Lily Phillips, ethics and morality, and the pornographization of culture and interaction. Trump's acquisition of the Gaza Strip, just empty rhetoric or the wrecking ball horror that his detractors fear? And finally, USAID, the CIA in different forms under different guises, is that the reason that neoliberalism and social democracy has fallen away into failure and been replaced by a kind of...populist nationalism best defined by the Trump MAGA movement?
00:03:48.000And don't worry if you're a local subscriber, we'll continue to provide that content until you find the time to join us over on Rumble Premium, our main home.
00:03:56.000So without any further hullabaloo, ludicrousness or needless linguistics, let's welcome to the show Neil Oliver and Lara Logan.
00:04:04.000Lara Logan, Neil Oliver, thanks so much for joining me today for Stay Free Oracles with Russell Brandt.
00:04:19.000You two being the oracles in this instance.
00:04:37.000We looked like twin denim armchairs in a club for men that you simply didn't penetrate, Lara, and it's on you.
00:04:44.000And perhaps the reason I'm using such gendered and eroticised language is our first subject today is Lily Phillips.
00:04:51.000Now, I recognise that Lily Phillips is not at the very forefront of the news cycle right this minute.
00:04:56.000Over the next hour, we will be talking, of course, about Trump's acquisition of Gaza and additionally USAID. Which some people, me specifically, are calling the story of the century.
00:05:08.000And if anyone else uses that phrase, they're a plagiarist plagiarising directly from me.
00:05:12.000But first we're going to talk about Lily Phillips.
00:05:14.000Not just Lily Phillips in her capacity as an OnlyFans model.
00:05:17.000I want to tell you why, both of you, why I'm interested in Lily.
00:05:21.000And watch out for any purility, prurience or unwarranted attention here.
00:05:27.000I am struck by Lily Phillips because a lot is enshrined in this story.
00:05:32.000Lily Phillips famously slept with 100 people in a day, and marathon and gargantuan sex sessions are hardly news.
00:05:38.000They've existed in pornography and in culture for a long time.
00:05:42.000Something that's fascinating about Lily Phillips and the OnlyFans phenomena, though, is the normalization of the commodification of sex.
00:05:49.000We not only have the commodification of sex, which we've had, I suppose, for as long as we've had prostitution, but now we have the normalization.
00:05:56.000And almost banalization of that commodification, i.e.
00:06:00.000the idea that anybody can sell sex at any time.
00:06:05.000And here's an example that really made this hit home for me.
00:06:10.000My wife told me that she heard of a fitness instructor that simultaneously does OnlyFans.
00:06:18.000Of what it would do to me if I didn't have a consistent and robust moral framework in the form of Christ Jesus.
00:06:25.000If when I'd been any age from 14 to 30 in my single adult life, I suppose, or post-pubescent life at least, if I'd have known that you could meet a human being, interact with them at a grocery store or outside a schoolyard or indeed in a fitness class, and then you could pay money to see that person intimately expose themselves in a way that typically...
00:06:47.000Hopefully they only would to a loved one or a gynaecologist.
00:06:54.000And when I think of that ad infinitum, when I think of the phenomena of pornography, when I think of its impact, the commodification of all that is sacred, it helps me to understand something that is culturally pervasive that probably hasn't yet been correctly defined.
00:07:07.000Lara, I know you have strong views and are a strong advocate for anti-trafficking measures when it comes to women and children.
00:07:15.000I also know that you've been the victim of rape.
00:07:18.000And I wonder how you feel about the sacredness and sanctity of sex and what the commodification of sex, whether it's someone like Lily Phillips or even someone like me, who when I was a famous person was being indulgent, hedonistic, epicurean to a ludicrous degree.
00:07:33.000What do you think is the impact of the commodification, commercialization and normalization of that commodification when it comes to the erotic?
00:07:47.000I think the only thing I can tell you is what I told my children, is that they want you to believe today that you can have physical, intimate interactions, sexual interactions with people, and that it doesn't take anything from you.
00:08:07.000And I think that's part of the reason that Lily Phillips, in the documentary film that was made about her doing this stunt, Is crying, right?
00:08:17.000And it's obvious that this person who, for whatever reasons, I don't know enough about her and her life and what brought her to that point, but this is a person whose soul is just being obliterated.
00:08:34.000I mean, I was lucky enough to be raised to love myself.
00:08:40.000You know, and to have a sense of self-worth.
00:08:43.000I'll tell you what my mother told me when I was a young girl.
00:08:47.000She said, I'm just going to be honest with you.
00:08:49.000She said, if you want to come cheap, there isn't a man in this town who won't take you.
00:08:54.000She said, they'll be lining up from here to Timbuktu.
00:09:53.000Just don't put yourself in that position.
00:09:55.000And not everybody has a mother like that.
00:09:57.000Not everybody grows up with that sense of self-worth.
00:10:03.000Obviously, become a society that when you take the meaning out of life and the meaning out of spirituality, if you say, well, God, it doesn't matter.
00:10:11.000Religion is corrupt and priests are all pedophiles and it's all evil and horrible and we're better off without it.
00:10:18.000What you essentially do is you take purpose away, you take meaning away, you really take spirituality away.
00:10:26.000This concept that you can find spirituality in nature and it's got nothing to do with God is sort of ridiculous to me.
00:10:32.000And what you do is you end up with a very sad, very rich, but very broken, empty little girl.
00:11:55.000And I have nothing but pity for all the people that are involved in elevating that and putting it out and profiting off it because you sold your soul and you sold it to the devil.
00:12:06.000And that's, you know, that's between you and the devil and God if you believe in it.
00:12:11.000But, you know, it's an indictment on us.
00:12:15.000On us all and it's also a warning because this idea that you can do OnlyFans and you can do a little bit here and a little bit there.
00:12:23.000OnlyFans is grooming and it's grooming for a much darker world just like pornography is training.
00:12:30.000You know, traffickers today they use pornography to train kids so that they know what to do when they put them to work.
00:12:52.000But what I do think each one of us has a responsibility to do is to look at the whole picture.
00:12:58.000And when you are raising young girls to believe that there's some kind of achievement in selling yourself and selling your body, I mean, sex is always sold.
00:13:10.000You can't be self-righteous and say it's okay to do it in a movie with mood lighting and make it look beautiful, and it's somehow different.
00:13:21.000And so we have to ask ourselves and come to our own decisions is where we stand on that.
00:13:27.000But when you get to the point where a girl is doing that to herself and people are trying to elevate her for that, people are offering her more money and better deals and all the rest of it, there's going to be nothing left of that girl.
00:13:41.000When they're done with her, there'll be nothing left of her.
00:13:45.000They're not only elevating her, but also simultaneously denigrating her.
00:13:49.000That formed part of the conversation between Lily Phillips and myself, which I approached openly and transparently as a person that in the past has had Not a complicated relationship with sex, an exuberant relationship with sex, and I discussed that exuberance.
00:14:09.000By the way, actually, Laura, I heard that there was a point where that dog in your room made a low, grumbling sound while out of frame, and I'm glad that the dog has subsequently been revealed, because otherwise, Lord alone knows what conclusions we might have drawn from it.
00:14:32.000If you're watching this on X or YouTube, remember that this show in its entirety is available exclusively on Rumble, and you should become a member of Rumble Premium to get ad-free content as well as additional content, including early access to the content I made.
00:14:46.000Please use the code BRAN to get access to that.
00:14:48.000Here's a small part of the conversation between Lily and myself where she talked about how she started on OnlyFans.
00:14:56.000And Neil, after that, I'd love you to come in on what you think happens to morality and the very idea of sex as sacred when it's introduced to the...
00:15:05.000To mass technology, because I think that's an important part of this story, not just ethics and pornography, but the impact of technology on morality.
00:15:13.000Here's Lily Phillips talking about how she got into the OnlyFans.
00:15:16.000I was, like, 80 and I started to hear about this OnlyFans.
00:15:21.000For me, I thought it was, like, the perfect job because it, you know, combines something I love, sex, with, you know, a job.
00:15:32.000You know, being able to monetize off that and being creative.
00:15:37.000And so when I went off to university, I knew that what I went to university for wasn't quite what I wanted to do.
00:15:47.000I wasn't really sure why I went to university.
00:15:49.000I just kind of went because everyone else was.
00:15:51.000And then that's when I was like, you know, I'm going to start.
00:15:55.000Later we'll be talking about USAID, which until pretty recently I would have considered to be one of the great controversial moments in the Trump administration.
00:16:03.000But of course, since then, there has been the Trump acquisition, let's call it, of Gaza.
00:16:07.000We'll be talking about all of that a little later.
00:16:09.000But first, Neil, I'd love your response, mate, on the Lily Phillips phenomena and the impact of technology on pornography and the impact of pornography on the human spirit and what your reaction is to this.
00:16:22.000I find it difficult to follow Lara talking about it because, you know, one of my basic reactions to the story is that I do believe that sex is profoundly different for men and women.
00:16:41.000You know, I think there's no way of...
00:16:46.000Of making broad generalisations that, you know, that sex is just sex and that it affects men as it does women.
00:16:52.000And I do think comment on the Lily Phillips story is more relevant coming from a woman and from women because, you know, a male response to the act is profoundly different.
00:17:07.000But I suppose what I thought right away was, I think she's 23, is that right?
00:17:16.000And she's obviously been in the industry for a while.
00:17:23.000She was younger when she started in the industry.
00:17:26.000And I'm a dad of, you know, my daughter's 21. And so I, you know, anything that happens to any young woman, whatever it is, I automatically think about it in relation to mine.
00:17:46.000I'm just frankly horrified at the thought of it.
00:17:51.000I think there's no way, I don't think there's any way of looking at what happened to Lily in that project, in that stunt, as Lara called it, without seeing it as a violation.
00:18:12.000But without saying that she was in any way coerced, we're taking it as read that she was completely compliant with the event, but looked at objectively.
00:18:28.000I heard her use expressions at certain times when that coverage that Lara's talking about, where she seemed to be distressed about what had just happened, and she was talking about one in and one out.
00:18:40.000There's no way you could listen to the testimony from her own lips without...
00:19:50.000Would you have been one of those hundred?
00:19:53.000When I was younger, I wouldn't have hesitated.
00:19:57.000I maybe wouldn't have wanted to be in a context with loads of men, but what I was aware of when speaking with her was the kind of, and I declared this in the conversation, is that the periphery of my being, there is a kind of shadow that is stimulated by the image of absolute Lack of inhibition or prohibition around sex.
00:20:18.000And I said, when I was younger, I would have, I can, I said, like, almost like a phantom limb, as it were.
00:20:24.000I can feel the sort of haunting of the power of the erotic.
00:20:28.000And that is to acknowledge its sanctity, its literal sacred set-apartness.
00:20:33.000So yeah, I would have, when I was younger, like, not...
00:20:36.000Perhaps literally have been in the line, but certainly I would have co-signed the idea that we should engage in sex abundantly with any consenting adult who's up for it, that there should be no censure.
00:20:51.000But would you have been like number 80, number 85, number 90?
00:20:56.000Would you have been the hundredth guy in a day to go and have sex with a young woman?
00:21:03.000Yes, I recognise now, as the man I am here as a follower of Christ Jesus, I hear how outrageous and ridiculous what you're saying is.
00:21:09.000But what I can tell you is, there was a time when I was about 23 or 24, when I probably was still using drugs, where I filmed something with a sex worker, stayed at her house, and she was working and stuff, and I had sex with her at the end of it.
00:21:23.000And I remember part of what felt eroticised was the fact that this is a person that had been objectified.
00:21:29.000And there is also, may I say, some sort of warped sense of some kind of peculiar reverence, some perverse, I suppose is the word, reverence, of cherishing and treasuring sexually a woman that has been through that.
00:21:44.000I remember I've slept with a bunch of sex workers.
00:21:46.000I've had sex in situations with more than one, and sometimes significantly more than one, woman.
00:21:53.000And I remember that it was the feeling of kind of the erotic power in that.
00:23:06.000When I say that I'm appalled, I'm only reflecting on it and empathising with the situation in which she put herself.
00:23:15.000And then further, not imagining, but the very idea that anything like that would happen.
00:23:21.000Any of mine would want to be involved in anything like that.
00:23:24.000I just have to say that that frankly appalls me.
00:23:27.000But I don't want that to come laden with any kind of pious Victorian dad style, you know, walk through the streets with a flaming pitchfork about it.
00:23:37.000You know, she's a, you know, God love her.
00:23:47.000I'm so fascinated and impressed to hear you speak, Russell, because you speak with such honesty.
00:23:55.000I think it's very, very powerful that you're frank and that you find, actually, in the moment, persuasive ways to talk about the ways in which that kind of situation can be profound.
00:24:14.000But I myself, I don't have any experience of it.
00:24:18.000Me, personally, I've only ever wanted to be the only erection in the room.
00:24:24.000And the very thought about there being a queue of guys, you know, priapic at the prospect of what...
00:24:45.000But I can only seek to empathize with the situation and think, I just feel very, my sense is that Lily Phillips, having gone through that and whatever else that she has gone through, having gone through that and whatever else that she has gone through, there will be long term unhappy consequences as a result Maybe I'm wrong.
00:25:11.000But I can only conclude from my experience of life and having been intimate with and spoken to a number of women that there's no way that what she has been doing and what she seems to be proposing to do next, there's no way that that can be processed and become a happy part of a life going forward.
00:25:34.000Hopefully she'll survive it and come through it.
00:25:43.000And I want to just add one quick thing that will answer your question about the technology.
00:25:47.000There's a broader problem here when you step back from the personal impact to Lily and the personal choices made by the people that encourage this.
00:25:56.000And that broader impact is, yeah, group sex is one thing, but now you're adding in technology, right?
00:26:03.000Now you're adding in social media and the vehicle by which OnlyFans Literally, because of the economies of scale, because this can now reach people all over the world, the amount of money in it is enormous.
00:26:18.000And it's like nothing we've ever seen before.
00:26:21.000There's nothing that Playboy ever did at its heyday that comes close, right?
00:26:26.000We're talking about technology that is making this instant and is making this accessible and is making this...
00:26:59.000You know, she's being painted as being powerful in her own way because there's a whole ideology today that sex workers make the choice, they're not the victims, the prostitutes of old were, that there's something powerful and that we should empower them because they have every right.
00:27:16.000She said, I love sex and basically I don't want to go to college and do the hard work.
00:27:36.000Because there is no, the thing about life is that there are certain fundamental principles.
00:27:42.000You get out of something what you put in.
00:27:44.000You know, things are a product of hard work.
00:27:47.000How much work are you willing to put in?
00:27:50.000And everybody wants to take shortcuts and they want to tell themselves that they can change the rules.
00:27:54.000But the rules of the game, in a sense, they never really change.
00:27:58.000And the reality is that when you try to take these shortcuts, it usually means that there's something darker there.
00:28:04.000And what technology has done is it's taken all of that darkness.
00:28:08.000And it's created a marketplace for it.
00:28:11.000So whether it's the OnlyFans, or whether it's the Hurtcore, which is sadistic pornography, or whether it's the snuff films, these things through technology and the dark web, they have a broader audience, they have a broader reach, they have more power than they ever have, and they're setting an example for all of our kids that it's okay.
00:28:33.000What they're doing is they're saying it's okay.
00:28:35.000It's okay for you to sell your soul if it gets you a pair of designer shoes.
00:28:39.000It's okay if it gets you an Instagram, a crown, it makes you an influencer, it gives you followers, that this is the way to live now.
00:28:50.000And there's nothing essentially wrong with it.
00:28:52.000And, you know, I mean, my heart breaks really when I see her in that film talking about what happened.
00:28:57.000But then I take a look at her ex account and it's, you know, I mean, I mean, there she is, selling herself and setting an example for all of our kids that this is what you've got to do if you want to succeed.
00:29:13.000You know, I remember my son and my daughter, young, having an argument once.
00:29:17.000And my daughter is feminist, you know, like me, and so on and so on.
00:29:20.000And she said, if boys have the right to sleep with anybody they want, this is about six, seven years ago, then girls should have that right too.
00:29:28.000And I turned around and I said, That's not really the whole point.
00:29:34.000That's not really the whole point of the argument.
00:29:36.000I said, when, you know, you, yeah, sure, people can have sex and say, oh, it was just, it was just physical and it didn't mean anything at all.
00:29:45.000Sure, you know, there's, that happens all the time.
00:29:48.000I said, but this is, you're taking the mystery and the magic and everything that matters, you're taking it out of this and you're making it now, like, there's many other lilies out there.
00:30:15.000But they're setting the stage, they're letting you know that there is nothing, that you lose nothing, that you give nothing of yourself, that there's nothing spiritual and magical about that connection that comes from physical intimacy, not just the sexual part of it, but when you really love someone and when you bring all that together, they're taking that away from our children.
00:30:39.000Certainly I would say that there is an impact for men as well when it comes to promiscuity, even though I take and acknowledge Neil's points that there are biological and anatomical differences that likely have...
00:30:52.000Bear out psychologically and even spiritually on the mind of the sexes.
00:30:57.000All of that and more is covered in the conversation between Lily Phillips and I. I don't think I didn't notice that Lara Logan's dog during that conversation appeared to disappear to tend to her OnlyFans account for canines, which I'm calling in my mind like bony fangs or OnlyFangs, something like that.
00:32:23.000The Tax Network USA has proven strategies that are designed to settle your tax problems in your favour, whether you owe ten grand, or ten thousand dollars, or ten million dollars.
00:32:31.000Their attorneys and negotiators have resolved over a billion dollars in tax debt.
00:33:18.000If you get Rumble Premium using the code brand, you get access to all sorts of additional content from me and other Rumble creators as well as an ad-free experience.
00:33:26.000Now, many people saw the advent of the Trump administration as an end to the global order, as a significant shift in the trajectory of presumed Kafkaesque institutional tyranny.
00:33:39.000The Trump movement was a spoke in the wheels of a particular type of globalism with the announcement that Trump says that...
00:33:48.000We are going way beyond the tongue-in-cheek talk of the Panama Canal and Greenland into an extraordinarily contentious area, perhaps the most contentious area in the history of...
00:34:03.000And to hear Donald Trump talking about it in the kind of extraordinary terms of construction, as if it's just another deal, has been pretty startling for some.
00:34:12.000Not for people, though, who on the periphery have claimed that MAGA Trump is just another iteration of centralized global power playing out in democracy.
00:34:20.000So what does this tell us about the Trump administration?
00:34:23.000Here's Donald Trump himself talking about the acquisition of Gaza.
00:34:27.000We'll be talking about that after this.
00:34:46.000create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area.
00:34:54.000If we can get a beautiful area to resettle people permanently in nice homes and where they can be happy and not be shot, not be killed, not be knifed to death like what's happening in Gaza, why would they want to return?
00:35:38.000Neil, to the already pretty entrenched divisions between the left and right, the left will claim that this is an example of the megalomaniarchal Trump that they always feared, and it's difficult really to see how this was part of his America First campaign agenda.
00:36:50.000Obviously, you go back a year and more ago and his son-in-law was talking about beachfront property in Gaza and it being an enormous investment opportunity and all of the rest of it.
00:37:01.000I listened to that at the time and thought...
00:37:04.000Did anybody know that he was going to say that there?
00:37:07.000And then you watch Trump in that press conference and you think, did anybody know that he was going to say that there?
00:37:14.000And Benjamin Netanyahu didn't seem to understand, judging by his body language, it didn't seem as though he had been pre-warned about what Trump was saying.
00:37:23.000So there's just this whole bubble of uncertainty hanging all over it, because in the face of it, it sounds like it would be...
00:37:31.000To any rational person, it would be completely illegal and impossible for the USA to take Gaza, level it and redevelop it and decide who was going to live there, which is what he certainly seemed to be saying.
00:37:46.000And then that bit in the second clip, you know, where he says Gaza's been such a terrible place, why would anybody want to go back to it?
00:37:55.000The people who previously lived there are not going back there.
00:38:00.000Whether they want to or not, he seemed to be implying that whoever was going to live in the redeveloped Gaza was not going to be the people who have spent seven decades and lifetimes of hurt and pain trying to hold on to something.
00:38:19.000So, in short, I look on it and I don't know how to interpret what Donald Trump said there.
00:38:28.000I suppose many of us were wondering what a newly emboldened 2025 version of Donald Trump might look like with him, confirmation pending, surrounded by legitimising and, in my view, brilliant figures like Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard.
00:38:46.000The opinion of Trump changed over the years as to, oh, this dude is a wrecking ball when it comes to globalist power, and even though he is a nationalist and a populist, people love him because he's kind of funny and affable, and he's an old-school entrepreneurial tycoon-ish figure that regards everything as a kind of a deal opportunity.
00:39:03.000Kind of from that perspective, there are aspects of this rhetoric, at least, that aren't surprising.
00:39:09.000But when it comes to the most contentious historical issue that encompasses ideas like imperialism, colonialism, And spiritual legitimacy of the rights to claim land, claims that could, of course, be made by Aboriginal Australians or Irish people to the British or Indian people to the British or Native Americans to currently settled residents of the United States of America.
00:39:50.000I wasn't expecting it, and I had to listen to it a couple times.
00:39:53.000I saw different headlines and different people commenting on it, and I had to go to the original video to listen to it just to sort of wrap my head around it.
00:40:02.000I'm not 100% convinced that Trump meant what he said.
00:40:11.000I think that Neil's very astute observation there of Jared Kushner.
00:40:15.000I remember when he said that about beachfront properties in Gaza.
00:40:18.000And it also stuck out because, you know, Gaza obviously is, on the one hand, you have this massive destruction.
00:40:25.000But then on the other hand, I have been to Gaza and I have seen the ginormous Porsche dealerships and all the luxury car dealerships and the very wealthy parts of Gaza, especially.
00:40:37.000Especially after Hamas came in, they stole so much from the people and it helped them to keep the people in poverty because that was very much a recruiting tool for them.
00:40:52.000And not to say there weren't other issues, it's just something that's not often remarked on or not often known because people don't generally go to Gaza and see these things for themselves.
00:41:01.000But I'm always, you know, this is one of those situations.
00:41:06.000Where I immediately hold and try to figure out what is this really about?
00:41:12.000Because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
00:41:15.000I mean, it sounds, you know, it sounds simple in one respect.
00:41:20.000Oh, we're going to, you know, take over Gaza and rebuild it.
00:41:22.000Well, rebuilding, I've seen that in Afghanistan.
00:42:32.000Well, I can't be sure, but I imagine that if you sat down with him, he would have a very, you know, reasoned, articulated, substantial argument telling you why he means it.
00:42:45.000And in terms of how could they legally do it now?
00:42:48.000The only way they could legally do it was if the Palestinian Authority, the people, you know, in charge who legally owned Gaza, were, I mean...
00:42:58.000We agreed, made an agreement with the U.S. And I don't think it's beyond Trump to do.
00:43:04.000I mean, we don't really know at this point.
00:43:06.000We don't have a good granular idea of how much legs does Hamas still have in them.
00:43:12.000And what about Hezbollah and the Iranians?
00:43:15.000There's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that I know about that is not reported, where Iran has taken massive, massive, massive hits to their infrastructure.
00:43:26.000And people blame everything on the Israelis.
00:43:28.000Even when the Israelis don't actually have the military capability to do what's being done, which tells me that the people who are really doing it are the U.S. So I know that there's a lot going on behind the scenes that we're not aware of.
00:43:41.000I mean, of course there are people within Hamas that are completely ideological and cannot be bought, just like anybody else.
00:43:48.000But there's also a lot of them that can be bought.
00:43:51.000There's also a lot of them that have paid a very heavy price at this point, have been brought to their knees.
00:43:56.000And I don't know what kind of deals are going on behind the scenes.
00:44:00.000I wouldn't put it past them to make some kind of crazy deal.
00:44:19.000I just find it very difficult to contemplate even the possibility in the real world.
00:44:25.000That Trump's sponsors and major donors and Benjamin Netanyahu and the party of which he is the front could entertain the idea that Donald Trump was going to redevelop Gaza, by whatever means, and reinstall the incumbent population now into a lovely Gaza.
00:44:57.000And that was one way in which one might have read what Trump seemed to be saying.
00:45:04.000But I think the other thing to be, you know, when you look back on the history of, which is from 1948, or even further back, you know, you go back to 1917 and the Balfour Declaration.
00:45:17.000And when you look at it from the distance of time and think that in that instance, You know, Britain invited itself to decide to give away a territory that it didn't own and had no ancestral claim on to someone else without any consultation whatsoever with the incumbent population.
00:45:44.000And that incumbent population was frightened and forced away from it.
00:45:50.000You know, from their homes, from their olive groves, from their fruit trees and all of the rest of it.
00:45:57.000They were just forced out of it and found themselves disenfranchised and exiled in living memory.
00:46:06.000And it seems absolutely, it's surreal now to watch Donald Trump representing the United States of America seeming to now take claim ownership of part of that territory and again decide, it's surreal now to watch Donald Trump representing the United States of America seeming to now take claim ownership of part of that territory and again decide, you know, without direct reference territory and again decide, you
00:46:36.000Now looking on at Donald Trump as the next person coming in saying, well, I'm just going to tell everyone what's going to happen here.
00:46:44.000Let me throw something controversial at you both, okay?
00:46:49.000Let me throw something controversial at you.
00:46:50.000Neil, I understand it, and that's why I don't really believe it.
00:47:38.000I'm just saying we are in a very interesting moment here.
00:47:45.000Modern history, where there is someone who's not playing according to the rules that we have seen.
00:47:52.000And the rules that we have seen, going back to the Balfour Declaration, or whether it's the Durant Line in Afghanistan, or whether it's the separation of Rwanda.
00:48:00.000I mean, I'm a product of colonialism and all the rest of it growing up.
00:48:04.000In South Africa, I've seen that all over Africa.
00:48:07.000I've been to probably 40, 50 countries where I've seen that.
00:48:11.000So I know exactly what you're talking about.
00:48:13.000One after another, you can trace modern warfare to decisions that were made by the Arabs, not just the Brits, the Arabs, the Portuguese, the French.
00:48:22.000I mean, all of them have their legacy of imperialism that has torn tribes and societies and countries and areas apart.
00:49:42.000When it doesn't make sense, there's a reason it doesn't make sense, right?
00:49:46.000And this doesn't make sense on the surface.
00:49:50.000Trump's leadership, I suppose, has always contained a component of staggering havoc.
00:49:58.000That he tore apart the playbook when campaigning to be the leader of the Republican Party.
00:50:02.000He tore up the playbook when electioneering against Hillary Clinton.
00:50:07.000And in his first term, domestically, there was this sense that we're dealing with a leader that's not confined by norms.
00:50:14.000Those norms themselves have to be undergirded by sets of moral authority that broadly have...
00:50:21.000To see Trump playing that out on a geopolitical scale, we are at the kind of nexus of the issue that's around which appear to web ideas such as colonialism, imperialism, spiritual power, is extraordinary.
00:50:36.000And I take your point, Lara, that to end this sort of ancient cycle of violence, what kind of epoch-shifting act and figure does it require?
00:50:53.000The sort of extraordinary individual power of Donald Trump that's going to provide this fracture and warping in our understanding of reality.
00:51:02.000Like you, Laura, I can't actually imagine it.
00:51:05.000And like you, Neil, I sort of have this sense that, does Donald Trump mean that?
00:51:09.000And what I really think it is, it's a sort of Donald Trump being Donald Trump, this person that uses tactics, rhetoric and behaviours that are way outside of what we've come to accept as normal political discourse.
00:51:25.000He'll just say a thing and now we're all having to deal with this new reality that's almost been spoken into being by him.
00:51:33.000And it's so sort of absurd and extraordinary that you almost can't keep up with all of the moral, ethical, national, historical, colonial narratives that have preceded it.
00:51:47.000It's like, it's like and it's not like...
00:51:51.000Being there, you know, the Peter Sellers movie about the American president.
00:51:57.000I'm not suggesting for a moment that he's like the character that Peter Sellers plays in that film, but the character Chancey Gardner would say things and everyone else would just interpret it for him.
00:52:48.000And maybe he did mean that, but it's also possible that he just speaks.
00:52:52.000Well, and it's also possible that he has a different plan.
00:52:56.000I mean, like you said, Netanyahu's body language showed that it wasn't something that they had sat down in meetings and figured out and knew exactly what to say.
00:53:08.000But we don't know because we weren't there.
00:53:10.000But what we do know, you know what I do know?
00:53:13.000I know that the new director of foreign assistance at the State Department, Who would presumably be quite heavily involved in a project like that.
00:53:22.000I know this is a very serious person and someone I've known for 20 years.
00:53:27.000And so I think we have to wait and see.
00:53:33.000I think that's the thing, is not to be too reactive.
00:53:48.000Or if you hate Donald Trump and you're right, I told you Donald Trump was like Hitler or whatever it happens to be, you know, whatever your position is.
00:53:55.000This kind of knee-jerk reaction is sort of fostered by social media because we've taken the critical thinking and the thought out of it and the time out of it.
00:54:06.000I think we need to give this one time to play out.
00:54:08.000I don't think he meant for a second that he's going to annex Greenland, for example.
00:54:13.000However, the U.S. does pay all the bills in Greenland.
00:54:16.000And there are a lot of people in Greenland who say they want to be part of the U.S. But is that what he really wants?
00:54:59.000So, you know, I feel like this is one of those situations where, within a very short amount of time, we're probably going to learn a lot more about what he really meant.
00:55:10.000Surely there's only so many times, though, that you can play...
00:55:12.000I mean, he just says, see Panama, I'll have that.
00:56:18.000Certainly, it seems that Donald Trump is bringing to international diplomacy the sort of sense of a wild and occasionally unbridled havoc that he's brought to various strata of US domestic politics.
00:56:30.000And perhaps we shouldn't be surprised.
00:56:32.000And maybe, like you said, Laura, we should wait and see what will happen.
00:56:35.000We can't make this content without the support of our partners.
00:57:09.000Lean is for frustrated dieters who want to lose meaningful weight but aren't into injections.
00:57:14.000You know, you don't want to be taking the older Zenpik or similar brand when in fact it's a deadly, deadly intoxicant and might have long-term consequences and be addictive, allegedly.
00:57:22.000Those are not my opinions, I'm just supposing.
00:57:55.000If you call it USAID, you're likely on the left and regard it to be a bit like Band-Aid, but for international forum diplomatic aid granted to America's friends around the world.
00:58:04.000If you call it USAID, you see it as the apparatus of the deep state.
00:58:08.000And this is the conversation that's unfolding right now in real time with the likes of AOC advocating for USAID or Joy Reid saying that it's a kind of coup against the state to destabilise and even abandon it.
00:59:18.000Well, because he was one of the chief architects of the persecution and the cover-up following January 6th, who felt nothing to tear apart families and destroy lives and put innocent people behind bars.
00:59:29.000So I find my skin crawling having to listen to him.
00:59:35.000But the funny part there is he says that the Congress created USAID for the American people.
00:59:41.000No, USAID is a foreign aid, international aid agency, right?
00:59:49.000So it wasn't created for the American people.
00:59:52.000Most of the American people had very little idea that USAID even existed before this happened.
01:00:00.000Most of the American people had no idea that their money, their tax dollars, were being taken to fund things like, let me see.
01:00:10.000George Soros' fund to install prosecutors that follow their ideology.
01:00:16.000And you can see their handiwork in San Francisco, which has been destroyed, New Orleans, which is down the toilet, you know, and so on and so on and so on, right?
01:00:25.000Most Americans, the majority that voted Donald Trump into power, do not support George Soros or the Open Society Foundations or any of the groups in his affinity network.
01:00:36.000And so they are shocked to discover that hundreds of millions of dollars of their blood, sweat and tears Is being used to finance things that they regard as basically slitting their own throats.
01:00:50.000So when Jamie Raskin and these people, they talk about oversight.
01:00:54.000They didn't do any oversight of USAID. In fact...
01:00:58.000In fact, what USAID did was bypass Congress.
01:01:04.000And they created the power unconstitutionally and against the law.
01:01:08.000They created the power for these satellite offices of USAID that was spread all over the world to completely bypass everyone and get money directly.
01:01:18.000You know what really irks me, Russell, is I have to say this.
01:01:23.000People are very cavalier about American tax dollars.
01:01:29.000Because I live in a beautiful tourist town in one of the wealthiest counties in Texas.
01:01:35.000And the vast majority of people living here do not take a vacation because they can't afford it.
01:01:44.000Most of the kids that come to my house, and there's 20 or 30 of them every weekend, have never been on an airplane.
01:01:49.000And it's not because, as many Europeans think, They're a bunch of ignorant Americans who don't give a shit about the rest of the world and think America is so great, I don't need to travel.
01:03:36.000They want their tax dollars to pay for my kid.
01:03:40.000I'm some elite person in Washington, D.C., but somehow I don't think my kid should have this burden of their fees from college, so the American taxpayer can just pay for it.
01:03:52.000The American taxpayer can finance, let me see, trans operas in Serbia.
01:03:58.000Do you know that program was 50 million dollars they were funneling into LGBTQ causes outside of congressional oversight into Serbia?
01:04:08.000You know, the kind of things that they have been financing, it's not just these outrageous programs overseas in foreign countries.
01:04:18.000It's not just that you're paying for children in foreign countries to get scholarships and to go to university, but you're not doing that.
01:04:28.000It's not just that Americans don't believe in many of these things.
01:04:34.000It's that what you've done is you have taken the United States government and you've used it as a slush fund to finance an ideology that is profound, that ultimately is the death of everything that these people who are paying for it actually believe in.
01:04:54.000And you've done it You've done it in darkness.
01:04:59.000You've hidden what you're doing from the American people.
01:05:01.000And so any person who's standing up now and says, oh, how dare E.R. must do this and how dare we have to stop this tyranny and we need oversight.
01:05:14.000As usual, they never want to address the substance of what you're dealing with.
01:05:18.000And of course, what they also don't want to address is that the president, through his executive order, When you are violating the law, as the USAID has been doing, they've been violating the law over and over again.
01:05:32.000They've been money laundering to all these affinity groups and all these NGOs and they have been pushing this through.
01:05:38.000They've been stealing from the American people and all so that they can keep these people subjugated.
01:06:22.000I don't think that any of these people want innocent people to suffer.
01:06:28.000But when you find out that less than 10% of the money that has supposedly been going to help poor people or people in need in foreign countries has actually been reaching those people.
01:06:39.000When you find out that Angelina Jolie and Sean Penn, these people were paid millions of dollars in taxpayer money.
01:06:49.000Buy USAID to take trips to Ukraine, to Ukraine, so they could do photo ops that could justify hundreds of millions more dollars going to finance a war that nobody believes in, that is absolutely unwinnable, that is costing lives on a daily basis.
01:07:09.000I mean, it's unconscionable what has been done.
01:07:15.000And for the Democrats to focus on Elon Musk, And to go there with their stupid little pathetic posse.
01:07:21.000And by the way, it's not just Democrats who have benefited from this system.
01:07:26.000There is a plethora of Republicans whose hands are as dirty as every single one of those small, little people that stood and staged their protests and went out there.
01:07:39.000So this is not, I'm not painting this as a partisan thing.
01:07:42.000They just chose to stand on the wrong side of history.
01:07:45.000Elon Musk has been given legal authorities by Donald Trump.
01:07:52.000The Trump administration learned its lesson the last time around.
01:07:56.000When they were being, every single thing that they were trying to do was being attacked by the other part of this affinity groups who go after them with lawfare and try and shut them down with legal actions.
01:08:08.000They learned their lesson from that, and they were a lot more careful this time.
01:08:11.000It doesn't mean that they're foolproof, but they knew what they were doing, and they're making sure that they act with legal authority every step of the way.
01:08:20.000Trump's declaration that Gaza could be occupied and developed is...
01:08:26.000Perhaps the kind of rhetoric that defines the fears of MAGA Trump's opponents, that he could be a Megalomayanak unbridled influence on global politics, is an idea like USAID, the kind of pinnacle of that kind of globalist neo-left politics that preceded it, i.e.
01:08:48.000because we are so philanthropic we're going to tax you, because we're better than you we're going to make moral choices for you, we're going to invest in ideas that you...
01:08:56.000And it won't just be philanthropic and humanitarian altruistic causes.
01:09:05.000To some degree, participating in the 2014 coup.
01:09:08.000It will be funding foreign news organisations like the BBC who have received USAID contributions.
01:09:14.000Do you feel, Neil, that USAID is one of the defining initiatives of the type of politics that appears to be dying with the advent of MAGA-style nationalist populism?
01:10:06.000But it's actually the Agency for International Development.
01:10:10.000The acronym doesn't stand for what you might be invited to think when you see US aid.
01:10:17.000And that it was a bigger budget than the CIA, that it was a front for the CIA, and that it was understood around the world.
01:10:24.000I think possibly people in America maybe came late to their understanding.
01:10:29.000It was understood all around the world as a front for the CIA. And people on the right and people on the left had grown very, very suspicious of it.
01:10:38.000You know, the fact that USAID involvement in Cuba, under the auspices of helping with AIDS and HIV, but at the same time they were really just trying to pull people in to foment a colour revolution against the regime.
01:10:55.000And that you had people like the rightist, the right-wing president of El Salvador, you don't want anything to do with that kind of operation because we know they're at it and we know what they're up to.
01:11:07.000In the same week, the leftist president in Mexico was saying the same thing.
01:11:13.000People on the right or left of the political spectrum around the world were saying, no, USAID is a cover.
01:11:20.000It's all about fomenting regime change.
01:11:22.000It's all about fomenting colour revolutions and all of the rest of it.
01:11:26.000You know, go into a country in Africa and promise to irrigate the fields.
01:11:29.000But we really know what it's all about.
01:11:32.000And America and, you know, myself, you know, you come late to the, admittedly come late to the game and understanding what these things are all about.
01:11:41.000And I think it's a, it is a potential, as Russell, you were teeing it up as a matter of enormous significance that Donald Trump, in his first few days in office, has shut the HQ and pulled the plug on it.
01:11:55.000But as I heard Mike Benz, Mike Benz, who is...
01:11:58.000who amazes me with his every broadcast, I heard him saying that although the HQ has been shut down, it's potentially the case that everything that USAID were seeking to do has now just been taken under the wing of the State Department.
01:12:21.000That the ideology may have gone nowhere and that the objectives may have gone nowhere and that the funding may just have been redirected so that it's now in the State Department.
01:12:30.000In which case it would make Marco Rubio the most powerful Secretary of State in history because of the international reach that it would give him potentially.
01:12:43.000So again, it's one of these ones that it's too early.
01:12:46.000everything I think we've been saying tonight about everything, apart from Lily Phillips has been about, you have to wait and see you know, it's just too early to tell exactly what is meant by what, on one reading of it, may be a truly momentous decision, But the wider world has evidently been well aware that when you see USAID coming into your country, it's not about irrigating the fields.
01:14:10.000In this case, I do know for a fact that Trump has outmaneuvered them.
01:14:15.000Because he's already taken care of that side of it.
01:14:18.000This isn't going to be a just transfer.
01:14:20.000And also, you know, listening to you, you made me realize that we all wondered how Trump was going to take on the CIA. We know how he tried to do it last time.
01:14:31.000And he was told, you know, you go after the intel agencies, watch out, they're coming for you.
01:14:40.000You removed that front for the CIA, which was a massive, massive Part of their operations and he took that down before he took the agency out.
01:14:52.000When we talk about the 5D chess, that would be a 5D chess move, right?
01:14:57.000And already having people that are in place in those blocking positions so that you don't have that shifting of the money and it doesn't just flow around.
01:15:36.000I think it's still what we know is the tip of the iceberg.
01:15:40.000It's good that you say that, because under all of it at the moment, in the UK and in the US, which obviously I don't know in the same way as I'm aware of the Constitution, let's say, in the UK, one of the fundamental, one of the two or three truly fundamental problems, as I see it, is that We live in a lawless West.
01:16:09.000In the UK, and it's apparent in the US as well, in terms of the way in which the Constitution has been set aside in all but name, and in the same way the Constitution in the United Kingdom has been set aside, the powerful have put themselves in situations where they have sought to set aside the law.
01:16:57.000We'll have to wait and see whatever Trump is actually up to.
01:17:00.000But what is being laid bare is that at the highest levels, it's lawless.
01:17:07.000And that's a very dangerous stone to have been unturned in the rock pool to make too many people aware of.
01:17:16.000Because if the powerful and the decision makers disregard the law...
01:17:20.000Then it sends down a cascading signal that there is no law.
01:17:25.000And that's very interesting to watch, to put it mildly.
01:17:30.000So perhaps at the very least what Trump is doing is exposing the blatant lawlessness of the people that are supposed, perhaps more importantly than anything else, but to uphold the law.
01:17:46.000At the start of this conversation, while we were discussing Lily Phillips, we talked about how technology amplifies beyond scale and magnitude ideas that have to be understood molecularly, i.e.
01:17:57.000the sanctity of sex, the sanctity of that exchange.
01:18:00.000Prostitution is the advent of the commodification of sex, but when you add technology to that and mass broadcast, you create a moral problem that goes way beyond its simple amplification.
01:18:11.000Then when we discussed the type of statecraft, You can sort of see that there are large,
01:18:38.000millennia-old questions in that region that need to be handled correctly, deftly and carefully.
01:18:44.000You can see in the USAID story how the delegitimisation of neoliberal social democracies has taken place precisely because they use philanthropy and altruism as a mask for corruption, use their deep state agencies in ways that are veiled and deceptive,
01:19:01.000and that Donald Trump, once again in this instance, appears to create a kind of havoc with his unusual guerrilla tactics in these arena and with the deployment of an agenda that's difficult to understand for casual observers.
01:19:14.000Perhaps he just does see things in entrepreneurial terms, construction, development, deals.
01:19:21.000Certainly I don't feel qualified to say, but I certainly feel more edified and better educated on these subjects haven't listened to you, Neil, with your ever-palescent, glorious, Gandalf-like wisdom dispensed from by the hearth, this time in a safari suit.
01:19:39.000And we are never more illumined than when in your occasional presence, Lara Logan, rhinestoned and magnificent, offering insights and incendiary, invective, almost, it seems, unvaryingly.
01:19:55.000Thank you so much, both of you, for joining us for this episode, Lara.
01:20:12.000Promise me that we'll do this all over again next week in a new news cycle so that once again we can enjoy the occasionally avuncular, always oracular vernacular of these fantastic contributors.
01:20:25.000Thanks very much for joining me today for Stay Free Oracles with Neil Oliver, Lara Logan and Russell Brand.
01:20:32.000See you on Monday for that interview with...
01:20:36.000Lily Phillips, where we'll be talking about the commodification of the erotic technology, morality, and of course where I'll be contributing from the perspective of a former womanizer and player myself.
01:20:48.000Remember, if you get Rumble Premium and use the code BRAND, you get a discount as well as access to all of my content, and Lord alone knows there's enough of it, as well as an ad-free experience on Rumble.