15:17.000They are engaged in a pretty serious war.
00:15:23.000They just cancelled elections again in Ukraine, third year now, and the place they're telling you is the democracy we need to defend.
00:15:29.000Remember, and burn this into your brain, democracy means institutions now, not elections.
00:15:33.000Institution just means the organizations and outlets of the blob, a new emergent phrase to describe the So in this new martyr Aaron Bushnell what we have is a reminder that the military personnel themselves don't believe in these wars.
00:15:55.000The American public don't believe in these wars.
00:16:13.000Uh, in our piece of content tomorrow on Here's the News, we'll be talking in some depth about the conditions that American service personnel find themselves in more broadly.
00:16:22.000Even serving members often find it hard to feed their families and keep a roof above their heads.
00:16:29.000Now, This is an interesting piece of footage, given where we find ourselves now, where Vladimir Putin, to an audience that I'd love to know, is explaining how Ukraine during NATO and attempting to bring Crimea back by military means will escalate to war.
00:16:48.000So, What I think is interesting about this is we've, all of us, shouldn't all of us have had the opportunity to determine whether or not we want to contribute to the escalation of a conflict that is always being clear has the potential to go nuclear?
00:17:06.000Let's have a brief look at Vladimir Putin making it pretty clear what this would lead to.
00:17:11.000If you're watching us on YouTube We'll stay with you for a couple more minutes, but then we've got so much more content.
00:17:17.000Indeed, Mike Benz, whose post I just showed you, we're going to be analysing that in some detail.
00:17:22.000Not just that post, we're going to be analysing his conversation with Tucker and how much it revealed about the censorship industrial complex.
00:17:28.000Indeed, not since Edward Snowden's revelations have we had a better understanding of how the government is using proxies to shut down free speech and control narrative.
00:17:37.000If any of you think that the legacy media is anything other than an amplification device for the establishment, or as we now call it, the blob, then I want to know what you're watching or reading on there.
00:17:58.000I said it, but I would like you to hear me after all, and to convey it to your readers, viewers and users on the Internet.
00:18:08.000But do you understand or not that if Ukraine joins NATO and returns Crimea by military means, European countries will automatically be drawn into a military conflict with Russia?
00:18:23.000Of course, the potential of the United Nations and Russia is insurmountable.
00:18:29.000We understand, but we also understand that Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers, and on some components, even today, it is ahead of many.
00:18:35.000and in retrospect pretty accurate in terms of how things have played out for
00:18:50.000Former Secretary General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen has now demolished the narrative of the unprovoked war in Ukraine.
00:18:59.000This is an extraordinary bit of footage where you get the sense That we've been kind of walked into this conflict when people knew what the likely consequences would be.
00:20:11.000And I think NATO should decide to say, OK, we outline a roadmap towards Ukrainian membership of NATO.
00:20:22.000Step two, in the run-up to the NATO Summit in Vilnius, some countries led by the US should sign a document giving security guarantees to Ukraine until Ukraine can
00:20:58.000Here's Victoria Nuland discussing Ukraine's democracy and America's self-interest.
00:21:02.000Those of you that are familiar will know that Victoria Nuland has worked for successive administrations on both sides of the Irrelevant aisle in perpetuating wars and globalism.
00:21:14.000Again, consider what is meant by democracy now.
00:21:16.000Does it mean the interests of us, the people, or does it mean the interests of certain institutions, sometimes on a national level, sometimes on an international level, which is to say globalist interests.
00:21:28.000Let's have a look at Victoria Newland on this.
00:21:31.000They've been out in their districts hearing from the American people after they have heard from Ukraine, they have heard from Europe, which by the way just passed 54 billion in additional aid itself, that we will do what we have always done, which is defend democracy and freedom around the world, not just for victims of tyrants like Putin, but in our own interest in preserving a free and open international order.
00:22:01.000And by the way, we have to remember that the bulk of this money is going right back into the U.S.
00:22:08.000economy to make those weapons, including good-paying jobs in some 40 states across the United States.
00:22:16.000Good paying jobs for ordinary Americans.
00:22:18.000Can you really believe that, having seen Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire while still in active service, that these wars benefit anyone than military, industrial, complex interests?
00:22:31.000Isn't that astonishing to see that perspective conveyed, as always, by an unquestioning and compliant legacy media?
00:22:41.000Let's see what Glenn Greenwald had to say.
00:22:44.000Imagine how dumb Victoria Nuland thinks everyone is that she feels comfortable with saying with a straight face, we will do what we have always done, which is defend democracy and freedom around the world.
00:22:52.000As fraudulent as the Iraq war was, more lies were told in February 2022.
00:22:55.000Now we're going to leave you if you're watching us on YouTube, but by God do we have some fantastic stuff coming up.
00:23:01.000We're talking about the Google Gemini AI images and what that shows you about the difference between intelligence and consciousness and how it reveals a kind of agenda at the heart of the globalist AI revolution.
00:23:13.000In our deep dive item, we're looking at Mike Benz's conversation with Tucker.
00:23:18.000In some detail with additional information about how the censorship industrial complex is managing and controlling reality and of course we're gonna cover Trump's victory in South Carolina.
00:23:29.000Is Nikki Haley viable anymore or have people lost interest in her?
00:23:34.000Also, become a member of our Awaken Wonder community to get additional content!
00:23:37.000Right, you guys, the first thing that we're looking at is Google have issued an apology for Gemini for overcompensating, leading to inaccurate historical images.
00:23:48.000Let's look at how that's covered on Legacy Media.
00:23:52.000George Washington as a person of colour, Vikings with hues of pigmentation unlikely to occur in that region at that time.
00:24:01.000Is that what's important or is it more interesting that it's the revelation of a lack of objectivity in a piece of technology that's likely to become more and more central when it comes to building a future around social credit scores, facial recognition technology and presenting Versions of reality that are deemed absolute when plainly they are highly subjective and, in some cases, just damn wrong.
00:24:25.000...artificial intelligence tool Gemini because of inaccurate depictions of race.
00:24:31.000The chatbot was incorrectly generating images of historical figures including America's founding fathers and Nazi soldiers as people of color.
00:24:39.000People were blasting the snafu on social media saying AI models are struggling with the concept of race.
00:24:45.000Google says it's working to fix the issue and plans to release an improved version of the tool soon.
00:24:51.000I'm actually not that interested in this story.
00:24:54.000I can't even believe I'm having to deal with this.
00:24:56.000Let's have a look at some of those images.
00:25:41.000I would definitely prefer misgendering to nuclear apocalypse.
00:25:44.000Because of that post, is it okay to misgender Caitlyn Jenner to stop a nuclear apocalypse?
00:25:49.000Now, that's sort of trolling this piece of tech, I suppose, but in so doing, revealing that there's a total lack of clarity, intelligence, and objectivity at the heart of AI, and it's ultimately a tool of the global establishment that one day may be utilized to identify who, not what races, ought be represented in what way, but What people might be deemed terrorists or people of interest as it facilitates a minority report reality where all of us are presumed criminals based on our previous posting history or the preferences of a machine that as I say is not objective but is rendering reality
00:26:27.000On the basis of the ideology of a small group of people who, again, do not really care about democracy, they care about power, profit, the management of reality.
00:26:39.000And indeed, when we look at the Shane Gillis SNL, did you see Shane Gillis on SNL?
00:26:43.000We have another opportunity to note how the culture cannot accommodate even good-humoured communication between people.
00:26:51.000The assumption of cruelty in place of comedy and conviviality.
00:26:57.000We'll be talking about that and looking at that in more.
00:29:09.000Trump will win the South Carolina Republican primary, defeating former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley in her home state and securing his fourth major early victory in the GOP primary season.
00:29:21.000The former president taking another critical step toward winning his third Republican presidential nomination and continuing his dominance over the race.
00:29:31.000So I suppose it's inevitable that we will get Trump v Biden unless Trump is incarcerated and Biden, well I mean sort of there are some health issues that could catch up and lead to who?
00:31:06.000I've never seen Gavin Newsom talk before.
00:31:07.000He's got a sort of helium feature to him.
00:31:13.000He looks like he's sort of held up by gas, is what I would say about Newsom.
00:31:18.000All I know about him is he had that dinner party during COVID-19, but all of our politicians in Britain were literally partying their way through that pandemic like it was 1999, when it was about the time that many of the medications for that period were patented, curiously enough.
00:31:34.000Hey, we got a feeling about 20 years from now, you're gonna be needing a little vaccine, but I don't want a vaccine!
00:31:39.000You know what else is gonna be popular?
00:31:44.000Hope you've seen our piece of content, of which I'm very proud, created in-house here at Stay Free Media, on the new French laws, and our comments on that very funny bit of news media, where I think they were local news in Florida, where they go, like the two news people, like the woman that's doing the news, the news anchor's going, Wait a minute, I took all those jabs and I got myocarditis last week!
00:32:06.000It's really, really, well it's not funny, it's not funny that she got myocarditis, it's just funny the way this stuff's playing out.
00:32:12.000Hey, listen, you're going to love this.
00:32:14.000We're talking about the Federal Censorship Industrial Complex.
00:32:16.000Tucker Carlson's interview with Mike Benz detailed the emergence of what Benz calls military rule.
00:32:20.000Now Mike Benz, we've got to get him on this show, we've got to find him, we've got to track him down, we've got to bring him on.
00:32:24.000He talks about an online censorship industry and how powerful it's become, how corrupt and tyrannical the U.S.
00:32:30.000defense and foreign policy establishment is now.
00:32:33.000So, after the 2020 election and COVID-19 pandemic, the two most censored events in human history, can you believe that?
00:32:40.000More censored than the Army, uh, the Library of Alexandria.
00:32:44.000More censorial than the Nazi Party and their book burnings.
00:32:47.000Now what's burned is American service personnel protesting wars that they themselves are supposed to be fighting in.
00:32:54.000What does this new censorship industrial complex, backed in the way that it is by the military, mean for future elections and terrifyingly, pandemics?
00:33:11.000The 2020 election and the 2019 pandemic were the most censored events in human history Mike Benz has revealed on Tucker.
00:33:19.000So has the US foreign policy and defense industry become the most tyrannical instrument in the history of the world?
00:33:28.000We now know as a result of the fascinating interview between Mike Benz and Tucker Carlson that there's a new emergent political force operating on a global stage that you may have heard referred to before by authors like Martin Goury but will now understand in great depth as this censorship industrial complex truly emerges which means that the 2020 election and the 2019 pandemic were the most censored events in human history that now the US foreign policy and defense industry have unprecedented power And with 2024 being the year of elections, it's likely that we will be experiencing more censorship than ever before.
00:34:06.000Nick Clegg, a former British politician and now head of Aspect of Meta, has 40,000 employees over there dedicated to censoring free speech in order to preserve what he bizarrely refers to as election integrity.
00:34:20.000And the word integrity does not belong in this conversation.
00:34:23.000We are in a war for freedom of information right now.
00:34:26.000We are in a war to control the perception of reality.
00:34:30.000Independent news sources such as this one, the ability to communicate immediately and with as little friction between us, the way that we currently can, is under threat.
00:34:41.000International relationships are under threat.
00:34:42.000The ability to challenge the legitimacy of wars and measures taken by our government, often under the guidance of global organisations, is under threat.
00:34:51.000We have to wake up immediately. Several people have sent me this interview
00:34:55.000saying it's hypocal and given that Tucker Carlson's done two very important interviews
00:34:59.000recently, he did that one with Putin, then he had a little chat with another guy who gets
00:35:03.000a little bit of heat from the mainstream media. Yes, old Russ himself, but this is the
00:35:07.000one. This is the one to watch because Mike Bent explains how information and therefore
00:35:12.000reality is controlled by some very powerful interests. We're going to look at some of it
00:35:16.000together, then we're going to analyse it further and then we're going to organise against
00:35:28.000And then they articulated a multi-step framework in order to coerce all the tech companies to take censorship actions.
00:35:35.000They said on tape the tech companies would not have done but for their pressure.
00:35:39.000Which involved using threats of government force because they were the deputized arm of the government.
00:35:44.000They had a formal partnership with the DHS.
00:35:46.000They were able to use DHS's proprietary domestic disinformation switchboard to immediately talk to top brass at all the tech companies for takedowns.
00:35:55.000So what we thought of as big tech censorship was always government censorship.
00:36:00.000Governments have proxy organizations within social media, and actually social media itself, operating to control the information that is accessible.
00:36:09.000Generally speaking, this is just my personal opinion, it's information that would arm you with sufficient facts to become a dissident, for you to become suspicious and cynical of your own government's actions.
00:36:19.000In short, Apparatus that was designed, and this is explicit and becomes more explicit over the course of this conversation we're having now, that was designed to control what was referred to as terrorism, foreign terror threats, has now been turned inward onto domestic populations.
00:36:33.000This happens in my country, the United Kingdom, where you have the 77th Brigade, which has peculiar ties to Caroline Dynage, who was specifically the politician who demanded that I be demonetised.
00:36:43.000And when I say peculiar connections, it's her husband ran it.
00:36:46.000Psy-ops that were utilized to control foreign dissidents when it was convenient and necessary are now being used to control domestic populations.
00:36:53.000And for a moment, pause just here on the semantics of this situation.
00:36:57.000They were regarded, weren't they, groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, they say quite rightly, as terrorists.
00:37:02.000But we regarded the key feature of terrorism to be sort of violence, and maybe because of the way that we were generally coached, perhaps some of the religious and cultural paraphernalia That doesn't belong to the idea of the terrorist.
00:37:14.000But now we know that what terrorism truly means is a desire and potentially the ability to disrupt the agenda of the powerful.
00:37:44.000And they bragged on tape about how they got the tech companies to all systematically adopt a new terms of service speech violation ban called delegitimization, which meant any tweet, any YouTube video, any Facebook post, any TikTok video, any Discord post, any Twitch video, anything on the internet that undermined public faith and confidence in the use of mail-in ballots or early voting drop boxes Excellent.
00:38:11.000People are in prison as a result of that, by the way, now.
00:38:13.000And remember that France has just introduced laws to prevent you criticizing Pfizer.
00:38:17.000under this new delegitimization policy.
00:38:20.000Excellent. People are in prison as a result of that, by the way, now.
00:38:23.000And remember that France has just introduced laws to prevent you criticizing Pfizer.
00:38:28.000And look, to Ireland, too, the new hate speech laws that are peculiarly diffuse and oddly draconian.
00:38:33.000And our country, the online safety bill, championed by someone who has connections to psy-ops that were previously deployed against terrorism.
00:38:40.000I don't want to sound like a hysterical, ranting conspiracy theorist.
00:38:44.000I'm simply pointing out that global organisations with global reach have a singular policy that they are deploying against vast populations.
00:38:53.000And someone like Mike Benz here on Tucker's platform, gracefully delivered by Elon Musk, That they only adopted because of pass-through government pressure from the Election Integrity Partnership, which they bragged about on tape, including the grid that they used to do this and simultaneously invoking threats of government breaking them up or government stopping doing favors for the tech companies unless they did this.
00:39:19.000That's brilliant, because do you remember all the demonopolisation conversations?
00:39:22.000I remember being broadly supportive of that.
00:39:26.000You should have that communally run, democratically by the people.
00:39:29.000No, no, no, not the last bit, but we should break them up.
00:39:31.000All that was was a threat to get Big Tech platforms to be obedient and start acting as proxies for the government.
00:39:38.000Now, these are things that we're all experiencing.
00:39:40.000If you've had a single post disappear, let alone if you've been subject to massive psyops yourself, this is this policy in action.
00:39:47.000As well as inducing crisis PR by working with their media allies.
00:39:51.000And they said the government, DHS, could not do that themselves.
00:39:53.000And so they set up this basically constellation of State Department, Pentagon, and IC networks to run this pre-censorship campaign, which by their own math had 22 million tweets on Twitter alone.
00:40:08.000And mind you, they did this on 15 platforms.
00:40:10.000This is hundreds of millions of posts.
00:40:12.000Which were all scanned and banned or throttled so that they could not be amplified or they existed in a sort of limited state purgatory or had these frictions affixed to them in the form of fact-checking labels where you couldn't actually click through to the thing or you had to, it was an inconvenience to be able to share it.
00:40:28.000I've always been cynical about online activism, but now simply by sharing posts like this, you are becoming a dissident.
00:40:34.000You can contradict the intentions of the state powers that Mike Benz is describing.
00:40:39.000Now they did this seven months before the election.
00:40:41.000This took out... Wait, wait, may I ask you to pause right there?
00:40:45.000So what you're saying is, what you're suggesting is, they knew the outcome of the election seven months before it was held.
00:40:56.000But even something as apocal as election rigging, which in a way is just a technological evolution of ideas like gerrymandering and manipulation and uniparty policies and comparable politics within both of the major parties in most democratic nations, it's Shocking, astonishing, to a degree, but also, God, if you're living in this space, hardly surprising.
00:41:17.000Let's look in more detail now about this age of censorship that we've entered into, and how censorship's not just like what it used to mean in the old days, a sticker across explicit images in a potentially erotic magazine.
00:41:30.000No, what it means now is the control of reality itself, the control of elections, the control of global policies around health, the control of your mind, your reality, the control of everyone you love, everyone you care for, being filtered for and dominated by systems that you didn't vote for.
00:41:47.000And if you do vote for them, that vote may not count, it seems.
00:41:51.000Mike Benz, the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, explained to Tucker how a constellation of federal agencies and publicly funded institutions under the pretext of countering misinformation rigged the 2020 election and are right now smothering the First Amendment and rigging the 2024 election through massive state-sponsored censorship online.
00:42:10.000The 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic, says Benz, were the two most censored events in human history.
00:42:16.000And 2024 is shaping up to be the same, thanks to the emergence of a federal censorship industrial complex.
00:42:23.000In a sense, this is the pinnacle of stories we've been covering for a good while now.
00:42:27.000The censorship industrial complex is a term that we learned from Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi.
00:42:32.000Recently, because of Lee Fang's reporting, we were able to understand that Moderna had been spying on our channel.
00:42:37.000We know that the government spent money ensuring that our content got curtailed and shut down.
00:42:42.000The stories were being planted in the media.
00:42:44.000It's astonishing what's taking place here and it's astonishing that it's continuing.
00:42:48.000Think for a moment that Julian Assange is having those hearings.
00:42:51.000Think for a moment about the revelations of Edward Snowden some time ago that had comparable
00:42:54.000revelations but now looks like some old timey hacking like where the five eyes nations all
00:42:59.000exchanged information on one another's populations in order to get round pesky freedom of information
00:43:06.000and privacy laws in those domestic territories themselves.
00:43:09.000Now what's happening is this is metastasized into a vast unstoppable cyborg of censorship
00:43:15.000The problem here is profound with deep historical roots that go back to the aftermath of World
00:43:20.000War II and the creation of the CIA along with a host of US funded international institutions.
00:43:25.000But for our purposes it suffices to understand the problem in its two most recent stages
00:43:29.000the period from 1991 to 2014 and from 2014 to the present.
00:43:33.000What's being referred to are the establishment of the legacy news media and its implicit connections to the state from their inception, Operation Mockingbird and various other ways that the CIA and deep state organisations have always infiltrated media.
00:43:47.000And the problem occurred when legacy media's power base became diminished with the rise of social media and the internet.
00:43:54.000At the outset of internet privatisation in 1991, free speech online was seen as an instrument of statecraft.
00:44:01.000At that time, says Benz, internet free speech was championed by the US foreign policy and defence establishments as a way to support dissident groups around the world in their efforts to overthrow authoritarian or disfavoured regimes.
00:44:12.000That's why freedom of speech used to be a neoliberal issue.
00:44:15.000That's why, as you might say, as people say, the left used to care about free speech.
00:44:20.000At that point, free speech could be used to destabilize foreign governments.
00:44:24.000Hey, these dissident groups, they should have free speech because that free speech means that we'll be able
00:44:28.000to corrupt their democratic processes and install a puppet government.
00:44:32.000Now free speech means that you might start challenging your establishment, the United States government,
00:44:37.000the UK government, the Australian, Canadian government.
00:44:40.000Now you are the dissident and free speech is not so popular.
00:44:43.000That's how and why that change took place.
00:44:47.000Didn't the left use to talk about free speech?
00:44:49.000Didn't I grow up thinking free speech because of women's rights, because of civil rights, because of rights of gay folk, because it's important that we can all speak to one another?
00:45:12.000Among other things, free speech on the internet allowed U.S.-backed groups to assert control over state-run media in foreign countries, making it much easier to overthrow government.
00:45:22.000Every time you hear someone say, in Tehran, oh, they're sexist over there, don't care about women's rights, Now we can learn to tune in to what's actually happening.
00:45:29.000We know they don't care about women's rights.
00:45:30.000They're obviously trying to institute a regime change in that country.
00:45:34.000So just watch out for it now, because the legacy media will do it again and again, because that's what they do.
00:45:38.000The high watermark of this way of deploying free speech online, Benz explains, was the Arab Spring in 2011 and 2012, when governments the Obama administration considered problematic.
00:45:48.000Egypt, Tunisia, Libya all began falling in the so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions.
00:45:53.000During that time, the State Department worked closely with these social media companies to keep them up and running in those countries to be used as tools for protesters and dissident groups that were trying to circumvent state censorship.
00:46:03.000So if your agenda is in alignment with their agenda, they will support you.
00:46:08.000Say, a figure like Zelensky, who just becomes a hero overnight and he's turning up the Golden Globes and billions of dollars are going his way, do you really think that that's because they care about Ukrainian people?
00:46:19.000Or do you think, just temporarily, Zelensky becomes, oh look, use this guy quick, baggage him up like a mule with funding just strapped on him like dynamite and sent in to explode conveniently for their narrative.
00:46:31.000And if Zelensky at some point becomes inconvenient, just ask Colonel Gaddafi what happens when you're no longer useful to the establishment.
00:46:38.000Oh, you can't cause, you know, dead now because they facilitate his death.
00:46:45.000So this is a significant moment when you look at the Ukraine-Russia conflict, the ongoing vilification of Vladimir Putin, who I acknowledge is a tyrannical figure, war criminal, all of that.
00:47:02.000All that changed in 2014 after the US-backed coup in Ukraine toppled the government of Viktor Yanukovych, and there was an unexpected pro-Russia counter-coup in Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine.
00:47:13.000That's literally the advent of the war we're involved in now.
00:47:17.000Last same year, says Benz, when the people of Crimea voted to be annexed into the Russian Federation.
00:47:22.000That was the last straw for the concept of free speech on the internet in the eyes of NATO.
00:47:27.000For a moment we can question what NATO does and what NATO's for.
00:47:56.000Thereafter, NATO, the CIA and the State Department, together with the intelligence agencies of our European allies, did an about-face on internet free speech.
00:48:04.000Oh, you don't like free speech all of a sudden?
00:48:06.000They began instead to engage in what amounted to hybrid or information warfare to censor what they saw as Russian propaganda online.
00:48:13.000These efforts quickly spread beyond Ukraine and Eastern Europe to include the censorship of populist groups on the right that were emerging across the EU as a response to the Syrian migrant crisis.
00:48:22.000We all saw this take place as well. We remember the vilification of far-right groups. Now
00:48:26.000whatever your politics are, you're actually in a democracy entitled to them. Personally,
00:48:30.000I would suggest hating individuals or groups of people on the basis of their culture is
00:48:34.000not acceptable, but I can understand people having national identities because for a long
00:48:38.000time we were told that we were meant to be protecting our nations and going to war to
00:48:41.000protect our nations and sacrificing our lives to protect our nations and actually fighting
00:48:45.000wars in some of these territories. In fact, that's what's caused the migrant crisis is
00:48:48.000these are the same bloody countries that are being bombed by the exact same interests that
00:48:52.000are telling you that you're racist for having concerns about your countries.
00:48:56.000By the time Brexit emerged in the summer of 2016, explains Benz, NATO and the foreign policy establishment felt there was a real crisis afoot.
00:49:04.000The problem was spreading west from Central and Eastern Europe, and it had to be stopped.
00:49:08.000If it wasn't, then Brexit might trigger the collapse of the entire EU, along with NATO, and the entire constellation of supranational institutions that relied on NATO.
00:49:17.000Looking back at it as an inhabitant of this nation, what do you think their real connection to the EU and NATO and all that stuff is?
00:49:26.000It's obvious in retrospect that what they don't want is the disruption of their ability through these agencies to evade democracy and the process of democracy.
00:49:35.000Referendums and referenda like Brecht Brexit or the mad giddy election of Donald Trump is obviously an anomaly and a disruption to a global trajectory wherever you stand on either of those issues and whatever you think they're about because I notice that they're generally rendered as being about hate but since then I've learned that hate is one of the ways and hate speech and racism and the persecution of minorities which I'm pretty convinced the global establishment don't actually care about is one of the ways that they legitimize censorship and control and through that lens I look at Brexit a little differently.
00:50:07.000The entire post-war architecture of institutions might come crashing down, all because the hearts and minds of the people were being swayed.
00:50:14.000We're told that that architecture is to maintain peace, but even that's something that I might want to interrogate a little.
00:50:21.000As far as the National Security Establishment was concerned, citizens were being swayed by Russian and far-right propaganda, and we can't have that.
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00:51:56.000And doesn't it make sense, really, that you, if you become awakened, enlightened, and in tune, and demand real power in your own life, and that means the ability to disrupt the interests of the institutions and groups that are currently powerful, because at the moment there is a wealth transfer, it seems that more and more we're living within a fuel and energy crisis, inflation, explosion of grocery prices.
00:52:17.000If you want to influence that, or interact even with that, You would be impacting their current strategy and their current structures.
00:52:28.000From that moment, and indeed as we know from the Russia collusion hoax, even before Trump was elected in November 2016, the US foreign policy and defense establishment, which has done so much to censor and weaponize the internet overseas, turned their attention to American citizens.
00:52:43.000This is a theme you hear again and again.
00:52:45.000Infrastructure that was deployed overseas to create regime change, to control dissidents, to arm, to inspire, to utilize dissidents has been deployed in domestic populations.
00:52:56.000Sometimes I think it's as simple as they've got the technology and they sort of can't help but use it.
00:53:00.000But other times I think it's about absolute and total control.
00:53:03.000Initially, their predicate for domestic surveillance was Crossfire Hurricane, the fatuous notion that Russia had infiltrated the Trump campaign and that Trump was a Russian asset.
00:53:12.000Nancy Pelosi is still making claims along those lines.
00:53:15.000Literally, like right now probably somewhere.
00:53:18.000Once that collapsed, they needed another excuse to spy on and censor Americans who held disfavored opinions or who spread misinformation, to put it in the parlance of the censorship industrial complex.
00:53:27.000To do that, they had to get around the prohibition against the CIA operating on American soil.
00:53:32.000Since they couldn't very well get away with openly spying on and censoring American citizens, they decided to house the bulk of their censorship operations inside the Department of Homeland Security, specifically in a part of DHS tasked with reducing and eliminating threats to US critical physical and cyber infrastructure. Hence,
00:53:49.000domestic misinformation, which is really just a term for opinions and information that the national
00:53:53.000security state doesn't like or that run counter to State Department policy, was classified
00:53:59.000as an attack on critical cognitive infrastructure and could therefore be censored. What it
00:54:04.000amounted to was an end run around the First Amendment.
00:54:07.000We're told that the internet creates these silos, these bubbles of opinion, these worlds
00:54:11.000of escalating extremism. But on a personal and interpersonal level, did you not notice
00:54:16.000that in your own family, you used to have people that had different political views
00:54:19.000and at Thanksgiving or Christmas or whatever, you'd just go, oh, he's a bit Republican or
00:54:24.000Then you got on with your life rather than it being a frontier for a new war.
00:54:28.000Where is this new atmosphere actually coming from?
00:54:30.000Well, we've just had it explained to us.
00:54:32.000It's to legitimize regarding ordinary citizens as terrorism and differences of opinions as an existential threat.
00:54:39.000But even DHS couldn't do this directly, so it outsourced online censorship operations to third parties like the Election Integrity Partnership, or EIP, which consisted of four separate organizations.
00:54:50.000The Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, and a firm called Grafica.
00:54:58.000These private sector partners did the nitty gritty work of mapping out entire online networks of people who helped spread certain disfavored opinions or what the censors called false narratives.
00:55:09.000Essentially they were deputized to censor Americans on behalf of the government.
00:55:12.000Do you remember when you first saw like maybe a graph about the dark web and Joel Rogan is a gateway to being a racist he's a right-wing Portal Gateway.
00:55:21.000That was the result of these organisations, many of which are government funded or privately funded by vested interests.
00:55:27.000Certainly that Atlantic Council needs a bloody good looking at.
00:55:29.000And what they did is just created the idea that you can't trust powerful online sources whose opinions run counter to establishment narratives.
00:55:37.000Once they determined that that was the desired outcome, they set about finding ways.
00:55:41.000Well, you shouldn't listen to this person because they're a racist.
00:55:43.000You shouldn't listen to this person because they're a sex offender.
00:55:45.000You shouldn't listen to this, but they just filled in the blanks.
00:55:47.000These managers and their partners inside the US government went about their task with gusto, including a seven-month pre-censorship campaign ahead of the 2020 election.
00:55:56.000Any content challenging public faith in mail-in ballots, early voting, and ballot drop boxes was flagged for violating new rules about delegitimizing elections.
00:56:04.000The censors, along with their governments, had strong-armed the social media companies into adopting these rules as documented in great detail last year with the release of the Twitter files.
00:56:13.000You'll remember when Schellenberg has come on our show, you can watch these interviews, they're up now, he talked about pre-bunking, how journalists are often invited to conferences and told, hey, there's going to be all this disinformation about Hunter Biden's laptop, so when that does come out, will you go ahead and pre-bunk that for us?
00:56:27.000Indeed, the Twitter files exposed a massive effort by the federal government to deputize Twitter and other social media companies to do what it could not, at least not legally.
00:56:35.000But in some ways, the Twitter files just revealed the tip of the censorship iceberg.
00:56:39.000One of the problems I have with the liberal left, even though I really admire some brilliant online broadcasters and comics, for example, is their unwillingness to address that figures like Trump or Elon Musk, who might be out of alignment with some of their cultural views, are serving this vital function by disrupting exactly this narrative.
00:56:54.000Elon Musk's The acquisition of X is a problem for them because they lost a compliant partner in a space that they needed to control.
00:57:02.000And subsequently Elon Musk is dealing with a lot of stuff and a lot of flack and all of that.
00:57:06.000And you can have your own views about what his overall function is.
00:57:09.000But when it comes to this particular problem, and I believe that this is THE problem, the control of information and therefore the control of reality, Elon Musk is disrupting that trend and tendency, as did Brexit, as did Trump, wherever you stand on the cultural purview around each of those issues.
00:57:24.000And I would Also start to be open to the possibility that I personally may have misunderstood the cultural purview because where did I get it from?
00:58:06.000This is what's taken place in the last few years.
00:58:08.000The legacy media's control of the minds of the population has been significantly challenged, reduced, castrated, annihilated perhaps even, and what we are experiencing now is an attempt to reassert centralised power.
00:58:19.000The State Department then gave these tools to companies like Facebook and LinkedIn to target disfavoured media outlets.
00:58:25.000Through these and other methods during the 2020 election cycle and the COVID pandemic, the government-backed censorship industrial complex throttled millions of online posts, suppressing news traffic to news sites and undermined revenue streams for a host of outlets and influencers with disfavored or dissident views.
00:58:41.000Both the GDI and State Department's Global Engagement Center, GEC, developed censorship tools that included supposed fact-checking technologies, media literacy tools, media intelligence platforms, Social network mapping and machine learning, artificial intelligence technology, all these tools are being deployed now to control information.
00:58:59.000All the censorship infrastructure described above is still intact, still functioning, and is firing on all cylinders right now ahead of the 2024 election.
00:59:09.000Is there one politician that is right now saying, I will dismantle this?
00:59:16.000You let me know in the comments and chat.
00:59:17.000This is a global problem that should be addressed.
00:59:19.000If anything, the censorship industrial complex is more robust than it was four years ago.
00:59:23.000Just last week, META's President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg, boasted on CNBC that he currently has some 40,000 employees, which is nearly 60% of META's entire workforce tasked with censoring speech on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
00:59:37.000Clegg also claimed META has spent about $20 billion, including $5 billion in the last year, on censorship efforts.
00:59:43.000Or what he euphemistically called election integrity.
00:59:46.000Sometimes you wonder where power is now situated and a paragraph like that tells you where power has gone.
00:59:52.000If politicians seem replaceable and interchangeable, if democracy seems intransigent, turgid and static, where is power?
01:00:00.000Well, it's there when you've got billions being spent on controlling information that directs the outcome of elections and even beyond that, global policies.
01:00:10.000Remember that Facebook infamously censored the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020 at the behest of the FBI.
01:00:15.000With 40,000 employees now charged with censoring hate speech and ensuring election integrity, we can be fairly certain that if another Hunter Biden laptop story comes along this election cycle, it too will be quashed by the censors.
01:00:28.000Why exactly is our government doing this?
01:00:31.000It's not merely a partisan preference for ensuring Democrats stay in power, but something deeper and more insidious.
01:00:36.000To circle back to Carlson's interview with Benz, it's because the national security state has come to regard democracy not as the will of the people expressed for elections, but as the constellation of government agencies, government-backed institutions, corporations, media outlets and non-profit groups.
01:00:50.000Protecting democracy in this view means protecting these institutions from the people they were putatively meant to serve.
01:00:56.000It's almost like over a broader time frame, there's been a return to something like an aristocracy or even a monarchy or oligarchy.
01:01:03.000There was a sort of a brief blip where you had, oh, this is representative democracy.
01:01:07.000Here are these separate states and cities that might all interdependently be run by elected councils and officials and true democracy could be achieved.
01:01:15.000That idea has been crushed by a broader trend towards, let's centralise power, let's tell people they've got democracy, but what we've got is total control.
01:01:23.000What's being described there is total control.
01:01:25.000As Benz at one point says in the interview, the relationship between the managers of the American empire and the citizens of the American homeland has broken down.
01:01:32.000And that's played itself out in the story of the censorship industry.
01:01:36.000I think what we have there between that interview and this article is a good understanding, as we are likely to achieve, of what's happening in the world right now.
01:01:45.000The potential for information, for dissent, for diverse opinions, for conversation, for discourse, discussion, contradiction, democracy, power, as local as the individual, as diverse as the planet, has exploded into a set of systems that were simply not ready for it.
01:01:59.000And we're now witnessing those systems try to regain control, introducing new laws to regain control, exerting new influence over the companies that have access to all of us, i.e.
01:02:09.000the big tech and social media platforms that we all now use as part of everyday life.
01:02:13.000We are nothing less than a war for the control of our minds and our reality is taking place and all of us are somehow confined to very narrow bandwidths of conversation.
01:02:23.000Little issues here or there, local or topical, or what about this and should that have happened and what about this?
01:02:28.000When in fact what we all need to collectively do is take a broader perspective together and say the people I disagree with on the local and individual level have so much more in common with me than these vast institutions that are attempting to assert
01:02:43.000And unless we find ways together of forming a collective manifesto,
01:02:46.000of demanding a decentralised but unified opposition to the problem of globalism
01:02:51.000and the global censorship required to achieve it, as outlined in these two pieces,
01:02:55.000then we're going to be in real serious trouble.
01:02:57.000So get ready to make some new alliances right now.
01:03:00.000Get ready to, as they used to say, hold your nose and form friendships and alliances with cultural groups, ideas even, that you might not agree with because the alternative is plainly in sight now.
01:03:11.000It's a centralised technocracy where a cadre of experts, powerful institutions, have near total control, executed through technology in forms of social credit scores, digital currencies, absolute control of media, that is absolutely unprecedented.
01:03:25.000And while we're all distracted Oh no, are these people like new Nazis or populists or is that hate speech?
01:03:30.000They are quietly but very deftly like a sliding saber slicing right through the heart of everything that we're supposed to hold dear.
01:03:39.000Freedom of speech, representative systems of government.
01:03:42.000We're going to lose all of it unless we wake up now.
01:04:50.000The legacy media insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Ukraine is winning that war they're in with nuclear power, And well-led country by an old-school tyrant who's very, very confident in himself.
01:07:50.000Uh, alright, well listen, it's gonna be a proper good interview.
01:07:53.000Anyway, you can join it and improve it, perhaps, with a little thing called Research.
01:07:57.000As well as that, if you're an Awakened Wonder, you get access to the additional content we make each week, like my, uh, Amy Winehouse thing.
01:08:04.000There's a new movie about Amy Winehouse that's being celebrated in the mainstream media.
01:08:08.000I wonder if they will remember to point out that they contributed to her death by vilifying her continually and treating her like shit while she was alive.