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Feb. 4, 2024 - On Brand

03:05:59

OB #41 - Tucker Carlson, UNO Reverse

Russell went on Tucker's Twitter show for his first interview post-allegations. Could it be worse than when Tucker came on Stay Free? Turns out most definitely yes. Support us on Patreon! - patreon.com/OnBrand Buy a magnet! - therebegoldinthesehills

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	This is On Brand, a podcast where we discuss the ideas and antics of one Russell Brand.
	I'm Al Worth, and each week I go through an episode of Brand's show with my co-host Lauren B. That's me, Lauren B. And I don't know what we're going to get into.
	I know the headline, to be fair.
	But I don't know what the meat of the episode is going to be, but it's usually not good.
	No, it is in fact bad, and that is why we do the Good Thing Before the Bad Thing.
	Lauren, what is your Good Thing Before the Bad Thing this week?
	What is the show, I guess?
	Yes, the Good Thing Before the Bad Thing this show, I'm gonna ask y'all to bear with me.
	Okay.
	It's at the end.
	We're gonna start bad and go good.
	All right, take me on the journey.
	Let's do it.
	Well, so Carl Withers and, we found out last night sitting on the couch, Mike always has to break this bad news to me, Carl Withers and Wayne Kramer passed away.
	Right.
	And the respective ages of my grandpas when they also passed.
	So it's not like this sad, you know, it's not this unexpected boohoo.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Which, and respect to Carl Withers, I don't have as much of a personal connection, I mean, aside from Rust development, like, that's certainly, you know, like, his catalogue is vast.
	Wayne Kramer made me really sad, and I'm still sad.
	And he wasn't my uncle.
	But I feel like ever since David Bowie passed away, that hit us all really hard.
	And I feel like every time one of those people leaves their mortal coil, I'm like, well, world's a little less cool, a little less rad.
	And I still like to see when he would work on projects and stuff, because he's like, you know, I mean, all the MC5 guys are, you know, the rest of them or whatever, like, they're, you know, they did the damn thing.
	And I really like their music in particular, really was important for me.
	And I love it.
	And, And so that's, I'm taking it kind of tough.
	Just, you know, I mean a celebrity, you know.
	Yeah, it can be tough though.
	It can hit you.
	You know, Bowie was a tough one for me as well.
	I was very sad about Robin Williams when he went.
	You know, Chris Cornell, you know, that was fucking tragic.
	Well, there's no tragedy, but we're my good thing.
	I want to get to my good thing.
	No, no, I know.
	Sorry, sorry, yeah.
	I know, I know.
	We're going to go down, I don't want to... Because technically this is my good thing.
	I can't not do my prompt.
	That's inappropriate.
	Tragedy or not, celebrity deaths can hit you hard.
	Anyway, carry on.
	Well, because it's that retrospective of like, oh...
	All these important moments and, like, the soundtrack to all these, like, important moments and, like, empowering moments in my life.
	Like, especially that, you know, just, I fucking, I bought the CD.
	Ugh!
	Like, I'm pretty sure I had to re-buy one of them because I, like, used it so much, like, it was unplayable.
	Like, that was a moment.
	And I know that sounds kind of weird, but, like, for a weird, like, for a butch weirdo like me.
	It was a little bit solitary because I didn't have anyone to bond with on that level that was in my head space, but they were.
	were, and that was like, "So I'm just kind of, I'm sad, but it's really cool to think
	about what art can give you, I guess."
	And also, I think we thought about it the other day, and it was like, Wayne Kramer,
	the MC5, and the Beastie Boys are the two bands that came forward and said, "We had
	inappropriate behavior.
	We didn't treat women well, and we're really sorry, and we wish we hadn't."
	[BLANK_AUDIO]
	Well, everybody could do that.
	But they don't know.
	And we've talked about that before, so whatever.
	I don't want to retry that.
	But I do want to give some props and a mention.
	And all the good stuff that you can get out of art, and it's still here.
	And I hope they're both in a better place.
	I know they're not in a better place.
	Okay, so the good thing is the legacy that is left.
	Yeah!
	I can't believe I said I hope they're in a better place.
	That's absurd.
	I don't know.
	We don't have better phrases sometimes.
	When people sneeze, I say, God bless you sometimes.
	I don't know, man.
	Nobody knows for sure, so I think it's perfectly reasonable to hope.
	I hope their families are happy and proud and feel fulfilled and they feel peace in their heart.
	That's more appropriate for my actual moral system.
	Absolutely.
	The good thing, yeah, is the legacy and the things that, like, and holding things close and it's not stupid to feel moved and feel and hold art close to you because it makes a big difference.
	So what's your good thing?
	My good thing is... We're moving up!
	We're moving up in the world!
	So obviously, you already know, we're covering Tucker Carlson this week, because Russell went on Tucker's show, right?
	So we are getting to that.
	The thing, the good thing for me is, is that, right, again, bear with me here.
	So, so in the, in the kind of, in the pandemic, there was a YouTuber that came to prominence called Nat's What I Reckon, Australian guy who does cooking videos, right?
	He's, you know, comedian as well, and kind of, you know, had kind of tried his hand at various things, started doing cooking videos, just really funny ones, in lockdown, took off massively.
	Yeah, it was great.
	Australian guy swearing, saying fuck jar sauce and all this.
	Showing people how to make good food and doing it in a really entertaining way.
	And also, really genuinely lovely human being.
	Tattooed up to the nines in all of this, and probably looks terrifying to some people.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	But objectively, just loveliest guy.
	And yeah, well, in covering Tucker, so Tucker obviously in Australia means food and... Oh!
	I did not know that.
	Yeah, it means food.
	I'll spend my lifetime learning Australian slang.
	Yes, yeah, there's loads of it.
	And it's all great.
	Yeah, like y'all abbreviate in ways that I...
	Tucker means food, and Nat, and I'm quite sure other Australians must call it this as well, calls his microwave the Tucker Fucker.
	It's great, it's great.
	I haven't had one for years, because that's what they do.
	Yeah, no, exactly, exactly.
	They're not great, you know.
	I have one for convenience, and even I'm like, you just have to.
	Kids different.
	But yeah, and so every time we come to Tucker Carlson, in the back of my head, I'm like, Tucker fucker, Tucker fucker, Tucker fucker, just in the back of my head, just constantly.
	That's adorable.
	I love that.
	That's a great, that's good.
	I'm keeping that.
	The Tucker Fucker.
	In my pocket.
	So obviously I come to Tucker and I'm like, Tucker Fucker, Tucker Fucker.
	Oh, I haven't checked in on that's what I reckon in a while.
	So I've been in between kind of, you know, doing bits for this show.
	I've been like, let's check out a little video of him doing a lamb shank or some shit.
	And it's great!
	And he's really funny and everyone should go check it out.
	Yeah, it's great.
	Much better than what we're dealing with today, that is for sure.
	We've got that to get into, and normally we'd thank some Patrons here, but we're going to jump right in as this is an emergency episode.
	That said, if anyone wants to support us in what we do, become an Awakening Wanderer, join the Invisible Hand, or donate on an elevated tier, head to patreon.com slash onbrand and you will have our eternal gratitude.
	It is this which allows us to be editorially independent and ad-free.
	As a patron, you will also get a shout-out on the show and access to our patron-only show, Off-Brand, where we discuss pretty much anything but Russell Brand.
	And please note that while you can listen to our audio version anywhere you can find podcasts, you can also watch us on YouTube, or if you're listening to Spotify, the video will come up there too.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	We also have magnets.
	We'll do it up top.
	We also have magnets.
	That is another way that you can support.
	We sell real gold.
	We're brave.
	Real, live, actual gold, unlike some other people.
	And you know, leave us a review, a rating, all that good stuff.
	That shit really, really helps.
	Absolutely.
	We are all here because Russell went on Tucker's Twitter show.
	As of the moment of writing, it sits at around 5.8 million views, though I know for sure those are inflated as they count anyone who scrolls past it in their feed as a view, in any case.
	Yeah, did the whole planet watch the Matt Walsh movie by their metrics?
	Exactly, right?
	It's absurd.
	But okay, fine.
	We know at least one person has watched it, because I have watched it.
	And a few other people in the media have been watching it as well, and they've been covering it and predictably doing a bit of a bad job.
	So, it falls to us to try and put this interview in context of Russell and his show.
	There is a nice bit of poetry here, as Tucker came on Stay Free for his first interview after being fired from Fox News, and now Russell is on Tucker's show for his first interview after all of the allegations against him came out.
	So, there's a nice little symmetry there, right?
	It's a big first interview since... Oh, that's how they're pitching it.
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, it is.
	It is their first interview, you know, since... It's their first... Elsewhere.
	No, no, no.
	It's Russell's first interview with anyone since the allegations.
	Oh, okay, okay, okay.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And when Tucker came on Russell's show, it was Tucker's first interview with anyone since being fired from Fox unceremoniously.
	Yeah.
	So, a little bit poetic.
	Yep.
	All right.
	Got it.
	Sorry.
	It's all right.
	No, no, no.
	It's okay.
	I'd rather be clear.
	Russell Brain.
	Oh, got Russell Brain.
	Oh, we're going to get into it.
	I promise you that.
	So the caption to the video is, quote, Episode 70.
	Governments colluded to shut down and destroy Russell Brand.
	This is his first interview since that happened.
	Watch it when you get a minute.
	It's one of the most brilliant explanations of the modern world you will ever hear.
	Watch it when you get a minute.
	What kind of call to action is that?
	You're not selling cakes on Etsy, dawg!
	Anyway, we're setting a high bar right out of the gate.
	No, no, no, it is funny.
	We are definitely setting a high bar right out of the gate.
	My expectations are up already!
	I'm just noticing the still frame that we've got of Tucker here looking like a dingus.
	Always enjoyable.
	Let's hear him bring Russell onto the show.
	Back in September, media outlets around the world, almost all of them here in the West, in the English-speaking world, ran headlines that shocked a lot of readers and viewers.
	Russell Brand, the movie star, the comedian, now the podcaster, was a sex criminal, a Bad man, a sex criminal.
	None of the outlets ran the names of the accusers.
	You had been sexually abused by Russell Brand.
	That was conspicuously absent.
	But the judgment was overwhelming.
	This is a very bad man and he needs to be taken out of public view for the sake of the rest of us.
	What was interesting about this is that, in fact, it was the final scene in a long movie that had been playing out for the preceding couple of years outside of public view.
	This was an attempt to make Russell Brand shut up.
	Russell Brand has views that diverge from those of most Western governments on big issues, not small things, big issues, questions of economic policy and war and peace.
	And they decided we have to make this man be quiet.
	Why Russell Brand?
	Well, because in contrast to a lot of us who give our opinions for a living, Russell Brand had the capacity to win people over from the other side.
	He hadn't spent a life identified with the far right, just the opposite.
	Russell Brand was a man of the left, and to most people, a cultural figure.
	Everyone knows who Russell Brand is.
	And so he had the power, the capacity to persuade, and that was the threat.
	So we thought it'd be interesting to go through in some detail what happened to Russell Brand.
	None of this has ever been aired before.
	The censorship campaign against him began with governments, not private organizations, but governments, their intel services, and their policy makers.
	What?
	And as we said, it played out outside public view.
	And we thought it would be very interesting and important for people to know what exactly happened.
	And so to find out, we are now joined by Russell Brand himself.
	And we're grateful to meet Russell Brand.
	Thank you so much.
	Tucker, thanks for having me here.
	Oh wow!
	The list!
	Like, you didn't have to... I mean, the list of things... Oh, let's go, bud!
	Let's fire... Wow!
	Wow!
	You can already get a sense of where this is going.
	And Tucker, he's being his usual condescending self that makes him just so insufferable to watch.
	We will get into some specifics as to what the fuck he was talking about in just a little bit.
	But the big takeaways here is that none of this has been aired before, which, I mean, technically this interview has never been aired before, but the things that they're going to be talking about have mostly come up very frequently.
	I was going to say, I bet Russell said all of it!
	A lot!
	Almost all of it, yeah, yeah.
	And yeah, Russell was attacked and taken down in a years-long project to get him to shut up because he was too persuasive to the left wing.
	To that, I would like to point to the poll we looked at a couple of weeks back where 85% of Russell's audience want the next president to be Trump.
	Odds are there were probably a few more lefties in his audience back before the allegations came out, but I doubt it would have made a huge dent in that figure.
	So, you know, still pretty heavily skewed to the right, that audience there.
	Not sure there's much merit to what Tucker is saying.
	The long drawn out process, the movie to which Tucker referred to, this long movie, is years of lawsuits from Russell's extremely active and fastidious legal team settling with victims and silencing them with legal devices.
	That's a part of it.
	Legal threats is the long movie that's been happening that finally got put over the edge with the interview.
	Well, see, here's the thing, right, as to what the years-long project is, like you, I sort of initially assumed that he meant the length of the Times and Channel 4 investigation into Russell being a serial rapist and sexual assaulter, as there was a four-year investigation in earnest done by real actual journalists with their careers on the line.
	But no, Tucker was actually referring to something else, which we hear a little bit about now.
	Oh, OK, so I didn't know any.
	I just want to say I didn't know any of this.
	And I was I experienced you because I didn't know you as a viewer.
	And I remember thinking, boy, that is one of the most articulate critiques of the brand new war in Ukraine I had ever seen.
	I saw one of your videos on the war in Ukraine, and this was In the winter of 2022, two years ago, and you were making kind of a remarkable case, not against the Ukrainian people and certainly not in favor of Russia, but that there might be real implications for the West if we get involved in a war that is not our own.
	And you, I thought, said it so well.
	What I missed, and I'm now seeing, is that in March of 2022, You were denounced by an organization connected directly to the U.S.
	government as an agent of Chinese propaganda for your views on Ukraine.
	So let me just ask you your experience of this.
	Did you know that you were being attacked as a Chinese propagandist for your views on Ukraine?
	I actually didn't, and still at this point struggle to see entirely what the connections are between those two issues and how I would develop and cultivate a strong affinity with China.
	I've never been to China.
	I don't purport to understand China.
	Certainly don't advocate for Chinese policy.
	I've just got a relatively superficial dilettante knowledge of geopolitical matters in the South Asian seas.
	It's not something that I would like to tie my colors to the mask for.
	Or be willing to be publicly shamed, attacked, and even jailed for.
	So, it happened, though.
	And a lot happens on the internet that we miss.
	But these, in my reading of it, and we haven't, by the way, talked about this off-air, but my reading of it is that these were the early seeds of a very deceptive plant that flowered More than a year later, in September, when you were accused of these crimes and demonetizing and censored as a result of that.
	But looking back, so you were accused by a group called Coda Story.
	It published a story on its anti disinformation newsletter.
	Now, Coda Story is connected to the UK government.
	But it's also connected to the CIA.
	How does it make you feel to know that you were in the crosshairs of two of the most powerful governments in the world and their intel agencies?
	It seems to me ridiculously grandiose to even imagine that I would stir and arouse the interests of such powerful agencies and groups.
	It does seem ridiculously grandiose, doesn't it?
	And there is a reason for that.
	Yep.
	Yeah.
	So this is a new narrative.
	It's one which Russell himself hasn't covered, and so I'm quite sure he wasn't aware of it until this interview with Tucker, hence his kind of, like, I didn't know that, actually.
	I think I can find some room on my cap for that feather if I scooch some others around!
	Thank you!
	Definitely, we are adding that to Lee Fang's bullshit, we are putting that in there, right?
	Well just, oh thank you, I am!
	You're right!
	I am a victim, thank you!
	Thank you!
	So let's see who Coda Story are, shall we?
	Yes please!
	So Coda Media is a New York-based news website headed by Natalia Antelava, a former BBC correspondent, and Ilan Greenberg, a magazine and newspaper writer who served as a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
	CODA deploys a team of journalists to report on an ongoing crisis and unlike traditional media outlets, they stay focused on a specific story for up to a year in order to put individual stories in the context of larger events.
	They've covered a few crises thus far, so like the migrant crisis in Europe, LGBT rights in Russia, disinformation campaigns across Eurasia, They employ teams of reporters, editors, and designers in the States, in Georgia, and in Russia.
	They're attempting to bring together reporters from different news outlets to work on and develop stories together.
	Okay, great.
	Coda Media is a non-profit organization and depends on large foundation grants for the majority of its revenue.
	Coda Media has partnered with several newsrooms throughout the Eurasia via the Coda Network,
	which received a grant of $180,130 from the US government-backed National Endowment for Democracy.
	Now then, the National Endowment for Democracy, NED, is a quasi-autonomous,
	non-governmental organization in the United States founded in 1983 to advance democracy
	worldwide by promoting political and economic institutions such as political groups, trade
	unions, free markets and business groups.
	The NED was created as a bipartisan, private, non-profit organization and in turn acts as a grant-making foundation.
	It is funded primarily by an annual allocation from U.S.
	Congress.
	In addition to its grants program, the NED also supports and houses the Journal of Democracy, the World Movement for Democracy, the International Forum for Democratic Studies, the Reagan-Faskel Fellowship Program, the Network of Democracy Research Institutes, and the Center for International Media Assistance.
	So basically, democratic stuff.
	That's generally what they're about, is pro-democracy.
	Now, because the NED has assumed some former activities of the CIA, political groups and activists, as well as some governments, have said the NED has been an instrument of United States foreign policy helping to foster regime change.
	That is the theory.
	In 1986, the NED's President Carl Gershman said that the NED was created because, quote, it would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA.
	We saw that in the 1960s and that's why it has been discontinued.
	Throughout the course of a 2010 investigation by ProPublica, Paul Steiger, the then editor-in-chief of ProPublica, said
	that "Those who spearheaded creation of Ned have long
	acknowledged it was part of an effort to move from covert to overt efforts to foster democracy."
	Okay.
	That is our connection to the CIA.
	It's through the net, that is it.
	And it seems like a damn stretch to me, and I couldn't find anything specific about the UK government, so I had to wonder where the fuck Tucker was pulling this information from.
	Was he making it up out of thin air?
	Not quite, but someone was.
	After a bit of searching around, I managed to find a piece that Coda Story had written about the Grey Zone, Max Blumenthal's rag of bullshit misinformation site.
	They, much like other news blogs, have a pretty fragile ego, and so they were of course compelled to issue a response in the form of an article entitled, US Government Funded Coda Story Smears American Journalists Who Undermine New Cold War Propaganda.
	And this is from August 18th, 2020, right?
	The opening paragraph reads, quote, A shadowy neoconservative website called Coda Story has launched a smear campaign against American journalists who challenge new Cold War propaganda.
	But what this publication has not disclosed is that it is funded by the U.S.
	government, backed by the European Union, linked to the NATO war alliance, And part of a larger network of regime change outfits that are bankrolled by Western governments and corporate oligarchs.
	Unquote.
	Some big swings being made here, and it'll be interesting to see what evidence they have to substantiate them.
	From a bit further on in the article, quote, Unlike Coda's story, the Grey Zone is totally independent.
	It does not accept funding from any government or any state-backed group.
	Coda Story cannot say the same about itself.
	Although the neoconservative website marks itself as independent and its editor has claimed, we don't take money from governments, it is actually financed by the US government's regime change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy, NED.
	The NED is a CIA cutout established by the Ronald Reagan administration during the last decade of the First Cold War.
	One of its primary goals, stated clearly on the NED website, is to promote free markets.
	To do so, the putative Democracy Promotion Organization finances right-wing opposition groups, NGOs, and media outlets in countries the U.S.
	government has targeted for regime change.
	a co-founder of the NED, Alan Weinstein, gloated in the Washington Post in 1991,
	"A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."
	Okay, we've got a lot here.
	This is just laying it on thick from these guys.
	Can I say?
	Yes, please.
	Alright, peek behind the curtain, listeners.
	Since we have an emergency episode in lieu of our extra episode every week, which is off-brand, we're doing this instead.
	What is the fucking coincidence?
	That we were like, what are we going to talk about?
	What are we going to talk about?
	And I had just finished a big-ass book on the CIA.
	About the CIA!
	And Mike has finished several.
	And the CIA is our roommate for about two weeks now, because that's all we talk about.
	And we were like, oh no, this Glenn Greenwald, there wasn't a lot to take from that.
	What do we talk about?
	And off-brand.
	And I was at a loss.
	And you're like, Well, let's talk about the CIA, which I was like, big topic, but I can talk about the book I just read.
	What the fuck?
	Oh, man.
	Well, now we're definitely going to have to talk about it.
	Yeah, now we know the off-brand topic.
	It's still going to be the CIA, everybody.
	Oh, shit!
	Yeah, well, and so where I'm coming from, and I need to say this up top, and I don't think we'll necessarily be exactly on the same page, and I'm fine with that because of, all right, We haven't talked about the NGO and the non-profit sector as far as problematic funding.
	Whenever I did the Grifter funding episode, it was all the front of house stuff.
	Front of house profit stuff, not the NGO and non-profit.
	There are so many problems.
	you know, front of house stuff and not the like front of house like profit stuff, not the NGO and like non-profit.
	There are so many problems and the thing is like, I'm not reporting. I'm telling you what strikes me.
	And I think that that Grayzone comment, I don't, there's a lot of stuff that was like, kind of right, and kind of like, but like, I'm giving you my opinion.
	It's not a report.
	So NGO, I don't like NGO also like any connection to the CIA, especially like in 1986 in America, yipe stripes, that puts me on the back foot but all these things that put me on the back foot are I don't have proof, but they put me on the back foot, and I'm going to be very sceptical.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And I think it's reasonable, when we're tackling the CIA, to have a degree of scepticism.
	I think that instinct is correct, I think.
	Just being public?
	I still hate it.
	I don't want the CIA to be doing what they're doing at all, public or private.
	One of the things I think to take away is that the whole point of Ned is that they have taken things away from the CIA to do things overtly in public.
	It's taking things away from cloak-and-dagger bullshit of installing democracies and blah blah blah, to actually like, no no, we're just gonna, we're gonna fucking flood the place with pro-democracy information.
	Which, okay, you can critique that in other ways.
	Well, in 86, they were still doing that.
	All over the fucking place.
	And they being the government, right?
	The Reagan government.
	But that's not a thing that Ned is doing.
	That's a thing that CIA is doing.
	Ned is a separate thing, and to these people it's very much not.
	Anyway, so... Right, right, right, right.
	I agree completely with that, yeah.
	Here at this stage in their article about Ned and Greyzone, they linked through to another article of theirs providing this quote alongside a 22-minute video about the Ned, which purports to demonstrate that the Ned is CIA-affiliated, right?
	They make a string of big claims in there, including that it was the Ned who helped swing a Russian election for Boris Yeltsin in 96, Drove a failed coup attempt in Venezuela in 22, orchestrated a successful one in Haiti in 2004, and then another one in Ukraine in 2014.
	That was all the Ned, apparently, and we covered the Ukraine one, and that was bullshit, that wasn't a coup, that was a revolution.
	The other piece of evidence that the Gray Zone cites is a quote from former CIA whistleblower Philip Agee.
	Quote, nowadays instead of having the CIA going around behind the scenes and trying to manipulate the process by inserting money here and giving instructions secretly and so forth, they now have a sidekick which is the National Endowment for Democracy, NED.
	Unquote.
	That's it.
	That's the summation of Blumenthal's evidence for the NED being a CIA cutout, as he calls it.
	Also, do bear in mind, it's not like Philip Agee would have had much in the way of inside information.
	He left the CIA in 1969 and the NED was formed in 1983.
	He's kind of been out the loop a little while, but you know.
	The thing is, they're playing on all the stuff that makes it look fishy, and that's their MO, I think.
	their MO, I think, there being, you know, people like Russell and Tucker, they're like,
	trying to chip away.
	I think with the Ned specifically, you know, all they have is "hmmm seems weird, I don't
	like the vibes from this."
	There is no substantiated evidence of the Ned having any kind of nefarious involvement in any kind of No regime change in any country at all.
	CIA?
	Different fucking question.
	Right.
	What we have is very clearly a case of the CIA cutting out a lot of the obvious cloak-and-dagger shit that was meant to be pro-democracy through nefarious means and instead openly funding and promoting pro-democracy actors within media, politics, and business in places the US believes to be undemocratic in nature, while still continuing a little bit of the cloak-and-dagger shit.
	Now, we can go back and forth on the CIA and the NED as much as we like, but the reality here is that the Grey Zone and Tucker are saying that the NED taking over any of the CIA's former duties, and doing them overtly, makes it a CIA affiliate of some kind.
	And then the NED giving a grant to Coda Story means that Coda Story are in fact CIA affiliated.
	To start, I reject the premise.
	Let's say that our desire to defund the police came through in any meaningful way, right?
	For instance, mental health crises weren't being dealt with by police officers.
	And instead, there was a dedicated, government-funded emergency organization who would send people to handle the situation appropriately, right?
	That organization wouldn't then be police-affiliated just because it was the police who used to do that job.
	And then, say that organization gave some money to a mental health charity, believing it to be in their interests, that mental health charity is also not then somehow police-affiliated.
	That's just not how any of that works.
	Well, right, and the reporting that I would see on that subject would be, hey, look at all of these, the funded charity for mental health.
	Turns out, the stated goal is not congruous with their product, or there is a questionable kind of bent, and someone would investigate that, and then tell you specifically why they think there's an issue, not just because they're funded, they're automatically manipulating and covert.
	That's the assumption that is the leap that we shouldn't take.
	Yes, and it is automatic.
	There is zero evidence or substantiation to any of it.
	It's guilt by affiliation.
	Guilt by association, right?
	That's all it is.
	So we're off to a bad start here, right?
	So let's get back to Coda's story in that original article from The Grey Zone, where I'm quite sure we get to more of the information that Tucker is using here.
	It does, however, start to get batshit crazy pretty quickly.
	And so the image I want you to hold in your head, right, is Charlie Day in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia stood in front of the board covered in pictures and strings, right?
	You've seen, everyone's seen the meme at the very least, intensely relaying his conspiracy theory.
	I will attempt to match that same energy to stay true to the article, right?
	So let's go.
	Natalia Antolova, the co-founder of Coda Story, is an overtly pro-Western journalist originally from Tbilisi in Georgia.
	Before becoming the neoconservative site's editor-in-chief, Antolova worked as the Caucasus correspondent for the UK government-backed BBC and covered the 2008 Russo-Georgian war from a hardline, anti-Moscow perspective.
	NATO has taken notice and has found utility in Antalava's viewpoint.
	In 2018, the Coda Story editor was invited to speak at the NATO-Georgia Public Diplomacy Forum in Tbilisi.
	The NATO conference featured Georgia's Prime Minister and President alongside top US government officials.
	It was organized by Tbilisi's NATO and EU Information Center, Along with the Georgian Foreign and Defense Ministries.
	Antilava participated in a panel titled The Era of Post-Truth and Fake News.
	Joining Antilava on the stage was Alexei Makukin, the director of the Hybrid Warfare Analytical Group of the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, an anti-Russian organization funded by a long list of Western governments, including the United States, NATO, Germany, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and the Netherlands, along with the European Endowment for Democracy.
	The other panelist sitting next to Antalava at the NATO conference was Anna Nemtsova, a correspondent for the neoconservative website The Daily Beast, whose willingness to propagate the most lurid narratives of the new Cold War has made her a favorite at Western confabs.
	The moderator of the event, Yes, the moderator of the event was Mark Lahti, a NATO spokesperson who directs Strategic Communications at the Military Alliance's Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers, Europe.
	Shape.
	Like Antilava, Lahti is a veteran of the UK government's BBC, which is closely linked to British intelligence and was used by MI6 during the first Cold War to spread propaganda.
	Okay.
	And from there, The Grey Zone starts to take aim at everyone from George Soros to Chinese separatists to the Uyghurs in trying to shit on Coda's story.
	It's remarkable, and it comes in at around four and a half thousand words in total.
	Anyway, that's all I could find about Coda's story being CIA and UK government affiliated, and we have got some weak fucking tea.
	All that said, what the hell did they say about Russell?
	Where does that come from?
	There are two pieces that, taken in their totality, still don't match what Tucker is saying, but it's the closest we're going to get.
	The first is from March 2022, with the title of the piece being, British Homegrown Conspiracies Get Beijing's Stamp of Approval.
	It reads, quote, QAnon adherents and far-right anti-vaccine evangelists, in their ardent support of President Trump, used to lambast China.
	But Russia's invasion of Ukraine has changed that.
	The dynamics of the invasion are shifting their views.
	In an astoundingly short space of time, Xi Jinping appears to have been recast from a villain to a hero in the QAnon conspiracy pantheon, analyst Elise Thomas wrote in a report for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue on Wednesday.
	Weird.
	So weird.
	It is fucking weird.
	QAnon conspiracy theories both feed into and borrow from Chinese and Russian state narratives.
	The claim that the US has bioweapons labs on Russia's borders is a perfect example.
	Indeed, any conspiracy theory dreamed up by disinformation influencers, QAnon or not, has the potential to get picked up by Chinese Communist Party-backed media if it suits the state narrative.
	This week, a new symbiotic relationship has emerged between Chinese state media and a fringe British conspiracy website.
	It then goes on to talk about a website called The Exposé, run by a mechanic in Lincolnshire, which was spreading COVID conspiracies, which were then getting picked up and used by the Chinese state media.
	I know, I know.
	I know!
	In order to find anything about Russell, I have to scroll down much further in the article to the heading, In Other Infodemic News, and here's the bit about Russell in full.
	Quote, Is Russell Brand Pushing the Ukraine Biolab Narrative?
	The British comedian and social commentator Russell Brand, who has a 5 million strong following on YouTube, has weighed in on the biolab disinformation narrative that claims the U.S.
	is building bioweapons on Russian borders.
	To be clear, the U.S.
	does have biolabs in Ukraine.
	This is no secret.
	They've been there for years.
	But they are not germ warfare labs, as Putin would have you think.
	We've covered this extensively in the past, so have we by the way, so do check out our reporting on it if you haven't already.
	Brand says he's explaining, not condoning, writes Francesca Scott of Logically this week, but he's boosting a lie and dodging responsibility for doing so.
	Logically, we'll come back up a little bit later.
	Nothing in there about China related to Russell whatsoever.
	That sounded weird.
	Like, initially, it's like, you picked China, not Russia?
	Yeah, right, exactly.
	It does sound weird.
	It felt like a dodge in and of itself.
	Nine months later, Nine months later, in December 2022, Coda storied a reflective piece called The Year in Conspiracy Theories, and here is the relevant portion of that.
	Quote, Russian Biolabs.
	Shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, the internet was set alight with pro-Russia conspiracy theory that the US was running secret bioweapons labs on Russia's borders.
	The theory was used as part of Russia's justification for invading Ukraine and was pushed by Russian state media before being picked up by online conspiracy theorists and QAnon adherents, as well as influencers like Alex Jones.
	Even British comedian and social commentator Russell Brand ran with the narrative, weighing in on the lie to his 5 million strong following.
	Now we're up to 7 by the way.
	The myth that the U.S.
	is building bioweapons on Russia's borders goes back years.
	Chinese officials and state media also promoted the conspiracy theory, using it as an opportunity to parrot its long-running claim that the U.S.
	was behind the COVID-19 pandemic.
	In summation, these two articles from Coda's story are somehow calling Russell Brand a Chinese disinfo agent, and to use Tucker's words, are the seeds of a deceptive plant that flowered when the sexual assault allegations came out against Russell.
	So, this is all one long coordinated attack, and then, to bring us back to the end of the clip, Tucker asks, how does it make you feel to know that you are in the crosshairs of two of the most powerful governments in the world and their intel agencies?
	That, from barely a mention across two articles from a news outlet that has nothing to do with the CIA or the UK government.
	And right, aside from the information I've already shared with you, how do I know that they have nothing to do with the CIA or the UK government?
	Well, I asked them.
	I sent Codastory an email requesting comment, and I had Ellery, or Ellery, I'm not sure, Biddle, the managing editor, come back to me with the following.
	Quote.
	Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
	We reviewed the archive and it seems like the piece he was referencing is this one.
	That was the first one that I read out.
	The piece discusses Chinese propaganda and later mentions Brand having commented on the Ukraine Biolabs narrative.
	To say, as Carlson did, that our story denounced Brand as an agent of Chinese propaganda feels like quite a stretch.
	Regarding Carlson's assertions about our connections to governments, I should first state that we only take grants on the condition that our funders have no direct influence on or sway over our reporting.
	We are an independent newsroom and we maintain the highest ethical standards in our reporting.
	Our only allegiance is to the truth.
	The only connection we have to the U.S.
	government is that we, at one time, were grantees of the National Endowment for Democracy, which is funded by the U.S.
	Congress.
	We no longer receive money from the NED, but this is beside the point.
	Ned had no editorial influence on our reporting whatsoever.
	Carlson also casually referred to us as being connected to the CIA.
	We have absolutely no connection to the CIA whatsoever.
	Carlson also asserted that we were connected to the UK government.
	Perhaps he thinks that our affiliation with the Open Information Partnership, which is funded by the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, constitutes a connection to the UK government?
	We do not currently receive money from OIP and in practice we have almost no contact with OIP and absolutely none with the UK Foreign Office.
	OIP has never had any influence on our reporting."
	And I know with absolute certainty that there will be people watching this saying, Oh, are you going to believe them just because they said it?
	And no, no, I'm not.
	I'm going to believe them because they said it and there is not a shred of evidence to the contrary.
	Bingo.
	That's it.
	That's the one.
	Tucker just threw all this shit out there without so much as a hint towards a source for any of it.
	And you picked up on that.
	Oh, please explain.
	Please explain, Tucker.
	Not a fucking thing.
	He doesn't bring it back up.
	He doesn't substantiate any of what he said at all.
	And that right there is deliberate, because if he had referenced where he actually got this information, those in the media paying attention would have fucking eviscerated him.
	Instead, he throws it out there, expecting his audience to treat his word as the gospel truth, and so it goes.
	Incidentally… Right.
	That's the list.
	That person that responded to your email?
	No slouch, I'd imagine.
	That's probably their job.
	And so they have, like, if Tucker's people I sent the same email and got the same response, to some degree.
	This is the list of things that if you want to prove they're not true, it's right there!
	Like if you want to prove they're not true, it's right there.
	I, I, yeah.
	If you have that proof, publish that.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I, yeah.
	I get the feeling Tucker's team didn't reach out to Codestroyer.
	Given that I'm the one who brought it to their attention, I don't think it's... I don't think that's what happened.
	Incidentally, this little clip... Well, well, well, there it is!
	Yeah, there was no due diligence done here at all by Tucker Carlson and his team because he doesn't give a shit.
	And also, you know, just being able to throw these things out there without a reference, you know, just kind of hoping that really no one kind of looks into it or picks it up.
	Well, we did.
	Incidentally, this little clip does, in a nutshell, act as a perfect example of why these motherfuckers are so hard to debunk with anywhere near the same effect that they have.
	Tucker rattling off this bullshit story took him all of two minutes, interspersed with jokes from Russell, whereas looking into it took hours, and even just conveying it took a fuckload longer than his two minutes.
	It can't be cut into a convenient soundbite that gets people all riled up and scared, and it can't manipulate people into spending money.
	But hey, audience, now you know at least.
	If it sounds like impossibly grandiose bullshit, that's because it is.
	That was a lot.
	I got sent on a merry fucking chase, thanks to Tucker Carlson there.
	Well, thanks to signing up for doing a podcast, but Tucker didn't help.
	Yeah, I'm still blaming Tucker.
	Yeah, but the disinformation stuff is so simple to understand.
	What you're saying is there's one article from The Grey Zone that does not have the information that we've just laid out that you would need to actually disprove anything.
	If what they said was true, when that story broke, other reporting would probably be there to corroborate it.
	There would be more.
	There'd be more than just this one little sliver of something.
	Yeah, and that's always the case when you get one of these idiots saying, why is the legacy media not covering this?
	And it's like, well, it's because you're full of shit and you're making it up.
	And they're not willing to do the same thing.
	That's almost invariably what the case actually is.
	Using the CIA claim, specifically like as a band-aid to throw on any conspiracy you want, it's just like anything else!
	It's like, you know, it's like the Save the Children and it's QAnon.
	Like, if you're calling everything the CIA, that was a CIA op-ed of itself!
	That was part of their plan!
	Is to saturate this brand of the CIA as a scare tactic, so then no one takes it seriously when you actually point out a problem.
	That's also, as you just said, is way less sexy than just being like, they're out to get you, Russell.
	There's a real problematic history that is kind of tangible, but you gotta prove it.
	You gotta show the stuff.
	You gotta show your work.
	It's gotta be long division.
	You should have to, but now there are fucking hundreds of people on Twitter sharing clips from this interview saying, oh yeah, CODA story, they're backed by the CIA and they're backed by MI6.
	Fucking excuse me, there is no evidence for any of that whatsoever, you lying shitheads.
	I mean, prove it, yeah.
	If it is, Yeah, I mean, hey, if I'm wrong, if I'm wrong, team of Tucker Carlson Network, of the Tucker Carlson Encounter, by all means, drop us a fucking email, it's theombrampod at gmail.com, and I'll happily go back and forth with you if you have evidence to the contrary.
	Right, we're gonna move along a touch to Russell speaking about how the media are all out to get voices like him.
	And I play this clip mostly because it's this kind of shit that takes up the lion's share of the interview.
	There are points in my life where my personal self-regard would have loved the idea that I would be considered important enough to attack on this scale, to spend this amount of revenue and resources on.
	But I'm now seeing that independent media itself is an extraordinary threat.
	That independent media inevitably leads the independent politics and independent thought.
	And we appear to be at some precipitous moment of radical transition.
	I'm not sure and I'm not sure if anybody could be sure of where this is all heading, what the exact teleology is, but it seems to be to do with mass centralization, globalization, significant attempts to control the information space that are so rigorously adhered to and protected that even what you might imagine to be a marginal voice is considered a significant enough threat To warrant coordinated media attacks, expenditure on peculiar clandestine non-government organizations and think tanks that take their money from the military-industrial complex, from the legacy media, who, by the way, when they're critiquing independent media, they've got skin in the game.
	They're not able to independently assess your work, or my work, or the medical opinions of Joe Rogan.
	They have a vested interest in destroying those organizations.
	In the last few years, I've learned about the Trusted News Initiative, which has extraordinary connections, again, to Big Pharma and sets of interests around the reporting on war that have decided and determined that they are no longer competing with one another.
	You, in particular, come from a journalistic background where it would have been commonplace The great institutions of American media to compete with one another for scoops.
	The New York Times.
	Those days are gone.
	It explicitly states on the Trusted News Initiative website, we are no longer in competition with one another.
	We have to curtail and stamp out.
	I think it even uses the word choke independent media.
	And it's clear that there are now sets of globalist organizations funded by government, but also corporations that are making deliberate, profound attempts to shut down any dissent in an astonishingly aggressive way.
	And to be sort of caught up in it is terrifying on one level, absolutely terrifying, particularly due to the Good God.
	Master of the Gish Gallop this man.
	I faced, but also revealing, more importantly, it's revealing
	about the way that I believe the world and in particular this
	space will be affected and the way these events will continue
	to unfold in the coming years.
	Oh, good God. Just just...
	Master, master of the gishgal up this man, just throw in the
	shit out there. However, do you know what's fun about Russell
	saying that it says directly on the Trusted News Initiative's website that they aim to stamp out and choke independent
	voices.
	The Trusted News Initiative doesn't have a website.
	There are a couple of pages on the BBC's... I'm sorry?
	Yeah, they don't have one.
	Are they the last thing on the planet that doesn't have a website?
	Well, I think they feel like they don't really fucking need one, and I can see why.
	Like, yeah, there's a little bit on the BBC's website dedicated to it from when they set it up, but that's about it.
	And nowhere among those pages are the words choke or stamp.
	What's actually happened here is that Russell is misremembering his own conspiracy theory.
	He is misremembering what bullshit he specifically wove about the TNI and that actually he had maliciously edited one quote from someone at the TNI.
	For the curious among you, go back to our Russell Brand Returns episode at around 24 minutes.
	And the other thing that Russell had used was a quote taken out of context of someone saying that we need to choke off misinformation and falsehoods as opposed to letting them fly free in the world like they do at the moment.
	The TNI have also not stated that they're no longer going to be competing with one another for stories because of course they fucking are.
	The collection of media and press organizations within the TNI, like the BBC, Washington Post, Financial Times, ABC, Australia, etc, etc, have all agreed that alliances must be made to try and combat misinformation, which is now actually their collective main competitor.
	Like, they are not just competing with one another anymore, they have to be able to deal with, yes, producing legitimate, verifiable, journalistic work, but also they must all be able to combat whatever nonsense falls out of Joe Rogan's mouth that morning.
	It is painfully obvious that Russell does not want the TNI to succeed at its job because, quite frankly, it would put him out of business.
	We've documented the endless outright lies, malicious editing of quotes, and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that constitutes the show, Stay Free With Russell Brand, and if any of these organizations ever do their job correctly, he won't be able to lie for money anymore.
	So the move is, of course, to try and say, ah!
	They're trying to shut down independent media and independent voices because we're so dangerous!
	And well, yes, you are dangerous, just not because of any truth that you're telling.
	Organizations like the TNI are not in fact trying to shut down all independent media operations, just the ones who are actively spreading bullshit for profit.
	There are plenty of independent media operations out there who both are responsible and doing good work, it's just Russell.
	You're not one of them.
	The journalistic background situation?
	Tucker's journalistic background, yeah.
	Tucker got on TV because he lied about being an expert on the OJ trial.
	That's not a journalistic background.
	No, he's a talking head.
	He's always been a talking head.
	Nor is Russell!
	No!
	If we fundamentally disagree on the definition of journalism, What are we doing?
	Where do we get to go from there, you know?
	What Russell's definition is, I don't know, because he seems to veer between, I'm a journalist, I'm doing a journalist thing to, I'm a comedian, whenever it suits him.
	Or like, I'm an entertainer, I'm entertaining, this is fodder.
	I don't know what I'm talking about, I'm just making stuff up, it's funny.
	It's gotta be the same thing the whole time.
	It's gotta be the same thing the whole time.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, basically.
	Fucking hell.
	Alright, moving along.
	Tucker has some unique spin on Russell's pivot to being an alt-right propagandist.
	What I love about your critique is that you're coming to all of this pretty cold since you had a midlife career change.
	You're doing something very different from what you did 15 years ago.
	One way of putting it.
	And I'm wondering if your assumptions haven't been completely blown up.
	You're a British citizen, lived in the country most of your life.
	How strange is it to know that your tax dollars are being used against you by your government, which they are?
	And how bewildering is it to find that the open contest of ideas that we were promised here in the West made the best idea win?
	Well, I suppose I went into the entertainment industry really with the giddy trajectory that propels a lot of people into those spaces, believing that there might be some fulfillment and certainly there would be excitement.
	And when I was a denizen of that world, I was fostered and adored and celebrated and facilitated and lived the kind of lifestyle which I feel I think it's kind of common for people in that area, for single people, in my case, drug and alcohol free, but certainly with an appetite for a promiscuous lifestyle.
	When I was part of it, I found it empty and unfulfilling, of course, as it would be, as anyone who's had those kind of experiences ultimately realizes.
	When I departed it as a result, really, of various spiritual crises or commercial failures or a combination of those events, I grew up in a normal blue collar town, greys, kind of like a place that's like New Jersey, I guess.
	A kind of suburban, outside of the city, normal people, good values kind of place.
	Yeah, I had to stop that there.
	Grey's in Essex!
	Paragon of good values!
	Suburban New Jersey.
	So Grey's in Essex is like New Jersey, right?
	According to... This may seem stupid, but just bear with me, right?
	Grey's is a small coastal town.
	New Jersey is a state.
	What's fun about this, however, is that with the USA recycling a lot of names from dear old Blighty, right, especially on the East Coast, there is actually an Essex County in New Jersey.
	So we have Gray's in the county of Essex in England, and then Essex County in New Jersey, which is the state's second most populous county, which is located in the New York metropolitan area.
	That doesn't seem quite right.
	Let's be generous and say maybe he was meaning Jersey City, right?
	I mean, Graze has a population of 44,000 and Jersey City has roughly 290,000.
	Doesn't quite track either.
	In trying to dissect exactly how the fuck Graze was supposed to be like New Jersey, because that did stump me, the only thing I could possibly think of is that Graze is some distance outside London, and New Jersey is geographically outside of New York City.
	Sort of.
	Which speaks volumes as to how much Russell is willing to talk about things he doesn't have a fucking clue about.
	I mean, it was vibes.
	He vibed.
	He vibed New Jersey.
	Geographically in his head, he's thinking, this is the same thing, because it's nearby to the thing.
	Not how that works at all.
	New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the United States, for a start.
	Gray's and Essex in general, very much not that.
	There's a lot of bedroom communities to feed in New York City, which is why.
	Graze is not that either.
	As for Graze being a normal place to live, I can't really speak that much as to how it was when Russell was coming up, but these days it's consistently voted as one of the most depressing places to live in the UK, living up to the name Graze, mostly because of an intense lack of public funding.
	That doesn't sound unlike New Jersey.
	Fair.
	At least northern.
	Southern sounds beautiful from what I understand.
	I've heard lots of mixed opinions on New Jersey as a whole, and you know, I've never been there.
	Like all places, man.
	It's a state.
	Like you just said, it's a whole ass state.
	Exactly.
	It's a fucking state.
	And so like, Greys and New Jersey are similar, much in the same way that the country of England and the continent of North America are similar.
	Or in the way that the truth is similar to what Russell and Tucker are saying in this next clip.
	So these organizations, it didn't surprise me to find that the British government, through the Department of Culture and Media and Sport, the very person, the very people that sponsored the new rather draconian online safety bill, personally contacted the height of these allegations and attacks on me,
	contacted social media platforms and asked if I would be demonetized, but they're the body that
	regulates them.
	They have the ability to fine those organizations.
	They're the very person who is sponsoring the online security bill.
	Can I ask you to pause for a second?
	Yeah, of course.
	Just to make sure I understand what you're saying.
	So these accusations appeared.
	There were, I don't know if this has changed, but at the time there were no names attached at all.
	You were accused anonymously of committing crimes.
	Dude, I can't do that.
	And then your own government, which you pay for, reached out without telling you to online service providers and media organizations and said, please kick him off and censor him and take his money away.
	Is that what you're saying?
	Yeah, that's right.
	Before any kind of trial, before any proof that you were guilty, before any names were attached.
	That happened?
	Yeah, and it's the same people that are sponsoring online safety bills which amount to facilitating further censorship.
	But what a betrayal by your own government!
	He's describing experts!
	What a betrayal by your own government, Russell.
	He is, of course, talking about Dame Caroline Dainage, who is not a member of the British government.
	She was the Minister of State for Digital and Culture under Boris Johnson, and now serves as Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which is a select committee.
	I hate repeating myself, but I'm gonna do it.
	A select committee acts as a sort of cross-party shadow to government departments, acting as a form of oversight with the ability to investigate certain areas within the remit of its department.
	The entire point of these committees is that they're made up of people not in the government to then be able to critique the government.
	Um, it's important to note that while Caroline Dainage is a Tory and her party are in power, she has no official position with the government, unlike what Brand is saying.
	Um, now yes, she did send letters to both TikTok and Rumble asking them to demonetize Brand's content.
	As she said, quote, while we recognize that TikTok is not the creator of the content published by Mr. Brand and his content may be within the community guidelines, we are concerned that he may be able to profit from his content on the platform.
	We'd be grateful if you could confirm whether Mr. Brand is able to monetize his TikTok posts, including his videos, relating to the serious accusations against him and what the platform is doing to ensure that creators are not able to use the platform to undermine the welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behavior, unquote.
	Yep.
	letter to Rumble was virtually identical. YouTube had already demonetized Brand of their own accord,
	and honestly he's lucky they hadn't done it sooner with the amount of bullshit that's in his content.
	Now I've said before I think this was an overreach of Caroline Dynage, however well-intended
	it was. It's not necessarily her place to intervene at this stage.
	However, Caroline Darnage is an MP, so technically Russell's taxes did actually pay for those letters to be sent.
	That is kind of true.
	But a portrayal of his government, it was not.
	Because she's not in the fucking government.
	Tucker also keeps bringing up the point that there were no names attached to the accusations leveled against Russell, as though it's some kind of great smoking gun, when actually it is fairly standard journalistic practice, especially in high-profile cases where the victims might be putting themselves at risk of significant abuse.
	Given that roughly half of the internet seemed somehow willing to side with Russell when he was outed as a rapist, I think it was probably a wise decision to remain anonymous to the public.
	They are not, of course, anonymous to the journalists who worked on the case.
	Investigative journalists involved will, of course, know the actual names of those involved and there will be an audit trail to demonstrate their investigation Not only internally, but externally, if needed.
	If, for instance, you know, Russell decided legal action against them.
	Anyway, bear in mind, this investigation occurred over several years between the Times, Sunday Times, and Channel 4, and I somehow doubt that each newsroom would have just implicitly trusted the others enough to not at least check that the evidence was correct that each team was bringing to the table, right?
	There would have been- Which they outlined in the documentary, how they corroborated their information, not just that, they corroborated- Multiple stages of verification!
	Right?
	Nonetheless, if Russell does feel like he's been wrongly accused, he has every right to report these organisations to IPSO and sue them for libel, for what is clearly such a grave injustice.
	I mean, if he didn't do it, they can't have any evidence of him doing anything, like, say, texts from his phone discussing the rape he just did with the person he just raped, and if they don't have any evidence, then he would win that court case in a second.
	Curiously, there is no legal action whatsoever amounting from Russell.
	How fucking strange.
	In four months.
	Not a thing.
	Not a jot.
	Nothing.
	Why are we pretending that there aren't legal teams of lawyers behind both of these individuals we're looking at right now?
	Absolutely!
	It's not just two guys jawing in a garage.
	They're entities.
	Russell Brand has the same lawyers as the royal family.
	Those are his lawyers.
	They are not people who would just sit idly by if something was bullshit.
	Right?
	If it was unsubstantiated, then yeah.
	Yeah, it'd be all hands on deck.
	They'd be making a meal out of it.
	If it was unsubstantiated, I would be the first person in line telling them to shut the fuck up and sit down, you know?
	Because I would take issue with that as well if they were playing make-em-ups, because that's what we do.
	And why they wouldn't go to that length, why it is dangerous to take that leap is discovery.
	It's the discovery process that if you've got something that you don't like, and it's not always the case.
	Innocent people get accused and convicted all the time.
	I'm not saying there's anything perfect, but The process of discovery brings a lot of things up that you are legally obligated to present to the court.
	Oh yeah.
	And they don't want to do that!
	It would be the stickiest of wickets for Russell to decide to bring up.
	It really would be.
	For both of these guys.
	Oh, absolutely.
	They don't like discovery.
	No, they don't.
	It's one of the things that got Tucker fired from Fox.
	That's the thing.
	It feels like we almost take this for granted, but man, what just turns my insides black, and it's hard to listen further, is that statement of protecting witnesses' identity.
	Tucker's already said it a couple of times.
	It is such a dangerous narrative to assume that, through a legal precedent or through investigating, that there's no reason why a witness would want to keep their identity protected.
	There's legal precedence why we don't release the names of victims generally.
	That's a very basic, easily understandable tenet of the legal system.
	Yeah.
	The police don't do it for a reason, yes.
	Exactly.
	And so that to me is like, that's that poison pill to, you're gonna dance around and make all this vibe argument, but then it feels like it's serving that kind of purpose to reinforce that basic, it's biased, it's racist, it's misogynistic, it's that kind of undermining of any witness, any victim.
	You're undermining victims in general, and witnesses in general, and that is awful to hear.
	It hurts every time.
	Yeah, and in Tucker's conception, they should all be named.
	We should go back to the times when whenever there was a thing like this, we should have their name and address in the paper, you know?
	Because that's how it used to be.
	It's how you easily attack people and lynch people.
	Isn't it just?
	There are very specific devices that people like Russell want to argue to keep, and there's a reason we changed them.
	Yeah, there's a reason we got rid of those things, because people kept getting harassed or killed.
	Oh boy.
	Anyway, we're going to get to how Russell feels about being betrayed by his government.
	Well, it's astonishing if you regard your government to be in a position of service rather than a position of domination and control.
	But what's become apparent in recent years is what the nature of our relationship with government is, that they are there to rule and control and dominate.
	And whilst they may now do it with And with the language of inclusivity, I believe the threat of authoritarianism is far, far greater from those that use the language of liberalism than these emergent, somewhat nationalistically-oriented populist movements present.
	Because they are leveraging that power now.
	They're interested in censorship.
	They're militarizing the police force.
	They're introducing protest laws.
	They're introducing censorship laws.
	Through their actions, we can observe them.
	Through their fruits, can we know them?
	We can see what they do.
	And if you try to dissent, if you try to oppose, even what I consider to be a relatively marginal scale, then the consequences are severe and immediate and robust and terrifying.
	I think what makes your specific case so compelling is that if they could do it to you, a person who had the admiration of a lot of people who weren't interested in politics and was pretty famous and had some means, etc.
	Then the average person stands no chance against these forces.
	So with that, if you don't mind, can we get specific about a couple of things that you mentioned?
	Oh, please do.
	What Tucker makes there is almost an astute point, just not in the way he means it.
	The reason that Russell is able to get away with being a serial rapist and sexual assaulter, in spite of a wealth of evidence against him, is that he's famous, wealthy, and has a huge media platform.
	He has, as I've mentioned, the same lawyers as the royal family dealing with his public reputation bullshit.
	If he were just an unknown average-income serial rapist and sexual assaulter, I dare say he'd maybe be in prison by now, which really does highlight the actual corruption and inequity in our justice system.
	Yeah.
	The fact that we had to say maybe is the problem.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Not whatever bullshit these incredibly rich white men are saying.
	It's also just like, you're talking.
	No one's stopping you.
	Their version of censorship is, I don't get to make as much money on ads.
	My salary got cut because I was blatantly a legal problem.
	I mean, come on!
	That's another thing.
	Maybe it's too obvious.
	It's just, it's still so glaring, because like, especially whenever Russell brambles, like does, which is every, all the time.
	Yeah.
	You just like think about like, you're thinking about the overarching, like, what you're talking about, you're getting in the weeds.
	You're talking into a microphone.
	Everyone that's listening to you, I don't know how many, but enough!
	Stop saying you're being fucking censored.
	Being demonetized by private companies.
	He's being shut down to his 7 million YouTube subscribers.
	They're trying to de-amplify me!
	Okay, buddy.
	Okay.
	And speaking of which, we get a bit more of the conspiracy surrounding him in this next clip.
	The first is Moderna, which is a drug company.
	It's part of Big Pharma.
	Tell us how you intersected with Moderna and what you think they did to you.
	During the pandemic period, we reported continually about some of the clinical trials that Moderna conducted and whether or not they ought be deemed sufficiently rigorous to warrant the level of measures that were being implemented, if not entirely mandated.
	We talked about a government official called Jonathan Van Tam, who was the public face of the government saying, you know, we should be taking vaccines, recommending You've got to calculate it.
	Jonathan Van Tam subsequently took a position at Moderna.
	We reported on that.
	People within the FDA took positions at Moderna.
	We reported on that.
	We accurately reported that both Pfizer and Moderna were making $1,000, like a second
	or a minute, just like we reported a lot.
	You got to calculate it.
	Well done.
	We reported accurately and thoroughly about the degree to which big pharma were profiting
	from a situation in which Albert Baller explicitly said it would be inhumane to profit from this
	global crisis.
	This meant that we were tracked by agencies employed by Moderna.
	They had us on a high risk category.
	This is the reporting of Lee Fang on his sub stack.
	Not just me, Jay Bhattacharya, Michael Schellenberger, Alex Berenson, a number of what you might call
	anti-pandemic measures voices or strong critics of the way that the pandemic unfolded were
	under observation by agencies that were either funded by big pharma, sometimes the government,
	And in a sense, what I've started to realize, Tucker, is this cartilage between the state and the corporate world is often provided by these unusual organizations that are claiming to be Observing disinformation or monitoring, but they're actually crushing dissent.
	That's what they're doing in practice.
	Dissenting voices are being aggressively crushed by almost any means necessary that media organizations are collaborated in a way that is unprecedented in order to shut down dissenting voices.
	And it appears to me that this is part of something.
	I don't know that we've seen anything like this before.
	Hmm.
	Um, yeah.
	What?
	Oh, okay.
	Yeah.
	You haven't seen anything like this before?
	Like, I don't know.
	Well, I mean, what Russell is saying is, of course, that the TNI and organizations like it, as well as NGOs and disinformation tracking companies are all in cahoots and they all cooperated and coordinated to take Russell down with the allegations against him.
	Yeah, when they'll make up these elaborate lies to ignore capitalism.
	Being like, yeah, maybe you would argue there's too much power because there's only four websites left on the internet anybody uses.
	That's because it makes money.
	If that's your complaint, it makes money!
	Coming back to capitalism again.
	In reality, the two things that Russell is talking about are entirely separate.
	The Times and Channel 4 did their investigation without the involvement of any of these other media organisations or Big Pharma.
	If it feels like a lot of people are keeping tabs on what you're saying, Russell, it's because you're lying about people who have a vested interest in remaining credible.
	You are a lying liar who lies for money, much like Tucker here, and so these organizations have to keep tabs on you so they're able to combat whatever unsubstantiated bullshit you happen to be flinging about that week.
	Yeah.
	As for the other stuff, you know, Lee Fang and all of that and fucking...
	Jonathan Van Tam, like, yes, okay, government official, then later, you know, goes and works for a private company.
	Okay, okay.
	There's something eugenical about it, for real.
	Like, this is what I'm, like, just, it's striking me to, it's like, well, your, like, your pedigree is bad, so you're always bad.
	Yes, yeah, yeah.
	It's an arbitrary choice as to what your pedigree is.
	Regardless of the job you had, the job you were vested with, and your accomplishments within that job, listening to past FTC commissioners are the most frustrated people in the world.
	They're also the most qualified to explain the machinations that got us to where we are.
	So it's just, it is that like, well, you're the wrong kind and you'll always be the wrong kind and I will hold that against you.
	And it's obvious, I mean, obviously you're, you know, it's not how you're born, but like, it is that kind of like, Wholesale, baby-out-with-the-bathwater disregard.
	Be skeptical, by all means.
	But just throwing it away from the surface, and be like, you're the wrong one.
	Bye.
	It's pure guilt by association.
	That's all it is.
	That's literally all it is.
	If you worked in the fucking janitorial stuff at Moderna, good luck.
	You are a fucking Moderna.
	You're FBI now.
	You're a former Fed.
	It's the Georgia case.
	Right now, women were targeted as poll workers.
	I've been a poll worker, dog.
	It's not like you got power.
	That's not a thing.
	No, no.
	Targeting these individuals, that's exactly what they're doing.
	They're using these scapegoats.
	It's wrong.
	It's wrong and it's ridiculous.
	Have some evidence!
	It's just, ugh.
	It's a drag.
	It's a drag.
	I think they've heard the word evidence before, I just, I'm not convinced they're quite sure what it means.
	It's another disagreement on the terms.
	Like, we can't agree on the definition of terms, we can't agree on journalism, we can't agree on evidence, we can't agree on research, what are we gonna do?
	The standard of evidence is definitely a consistent disagreement, even among some people on the left as well.
	Well, and that's a discussion, but these guys are miles away from having a discussion.
	Yeah, exactly.
	At least we can have a discussion within ourselves.
	This is just, woo!
	Anyway, we get some more specifics from Russell here.
	So what you're saying is that these organizations which purport to be independent Are not actually independent from government.
	They merely give government, the politicians and the intel agencies, especially some plausible deniability, some distance.
	Yes.
	What they're doing.
	Is that what you're saying?
	I'm saying that Tucker, that seems to be the function.
	There's a group called Logically, and Logically have received millions of pounds of taxpayer money.
	And what they do is observe dissenting voices around, in particular, COVID and pandemic measures.
	but they are now working in the United States, apparently in order to regard misinformation
	around election campaigning.
	It seems that this group received government money in order to control online spaces.
	So if you're worried about the security of electronic voting machines or absentee ballots,
	you are denounced by these people and censored by them.
	Don't bring it up, Tucker.
	And that's precisely how it works.
	And of course, they employ former FBI agents, CIA agents.
	In a way, I suppose, what happened during the pandemic period because of like the Twitter files, for example, we started to learn the degree to which the deep state were involved in social media companies, the degree to which they were censoring and shutting down information, information that we now know to be true, which it was, you know, of course, you'll be aware that Mark Zuckerberg said we did sensor true information the category in fact of malinformation
	is information that's true but harmful to the agenda or powerful. Well it seems like
	groups like Logically and the Public Good Project are specifically empowered to control,
	sensor, de-amplify information that is harmful to that agenda. Boy, that Mark Zuckerberg
	quote was basically hey we were maybe a little bit overzealous that's all that
	actually amounted to in you know in We sometimes overstepped the mark in how intense we were on taking things off Facebook.
	Not acknowledging the mark being so gravely and consistently missed for years for us to get to this point.
	Ask me, Anmar, how unaggressive you can be, Facebook.
	For real!
	Come on!
	Yep.
	See, the problem with Russell engaging with specifics in general is that people like me can look it up.
	So let's take a look at Logically, or Logically AI.
	In their words, quote, Logically is a technology company that combines AI with expert intelligence to tackle the impact of harmful online content at scale.
	Our mission is to provide citizens, governments, and digital platforms with the ability to access accurate information, identify threats, and reduce the harm online content can cause.
	Unquote.
	Now, I've taken a little look at their harm reduction solutions, and it mostly comes down to clear communication of verifiable information and leading people to pre-bunk wherever possible.
	They don't have some great powerful solution to shut down a website or get people like Russell to shut up because of course they don't.
	It is impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.
	That is the problem that we have with misinformation in general.
	What an individual company then decides to do upon logically making them aware of a disinformation campaign against them is of course up to them.
	Like, they hire logically to present them the information, that's it.
	But options, yeah, are incredibly limited as to what someone can do to actually resolve the situation.
	The most obvious example of this is the COVID-19 vaccines, right?
	The most powerful companies and governments in the world all agree the vaccines are safe.
	But that does not stop Steve Down the Pub from telling me how he didn't get vaccinated because he didn't want Bill Gates tracking him.
	And then your breathing goes shallow very quickly.
	Yes, indeed.
	I take a few steps away.
	And you're like turning your head.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And if the argument is, oh, they'll shut down the people spreading the information like what they did to Russell, well, why haven't they done that to everyone who spread this shit?
	If they're so powerful and are able to manufacture accusations and allegations from across a 20-year period, why haven't they done that to Tucker, to RFK Jr., to any of these anti-vaxx grifter idiots?
	Maybe, just maybe, it's because the evidence has to be there in the first place.
	It has to have happened.
	And they're using their platform to say the thing.
	Come on, man.
	You're telling me how censored you are?
	Logically... Yeah, yeah, it's Dave Chappelle all over again, isn't it?
	Oh, I'm cancelled.
	Shut the fuck up with your Netflix special, you son of a bitch.
	Logically, in general, are just another disinformation tracking company, and that's about it.
	They've also got a partner website now called Logically Facts, which aims to act as a facts-checking resource for various topics in the current media cycle, Um, but that's about the extent of their reach, uh, and let's be honest, the only people who'll be looking at that site are people like me, who like to actually verify whether something is true or not, so it doesn't exactly affect Russell or Tucker's respective audiences.
	They ain't gonna be looking this shit up.
	We know that.
	We know that.
	Well, and acknowledging that it's harder and harder to keep track of all of the information that we have to take in every day, and they're capitalizing.
	Because the thing is, I'm not going to come for somebody that does not have the time and inclination, not necessarily inclination, but the energy to vet every single thing that you hear online!
	It would take three days!
	Oh, yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	To tackle your morning scroll.
	Yeah, you do have to have some basic seeking out trustworthy sources and using critical thinking skills, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	The media literacy.
	Exactly.
	And so, They're exploiting that situation.
	That situation is only getting harder for regular people, and so it's easier for them.
	It's this corollary of it's easier than ever for them to throw out some buzzwords, get people freaked out, and then they've got you hooked.
	It just is so unfortunate!
	And accordingly, you know, there's so much fucking misinformation out there and so many of these shitheads, you know, aside from the prominent ones like Russell, you get the little mini ones that exist everywhere.
	The supportive structure underneath them.
	Exactly.
	Of course you need a company like Logically to be able to actually figure out where all of this stuff is happening, because it's impossible for me to look into like all the various threads and everything that spin off just from one of Russell's videos.
	It would take weeks!
	It would take weeks of trying to figure out, right, this led to this, and all this happened in this fucking forum over here.
	Whereas, yeah, Logically can actually track that.
	And, you know, what the various governments and whatever then decide to do about it is up to them, but, you know, Logically aren't some great fucking demonic force in the internet.
	You know, shutting people down, you know, because they have different, differing views on, say, voting machines and all that.
	Shut the fuck up, Tucker.
	Now, in the next clip, we get a fairly remarkable turn where Russell decries media organizations for fear-mongering before telling people how scared they should be.
	This seems totalitarian.
	Yeah.
	To control what people are allowed to think is, I think that's the definition of it.
	I suppose that's what in essence what I've started to feel and report on consistently as you noted at the beginning of this.
	I'm not someone who's affiliated organically with conservatism or what you might regard as right-wing politics although I of course recognize the legitimacy of a whole variety of political views and the right of people to hold different views from one another.
	But it seems to me that authoritarianism now is being deliberately veiled in the insidious language of care, concern, safety and convenience.
	It seems to me that we're in a time where we lurch from one crisis to another, that the crisis is always used to legitimise certain solutions and a docile or terrified public is willing to participate In this proposed solutions that usually involve giving up their freedom, we are continually being invited to give up our freedom in exchange for safety or convenience.
	And it seems that this process is radically escalating.
	And I feel that this is something that we will see yet more of in the coming year.
	I feel like you've spoken publicly about this, that we're potentially on the precipice of serious, and to use your term, a hot war with Russia. And
	that's being reported on in my country right now. It's like we're being prepped, groomed,
	primed for war is coming. That we're being kept in a state of constant anxiety in order to
	induce compliance. That the ongoing stoking of cultural tension is to ensure that people don't
	begin to recognize that actually we have far more in common with one another than we do with
	these curious sets of establishment interests that seem to be transcendent of national
	democracy to...
	To be explicit, I'm talking about organizations like the WHO, NATO, the WF and their astonishing influence.
	Added to that, the types of groups we've discussed already that have been exposed due to Lee Fang's reporting, These think tanks and apparently independent organizations who are not independent when you look at where they get their money.
	Big Pharma or the government or the military industrial complex or the kind of people they employ.
	People from deep state agencies such as the FBI and CIA that have extraordinary affinity with the legacy media and their ongoing agenda.
	So what I suppose I'm sensing is that totalitarianism now will not bear the inflections or aesthetics of the 20th century militarism guys in medals with mustaches thumping their fists on a desk will be calmly told by gentlemen with beautifully coiffured hair or elegantly speaking ladies that just for our safety and just for our convenience we will be returning to our homes and anyone that has an audience or a base or an ability to communicate with people to disrupt those types of narratives will be identified and destroyed.
	Identified and destroyed.
	Are you scared yet?
	We will be told by gentlemen with beautifully coiffured hair or elegantly speaking ladies that just for our convenience we'll be returning to our homes.
	Or we'll be yelled at by a guy exposing most of his chest to Tucker Carlson to be afraid!
	And the only solution is of course to watch Russell's show and subscribe to his fucking locals channel.
	And here's the thing.
	It would be bad enough if he was criticizing the media for scaremongering and then just doing the same thing himself.
	It would be hypocritical and fundamentally fucking annoying.
	But what he's doing is worse because he's not just fearmongering, he is also lying.
	Repeatedly and often.
	Now, you can argue that the legacy media engages in fear-mongering to sell papers or get clicks or whatever.
	Fine, we can have that discussion.
	But what Russell is doing is selling fear based on lies.
	Usually intensely ramped-up, insane-sounding, borderline apocalyptic lies designed to scare the absolute shit out of his audience and prompt them into giving him money.
	You will be destroyed if you are a dissenting voice.
	As for what lies Russell is telling, like fuck, pick any episode of our show.
	Excess deaths in children is a good place to start, that was a few weeks ago, or anti-semi, anti-vax, pro-liar, because that's what he is.
	He's both pro-liar, he supports liars, and he is a professional fucking liar.
	That is what this man is and does.
	Oh, I mean, just thinking about especially even like that, that kind of veneer that he's claiming is, as far as the dissenting voice, like, okay, you know what, different point entirely.
	They want another lockdown so bad.
	It's impossible.
	There's no way that would happen.
	It would be so fucked up.
	The numbers say for COVID, that should have happened several times.
	And it's not that it was like... In America, anyway.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, you know, the air I gotta breathe every day.
	It's gross.
	Over here we're kind of okay.
	Well, it's not looking good here!
	Because that's the thing, or even just mask mandates, they have attacked these ideas so effectively.
	And also, they suck.
	People already don't want to do it.
	It's not hard to convince someone to rationalize, give themselves reasons to not do something that's a pain in the ass that we don't want to do.
	At best, a pain in the ass.
	Very difficult for some people.
	It makes their lives virtually impossible to live.
	They want it.
	Very true.
	It's never going to happen.
	Well, never is the wrong word.
	It ain't gonna happen for a long time.
	No one's gonna be willing to do it.
	It's just- No, no, no.
	It's so absurd, and they're just, they're baiting, like, ooh, they want a lockdown.
	Ooh, they want it so bad!
	Oh, absolutely.
	Well, I mean, like, every couple of weeks, Russell's got a new video being like, this is the next pandemic!
	Exactly.
	Or, oh, lockdown's coming again!
	Or, oh, disease X is the next pandemic!
	And it's gonna be now until forever fucking more.
	Well, that's what they were doing it before with Ebola.
	Yeah, they were doing it before with Ebola.
	They were doing it before that with swine flu, you know, with anything.
	And finally something hit.
	Something hit, and it hit everybody, and then their eyeballs turned into dollar signs like little cartoons.
	That reminds me, I've not watched it yet, but one of the taglines in one of Russell's recent videos is, uh, COVID is like HIV.
	No!
	Yeah, yeah, that's one of them.
	I've not looked into it as to what the fuck he's saying yet, so that might be next week.
	We'll see what comes.
	Oh, we capitalize them.
	Tex capitalized those words immediately.
	I hope that's what he's saying.
	Yeah, maybe.
	Autocorrect capitalizes those when you type them in.
	Is that it?
	I hope so.
	I hope that's it.
	It could be something that completely banal and stupid.
	Knowing Russell's coverage, it could be that.
	It could be something that's entirely nefarious.
	We really don't know with this guy.
	Probably.
	I will, of course, look into it.
	Now, we get into a clip that most of the media have centered their coverage around, right?
	That's what's coming next, in which Russell lays out his victimhood proper.
	Well, they're certainly, they've identified you and they're trying to destroy you in the most obvious way, in a way that hurts not just you, but your family.
	Was there ever a moment when this happened in September where you thought, you know, it's just kind of not worth it to be doing what I'm doing.
	This is so painful and so threatening to my family that maybe I just bow out and stop talking.
	My son was born with a heart condition and while this was happening he was undergoing heart surgery.
	He was 12 weeks old.
	Is that the world's tiniest phylingo in there?
	It sucks.
	Sick kid.
	Terrible.
	This is it.
	Russell's son was born, by the way, at some point recently.
	He hasn't made particular mention of it, and I don't really care.
	Except for him bringing it up here.
	There have been photographs of him and his family out and about doing things this last month and I just, it's not fucking relevant, I do not care.
	That is until he says, oh while all this was going on my son was 12 weeks old and having heart surgery.
	Firstly, and very obviously, any child having medical issues is heartbreaking, especially as a parent, because you feel utterly helpless and powerless in that moment and can do nothing to fix the situation.
	And I'm not going to come after Russell over that.
	Now, I mentioned in passing very early on in our show that Russell had another kid on the way.
	They announced it in late June and were seen shopping in early July, with Laura being very obviously pregnant.
	For this timeline to work out, the kid would have had to have been born, like, the week after.
	Which, okay, let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say that that happened.
	There is a kernel of doubt in my mind that that somehow perfectly lined up, and I have my reasons for that, but really, it's impossible for me to know for sure and impossible for me to judge.
	Fine.
	Assuming Russell is telling the truth, firstly, the only time that he stopped doing his show since we've been covering him was that one week when the allegations came out, and then some filler bullshit over Christmas, right?
	We've had ample evidence of Russell essentially being an absentee father for a while, but that shit takes the cake.
	Like, your son is born, leaving your wife with two young kids and a newborn baby to deal with, and last I checked, no nanny or au pair to speak of, and you just carry on like nothing happened with your usual fucking schedule.
	There's a degree of keeping up appearances for the sake of maintaining for your family.
	Sure, but like, throw up a clip show, do something.
	You couldn't get a guest for Football is Nice?
	This is what I'm saying.
	Yeah, and this was back, he was still doing Football is Nice, he was still doing all of this, right?
	Yeah, and so he just carries on, and then it turns out your son has a heart condition and has to have surgery, right?
	An awful, anxiety-inducing, agonizing time for your family, for you, for your wife, and at that moment when your infant son of three months is supposed to be having a scheduled heart surgery, you're doing a stand-up comedy tour around the UK.
	Because, remember, that's what was happening when everything came out.
	That's what he was doing.
	He was off doing a fucking stand-up comedy tour and he did one last date where everything came out and then had to cancel the rest.
	And listen, make any choices apparent that you want.
	We're going to make our assessments.
	Mm-hmm.
	And everyone's allowed their opinion.
	Absolutely.
	Ours is, well, not great.
	But then you don't get to go back and talk about how impossible it was to do your job, and how difficult it was to work, and how serious- How tough it was on you.
	Oh.
	Well, or just because something bad happened.
	Something bad came out against your character.
	It's that like, it's Darvo, it's Reverse Vendor, I was like, I'm now the victim because the news came out and it's so hard to deal with people accusing me of my sexual assault history, credibly and well-researched, and then now?
	We hear about the like, because also kids unassailable, like that's that's one of those like, okay, you can't I mean, honestly, like we're taking a risk and picking on it right now.
	Yeah, no, no, I know.
	I know.
	I know.
	But it's also the truth.
	Like it's real.
	I'm like, I have to I have to say this bit because there is definitely something like To me, it speaks to either, like, Russell being a massive piece of shit and, well, I mean, he is a massive piece of shit and does treat his wife like a drone who pops out kids for him, but... Yeah, let's all focus on how Russell is the victim in all this, because supposedly the allegations about the rapes he very much did happened to come out while his son was due for heart surgery.
	While Russell was barely at that time, he would have been barely fucking present in his own house!
	Like, either...
	These are the two options.
	Russell is lying about when his son was having heart surgery, or he's a piece of shit husband and dad.
	These are the two options here, and neither paint a great picture of our dear subject, Russell Brand.
	Post-op process was very harrowing and difficult.
	Like, even taking that off the post-op process was very harrowing and difficult.
	Sure, yeah.
	Seeing no amendment to his professional schedule whatsoever, it deflates his position now.
	Yes, yes, just to see.
	And maybe it was so painful he couldn't talk about it till now, but like, you don't, I don't know, man, it just...
	And she was pregnant again?
	And so he was taking off for the tour when she was pregnant again also?
	No, no, no.
	So they've had two kids.
	They had the third.
	Oh, OK, OK, OK.
	I heard June and July, and I was like, wait a minute.
	OK, all right.
	Got it.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And again, I am not convinced as to the timeline.
	But yeah, my guess Personally would be that probably he's lying about the timeline here.
	That would be my guess, but no way for me to know that.
	Not until eventually, I don't know, this kid turns 18 and becomes a fucking media star himself and we all know his birthday.
	That's the thing!
	He can say it and there's no way we can know.
	The best we can do is speculate.
	There's no way we can know.
	There's no way we can know yet.
	Unassailable.
	Eventually we'll find out and in 20 years time I'll be able to be like, I fucking knew it!
	Maybe.
	Maybe.
	Maybe Aura can be like, ah, he is a piece of shit.
	Okay.
	Again, those are the two options.
	Yeah, I don't like having to cover this.
	I really don't.
	I hate that he's brought this up and I have to look into like, wait, hang on, did that actually happen?
	Because again, this is the part that all of the kind of, all of the media are focusing on.
	They're like, oh, Russell Brand, you know, Sam was having, you know, heart surgery, you know, it was so difficult for him, he said, you know, how hard it was for him.
	Even if that's the case, being a rapist, having it come out in the news that you're, like, a rapist, no amount of, like, you made your bed, you don't get to choose when and how you lie in it.
	That's still your actions creating your crisis.
	You still put yourself in this situation.
	So you don't get to blame other people for calling you out to make you feel bad and that is somehow equivalent or even close.
	That's still just because it happened a long time ago and just because you did not foresee a potential like crisis in your family intersecting with this coming out doesn't make it not still your fault.
	Yep.
	Yep.
	That's how it works.
	But it's working because, you know, a bunch of the media coverage that I've seen has been sympathetic, which, uh, great.
	Anyway, next up, Russell spins yet more of a yarn about how dangerous he is.
	But what I've seen is the significance of family, the importance of having values that are transcendent of this, the importance of God.
	It's very easy to talk about God.
	I talk about God all the time.
	But when you need God is when the outside world shows you the reality of your powerlessness.
	This can just happen.
	This can be undone.
	This can be unspooled at you.
	And with our boy and to be in environments as you understandably and obviously are when you have a sick child you're in environments with other people they're in the exact same position.
	Yes.
	And you are shown what is real and you are shown what is truthful and you are invited to look at life very differently.
	So there are many things that I am grateful for as a matter of fact even though it's not a situation that I welcome and it's a as I say these are allegations that I object to in the strongest possible terms.
	The fact that it happened concurrently, while I had the opportunity to see the strength and dignity of my wife, and the beauty of my little son, and the reality of the people in this world that care for sick children, that perform heart surgery on tiny babies, shows me, look at all of these realities.
	How can you live in the ridiculousness of their version of events?
	I couldn't have been more open and public about the way that I lived when I was younger.
	I was riskiest.
	If anyone wanted to have sex with me, I'd have sex with them.
	I publicly announced it at the beginning of all shows.
	The idea that that was some sort of a smoke screen for criminal conduct is absurd.
	But I recognize now that unless you're willing to be a participant in these systems of compliance and distraction, then you pose some kind of evident threat.
	A big threat.
	Yeah.
	I mean, obviously, the response proves the power of the threat that you posed, and still do.
	Ugh.
	Okay.
	I am- That's a lot of praise for Big Pharma.
	There.
	Top.
	Well, well, well.
	For doctors, which, yeah, interesting.
	I'm going to encourage anyone at this point who hasn't seen or heard it to please go and check out episode 20 of our show where we cover what Russell did.
	We've got clips from the Dispatches special which aren't available for people to watch outside of the UK.
	We've got information from the Times reporting.
	We've got surrounding context.
	It's all there, right?
	And Russell is here claiming that, oh, he was very, very promiscuous and just had sex with lots of people, and that's all this could possibly be, when no, the man has a documented history of grooming and sexually assaulting women over decades.
	It's a tough watch, but please go and take a look.
	I honestly don't want to have to reiterate in full the horrific shit he did and said to these women, because it's rough and a serious downer for the show, but please, go and have a look.
	We got it.
	It's there.
	We've done the thing.
	Please.
	Also, no one is saying that his promiscuity acted as a smokescreen for illegal activity.
	It isn't a not this but this moment, it's a this and this moment.
	He did both.
	He was incredibly promiscuous in public view, and he also raped people.
	He did both of those things.
	It's a character witness kind of moment.
	And a rationalization.
	But that's not, yeah.
	It's not an or.
	You're right.
	Totally.
	No, it is not.
	And speaking as to him being around the people who care for sick children and perform heart surgery on tiny babies, you have to wonder what any honest-to-God actual doctor must be thinking around Russell.
	Like, I cannot imagine standing in front of someone who has made your job specifically immeasurably harder over the last, like, three or four years, and having to just grin and bear it and be fine with a conspiracy-spinning idiot, you know?
	The problem is, they probably have no idea!
	They're like, oh, they're getting Sarah Marshall, cool!
	They don't, like... Yeah, maybe.
	And that's what is amazing to watch Tucker specifically salivate over, not just lockdowns, but we have a converted lefty, when I would argue that's not the case.
	And I mean, it's like, you know...
	Big Christian authors through history, they add credibility to the beginning of their books by saying, I was a staunch atheist, and I converted, and here's why I'm writing the case for Christ, or whatever.
	Yeah.
	This is red meat for the Tucker set is a conversion story.
	But also, because of the volume of content and the environment they're in that does not hold consistency, consistency is not a standard that they adhere to.
	So then, He can say, I've been converted or I am still a leftist interchangeably.
	No one's going to hold his feet to the fire.
	No, no, no.
	Absolutely not.
	Absolutely not.
	Oh, yeah.
	Next, Tucker has to drag Russell back to the question because he did ask a question a while ago.
	And just take note of the little giggle at the opening of this clip.
	But again, just to quickly back to my question, because this was so intense and it happened.
	Oh, yeah.
	Your son was born and under undergoing the surgery.
	Did it ever cross your mind like this?
	I clearly have hit the third rail.
	And I'm out.
	I've seen that happen a number of times.
	Have you?
	Yes, I have.
	With who?
	And yes, with well-known people.
	Who?
	Name one.
	But you didn't do that, and here you are.
	You've clearly thought about it, and you've decided that you're going to continue forward.
	Was that a hard decision?
	Do you sometimes think that there is no choice?
	You have no choice.
	Did you ever really?
	Yes, I do feel that way strongly.
	There is no choice.
	We have no choice.
	Something strange is happening.
	Something ulterior is moving.
	Something very important is happening.
	I'm not probably to be a person that lacks self-interest.
	I feel fear.
	I feel anxiety.
	I'm a recovering drug addict.
	I like, you know, you know what that kind of psychological baggage that comes with.
	But I feel like, what is the purpose here?
	What are we doing here?
	I've been shown, in a way, I've lived a pretty amazing life.
	I grew up in a normal background.
	I got super famous.
	I experienced all of that giddiness, all of that hedonism, found it empty and hollow, and have been returned to a position Where people could actually be connected.
	I actually feel incredibly optimistic because of things like the ongoing agricultural protests around the world, the trucker protests, the lengths that people will go to to criminalize not just an individual like me, but whole movements will be criminalized as far right as Narcissist, whatever language is required to delegitimize the rejection of this global authoritarianism is what will be deployed.
	So when I say, no, I didn't think for a second about doing anything different.
	You know, I didn't think that.
	I don't think like that.
	And it's not out of bravery.
	It's out of something beyond that, because I think, you know, sometimes I would like to just be with my little daughters and my wife and my son and just live peacefully.
	But I don't know, Tucker.
	It doesn't seem like there's a choice.
	There isn't a choice.
	There isn't a choice.
	But, you know, even under those circumstances, some choose cowardice.
	And again, I've certainly seen it quite a bit.
	From who?
	Cowardice.
	Name one person, Tucker, who in your words has chosen cowardice.
	Give me one example of someone in Russell's position who has chosen cowardice.
	Fucking hell.
	Also, choosing to be, like, choosing to focus on your family.
	It's cowardice.
	Yeah.
	It's cowardice!
	Wow!
	And Russell hates being with his family.
	He's made this abundantly clear.
	He's always whinging about how hard it is to be a parent.
	And there's a reason he's never doing any of the fun things with his kids, like going to the fair.
	He's spending all of his time doing other shit because he doesn't want to fucking be with his family.
	Well, honestly, Steal My Basket scenario is like, he feels like he has to knuckle down and work even harder to- Commit to the cause, right?
	To support his family and to keep his family, you know, at a standard and whatever.
	But that's what I'm saying.
	That excuse could be made that, okay, well, all of these monetization options are taken off the table, so he's got to work extra hard to work and to make up for that loss.
	But there was no real change in the before and after.
	necessarily, there's a big change. But like, I can see that argument being made and to
	a degree, I mean, we've all been there.
	I feel like I've been there, you know, like having to like, oh, well, shit.
	Okay, I got to work twice as hard right now.
	But then that's a benefit of the doubt that I don't necessarily see as like, Justified!
	It's just, I don't... Yeah, I mean, the thing is, the thing is, yeah, I mean, that is, that's a problem that doesn't tend to occur to people within Russell's earnings bracket.
	You know, having to is a very, it's a very different question to you and I compared to Russell.
	Exactly.
	Having to work to support family.
	I'm coming from a place of class analysis, like, I'm up here and I fucking want to stay up here.
	And there's like, there's a lack of humility, I guess, in that, at least to me, that like, you know, I think maybe y'all are fine.
	I think maybe you could have taken time off for your kid having surgery, probably.
	Yeah, for your kid being born, for any of it.
	Maybe just to support your wife, good lord.
	You know, I think his other kids are, what, five and seven?
	Like, imagine having a five-year-old, a seven-year-old, and a newborn baby.
	It just sounds impossible to me.
	You know, God, poor Laura.
	Anyway, these two chuckleheads here are on just too noble a mission and have no choice but to continue their shows.
	It's too important, they have no choice!
	That's the rationalization of working harder, too.
	It's like, oh, I gotta knuckle down and be extra good at this.
	Gotta do it.
	Yeah, that's part of it, right?
	I will say, there is a nugget of truth in here, right?
	In that once you've gone to the spaces that Tucker and Russell have gone to, once you have veered this far right, 99 times out of 100, there is no coming back.
	Like, you cannot edge back towards the left.
	You definitely can't come back towards the left wing proper because the left generally take credibility very seriously.
	Russell won't ever be embraced by the left again because the other thing the left usually care about is when someone is a serial rapist and sexual assaulter.
	Conversely, the right don't seem to be too bothered by that.
	And even if that wasn't the case, right, if we took that out of the equation, if it just came down to the lies and conspiracy theories, it would take one hell of a performance for him to become anywhere near acceptable again by the left, and it would take years of genuinely trying to undo the harm that he has done to the world, and that's just not gonna happen.
	So in a way, yeah, there is no choice.
	If he wants to keep earning millions and being the center of attention, continuing to be an alt-right conspiracy grifter propagandist is about the only career path left to him, and that is entirely of his own doing.
	He put himself in this position and is now stuck.
	There's the community!
	The thing is, though, is like, there is still a foot, he still has a foot in the left sphere, the left, like, the wooey, you know.
	The crunchy side of things.
	Yeah, the granola, like, the burlap pastel.
	You know, geodesic dome crowd.
	He still has that, and he's still cashing in on that image, but also putting Laura's name on it, and talking in clearly very strict Christian terms on this show, but signing those posts on the community, you know, like social media, Hare Krishna.
	So, he's, he is getting, like, he's having his cake and eating it too for as long as he can.
	Yeah, but I will say, you know, the kind of, the thing about the crunchy to alt-right pipeline thing, you know, that is there for a reason.
	That's very much what he's capitalizing on there.
	I don't think it's him presenting to the left so much as him dragging people from that sphere over to him, you know.
	Right, but I'm saying that's the danger, is that he can still cash in on that- Yeah, he can still appeal to that specific market.
	Persona.
	And they're gonna use that too, because he's still welcome at community, so he's still a lefty granola, he's our little new pet lefty granola guy.
	The aesthetics can rationalize a lot.
	True, true, true.
	But he'll never be accepted by the left in earnest, I don't think.
	Yeah, no, I'm not saying that.
	No, no, no, I know, but that's the point I'm making.
	And he's never going to be a fucking movie star again.
	That ship has sailed.
	Yeah, all of these career paths are closed off to him because of his own actions.
	And he has just stuck himself in this little box.
	And it's like, well, I don't have a choice.
	Because what else can I do at this stage that will get me the same amount of attention and income?
	And there's nothing.
	There is nothing.
	He can do this or he can retire.
	Those are his options.
	For now, he's going to carry on doing this.
	Well, retirement's going to be less money.
	Exactly.
	Tucker finally takes us back to Caroline Dynadge, and Russell starts to make a fairly good point before veering back to his bullshit.
	Dynage, you mentioned a person called Dynage.
	Can you explain what you mean by that, who this person is and what role she plays in what has happened to you?
	When you become accustomed to dealing with American politics, it's huge sums of money.
	It's powerful agencies that you see depicted in Hollywood movies, characters played by great movie stars.
	And so when you return your gaze to British politics, you feel like you're dealing with some sort of drudgery.
	Like some ludicrous heritage porn.
	Who are all these dames and baronesses, entitled individuals?
	They can't be doing anything serious.
	Someone called Dame Caroline Dainage, who sounds like a Downton Abbey regular.
	But actually though, Dame Caroline Dainish put forward the online safety bill.
	She's married to a dude that does military psyops and now uses those very psyops with the domestic population.
	She's the person that got in touch with the social media platforms demanding that I be demonetized.
	They seem to have an extraordinary agenda.
	I looked her up because I'm not as familiar with your politics as I should be.
	I looked her up and I think what I was so struck by was that she's a member of the Conservative Party.
	Right.
	And that suggested to me that there isn't a choice in British politics.
	There's really just one party.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	It's a uniparty.
	But they're not even pretending at this point.
	They're not really pretending.
	Um, there was a moment there just then where Russell didn't know where Tucker was going with this.
	Um, and then as soon as he heard, oh, it's really just one party.
	Oh, yes.
	I know what I'm doing now.
	Yeah, they're not even pretending anymore.
	Um, good lord.
	Um, yeah, so...
	First, Caroline Doniger's husband, yeah, was a bit of a spook in Afghanistan, etc.
	There's absolutely zero evidence of him using spook tactics on the general public of the United Kingdom.
	There's just nothing to substantiate that at all.
	Very different set of rules on home soil, yeah.
	Well, they're arguing that there isn't, and it's all a psyop against us.
	Everything is a fucking psyop.
	Politics is politics, and yes, Caroline Dainage is an MP for the Conservative Party, as Tucker so astutely pointed out.
	Um, but the party itself is far from unified on plenty of issues.
	The only thing they collectively agree on is fucking over the poor and making life better for the rich, which is why that's the consistent thread of five successive Tory governments.
	Um, but underneath that is factions within factions all backbiting and bickering, right?
	Standards stuff.
	Plenty of Tories agreed with Dainish sending those stupid letters to TikTok and Rumble, and plenty of Tories called her an idiot for it.
	Beyond that, much like in the US, we predominantly have two parties.
	I got into our electoral system and the genuine third or fourth party options in some parts of the UK in our last off-brand.
	Head to patreon.com slash on-brand if you want to listen.
	But mostly it comes down to labouring and conservative, and while in my opinion the difference between those two parties is not significant enough, it's still pretty fucking significant.
	Uh, one party wants to kill the poor, the other seemingly does not, for a start.
	One party wants to sell off the NHS, the other does not.
	Um, these alone are differences enough to swing my vote in one direction or the other.
	Uh, but what Tucker's really seized on here, um, is that if this were happening in the US, there's not a fucking chance that a Republican politician would be advocating for Russell Brand to be demonetized for his actions.
	They protect whoever is perceived to be on their side, whereas apparently some of the Tory party does actually have a little bit more integrity than that, which is surprising even to me.
	In Tucker's mind, it should be the Labour Party agitating for Russell to be demonetized, which believe me, there is an appetite for that.
	But over here, even the scumbags responsible for killing off impoverished children are disgusted by Russell Brand.
	I mean, so here's the thing.
	I agree with Russell.
	Mm-hmm.
	Movies are more exciting than real life.
	Oh yeah, that's true.
	I agree completely.
	That is absolutely true.
	Maybe if he sat through a couple hours of C-SPAN, he'd see that government is boring.
	Government should be boring!
	When it's not boring, that's a problem!
	And I mean, not necessarily, like, learning about it, I'm very interested.
	Also, I wish I didn't have to learn about hideous scandals and fraud and corruption.
	I'd love to not have to think about it ever.
	That's what government is supposed to be.
	Yeah, no, I completely agree.
	I don't want to see people trying to have fistfights in the Senate.
	None of this is what should be happening.
	Yeah, we started at movies.
	We're not talking about movies, and we're not gonna carry on with real life, bud.
	Isn't that where we always start?
	Or we end up, if it's in there anywhere.
	It's like rollerball.
	I don't care where we place it!
	Right, yeah.
	Running Man might be an interesting commentary.
	It's Minority Report.
	We're all coming back.
	Next, we get to hear about why the COVID inquiry is happening in the UK.
	Here's a sort of an extraordinary thing that appears to be playing out in addition to just being casually informed by the legacy media that we're on the precipice of war with Russia and that conscription might be reintroduced in 2024.
	But there was a COVID inquiry in our country, which by the way, I don't imagine for a second would have happened without independent media reporting, without voices like Jay Bhattacharya, who was shut down, or voices like Michael Schellenberger or Berenson, people that have been shut down and vilified at large and extensively.
	The COVID inquiry has already cost £145 million.
	It's been booted off and delayed indefinitely, but at least until after the general election.
	Like many countries, there's an election in our country this year.
	But as usual, it's between two neoliberal, what you might term centrist parties, that are ultimately dominated and controlled by the same concerns, where an extraordinary focus is spent on the tiny, minute differences.
	But the party nominally of the left is ultimately a centralist neoliberal party.
	The Labour Party, nominally of the right, is a neoliberal, centralist party.
	They may quibble about some issues that seem significant, and certainly those issues are stoked and amplified.
	But neither party will say, we are going to have a thorough investigation into what went on in that pandemic.
	That clearly was a lab leak.
	It looks like it was a bioweapon.
	It's been concealed.
	The people that we entrusted with our response to that pandemic are likely explicitly linked to the leak in the first instance.
	These kind of stories are never told.
	There are no legacy media organizations that worked in conjunction with one another to attack me evidently and by their own reckoning over a series of years.
	They are not conducting investigations into Epstein Island.
	They're not conducting investigations into the nature of the pandemic, how it was funded, where the money went, where it came from, the efficacy of lockdowns.
	Where are these investigations?
	Even the fabled Times of London?
	The fabled Times of London!
	Such garbage.
	It's just the times, has been since 1788.
	Yeah, so yeah, no one is looking into Epstein Island and no one has ever reported on COVID-19 with a degree of scepticism.
	Yeah.
	When they just released a bunch of new, like, legal documents for an Epstein case.
	And everyone is reporting on them.
	Everyone is reporting on them.
	It's everywhere.
	Yes.
	That's... Wow.
	Alright.
	Okay.
	Sure.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	In reality, but of course, there are shedloads of articles about Epstein Island.
	Though, I will say, mention of Trump is conspicuously absent any time Russell covers it, by the way.
	Curious.
	While the legacy media tend to give the actual full list of who is involved, and Covid-19, if you look back across the last four years, there are plenty of articles in places like the Guardian, the BBC, as well as even places like the Telegraph and the Daily Mail asking earnest, sceptical questions about lockdowns and vaccines and all of that stuff.
	It's just that the honest, journalistic conclusion of that is always, eh, they seem to be for our benefit in the end.
	Because that is essentially the only conclusion that can be reached by anyone looking into this with a degree of honesty.
	Plenty of questions have been asked by these same institutions about the origins of COVID-19, it's just, again, they are for the most part asking honestly, and even the rags that have a narrative to spin, like the Telegraph or the Daily Mail, Have to stay within IPSO regulations or they'll get fined, sued, have to print a retraction the same scale as whatever lie it was they told, and potentially will be shut down if they fuck up badly enough.
	So they can't outright lie about it, unlike these two people.
	PBS has a whole playlist if you'd like to watch it.
	It's all about, like, there was so much reporting that they did that was very important.
	What they were doing was they were exposing the problems with our healthcare system and the breakdowns of our healthcare system and the impacts of this actual disease on our real lives.
	So yeah, it's everywhere, it's free, and you can just watch it.
	Unless you think P.A.B.S.
	is a psy-op, then honey, I don't know.
	I don't know what to do.
	Well, this is part of the problem.
	Oh, it's government-sponsored, it's a fucking, yeah.
	The BBC have fucking looked into the veracity of it being a Chinese lab leak and all of that, because it's such a popular narrative.
	Yeah, there's tons of content out there!
	Media organizations are like, huh, we should, okay, let's look into it and check it.
	And obviously everyone's going, yeah, no.
	But that's not sufficient for these idiots.
	As for the COVID inquiry in this country, it's not been postponed until after the general election.
	It's continuing as we speak.
	But the specific segment of the inquiry hearing evidence about the development of vaccines and other drugs has been pushed back likely to early 2025, which is after the general election.
	To Russell, this is a great conspiracy, but in reality it was always just a potential outcome of these hearings in case of any more investigation being required, which is exactly what's happened.
	Specifically, Baroness Hallett, who is chairing the inquiry, said more time was needed to prepare for a separate investigation into the impact of COVID on the NHS.
	That right there is essential to better understanding the shape of our healthcare system and how it has been and is still being completely battered by COVID-19.
	But Russell doesn't give a shit because, well, he can afford private healthcare and this whole thing doesn't fit any of the narratives that he's trying to spin.
	As for the COVID inquiry being brought about by shitheads like Jay Battataria, Michael Schellenberger and Alex Berenson, abso-fucking-lutely not.
	These idiots never called for an inquiry or a proper accounting of what went on during the pandemic in the UK, not least of all because they're all fucking Americans.
	They don't give a shit what's happening over here!
	Yeah.
	They do not care.
	The reality is that there was always going to be a COVID inquiry.
	We knew this from the start.
	There's no way it was ever going to be otherwise in this country, particularly as Boris Johnson and his team of cronies were in power at the time.
	From the jump, we had 40 million pound PPE contracts being given to Matt Hancock's pub landlord mate, who had never had anything to do with any industry like that before.
	It was just, here you fucking go, here's 40 million.
	That's just one example, right?
	And according to a British court, over £600 million worth of PPE contracts were given out unlawfully to mates of Tory ministers.
	£600 million.
	We had government ministers ignoring their own lockdown laws.
	It was an absolute fucking shitshow from the start and there was always going to be an inquiry into this.
	Also, there's the other side, like MP Dr Johnson the other week, who was insinuating that it was the vaccine who was killing children in that very same COVID inquiry.
	Now, she's an absolute ghoul of a human being for doing so, as it completely obfuscates that it's her party's policy of enforced poverty causing these child deaths, but the people with these insane beliefs do in general have a right to ask these questions about vaccines and the efficacy of lockdowns and be heard.
	This was always going to happen.
	Like, it's nothing to do with- They're allowed to be heard, and then they eventually have to accept an answer that's evidenced and researched.
	That's the- There's the rub, right?
	That's the idea.
	That's the idea.
	Right.
	Yeah, I'm not too convinced that's what's going to happen, but hey, we'll see.
	I went into the white room of my mind for a second, thinking about how badly I want any consequences for the PPP loans that were given out here.
	It is outrageous!
	Again, the court ruled that these contracts were given out unlawfully.
	There were no consequences for the government, no consequences for the people involved.
	It was just, this happened, and that's it.
	That's also why I was like, oh, I wish we had that.
	I know, it wasn't enough.
	Yeah, no, at least acknowledgement is something.
	Yeah, and I mean, and maybe there is kind of a piecemeal, you know, maybe there is some accountability and there's a piecemeal, like, you know, any kind of justice happening over PPP loans.
	I have not seen it.
	And with the kind of like, there has been investigation, there's been reporting.
	It just doesn't seem like it's gonna do anything.
	When, like, if I get my taxes wrong, the IRS lets me know and gets my money.
	We can do it for the rest of us.
	Why can't we do it for the stuff that's, like, actually really expensive?
	Yeah, and especially there are so many fewer of the rich people compared to us.
	It's funny how that works, isn't it?
	It seems strange.
	Seems strange.
	Almost like there's an actual conspiracy there that maybe someone should look into, but no, no, these two people are two of the richest people on the planet, so why would they do that?
	Well, institutional bias isn't real.
	I don't know if you've heard Tucker about that, but I know he doesn't think it's real.
	Oh, okay.
	Oh, well, good to know.
	Yeah, see?
	Problem solved.
	That solves it!
	Alright, let's carry on, everybody.
	I do want to point out, I wish that, like, even calling this an interview, like, qualifying this as an interview of Russell is a lie, because every single clip, I had that, there was an Axios article, there was an Axios interview, I didn't even watch the whole thing, I couldn't find it, it was a whole thing, and it was years ago, of Donald Trump, and there was a puzzled man, and I can't, I'm so sorry, I can't remember his name, there's a puzzled reporter who just had to stop him, like, every five words, like, wait, What?
	That's what an interview is, like a touted interview, and there are moments...
	Very, like, just, oh, one after the other.
	I mean, like, an interviewer, not like a puff piece commercial maker, would say, wait, what?
	Russell, what?
	And being, especially up top, like, because he starts one place and he goes to another place, and they're like, oh, I'm sorry, conscription?
	We're gonna do, like, stop at conscription.
	Stop, tell me.
	Yeah, some degree of critical analysis would be required of an actual interviewer.
	On its face!
	Just, whoa!
	We're just accepting that conscription is now on the table because that has been a conservative talking point for decades in this country.
	That was a threat that was immediately employed after 9-11 by Every single fucking, like, crazy-ass pundit.
	And then before that, conscription of women was used as a cudgel by Phyllis Schlafly to attack and ultimately defeat the ERA.
	And in the wake of Vietnam, like, that's a very serious threat to make, and it was very fucking effective.
	Come on!
	Yeah, conscription is doing the rounds again at the moment, and yeah, we may end up covering that in the imminent future.
	Well, we at least touched on it, because that's the basic, like, they've been doing it for, like, John Birch Society shit.
	Like, that's what they've been doing.
	And it's been very effective, which is scary.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	In the next clip, Russell, well, he hits his stride, really.
	So there's nobody, and pardon my ignorance, I'm peering in from the outside, but there really isn't any big media organization in your country that's even trying to answer the question, what was that?
	Where'd this virus come from?
	No one's doing that.
	Do you know one of the things I find terrifying about becoming more educated about this space, Tucker, mostly by listening to more educated voices than my own, is that many of the things a person might instinctively feel, such as you feel like, you know yourself, forgive my ignorance, I don't know much about British politics, but the way that one might intuit, hey, should we not be provoking Russia into a war?
	Don't they have nuclear weapons?
	Should we think very carefully about that?
	I mean, how much do we want Ukraine in NATO?
	And do we even need NATO anyway?
	The kind of things you might think if you If you're a regular blue-collar person working for a living, maybe in the police force or the fire service or as a nurse or as a teacher, something that gives real value to your nation, the kind of things you might think, they're true.
	Those ideas are true.
	And in order to prevent you from reaching those ordinary everyday regulations, a machine is put to constant work.
	To conquer the space of your attention, incessantly and relentlessly, filling your mind with dumb ideas and dumb distractions, making you believe that some sugar or a screen might be a convenient palliative as your children are marched off into an unwinnable forever war.
	Gotta admit, he's nailing the rhetoric here, right?
	It's this little segment, it's this little fucking reel that makes Russell such a dangerous propagandist.
	He is spinning that yarn, he is throwing his truffles down before Tucker and his audience, and the little conspiracy piggies that they are are gobbling them up.
	Um, like, Tucker is... Tucker is beside himself!
	He's in stitches!
	Um, so, if you didn't go to university and are in the police force or fire service or a nurse or a teacher, maybe you might think we shouldn't be at war with Russia.
	The idea being, ah, it is actually the less educated of society who have some common sense about world politics and haven't just been led astray by these highfalutin academic institutions and media organizations.
	Fun thing there is that in the UK you need a degree in nursing to become a nurse, a degree in teaching to become a teacher, and if you join the police you will have earned an accredited degree in professional policing practice by the time you finish your training.
	So all three of those professions do require a degree, and the only one of those things that he just mentioned that doesn't require one is being a firefighter, but there is still significant education and training required to do the job these days.
	And I know this because, well, I can look it up, and also one of my brothers was a firefighter for a bit, so I know what he went through.
	So, yeah.
	Not quite, Russell.
	Not quite.
	And here's the thing.
	I don't want to be at war with Russia.
	I don't want the Ukraine to be at war with Russia either.
	What I want even less is for Putin to think that it's totally fine for him to just invade and take over sovereign countries.
	Because, for a start, the buck does not stop with Ukraine.
	He would very quickly be moving to other bordering countries.
	As has already been reported on, he's openly eyeing up Finland out loud.
	You know, that's what he is doing right now.
	And I don't give two shits if he felt provoked or threatened by NATO or whatever else.
	That is not an acceptable excuse to invade a sovereign country.
	Oh, I felt threatened so I, you know, murdered a bunch of people.
	I attempted a genocide because I was so scared.
	That's not an excuse.
	That or even, you don't want to challenge a nuclear power, well then, nope.
	He's exposing one side of the foreign policy calculus without examining the other side.
	Conveniently leaving the other side out of like, yeah, no, we maybe shouldn't let a nuclear power run roughshod.
	And that's all of them, including the one I live in!
	Yes, absolutely.
	None of them should be allowed to do that.
	And again, what Putin actually wanted was for all of the military forces in the region around Ukraine to fuck off so that he could take it without so much as a fight.
	That was his aim.
	And he was like, well, I guess we'll just do this the hard way.
	Yeah, and plenty of politicians do use that as an excuse.
	It's like, well, I'm afraid of what they're going to do, so I'm not going to do anything.
	And that's bad!
	There is not a cost-benefit... Somehow, people in charge can't make... Their cost-benefit analyses are at best quarterly, without considering the long-term ramifications of maybe how they get involved or not getting involved or whatever.
	So it's like the accusations... The thing is, The top, you know, the top-down accusations, okay, let's be critical of how NATO operates, let's be critical of these things, but like, you're not coming to this in good faith, and you're showing it in your own argument.
	Like, come on!
	Anyway, yeah.
	Yeah, is about how I feel as well.
	Anyway, Russell has managed to make Tucker laugh, and you know, he's a comedian, ostensibly, and what every good comedian knows to do is if you make him laugh, you fucking hammer on that point, and so he's gonna hammer on it just a little bit further.
	We've been thinking lately with the hoofies and stuff, and I'm being deliberately glib, but you go from not ever having heard the word hoofie to being invited to hate the hoofies.
	Oh, the hoofies!
	got to hate the Hoofies now and you're like, you know, just to move a battleship into that region,
	think of the taxpayer dollars and it's not as if the Pentagon are going to be passing an audit
	anytime soon and telling you where this money is actually going and two trillion dollars was
	spent on Afghanistan and if you think of the before and after picture of Afghanistan, oh well
	thank God we spent that two trillion dollars because before Afghanistan was and now Afghanistan
	is, it's very difficult to fill in those sentences isn't it?
	And like so what I'm saying is, is like your sort of easy dismissiveness of what British politics
	amounts to is probably right. Two corrupt parties pursuing the same ultimate end, keep people tyrannized,
	keep people distracted, keep them turned on one another over minor issues that will not
	ultimately affect their lives or the lives of their children so that the agenda of the powerful can be
	pursued without opposition.
	War, the economy, public health, food supply, water supply, I mean these are the energy, these are the things that matter, and they're the things that are never discussed openly, ever.
	Ever.
	No one ever talks about these things.
	Yeah, war, the economy, public health, food supply, safety of the water supply, and energy.
	Desert.
	It's just a desert.
	They're all things that are never discussed openly according to Tucker Carlson.
	Like, I didn't need to look into that one.
	It's a profoundly stupid thing to say.
	As though every single article in the last four years hasn't been about exactly one of those things.
	Um, in reality, his actual complaint is that the conclusion of these articles don't match up with the conclusion he wants them to arrive at, which is one of the alt-right conspiracy grifters.
	So, Russia?
	Good.
	Vaccines?
	Bad.
	Oil?
	Good.
	Renewable energy?
	Bad.
	Um, these things are all discussed openly and at length, it's just he doesn't agree with the outcomes, and so he pretends that, oh, everyone's too scared to talk about them openly.
	Sure thing, buddy.
	Well, and the thing is, I don't disagree with what Russell said at the beginning.
	About Afghanistan?
	No, no, no.
	But being critical about, like, that's literally happening.
	Millions of people are taking to the streets because they are aware of the problem, and because they're upset with the problem.
	And we don't want to see that happen again.
	But why you're saying it needs to...
	It is so unfortunate that the nuance can be stripped of these ideas.
	Like, that's a perfect soundbite.
	There's tons of soundbites that people reference of Tucker, like saying a portion of a thing that sounds reasonable, but then everything else around it changes the definition and the intent behind that soundbite.
	But we can't get there, and we need to find a way to get there on a massive scale if we have any chance of tamping down misinformation.
	What fucking choice?
	You know, especially if you just pick and choose from this interview.
	Anyway, Tucker has a critical question for Russell.
	Can I ask you a question that you may be able to answer that I've been meditating on?
	I'll give it a go, Tucker.
	I'll tell you that.
	Well, you're just uniquely positioned to answer because you've seen both sides.
	But so the things that the people in charge hate include nature.
	Yes.
	And the class of people who are most useful to your nation, you describe them.
	Cops, firemen, teachers, nurses, all of them are crushed during COVID, by the way.
	Yes.
	And farmers.
	And it's indisputable that if you don't have those people, you don't have a society.
	You could get rid of every think tank and every sociology department and every liberal arts university and probably be OK.
	Get rid of your farmers and starve to death.
	So it's not obvious why the leadership of a country would hate the very people they need most and hate the most beautiful and valuable thing they have, which is nature.
	Why do they hate those things?
	Oh my god.
	It terrifies me to contemplate, Tucker, that people like Alex Jones and in our country, David Icke, who aside from some views that are impossible to corroborate around quite occultist and shall we call them marginal ideas, difficult to corroborate ideas, When it comes to the subject of globalisation and the increasing authoritarianisation of our planet, appear to have been ahead of the curve.
	You can see them 20, 30 years ago saying the empowerment of NATO, the empowerment of world banks and the WHO.
	It's extraordinary.
	It is extraordinary, I'll give him that!
	Okay, we've got some Alex Jones was right shit happening here.
	And some David Icke was right shit happening here too.
	That's riiiiich!
	Ah, dear.
	For Alex Jones, everyone go listen to KnowledgeFront for a full accounting of how full of shit that guy is, and for David Icke, well...
	He's a bit slipperier and much less interesting little devil, but I know Cognitive Dissonance covered quite a bit of his lizard people shit back in the day, like reading through his books and stuff.
	I know there was a podcast called Ikeland, I think, looking into him.
	But yeah, there's information out there, let's put it that way.
	This gave the amputee a read-through of his book, as well.
	Ah, cool!
	Okay, great.
	The most critical point to harness about these people is that when they're not outright lying or spinning half-truths and conspiracy theories, they're in fact just throwing out tons and tons and tons and tons of incredibly vague predictions.
	And it is the same shit, day after day after day, and it compounds, and what will happen is that something tangentially close to what they said would happen happens, and they go, ah, see, I predicted it!
	Which is easy to do when you have thrown out predictions for every possible negative outcome that could ever happen.
	It is exactly this.
	Say, conscription, for example.
	There you go.
	There you go.
	Yeah, it's this kind of shit that allows Alex Jones to say, I predicted 9-11 as though he's some great savant, whereas no, there was a credible possibility of that happening, of Osama bin Laden once again attacking the World Trade Center, and that's exactly what happened.
	And there are much more tangential examples that exist, you know, where if you throw enough shit at a wall, something will stick to it.
	And there are many cases that Knowledge Fight have covered where Alex is up there making it stick with a truckload of duct tape and maliciously editing the things that he has said previously to make sure it sticks.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, that's actually the situation.
	If you read a list of a hundred things that might happen every day, you're going to hit it eventually.
	Yeah!
	Exactly!
	Exactly!
	That's it!
	It's the horoscope method.
	That's the game!
	That's the game!
	And that's how we become some great fucking shaman, according to Russell.
	What a rich tradition they've joined.
	I know, right?
	But yeah, Alex Jones and David Icke are full of shit.
	And so is Russell.
	And so is Tucker.
	These people.
	Russell has a little bit more to say on the subject, and Tucker gets a little bit excited.
	And it seems to me that the disempowerment of ordinary people, the condemnation, the demoralization of the public, to create people that just are weary and broken, and if not enslaved then so dependent it amounts to a form of slavery, cannot be inadvertent.
	It seems to be a denial of something fundamental that I, in my language, I would call spirit.
	The right to be who you are.
	That there isn't something fundamentally ugly or wrong with you.
	That you are allowed to be who you are.
	And I see that as a universal principle that will be applied all the way from the left to the right across various ways that people claim their individual identity now.
	It seems to me that yes, that if you start to attack those pivotal infrastructural roles.
	I was struck when speaking to some of the people that you work with.
	Man, as you know, that's been a cop for 26 years in New Jersey, 45 years in the security services.
	These people that give their lives for a country.
	So to tell those people that your country doesn't mean anything or to alter the meaning of what a nation is or alter what your contribution has been.
	It seems to be about a kind of disorientation and it's difficult actually sometimes.
	The reason I mentioned at the beginning of this rather chroming answer figures that are broadly condemned as conspiracy theorists but then aren't we all these days?
	The reason I mentioned them is because they talk specifically about ideas...
	It's to do with spirituality, morality and ethics.
	And it's hard for someone like me to consider that the goals of this global establishment are anything other than power, finance, dominion.
	But when you talk about this loathing of nature, whether that's human nature or botany or the great expanse, it's difficult to think that there isn't something dark at its core.
	Jesus.
	Because there's no rational explanation for that.
	How could you want to despoil nature?
	How could you hate human nature?
	How could you want to hurt people?
	Those are not rational responses to anything.
	I mean, clearly, What we're watching are the fruits of spiritual war.
	If you can give a better explanation, let me know.
	Money, stupid!
	Oh, you got it before I did.
	All right, Tucker.
	Yeah, no, no.
	Tucker, I do have a better explanation for all of this than a spiritual war, but I don't think he's going to like it very much.
	In fact, what's happening is that... Yes, money.
	And also, Russell and Tucker live in a separate but distinct reality to our own.
	Or more likely, their audience live in that reality.
	How much of their own bullshit they believe remains to be seen.
	But their audience definitely live in that separate reality where, yes, all the people in any position of power hate nature and hate human nature and hate spirituality and are quite probably of the devil when it comes down to it, maybe even the literal Christian devil.
	Uh, whereas the reality that you and I live in, Lauren, is one of, yes, rampant late-stage capitalism fucking the planet and the people who live on it.
	Uh, but those in power are ultimately human beings.
	Uh, some of them are good.
	Some of them are overwhelmingly shitty.
	Some of them are helping the fight against climate change, while others are tearing down every bit of forest they can find because it earns them money.
	Um, the hatred of nature, the wanting people to be downtrodden and just to get on with it, all of this fundamentally comes back to capitalism.
	Extortion of the finite resources on our planet and extortion of the workers themselves because it benefits those making money at the top.
	Once again, that's the real problem here.
	It's not some great fucking satanic warfare.
	It's not people hating nature.
	It's people being able to profit by fucking nature, and the system that we have massively rewards that.
	That is the answer, Tucker.
	Not spiritual warfare.
	Yeah, and where they started was the disorientation of once you learn the real history of your culture, your country, whatever, right?
	Yes, it is disorienting to have to dismantle every tiny little thing you learned.
	And you're like, all right, the dollop threw me for a loop.
	They recently did an episode on Lisa Frank.
	Now, I tattooed down in the Lake of the Arts, Like the Ozarks is a Branson adjacent for Americans are very aware.
	It's a little tacky, a little rough around the edges, but like a fun, like a resort area in Missouri.
	I'm a poor, I'm also an American poor, so I'm doing worse than my grandparents did.
	They had a little more comfort.
	So that's how we, summers were spent in this kind of, Tacky, cheap, but lovely place.
	And I went and tattooed there as an adult and like and airbrushing.
	It was a big deal down there when I was growing up.
	And I was told that Lisa Frank, the artist that made all of our folders and binders and stickers we were obsessed with as a child, started as an airbrush artist, which makes perfect sense with the way that her style of art is, right?
	It lined up completely.
	It's this lore that I was convinced of.
	I told it to other people because it was so authoritatively told to me.
	Guess what?
	Literally not at all.
	Literally completely wrong.
	And the beginning of the dollop episode, I was like, oh, I done been lied to.
	Okay.
	And rather than starting the coalition to defend Lisa Frank's airbrushing empire, I was like, huh, somebody was wrong.
	That's a cute story.
	And it is disorienting to think, for me especially, the more I learn about history, I'm like, oh, I can't trust any piece of information?
	Yeah.
	And they fill in the emotional void without the informational void.
	So getting information for me, even if it's unpleasant, even if it proves me wrong, it is a relief to know the reality.
	And they don't have, like, it's not a relief to learn the truth.
	Because it injures, like, if your ego is bruised by learning the truth when your worldview or your, you know, your information was incorrect, you don't need to blame yourself for not knowing.
	We can't know what we don't know!
	So that's like a whole emotional...
	Hurricane, they are using and exploiting.
	And that's how every, like the beginning of every single one of these clips is like, starts off with a batshit notion and then goes somewhere totally different.
	And I'm like, oh, it's, it's, that's disorienting.
	That process is disorienting.
	And I get it that, you know, upon that situation occurring, you feel a little stupid in the moment, you're like, oh shit, I had no idea, but then that's not really your fault, necessarily, you know?
	Someone gave you the wrong information, which is going to be the case with these idiots, or no one told you a thing at all.
	Maybe there was an assumption somewhere along the line.
	Maybe one of your parents, someone in a position of authority, led you down the wrong road or whatever.
	It happens to everyone.
	And the more you practice and the more you interact with the reality, like the more you interact with, you know, Data-supported, research-supported history and learning about the world.
	Yes, that I-feel-dumb moment is going to happen more, but you'll feel less dumb when you realize, oh, I just didn't know, and now I do.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	The more you practice that feeling, it gets a lot easier.
	I think that that's almost a maturity point, of the more you realize, oh, I was wrong.
	Well, Okay, now I know.
	And that's all it has to be.
	And these people are fundamentally fighting even that.
	They can't break any part of, you know, any amount of my little Sonic the Hedgehog blue bubble of, you know, the wob around me to protect me from the world.
	It's not, you'll be fine.
	And they're not fine.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	It's remarkable the kind of the picking and choosing that they will do of what is acceptable to, to kind of, to rewrite the history on.
	You know, it's, because they're, they're, you know, there's the supposedly a skeptical, a skeptical kind of corner of society that you know oh no the CIA was doing this and doing this and some of that may be true um some of it some of it might not be and and and yet with other things uh with with American history and whatever they're unwilling to look at it through that same lens and be like oh maybe maybe this didn't happen maybe maybe maybe these other kind of uh things were going on you know because you know history written by the victor and all that and hey maybe
	Maybe the textbooks in schools and teaching us history in schools aren't the best, maybe.
	But no, we're not able to look at that lens.
	Even the CIA exam.
	Yeah, it's so hard to learn.
	And that was a moment that happened in the 70s.
	It's very, like, you can kind of There was a commission, you can nail it down.
	I keep forgetting the guy's name.
	Anyway, there was a moment that rocked the American psyche, was to learn about all of these secret documents.
	What's even worse about the CIA, so much of it is like, oh, we just don't get to know.
	It's just a hole, because the evidence is destroyed, and once it's gone, it's never coming back.
	MKUltra, that was sheer fucking luck that not all of the records were destroyed.
	And it is uncomfortable to accept an unknown.
	It's a very, and honestly, a big part of, you know, Chaos, the book I just finished, is like, there's stuff I'm never gonna know.
	And that is unfortunate.
	So they're filling in of the, like, if they can give you unknown, where there was previously a question mark, that's even better.
	Then you can't prove them wrong.
	Then you can't attack their argument because you can't prove a negative, right?
	There's a void where there should be information, and if they can provide an explanation, then they've got you hooked.
	Yep.
	Yep.
	And it's explanation by usually nothing but insinuations.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	Oh boy.
	Now, spiritual warfare obviously requires a spiritual solution.
	Certainly the solution seems to me to be spiritual and even when they're talking about ecology and evoking words like Gaia, like the spirit of the planet, it seems oddly utilitarian.
	The earth is a resource even when claiming to care about the types of energy industry that might be most beneficial and those which might not be as beneficial.
	I don't see reverence I don't see an acknowledgement of the sacredness of the Earth.
	The Earth is not a resource.
	Obviously, the left and right are classically almost at this point divided around the subject of climate change.
	What I feel is, who Who among us ought not love our planet and behave respectfully and reverentially and lovingly to our planet?
	And how is that going to happen if no one has a relationship with it?
	I think like 90% of, in my country, 90% of the land is inaccessible to most people.
	90% of the land is privately owned.
	Land that used to be commonly held is now all privately owned.
	There has been successive law after successive law.
	That has moved power and control and the land and nature herself into the hands of an elite.
	And it's this, I suppose, even where it would have been risible.
	So you're getting back to feudalism?
	Yeah, let's get back to good old feudalism.
	What was wrong with feudalism?
	Why are we making such a fuss about it?
	The idea that you and I are people that operate on different sides of a political spectrum becomes exposed as ridiculous when the anti-authoritarian aspect of what we both clearly believe in has to become the clear and pivotal point around which all political views have to now start to coalesce.
	You are either going to oppose what's happening when it comes to globalisation and centralised authoritarianism, or you are going to be crushed by it individually and collectively.
	Wow, okay.
	Really bringing everyone together, this guy.
	The idea that these two are on opposing sides of the political spectrum is indeed laughable, because Russell is firmly fucking right-wing these days, and we have demonstrated this pretty thoroughly by now.
	Yeah, and also, it's interesting that he's suggesting there should be some kind of reverence for planet Earth.
	It's very curious.
	I have thoughts.
	Yeah, I mean, you know, given that any time climate change is brought up on his show, he's like, ah, we shouldn't need to worry about this!
	You know, he's coming at it with a specific libertarian bent any time it comes up on his show, so that the issue was never actually dealt with in any kind of responsible way, or acknowledged in any kind of responsible way.
	Yeah, I'm sorry, sir.
	I can use this example that I'm looking at right now.
	The reason that we don't hold nature in reverence is for the sake of consumer convenience.
	Look at the outfits you're wearing.
	Look at every stitch of clothing on both of these men.
	Look at their mic stands and the guts in the electronics.
	It's because you want the modern conveniences that are poisoning the planet.
	Veraciously.
	Like, that are chewing our planet up.
	And you're not talking about that.
	You're not talking about regulation to limit corporate corruption and corporate injury of the planet on any level.
	Because there are so many places in the supply chain where you could put something in place.
	Or even the accountability, like, the donate, don't dump.
	Movement.
	There are so many ways to attack this, and you don't have to think big brain.
	You can look down at your clothes and realize, ooh, maybe a baby slave made this.
	You need to understand that first, and then you can extrapolate that idea.
	You need to understand it first.
	Just acknowledge it.
	That's the answer to your question right there.
	It's literally on your body.
	Yeah, I also know for a fact that Russell drives a Land Rover Defender, which is a famous gas guzzler.
	There are so many things within his existence.
	I'm tempted to go Prophets and Watches.
	Like, I don't know if you follow Prophets and Watches on Instagram.
	They're amazing.
	And Preachers and Sneakers as well.
	They look up the price tag of the clothes that the preachers wear, which is outrageous!
	There was one from, again, I mentioned there were pictures of him out with his family At a service station in the UK.
	And he was there wearing, yeah, 450 quid trainers or whatever.
	He had a four and a half thousand pound cardigan on, you know.
	Yeah, so.
	And the thing is, is we can't blame just individual action, obviously.
	That's not the point.
	That's not the understanding.
	But using your platform to actually make any kind of difference.
	Start with your back.
	Start with your pants.
	Start with your socks.
	Or even just include that narrative.
	As an accurate, like, you need to be accountable.
	Or, did you buy everything used?
	Great.
	Good.
	Do I think that happened?
	No.
	No.
	I don't think that's the case.
	No, seems unlikely.
	So, about the UK's land all being privately owned and inaccessible, technically speaking he's half right.
	So, in that it's privately owned by the National Trust, which is Europe's largest conservation charity, for the reference.
	We're a pretty small island, all things considered, and the National Trust hold nearly a thousand square miles of land here.
	Quite a bit.
	Some of which is free entry, some of which you have to pay a small fee to access.
	Unless you're a member of the National Trust, in which case you pay like annual dues, right?
	They own roughly a fifth of the coastline in the UK, and protect it accordingly, with thousands of volunteers helping to maintain and look after the National Trust lands.
	There are more than 6 million paid up members of the National Trust who also help keep things covered and maintained with their fees, right?
	And we're a population of, what, 70 million?
	So, you know, that's a good chunk of the country.
	Yeah.
	They are the UK's largest farm owner with more than 1,300 tenant farmers on their lands and have 180 registered parks and gardens.
	All of this land is now cared for, conserved and protected for the British public.
	The National Trust's motto is For Everyone Forever, and accordingly they do a shitload of work to combat climate change wherever they can.
	Um, so yeah, technically privately owned, technically, but also, you know, definitely for the benefit of the country in this specific case.
	So I'm fine with it.
	It's one of those things that like, if you don't interact with public lands, you don't understand what rights you have to it as a citizen.
	You don't, because like, if people that interact, because like, And also there is way less public land or it's managed by different, you know, it might be state, not federal.
	And those tend to be like, yeah, you got to pay a fee because there's maintenance and you got to pay the rangers and all that kind of stuff.
	But like, it's just like voting.
	You go to one national park, and you read the rules when you walk in, and you understand that every citizen has a right to use this public land.
	And also, there's a million problems, and all the public land, blah blah blah, of course.
	But even the misunderstanding.
	I don't think that Russell has to interact with public land because he's got money.
	He doesn't have to.
	That is a disparity I see in my own life all the time as a road tripper and camper who is poor.
	We understand that, OK, maybe it's a vault toilet, but the nature is just as pretty when we go to this forest and we camp out.
	And it's not as like it isn't an Airbnb.
	It's nice.
	We still get to go enjoy the land.
	And that's something that, like, People that have the money to plan their vacay, you know, do the zhuzh, and don't have to count their pennies, they don't realize that as a citizen, the invitation is open.
	Just because they haven't interacted with it.
	It's like people think that ballots are so easy to fake and steal.
	Like, I don't think you voted.
	I don't think you go vote.
	Cause like if you, if you experience it once, it's like, okay, so many of these are nuts.
	Yeah.
	You know, that's just not how this actually operates in reality.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And it's, it's not.
	Terribly surprising that again, you know, Russell is among the 0.01% richest people on the planet.
	Yep.
	And Tucker is a good few rungs above that, I dare say.
	Yep.
	Masses of inherited wealth for that man.
	So yeah, of course they're going to be fucking out of touch with reality.
	And yet saying, oh, we're all returning to a feudal system now.
	It's like, well, if we were returning to a feudal system, you would be one of the land barons, you fucks.
	Yeah, you want to.
	You want to.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, because they're at the top.
	Um, yeah.
	Uh, now Tucker has one final question for Russell.
	How do you see, and I'll stop at this, um, compound question.
	How is, how are your family and friends holding up in the face of this assault on you and your family?
	And how do you see this playing out?
	The battle that you just described?
	Are you hopeful or no?
	You know, because I've been subject to personal attacks, I have a program of recovery.
	I've been in recovery for 21 years.
	In a sense, it's what enshrines and helps me practice my relationship with God.
	It's the most important thing to me.
	The thing I have to most be observant of and have to keenly avoid is descent into self-centeredness.
	When I am very frightened, it's very easy for me to drift into becoming quite myopic and insular.
	What I've observed, like in this period, from a personal perspective, I'm incredibly fortunate.
	I've got an amazing wife.
	I've got amazing, beautiful children that are healthy and doing well.
	I've got incredible people that I work with.
	And another thing that's been amazing is for a month, publicly, continually, I was called the worst names you can call a man.
	And then I'd go out in public and people are like, Russell!
	Hey!
	We support you!
	We support you!
	And like one time I was away in like sort of like a family with all their daughters that were aged between like sort of 15 and 19.
	Oh, can you do photos?
	I was thinking if there were one group that would be negatively affected by what's just been publicly said about me, it would be the parents of teenage kids.
	And, like, people aren't.
	People aren't buying it.
	People aren't buying it.
	That's the problem.
	People are waking up.
	People are starting to think, well, Jesus, is there going to be a better example than your former and perhaps future president?
	The more they hate him, the more people like him.
	The more people like him because what they know is they don't trust the establishment anymore.
	They cannot trust the establishment anymore.
	They cannot, and it's because of people like Tucker and Russell.
	Um, it's a particularly fucking depressing thing to have to reckon with, and I apologize, audience, because what Russell is relaying here is the bleak reality that to those on the far right, negative actions do not beget negative consequences.
	And in fact, when it's someone on their team, there are no negative actions.
	Like, there's just the cult of personality, and that's all.
	That's all that's there.
	That's all that we've got.
	That's all that we've got around these fucking people.
	I will say, for sure, I'm never letting this man near my daughter.
	That's never going to occur, if I can avoid it.
	I'm kind of lost.
	I'm just like, man.
	It's depressing as fuck.
	Well, the thing is, and even like learning about, you know.
	The encouragement to put blinders on to some degree is exactly what they're banking on.
	It's what they want.
	And it's that kind of like, because the experience I had here in America, after all the reporting came out, and I've talked about this with huge limb blue in the face, I've definitely mentioned on air before, And I made a little reel about it.
	I'm so frustrated with the... And I bet all of the support that he's getting is the American kind of perspective because either the reporting was behind a paywall for a while and you can get it if you're an online person, or the documentary you can't watch outside of the UK.
	And there would have been Potentially, there would have been a Jared from Subway moment here if it was on Netflix.
	Maybe.
	And so talking to people and understanding that like, you know, like, oh yeah, you do a podcast about Russell Brand, which I, it's embarrassing to admit.
	They usually catch me.
	I love doing it with y'all, but also like owning up to it in public is still a little questionable.
	Mixed company, you know what I mean?
	And you never know.
	Yeah.
	The universal understanding that the takeaway from Americans was like, well, he's like kind of a sex pest, like we always knew that he was like kind of shady, like a shady sex guy.
	And what we know, because we cover this and we understand it, is like, oh, no, no, no, it's way more than that.
	We could have a Jared from Subway moment.
	And there's something to be said for a media circus around a specific figure, but it's also an awareness of the implications and the problems they're in.
	And so he relied on that ambiguity, and he's capitalized on it as a result.
	And if he's advertising stuff on his show that is Illegal to sell in the UK, but is legal to sell in the United States or only is sold in the United States, we know who he's targeting because he wouldn't get ads for that otherwise.
	He wouldn't get a sponsorship for that.
	He's not relying on those dollars.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Yes, for sure.
	I will say I do think he is talking about a number of those interactions in this country as well, though.
	I've seen a couple of Instagram posts and that kind of thing that he's put up of him with various families or whatever, okay, whatever.
	Because even over here, even with the wealth of evidence being available for people to go and read or watch, It's so hard.
	A lot of people fucking didn't, and half of the population of the UK was still on this guy's side, despite the evidence against him.
	And that was tough to reckon with.
	The number of people I fucking argued with on my own Facebook alone, which was just like, it's staggering.
	You do not expect it.
	Well, what he's doing- And yet, there we are.
	Yeah, right.
	Yes.
	And what he's doing, he's like, well, using these anecdotal examples, he's like, it's tantamount to like, well, my black friend says I can say the N word, so I'm going to say the N word.
	Like, nope.
	Nope.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And there is also, again, some of what Glenn Greenwald was doing with that politician.
	It's like, well, these people think I'm fine, so people aren't buying it.
	It's like, well, I would be curious to see the numbers.
	I would be curious to see the numbers as to how many people would be on your side.
	Also, also, like, we are real star fuckers in this country.
	We love a celebrity.
	That is true.
	Like, there is a degree of like, oh yeah, I'll take a fucking selfie.
	No concept of the rest of your existence, but I've seen you on the telly, I know you're famous, let's have a little snap, you know.
	Yeah.
	There's also that to factor in.
	There are people out there staunchly defending Jimmy Savile still, then like, that's a social problem.
	That's a social problem that needs to be addressed in some way that might need to be taken a little more seriously.
	I don't know, maybe we like hating stuff more, I'm not sure.
	But even there's, you know, I mean, there's going to be defenders no matter what, but it's just a question of like, and again, I can only speak to my experience, but I'm sure a lot of those interactions are like the ones that are fresh in his mind and make his heart feel good are the ones that he's getting from Rumble every week and from his local channel.
	Oh, I mean, that's definitely where he's getting the more consistent feedback from.
	That's for sure.
	All right.
	We got one last clip and it's how Russell leaves the show.
	I was speaking from the perspective of, look, this isn't the first time I've known personal crisis.
	I'm a drug addict in recovery.
	I'm a product of a single parent family.
	I've come from, I'm a normal person from a normal background.
	But what I would say is that in a sense, a crisis becomes an invitation.
	A catastrophe is an invitation.
	And it seems like whether you're on the left or right, everyone believes catastrophe is coming and it will be an invitation.
	It will be an invitation because if what we're being offered is a slow grind into endless war and more and more authoritarianism and more and more control of our personal lives and our ability to worship, our ability to affiliate, our ability to pray.
	If what we're being invited to accept is the colonization of the self, of our ability to think freely, then what we got to lose when all they're offering us is more war, endless pandemics that are being legislatively enshrined even now through the WHO treaty.
	What have we actually got to lose?
	I think in a sense, perhaps they are, you know, if there is one God, one all-powerful God, then surely that God is at work now.
	And surely that God is creating the perfect conditions for our mutual awakening.
	And perhaps what's required is the spur, the ignition of something so unbearable that people will awaken rather than endure it, rather than endure it any further.
	And perhaps that's what we're being offered now.
	Yes, of course it seems like we're on the precipice of catastrophe geopolitically and from various potential health pandemics, but also it seems to me like a potential offering to awaken, and I don't think we have any choice other than to see it that way.
	Russell Brand, you have not been broken.
	You are at your very best.
	Your very best.
	I really appreciate it.
	Thank you.
	Thanks, Tucker.
	I don't know about that.
	Okay.
	Anyone watching, I was nodding.
	I was bobbing my head.
	I'm so sorry.
	It looked like I was nodding for a second.
	I was just... I was ingesting words with my head motion.
	I was not agreeing.
	I just got very self conscious of them.
	Go on, go on, go on!
	I hate to bastardize a line from my own favorite film, but it appears that Russell is on a mission from God, apparently.
	Okay.
	Unimpeachable, right?
	How can you argue with that?
	Yeah, right.
	I mean, you know, I don't know.
	So, I will say that the adage that every crisis is an opportunity, because I think that's what he was searching for with Invitation there, that is particularly apt for Russell and his entire career of failing upwards, and is in of itself a dire and accurate view of the alt-right mediasphere's modus operandi, I think.
	Every crisis is an opportunity.
	And there we go.
	You can say the same thing and be in the Obama administration.
	I mean, you know, where I'm coming from, as far as that's concerned, is class consciousness and is class analysis and solidarity analysis, which is the top is going to stay at the top as hard as they can.
	That's I mean, that's and that's that's the issue that like he can't talk about being one of the common folk and not understand the implications of like where he's speaking from.
	And well, yeah, it's plain ignore it.
	They just throw it away.
	It is conspicuously absent that every time he brings up, you know, him going to Hollywood and, you know, doing all these films and, oh, I found it.
	I found it shallow and all of that.
	And, you know, also massively financially enriching.
	But that bit just kind of gets, you know, just shoved off to the side.
	Yeah, you haven't moved into a cabin in the woods and unplugged, sir.
	Like, you haven't turned your back on entertainment.
	The business we call show.
	Yeah, yeah.
	The media, you know?
	Yeah, right.
	Stay free suggestions?
	Nope, it's stay free media.
	But like, especially like, dude, the setting Tucker is in is manipulation in and of itself.
	That is a- Yeah, yeah, the wooden cabin, right?
	It's, yeah, it's all this, it's this like rustic, it looks small, like it looks like a small rustic cabin.
	It is, there is storytelling before anyone even says a word.
	It's it's very like we know what point we're trying to make that he's in every man and I bet that like that was some spark of genius like oh let's do log cabin shit let's like let's because now you're not even you don't have to be on Fox anymore let's go whole hog and like Suggesting, you know, like, every inch of that presentation is very, like, calculated.
	And, like, you know, brand identity, I get it.
	But also, like, if they weren't also trying to present themselves as everyman, especially Tucker Carlson, is, like, one of the most privileged humans in history.
	If we're talking about historical amount of humans, he is, like, the Very tippy-top of, like, our species in privilege and money and access.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, well, we covered it in the very first time we covered Tucker Carlson coming on Russell's show.
	Yeah, massive inherited wealth, you know, and that's the land that Tucker's coming from.
	And Russell, like, at least grew up, you know, financially challenged and everything.
	Grew up poor.
	Yeah, single parent household.
	Creepy relationship with his weird dad.
	Like, yeah, there's a lot there that was very difficult for him.
	You know, he had a tough time coming up.
	And that's one of the things from our Primer that, you know, it made everything very difficult to reckon with that came later.
	It's like, oh, you feel sympathy for this man for a while.
	I will say, however, that I think it's been a long, long time since he has interacted with anyone or anything in that universe.
	He is incredibly far removed from the place he grew up in.
	I'm not as surprised by that because I think that if you do struggle a lot when you're growing up, you are going to cling that much more voraciously to money, power, and success that you have earned.
	Yeah, to get the fuck away from that.
	Yeah, yeah.
	There's a little bit of scrabble, hard scrabble in there that Tucker doesn't have.
	Tucker, there is something about Tucker Carlson that I don't think he's ever had a real bad feeling in his life.
	He can just say whatever, because nothing bad, even remotely bad, has ever come close to happening to him.
	There is something conservobot about it, like, oh, he can just say anything.
	He can just say anything, because he's always been able to just say anything.
	Why would he stop?
	Obviously, pain is relative, which means he can still act aggrieved and probably still feels aggrieved.
	Oh, I bet he feels bad all the time.
	The actual consequences to any of the things are so far removed from the reality that the rest of us live in that it is... It is relative.
	It is staggering.
	Yeah, you're right.
	You're absolutely right.
	And I have zero sympathy for anything.
	Because he lives on another planet, and he was born on the other planet.
	Russell has managed to fight his way to that planet, and he's got his You will drag him kicking and screaming with like big scrape lines in his fingers the very last breath he's going to spend staying on that planet no matter what and these kind of in quote unquote interviews.
	Quote-unquote interviews are going to solidify his connections with that rich white priv planet.
	And it's just, it's a patriarchal rich white priv planet.
	And he's going to do everything he can to stay where he's at.
	Abso-fucking-lutely.
	Oh boy.
	And yeah, that brings us to a close there with this, yeah, interview?
	I don't know.
	Yes, and session, I think is more likely.
	This little bit of laundering for Russell's PR.
	Yeah, it's... I don't know about you, audience, but I hated every waking second of that.
	That was terrible.
	Content-wise, good lord, that was ew.
	Worse than Russell's show.
	Worse than Russell's show.
	Unfortunately what we've signed up for, so I don't really feel right bitching about it because I chose to, guess what, if I didn't want to do it, I wouldn't.
	I wouldn't be here.
	I don't like it.
	I feel like we gotta show up and do it, you know?
	I don't like it one bit.
	It's obviously upsetting.
	I think it is worth covering, but yeah.
	But hey, audience, let us know what you think.
	Sound off in the comments and all that.
	Send us an email, whatever, all that good stuff.
	If you want to support us on Patreon, go to patreon.com slash onbrand.
	We'd be very, very grateful.
	Yeah, drop us an email.
	It's theonbrandpod at gmail.com.
	Come and join our Facebook group, On Brand Awakening Wonders.
	Some lovely human beings in there discussing the show and all that good stuff.
	There are also some good people doing that on Reddit at r slash onbrand underscore pod.
	In terms of the socials, you can find us, The On-Brand Pod, in most places except for where we're not.
	Just look for the logo.
	And personal socials, I'm at alworthofficial and Lauren is at made.by.lauren.b.
	We are typically most active on Insta, but yeah, you might be able to find us in other places.
	Well, and we're caught up, so yeah, I'm caught up on our- mostly.
	That's true!
	That's true, the on-brand pod Instagram is up to date, so hey, come over there!
	I'm sure there'll be new stuff coming.
	Yeah guys, wow.
	It's been a couple months.
	Well, you know what, we got there.
	We got there today as well, because putting this whole thing together was a struggle.
	But hey, we did it everybody!
	And I hope to not have to deal with Tucker for a while, that's the position I'm coming from.
	Good lord.
	Oh, I think he spent his capital doing that.
	I think they both are going to come back.
	I hope so.
	I am conscious of the fact that the Christmas special was supposed to be with Tucker Carlson and they didn't end up having Tucker because Russell had to go on Tucker's show first.
	So I get the feeling there's something in the works somewhere probably.
	What a missed opportunity with the Christmas cabin.
	I know!
	It would have been great!
	That would have given us any amount of festivity.
	Perfect.
	Yes!
	Yes, some, rather than fucking Jonathan Pageau.
	God, atrocious.
	Put up some fucking stockings, goddammit.
	Jonathan Pageau talking about Snow White.
	Like, come on, at least pick a Christmas story.
	Stockings and a fucking Christmas light.
	Gimme anything.
	Anything.
	Wear a sweater!
	A silly hat that you leave on for more than five seconds.
	Yeah!
	Yeah!
	Son of a bitch.
	Come on!
	Anyway!
	God, yeah.
	Well, thank you for sticking with us, listeners.
	Yeah, that interview was a lot.
	Well, thank you so much!
	Yeah!
	Yeah!
	Well, thank you so much, and we'll see you soon.
	Thank you for listening to this emergency episode, right?
	I hope this is helpful.
	Absolutely, absolutely.
	I hope this is helpful.
	I hope it'll help you, yeah, without having to consume this.
	Yep.
	And we'll see you Thursday for the regularly scheduled On Brand episode.
	Yeah, take care of yourselves, take care of each other.
	Have a great week!
	Bye!
	Bye!

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