In this episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand: The Truth Behind Mainstream Media Narratives, we take a look at what the world wants you to be looking at. Is it balloons? Is it UFOs? Or is it the Super Bowl? And who's the real hero of the Superbowl? Plus, a new interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh about his story about the Nord Stream pipeline. Stay Free with Russell Brand is on all of the social medias, if you search for it, you'll find us. Stay Free, wherever you're watching this, we do the whole show, exclusively on Rumble, because we are granted the ability to speak freely so we can bring people together from across the spectrum, in and from the peripheries, to confront centralised power. And what does power want you thinking about today? Ballooning? Or UFOs? Later in the show, we'll be talking about that, and we ll be meeting James Schneider, a political organiser whose sworn intention is to disrupt the establishment. We ll be talking to him about new democratic models and methods, and ways we can disrupt the existing power. Then, once we click over to Rumble, we ll have the first interview with the Pulitzer Prize winning conspiracy theorist, journalist, whatever they are now, with the first episode of his new show, with Jocko Willink on the show. Stay free, you're listening to Stay Free! and stay tuned in to Rumble! . stay free, stay free! - Russell Brand. - The Eternally grateful! - EJude - - . . . - Stay Free - Stay free! - - Thank you, You're Woke, Elegant, Eternally Grateful, - Elyssa - Elisha - Thank you for listening, Elyss - ? -Elliott - , & EJ - EJ, EJ & Elyss, , EJ and EJ ( ) - Russell Brand - ( ) - Ollie, Elyss - and Elyss ( ) . , and Ej, Ej ( ) & Ej( ) - Ej & EK ( ) EJ&E ( ) , and JK ( ). ( ), EJK ( , J.J. ( ), and EZY ( ) ( ) ? .
00:00:01.000Thanks for joining us today on Stay Free with Russell Brand, bringing you the truth behind mainstream media narratives and giving you a different, hopefully illuminating and encouraging perspective on global events.
00:00:13.000Wherever you're watching this right now, we do the whole show.
00:00:16.000Exclusively on Rumble because we are granted the ability to speak freely so we can bring people together from across the spectrum in and from the peripheries to confront centralised power.
00:00:27.000And what does centralised power want you thinking about today?
00:00:33.000Later in the show we'll be talking about that and we'll be meeting James Schneider, who's a political organiser whose sworn intention is to disrupt the establishment.
00:00:41.000We'll be talking to him about new democratic models and methods and ways we can disrupt the aforementioned power.
00:00:48.000Then, once we click over just onto Rumble, we'll be having the first interview that Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize winning conspiracy theorist, journalist, You know, conspiracy theorists, whatever they are now, about his story about the Nord Stream pipeline.
00:01:01.000He revealed that it was allegedly, allegedly, I've got a button that says that.
00:01:27.000Because we're also Pulitzer Prize winning conspiracy theorists ourselves.
00:01:30.000That's how you're taking this are you?
00:01:31.000I see this as us Pulitzer Prize winning journalists have got to stick together in our task of bringing the mainstream media down.
00:01:40.000Presenting people with the opportunity to confront power.
00:01:43.000What we're talking about actually in this episode is where your attention is being directed and what you actually should be looking at.
00:01:50.000The world wants you looking up into the skies at balloons or potentially UFOs.
00:01:55.000We'll have Jeremy Corbell on the show talking about recent deep state disclosures around UFOs so we can get some sort of handle on that stuff.
00:02:02.000Let us know if that's an interview you're interested in.
00:02:05.000What fascinates me is the way that we're being invited to observe particular narratives.
00:02:09.000I reckon we're at the point we were at maybe five, ten years ago with the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, that we're seeing the incremental movement towards hostilities with China, and they're giving us almost childlike, identifiable images of infringement and attack.
00:02:31.000And certainly, we're not including in the narrative the ongoing encroachment of Chinese territories by US military bases getting into their waters.
00:02:42.000What you've been invited to look at are potential external threats at a time where there's a lot of domestic dissatisfaction in the United States, when Biden's approval ratings are falling, as may his bowels be.
00:04:40.000The point of dance, dance in a sense is about fertility, expression of human potency, confluence, grace, movement, semiotic and semantic power that ain't issued verbally.
00:05:08.000So that's when you see Clip Clop marching down your street, scaring himself with his own bullet-y grooming, you'll go, I like that guy, I see him at the Super Bowl, he's a friend of mine.
00:05:18.000So we're being invited not to look at the robotisation, the militarisation of the police force, the normalisation of robots, you're being invited to look at what?
00:05:30.000You remember it, that film, Don't Look Up.
00:05:32.000Well, We're in a situation that's similar to that, because that was obviously a film about where people were not looking at an impending disaster.
00:05:37.000It was written by David Sirota, a friend of the show, and is sort of a metaphor for climate change and perhaps other looming catastrophes.
00:05:43.000Well, now what you're being invited to do is do look up.
00:05:56.000Don't start looking sub-aquatically about what them Navy SEALs are doing to that pipeline.
00:06:00.000That's what we'll be talking to Seymour Hersh about a little later.
00:06:03.000Don't be looking down there in the depths, down in the fathomy places.
00:06:07.000Don't look at the Pentagon and the government of your country, United States of America, campaigning to maintain their budgets at a time where interest in the Ukraine war is starting to wane, where new narratives are starting to emerge.
00:06:19.000People are starting to see that a lot of economic interests are being met, i.e.
00:06:22.000the Black Rock reconstruction, digitalization of Ukraine stuff,
00:06:26.000the military industrial complex and their endless profiteering,
00:06:28.000the $100 billion package that's already been issued.
00:06:31.000Don't start looking at the increasing tensions between the US and China and the US's role in that.
00:06:38.000And don't look at Biden's constantly tumbling popularity and evident ineptitude.
00:07:11.000Andrea, before it was shot down, pilots were able to get close enough to that unknown object to see that it was unmanned and drifting in the wind.
00:07:20.000But there is still a lot of Why is he talking so poetically about that?
00:07:28.000Why is he politicizing that balloon so much?
00:07:31.000Yeah, also the way that they're already tying the balloon and these UFOs, if that's what they are, together is amazing because it's basically a way of kind of saying UFOs are scary.
00:08:02.000So this news report concentrates on, this is a sort of mysterious thing, As we all know, these are common practices to have various weather balloons and even spying balloons.
00:08:20.000It's not a cause for escalation of tensions.
00:08:23.000Unless, of course, you want to escalate tensions because people are getting a bit sick and tired of the lethal aid packages that go, curiously, via the Pentagon.
00:08:31.000You might think, oh, if you want to help Ukrainian people, why don't you give that money in humanitarian aid directly to the Ukraine?
00:08:36.000Why don't you broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine rather than disrupting them?
00:08:41.000No, it's curious that that aid passes via the military-industrial complex.
00:08:45.000I think up to 70% of weapons don't even reach their destinations.
00:08:48.000It's not confusing and complex, it's...
00:08:52.000Also, let's not rule this out, Biden gets to posture on temporary AstroTurf rouge carpets as a commander-in-chief leader with Washingtonian prestige, as someone with some military clout shooting a balloon out of the sky.
00:09:59.000Look at the way that the mainstream media presents you with information.
00:10:02.000You'll all be familiar with Corrine Jean-Pierre.
00:10:04.000She's the White House Press Secretary.
00:10:07.000Look at how She goes on mainstream media for a softball interview where, you know, this is an inviting mainstream environment where people are going to facilitate that kind of narrative.
00:10:18.000You feel like, how does she mess this up so badly?
00:10:21.000If I was briefing her, I'd say, right, OK, you're going on mainstream news.
00:11:15.000It's alright though, she doesn't go on a job like Press Secretary or anything.
00:11:18.000So your job doesn't involve being the interface between the public and the media and the government, does it?
00:11:23.000Oh, yeah, that's actually all my job is now talking about the media's intervention and role in presenting news stories.
00:11:31.000We're fascinated by the Project Veritas James O'Keefe story.
00:11:35.000Now, obviously, remember, we are, broadly speaking, a transcendent news organization interested in true democracy and moving beyond the old labels of left and right so that we can create a different type of populism, new coalitions, Whether you have a traditional identity or a progressive identity, if you have democratic control over your own community, then you don't need to worry about other people's lifestyles and traditions and orthodoxies or lack thereof.
00:12:02.000As long as we're all locked together in a cultural war, how can we form the alliances that are necessary to displace and disrupt centralised power?
00:12:09.000Something we were talking to James Snyder, our guest, about in a minute.
00:12:13.000If you're watching this on YouTube, we're going to have to click off in a second because we're bringing another Pull its prize-winning conspiracy theorist onto the show a little bit later, Seymour Hersh.
00:12:23.000But I just wanted to touch on this James O'Keefe story.
00:12:27.000James O'Keefe is in a lot of trouble there at Project Veritas.
00:12:30.000And even though it's an anti-establishment organisation, Gary, I suppose it still sits within conventional, would you call it libertarian, right-wing politics in terms of its funding?
00:12:40.000I guess they are still there to make profits, you would imagine.
00:12:43.000And when profits are put at risk by people getting a bit angry about the kind of stuff, it just shows the power.
00:12:49.000I mean, look, if this is linked, it just seems odd that at a time when people are coming out and saying that he's a bully at work, which obviously no one likes a bully at work, but why is this happening now?
00:12:57.000He's literally just revealed these things about Pfizer, which we don't know whether they're true or not.
00:13:02.000Fascinating stories about Pfizer, if they are true.
00:13:04.000And of course, while we're still on YouTube, we have to be careful.
00:13:07.000Shall we come off YouTube now and then get right into this?
00:13:09.000Because I can't believe the way that Rolling Stone, who used to be regarded as an anti-establishment, radical magazine, I seem to remember that I adorned the cover once.
00:13:51.000Directed evolution could, with a couple of tweaks, become mRNA, which is the sort of thing they're involved in.
00:13:56.000It's one little bat microbe away from becoming mRNA.
00:13:59.000Basically what he was saying is that Pfizer were involved in a business of creating new versions of the virus in order to then create the solutions.
00:14:09.000Just so happens that the solutions are extremely profitable to Pfizer.
00:14:11.000And that's such a massive story, and that's so much more significant.
00:14:14.000Of course, being a bully in the workplace is horrible.
00:14:17.000I sometimes think, Gareth, simple human values ought to be enough for most of us without getting into particular ideologies.
00:14:24.000Sesame Street values, as some call them.
00:14:25.000If you are kind, That means you'll be kind to people regardless of what their beliefs are.
00:14:31.000Like the basic principle of be kind, be kind, are you being kind, are you being kind?
00:14:34.000These are some things I have conversations I have to have in my own mad head.
00:14:36.000But some of the things that old James O'Keefe was doing at work were quite funny.
00:14:40.000According to one complaint, he took a sandwich from a pregnant woman because he was hungry.
00:16:13.000Let's go back to the last... Yeah, because the funniest thing is, like, when you're trying to bring down James O'Keefe, who sounds like, you know, who knows, because these are, at the moment, simply claims.
00:17:44.000So even if this dude ain't great, and certainly it seems if they're a right-wing organisation, their politics are different from our politics, but we believe left, right, We should unite.
00:18:21.000We've been speaking to Christian Smalls, the leader of the union in the United States,
00:18:26.000and what struck me about him is the way that his perspective was transcendent of the ordinary
00:18:30.000left-right divides that sometimes prohibit, I think, advancement in a political landscape
00:18:36.000that seems to be increasingly defined by centralism versus the periphery.
00:18:41.000How do you think we can order democracy to make it more meaningful so that people have more investment in democratic process?
00:18:48.000How can dissent be incorporated into this process when you have now mostly central political parties that, broadly speaking, agree with one another and are not representing the interests of ordinary people, whether that's in our country, the UK or America or wherever else, mate?
00:19:03.000So I think the point that you're making, which is right, is that ordinary people have basically the same interests and want, broadly speaking, the same things.
00:19:12.000Some people have some differences this way and the other way, and they don't have power in their lives to do that.
00:19:17.000So take, if you're an Amazon worker at work, you're monitored by an algorithm which knows everything about what breaks you're taking, how much you're lifting, how far you're walking, all of that stuff.
00:19:28.000You don't have any control over your life.
00:19:31.000So what is, I think, important, what most people want, what people feel is missing, is that control and is that democracy in their lives.
00:19:39.000So that goes for, you know, if you're a striking nurse now, if you're an Amazon worker, if you're worried about climate change or whatever that might be, because you don't have control in your life, you can't do anything about it.
00:19:51.000So the thing to do It's for people who are in the same type of situation to get together to work with each other against whatever power they're confronted with.
00:20:00.000So that means if you're a worker with other people that you work with, because you've got the same boss, you can deal with them.
00:20:06.000If you're a tenant, work with other tenants so you can deal with landlords.
00:20:10.000If you're paying rip-off energy bills, work with other people who are paying or can't pay their rip-off energy bills.
00:20:17.000And together, bit by bit, and And, you know, we can build our own power and we, you know, that's not going to be, there's no simple solution.
00:20:25.000You can't just elect one party and everything will be better.
00:20:29.000And also has to happen on a global scale, not just in our own countries, because there's huge systems of power and control, which keeps some people rich and particularly hurt most of the countries on earth.
00:20:41.000And it's clear that those powers now are globalist.
00:20:45.000They are ultimately transcendent of national sovereignty.
00:20:50.000We talk a lot about how organisations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation exert incredible control over another unelected organisation like the WHO, how WEF policies keep finding their way into national governments and how the pandemic period Broadly speaking, exacerbated that trend.
00:21:08.000Now we're talking about the way that Amazon treats its workers generally.
00:21:11.000Now that Amazon are, I think, the ninth, if Amazon were a nation, they'd be the ninth most powerful nation in the world as I understand it.
00:21:16.000And in the post-war Ukraine environment, there's an assumption that the digitalization of Ukraine is is utmost among their goals. We get this sense that people
00:21:24.000are piloting these modalities, piloting new ways of surveillance, digital ID scores,
00:21:30.000tracking people, new methods for a certain control. And I liked the way you described the
00:21:34.000necessity for forming new alliances placed perhaps on community where you live or unions around
00:21:40.000the way that you work and indeed the way that various unions can come together in
00:21:45.000What we essentially need, it sounds like you're saying to me, James, is new ways of forming alliances.
00:21:50.000I know there are groups like Don't Pay UK in our country that are trying to confront the energy crisis at a time where Shell and BP are experiencing record profits at a time where the Nord Stream pipeline has been blown up, seemingly in accordance with an agenda that the United States of America have to control the natural gas market which they've explicitly
00:22:09.000talked about though I have make no claims to access to information that nobody
00:22:13.000else has. How do you see the role of unions around big tech companies like
00:22:18.000Amazon and even some of the movements around health workers that are happening
00:22:22.000in our country the UK being influential for global solidarity movements for
00:22:28.000I mean, these are new things, but they're also old things.
00:22:31.000The ways in which people have stood up and resisted power and oppression throughout history are basically the same kinds of ways.
00:22:38.000They're people who have the same interests coming together to fight back and then forming alliances with other groups of people who are doing the same thing.
00:22:47.000And I think, you know, if we're going to get substantial change in this country, in Britain, that's going to be in large part due to the trade unions and the workers who right now are saying, I don't want a pay cut.
00:23:00.000I don't want to have lower living standards.
00:23:56.000If it were easy, it would have already happened.
00:23:58.000But the interests of the many, as it were, are so much more aligned.
00:24:04.000It's interesting how much work goes into keeping these divisions entrenched.
00:24:19.000It's also fascinating working in the media space, James, to see how a figure like Bernie Sanders, who's strongly, of course, connected to the left wing, one might say, of the Democrat Party, is now Right in on Fox News, how it's conventional to see a traditional or conventional right wing space like Fox News talking about demonopolization, establishment corruption.
00:24:41.000And we've had guests on this show from Adam Curtis to Martin Goury talk about how these labels are becoming increasingly redundant as establishment power of the in the United States of the Democrat left comes alloyed to the kind of financial interests that you know, at the time of the Iraq war would have been, we
00:24:59.000all knew what Dick Cheney, Bush, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, we all understood, oh, what it is, is
00:25:05.000they're agitating for conflict, then they profit from that conflict, then they profit from
00:25:09.000the reconstruction. Similarly, and much more anecdotal and on a more parochial scale, like
00:25:15.000I live in an area that is conventional, what you might call conservative.
00:25:19.000That's, I guess, Republican in your language.
00:25:22.000And we went to a sort of an anti-water protest because the water facilities where I live are owned by QA and China and various foreign investors.
00:25:33.000And they are indeed pumping raw sewage into the rivers because it's too expensive or not profitable enough
00:25:40.000to spend money on filtration systems that exist that would mean that it's not necessary
00:26:02.000We don't have it in a Labour Party led by Keir Starmer, I wouldn't imagine.
00:26:07.000So do you think this is a time for the organisation of new political movements and how ought they be framed, James?
00:26:14.000The leader of Tanzania's independence, Julius Nyeri, said the US is also a one party state, but just with traditional American exuberance, they have two of them.
00:26:26.000And we've got, you know, not exactly the same, but we've got some problems like that here.
00:26:31.000And I think We do need big political movements, and they need to be movements of movements.
00:26:36.000They need to bring together your people from, you know, they might vote Conservative, but they're worried about the river.
00:26:43.000They want that to be managed properly.
00:27:16.000Then you build alliances, then you build solidarity.
00:27:19.000And I think once we've done some more of that, then we'll be able to have a political movement that can transform the country and go much further.
00:27:27.000Do you think that independent media is going to become increasingly necessary?
00:27:30.000It seems there's quite deep collaboration between most media spaces and conventional establishment-oriented politics in the manner that you described.
00:27:40.000Two parties in a one-party state, ultimately.
00:27:43.000What is the role and the significance of the media in disrupting these systems of governance that are becoming increasingly adept at nullifying dissent?
00:27:54.000The media's got a long-standing role in shaping public opinion.
00:27:59.000It's not perfect, it's not like it's completely planned by a small group of people, but they have a role in shaping public opinion and generally to the interest of the establishment.
00:28:08.000So places that give you a way in, whether that is independent media or the openings that do open up on the mainstream corporate media, although there are not very many of them, are extremely important to take.
00:28:20.000And also people doing things with each other.
00:28:23.000You know, one thing is watching something and that's good because you learn.
00:28:27.000But when you learn by doing, you learn through the experience of being part of something.
00:28:32.000That's also how, you know, so I find people will get way more education, for example, about what's going on with the water system by going down to the protests at a river or on a beach and talking to people.
00:28:47.000Then, of course, it's good to watch videos and read you know read books and all the rest of it that's that's great but I think if you can move people from passively finding out how the world works and how the world is generally not speaking not set up in their interest and move towards action then you get from just knowledge to actual power.
00:29:08.000That's good Yes, and also, as you say, finding new ways to formulate alliances, not being trapped in the conveniently placed silos that prevent us from finding new ways to work together.
00:29:22.000We've got Christian Smalls, leader of the American Amazon movement, who I feel like, and we'll check this when he comes, maybe voted for Trump at some point.
00:29:29.000So it shows you that populism in the United States is an anti-establishment ideology, That is now appears to be coming from a surprising direction, although I know a lot of you will disagree with that.
00:29:42.000Let me know what you think in the stream and the chat.
00:29:45.000Now I can sense, Gareth, because I know you well, because I hear your breathing patterns change, that you want to say something.
00:29:56.000I think what he said, I remember when Christian was on, and he was saying that a lot of the people that he had to kind of convince to come along with him on, you know, the unionization around Amazon were Republicans, were Trump voters, were people from all backgrounds.
00:30:09.000He was saying that there were, you know, lots of kind of poor people he had to bring together.
00:30:13.000Different gender identities, he was saying.
00:30:15.000And he was saying that that was what worked in the end.
00:30:19.000Because everyone was getting fucked over by Amazon.
00:30:22.000But do you think that there's obviously this issue at the moment when you're talking about coming together and actually doing something, tackling some of these issues, there's obviously these protest laws that are coming in at the moment worldwide.
00:30:33.000Is that as a kind of reaction to the kind of things that you're talking about?
00:30:37.000Yeah, so I want to say one other thing, just to come to the protest thing.
00:30:41.000When a system of control starts to break down, and that's what we're seeing, that's what we've been living through since 2008, the system is struggling to reproduce itself.
00:30:55.000In the economy with debt and with consent.
00:30:57.000People don't trust the system in the way that they used to 20, 25 years ago.
00:31:03.000And either you can make people's, from the perspective of the system, you can make enough people's lives better that you gain consent.
00:31:12.000Or you have to police it much more aggressively.
00:31:13.000And obviously, they don't have any plans to make people's lives better.
00:31:16.000So policing is going to get going to get, you know, stricter, more aggressive, shut down dissent, shut down protest.
00:31:23.000But one thing I want to say about this, you know, left, right pop this point that you're making.
00:31:49.000It gives the biggest, you know, handout to corporations in the history of the US.
00:31:54.000He says, I'm standing with the people, but then he stands basically with his billionaire mates in his actual policies.
00:32:01.000I think that's the thing that you have to, you have to look at.
00:32:03.000I think the thing that in the, in the, sorry, carry on.
00:32:06.000Ultimately these things will become measurable in policy and economics.
00:32:09.000How did these, the measures of the Trump regime, not regime, era, how did they affect your life?
00:32:16.000Did things improve for you personally or was it more of an emotional catharsis?
00:32:20.000I'm so fascinated in what it must have been like to live in that country during that period.
00:32:24.000Certainly I would agree with you that the establishment are not offering solutions to the problems in your life because they don't care, because it's not a bug or an error, it's a feature.
00:32:33.000You're going to find and follow James on Twitter at SchneiderHome.
00:32:38.000We'll get to talk about chess on another occasion.
00:32:40.000Now, we've got a fantastic Pulitzer Prize winning conspiracy theorist joining, sorry, journalist joining us in a matter of seconds.
00:32:48.000But before we talk about the Nord Stream pipeline and how that narrative shifted, the ludicrous tricks and skullduggery that was at play during that narrative, Joe Biden's announcement, believe me, we will stop them.
00:33:33.000The evolution on the Nord Stream Pipeline story is a piece of reporting from a very credible Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who, get ready, is about to be called a conspiracy theorist, a whack job and condemned For whatever they can find.
00:33:55.000The bombing of the Nord Stream underwater gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea was a covert operation ordered by the White House and carried out by the CIA, a report by a veteran investigative journalist claims.
00:34:06.000And we all knew that anyway, because it was bloody obvious.
00:34:10.000Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, has claimed that US deep sea divers using a NATO military exercise as a cover planted mines along the pipelines that were later detonated remotely, as Jocko Willink said when he was on our show about three months ago.
00:34:25.000Once hailed the greatest American investigative reporter, Hirsch, 85, who broke stories such as the mass murder of 500 civilians at Mai Le in Vietnam and the torture of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, said that the black op was ordered by President Biden and that the attack was carried out by the CIA in cooperation with Norway.
00:34:45.000Many of us were discussing this possibility just because it seemed plausible, just because it had been explicitly stated that the US had an agenda to take over trade of natural gas between Russia and Europe, that they saw that as a market that they should own.
00:34:59.000Because Joe Biden in public said, well, I tell you, we'll blow up that pipeline.
00:35:03.000Just because Condoleezza Rice about 20 years ago explicitly said, You simply want to change the structure of energy dependence.
00:35:11.000You want to depend more on the North American energy platform, the tremendous bounty of oil and gas that we're finding in North America.
00:35:20.000You want to have pipelines that don't go through Ukraine and Russia.
00:35:24.000For years we've tried to get the Europeans to be interested in different pipeline routes.
00:35:30.000I suppose it wouldn't be a big deal were it not for the fact that the whole thing is framed by a war that we're continually told is humanitarian when every day new evidence emerges that it is financially motivated, that Zelensky and his government have unusual financial relationships, that Ukraine is corrupt, that it was okay to say Ukraine was corrupt before the start of this war, peace deals have been suggested and then sabotaged until it's convenient and enough profit's been extracted.
00:35:55.000It just goes on and on and on Until in the end you think, well, what is it we're being told right now that's not true?
00:36:01.000Because we could start just adjusting a bit more quickly.
00:36:30.000Of course now we all know that was unethical.
00:36:32.000Necessary war that wasn't a mad giddy proxy war carried out by lunatic corrupt presidents and unnecessarily draining American lives and resources and wasting the life of the good people of Vietnam.
00:36:45.000And what about this Abu Ghraib prison?
00:36:47.000Oh, what a lot of hocus pocus that turned out.
00:36:51.000Complaining about conditions in Abu Ghraib, but may I ask, how are we to reform these Iraqis if we don't attach electrodes to their genitals?
00:36:58.000So Seymour Hersh, with his crazy stories about Vietnam and Abu Ghraib, is just some sort of nutcase.
00:37:04.000He should have his own channel on Rumble.
00:37:07.000We're joined now by Seymour Hersh who's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who already would have seen the ineptitude of that link and probably been astonished by the standards and how they've fallen in media in the last 10 or 20 years.
00:37:21.000We're speaking to Seymour Hersh because of his recent Substack article I'm glad to be here, I think.
00:37:28.000which of course suggests that the US involvement was contrary to their very public denial and
00:37:34.000even why the denial itself was significant in avoiding congressional permission. It's a fantastic
00:37:39.000piece of writing from a prize-winning journalist. It's an honor to have you, Seymour. Thanks for
00:37:44.000joining us. I'm glad to be here, I think. Let me ask you a question. Yes. What's your hat?
00:37:49.000It's probably attention-seeking on some level, Seymour.
00:37:54.000I've come from the world of entertainment, probably haven't entirely let go of the idea that I'm sort of a physical representation of the radical stance that I take in my own journalism.
00:38:19.000As I told one of your aides just a minute ago by the Condoleezza Rice quote and I'm my pay my pay for this this performance here will be somebody send me a link to that we will send that to you it's not it's it's It's you're ahead of the curve with that idea.
00:38:39.000But that's that's been a prominent theme in the American conversations about oil.
00:38:47.000And it is a fact that Norway which did help us has more than doubled the amount of oil natural gas rather is shipping out to Western Europe.
00:38:56.000It had about 9 or 10 percent its way up.
00:38:59.000And so you can't work, you can never cut out mercantile interests, but there were probably much more immediate interests of war in Ukraine, etc, etc.
00:39:08.000But that's a fascinating point that you were making.
00:39:11.000Anyway, so I got something out of this.
00:41:00.000look, you're asking-- you're throwing the ball to me.
00:41:04.000You know, this is, this is all I brood about a lot because I worked at the New York Times in the seventies and, and had a great time, was never sort of blocked from writing stuff.
00:41:19.000The bottom line is that I think what a secret source now is for the people, many of the people who write for the major newspapers, is a press secretary who says, come over here, I'll tell you something a little different than I've told the other guys.
00:41:36.000I just don't understand why they're not jumping on certain stories.
00:41:39.000Certainly this story is, I could just tell you a friend of mine, I have a wonderful old friend who escaped from the Middle East, became an oil man, became very rich and very happy, living in France now.
00:41:50.000He wrote me after this, after the story, and he said, he said, oh, oh Sai, he said, my nickname, he said, you have become a master in the deconstruction of the obvious.
00:42:01.000I mean, what was so hard about this story?
00:42:04.000We know Russia didn't do it, because if they wanted to, they could turn a valve.
00:42:08.000And so, I guess, is Macedonia a member of the NATO?
00:42:26.000My old newspaper, the New York Times, to which I probably went, I did all sorts of stuff on the CIA and Watergate and Vietnam for them, hasn't touched the story.
00:42:37.000Neither has the Washington Post, which is another two great main sheets.
00:42:42.000I don't think the Wall Street Journal has.
00:42:43.000The rest of the country, some people have.
00:43:02.000And if we write something critical of—we're now in the Biden corner, rather.
00:43:06.000If we publish something critical of Biden, we might be leading ourselves open to more Republicans, the guy in Florida, etc., the scientist.
00:43:17.000But it can't just be about the fact that I don't name sources.
00:43:21.000I spent, you know, nine years at the New York Times writing about the CIA going after Allende and going, you know, and all that stuff, killing people abroad without naming sources.
00:43:31.000I mean, you know, either trust what I do or you don't.
00:43:33.000Yes, I know that you also wrote about Abu Ghraib, significant revelations there, and about the mass murders in Vietnam of civilians.
00:43:42.000And the banalization of the media space is a theme that we touch upon frequently, the infantilization of us as the audience class.
00:43:53.000Even with the current escalation of tensions between the USA and China through the sanctions around semiconductors and of course the rather more visually stimulating and sensational story that accompanies the balloon and indeed the shooting down of the balloon.
00:44:20.000Of course, they've been there forever.
00:44:24.000Maybe you could argue they could take photographs of what a satellite can see much better.
00:44:28.000But basically, the last wave of the unnamed car like with American press so full of it.
00:44:34.000It turns out the federal government has a contract with the meteorology department or whatever it is, weather department at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, and that is one cold place.
00:44:53.000And over the Arctic Circle, the Arctic Circle is a Everybody flies the polar route from Asia to America and there's no weather station there.
00:45:04.000So the university has these little vehicles that goes and reports.
00:45:10.000Pilots want to know if there's any unusual weather going on.
00:45:45.000Whether they're going to talk about it in the next couple of weeks.
00:45:48.000And we've put about, what, Honestly, I don't know how many hundreds of billions of dollars into a new fighter, the F-22, that's coming online.
00:46:56.000We kill the balloon and that's worth a couple couple, you know, few hundred billion dollars for a plane.
00:47:02.000Yeah, a small price to pay for dispatching some hydrogen and some helium.
00:47:07.000It's over-the-top, it's over-the-top crazy, that's all I can tell you.
00:47:10.000How do you feel then about the context that has to be said frames the Nord Stream Pipeline story, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the years of infringement upon former Soviet territories, the 2014... You're not allowed to say that!
00:47:28.000How dare you say that, that there might have been reason Behind, you know, the language used.
00:47:34.000The language, it was done in 1990, the first agreement not to go east, but when East Germany joined West Germany, that was in NATO.
00:47:43.000We wanted to make the combined country, and don't forget, the Germans had a real problem because after World War II, when they wanted to get back into civilization and be accepted by other countries, get into international groups like NATO, they spent a long time murdering people in Western Europe and bombing it and destroying it.
00:48:02.000And so Willy Brandt was the guy that said, we're going to be a money bank for you guys.
00:48:17.000He got that started for all of his faults.
00:48:19.000And so in 1990, when they joined, Gorbachev agreed to let this unified Germany into NATO and the price was a commitment by us in writing that I have a um I live in Washington so I know people I have a friend that has access to the classified part of the embassy and our embassy in Bonn and he ran him he went and read the cables for me there's nothing fantastic about it the language used by our Secretary of State James Baker was the equivalent the equivalent in the in the documents
00:48:50.000The agreement we made with the Corbett shop it wasn't a treaty but it was an understanding not one inch we will not go one inch east and then we've now NATO was initially was 19 when it was set up in 69 49 rather it's now what about 170 countries Macedonia you know stuff like that I'm exaggerating but you know NATO is a far cry from what we It's not Europe anymore.
00:49:23.000And then we start putting missiles in the border in Poland that we claim are defensive, but in a half a day they can be turned into offensive weapons.
00:49:41.000So, what I hate to see in the paper, in Mildew's paper, for example, they keep on describing the Russian attack as being without provocation, unprovoked.
00:49:55.000I'm very troubled by my president and his immediate foreign national security team, Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland, whose husband He's one of the leading neocons who helped convince Dick Cheney that the solution to 9-11 and Al-Qaeda was to attack Iraq.
00:50:19.000One of the great non-existence relations.
00:50:24.000But anyway, those three, I call them Winkum, Blinkum, and Nod.
00:50:28.000Nod, I don't know if you have that child story there, but we have it in our country.
00:50:33.000The first thing they do is they meet the Secretary of State in Alaska with the Chinese and start telling the Chinese what to do about their own domestic problems.
00:51:45.000So Germany always had the chance option of opening up the pipeline anytime they wanted.
00:51:50.000And who cares about the pipeline in summer?
00:51:53.000But comes fall, comes winter, and that's when you're going to need it.
00:51:58.000The Russian natural gas has been supplying Germany and Western Europe with cheap gas for, what, a dozen years, and the economy's boomed based on cheap gas.
00:52:10.000Now, uh europe suffering it's getting cold they had a mild winter but it's getting very cold now the leading companies are all getting the price of gas is going up enormously companies like basf which is the largest chemical company in germany in the world has been talking to china about maybe moving some assets there the consequences of knocking out the pipeline economically are disastrous uh as again as you said norway's getting more gas and norway was a big player in us with the project but the key
00:52:44.000The key thing is, when the president told the intelligence community, I want this, I want this, I want to see if I have an option, I think the thought of, in my understanding was, the thought of the community was, we're going to do what the, we do what the president wants.
00:53:00.000That's what, that's the whole idea of having a CIA.
00:53:03.000I mean, if you're the President of the United States right now, this guy can't get a thing through Congress.
00:53:08.000But tomorrow, if he wants to, he can take a walk in the Rose Garden with the CIA director and somebody can get hurt the next day.
00:53:13.000That makes you feel pretty good, particularly if you can't have your way anywhere else.
00:53:17.000And so, I mean, that's one of the reasons I think the CIA is a very dangerous community, but full of a lot of smart people.
00:53:25.000Anyway, it was always to be an option.
00:53:28.000And what happened is, he didn't exercise it.
00:53:32.000They were going to do it at one point when they had cover in the summer.
00:53:35.000They had cover because of a, there was a big, the Baltic Sea is not, there's no oil there.
00:53:42.000And the idea of having a bunch of deep sea divers start digging around would have been exposed any problem, any thought of getting away with taking out the pipelines.
00:53:52.000It just would have been too obvious, too seen.
00:53:54.000But there was an exercise, NATO exercise last summer, there's been one every summer, For 22 years now in the Baltic, and then maybe you could slide it in then.
00:54:09.000And by that time, the community itself had thought there was no reason to do it anymore.
00:54:15.000You know, it was there as a potential threat, but he'd already started the war.
00:54:20.000And by September, the one thing that was interesting, I've always been among a group of journalists and people in the community have been very skeptical about the chances of Ukraine to win a war against Russia.
00:54:35.000You know, if you know the history, when in Stalingrad, when the Germans got their great defeat, the Russians were losing 2,400 dead and wounded every four hours in the final days of the battle, and one just kept on They are tough.
00:54:53.000So far, in the war against Ukraine, I'm sure in the beginning it's correct that Putin or his generals underestimated the willingness of the Ukrainians to commit hara-kiri, as they have been.
00:55:04.000But by September, it was clear there was real trouble.
00:55:07.000Among other things, the corruption was so wild among the top, even including Zelensky.
00:55:12.000They were all fighting for what percentage of the money they're going to steal.
00:55:15.000There was a lot of fighting and brooding about that, even today.
00:55:39.000He's throwing in, for whatever he can, the fear he had was that since Germany controlled the new pipeline, Nord Stream 2, the one that was just built and was just stopped, they just finished it in 2020.
00:56:14.000And anyway, and that's what bubbled up.
00:56:15.000It wasn't pumping any, it just had, just stored there, would have been perfectly safe.
00:56:21.000And so I guess Biden's thought was, I want to keep any possibility that the Germans and the rest of the Western Union, which is going to start getting cold, he did it in late September, will open up the pipeline and then be at the mercy of Russia.
00:56:41.000In other words, the way they put it, that pipeline, the Russian gas, was a weapon for the Russians.
00:56:51.000And once you took away that weapon, West Germany, if West Germany cannot open up the pipeline anymore, Germany rather, and the European allies of NATO, well, then they'll keep on supporting us in the war.
00:57:05.000They won't have the option of saying, we quit.
00:57:07.000We'd rather have Russian gas than join you in a war that you can't win.
00:57:11.000And that's what I think the dominant thinking was.
00:58:30.000A short time ago you could rely on an organisation like the New York Times for anti-establishment, radical reporting and now they are a mouthpiece of the establishment.
00:58:41.000It's interesting that the Ukrainian conflict, you know, much of the aid that's being offered to Ukraine passes from the Pentagon through the military-industrial complex.
00:58:50.000Many of those weapons and assets appear to be quite difficult to track.
00:58:55.000And in the subsequent post-war reconstruction of Ukraine, BlackRock are handling that, and there is an aim for 100% digitalization of Ukraine. So it's certainly, it seems to be a nexus of a
00:59:07.000great many stories that coalesce around corruption and globalism. A lot of people, by the
00:59:14.000way, I will tell you Seymour, on our online chat, adore you and your casual radicalism.
00:59:20.000Although I'm getting there's a lot of people saying you should not have said that about my hat.
00:59:24.000So it's, I think you've had a bit of a better time than you thought you would have.
00:59:28.000I think you've enjoyed this a little bit, haven't you?
00:59:31.000You started off a little bit curmudgeonly in your favourite chair that only you're allowed to sit in, but over time you've warmed to us, as if being warmed by beautiful Nord Stream gas.
01:00:50.000And when Biden wanted to whistleblown, blew it up, the people who in the community, we're talking about really the creme de creme, We're really appalled by it.
01:01:01.000They saw it as him making a political, him deciding I'm going to keep Germany and Western Europe cold and broke because I want to try and win this war in Ukraine, a war that he cannot win.
01:01:15.000The trick that you must, that I will tell you that I've learned in my long, as you said, many, many years, is presidents love wars because they're good for ratings.
01:02:45.000You can find Seymour's incredible work at seymourhersh.substack.com, where as well as providing investigative journalism, cruel barbs come for free.
01:02:57.000What I thought was that had basically the dynamic of the film Up and we were talking about balloons you know there's that that curmudgeonly old man and that little boy's called Russell in the film Up who's sort of like a little bit optimistic and stuff.
01:03:10.000Well but like he's obviously so brilliant Seymour Hersh and like even in the times when he was talking about all the times because they were they were the only newspaper that kind of published it in mainstream newspaper in this country and even in that they were like the veteran reporter now aged 82 like really trying to do him for like being over He's so brilliant!
01:03:27.000I feel like we've lost the basic and positive aspects of tribe and hierarchy, i.e.
01:03:35.000that person is an elder, so when you're talking to that person you think, oh well I'm dealing with someone I would speak respectfully to, like I would if it was in a family or community environment.
01:03:44.000when everything becomes this sort of mindless damning of patriarchy, even though there are doubtless
01:03:49.000corrupt things that have come from authoritative and power-oriented structures,
01:03:53.000doesn't mean that you lose regard for wisdom.
01:03:56.000That's how people move forward, is by like, all right, take on board what this dude's saying,
01:04:01.000then we'll apply it to what we've learned and what people younger than us are observing
01:04:05.000about the cultural trends and priorities of their generation.
01:04:10.000Every direction we have, I think, like a kind of de-racination and separation,
01:04:16.000that we're not connecting to one another, we're in good faith and in love.
01:04:19.000There's so much antipathy that in the end, to maintain their line, they have to start dismissing people that are clearly plausible, credible, and in the case of Seymour Hersh, I would argue, quite brilliant.
01:04:34.000And it's also like, that's the, yeah, like he was taking a piss of it, wasn't he?
01:05:00.000He'll be talking about the ongoing propaganda push for another world war, which I think, if you live on the world, isn't necessarily a good thing.
01:05:06.000If you want to join us for the show behind the show, Stay Connected, that we make every week, as well as getting access to my new stand-up special, When It Drops, become a member of the Locals community.
01:05:17.000They're on here right now, all of our friends on Locals.