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Oct. 31, 2024 - On Brand
02:46:54
OB #83 - Was Hitler Even That Bad?

Russell rejects the Trump-Hitler comparisons, before discussion reproductive rights and puberty blockers. Happy Halloween everybody, this should be horror enough! Listen to Al's spooky new EP! Support us on Patreon! Buy a magnet!

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This is Propaganda Live.
I only suggest how to think and how to 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 a sort of like a poet.
Is this Eminem?
Man, if we didn't come together in that stream, I'd say it was just the key.
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 Show with my co-host Lauren B. That's me, I'm Lauren B. And I am the host that has no idea what we'll be getting into today, which is usually bad.
It's almost invariably bad, which is why we do the good thing before the bad thing.
And Lauren, what is your good thing before the bad thing this week?
Well, it's going to still be 31 for 31 related as far as, you know, watching spooky movies.
Spooky season?
Yes.
Now that spooky season is almost over, I need to admit that ours is more 90 for 90 or 120 for 120.
Because we usually, we still have more on the list that we just want to watch.
Wow, so you've just really been pounding the horror films then, huh?
We've been watching them.
We've been watching them.
I'm not just saying it.
We also do, in fact, watch horror movies throughout.
It's what we spend the bulk of our watch time.
We've got to keep up with Drag Race, but other than that, yeah, of course.
It's been really, really fun, and I've got to say, You know, I think especially with horror movie franchises, you think about, like, usually the first one's the best one, and then if you're lucky, something's kind of downstream in another sequel that might be good.
might actively kill your brain cells and make you dumber while you watch it.
And you can, it just makes me question like, or at least reminds me of my mortality.
Uh, and it can be a real crap shoot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yep.
Yeah.
Um, but I will say the carp, my, my good thing is the carp speech from, uh, exorcist three.
It It's just...
If you're a horror person and you're listening, you know.
And if not, I highly recommend...
Now, Temporary Expectations, it is very...
I don't even want to say of its time.
But yeah, so Exorcist 3...
It's funny.
Mike was like, what does this have to do with the exorcist?
And I'm like, oh, I completely get it.
It's all about, it's like very Catholic.
And it's all about Catholicism and Catholic lore.
And the guy that does the voice of Chucky in Child's Play, Brad Dorff, he's amazing at being scary.
beatery chewing and big personalities.
And if that's not your bag, I get it.
But I just eat it up.
It's camp, but not...
I hope this makes sense.
It's not camp like Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
It's camp like Glengarry Glen Ross.
And I don't think maybe people think of that as camp, but that's how it strikes me.
It's like, oh, just drama for the sake of being dramatic?
It's man camp, but it's still very much, to me, files as like, oh, girl, oh, okay.
Like, just...
It's very over the top, but also it looks great.
I don't know, I've been kind of like noticing myself feeling like the 90s, like actually specifically like 1990.
Like either people think that The 80s looked like the early 90s, or it's in the aughts, but oh no, it's actually 1990.
It looks great.
Except for the beginning.
There's puppetry with a very serious representation of Christ in a church, but his eyes get wide, and it's hilarious.
I promise the rest of the movie is not equally goofy.
It is so funny.
Like, well, we didn't need to do that.
Yeah.
We didn't need Jesus to pull his eyelids back like Gonzo does, but the rest of the movie, ugh, I live.
Yeah, and the carp speech.
It's the beginning of the movie.
It delights me.
It's this whole little thing that I didn't know about, if not for Joe Bob.
Love Joe Bob on Shudder.
Highly recommend all the time.
Has the best story.
So anyway, that's...
I'm not going to talk about horror movies anymore.
And happy Halloween, everybody!
Happy Halloween!
Happy Halloween!
I hope you're having a very spooky, scary day.
But we'll still be watching them, probably.
Very cool.
Just admitting the truth.
What's your good thing?
My good thing is, in fact, a plug.
Or rather, I have two plugs, actually.
Firstly, I have some new music out today on our spookiest day of Halloween because the music in question is some spooky electronic music I wrote a while ago that is loosely based around some horror mythology type stuff.
It's an EP called Spectre, and I will pop a link in the old description.
If you want to get into the spooky vibes, take a listen!
It'll be for fans of the likes of, like, Lorne, Porter's Head, a bit of Apex Twin, maybe.
Basically, it's spooky and alternative and dark and dynamic, and I had a lot of fun making it.
And I hope everyone who's into that enjoys it and gets spooky.
The second plug is even more fun, and it's something I've not done in a while.
Basically, we're into a quiet season for me, so I'm opening up commissions for songs.
Now, what this means is for the price of Tree Fitty, that's $350, I will work to a brief and I will write, perform, produce, mix and master a song for whoever the client is.
It's a lot of fun.
As I say, I've not done it in a while.
Usually they're like given as gifts to others.
So like previously I've done songs for like children being born or like classic romantic ballads.
I did a fuck you comedy song to someone's friend once that was really fun.
Someone wrote a poem and I narrated that and wrote some ambient music to go underneath.
There's all sorts of fun options to be able to do and I really enjoy doing it.
And best of all, I usually get to mess around in different genres and I like that because my background includes Rock, jazz, hip-hop, electronic, folk, classical, blues.
I've done all this stuff, like, and I love getting as broad a spectrum as I can.
And, yeah.
And occasionally covers as well.
If there are covers, I can do those at reduced rates.
If there's, like, a specialized cover for a loved one or something like that, significant other.
You know, I can do that for cheaper because I don't have to, you know, songwrite, etc.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
A bit less work.
So, yeah.
Bunch of fun options and enough time to get a load done before Christmas.
Though, obviously, I will have limited spaces.
So, if it sounds like your jam, please email alworthmusic at gmail.com.
That's alworthmusic at gmail.com.
And we can...
Make some tunes.
That'd be cool.
Ah, dear.
Yeah, so that's fun.
Good thing now and a good thing for the coming season.
So that's, yeah, I'm all stocked.
Anyway, we have got a show to do, but first let's thank a new patron.
So, David Hogue, you are an Awakening Wonder.
You are indeed an Awakening Wonder.
Thank you, David.
Thank you, David.
Deeply, deeply appreciated.
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It would be hugely appreciated and goes to great lengths in helping us continue.
And if anyone wants to support us financially in what we do, become an awakening wonder.
Join the Invisible Hand or donate on an elevated tier.
Head to patreon.com slash onbrand, and you will have our eternal gratitude.
It is this which allows us to be editorially independent and ad-free.
And as a patron, you will also get a shout-out on the show and access to our patron-only show, after show, off-brand.
And this week, Lauren led a dive into Russell's magic EMF blocking necklace he's been hawking and what the thing is actually made of.
Part one of two.
Part one of two.
Yeah, because basically there's what they claim.
So we're talking about claims.
We're talking about the now, the present.
And next, this coming Sunday, will be part two where we talk about where all of this particular hootenanny and scuttlebutt came from in the first place.
Origin story.
Yeah, because it's like from somewhere.
It's not kind of, you know, and I think that there's nothing wrong with, because it's true, there's nothing wrong with being like, oh, it's wooey hogwash.
Yes.
Yeah.
But there is provenance and we can kind of trace where it came from.
And I think it's important in the same way that kind of understanding the parts that made QAnon, it's important because there's a lot of innocuous kind of like maybe fun seeming goofy things from the internet that coalesce and actually kind of make a problem.
Oh, and it's Highway robbery with their charge.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
So much money.
It's literally extortion.
It's ridiculous.
Yeah, it's just, it's absolutely, it's egregious.
And not to say that, you know, Balenciaga or, you know, Miu Miu has like a $400 lanyard keychain made with feral beads.
Right.
So they're not alone, but...
Different claim, you know what I mean?
Exactly, exactly, exactly.
Balenciaga aren't claiming to protect me from...
Yeah, the keychain isn't going to cure your Alzheimer's.
Yes, right, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah, and it is fun learning what the thing is actually made of as well, good lord.
Yeah.
So, yeah, head to patreon.com slash armbran to check that out and the many, many hours of content up there.
And please know that while you can easily listen to a radio version anywhere you can find podcasts, you can also watch us on YouTube, or if you're listening to the Spotify app, the video will come up there too.
Okay, this is our last show before the US election on Tuesday, so I do want to say something about it up top.
From my perspective personally, if you live in the US and are eligible to vote, please go and vote on Tuesday, and when you do, vote for Kamala Harris to be the next President of the United States.
I know for some of our audience, it's not an easy choice to make, and there are some very genuine and legitimate issues to take with Harris and some of her policies.
Gaza would be a big one, as an example.
However, much like Keir Starmer in the UK, whatever issues you have, the alternative would be orders of magnitude worse.
Every criticism that you can have of Harris's policies are things that would absolutely be even worse under Donald Trump, including Gaza.
And here's the thing.
I'm not asking you to be happy about this decision.
In fact, I expect and encourage you to be fucking livid over it.
That your democracy has been forced into a binary choice of abhorrent or Hitler is something you should be mad about, and I fully support your justified rage.
immediate activism to rectify now and on day one of a Harris administration.
But it does have to be a Harris administration, because the alternative is likely a couple more Supreme Court picks for Trump, as well as the evisceration of reproductive rights, civil rights and democratic rights, and the intentional devastation of any community that isn't the Republican cishet Christian whites.
I will admit, I am slightly sick of hearing this is the most important election of our lifetime for the third time in a row.
But in this case, the only way for the stakes to get any higher is a literal civil war, and it came pretty close the last time.
Regardless, voting for Kamala Harris might not be fun or easy, and it's unlikely to feel good for some of you, knowing the consequences, and I 100% get that.
And that is exactly why voting is called a civic duty and not a civic pleasure.
Sometimes it ain't great, but we have to do what we have to do.
And if you need any additional incentive, do it so that our collective good thing before the bad thing in a week or so can be keeping that bigoted orange sex criminal out of office probably forever.
That would be a very good thing.
Now, obviously, I'm not from the US, nor do I live there.
And while the election of a US president does affect politics in the UK, it's much more oblique.
Whereas, Lauren, you live there.
You get to vote, you get to do the thing, and then you very much have to live with the consequences of whatever happens.
Yeah!
What would you like to add?
My parts are on the ballot, as a matter of fact.
Right, right.
That I was born with are on the ballot.
I mean, yeah, I agree with everything for the most part, as far as the sentiment of what you said.
So I don't necessarily have anything to add, but I do want to reiterate that it's a tough decision and I think it doesn't feel good.
I would remind everyone, and I mean everyone, And I say this, I'm not shaming, and I honestly can't control how much these words can sound like shaming to people.
Because it's just true that you vote with every dollar you spend.
So have a little grace in your heart for people that feel like they need to make a decision.
If you have already made up your mind that voting for Kamala Harris does not sit well in your spirit and it doesn't feel like the right thing for you to do, I'm not gonna, like, maybe please don't or at least definitely I'm not gonna, like, maybe please don't or at least definitely research and vote down Don't just sit out, please, please, please, please, please.
Judges especially, look at judges.
There's more resources than ever that we do have that are readily available on the internet.
There's a lot of seats coming up across the board.
Just remember that you have opportunities.
Well, I wouldn't say opportunities.
Maybe our opportunities are actually very limited.
But the opportunities that we do end up having are kind of voting with our dollars and where we put our time, attention, and energy.
So have a little grace.
Everybody does kind of what they feel they need to do.
Oh, actually, there was a campaign I was just telling you how I wish I had known about before today.
I wish I had known a month ago.
But Poor Pearl's Almanac posted on their Instagram.
And either this is a way to, if you want to get involved within the next week, then you absolutely can.
There's a campaign called Swap Your Vote.
Or if this is just maybe a mindset you want to have, because it's definitely one that like, if Republicans, if it didn't matter, if your vote didn't matter, Republicans wouldn't be fighting tooth and nail so hard to both throw out or disqualify votes and registered voters.
If they weren't working so hard at that, I wouldn't take this as seriously as But what they're fighting against, it's important to do, probably.
But also, not but also, finishing this thought, swap your vote.
What they say basically on their Instagram is, teaming up voters to vote against Trump in the swing states and vote third party slash protest votes in safe states.
Because we have to remember that a protest vote is not a protest vote.
You just don't show up.
So, no one hears that protest.
Going and demonstrating in public and using your voice and organizing, that's a protest.
But there is really no such thing as a protest vote.
It's just a not there or...
You're not necessarily considering the strategy and not just about reproductive rights, the economic policies of tariffs that Trump has been talking about.
is like the amount of things that he has been talking about in the past few months um he wasn't organized to be able to accomplish he wasn't even planning on being president the first time so he didn't really have a plan and now i don't think he has any more of a plan but a lot of people around him they got some plans
and what you are also voting for is his ability to of his and his cronies or friends or compatriots um their ability to not face legal consequences because we have to understand that um if That's kind of, I think, one of the main motivators that he has to still keep up this charade.
Because I don't think he wants to be president.
I don't think he ever wanted to.
I think he just wanted to be popular and make a lot of money.
And so he won't have to see the consequences of his actions, nor will anyone that he can potentially pardon.
That's another thing to think about, is who you are kicking the door open for.
And that's a problem on both sides.
It absolutely is.
Yeah, yeah.
It absolutely is.
I would like the...
The Federal Trade Commissioner to stay exactly where she is.
I think that's really great.
She definitely will not be there.
If Trump gets elected, just some things.
There are some good people that are doing things and something to think about.
And if Trump is elected.
Also, I think that we need to remember that regardless of the outcome of the numbers of votes...
lot of challenges with voting itself, the election itself.
It's not going to be done when the votes are counted.
And we need to take that very seriously.
Keep your head on a swivel.
We know better.
And so please don't be surprised whenever weird shit starts happening around elections and then between now and now.
January.
I'm sorry.
It shouldn't be that way.
We're going to be dealing with that probably either way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's going to be a tense period between November and January.
It's really going to suck.
So, yeah.
Just think about all that stuff.
Maybe look up how Swap Your Vote is doing what they're doing.
And I genuinely think that if...
If that will make your choice easier, then I think that's pretty valid.
And I think it's smart to consider the strategic kind of actions you can take as an individual.
And also it helps support your community because you listen to what other people are trying to struggle with.
I've always been in a large city center.
My votes never mattered at all.
Like, less than nothing.
And that doesn't feel great.
And so if you're already kind of in that position, then...
And I mean, we should get rid of the Electoral College.
Yeah, there's a lot of things that the Democrats and Harris could do to sweep this thing.
And it seems like they're trying to lose.
So that's a valid feeling.
Yeah.
Yep.
And if you're smarter than that, like if you're smarter than they are, if you can make better choices, then that's probably, you probably are.
It's probably true!
And just being able to, I'm saying, here's what I'm saying, is if like, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
100%.
It doesn't feel good to just vote against Trump.
But yeah, there's a plan.
And yeah, I would say look into or any other organization like swap your vote.
Yeah.
Yeah.
See what people need.
Seems good.
And show up there.
And again, if you can do poll watching, definitely do it.
Please do.
If you can volunteer for the election, I think it's probably over by now.
It's probably all in place.
But anything that you can do...
To help your community get through this very shitty period we all know is coming.
So don't be surprised.
Do it.
Do that thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Do the good thing.
Be the good thing you want to see in the world.
Now, all of this talk does seem a little hard to stomach at times, or at least it's a little anxiety-inducing for a lot of people, I think, and I think that's normal.
And to combat that, I do have some good news, everyone, with a little announcement.
See, on election night itself, word on the street is that Russell, Stephen Crowder, and Alex Jones, among others, will all be going on each other's shows in In a big shithead livestream, basically.
And accordingly, we will be taking part in a livestream with the fellas over at Louder Than Crowder and Knowledge Fight and having a crossover livestream covering the crossover livestream.
It might get a little bit chaotic.
It might be a bit ambitious, but I think it's going to be a lot of fun.
I'm quite excited.
Yeah, so we'll be...
Come and join.
We'll be suffering publicly, and you're more than welcome to come and hang out with us on election night.
Please do.
Come and exert your anxieties alongside us.
Obviously, as Lauren just mentioned, realistically, we're not going to know anything on that night.
We're just going to be covering these idiots' bullshit, and we can have some fun with that at least.
Well, the reality is, yeah, we have to take it as it comes.
We're going to have to take everything as it comes.
Do your best.
The best defense is a good offense.
And that means planning and preparing for it.
Yes, indeed.
Yes, indeed.
And I'll put the link wherever I can as soon as we've got one.
And yeah, come along and join in.
I think that'll be...
Time-wise, I think it'll be like six or seven-ish in...
I think it was Mountain Time.
The louder than crowded guys live in different places to what I'm used to.
But I think, like, 9 CST, I think, is what we were looking at.
I think-ish.
If you're in Central, it's 8 o'clock.
Central's 8 o'clock, Mountain is 9.
Right, right, right.
Okay, okay.
Yes, you can.
And, you know, keep an eye on us on, like, socials and everything.
Come and join the Facebook group or the subreddit, and I'll definitely be posting there and on Patreon as well.
So just so it'll be everywhere that we are.
And not only that, but on the Sunday, on the 10th, we'll be having our own on-brand livestream on the YouTube, because it is that time of the month where we can all hang out and patrons can ask questions, and it'll be a lovely time!
And that will be on Sunday, the 10th of November, at 8pm GMT, 2pm CST. I think...
Yes, the clocks will have changed by then.
I think it will be 2pm CST by that time.
I think.
I will double check.
Yeah.
We're still on second Sunday.
Second Sunday of the month, we will be live streaming at 2 o'clock CST. Yes, yes, yes.
We have a fun thing where the clocks change in the UK earlier than they do in America.
And there's like a week or two where the time zone is different.
It's incredibly dumb.
I'm going to just Google it right now.
LAUGHTER Sure.
When do the clocks change in Chicago?
Because over here it was this past weekend.
And everything is dark now.
Google could make this easier.
Testament to how terrible Google has become.
We fall back on Sunday, November 3rd, so then we'll be back to the same time.
Sweet!
So yes, it will be the same time.
Okay, cool.
We don't have to worry about that.
So yes, 8pm GMT, 2pm CST for our personal live stream.
Good, good.
Okay, right.
Let's get into our show.
We have one of those to do.
Now, obviously...
Trump went on Rogan the other day, and Russell has already dedicated most of an episode to blathering about that.
But he said remarkably little of interest.
It was basically tantamount to playing clips and going, that's good, isn't it?
And he also had a couple of guests on, of little consequence and even less interest.
And so, in fact, what we're going to be dealing with is the Stay Free from this last Friday.
With no guest, it's pure Russell, start to finish.
To borrow your phrase, Lauren, I am pretty sorry.
And there's a lot of election talk as well as some genuinely terrible things to discuss.
First, however, the first clip we'll deal with is, well, supposedly a palate cleanser from the politics.
You know, we'll have some bullshit up top because Russell doesn't want to get into the story straight away.
So here's the clip from the start of the show where he wants to have a bit of fun with his audience and then almost immediately regrets it.
You are indeed an awakening wonder.
That's not the right clip.
Let's try that again.
Let's get into today's stories straight away.
Donald Trump appears to...
We're going to have a bit of fun first.
We're not going to jump straight into the madness and the potential civil disruption and disturbances.
We're not going to do that yet.
Russell looks like a bald boy at Wimbledon.
I will not have that.
I will not have that.
I'm blocking that, bald baby.
Do you think so?
A bald boy at Wimbledon?
My dear, they're quite cute, aren't they?
Don't you think?
I don't think people support genocide.
We're against all forms of genocide.
We're against all forms of war.
We're against all suffering.
We defend the rights of all people to worship their creator.
We defend the rights of all people to live safely.
But where are we going to get law from?
Who's going to ensure that Moses' laws are obeyed?
Who's going to ensure that we live in connection with some sort of spirit?
I don't know.
We're going to work that out over the course of the hour, though.
We'll be okay.
Oh good!
We're gonna figure that out over the course of the hour.
That's good.
Feels ambitious, but okay.
Yeah, what just happened was, you know, Russell wanted to piss about with the chat for a moment.
He's wearing like a green kind of corduroy shirt, by the way, which is why someone said he looks like a ball boy.
And after that moment happened, it sounds like someone was criticizing his lack of a position on Gaza and Russell was unable to ignore it in the moment.
Now, I scrolled back through the entire locals chat, in which there was a decent amount of pro-Palestine sentiment in general, by the way.
But the comment didn't come from there, which means it came from the Rumble chat.
And unfortunately, with Rumble, when a live stream ends, the chat disappears and is lost forever.
So we will never know specifically what was said to make Russell say that.
Yeah.
I think Twitch does that too, which is unfortunate.
Yeah, yeah.
I think it's better to be able to keep track of the things people say on the things.
I'm not on Twitch a lot.
Don't hold me to that.
There might be an option where you get to still replay the chat.
I just haven't.
It doesn't work on my very dumb TV. Ah, I see.
Who knows?
It's ephemeral, right.
Yeah.
With Rumble, I know why they do that.
I know why that decision has been made, and it's because of the many comments I have read out previously.
Well, and I think that's, it's like, just to say that it's like pretty common.
That's not, that's not out of the question, but it certainly helps.
And I think, I think maybe more so for the individual and less for Rumble, is where the individual, like, oh, you can just say whatever you want and it goes away.
Knowing that, I think, I think that helps people make their own decisions as to what they want to do.
Yes, and let us say some very, let's say, colourful things.
Anyway, now a brief clip with a little update as to what Russell is up to at the moment.
Russell's eyes are sad today, says flowerpower678.
I don't think so.
I'm extremely happy.
I've got two beautiful doors.
I've got a beautiful son.
I've got a beautiful wife.
I'm being supported by the Destiny Church down here in the Redneck Riviera.
We're whooping it up.
I'm driving a truck, man.
I'm driving a Ram Longhorn.
A Ram Longhorn.
Isn't that the most American thing you've ever heard?
Yeah, so Russell is still in Florida, for anyone wondering, driving a Ram Longhorn, apparently, and going to Destiny Church, which is a megachurch.
Not to be confused with the Destiny Church over in New Zealand.
That one is a cult.
This one in Florida is just a regular megachurch, and that's better.
But yeah, either way, Russell is having a great time in the old US of A with his family out there, because, you know, He's wealthy, white, and famous, so it's not going to be a bad time, is it?
His lighting's different.
That's what they're responding to.
Yeah, that is 100% it.
Yeah, just a little more haggard because of the lighting.
Top down bad.
Have your lights face your face.
Indeed.
Finding your light means blind yourself.
There's a skill in finding your light that is like, oh, if you're squinting and then learning how to keep your eyes open while you're being blinded by light, that means that you look good.
Flash on!
Yes.
Yes, indeed.
Light helps.
Yes, it does.
And it's not doing him any favors today.
But his eyes aren't sad.
That's adorable.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's also the last person I can imagine driving a Ram Longhorn, by the way.
I would like to see an image of that.
It tickled me.
But I'm also slightly curious as to what Russell's plans are, because he has been out in the US for basically six weeks now.
And I'm wondering if he's just kind of hanging on until after the election so that he could be in the right time zone for all of the election coverage and live streams and everything else that's about to happen.
Oh, that'd be smart.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm worried about you.
Thank you.
It's going to be late.
When we talked about it, I was like, Al, be reasonable.
And when it came up in the live stream, I was like, let's all temper our expectations.
Al is a human being.
I am a human being.
It's going to be late.
Yeah.
Well, I'm like, I can show up.
There's no skin off my nose.
It's not going to be in the middle of the night or even in the wee hours of the morning for me.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, thankfully, I'm a night owl in general, and if I have to tap out early, then I will, but we'll see how we go.
But yeah, it would make sense for Russell to be doing that, you know, especially as he was already there like a month ago.
He might have just calculated the odds and be like, yeah, let's have an extended, you know, situation.
But we'll see.
We'll see.
He might never come back.
Who knows?
That's also a potential option.
He seems to be really liking it out there.
Anyway, Russell now wants to hurry up and get to the news.
And apparently the news is a clip of Trump dancing at a rally.
Alright, let's have a look at what Trump's up to.
I don't see how you can compare that guy to Hitler.
I just don't think Hitler would have done that.
He was a...
Like, have you ever watched him?
Like, have you ever, like, gone back and looked at the speeches and it's like...
Like, it was not like...
Like, Hitler...
Was not down with golf.
He'd have had strong views about that even, wouldn't he?
Although, I do understand that back in the day it was hard for Jewish people to join golf clubs.
I don't know.
You can let me know in the comments in chat.
Maybe there's some crossover, but I don't know.
I don't know, man!
What a fun observation, Russell!
What do you know?
Maybe carry that thought forward a little bit.
Let's roll with it.
See where it goes.
Trump always closes with YMCA. He loves it.
Yes, yes.
Feels very intentional to me.
As for the Hitler thing, I do think there is a degree of common misconception about this as well.
So I'm going to read selected portions from a BBC article from 2012 about the charisma of Hitler.
Quote...
Hitler was the archetypal charismatic leader.
He was not a normal politician, like someone who promises policies like lower taxes and better healthcare, but a quasi-religious leader who offered almost spiritual goals of redemption and salvation.
He was driven forward by a sense of personal destiny he called providence.
When Hitler spoke in the Munich beer halls in the aftermath of Germany's defeat in World War I, his weaknesses were perceived as strengths.
His hatred chimed with the feelings of thousands of Germans who felt humiliated by the terms of the Versailles Treaty and sought a scapegoat for the loss of the war.
His inability to debate was taken as strength of character, and his refusal to make small talk was considered the mark of a great man who lived apart from the crowd.
In the good economic times, during the mid to late 20s in Germany, Hitler was thought charismatic by only a bunch of fanatics, so much that in the 1928 election the Nazis polled only 2.6% of the vote.
Yet less than five years later, Hitler was Chancellor of Germany and leader of the most popular political party in the country.
What changed was the economic situation.
In the wake of the Wall Street crash of 1929, there was mass unemployment in Germany and banks crashed.
The people were really hungry, says Jutta Rudinger, who started to support the Nazis around this time.
It was very, very hard, and in that context, Hitler, with his statements, seemed to be the bringer of salvation.
He did not hide his hatred, his contempt for democracy, or his belief in the use of violence to further political ends from the electorate.
But, crucially, he spoke out only against carefully defined enemies, like communists and Jews.
Since the majority of ordinary Germans were not in these groups, as long as they embraced the new world of Nazism, they were relatively free from persecution.
In an economic crisis, millions of people suddenly decided to turn to an unconventional leader they thought had charisma because he connected with their fears, hopes, and latent desire to blame others for their predicament, and the end result was disastrous for tens of millions of people." of people." Unquote.
I'm not sure I even need to provide any personal commentary on this.
The parallels between the two situations and men speak for themselves.
Replace Jews with migrants or the enemy within, as he's fond of saying now, and we're basically there.
That's it.
You know?
Well, okay, so the man for the moment, right?
Like when history collides and there's a man for the moment.
I don't think Hitler would be able to be Hitler now.
It was, I don't know, almost a fucking hundred years ago?
Yeah, people change.
Yeah.
And just, you can't plunk a clone of Hitler, or you can't Bill and Ted Hitler into America today and make it work.
There's a man for the moment.
There's a person to take advantage.
And Trump is doing a fascism, and Hitler did a fascism.
So, Russell's Incredibly, like, to be a surface level is to not even consider, like, the clip itself.
It's just, he could get this from a description of the clip that would be, like, you know, for the sight impaired on social media, right?
Like, a description of the clip is all that Russell's engaging with.
And if he wants to be that shallow in his analysis, this is what you're going to get, I guess.
But it's literally the most shallow possible analysis.
You don't even need to speak the languages or anything to gain this level of analysis, which is not contributing to the conversation.
Well, the purpose is to try and obfuscate and minimize the threat that Trump poses because, oh, it's ridiculous.
He can't be Hitler.
He dances to the YMCA. And yeah, the cynic in me does think like, well, perhaps that's why that song in particular is so consistently used.
And also he loves the song, but also it does have this kind of disarming kind of thing to it.
It seems ridiculous.
And so, yeah.
The man loves musicals.
And I'm not saying anything new or groundbreaking.
He's an old New York queen, and has been.
And that's exactly how he acts.
And so it is baffling.
To see the amount of contradictions that are happening at any given time, really, with Trump speaking.
So we have to understand the surface is not what is going to give us the information.
We understand what's going on in content, not presentation.
So if I was a village person, I'd be livid, frankly.
Yeah.
Yes!
Yes, me too.
I'd be out of my mind angry.
Yes.
I'd be in my performance outfit, whichever it may have been, and marching in front of every rally myself.
Maybe the village people trust.
I don't know.
Is there like a foundational trust to represent their interests?
I don't know.
Yeah, we need a village people protest group is what we need.
That's what we need.
I would be fully in support.
You're only allowed one of, like, what was it?
How many outfits?
Was it four or five?
I can't remember, but five.
You're only allowed one of five outfits, right?
Anyway.
So now we get some biting analysis, some further really in-depth stuff from Russell of both J.D. Vance and Trump in this next clip.
Okay, so there it is.
And this is good, I've heard.
Now, J.D. Vance, a good Catholic, comes from nothing.
Come from nothing.
Say what you like about J.D. Vance.
That guy grew up in what I would call proper squalor.
Proper...
Was it redneck or more hillbilly?
I don't know all of your terms.
Hillbilly.
Oh, yeah, because it was a hillbilly elegy.
That's what he wrote, wasn't it?
An elegy for the hillbillies.
Well, here he is doing a town hall hosted by Chris Cuomo, and Trump does a surprise call.
I'm not seeing this yet.
This seems good.
We have a call right now from former President Donald John Trump.
He wants to weigh in.
Mr.
President, I know there's a little bit of a delay.
Can you hear us?
And what is your question for the senator?
Well, I can hear you, Chris.
And I do have a question, and I think it'll be quite an interesting one.
The answer should be easy.
How brilliant is Donald J. Trump?
Take your time. - I'm thinking about that.
Well, first of all, sir, this is supposed to be undecided voters.
I would hope that I have your vote, of all people.
Not sure.
Nice.
Bit of fun.
Bit of fun.
Light hide.
Cool.
Cheers, Russell.
Yeah, and he just moves on from there.
That's the analysis we get.
Did you need his answer?
Well, not according to Russell.
He just goes on from there.
And obviously, you know, there's a pretty distinct lack of criticism here.
And this is an election with such a stark double standard between the two candidates.
It is basically parody.
You know, you have...
Very much two people sitting two different exams.
You know, one is expected to be pitch perfect on every single thing while providing detailed and instructive policies, while the other is able to dance and sway on a stage for 45 minutes, piss about in a McDonald's, and talk about the size of Arnold Palmer's dick.
You know, it's two very different situations.
And the thought that struck me during this clip was that if this was Tim Walz doing a town hall, and Kamala Harris called in and asked the question, How brilliant is Kamala Harris?
The world would have fucking ended.
Kamala's campaign would be basically finished.
Russell would be jumping on it to elaborate at length with far too many words.
How inappropriate a question it was, and there's not an election about you, and whatever else.
And I think he'd be correct, by the way.
But Trump doing it, oh, that's just Trump being Trump.
It's charming and lighthearted, and he's got a big ego.
What are you gonna do?
I'm like, yeah.
Or it'd be a weird joke.
It'd be a weird joke to make if that was the joke that you wanted to make.
I'd hope it'd be a reference to something.
Or a reference to this.
This very thing.
Honestly, that'd be kind of funny.
That'd be a pretty...
Yes, yeah.
If Kamala then did ape this, it would be funny.
Exactly how brilliant am I, Tim?
Yeah, that's actually...
That'd be funny.
Yeah, I would enjoy that.
But...
Then they'd be like, oh, I'm joking.
I kid.
So, like, the rest of...
Also, if Trump...
Because this is also kind of, like, his character...
I'd write that for his character in this scene.
That's entirely reasonable.
And then if he's like, I'm kidding.
JD, how do you feel about our new tax structure?
Whatever.
Which the answer is also bad, by the way.
It's actually more horrifying than just him saying, how great am I? If he said, how great am I? And then, wow, can you explain tariffs to me?
Because I fundamentally do not understand how they work.
That'd be great too.
So yeah, if it's a joke, great.
If that's all he's got, yeah, that's bad.
It's not great.
But I don't even have that context because Russell can't engage with that.
Let's keep going.
And yeah, we do move on to a clip now of Bill Clinton, you know, and is it going to be a surface level?
Is there going to be more criticism of Bill Clinton, I wonder?
Obviously, I won't wander for very long because Russell spends a long time on this and goes into far more detail than is reasonable.
Look at Bill Clinton now, right?
When you see Bill Clinton talking about Carrie Lake, and Carrie Lake's come on our show, she is actually a lovely woman, and I think he says physically attractive.
He sort of shows you that Bill Clinton, for all of these sort of changes, and the changes of our time, is still very much essentially the Bill Clinton he always was.
And there's something important in this.
Look how the culture's changed.
You used to be able to have a president that was like Outwardly, like a bit of a player.
Like, he was a married man, and we all got to say, that guy is, he's having sex with more than just Hillary Clinton.
And I've got, listen, I don't want to make...
Who am I to judge or make any comment on that?
Who am I to judge?
Like, they were married, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, you had the distinct impression, and then it was proven, wasn't it?
Because I believe there was demonstrably ejaculate upon that blue dress.
That he was having sexual relations.
I don't know.
I mean, can I say that any more politely?
There was demonstrably ejaculate on that blue dress.
And then that cigar thing.
Right?
We all remember.
That was the president.
This is in our lifetimes.
But Bill Clinton, like, he's all old now.
But he's sort of kind of still like it.
He's all sort of like...
So he's the Joe Biden version of Bill Clinton.
And I mean, he's old.
I'm going to get old one day.
But he's sort of like...
He's all sort of like, oh, man!
But he still wants to play that sax, you know?
He still wants to read between his lips, you know?
He still wants to tickle them buttons.
Somehow, it spilled out of the bedroom and into the Oval Office.
Let's have a look at Bill Clinton hitting on Carrie Lake, who I met at the RNC, I think.
She's like, dignified woman.
Running against someone who is physically attractive but believes that politics is a performance art.
Physically attractive.
Hey, politics is a performance art.
He's interesting.
What an interesting dude.
Sure.
Sure.
Wow.
Yeah, a little more interested in this clip, I think.
Now, don't get me wrong here, right?
Bill Clinton is probably not the person who should be bringing this subject up, but Like, Clinton's point is correct.
What he's talking about is Carrie Lake going up against Ruben Gallego in Arizona, which is where this speech was given.
Specifically, it's the Senate race that's happening over there.
Clinton described that Senate race as a beautiful microcosm of the campaign that Kamala Harris is running for president.
The full thing was, quote, "You've got a person that grew up under sometimes challenging circumstances who made something of his life, running against someone who is physically attractive but believes that politics is a performance art, and where, like J.D. Vance, she has to be prostrate before the master." Unquote.
Um, yeah, Carrie Lake has never held elected office and is a former news anchor, and we covered her coming on Stay Free at the RNC back in episode 69.
Like Trump's 2016 race, you've got someone with no experience in government wanting to come into government and now, in this case, represent the state, and that just seems like a bad idea to me.
Mercifully, she does seem to be falling behind in the polls, but it's a tight race, and Arizona is one of the ones that really counts in the ridiculous system that you have over there.
So yeah, it is important.
But yeah, maybe shouldn't be Bill Clinton bringing up anyone's attractiveness.
He should maybe just be a little quiet.
Yep.
Yep.
For the fact that Russell said, can I say that in polite company?
No.
One, no, Russell.
You can't, because you're also a rapist.
And two, yes.
A hundred percent.
Okay.
Monica Lewinsky jokes were in-fucking-escapable in this country.
And yes, all of those jokes are 100% on the table.
And I think that the most responsible jokes these days are acknowledging that she was barely not a child and that Bill Clinton was doing the wrong thing and should have seen the consequences of the wrong things he did to women.
Mm-hmm.
In that regard, and it's a big issue I have with the Democratic Party, is that the Clintons are uniquely positioned to be fucking hypocrites to say anything about Trump's behavior.
Yeah, you are a target.
And no one made you do that.
That's you.
Those are the choices y'all made.
That's the decision you guys made to continue to be in politics, to be political figures and to hold on to power, even though there is this one point that is this open secret or is just open that anyone can even though there is this one point that is this open secret or is Because, yeah, y'all are fucking hypocrites.
And Clinton and Trump are both on the same fucking flight logs with Jeffrey Epstein.
So no, I would like to see neither of them in public life.
I would like that to be disqualifying for people in public life.
Yeah, would be nice.
Would be nice.
And obviously, yeah, Russell should be the last person talking about any of this.
Based on history.
Your history, Russell.
Yeah, based on the things you've said and done.
You should just let this one, just let it go.
This was a choice to cover this.
The history you are either actively denying or just are in denial of.
Yeah.
You also are not contrite or regretful or exhibiting any change in your demeanor or behavior that would...
I feel like it's so damning.
And it's not just anybody, right?
That baptism picture being taken and published.
Any old person is one thing.
You are a public figure, and that's Russell's rape outfit.
That is his outfit that he used to attack women consistently.
So wearing your rape costume In a publicity stunt, you know exactly what you're doing.
And that's hateful and cruel to me.
None of y'all have any fucking business talking about this!
Yeah!
Glass houses, stones, that whole thing.
Maybe just pipe down.
Wind your neck in, as they say over here.
Or just hold other people to the same standard you hold yourself to.
That's how you avoid being a hypocrite, is you just, you take your own advice.
You apply your own rules to yourself.
That's, man, you'd really avoid a lot if you listened to what you said about other people and then held yourself to the same rules.
Write it down if it helps.
Make a graph.
Yeah, yeah, it's true.
Okay, so now we have Carrie Lake's response to this comment from Bill Clinton, where she's ignoring the first part and the last part and just taking the middle bit and taking it as a compliment.
I thought I was a little too old for him.
Doesn't he like interns?
Good joke.
Stale.
Very, very stale.
Three, I'm happily married to my husband, Jeff, who's right down here.
The love of my life.
And four, nobody in their right mind wants to cross Hillary Clinton.
It's just dangerous.
That's amazing.
I mean, think about how our culture has changed, that that's become a mainstream reference now.
The old list, the Clinton list, the old, the old unluckies that have known Hillary and Bill Clinton.
Mm-hmm.
Um, yeah.
The thing is, right, the statement itself of not wanting to cross Hillary Clinton, right, to the uninitiated can come off as pretty innocuous, right?
Like, the idea that a wife in a monogamous marriage would be defensive of her husband calling someone else attractive or something, that's not, it's toxic, but it's not exactly unheard of.
What she's doing is signaling conspiracy theories about the Clinton body count that have been circulating since 1994, thanks to the likes of Larry Nichols, and then came back with renewed vigor in recent years, thanks to QAnon.
And of course, what Russell hears is just the cooked version.
And so that's all he can hear when she makes that statement, which leads to, wow, the Clinton kill list is a mainstream idea now!
And it's more mainstream than it should be, but I'm not convinced that the broader American public would read that statement the same way he did.
Really?
That it's not the Clinton body count?
I don't know.
Even as, like, a joke?
Like, even if people are like, huh, oh yeah, that weird thing that won't go away.
Like, I think people don't understand.
I feel like that...
I don't know, man.
This is so beyond parody at this point, but, like, I think that referencing the Clinton body count is, like...
Sure!
like it's gonna be it's gonna that the the dog whistle is not as maybe it's a whistle that works for dogs and humans it's very obvious like that's to me yes yes uh But I would say...
As the person who lives in America and talks to Americans almost exclusively.
Well, yes, yeah, yeah.
But I would say the thing is the way it's phrased is very, very specifically mundane.
The way she put it was, oh, you don't want to cross Hillary Clinton, like to the point where it's almost mundane out of context, but completely fucking batshit when in context, which actually I think signifies exactly how Carrie Lake has been running her entire campaign, by the way.
Well, it's even just like, oh, she's a huge bitch.
Like, that's kind of a conception.
Like, she being Hillary Clinton.
Like, oh yeah, well, Hillary Clinton's such a bitch.
Not, I'm gonna die.
I'm not gonna be assassinated.
So, it's kind of, it's like fucked up regardless.
Right.
Yes, pretty much.
Pretty much.
And it's disheartening because I have a lot of fact-based, researched, and proven reasons to have a lot of very bad feelings about that person.
And none of them, none of them enter into this conversation.
That fucking pisses.
Like, listen, you can have a million complaints about Hillary Clinton.
I sure fucking do.
And you guys just have to make them up instead?
Why?
Why?
There are legitimate problems.
We know why.
We know why.
Because truth is too tough.
Oh, we don't want to do it.
It's too hard.
I don't want to.
But still, I don't know how that disheartened feeling springs eternal for me.
It just does.
Like, every time.
You guys could complain about something real.
But then you'd have to also not be a hypocrite about that thing.
We're playing on fear.
That's a big part of the problem.
And also conspiracy theories are easier and way more fun, aren't they?
It's way more fun to think about the Clinton body count rather than issues that you can actually address.
You know?
I think the people don't acknowledge how terrified they are of the reality of conspiracy theories.
It's actually a lot scarier if hurricanes are a weapon on purpose.
Yeah, that sounds terrifying.
I'm not gonna lie.
It's scarier, but it gives you control.
Like, whereas the reality is climate change is a lot more difficult to deal with because we've gotten where we have.
So yeah, it's difficult, but also rational, and that doesn't feel good, really.
It's not an emotional hit.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
Whereas, yeah, it's, I guess, the same kind of thing of, you know, explaining the world through different gods being angry at you, you know.
It's, you know, hurricanes happen because this god was gay, you know, and...
That goes back thousands of years.
Like, instead, we're going to make up a conspiracy theory about how it's a weapon.
At least when you had different gods, you could go complain to another one.
I would argue that monotheism, like, don't just kill the cop in your head, kill the god in your head.
Because if one guy is in charge of everything, and everything he does is good because he does it, that's a much scarier proposition to me.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately.
Listen, I'm...
I make religiously coded secular art.
So obviously I think about this more than the average bear and there's a lot of moving parts and I haven't nailed them all down.
But I do think that monotheism developing with like authoritarian heads of state is no accident because at least when they were a bunch of gods you could bitch to another one and then another one Could go get after Zeus for doing something fucked up.
But instead, you just got the one God.
It's like, well, God wants war, so it's right.
Well, well.
And you have zero recourse except for, I don't know, Satan, I guess.
But that's evil, so you can't do anything.
Yeah, he loses all the time in the Bible, so no, maybe not a great ally.
All the stories are of him losing, so yeah, no.
Yeah, not the best.
Not the best.
Yeah, polytheism makes more sense to me.
It's certainly more fun, I think.
We also already do it, so we just need to accept it.
It's like what the brain does is fine.
Yeah.
So now, we move on to a new advertiser of Russell's, and some enterprising individual out there has managed to combine two scams into one.
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Guys, listeners, I'm so excited to describe what's happening to you.
Oh my god.
Oh my god.
Are we going to describe what the video actually is?
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
Is it my birthday and Christmas all at the same time?
So, okay.
At first we heard, you know, there was a lot of very lovely animation.
Someone did a bang up job, great branding.
And at first you see like a Bitcoin mining like server, right?
Like a server rig, a square server rig.
And you think, oh, okay, you're investing in a portion of that mining rig.
You're investing in Bitcoin mining and you'll get a return.
I mean, that's kind of maybe what they're claiming.
What you're doing is buying an NFT of the picture they showed you of the piece of equipment.
I've gone through angry right back to delighted.
That is absurd.
You get an NFT. They don't even explain how it, like, well, Russell doesn't necessarily explain, maybe it was in there and I didn't hear it, like, how your investment appreciates, because you get, I guess, the NFT of the picture of the equipment that you would use to mine Bitcoin.
Yeah, so, like, that kind of- Appreciates to whom?
Well, I think the idea is that, like, you buy the NFT, and that money that you buy that with then goes towards, like, some mining servers that these guys already have, and you get, like, a portion of that, supposedly?
Yeah, but that doesn't...
That was not made clear.
No.
Am I crazy?
That was not made clear.
No, no, no.
It's completely unclear, and I think that was always going to happen when you're trying to say, hey, have some mining cryptocurrency stuff by buying NFTs.
What?!
This should not be legal.
Whatever we need to do to make this not legal, we should do it.
This is not free speech.
It's a scam.
It's scam squared.
It's scam multiplied is what it is.
It's scam cubed and the cube looks like a...
Bitcoin mining server operation thing, square.
Wow!
There's a part of me that really appreciates the double down of this, of like, oh, I'm gonna do just all the terrible things in one.
Yeah, this is performance art.
That's what this is.
That's what this is.
I think Ray Johnson actually already did this in the 80s, but he was so ahead of his time, we didn't know.
Oh, boy.
Oh, that's magic.
It'd be so fun if people weren't falling for it.
And, okay.
Five percent.
Guys.
Use code STAYFREE for 5% off your first purchase?
Pay me 5% to type that in.
You owe me 5% of my purchase to have to think about your code.
What in the shit?
5% of $25 is what he said?
Fuck all the way off!
Entirely fuck off.
Oh my god.
Russell owes me 5% of my life back that I had to listen to him say the word stay free code.
Fuck you, dude.
25% minimum or you owe me money.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't care if it's 15 fucking cents glued to a postcard.
You owe me.
That's fucked up.
Get out of here.
And it's only valid for 10 days, so do it now!
Yeah, or if it's 5% on a new car.
Okay, like, come on.
Let's be realistic here.
Oh, dear.
We're adults.
Why is this happening?
I enjoyed that.
Oh, I can't wait to look into that fucking company.
I had a feeling you would.
Mmm.
Mmm, yum, yum, yummy, yummy.
Snacks for LB. Oh, dear.
Okay, now we get back to the content, and Russell addresses more of the Trump-Hitler criticism.
But let's look now, in some detail, at the ongoing claim during the Kamala Harris campaign that the reason you mustn't vote for Donald Trump is because if you do, he'll make himself a dictator for life, just like the worst dictator...
There's ever been Adolf Clarence Bobcat Hitler.
Now let's have a look at Hillary Clinton making that claim.
One other thing that you'll see next week, Caitlin, is Trump actually reenacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939.
I write about this in my book.
President Franklin Roosevelt was appalled that neo-Nazis, fascists in America were lining up to essentially pledge their support for the kind of government that they were seeing in Germany.
So I don't think we can ignore it.
I like the way when people say stuff like, I write about this in my book.
I wrote a book.
I've been to a lot of trouble to write books.
I'm trying to help you people by making tangential and tenuous comparisons between a modern tycoon billionaire who was on the TV for a bunch of years, whose wedding I went to.
You know that Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton went to Trump's wedding?
Like, so...
If he is like Hitler, they're like people who went to Hitler's wedding!
So, Hitler couldn't get married, could he?
Which is worse.
He was a bit too complicated.
He was sort of in love with his niece and stuff.
That guy, he was off-key in a bunch of ways.
It's weird.
Hot take.
Right.
Scolding hot take from Russell Brand.
Yeah, I tell you what, he talks about Hitler quite a lot in this episode, and what was the strangest thing to me was, like, how little pushback Russell gave to the idea of Hitler.
He was just like, yeah, I mean, he was weird, wasn't he?
You know, a bit off-key.
I'm like, I think he was a bit more than off-key, Russell.
Just a bit.
Well, that also serves to, like, downplay what Hitler was.
Exactly.
I mean, like, yeah, he's a little off.
Yeah.
No, he was a murderer.
He was like an industrial-scale murderer.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, he's up there in terms of achievements on that scale.
And yeah, and obviously that then has the effect of minimizing the very criticism itself of comparing Trump to Hitler.
Because, well, was Hitler even that bad?
I mean, he was a bit off-key!
Exactly.
Or like, oh, he's just one guy.
How much damage can one guy do?
Like, well, he wasn't just one guy, as a matter of fact.
Right, right.
Yeah.
He managed to get a lot of guys to guy about together, and that was the issue.
Yep, yep.
All over Europe.
It was a whole thing, in fact.
Yep.
Anyway, yeah, this was obviously filmed before the rally happened at Madison Square Garden, but it did in fact happen.
And the Democrat claim was that Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden would draw direct parallels with the largest Nazi rally in US history, which took place at Madison Square Garden in 1939, seven months before the invasion of Poland.
It's an incident and event that was so famous, I would be shocked if it went unnoticed by Trump's campaign organizers.
You know, at the end of the day, they're managing a candidate once branded America's Hitler by his own running mate and fascist to the core by his former senior military advisor.
Um...
If we're talking about who's calling Trump Hitler, start with fucking J.D. Vance.
It doesn't matter who else is if you're not engaging with that reality.
Like, okay.
Alright, Russell.
Last week, this description of him was echoed by John Kelly, the former chief of staff under Trump, who told the New York Times that Trump had said he wished his military personnel showed him the same deference that Adolf Hitler's Nazi general showed Hitler during World War II. Like, Which was try to blow him up a couple times, by the way.
Yes, yes, yes.
So Trump doesn't even know that.
No, no.
He just lied.
Like, Trump was just like, no, he didn't.
Like, no, they didn't.
Like, oh, great.
Well, we know how that works.
We know how Trump's brain works.
Because that's what John Kelly, I believe, said.
Is like, well, yeah, some of them tried to blow him up.
They tried to kill him a couple times.
And he was like, no.
No.
They didn't?
No, they didn't!
That's how that person's brain works!
Yes.
The things I think, that is reality.
Everything else is not.
The crucial question here for me was like, you know, was the Democrat prediction accurate?
You know, did it turn out to be true?
And I'll read from a Guardian article about the thing.
So here's the part about the 1939 rally.
Quote, the organizers chose George Washington's birthday as the date to parade their vision of an Aryan Christian country dedicated to white supremacy and American patriotism.
They erected a giant portrait of Washington, which they flanked with swastika flags alongside the Stars and Stripes.
More than 20,000 American Nazi sympathizers attended, many dressed in stormtrooper uniforms and giving the Sigh Heil salute.
The Fhrer of the American Bund, Fritz Kuhn, told the crowd that America would be returned to the people who founded it and decried the Jewish-controlled press.
Okay, and here's the longer part about the Trump rally there.
Okay, and here's the longer part about the Trump rally there.
Anger and vitriol took centre stage at New York's Madison Square Garden on Sunday night as Donald Trump and a cabal of campaign surrogates held a rally marked by racist comments, coarse insults, and dangerous threats about immigrants.
Nine days out from the election, Trump used the rally in New York to repeat his claim that he is fighting the enemy within, and again promised to launch the largest deportation programme in American history amid incoherent ramblings about ending a phone call with a very, very important person so he could watch one of Elon Musk's rockets very important person so he could watch one of Elon Musk's I mean, that is remarkable.
Genuinely.
This is rare.
Yeah, yeah, it's true.
Plan safely?
Yeah.
You know what?
Okay.
Doesn't happen often.
There was certainly a dark tone throughout the hours-long rally, with one speaker describing Puerto Rico, home to 3.2 million US citizens, as an island of garbage, Tucker Carlson mocking Harris's racial identity, a radio host describing Hillary Clinton as a sick bastard, and a crucifix-wielding childhood friend of Trump's declaring that Harris is the Antichrist.
Trump continues.
If you're not getting called the Antichrist, then what are you?
Nah, that's fine.
You're not doing it right.
What are you even doing?
That's just a compliment.
No, if someone's not calling you the Antichrist, then you need to work harder, frankly.
That's fine.
I love it.
Oh my god, what a compliment.
Totally.
Goals.
Trump continued his frequent rants about immigration and claimed that a savage Venezuelan prison gang had taken over Times Square, which will come as a surprise to anyone who has recently visited the New York landmark.
The former president also stated wrongly that the Biden administration did not have money to respond to a recent hurricane in North Carolina because they spent all their money bringing in illegal immigrants, flying them in by beautiful jet planes.
Unquote.
Yeah, personally, I'd say there's a good chunk of parallels between the two things.
Though, I would say Trump's rally sounds even more unhinged than the literal Nazis.
I will say that.
Sounds pretty out there.
How about we don't need to rank?
I don't know.
The ranking is important.
All bad.
Or that.
Well, what's crazy is like...
The issue...
I didn't learn about the...
And maybe they do now.
Maybe they teach it now.
But I didn't learn about the Nazi rally in America when I was in school.
I was not taught that.
I was not taught about Henry Ford being a fucking raging fascist.
Oh.
I was taught that he was a hero of American industry.
Here's the thing.
I hope that the schools that can teach real history are, but I know that a whole section of schools actively aren't still and are avoiding it still.
Yeah.
That's what's fucking awful and frustrating and of all people I don't know man it's just okay this is me but it's fucking rich hearing it from Hillary Clinton because like you didn't worry about it until it was too fucking late and you did the wrong thing anyway.
So yeah you have not used your power well to combat this kind of I don't know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, valid.
Again, wrong people to be making these criticisms.
Like, the criticisms are valid, but also, you know, just go away.
Or repent!
Yes.
Repent!
Yeah, yeah.
Hey, I made these decisions because I am bought and paid for by Goldman Sachs, and that's not right, and we should stop it.
Let's fix Citizens United, because that's how we got here.
For fuck's sake!
Yep, yep.
Oh, and the guy that was taking a shit on Puerto Rico was Tony Hinchcliffe of Kill Tony, you know, and he can go fly a fucking kite, as far as I'm concerned.
The Puerto Rican communities across the country have not been thrilled, funnily enough.
Weird way to admit to everyone and advertise that you don't understand what your own country is, because Puerto Rico...
Puerto Ricans are Americans, baby.
That's like a thing.
Yes.
Yes, indeed.
Yes, indeed.
Yeah, Ricky Martin was really deeply pissed off.
And fucking good, by the way.
That's great.
Oh, would you like to see what communities organizing against hate looks like?
Yep.
Gestures to Puerto Ricans.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Get your shit together, everybody.
Whites, work it out!
Yep!
So now we get to a clip of Mika Brzezinski on Morning Joe covering Donald Trump.
Let's have a look at the lady of Morning Joe.
I remember her.
I met her before.
She's sort of saying that Trump's like Hitler, as usual.
His cozying up to dictators, his obsession with Hitler that has now come out.
What he is...
My obsession.
He's obsessed with Hitler.
Hitler is a fascinating historical figure, isn't he?
Genghis Khan is a fascinating historical figure.
Attila the Hun, a fascinating historical figure.
Stalin, fascinating historical figure.
Being fascinated by people does not mean that you want to emulate them.
In fact, a key way to avoid that would be by saying, I... A conduit for power rather than a receptacle for power.
That would be a good way of knowing it.
Accepting spiritual values would, I suppose, be an antidote to the hubris and horror that tyranny in its darkest form represents.
No.
Okay, so it's again leaning into the idea that, well, if you have a Christian dictator, it's fine.
Here's a little bit about Hitler's relationship with Christianity.
Although personally skeptical, Hitler's public relationship to religion was one of opportunistic pragmatism.
In religious affairs, he readily adopted a strategy that suited his immediate political purposes.
He typically tailored his message to his audience's perceived sensibilities, and Kershaw, a historian, considers that few people could really claim to know Hitler, who was a very private, even secretive individual, able to deceive even hardened critics as to his true beliefs.
In private, he scorned Christianity, but when out campaigning for power in Germany, he made statements in favour of the religion." But yeah, no parallels there, I'm sure.
But anyway.
I mean, the thing that's screaming to me that Russell actually said is like, conduit versus receptacle.
No, that's not solving anything as far as your relationship to power.
The way that you check your own power is that you respect the checks and balances that are put in place to To control your own power.
So, just saying like, well, I'm just a vessel, I'm just a conduit, that's not a me.
A conduit versus a receptacle is not different.
Well, because, I mean, the example would be the Pope, wouldn't it?
He's supposed to be a conduit for God, is the idea.
You know, God speaks through the Pope.
And there have been a lot of really, really bad Popes, you know, that have done terrible and awful things.
Hmm.
Whether, yeah, conduit or receptacle, we're talking about the time the power is in your possession, that you have it.
So no, those words are not different enough.
Little baby wordsmith over here, little sparkle wordsmith boy, is not using, like, no, what he's saying is like, oh, well, while I have it, I'm going to use it for good.
No, no, no, you are misunderstanding the problem, you're misrepresenting the problem, is that If you have power, respect the checks and balances on that power because you cannot be trusted to be like, well, I'm in charge of my attitude.
So while I have the power, everything's fine, guys.
I'm saying it's fine.
I believe what I'm doing is right.
And therefore, it's copacetic.
No, no, no.
Listening to the checks and balances on your power is the way that you mitigate the issue of accumulating too much power is sharing it.
Right.
Right.
And, you know, this is the party that wants to actively get rid of those checks and balances and those guardrails, obviously, you know.
And the thing is, like, even if the person who is in power now is perfectly fine without them, there's no guarantee that the next person's gonna be, right?
So you just have them in place anyway.
That's the whole fucking point.
Also, science has kind of proven to us, I feel.
Like, I think that as humans, we already knew this.
If you need extra proof, science has given it to you.
That by just having too much power for one person cooks your brain.
Now, to whatever degree it cooks your brain, that's an individual experience, probably.
But you should not want a system that does not you should not want an honor system.
You should want a check and balance on your power so that if you make the wrong decision in a certain instance, then you will have someone there to help you make the right decision.
You will have like it's.
It's amazing that, like, this was an argument that was made by the church, and specifically, like, Catholics, but not just Catholics, before basically, like, the rise of the religious right being this political force.
Before that very particular campaign decision made by Jerry Falwell and his cohort, Christians were actively...
It's impolitical, not political, because of the separation of church and state, because they understood that, like, well, if we are in charge, that means that there's a lot of eyeballs in what we're doing, and we don't want to have all the power because that could be used against us.
Like, that was before this turn that happened, like, in the 70s, 80s, early 90s, towards a religious right— But politics was not – because they understood, even if it was lip service or if it was real, they understood that if – like what you said, it can be used against us as much as it can be used for us if our religion falls out of favor or our particular brand of religion falls out of favor.
We should not be – also, like the Bible says, that you shouldn't be using your religion for political gain.
Yeah.
Also, or a tax code, by the way, it's actually illegal to maintain tax exempt status while preaching any kind of political claims from the pulpit.
So, yeah, laws are spongy and flexible, maybe.
That can't be true.
So many people just seem to do it anyway.
That can't be right.
Right.
That used to be antithetical to the teachings of the church and now it's the opposite.
So times fucking change and there's a reason why.
That was the opposite argument.
And also the people I was around growing up, not the fundamentalist ones.
Other side of the family is Presbyterians that absolutely believed that and thought it was crazy.
This is where we're at now.
Yeah.
That's not a thing.
You should want a check on your power if you are operating in good faith and you have power.
Because it also means that it's not all on you when it all goes tits up.
There's cynical reasons that are totally rational.
True, that's true.
But anyway, Trump is not obsessed by Hitler, but even if he is, it's not a bad thing, because, you know, being obsessed by someone doesn't mean you want to emulate that.
To me, in a general sense, there's a big distinction between being curious about historical figures and collecting Nazi memorabilia.
And in Trump's specific case, there's a larger distinction still between being curious about historical figures and holding marches and rallies with fascistic messaging.
You know, I feel like there's a difference between, you know, oh, Hitler was an interesting guy, and I'm gonna hold a Nazi rally, you know?
Well, it's a denial of the understanding of fascist words and actions in American history because I think the argument could be made that Trump is being a true American because we pioneered a lot of the methods that – That Hitler admittedly cribbed from.
That's the other thing.
If you're fascinated by Hitler and how he got all these ideas, then if you are fascinated in good faith, not just to confirm your preconceived notions, then you learn, oh, well, Hitler was actually pretty into what the American government did to the native people who lived here.
And still do live here because reservation systems and also chattel slavery, those are systems that America perfected over hundreds of years and Hitler directly references as, oh my god, what a great idea.
I think I'm going to do that.
Also, the British invented concentration camps.
So if we all admit the implications of That's another, like, you're sharing the blame and responsibility, and it's a lot harder to hide.
But if you make it this one singular, oh, this one guy in Germany.
Yeah, out of nowhere.
Sure, he's an example.
Just did it.
You know?
Yeah, but he's not – it's not like – definition of fascism in the dictionary is not just a picture of Hitler.
It's actually – like it is its own thing that can apply to a lot of circumstances, one of them being the rise of Hitler to power.
That's – I do think – like that's why the Hitler rule was initially, you know, I think stated for the internet.
But then – Well, now it's lost all meaning, because everything's a Hitler now, and that's not, it shouldn't be shorthand, we should take this thing seriously.
Yeah.
I understand it's a concept, not a person.
Yes, yes, exactly.
And now we get to the big topic that Mika Brzezinski wants to discuss on Morning Joe regarding Trump, and it's the subject of abortion and reproductive rights and the effects it's having in the U.S. It has now come out.
What he has said about our veterans and what he wants to do with the military against his political adversaries, it's all huge news.
This is the future that we're looking at in the next Trump term, if there is one.
But this is what voters know right now, that he is killing us.
I'm talking about us women.
He's killing us.
He is putting us at risk.
He is making us afraid to have babies.
He is putting our reproductive health at risk.
That's interesting, isn't it?
Look, I know a lot of you have very strong views on this subject.
It's one of the issues that's long defined politics in your country.
But I feel like Trump said he's going to leave it to the states.
Isn't that what his position is on the subject of abortion?
Women have died already because of this.
So we can see right now what's coming.
Obviously, yeah, women have died and are dying already, as Mika Brzezinski just said.
Lauren, again, as you learned an entire off-brand about this, and have a uterus, and are in the US, and are having to vote on this subject, I am going to defer to you.
Why would you say reproductive healthcare being left up to individual states is maybe not a good thing?
Yeah, we have talked about it at length.
I feel heartened that a lot of people understand this subject a lot better than I think they even did a year ago or two years ago, definitely.
I mean, five years ago?
Crazy.
Crazy how much we have all become educated on this particular issue.
Oh my god.
This...
Yeah, it's not that difficult to explain.
I feel like we've already kind of...
We are talking about it.
Leaving it to the States is...
I mean, it kind of was already happening to a degree.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I genuinely think that even, you know, blue states and places where you could get access to an abortion were still not really understanding the reality on the ground of states that had all but limited abortion.
Even like and Roe versus Wade did not protect the people that were getting like their access to abortion was so limited to be non-existent.
And the fact that all these loopholes were allowed to accrue throughout the 90s and 2000s and also like the government 100% capitulated to acts of domestic terrorism.
We are now seeing a national.
like, It's coming to national prominence how states that barely had abortion access at all, America's finally dealing with the reality of what half of the states in the union were already dealing with.
So it's a little bit fucking galling to hear this argument because it is such a thought-stopping statement from Russell.
Right?
I don't know.
Was I supposed to make a very...
No, no, no.
No, no, no.
Business is why.
Yes.
Yeah.
Business is why, and here's why it's especially galling to hear from a UK citizen, because y'all don't have to make profit in a business to provide healthcare to people we do.
All of the healthcare in America is a business venture.
It is a capitalist business venture.
So even if Russell understands, like, we already know that Russell does not understand what American life looks like on a basic level.
So he definitely doesn't understand that, like, oh, well, the states that want to have abortion are going to have abortion in the states that don't, won't.
Not understanding that it is also a business where people have to pay to go to medical school who will not be entering the field that could get them arrested and sentenced to life in prison if they apply their trade in the wrong way in the wrong place.
Even if they are in a safe state because of all the restrictions that states are some fucking how being allowed to.
like, put bounty hunters out.
And it doesn't matter where, like, even if you get an abortion in a state where it's legal and if you go back to your home state where it's not legal, that's what leaving it up to the states looks like.
And you can't run businesses where a death penalty is on the line.
You can't run businesses that way.
And our healthcare is a business and y'all's isn't!
Yeah, yeah.
And this is why women are scared of having babies, as Mika Brzezinski put it, you know, because if anything goes wrong within the pregnancy or within the birth or any of that, there's a good chance that a doctor's not going to touch you in case it harms the baby or kills the baby, and they end up, you know, potentially going to prison forever.
And so there's a potential that if something goes wrong, the woman who is pregnant is going to die.
Or come very fucking close.
You know...
And so, yeah, it is terrifying.
Legitimately terrifying.
And gruesome.
Fucking cruel and grisly and gruesome.
Dehumanizing.
I think even just thinking about how it feels as having a reproductive body in the world, that's one thing.
And being terrified, it still feels individual.
I think that what we need to focus on is how gruesome and cruel and inhumane the people making these decisions are.
They are monsters.
So I can talk about my experience.
I can talk about how afraid I am and how afraid everyone else around me is.
I have to, I mean, I don't know.
There's a lot of things I have to consider, right?
We all do.
There is not enough, I feel, is said about the abject cruelty that someone even like Russell is saying.
Because like technically, if it was up to the states in the UK, then there would still be an avenue for like a federally mandated like, okay, if you're the state that wants to have abortion, then you are legally mandated to provide it.
But here, it's just a business, and if the business can't operate, it's just not going to be there.
There is no federal mandate to protect abortion access in the states even that can do it, right?
So it is especially cruel and inhumane for Russell to say this because I know he doesn't understand it.
Well, yes, and speaking of that, let's hear Russell's actual opinion on the subject of abortion, because he's much more direct here than he usually is.
What we are living through, I believe, is an attempt to emotionalize politics to the point where you can't even understand its proper parameters.
Abortion is an emotive issue.
Whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, it's a very serious thing indeed to make that choice, to take that course of action, to end the life of a fetus or an embryo or whatever language suits you.
The reason I suppose that we are migrating the discussion to that particular topic is because it is a motive and it doesn't allow you to have a kind of a clear rational purview on a matter that should be rationalistic.
Let me unpack that a little further.
Politics must become about management and administration.
It cannot be about Ideology.
Now, I know to have management and administration, you might argue that there needs to be an ideal.
The ideal should be this.
Minimum amount of power, minimum amount of intervention, minimum relationships with globalist corporations.
Maximize the power of the individual.
Maximize the power of the community.
For example, just off the top of my head, if a community were able to vote for themselves what their policy might be on any issue, First Amendment, Second Amendment, you might say these are enshrined and holy rights, but that in itself would be a secular claim.
To make the First and Second Amendment holy would be to attribute to the nation the qualities of a god.
What I believe is our principles must be derived from spirituality.
There are laws that have been given to us, There are principles that we have been offered and indeed they are resonant because you know yourself when you act against those principles.
You know yourself when you act against God, when you act against holiness.
And you might even want to use a Jordan Peterson definition of God, the highest principle.
Say you don't believe in God, I believe in God as you know.
But if you don't believe in God, what is the highest principle?
When you act against the highest principle, valour, morality, decency, kindness, service.
When you act against it, you feel it and you know it.
Valor is first?
Yeah.
So, this is both interesting and awful.
Russell, and he cannot be so stupid, he doesn't know what he's saying, is arguing that the Bible is the true law of the land and comes above even the Constitution, and according to him, abortion comes under the umbrella of things that defy principles laid down by God, and therefore abortion is immoral.
No, let's use the Bible rules, because the Bible says whenever you draw a first breath is when you're a person.
Yeah, let's use those rules.
I don't think he wants to use that bit for some inexplicable reason.
Feels a little pixie choosy.
But yeah, this was interesting to me because it isn't Russell mealy-mouthing his way around it, though his way of putting it is indirect as fucking usual.
This is Russell actively saying that abortion is bad.
A few months ago he was unwilling to really even take a position, leaning on his idea of states' rights and smaller democracies instead, as he just kind of brought up there.
Whereas now we have, well, it's an affront to God and you know when you do something bad.
Yeah, it's a shift that I wanted to make note of.
I mean, he really is going...
I think that he's starting to get being an American Christian, which is you're against abortion unless you want one, in which case, working it out.
I cannot imagine for a second that whoever Russell got pregnant and then he didn't want them to be pregnant and it was inconvenient.
I cannot imagine a world where Russell is going to be like, yeah, we're going to get rid of that.
I cannot imagine any iteration of Russell that will keep that unless it's somehow.
entertaining and politically advantageous.
And I don't mean necessarily politics is in government, but just politicking in general.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Is the positioning.
- Yeah, yeah.
- That's amazing.
Also, even throwing it to states' rights, that has been...
It's actually coming up.
They're voting in Missouri.
Please, if you're in Missouri, please, please, please, vote, vote, vote.
If you can, actually.
If you will be allowed to.
Because...
Trump says they're leaving it up to the states, but also Republicans are fighting tooth and nail, pulling out every legal judicial stop that they can to keep abortion from going on the ballot because people overwhelmingly support access to abortion in America.
So it shatters their absolutely incorrect conception of minority rule when they actually let people do what Russell said they're going to do.
They want to say loudest yelling wins, not what people actually want.
So if Russell had any kind of critical thinking around what he's supporting and promoting, the situation he is describing is exactly what Republican conservatives in these states are doing to block Republicans.
The vote that Russell explicitly wants.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But you have to know about reality for that.
Yeah, that does seem like a lot more work.
And of course, he brought it up there, but he does want to cap this whole thing off with his concept of tiny theocratic ethnostate.
So in a brief clip, let's hear a little bit of that.
I believe the more you regionalise significant ideological conversations and decisions and policies, the fairer and more just society you will have.
More just and fair still if the decisions you come to are guided not by humanitarianism, not by pragmatism, but by principles that come from a higher plane.
But that's just what I think.
Aha!
So we should all have tiny Christian democracies.
Um...
No, that's a formula, Russell, for making enemies.
That's literally how, if you set up camps based on your ideological convictions and then separate everybody, that is how you make people who want to fight each other.
That is the textbook definition, down the line, clear equation to make enemies who want to fight.
Yeah, yeah.
It's also kind of like, it's antithetical, I think, to a broader system of justice in general.
The idea that, like, these tiny theocracies would, that's more justice, that's more justice in that system rather than any kind of federal system or even a state system.
No, no, no.
The way to get justice is to devolve democracy as much as possible to these tiny little things.
And where you can have one community where, hey, lynch mobs is justice, and that's okay.
You know, like, you're gonna have...
Yeah, this is pitch for the purge.
Like, it's not actually what we're doing.
Justice.
Purge.
I just...
There's a degree of, like, he's like, yeah, because I said so.
Like, no.
You're not...
You're starting in these ideas.
You're in the middle of these ideas and you're using big words to make a very simple thing seem very complicated and you're actively obfuscating the subject, Russell.
But even if you try to simplify it, which is what you should be doing to help out your followers, not making it more complicated, then what you need to do is understand the situation and then talk about it in a way that's consistent. then what you need to do is understand the situation And he can't even do that in his own paragraph.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because I said so or because it sounds better.
Because even like.
Christianity has been in charge for such a long time.
Oh my god.
Pretending that Christianity has never been in charge and that's his brilliant new idea of how to fix the world is baffling to me.
The amount of like...
Some of Hitler's generals tried to blow him up.
No, they didn't.
It's that thinking.
It's just like...
Yeah.
Why?
I don't like that thought, so I'm going to throw it away, because it doesn't feel good right now.
Yeah, it doesn't fit in with the things that I like, so I'm just going to get rid of it.
That's not how reality works.
Yes, it is.
Oh, okay.
What are you supposed to do?
No!
What are you supposed to do about that?
Yes, it is.
No!
Next question!
How great am I? Yeah.
That's stupid.
So now we get Russell's direct take on Kamala Harris.
I don't think there's any fair, just way that Kamala Harris can win this election.
Why?
Because she doesn't seem like, behave like, talk like, act like a President of the United States of America.
And even the Democrat Party don't believe in it.
That's why you've got the spectacle of, excuse me, their harbingers on the news.
People like Mika Mika there going like just with only recourse to mad emotion because rationally and sensibly Kamala Harris is unelectable.
Hmm.
Firstly, I'm deeply curious what Russell's conception of a president is, you know, like how a president should be, because if you're trying to tell me that Kamala Harris doesn't act like a president but Donald Trump does, there are problems.
There are real problems.
What's important about this is Russell, his cabal of alt-right shitheads, and Trump himself have been laying the groundwork for months now that there is no legitimate way that Kamala Harris can win the election.
It's been a slog of constant work in ensuring millions of people believe Kamala Harris is a useless and inept candidate and divorcing them from the reality that she's in any way competent to cement the idea that if Kamala Harris wins, the election must have been stolen.
It's either a Trump win or a stolen election.
Those are the two options.
And Russell is aiding and abetting what will almost certainly end in violence over the coming weeks and months if Kamala Harris wins because of this intentional divorcing from reality.
Yeah, the rationale he just presented was, well, she doesn't look or act like the other presidents that we've had.
Or men.
What's the common name?
Ah, right.
Yes, yes, right.
Almost exclusively white men, except for the one.
Mm.
That's all I heard from Russell right now.
Well, she's a lady.
No.
And, like, black.
Not black enough!
Or too black, depending on the day, fucking apparently, which is another outrageous conversation that is happening in the year of our Lord 2024!
Yes.
Yeah, well, yeah, she brown.
Oh, lady.
That doesn't look very presidential to me.
That's not presidential to me.
Oh, cool, Russell.
You know what?
I believe that Russell believes that 100%.
Yeah, I believe he's speaking honestly here.
She's very different from a Calvin Coolidge.
Yes, you're right, Russell.
Yeah.
It's true.
Also, Russell is upset that such an emotional topic is being spoken about with all the abortion stuff.
And, oh, it's an emotional appeal!
It's an emotional appeal!
And, again, small quote from Donald Trump that has caused a lot of harm in its wake.
In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what's happening in our country, right?
And that's not an emotional appeal at all, I'm sure.
That doesn't count.
It wasn't Larry David, actually, guys.
It was Trump.
Just so you know.
I'm kidding.
But, yeah, that, like, the emotional appeal shit, like, he said, like, that's saying the quiet part out loud to a, like, a volume, like, yeah, all those sentences he said were right.
And I'm just waiting for him to land it and be like, yeah, it's an emotional appeal that does not apply to reality or healthcare or people's lives.
It is a religiously manipulated emotional appeal only.
Guess who never knows that they were aborted?
Pregnancies that end in abortion.
Yeah.
No one's the wiser.
Genuinely, truly.
No one's losing anything.
It doesn't need to be traumatic.
It doesn't need to be this emotional, fraught moment.
It can be...
It's a medical procedure.
Yep.
off a wart.
It's not the emotional appeal.
Like, which team is fucking doing that, dude?
And for who?
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Because it is very emotional to hear what women go through when they cannot access abortion care or have to hear from their families and their existing children because she died.
Yeah.
That's emotional.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's pretty emotional.
And I think the people who are for reproductive rights also, I think we're allowed to get emotional about that, you know?
I think there's justified, you know?
I think that's okay.
Good lord.
Alright, moving on.
No other way to put it.
There is some utter bullshit from RFK Jr.
Here's Bobby Kennedy talking about the Department of Defense using the military on the public.
Can you believe this is happening in America?
One other thing.
President Harris said today in her post, in her speech, he said that President Trump was going to turn the US military against the American public and use the public to promote his agenda.
How many of you think that is true?
Well, what's interesting to me is that the Biden-Harris administration has done something two weeks ago that has never been done in American history, which is to send, exactly, lethal force to send directives to the Pentagon.
Changing the law to make it legal for the US military to be used to use lethal force against American citizens on American soil.
Bitch!
You were alive when that shit happened for real.
Technically now it's legal, the U.S. military, under this directive, it will become legal for the U.S. military to shoot and kill Americans who engage in political protests because they disagree with policies in the White House.
I'm not making this up.
Any of you can look it up.
This is a Democratic initiative.
This did not come during the Trump administration.
This did not come from Donald Trump.
It came way before!
It came from the Democratic Party.
And that's why I left the Democratic Party.
Wow, so what is the real threat to freedom at this point?
Is it Trump's similarities to Hitler?
Or is it that bills are being part of which, you know, again, is not an opinion or an idea I endorse.
I actually think it's very disrespectful to everyone involved to make such a comparison.
I mean, people that have suffered as a result of the Second World War, etc.
And it's mad to make that comparison about anyone.
Is it a greater threat that literal laws are being passed that increase the power of the state and their ability to use lethal force against protesters?
Let's look at that in a bit more detail.
There it is.
There's the important, significant parts of that bill highlighted for you to peruse at your leisure.
Sigh.
Yeah, Russell has left the DOD directive up on the screen, which is helpful, or it would be if it wasn't just the front page and then a random extract.
Worth noting that RFK Jr.
was talking at a turning point event there, by the way.
Yeah, TPUSA, Turning Point USA. Yep.
So I'm going to read from a Newsweek article on this subject because it's been doing the rounds.
Quote, The Secretary of Defense can approve assistance in responding with assets with potential for lethality or any situation in which it is reasonably foreseeable that providing the requested assistance may involve the use of force that is likely to result in lethal force, including death or serious bodily injury, in the official wording of the document.
A bit legalese, but...
The directive does not hand over new powers to the military.
The directive is actually just a reminder for the Pentagon that if they are backing up law enforcement or police in a scenario where there could be a use of force, this must be greenlit by the Secretary of Defense.
This is not a change of policy, stressed Elizabeth Goitin, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based law and policy institute.
Another directive, 3025.18, has already been applied to the defense intelligence bodies since the Trump administration, just under a broader umbrella.
The substance is the exact same, Goitin said.
This has been the policy for some time.
They were already subject to it.
It is not an authorization for any sort of action by defense intelligence components, certainly not an authorization to use lethal force.
It is a procedural restriction on any such operations." There are already situations in which the Department of Defense is authorized to provide assistance to civilian law enforcement in situations where there is the potential for lethal force, including when the military is deployed under the Insurrection Act, Goytin said.
This is not an expansion or diminishment of current law.
Unquote.
So, yeah, I'm going to say that the Trump threat is a bigger threat than laws staying the same.
Sorry, Russell, but...
Bad law.
Bad law, sure.
I'm going to say fucking bad law.
And this is part of the problem with the Democrats' approach to this election and Harris' stance in particular is there are massive tenets that are like foundational tenets of her policy positions and her campaign that are barely different or not at all different from Trump.
Mm-hmm.
We don't need the most lethal fucking fighting force in the world.
We don't.
We don't need a militarized law enforcement wing in America that is used against citizens every fucking day.
We don't.
Yup.
Well, that was going to be the next thing I was going to say was, like, cops are killing people every day.
Like, how is that different from the military doing?
Like, functionally, you know, like...
The, yeah.
And the specific update here was, yeah, a further restriction.
Potentially!
Yeah.
Because it's what pending approval, what does fucking pending approval even mean?
I don't think it's necessarily that, like, that does not comfort me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But ultimately, this was something already on the books.
It's an update and just kind of a clarifying of the procedure of the thing.
Nevertheless, none of this is comforting.
No.
Make cops pay for their own murders.
That's it.
Start that.
Do that.
Because also the taxpayers have to pay for the settlements when it happens.
Madness.
And an officer fucking friendly murderer gets to be on vacation?
Paid fucking vacation?
Yeah.
Come on!
Yeah, yeah.
Be different than Trump!
Guess how much you'll win if you're just different than Trump!
Like, the fact that people have to, like, rationalize and force themselves to accept they are voting against Trump, even with all these policies that are virtually identical, the fact that we have to make that rationale and they can't just say it or do it, these, like, fucking insane, like, securing the border, shut up!
Oh my god!
like both sides act like immigrants are a pariah both sides do and lip service makes it more insulting to sometimes this is it's madness all of it is madness quit giving people ammunition when they're completely right they don't want to vote for you This is not good enough.
Yeah, I... And I'm still gonna do it!
God damn!
Yeah.
I agree.
It's terrible.
My main point is more just that RFK Jr.
was full of shit.
Kent State!
Done!
But also this is bad.
Right, right.
Yell Kent State at him!
It's never happened before!
Stop lying!
Fuck off!
And it's not just that.
That's just the most obvious.
He was...
Okay.
Yep.
Yes.
He's not a 16-year-old TikToker.
Girl, you were there in the world.
You knew.
Yeah, yeah.
Stupid.
Awful.
Yes, very.
So now we're going to take a look at a slightly longer clip that Russell plays for a very specific reason that he plays it.
And it's a clip of J.D. Vance on Theo Vaughn's podcast.
Let's have a look at these varying candidates.
I don't mean that Theo Von is running for office, though I'd vote for him.
What I'm saying is, on one hand, you've got Tim Walts, who does seem increasingly peculiar, and Kamala Harris, who's the president that never should have been.
And on the other hand, you have, you know, Donald Trump.
I think Donald Trump is pretty much an open book.
And J.D. Vance, who his detractors would say is representative of some sort of handmaid's tale dystopia yet to be unburdened by what might have been.
But by my reckoning, he's a pretty good guy.
I like him.
Let's see how he gets on with Theo Baum.
A young person who has a parent who's...
Who has alcoholism as to how to navigate that because I even get messages a lot from people that are like, hey, my dad is struggling or this.
What do I do?
I don't know what to do here.
You know, do you have any thoughts on that?
And it's not like you're a specialist.
Yeah, I'm not a specialist.
I mean, here's here's what I try to do.
I mean, take this for, you know, for what it's worth.
But number one is If you're a kid and you're in an environment where there's a lot of addiction, you've got to make sure that you're taken care of.
Don't get yourself in such a situation where it's not just your parent that is struggling, but it becomes you that's struggling too.
Because you can't help them out.
You can't help them out unless you're able to take care of yourself first.
That's number one.
I think number two is...
As hard as it is, man, and shit, I know this very well because there were times when I had some very angry moments with my mom.
Don't get resentful and try to keep your heart as open as possible, right?
You got to compartmentalize a little bit, right?
Yeah, there's the addict version, but then there's the version that, you know, that read you a book when you were a kid.
There's a version that took you to, you know, your favorite movie.
Try to hold on to the memories.
That are completely divorced from the addiction.
Because I think if you allow yourself to become totally resentful, then it doesn't just affect them, it starts to affect you too, right?
Don't allow your parents' addiction to become something that destroys your life too, in other words.
You've got to kind of keep your soul intact here.
I mean, just practically, go to those NA meetings.
And I learned more about mom and her addiction going to those NA meetings.
It's not like it was some eureka moment.
Oh, I'm not pissed off at you anymore.
But you at least understand it a little bit more.
And you gain some appreciation for what's going on in their life because that's a big part of it.
Oh no, he's not weird, is he?
That's like a normal person talking about a personal and difficult issue in a way that was cogent and coherent.
Yeah, he's not weird, goddammit.
He is normal, he is not weird, and that's the entire reason he just played that game.
Well, it's also, I mean, it helps Russell's personal mythology as this struggling, recovering addict who is simultaneously a beacon of Christianity and morality.
Indeed.
And I will say in this very specific tailored and manicured setting that we just saw where Vance has all the control over the situation, he comes off as...
Far more casual than he has elsewhere, necessarily.
Almost like he's been actively practicing hiding how much of a fucking weirdo he is.
But, you know, get him into spontaneous situations and we're back to square one.
But he's not weird, everybody!
Or have him talk to a black lady on video and we see how he actually acts.
Yeah, yeah.
I do, however, I love just how effective the weird moniker has been to these people and how upset Russell is clearly getting about it even now.
Yeah, J.D. Vance was just lying.
That was just a lie.
Yes.
Also, I did spot, I hadn't noticed this before, but I did spot Rainn Wilson's book on Theo Von's shelf there.
Soul Boom.
Sure.
Oh, that's a fun little throwback.
Yeah, Rainn Wilson is not Russell.
No, he is not.
Rainn Wilson would not be on Russell's show now.
I would be shocked if that did occur.
That would be an admonishment.
Alright, now we come to the final kind of segment, the final section of the show, and he's very much saved the worst until last, because...
Trigger warning here, everyone.
We're about to get into some, like, pretty bullshit anti-trans narratives in discussing puberty blockers.
And right out the gate, Russell is considering puberty blockers as an affront to God and nature.
Now, these are strange days indeed, baby, because globalism means one thing, centralized power that is taking the power of God.
How will you know that?
Well, it will start trying to control nature.
You could argue that mankind has been trying to control nature from the advent of agriculture, and you'd be right.
Instead of hunting animals, we started to herd animals.
Instead of picking and foraging trees, we started to grow, cultivate, and control plants.
But, would you say there's a subtle difference between controlling animals, animal husbandry, and controlling hormones?
Would you say, though, too, that it's important where the ultimate authority lies?
What authority is granted to us to have dominion over nature?
Are you able to point to any scriptural verse that says that precisely that is possible?
And what authority is telling you that it's okay to go to war with nature?
The nature of Let's have a look at the revelation of a recent study that pubic blockers aren't good for children.
And even as I say that out loud, it's clear to me that it's sort of obvious that pubic blockers would not be good for children.
A study examining the impact of puberty blockers on children is not being published for political reasons, according to the doctor in charge.
The study that's already nine years old and received $10 million in taxpayer funding isn't being released because the doctor says its findings might be weaponized in arguments against transgender medical treatment for kids.
It's a story that's not being picked up by most news outlets with a left-leaning bias.
However, it was the New York Times, a left-leaning outlet, that first interviewed the doctor at the center of the study.
What the fuck is Straight Arrow News?
El?
What the fuck are we watching right now?
So, the New York Times have come out with yet another anti-trans article that is misleading moral outrage bullshit.
It has then been picked up by Straight Arrow News, who claim to be unbiased and straight-faced and, you know, just given the facts.
But they're about to lean into the anti-trans bullshit hard in this segment.
Yeah, they're almost basically a secondary news kind of situation, basically.
Now, rather than take it chunk by chunk...
Secondary as in, like, where would one find Straight Arrow news in the wild?
Where would you come across?
Are they on YouTube?
Do they have, like...
Yes, they've got a website, they're on socials, they're on these kinds of places, and they'll take other people's work and kind of report it and that kind of thing.
I'm not sure how much journalism they're doing themselves, let's put it that way.
Yeah, but rather than take this all chunk by chunk throughout the next few clips, we're going to pre-bunk this one right at the top so everyone knows the full situation.
It won't make it any less rage-inducing to listen to, but hopefully we'll all feel better knowing the thing.
- It might. - The claim that's being made by Azeen Goreshi at the New York Times is that Dr. Joanna Olson Kennedy is withholding research from the Trans Youth Care Network because of a charged American political environment over transgender people, and that the study being withheld shows puberty blockers don't improve and that the study being withheld shows puberty blockers don't improve trans kids' mental That's the argument that's being made.
An obvious point out the gate is that from this data that's being referred to, 28 studies have already been published, including from patients on puberty blockers.
It's just that one study using the data is being held back for a couple of reasons.
One, there was no control group used.
Meaning that the data will be inconclusive.
On top of that, there's also a small sample size of only 95 kids for this specific bit of data, right?
Those two things combined presents an issue.
And the other reason is because the environment is too politically charged and Dr.
Olson Kennedy specifically did not want the study being weaponized by the scientifically illiterate to harm trans kids.
Um...
From here, I'm going to read a piece from Erin Reid at ErinInTheMorning.com, who is doing some good work in debunking anti-trans bullshit across the board.
Quote, Olsen-Kennedy explains that she is being meticulous with one of the registered studies on puberty blockers because she doesn't want her findings to be weaponized, adding that the work has to be exactly on point, clear, and concise.
Goreshi then uses this quote to imply that Olsen-Kennedy is withholding research because it somehow proves puberty blockers to be ineffective, which is just not true.
While Goreshi's piece portrays puberty blockers as ineffectual and suggests that research is being hidden, Orson Kennedy's publications tell a different story.
For instance, in one of her studies on youth presenting for hormone therapy and puberty blockers, she found that those starting puberty blockers appear to be functioning better from a psychosocial standpoint than a gender-affirming hormone therapy cohort youth, highlighting the potential benefits of accessing gender-affirming treatment earlier in life.
While Goreshi acknowledges the study, she omits critical context by not comparing those who received puberty blockers with those who didn't.
Instead, she highlights depression and suicidality numbers in isolation.
Dr.
Olsen-Kennedy and her colleagues noted that one quarter of the adolescents were depressed or suicidal before treatment, Goreshi writes, seeming to contradict Olsen-Kennedy's claim that those seeking blockers were generally doing well.
What Goreshi fails to mention is that among those who didn't receive blockers, suicidal ideation was much higher, 66%, more than twice as high.
These figures notably come from the same TYC project Goreshi accuses Olson Kennedy of withholding data from.
Ultimately, the purpose of puberty blockers is not to improve a trans youth's mental health.
Gender dysphoria arises from a mismatch between a person's physical development and their internal sense of gender identity.
Puberty blockers pause physical changes, ensuring that when a transgender youth is ready to begin hormone therapy, as determined by their medical team, they won't have undergone unwanted pubertal changes.
This role of puberty blockers has become increasingly understood in recent years, with multiple studies, including one from Olson Kennedy's data set, showing that puberty blockers positively impact mental health compared to delaying treatment.
More recent studies have further confirmed these findings.
The most significant of these was published in December 2023 in the Journal of Adolescent Health, showing that TGD youth who received pubertal blockade at TAN-A2 or 3 were found to have less anxiety, depression, stress, total problems, internalizing difficulties, and suicidal ideation than TGD peers who had been through and suicidal ideation than TGD peers who had been through more of a non-affirming puberty.
Unquote.
Okay, so the NYT is talking out of its fucking arse yet again, as is this Garaci.
It happens on the opinion page all the fucking time, and it's reprehensible.
Yep.
Yep.
And yeah, Straight Arrow News are also taking this thing and parroting it and making it worse.
So yeah.
Thinking about it, right?
Like thinking about this, you know, what the statement, the New York Times headline we're looking at right now, US study on puberty blockers goes unpublished because of politics, doctor says.
Politics, doctor says.
Even if this is an opinion, okay, yeah, you're sharing the doctor's opinion at the end.
Don't say it that way.
And yeah, I think we can all understand that like the medication of a puberty blocker is not the thing that improves the, it's not Prozac.
It's, it doesn't, that's not the thing you take to improve the mood.
Child taking puberty blockers doesn't make their classmates nicer and it doesn't make the society they live in less hostile towards them.
If anything, it is amazing to me and genuinely speaks to the resiliency of children and the children that are going through this and young adults who are going through this that.
Even in this hostile social moment towards who they are as individuals and being these political pawns that are constantly being berated and insulted and minimized in this political discourse, that they are still improving to, what, 66%?
Yeah.
Yes.
Even though the world is getting more hostile at them, I would think even just a leveling off, staying the same would be a good number for me.
Yeah.
If I was if I was a kid that was like, I'm going downhill, man.
And then like getting on the correct medication, even just like leveling off and like, well, I do feel better.
But everyone at school is still a fucking monster piece of shit.
Horrible.
And so is the news reporting what politicians say and the news agreeing with them that I'm terrible.
Even just maintaining the same level of comfort and non-depression would be enough.
The fact that they are, in fact, improving from getting the treatment they need is incredible.
Yeah, it's amazing.
It's amazing.
Actively improving these kids' lives.
So let's get into it and see where Russell takes it.
And he only seems to expand on the idea that puberty blockers are fighting nature and God.
Dr.
Johanna Olson Kennedy, in charge of this study, is used to being at the center of the controversy.
She's an advocate for transgender rights and has been used as an expert witness to provide testimony against states banning adolescent puberty blockers and gender-related surgeries.
The study her team conducted involved 95 adolescents averaging 11 years old.
The children were being treated with puberty blockers to prevent things like the development of breasts or preventing their voice from naturally deepening.
The study followed the children for two years to track changes in their mental health.
According to Dr.
Sometimes I wonder how the spectrum of self-management is regulated.
For example, you know, I clean my teeth, I take various supplements, I look after myself and use sort of creams and care about my diet and stuff.
So where is the line where self-care comes into contact with interventionism?
You know, is it okay to have hair transplants?
Is it okay to have breast augmentation?
All of these things are indicators of something pretty profound, aren't they?
That we don't want to age, that I don't want to die and decay, that I care about what I look like and therefore I care about what other people think of me.
All of these things There's guidance available on all of those ideas.
Like, you know, for example, in the perfect version of myself, I'd only be thinking about my relationship with God.
I wouldn't be thinking about whether or not I'm attractive.
That wouldn't matter to me.
And I wouldn't care that my body was dying because I would know eternal life.
And I would recognize that the decay of the body is a necessary part of life.
That human beings die.
Now, so, you know, what I'm saying is I'm participating in this.
And also, remember, I'm born in the 1970s, mid-1970s I'm from.
Now, when I was in the 80s and the 90s, I didn't know what I was and what I wanted.
You know, like, I wonder if I'd had access to ideas like, hey, the reason you're unhappy is because you're not the right gender.
I mean, I wonder how that would have impacted me.
Probably not at all, Russell.
I mean, like, you're an attention-demanding little narcissist, so who knows what you might have said, but if you'd experienced gender dysphoria, I'm pretty sure we'd all know about it by now, and you would definitely know about it.
You know, it's not something that is small, temporary, or fleeting.
It is a...
Deep and unmitigated well of feeling wrong about your own identity, and it affects every single thing you do, and particularly the way you interact with the world.
Like, on a personal note, if someone calls me a man these days, I physically recoil because I know internally how wrong it is, but I can recognize why it happens, and I understand that now.
Now, imagine I didn't know that I'm not in fact a man and trying to process what the fuck that feeling of wrongness is, and that is gender dysphoria in a nutshell.
And there's no way that Russell has felt this, because if he had, he would know about it, and wouldn't be making comparisons between not wanting to age and being the wrong gender.
Like, different things, you know?
Like, putting creams on your face, as you said, is not the same as wanting a big ol' pair of tits, right?
It's not.
It's not.
It's just not.
Or it is, and it's fine!
That's my point!
It is, and it's fine!
Especially Russell's trying to sell the creams!
Like, wha- And the same person, we just listened to Russell, get his panties in a twist over being called a Wimbledon ball boy.
Like, because of the color of his shirt.
Yeah.
Yeah!
Maybe we all have feelings that are complex about who we are and our expression of that in the world.
And you don't get to tell somebody else how to fucking feel because someone else told you how to feel about how you look earlier today in the same goddamn segment and you can't even get it through your head that that's normal!
It's just like a normal thought to have, and then taking actions towards that, like wanting to collect pictures all over my stupid body.
Yeah, that's my choice, and anyone talking to me in public about it, fucking keep it to your goddamn self!
Jesus!
Like, it's, yeah, our bodies are not public, they are private, and we get to make choices for ourselves, and you trying to tell somebody else how to live is wrong.
that like Russell it just happened you just did it and you completely understand your own I'm positive that Russell thoroughly understood exactly why he said and did what he did in the reaction and then he can't even fucking extrapolate that to the point that he's in yeah we When you get to say something different every sentence and no one holds you to anything, this is what you sound like and this is who you are.
And it's embarrassing to watch an adult be so clueless about themselves.
Yeah.
Also, I'm sorry.
Is breast augmentation distasteful to you, Russell?
Really?
Do you want to be honest?
Yeah, I was going to say.
Yeah, yeah.
Hair implants or any of that other stuff you mentioned.
Right?
Get a fucking grit, dude.
Mm-hmm.
Does your haircut not matter to you?
Because you're going to be honest.
Get a fucking grip.
Like, that's what I'm saying.
Yeah.
Just apply the rules to yourself.
That you do for others.
That's all you have to do.
And if you don't like when people call you something that you didn't identify with, like a Wimbledon ball boy, and you're like, ah, I'm going to push back on that.
Maybe other people have the exact same fucking feeling you do.
And maybe it's more extreme.
Maybe it's more intense.
So yeah, that's what fucking...
I think it's so instructive to see how people process Russell talking, like his listeners or even just casual observers, sounding smart because of $5 words.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And you and I, you know, you and I, listen, we talk into microphones each other a lot.
I do, I have the capability of using, like, I like a vocab.
I like an SAT vocab word.
But when I'm trying to make a simple point, I like making it As simple and blunt as possible.
Because I'm not trying to complicate things.
I want to use exact language.
I want to be specific and I want to use the correct words.
So sometimes there's more words to use.
Russell is obviously performing intelligence for people he can trick.
Yeah.
Making a subject more complicated is not smart.
That's not Simplifying a complicated subject, that is a literal example of someone who is smart and understands the subject.
If you take a simple idea, like Russell getting upset about his shirt commentary, and then making it more complicated, he's adding all this bullshit to it so he doesn't have to engage with the fact that he thinks that he's different and better than everybody else.
Yeah.
Yes, yeah, yeah.
And it's the same bullshit kind of waffly nonsense that, you know, Jordan Peterson obviously uses, which led to him this last week trying to argue that dragons are real and fire is a predator.
You know, and you're just like, well, of course you've managed to get there by your stupid fucking nonsense.
By complicating what are simple issues and going from a position of basically oppositional defiance.
Yeah, right?
But that's the thing.
If your premise is flawed, if you are willing to build on a false premise or a flawed premise because you don't want to feel like you're wrong...
Or you can't take a step back and realize that your premise is flawed to begin with.
You aren't humble enough to be like, oh, wait, I'm building this house on sand.
No, I'm not going to do that.
I'm going to rethink where I'm coming from.
Then you turn into Jordan Peterson.
If you double down, regardless of how wrong you are, and then you have to spin your fucking wheels and do all this extra talking to justify to yourself Actually, guys, I'm actually right.
And I figured it out.
It did take about 45 minutes.
And it doesn't make any sense in the early thinking about it.
But I'm pleased with how I've decided actually I was right the whole time.
Aha!
Done.
Be embarrassed.
If you do that, be embarrassed.
Be ashamed of yourself.
I am embarrassed for you.
Be embarrassed and stop.
That's the shame that will protect you from being a bad person.
It's the longer version of Trump saying no to Hitler.
Hitler's general's trying to blow him up.
You know, it's the longer-winded version.
No, and here's why.
Those weren't really Hitler's generals.
They were generals that were hired by somebody else.
And so you can't really make that.
Yeah.
Yeah, you can rationalize motherfucking anything.
Ask any cult member ever.
Yeah, man!
Come on!
Like, it's a capability that humans have because of how our brains work, and if you indulge that impulse, you turn it...
That is the endgame you should be terrified of as a human being, is Jordan B. Peterson.
Yeah...
Because don't be that person.
Feeling like you're right is never that important.
Because anyone who listens to you still knows you're an idiotic fuckface.
Anyone that knows, just because you think that you're right...
That is your internal experience.
And you know what?
That's valid to you.
That's your experience.
Everyone else who hears the words you say and know that you're actually fucking dumb, that's their experience.
And that's also valid.
Yes, completely.
Dear.
Let's hear a little more bullshit from Straight Arrow News.
Great.
Cool.
And I know that there are...
I know people that feel like they would like to be referred to as she or whatever.
Me, personally...
What difference does that make to me?
To me, that's no different from calling someone doctor or mister or sir or your grace or your majesty.
Some people want to be referred to a certain way.
I will respectfully do that.
No problem.
I've got a principle for that.
I've got a few.
Non-judgment, kindness.
When it comes to, I suppose, children and medication, there's some things, I guess, we've got to look at.
And I suppose...
They would be empirical scientific studies, wouldn't they?
...health.
According to Dr.
Olson Kennedy, the puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements.
Dr.
Olson Kennedy claims that's because the children were already doing well when the study began.
But according to the Times report, that conclusion seemed to contradict an earlier description of the group of kids in which Dr.
Olson Kennedy and her colleagues noted that one quarter of the adolescents were depressed or suicidal before treatment.
The Times also notes Dr.
Yeah, that's an interesting piece of misinformation management, or mismanagement of information, rather, is that actually, it's quite likely that there will be high incidence of depression, uncertainty, and anxiety in people that are undergoing that, particularly if they're very young, that kind of treatment you would say.
Also notes Dr.
Olson Kennedy's team has not published the data.
Asked why she said the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to bans of the youth gender treatments.
More than 120,000 children ages 6 to 17 were treated for gender dysphoria from 2017 to 2021.
Puberty blockers have not received FDA approval to treat gender dysphoria.
Aha!
The FDA haven't approved it!
It must be evil!
But also the FDA is evil.
Fuck.
Confusing.
Difficult.
Good one!
Right?
And also, yeah.
As mentioned, it's not there to deal with the mental health side of things.
Um...
Okay, so it's true that the FDA haven't approved the use of this.
Yeah, it's not for the mental health side of things.
Right.
And who knows what's coming down the line also, because there isn't enough data yet.
It's a really big problem within discussing any of these subjects.
There is very little data that we're actually able to work with, and alt-right shitheads keep ensuring that there won't be enough data by demanding that the funding for the studies is cut or trying to get rid of the studies full fucking stop.
It's a real, real problem.
It's just like we have our fucking stem cells.
And that was scaremongering around abortion.
Yep.
Yep.
100%.
Nonetheless, the use of puberty blockers is supported by 12 major American medical associations, including the AMA, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
They are still on a temporary ban over here in the UK, however, that's because of the fucking bullshit Cass Report, and it's just one of the several serious issues I have with Keir Starmer's Labour Party.
Yeah, man, they were handing them like that.
Bad.
Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.
Fuck me.
Here's a reality we are not confronting, right?
Is that parents that do not want to acknowledge the transness of their children and therefore do not have to seek or provide a provider that will give them the health care they need.
The fear that they are playing on over and over, and they being the conservative, right-wing, fear-mongering What we know about puberty blockers is that the effects of puberty blockers are absolutely reversible.
The effects of puberty is not reversible.
What they are framing this as, and I promise you, what parents believe Is, well, my kid won't have these, like, markers of gender that I envision for them to have a good life.
Like, well, my daughter, regardless of how that daughter feels, isn't gonna grow tits, so she's not gonna be the human I want her to be.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because what do they talk about?
Genital mutilation.
And I've got bad news for parents.
You don't get to decide how your fucking kid comes out.
And there's a million reasons that are more important than aesthetic to have a problem with this.
I just, I'm positive.
I hear it.
I hear it come through these types of like news segments or this kind of coverage is my kid isn't gonna look how I envision them looking.
Yeah.
They're going to look different.
Yeah.
And I'm not gonna love them as much because they're not performing the gender I believe they should.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's 100% it.
Throw in some religiosity as well.
Wildly.
Well, but that's like wildly fucking shallow.
No, the religious shit, that's a fucking smokescreen.
No, this is so much more selfish than people talk about and want to acknowledge.
Religion doesn't talk about this.
Even Christianity does not talk about this.
Yeah, yeah.
Most indigenous cultures in the world and other ancient cultures had plenty of solutions that were not in a gender binary.
This is a patriarchal belief in that presenting with your gendered characteristics...
Listen, I can speak from motherfucking experience on this planet.
The way that I was treated, I watched how I was treated five years ago, 10 years ago, 15, 20 years ago, how differently the expectations have developed, which I saw at the beginning of fucking reality TV, is this hyper-feminization and hyper-masculization that just wasn't there when I was a teenager.
It was not there.
Like it just, and I'm talking about Delia's catalog.
Everybody looked the same.
Like it was very like, there was this kind of, it just, it wasn't, you know, Barbie and Ken.
That wasn't the cool thing to be.
That wasn't what millennials really like grew up with.
And it's weird that we aren't looking at the whole culture of As feeding into this, like, very fucking shallow understanding of the relationship between parents and children.
And what we're also not acknowledging is that, like, I could have heard it come out of Russell's mouth in this clip is, well, you know, it's like talking about how he will respect what people want to be called as adults.
Mm-hmm.
But then it's like, well, children.
Well, children are property of their parents.
And so parents get to make the decisions for the child because they're not autonomous until they turn 18.
And then we can just be very mean to them if we don't like them.
Parents are saying, if you were born a girl, I had a party that we blew up a pinata that was pink.
And if you don't look like a girl, I'm not going to love you.
That's what they're saying.
And it's atrocious because plenty of things can happen to your children that make them less than perfect visually to you.
And you need to accept that regardless.
So if we're going to accept a kid that has other mobility issues or birth defects or whatever, why do people get to be viciously shallow about this?
That's a good question.
I mean, also because they're kind of viciously shallow about anyone else that is different.
But that's the thing.
That's what you tell me.
When you don't want your kid to turn out that way.
Oh, okay.
You don't want anybody to turn out that way.
You don't want to see it and you won't love them.
Yeah.
So don't have a child if you are not capable of accepting the reality of who that individual person is that you decided to fucking make.
That's part of the fucking contract you should sign.
I think abortion should be sold next to...
Next to the Milk Duds at 7-Eleven because people do not enter into that contract with a human fucking life!
They're responsible enough to understand the implications and be able to act right.
How does that fucking work?
To be able to take it seriously.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I feel bad for Russell's kids in all of this situation.
Because also his take there was, well, teenagers are depressed and crazy anyway at that time.
So even if it is for a reason that we can fix, we should probably just let them all be.
It's just going to happen anyway.
Just let them be miserable.
Fuck it.
Oh, great.
Cheers.
Thanks.
Well, yeah.
I mean, you're suffering if you're, like, they're an extension of him.
Yeah, there's a separate Russell-based problem there.
Yeah.
That's what I'm saying about parents in general.
Like, if you aren't mature enough to understand that your child is a person the whole time, the whole time.
Yeah.
Telling a child not to touch a hot stove, you aren't hurting that kid.
You are helping them.
But it might seem like discipline at the time.
It might maybe do it a way that's not mean.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're more likely, you know, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, even when it's a child.
Yeah.
Be gentle.
You don't need to traumatize your kids to teach them.
Right.
It's so different.
Yeah.
It's just, like, this understanding of, like, your child is your property.
That is, again, guys, polytheism.
I'm telling you, we fucked up.
We fucked up with this monotheism business.
Yeah.
Yeah, the poly side sounds better.
Because kids could have their own protectors.
It's why Catholicism has so many saints.
It's because we love having a bunch of different options.
We love options!
Yeah, they're good.
They're good.
I like them.
I like them.
Alright, let's have the last little piece from Straight Arrow News here.
In a Washington Post poll, 68% of Americans are against providing puberty blockers to children 10 to 14 years old.
58% are against hormone treatments for those 15 to 17 years old.
I suppose the conclusion that could be drawn from that is one that we've drawn several times today.
Decentralized power gives people the maximal amount of authority over their individual bodies, but also over their communities and their laws.
And I suppose, as a parent, I would like to I wouldn't be the main steward of the culture that my children receive.
I wouldn't want them getting too much cultural messaging from outside because I no longer trust centralized cultural messaging as I believe and have believed long before the modern era, which I mean sort of the last 10 years rather than the last 100.
That you can't trust media.
You can't trust the state.
And thank God I don't trust the state.
Because the reason that I don't have myocarditis right now, and there was no chance of me getting myocarditis, is because I don't immediately, when the government and media team up to tell me something, think, well, this is probably for my own good.
I think exactly the opposite.
That there's a significant chance that corruption's at play here.
So in this issue that's been one of the defining topics of recent years and of recent eras that's often used to condemn people for a lack of compassion, what's plainly needed is a new type of clarity around science and empiricism.
If studies are available that suggest that there are risks and dangers involved in gender interventionism, that information should be available for parents that are entrusted with looking after their children's welfare above and beyond all else.
But that's just what I think.
And then he ends the show.
Fuck me.
What did I say?
What the fuck did I say earlier?
Is that the conduit for power is a conduit or receptacle.
I'm just a conduit.
They'll turn 18 one day.
I'm just a conduit for power.
And what he just said belies exactly the point that I was fucking making is that he has the power because he thinks that he has the best perspective on news and culture.
So everything his children somehow are taking in about the society has to go through him.
When in reality, what the news and what society and what social media and their friends face family, teachers tell them is a checklist.
On his balance of power.
Now, if you are giving the right information that you don't necessarily need to lord over and control, then your kids can go out and they'll find...
News that agrees with what you said or pieces of information learning about history, culture, right, whatever, fit like a puzzle piece into the points that Dad made.
And Dad's kind of smart.
That's cool.
Wow.
Dad prepared me well, which has been...
I can't say a lot, but my dad did that.
My dad explained things and then I went into the world and I was like, oh man, I'm so psyched that dad told me that.
Because it fits with reality.
Now, if your mind palace doesn't fit with reality, well then yeah, you have to control your property, I mean children, what they hear and And then continue somehow to control their reality forever, which is impractical.
At least until they're 18 and move out, apparently.
And yeah, you've got to remove those checks on that power.
You've got to remove that from the equation, otherwise you lose control.
Exactly.
Yep.
He doesn't want independent, yeah, like any kind of rebuttal to what he has to say.
It's like that confuses them.
Like, no, they're confused because you're wrong.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess he's going to be, like, he's going to be homeschooling his kids or rather his wife, Laura.
I was going to say, he isn't doing shit.
He's not doing a damn thing.
He's bopping around fucking Florida for six weeks is what he's doing.
Someone's homeschooling his kids.
That's what's going to be happening.
Someone who is Russell approved and Russell checked.
That's the thing.
That's the one thing that is the saving grace of this attitude is that it's fucking impossible.
There was a time...
Ask the Mormon Church.
There was a time when you could keep people away from the news completely and construct their realities for them.
That time has passed.
Yeah.
And if you don't want to accept that, I don't know what to tell you.
You should be embarrassed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're going to have trouble.
You're going to have real trouble.
Fortunately, we know that Russell is a lazy asshole and isn't going to do that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or do it badly, at the very least.
Well, he's doing a bad job.
Listen, if there are cracks in the boat, if that Faraday cage isn't all the way shut, those waves are getting in, baby!
At least we know he's too much of an intellectually lazy person.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I do agree with him saying that we need more clarity around medicine and science.
Yeah.
But yeah, not in the way he's putting it.
He said a lot of true sentences.
Yeah, right.
This whole episode.
Yeah.
But put them together.
Yeah.
Wildly in the wrong direction.
And yeah, I would say more than devolved tiny democracies, what we need is to not be listening to fucking polling data from people who know nothing of the science as to whether trans kids should be offered puberty blockers or not.
I don't give a shit about a fucking poll in a newspaper polling people who have almost certainly been lied to about this subject.
Probably by the New York Times.
I'm like, I don't give a shit what they think.
What do the doctors think?
What do the people who know the stuff think?
Oh, exactly.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I would like no decisions to be made based on a poll in the Washington Post.
When it comes to science or anything demonstrably provable.
No!
Again, we talk about it all the time, but populism is not popularity, but that's what Russell thinks.
So like, oh, popularly, we'd be using the miasma model of disease if that was popular opinion.
We move past that.
Yes, yes, exactly.
Yeah, I don't need to take my cues from Jeff Bezos' paper.
Thank you very much.
Yeah.
Tell me how the poll was taken.
Tell me why I should believe that poll.
Exactly, right?
Like, tell me how credible it is and how many millions of people do, you know, all this other stuff.
It's just, Right.
Just, no.
Was it Twitter poll?
Right, exactly.
Yeah, there are, anyway, there are two concrete things here in this episode that Russell has previously kind of more wormed his way around, that he's now much more clearly against.
And that's abortion and puberty bloggers for trans kids.
I mean, in fact, he's broadly against trans people in general, but this is the most specific that he has been yet on both of these subjects, and I do think that is worth noting.
I don't think he sees it that way, though.
I agree.
Because he says...
Yeah, yeah.
Like, he's not...
If he can argue that point, then I think that we should put that asterisk there.
He's not going to concede that that's how he feels because the first thing he says is like, tell me whatever you want to be called and I respect that.
And he has taken that statement further and hasn't necessarily amended that statement, but has taken that statement further even in the face of pushback from like Candace Owens where he's like, no, no, no, I'll respect or Marjorie Taylor Greene too.
He's like, I'll respect what you want to be called.
And implied within that rationale is I will respect your humanity as you want to present it to me.
That's the implication.
And I think that's probably what he believes.
And he's like, ah, asterisk for kids, though, because kids are property.
That reflects on the parent's ego.
I think there is a degree of him believing that that's what he thinks, but his actions are telling a very different story, you know?
But yeah, that's absolutely what he'd say against that criticism, yeah, for certain.
I also, I think his actions, yeah, what he says on his show, I don't think he has a single problem with trans people at all, genuinely, in his real life.
And I think that he's not good at performing it.
Because he doesn't have, like, he's not clear.
And I think that he doesn't, I don't think he fucking cares.
He cares about Russell.
He doesn't think about trans people because he doesn't think about other people.
He doesn't think about them except for in relation to how they can help or hurt him.
So what he wants to do is he can say whatever he wants and it doesn't matter because he doesn't care about other people.
Yeah, yeah, pretty much.
Yeah, yeah.
To the narcissist, you know, it always comes back to the one thing.
But genuinely, like, that's what I'm saying, is, like, I don't think that he has any issue, like, as an individual, and there is some, I don't know, man, there's something, like, galling about that particular, like...
That thing is that like, I know for a fact I can see this dude when he says this shit, I know it is so cynical.
Because if in like...
I cannot believe that Russell cares about trans people, like, cares if someone is trans at all.
I just can't.
Because, like, there's nothing to, like, he says this stuff to benefit him and his bottom line.
Sure.
Sure.
And that was just who he was for such a long time in the public eye.
I just don't think, like, this is all just whatever is advantageous in the moment.
I cannot believe that that person is, like, genuinely worried about trans people at all.
Oh, yeah.
No, I don't think it crosses his mind.
But I would say this is one of the cases where because his actions are actively harmful towards those communities, it almost doesn't matter.
You know, like the intention, what he feels doesn't matter because he's doing the thing anyway, you know?
Yeah, what I'm saying is, like, I think Tucker, I think a lot of the pundits that he has tried to, like, enter the class...
Mm-hmm.
I think they genuinely do have a problem. - They think about it a lot. - Yeah, they think about other people's junk a lot.
It's real weird. - Far too much.
Yeah, and they're yucked out.
They get theick because they have a conception in their mind that is completely divorced from reality and they do not understand.
And so what, like, I...
I'm not commending anyone for being more honest.
What I am saying is it is uniquely insulting to hear from Russell because I am positive.
I'm not positive about many things of Russell, genuinely.
But this might be end of list.
I know.
I know!
He doesn't give a shit.
Yeah.
He gives way more of a shit if you're ugly than if you're trans.
I promise.
Yeah.
He hates...
I'm sure he hates ugly people.
Yeah.
Way more than he thinks about trans people.
Yeah.
That, I can tell you for fucking certain, which, because there is what you just said, there is so much harm, and I'm not...
I don't want anyone listening right now to my voice to think that I don't, like, that's not, like, the counterpoint you were making, it's just a different point.
Like, yeah, that's all included.
You're not defending him.
That's included in my point.
Right.
Like, yes, absolutely.
He is, it is especially galling to me to know that, like, this guy was already groovy about gender.
Mm.
That's who he is.
And that's real because he doesn't care.
Like I said, he'll care if you're ugly way more than whatever you were born with, right?
That's what he would give way more of a shit about.
Mm-hmm.
So that is why it is uniquely insulting to listen to him still say things that are so incendiary and do have such, like, an impact.
Because he doesn't live in a world where that affects him, so he doesn't believe that it's true.
Because it hasn't happened in front of his face.
So he can just ignore it.
And it doesn't matter to him because he doesn't think about it.
Yep, yep.
And he doesn't have to think about it at all, ever.
He doesn't have to interact with any of it.
He can stay in his little rich white world of alt-right people and his little place in Florida, and it's never going to affect him, ever.
And his persona as a quote-unquote leftist, not an actual opportunist, as a quote-unquote leftist will still provide cover for all the people that do not have, also have had personal experiences or their beliefs in general.
they are not even protective, but accepting of trans people and trans rights.
And they don't have an issue.
You know, like the wooey side, which we know he's trying to bridge the gap.
So like those people that are crunchy and wooey and groovy, They can rationalize themselves the old Russell that they know and are comfortable with.
And they're like, well, no, I know Russell doesn't have any ill will.
And he says the thing where he's going to respect whatever you want to be called.
So like, I know Russell isn't like it's it's like a reverse dog whistle, which doesn't make sense.
But like, it's a it's like a positive dog whistle.
It's like the dog whistle is something positive to people that like that.
and have a problem with it.
And instead, like if he was just blatant about it, but the fact that he pushes back against like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Candace Owens, like that works in their favor of like, oh, no, no, no, he's actually really nice about it.
Yeah.
He's just misunderstood.
So that kind of like that, that obfuscation, that, that gray area is what he plays on.
Yeah, yeah.
It's enough performative pushback to just about stay there.
Right.
Yep.
Right.
Yep.
Okay.
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That's going to be fun.
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Ha!
Four of you were so excited.
Oh, no.
Okay.
Patrons, we'll see you Sunday for that.
But everybody else, we'll see you next week.
Take care of yourselves and each other, especially during this next week.
You know, just keep your heads on a swivel and all that other good stuff.
Well, have fun today.
Happy Halloween.
Yes, yes.
Have fun today.
Enjoy, enjoy.
And yeah, we'll see you next week.
Thank you very much.
We love you, buddy.
Henry Kissinger.
Henry Kissinger's still dead.
Love you, bye.
Yes, bye.
That's not win-win-win.
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