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Feb. 22, 2024 - On Brand
02:05:41
OB #44 - Rogan Rhetoric & Cultural Marxism

According to Russell, Joe Rogan is 'DONE' with The Left. Shocking, we know, but this episode does lead to some revelations regarding Russell's specific conspiracy pipeline. Support us on Patreon! - patreon.com/OnBrand Buy a magnet! - wesellreallivegold

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Time Text
This is propaganda live.
I only suggest how to take him out of vote.
Extraordinary cultural moment.
Already iconic.
Already iconic.
We love you.
You're welcome here.
Where did this guy come from?
It's like he's been doing it for ages.
He's very confident.
Plainly, and this is a matter now of fact and record, I'm right wing.
I feel that Christ may have had a better vision.
Is this misinformation or is Vivek Ramaswamy in the lavatory?
That's sort of like a poem.
Is this Eminem?
Man, if we didn't come together in that stream, I'm assuming it was just the Pete.
Now these are the kind of conversations I think that the legacy media can no longer compete with.
Win win win win win win win 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. And that's me, Lauren B. And I am the one that does not know what we'll be talking about, but if history serves, it's usually not good.
Is that kind of bad?
Almost always bad, which is why we do the good thing before the bad thing.
Lauren, what is your good thing before the bad thing this week?
The valentine, not valentine we got in the mail.
So nice.
Yeah, I just want to give a little shout out to Karen.
Thank you so much.
Oh my gosh.
And you know what?
It's fine that it didn't make it for Valentine's Day.
That's totally OK with me.
It counts just as much to get any kind of snail mail.
Hell yeah.
Very kind, very sweet.
Very sweet and really cool art on the front as well really yeah yeah yeah yeah we love indigenous art and i i miss visiting the pacific northwest i fully took it for granted i'm like oh i just get to see this everywhere all the time oh it's the prettiest like one of the prettiest uh airports i've ever seen it's like oh ho hum and they're like oh right and you don't see it all the time you're like it's actually really cool and pretty and nice it's super cool so yeah super nice That's my thing.
That's my nice little thing.
What's your good thing?
My good thing this week is a little bit of a professional development-y thing.
I've been doing a music gig for somewhere and I was struggling for fucking ages with this remix.
Just one of those things where there's like a creative block where I'm just like, I don't know what to do with this.
And kind of the couple of ideas that I'd already had were like, Kind of too close to the original because generally when I do a remix I prefer to just get given like the stems and try and avoid the original version of it as much as possible.
So I just get the individual tracks and then like you know kind of come into it with a fresh kind of perspective.
I do feel like a remix is a bit of a waste if it's very very similar.
Exactly, exactly.
What's the purpose at that stage?
But then obviously what happened to me is I had a couple of ideas and then I went into it and I was like, ah, shit, there are a couple of things that are really too close to the original.
I'm like, ah, shit, I need to fuck with it.
And I just, I couldn't, I wasn't getting anywhere with it.
And then suddenly just, you know, Just sitting down and kind of hammering away and it eventually got there and I'm now like, oh, this is tight.
I'm really, I'm really pleased.
Okay, so it wasn't so much a bolt out of the blue or like, was it a walk away from it and come back?
Because that's usually the magic sauce that I forget all the time.
Yeah, yeah, there's a little bit of that involved.
I think, yeah, a bit of both, I think, from my perspective, because I do think people underestimate the power of creativity being like a habit, you know, where if you kind of have a force of habit, where like every day you'll sit down at the At the, in your studio or whatever else and do this creative thing from X time to Z time, it will eventually start to become like a reflexive kind of thing of like, okay, now is creative time and those juices will kind of start going on their own.
And, you know, you can kind of pavlov yourself into that situation.
Kind of.
Kind of.
It doesn't, yeah, it's not uniform.
It's not a, you know, it's not a, a switch on or off kind of situation but it'll get you a good chunk of the way there and at the very least you're theoretically doing some work on something that is supposed to be there.
Well yeah there's tons of skill stuff that you have to put like that's the stuff the stuff that takes the nuts and bullshit is what takes time.
Yeah exactly so even if kind of inspiration isn't striking you know you're still working on the thing anyway and then something about it will hit you or wherever else but Yeah this was kind of um it did need that bit of time a bit of space as well to be like okay now you need yeah to figure out where I was going with it and yeah really happy I'll um nice I'll let I'll let you know when when it ever gets released I don't know when the hell that'll be it's not up to me but there we go
There we go but yeah yeah so that's that's my good thing this week so hey good good good thing for for creativities this week good good good things for creativity well and just friendliness general yes exactly exactly now we have got a show to get to but first we should thank some new patrons just the one the only Kylie you are now an awakening wonder You are indeed an awakening wonder.
Thank you, Kylie.
Thank you, Kylie.
It's just Kylie.
Over here, that's synonymous with Kylie Minogue is the only like, just Kylie.
That's where I went.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So Kylie Minogue, thank you so much.
And if you're not Kylie Minogue, we love you just as much.
You're a stunning queen.
I appreciate you.
That's fantastic.
All Kylie's are stunning queens.
I think that's the new rule.
Only one!
I get it.
Totally.
I'm in here.
Well, you know what?
The bars for Kylie's are very high.
I understand.
Kylie.
Pardon.
Only one.
It's true, they are one.
I'm signing off on that.
I'm fine with it.
If anyone wants to support us in what we do, become an Awakening Wanderer, join the Invisible Hand, or donate on an elevated tier, blah blah blah, head to patreon.com slash ombrand and you will have our eternal gratitude.
It's 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, Offbrand, where we discuss anything but Russell Brand.
And this week is part two of what is a four and a half hour discussion about the CIA.
And the second part deals with how the CIA have influenced the arts and culture in general by aggressively funding and promoting certain areas over others backed by a militant capitalist agenda.
Fun times!
It's super interesting and you hear some art perspective from both me and Lauren in this as well, which is cool.
So yeah.
Head to patreon.com on brand to have a look at that.
Really, really fun.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's like international, like very heavy handed implications for like our entire culture and how it developed.
Yeah.
Not a fan.
Okay.
I'm sorry about how when you tell people about what we talk about in the wild, they're going to think you're crazy.
Yeah.
I wish it weren't that way.
Yeah.
It's by design, everybody.
Don't shoot the messenger!
It's by design.
It's not my fault!
It's supposed to sound crazy, so it makes it sound less plausible.
Yeah, totally.
Also that.
Also that.
Please note that while you can easily listen to our audio version anywhere you can find podcasts, you can also watch us on YouTube, or if you listen in the Spotify app, the video should come up there too.
Alright, so it's been a weird week for Russell's content.
For all intents and purposes, it seems he had the week off up until Friday.
So after last week's shenanigans with the Tucker Putin interview, he just tapped out for whatever reason until Friday.
Don't blame him.
Can we say?
I was like, I was having a half of a good time for once.
Yeah.
And then the Navalny stuff comes out and happens.
I'm like, oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
That was the bring down.
I mean, there's a lot of other stuff that is going on.
Like, You know, that they've ramped up the oppression for, like, for queer people.
Like, that was the same thing that was happening the same week.
Yeah, like, going through, you know, actual, like, prosecutions and convicting people, which is fucking medieval.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not cool.
So, I know it's not my fault, but I still felt a little guilty for giggling so much, but it was objectively funny also.
What are we going to do?
Again, we need to get our good things where we can, right?
At the end of the day, that is the situation that we're in.
Yeah, that's true.
Regardless of how we feel about what happened, it wouldn't have changed what Putin was doing.
Not one single iota.
Of course.
But yeah, so Russell took some time off and he filled that space with a few editorials, an interview with Max Blumenthal of the Grey Zone, joy, and what is the third or possibly fourth I Lose Track interview with Vivek Ramaswamy.
All pre-recorded, of course.
Yeah, yeah.
Why?
Good fucking question!
Yeah, my position on Vivek at this point is despite him having been on the show multiple times, the man has nothing to say except for smooth talking his way through the popular right-wing talking points of the moment.
And this time it was Nikki Haley sucks and Michelle Obama will be the Democratic nominee for president.
Which, okay.
Okay.
Whatever.
Yeah, wisdom suggests that the vague is eventually going to settle into a position either in right-wing media or politics and, you know, people keep saying VP and good lord, can you imagine?
Well, anything's possible at this point.
I don't know, I don't think Trump wants anyone who would upstage him.
And yeah, I don't know, maybe he'll be more interesting once he picks a direction, once he picks kind of what the fuck he's doing.
But for now, despite being a smooth operator, I just find him really boring.
On the Friday, Russell did his show as usual, including an interview with Stella Assange, Julia Assange's wife, and that was just a bunch of bullshit.
Yeah, because it was just a lot of like, He's innocent.
He hasn't done anything wrong.
Okay.
The whole trial situation, all of that is going on at the moment and Russell is at present doing various forms of live coverage, I think, of that.
Yeah, so we might be tackling that next week to see how he does.
Yeah, just as a forewarning, because there will be a decision and it's almost... I would be really, really shocked if it doesn't end with Assange being deported to the United States.
I feel like that is pretty much a foregone conclusion at this stage.
Even Stella Assange was basically saying that, so I'm like, eh, okay, that's what's gonna happen.
So he will be making hay out of that for time to come.
Yeah.
But we'll deal with that when we have to.
Nevertheless, I'd already kind of gotten a grasp of what I wanted to cover by this point.
And then, unusually, over the weekend, Russell dropped two new editorials and a brief interview with, of all people, Tony Robbins.
Well, I'm out.
I'm gonna go.
I hope you have a great day.
I hope everybody feels great.
It's been an awesome show.
I'm outta here.
Yeah, I'm gonna say- I can't leave!
That was a lie!
Oh man!
Yeah, I'm gonna say birds of a feather based on the allegations against him that came out in 2019.
But yeah, and just Jenna, the guy's always given me the ick, you know?
There's always been a grifty vibe from my perspective.
I don't know how anyone else feels, but that's just how I've always personally, internally felt.
I'd say you're not alone.
Is that literally at all?
But it is a one or the other.
It's very much a one or the other, which is wildly irritating.
You'd see him in movies and whatever else, but what the fuck is happening here?
Movies?
What?
Yeah, yeah.
I've seen him show up in movies.
He's just like all over TV here.
All the time.
Yeah, on TV as well, but he's done cameos in movies and all kinds of stuff.
I'm like, why the fuck is this guy showing up?
Yeah, I've been on The Simpsons, whatever else.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, anyway, yeah, him and his net worth of at least 500 million dollars came on to the show to promote his new book and talk about trading stocks and shares.
What it turned into?
Yeah, he's got a book about stocks and shares, everybody, about trading.
And do you know what?
I will say, like, because Russell's show is a lot of the time, here's two very rich white men talking about anything but how rich they are.
I will say at least it was him talking about how rich he is.
Respect!
Respect for that!
Cause I will say that very often I hear whatever like that wah wah wah wah but also like I'm so fucking rich I don't have to try is what I hear over and over and over.
There is, however, a flip side to it, because what it actually turned into was basically half an hour of Russell looking confused and dumbstruck into the camera, while Tony Robbins just talked all over him about the intricacies of the stock market, and now he is now apparently the saviour by bringing financial advice back to the common man.
That's the position that Tony Robbins is coming from.
Alright, this is great.
Yeah.
I don't have words for this.
Literally, he was like, I told Congress to do this and they passed this law and changed this thing.
I was like, fuck.
No, you didn't.
No, you didn't.
Sure thing, buddy.
No, you didn't.
And if you did, they should all be fired.
That's crazy.
Oh my.
Yup.
Okay.
But yeah, entertaining in a few ways, but definitely not worth kind of covering on the show.
So we won't be dealing with Tony Robbins.
Oh boy.
I was like, I was girding my loins mentally.
I was bracing myself.
The teeth monster's gonna show up and it's gonna be bad.
Yeah, no, we've avoided it for now.
I'll be shocked if it's his last appearance on Stay Free, but we'll see.
But yeah, normally Russell's channel is radio silence over the weekend, but he also dropped a couple of editorials.
So we are going to have a brief look at the thing I already wanted to cover a little bit later on.
But first, one of the ones that dropped this weekend, one of the editorials, puts one aspect of our show into stark focus.
So let's take a look.
No, here's the fucking news!
Joe Rogan's just done the biggest deal in independent media history, as well as saying he wants nothing more to do with the left.
So why is the left falling apart and why can't it utilise powerful advocates like Joe Rogan?
Russell Brand on Rogan and Liberals.
I think we can all expect this to be illuminating.
That's a word.
Yeah, yeah.
I know I'll feel illuminated after we're through.
Because I'm like, what?
I know.
What is happening?
This seems like it should be the most bullshit kind of fluff piece out there.
Yeah.
But we shall see, because in spite of the incredibly obvious right, Russell Stans to this day will cite him as, at the very least, not being right-wing.
And the right who so love Russell usually describe him as left-wing.
There's immense value to that media sphere with the concept of, oh, even a guy on the left agrees with us, as though it bolsters their arguments.
um tied into the idea of "Aha we've turned one everybody we did it because we're so right"
and whether they describe him as left-wing or a former left-wing now right-wing guy very much
depends on what serves them best in the moment. It's interchangeable from their perspective.
I genuinely did.
I'm having Mandela effect moments right now.
Now Joe Rogan has come out and made it very clear that he's done with the left wing. To
the shock of literally no one. In fact, the- I thought that already happened. I genuinely-
I thought it was pretty fucking clear, right? But no, apparently-
I'm having Mandela effect moments right now. I thought that already happened.
I was pretty, yeah, it seemed pretty blatant to me anyway, but now he's just coming out
and saying it in a different, I don't know.
The title of Russell's video is in quotes, I'm done with the left, Joe Rogan blasts liberal cult.
Okay.
So that's what we're looking at.
Oh, we watched Mother God!
That's fun!
Let's talk about it!
Tight!
That's a left-wing cult that you should... Okay.
No?
Was what he was talking about?
No, not that one.
Not that one.
Not the thing.
So, Rogan coming out with any position whatsoever usually means the right-wing media are going to follow literally whatever it is he's saying and agree with it, and Russell being both a trend hound and starfucker is absolutely going to follow suit.
But he does frequently insist that he's not right-wing, so where does he land on the discussion about abandoning the left-wing?
Well, let's take a little look at the first clip from this editorial.
Now Joe Rogan has just done the biggest deal in independent media history.
He's survived some of the biggest attacks that the legacy media have ever tried to impose upon an independent voice.
The N-word attacks, the horse-paced attacks, the, he shouldn't be allowed to have this audience, why are people listening to Joe Rogan?
Hey, that's not fair!
Why do you listen to him?
We got a newsroom in shiny, I put a tie on!
People are infuriated, but there it is, the genie's out of the bottle.
There's no question now that Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan are the biggest voices in independent media, and people are losing their trust and leaving legacy media resources in their droves.
They're losing viewers, they're losing power, they're losing advertising.
Could there be a connection between this decline of trust in the legacy media and the breakdown of neo-liberal values, or what Joe Rogan referred to as the lunatic left?
I know Joe Rogan, I've been on that show a few times and I think he's a great person.
And I would say that he has what you'd call liberal values, like he just wants to sort of be left alone, doesn't care about people's identities or cultural choices, believes in democracy and representation and voting and all that kind of stuff.
Is someone that the left could have grabbed and turned into a hero rejecting the left?
Is it because the left has gone kind of crazy, lost all its values and principles and doesn't mean anything anymore?
Is it because of that?
Or is it because Joe Rogan is a moron who is both easily led and living so far outside of reality he keeps getting fact-checked on his own show?
Here we have a classic example of Russell saying something without explicitly saying it, simply by phrasing it as a question, rather than outright saying, the left has gone kinda crazy, has lost all its values and principles and doesn't mean anything anymore.
He asks, Has Joe Rogan abandoned the left wing because the left has gone kind of crazy, has lost all its values and principles, and doesn't mean anything anymore?
Now, spoiler alert, he doesn't offer any alternative perspectives as to what the answer could be, leaving that as the only conclusion for his audience to draw.
What he just said.
I want so many other facets of this argument.
I really do.
The left has gone crazy, has lost all its values and principles, and doesn't mean anything anymore, Lauren.
That is the only answer.
What changed this week?
What happened this week?
Because here's the thing, usually whenever there's an editorial, even if it's kind of wacky, some whisper of something comes across any of my feeds.
I'm not completely blindsided.
Yeah, this is, uh...
What?!
This is out of thi- From what I can- I'm ba- I'm...
I'm baffled.
I have yet to be unbaffled.
You're not wrong, and I'd love to tell you it's gonna get better, but it's definitely not.
Listen, my expectations are not that high, and that's fine.
I've learned.
I've been conditioned.
The crucial thing about this tactic that Russell's using is that if anyone tries to press him on it, he can say, I didn't say that.
I was just asking questions.
Because it's in the format of a question.
We've covered the tactic before, but every now and then I do like to point it out because it's such a frequent thing of his and almost always just serves to thinly veil his actual beliefs on a subject.
And look, I can do the same thing with the same subject.
Why has Joe Rogan abandoned the left?
Is it because he's a meat-headed moronic multimillionaire with the critical thinking skills of a toddler?
See, and if I don't immediately move on to the next sentence, the instinct screaming at you is to say yes, or possibly no, if you're politically alert to the right or whatever, right?
I let that hang deliberately for you to feel that kind of moment, that tension, while Russell just hurries on to the next sentence in his choppy editorial, which instead lets the question and the desired answer linger in the back of your mind the entire time.
It's a bamboozling kind of situation.
But my instinct to that question is again like 2019?
I thought this happened already.
I reject the premise.
I thought this happened already.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm with you.
I'm with you.
But again, you are critically analyzing the situation, which a lot of people, certainly a lot of people who watch Russell's content, don't necessarily engage that same muscle.
Or definitely Rogan's content.
This is so weird!
Kitten's hanging in there, on her little branch, by her little paws, looking very confused.
I'm hanging in there, kitten.
I'm going with it.
I've got to.
I'm hanging in there, Kitten.
I'm just, I'm going with it.
I've got to. I have no other choice.
I'll try and provide a ladder by the end of the show.
Also don't hurt yourself.
It's okay.
It's not our fault.
We're just here.
We're just here going with it.
We're just here.
We're rolling with it.
We're rolling with it.
So we've had a little bit of Russell playing up his celebrity already, but we get a bit more in the next clip, followed by a weird defense of the Christian right.
Let's have a look at what he said in the framework of this being the most significant voice in independent media.
"Well I used to be a part of the blue bubble. I was 100% a left-leaning person who lived in Los Angeles."
I suppose I was as well. I worked in Hollywood, worked in British media, and when I was part of that establishment,
it seemed kind of ordinary and necessary that your values would be Democrat or Labour or Progressivism.
And for me, that was always based on kindness, that everyone has the right to express themselves how they want to.
And I kind of, I suppose, didn't notice how the rights of people that had traditional values, like say Christians, were always alloyed to power structures that were regarded negatively.
How the framing around pro-choice versus pro-life or pro-gun versus anti-gun were always skewed in the media in a very particular way.
Okay, so it's not that the Christian Right have been overwhelmingly against reproductive healthcare for women, or that they've been overwhelmingly pro-guns, even in the face of having more mass shootings than there are days in a year.
It's just the media skewing things in a very particular way, working against the rights of Christians and people with traditional values.
I thought there was a lot to be concerned about, but apparently not.
It's just the media hyping it up.
Now, here's the thing.
If these are two dudes who had some success, this is tough.
It's tough to bring it into the real world.
Okay, to reality, I should say, not the real world.
If there's two dudes who found that were maybe overexposed to performative neoliberal bullshit through especially rich people in Hollywood, I'd maybe go a different direction, but I'd feel a lot of distaste as well, but I'd go a very different direction.
Yeah.
So I'm going to feel like, okay, I have a whole other set of complaints that sound very similar to yours, but are not going to actually be similar at all.
Yes.
Like there's going to be aesthetically similar on their face, like, okay, and then it's right underneath it.
Like, no, no, no.
Yeah.
Super, super duper no?
Oh my god, no.
Please stop.
No.
Okay.
All right.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah, you can see where we're going with all this.
Forgive me, I don't know that I can!
I'm honestly, like, I'm still a little... Yeah, I probably should... I'm overthinking it.
Well, okay, the next clip will definitely make it clear, and it takes the concept of the media skewing things to a very silly place, or what seems a very silly place.
And how one of the perspectives that we were never offered is decentralization.
Allow different communities to be run differently according to the principles and values of the people that inhabit that community.
That was oddly never discussed.
And now you have a left that's taken progressivism into some interesting areas which I frankly don't trust.
I don't think the left is all about looking after what they would call vulnerable communities.
I think the left is about Censorship and centralised authoritarianism, corporatism and globalism.
That's what I think defines the left now.
And if you look at the great experiments of the left, Maoism, Stalinism, perhaps it was always this way.
Perhaps all of us massively understood that aside from a cultural blip in the 60s, where it's like, oh my God, hippies, Black Panthers, women's rights and the uprisings of trade union movements, maybe the left has always been about authoritarianism.
I don't know.
Certainly Joe Rogan's rejecting it.
Whew!
Ah yes, those famous leftists, Mao and Stalin.
Liberals!
They're so... This famous shitlib.
Mao.
Mao, famous shitlib.
So, I've been going back and forth with this and the other thing that we're going to cover all week.
So on its face, this concept seems completely fucking absurd.
But there is an explanation.
And there's a subject I've been wrestling with in terms of Russell's coverage for quite a while, and he just showed his cards just that little bit too much.
See, for a long time, Russell has been relaying talking points that have had the undergirding of racist, bigoted, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, but it's been quite difficult to pin down whether he's been doing so with any amount of knowledge, or if he's just been following whichever way the winds of profit have been blowing.
Right.
A sort of variation of the stupid versus evil continuum, in that it's been very difficult to tell his degree of ignorance of any of these subjects, even if he is painting himself as an authority figure on them.
But now that he's described Chairman Mao and Joseph Stalin as being leftist, while in the same breath saying that he concretely believes the left wing to be about censorship, corporatism, centralised authoritarianism and globalism, I can feel at least 99% confident in making the case that Russell has run headfirst down the pipeline of being against cultural Marxism specifically, and does so knowingly.
Now, I know that probably you, Lauren, and our listeners who are versed in the concept of cultural Marxism have picked up on a few moments of Russell signalling, or virtue signalling, if you will, his opposition to cultural Marxism, but here's a brief explanation of it for those not in the know.
So, Cultural Marxism is the conspiracy theory that misrepresents the Frankfurt School, an early 20th century school of philosophers who were both Marxist and predominantly Jewish, as being the originators of the concepts of identity politics, political correctness, and the culture war at large.
The idea is that there is a concerted academic and intellectual effort to undermine Christian values or traditional values via the use of identity politics, as they call it, To get Americans and the West to embrace immigrants, embrace their sexualities, and shed the shackles of Christian conservatism and come over to the left wing.
Now, is this what the Frankfurt School were actually doing?
No.
They were concerned about the whole fascist dictator perpetrating a genocide thing and trying to, you know, trying to take over the world thing that was happening at the time, and so they were trying to figure out how to prevent history from repeating itself.
One of the things they arrived at was essentially hate speech and vocal bigotry being a big problem, kind of wrapped up in the whole thing, one might say.
And alongside that and what was happening in Russia, they also founded the concept of critical theory,
which is approaching society and culture in such a way that reveals and challenges power structures,
often examining things through a lens of the oppressed and the oppressors.
One of the loudest and most irritating idiots who brings up the concept of cultural Marxism
these days is Jordan Peterson, who sometimes renames it post-modernism at his will,
but he's very much talking about the same thing. Yep, very much talking about the same thing.
And Peterson mostly uses it to say he shouldn't have to respect the trans community.
Ben Shapiro is another advocate of this, though he's usually more racism-oriented.
That's kind of the direction he goes a lot of the time.
That said, Jordan Peterson does bring me to my next point, which is that cultural Marxism doesn't conceptually really have anything to do with Marxism.
Marxism is an economic model that is communist in nature and doesn't really have any focus on culture whatsoever.
Culture in that kind of system is inherently defined by the masses and can be either liberal or conservative under a Marxist structure.
Marx was pretty vehemently anti-semitic as well, actually, and so likely wouldn't advocate for what the Frankfurt School were arriving at.
But Marxism is a good word for othering, particularly in the United States, where any association to Russia or communism whatsoever up until the recent past was considered the devil.
And so the word Marxism has been bastardised and misused by this phrase, cultural Marxism, because words just don't have meaning anymore.
It's exactly what I was thinking and feeling with every fiber of my being.
Yeah.
And how that relates to Jordan Peterson is, well, he and Slavoj Žižek had a debate about Marxism some time ago.
I bet they did.
Zizek was trying to advocate for a form of actual Marxism, and Jordy Pete's just wanted to whinge about cultural Marxism, which of course has nothing to do with Marxism.
And so they just talked past each other for almost the entire thing, which is delicious.
Jordan Peterson is still an idiot, everybody.
Always was, who knew?
For the record, I'm also not terribly on board with Zizek either, but at least he knew what he was supposed to be debating.
Anyway, I digress.
The conflation of Marxism and leftist ideologies through the conspiracy lens of cultural Marxism is exactly why Russell just landed on Stalin and Mao being leftist.
If his best buddy Jordan Peterson is combining the ideas of Marxism and leftist ideologies, it's not overly surprising that he is too.
And so with Stalin and Mao leading totalitarian dictatorships under the guise of communism, which is based in Marxism, Stalin and Mao must therefore be leftist in Russell's conception.
Now, all of this has a much broader tapestry and history over the last century, with a particular resurgence in the 90s, thanks to the likes of Lyndon LaRouche, Andrew Breitbart, who posits that infamous Jewish billionaire George Soros is advancing cultural Marxism, Paul Weyrich, William Lynd, Pat Buchanan, and Steve Bannon as well.
And there are plenty more names to go alongside there, but there are also distinct- I think that's a great representation of like, oh, They're horrible.
Yeah, this is who we're dealing with.
And there are also distinct and clear connections to the John Birch Society, the Heritage Foundation, and Cambridge Analytica.
It's a good chunk of what inspired Anders Breivik to murder 77 people in Norway back in 2011, and has served as inspiration and fuel to many right-wing Christian nationalists and white supremacists.
The theory serves to preserve misogyny, racism, and anti-LGBTQ sentiments, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and general bigotry to this very day.
There are also lots of tendrils of Russell's thoughts and beliefs wrapped in there, including both the apparent dumbing down of the media and the very concept that we should all live in separate ethnostates.
Regardless, it's a huge topic to dissect and discuss, with the apparent evidence of the conspiracy being based in two misused quotes from the Frankfurt School, by the way.
That seems to be the summation of it.
But we're going to have to tackle it another time, because we have some more clips of Russell and Rogan being big dum-dums, and those do deserve our attention.
But we might have to dig into this properly at some point.
Never?
I don't know.
Like, could we not?
Would be also cool.
Because I always appreciate at least a roundup or like an overview.
And I was like, so, because cultural Marxism is like a term I can't easily retrain because it doesn't mean anything.
Yeah.
It doesn't mean anything.
And also to conflate it with postmodernism is like, those are always like, I mean, cultural Marxism I can kind of hold on to a little better as far as what, but I have to remember fake goalpost moving definitions depending on who's saying it at any moment.
And I can obnoxiously keep a lot of those in my head because I, and also everything I watch and listen to, I do, these are just, cultural Marxism specifically is one of those that I'm just like, it's so nonsense that it's hard for me to even grasp.
And grasping that, obviously grasping is fine, but it just goes right back out of my head again because of what those words actually mean.
Like the real definitions of words.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They don't tend to care about that.
Jordan Peterson certainly doesn't care about that.
No, and having like an art history background, let me tell you how confusing the real definition of postmodernism is with how these fucking jokers are using it now.
What are you talking about?
Yeah, it's a problem.
He did, Peterson did initially start using, he was initially using the words cultural Marxism and then he shifted probably around the time everything started to get a bit more pro-Russia, started to kind of just lose a little bit of that vernacular for whatever reason, I wonder why.
Yeah.
It's also just overdone, so you don't know what you're saying anymore.
It's such a bummer.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, and the thing about... As far as Rogan, I don't know if we're going to talk more about Rogan.
Oh, we got more Rogan, yep.
We got more Rogan.
As far as like being on the left, like if he's talking about the left or whatever.
Yep, yep.
I want to stake what I know and enjoy about what I associate Joe Rogan and the left.
The actual left is the episode of NewsRadio where he goes on strike.
This is very young Rogan then.
It's his union.
Well, I'm telling you about a time I liked him, so it has to be a while ago.
And that like that episode is like thoughtful it's funny it's still like oh he seems to say just eating the sandwiches and taking a break what are we doing they don't like it's very that which is like kind of a silly kind of anti caricature.
Of like men who had good jobs, which is a cartoon in the past now.
I love that episode.
I think it's amazing.
And he's very much like representing what the guys that I still follow on on, you know, like we're strong working families union.
You know like Union Proud, Union Strong, also bald kind of pink guys but saying a lot of things that I appreciate and I like to even in my heart and my mind by myself reach across the aisle to people that don't look like me, that have ideas I can get behind.
And so there is that representation and still always is going to be in my head of like, The discussion that they brought to mainstream television about strikes and union busting.
And they put a lot of words in Joe Rogan's mouth, the writers did, that were on point.
And he was winning.
Because it was just him in the room.
And it was him and Jimmy James arguing.
And there was a lot of, well, got me there.
Either way, it's very...
I know news radio is from the fucking Jurassic era at this point, but that's my Joe Rogan leftist moment?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I can't, I have not yet been able to shake it.
I'm afraid I won't be able to.
Maybe that's not the worst thing in the world.
Maybe it helps, you know, it's a bit of a... Maybe it's survival.
Yeah.
Spoonful of sugar, you know, to go with the medicine that is this show.
It is from a long time ago.
I have some more recent positive associations from like before he went berserk.
you know, and like he used to do interviews that I used to really enjoy with musicians I like.
Him sitting down with Maynard James Keenan for three hours, always fascinating, really interested
in that. But yeah, I distinctly remember when he started going to, during COVID times, there was a
great one where he had Bill Burr on. And him having Bill Burr on is always a delight because Bill
isn't particularly afraid to give him shit. And at this point...
I wouldn't if I were him at all. [laughter]
At this point, Joe was calling everyone who wore a mask "pussies"
and Bill Burr was like, "Oh, look at you so manly over there with your open nose
and throat, just like, just abs, tearing him a new one. Just like, you probably got six elk
in your freezer. Like, what fucking world do you live in?" It was...
It was great, it was genuine.
At least Joe Rogan took that on the chin and considered his behavior after that, so that's great.
Right, exactly, exactly.
When someone he's known for decades, you know.
If I see bigger numbers in his deals for Spotify, which...
Are we arguing that that's still independent media if he's getting $250 million from a major media company?
I don't think that's what that is anymore.
I just also see Line go up in bank account for these jokers.
I'm not going to keep saying that word.
Nope, we're not doing that today.
I'm not getting trapped into saying the same word 15 times.
No, Lauren, that's not cool.
I see, yeah, bank account go up and they're going to be crazier.
Yeah, pretty much.
Pretty much.
You know, all of this talk about them getting cancelled and being called whatever else and being under the greatest attacks the media could level at them, according to Russell.
It's like, well, you're just reaching more people and making more money, so how does this figure?
I'd love that attack any day of the week.
We'll take it.
We'll take it.
Oh dear.
Please, someone attack the show and suddenly we profit.
I don't know.
And reach more ears.
Okay, I'll probably take that deal.
I don't think we get to do that.
No, I don't think we get to do that either.
I think we are saying the wrong things to be able to do that.
It's just a hunch I have.
Now, the next clip opens with Rogan in conversation with Asian-American comedian Bobby Lee, who has been going down the right-wing comedy pipeline since the controversy surrounding him last year, where he told a story on air about him raping a child prostitute in Tijuana, and later backtracked it as being a joke.
I've listened to it.
There's remarkably little about it that sounds like a joke.
But since then, he's mysteriously started to embrace conservative politics.
So it's been a year, right?
So we just saw a little stuff.
We're like, wait, Bobby Lee?
What?
Because I hadn't heard about that story.
Very hideous story and also cool good.
Yeah.
Hmm, didn't need that in my day.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So throughout this, Rogan is chatting and his guest is Bobby Lee.
And you will hear Bobby Lee chime in from time to time, but I did want to make that clear as to who he's talking to and why it's possibly important that it is Bobby Lee specifically.
Anyway, here is the clip.
Over time, this is what we're seeing.
So over time, you and I, who used to be on the left, are now like, where's the left?
Where are you guys?
You guys are so far away!
I know a lot of people feel politically homeless.
A lot of people that would say, I'm not a Republican, I don't think, or I'm not a conservative, or I'm not a right wing person.
I mean, what?
Are you if you say, I believe in free speech, I believe in communities being controlled by the people in them, I believe in leaving people alone, I believe in minimum government, I believe in opposing rampant corporatism and extremist capitalism, particularly as it's practiced on a global level, I believe in freedom to worship, freedom to identify, freedom to love, freedom!
I believe in freedom and I recognize that other people's version of freedom might be different from mine and if I leave you alone, you leave me alone.
Is that cool?
What's that now?
Again, you're talking about libertarianism, man.
Albeit with some apparent desire for some unspecified curbs on extremist capitalism, which hey, he actually said the word.
I'll give him credit for that.
That's the most I can do on this show.
I was about to agree and I got sad.
He's not kidding when he says he believes in small government and being left alone, but we will come to that a little bit later.
The main thing, of course.
He said people being in charge of the place that they live and small government.
What?
That's more input from everyone, which means... okay.
Yeah, I'm not going to say his positions make sense.
The main thing that libertarian views rub up against usually is, of course, the notion that we at some point need to exist as a collective society, you know, when it comes to democracy and how our government functions and all that stuff, even in a smaller community, which means that being left alone is all well and good until the democratic decision is to do something you disagree with.
At which point, when you're of libertarian beliefs, pretty much all you can do is either bitch about it, not pay your taxes, or commit violence in an act of impotent rage, as is so often seen within the United States.
Oh, so crimes?
Yeah, pretty much.
Cool.
Pretty much.
It's disengagement and whinging, or crimes.
Not paying your taxes is also a crime.
Exactly, exactly.
That's what I'm saying.
Neither is a crime.
I struggle to see any other realistic endpoints for libertarianism when you take them all the way down the line, you know what I mean?
And you know what's crazy?
Is that guys that give the don't pay your taxes advice go to jail, but the guys that are like violence is the answer manage to skirt authority when it's the same The guys that like violence is the answer get to run for president!
So there we are!
Well that's a bummer, ain't it?
Tight.
It is, especially as last week Russell was telling everyone not to pay their taxes.
That's what I'm saying!
That's the thing he might go to jail for!
Uh, we can only hope.
That would be a funny reason.
Of all the reasons for him to go, I would enjoy that one because it seems so minor compared to the actual horrors that he's done.
Like, alright, I'll take it, I'll take it, you know what?
Al Capone him, what are you gonna do?
Abso-fucking-lutely.
Now, Russell has some points to make about how the left has become authoritarian.
I can't even see you!
You're out of your mind!
Even if you look at the idea of Tucker Carlson's recent trip to Russia,
it's the left that's saying, "Well, this is treason.
He shouldn't be allowed over there. Russia are the baddies."
That's what the right would have said 20, 30 years ago.
"He's a traitor against our nation."
These are the kind of tropes and ideas that were not of the left.
Authoritarianism, take the shot, all of this emergent authoritarianism
in the name of cultural progressivism makes me feel that it was never about freedom.
That the left was never about freedom.
Certainly, it doesn't seem to be about freedom now.
Yeah.
Why are you just accepting this?
Because it's a noble thing to blurt out, so everybody goes, you're on the right team.
That's what it is.
Above all, the left used to be about supporting working people against the establishment, whether that establishment was the state or corporations, which were largely believed to have captured the state, which is still what I actually believe.
But there's no way that you could say that the left are the party of working ordinary Americans, ordinary British people.
Now it's elitist, it's progressive, it's exclusive, it's condemnatory, it's patronising, super
silly and haughty.
They clearly represent professional, educated, city class people.
There's no doubt about it.
If you see someone in a white van flying the flag of their nation, the left hates those
people.
The left hates people in white vans waving flags.
And we're all professional, educated, city class people.
I can't.
I can't with this.
It's a lot.
I'm also so bored.
This is so boring to me.
I'm like, because...
If you start with not... Listen, you want to complain about disconnected neoliberal absurdity?
Let's talk about that.
But just saying, the left... Yeah.
If we're not using words that mean things, I can't... I can't... What are we doing?
We're not talking.
That's for sure.
We're not on...
If we can't agree on basic terms, what are we doing?
It's one of these things where the rhetoric is very much not new, but it is new for it to be so direct from Russell.
And he is just, he's laying it all on the table here.
you know, whereas when we started this show it was kind of, it was a bit of a struggle
to be like, "No no no, he's fuckin' right wing and he is white and you kinda had to
kinda pin him down," whereas now it's just like, "Oh, give me twenty minutes and I will
tell you how much I hate the left for twenty minutes."
Okay!
Um, yeah.
Now.
SEAN Yeah, I guess it's more thinly veiled, or was more thinly veiled?
ALICE Way less, yeah, way less veiled than it used to be.
There are absolutely some people on the left who don't like members of the working class.
That is a thing.
But it's not because they're of the left wing.
It's because they, at very least, consider themselves to be in a class above working class, be it middle or upper.
That is something that exists across the political spectrum.
And I can promise you there are plenty of right-wing people who fucking hate the working class.
It's a class politics kind of thing, not a left-right divide.
It's a financial fucking divide.
Yeah, and never forget, everybody, the upper class, the very top, they always analyze by class.
They don't call it that.
They're the most class conscious and they have the most class solidarity out of anybody, so the rest of us have to do the same thing to even be able to tread water.
Yes.
Absolutely.
As for the left no longer supporting workers, there is an argument there.
The left wing in both the UK and the US essentially abandoned workers' rights as a concept, as well as generally abandoning the working class.
Happened a couple of times, embodied most recently, I would say, by the acceptance of neoliberal policies by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, that were initially, of course, installed by Thatcher and Reagan.
But, you know, the left very much was like, Yeah, I'll keep these.
So yeah, there's something to it.
But of course, Russell's implication by way of omission is that the right wing is actually for the workers and supports workers.
Much like the mythology surrounding Donald Trump by swaths of working class white people.
You know, he saved Michigan and blah blah blah.
But the reality couldn't actually be further from the truth.
The left betrayed the working class, sure, but it was the right who fucked them in the first place.
And some politicians on the left, like some on the left, are trying to push for workers' rights and unionization these days.
There is a push for that on the left in general in the US and in the UK.
And as per Donald Trump's last presidency, all you would find under another of his presidencies is more tax cuts for the rich and anything that negatively affects the working class while he's in power is all somehow the work of the deep state, which he mysteriously can't do anything about.
Because that's all that fucking happened last time.
Oh, yeah, well, even saying like the left in this context, like the Democratic Party, I think you can say all this stuff about and like, basically the well, yeah, and so the the it's tough also, because over here, labor is still like, For all its flaws.
I think maybe more positive connotations because the way we use it is so different.
It was New Labour that kind of did it.
Tony Blair kind of pioneered New Labour and that kind of concept.
Blairism is its own thing as well.
So, you know, any of those kind of things.
But yeah, you're absolutely right.
It's not like the left as an entirety.
It's the centrist portion.
Right, because we also need to talk about the Overton window, right?
And so even the neoliberal policies have been dragged so far right that, yeah, the Overton window is completely, I mean, is a different world from even 10 years ago.
And so, yeah, left, the left, wants usually abolition or reconstruction or reframing or changing something to be better to progress.
And neoliberal at best argues for incremental reform.
Even that might be generous.
If that, if that.
Well, you know, the way that I see it is like, and the way that it is so obvious to me is there has been this like corporate, you know, like corporate Congress marriage romance, whirlwind romance that has put us in these dire, serious, like, you know, world impacting You know, like, implications for the future of the human race's ability to survive on the Earth.
And so these problems are gigantic.
And they're like, let's do, like, a bake sale to fix it.
Like, it'll be great, guys.
Let's do, like, a fun little bake sale.
And then we'll just throw more money at the problem that couldn't possibly be fixed unless we actually go to the root of the problem.
And we wonder why we're here.
Yeah, pretty much, pretty much.
It's, yeah, it is way more complicated than I am able to succinctly describe, let alone what Russell is saying, which is just kind of not based in reality, one might say.
What an unhelpful, but obviously, like, unhelpful, but, oh, he's gonna spend so much time.
Yeah, intentionally unhelpful, one could argue.
And yeah, Rogan's point is supposedly the only reason people in LA vote left is so that they can say they're on the right team, because no one can have beliefs or things to stand by, apparently.
My guess is, once again, this is a position of being so absurdly wealthy while also being a selfish prick, so you can't imagine why someone would vote for a party who would take some of your money away in order to make the lives of others better.
Yeah, there's a class question going on here as well.
Like, Joe Rogan, so for those of you that aren't watching, right, so Joe Rogan was saying like, oh, I'm this far away and we're this far away.
It's like he was spreading his hands apart in this kind of upside down V. You know, like, oh, we're just getting further and further apart.
It's like, look at your hands and that's how much more money you have.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Where is the call coming from, Yosef?
Inside the house.
Yeah, tell me, Jo.
From the bank.
What are you doing to help the situation, Joey?
But I mean, if he can't even identify the situation in the first place, understand, like, oh, this is the gulf that I'm feeling between me and the rest of normals.
Like, the normie people.
Yes, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think you it's you're looking in the wrong place he does actually have he does have more to say on that subject, but But yeah, in fact, in fact, he's got some bullshit right up top here actually tight.
Okay It's not like, oh my god, what are we doing to San Francisco?
It's not like, oh my god, why are we letting these violent criminals out of jail?
It's like, oh my god, why are we defunding the f***ing police?
What are you doing?
You can't say any of those things.
Whatever you think about those issues, the fact that we can't talk about them is the biggest problem.
Shouldn't free speech and the ability to communicate be a shared value across all political spectrums?
I would say the side that wants to shut down debate are not the goodies.
Whatever your view is, if you're like, I believe the opposite to Joe Rogan and everything.
Early release for criminals, compassion to people, belief in true reform.
Even if you absolutely believe in that, you should be willing to have a conversation about it.
We all should be willing to have a conversation.
Otherwise, what are we ultimately going to get?
We're going to get conflict and fracture and the breakdown of cultural values.
And I start to wonder if that is the name and the point of the experiment.
Okay, so we're supposed to be having more conversations with people from the opposite side of the political spectrum.
Interesting, interesting.
Pretty weird how Russell, with his platform of tens of millions including social media reach, decides to pretty exclusively talk to right-wing people then, isn't it?
I mean that does strike me as odd.
Apparently the furthest we can reach across the political spectrum these days, and especially post-allegations, is Jimmy Dore, I guess?
I mean, he did have Chris Hedges on, I'll say that, but Hedges was there to pretty much exclusively talk about Israel perpetrating a genocide in Gaza, and even then that was just Russell nodding along through most of it, and kind of still trying to walk a centrist line.
Yeah, they didn't really touch on politics much, and even then his audience fucking hated it, and the comments were just full of that moment where Hedges described Trump's base as Christian fascists.
Either way, that's one lefty, albeit pro-Russia lefty by the way, within a span of six months.
Doesn't feel quite like we're putting the effort in of having more diverse conversations.
But no, it's the left who want to shut down all conversation that's happening.
Ah, hypocrisy aside.
Hypocrisy aside, you can see how this argument lends itself to the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, with the left and their woke ideologies of respecting trans people apparently leading to conflict, fracture and the breakdown of cultural values, as Russell puts it.
Oh, and before I forget, Rogan there was talking about San Francisco decreasing their prison population during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic by releasing non-violent offenders who were considered a low risk to re-offending.
This was, of course, to ultimately save lives and because they were told to, because they were famously overcrowded.
Also, he fundamentally misunderstands what defunding the police is supposed to mean because that's been an intentional project of the right wing.
Lord forbid we allow cops to not have to deal with crises of mental health or addiction and instead spend the money on professionals who are trained to respond to those things specifically.
No, let's just keep paying for the police to have armoured vehicles, I guess, and see if that fixes any of our societal problems.
It hasn't changed.
They have more money.
Oh my god.
Oh my god.
Yeah, exactly.
It's also not happening.
I would love for it to happen.
It's not.
What's crazy is that's an argument that sounds smarter than these kids think they're cats and we need to put litter boxes in the bathroom, but there's just as much veracity to that crazy bullshit.
It's the same.
It's as real.
These things are equally real on the ground.
Absolutely.
And Rogan's main point is, of course, that, oh, you can't talk about prisoners being released or defunding the police, because if you do, then you get called a Nazi, he says on his podcast to his hundreds of millions of listeners while being literally the biggest podcaster of all time, having signed the biggest podcast deal of all time of 250 million dollars ish, with basically no one calling him a Nazi.
I don't think he's a Nazi, by the way.
I think he's a moron.
But there we are.
Yeah, I feel like Doofus is fine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And honestly has more affection in it, from my perspective.
Yeah, he's a gentler, yes.
Yeah, also, he's not even complaining about cash bail reform?
Because, like, that's something that's been completely psychotic.
He brings that up.
He does bring that up.
Oh, okay.
So, I was gonna say, like, I didn't even hear, like, as far as San Francisco, like, I just assumed it was, like, psychotic fear mo- Great.
Yeah, it's because of the way that Russell has chopped these clips up and then inflicted his views upon them and then everything else.
Rogan's kind of full statement has been cut into little segments.
So, who does Rogan, like one might wonder?
Austin people are great people.
They're really nice.
They're nice.
They're not sh**heads.
They're not Hollywood people.
They're not lost in this fake world of leftist ideology that everybody's trapped in.
They're just people.
They're just regular people, man.
Gotta say that when I first went to Florida and met all the people that I work with at Rumble, and people that are conservative, they're often Christian, they believe in traditional values, and you can ask them outright, are you a racist?
Do you believe that white people are superior to people of other colors?
And if people go, no, I don't believe that.
Well, what are you going to do?
Oh, you're a liar.
You are a racist.
I mean, if people are being secretly racist, well, then if you're not going to trust anybody's views, what I found was speaking to conservative people is they don't care what I believe in.
They just want basically to be left alone.
I'm sure we could tear each other to shreds over the right to bear arms or pro-life, pro-choice values.
I'm sure I could argue with numerous people on numerous subjects, but the fundamental
principle of being able to freely and openly discuss our values, that shouldn't be up for
negotiation because that leads to hysteria. When Tucker goes to Russia to speak to Putin,
it leads to censorship. It leads to the legitimization of controlling social media
spaces. It leads to government interventionism. It leads to being told things like war is the
only route to peace. It's leading to a kind of madness. Tearing each other to shreds in an
Argument!
Children are being torn to shreds with bullets.
Women are being torn to shreds with anti-abortion legislation.
This isn't an argument, it's a real fucking thing that happens.
Gestures to Pulse nightclub in fucking Florida, but none of these joke- I almost said it.
None of these turds give a single solitary shit about that.
Ho!
Yeah, it is interesting how easy it is not to particularly care about issues when they don't affect you.
No shit!
Yeah, yeah.
Truly.
Yeah.
So before he went on that little, uh, that little jag at the end there, he started on a path about, oh, if people are secretly racist, as though that's something that's outside the realm of possibility, by the way, but if people are secretly racist, if you're not going to trust anyone's views, and then he just changed the fucking subject.
I need to know what to do if people are secretly racist, Russell.
Get this man a big old bow on the top of his head and a lollipop stat.
Cause that is like little kid baby brain bullshit.
Yes.
That is insane.
Yes it is.
And people could even be secretly racist!
Well I mean- You're secretly too!
You're secretly a toddler.
If you're not going to trust anyone's views.
But obviously, you know, he doesn't answer that question.
And so like what?
I should trust the things people say at face value and do as Russell apparently does and go around the office asking colleagues outright if they're racist.
And if they say no, then they're not racist.
Job done.
We did it, everybody.
We fixed racism.
Turns out you just need to ask people.
And I still think HR might have an issue.
Probably would!
Probably would!
That is so absurd.
Jim, why do you keep going around the office asking everyone if they're a racist?
Well, I just want to make sure.
Okay.
I just... Like, that's so... Okay.
That's crazy.
We gotta, we gotta... I bet there's other... It's bananas.
It's fuckin' maps.
But that's the thing.
It's like, we can say it's crazy as much as we want.
Everybody knows.
Let's... I mean, we... I don't know.
Substance, please.
Oh, you might be asking a little bit much.
After last week's fucking Putin escapades, you're asking for substance?
Why don't we just play a clip and not talk about it?
Oh, dear.
Also, yeah, surprise, surprise about, you know, Austin, Texas people being nice to Joe Rogan, who is a world-famous celebrity, compared to probably left-wing people in LA who see celebrities a lot more, for a start, and are also more likely to think Rogan is a bit of an idiot.
No, he fucking made it up!
He made it up!
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
Like, we have a ton of friends in Austin and in Texas and plenty of them are, like, are on the spectrum of the left.
Austin is the left-wing hub of Texas.
I do, yeah, yeah, I have heard that.
Yeah!
They just don't have any political power because of, like, three psychopaths.
Yeah.
And what do you say to Joe?
Like, what are you going to do if you see Joe Rogan in the wild?
Are you going to give him shit?
I probably wouldn't.
I'd be like, well, I can't be bothered.
I'm not rude.
Also, talk to him about, like, anything fun.
Also, do you think that he's hanging out with regular people or like- Fuck no.
No!
Is his door dash from Torchy's going to be like, hey man, I don't like your stance on Israel.
Come on.
No!
He's not!
This is his interactions when he, I don't know, gets a refill on cigars or something.
I don't know, something.
I'm not going to say that LA people are less annoying than Austin people.
I need that to be very clear.
But that's also anecdotal at best.
There's like, it's a rich tapestry everywhere.
It's a rich tapestry.
But I will say, people that are in Texas and Austin, okay, okay, you know what?
I'm going to take back Mm.
I'm gonna put a big ol' addendum, because they are amazing at couching their language in a way that will not get them shot by their crazy neighbor.
That is, like, they are way better at, like...
Couching their beliefs and their statements in ways because they're in peril.
And you have the whole southern hospitality concept, you know, of like, of giving people shit through like aggressive politeness, you know.
There's, I mean, there's more wrapped up in the concept than that, but it's a possibility.
Well, but also like, that's everybody's game.
And that's also, that's a sticky wicket because everyone in the South knows The rules?
So you can still break those rules.
But I'm saying like...
Not everybody's on the same page politically, but they know who will flip a table and throw a drink on them like a psycho.
And so people that maybe have more progressive views have to be careful about the conversation.
I'm going back to the conversations that Mike and I have had, and also the way that we are gingerly couching our conversation.
How do we?
Well, I don't know.
Yeah, that's true.
You gotta be more careful how you talk, because people are nuts.
And also, they've been given this kind of carte blanche pass that we all agree happened with Trump to be very visibly horrible to other people all the time.
Very hostile, very actually violent.
Extremely hostile.
Either way, it doesn't terribly shock me that everyone is nice to Joe Rogan.
Also that!
God, you're fucking famous!
Yeah, exactly.
Like you're really famous.
That's it.
Yeah, yeah.
Ridiculous.
Absolutely ridiculous.
Is no one nice to him in LA, apparently?
That's silly.
Yeah, that's ridiculous.
Now, Russell has a point to make about how the left should in fact be getting Joe Rogan onside.
these blue bubbles where everyone's gone insane.
Well, I used to be a part of the blue bubble.
I was 100%.
I never voted Republican my whole life.
I was very left-leaning.
Even from a strategic perspective, if you can't get your movement together
to get Joe Rogan on your side, you're a mess.
Like, this is someone that could be going out to bat for the Democrat Party.
They could be going, Hello, I'm Joe Rogan.
Here's Gavin Newsom on my podcast.
Here's Joe Biden.
Joe, wake up!
Joe, wake up!
But they're still going, We don't like him.
He's a meathead.
He's a meathead.
Oh my God.
Who do you want to exclude next?
Who is that?
When did that happen?
When did that happen?
When did Joe Biden say, Oh, he's a meathead to Joe Rogan?
Was there a Joe vs. Joe I don't know about?
I mean, I'd watch it if there was.
My favorite thing about that clip is the subtle suggestion that even Russell knows that Rogan is, as you say, a doofus.
Where he said, if you can't get your movement together to even get Joe Rogan on your side, then you're a mess.
See, that's the British insult.
That's what that is.
Yes, it absolutely is.
It's just got that subtle, like, he's an idiot.
If you can't even get him, you're in trouble.
If you can't get that brain-dead asshole, what can you do?
Did I translate from UK to USA?
Exactly, exactly.
Well done, well done.
Duolingo, call me.
Let's work it out.
That's hilarious.
Yeah, yeah.
There's just some delightfully subtle shade there that I don't think he was intending to give, to be honest.
Well, no, of course, of course.
And which those are the best insults, I think, because you're like, oh, you mean that?
Yes.
Great.
Like, also, that's part of the left.
Is genuinely believing that people can make their own decisions because conservatives are all about conforming in the status quo and then and that's you're molding the individual whereas like the left does want in theory a big tent where like If Joe doesn't like we're not the whole party shouldn't pander to one guy because he's famous that's the like as a person in the world that's the wrong thing to do to present your which I would agree agree I would argue that like the Democratic Party doesn't have a moral stance which is
Their main problem is no moral conviction or backbone whatsoever when it comes to reality and actually doing anything.
But even the branding of it, you can take it or leave it.
There's something very weird about putting it on the left to convince one guy There is something so strange and, like, egomaniacal to me.
And maybe, I think, speaks to what's on the inside of Russell Brand.
Of like, well, you haven't sold this idea to me well enough, so I'm gonna be an asshole.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think there's an element of that with probably both of them.
Yeah, I don't think you're wrong.
The rich whites aren't okay.
Like, they're not okay.
No, it turns out I don't think they've ever been okay.
I don't think they've ever been okay.
Now, there's a lot of problems in this world and a lot of problems with the left, but I have good news.
Russell has a solution.
And as I've said to you before, I think it's become an elitist, authoritarian organisation that doesn't like working or blue-collar people.
That's been insidiously creeping in for a while, from Clinton and Blair in our country onwards, and that was enshrined in policy, in our country at least, and in yours.
You saw different kinds of financial deals and deregulation took place under Clinton.
Basically, ordinary people got abandoned.
To justify that by saying those people, we should abandon them.
And who we're looking after is vulnerable minority groups.
That's what it's done, in my view, in order to give itself a moral backbone, which it now lacks, because it has no raison d'etre.
It has no purpose, because it's essentially the same as any party that goes, we're here to support the interests of big business and globalism.
There isn't anything else they're offering except for, oh, yeah, we think these groups are getting a hard time.
And those groups historically have been getting a hard time.
But again, most people Are willing to say, you do your thing, we'll do our thing.
That, along with an ongoing dialogue, is the only solution to this, as far as I can see.
I would say that they famously haven't been able to do that with these minority groups that he's discussing, and that's been the problem!
Ow.
This is so... What are we... What am I supposed to do?
I can't... How do I engage?
Yeah, yeah.
It's not sane.
It's not hinged.
This goofy little podcast project that we've started is forcing me to engage with the stuff that I literally have to just, like, reject out of hand because, like, this is so crazy!
You're just so clearly, obviously wrong on, like, all the things!
I was thinking about this like we are we are seeing a really kind of you know it's a bit of a slow motion dive but we are seeing a very interesting transition of Russell happening and we are just starting to properly get to some of the crazy.
I'm just seeing like little Lord Fauntleroy in his like lacy little outfit you know his like little sailor suit with a big bow and a big like amp amp lollipop just saying simple things the children think like it's not Yeah, and profiting.
Yeah!
If he were slightly more, like, if his delivery were a little more, like, simple, I'd feel terrible.
I wouldn't want to even talk about it, because I'd feel like we were picking on him.
Yeah, we were punching down somehow, yeah.
Picking on a compromised narrator, you know?
Yes, yeah, yeah.
I almost feel guilty, except I know he knows better.
Yes, no, absolutely.
He 100% knows better.
That's the problem.
Because also, you know, how is the solution to the problem of minority groups getting fucked over, you know, segregation into tiny ethno-states?
How is that the solution?
Like, all the gays can live together.
Blacks, you go over there.
Trans people, you can have Greenland.
The white Christians can have America, apparently.
And we can all have open lines of communication between our weird segregated Yeah, exactly.
But that situation, according to Russell, is preferable to and better than left-wing politics, and is actually the only solution he can see.
That is, you know, it's a solution until maybe white Christians want to invade brown Muslim land again, and then, oh look, we're back here again.
Because that seems to keep happening.
I just, the underpants gnomes of it all.
I don't under, like, it's, it's, it's, it's tiny ethnostates question mark profit.
What?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Fix everything.
Okay.
Um, okay.
Good luck.
Um, all right.
I learned something about San Francisco today.
Especially with any social issues.
When it comes to financial things, I'm a little bit more conservative, but at the end of the day, I'm way more left than I am right.
But California went nuts, man.
It's gone like full communist.
It's out of its fucking mind.
And their approach to law enforcement is so insane.
It's so insane.
The no cash bail, the letting people out for committing violent crimes.
The f***ing not stopping people for stealing up to whatever money it is.
What is it?
$900 now?
I think they raised it.
I think they made it a little higher.
San Francisco is non-existent.
San Francisco, most of San Francisco is emptied out of like big chain stores and big department stores.
I wouldn't even do stand-up there anymore.
It's crazy.
It would be ruined.
Amazing and interesting.
And again, if someone who plainly speaks to so many ordinary Americans in the way that Joe Rogan does in an unprecedented way can't be reached, that is a barometer that should be paid attention to.
If you're part of the Democrat party establishment, you should be like, that idiot, then you are unelectable.
Well, I guess I'm unelectable.
And San Francisco is empty now, did you know this?
There's nothing in San Francisco anymore, just gays and criminals, and no train stores or department stores, and Bobby Lee won't even do stand-up there anymore because they ruined it.
Fucking Walgreens and CVS, whoever admitted!
Or like, they got caught lying!
Blaming shoplifting for closing stores and really they're just bad at every business is bad now and so like and the rent's too damn high.
Yep, sounds more accurate.
Half of the CVS's within spitting distance of my house, of which there were way too many, there were too many!
And so they closed half of them!
And they're all just sitting there!
Because they're so fucking expensive!
Who's supposed to move into the old- if CVS can't afford it, who the fuck is supposed to go there?
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, you know, you could probably turn it into affordable housing or something, I don't know, for maybe the houseless of the country, but that sounds like it's doing a good thing, so maybe we won't do that.
Yeah, okay.
So Joe Rogan has some feelings about San Francisco, clearly.
This is the second time I'm bringing him up.
So eliminating cash bail for all but the most serious of crimes is something that California passed in late 2023, and it's It's fundamentally a good thing because the concept of bail is both racist and classist by both its nature and implementation.
The whole thing is easier to see with a clear lens from over here where we don't have bail charges or predatory lending companies looking to loan cash for said bail charges at extortionate rates.
It's just not a thing here.
Remind me of that.
Because it's so evil.
The fact that it just doesn't have to happen.
Yeah, it's one of those things where, you know, people kind of assume, I think, in the States that that's the way it is everywhere, and it's just fucking not.
It's really, really not.
It's so hideous.
It's barbaric.
So Illinois, where I live, was pioneering in ending cash bail for the lowest level, not a threat, not a danger.
Misdemeanors kind of stuff.
Yeah.
The people that you realize are in jail, and then you're like, they're in jail for what?
For how long?
They wrote a bad check for lettuce?
Why are they there?
Also, why are we housing them?
Their lives are being destroyed.
Because it's not necessarily just a conviction.
It's also like, if you're in jail... I got to find out how many people don't know the difference between jail and prison.
That's a fun one.
That's cute.
That's very adorable for them to not have a base.
They'll Write a screed about the Purge because they were calling them the Purge laws like the movie.
Like as soon as we pass this law, then the Purge would happen.
Was a thing.
Wow.
I think I have, I think I have them right here.
I have.
Wow.
Fuck no, I've been cleaning.
I have.
So we talked about this a while back, but we were getting fake newspapers sent to our house while the voting was happening.
And we were getting newspapers that were saying purge laws, death and destruction.
It was actually way worse than that.
I'm not gonna repeat what they said on these fake papers.
And they were, ooh, they're like, Yeah, here they are, right?
This is crazy that I had them on.
To hand, yeah, almost as though we planned this.
Under Safety Act, Chicago Scream ad attackers would be right back on streets.
Like, that's pretty, like, fine.
It's not great.
It's not that evil, but like, there's, it's just, it's, Oh my god.
So yeah, so we got these.
It's, um, yeah, so this is all anti-Safety Act, which was reforming cash bail, and then, um, and anti-trans hate.
These, and I saved them all because...
It's insane that these got mailed to our house and they look like a newspaper and all of the old people around us got absolutely terrified, including my sweet little landlord neighbor lady.
Like, it's like insane rage bait, and they're all privately funded by Uline, the brand, like, the company that you order all your boxes and your shipping shit from.
If you ever have a Uline...
Catalog, access to it at your job or at home.
There are like extreme fundamentalist Christian passages on the front and back.
It ain't just Hobby Lobby.
So if you're ordering stuff from anywhere, it's probably getting shipped in a Uline box or it's getting shipped like all, it's like corporate suppliers across the board use Uline.
The biggest shipping supplier, at least in America, God only knows where else.
I didn't have nearly as many feels until they started sending insane shit to my house!
Yeah.
In my home!
And yeah, I could have thrown it away, but...
I think I'm going to keep them forever as some of the most insane things I've ever gotten in the mail.
Yeah, no, completely, completely justified.
I think the back two pages are all mug shots, which you guys probably don't do this either, because there's usually like a cheaper kind of or like, you know, just another news rag kind of A step above a thrifty nickel?
Oh!
Yeah, just like they publish all of people's mugshots in the paper.
Okay.
No, that's not generally a thing.
No, it's a terrible thing to do.
Sometimes one will make its way into local newspapers, but it's quite rare when it happens.
Yeah, but when they're arrested, they don't.
These are just people that are arrested, they're not convicted of anything.
It's just an arrest.
Oh, that's way worse!
Oh wow, okay, that got worse.
I didn't expect that to get worse.
What an excellent way to enforce the dire need for bail when you're showing Exponentially more quote-unquote criminals and their faces.
Good lord.
No one's looking like Bella Hadid.
No one's looking like a supermodel.
No, of course not.
It's a mugshot.
Not a great day.
I think David Bowie is the only person who has ever looked attractive doing a mugshot.
I feel like Frank Sinatra did a good job too, but he still looked disheveled.
You're right.
He pulled it off, yeah.
The thing is, yes, these were crazy.
I was very surprised.
I was like, oh, we're getting mugshot sheets again?
Wowie wow wow.
But yeah, that's still a thing that happens over here all the time.
See, I think it's abundantly clear which newspapers Joe Rogan has been reading.
I think it's that one.
I think that's even giving a little... This is talking points!
They're like crazy talking points!
He's listening to Walgreens!
Walgreens lying!
It's talking points from social media.
I have a degree of proof for that because as for not charging for shoplifting up to $950, that one is a baseless conspiracy theory that was initially amplified by Adam Carolla.
What actually happened is that Proposition 47 was passed in California in 2014 and it took very low-level crimes like petty theft, some drug offenses, petty larceny, And reclassified them as misdemeanors rather than felonies.
It also increased the dollar amount by which theft can be prosecuted as a felony from $400 to $950 to adjust for inflation and cost of living since the time the law was fucking made.
But most shoplifting cases are under $400 to begin with so before Prop 47 and after Prop 47 there isn't any real difference, substantive difference, to how this thing actually fucking works anyway.
And all of this was enacted to comply with the 2011 California Supreme Court order which upheld that California's overcrowded prisons violated incarcerated individuals' Eighth Amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment.
And so they needed to get the prison population down by maybe updating some outdated laws.
But Adam Carolla posted a stupid video to Facebook with the comment, oh, thanks to Prop 47, thefts under $950 will not be prosecuted, which is blatantly not true.
But that doesn't matter because, as I keep mentioning, Joe Rogan is an idiot with the critical thinking skills of a bewildered raccoon that just fell into a dumpster.
And maybe I'm not being generous enough to- Which, but that sounds adorable, so we can't even, I mean- I feel like even then- I think I follow four of those accounts on Instagram.
I am not being generous enough to the raccoon in that situation.
Yeah, so that's the shit that he's parroting.
It's all just social media bullshit that he never gives as much of a second glance to, which is why he keeps getting fact-checked on his own show because he tells Jamie to look something up and then Jamie has to be like, uh, turns out this was actually said by Trump, not Biden.
I look a bit silly now. Huh, could have sworn. Okay. Um, yeah. So the next clip, uh, starts
with Bobby Lee talking about how he is supposedly centrist now.
I'm in the middle.
I'm in the middle.
I never thought I would ever say that.
Never.
It only happened in this last year.
Right.
Exactly.
I just went, I can't do it anymore.
You know what I mean?
People that you thought were aligned with you are now mad at you about sh**.
They're in a cult.
They're in a cult.
It's got all... I mean...
Marc Andreessen, who's a brilliant venture capitalist guy, explained it to me in very clear terms.
Like what the definition of a cult is, how you can get excommunicated, how you get shamed for having differing opinions, the groupthink, the whole... He's like, it's a cult.
And he's right.
He's 100% right.
It's just hard to say because then people in the cult will attack you.
You get excommunicated.
You get treated like you're a Nazi.
A famous VC guy assuaged your rich guilt and allowed you to rationalize how disconnected you are from regular people?
Shocking.
Yeah, call me crazy, but I don't feel like these guys are being particularly honest either with themselves or their audience about being centrist.
Just a feeling I've got, which is, by the way, entirely supported by Rogan trotting out quotes from venture capitalist tech bro Mark Andreessen, who was saying that the left is a cult.
Um, and yeah, I have got a fun little experiment for both Joe and Russell, actually.
What each of them needs to do is say something vehemently anti-Biden and then something vehemently anti-Trump.
And based on the response from the audience, tell me which side of the aisle feels more like a cult to you.
In fact, you can take it a step further.
The left don't like Biden that much, right?
Say something transphobic or something racist.
Say the N-word for Fucking go for it and I guarantee you that the backlash you get from the left will be nothing compared to the almost certain death threats you would get from the right simply for insulting their god king.
Talking about cults up in here.
Get to fuck.
Jesus Christ.
Words just don't mean.
The left is a cult.
Isn't Trump great?
Alright.
Okay.
The thing is they're talking about the center.
You're talking about a horizontal axis when I'm trying to talk about a vertical axis.
You think you're in the center of a horizontal right to left.
I'm saying I don't care where you are on the horizontal axis.
I'm looking at the vertical of top to bottom.
And if you're in the top, like, how are y'all not getting this?
That you're like more successful?
You know what I was even thinking about this?
Rather than have a shower fight with myself later, I'm going to mention it now, is in Austin, but this is very much to do with like the money thing.
Versus like, if you're in LA, being rich and famous is not special.
But there's way fewer rich and famous people in Austin.
So I bet everybody's extra fucking nice to Joe Rogan when he walks into a building.
Absolutely.
Because he's way more special.
Because it's Texas.
That's it.
That's it.
Of course.
So yeah, you've climbed up the ladder.
I don't want to say good for you.
It's not good.
But you're the money.
Yeah.
Why are we all blind to this?
Pretending it's not real.
It's a big problem in general, and I would say a huge problem with our politicians, which is why they all seem so fucking out of touch.
You know, one won't think.
A bipartisan issue.
Yes!
You know, yeah.
Eat the fucking rich, everybody.
Just eat them all.
Now, Russell uses all of this cult talk to, well, I think call himself out, to be honest.
When did this transition take place?
Perhaps the most identifiable and obvious point was during the pandemic when left and right bifurcated at a point when everyone could and was supposed to come together.
When the cult of wearing masks and taking medicines and posting on TikTok and shaming people And then acknowledging, wait a minute, minority communities are particularly vaccine hesitant.
How do we move the pieces around on the board to facilitate that?
The point about a cult is an important one because that is where authoritarianism and the refusal to engage in discourse really take hold.
If your ideology is quaking, shaky and not solid, then you don't want to engage in conversation because you know you don't have a robust ideology that can withstand discourse.
I mean, what do I even say to this other than, no, you!
It's you doing this thing around Trump and yourself!
And if you want robust discourse, I'd love to see some on your show, buddy!
Big bow, saddle shoes, lollipop.
Amp, amp, amp.
What are we doing?
Oh, Russell.
Good God.
Maybe one of those little like beanies that are different colors with a little like helicopter on top.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I like them.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I'm in.
I'm in.
Good lord.
It's just, it's outrageous.
And he has to know, right?
You'd think he has to fucking know, but I don't know.
I don't know.
He's just talking.
Yeah, let's see.
What else?
Yeah, exactly.
We get some closing thoughts from Russell in the last of this editorial before we take a look at that other thing I wanted to cover.
Ultimately, what's clearly necessary in this age of mass communication is decentralization.
It's the ability for communities to be governed differently according to the will of the people that occupy those territories, whether they're physical or online spaces.
The idea that you can now have a country split down the middle with one half oppressing the other half is ridiculous and laughable.
The pandemic period was when authoritarianism became normalized.
Initially, well, you have to stay indoors because you're protecting other people.
There's no evidence that it protects other people.
There's no evidence that social distancing works.
The whole argument fell apart and I think helped us to recognize that what neoliberalism in the form of this peculiar new form of leftism was masking was authoritarianism, a desire to control, a desire to signal virtue rather than practice principles and actual virtue.
And if the left can't house the biggest voice in independent media, a person who's plainly not a communist because he's just done a massive, massive media deal, who says he's never voted Republican in his life, who clearly speaks the blue-collar America in a way that's unprecedented, if you can't get in alignment with that voice, then your political movement, I would say, is on its way to expiring.
But that's just what I think.
Let me know what you think in the chat.
See you in a second.
Okay.
If we can't get Rogan onside, then the left are finished.
We are expiring.
Yeah.
The argument is dumb.
Profoundly dumb, of course.
And it implies that Rogan is the only voice that matters when it comes to political discourse.
That that man can make elections all on his lonesome.
And despite his significant influence, I still don't believe that.
And try telling me that a hypothetical endorsement from Taylor Swift wouldn't balance out those scales, because I think it would.
I mean, Biden needs to stop aiding genocides if that's to ever happen, but still.
You know, it's...
Yeah, they're not helping themselves, literally.
Yeah, no, no.
But Rogan is very much not the only voice at the party.
He might be the only voice that matters to the right wing.
There might be some degree of truth to that.
But yeah, I wouldn't say it's... Even then, there are things that could... There are people that could balance out those scales, I think.
It's just everything he said.
Like, I don't know how to engage with it.
It's all...
Opposite day, fun time, candy land.
Like I don't- Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, I hope that the concept of cultural- This feels over simple to say that.
I feel inadequate.
Yeah.
No, it's all backwards.
But I hope the concept of cultural Marxism has been abundantly clear within this editorial.
The idea that the left are authoritarian and preventing people from communicating and are just controlling and virtue signaling to erode traditional Christian values as they're displayed in the media.
And the guy who's not communist, Joe Rogan, he just made it clear he's clearly not a communist, is now leaning right-wing because he's not communist, unlike those pesky cultural Marxists.
Okay, okay, yeah.
It's a lot.
It's a lot.
Let's do the other thing.
Yeah, let's take a brief look at the thing I initially wanted to cover, which was a different editorial about hate speech laws in Ireland, because it's something he's going to bring up again and again.
And this clip starts with a lady talking about it in the Irish Parliament, or Dáil Éireann.
And then we'll decide if it's hate speech that we can utilise to control the conversation and we'll act on it if it's convenient hate speech and we'll ignore it if it's hate speech that we can't really utilise to manage the flow of information.
So we'll keep this All nice and vague but the end result will be we've got control of social media and therefore the public conversation and we can then essentially facilitate globalism which you know is the agenda because we've asked you what you wanted, you told us no, they told us yes, we're doing what they want.
So there'll be a lot more of that coming down the line.
Hmm.
So, uh, there was a piece of polling that the Irish government ignored to put this legislation through anyway because the polling had a tiny response rate and based on recent events in Dublin they need this fucking legislation.
Um, nonetheless, apparently passing hate speech laws facilitates globalism.
You know, that thing that he said the left were about in the last editorial.
globalists long being considered a euphemism for Jews, I will point out yet again,
and we'll be picking and choosing what hate speech works for us
and what doesn't, which he doesn't expand upon or substantiate in any way,
but the only times I've ever seen people on the right complain about hate speech is when they're either doing the
hate speech and don't like being called out on it, or they're making the case that "Aha, anti-white racism is
happening here, which is almost always some bullshit white victimhood or
anti-woke nonsense."
Um...
But hey, go Russell for stoking white fear, I guess.
Well, or Christians acting like martyrs.
Yes, absolutely.
They can't run roughshod over the government.
Points at the hairy individual staring down a camera.
Yes yes uh boy oh boy um so that's just a little little introduction little taster little taster um already not great but um but very swiftly in the next clip Russell crosses a bit of a line.
I don't know if there's anything in Irish history about informing on your community in order to facilitate an external colonial imperialist oppressor whether or not you have any taboos against that or anything the black and tans but there's gonna be a lot more of that also Now this may have more impact to British listeners or certainly fucking Irish listeners.
Russell just invoked the Irish Civil War as a method of denouncing passing a hate speech law.
Now this was a long time ago, in 1923, but it was bloody, vicious, vitriolic, and the scars of it long remain within Irish politics and Irish culture.
Until the 1970s, most of the politicians in the Doyle era were veterans of the Civil War, which only made things more fucking divided.
I mean, your country went through a civil war and the aftermath of that wasn't great, right?
Didn't go great, didn't go great.
No, the Civil War and its results later prompted the Troubles, which was a good 30 years of low-level ethno-nationalist conflict in Ireland and the UK, as well as the transformation of the IRA into a terrorist organisation.
That only came to a close in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement.
Um, so things are very much still fucking tense over here.
Like, you don't bring this up.
You don't fucking talk about this.
It's not cool.
And that black and tan part that he's mentioning there were the English World War I veterans sent over to kill the Irish who, among other things, just wanted a fully free Ireland rather than for Northern Ireland to rejoin the United Kingdom after the Irish War for Independence, which happened just before the Civil War.
Those Black and Tans, the English soldiers, were particularly known for their brutality, as well as murdering civilians, looting, committing arson, and of course, a legion of sexual assault crimes.
And then Russell is saying that passing this hate speech law is the equivalent of aiding the Black and Tans.
Holy fucking shit.
I mean, he obviously doesn't mean it.
Like, he does not grasp the gravity of what he's saying.
Possibly not.
Maybe he does.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I really don't know with this guy anymore.
The fact that it's a toss-up is...
Even if he doesn't know, that's the thing he's saying out loud, y'know?
That's the comparison he's making, and it's fucking outrageous, and I would be stunned if any of his Irish audience would be able to watch that and stomach it.
Yeah, right?
He's got some people in Ireland, surely.
Four dudes in the chat are livid?
Like, going to town?
Like, that's okay.
All right.
That's nuts.
All right.
It's a fucking lot.
And we've got one final clip now.
And this whole thing does kind of dovetail into what we're already discussing.
It starts with a quote from Elon Musk being reported on in the Irish Times, because Musk came out and said he would fund the legal bills of anyone who, in his view, is wrongly prosecuted under the new hate speech law, and he would fund any challenge to said law, because Musk is gonna musk, I guess.
He said there should be concern if the Irish Parliament defined hate speech in its own terms.
People should be extremely concerned about that.
We're just at the mercy of the ruling party and whatever bureaucrats they put in place and they can just define something that is really not hate speech as hate speech just because they don't like it.
That's the key issue.
It's a very diffuse term.
Hate speech.
What do you mean hate speech?
There's absolutely absolutely define that just in case it became exploitable
in order to impose undue regulation and control over public conversation. The reason that it allows
that is because that's what it's for. It's not for protecting people from hearing
racist terms or rudeness or whatever. It's not for that and in fact you
could make an argument that's not even the business of the state. The business of
the state should be to run facilities and amenities for people correctly and
fairly and justly and even words like fairly of course would need some scrutiny. But what this plainly is about,
and we saw it because we witnessed the dynamic of it, is create a citizenry of
informants, impose laws that have been designed and determined centrally, globally, elsewhere
against the will of the people in order to legitimize control that is currently
unavailable because of free speech and is sort of creating a global uprising really.
*Sigh* Okay.
That was a lot.
So when he says the laws were drawn up elsewhere, in his estimation, because most hate speech and online speech laws around the world have a very similar framework and function, that's a grand conspiracy.
It can't possibly be that the problem is almost identical regardless of what country is legislating it, and so naturally the laws would be very similar.
No, no, no.
Yeah, parking tickets across the world are eerily similar.
It's a conspiracy!
They're usually time and location based, and they have a sign.
That's the fucking... It's the globalists.
That's the globalists, exactly.
Right.
The globalists, it's them.
So they're doing it.
And yeah, how do you define hate speech?
I mean, it's not like we have a way of writing that down and have a legal definition for this piece of law that is going to be law.
It's not like they thought of that and wrote it into the fucking thing.
That quote that Elon Musk quote the first half was just like, "Oh, you just described a law.
You just described like what laws are and then you're like, I know what laws to apply to me."
Yeah, yeah, kind of, kind of.
He was trying to imply that it would be like, you know, it would be superfluous shit that doesn't matter, you know, or there would be like, I don't know, anti-vax stuff or whatever the fuck, whereas actually, like, no, it's very specifically, you know, hate speech against protected classes of individuals.
There are specific classes that we have, and there are legal definitions for those, like, you know, and it's not just some diffuse, like, oh, who knows what hate speech is, Yes, we can.
We've done it legally a long time ago, actually.
They've been around a while.
He also can't engage with the value of the definition on its merits, because if you actually look at the definition, you're like, this is very reasonable.
These are things that are very dangerous because it's like incitement to violence.
Because the hate speech can follow with a hate crime, which is also very clearly defined.
Yes, absolutely is.
Demonizing the act of defining rather than even engaging with the definition itself sure is clever,
and so a great way to avoid actually talking about all the hate speech you do.
You don't have to reckon with the definition if you're demonizing the notion of definition in general,
which also is intentionally blinding yourself
to the reality of and longstanding hate speech laws and hate crime laws and the establishment.
Well, that's also part of it is they want to--
They don't want protected classes.
They, being conservative people in power, they don't want any protected classes.
This is all, this, I'm pointing at Russell, they don't want any protected classes.
He just said it shouldn't be.
He said it shouldn't be the government's job to do it.
He just said that.
That's what strikes me most about this clip is the notion that in fact the function of government, according to Russell, should not in any way involve legislating against hate speech or protecting particular classes and characteristics of people.
And so like, well, who should be doing that?
Fucking no one, apparently.
Like, the argument he's made is, ah, these aren't to protect people against racism or bigotry, these hate speech laws.
They're just to exert control, and so they must be done away with.
And not only does this fit perfectly into the cultural Marxism narrative, But it's also Russell trying to protect his business.
The more legislation that gets passed making it clear what should and shouldn't be allowable to say in public forums on the internet, the more it infringes upon Russell's stoking nativism, xenophobia and antisemitism for profit.
When he says he wants free speech, what he really means is he wants to be free to say whatever the fuck he wants without consequence, rather than having to worry about couching all of what he says carefully to avoid breaking any rules or laws, like he currently does.
I just want to be able to say how much I don't like the blue.
That's what he fucking wants.
That's the mission here.
And yeah, he just outright said, yeah, government shouldn't be doing, shouldn't have hate speech laws.
It shouldn't be the government's job.
Which, I mean... What did he say?
He's like, everyone should just get along and be nice.
Yes, or separate.
100%.
Licking the lollipop yet again.
It's just... Yeah, yeah.
It's moronic and dangerous in equal measure.
It's just too simple.
Like, you're being simple.
Yeah.
Sorry you're being simple.
And Man, how... the amount of comfort that he has in his life to be able to have these little Pollyanna notions is incredible.
It's incredible.
Yeah, you wouldn't hear these arguments being made by anyone other than an incredibly wealthy, you know, white man.
You know, that's the reality.
There's a whole lot of status quo warriors out there that are like, just get along and be fine.
Cause there is, there's also a lot of cognitive dissonance as far as like, and I do think especially like Elon Musk is like, well, I don't want them to apply to me.
Like that's how it feels.
Also, it's adorable that anyone thinks that Elon Musk is going to give them one thin dime.
For their legal defense.
Not a chance.
Talk about virtue signaling.
Fucking hell.
Yeah.
Ask his creditors.
It's very similar, like, ask the guy that... the contractors that Trump didn't pay for the Taj Mahal casino.
100%.
No, the man just wanted to... It's still happening.
He wanted headlines and to be seen making the comment.
That's all he wanted.
And he got that, and nothing will ever come of that.
Great.
Yeah.
Publicly be a dumb baby some more.
That's so weird.
Yeah, pretty much.
I mean, yeah, and if you're just, if you're, if you're anti the definition, like just define, like if you're... Anti-defining things.
I... What are we doing?
Yeah, that's just so... I mean, these are the same people who have a war against convenience happening, so, you know, it is difficult to try and understand, you know?
That's another one that I can barely wrap my head around.
Like, a 15-minute city is a lot easier to remember what they're talking about when it comes to... I mean, it's still an opposite as far as, like, demonizing, because that's the worst branding for demonizing an idea I've ever heard.
Yeah.
It's like, oh, boo, 15-minute city.
It sounds awesome.
Sounds great.
If you say the words, you have to do so much work to get to the point.
To explain why it's bad every time.
Yeah.
Like, wait, what?
Wait, wait, wait, wait, what?
And yeah, it's out-fucking-rageous.
What are they even getting?
What is anyone getting out of this?
I don't understand.
Why am I here?
What are we doing?
Oh, my God.
Well, they're getting lots of money and we are, we are, I don't know, documenting something, I guess.
Yeah, and we're relitigating fucking cash bail.
Like, I know the cash bail thing is like a fucking big, that is huge.
It is a big deal.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's why I have these crazy papers.
Yeah.
Chicago City Wire.
If anyone wants to Google them, I actually might just, I've been meaning to take pictures and post them for ages, but they haven't come up.
They literally like under sewing patterns that are behind the hammer right here.
If you're under attack, it's because you're over the target, Tim Pool.
There we go.
Sorry.
I know I bring it up every single time, but it will never not be funny to me that they attributed that to Tim Pool.
Sorry.
Carry on!
It's actually Snoopy as the Red Baron, is what it was.
Exactly.
Not even Charles Schultz.
It was actually Snoopy.
Yeah, yeah, the whole thing, you know, a lot of what we've covered today has felt fucking stupid because in many ways it is, but also it's pretty good to nail Russell down on a lot of this stuff because he's just kind of coming out with it.
And being able to kind of put two and two together with the cultural Marxism narrative is helpful and it does illuminate properly a number of the things that he thinks and paints them in a very particular perspective and it's something that I'll be paying even more attention to in In the coming times, because I don't know, he might start doing readings from bits of literature or something that might fucking tip his cap to something.
I don't know.
I don't know, but I'm going to be there.
I'm going to be paying attention.
Yeah, well, it just feels also like this, what news is this?
Even if he's addressing an old story that's recirculating, Mm-hmm.
At least there's some kind of blood in the water that I'm like, okay, I know kind of where this is coming from.
This is like out of nowhere.
Yeah, pretty much.
Joe Rogan said he doesn't like the left, therefore I'm gonna... Was it a slow news week in the UK?
I don't think it was.
Not particularly, no.
No, it's been fairly busy.
And also, he'd had the week off.
I don't know.
Maybe he was scrounging for- maybe this was filmed before he took his week off, and so he was like, you know, scrounging for content, you know, it's like, ah, I gotta have something to fucking say.
But even then, he doesn't normally do weekend content, so like, he didn't have to put those out.
I'm also- I do want to say, like, I'm so curious about his, like, schedule, because it doesn't seem regular, but maybe, like, you know what I mean?
Like, that's weird that Yeah, yeah.
I mean, in your average kind of week, he will be on Monday to Friday for an hour each day.
That's what it's supposed to be.
That's the rumble agreement, right?
That's the deal.
Yeah, that's how it's supposed to go.
And then the editorials kind of get cut out the middle of those and posted separately as well so they get more eyes on them and he can have more stupid clickbaity titles like, it's coming!
And that's literally the extent of it.
Fill in the blanks, everyone.
That's generally how it'll go, and so either he was on some kind of vacation this week or something happened, or also very probable is that he was off doing some other shithead show is very, very possible.
Yeah, he does occasionally do that, and I'll be keeping an eye.
I'll be keeping an eye.
We'll get an explanation soon, I'm sure.
And yeah, we've got the Julian Assange coverage to look forward to.
We've got Alexei Navalny, his coverage of that, because he's only just come back, so he's only just started covering it.
Yeah, initially he's gone a direction of, well, yeah, okay, this guy's dead, but why aren't they talking about all these other deaths that have happened?
No.
Yeah.
No.
But I feel like he's still unsure where he's gonna land on it.
I mean, if that's what he keeps going with, it's pretty weak tea, so I don't know.
But, uh, we shall see, we shall see.
Well, I'm gonna hijack Russell's point.
How about that?
I want to reiterate that reforming and, like, reforming cash bail is a massive, like, it's such a big deal.
I was so proud to vote for it.
I was so proud when it passed.
And there's been a, like, the attack, like, the political attack has been insane and unhinged from the jump.
I was still trying to participate in Facebook groups a little bit in like 2020 and oh silly me like just trying to you know get a get a litmus test from a neighborhood and let me tell ya um Then I stopped.
Because of the conversation around, like, the complete misunderstanding around cash bail reform.
Which, like, it's the most minor shit.
It's the teeny-tiniest little thing that, like, is...
It's such a teeny tiny adjustment on the scale of prison and the, you know, the prison industrial complex reform.
It is a drop in the bucket, but it's a drop that will make a massive difference for families all over the place.
Like it's such a huge, like, especially when you hear about what people are in jail, like the low level offenses, like writing bad checks to feed your family and stealing infant, like baby formula.
Oh my God.
Like, Yeah.
And then you are kept in jail for months, and that's the thing.
At least.
Longer than your probable sentence would ever end up being in a lot of cases.
It's mad.
It's absolutely mad.
Yeah, or they'll get time served.
That's the thing that I think people don't understand, is the only difference Is the ability to pay your bail.
It's not people that would otherwise get out.
The level of your crime is the same as far as who would be affected by this change in policy.
If you could pay, you will be back out on the street until you go to trial.
But if you can't pay, They keep you in jail.
And jails, especially in large urban areas, are notoriously fucking nightmarish.
I don't know nearly as much about Chicago as I do in St.
Louis.
And that is a nightmare.
It is an absolute nightmare.
I don't know why there aren't more horror movies about it, honestly.
Kind of seems like a good activist.
I think it's too real.
It's too scary because it's actually happening.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Maybe let's just do it.
I don't know.
But like it's that scary, right?
So that kind of idea is like...
There's so many profound misunderstandings that I do believe if you listener, individual, can engage in this conversation, and Al, you're a great counterbalance because you're like, well, we don't do that.
We don't do any of that.
No, no, no, no, we do not.
No, we do not.
And we have to get so used to this nightmare shit that is hiding around every corner in America.
We forget that it's not everywhere.
Yeah.
And the fact that Illinois ended it and now California's ending it, it should just be exciting and good.
And it's something that, like, get excited about voting.
I was really excited to vote in favor of the Safety Act.
Like, it's what you can do as a citizen.
And also vote with your fucking dollars.
Yeah, yeah, and it's not terribly surprising that Joe Rogan would be against it because he can afford pretty much any fucking bail, you know, because the man has, you know, he's just got all the money.
Putting him in that position is already like... It's already laughable.
The idea of Joe Rogan getting arrested is hilarious as a concept.
But also understand where the money that you are paying people is going.
As far as, like, Uline, look at the box that shows up to your house when you order something.
And then if it's Uline, tell the company, please don't use this.
Like, please don't use this.
Use someone else.
Please recycle.
Please reduce, reuse, recycle, or whatever else.
Like, that is, it is...
It's out-fucking-rageous what... Because, like, the Hobby Lobby family is, like, what... They were, like, a major backer of those, like, ridiculous he-gets-us ads in the Super Bowl.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like, $500 million.
Yeah, yeah.
To be creeps.
It's so, like... That's where this, like, big fundamentalist Christian money is going.
And it's... Oh, it's going somewhere.
Like...
It's just, I'm so sick of feeling like I live in a goddamn parallel universe.
Yeah, yeah, and of course Russell's not gonna give a shit because he lives over here where I live and it's never gonna affect him so he can parrot it as much as he wants.
It's such an easy thing to fearmonger about because people do not understand the basics, the absolute basics.
And yeah, crime is getting worse here because inflation is getting worse here.
And Chicago schools, it has been They've, like, stopped busing.
They just don't have buses anymore.
As far as, like, there are high schools... Oh my god, I can't even... I can't even parse out, like, the news.
Like, the reporting isn't even that clear.
But, like, you've got parents that are losing their jobs because they have to use public transit to get their kids to school, to and from school every day.
Do you think that's making less, like, low-level, like, crimes, or also just, like, poverty is so, like, criminalized in every possible fucking aspect in this country?
Well, this is the next question, is, you know, when crime is on the rise because inflation is on the rise, it's like, well, there's also the combination of, like, okay, what's the social safety net doing?
Is there one?
Um, you know, and, and, and, you know, exactly, exactly.
It's like, well, then you're going to get crime.
That's, that's, that's literally the recipe.
Um, that, that's what's going to happen.
Well, even the choices made by the police and like by, I mean, from the head guy on down and he's, he's, he's extremely political and extremely aggressive in no uncertain terms.
Policing is heavily politicized.
And that's not a choice we made.
That's not a choice we're paying for either.
I mean, I'm 100% for abolition.
But we also have to try to reduce harm in the meantime.
And so even like, there's a lot of stuff that's been going down.
It's like that I can look around in the last year that it's like, this is This is just telling me how much these cops don't know their ass from a hole in the ground.
Unless they want to shoot it, in which case they can find the hole.
I don't know.
I mean, you know, the acorn cop didn't happen here, but it's like, we're witnessing a lot of cracks and a larger problem.
Yeah.
That was California, wasn't it?
That was a California thing.
I think so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Pretty sure that was a California thing.
That place that... Maybe Rogan should go back there.
Maybe he'll be more on board now that the acorn thing has happened.
Oh dear.
Okay.
Well, that's our show everybody.
Weird one.
Weird one.
Interesting in its own fucking way.
But yeah.
Okay.
If you want to support us in what we do, head to patreon.com slash onbrand.
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Look for the logo, everybody.
The logo, big face, lots of hair.
Is there a wild magnet this time that's about to pop out with said logo on it?
Oh, surrounded by gold.
Here it is.
We sell gold.
We sell literal gold.
Yeah.
Russell's still selling medication, by the way.
He keeps hawking those ads at the moment, which is great.
But we sell actual gold.
Is it even available to purchase in the UK?
No, but then most of his audience are American, so why does he- Yeah, but!
Yeah, but!
I'm sorry.
I know that this is my tinfoil- I'm screaming on a street corner with the sign.
I know.
I'm- I'm- I'm Rainbow Wig Man about it, but that is like- It's so crazy to me.
That he's not even advertising things that are available to purchase in his country of origin.
Yeah, where he lives!
Not even just origins, where he lives now!
That is what I mean.
You're being more specific and that's absolutely correct.
Can't even, can't buy.
Yeah, yeah.
Cannot purchase.
Yeah, it's not the first time either.
Do you remember the satellite phones that he was doing?
I know!
Satellite phones weren't available in the UK either.
It was the satellite phones.
It was the makeup stuff.
It was like there were so many, or wait, yeah, like there's like supplements.
Yeah, I don't think the makeup has international shipping actually.
I don't think the Charlize thing does international shipping.
I don't think.
Well, they're also making, like, health claims!
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
There could be reasons for that.
Yeah, yeah, it's... That needs to be a spreadsheet.
That might need to be a spreadsheet.
Of, like... Of shit that Russell sells that you can't get in the UK.
Like, Russell can't buy it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Russell can't have it, but he'll sell it to you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's a lot of it.
I'm gonna say there is a lot.
Crazy!
Boy oh boy.
That's crazy!
That is the theme of today's show.
If you want to find either me or Lauren on socials, I'm at alworthofficial and Lauren is at may.by.lauren.b.
That's me!
We are most active on Insta if you want to come say hi there.
And I did finally get around to posting some footage of The Scratch, who were amazing fun, so you can go look at that as well.
All right, everybody.
Patrons will see you for Off-Brand and the rest of you, we'll see you next week.
But we love you very much.
Thank you and bye!
Thank you, bye!
That's not win-win-win.
That's lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie.
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