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June 6, 2024 - Triggered - Donald Trump Jr

02:22:25

LIVE WITH RUSSELL BRAND | TRIGGERED Ep.143

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	you you
	welcome to another episode of triggered This is going to be a fun one because we have Russell Brand in my house.
	This is like the only place in the house I actually have a little bit of control over.
	The rest is controlled by Kim and someone else.
	This is my happy place, so we get to do stuff here that we can't otherwise.
	We were sweating our asses off this morning.
	It's been like a sauna thing.
	I like the zen look.
	I'm going to have to do that.
	We'll get comfortable and do it that way.
	How are you, man?
	I've been so happy in your home all day long, Don.
	I've enjoyed the tour.
	It was pretty generous of you to allow me to have a shower, particularly in your en suite.
	I've just felt incredibly welcome.
	Thank you so much.
	It's my pleasure.
	I did not get invited into the shower, just for the record, but I was happy to let you use it.
	It's actually been a fun day, and for those of you who didn't see it, I did Russell's show earlier today.
	We sort of had a good time where, you know, I was the interviewee and you were the interviewer.
	Now we're sort of reversing those roles a bit.
	I think what we'll do is, just because of the timing and everything, we'll add that to the end of this.
	So I'll throw to this at the end of the show and you can see the different perspectives.
	But I think, you know, one of the things we sort of talked about was, you know, it probably wasn't all that long ago where, whether it's, you know, the powers that be or, You and I would have not been a likely conversation.
	We probably wouldn't have agreed on much, and yet, you know, we've spent all day together and sort of had a great conversation, even with differing views.
	It was sort of fascinating to me.
	I think, like, culturally, I would have felt, oh, I'm not allowed to talk to Donald Trump Jr.
	These are weird people that are from the other side of the culture.
	And we're not going to be able to get on, we'll have nothing in common, but over the course of the day it's become clear to me and hopefully that's sort of based on pretty integral... This is too far from my mouth.
	Hopefully it's based on sort of some shared values.
	I feel like... Do you know what?
	I reckon that one of the things that's really important and significant is for people to, before assuming that they wouldn't be able to have easy camaraderie and collaborate with people, to get to know people first of all, because I think somehow... Right, right.
	It doesn't seem that hard, right?
	If it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
	It's fine.
	If there's someone you think you won't get on with, go to their house, have a shower in their home.
	That might augur a brilliant friendship and the possibility for new alliance.
	So, you know, when you talk about that, I mean, talk about sort of that notion, I guess, there's sort of an element that, hey, if you were even open to that a few years ago, you'd have been derided, you'd have been, you know, there would have been attempted cancellation, but now that they've already tried to do that for all sorts of other reasons, simply for speaking out against the machine for you, there's an element that it's sort of freeing, actually, right?
	Yeah.
	As brutal as it can be getting there.
	You know what?
	Having been inside the machine before, you recognize that it's got some pretty insidious values and makes some pretty serious demands of you.
	That there's a moment when you're being celebrated and sometimes you think that's because of something you're doing.
	Like, oh, I deserve this.
	This is on merit.
	I must be creative.
	I must be brilliant.
	And in retrospect, you start to realize that you're fulfilling a function for a particular aspect of the machine.
	You know, maybe for a minute it can utilize you as a Easy kind of symbol of decadence or hedonism or maybe just for a minute your face fits.
	You're useful.
	You know people use that phrase useful idiot a lot.
	And then, after a while, maybe the machine no longer can use you, you're not convenient anymore, then it will dispatch you.
	By God, heaven forbid you should speak out against it, heaven forbid you should start recognising that this culture can be pretty punishing, that it seems to benefit from separating people, censoring people, surveilling people, controlling people, legitimising citizen management wherever it can.
	If you start to wake up to those ideas and communicate, The machine will be brutal.
	It will thresh you.
	And with that, though, as you say, Don, comes a different kind of freedom.
	You realize that I'm going to talk to whoever I want because I believe actually in people's individual freedom anyway.
	So if you have those kind of principles, you believe in free speech and autonomy.
	Yeah, sort of young people always ask, you know, what can I do?
	How do I learn?
	How do I get better?
	And it's actually to have that discourse, to have a dialogue, not necessarily with someone who's simply agreeing with you all the time, but someone who doesn't.
	I found I've learned so much more in life from that than simply, you know, regurgitating what academia has told me or what the mainstream media has told me and just, you know, it's interesting the left still thinks of themselves as counterculture but they're agreeing with corporate America and entertainment and all of that.
	Have you seen the sort of the irony of all of that?
	Yes, I think that it's an important point that if your ideals are corporatised ideals, if the ideals that you find yourself parroting are able to be utilised to legitimise authoritarianism or control, then you have to examine what they might really be about.
	For example, the idea of compassion, the idea of open-heartedness, the idea of letting people be who they want to be, to express themselves freely as long as they're not harming anyone else, all these kind of values that I used to associate with the left, you know, free speech, civil rights, the ability to be who you want to be, all of those kind of things, I still believe are pretty important ideas, but I've noted that these ideas that claim to be based on compassion Always end up in facilitating control.
	And I don't believe in the compassion anymore.
	And I think during COVID, Don, I felt like we were exposed to perhaps the true agenda.
	Because, you know, the whole point of lockdowns and taking experimental medications was meant to be, life is so sacred, we must lock ourselves in our homes, we must take these medications in order to protect the most vulnerable people in society.
	And protecting the most vulnerable people in society Seems like a pretty lovely aim.
	Who wouldn't want to look after their elders and the elderly?
	The people that can't look after themselves.
	These seem like important values.
	But now, over time, we saw...
	Excuse me, that those weren't the motivating ideas at all.
	They just offered the opportunity for profit, for wealth transfer, to legitimize regulation, to restrict people's movements, to restrict people's freedom, to shame and condemn and criminalize people.
	So that for me was a big part of the awakening.
	Yeah, watching, you know, major corporate American chains be sort of exempted from any kind of lockdown because they're critical, but a gym, You know, physical fitness.
	The small coffee shop wasn't critical, but Starbucks was because they could pay a lobbyist $100,000 a month.
	It sort of felt like that was the big tell.
	It was a really awakening moment.
	It's like, well, what's the difference?
	I mean, you go into a coffee shop, it doesn't, that doesn't change transmission magically.
	One coffee shop isn't less transmissible than another.
	It doesn't work that way.
	And yet it was almost, that's what we were told was the case.
	Yeah and some of the things that have been maligned and condemned either as right-wing or far-right or racist or fascist or whatever do include stuff like health and fitness and bodily autonomy and personal awakening and like when you see someone like Joe Rogan being attacked in the way that he was who's someone that to me doesn't appear to be carrying a particular flag when it comes to political ideology just open-minded General speaking, individual sovereignty and freedom.
	That made me ask a lot of questions and you know I was chatting to, excuse me, is it John in there that you guys work with?
	Yeah.
	And we were talking about the That how somehow there appears to be a war against human nature.
	That when you spend some time away from the culture, he was using the example actually of naked and afraid.
	Like after a couple of weeks of naked and afraid, people aren't sweating toxins so they're not getting bitten by mosquitoes.
	Suddenly people that are vegan are willing to hunt and eat meat.
	He suggests that there is a nature within us that we're being shut off from.
	Now, you can't follow your every impulse in this world because of course we have to be considerate of one another.
	But I feel that what we're living in is a kind of prison planet penitentiary that appears to have the inhibition of freedom almost as its driving ideal.
	It doesn't want people to be awake and confident and proud of who they are and truly proud of diversity.
	And like we were saying at lunch, it's like there's the promotion of superficial diversity but beneath it homogeneity, absolute homogenization of spirit and of thought.
	They want diversity of Color, of ethnicity, of sexual preference.
	The only thing that's verboten, the only thing totally off the table is diversity of thought.
	The second that happens, that's when they're not so into diversity anymore.
	You see that on college campuses, you see that elsewhere.
	I'm sort of curious, obviously.
	You're a major actor in Hollywood.
	You were married to one of the biggest people in pop culture and music with Katy Perry.
	You've sort of spoken out against the machine now, so you've perhaps seen a little bit more exposure to both sides.
	Which side, if you had to pick, is actually more tolerant?
	Because one side preaches tolerance, but it doesn't actually seem to espouse it.
	A few years ago, when I first started doing stuff on YouTube, I must have been super naive, but just from the background I'm from, a lot of people organically didn't trust politics, didn't trust politicians.
	Oh, I still don't!
	Just so we're clear.
	Right, right.
	That was sort of just like where I stood.
	So it's not like I was a liberal left-wing type person.
	I didn't trust politicians full stop.
	So one time when I was like doing some promotional work or something, I can't even remember what for, I spoke out and said, I don't vote.
	I've never voted.
	Why don't you vote?
	Because I don't trust politicians.
	I think they're all the same.
	I think they're all controlled by the same sets of powers.
	This is like, you know, in 2015 when I said this, OK?
	And when I said that, to your point about which side have you found to be more tolerant and which side is more vindictive, the attacks that came from liberal media, the condemnation, the criticism, the cruelty, how patronising they were, it made me realise, hold on a minute, These institutions hate ordinary, in my case, working British people.
	And I think the same thing became relevant during the campaigning era prior to the election of your father, that there is a sort of malignment and disdain for ordinary Americans.
	And I think that what we're experiencing now, Don, it seems to me anyway, is any opportunity to legitimize the hatred of ordinary Americans is taken.
	Ah, they're racist, they're disgusting.
	And it seems like there's a professional class that kind of have a vampiric, parasitic appetite to condemn and control.
	And for me, it, like, listen, people that are on the right, whether they're conservative socially, conservative economically, there might be ideas that I disagree with strongly, but I want to be able to talk to people that go, this is why I believe in free market capitalism, This is why I believe you should deregulate here.
	This is why I believe in Christianity.
	And I'm a Christian myself now, of course.
	But, you know, like, you're right.
	The side that are claiming tolerance appear to be quite condemnatory exactly in the area where tolerance is required when dealing with people you don't agree with.
	If you don't have tolerance there, you don't have tolerance.
	You have the exploitation of certain ideas to legitimize control.
	Let's talk a little bit about Christianity.
	You were recently baptized.
	I know we spoke earlier.
	I said the left doesn't believe in a higher being necessarily, so they create their own along the way.
	Greta Thunberg for climate change, George Floyd for I'm not sure what.
	He was a deity for quite some time and seven funerals around the world.
	You had, you know, Zelensky today as the sort of high lord of Ukraine, which is apparently the most important issue in the world, even if most people don't agree with that.
	Obviously, during COVID, you had Anthony Fauci as the, you know, the high priestess of that.
	You know, what was that journey like for you?
	To, you know, at your age come to Christianity, be recently baptized?
	How did that happen?
	Well, I guess probably before, I might have had a more New Age approach to spirituality.
	I think that, tell me what you've believed on, but like addiction to substances is often an attempt, at least in the philosophy that's helped me get well, 12-step philosophy, is an attempt to address a spiritual malady, some loss, some absence, some yearning at the core of your being that you cannot live without God.
	If you don't have God, you will create God.
	At the level of the culture, that may be Anthony Fauci as a kind of deity of health and science.
	At an individual level, people need to have a God.
	People need a set of principles, a set of values.
	And there is something in our nature that yearns after a creator.
	Now when you get clean from drugs and alcohol, you know, I went to a place that was pretty, well, secular for sure.
	Secular.
	Atheist almost.
	But they still have to instruct you that you are using drugs and alcohol As to give your life purpose and to cope with the lack of purpose.
	In the same way that there might be animal drives within us that are being denied, there are spiritual drives within us that are being denied by the culture.
	And so by getting clean, you know, you have to surrender to a higher power.
	You have to hand over your will and your life.
	And this process began, and I must be pretty dumb and a kind of slow learner, but over the 21 years that I've been clean and sober, I've obviously moved closer to a spiritual life.
	Meditation, recognizing that values like kindness and service and humility, while difficult to achieve, are certainly worth pursuing.
	Then, as the pressure increased recently after being publicly attacked and accused of the worst things, in my view, that a man can be accused of, and at the same time as dealing with some personal difficulties that have proven to be incredible blessings, actually, because, as I mentioned to you earlier, my son was born with some life-threatening conditions that required Surgery and pretty significant intervention.
	I experienced a stripping away.
	An absolute annihilation of the idea that I am any kind of sovereign in my own life.
	And a recognition of my total lack of power.
	The acknowledgement that even having been involved in entertainment and show business for as long as I'd been, that I still cared deeply about what other people thought of me and that I'd made an icon of myself.
	Not consciously, but I cared so much.
	And when all that was destroyed, I found myself pretty raw.
	And in this place of rawness and fear, even though it brought out really kind and compassionate and brave and bold people, I want to mention at this point how strong Chris Pavlovsky in particular was at Rumble.
	He shut that shit down when people were saying, you've got to boot people off.
	Those attempts to censor, always using a crisis to assert control.
	What I found in this place of despair, really slowly and not through any will of my own, I've got to say, John, It's like, oh my God, Jesus Christ is always present.
	I've always known.
	I had this tattoo ages ago.
	I had this tattoo ages ago.
	I've had this fascination with the figure of Christ but never before been willing to accept the idea of God come to earth in the figure of a human being to experience our suffering as a transaction, as a sacrifice for all of our sins.
	To recognize that I can't ever achieve the mercy and forgiveness that I need, but it has been freely given to me by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, our Lord.
	And this is something I'm like, it's not like, you know, I've only been a Christian for a month, so like I'm reading, I'm learning, I'm reading the Bible, I'm going to church, I'm learning about it.
	What it's given me access to is grace and compassion.
	And I think that these are the things that are lacking, not only in my life, but in the culture that, you know, you were like a member of on one half of, you know, half of the America loves you and loves your family, half of America vilifying, hating, condemning.
	You know, we joked about it earlier that still on your Wikipedia page, they're saying Russia scandal, Russia collusion.
	That's been proven to be untrue.
	It's been proven to be untrue.
	The culture doesn't believe in redemption.
	The culture doesn't believe in salvation.
	The culture doesn't believe in Jesus Christ.
	It believes in materialism and power and control.
	Now, both of us in different ways experience some, you know, material privilege.
	Of course, you've been open about what, you know, your background is.
	We hardly need to examine it.
	And I've gone from a position of not having access to those kind of things to having access to it.
	And what I see now is that where the real exploitation and control is, is taking place nefariously, invisibly, insidiously, behind politics somehow.
	That there are big choices that have to be made by your country and by mine if we are to prevent further authoritarianism, further autocracy.
	And for me, the kind of technological feudalism that we face under the auspices of compassionate neoliberalism
	is far more terrifying than even the worst projections of the detractors of Donald Trump,
	who say, oh, he'll stay in office forever.
	They've lost their touch with basic values, and they are pretending that compassion and care
	are at the heart of their ethos, when control is the only thing that you can track all the way through it.
	Yeah, what was that like?
	You know, when they recently sort of, they went after you, terrible accusations as, you know, no one's heard anything about it in nine months or whatever it was, but it doesn't stop the attack from happening.
	And the attack these days is though, it's the gospel, right?
	They did it to my father the same thing.
	You know, he apparently sexually assaulted someone 30 years ago, but, you know, it's like he was hiding for 30 years and they magically found him, right?
	You've been out there with one of the most famous people in the world, and one of the most popular people in pop culture, him sort of the same way.
	And yet, the second you took a stance that wasn't 100% in line with sort of the rest of that group, you know, they went after you, arguably in the most horrible way possible.
	There doesn't seem to be any evidence of this, but that doesn't seem to matter anymore.
	I mean, where does this end?
	Because it doesn't feel like a good place.
	Media outlets collaboratively utilized anonymized sources and it seems to me there has been some considerable unusual collaboration and involvement of various agencies And departments.
	The whole time that I was famous, I was talking about, I'm a womanizer, I'm a womanizer, I love women.
	You weren't even hiding it.
	No one had a problem with it.
	It's like, that's fine.
	I feel grateful to say that women found me very attractive.
	And I have to be honest enough to say that the conduct that I engaged in was very promiscuous and very, very selfish.
	And when you're as selfish as that, of course, it has to be acknowledged.
	That that kind of selfishness is not in alignment with the kind of values, spiritual values, that I would like to live with now and I wish to God I'd lived with then.
	But to conflate that, and to amplify that, to confuse that, and to mendaciously fabricate that that is in alignment with crime and criminality, And as you say, this didn't occur while I was in Hollywood.
	Yeah, you were on the cover of every magazine in the world.
	It's not like, oh, that's the guy that did it.
	You weren't hiding.
	You weren't in a monastery for 25 years and then magically you came out and they recognized that guy.
	The culture's telling you that you're supposed to be promiscuous.
	The culture's telling you you're supposed to be hedonistic.
	Like, if you're a single man and you're fortunate enough to have women find you attractive, this is meant to be the greatest thing that you can be.
	This is meant to be celebrated.
	And over time, like all forms of, I would say, addiction-driven behavior, One, I come to recognise, no, this is not the way to live.
	And like, I've got a family, and I live differently, and I, you know, listen, to tell you the truth, Don, I don't look at pornography in my life.
	I do not masturbate.
	I have my attitude to, like, I try to find the sacred in everything now, including sexuality.
	We are supposed to be living sacred lives.
	We are supposed to be living sacred lives.
	And my God, my life was not perfect, but it was never criminal, always consensual.
	And the culture, curiously, that tries to suggest that we should be living this decadent, hedonistic lifestyle, when it suits it, it metastasizes whatever it wants to into whatever it needs.
	Utility.
	Utility.
	Always.
	How can we shut down dissident voices?
	How can we control opposition?
	That's sort of the great irony, I guess, right?
	The same culture that is literally out there promoting that, sexualizing it, oftentimes sexualizing our children, you see, on a daily basis, is the same culture that then attacked you for what they were essentially encouraging for decades.
	Yes.
	They would have actually lauded you for similar just promiscuity, maybe not the other what I believe to be totally just false accusations, as evidenced by the fact that it seems to be going nowhere.
	You still have to deal with the bullshit, but you know, if it was real, you'd still hear about it.
	We all know what crime is.
	We all know what consent is.
	We all know what it is to understand when people are interested, and thankfully, as I've said to you, I was in a position of Outrageous access, and I was pretty foolish to think that you can just live like this.
	It's not a way that I would encourage sons or daughters of mine to live, but I recognize that a lot of people live that way.
	Promiscuity and that kind of licentiousness, let's call it, is kind of celebrated throughout the culture.
	Sexuality is amplified throughout the culture, used to objectify and commodify almost everything.
	So, you know, in that, you know, there was sort of the natural, I guess, collusion between the media, a lot of the tech platforms automatically, you know, they take sort of an anonymous accusation and it became the gospel, right?
	I mean, YouTube wanted to throw you out, the UK government wanted you immediately demonetized from many of the platforms that you were out there on.
	What was that attack?
	Because to me, and again, now I'm sort of an expert at this because it's happened to us every way, shape, or form.
	They did the same thing to my father.
	You know, 30 years later, magically.
	But the attack is so vicious.
	It's so coordinated.
	It's so obvious.
	What was it like being in that moment from those same people who, again, Even months earlier would have had you on the cover of their magazines and would have been promoting you at all costs.
	You'd have been boosted in the algorithm instead of smothered entirely.
	I suppose as it says in the Bible, by their fruits shall ye know them, that if the result is Demonetization, shutting down de-amplification, shadow banning, shutting down of the voice, then you get to understand potentially what the motives are.
	What it's like on a personal level, as you must know, is pretty terrifying.
	It's pretty terrifying to see the ability to coordinate, to control, to metastasize, to fabricate.
	All of those things are pretty frightening, but as I mentioned to you privately, it was happening at the exact same time that my Infant son was undergoing life-intervening cardiological surgery.
	He was born with a condition called Tetralogy of Fallot.
	And when you're dealing with that, when you're in a children's hospital, when you're walking through an oncology ward to avoid paparazzi, a children's oncology ward, seeing children who are presumably not all of whom are going to make it, I had the blessing of recognising however important this might seem to me, however unfair this might seem to be to me right now, it is insignificant in the overall scheme of things.
	I felt very blessed to have that kind of insight and incredibly blessed that You know, the surgeons and medical workers that treated my son had the expertise and the experience and the genius to save his life.
	So, I had a... You know, sometimes God, always God, does for you what you cannot do for yourself.
	I was not about to awaken to the fact that I needed to radically change, that I needed to live a different life.
	And thankfully, even though that was not an experience that I would wish upon even my worst enemies, Yeah, every once in a while I think we all have those experiences where you realize the stuff that we actually worry about is really trite.
	I told you at lunch, a similar experience yesterday.
	The young man, I won't say his name, but Got to our system.
	Super big Trump fan.
	Congenital heart issue.
	Going into surgery.
	Not expected to live.
	Wasn't expected to live past his first birthday.
	Now he's in his early 20s.
	But not looking good.
	And all he wanted to do was speak to some Trumps because he's a huge fan.
	Also, severely autistic.
	And I spoke to this kid who next month, I guess, is going into a surgery that he's not expected to come out of.
	And he was Happier to speak to me than I am about just about anything in life.
	And I'm saying, what a fucking asshole I am.
	I was bitching about, you know, there was a fat guy in the coach seat on the plane that I was in.
	I'm like, argh!
	It was like my day was ruined because someone's overflowing into the seat next to me yesterday.
	I'm like, man.
	I'm a dick.
	Because in the grand scheme of things, the little things that sometimes ruin our days are bullshit compared to what some people are going through.
	And then you see them have that sort of spirit and that joy despite that, and you're like, perspective.
	Christianity, they say, does not mean that you are inoculated against suffering, but your suffering becomes purposeful and meaningful.
	And I've been able to recognize that my life is not about me and what I want, and I continually, like, the needle flips between self and God, and I have to work so hard to make it stay towards God.
	But when you have the opportunity or blessing to be around people that need you, to be engaged in purpose and meaning, then you experience the kind of relief and grace of that.
	I can't live in that selfishness no more, Don.
	Like, there's sort of like, you know, you have a little call with somebody.
	I remember speaking to someone telling me about how their son had died from a drug overdose, and I was on a movie set in the trailer, and like, I sort of felt like, oh my God, I don't know how, like, she started crying on the call.
	Her kid had, like, taken, like, ecstasy, I think was the drug, and had died, and she just said, like, you know, she was talking to me about that experience.
	I felt like, wow, in this moment, I've got to be qualified to handle what she's saying.
	I don't feel qualified, but I've got to be qualified.
	This was some years ago, and I think if you look back at your life, you'll find whoever you are, that there are moments where you're being guided towards meaning and purpose.
	You're being shown that life isn't what you're being sold.
	It is not about the avoidance of fear and the fulfillment of desire.
	It is about...
	About trying to become a conduit for something higher, shall we say.
	Yes, I guess talk about that in the context of addiction.
	I didn't realize it was 21 years.
	I mean, that's a long time you figured that out.
	Actually, before this interview, a very good friend from college literally texted and saw that I was going to be on with you.
	I guess she had read your book.
	about addiction and it was like that was the first thing she took in a long
	process towards sobriety. The same thing. So you've definitely moved the needle.
	What, you know, what made you have, what was the catalyst to start that change?
	Obviously it's something, you know, quite difficult for a lot of people.
	My father actually was talking yesterday about it.
	His brother died of alcoholism and he's never had a drink in his life.
	My dad is just stone cold teetotaler and he was literally talking about it in a speech.
	What would have been had he gone down that path?
	I think there's a genetic component to a lot of these things and people's ability to become addicted to something.
	Some people can go have a couple drinks and move on and never do it.
	Start and can't stop.
	I'm more one of those, and that's why I try to do the same thing and stay away from it.
	How did that start?
	What was that journey like?
	What are the things you would tell others who are struggling with the same thing to be able to get them over the hurdles?
	Because I imagine it's not a one-size-fits-all formula.
	Plainly within your genealogy, there are some pretty powerful drivers, I would say.
	We are an all-or-nothing family, but that's wonderful for That's wonderful for, you know, great things.
	It's not so good when it comes to vices.
	Yes.
	The vices, that's easy to go way over the line, right?
	Yes.
	It's great for work ethic and it's great for getting certain things done.
	There's a sort of drivenness that probably comes with that same, I'd even call it sort of manic personality.
	Yes.
	But, you know, you add in the bad stuff and it can go wrong really fast.
	The people that came up with the 12 steps upon which I based the book I wrote that your friend was kind enough to compliment, They realized that there is a yearning, even the phenomena of craving, the desire for a drink or for a drug, a kind of magnetic pulling towards, what is this longing?
	And what does the wanting want really?
	After I'd been clean and sober for about 10 years, I began to recognize what was plainly written in the great texts, which themselves were derived much from Christianity.
	In particular, there was a group called the Oxford Group, which were a first century Christian movement that believed in principles like restitution, and service, and confession, basic spiritual principles, in addition to the ideas and philosophy of Carl Jung.
	I, through reading it, recognize, like you, like everyone, we are looking for something.
	We are looking for purpose and meaning, and we find it in a variety of ways.
	Those of us that have a propensity towards addiction are unable to curtail something, even when it becomes destructive.
	Even when the drinking of the alcohol or the taking of the drugs becomes destructive, because it's filling an unfillable hole, unfillable without a spiritual solution, it gets right out of control.
	And that was exactly my experience.
	And when I saw other people that had got clean and sober using the 12-step method, when I heard them and when I read the literature, I recognized this is exactly what I have.
	I'm trying to fulfill a void using material methods.
	You can't fill a spiritual hole Using material means.
	So, like, even the pursuit of fame, the pursuit of money, the pursuit of all of these things is driven by a longing for something.
	And that's why even latterly, being specific and surrendering to, in particular, Jesus Christ, has made an impact.
	Because that is what's woven throughout the 12-step process.
	You must surrender.
	You must recognize you have a spiritual malady.
	You must recognise the way out of this is to surrender yourself.
	You've been worshipping God all along.
	It is the God of yourself.
	You think that what you want and what you're afraid of is the be-all and end-all.
	And that's why it takes sometimes a profound experience like you described, speaking to that young man who you said might not survive that operation, that wakes you up, oh my God, I've been living in an illusion.
	Now, the sustenance of this awakened state I don't find very easy.
	That means I have to regularly spend time with other people that have issues with addiction.
	I have to remind myself You know, every day you pray and you meditate and you get in the cold plunge and you read for me now the Bible and I stay in touch with other people that have addiction issues and I remember that kindness and service is the way that I'm supposed to be living and then I get distracted again.
	There's something, Don, inherently Sisyphean about it.
	That you wake up and you've forgotten and you have to push the boulder all the way up the hill again.
	But there is something so beautifully simple in you are not what the world revolves around.
	You better find some purpose and meaning in your life.
	And I think that that particular spiritual solution is available to anyone whether you're an alcoholic or a
	drug addict or not.
	And that's why I think partly the culture is trying to obfuscate.
	It's trying to tell us that your whole purpose is your individual fulfillment.
	Your whole purpose is, you know, be you, just be yourself.
	And of course people should be their authentic selves, but all of us, you know, that's why don't we all...
	But is anyone?
	Meaning, I feel like, you know, how few people are actually their authentic selves, right?
	You see, you know, like I know people, right?
	They're on Instagram and it looks like they have this perfect life,
	but it's a disaster.
	I know them, you know, actually, but the image that they're putting forth,
	how much of that is sort of a social construct, a creation, because we feel like we have to show that to people.
	I know people that they're miserable in their own lives that would otherwise be happy
	because they're watching other people who they think are happy,
	who are actually miserable, and they're not, they don't have the illusion.
	They're not living the illusion that's created instead of the...
	The culture certainly seems to be encouraging us, oddly, to not be ourselves.
	And even over the course of this day, I go from... We've met before and we've chatted a little bit before, but, like, because I've come here to your home, In good faith.
	And because I've been welcomed with such kindness and good grace, over the course of the day, you start to realize and you see what people really are.
	You see warmth and kindness and gentleness and sweetness.
	Hey, don't ruin my reputation.
	You see chauvinism and fascism and sexism.
	Listen, we bonded over a champagne glory hole like a year ago.
	You see white supremacy.
	Like, you know, yeah, we did bond over a champagne glory hole, and I'm going to provide context for that, Don.
	Please do!
	That'll go really wrong otherwise.
	The phrase, champagne glory hole, is not going to... I mean, this is a Rumble audience, so they're used to free speech, but at the Rumble offices opening in Sarasota a few months ago, maybe even a year ago, I guess, a year ago now, there was an interesting, what has to now be described as champagne glory hole, where it was kind of like a hedge, And through the hedge were human arms holding champagne glasses.
	Now, neither you or I drink, so we took the opportunity to comment on those arms coming through a hedge clutching champagne glasses and what might be on the other side.
	I think that was my icebreaker.
	Like, you know what?
	Let's see where this goes.
	Then we end up having a great chat that evening.
	And because you coined the phrase champagne glory hole, I realized... TM, I'm going to trademark that now.
	We can do something with this.
	It's a brand that could go places.
	This man is not what has been rendered through the legacy media.
	How else?
	The man that they are portraying could not have come up with such a cute phrase so instantaneously.
	Well, it was pretty sporadic, but it was fun.
	And that was a great night.
	And again, it was one of those things for me, the same thing, right?
	I mean, I grew up in New York City.
	Most of my friends were probably pretty left-leaning.
	You know, I was always probably pretty right-leaning, but there were certain things that I didn't get involved with because of the business we were in.
	We sold high-end real estate to people in major cities.
	You know, we had hotels, so we sold to everyone around the world.
	It was very difficult to sort of have to...
	Live in a world where you had to pick a side.
	Yeah.
	And I realized as a business guy, I went from, hey, you got to cater to everyone to, no, I can actually do fairly well being loved by half a country, then being agnostic to the entire nation.
	But that's not a natural transition.
	As you've gone perhaps a little away from Hollywood to this, a lot away from Hollywood, What was that transition like?
	Was that difficult?
	Were you, you know, content with it?
	Was it just sort of... That had to be a severe change.
	One of my mates once said, you see yourself on a billboard on Sunset Boulevard and you think you must be some real hot shit.
	Then you realize that's just an inadvertent side effect of someone else making money out of you.
	and you realize, okay, you're just in this temporary role, in this temporary role.
	Now, as long as you are a useful commodity within that system, it will celebrate you.
	Now, it didn't happen in a very dramatic way.
	It happened kind of gradually.
	I wanted to live back in the UK.
	I wanted to have a family, and I'm very lucky that I've always been
	a stand-up comedian, and I'm also kind of lucky that I've always worked with people,
	for example, Gareth, who's through there, that recognize the way that media is altering and changing.
	We just started doing stuff on YouTube.
	I was still doing the occasional role in a movie.
	I was still doing bits and bobs, as we say in Britain.
	But it wasn't defining me so much.
	I'd by then gotten married to my incredible wife.
	I'd had children.
	I was starting to awaken from the idea that there was something in this worth having.
	Sometimes I feel for the people that are still in that world, that it's a beguiling and alluring world, but it is a cannibalistic and parasitic world.
	So it just happened very organically.
	Because, you know what, why would it be that you would even head into entertainment?
	What is it you want to do?
	Really, what I like doing is making people laugh, mucking around, telling the truth.
	You know, man, I wish someone had suggested a seminary to me at eight or nine years old.
	I wish someone said, you probably should become a monk or a priest.
	You're not going to do very well with substances.
	You're not going to do very well with indulgence.
	You better learn how to direct your energy towards something higher.
	Otherwise you'll direct it towards yourself and it will spill out.
	It'll be chaos, you know?
	So it happened kind of gradually and what it's like actually is liberating.
	What it's like actually is freeing.
	What it's about actually is like recognizing that some of these categories are put there in order to keep people apart from one another and then when you start having conversations with people that you're told that you're not going to get on with, you recognize, hold on a minute, what they're trying to do is polarize everybody so that there's not a possibility for consensus and radical change, a deep institutional change, change to some of the structures that, it seems to me, need radical change.
	I'm only speaking about my country, but it seems like it might be true in yours as well.
	You're right.
	You brought up something interesting.
	You brought up comedy.
	I always think of you more as an actor, a comedian as an actor, but also a stand-up comic.
	Talk about stand-up comedy today.
	I mean, I look at the stuff, the classic skits that I thought were some of the funniest stand-up perhaps ever.
	Dave Chappelle doing Clayton Bigsby as the black white supremacist, right?
	You couldn't do that today.
	You think, is comedy making a resurgence because the pendulum has overcorrected?
	Because there felt like there was a while that comedy was dead.
	And now people are starting to poke back fun at it.
	But it succumbed to sort of the woke mindset where you couldn't say anything because anything could be deemed offensive to someone.
	And God forbid you offended the 0.00002% of a small group somewhere with comedy because it could be misinterpreted.
	How has that played out over the last years as you've watched?
	It's interesting to track, isn't it?
	Because ultimately these are corporatized spaces and you can see from the success of great comedians like Ricky Gervais and the ongoing success of Dave Chappelle as well as the emergence of a brilliant comic like Shane Gillis that ultimately if people are funny it's gonna have a kind of currency And, in the end, the same way that Spotify stuck with Joe Rogan because it must have made market sense, and the same way that Netflix having got edgy about Chappelle ultimately decided to keep that relationship, that, in a way, the ideas around comedy and maybe freedom of speech, you could say tangentially, are winning out.
	And also, I think, Don, there are several cultures now It's okay to have a culture that is kind of homogenized and neutralized and sanitized, as long as there is another culture where people can say what they want in good faith.
	And I think the idea has always been in comedy, the intention.
	I think people can diagnose when there is hatred in something.
	And I don't think there's hate.
	Brilliant comics are not hateful.
	They might use rage even, but not hatred.
	And I don't think that, you know, some of the comedians that we're listing, these are very skillful, brilliant people that sort of are motivated on some level by love and by ideals that are worth revering.
	Well, guys, we're going to break for two seconds.
	We're going to go to ads, and we'll be right back with Russell Brand.
	So stick around.
	Also, guys, for all the headlines that we spotlight on the show, check out my news app, MXM News, where you can get the mainstream news without the mainstream media bias.
	Okay.
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	There are a couple interesting charts in today's Wall Street Journal about the real impact of inflation and people's earnings.
	And you compare that relative to Trump and you see just the disaster we're in.
	In just the last week, as we've seen gold surging, as Americans look to guard against What seems like almost inevitable economic disaster.
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	Okay guys we're back with Russell Brand.
	We've actually been having a sort of a great conversation all day.
	It's interesting, even, Russell, in doing this now, it's like, did I cover that already?
	But I figured, you know, while we covered the part about alcohol and staying away from that, I think we still can have a cigar, one of perhaps the last vices.
	Yes.
	I'd love to join you.
	Maybe we'll get going on this and get you clipped and circumcised.
	That was very deftly done.
	You know, not my first rodeo.
	Thank you.
	I'll give you that.
	Thank you.
	So, you know, we were sort of talking about comedy and it's interesting now, you mentioned there is, there does seem to be a resurgence.
	I thought the actual, the great one, were you in the room by the way when that happened with Ricky Gervais when he called out Hollywood at the...
	I wasn't there at the Golden Globes.
	Because that was epic.
	Yeah, I marveled at that.
	I sometimes watch that as for a kind of catharsis, as a kind of release, to sort of see someone do that, to see someone confront people to their faces so boldly and so brazenly.
	It's fantastic.
	It was, I think, sort of comedically a masterclass as an award show emcee to confront your audience like that.
	Because I've done gigs like that, like for MTV and stuff like that.
	But to be as bold as he was, and as funny, and as confronting, it's one of the best things I've seen in those kind of spaces.
	Which, you know, they can be pretty dry rooms.
	Oh yeah.
	Well, I guess we were talking a little bit about that earlier, right?
	We just sort of, you've been in there, you've met some of these stars, people always ask me, you know, which is your favorite Hollywood person that you've met?
	And the answer is like, honestly, like, Many are sort of simply vacuous.
	They may be a talented actor, but it doesn't mean there's a lot beyond that, right?
	You may like the character that they play, but in real life...
	Oftentimes not all that impressive as individuals.
	What was your experience like that?
	I mean, you seem, in talking to you, you're well-read.
	You're not like the CliffsNotes version of a book that someone, they read one book one time.
	I always joke, sort of like the LeBron James picture where he's holding a book upside down to make it seem like he's reading, but not realizing it's upside down.
	What was that like in Hollywood?
	Well, you know, because it took me a long time to come up, I was like 30 before I made any money out of show business.
	And what I recognized is that a lot of people that I've been living in bedsits with, you know, like small single room apartments, a lot of people that were like signing on, like living off benefits, trying to pursue a career in comedy or acting, these people were also kind of brilliant and great.
	And sometimes that, and then the people that I met, I met some people that were, I mean,
	I have met amazing people in Hollywood that are kind or funny or brilliantly gifted.
	I wouldn't say it's as sort of simple as, oh, no one's got, you know, because some of
	them were amazing.
	But like what I did notice is there seems to be a good deal of good fortune and luck
	that the luck, you know, that the right place, right time.
	Kind of, because a lot of people are just scratching out and eking out a living like when I was doing stand-up comedy in front of five or ten people.
	They were brilliant, and just the right thing don't happen, or maybe there's not, I don't know, the lucky breaks, or maybe enough persistence.
	I don't know.
	But what I kind of agree with is that it's I don't want to say there was a kind of don't meet your heroes type of disappointment because I did meet some really really lovely and kind people.
	I can think of quite a few actually.
	But overall it was not a world that was fulfilling and overall I have better interactions on a day like today.
	Like where you took me for lunch, meeting that guy, what's he called?
	Nyaka.
	Nyaka.
	Meeting a guy that sort of tasted food from Nelson Mandela, that tells that story so beautifully, that speaks so patriotically, that rendered the story in a way you couldn't understand.
	South African man, he works here where we live, he's become a very good friend of ours.
	He was literally a food taster for Nelson Mandela for years.
	And, you know, he's an immigrant and now an American citizen, and he's more patriotic than the vast majority of, like, naturalized-born Americans that I know, and it's sort of an amazing thing, and his story's incredible.
	But yeah, you see a lot of that, and that conversation to me is often more interesting than the conversations I've had with, you know, sort of the celebrities that everyone else is curious about.
	Yes, this is what I find as well, and also patriotism is changing.
	You know what's happened is I've spent more time in your country talking to people like in the military, people that are like, you know, some people that have pretty high rank in the military, talking like that they now sound like rebels and radicals, like they are not with the government of your country, you know.
	There was a time where, as a British person, if I was critical of America, I would assume that, even though I was never criticising American people, that patriotic people reject that.
	Now, patriotic people are very, very angry about the way that their country is being governed, even when it comes to things like war.
	And therefore, support the troops used to be a way of bypassing sensible conversation about war.
	Correct.
	You're not allowed to say anything.
	If that person checked the box and they were a veteran, they're beyond reproach.
	And it is interesting, actually, because we're having this conversation on the 80th anniversary of D-Day.
	I was actually supposed to be over there.
	A bunch of my friends who were former veterans, I was going to jump into Normandy.
	They did this, like, they're reenacting sort of the Normandy landing.
	A bunch of my friends who are veterans and the guys from Black Rifle Coffee, and I was supposed to go.
	And then I literally hurt my knee three weeks ago and I had to get surgery.
	Uh, and you know, needless to say, my doctor's like, yeah, you can't jump out of a plane for a little while, which really sucks because I was going to jump out of a plane with them.
	And that just feels like an amazing experience.
	But, but I think of, I think of, you know, the guys that did that, you know, stormed the beaches at Normandy or jumped into, you know, behind the lines at Normandy.
	And I look at.
	I look at some of the stuff we see today, you know, furries and some of the lunacy with the trans general and the dog mask.
	And I'm saying, what would those veterans, what would they think of what's going on in this country today?
	You know, that they were so willing to lay down their life for, you know.
	I don't know.
	I'd be second guessing what I'm jumping for, which perhaps explains a lot of the lack of ability for the military today to recruit.
	Because while most of the door kickers are still very much patriotic Americans, the leadership has lost their minds.
	This has happened everywhere, hasn't it?
	But, like, perhaps that's always been the case.
	There's that famous World War I edict about the British military lines led by donkeys.
	And, like, you know, maybe that's true to this day.
	And the individual freedom of people to dress up and do whatever they want is a, you know, why not?
	Be who you are.
	But to not acknowledge that there is an archetype in our kind called the warrior, that certain demands need to be made of people that they Put themselves in that kind of position.
	It's a denial of nature.
	Now, with that jump, were you going to do that jump on your own, or were you going to be strapped to another person?
	Oh yeah, the static line jump.
	I used to paraglide.
	I'm a licensed airplane pilot.
	You can do all this stuff.
	I've jumped off things with parachutes.
	You can jump out of things with a parachute.
	I'm not static line certified, but I have We talk about propensity.
	Mine is I have an incredibly underdeveloped sense of self-preservation, so everything I do is usually designed to... I'm waiting for medical technology to get ahead of my early-onset arthritis, because I've broken every major bone in my body doing everything stupid.
	I see some scar there.
	I got a lot of scars.
	This is surgery last week.
	I realize my shirt's shedding.
	But yeah, so... You like that?
	You like that sort of adventure?
	Yeah, I love that sort of adventure.
	You know, everything I do, I sort of take it to, you know, I'm a scuba diver, but I went all the way to Trimix, where I'm just going down to, you know, three, four hundred feet deep.
	And, you know, again, I don't do well with just enough.
	By the way, it probably comes to the conversation of addiction, which is, you know, you know, Going out and having two or three drinks, for me, wasn't enough.
	You know, if I went out and had two or three, that became six or eight, or ten to twelve, or, you know, whatever it may be.
	The off switch, where it says, okay, now we've had enough, that doesn't necessarily exist with me.
	Right, that can be a great gift, but also an incredible curse.
	So, right, yeah, another hundred feet, another gin and tonic, let's go another hundred feet lower, jump out of another plane.
	Why do we need parachutes?
	They're holding us back.
	That kind of thing.
	Yeah, so it's interesting you talk about that.
	I had a friend of mine, Christian Craighead.
	He was a British SAS officer, so from your side of the pond.
	And he was the guy that went into, remember the, I guess it was a hotel complex in Nairobi, Kenya.
	Al-Shabaab had taken it over.
	And this was during the peak, you know, toxic masculinity.
	And if you're alpha male, it's terrible.
	You know, everyone hates alpha males until shit goes down and you need some alpha male shit, right?
	And so this is the guy that was, he was driving by his British SAS and, you know, he literally threw on a mask and got his AK-47, you know, and ran into this, you know, hotel complex, took out a bunch of these terrorists, saved a bunch of people, and all of a sudden, you know, the British government's out there denouncing him, and he can't write a book about it, he can't, I'm like...
	That's what I want from my operators.
	Those guys, those actual warriors.
	That guy saved lives.
	It was 100% the right call.
	You're going to wait 45 minutes for them to massacre a bunch of people and to do it by the book, and yet you're watching the UK, maybe one of the greatest militaries in the world, and all of a sudden, just a few years later, a few decades later, denouncing Exactly what we're supposed to train our warriors to do.
	And it's interesting to see that mindset.
	I don't know what the future is of that civilization.
	Are we at the tail end of a civilization if we're denouncing that kind of behavior?
	But we've got to make sure we're recognizing the 4,376 genders, which no one can articulate or name, And yet it's treated as though it's the gospel.
	Joseph Campbell, you're a brilliant academic and author.
	He said that when someone has got the apparel of a warrior, when you've invited someone to take a vow or an oath, put them into service, put them into uniform, ask them to risk their lives, you can't suddenly apply a different kind of mentality.
	You know, I was chatting to your mate John out there about, you know, that 21, 22 veterans a day commit suicide.
	The astonishing statistics of the number of vets that are homeless, even people in active service having to use food banks.
	And it makes me realize that something is falling apart, the core of these institutions.
	Now, you know where I stand on all this.
	I really think that people like celebrate absolute diversity
	of course, but also recognize the significance of tradition.
	And in a country where you have full autonomy, where you have actual electoral democracy,
	where you have maximum decentralization, where you have maximum ability for people to be free,
	then I think, you know, like surely for maybe hundreds or thousands of years, there would have been,
	we would have lived in tribes across the world where we would not have expected homogeneity
	that you'd have had glorious gods and different creations and different ways of hunting
	and different ways of surviving.
	And there would have been a true understanding of the difference of cuisine,
	rather than as we've touched on before, Don, Superficial diversity underscored by homogeneity, as you said earlier, of thought.
	The role of the warrior, the role of the hero, like for me, I mean, unless there's something you're missing out that story, someone who pulls on a mask and takes out an AK in the sweet name of freedom, it's difficult not to admire.
	But there does seem to be an affront on masculinity in general.
	You know, Allowing men to play in women's sports.
	You know, everything's toxic masculine that would have been otherwise just normal gender roles.
	I mean, I think, you know, we've seen that as it plays out in sports.
	We see, you know, high school and college male athletes that are journeymen in their respective sports.
	They, you know, they start competing against the females and they're winning national championships or they're taking away scholarships from actual biological women.
	Why has that become so encouraged?
	I mean, that seems like it started, it certainly stemmed from sort of a Hollywood mentality, and yet, I've been sort of speaking out against this for years when I was like, this is fucking bullshit, and I put it out on Twitter, years ago even, and that was when Twitter was 95-5, you know, sort of liberal to conservative, and even there, Even there... Man, I hate Don Jr.
	with a passion, but you know what?
	He's right about this one.
	Like, I can't believe I'm agreeing with Don... It doesn't feel like there's actually... It's even a 50-50 issue in pop culture.
	It's probably like 90-10 the other way, and yet...
	The way it's pushed to the world as though everyone agrees that this is 100% normal and totally acceptable.
	It doesn't make any sense.
	Yes, I do wonder what ideologies drive it.
	And remember, as I've said to you before, I completely believe in people's individual freedom.
	But it seems that sport is an area where there are metrics that are designed to generate fair competition, for example.
	Age groups, you know, like seems to be where it's accepted that there are categories that are worth observing.
	I heard before that perhaps it is this replacement of God at the centre of our universe with the individual at the centre of our universe that means that everything, nature, biology, Ideals.
	Everything can be regarded as a kind of relative value.
	No absolute value.
	For me this potentially creates a kind of chaos.
	Now I would yield to anyone who knows more about sport than I do but it seems that there might be a reason That elite sports appear to be categorised around gender and have been historically, that you don't generally have men against women in football or boxing or MMA or whatever.
	It seems that experts have arrived at that being a good system.
	When it comes to the ideals behind why there is the promotion of people's right to free expression, I agree with free expression, but that should It should mean the right to freely be Christian, the right to freely be super traditional, the right to be as progressive as you want.
	In a society where people have their maximum amount of freedom and control over their own lives, but no right at all to intervene and control other people's lives, other than in the obvious areas for which there are already laws, I feel that that is a way of diffusing this ongoing cultural war.
	Because I do worry, actually, Dom, that after this election, In which, you know, the detractors of your father and the movement around him say that he will take office and remain in office forever.
	When we saw, when your father was elected president, just an entire term filled with subsequently proven to be untrue claims that there was Russian collusion.
	continue to this day, that it seems that the vision appears to be kind of seared in.
	But if there are different types of America emerging, maybe the ideas behind federalism should be doubled down on,
	because my understanding as a visitor in your country
	is that the point was having the maximum amount of freedom and democracy in
	each state, in each region, so that people could determine for themselves.
	And if people vote to live in a certain way for electoral democracy, then maybe they should
	be able to do that.
	And you shouldn't, you should remove the subject.
	You know, like I saw that CNN guy a minute ago saying about, you know, if this, you know,
	if his name weren't Trump, he wouldn't be going through this trial.
	And in real, you know, that's the point.
	Imagine CNN actually admitting that.
	I mean, if CNN is willing to admit that, that shows, if they acknowledge it, and let's just
	say, you know, the Communist News Network doesn't usually acknowledge something like that.
	That's sort of been interesting and telling.
	That's the point of justice being blind.
	The statues are always depicted as being blindfolded and carrying a scale because it's not meant to happen.
	But you're not meant to evaluate it on the personality.
	You're meant to evaluate it based on the principle.
	And if this country or this culture is determined to toxically tear itself apart, Then perhaps ideas like secession, perhaps ideas like maximum amount of representation electorally become more significant.
	If people in certain regions want to live a certain way, then I don't think you should even ask what it is, other than the obvious laws that we already have in place.
	Live how you want to.
	I mean, for me, that is what liberty and freedom means.
	Because I meet people with all manner Of backgrounds and all manner of expressions of self and I think they're entitled to them and that's like, I think you yourself said, you don't really care.
	People are like, if you leave me alone, I'll leave you alone.
	Are we going to cooperate and get along?
	Do we care about this country?
	Do we care about the planet?
	Do we think that the people who claim that they care about immigration aren't using it in some shady way?
	Do we think that the people that are talking about climate change aren't exploiting it?
	If always the result is more control, more opportunity for citizen management, more opportunity to censor, more opportunity to shut down dissent, then I think that that's what it was always about.
	It was never about compassion.
	Yeah, nine out of ten doctors agree with whoever's paying for the study, right?
	It's one of those.
	I like that you brought up sort of the notion of federalism, because you've been in Florida for a few hours and you've already ripped off the sleeves of your shirt, so you've fully adapted the Florida man personality.
	I'm going to get me an alligator.
	I'm going to push it into a garbage can.
	I'm here now.
	This is me.
	I'm embracing this state.
	You're thinking about possibly moving here to the States?
	I must say it's appealing.
	There's a lot of things I love about my country and there's a lot of things that I adore.
	I'm English.
	I'm English to my very core.
	But I've got to say, like, you know, it seems that this is a pretty appealing place to live.
	Pretty appealing place when you've got rumble here, when you've got a free speech movement, when you have a lot of people that are interested in preserving the kind of values that I care deeply about, yeah.
	And also, you've been so hospitable, you know, not many people let me just turn up in their, you know, and use their shower and their bathroom and stuff like that.
	Next time we'll run over to the Bahamas and we'll go, you know, have some fun and But, so talk about, you know, the UK, right?
	I looked at, I think COVID was a big awakener for everyone.
	I used to think, you know, hey, it was the US and, you know, Canada and the UK and Ireland and New Zealand and Australia.
	These were bastions of freedom and democracy.
	And yet, Not so much.
	The UK seems to be ahead of us.
	I've read the articles about, you know, you misgender someone.
	You have a nice beard there.
	It's similar to mine.
	Thank you.
	But if you were a female and I called you a man because you have a beard, I'm supposed to...
	I'd be jailed for two years.
	What's going on there?
	What's happening to free speech?
	Not that it exists as it does for us as part of our constitution, but I think it's under attack here as well.
	And also the rest of Europe.
	We don't have a constitution.
	What's that?
	We don't have a constitution, so it makes things a little more amorphous.
	During the time that I was attacked, an online safety bill was passed which, guess what, granted people the ability to censor and control online information.
	Like in your country, agencies that were previously deployed in Middle Eastern nations to track
	terror and control it online are being deployed against domestic populations.
	There seem to be patterns taking place in our country that are taking place in yours
	and it always seems to be about leveraging control and the, you know, whether it's the
	EU or UN or NATO creating new bureaucratic opportunity to legitimise profitable wars.
	Man, I don't know.
	Even if we just track our shared interest of Rumble, you can see that Rumble were kicked out of France because they wouldn't take Russia today off of their platform, our platform.
	Then Russia shuts Rumble down in Russia.
	Well, the best was the article saying, Rumble's an apologist for Russia, and then Russia bans Rumble as well because they didn't take down the other stuff.
	Actually being true free speech, probably the only platform like that, certainly in the video side of things, even remotely true.
	I mean, even other big platforms that talk a lot about free speech, it's like, well, we're, you know, we don't want to get thrown off in Turkey or in France, so we'll give a little bit.
	We don't want to get thrown off in Brazil, so, you know, we'll accommodate, you know, the regime because, you know, we feel having a little bit of a voice is better than none.
	And it's like, wait a second, but if the little bit of the voice is essentially propaganda, What's the purpose?
	Don, they've admitted that the whole category of malinformation means information that's true that they don't like.
	It could be.
	They're not even hiding it anymore.
	It's like, no, no, no, it's real.
	We understand it's true, but it's just not convenient.
	Yeah, because of how fast things are happening now, you can track in real time.
	Hold on a minute.
	These people were censored during the pandemic.
	They were telling the truth.
	They've admitted they were censoring true information.
	The statistics about the efficacy of the supposed medications have had to be evaluated.
	The subject of excess deaths can't be properly discussed.
	Adverse events can't be discussed.
	Platforms like YouTube still are using the WHO's metrics and regulations to control free speech.
	The WHO in their treaty wanted censorship of the nations that sign up to the treaty.
	as part of it, the control of free speech I think might be the fundamental issue because
	with free speech you can disagree with one another, you can say well I hear you man but
	I don't agree with that and then you can reach a consensus democratically. In fact I think
	that's what underscores all of it. They recognise that this technology could change, is changing
	the world. They recognise that people that they don't want to get into positions of power
	are getting into positions of power.
	Referendums, or referenda, ain't going their way.
	Elections aren't going their way.
	And they're beginning to realise that they have to assert some sort of centralised authority.
	And they're having to create categories to do it.
	They're having to shut down dissent to do it.
	They're having to criminalise political opponents to do it.
	They're using what institutions they have and calling that democracy, instead of what it appears to actually be, a new And I think that tyranny is sort of evolving.
	It's interesting, right?
	People like me caught on to what was happening on the censorship because I had a big social sort of following prior to getting into politics, right?
	So when you were, you know, A reality show, The Apprentice, or whatever it may be.
	When I was pushing that, oh, it's agnostic, it's entertainment, I could see what was happening.
	But because I do my own social, when I hit that button, I know what it's going to do.
	I know when a tweet or whatever it may be, a post, ah, this is a good one, ah, that's going to go hot, it's going to go big.
	But then I'd watch, and I'd be like, oh, it's going big, and then boom.
	I mean, you get 1,000 retweets in the first hour and seven more over the next 24, and you're saying, wait, what just happened?
	So, you know, I called this out and I'm like, I'm being censored.
	How do you know?
	It's like, well, because yesterday when I, you know, my average tweet did 5,000 retweets.
	Today it's doing, you know, 13, you know, like just double digits, not 13,000, 13.
	And I'm like, something happened.
	And it's very palpable.
	But now, it's sort of interesting.
	I see, you know, AI is getting involved.
	And they're allowing people to sort of see what they want to see
	that they're already following.
	But they want to make sure there's also no growth beyond that.
	So people believe there actually isn't a suppression.
	There actually isn't censorship because they're still seeing what they're following, but no one knew it.
	I can see that on my meta platforms where I used to get half a million likes a post.
	Now I'll get 30,000 to 50,000 maybe, sometimes 100,000, but 10 to 20% of what I used to get.
	sometimes a hundred, but you know, 10 to 20 percent of what I used to get. But I've also had zero new
	growth in two years, essentially. You know, zero new followers, zero new users. So the people who
	are already following me can kind of see me, but no one from outside of that world will do it. And
	if I get a spike, the next day it's gone and neutralized.
	Kim has had to refollow me, I think, seven or eight times, where she's just following me and all
	of a sudden she isn't.
	Yeah.
	Have you noticed that as well, and have you noticed that accelerate since the nonsense when they started attacking you?
	Yeah, extraordinarily, of course.
	And again, it's something that we were aware was happening, because when they threatened to break up those monopolies, a pact was plainly made.
	To act as a censorship unit in the same way that Legacy Media seemed to have been doing for quite some time.
	You know, like I had a brilliant conversation with Mike Benz, who told me that a CIA cutout funded even the PhD research of Larry Page and Serge Brin, the eventual creators of Google, even at the point while they were at Stanford, I believe, University, they had relationships with a CIA carve-out.
	He then went on to tell me That, of course, when Google Maps got launched, you know, if you just look at these things superficially, you think, oh yeah, what ingenuity, these entrepreneurs came up with Google Maps.
	But satellite technology is not something you can access willy-nilly or easily.
	Some kind of group or agency granted them access to satellite technology in exchange, according to Mike Benz, for back-channel access to the use of Google.
	Now we're beginning to understand that these platforms exist in order to surveil and control.
	Anyone who saw Edward Snowden on that documentary Citizenfall saw someone like Awakening, like they can track you here, they can track you there.
	We get so quickly used to the idea that the control of information, the control of citizens is absolutely paramount.
	You can't have a population of intercommunicated, awakening civilians that are brave and bold and willing to sacrifice themselves and willing to form new alliances.
	You have to, in a sense I suppose, somehow castrate us in as many ways as possible and control information as steadfastly as possible.
	To prevent the natural flow of what's happening in spaces of power.
	It is dissipating.
	There is no reason to have centralised control to the degree that there has been.
	Freedom is almost a natural condition at the level of the individual and the level of the community.
	And I think this is the true war that we're participating in, and in various ways we experience it.
	And that's why categories like Left and right are irrelevant now because it becomes little more than a device to prevent consensus.
	Talk a little bit about your thoughts on Snowden, maybe even Julian Assange.
	It's interesting, my thoughts on that have changed so dramatically because of what I've been exposed to.
	The kimono has been opened.
	No, because I used to say, hey, the FBI, the CIA, these are patriotic American organizations, until they went after me.
	And I'm like, wait a second.
	And when they started going after me, even then, for a while, I was like, well, there's got to be something there.
	I'm obviously not aware of it, but they've got to figure it out.
	But no, no, no, they didn't.
	There was nothing to figure out.
	It didn't matter.
	It was by design.
	It was for them.
	And if you ask me, when the Assange stuff first broke, or the Snowden stuff, I'm like, what?
	It's a traitor.
	I'm like, no, no, no.
	Our government has been lying to the people.
	They've been lying to Congress.
	They've been lying to the world.
	It's all been there.
	And now that that's exposed, it's like, wait a second, uh...
	It's a little different.
	So, you know, where I would have been sort of radically against both of those guys, I look at that.
	They should be freed and they should be given a platform to stop this stuff from continuing.
	Where do you stand on that?
	Julian Assange has been incarcerated in various ways for nearly 10 years now.
	He's still likely to be extradited to your country, even though, blessedly, he's been granted the right to appeal.
	And you gave an example of what a hero is earlier.
	In a military context, the hero is over.
	A person that is brave enough to run towards danger, willing to sacrifice themselves for a higher good.
	In the context of journalism, a hero is a person that's willing to convey true information to the people and knowing that there might be risk involved.
	I don't know that Julian Assange knew that he would be put in Belmarsh, a maximum security, A category prison, for five years now without trial, waiting extradition under the Espionage Act, as yet unpardoned.
	And I feel like, you know, earlier when we were chatting, For me, the two things, and I know that you are not your father, but you bear his name and of course you work closely with him.
	The two issues that, for me, I'm curious about are the pardoning of Assange, whether Assange will be pardoned if there was another Trump presidency.
	And the acknowledgement that what went on in the pandemic, what went on with Big Pharma's power, what went on with Big Pharma's profits, what went on with their legal indemnity and their ability to mask and redact files and information, that for me is an area where I think a lot of people would like to see some sort of change.
	And so what I mean Well, we'll air our interview that we did earlier at the end of this, so we'll flip to that, and I discuss sort of my thoughts on that.
	I've been pretty open about that.
	I'd love to get you in front of him to talk about his, but yeah, I think so many people's views on all of that have changed.
	I mean, again, when they raided Mar-a-Lago using the FBI's hostage rescue team, we found out ten days ago, they were, you know, Allowed to go live fire if, like, what, my father's gonna, you know, like he stole the beefs to drive down to January 6th, right?
	He knocked out two Secret Service agents.
	That was gospel.
	That was congressional testimony under oath as though that happened, even though, of course, that didn't happen.
	Now, if my father was able to disarm two 30-year-old heavily armed and well-trained armed agents and steal a car and do, I'd be like, I'm probably more likely to vote for him now than I would have been otherwise.
	But you see, again, that manipulation snowed in.
	I don't know what the counterargument is.
	Our government was breaking up.
	He didn't create something.
	He released what we were lying to Congress about.
	The Washington Post, when they raided Mar-a-Lago, put pictures of the quote-unquote classified documents.
	It's all bullshit, but they put it on the front page of that thing.
	It leaked from the FBI within minutes of this raid.
	Man, that was crazy.
	So wait, he's guilty of doing this under his documents that he's able to declassify, that he's able to have under lock and key, guarded by Secret Service.
	The FBI comes and raids and all of a sudden there's photos of these on the front page of the Washington Post within 20 minutes?
	Who's exposing classified documents to the world?
	It doesn't seem like us, it seems like them, and yet there's no accountability for that.
	Edward Snowden's in exile in Russia.
	Julian Assange has been in jail for a decade.
	What about the people that were doing the illegal shit that they published?
	I mean, what happened to them?
	The answer is nothing, and it's like, what the fuck?
	We saw the same thing in 2008.
	What appeared to be a lot of financial mismanagement, at least, and total corruption, at worst, that created a crisis that still impacts us culturally and socially to this day.
	Nobody, except for I feel like one person, was ever found culpable for that disaster.
	That was an opportunity for the change and hope that Barack Obama was elected under to be made manifest.
	This was when the Occupy movement grew.
	This is when populism of a variety of hues emerged.
	Now it seems to me that when something happens like the legitimization of lethal force for that raid, the extraordinary collaboration and corroboration of the media, it seems, unless that's standard, unless Always when they do those raids, they legitimize legal force.
	Then for me, that's some shady shit right there.
	And the other thing is, how many times have the New York Times apparently been involved?
	Like with the arrest of that Jack Tashera, that whistleblower, they were involved in the arrest.
	Yeah, what happened to that?
	I mean, you have someone that releases essentially information.
	We are boots on the ground in Ukraine, and we're fighting a proxy war, but that's pretty clear against Russia, the world's largest nuclear superpower, by volume of missiles or warheads.
	And then it's like, gone.
	Like, well, so did we just stop doing it because of that, or they just don't want us to know that it's continuing?
	I mean, seems like a big deal.
	Yeah.
	I've never seen a bigger story disappear from the media faster.
	It was almost like, I don't know, we actually, this is going on, but we want to continue it, so we just got to make that go away.
	That guy's never going to be heard from again.
	Yeah, they vilified the kid, as they always do.
	Oh, he was a weird kid, you know.
	And then the actual information is lost, the same as with the other leaks pertaining to Snowden and Assange and their various cases.
	It's extraordinary.
	And even with the revelation that there were CIA bases across Ukraine.
	Again and again, we're seeing...
	Biochemical labs?
	What could go wrong?
	We've seen this one before.
	Dual purpose research.
	All of these ideas that were like, you know, you are crazy, this is a conspiracy theory.
	By the time we get that information verified, all of the people that are conveying it have been smeared and attacked and condemned as dissenters.
	People are getting jail sentences left and right.
	It's an extraordinary machine and I'm starting to feel that it is quaking and quivering and falling apart.
	That even though it sometimes feels terrifying, we might be on the precipice of the kind of revelations and the kind of uprising that could lead to meaningful change.
	When you have a legacy media that is clearly working in conjunction with the deep state, amplifying the state's messaging, de-amplifying the messages of dissidents, creating continually disruption and cultural conflict, it's pretty plain to me that these are maybe the death threats.
	froze of a dying system, that something new has to emerge.
	And whether it's in alignment and faith to the constitutional edicts of the forefathers
	of your country, I'm not in a position to say.
	But what I do believe in is that there are fundamental things, like individual freedom,
	collective freedom, electoral representative democracies, that are being lost at a radical and terrifying pace.
	So as an outsider, but someone who's also spent plenty of time here, what do
	you see happening in November.
	Well, I'm like, to be honest, I'm sort of, after the pandemic period, and after sort of seeing, like, for example, some of the pledges that have been offered around the escalation of hostility between Ukraine and Russia.
	There will never be boots on the ground.
	Oh, they kind of are boots on the ground.
	We'll never use American munitions in Russian territory.
	We're kind of doing that.
	Yesterday, Novgorod, or whatever the Russian city there, like, attacked by U.S.
	arms.
	I don't think it's beyond the bounds of possibility that some sort of crisis event might take place that prevents an election.
	It doesn't seem beyond the bounds of possibility that... Well, it actually seems to me more plausible than not, right?
	Sure.
	Either World War III or, you know, I'm reading about, you know, another bird flu strain coming out of Mexico.
	It's like, here we go again, folks.
	Fool me once, shame on you.
	Fool me twice, shame on me.
	And now it's like, we're at, like, fool me the 37th time, and it's like, we're going to keep going for it.
	Do you see, you know, enough people?
	You know, again, I feel, obviously, I'm so jaded on that my whole ethos right now is, you know, being at sort of that counterculture, trying to, you see that other argument.
	But, you know, regular people who are working hard to get by.
	You know, world's not easy, no matter what.
	Do you think they see that yet?
	I think, for example, look, some time ago people started talking about, oh we might have to prepare for a Trump presidency, you might have to have some... It was so rough.
	Prosperous economy, no wars, peace deals in the Middle East, I mean it's terrible.
	Oh no!
	What a disaster!
	Yeah, never any acknowledgement of the culpability, never acknowledgement of the hypocrisy, never any acknowledgement of the corruption, only condemnation of the extraordinary number of people that are incredibly passionate about the movement of which you are part.
	I don't know, man.
	I have serious doubts about the institutions that are now being called democratic, that are being called democracy.
	Again, we used to believe that democracy meant that the will of the people through the ballot box would be enacted by systems of service.
	Now, what it seems like is there are some institutions that are controlling and will not give up control.
	And it seems that more and more, That the things that the opponents are accused of are the things that are being practiced in a literal Orwellian flip.
	From the outside, it seems to me that, I don't know, I can't envisage anything.
	And it seems weird with something that's sort of coming up on us so soon that it's, you know, what's going to happen?
	Is your father going to be jailed?
	Is the election going to be cancelled?
	Is there going to be some sort of crisis where it's like, oh, we're not holding elections anymore.
	Everyone get in your houses for some reason.
	Yeah, it's interesting watching at least the mainstream television.
	We've got to prevent the guy that's arguably leading the presidential election in all of the polls, but certainly the leader of the Republican side, one of the party systems.
	We've got to save democracy by making sure he's not on the ballot.
	I'm waiting for, like, you know, Ashton Kutcher to jump out of a cake and be like, you're being punked.
	Like, you're going to preserve democracy by not letting people vote for who they want to vote for?
	I don't understand.
	Please, like, give me more.
	But it's just, well, no, no, we said it.
	We don't have to explain it.
	It's just, that's right.
	Yeah, democracy with only one sanctioned outcome is not a desirable... It's not, in fact, democracy.
	That's anathema.
	Yeah, I wanted to ask you before, like, you know, we've been talking all day long.
	You mentioned just briefly that there was a point where you were in a pretty agnostic political space.
	You're a reality TV star and you're the famous son of Donald Trump, a billionaire.
	When it was announced that you were going to be entering into new territory, political territory, did you imagine that it would be as terrifying and as toxic and that it would entail what it has done?
	Not as much, meaning it's much more vicious.
	We knew it would happen a little bit, right?
	I tell the story when my father announced it was June 16, 2015.
	And that was sort of the infamous escalator ride as depicted in The Simpsons.
	But he did that, and I remember the elevator ride before that when we were all there as a family.
	And my father, I always tell the story, it was in my first book, Triggered, ironically, like this show.
	And I told the story where he looked me in the eyes and he goes, And now we find out who our real friends are.
	And that was a... Like, wait a minute.
	So he knew what was going to happen.
	Maybe not to the level, but he understood.
	He was friends with a lot of those people in Hollywood, then all of a sudden he was the devil.
	And I'm like, the people who said we were the most terrible people in the world, I was like, well, you know, we had dinner like three weeks ago.
	What are you talking about?
	All of it.
	So he knew that that was going to happen and he did it anyway.
	I think in 2020, I think he knew that if he would have just stopped, You know, it would have also stopped the pain.
	They wouldn't have come after that way.
	You know, as long as they got their way.
	But it's just not really his style.
	And, you know, he understands what's at stake.
	So he's just gonna keep fighting.
	For me, it was an interesting thing, because I think, you know, the reality, you know, I told you earlier in the interview, I grew up on sort of construction job sites.
	Yeah, I like that.
	Those were my friends.
	You know, my outdoor stuff.
	I hang out with, you know, sort of good, you know, just regular Americans.
	That's where I spend most of my free time.
	I choose to do that.
	The reality is, like, growing up, even in New York City my whole life, That was probably more pretend.
	I could do it and, you know, throw on a tux or a suit with, you know, every other, you know, monkey and dance and whatever it is and do that just fine.
	But I was actually probably faking that much more than I was actually what this world was, you know, sort of defending, you know, at least the rights, the freedoms, you know, that hardworking American, the forgotten man and woman, as we sort of refer to it, right?
	And so, as brutal as all of this process has been, and it's much worse than we envisioned, For me, it was actually kind of freeing, because I actually got to be who I probably am in real life for the first time in what was then essentially 40 years.
	I was always conservative-leaning, I was always very pro-2A, but I also built buildings in New York, and that wasn't a popular position, so I could feel that way, I could do that on the weekends in my free time, but I couldn't do it very publicly, because there was a cost.
	Once we sort of went all in, I was like, great, I get to be who I am.
	And it worked out well.
	So as brutal as the process is, as costly as it is, you know, they tried to throw me in jail and treason and all that.
	It was like, for me, it was actually quite cathartic.
	It was very freeing.
	Yeah, I wonder if, like you, have ever thought, is there a way out of this?
	Because, of course, some of it is like... No, now I'm all in.
	You know, I'm public enemy probably number two, at least in our family.
	And that's okay.
	I mean, I find, you know, when we talk about Earlier, talking about purpose in life, I'm like, no, now I got mine.
	I turned out, hey, I was decent at building stuff, I'm probably better at this, and I'm willing to do that, I'm willing to have that conversation and that dialogue, and I can articulate it, and I have a big platform that I'm willing to utilize, not just to...
	You know, well, I can't offend anyone, so I'm going to try to grow.
	I don't have to be, you know, someone from Hollywood where they can just be friends.
	Like, I've picked a side, and that's fine.
	And, you know, the things I'm fighting for are actually to create the things I thought actually existed in America that had, frankly, been missing for quite some time.
	You know, bring back actual freedom, not sort of, you know, a bastardized notion.
	Yeah, yeah, sure, you got freedom.
	You just can't do that.
	You can't do that.
	You can't do that.
	So, you know, I'm fighting for an ideal that I believe Up until I sort of got exposed to it, I believe existed, but probably didn't actually exist.
	Do you feel that there are, on the cultural left, ideas that are interesting to you or that have changed you for the positive?
	Do you see things in that?
	Let me give you an example.
	Some of us, I think, have a willingness to really analyse what we take for granted and to look at, oh yeah, those traditions or perhaps those institutions maybe are punitive to some groups and beneficial to other groups.
	Oh, I think without question.
	Right, so there's ideas that you are open to.
	I think without question, but you see all sorts of these things.
	I'm not ever pretending that we've lived in a perfect society on this, but I do think the cure for some of these things gets a little bit ridiculous.
	You talk about the argument...
	We must have reparations.
	Slavery was an incredibly dark time in America, and it happened all over the world,
	and frankly, still up until recently, and in some places still happens today,
	whether it's sexual slavery or the essential enslavement of women and children around the world for these things.
	And if you look at the lithium mines from China, I know we have to have electric vehicles,
	but no one wants to learn how the sausage is made, or acknowledge how the sausage is made,
	and how we're beholden to China.
	So no, I think, you know.
	You know, when we talk about, you know, people always write, well, you want to make America great again because you want to bring back slavery.
	That's fucking lunacy.
	Like, not at all.
	But we do want to bring back sort of the values where we all were actually equal, where there can be an actual meritocracy, not where, you know, I joke with my boys, right?
	They're white men with the last name Trump.
	They're fucked.
	I was like, you gotta become trans if you wanna, you know, you wanna get, you know, you see that in the trans movement, right?
	It's not about being equal.
	You know, I told you, I was like, hey, if you're an adult, you know, you want to do it, I don't care.
	I actually don't care.
	I'm, you know, libertarian on the issue, whatever, but I don't want to pay for it.
	I don't want to hear about it ad nauseum.
	I don't want to be, you know, penalized for not adhering to your ever-changing whims as it relates to pronouns and bullshit.
	I don't want to have to be subjected to that and stay the fuck away from my kids.
	And yet, that's not what they want.
	You know, you say, oh, we're not letting children at the pride parade, therefore we're not going to show up.
	It's like, why?
	I thought it wasn't about indoctrinating children.
	I thought it was just about, you know, you don't have drag queen story hour at elder age hospice care centers.
	It's only in front of children.
	It's clear they're doing that indoctrination.
	So, you know, there's no question, you know, nothing's been perfect in this world.
	It's not a perfect place.
	And by the way, it never will be, right?
	It's probably not human nature to be perfect.
	Someone will always, Create havoc.
	I think the universe is probably guided a lot by chaos.
	But it feels like today's correction, it's just...
	An extreme reversal of that.
	I think now, when you look at a lot of the policies, it's reverse racism.
	It's like, well, that's OK, because it's against a white man.
	So it's OK to do that.
	You see some of the policies of DEI.
	Well, we're going to make sure that there's X number of X color people that are pilots.
	It's like, well, what if they're not qualified?
	It doesn't matter.
	We're going to put them in charge of a plane at 36,000 feet, flying 700 miles an hour.
	And what could possibly go wrong?
	The answer's a lot.
	You see that with the air traffic control stuff that's been come out recently.
	It's like, well, if you perform well in science and you were competent, you know, you're actually at a disadvantage to someone who was a terrible student to become an air traffic controller.
	I'm saying, what is going on here?
	That's literally government policy.
	So, there's definitely things I've changed my mind on.
	I think there's plenty of issues on the conservative side that I don't agree with.
	I don't agree with any dogma completely.
	I think if you buy into it, I think you're probably a fool.
	But I can say, hey, for the most part, I agree with X, Y, Z, or this, and there's always exceptions, and things change, and I think things evolve.
	But they've evolved sort of regressively, in my opinion, these days.
	Yeah, and while you were talking then, Don, I was thinking that, God, it sounds so complex that in the end, I suppose that we have to look at things that I was talking about with Kim earlier, like forgiveness, redemption, salvation, compassion, love, good faith, ideas that you don't find in a materialistic set of values, but that you do find enshrined in spiritual value systems.
	And those are the kind of things that are starting to slowly transform my life, and where I sense that there might be some hope and opportunity, because one way or another, this country is going to have to be healed or torn apart, and I don't see people talking about that.
	This world?
	No, it's hard.
	I mean, I have guys that are friends of mine that are either, you know, let's call it independent or even even former democrats
	that have sort of come around and I mean these are successful rational people and they're
	asking like hey can we actually survive this I mean is like is a civil like these are
	rational people in asking questions about is there a potential for a civil war in America
	They actually think it's very realistic.
	And I'm like, holy crap, if they're thinking that, imagine what sort of the extremes, you know, the ends of the spectrum are saying.
	But we saw that, right?
	2020, the summer of love.
	I mean, it didn't look much like a summer of love.
	And yet, you know, it was a mostly peaceful protest where buildings were burned in the background.
	And, you know, we looted, you know, a Gucci store because I guess, you know, a pair of Gucci shoes and a purse is, in the name of social justice, makes it okay and it's acceptable.
	You know, that's not a society that I'm, you know, that I think is going to be too long for the world, unfortunately, and yet we've normalized that.
	So I think we have a lot of work to do.
	Yeah, I think so.
	Maybe if we just smoke cigars, share showers... And talk.
	And talk with people from the other side.
	I think we can probably make a lot.
	Stop.
	Tune out the mainstream media.
	Tune out the narrative.
	That's got to go.
	Tune out the machine.
	Uh, have actual dialogue.
	You can do that respectfully.
	It doesn't have to be, uh, disrespectfully.
	And I think we can probably come a long way, Russell.
	Yeah, I agree, Don.
	I feel a lot better about it than I did when this cigar was here.
	I felt...
	Less hope.
	And maybe I'm just high on nicotine right now.
	It could be something, right?
	It could be asphyxiation, suffocation and nicotine.
	But now I feel like, man, whatever we may disagree on, it is plain that the real threat to freedom is globalist, corporatist, authoritarianism, always looking for opportunity to Assert civilian management to control currency, to control free speech, to centralize authority, to limit the ability to communicate.
	That can't be the goodies.
	That cannot be the good guys anymore.
	Not even a little bit.
	Well, guys, I know Russell has to catch a plane to get out of here to go to the other side of Florida.
	I only go to places in Florida now.
	Only Florida.
	The sleeves are off my shirt.
	I'm staying.
	The free state of Florida as opposed to the People's Republic of New York where I spend most of my life.
	But guys, stick around if you want to check out what I did with Russell earlier.
	Sort of a little bit of a role reversal.
	Stick around.
	We're going to air that right here next.
	But thanks for tuning in, Russell.
	Thank you for For being that voice, for taking that leap, for stepping out of that world and fighting for these things.
	Because I think it matters and we need more people to articulate those thoughts, to have that conversation.
	When more people become unafraid to actually have that conversation, when they sort of disregard the social consequence of that, I think we can actually make real progress.
	Whether it's champagne glory holes or cigars or Kim's Well, I don't threat that there are cameras in your shower.
	It seems that we are creating new opportunities for revelation.
	If we want to go viral, I may or may not have the video, so we'll see what happens.
	Guys, thanks so much.
	Stick around.
	Russell, appreciate it, man.
	That was great.
	Great talking to you.
	Thanks, man.
	We'll speak freely, but after that first 15, we'll be exclusively available on Rumble, the joint home of both Dear Don and myself.
	You are a resident at Rumble like me.
	I am.
	I am.
	Listen, I think I was the second The second verified user on Rumble after Bongino.
	Bongino was verified, then you were verified.
	Yeah, well, it was right when all of that stuff happened with, you know, Twitter 1.0, where all of a sudden they cancelled the President of the United States, and I had a large following there, and I said, wait a second, this could disappear in two seconds.
	You could see what was going on, and, you know, reached out with Dan, started talking with Chris Pawlowski, the CEO, and I was on there and have been there ever since.
	It's, you know, arguably the only You know, true free speech video platform.
	You've experienced what YouTube will do and the manipulation there.
	And so I thought it was such an important thing to do and to support.
	That's why I'm here and that's my home.
	Also resident in this home, in this house and on Rumble is Kim Guilfoyle, who will be joining us in a minute.
	Also, although not simultaneously, for numerous reasons, mostly technical, but also social, we feel like we'll have conversations successively.
	We're all talkers.
	Yeah, we could have an interview of just everyone talking simultaneously and no one will be able to hear anything So what I like about this conversation, so if you're watching us on YouTube There'll be a link up in about 15 minutes And you'll have to click the link and follow us over to rumble and hopefully if you permit me Don We'll be staying live on local so become an awakened wonder and join us there where we will be smoking cigars freely together yes and Discussing subjects as varied and vast as masculinity, liberty, freedom and what revolution and indeed insurrection means in the modern world.
	Don, thank you very much for having a conversation that just a few short years ago would have seemed impossible.
	We've only met once before at the Rumble launch.
	in Sarasota. And I remember then thinking, wow, I'm moving into a different environment now. I'm
	having conversations with people from the Trump family, people from a different world, in your
	case an outdoor hunting fishing person. According to your Wikipedia page, as of today you were still
	involved in a Russia gay hoax. In a way, this conversation couldn't have happened five years
	ago because I occupied an entirely different world.
	It's a miracle that it can even still happen today, to some degree, because we live in such heavily censored and controlled spaces.
	What do you think it means when people from different cultural pockets find themselves allying on the basis that now there is so much freedom, so much impediment to freedom, so much censorship, so much control, and so much to be afraid of when it comes to establishment authority, that new alliances simply have to be formed?
	I think it's a great start.
	You know, I think a lot of the forces that you're talking about in censorship and suppression, I think a lot of that's been going on probably for decades.
	It was the extreme nature of the last few years, maybe the last eight years, that I think woke up a lot of people to exactly what was going on.
	When we started speaking, I said, there's probably not a lot we would have agreed on politically or otherwise eight, ten years ago, and yet We're sort of in this same fight against these external forces that, at this point, honestly, to me, scream just pure evil.
	It's just total control.
	There's nothing they won't do.
	And as we talked this week, you said, on my Wikipedia page, I don't check it because I think Wikipedia is literally the The basis that everyone else uses to spread misinformation and create censorship in an artificial means.
	But yeah, I'm still an agent of Russia, even though that's been totally disproven, and even though a Hillary Clinton campaign pushed these lies, and our three-letter agencies blindly bought into that, and they leak the information to establishment media, in that case the New York Times, which writes an article that they use as the basis for an investigation to try to destroy a presidency, which is As far as I'm concerned, an affront on democracy, but according to them, that's actually saving democracy somehow.
	We don't know how, but they will tell us that ad nauseum.
	It's difficult to wrench your head out of the domestic environment that all of us inhabit.
	I mean primarily culturally.
	And for a moment, consider that if we heard of a foreign country where a political opponent While simultaneously having their previous policies plagiarized, policies which whilst in office, Donald Trump was significantly condemned.
	I'm talking about the travel ban and various attempts to curtail or otherwise control immigration.
	While Donald Trump was in office, He was attacked by the same media now that are attempting to significantly amplify and support Biden's recent executive order when it comes to the border.
	Now, you seem to be saying, Don, that that is both an inept policy rather than pure patriotism.
	It's a lie.
	It's just optics, right?
	The Biden border policy is 4,000 guaranteed amnesty every day with all sorts of loopholes for additional people.
	And just so we're clear, You know, Obama's homeland guy said a thousand a day would be overwhelming.
	So now we're at 4x plus all the loopholes.
	So it's the optics.
	They're appearing to do something, but I'd ask, even if they're appearing to do something, maybe that's a start.
	Why'd it take three and a half years?
	Did we think there was any good to come from, I don't know, human trafficking?
	The child sex trafficking, the fentanyl crisis that, you know, has killed, you know, kills, let's call it a hundred thousand Americans a year.
	A hundred thousand, just so we understand what that is.
	That's two Vietnams a year.
	Two Vietnams a year.
	Vietnam was, you know, ten plus year war.
	Two a year, and we barely talk about it as a crisis.
	I mean, that's where we are.
	Where's the media talking about that?
	Because, you know, they will make it seem like they're trying to do something, and it's all smoke and mirrors.
	It's nonsense.
	We've got Vietnams everywhere we look.
	Ed Dowd, reporting on excess deaths in your country, says that in the two-year period immediately post the pandemic, if we can even say post-pandemic at this point, there was a Vietnam worth of excess deaths.
	We're living at a time, it seems to me, where centralised authority and the potential for a kind of technological feudalism is using as its biggest weapon the threat of a ...second Trump presidency to augur and allow them to create authoritarianism that's much more akin to versions of tyranny that we've seen in literature, yes to a degree in George Orwell, but notably in Aldous Huxley, and the kind of terror and dread that I get from reading Franz Kafka in books like The Trial, where there's this new
	This invisible, cruel bureaucracy that tells you that it's helping you, tells you that it cares about you, won't give you details or facts about where power actually lies, uses really kind language, all the while inhibiting your freedom, turning people against one another.
	I recognise now that's a much bigger threat to freedom than even the worst portrayal of the MAGA movement and Donald Trump.
	That frightens me more at this point.
	It should.
	I mean, listen, we've been hearing people screaming about fascism for eight years, nine years, and yet look at the actions of those people.
	They are the ones literally trying to jail their political opponents.
	They are the ones who, you know, gave a total pass to, you know, the very peaceful protesters of the 2020 Summer of Love who happened to burn down major cities in America, billions in damage, people actually murdered.
	You juxtapose that to, you know, January 6th, You know, which, as far as they're concerned, was, you know, the greatest insurrection in the history of insurrections also happened to be the first unarmed insurrection in the history of the world, and yet they utilize that narrative over and over again, right?
	They create a narrative, you see the sound bites, you see every aspect in mainstream media picking up on every talking point.
	It's always the same.
	You put in the three words and it becomes gospel, right?
	Now, as of this week, it was, you know, convicted felon, like, you know, without looking at the details of this case, right?
	Convicted felon is the new one.
	Joe Biden can't run on anything, so he's running against a convicted felon.
	How can you allow that?
	Yes.
	Disregarding all of the corruption of his family, all of the corruption and the illegalities that his son has done.
	I mean, you know, you compare me online, you know, to Hunter Biden, and I am the devil, and he is, you know, someone who simply suffers from addiction, not is just a total piece of garbage, has sold out our country.
	You know, I get it.
	I am not the upstanding citizen that he is, according to CNN, but the reality is that doesn't jive if people get below the surface.
	Just the narrative that they're spoon-fed.
	Yeah, what I'm starting to think is that when you can see powerful institutions leveraged and utilized in a particular direction, you can observe likely where the power lies and where power And what its agenda is, and where it's projected towards.
	It must be very difficult, I suppose, for anyone that's living in your country right now, but in particular for someone in your family, to try to contemplate what's happening on a larger scale.
	Because when an election is approaching, there is a kind of generalised hysteria.
	And both sides, to a degree I suppose, are amplifying the enmity between the two camps.
	I feel that something's happening at a global level, and perhaps it's easier for me to see that as a person that's not from your country, but it seems that when you're looking at EU policy and UN policy and Canadian policy, Australian, Irish, particularly say for example, just take the subject of censorship, it appears that something is being coordinated on perhaps even a global scale to generate conditions where if in response there's just a jet ski going by, there's just a jet ski going by, that's where you live, Don Jr.
	riding the Stars and Stripes in a jet ski.
	It's the most American thing I've ever seen.
	It really is.
	It feels a little Kenny Powers.
	Yeah, that's the battle I had in mind.
	Get the pinvipers on and get on a jet ski and let's rock and roll.
	Express ourselves.
	Yeah, it seems that something's happening on a global level that's primarily designed to prevent people communicating freely.
	So the next time crises are exploited to introduce more authority, the same way that it was in the pandemic, the same way it appears to be around wars, and might yet be in a more generalised way, perhaps connected to climate change, when people's individual freedoms are restricted, The ability to, in real time, communicate about it and say, hold on, this doesn't seem to be true.
	You know, but it seems, for example, Don, that the WHO treaty was designed to prevent what happened in the last pandemic happening.
	It was essentially a treaty to be able to lock Joe Rogan in a box, stop people communicating freely, demand that people take medications, be very vague about what constitutes a pandemic.
	It could be a whole variety of things.
	Do you see The true power of America being transcendent of even your most obvious enemies, the Democrat Party, and involving forces like the three-letter agencies.
	But do you see it as being transcendent of not only America's interests, but America even as a nation?
	Oh, a hundred percent.
	I mean, I think it's so broken, and I think that globalist mindset has taken such control of even America.
	Uh, you know, I saw that on us.
	We, you know, we talked about, you know, still being an active collusionist with Russia, uh, and me and, uh, you know, at the time when that was going on.
	And I'd say it's safe to say I was the number two target after my father of Russia, Russia, Russia, of the hoax.
	But at the time, I'm saying, well, I mean, the FBI said this, Rob.
	There's got to be something.
	Like, I wanted to believe that as a patriotic American, everything I had sort of grown up thinking about my country was real.
	That it wasn't, you know, smoke and mirrors.
	But it's actually all bullshit.
	Back then, I was fighting to preserve what I thought was real.
	The reality is that is gone, and we're fighting to actually make that reality exist, because it does not exist right now in these things.
	You saw that across the board.
	You saw it, you know, this week with the Fauci trials.
	It makes that relevant again.
	I mean, I remember as someone who is not a virologist saying, like, of course, Of course the Wuhan virus started in the lab that studies the exact virus in question at the place that was ground zero.
	No, no, no.
	It started from four feet outside of that lab, Russell.
	Magically.
	Magically.
	And, you know, you don't have to be a virologist to say, of course that's the most plausible place for it to start.
	But if you were a virologist?
	If you were in academia, if you had research grants, if you said that, you'd be cancelled.
	Your government funding would be pulled by Fauci because they were clearly trying to control a narrative.
	And that goes forward in each and every one of these things that we see.
	It's not limited to that.
	They get what they want out of that weaponization at the time.
	And, you know, two, three, four years later, when the truth actually comes out, there's no accountability.
	There's no mea culpa.
	No one gets sent to prison.
	They ruined businesses.
	They destroyed lives.
	They did that under the auspices of science, and yet there was no actual science there.
	And we knew that even at the time, because we saw the Fauci emails to his colleagues.
	Yes.
	It did not jive.
	You know, when he was talking to doctors, it did not jive with what he was telling the American public each and every day when he was living his 15 minutes as a, you know, celebutant, you know, rock star on television because he never met a camera he didn't love.
	And that's the problem with our system.
	We encourage and allow the best bureaucrats to succeed.
	The people who are the most vicious in the PR game.
	Fauci was never the best doctor.
	He's been wrong about everything since the 1980s.
	But if you said, during the pandemic, if you said anything about that guy...
	You were out.
	He was the left's deity for a two-year period.
	He was a god.
	They don't believe in actual god, so they create their own, right?
	They had Greta Thunberg as the high priestess of climate change.
	They go to Fauci as the lord of COVID.
	George Floyd for a shorter period of time, but that was a temporary deity of the left for a while, and today that's dominated by Vladimir Zelensky.
	You know, leading one of the most corrupt nations in the world, who we will blindly send trillions of dollars to for an end result that has not yet actually been articulated to me, and I do this kind of, at this point, for a living.
	They just blindly follow these things, and we must believe the gospel, and we must believe everything is above board.
	But I think they've overplayed their hand in each and every one of these instances so much that rational people, people with an IQ above like seven, They're actually questioning these things now, and I think that's the biggest thing for us.
	We have to question all of these things.
	Don, you've brought up so much there.
	I'm so glad that you've brought up the new erected, forgive the word, pantheon of gods that are casually strung and slung before us in the absence of real faith and in the absence of real love.
	That's something I want to discuss more, because when you do have just a material and rational purview, it is very easy For the state to replace God, for a set of ideals to replace God that are tethered to, it seems to me, some pretty corrupt values.
	And I'd love to talk to you in a minute about how we might see a resurgence of religious and spiritual faith.
	I'd like to talk to you about the complexity of being born the son of your father, the obligations that's placed upon you and the times when that must have been challenging for you because we casually spoke about what it's like to disagree with a family member in any family, let alone in your family.
	You've already tagged the idea of Hunter Biden and the way that the failings of a particular son can be forgiven and elsewhere utilised and maybe both sides are guilty of that in their own way.
	We're going to leave you on YouTube right now, so click the link in the description.
	Join us on Rumble for the rest of this conversation.
	We'll be joined by Kim Guilfoyle.
	In a little while, we'll be talking more about the unique position America finds herself in At this moment.
	Remember, consider joining locals as well because me and Don Jr.
	will be smoking cigars, driving fast cars, firing off rounds of firearms into the sky in a giddying celebration of freedom.
	Click the link in the description.
	Join us over there now.
	Don, this collapse of religious faith, and this erection of new deities, I think is pretty fascinating, because perhaps, like, you know, right at the beginning of this, the reason that I became sympathetic, first of all, to Donald Trump, when I was a person that was on the other side of that argument, when I was elected, you know, just to be playing with you, sir, like, at the beginning, I was like, you can't have Donald Trump as President of the United States, that's crazy.
	Like everyone, everyone knows.
	I get it.
	Right, that's where I was, of course.
	But then I saw the way that when the MAGA movement started to grow, and I saw the way that the media class was condemnatory of Americans that were supportive of Trump, I became very suspicious and cynical about their motives.
	I also noticed a similar thing happened in my country during Brexit.
	That there's a kind of appetite to condemn ordinary people.
	Now you're obviously a very affluent man, and you're obviously from a very wealthy family,
	and yet emotionally and socially and culturally, there seems to be some kind of resonance
	between the MAGA message and ordinary Americans.
	And I'd really like to talk to you a little about that, but I've just been told that I've got to do an ad.
	So we're going to just throw to one of our partners now, and then I want to talk about what is the connection between Trump and ordinary Americans, and why do the current establishment in the form of the Democrat Party loathe ordinary Americans so deeply, and how are they able to continually use compassion?
	Let's have a look at this message from our sponsors.
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	You may have been able to hear us because we are using very up-to-the-up-to-the-very-moment technology, aren't we, John?
	Yes.
	We just got this technology to do this about an hour ago, so we're just do it live.
	Who cares?
	We have no idea in the words of Bill O'Reilly.
	F it.
	No, we can just swear.
	Fuck it.
	Let's do it live.
	We can say that.
	That's what I like about Rumble because I can actually...
	Can be who you are.
	Yeah, like, well, you know, I sort of, I grew up on construction sites, right?
	It was a little, you know, it was a little different.
	So I understand I totally come from a privileged place.
	I understand I'm a son of a billionaire from New York, but my father was a little different with the way he pushed us from that world.
	You were on sites when he had construction projects in New York.
	Those were my first jobs, right?
	I was joking.
	I'm the only son of a billionaire, with my brother, I guess, who can drive a D10 Caterpillar bulldozer.
	Can you?
	Because we actually did those things.
	If you're going to build a building, you better know how to dig a foundation.
	You know, watching someone do it and actually spending a summer doing these things yourself are two very different things.
	And I think to sort of where we left before the break, you know, that's perhaps how Trump had an understanding of sort of real people in America, right?
	It wasn't just a guy that sat in a, you know, in a gilded office.
	He did that too.
	But, you know, he got down on the ground being a builder, not just a tech guy where you're sitting at a computer all day, you know, spending time on job sites, spending time with construction workers.
	Uh, you know, I think, while very unlikely on paper, he had a very, very good understanding of where those people were for, you know, a 30 or 40 year career before he ever got into politics.
	And I think that's what was unique about him.
	He understood those people better than, you know, the elite snobs at the New York Times who couldn't understand, who are these people voting for Trump?
	We don't know a single person who would vote for Trump in our, you know, little cocoon in Washington, D.C.
	It's, it's absolutely shocking, and yet, You know, he resonated so well with real people because it wasn't the first time he actually spoke to real people, unlike so many of our political class.
	Yeah, because people always try to score points with that I-was-talking-to-my-plumber type of rhetoric.
	It's the way that politicians in your country and in mine automatically operate, pretending that they're down with ordinary people.
	And I've questioned from the outside, how has this person, in the case of your father Donald Trump, been able to achieve this affinity With ordinary people and you say socially and historically because it's just been part of he was he ran things different So like just did that.
	I mean, he's always at heart.
	He's always sort of still, you know the boy from Queens Well, like again, he was he was blessed and privileged and you know, we get that we don't we don't discount that we we don't You know pretend we don't understand that But you know, that's sort of his where you break it down, right?
	He did the sort of outstanding lavish things, but you know at heart He wants to have a cheeseburger and watch a baseball game, right?
	He's a regular.
	I was the guy decades ago that coined the phrase, you know, sort of blue-collar billionaire.
	And people at the time, what are you saying?
	It's like, now you get it.
	They never got it.
	They actually criticized me greatly for apparently not understanding something, but it turns out they were the ones that just didn't understand, you know, let's call it, you know, 300-something million people in America.
	The reason I know something strange is happening is because my country, which is of course heavily influenced by American politics and American economics and American geopolitical objectives, does still yet have its own culture, and in particular around the time of Brexit, We saw and I was uneasy about what I saw as a kind of blanket condemnation of ordinary people, a kind of a willingness to sort of say that people that voted for Brexit were racist and like people in the north of the country or let's say blue-collar or working-class regions
	were idiots. And like during the cycles of these elections it's become pretty clear that
	there is a kind of contempt for American values, for the values of ordinary people of numerous
	cultures. So this kind of, whether it's a charismatic ability or just an organic connection
	to ordinary people, is a surprising phenomena.
	Do you feel it as well?
	Do you feel comfortable?
	Because I suppose you've grown up in a very different environment as any child of a billionaire would.
	You know, I think I did.
	It was sort of, it was interesting, I think, because of that.
	The guys, you know, going and working on a job site during the summers at 14, 15 years old.
	You know, I actually probably relate much more to that.
	That doesn't mean, you know, I don't, you know, throw in a tux every once in a while and go do some rubber chicken dinner.
	But, like, my friends are actually far more heavily based in sort of just ordinary America, right?
	That's who I spend my time with, the outdoor stuff that I do, all that.
	You know, I don't...
	You know, I choose to spend my time there because that's where I'm actually more comfortable.
	So ironically, getting into sort of politics was actually far more natural for me because those are the people I was spending time with anyway.
	You know, throwing on, you know, going to a rubber chicken dinner.
	You know, I was actually faking that, whereas for politics I'm not actually faking it.
	I'm just being who I naturally am.
	Does that make sense?
	Yes, it does.
	And I think what it says to me is that elitism is real.
	There's this kind of like, look, I recognize economic elitism and I recognize privilege.
	I live a pretty privileged life myself.
	question about that. But what I'm like interested in is the kind of contempt
	and hatred not only for Donald Trump, your father, because I can see how that's
	politically expedient and necessary to amplify him as a threat as a kind of you
	know the obvious example that is continually used is to try to portray
	Donald Trump as a reboot in of the militaristic dictators of the last
	century even though this is a president has already had four years in office and
	didn't seek to use the military to shut down...
	accomplished peace deals. I mean we went from signing peace deals in the Middle East to having you
	know what you any one of the number of conflicts that could escalate into the
	World War three and yet Trump was the dictator. You know you can't it's hard to
	reconcile that I mean the the level of mental gymnastics to yeah to try to...
	Even understand the narrative of today's left is really getting complicated.
	It's very hard.
	The reality on election day in November, you will have had four years under Trump and you will have had four years under Joe Biden.
	That doesn't happen often where it's not just talk or rhetoric.
	It's actually you've had real world experience.
	When were you better off?
	Name a metric, a single metric, where we are better off today than we were four years ago.
	You know, the adults were back in charge, but they took back in charge and they withdrew from Afghanistan, and Americans are killed for the first time in 18 months in a conflict zone, and rather than taking accountability or acknowledging stupidity or whatever, we have our Secretary of State, the adults who are back in charge, gets on a world stage before Congress and says, he's shocked and dismayed.
	And I quote, you know, that the Taliban did not install a more diverse and inclusive government.
	I'm saying, I don't know guys, like, if you want to be dismayed, fine.
	You're shocked that the Taliban didn't have a, you know, a trans contingent, Russell.
	They didn't take those things into consideration.
	And we are shocked that that didn't happen.
	I'm like, They threw people off buildings for being homosexuals, you know, like, for the last 20 years.
	We've been at war for that.
	It's not we didn't understand them.
	We've been at war for 20 years.
	We thought magically they were going to change because, you know, corporate America put up, you know, trans flags for Pride Month.
	Those are not serious people.
	And yet those are people who are making literally trillion dollar decisions, not just for Americans, but for people around the globe.
	Don, one of the things that we can use to draw points of distinction because it spanned both administrations is, of course, the pandemic.
	Now, I recognize that at the beginning of the pandemic period, we were in a different environment.
	And Donald Trump's enthusiasm for Operation Warp Speed, as well as some of the things that he said that in retrospect were pretty interesting around hydrochloric... I can never say that word.
	Hydroxychloroquine.
	Well done, man.
	Well done.
	Like, you know, he did have an interesting approach.
	But do you feel that if Donald Trump outright said these vaccines weren't what they claimed to be, and some people won't even use the term vaccines now, gene therapies, weren't what we thought they were, Excess deaths needs to be looked at, adverse events needs to be looked at, and the big pharma companies need to be examined in the same way you would around the opioid crisis.
	Do you think that many of the people in his base, in addition to, I'm assuming, other people, would find that appealing?
	I actually think so.
	I mean, you know, and I agree with all of that.
	I think, you know, when he takes criticism for that, I think you have to go back in hindsight.
	Right, if Trump would have fired Fauci when we all started questioning it, he would have been impeached in...
	Seven seconds, and he would have had a hundred percent of the... You know, again, they turned someone into a deity.
	They did that very much on purpose, because they could use that as a crudgel against Trump.
	Yeah.
	If he questioned these things, he saw that, you know, hey, hydroxychloroquine, it turns out it's actually right.
	You know, remdesivir, whatever the other ones were.
	Hey, it was right.
	He was looking at all of these things as potentials, but guess what?
	None of those, you know, a drug that's been out in the open market for 50 years, None of that meant money to big pharma and to those
	institutions, those same institutions that I guess we found out, I guess, part of the, you know, NIH or whatever it is,
	the scientists there, they've made $70 million in royalties for this things that they came up with that don't seem to
	have been effective at all, yada, yada, yada.
	At the time, he would have been killed for going against a Fauci.
	That's not even a pretense.
	Same thing with, you know, January 6th.
	You know, they show you a couple videos of, you know, they're certainly some bad actors, right?
	You know, we don't, but like...
	7, 10, but that was the video they showed you.
	And then for the 14 days between that and the transition of power.
	Well, why didn't he pardon everyone?
	Well, because the only thing we saw, the only thing that was made available to the public was this image of like, hey man, that could look like an insurrection.
	Then you see, you know, now we see videos of grandmothers taking selfies, like within the velvet ropes, those people were questioned by the FBI and thrown in jail for years.
	You know, now we know that, but at the time, What did we actually know?
	What was made available to us?
	I mean, it took two years to get even the basic information out.
	It took years to get the videos out of, you know, again, the insurrectionists conveniently being escorted and toured through by armed officers.
	We have Christopher Wray a couple months ago saying, well, we can't release the videos because we had too many agents undercover.
	Well, you had agents undercover that were armed in there, and yet you did nothing?
	They just, they allowed literally an insurrection?
	Yeah.
	Just like, you literally, if Trump went against Andy, you're literally killing grandmothers.
	You're literally doing that, Russell.
	You know, it's insane, but again, that's the point is, these narratives are created, they're weaponized at the time.
	I guess this week we saw the Hunter Biden laptop be entered into evidence in his, you know, what should be one of many, but you know, I'm sure he'll get off because that's the way the system is designed right now, but it was entered into evidence in his trial.
	I mean, I was told by 52 high-ranking intelligence officers in the CIA that that was Russian disinformation.
	Yeah.
	You know how I knew it wasn't Russian disinformation?
	Because, like, he didn't come out and say it was Russian.
	Like, if that was my laptop, and it wasn't true, I'd say that.
	If it was my laptop and it was true, at the time, my father would have thrown me in Gitmo, and rightfully so.
	I'd still be there.
	I'd be in Gitmo right now, and that would have been right.
	Of course it was accurate, and of course those 52 intelligence officers had no way of knowing, but it didn't stop them from weaponizing that.
	You know, months later, when it started leaking and these things, you know, 17% of the American populace said that would have changed their vote away from Joe Biden had they known that that was accurate, that we were that corrupted.
	As we're, you know, honestly, as we're possibly on the brink of World War III, with the world's largest nuclear superpower by volume of intercontinental ballistic missiles and warheads, Russia Are we making policy decisions?
	That are simply influenced because one of our other enemies has more information about a kid that was corrupted and broken and taking all sorts of money for God knows what, for things he had no business actually making.
	Like, our media is not even asking that question, Russell.
	Like, are we possibly getting ourselves into World War III because this administration is acting to further cover up other things?
	Like, maybe they are, maybe they're not.
	But the fact that we're not even asking, like, is it a possibility?
	Of course.
	Like, I look at all of the America last decisions that we see from the Biden, whether it's energy, whether it's this, whether it's the dealings from China, you know, bringing down our strategic petroleum reserves and cutting off American energy.
	I'm like, not one of these things is good for America.
	Could they be done because there's undue influence?
	And given all of the information that's out there, given all of the shade, you know, if that was my laptop, it would be a problem.
	It wouldn't just be someone struggling with addiction.
	Yes.
	Like, you know, it would be a serious issue.
	It'd be non-stop news.
	I know that because I saw what happened in Russia, Russia, Russia, and that was one thing.
	There are dozens of things and, you know, just absolute crickets.
	And, you know, I think that in and of itself is, you know, sort of enough to make everyone question, like, what's the, you know, whatever level of disdain you have for sort of mainstream media, it is not enough.
	It's extraordinary actually that both you and Hunter Biden are in the public eye at the same time as it offers us an additional barometer to see how the different stories are covered in different sections of the media.
	I'm well aware of what happened immediately prior to the revelation of that story, the lengths to which deep state agencies went to ensure that it was handled correctly and not handled at all and the level of censorship that was enacted and that it's one of the events
	that enables us to see that not only has legacy media long being controlled by
	deep state forces, but there are obviously significant attempts and successes in controlling social media
	platforms as well, Don.
	One of the things I query sometimes having had a Donald Trump term is
	that when Donald Trump campaigned very successfully on and I would say in a way
	that reached a lot of people emotionally that you know this is one of the times
	where I was watching I was thinking yeah this is what needs to happen you do need to
	drain the swamp you do need to control the institutions that prevent there
	being democracy I agree with Mike Benz's analysis that when people say democracy
	now for example talking about Ukraine they don't mean the electoral process by
	which a population... The suspended elections in Ukraine.
	They banned religious institutions. Gonzalo Lira dies in that prison.
	I think it's such a deep tragedy that Gonzalo Lira died in prison and that the Ukrainian people are dying in such considerable numbers when it appears that there could be a diplomatic solution simply by withdrawing their support.
	But there's no money in peace, Russell.
	That's the point.
	If my father was in there, he gets people at the table.
	The way to get people at the table is threaten that withdrawal of the money.
	As long as the generals and the people who are actually not at risk at all on the front lines in Ukraine are making millions, they're pilfering the money.
	We've seen that, right?
	We donated money to a city, but it disappeared magically, right?
	Every time the Ukrainians shoot down a Russian jeep, Right?
	It's an incredible victory for Ukraine.
	If they lose a quadrant of a country to Russia, it was a strategic withdrawal.
	We see what's happening in real time, and what's really scary is it literally feels like a sanctioned genocide of, frankly, both Ukrainians and Russians.
	We're just going to send a bunch of Eastern Europeans to die as cannon fodder, and as long as the guys in charge get rich and aren't really at risk, it's going to go in perpetuity.
	It's been two years and we have not been told, like, what does victory look like?
	Is it, like, just the entire genocide of the Russian population?
	Is it Ukraine taking over Russia?
	Is it just going back to neutral?
	No one's even said that yet, and yet we'll fund it, you know, as though it's, you know, the greatest cause in the world, and it doesn't resonate with the people.
	I go around, I speak in front of a lot of Republicans around the world, certainly the country, and I think I've done an in-person live survey in front of thousands of people at a time, probably about 60,000, 65,000 people in total over the last two years.
	Live audience.
	Hey, is it a top three issue?
	Zero people have raised their hand.
	Not a top three issue, Ukraine.
	Is it top 10?
	Three people.
	One happened to be from Kiev.
	I gave him a pass.
	One was a guy that's tied to the sort of military-industrial complex, so of course he was getting rich off of it.
	And another misunderstood the question.
	He thought it was a double negative, and it was not important.
	But, so, two people out of 65,000 people thought it was a top ten issue.
	And yet, you know, Washington DC, it's a number one issue for both sides and they're going to fund it ad nauseam because they're all getting rich.
	And do you think that that is the type of, is that, because if there is so much deep state power and global power and power being deployed By global agencies, you know, if this is a really a war that is governed by or at the behest of military industrial complex interests and NATO policy, then is it something that, you know, when Donald Trump said we could just leave NATO or we can stop funding NATO, do you think that that is the case?
	And in recent interviews, Donald Trump said, like, you know, I'll release the 9-11 files.
	I'll release the JFK files.
	When in office, are those things able to happen?
	Or are the various institutional interests too restrictive to prevent that kind of thing?
	Well, I think they're going to go all out to prevent it, right?
	You just have to, you know, the reality is you need someone with the resolve to do that.
	I don't, you know, if we had a bench of people that I thought could actually do that, that would be wonderful.
	It'd be much easier than getting back into this.
	I think right now my father's the only guy that can actually stand up to that and I think Perhaps why the level of attack now is so much more aggressive, so much more ridiculous, frankly, but is that coming in as an outsider, it's sort of hard to figure that out, right?
	The plum book, which is the book of 4,000 jobs essentially appointed by the president, like, you come in as an outsider, 4,000 jobs, like, you can find five maybe of people that you like, and then 4,000 that, well, I think, I guess he's, you know, I guess he's on our team.
	Who knows?
	You know, currency, it's not like business.
	You sort of understand in business what everyone's motivation is.
	Whether it's money or success or what, you get that.
	In DC, you know, someone could be on board with everything that you're doing, but they'll snake you to get a favor from a reporter who he's working on some sort of other.
	It's just, it's a lot more nebulous.
	And so, you know, I think the fear of Trump is that now that he's got four years, now that he understands those workings, now that he understands who can be trusted and who can't, Uh, that notion scares them much more because I think he can be much more effective in a second term than he ever could have in a first, especially when you consider the sort of, you know, the first two years were occupied by Russia, Russia, Russia, maybe first three years.
	And then the last year occupied by COVID.
	I mean, they threw everything at him and yet our economy flourished.
	You know, job numbers were going up, lowest income earners were getting real wage growth.
	I mean, success after success after success, and that's before you get to peace in the Middle East, yada, yada, yada.
	I mean, he had a pretty amazing track record when you consider that he was up against arguably insurmountable forces that, you know, that no other president, right or left, has ever faced to do, you know, the basic duties of the duly elected president of the United States.
	Hey, Don, Robert De Niro's fear, as well as the fear of the legacy media, is that if Trump gets another term, he will never leave office.
	He will declare himself dictator for life.
	Is this just hyperbole?
	It seems to be outside of the Constitution.
	It seems to be absolutely unprecedented.
	With all due respect, your father is an older gentleman.
	It seems like... You know how I know that wouldn't happen?
	Go on.
	It didn't happen the first time.
	It didn't happen the first time.
	You know, this time, he's going to do it this way.
	He didn't do it last time, but he's going to... It's so ridiculous.
	And there's powers that would never happen anyway, right?
	I think we've seen very clearly that the powers of the presidency can be limited, and are, and can frankly be manipulated.
	They took what was the most powerful man in the world on paper at the time, and they threw him off of social media, and effectively cancelled him, and lied about him, and have tried to jail him, and find him You know, half a billion dollars for paying back banks on time, because he was actually a businessman, you know, prior to getting into that world.
	I mean, it's so asinine, not because it's just asinine in general, but because we actually have evidence, similar to we have evidence of four years under this regime, and then four years under my father, and you can compare those things.
	We know what's happened when his time was up in his first term.
	I was on the plane with him.
	We flew down to Mar-a-Lago.
	We came down here.
	I came back to my house.
	That was it.
	All of a sudden, it's going to be magically different.
	How many times are we going to fall for this?
	It's going to be magical.
	Apparently MAGA people drove it.
	I would say that was a supportive... Yeah, this area is very MAGA.
	The jet ski seemed keen as well.
	We may have to do it later on.
	Alright, I'm up for that.
	Don, thank you so much because it's been a very sort of a lucid appraisal about some of the bigger picture issues that pertain to the power that I fear most, which is a kind of global corporatist Power.
	And my own slow thawing around this issue has been based on if institutional power, both judicial and media, detests this man so deeply while people appear to adore him, at least 50% of the population of your country, then something unusual is happening.
	Because I don't trust institutional power.
	I don't trust technocrats and bureaucrats and technological feudalists.
	So, for me, it's like an opportunity to look at, well, where are the points of alliance and what does freedom and democracy look like in 2024?
	By the way, take it further.
	Look at Joe Biden.
	I mean, he almost collapsed on a stage yet again today.
	Did that happen today?
	Yeah, at a D-Day anniversary celebration.
	He, you know, almost keeled over.
	Does anyone actually believe... So that's the guy you elect?
	You think that's the guy that's actually in power?
	Right.
	You don't think there's institutions as the marionette of, you know, of this guy who, you know, can't find his way off a stage?
	Not once, but daily.
	If this was happening to Trump, you know, he's in the later stages of dementia and Alzheimer's combined.
	He's clearly 25th amendment.
	We must get him out.
	Joe Biden is very competent, folks.
	We've got to stop this.
	I mean, it can't be.
	No one actually believes that.
	And yet, there is a power that is controlling it.
	It is doing these things randomly.
	He's signing off on whatever it is, the policies that have failed our country for the last four years.
	That's pretty apparent, as evidenced by the economy, by wars, however you want to look at it.
	So what's going on?
	It's scary.
	I mean, it's scary times.
	Something extraordinary is happening that creates alliances like this.
	And there are also ulterior powers in this household, and I'm talking about the great force that is Kim Guilfoyle, who will be joining us after this at Don Trump Jr.
	Thank you so much for joining us.
	I've really enjoyed our conversation.
	We're going to be talking later on my show, so we get to keep going, we get to reverse the We're going to be on local smoking cigars, but after this message from the beautiful Charlize, run by Charlene Bollinger, entrepreneur, outspoken woman, great patriot and Christian, have a look at this advert for these fantastic products.
	I'll be back with Kim Guilfoyle.
	I don't know where you'll be.
	I'm wondering if you're going to watch the conversation.
	Am I going to see you whiz by in a jet ski?
	I may just do the jet ski, just feeling a little American right now.

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