In part two of Derek and Julian's deconstruction of the Russell Brand/Matt Taibbi Twitter Files Rumble Session, Matt and Russell swoon over their interactions with Elon Musk, discuss how the MSM unfairly maligns Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine, and chat about the old regime at Twitter being in service of the sinister agenda of global institutions like the IMF.
Strap in.
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Thank you for your support.
Thank you Matt, that's really helpful.
We were talking earlier about the Ukraine war, I suppose, in light of David Letterman
talking to Zelensky, and just the presentation of this product is pretty sanitary or hagiographic
even, because what I feel is that with the way that Putin is reported on continually
as sort of a malodorous and sick, filthy old Parkinson-ridden, self-defecating filth bag,
it feels like there's an inability to think critically in a nuanced way about a complex
situation.
When Jeffrey Sachs came on the show, he gave us a sort of a rundown on events between NATO
and Russia from the 90s.
He just gave us a sort of a whistle-stop tour between, well, they said NATO wouldn't impinge,
NATO impinged.
They said they wouldn't meddle in elections, they meddled in elections, and all the way
through to sort of military-industrial complex stuff.
Do you think we're at a point, Matt, where all news is propaganda, or at least the majority
of mainstream news is propaganda?
I think we're pretty close to that.
I mean, I know for a fact that there are certain stories out there that would not have a home in traditional corporate media.
And that is new, right?
Once upon a time, a news organization was most interested in whether or not they had That's a big story.
They didn't think about other considerations.
Very rarely you would see something like the New York Times reaching out to the CIA or having conversations with them about whether or not they should print something.
But now I think that's routine across the entire business.
I think, maybe not the contact, but there's a presumption that we only print things that we think are going to help Whatever the cause is.
You combine that with the social media censorship and manipulation, which is just so sophisticated.
Now, I don't know how you would cover something like the Ukraine war.
You know, and have an impact, right?
Because you'd be drowned out if you had a counter-narrative fact by so much other stuff, it would be difficult to report on.
Let me just say, it can't be a Russell Brand segment without him using words like hagiographic and melodic.
I often wonder when he's talking to people in a live moment if they are even making sense of a lot of what he says.
It couldn't be hagiographic because neither Zelensky nor Putin are dead.
I think hagiography is a myth that is propagated about someone after they die.
I could be wrong about that.
Portraying Putin as being stinky?
I don't, I don't know.
But notice here, Brand brings up Ukraine and how Jeffrey Sachs has helped him see Putin's justification for the invasion based on NATO doing things they said they weren't going to do.
And so therefore invading Ukraine and bombing the crap out of their cities and all of the
atrocities being committed against those people somehow are held in a, it should be held in
some sort of neutral moral space where we put aside our judgments.
He talks about how Putin is demonized and then he asks, is all mainstream news now propaganda?
He actually says, is all news now propaganda?
And Saebi perpetuates this conspiracist generalization move.
All media is now in contact with the CIA.
censorship also colludes in controlling the narrative.
Nothing else will get through. It's just so irresponsible.
I know I've mentioned this before, but there is a style of writing which
Le Monde d'Arthur was written in called amplificatio.
I'm going to guess it's the precursor to amplification.
Any linguist can correct me if I'm wrong on that.
But it was this sonorous style where the repetition of rhyming in words
would give you a vibe, a feeling, so that the words themselves
didn't matter that much.
It was the feeling you got when you were at the speaker, and at that time it was really important because not a lot of people were literate.
So, the people who were literate, they needed translators, i.e.
people who were orators reading to them, and they had to capture the moment.
We still have this in theater.
It's very common.
But Russell really exploits that in people by just throwing out words there that don't actually fit into the context, but they're multi-syllabic, and so they'll just think, wow, he's right.
They won't actually go back and read the transcript like you did, and then actually say, wait, he's not actually saying anything.
Along those lines, I really want to know how much these guys read beyond headlines and how often they check any other source besides the New York Times, right?
The Guardian does excellent reporting.
ProPublica is one of the best organizations out there for actual investigative reporting.
Now, as I said off the top, Russell Lambas, the MSM, but then shares headlines from British tabloids as if it was the New York Times or CNN reporting.
Now, in this clip, Taibi makes a lot of accusations without citing a journalist or a story.
It's all broad strokes that they want to make complex when it's really quite simple.
Pay attention to us, not them, even though we're going to use them as punching bags in order to pay attention to us.
Now, I could have more commentary if they actually cited a situation, but instead Russell is too transfixed by a Netflix docuseries by a former late-night TV host who does long-form interviews, and quite well in my opinion.
But how does Netflix get tied into New York Times reporting?
It only happens in that firehose of Russell and his followers that people aren't really going to pay attention to.
Yeah, and I'm so glad you mentioned some of these various sources of really good investigative journalism, right?
Because the narrative, to use their word, that so many of these people try to sell is that everyone, except for them, is in the bag and at the behest of these corrupted institutions and they're all just saying the same thing and you can't ever contradict them or else you'll be ostracized.
