In today's show, we re asking, is all news propaganda now? Is there any truth in it? And how can we trust anything we are reading in the news anymore? We re talking to Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss, two journalists who broke the Elon Musk story, and ask what's really going on at Tesla and what's going on with Elon Musk. We re also talking to Russell Brown, and the student circle, about what it's like to be a member of the Stay Free with Russell Brown community. Stay Free With Russell Brown is a show about journalism, politics, and pop culture, hosted by writer and podcaster Russell Brown. It's a space where we can speak freely and bring people together from across the political spectrum. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships/StayFreeWithRussellBrown and use the promo code RUMBLE at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase when you sign up for our newsletter! We are moving to Rumble, where we cultivate a new space where you can speak free, unfiltered and uncensored in order to bring more people together in a space that's truly democratic and non-corruptible. If you want to join our membership community, there's a link in the chat to show you can get even more stuff, join us on Rumble and get access to more stuff you can t get on Rumble. We'll be talking to some fantastic guests over the course of the coming up over the next few days, including: . . . . , and . We're looking forward to hearing your questions and tips on how you can help spread the word about what you can expect from us in the coming weeks. . And we'll be hearing from us on the future of this podcast. , and we'll see you in the next episode of StayFree with Russell's Stay Free, Stay Free. Stay free with Russell, Stay free! . Stay free, Russell Brown by RUMBER, Rumble, and much more! , Stay Free! - Rumble Thank you for listening to Stay Free Stuff? - Russell Brown and Rumble. - Caitie, Rumpel, Rupel, and RUPEL, Subscribe to stay free with us on this episode, and stay tuned for more episodes coming soon!
00:00:00.000I'm going to go ahead and get my phone out of the way. Let's see what's going on. I'm
00:00:07.000going to go ahead and get my phone out of the way.
00:00:15.000I'm going to go ahead and get my phone out of the way.
00:01:27.000Pfizer In this video, you're going to see the student circle.
00:01:48.000Thanks for joining me on Stay Free with Russell Brown.
00:01:51.000If you're watching this on YouTube, you can stay here for 10 minutes, but the minute stuff starts getting deep and a little bit uncensored, you're going to have to come over and join us on Rumble because there's certain things we simply can't say on a censored platform like YouTube, much as I love it, and kind and wonderful home, though it has been to us, In today's show, we're asking, is all news propaganda now?
00:02:53.000He's got a swollen foot, he's only got one ball, he fell down the stairs the other day, his hands are shaking, he's trembling.
00:02:59.000Yet, in his evident ongoing senility, perhaps not the right word because that's a medical word, but in his, let's call it, trembling inefficiency, Joe Biden appears to be a modern-day equivalent of King George III, a living Freudian slip that unwittingly reveals the power abyss at the core of American democratic politics, which has of course been replaced by corporatism.
00:03:23.000So how can we trust anything We are reading in the news.
00:04:04.000Hit Rumble if you're watching us on Rumble, and if you're watching us on YouTube, join us over on Rumble now.
00:04:10.000We've got some fantastic guests coming up over the course of the week.
00:04:12.000Let's focus on today's show, and in particular, the reporting on Putin's health.
00:04:16.000Putin is red-faced and swaying and slurring.
00:04:20.000He's got a claw-like grip while he's holding onto a champagne glass.
00:04:24.000It sounds like a sort of a monstrous spectacle, the sort of thing that if you were witnessing it with your own eyes, you'd struggle to stifle the vomit.
00:04:55.000I mean, do all hands look like a claw?
00:04:58.000That's more of a modality rather than an essence.
00:05:02.000I think what the implication is, is that he's involuntarily clutching at that champagne flute like a man possessed.
00:05:10.000Really, it looks relatively composed, and I suppose that the reason we're asking the question about is all news relayed in a propagandist way is because you find yourself suddenly at odds with an entire culture, not because you support Russia, because obviously Russian actions in Ukraine are egregious, the suffering of Ukrainian people is appalling, but because you're invited to blindly forget events of just months ago.
00:05:37.000We know that because of the pandemic and the way that's been reported on and what's been learned since then.
00:05:42.000And the way that we're told, the way that the story of the Ukraine-Russia conflict is told.
00:05:48.000So it's mostly the media's role we're focusing on and the way that they extract any possible NATO action or American military or resource-based interests.
00:05:58.000For me, for the news to make sense and for me to feel sort of at ease and like I could trust the source, they would just say, listen, we know that NATO has reneged on some of the pacts that were made with Gorbachev in 1990.
00:06:11.000It's clear that there was electoral meddling in 2014.
00:06:16.000And the American pro-democratic think tanks were operating in Ukraine to meddle in democracy.
00:06:22.000None of this means that Russia are great or that Putin's a fantastic sort of Russian Father Christmas character.
00:06:29.000It just means that if you do not gain access to the necessary nuance, it invites you to contemplate what the agenda is.
00:06:38.000Why are you not being trusted with complexity?
00:06:55.000Actually, normally when people are reported on that are overcoming those sort of health difficulties, they're lauded as heroes, aren't they?
00:07:05.000allow the war to continue in a way because if you just keep portraying this
00:07:09.000as Putin he's gonna die pretty soon this will be over you don't have to say why
00:07:14.000are we still doing this and spending all this money on weapons I also think it's
00:07:18.000a more vivid image to constantly focus your attention on a demonic tyrant who's
00:07:24.000sick and ill of body whose own biochemistry is telling you of the
00:07:29.000malady at his core you don't have to think about the complexity of the
00:07:32.000funding of the war the profits that are being made by Lockheed Martin and
00:07:36.000Raytheon the reductivism in the reporting and I suppose that's sort of
00:07:41.000what I mostly resent is being sort of spoken to like we're idiots I mean Joe
00:07:45.000Biden's meeting up with Macron and like look you can't on one hand I suppose
00:07:51.000Lord Putin which I would you know obviously never do and then needlessly
00:07:56.000demonize Joe Biden just that How is it that we have moved to the point where only avowed right-wing outlets will point out the plain absurdity of a moment like this?
00:08:22.000I hope that... I don't watch late night talk shows anymore, not because I don't like those people that do them, because I know some of those people and they're very nice, but like...
00:08:29.000I feel like when Trump was doing his off-key weird stuff, they were all over it night after night.
00:08:33.000In fact, they're still talking about his tax affairs and all of those things, which, if true, are significant in some way.
00:08:39.000But why would you not equally spread your ire on any figure who is powerful that's come up through the CIA, that's clearly a representative of economic interests?
00:08:49.000Why are we pretending that there's this incredible distinction, that this is anything other than an absurd spectacle akin This is what I'm offering you.
00:08:57.000Let me know what you think about this historical analysis.
00:09:00.000Like when King George III, who was, of course, a de facto tyrant and king of the colonies, and therefore that's the very king that you guys overthrew, in my view, mistakenly.
00:09:09.000When he went senile, people tried to keep it down and repress it.
00:09:13.000But his erosion, his mental decline, symbolized the arrival of the great democracies,
00:09:19.000and perhaps democracy in its modern form, altogether.
00:09:23.000I.e., the French Revolution happened, the American Revolution happened,
00:09:26.000and from then, there was a different kind of democracy.
00:09:28.000Now, some of you will argue that deep state power was around even then, that there tendrils of true authority
00:09:35.000lay in wait, continually controlling power.
00:09:38.000But for me, I wonder if this is comparable.
00:09:41.000I wonder if he might be regarded, as I said before, as a kind of human Freudian slip, letting us know what the true state of American democratic power really is.
00:09:51.000He's falling apart and new systems will have to be born.
00:09:55.000Perhaps we can snatch something from the ashes, but first... One thing is clear, that none of these leaders know what to do with their hands.
00:10:01.000I mean, whether it's Putin, Biden or Macron, no one's understood how to do a proper hand.
00:10:06.000What you should be doing Hands, what do you do with your hands?
00:10:10.000It's very, that's a good acting skill.
00:11:22.000OK, listen, if you're watching this on YouTube, we're going to cut the stream now and we'll only be on Rumble.
00:11:27.000Remember, Matt Taibbi is coming up in a minute.
00:11:28.000We're going to ask him proper questions.
00:11:30.000What's your relationship with Elon Musk?
00:11:31.000Like, are you concerned that you're pursuing Elon Musk's agenda?
00:11:34.000What kind of criticism and attacks have you received since making these revelations?
00:11:39.000And our video, Here's the News Now, Here's the Effing News, is a brilliant look at Elon Musk and what his agenda might be with Twitter and beyond Twitter, and whether or not he ought to be regarded as different from any other oligarch.
00:11:50.000We're going to cut the stream now, jump right over to Rumble, where we can speak in an uncensored way.
00:12:16.000The main thing that, one of the reasons we wanted to look at propaganda is because Netflix have made a show where the great David Letterman is interviewing the broadly viewed as heroic Vladimir Zelensky.
00:12:29.000Now, I couldn't be more enthused by the rise of a comedian to leadership of a country.
00:12:35.000The more I think about it, the more I think it would be a lot of pressure to run a country.
00:12:38.000And I actually find it quite hard to just look after my own cats.
00:12:43.000I struggle with Vladimir Zelensky's old job of being a comedian.
00:12:49.000But when you look at the trailer that Netflix have released for the interview with Lehman, it makes you wonder if they have lost the art of critical thinking.
00:12:59.000And I suppose not every single conversation can cover every single topic.
00:13:04.000But when you're talking about something as potentially devastating as a proxy war between the United States and Russia, although of course people stringently deny that's what it is in spite of the billions of pounds of funding, the direct advice, the meddling in the diplomacy, It feels like that you need a little nuance.
00:13:20.000You need to know what the history of that conflict is.
00:13:22.000You need to know what sort of interests are benefiting.
00:13:26.000You certainly don't want it reduced to a sort of simple puff piece.
00:13:30.000And note the fact that the interview itself takes place in a subterranean space, I think in a train station in Ukraine, with the obvious implication that it's not safe to do it above ground.
00:13:39.000But do you imagine for a moment that Dave Letterman's Sleeping under the ground?
00:13:43.000Do you imagine that Zelensky is living under the ground?
00:13:48.000I mean, he might be in a bunker, I don't know.
00:13:49.000But for me, I would argue that it's a propagandist move to present the show in the manner that they have done.
00:13:56.000Unless, of course, they do ask what happened in the 2014 elections?
00:14:00.000What is the nature of the funding that you're getting?
00:14:04.000What's the nature of some of the forces within the Ukrainian army and their affiliations with ideologies that are not celebrated elsewhere.
00:14:12.000I'm talking in particular of fascism and Nazism.
00:14:14.000I'm not saying that Zelensky is anything other than a hero.
00:14:17.000I'm just saying that there ought be an obligation to present reporting that is not dipped in saccharine and reductive and overly simplified.
00:14:25.000I think the way that it is presented sort of suggests that they think we're idiots and that we're being sort of corralled into sort of neurological paddocks fit only for goons and children.
00:14:37.000Yeah, it reduces the war to, like, heroes.
00:14:41.000The American heroes, Ukrainian heroes, of which we're not denying that they are, and an evil dictator with claw hands.
00:14:52.000Although, actually thinking about it, Putin does look a bit like Darth Vader when he takes his mask off.
00:14:57.000In fact, I'd like to see a side-by-side comparison of that after this video.
00:15:01.000Let's have a little look at the Netflix trailer, why not?
00:15:05.000When we were planning this trip, I wasn't sure what to expect.
00:15:08.000It had been months since Russian troops were driven out of the city, but just a week ago, Russia launched missiles and drones into Ukraine, including several that hit Kiev.
00:15:41.000I see you, I sort of watched something come across your face there, a flicker.
00:15:45.000No, I just, you were talking earlier about the kind of complexities that are not revealed by this kind of, I guess what you could call propaganda.
00:15:51.000know we talked about 2008 this is when we had Jeffrey Sachs on he was talking
00:15:55.000about this that this goes back this doesn't go back to a few months ago that
00:15:59.000this war goes back to say 2008 when you know Bush talked about wanting to expand
00:16:04.000NATO into Ukraine and Georgia and at that point like Putin was like don't do
00:16:08.000that or I'll annex Crimea and that's what he did and this was like what
00:16:12.000kicked this all off according to Jeffrey Sachs also lots of you know other people
00:16:16.000have spoken about the same thing There was this, we were talking about it earlier, this was in FAIR that they reported about the backdrop to the 2014 coup and the annexation that apparently cannot be understood without looking at the US strategy to open Ukrainian markets to foreign investors and give control of its economy to giant multinational corporations.
00:16:36.000And I suppose what feels eerily true about those kind of statements is it lines up pretty neatly with United States actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, the famous and notorious meddling in Latin American politics, the coups that have been staged.
00:16:56.000And why can't you have a conversation like this without automatically being dubbed a kind of, I don't know, Pro-Putin.
00:17:09.000Like, when I've seen the list of celebrities that have been out to Ukraine, firstly I was jealous because I've not been invited.
00:17:17.000No, like first I thought, oh no, does that mean that I'm sort of at odds With those people who I sort of like and kind of respect and admire, that if you ask these kind of questions, you're excluded from the mainstream.
00:17:28.000And then I recall that during the pandemic, that if you were like, hey, this science that we're meant to be following, are all the results in?
00:17:34.000Are we sure that they're conducting the correct clinical trials?
00:17:37.000Have they even ever tested for transmission at a clinical level?
00:18:06.000I'm not suggesting that we're actually right.
00:18:08.000That's why I want to talk to people like Matt Taibbi, journalists who I can trust, and we talked to Chris Hedges and we bring people on here to educate and illuminate like proper investigative journalists, academics, experts.
00:18:20.000Jeffrey Sachs to me when we spoke to him and he gave us an alternative narrative that began with NATO impingement after the dissolving of the Warsaw Pact and Gorbachev's willingness to end the Cold War as long as NATO did not impede
00:19:44.000I think they're trying to stamp him out.
00:19:46.000Now look, even outside of the conditions that led to the Ukraine-Russia conflict regarding NATO involvement, outside of that, here's a few little stats that would be good if they were included in that Netflix show.
00:20:01.000America recently gave Ukraine the green light to launch drone strikes deep inside Russia.
00:20:05.000The Biden administration plans to sell Ukraine four MQ-1C Grey Eagle drones that can be armed with Hellfire missiles for battlefield use against Russia.
00:20:12.000Now, that sort of sounds a little like a proxy war.
00:20:15.000The US has approved more than $54 billion of economic and military aid to Ukraine since February.
00:20:19.000Of course, that's very public and often lauded as support for Ukraine, which, you know, when you consider this situation from the perspective of suffering people in Kiev, it's a Seems like a good move, of course, but like where's that money ending up?
00:20:32.000Some of the largest weapons companies in the world, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, openly tell their investors that tensions between the countries are good for business.
00:20:38.000It's something that they can use in their projections for the next quarter.
00:20:41.000The CBS News report suggests that only around 30% of the weapons sent by the West actually make it to the front lines.
00:20:46.000So again, we're not saying that there is a A counterposition to the mainstream vanilla narrative that is necessarily 100% correct.
00:20:56.000What we're inviting you to consider is a degree of complexity in stories such as this, and perhaps even, tell me in the chat, tell me in the comments, is it irresponsible to report and make hagiographic shows like Netflix, eulogizing about the greatness and bravery, no doubt bravery of Zelensky, without Including the complexity and advantages afforded to corporate interests as a result of this conflict.
00:21:22.000Those are just a few of the things I'd like you to consider.
00:21:24.000But, before we get to Matt Taibbi, we have taken our own deeper dive into the Twitter files we've had.
00:21:32.000I mean, you know me, I'm one of the best investigative journalists that there are.
00:21:36.000Probably, if not the best, but it's one of the things we'll be asking.
00:22:31.000Doesn't he sometimes seem like a brilliant maverick, orator, novel thinker, innovator, strange enemy of the state interest, free speech advocate?
00:22:40.000But then you find out that Tesla, of course, have massive contracts with the government and SpaceX have big contracts with the government.
00:22:46.000So let's have a look at these Twitter file revelations which doubtlessly demonstrate the degree of corruption to which Twitter and presumably other social media outfits were willing to support, in this case, Democratic party narratives with the over obvious suppression of the Hunter Biden story which, you know, is now spoken about on mainstream media.
00:23:06.000But at the time, if you mentioned that, you know, people openly called Glenn Greenwald a right-wing fascist.
00:23:10.000Glenn Greenwald, the guy who broke the Snowden story, he was married to a man, right-wing fascist!
00:23:17.000So whatever they're saying about what we're saying now, in 80 months' time, that will be normal news.
00:23:22.000When it's too late, when the election's been won by their preferred candidate, when their objectives have been met, when their agenda's been pursued, let's see how the mainstream media reports these Twitterphile revelations, and we're going to take this deep.
00:23:36.000We're going to cover the complexity of Elon Musk's connections without needlessly condemning him or fawning over him and celebrating him.
00:23:43.000In the run-up to the 2020 election, the New York Post ran a story accusing Hunter Biden of using his father's position for his own business dealings.
00:23:52.000It also documented the explosive and sexually explicit contents of Hunter Biden's laptop.
00:24:00.000They were not thought to have been the result of hacking.
00:24:08.000They had to find a way to repress the story, because ultimately there are affiliations within Twitter, or there were at that time, that were aligned with it.
00:24:16.000I hope you know that we are not a pro-Republican organisation, that we wouldn't call ourselves right-wing.
00:24:22.000In fact, I think our raison d'etre is to get beyond those categories, because I don't think there's a future for ordinary people.
00:24:48.000Or does the recent banning of Kanye show, whether you think that was right or wrong, that nothing that dramatic has really changed?
00:24:54.000Twitter banned Kanye before for antisemitism, Twitter banned Kanye now for antisemitism.
00:24:58.000My personal stance on antisemitism is you shouldn't be racist.
00:25:01.000It's something the company's founder now accepts was an error.
00:25:05.000We recognize it as a mistake that we made.
00:25:08.000If Twitter is doing one team's bidding before an election, shutting down dissenting voices on a pivotal election, that is the very definition of election interference.
00:25:19.000On this point, I'd have to say that I 100% agree with Elon Musk, as we stated at the time of the Hunter Biden revelations, when we were at some risk for reporting on it.
00:25:30.000So with regard to this issue, we agree with Elon Musk.
00:25:33.000Frankly, Twitter was acting like an arm of the Democratic National Committee.
00:25:38.000The world's richest man also started to release internal Twitter files, something the White House said was not healthy.
00:25:47.000We see this as an interesting or a coincidence, if I may, that he would so haphazardly, Twitter would so haphazardly push this distraction that is full of old news.
00:26:04.000We know that they tinkered with, prohibited, controlled that information because they knew it would affect the outcome of an election.
00:26:14.000We know that there are other things like that that it's still not safe to talk about.
00:26:20.000We know that Joe Biden made numerous pledges throughout his election campaign, whether it's around Saudi Arabia, supporting the rights of workers, not exacerbating a nuclear conflict, that he's reneged on.
00:26:31.000Because there is so little trust in public life, a figure like Elon Musk, even as the world's richest man, is a breath of fresh air.
00:26:39.000When the Hunter Biden stories, outlandish and lurid as they were, emerged just weeks ahead of the 2020 poll, social networks decided they were probably false or the result of hacking, and so took decisive action.
00:26:48.000on Twitter have meaningful ramifications for ordinary people.
00:26:51.000We also have to be open-minded about other allegations.
00:27:10.000The nature of Hunter Biden's relationship with Ukrainian energy companies, Chinese energy companies, Joe Biden's impact on those relationships, the degree of his influence and involvement.
00:27:19.000We can't just dismiss it as hacking and conspiracy theory, can we?
00:27:25.000It's hacking and conspiracy theory till it's irrelevant, then you can put it on the mainstream news as all, oh well, never mind, everyone was trying their best.
00:27:32.000The second installment of the much-hyped Twitterphiles debuted on Thursday night with conservative writer Barry Weiss outlining in a Twitter thread what she described as the shadow banning of prominent conservatives including Charlie Kirk, Dan Bognino and Libs of TikTok.
00:27:45.000The founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, argued that the public would be better served by a more
00:27:49.000transparent approach that cuts out the middlemen.
00:27:52.000If the goal is transparency to build trust, asked Musk on Twitter yesterday,
00:27:55.000why not just release everything without filter and let people judge for themselves?
00:27:59.000Presumably because Elon Musk is, if nothing else, a brilliant entrepreneur and media manipulator,
00:28:05.000and as CEO of Twitter, he does have an obligation to make Twitter relevant again.
00:28:29.000Actually, it was rocket science, but this time it's not.
00:28:31.000Critics of Tabi included MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan who wrote, But of course the left have to deal with similar accusations when defending the repression of the Hunter Biden laptop story and numerous other narratives that ultimately play into the hands of establishment liberals like the current Democrat party who Ultimately operate at the behest of corporate interests and are not serving the people that they were elected to vote and not fulfilling the promises and pledges they were elected on.
00:29:05.000Tybee, now labeled a former voice of the left, came to prominence right in about the 2008 crash.
00:29:10.000He was skeptical of claims of collusion between Russia and Trump but literally wrote a book about Trump called Insane Clown President.
00:29:16.000So he was not a pro-Trump figure, he's just interested in investigative journalism.
00:29:21.000It's got to the point now where the narrative has shifted.
00:29:23.000The imposition of censorship has become so rigid and immersive that if you're just investigative and open-minded and not blinkered and blind you are a de facto right-wing conspiracy theorist.
00:29:34.000Although in 18 months you'll just have been telling the truth but you'll be talking about something else then and that will be right-wing conspiracy.
00:29:39.000So you can't really ever get out of it unless you're willing to wear an outrageous coat.
00:29:43.000So is Elon Musk right about government censorship and collusion?
00:29:46.000The FBI warned Twitter during weekly meetings before the 2020 election to expect hack and leak operations by state actors involving Hunter Biden.
00:29:54.000So they started to prime them and let them know, hey, when you hear about this, that's the old hack and leak.
00:29:58.000You sure it's not that Hunter Biden's got all sorts of shady business deals?
00:30:01.000Do you not remember seeing him on the news going, I don't need to tell you about my business deals.
00:30:06.000I'll show you what's going on downstairs.
00:30:07.000One thing that I don't have to do is sit here and open my kimono.
00:30:10.000It's clear now that those revelations were true and there's probably more information in them that's relevant to their credibility of Joe Biden as a president and the lack of transparency around his business dealings and his connection to his family and these various energy companies.
00:30:24.000Former Twitter legal policy and trust and safety lead Vijaya Gad played a key role in censoring the Hunter Biden story in October 2020.
00:30:31.000After Biden became president, his administration appointed her to an advisory role on a committee that helped shape the Department of Homeland Security's misinformation and disinformation work that same year.
00:30:40.000The revolving door keeps spinning, these connections are still evident, and the idea that we are spoon-fed this stuff and don't question what's going into our mouth becomes increasingly ridiculous.
00:30:51.000Alan McLeod revealed that Twitter hired a host of former FBI agents to work in the fields of security, trust, safety, and content.
00:30:57.000So, deep state agencies had people in social media that were working in areas that meant they would explicitly be directing censorship, controlling content output, and having an influence on how we perceive reality.
00:31:10.000While talking about this and celebrating Elon Musk's work for the freedom of speech, let's have a look at some of his other relationships to give us just some context for how we can look at him as a cultural figure more broadly.
00:31:20.000Tesla and SpaceX have received more than $7 billion in government contracts alone, and billions more in tax breaks, loans, and other subsidies in recent years.
00:31:27.000Tesla has sold at least $6 billion worth of government-backed electric vehicle credits.
00:31:31.000These sales of twice in recent years made the difference between the company posting a profit instead of a loss.
00:31:36.000So ultimately Tesla and SpaceX need their relationships with the government.
00:31:39.000Now that doesn't necessarily mean that Elon Musk is in the pocket of the government.
00:31:44.000It just means that perhaps business operations at that level require a degree of compliance
00:31:47.000around taxation issues and funding issues.
00:31:50.000SpaceX has a $300 million contract with the US Air Force and a $5 billion deal with NASA.
00:31:54.000Emmanuel Macron asked Musk to sign up for Children Online Protection Laboratory, an
00:31:59.000initiative aiming to shield minors from harmful content on the internet, a wide-reaching legal
00:32:44.000In addition to that, there are Elon Musk's views around technological utopianism and transhumanism, e.g.
00:32:50.000Elon Musk said on Wednesday that he expects a brain chip developed by his health tech company Neuralink to begin human trials in the next six months.
00:32:57.000In addition to forecasting clinical trials, Musk said he plans to get one of the chips himself.
00:33:01.000This, as the company is under federal investigation after it was reported around 1,500 animals died in the last four years during Now, of course, many people say that Neuralink and much of this technology is used to help people that are paralyzed or blind, ultimately impeded in some way.
00:33:16.000Whether or not you think it's a good thing or whether you're concerned about the sort of cyborg dimension being so rapidly approached, let me tell you there's an unusual ally for Elon Musk in this world.
00:33:28.000Can you imagine that in ten years when we are sitting here we have an implant in our brains and I can immediately feel because you all will have implants.
00:34:01.000So while Elon Musk is a radical opponent of certain Democratic National Party interests, elsewhere his interests seem to be in alignment with globalist goals like the one just cited there.
00:34:12.000That doesn't Let me know what you think in the comments, let me know what you think in the chat.
00:34:15.000person, it just shows that within that space there is alignment financially and
00:34:21.000ideologically in ways that might be surprising and these are certainly the
00:34:24.000things we would love to discuss with Elon Musk. Is Elon Musk a radical maverick
00:34:29.000or is he part of the establishment? Possibly he is both.
00:34:32.000Perhaps it's necessary to be both to operate in the spheres he operates
00:34:35.000in. Let me know what you think in the comments, let me know what you think in
00:34:38.000the chat, see you in a moment. Hey have you noticed that big tech companies are
00:34:42.000now masquerading as privacy companies.
00:34:45.000Just fix your privacy settings, turn off app tracking and you're all good.
00:34:49.000Are we supposed to suddenly believe that the big bad tech wolf has now turned into a sweet grandma?
00:35:00.000They can't stop themselves looking at what you do online.
00:35:04.000Oh, you dirty... When you use the ExpressVPN app on your computer or phone, Hide your IP address so websites can't use it to find out your real location or track what you do online.
00:36:04.000Listen, we're talking about the nature of propaganda and the nature of truth and I suppose that leads us to real investigative journalism and as sure as day follows night.
00:36:14.000You can't mention investigative journalism without perhaps uttering the names that rhyme with baby and maybe.
00:36:31.000We're angry and we're jealous that you've been making all these revelations and you've been carrying on.
00:36:36.000Can you tell me firstly how it unfolded, your relationship with Elon Musk and how he told you that he wanted you to release these files?
00:36:46.000Well, that part of it's complicated because I agreed from the start to a general attribution, which is sources at Twitter.
00:36:56.000So the kind of the story of how I got the story, I gotta just leave it at that.
00:37:00.000But I can tell you about interactions with Elon Musk.
00:37:05.000You know, he's, it's funny, I've had a lot of, I've probably done Tens of thousands of interviews.
00:37:13.000I mean thousands, at least, of interviews in my life.
00:37:16.000And there's always this uncomfortable moment when you ask to turn on the tape recorder or the recorder because the person's always afraid that you're gonna, you know, catch them.
00:37:28.000This is the first time that I looked in somebody's eyes and I could tell they legitimately just did not give a fuck at all.
00:37:37.000Whether or not I was recording, like what I was gonna write.
00:37:40.000And I was explicitly told I could write anything I wanted, and we haven't seen anything.
00:37:46.000or run into anything that suggests otherwise.
00:38:26.000What, like— The idea is that Elon Musk is the sort of representative of a new sort of right-wing type of rhetoric and political perspective, and that you haven't made any revelations about a sort of shadow banning of left-wing figures.
00:38:48.000And I think one of the misperceptions that people have is that we're sitting in front of a terminal that has global access to everything.
00:38:56.000And if that were the case, we'd be searching for all kinds of names.
00:39:01.000But the data sets that we have, we've looked for Evidence in the other direction of, let's just say, requests from the Trump White House to get this person or that person banned.
00:39:15.000I was told that by human sources, so I felt obligated to put that in one of the threads.
00:39:20.000But we're not seeing that in the documents, so I can't write about it.
00:39:25.000And I think everybody would say the same thing.
00:39:43.000The most interesting revelations, or the most scintillating at least, appear to be the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, Twitter having a secret blacklist, and the removal of Donald Trump and trying to create a unique case for the removal of a political figure.
00:39:59.000But you believe that the most important thing is the relationship between law enforcement, government, and social media.
00:40:07.000Yeah, and that was the thing that I was really most interested in headed into this project was, I think a lot of people have questions.
00:40:14.000How involved is the government in monitoring and censoring the speech of ordinary people?
00:40:24.000What we've seen so far already, and we have definite conclusive proof of, is that there are lots and lots of reports where we see Twitter executives saying things like, DHS flag this, the FBI flag this.
00:40:41.000And then there's a whole thread where they decide what to do about it.
00:41:11.000And then we're learning a lot about The kind of scraping of raw intelligence and fire hosing it to the government, all kinds of government agencies on the back end.
00:41:22.000So the government is harvesting tons of information from these companies and then turning around and spitting it back to companies like Twitter in the form of requests for, you know, maybe bannings, maybe shadow bans, maybe deletions or labels and that sort of thing.
00:44:39.000I think it's a safe assumption that every single one of the major platforms has basically the same arrangement with the government.
00:44:50.000We can't say definitely exactly how it works yet, but I'm assuming, I think it's a safe supposition, that there's probably something similar to what's going on on Twitter at the other platforms as well.
00:45:03.000Twitter is a different animal than the other platforms.
00:45:08.000Like, for instance, one of the things we were told is that you can't get sort of a viral outbreak of
00:45:18.000Political activity as quickly say on YouTube because people have to physically sit down and watch the video
00:45:24.000On Twitter it can happen in in seconds in microseconds Which is one of the reasons why they pay such close
00:45:32.000attention to every single thing that happens on the platform
00:45:36.000What will Elon Musk's actual ability to?
00:45:42.000To deny this kind of access to those sorts of agencies be and
00:45:48.000And this is speculative, and I certainly wouldn't expect you to put your relationship in jeopardy, but how distinct... So firstly, how much is Elon Musk likely to oppose the previous regime's relationship?
00:46:01.000And how different is Elon Musk's agenda likely to be given that many of his economic relationships are going to be sort of comparable?
00:46:12.000And he explicitly, again, he told me we're not just interested in looking at bad stuff from the past.
00:46:20.000If there's bad stuff in the future, we want you to look at that too.
00:46:25.000So as we learn about all these things, we can look at it.
00:46:30.000But I will say, As a journalist, I think all of us, we all feel the same way, which is that we don't know how long this opportunity to look at this material is going to exist.
00:46:44.000And so I feel like we have a responsibility to try to dive into it as quickly as we can and as comprehensibly as we can before something happens.
00:46:54.000Let's say there's a federal investigation or congressional investigation and the whole thing gets shut down.
00:47:02.000We feel like we've got to look at that first.
00:47:04.000And there are other questions, obviously, about what's going on at Twitter now.
00:47:07.000If people have questions about Elon Musk, I mean, those are things that we can try to answer.
00:47:12.000But I feel like right now, the priority is the documents that are in front of us.
00:47:55.000But certainly the press backlash has been all I mean, it's been remarkable to see how they're all using the same language and everything.
00:48:06.000It's almost like they got a memo from somewhere, which is incredible.
00:48:13.000I don't know how they think this isn't a story to see.
00:48:19.000screenshots of you know where it says the FBI has asked you to look at this and this and this
00:48:25.000um that's not a story I I don't know any journalist who would look at that and not think that a real
00:48:31.000journalist would look at that and not think well that's cool that's interesting we gotta
00:48:35.000we gotta learn more about that. Yeah because I like Mehdi Hussain.
00:48:39.000I've known him for a little while and he sort of was one of the most vociferously condemnatory saying like, oh, you're doing the bidding of a billionaire.
00:48:47.000But I figured maybe he's on MSNBC and stuff.
00:48:50.000I mean, it's such a it's so unfortunate that the very type of journalistic integrity that seems more vital now than ever seems to be In total decline, that people are, it seems, absolutely willing to uncritically absorb information and, as you say, reproduce almost a template of criticism, in the case of this story at least.
00:49:15.000Yeah, and again, I don't know what journalist wouldn't be totally turned on by the opportunity to look through these kinds of documents.
00:49:26.000I mean, for years, everybody who's used Twitter has had these questions like, do they do shadow banning?
00:49:33.000Or is my follower count being suppressed?
00:50:11.000You're talking about stuff that was stolen.
00:50:14.000We're not supposed to care about that.
00:50:15.000We're supposed to care about what's true, and it's our job to figure out whether these documents are real or not, and understand what's happening in it.
00:50:23.000But the provenance of it isn't supposed to be really that much of a factor.
00:50:27.000Obviously, Elon Musk is a part of this story, and we've got to address it at some point.
00:50:32.000But much more important is the stuff that we're looking at.
00:50:36.000Yeah, in particular, I suppose, the idea that it's ongoing and that while there is this sense that we live in a time of great censorship, where powerful interests are able to absolutely manipulate narratives and remain unaccountable, it seems that, yeah, I feel like you're totally right.
00:50:56.000And in this instance, I suppose, like, you know, I've, you know, I think I've mentioned it to you and I've certainly mentioned it on the show enough, God knows, but like, you know, I had a brief conversation with Elon Musk once and I thought, He's sort of operating in a trans-moral space anyway.
00:51:08.000He's almost so intelligent and curious that I felt like, you know, that what he's doing here is likely legitimate, even if there is some entrepreneurial flair being shown in sort of bringing Twitter into the forefront in a kind of an interesting and elegant piece of rebranding.
00:51:25.000He was pretty curious, he thought he might get killed as well.
00:51:45.000And, um, Yeah, I mean, I think some of the things that he did that were suggestions, like, I was very skeptical initially of the idea of putting all this out on Twitter first.
00:52:01.000And, you know, I'm a long form reporter, I like to explain everything, you know, and all that.
00:52:08.000But there, there's a kind of brilliance in using Twitter to flay Twitter.
00:52:13.000And it's kind of also a burn on the regular media who tightly controlled Twitter for so long.
00:52:21.000There's a little bit of genius in that that I didn't recognize at first.
00:52:28.000He's an interesting person and difficult to categorize, but I think that's a long term job
00:52:40.000rather than trying to do the spade work of digging into these docs and figuring out what they mean.
00:52:48.000Absolutely, I think you're right, because the revelations are in themselves,
00:52:52.000so weighty that to add to that, what is the...
00:52:55.000Presumed teleology or intention of Elon Musk who is a fascinating figure and anyone that powerful and that wealthy who happens to be pretty idiosyncratic also and isn't just towing the line is it's difficult not to reflect on what his agenda might be and where this might be going because I know he's Deeply into sort of off planetary solutions and transhumanism.
00:53:14.000He's got a lot of interesting sort of like ideas But thank you Matt.
00:53:18.000That's really helpful, but we were talking earlier about the Ukraine war I suppose in light of David Letterman talking to Zelensky and just their presentation of this product is pretty sanitary or hagiographic even because I What I feel is that with the way that Putin is reported on continually is that sort of a malodorous and sick filthy old Parkinson ridden self-defecating filth bag.
00:53:45.000It feels like there's an inability to think critically in the nuanced way about a complex situation.
00:53:53.000When Jeffrey Sachs came on the show he gave us a sort of a rundown on events between NATO and Russia from the 90s.
00:54:01.000So you know he just gave us a sort of a Whistle-stop tour between, well, they said NATO wouldn't impinge, NATO impinged.
00:54:07.000They said they wouldn't meddle in elections, they meddled in elections.
00:54:10.000And all the way through to sort of military-industrial complex stuff.
00:54:14.000Do you think we're at a point, Matt, where all news is propaganda, or at least the majority of mainstream news is propaganda?
00:54:38.000Once upon a time, A news organization was most interested in whether or not they had a big story.
00:54:45.000They didn't think about other considerations.
00:54:48.000Very rarely you would see something like the New York Times reaching out to the CIA or having conversations with them about whether or not they should print something.
00:55:00.000But now I think that's routine across the entire business.
00:55:04.000I think maybe not the contact, but there's a presumption that we only print things that we think are going to help whatever the cause is.
00:55:16.000And so there's, you know, you combine that with the social media censorship and manipulation, which is just so sophisticated.
00:55:28.000Now, I don't know how you would cover something like the Ukraine war.
00:56:13.000I've seen them also decide not to do it.
00:56:16.000There was one One case where there was like a hashtag, I stand with Putin, where I was very surprised to see that they discussed it, but then they ended up leaving it up because they couldn't find any coordinated inauthentic activity behind it.
00:56:36.000But there's other stuff that they took down and there's other things that are interesting.
00:56:42.000But we're only just starting to look in that direction.
00:56:44.000I think sometimes it was arbitrary and just as a result of people's sort of personal political alliances.
00:56:50.000The reason that it sort of, broadly speaking, has been favourable to the establishment liberal class was just because that's the general affiliation of the people that were on the team.
00:57:00.000Yeah, that's one of the things that's amazing about this, the stuff that we've already put out even is you can see in these threads, somebody will say, oh, this got escalated by whatever the ops team, what do you think?
00:57:13.000And then like two minutes later, you'll get a decision from some very senior executive who will say, nah, you know, that's fine.
00:57:21.000Because The executive clearly either thinks it's true based on whatever or did a Google search and found an NPR article that they liked.
00:57:32.000I mean, it's that unsophisticated on that level.
00:57:37.000It's like they'll get a request about something and then they'll do like a two-second Google search and that will be the basis for whether or not they censor it.
00:57:48.000Yeah, I suppose that's why the Hunter Biden laptop story is so significant, because there was obviously an assumption that that would have a negative impact on the election, so they repressed it, and now 18 months later, mainstream media in our country, like the BBC, it's just, oh yeah, that was true, that got repressed.
00:58:05.000And then what do you think about, sort of, I suppose in the realm of celebrity, Kanye West was sort of like, he was banned before, now he's banned again.
00:58:14.000It seems like there's, you know, I guess there has to be a line around hate speech or racism in whatever form, so I guess that's, in a way, that's relatively uniform.
00:58:25.000But then the figures like James Woods or whatever, who seem like they're just like old-school conservatives, like they're not like even that Particularly political.
00:58:33.000They're just like your uncle, who's a bit different from you.
00:58:38.000The ubiquity of James Woods is kind of hilarious.
00:58:41.000You would think he was the most important person on earth.
00:58:43.000I mean, he's kind of like the spiritual opposite of Susan Sarandon.
00:58:50.000Like, he's responsible for everything.
00:58:53.000He keeps popping up in these discussions.
00:58:55.000They keep having long discussions about what to do with him.
00:58:58.000And we found this amazing one where they're like, well, He's not guilty this time, but we're going to hit him hard next vio.
00:59:08.000Which proves that the institution has muscle memory, right?
00:59:13.000It isn't just looking individually at each case, it's remembering.
00:59:17.000And that's one of the things that happened with Trump too.
00:59:21.000Yeah, I guess that's another way of saying there is a bias and a clear bias.
00:59:26.000I wonder at times, Matt, when we have these conversations, if the sort of culture war more broadly keeps us kind of throbbing in a space that's relatively convenient for Power that transcends those kind of bounds.
00:59:40.000You know, when you consider like the judicial structures that prevent corporations, profits being impeded in foreign countries.
00:59:47.000When you consider the sort of the advancing power of unelected bodies like the WEF and the sort of established power of groups like the IMF.
00:59:57.000When we're sort of fretting about James Woods, his political perspectives, perhaps we have, you know, somewhat taken our eye off the ball.
01:00:07.000Yeah, I think that's a big part of this whole story, which is you can kind of maybe justify there being some kind of involvement in suppressing this or that.
01:00:22.000I guess there's an argument for that, but they're doing it at a level that's so micro and so And so ridiculously thorough that it can't possibly be anything but a dystopian project.
01:00:41.000I mean, they want to absolutely control or at least have some impact on basically every communication that happens on their platform, which is Which seems crazy to me, but I don't know about you, but that seems more in the realm of Orwell to me.
01:01:02.000Yeah, I suppose so, because I think that none of us, I don't mean none of us, obviously some of us do, but we're pretty anti all forms of racism and obviously anti-Semitism, but I feel that elsewhere in social media, literal far-right groups, because of convenient affiliations even within the current conflict, are sort of promoted, celebrated, supported, given medals at Disneyland.
01:01:23.000You know, there's an unwillingness to kind of allow yourself to fully inhabit the complexity of the world we find ourselves in.
01:01:31.000Just the continual nomination of plain villains and overt baddies and a kind of reductionism that can't lead to solutions because it doesn't take in anything like the necessary scale of the truth.
01:01:43.000Yeah, you have to have gradations of things in order to understand the world and they're not really allowing that to happen.
01:01:49.000So, um, in any case, Russell, I apologize.
01:01:53.000I've got, I've got a, I just got pinged about something.
01:01:56.000Um, but this has been great, great to talk to you and thank, thanks so much.
01:02:00.000I hope it's not an execution order and we appreciate you coming on Matt, but particularly at the last minute, it's lovely to chat to you and we'll see you soon.
01:03:16.000It'll come up in the course of my investigations obviously.
01:03:19.000Steve-O's coming on as well on Thursday, the great Steve-O, a man who pursues valour in outrageous places through outrageous acts and also Tim Robbins is coming on the show.
01:03:28.000We're going to talk to him about the pandemic and probably liberalisms and the limitations of that sort of philosophy and perhaps the disingenuity.