On this episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand, host Russell Brand sits down with presidential hopeful Donald Trump to discuss his new role as an advocate for the Trump campaign and how he plans to continue to speak the truth about the issues that matter most to the American people. He also talks about why he believes the media has lost its stranglehold on the minds of American people and why he thinks it s time for a return to the old ways of journalism and an unvarnished view of events. Enjoy the episode and remember, there s an episode every single day to educate and elevate our consciousness together. Stay Free with Russell Brand! Remember, there's an episode EVERY single day, 7 days a week, to elevate consciousness and elevate consciousness. You'll get a detailed breakdown of current topics that the mainstream media should be covering, but if they are covering them, they're amplifying establishment messages and not telling you the truth. If they're not covering what you need to cover, they re amplifying the lies they should be amplifying, you're not going to get the full picture of what's going on in the world, and you won't be able to make sense of the world as it really is. We really appreciate you, our listeners, and we want to bring you more content. - we'll be delivering a podcast every day, seven days, 7-days a week. Stay Free! - and enjoy the episode! "Awake Waking Wonders" - a podcast delivered by Awakening Wonders, wherever you get your podcasts, every singleday, to help awaken you to the world of consciousness and freedom, everywhere you get a better understanding of the things you need it. - . - . . . - Welcome to Awakened Wonders! We're your host, awakening Wonders? - stay free with Russell Brown! Thank you for listening to our podcast? and stay woke! , , and stay free, Stay free! ~ by , stay free! - R. , R. Brown, R. B. Brown R. M. & R. R.K. Jr., R. K. (R.K Jr., Jr. ( ) & Sam Harris, V. M., V. J. & V. S. ( ), and R. VAN V. TAYLOR, Jr.
00:00:00.000Hello there you Awakening Wonders on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you download your podcasts.
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00:01:39.000I don't know about you, but whenever you sort of made dead set plans and plot everything out, it never goes according to that plan anyway.
00:01:49.000I did run for president with the sole intention of being the next president.
00:01:52.000The beauty of this country is that's up to the people, and the people made clear who they want this time, which is the other America First leader who's tried and true, who's done it before, and that's Donald Trump, and he has my full support.
00:02:03.000But my strategy, I think, going forward, whatever I do, is going to be the same as it was during the campaign, which is to speak the truth, speak in an unvarnished way, or at the very least, at least my true view, what it is.
00:02:17.000And I think that we don't have enough of that in our culture anymore amongst politicians, amongst media personalities.
00:02:23.000And so that's what I'm going to continue to do, is to especially speak hard truths that maybe are a little bit beneath the surface of what the rest of the corporate media is scratching on issues that matter to me.
00:02:33.000I think I'm paying a lot more attention increasingly to what is, I think, a smokescreen around the current border debate in the United States.
00:02:40.000I think that going deeper into some of the themes that I raised on the campaign trail about the media's dishonesty remain of interest to me, from the truth of what happened on January 6th to the truth of what happened with the origin of COVID.
00:02:52.000I mean, we can go straight down that list.
00:02:54.000I've even had some, you know, more recent experiences with the media's intentional distortion of things that I've said late in the campaign or towards the end of it.
00:03:02.000Regardless, I think restoring media honesty, or at least the public's understanding of the media's dishonesty, remains a passion of mine after the campaign as it did during the campaign.
00:03:13.000And I think all of that is going to be helpful in making sure that not only is Donald Trump elected as the next president, but that our America First movement, our I would say a George Washingtonian movement that began in 1776 is able to be carried forward another 250 years and then some.
00:03:31.000And so that's my focus and whatever form that takes, be it inside government or out, I'm all in for doing my small part to make this country's future a reality.
00:03:42.000One of the reasons that we were excited about you on our channel is your ability to communicate, your ability to pull together a variety of ideas, to present cogent arguments spontaneously, and I've been fond of saying that you are the first true social media political figure.
00:04:03.000Because of course, you know, RFK has benefited hugely from the way that legacy media has lost its stranglehold on the minds of American people.
00:04:11.000Donald Trump, through his use of Twitter, was able to sort of govern through social media and certainly influence powerfully.
00:04:19.000And even like in countries like Greece and Spain, there were movements like Syriza and Podemos that were doubtless anti-establishment movements.
00:04:26.000Do you feel That it's going to be impossible for the legacy media to ever again regain the kind of control over the minds of the American and indeed global population.
00:04:38.000Do you see this raft of censorship laws like the online safety bill in the UK, the laws being passed across the EU in Canada and some of the stuff proposed in your country as a direct threat to independent media?
00:04:49.000And do you think that we'll see more political figures like you emerging across the world?
00:04:56.000They're essentially bypassing authoritarian, centralised legacy media and their affiliated groups, be they corporate or state.
00:05:05.000Yeah, so I like the way you framed that, by the way.
00:05:09.000I mean, in the U.S., you do have a quasi-state media.
00:05:12.000It's not really the traditional version of what you think of as state media, but it's like a game theory, right?
00:05:18.000In a game theoretic, repeated game, they start behaving as though they're like state media because they get a pat on the back when they do.
00:05:25.000So, I'll make a couple of observations, Russell.
00:05:26.000One is, the trend is definitely in the direction that you just mentioned, which is, I think, bypassing that corporate media.
00:05:31.000But a couple of observations to make beyond that.
00:05:34.000I think that we're nowhere near that being the sole decisive factor.
00:05:39.000To the contrary, one of my learnings in this campaign is that, for better or worse, I think it's for worse, the legacy corporate media still played and continues to play in this election a major role in defining the public's perception of individual candidates and the issues that are put in front of them.
00:05:55.000People like to think of themselves as independent, but I think it's part of our human nature that most of us still behave like sheep.
00:06:02.000There's a sheep and there's a lion inside each of us.
00:06:05.000I think it's true of you, it's true of me, it's true of every human being.
00:06:09.000But as much as we like to think of ourselves as independent consumers, it's less about the top-down battle between independent media and corporate media, but more, what is it inside each of us that makes us want to bend the knee to some kind of authority?
00:06:23.000I think that element that makes you still think, okay, I'm not believing what I'm being force-fed by CNN or cable news or whatever.
00:06:30.000There's an element of it, the sheep inside each of us, that views that as a legitimizing filter.
00:06:36.000And one of the things I learned during the campaign is, even as much as people will seek independent alternative opinions, right now we're still in a place where, if we're being honest, most of the electorate, especially people above the age of 40, View that as still even if they're consuming some of their information independently, they still view that as the alt, as the alternative, as the indie track that they want to hear, but it's not necessarily causes them to question what they still view as the traditional means of consuming information.
00:07:05.000Where I think is, yes, the optimistic side is what you said is true, that's the evolution we're seeing.
00:07:10.000But the realistic, even I would say somewhat pessimistic side is that's a very gradual trend and something that I might have wished to have happened over a matter of years, that we would already be there.
00:07:21.000I think it's going to be a slow trajectory in weaning away the impact of that legacy corporate media.
00:07:29.000The other thing I will say is the kinds of candidates that you're talking about, it's not just, what should I say, an implementation question, right?
00:07:36.000Some people think, you know, well, why don't you just serve this up to, and I don't want to pick on any other individual candidate in this election, but pick your favorite professional politician.
00:07:44.000Why didn't they do it like you're doing it?
00:07:46.000And if so, they would have been far more successful.
00:08:06.000I think part of this is it's not just, oh, you turned that on and then you did the social media.
00:08:12.000Part of what that modality demands is the ability to spontaneously respond, to actually share what your own independent thoughts are.
00:08:20.000In order for you to do that, first, you have to have independent thoughts.
00:08:23.000Second, you have to be willing to share them.
00:08:25.000And I think that that's something that most political candidates, both in the United States and traditional politicians who run for office around the world, don't actually have.
00:08:43.000The system churns them out like they're on an assembly line, a motor conveyor.
00:08:49.000Henry Ford would be proud in terms of the repeatability of producing these kinds of products.
00:08:54.000But one thing about being a product is that you lose the ability to either have independent thoughts, or even for those who still have the vestige of the ability to have those independent thoughts left, have a reluctance to share that without going through the normal assembly line procedure.
00:09:10.000And so, you know, I think that in the case of other candidates, one of the things I've learned about as many more good people, you know, I think that maybe the candidates that competed against Not all of them, but many of them are good people, but they're not wired in a way that allows themselves to either have those independent thoughts or to share them with the public at large, Republicans and Democrats alike.
00:09:29.000And so it's not just a matter of coaching more candidates that you're going to see using social media.
00:09:34.000That makes it sound like an implementation or a plumbing experiment.
00:09:39.000I think part of what you're seeing is far more what kinds of candidates are selected for.
00:09:44.000Is it the kind of candidate that's going to speak in an unfiltered way and take some risk?
00:09:48.000I mean, there's good reasons people don't want to do this, right?
00:09:51.000Something you'll say on the medium that you and I are having right now will inevitably be helicopter lifted from this conversation to the modality of linear cable media.
00:10:01.000And they will take something disproportionately out of context, maybe it's a joke, this happened to me in the last couple of weeks, say something in a joking tone, and then legacy corporate media purposefully knows how to exploit that in the context of an hour.
00:10:14.000It might be a joke in reference to something that you and I said half an hour ago, but if you're doing a two-minute clip, that is the perfect fodder for lifting that out and having that distorted in a way that penalizes the person from using that media in the first place.
00:10:28.000Which then sees a confluence between both the kind of legacy corporate media and the kind of political politician creators, how those two things converge, is they create the disincentive for politicians to engage in new media in the first place.
00:10:43.000Because so long as legacy media matters, and as I said before, it actually does, like it or not, it still does.
00:10:50.000That's legacy media's effective attack on new media is you create the disincentive for political participants to engage in that new media because if they do, you increase the risk of the consequence of the price they'll have to pay by the price that legacy media extracts from them.
00:11:05.000And so that ends up becoming a complex game, a cat-and-mouse game between legacy and new media using the politicians and the incentives you create for them As a way of reclaiming what otherwise would have more naturally gone in the direction of decentralized media.
00:11:18.000So I'm sure I'm rambling, but maybe some of it makes sense to you.
00:11:21.000No, it makes a lot of sense because in a sense what you're, it seems, illuminating is the idea that this type of media for an anti-establishment candidate is successful.
00:11:33.000In an environment where recently there was a poll in the UK, which politician would you like to lead the UK?
00:11:42.000Current PM Rishi Sunak, leader of the opposition Keir Starmer or Vladimir Putin?
00:11:48.000And Vladimir Putin won by 90% just because there's been so much bombardment.
00:11:53.000It was a poll of 40,000 people and Like, if your position is, I do not trust the establishment, whether that's deep state agencies, the government itself, corporations, legacy media, you can operate in these looser, long-form spaces knowing that people almost have a, if not a sophistication, a tolerance that if you make some joke or reference about Nikki Haley or the Koch brothers, or some reference to Ron DeSantis, that people recognize, or Trump saying, I'll be dictator for a day, people seeing that
00:12:24.000They won't deliberately extract it, narrativise it, knowing that it will have a certain amount of impact.
00:12:30.000In fact I was really struck by a speech that Barack Obama gave at Stanford immediately prior to some proposed legislation to introduce further censorship to Social media spaces where what Barack Obama said was that independent media, even when people don't believe it, it muddies the water.
00:12:48.000And I thought actually the reverse is true.
00:12:50.000It's the legacy media that muddies the war.
00:12:53.000Even when you're at the point where you think, no, hold on, Ukraine can't beat Russia in a war.
00:12:58.000It doesn't matter how long we perpetuate it.
00:13:00.000Ultimately, Russia will be successful unless it escalates to being a conflict that involves more nations.
00:13:07.000But like you're able to sort of Hold at bay that obvious conclusion by muddying the water or it seems like they never clinically trialed these medicines for transmission.
00:13:19.000Why on earth were they saying you'll kill grandma?
00:13:22.000Hold on a minute, the six feet distance was arbitrary.
00:13:27.000Through legacy media, through various talk show hosts dancing around dressed as vaccines, through each demographic having their own musical number, whether you're gay or black or country, whatever it is you're into, they found a piece of propaganda for you.
00:13:40.000It's the legacy media that creates that.
00:13:42.000Have you found that to be true, for example, around January 6th or even 9-11 or many of the subjects you've spoken about quite boldly?
00:13:51.000I mean, I think that my view is you shouldn't ban any modality or you shouldn't put negative pressure against any modality.
00:13:58.000It's leave it up to the people to decide.
00:14:00.000So there's two elements of this, Russell, is when Obama makes comments like that, what he's actually doing is it's not just tipping the scales towards some type of censorship regime, though it can go in that direction, too.
00:14:13.000But it's planting the seeds of doubt in the mind of the electorate or the consumer of that information.
00:14:21.000And it goes back to, I think this is one of the things that I've learned in this campaign, is the problem we have in this country, I think in the modern West more broadly, there is a major top-down problem, no doubt about it.
00:14:32.000But it's not just the top-down problem of the government working with private actors, each scratching each other's back, and it happens using tech companies to silence speech either directly or indirectly through the back door.
00:14:43.000And it's not just silencing through suppression, silencing through shadow banning or otherwise.
00:14:47.000As a favor for the government that the government then scratches their back with lighter regulation or vice versa.
00:14:52.000That's what I call the top-down problem.
00:14:54.000The rise of this woke industrial complex in America and where I focused for much of the last several years and I remain focused.
00:15:02.000I think equally pertinent is that other half of the problem where When we lose our own anchoring of what matters to us, right?
00:15:15.000You could have different things fill in the blank.
00:15:17.000Faith, patriotism, hard work, family, self-confidence, achievement, whatever it is.
00:15:25.000The things that give us our own mooring and sense of self-confidence.
00:15:28.000When we lose that, Then there's something about each of us inside that leaves this vacuum in our heart that causes us to look for legitimization externally.
00:15:41.000And that's what causes us to want to bend the knee.
00:15:44.000So if you don't pledge allegiance to the real flag, you're going to pledge allegiance to something else.
00:15:47.000Maybe it'll be the transgender flag, maybe it'll be the Ukraine flag, maybe it'll be CNN, right?
00:15:53.000And so I think that that is something where we, especially in the conservative movement, have not done a good enough job of really admitting to ourselves is that human beings are fallen and we have in our very nature a desire to believe in something bigger than ourselves that almost legitimizes ourselves and our own beliefs.
00:16:13.000And there's something about the history of the way legacy media and the role it's occupied in culture that causes, it's not just the government's foisting of it that causes its continued existence, it's a kind of psychological insecurity in the general populace that says even in a world where people are able to access you through local or rumble, locals or rumble or whatever, That they still need what they view as the baseline arbiter of truth, against which you are the alternative, versus the other way around, which is to say that there's an even marketplace of ideas, and I truly am independent and able to consume and form my own opinions on my own merits.
00:16:55.000Especially younger people, more of them are maybe heading in that direction, but that's a slow shift.
00:17:00.000And so when Obama says something like that, it's about sowing the seeds of doubt in people who might have otherwise taken that step anyway, but to awaken in them that inner sheep within.
00:17:11.000And that's something I'm increasingly, more so at the later phase of this, after having finished the campaign, drawn to, than even I was in the very beginning, is it's not just a top-down problem, it's a bottom-up cultural revival that we're going to need as well.
00:17:25.000And it's not just going to happen through political leadership.
00:17:28.000It's going to happen through leaders in other spheres of our lives, causing people to awaken their own independent selves as well, as opposed to being a bunch of automatons doing what program to do on a given day.
00:17:39.000That's what the country looks like to me on certain days.
00:17:42.000And I think that that programming of our automaton mindset is equally part of the problem we're going to have to tackle in this country.
00:17:50.000It's pretty clear that there would be anthropological reasons to align yourself with a group or at least not nominate yourself as an outlier, that that exposes you to potential persecution.
00:18:03.000And it seems important to make this distinction that even when people are sympathetic to the views of Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson or people Enjoy the punditry and prose of Vivek Ramaswamy.
00:18:19.000It's by default, by your reckoning, being opposed to what they might hear from Carrie Jean-Pierre or Joe Biden as this is the establishment rhetoric.
00:18:33.000To establish a kind of levelling, that's sort of a bold idea.
00:18:38.000Often in this space, and it's something I'm sure you're familiar with now because you've mastered this space, certainly you've learned how to utilise this space very successfully, the term controlled opposition, like it's something that I've been accused of, that Alex Jones has been accused of, Tucker Carlton gets accused of, these are controlled opposition.
00:18:57.000And I start to think, well, in a sense, But on the basis that you've just described, perhaps I am.
00:19:02.000People sometimes might think it's enough, because certainly I'm not in any complicit way getting told, here, say this, say that.
00:19:08.000Because, you know, my strongest, deepest, most vehement belief, Vivek, is that wherever possible, authority should be decentralised, that the sovereignty of the individual is paramount, that communities should be autonomous wherever possible, that we should Debate, discuss and vote on how our shared collective and individual resources are aggregated in order to create a sense of nation or state or city or whatever is, I would say, the smallest denomination is the most favourable.
00:19:38.000You know, that's what I believe in myself and I know I don't have relationships with legacy media.
00:19:42.000I know they see me as an enemy and they treat me like an enemy and they have treated me like an enemy.
00:19:47.000But I still wonder if What is it that we're doing that allows people to think this is just a condiment, an alternative, before we comply?
00:19:59.000I don't mean to get overly psychological here, but that's where we're going.
00:20:11.000I think for many of the people who might say that about you or Alex Jones or Tucker, I've heard my share of that as well.
00:20:18.000It goes back to that element that resides within each of us.
00:20:21.000And so there's an element inside each person who is even an anti-establishment viewer or consumer or voter or audience member.
00:20:29.000Who still senses their gravitational pull to bend the knee to something, but I think that that guilt ends up showing up in the form of self-love.
00:20:37.000Well, if that can happen to me, then you know what?
00:20:39.000It's probably true of Russell Brand, you know, or whoever else that's speaking to me too.
00:20:46.000When in fact, I think that that's a little bit of a...
00:20:49.000Often a projection of just what's part of each of our own human nature.
00:20:53.000I think if we all admit that about ourselves, it's true of me, it's true of you, it's true of probably every other individual you mentioned too, that there's something if we just admit that about ourselves.
00:21:02.000We're human beings, we're fallen, and so there's a part of us.
00:21:06.000Now once you're conscious of it, that's your path to liberation.
00:21:09.000But if you're conscious of it, that there's something inside me that makes me want to bend the knee to authority or to supplicate to something, no matter how independent I might think of myself as being, that even subconsciously there's some element of me that's going to comply with some sort of higher authority that I may not recognize, but I know that that's going to exist.
00:21:29.000That consciousness, I think, is the liberation.
00:21:32.000Now, what I see happening, it descends into sort of this tug-of-war-ism, is that many of those audience members may see the same thing in themselves, but then use that to sort of point the finger to you or, you know, whoever else, Tucker or Alex or whoever else they would say the same thing about, instead of actually all recognizing, it's true of all of us, great, now we're free, we understand that.
00:21:54.000Now we can actually engage in honest discourse and recognize that amongst each other or amongst even within ourselves, what elements of our own bias may be as anti-establishment as we might be, still have some vestige of a bias that we didn't recognize.
00:22:07.000And then say, hey, we're all open to that.
00:22:09.000I think that's actually the place to go.
00:22:11.000And then the other thing I would say in terms of what an alternative media institution looks like, and I've been given very recently a lot of thought to this as well, is right now, legacy media institutions are built In a central command and control kind of way.
00:22:26.000If you look at most cable news operators, it almost doesn't matter who's on the air.
00:22:33.000All that matters is they're part of a general machine and they're a mouthpiece.
00:22:36.000Whereas the thing about independent media is the locus of trust is actually built at the level of the individual.
00:22:42.000But there is no, by definition, one-stop shop or centralized place to go.
00:22:47.000And so I wonder if there's some element of creating kind of an inside-out model where the business model Is run such that the actual individual who's the locus of trust, people like yourself, etc, are uncapped upside in the amount of money they generate, etc, are completely unfiltered in terms of the content they can bring, but still has some sort of hub and spoke where there still is a hub just in terms of the level of organization of how it's set up.
00:23:19.000That's what a long run competitor to the New York Times or CNN, I think it's got to look like.
00:23:24.000In order to really eliminate the existing need that people still have to go to that centralized one-stop shop kind of place.
00:23:34.000Does that make sense what I'm telling you here?
00:23:45.000It doesn't quite exist in the marketplace today.
00:23:47.000But based on what I saw, as you know, I would think of myself certainly as an anti-establishment candidate.
00:23:52.000That base need that consumers and audience members and voters have to still have their default against which you're the interesting alternative to say that no, it's actually just one level playing field of equal.
00:24:05.000Everyone's an alternative among equals of alternatives.
00:24:09.000I think that in the media, you have to give people that sense that they're still having some blanket of Permanence and, dare I say, security.
00:24:21.000It's just part of a human nature that people have.
00:24:23.000But actually, the way that it's run is still completely, you know, 100% unfiltered.
00:24:28.000The people who are making the money are actually the people who are looking the audience members in the eye.
00:24:33.000But there's still just an established Alternative to an existing centralized command and control operation.
00:24:40.000I think that's where the equilibrium will ultimately settle.
00:24:45.000But without that, I think that there will always be, because of our human nature, that kind of trust deficit against which the alternative still is an alternative, rather than actually on an equal playing field relative to the status quo incumbents.
00:24:59.000That was one of my learnings, at least in the campaign is, you know, the debates.
00:25:02.000I'll give you one example of this, Russell. The presidential debates, you saw most of them,
00:25:06.000or that we had. Yeah. So one thing I learned through the campaign is that the true audience
00:25:13.000of those presidential debates is not actually the viewership or the voter base.
00:25:25.000Of the 330 million people in the United States, a tiny, and I'm talking like very tiny, certainly by the third and fourth debates, which I thought were some of the best ones, certainly, you know, the ones where I had the most fun, but I think actually were some of the best ones, We're talking like, tiny, like 0.3% of the voting public ever saw even a portion of that debate in any actual form themselves.
00:25:50.000But you're talking about hundreds of millions of people who read the media's distillation of what actually happened, you know, from the combination of the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, you know, you go straight down the list.
00:26:03.000And then you actually look at the juxtaposition between what the people who distilled the media, the media distilled the debates, what did they say happened, versus actually seeing what actually happened.
00:26:17.000And it might have been two completely different worlds.
00:26:20.000You might as well have been living in two completely different worlds.
00:26:23.000It might have been two alternative events.
00:26:25.000A person who reads what happened and a person who watched it would recognize them as not even being descriptions of the same phenomenon, but it doesn't matter.
00:26:33.000Because the real audience was never the people in the first place.
00:26:37.000That was just a charade to make you think that this thing called debate happened.
00:26:41.000When in fact, most people's experience of the presidential debates came not from watching the presidential debates at all.
00:26:47.000It came from reading the descriptions of what happened during the presidential debates, which means that if you figure that out and you realize that's your actual audience, it then shapes what you say on that stage.
00:26:57.000And so it's an interesting game that you see firsthand that this idea that you were reaching the people directly at all was an illusion in the first place.
00:27:06.000And the people who played that game well, or really, I think, professional politicians who understand who their audience actually is, versus the people on the internet or whatever that even saw clips of the debates, let alone actually the debate itself, Understood that the reality of what happened was very different.
00:27:21.000A lot of those were my supporter base, but it turns out that that is a tiny fraction of the overall viewership.
00:27:41.000And until those people view alternative sources of media consumption in the same way and with the same level of implicit trust that they have from legacy media institutions that they should have no basis trusting in the first place, we're not going to see major change, which is why I think Alternative media needs to move one step further in leveling up the psychology of how it interfaces with the people who are actually consuming it.
00:28:07.000Not as some alt-alternative, but as really just in an even playing field with the legacy media institutions in the first place.
00:28:16.000Perhaps this point could be extrapolated further, Vivek, that we would naively on the surface assume that an orator or candidate is directly addressing a voting population.
00:28:29.000But the experienced politician, perhaps even a figure like Joe Biden, knows that he's talking to the electoral college or some smaller democratic unit.
00:28:43.000It's clear that from the strategies of a politician like Biden, like against Trump round one, it's just keep this guy out the way, let the anti-Trump sentiment of our, inverted commas, natural audience abide, and he will reach the people that he is required to reach.
00:29:00.000And perhaps there are whole sort of modalities of donor, of legacy media, of corporate interest, that all interact and ultimately where we like sort of giddy
00:29:10.000and passionate and carnal assume oh wow look at this person's doing really well in the
00:29:15.000debate oh that was a zinger oh that point destroyed Nikki Haley oh this is funny man that that's just
00:29:21.000taking place that's might as well be sport and yes and it's interesting to know how these
00:29:26.000function because i think that the fear of populism and the ongoing perjuring of the term or decimation
00:29:35.000and attacks of populism the attempt to make populism itself a negative idea is the terrible
00:29:43.000threat that That there might be, because of the way the independent media is altering and radically evolving, the potential exists for individuals and movements to emerge where what happens is the power of the population is directly harnessed and bypasses all of those gatekeepers, all of those institutions.
00:30:06.000And if you look at, say, the farming, like, gosh, this sounds quite tangential, Vivek, but the farming movement It's not tangential.
00:30:14.000protesting in Germany, they're protesting in Holland, in France. It's not tangential at all.
00:30:19.000They're taking power, unless they're not waiting and going to whatever the national
00:30:25.000broadcaster is in France or Germany or to De Spiegel or Figaro, because they're happening
00:30:30.000in Spain as well, and saying, "Oh, do we have your permission and would you support our campaign?"
00:30:34.000They're just doing it. And then you have a figure like Tucker Carlson going to Russia to talk to
00:30:40.000Putin. And obviously the threat is that if on X we have the opportunity to watch Vladimir Putin,
00:30:47.000and we hear Vladimir Putin say, "Stay out of Crimea, allow some freedom of cultural expression
00:30:55.000in the Donbass for the people that affiliate with Russia, and don't let Ukraine join NATO."
00:31:00.000If we hear Putin say, and you know, you've got a deal, the war's over, then the American taxpayer, the British taxpayer, All of us that are funding NATO might go, well, what is it that NATO's done for me lately?
00:31:12.000And start to question the entire damn narrative.
00:31:16.000I mean, that's the threat of populism.
00:31:19.000Even if you're right that there's some way to go before these monoliths of the New York Times and the WHO and NATO, all of these powerful institutions are obviously in a death match right now.
00:31:32.000But the outliers are sometimes quite easily subsumed back into the system.
00:31:38.000So what do you think about, I'd love to know what you think about, what is the real threat of Tucker interviewing Putin?
00:31:44.000And what is the real power of the kind of activism we've seen in Canada with the truckers and across Europe with the farmers?
00:31:53.000This is what the American Revolution was actually thought of.
00:31:56.000Do we actually trust the people to self-govern?
00:32:00.000The negative valence attached to the term populism that you talked about, what is that about, actually?
00:32:06.000It's about, do you believe that the people can be trusted to self-govern?
00:32:11.000That the elected should be responsive to the will of the people?
00:32:15.000Or do you believe that they should be responsive to a different will?
00:32:18.000Something other than the will of the people.
00:32:56.000I viewed my audience as the electorate of the United States.
00:33:00.000The people of this country, the 330 million American citizens.
00:33:04.000But it turns out most of the trained professional politicians understand that that's a joke, because that doesn't matter.
00:33:09.000The system is set up for a 0.01% of those people to be your audience, who are then the filters of deciding what the rest of the masses can and cannot hear or consume.
00:33:20.000Here's the dirty little secret at the heart of this.
00:33:22.000That 0.01%, they don't think that they're acting nefariously.
00:33:27.000They don't view this as betraying the interests of the broader 330 million.
00:33:33.000They view themselves as actually acting in the interest of the broader 330 million because the whole premise is that the people could not be trusted to self-govern in the first place.
00:33:43.000So I think you've got to understand that it's not even in their own minds coming from a place of ill will.
00:33:49.000It's coming from a place of benevolence, actually.
00:33:54.000What this relates to is the same thing as it relates to the origin of COVID-19 or the Nashville Transgender Shooter Manifesto or the truth of what happened on January 6th.
00:34:02.000You can go straight down the list of every other truth that's been surprised.
00:34:06.000The people cannot be trusted to deal with the primary information.
00:34:11.000It's up to us, for the good of the people, and this is the key part to understand, is the mindset.
00:34:16.000For the good of the people, we have to make sure that the people are served up what they can actually handle.
00:34:22.000It's like at the end of the movie, did you ever watch A Few Good Men?
00:34:32.000In his mind, it wasn't that he was trying to do something that was ill-begotten for the American people.
00:34:39.000He viewed himself as, and in some sense our country has been structured for a very long time as, him being a patriot.
00:34:45.000This is a guy who makes the sacrifice that needs to be made, that bears that cross on his shoulder of knowing the actual truth but serving as the gatekeeper in the filter because you can't handle the truth.
00:34:57.000That's the albatross, that's the cross that the true leader bears, is to say that I will bear the truth of the actual reality so that you can give the populace What they can otherwise handle, be it the truth of what's happening in Russian Ukraine, the truth of what happened on January 6, the truth of where COVID began early in the pandemic, which we knew and should have known, the truth of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax that never was, the truth about the Hunter Biden laptop story on the eve of the last election, the truth of what, you know, you go straight down the list, Bubba Wallace, you go straight down the list of the last 10 years, I could probably rattle off 10 more instances of
00:35:41.000I mean, if you go back to Socrates, he would talk about, Plato would talk about the noble lie, that the people could not be trusted with the truth.
00:35:49.000And the beauty of 1776 in the American Revolution is we said hell no to that vision.
00:35:53.000That we said, for better or worse, and maybe sometimes it's for the worse, But for better or worse, we the people can be trusted to self-govern.
00:36:04.000We the people demand free speech and open debate in an unfiltered way, which is the path to the truth.
00:36:10.000And maybe sometimes in the short run we'll get it wrong and we'll do some stupid things.
00:36:13.000But in the long run, we still believe that that is what is right and what is just for a free people to be able to self-govern.
00:36:21.000That's really that age-old question that reared its head during the American Revolution.
00:36:26.000That in some sense even reared its head again 13 years later in the French Revolution.
00:36:30.000Although that was, I think, a more complicated form.
00:36:33.000Rears its head again every century or so and it's rearing its head again now.
00:36:37.000Can we the people be trusted to self-govern or not?
00:36:40.000And I think that there are most in modern institutional life who believe that the answer to that question is no.
00:36:45.000It's a crazy idea that you get to speak your mind freely as long as I get to in return.
00:36:49.000That every one of us gets a voice and vote that counts equally in a democratic constitutional republic.
00:36:55.000And the thing to realize about this, Russell, we gotta admit this, is people like you and I, we're the weird ones, actually.
00:37:00.000Because for most of human history, it was done the other way.
00:37:03.000I mean, if you look at the totality of all human history, not just Old World Europe before the American Revolution, but just all of human history.
00:37:09.000I mean, go back to Plato, Socrates, etc.
00:37:12.000The conventional wisdom amongst the wise for most of human history has been societies can't function this way if you trust individuals to be able to immediately have an institution or a government that's responsive exclusively to their interests.
00:37:27.000The whims of people would cause themselves to be defeated, to be dead, and that's what modern climate change's claim really is about.
00:37:33.000If you leave this just to the people, we're going to burn the planet out of existence, and we won't have a planet left to inhabit.
00:37:38.000So, what a silly idea that would be to leave it to the people to self-govern versus a group of enlightened elites that have to save the very existence of the planet itself.
00:37:47.000That's the modern climate change version of it.
00:37:49.000But it's an age-old question that's always been played out this way.
00:37:52.000But once we embrace that to say that, no, no, no, we're the weird ones, and in America, I say this, we're the weird ones on this side of 1776, in the New World, in the United States of America, yes, we are the departure from the rest of human history.
00:38:05.000Once we embrace that that's what makes America great, that's what makes America itself, That's where America, I think, can then be still that shining city on a hill, that last best hope for the rest of the free world that can use that as, you know, I say this with an American conceit, but I think it's true, as their last best hope of what's possible.
00:38:25.000But when America itself, that shining city on a hill, no longer still shines, You know, the rest of the free world then has no hope as well, and it's old world Europe all over again.
00:38:34.000That's what the Great Reset, that's what the Davos World Economic Forum vision is all about, is it's not some modern new nefarious tendency.
00:38:43.000I think what we have to actually view this as is this is nothing more than a reversion to the norm, actually, for what's been the case of most of human history.
00:38:50.000And once you see it that way, I think we're closer to being over the target that actually it's not this new pernicious force threatening our way of life.
00:38:58.000It's that our way of life is actually what's the modern post 1776 American way of life is what's threatened the historical equilibrium of power held by a group of enlightened elites that once we recognize that we realize we have to continue to fight for that existence.
00:39:15.000If we don't, if we just assume that we passively inherit it, as my generation, I think, has, that's when you lose it.
00:39:21.000And so anyway, that's, I think, what once you got to see what's going on, you get to the bottom of it.
00:39:25.000That's how you actually preserve that rare exception that post-1776 America represented in human history.
00:39:31.000I've got three more questions and they're all pretty good and we've only got you for one more minute.
00:39:40.000Everyone in America, other than the native people, was an immigrant at some point.
00:39:45.000Do you think that in order to morally legitimize the Rigid closure of American borders.
00:39:52.000America has to withdraw from foreign wars to recognize that there's a connection between foreign wars and destabilized migrant populations.
00:40:01.000And if it's not directly because of wars, it's sometimes other aspects of globalism and America having a punitive relationship with states.
00:40:08.000For example, a significant number of people crossing the border will be from Venezuela and Ecuador.
00:40:14.000So does the end of American interventionism abroad have to be a part of a rigid and closed borders policy?
00:40:18.000So, does the end of American interventionism abroad have to be a part of a rigid and closed
00:40:27.000What are your thoughts on that, Vivek?
00:40:28.000I mean, these are two sides of the same coin.
00:40:30.000It's a deep point you're touching on, Russell, but I'll make it much more simple and practical.
00:40:35.000Rather than focusing on sealing somebody else's border using our military halfway around the world, let's focus on sealing our own border in this own country.
00:40:42.000At a very pragmatic level, that's how I would say it, but there's a deeper philosophical connection here, too.
00:40:47.000I was on a trip recently, you know, just for fun with family.
00:40:54.000What drew me into his shop was he had this beautiful rendition of the American flag, so my wife and I went and we had a conversation with him.
00:40:59.000He was a Nicaraguan immigrant to the United States, but he had a wild story where he came here to go to art school, get an education.
00:41:35.000I personally have been almost recruited by the national security establishment to play a role in the Contras in Central America.
00:41:41.000And yet you wonder why these people are actually as violent as they are, as though there was no connection.
00:41:46.000So that's actually the deeper point that you're making is the more that you actually create, and Ron Paul I think did a good job of making this point during his presidential run, is a lot of the problems you create at home come from actually the meddling in foreign affairs abroad that you wouldn't have created as a backlash against the United States had you not gone out of your way to create it.
00:42:03.000But the simple terms I would put that in, to summarize it in a very simple way, is instead of worrying about using our military to seal somebody else's border somewhere halfway around the world, let's first actually start by using our own resources to seal our own border in this country, and to restore the idea that I'm a citizen of this nation, not some nebulous, vague, global citizen fighting climate change somewhere, but that I'm a citizen of this nation, the United States of America.
00:42:26.000And had I been elected president, That's certainly the vision I would have restored and, you know, in whatever way I can, I'm going to make sure, and I think Donald Trump is a great option, is the option, who's going to be the person who actually leads us in that direction in the next four years.
00:42:41.000But I'm going to do whatever I can to restore that vision of national identity in the United States.
00:42:46.000Is Nikki Haley a uniparty stooge, the preferred candidate of the establishment and the Democrats?
00:42:53.000Is the Nikki Haley candidacy an attempt to retain control over both parties in the event that there is an election in 2024, if it goes ahead, in order to not have any candidate that is an inverted commas anti-establishment candidate?
00:43:15.000I don't think that the establishment's gonna be successful at it.
00:43:18.000I think one of the great learnings for me is if you want to prevent something bad from happening as a problem, first name the problem.
00:43:27.000And once you name the problem, it becomes a lot more difficult for the people who are propping it up.
00:43:31.000And so I've been saying this for months at this point, Russell, even when it was very unpopular, even within our own conservative base and America First base, many people excoriated me for saying it, but I think it's the truth.
00:43:42.000The entire system has been conspiring, I believe, indirectly to, you know, it's a game-theoretic conspiring, not a back-closed-door-cigar-smell-filled-room smop conspiring, but a game-theoretic conspiring.
00:43:54.000Which is a repeated tacit game theory of narrowing this down to two candidates, Donald Trump and Nikki Haley, in one way or another eliminate Trump from contention, and then trot their puppet who they can control into the White House.
00:44:07.000Now the more you've named that problem, the harder it becomes for them to pull that off.
00:44:13.000And that's also part of why I dropped out when I did.
00:44:15.000And through my support behind Donald Trump, I got about 8% in Iowa is going to get the same in or so in New Hampshire.
00:44:20.000I wanted to be clear that Nikki Haley should not come anywhere within striking distance of being anywhere close to the presidency or any of the levers of power.
00:44:29.000And so thankfully, I think after New Hampshire, this primary is indeed done.
00:44:34.000And I think that it's now about moving to the general election phase where I think that establishment is now likely I do think the The Nikki Haley threat here is not completely eliminated until she officially drops out, but for all intents and purposes, I think it's off to the general election.
00:44:49.000And you're going to see that same establishment now prop up another puppet who they can find within the Democratic Party itself.
00:44:56.000I think they tried to do it within the Republican Party.
00:44:57.000I think that has mostly failed, you know, all but the final steps of having failed.
00:45:03.000To then turn to the Democratic Party as a vehicle to do what they couldn't do through the Republican Party.
00:45:07.000But it's not Republican versus Democrat so much as an existing pervasive bipartisan uniparty establishment that I think has lost their use for Joe Biden as a puppet.
00:45:16.000So I do think that once it's Crystal clear.
00:45:20.000I think it's already basically clear, but once it's crystal clear that Donald Trump is definitively the Republican nominee, they will turn to then finding a better puppet who they can use through the Democratic Party to advance their objectives than Joe Biden is able to do for them right now.
00:45:33.000So you envisage Gavin Newsom, Michelle Obama, someone more capable emerging.
00:45:39.000And do you feel that this is a question from Neo Grammarian in the chat?
00:45:43.000Actually, our live members get to pose questions to our guests.
00:45:48.000They ask, Do you feel that there will be some concocted emergency used to cancel the elections in the event that Trump isn't incarcerated?
00:45:57.000Do you envisage a free and fair election in 2024?
00:46:00.000And if it is Trump, who do you imagine it will be Trump versus of those potential candidates?
00:46:06.000So I think that Trump versus fill in the blank someone other than Biden is not crazy.
00:46:11.000I think Trump versus Michelle Obama is not crazy.
00:46:14.000I mean, you know, I've no base other than just watching and observing what I see publicly transpiring.
00:46:21.000I think this system has decided they will stop at nothing to keep Donald Trump from returning to office.
00:46:27.000And I think they tried to use Nikki Haley as their first stooge to do that within the Republican Party.
00:46:31.000Thankfully, I think we managed to have staved that off.
00:46:34.000I think they will then turn to the Democratic Party as a vehicle to do it.
00:46:37.000They've turned to the legal system, the extrajudicial system to do it.
00:46:41.000So I'm not God, you're not God, and so none of us can... I'm not in the business of Predicting, like, what exactly is one individual thing that's going to happen.
00:46:51.000I'm in the business of observing what the collective facts are and incentives are that are hiding in plain sight and just connect those dots.
00:47:07.000But what we can do better, and this isn't conspiracy theorizing.
00:47:11.000Conspiracy theorizing is assuming a bunch of people get together in some smoke-filled room and are plotting out how to take over the universe.
00:47:17.000I don't think that's how it works exactly.
00:47:19.000I think the way it works is you have collective incentives.
00:47:23.000That are hiding in plain sight, an amalgam of those incentives.
00:47:26.000They're often difficult to see, but you have to connect those dots, and that makes the future possibilities that much more clear.
00:47:33.000And so I think that's what led me to my view about what they were trying to do with Nikki Haley, name that problem, and then it becomes harder for them to act on those incentives.
00:47:39.000I think the same thing goes for, okay, if it's not that, then they're going to turn to the next thing and use the Democratic Party as a vehicle to do it.
00:47:45.000And if they can't successfully do that, I think they will then turn to the next thing.
00:47:49.000So I think that's what this year holds in store.
00:47:51.000And our best way to prevent that from playing out is to name the problem.
00:47:57.000Once you just unsparingly name it to be true, actually call out that otherwise obtuse or obfuscated set of incentives that they were able to use to achieve an outcome, once you smoke that out, it becomes a lot harder for them to continue to act out and play out that same part.
00:48:17.000And so that's that, I think, game of cat and mouse.
00:48:19.000I think it's where it's important for folks like yourself, for independent voices to be able to You know, connect those dots in a way that once you've named the problem, it becomes a lot harder for that problem to transpire.
00:48:30.000And for my part, that's something that I will continue to do over the course of this year as well, is once you utter the words that should not be spoken, it becomes a lot harder for those unspoken words to then become the reality.
00:48:41.000And so I think we have to be vigilant.
00:48:43.000And so I'm not going to sit here saying, OK, this is exactly what's going to happen over the next nine months.
00:48:46.000What's going to happen over the next nine months is in part a product of how vigilant we are to those possibilities.
00:48:52.000And I think it is vital that Donald Trump is successfully elected as the next U.S.
00:48:56.000president, lead the America First movement for the next four years.
00:49:00.000But let's keep in mind, that's just the next four years.
00:49:02.000We have another 250 years and then some still left if we do this right.
00:49:06.000But it requires us to be vigilant, as our founding fathers would admonish us to do.
00:49:09.000We can't just passively inherit this country that we call home.
00:49:13.000To the contrary, what we enjoy, the freedoms we enjoy, that's the exception, as I said earlier, to most of human history.
00:49:19.000That exception doesn't last automatically.
00:49:21.000It's not something you just get to passively, lazily inherit.
00:49:25.000You have to consistently fight for it.
00:49:27.000Each generation does, and now it's up to us and the balls in our court to continue doing.
00:49:32.000So, I'm going to do my part, whatever I can, from the outside.
00:49:35.000Part of that is calling out each of these issues, which is no small part of it, but Ultimately, to see this through, we're going to have to shut down that deep state in Washington, D.C.
00:49:44.000We're going to have to shut down those illicit relationships between that deep state, that managerial class in the three-letter government agencies and the private sector, from tech companies to media to banks to financial institutions.
00:49:55.000I think we then create the space for that revival of individual self-confidence and purpose that makes sure that we no longer are sheepishly bending the knee to what we're force-fed.
00:50:07.000I think all of those things are going to be required to revive this nation.
00:50:10.000Vivek, thank you so much for your time, for your participation.