In a world of political turbulence and mainstream media bias, we re here to bring you an uncensored special on the presidential candidates who are taking on the hysteria surrounding one man, and the impact he continues to have on American politics. Yes, it s Donald J. Trump. Because we re talking about Trump, the berserker, the pedagogue, or is he the new bringer of light and messiah that many of you claim? In a world where political turbulence is constant, and in which we re constantly bombarded with stories about every little thing that s going on in the world, is Trump the new Messiah? Or is he just another narcissist? And if so, who s going to stop him? Will it be Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, or Ted Cruz? Stay tuned for the full special on Stay Free With Russell Brand, Stay Free with Russell Brand. Stay Free! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. All rights reserved. Used w/ permission from original artists. This episode was produced and edited by Riley Bray. We do not own the rights to any music used in this episode. All credit given to any other music heard on the show. Thank you to my main amigo, DJ Khale for producing this episode and all rights reserved to any artists mentioned in the episode. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you re listening to this podcast. We re listening and sharing it on your thoughts on social media. Thank you! I m looking forward to the music we re sharing this episode on our social media platforms. Love ya! - Russell Brand - Thank you, Russell Brand - I could never be a better man than that. - thank you so much Russell Brand and I m a Black man and I could not be more grateful for all the love he s giving me a chance to be heard on this podcast, I m so much more than that I m grateful for you, thank you, Thank you for being a good friend of mine, I love you all so much, I really appreciate you, I appreciate you. - RONDAILY, RONNA MCCARTE - KELLY LYNNE, JUICY AND KID RYAN JAYE.
00:00:55.000Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:57.000If you're watching us on YouTube, we're only gonna be here for the first 15 minutes.
00:01:01.000If you're watching us on Rumble, press the red button at the bottom of your screen and join us on Locals, because we are talking about Trump, the berserker, the pedagogue, or is he the new bringer of light and messiah that many of you claim?
00:01:15.000In a world of political turbulence and mainstream media bias, we're gonna bring you, and I'm I'm excited to tell you this.
00:01:21.000This is an uncensored special, at least on Rumble it will be uncensored, on the presidential candidates who are taking on the hysteria surrounding one man and the impact he continues to have on American politics.
00:03:43.000Trump reportedly showed a classified map related to a military operation to someone who did not possess security clearance.
00:03:49.000In a 2022 interview with Tucker on Fox, Kid Rock claimed the former president asked his advice and showed him what he believed to be secret information during a visit to the White House in 2017.
00:04:00.000Did he have Kid Rock at the White House?
00:05:21.000Why have you nominated a patriarch elite class that allowed access to information that you're not?
00:05:28.000Now I'm not suggesting that all of us on an individual basis want to be immersed in the bureaucracy of government.
00:05:34.000But the category of classified should be abolished except in matters where it's strictly necessary.
00:05:41.000Bolton told CBS News special handling suggests a special access program which can be so secret the government doesn't acknowledge its existence.
00:08:12.000He stopped to do some corruption, and he had to drive over some strewn boxes of secrets, some of which he was showing to Kid Rock.
00:08:19.000When he enters the courthouse behind me, his arraignment will push America's legal and political systems into uncharted territory.
00:08:27.000Never before has a former president been arraigned on federal charges, and never before has the leading candidate for one party's presidential nomination faced so much legal jeopardy.
00:08:38.000This will be the second time in just over two months.
00:09:05.000For some people, they're seeing a persecuted hero going to stand up to the system that's trying to crush their movement.
00:09:12.000And this is live images of this motorcade looking for Elvis, right?
00:09:15.000And then for others of us, you know, this is a dangerous scofflaw who stole a bunch of federal documents that anybody else stole and they'd be under the jail by now.
00:09:29.000I don't think any of us think that if someone else stole it, they'd be in jail by now.
00:09:33.000We know that Biden's got classified documents, some of which were taken during his time as Senator, some of which, 20 of them, were taken during another period.
00:09:40.000There's seemingly, according to Matt Taibbi and Shelley Berger, a credible allegation that he took a $5 million bribe while VP, and that information was repressed by the FBI.
00:09:51.000So there is no centralised moral authority.
00:11:20.000With all of their bombast and banal pageantry, they're in no position to criticise the propaganda of anyone else.
00:11:28.000Look at that, by the way, his name, John King, came thrusting onto the screen, an unwanted graphic, priapic erection, forced in from the side of the frame.
00:11:38.000If his point is they're doing this too early, just make a decision to not show it then.
00:12:20.000Let's see though, I think Trump's super PAC propaganda, not necessarily affiliated with the Trump campaign, which is a super PAC thing, is better.
00:12:28.000Because what they've gone for Is a garish, galling, gory, and awful image involving pudding.
00:12:37.000Also, like they're picking up on a weird detail about Ron DeSantis.
00:12:41.000I didn't know that Ron DeSantis ate puddings with his fingers.
00:13:07.000They might get their fingers right in there.
00:13:08.000If you are watching this live from India now, eating a puddin', Or if you're on DeSantis and you're watching this in Florida, with a great scoop of pud right there, cradled there in the nook of your third knuckle.
00:13:29.000Suck that down, delicious, like Mother Nature surely intended when she granted us these crazy little hand wands, and let's know what's going on.
00:13:38.000Now, that ad from a pro-DeSantis pack is responding to scathing ads from a pro-Trump group, including this, yes, stomach-churning dig at the Florida governor after a report that he ate pudding with his fingers.
00:13:52.000Ron DeSantis loves sticking his fingers where they don't belong.
00:13:56.000...is that De Santis has got a table and chair, and all that's on it is that pudding.
00:15:20.000I mean, the erotic need not necessarily evoke a passionate or even erotic response in the recipient because the world of sexuality is a complex and wonderful smorgasbord.
00:16:53.000A lot of my stand up was talking about measures taken in the pandemic where I live in the UK and the broad and I would say spookily ubiquitous response to the pandemic in most places in the world, except one might contest in Florida.
00:17:11.000I'm sure that the sense of state pride that Floridians have is a source of great joy to you.
00:17:16.000I wonder how you came to the position of confidence in taking a stance that was antithetical to the stance taken elsewhere in America.
00:17:29.000I was born and raised in Florida, and while I've always loved the state, we didn't have the same type of pride growing up that, say, people in Texas have about Texas.
00:17:39.000And yet, in the last few years, particularly since I've been governor, we've developed that pride, and I think a lot of it's rooted in the fact that we told people like Fauci to take a hike during COVID.
00:18:00.000We fought back against mandates, both in terms of not letting local governments impose mask mandates, not letting government or business impose COVID vaccine mandates.
00:18:11.000So in every step of the way, we were really leading.
00:18:15.000I mean, part of it was I just looked at the data that was coming in.
00:18:20.000The whole premise of lockdown, both in the UK and in the United States, was in the idea that COVID would cause massive amounts of hospitalizations and we wouldn't even have any more hospital beds left over for normal patients.
00:18:33.000We all got those models, all governors, all heads of state, and I'm looking at this in like March and April, And none of it was accurate.
00:19:49.000It made the state better, and that did.
00:19:52.000But I do think it had an impact around the country, because anytime the lockdowners wanted to do more restrictions, people could just point to Florida and say, well, wait a minute.
00:20:07.000You still have people today, Fauci and the like, They think that what they did was right.
00:20:14.000They think that these lockdowns worked.
00:20:16.000And so my fear is, if this happens in the future, a lot of these people are going to want to do the same thing again.
00:20:22.000So one of the things I pledged as president, and I think I'm the only one running on the Republican side who will be willing to do this, we're going to bring a reckoning to this health bureaucracy and this medical swamp.
00:20:33.000Because these agencies like CDC, NIH, FDA, they failed the American people.
00:20:39.000And they did a lot of damage with these unscientific anti-freedom policies.
00:20:44.000Well, that's pretty heartening to hear.
00:20:46.000In retrospect, your stance increasingly seems to have been the correct one.
00:20:52.000And that's interesting and exciting, in fact, to hear you talk about a reckoning.
00:20:58.000One thing that is evident from the position that you took as governor of Florida, the decentralization and the ability that you had to take that position, which must have felt like a huge risk given that it was in opposition to the proposed mandate in elsewhere, the sacking of key workers in New York City, the advocacy for shaming by CNN of people that were hesitant or reluctant to pursue certain medical propositions. It's a risk that
00:21:28.000has doubtlessly paid off, but also it helps us to identify the importance of
00:21:35.000decentralization. With this in mind, how do you feel that you would preside over the
00:21:41.000United States of America if you fundamentally believe in the rights of
00:21:46.000individual states to establish their own laws and govern in their own way?
00:21:51.000Well, there is way too much authority in Washington, D.C.
00:21:55.000and in the federal government right now.
00:21:57.000And a lot of that is, I'd say, illegitimate authority that has been accumulated over many, many decades.
00:22:05.000Some of that is because Congress has been neglectful, presidents have been neglectful.
00:22:09.000But you have a massive bureaucratic administrative state that exist almost outside of typical elections.
00:22:17.000They exert power over the populace regardless of the outcome elections.
00:22:21.000None of these people are elected and they purport to tell us what kind of energy we can use, what kind of car we can drive, even whether potentially you're allowed to have a gas stove.
00:22:32.000You know, in Florida, we made gas stoves tax-free because we believe that you should have the ability to do all that.
00:22:38.000So, part of the project, I think, is to take power out of Washington and send it back to the states, the localities, and individuals.
00:22:48.000That means we need a radical reduction of the federal bureaucracy.
00:22:51.000We're going to tell our cabinet secretaries that they have to reduce the number of employees that they have inside D.C.
00:23:01.000And that's going to probably be the biggest reduction in power in Washington In modern American history, but we cannot go down the road of letting more and more power consolidate in Washington, D.C.
00:23:14.000Part of the reason is the founders never wanted to have consolidated power like that because they understood that's a threat to freedom.
00:23:20.000You also have another problem that the ruling class in D.C., they get almost every major issue wrong.
00:23:28.000And so these are the last people you would want to surrender judgment and freedom to.
00:23:33.000They're going to lead us down the road to ruin.
00:23:36.000So we've got a lot of work to do, but at the end of the day, part of the reason we've been successful in Florida is we fought back against the federal government.
00:23:43.000For example, When the federal government tried to impose the COVID-19 vax mandates on the economy, you had one through the main economy, which we fought back and won.
00:23:54.000Then they did one on the medical personnel, nurses, who a lot of these nurses had had COVID.
00:26:21.000A lot of the things that were being censored during COVID, for example, that wasn't just being done because Mark Zuckerberg thought that he wanted it censored.
00:26:29.000No, he was working with people like Fauci.
00:26:32.000They were working with people inside of government to censor dissent on lockdowns, on mask mandates, on school closures, on vax mandates.
00:26:40.000All these things that, I mean, if you think about it, a free society has to have debates over important issues.
00:26:47.000What more important issue have we had in the last decade or two Then whether society should be locked down?
00:26:56.000And they didn't want to have that debate.
00:26:58.000So I actually think that, yes, obviously when there's less power in Washington, individual states, they have certain powers to make different decisions.
00:27:06.000But I do think if we break up the relationship between big government and some of these big monopolies,
00:27:12.000particularly in the tech sphere, I think that's actually gonna have universal benefit
00:27:18.000throughout the country, because there's gonna be more ability to speak freely.
00:27:22.000You're not gonna have Uncle Sam with its thumb on the scale.
00:27:36.000But they can't subcontract out that to a private entity and have the private entity do
00:27:41.000what the federal government couldn't do directly.
00:27:43.000It's still a violation of the First Amendment.
00:27:46.000One of the things we did in Florida as governor, I signed legislation expressly prohibiting our state and local government employees from colluding with big tech for any type of speech censorship or to police quote misinformation or disinformation they are not allowed to do that as a matter of law as president i'll issue an executive order basically barring federal employees from colluding with big tech like we've seen in the past but i think this whole idea
00:28:15.000of freedom in our society has got to be viewed through the lens of, yes, we know big government can be bad for freedom.
00:28:24.000But we live in an era where a lot of these big private concentrations of power are exercising kind of government-like power.
00:28:32.000I mean, if you have Wall Street banks collude to deny funding for, say, gun shop owners, well, that's an indirect attack on the Second Amendment.
00:28:43.000When you have different types of tech companies colluding with government to censor certain subjects, that's an attack on the First Amendment.
00:28:51.000So, you've got to understand that freedom's under attack not just from government power.
00:28:58.000There's also concentration of private power, which does threaten a free society.
00:29:07.000In the spirit of this invitation towards unity, Bobby, I was interested to hear your welcoming of, if not the endorsement of Trump, but at least welcoming the fact that Trump likes you.
00:29:21.000Bobby, I know that a lot of people here admire Donald Trump for the easy manner with which he engages with people.
00:29:30.000Even when Trump says something like, we'll just take that oil from Venezuela, that seems like, to some people, refreshingly open when you have Biden making a Freudian slip and saying Iraq when he means Ukraine.
00:29:44.000Perhaps because when he reaches inside himself words like exploitative war based on resources that is profitable and not undergirded by verifiable facts.
00:29:56.000is the sort of contextual complication that he uncovers there. So can you tell me what
00:30:01.000you consider to be the distinction between a political figure like Trump, what you regard
00:30:08.000as his appeal and how it highlights some of the problems that career politicians like
00:30:18.000Well, you know, I've been very critical of President Trump, but I try to keep my critiques
00:30:25.000on a policy level because I think that that's a healthy thing for our country.
00:30:31.000One of the things that I'm trying to do with my campaign is to end this toxic polarization that is, I think, more dangerous for our country than at any time since the American Civil War.
00:30:44.000And, you know, everybody, like, if you talk to any Democrat, left-wing, right-wing, left-wing, moderate, whatever, they'll all say that polarization is one of the, you know, worst thing that's happening to our country.
00:30:56.000But then, if you ask them, well, how do we, how are we going to solve that?
00:32:22.000And he found something in common with them that was beyond politics, that they were all chosen this very difficult life of, you know, being in public service.
00:32:32.000And he found things to talk about and they loved each other, you know, they wrote poems to each other, they painted paintings for each other and gave them to each other as gifts.
00:32:43.000He was able to, he never compromised his own values and he was happy about that, but he could get through those personal relationships.
00:32:52.000He made Orrin Hatch his partner in addressing the AIDS crisis at a time when most Republicans were very punitive towards people who had AIDS, and yet Orrin Hatch stepped away from that and said, this is something that we have to address as a nation, and we have to address with compassion.
00:33:14.000And they were able to find that in each other, and I think we have to look for You know, as Cheryl just said, we're all, we all want the same thing.
00:33:57.000I've sued him twice, both times successfully.
00:34:01.000But, you know, the one thing I think that he's done is that he's talking to Americans who otherwise feel utterly forgotten.
00:34:10.000And he's talking in their language and he's putting his finger on something that I think all of us need, that the people who support Donald Trump feel that they're regarded by the elites as deplorable people and that, you know, they're not part of our country.
00:34:27.000And I think Donald Trump made them feel like they were part of our country, that they're being listened to.
00:34:34.000He's willing to break things, and there's so many people in this country now who are so frustrated with the political system and with, you know, political leadership.
00:34:44.000They feel like that leadership is serving the needs of this oligarchy, this corporate kleptocracy, and that they've been completely forgotten, and they want to break things.
00:34:57.000They want, you know, and a lot of them, like I, you know, Represent a thousand families in Columbiana County, Ohio.
00:35:07.000And you know, they have Trump signs on all like sprout, like mushrooms on all the yards down there.
00:35:12.000And the people are living in a kind of poverty that is so desperate, so dire.
00:35:18.000Um, that I never thought I'd see anything like that in our country.
00:35:21.000And they don't, if you talk to them, I was with a group of them in a diner and I said, you know, what, what do you think Donald Trump's going to do with you?
00:35:30.000As long as he breaks things on the other side.
00:35:34.000And I think that, you know, at this point, they don't believe any politician is going to actually help them, but they just want to be heard.
00:35:44.000And he seems to be able to, you know, to connect with them on that basis.
00:35:48.000And I think, you know, my father, He used to look at Latin America and he saw the same thing there that is now happening in our country, where you have these huge aggregations of wealth above, you have these feudal oligarchies, and then below you have widespread poverty.
00:36:07.000And my father said there's going to be a revolution in those countries.
00:36:10.000And right, you know, up until my uncle's election, the U.S.
00:36:14.000policy was to fortify those oligarchies because they were anti-communist and to give weapons to the You know, the juntas and the military strongmen that were, you know, that were tied in with those oligarchies because they were anti-communist, but they were keeping down the poor.
00:36:33.000My father and my uncle said, America needs to be on the side of the poor.
00:36:38.000They need to be, you know, in those countries.
00:36:40.000And so they started the Alliance for Progress so that they could end run the oligarchies and give money directly to the poor.
00:36:47.000They started USAID, they started the Kennedy Milk Program, they started Peace Corps so that they could put America on the side of the fort.
00:36:56.000Made two trips abroad that were his favorite during his presidency.
00:37:00.000One was to Ireland, which was one of his last trips right before he died, where he told them, you know, I'll be back in the springtime.
00:37:07.000And then the other was to Colombia in Latin America.
00:37:12.000And there were two and a half million people who came out on the street in Bogota to greet him.
00:37:17.000And he was there with The, you know, the left-wing leader, Jaires Carmargo.
00:37:23.000And the people were, the emotional level of, you know, when they saw my uncle, the people were absolutely, you know, they were crying and they were cheering.
00:37:34.000And Jaires Carmargo said to my uncle, do you know why they love you?
00:37:42.000And he said, because you put America on the side of the poor.
00:37:46.000And you know, and my father said, there's going to be a revolution.
00:37:49.000And either the communists are going to own it, or we're going to own it.
00:37:54.000And we need to put ourselves on the side of the poor so that we can, you know, so that we can harness those revolutionary energies.
00:38:02.000Or on the side of idealism and democracy, all the same things happening in our country today.
00:38:07.000You know, there's going to be a revolution.
00:38:11.000And it's either going to be Donald Trump's revolution or it's going to be a revolution that sort of restores America the idealism and the democratic values that, you know, I think my uncle and father represented.
00:38:24.000Bobby, will you, Bobby Kennedy, get money out of politics by changing the practice of allowing donations to essentially, ostensibly, essentially run these political movements and bypass the process of democracy?
00:38:41.000and i'm gonna we're gonna let cheryl now go back to uh do the rest of my side effects then
00:38:47.000um okay i'm gonna let you guys finish this conversation um We've gone to the trouble of loading those into a deck, so I had to press those buttons.
00:39:02.000If you win the presidency, don't you get so trigger-happy pressing buttons just to see what they can do?
00:39:06.000That's the last thing we do after we narrowly avoided that Cuban Missile Crisis.
00:39:10.000We don't want you bullsying up your legacy on that one.
00:39:14.000We're going to replace Helen the Chief with that girl.
00:39:22.000First of all, it's been great talking to you.
00:39:24.000I'm going to let you guys finish this very serious conversation and I'm glad you're having it.
00:40:21.000So what do you think about, like, you know, I covered a lot there, but I know you're a man who gives a long answer and I can identify.
00:40:26.000So I wanted to talk about the censorship stuff, the stuff that's been taken down off YouTube.
00:40:30.000But significantly, because we know that when he was talking to our friend over there, Crystal, over at Breaking Points, that she pushed on the stuff about donations.
00:40:40.000And as I say, I'm excited by the Kennedy name and that your family have done great things.
00:40:47.000But some people will think, well, this is just ultimately another establishment Politician.
00:40:51.000And what about also, mate, like, you know, Trump prior to, like, I know a lot of people watching this will love Donald Trump, but it's my personal belief that in office, Trump didn't drain the swamp, Trump granted tax breaks to the richest people.
00:41:03.000So, what specifically around this, like, you know, censorship we can cover, but also I'd love you to cover, what are you gonna do to get money out of politics through donations, through lobbying, 700 lobbyists from the military-industrial complex, more than one for each person in Congress, What are you going to do about this important and defining issue, please, Bobby?
00:41:24.000Yeah, I mean, I think it's a very difficult issue, but it's ultimately the most important one.
00:41:31.000And if I can just go back, you know, we actually did lose our democracy at one point in American history during what we call the Gilded Age, which was in the 1880s and 1890s, in the time, the years after the Civil War, when really corruption overtook the idealism of the American experiment with self-governance.
00:41:55.000And at that time, There were no direct election of senators, so the senators were chosen by the legislatures in our country, and the legislatures were owned lock and stock and barrel by the trusts.
00:42:07.000The big sugar trusts, the rail trusts, the oil trusts, the coal trusts.
00:42:17.000And those trusts were themselves controlled by interlocking boards of these big families, these oligarchical families of the American aristocracy, the Rockefellers, the Whitneys, the Fricks, the Morgans, the Carnegies.
00:42:35.000And they were not only, so the senators were being, it was said at that time of the Pennsylvania State Legislature, There was nobody in that legislature who was for sale.
00:42:48.000Because John D. Rockefeller already owned them all and he would not sell any.
00:42:54.000And that really was the case in all the major legislatures in this country.
00:42:57.000They were owned by these big social titans, these robber barons.
00:43:09.000At that time, there was no income tax in our country.
00:43:13.000So the amount of money, you know, Rockefeller was much richer than Bill Gates or Elon Musk is comparatively today.
00:43:22.000He controlled, I think, 80% of the oil in the world.
00:43:28.000And so you had this tremendous wealth.
00:43:35.000There was no, you know, there was no child labor laws.
00:43:39.000And they really suppressed American democracy because the legislatures then were involved and they controlled the party so they could choose the President of the United States, which they did time after time.
00:43:55.000One, there was social movements, broad, grassroots social movements.
00:44:01.000At the beginning of the 20th century, the populist movement, which is in the countryside, the progressive movement, which was in the cities, the reform movement, which was Republican, the populist movement was Democrat, but they got together.
00:44:14.000And then you had muckraking journalists who played a critical role in Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis and many, many others.
00:44:26.000McClure's Magazine, which was, you know, this font of exposes about corruption in government that played a cue that everybody in the country read back then.
00:44:38.000And then you had one figure, Teddy Roosevelt, who came out of the aristocracy himself but was unintimidated by it and was willing to stand up to it and had these notions about bringing them under control.
00:44:55.000And he got into office over the next few years.
00:44:57.000They passed child labor laws, a 40-hour work week.
00:45:09.000And for the first time, they broke up the Standard Oil Company, which is the biggest company in the world.
00:45:17.000But the most important law they passed, which was in 1908, was a law that made it illegal for corporations to make direct contributions to federal elective candidates.
00:45:30.000That was in 2008, exactly 100 years later, and it restored democracy.
00:45:37.000And then we had the New Deal after that that created this robust middle class.
00:45:43.000The 50 years following World War II, the great prosperity, when we grew the middle class into the greatest economic engine in history, we owned half the wealth on the face of the earth, and the institutions of our democracy were essentially, well, tiny bits corrupt, but essentially incorruptible.
00:46:35.000Now, in exactly 100 years after we passed that law that really gave us back our democracy, the Supreme Court issued in 2008, I think it was 2008, the Citizens United case.
00:46:52.000And that Citizens United did something very unusual and I think very troubling and dangerous.
00:47:01.000Which is the Supreme Court said that speech, that donations, that monetary donations to a political candidate are the equivalent of speech.
00:47:14.000They're protected under the First Amendment, under freedom of expression.
00:47:17.000So you're, and there's no other country that says that.
00:47:20.000You know, all the Western democracies in Europe allow very stringent regulation of campaign donations.
00:47:31.000We had this very conservative Supreme Court that gave this revolutionary holding that opened up a tsunami of wealth that began pouring into the political process.
00:47:45.000And here's the problem now is that, you know, prior to that time, presidential elections cost less than a billion dollars today for all sides.
00:47:59.000Today, You know, this coming presidential election will probably go up to $3 or $4 billion.
00:48:05.000And if a candidate, for example, in New York State or California or Florida, a candidate needs to raise $40 or $50 billion or even $100 million to run for elective office and get into the Senate, well, if you have to raise that money, it means that you have to make several, maybe 1,000 calls a week To people who are going to give you $10,000 donations.
00:48:36.000When those people are giving you that money, most of them are not giving it out of a patriotic impulse.
00:48:43.000They're giving it because they have an expectation that there's going to be a return on that investment.
00:48:48.000And, you know, it may be a small return, meaning that you will return their phone call if they call you sometime in the future and give them your year for 10 minutes at least, or 20 minutes.
00:48:59.000That's what they can get for that 10 grand.
00:49:05.000And so if you have, you know, 3 or 4,000, 5,000 people have given you $10,000 apiece, and these are the top rungs of our society, and you have to answer all their phone calls every day, you're not going to have much time to listen to the little guy who calls you and never gave you anything.
00:49:23.000And, you know, and for a politician, Everything they do is about raising money for the next election.
00:49:32.000And they have an advisor whispering in their ear all the time, that guy's going to give me money, that guy isn't.
00:49:40.000And so we now have arrived at a situation in our country where, which is the exact situation that we had a revolution to get away from, which is a rule by the oligarchy, a rule by the aristocracy, because the only person, people of the ear of Congress is this aristocracy.
00:50:00.000And if you look, you know, recently at all the Democratic Party, the legacy media outlets, that are attacking me in this very, very vicious way, you know, ad hominem attacks that, you know, are very kind of personal and, you know, not policy related, but personal to silence me.
00:50:21.000They all have become part of this system where they're, you know, they're They're protecting the interests of the elites.
00:50:32.000And, you know, a couple days ago, I talked with David Remick, and I was pointing that out to him.
00:50:37.000He said, well, you're part of the elites.
00:50:44.000But I've spent my lifetime challenging the rule of the elites.
00:50:52.000Somebody the other day, I went to a dinner in Las Vegas and I made a little bit of a statement about my campaign and a guy next to me And then the people in this room were the highest level people in our government, you know, including the former head of the CIA, the head of the State Department, you know, two State Department Secretaries of State at that table.
00:51:16.000And I said something that made everybody at the table angry, and the guy next to me Turned to me and he whispered to me, they consider you a traitor to their class.
00:52:24.000Some people say they get involved, other people say they don't.
00:52:26.000Certainly there's no information that could be detrimental to the advance of the preferred establishment party that's held back, but I believe systemic change is what's required.
00:52:36.000Here though, I come to Joe Biden With sympathy in my heart, not because he's a stooge of a system that will never deliver real change to the ordinary people of America who deserve better, but because I've been in the situation he was in.
00:52:50.000It was Martin Luther King III's wife...
00:52:55.000His wife, Andrea, I think is her name, it was her birthday and he wanted to sing Happy Birthday to her.
00:53:01.000And have you ever been in that situation where you're singing Happy Birthday and then you realise that when it's going to get to the bit, Happy Birthday dear!
00:53:09.000And you think, oh no, I don't know the person's name.
00:53:10.000But what you can do is you can just drop out for that bit and the other people are going to sing.
00:53:14.000There's got to be other people doing it though.
00:53:32.000If you know that you've got a bunch of top secret files in your numerous residencies, don't go, right, Donald Trump's done the worst thing anyone could ever do.
00:54:01.000Happy birthday dear... Also, when you watch this, you see the moment when he realises he doesn't know the name, and then the thing that he comes up with instead of a name is frankly not good enough.
00:54:14.000But congratulations today, the honorees, including your wife, who I understand, uh, is it her birthday today?
00:54:24.000Well look, my wife has a role in our family.
00:54:27.000When somebody's birthday, you sing happy birthday.
00:54:35.000It's because in acting, you would call that playing the obstacle.
00:54:38.000He's always trying to present something that's not what he's actually doing, because what he's thinking is, how can I seem normal and cogent?
00:54:56.000Go out there and pretend to be normal.
00:54:57.000Your job is be the President of the United States, be the Commander-in-Chief, represent the will of the American people at a divisive time when the systems have become corrupted, when people are terrified about globalism, when people are worried that corporatism has overtaken democracy.
00:55:23.000Happy birthday... I want you to, while you're watching, try and spot the exact moment when he realises, oh no, I do not know the name of Andrea.
00:57:25.000And when I talk about liberal politics, progressive politics, when I talk about the left, one of the voices that I hold in my head and my heart is yours.
00:57:36.000And I've began to feel that liberal media has become so disconnected from the people that they're supposed to represent.
00:57:42.000that the British Labour Party have become disconnected from the people they're supposed
00:57:45.000to represent, that the Democrat Party is no longer a voice of bringing people together
00:57:50.000but in my view uses cultural issues to drive people apart and are disingenuous even in
00:57:55.000their apparent support of previously and let's face it, currently oppressed cultural groups.
00:58:02.000Dr. West, what do you think is happening in our culture?
00:58:20.000And the analysis has to be one in which it focuses on the precious lives of poor and working people, no matter what color they are, wretched of the earth from around every corner of the globe.
00:58:31.000But that means keeping a focus on what you actually do.
00:59:56.000When you got courageous brothers and sisters, artists.
01:00:00.000Like yourself, truth tellers, like so many others, the Chris Hedges and others, trying to be honest.
01:00:07.000The Matt Beatties and others, trying to be honest and saying, look, neoliberalism is dying.
01:00:16.000One of the big... Neomatism is escalating.
01:00:19.000The American empire is wrestling with spiritual decay and moral decrepitude in part because centralized power at the highest levels of our economy and tied to military with its politicians bought off by big money and war profiteering elites are making citizens feel as if There are nothing but consumers, nothing but commodified entities.
01:00:42.000So that truth telling and the visionary work becomes crucial.
01:00:46.000And that's what I've seen you do over these years, though, brother.
01:00:50.000I'm telling you, man, it's a beautiful thing to behold.
01:00:53.000Thank you for saying that, because your praise is a meaningful balm at a time where I've felt, if not attacked, because I also get a lot of love, I come from the world of entertainment, so I'm somewhat praise-oriented, I have to be honest.
01:01:11.000But I have felt, sometimes, I've felt, am I doing the right thing?
01:01:15.000Is this the right way to conduct this conversation?
01:01:17.000You've brought up so much, even in your first response there.
01:01:20.000I've been considering for a while that materialism, rationalism, and post-enlightenment values have led inexorably, even if inadvertently, to a state of nihilism such as you describe, that it's very difficult with populations of scale to instantiate a centralized set of values, ethics, and meaning And it appears with this divisiveness that I feel that somehow the culture is benefiting from has become worse and worse in recent years.
01:01:48.000A few just like placeholder arguments to consider, Cornel, as we hopefully advance our conversation, sir, is my friend Adam Curtis, the documentary maker, who said, no one ever made a left-wing case for Brexit.
01:02:02.000No one has, and I would add to that, no one has ever considered what the emotional timbre of Trump was, what it is that he reaches in people, what it is beyond the rhetoric and divisiveness, what it is within that emotional quality that is reaching people.
01:02:20.000Given that this is a contemporary news show that we are streaming right now, it's worth bringing up an issue that's becoming somewhat defining of our time, the January 6th insurrection.
01:02:31.000It seems impossible to say that both those events and the Black Lives Matter uprisings in the summer of the murder of George Floyd are in a sense a demonstration of the problems that centralised authority We'll always bring about that until we have a time where people that corral around these separate issues, these separate publics, before these separate publics, if these separate publics cannot recognize that ultimately they have to confront the same authority, we will not experience the kind of unity that both of us apparently crave.
01:03:07.000How do you think we have to frame the conversation both for people on the neoliberal establishment left But also for people that identify with patriotism and what are called these days right-wing politics so that we can overcome and not only accept but love and embrace cultural difference in order to meaningfully confront these forms of centralised media, political, financial and military authority that are thriving in this climate of division, sir.
01:03:37.000Yeah, I think we always want to begin with a fundamental commitment to wrestling with what it means to be human.
01:03:45.000Because when you get to our deep humanity, that functions at a level that is much more profound than what color, than what gender, what sexual orientation.
01:03:57.000Why we all wrestling with organized greed at the top, especially, but across the board, we all wrestling with various forms of hatred and self-doubt inside of us.
01:04:06.000We had to be honest and candid with ourselves, just as we're honest and candid with the powers that be.
01:04:11.000That's precisely what the legacy of the Martin Luther King Jr., and the Fannie Lou Hamers, and the Ella Bakers, and the John Coltrane, and the Aretha Franklin.
01:04:19.000And I would listen to a little Loose Ends, and I would listen to a little Soul to Soul for my British connection here.
01:04:25.000When you listen to that music, my brother, it touches your soul.
01:05:37.000We got to bring serious critique to bear on any kind of white supremacist, male supremacist, homophobic or transphobic sensibilities that they might have, but also recognize they are human beings just like us.
01:05:50.000And the fundamental question is the question that you've wrestled with, and I've wrestled with, What does it mean to be a wounded healer rather than a wounded hurter?
01:06:01.000If you're wounded and then you're going to somehow demonize the vulnerable rather than confront the most powerful, you're going to end up with a right-wing populism Rather than a progressive populism, or most importantly in the language of Sheldon Wolin, my dear brother Bernard Harcourt, his new book on the cooperative movement, on Nancy Fraser's cannibal capitalism.