In this episode, Russell Brand and Joe Rogan discuss whether or not the World Economic Forum in Davos is the end of the world as we know it. Also, Alex Berenson and Scott Gottlieb are joined by Andrew Lawton to discuss Eddie Munster and why he should have been kicked off the internet, and why the mainstream media should be worried about what could happen if the WEF folds. And, of course, there's a special guest on the show to talk about the future of the Davos event and whether it could be the last ever Davos ever again. Stay free, you glorious awakening wonders! - Russell Brand Subscribe to our new show, RUMBLE, where we can speak more freely without censorship and use freedom of speech to bring people together to create unification, not to create hatred or conspiracy theories, but to discuss the most fundamental truth of all. We come from a unitary force and if we ever to bring about truth and light, we have to do it. - We have to be united. - Andrew Lountonton Join us on Rumble, where you can speak without censorship without censorship, without hate, without fear, without being censored, and without fear of the dark side of the truth and without censorship. Rumble is a place where we re all of that which we can all agree on the truth, and all of the things we can agree on that we can do together. RMRUMBLE is a show about freedom and light. . Today's show is sponsored by McDonald's, which makes sandwiches, chips, sandwiches, crackers, chips and chips, and a whole lot more. We'll be talking about that! - let's see the future. Stay Free, you're going to see The Future, You're gonna see the Future, you'll be free, right? - stay free, You can choose the future, you can choose to see the truth as best we understand it, and you can decide for yourself, so you're not trying to be free! - Stay Free! - RMRY! - That's the future you're gonna be free. - Eeee! - Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee... - EEEEEEEEEeeeeeeee - by Russell Brand, Eeeeeeeeeeee! Join us, You glorious awakening wonder? - RAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay? - EEEEEEeeeee??
00:01:18.000Thanks for joining me on Stay Free with Russell Brand, where we convey to you the truth as best we understand it, so you can for yourself decide whether or not the mainstream media are feeding you establishment lies in order to keep you numb and dumb and distracted, or they're simply trying their best.
00:01:33.000Today's show is sponsored by McDonald's, what make a type of sandwiches, chips, things like that.
00:01:54.000We may have somehow, through the power that you provide, brought down this centralised system.
00:02:01.000Some people are saying that this could be the last ever Davos, that Klaus Schwab will be put in a way He's white pussy Blanco and retiring himself from trying to organise the world governments to meet his and their corporate aims and all because of the attention we've generated.
00:02:23.000But I think that this is the beginning of the end.
00:02:25.000I think you might have killed the World Economic Forum, Russell, because they just you drag them into the light and sunlight is the best disinfectant.
00:02:35.000And I think World Economic Forum has suffered such a reputational hit over the last two years that it really is on a downward trajectory.
00:02:42.000Maybe we could get that sunlight some way, I don't know, shine it into our veins.
00:02:48.000There's some proper news, or mainstream news at least, saying why an absence of A-listers at Davos is not just deep trouble for the World Economic Forum, but for globalisation too.
00:02:56.000It seems that the amount of independent news that's now available Information that hasn't passed through the filters of centralized systems of power means that now we can all discuss together and determine for ourselves what is the general direction we want our planet, our countries, our communities, our individual lives to travel in.
00:03:12.000That we're not at odds with one another.
00:03:14.000That together, if we unite, we can destabilize establishment power.
00:03:44.000We come from a unitary force and if we're ever to bring about truth and light we have to do it I'm just a bit worried about what's going to happen to Brian Stelter if Davos folds.
00:03:51.000It's owned by Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire tycoon.
00:03:55.000Davos faces uphill struggle to regain its influence.
00:04:21.000Also on the show, we've got Alex Berenson, he's a journalist who's been booted off Twitter because that Eddie Munster geezer Gottlieb kept complaining.
00:04:29.000Hey listen, you know who you shouldn't have on Twitter?
00:05:21.000Hey, listen, if you enjoy this kind of badinage, and why wouldn't you, in addition to reporting on establishment power, we also have a real hoot.
00:05:30.000And we do that on our Locals Community.
00:05:33.000You can join us for Stay Connected, our weekly show where we answer your questions, where we respond directly, giving you more intimacy, where we say stuff that we wouldn't even say elsewhere.
00:07:52.000Let me know in the chat and the comments.
00:07:54.000If that is the day you pray for, the day when these centralised forces concede that people should run their own lives, their own communities, that we're not idiots that need parental governance at every possible juncture.
00:08:03.000We're not people that are preparing to be replaced by AI.
00:08:07.000Even if it's AI like this little guy who I like the look of.
00:12:27.000Of course saying this is not saying that Russia's invasion isn't criminal or that Putin isn't brutal or Ukrainian people don't deserve humanitarian aid.
00:12:34.000It's saying that a diplomatic peaceful solution ought be the aim of everybody involved in case it leads to a nuclear war.
00:12:40.000But if there is a nuclear war, This is where you should stand in your house.
00:12:44.000Is it the green areas that you should stand, Gail, according to them?
00:12:47.000Well, I've looked through this and what they seem to be saying is away from the windows.
00:12:51.000It's a fairly large study that's been carried out to tell you something that I would think is fairly obvious.
00:13:42.000Yeah, I mean, fairly obvious, but... Don't sprint towards it and try and, like, put it out like Superman.
00:13:48.000Fly around the world backwards until eventually... Don't, like, whistle for a robot or a robot dog to come and help you.
00:13:54.000That's... We've got this beautiful camp robot guy who's gonna... He's gonna perform a routine.
00:14:01.000Oh, well, we're coming to the end of days.
00:14:05.000OK, so listen, if you're watching us on YouTube, we're going to have to leave in a moment because the information is going to get hotter than a radioactive blast.
00:14:12.000We're talking to Andrew Lawton, our man live in Davos, who we charged last time he was on the show.
00:14:18.000We're getting us a snap of Klaus Schwab.
00:15:04.000I like to keep my jowls full of shmickle.
00:15:08.000It's the way I have my commanding voice ever lubricated.
00:15:12.000The way I lubricate the corridors of power.
00:15:14.000With Prudhoe, Rishi, Angie Merkel, all of my little pals.
00:15:19.000Now, take a nipple from one of my many sowteets and suckle while I drool.
00:15:25.000If you want more entertainment like that and you're watching us on YouTube, you Awakening wonder, click on over to Rumble where we can speak openly and freely about the power structures on this planet and the surprising things that they get up to.
00:15:35.000I mean, our conversation with Whitney Webb yesterday, my God, it's still up on Rumble.
00:16:14.000We didn't think it would be making a comeback.
00:16:16.000We thought we'd passed that era, but now it's been brought back in some way due to economic interest hijacking the agenda of global sovereign nations and
00:16:27.000guiding them towards this terrible unipolar nightmare all in exchange for hot
00:16:33.000chocolate. One person who knows about it is the journalist Andrew Lawton who is
00:16:38.000live in Davos right now. We call him Chucky Lawton because he's been supping on
00:16:42.000the various hot chocolates available as if it were the teats of Schwab
00:16:45.000himself. How's it been going over there Andrew? Well pretty well although I've got
00:16:51.000to say I'm worried if I go into one of the wrong places at Davos I'm gonna have
00:16:54.000one of those Boston Dynamics robots chasing after me with their little twinkle
00:16:58.000toes and that's more terrifying than if they chase after you without the twinkle
00:17:03.000I think if you take big strides, The robot cannot catch you, but they seem determined to sort of, as you say, meander in a ridiculous fashion.
00:17:11.000I would think a powerful man like you will be relatively safe.
00:17:15.000First things first, it seems to me that WEF Davos is beginning to fade and Michael Schellenberger kindly suggested that is due to the community that we've become centrifugal to of independent journalists conveying truth about the true agenda of the WEF.
00:17:34.000Yeah, I mean, there's only one G7 leader this time around, and that is Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, so it doesn't have a lot of their... And no offense to, like, the Prime Minister of Kurdistan and the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, both lovely gentlemen, but they don't exactly have the global orders' heavy hitters this time around.
00:17:51.000And I also think there's a little bit of a skepticism by even some of the attendees.
00:17:56.000Like this group, Schwab, is saying that they can all get together and solve the world's problems.
00:18:01.000In May, he said, the future is built by us.
00:18:04.000Well, if the future is built by you, you don't exactly have a lot to be bragging about right now.
00:18:10.000Did you see, no, it's been the future and the present are in a terrible mess.
00:18:14.000Have you, did you see Tony Blair's one on how to annihilate Iraq or whatever it was called?
00:18:18.000It was like how to destabilize communities.
00:18:47.000And I, believe it or not, I actually went up to, I ran into Brian on the street and I asked him how he can, as a journalist, hold the WEF to account when he's here as their invited guest.
00:18:58.000And his answer was, I have to call my wife.
00:19:04.000But maybe she'll have some sort of solution.
00:19:06.000Yeah, it's like phone a friend on who wants to be a millionaire.
00:19:09.000Brian Seltzer, how do you hold the WAF to account?
00:19:11.000Hang on, let me get my wife on the line for this one.
00:19:14.000If you watch that panel on misinformation, it was quite chilling because to them the problem is not that they do not deserve our trust.
00:19:23.000The problem with misinformation in their view is that we need to regulate information they don't like.
00:19:30.000And they just accepted at face value that we are the problem, not them.
00:19:34.000That what they say is true is true, and what we say is true is not.
00:19:38.000And it's actually quite shameful, because they talk about rebuilding trust, but not a single one of them wants to look in the mirror.
00:19:45.000It's an amazing observation that illustrates the lack of ethics at the heart of modern media, that there is a requirement for humility, a kind of cultural mea culpa.
00:19:57.000I think there would be more opportunity to build trust if members of the mainstream media said, we now acknowledge that at the beginning of the pandemic we made mistakes, we reported on this in an irresponsible way, Whether it was the Wuhan lab, efficacy of masks, efficacy of the vaccines, the potential dangers of lockdown, the vilification of anti-vaxxers, the ongoing condemnation of the Canadian truckers refusing to allow people in vital positions to work if they hadn't had vaccines, even after we knew that vaccines didn't impact transmission.
00:20:44.000Yeah, and the Moderna CEO, I believe it was yesterday, it might have been two days ago, he got up there and he actually said that public debate about vaccines was a bad thing because when there was public debate in various countries, there was a lower vaccination rate.
00:21:00.000So his view is that if more people are talking, if there's debate on social media, if you can have a discussion about it, that is a bad thing.
00:21:08.000So a lot of these people, they don't even think You're right.
00:21:10.000the longer term implications or they don't admit to the implications of what it is that
00:22:06.000I failed on that front, Russell, and I'm sorry, but I got a picture of him.
00:22:10.000I went up to ask him about something that he has said in the past, which is about penetrating the cabinets of countries around the world, and I was just about to ask the question, and all of a sudden, he had somewhere else he had to be.
00:22:23.000So I got a picture of Klaus Schwab's hand, as if to say, get lost, you Canadian.
00:22:28.000He doesn't look to me like he's consenting particularly.
00:22:49.000I mean, have you seen that footage of Albert Baller being pursued by journalists through the streets where they just caroomed him with an endless, endless questions about various complex points in the COVID narrative, the profits, the lack of efficacy, the lack of We're going to be talking about that in our show.
00:23:08.000Poor dear Albert Baller just put on what looked like a Hull City FC scarf and remained stunned.
00:23:15.000He looked pretty frustrated. We're going to be talking about that in our show.
00:23:19.000Stay connected with Russell Brand that we do once a week.
00:23:22.000They don't link any of it together, do they?
00:23:24.000Because, you know, you've got Brian Stelter hosting this seminar on disinformation being the most existential challenge we're grappling with as a society, with members of the New York Times and other mainstream media.
00:23:34.000But then you've got people asking legitimate questions to the head of Pfizer who've made, you know, record profits around this treatment and medication that we have legitimately a lot of questions about.
00:23:46.000What you get is another puff piece by various mainstream media at the time.
00:23:50.000So it's interesting that this event that claims to be kind of tackling these issues such as disinformation, we're not actually getting the real story from the people that should be telling it.
00:23:58.000I mean, in a sense, Andrew, it's an extraordinary opportunity to have that many powerful people together.
00:24:21.000When we spoke to David Sirota yesterday, he talked about his own time attending Davos and how people are sort of astonished to be asked a challenging question.
00:24:30.000That's probably why Klaus Schwab Flung up his palm and disappeared into the butter suite when confronted by an inquiry about penetrating cabinets.
00:24:38.000It seems that they feel cozy in their piety and legitimacy and don't expect to be interrogated.
00:24:48.000Yeah, and to go back to your comments relaying what Michael Schellenberger said earlier, I think that for the longest time they've operated without any real scrutiny, and they've been hiding in plain sight.
00:24:58.000I think now this is really the first year where they've really had a lot of public attention from people that want to ask the tough questions.
00:25:06.000I mean, I talked to Chrystia Freeland, who's Canada's Deputy Prime Minister, and she's actually a member of the WEF Board of Trustees.
00:25:14.000And I asked her yesterday, how do you square having these two roles and it not being a conflict of interest?
00:25:21.000She was a very short woman, but man, could she motor fast to get away from me.
00:25:25.000And none of them are used to having people penetrate this little safe space of theirs in the Swiss Alps.
00:25:31.000Perhaps Chrystia Freeland and her sarcastic name and amazing ability to walk could provide a perambulatory model for the latest Boston Dynamic robots.
00:25:42.000If she's quick on her feet, if she's nimble, they could work on the gate.
00:25:48.000We always thought that that was astonishing, the way that in the name of freedom, and I know that as author of the book Freedom Convoy, this is an area where you are an expert, Andrew, that they introduced the freezing of bank accounts and more surveillance and tried to evoke that emergency act.
00:26:04.000And to know that these politicians, the representatives, democratically elected representatives of a sovereign nation, have The kind of conflict of interest that you describe is astonishing and gives the lie that this is just an empty conference.
00:26:20.000Yeah, and I think you do have some people pushing back against some aspects of it, but I think overwhelmingly there are the public programs, the Brian Stelter disinformation panel, the Moderna CEO COVID panel.
00:26:33.000But behind the scenes, there are all of these bilateral and multilateral meetings that no one knows about that are in these rooms that are in a back corner.
00:26:41.000of the conference center when you've got world leaders sitting down with corporate leaders
00:26:45.000and no one knows what's going on behind those doors but somehow they come out with
00:26:49.000proclamations and announcements and policy initiatives and all of these things and I
00:26:54.000do think that perhaps the influence might be waning just a little bit but I think that's
00:26:58.000only contingent on people keeping up the pressure and more importantly keeping up the exposure of this.
00:28:02.000Yeah, it was a brilliant little presentation where we show that that Scott Gottlieb, Scott Gottlieb, the sort of Eddie Munster looking figure who campaigned to have people kicked off a Twitter for talking about natural immunity.
00:28:14.000That's an image of Scott Gottlieb there.
00:28:16.000He's a Pfizer executive and social media campaigner.
00:28:21.000And he regarded Alex Berenson as his nemesis.
00:28:31.000Well done for being the first person to be able to traverse that threshold of being allowed back on Twitter.
00:28:38.000This is an extraordinary accomplishment in itself.
00:28:42.000Yeah, you know, I got a judge in San Francisco, believe it or not, who was willing to look at the facts of the case and what Twitter had, you know, sort of told me, senior Twitter executive in 2020, when things were not quite so polarized on social media and Twitter really was more of a, you know, Was in favor of free speech in the way it had always said it was.
00:29:07.000And so with those assurances, I went out and said a lot of stuff that, you know, I certainly think has turned out to be correct about the uselessness of lockdowns and uselessness of masks.
00:29:18.000the uselessness of school closures, all this stuff in 2020.
00:29:22.000And then in 2021, started raising questions about the vaccines. And of course, by that point,
00:29:27.000the powers that be really didn't want debate about the mRNA vaccines. And so in the summer of
00:29:33.0002021, Twitter kicked me off, but I did sue. And I had this judge who was sort of willing to look
00:29:40.000at the whole spectrum of what Twitter had provided me in terms of assurances. And he allowed the case
00:29:46.000to move forward. And that essentially forced Twitter, this is before Elon took over, forced
00:29:54.000It's an interesting precedent. And it's probably very important that the success that you have had
00:30:01.000with that being reinstated is a kind of a benchmark.
00:30:06.000We have comparable challenges on some of the platforms that we broadcast on where Of course, you'll be aware that the WHO set the community guidelines, for example, on YouTube, meaning that we are unable to frame the debate in the balanced way that we would like to.
00:30:23.000Around the time that you were kicked off, Scott Gottlieb, the Pfizer executive, he regarded you as something of a thorn in his side. He
00:30:33.000successfully had a former FDA head tweet about natural immunity and its potential efficacy
00:30:40.000removed from Twitter. How did you feel about that whole period and what do you think, what does it
00:30:46.000suggest when Pfizer have that much influence on a social media platform? I mean it's obviously
00:31:32.000But so Scott Gottlieb, you know, was very connected to, you know, obviously he was connected
00:31:38.000to Pfizer, but he was also connected to people inside the government during the Trump administration,
00:31:42.000but also during the Biden administration.
00:31:44.000So Pfizer and the White House were clearly working closely to message about the vaccines in late 2020, early 2021.
00:31:57.000And as the vaccine started to run into problems in the summer of 2021, And it became clear to these people that they were going to have to push for boosters.
00:32:06.000They're going to have to push for vaccine mandates.
00:32:09.000I think we're already seeing evidence that there was a concerted effort to message, you know, for the government to, you know, to put out heavy spin, the federal government, and to censor critics.
00:32:23.000And, you know, I was certainly one of the more prominent critics of what was happening.
00:32:27.000And I think, unfortunately, Russell, I mean, this is all very, very important, this social media piece of this.
00:32:33.000But what's even more important, or what's as important, is that the strategy has failed.
00:32:41.000You know, people continue to catch COVID.
00:32:43.000They continue to, older people especially, continue to die from COVID and Omicron.
00:32:48.000What we've done is we've given a lot of people at tremendous expense and risk to their long-term health Uh, you know, quote unquote vaccines that, you know, didn't provide any long-term immunity from COVID at all.
00:33:00.000And I mean, I think it's like, I want to talk about the censorship because I think that's incredibly important, but I also think we should, we should not forget what's happened, which is that those of us who warned in the summer of 2021, there's a problem here.
00:33:14.000These vaccines don't seem to be working as promised, have been proven completely correct.
00:33:22.000We sometimes forget the significance of the framing that you've just offered.
00:33:27.000It seems difficult, even for the most ardent critics of what happened in the last couple of years, to maintain sight of how significant what happened was.
00:33:37.000The way the information moves, the pace of change, the invitation to migrate to different issues, The kind of dismissiveness and the inherent nihilism that having access to information so quickly kind of generates makes it difficult.
00:33:52.000What's your most optimistic appraisal of what's just happened?
00:34:00.000How far are you willing to go and how far do we need to go and how do you think it's best to present this?
00:34:05.000What do you think are those salient points to focus people on if you want to galvanize opposition and generate some hope that this kind of thing can be prevented?
00:34:13.000in the future? Most optimistic view of what happened is that there was a real hope that
00:34:21.000this mRNA technology was a true breakthrough, a true biological breakthrough, that it was going
00:34:26.000to enable people to have a really powerful, robust immune response to the coronavirus. And we were
00:34:33.000going to be able to do something that we really had never been able to do before, which was stop
00:34:36.000a respiratory virus. And that when the results came out in November 2020, look, I was optimistic too.
00:34:45.000I mean, there was this brief period before I'd really seen what they'd done with the trials and how they'd designed the trials, essentially, so the trials were very unlikely to fail, that I thought, hey, this could work.
00:35:00.000And then what happened was in the spring of 2021, after the first wave of immunizations in the U.S., in the U.K., and especially in Israel, Israel It's a small country, has a good healthcare system.
00:35:12.000They got, they immunized almost everybody very quickly.
00:35:16.000There was this period in April and May of 2021 when deaths went, well not just deaths, but cases went way, way down.
00:35:24.000And I think they just got overly optimistic and they didn't realize that they hadn't actually, they hadn't actually done what they thought they'd done.
00:35:35.000And so they were caught completely flat-footed in July of 2021 when cases started to go back up.
00:35:42.000Now, you can say that they should have been more cautious.
00:35:46.000I mean, I'm not just going to say you can say that.
00:35:49.000They should have been far more cautious than they were.
00:35:53.000But the most optimistic view of this is that it's not some crazy, you know, it's not depopulation.
00:35:58.000It's not, it's not even corruption or money hunger.
00:36:02.000It's just that they got too optimistic.
00:36:09.000And, and you can tell that that's true because they all got vaccinated.
00:36:13.000All those people, unless you want to believe the true conspiracy theories that they were getting saline, which is not true, they all got vaccinated early.
00:36:22.000My joke about this is not really a joke.
00:36:24.000This is the only experimental medical product in history where rich white people demanded that they get it first.
00:36:37.000And that tells you that they believed.
00:36:39.000Yeah, that's also an interesting aspect of this.
00:36:44.000When we look back over the last couple of years, there are significant figures that were in retrospect perhaps unduly lionised.
00:36:53.000The now departed former head of the NIH, Anthony Fauci, perhaps stands head and shoulders above Everyone else is the main mouthpiece advocate and figure of authority who particularly while the Trump administration was still in play was regarded as a counter narrative voice in a sort of almost a righteous patriarch.
00:37:12.000We're of course excited to learn if you have any revelations about the Fauci files any potential releases and how you think that Anthony Fauci will be represented within them.
00:37:25.000So, unfortunately, Elon is mad at me again.
00:37:32.000And this has nothing to do with the substance of my, you know, my drop from the Twitter files, which came out a couple weeks ago, which, as you mentioned, had to do with Scott Gottlieb and how Gottlieb, you know, tried to get voices, not just me, but other voices that he didn't like censored.
00:37:48.000Elon got upset because I didn't put the whole Story on Twitter.
00:39:13.000The problem is, in terms of Fauci specifically, I don't know what's in there about Fauci.
00:39:20.000Obviously, Fauci's name comes up in Twitter a lot.
00:39:23.000But whether there's evidence that he directly or even provably indirectly was manipulating, you know, was trying to censor in the way we know other people were, I don't know that we have that.
00:39:37.000And I will say this, Anthony Fauci is very, very careful about what he says, right?
00:39:42.000You don't survive in Washington for 50 years unless you're really good at this game.
00:39:47.000And when he was deposed, meaning he had to testify under oath or give answers to questions under oath back in November in a lawsuit that Missouri had brought against a social media company or against him and other people, he said, Clearly, and he said, I don't recall to a lot of things, but not to this question.
00:40:08.000He said he had not been in touch with Twitter directly.
00:40:33.000He became this, you know, heroic anti-Trump figure in a lot of the media.
00:40:38.000But in terms of his specific efforts to censor social media, I think Anthony Fauci let other
00:40:44.000people inside the federal government do that for him.
00:40:46.000And I suspect that's what's—you know, that's what the files are going to show.
00:40:51.000So I think, I think people are looking for some revelation that Anthony Fauci called Jack Dorsey and said, get Alex Berenson off or get all the comments from Russell Brand off or whatever it is.
00:41:27.000I think it's crazy that the left has become the best friend of big pharma.
00:41:31.000I mean, that's not the history of big pharmaceutical companies and people on the left.
00:41:36.000The most famous incident in the last 25 years is actually involving Pfizer.
00:41:43.000Where a bunch of kids in Nigeria got meningitis and died in a Pfizer clinical trial that was, you know, that was very ethically problematic and became essentially the kernel for the book The Constant Gardener.
00:41:59.000You know, that famous John le Carre book that got turned into, you know, a great movie with Rachel Weisz.
00:42:04.000And that's what the left thought of Pfizer, that they would literally, you know, or not Pfizer, but big pharma in general, that they would literally let poor kids die in drug trials.
00:42:14.000And, you know, whether that's true or not, that certainly was the way the left viewed them.
00:42:22.000I don't understand how the left has lost its skepticism around pharma.
00:42:28.000What seems extraordinary, Alex, is since essentially the establishment and the left's interests have aligned, or even perhaps the left isn't the correct term, the liberal establishment and the left have sort of migrated to talking primarily about cultural issues because when it comes to matters of power and finance it appears that their interests broadly align, that there's been an abandonment of the working class and no interest in representing the interests of ordinary people because there's too much at stake.
00:42:56.000The working class, whether it's in our country or yours, have been, broadly speaking, demonized, even when it comes to demonizing 50% of the population, as is the case with Brexit or Trump.
00:43:05.000And it doesn't seem that there's much traction around those issues.
00:43:08.000I wonder, when you consider your time working for the New York Times, particularly as a correspondent in Iraq, if you can see how It's hard for me to know, since I'm not in Ukraine first-hand, what the reporting is like, right?
00:43:21.000And there's that old saying, truth is the first casualty of war.
00:43:23.000on the Iraq war in the position of the left is perhaps an interesting meter to measure
00:44:16.000In terms of Ukraine, it just seems like there's very, very little non-propaganda coming out
00:44:24.000I mean, it's very hard for independent journalists to embed with the Ukrainian military.
00:44:29.000It's certainly impossible for them to do that with the Russian military.
00:44:32.000So to some extent we're dependent on these statements from the Ukrainian military, from the UK military, from the Pentagon, from Russia, and none of them are going to really tell the truth about what happens.
00:44:44.000And so, you know, I think that's a That's why I don't really consider myself qualified to, you know, to tell you what is happening in Ukraine.
00:44:55.000I do think as a matter, I mean, in this I'm not really on the sort of left side or the populist side.
00:45:03.000I think it's right for the Ukrainians to defend themselves.
00:45:06.000I think they are an independent country and I think NATO has an interest in helping them defend themselves.
00:45:10.000So I know that's an unpopular position for Many of my readers, you know, but it's what I think, and I decided a long time ago that, you know, I have this sub stack, this unreported true sub stack, that I was going to tell people what I thought, even if they disagreed with me and if they decided not to subscribe anymore, that would be their choice.
00:45:29.000That's an interesting position in journalism these days.
00:45:33.000That word used to be known as integrity.
00:45:38.000I just had a question going back to Pfizer that we were talking about and Scott Gottlieb before.
00:45:44.000Because I thought what a really interesting element of that story was that the tweet that Gottlieb wanted flagged in the first place was by a former head of the FDA, which was kind of an amazing thing.
00:45:55.000And actually part of the tweet actually said That he encouraged people to go and get vaccinated, and yet it was still something that would sufficiently potentially harm Pfizer's vaccine sales.
00:46:07.000That ended up being flagged, even though it didn't violate any of the company's misinformation rules at the time.
00:46:13.000I just wondered, from your position now, what do you think the exposure of everything that's come through the Twitter files means for the future of The ability for government agencies to do this kind of thing.
00:46:27.000And, you know, you mentioned about Fauci not having necessarily contact with Twitter.
00:46:31.000We know he definitely had contact with Facebook.
00:46:34.000Do you think that there'll be a change in the way that these kind of things are either handled or exposed in the future?
00:46:42.000And do you think it will be in a good way?
00:46:43.000Or do you think that we're going to see even further crackdowns?
00:46:47.000I mean, those are really good questions.
00:46:51.000I think I think that, I mean, from everything that I've seen, the federal government and the public health bureaucrats have learned entirely the wrong lesson of the last, you know, in the last, let's say, six months, okay?
00:47:04.000The lesson they should have learned is that they overreached.
00:47:10.000They hurt people's belief in medicine in general, in childhood vaccines, which I think generally do work,
00:47:20.000although obviously like everybody else, I'm questioning that more than I used to
00:47:24.000because of the massive failure of the mRNAs.
00:47:28.000Then what they should have done, what they shouldn't be doing right now
00:47:32.000is looking at the reality of the fact that they made promises over the last three years,
00:47:36.000many, many promises that didn't come to fruition, right?
00:47:39.000I mean, essentially, they said, if you follow us, if you lock down hard, if you take this vaccine, you know, we're going to manage this in a way that it's not going to be a big, you know, I mean, yes, society will be disrupted, but there won't be very many deaths.
00:47:55.000And we're going to come out of this in a good place.
00:48:01.000And that's why, fundamentally, why there's so much anger.
00:48:05.000It's not because of me or Joe Rogan or Russell.
00:48:09.000Obviously, Russell, you have a huge audience, and Joe Rogan has a huge audience.
00:48:15.000But we're not bigger than the entire Federal government and, you know, international, you know, intergovernmental organizations and the rest of the media.
00:48:26.000The reason people are skeptical right now is because they see with their own eyes that things have not gone as promised.
00:48:34.000And they know that two years ago, in the spring of 2021, there was this, they were told That we are very close to beating COVID thanks to the vaccines, and that hasn't happened.
00:48:46.000So, unfortunately, what these bureaucrats and these politicians and even people like Brian Stelter are doing is saying, it's your fault, Berenson.
00:48:57.000You are, you know, interfering with our narrative that everything is going to be perfect, or, you know, you're interfering with what we're trying to say.
00:49:06.000And you need to be silenced in some way.
00:49:09.000And, you know, it's stunning to me that there's this—when people say, I believe in the First Amendment, but that's the end.
00:49:16.000Like, you either believe in the First Amendment or you don't.
00:49:19.000And these people no longer believe in the First Amendment.
00:49:22.000They no longer believe in free debate and free journalism.
00:49:31.000I would contest that they never did, but there was never a situation before where it was as relevant as it is now, where the means of communication has become truly democratised because of technological advancement.
00:49:41.000Just a side note, apparently Antony Fauci's daughter works at Twitter, so there's at least one tangential and genetic connection to that social media platform.
00:49:52.000Hey, Alex, thank you so much for joining us and thank you for your great work over the years.
00:49:56.000And more latterly, Alex Berenson can be found on Substack, where he will tell you the truth as he sees it, even if it will potentially irritate you.
00:51:32.000Tomorrow on Rumble, there is a fantastic conversation available between me and Bjorn Lomberg, where we talk about The misguided nature of the climate change debate and how many of the measures that are being suggested are ineffective and emerge from places like the WEF at Davos.
00:51:50.000You can join me then if you're not going to join locals to see more of our fantastic content, which I reckon you should do, particularly our show Stay Connected.