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Nov. 7, 2022 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:02:21
Why Has Elon REALLY Bought Twitter? - #029 - Stay Free with Russell Brand
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You're going to see the future.
Let's go.
All right, let's go.
Five, four.
Hello.
Thanks for joining me on Stay Free with Russell Brand, the channel where you can get an uncensored take
on the news, particularly when it comes to awakening you as an individual, me as an individual,
and all of us together so we can take control of our own communities and our own lives.
Challenge Establishment Power, which sounds sort of quite hard because I've been quite unsuccessful in trying to sort of peel this orange.
You've been doing that for ages.
It's not going well.
I hit my thumb nail with an axe the other day.
Oh, right.
Not as part of this.
I hit the orange with an axe.
Convoluted way of peeling an orange.
OK, sonny boy!
You won't stop me, sonny boy!
That was another event.
Sorry, let me qualify.
My thumb hurts and you need both your thumbs.
This is what separates us from the simians, isn't it?
It's what separates us from the monkeys.
Hey listen, that's not what I'm talking about on the show.
On the show I'm going to be talking about... Metaphor?
What is it metaphor for?
Half-peeled...
No Gareth, it's not a metaphor.
This is just a mistake.
Now we're going to be talking about Elon's Twitter takeover and is Elon unique among billionaires in the kind of deals that he makes and has made.
I suppose probably what it is, is I've not heard back from him for a while because you know he was going to come on the show as a guest and now I'm sort of stepping up the We're not stepping up the criticism of Elon Musk.
Does he deserve his somewhat unique status as a billionaire?
And which brings about plaudits and criticism in equal measure.
Some people really coat him off, don't they?
And others really celebrate him.
But is he especially different?
That's one of the questions.
Hey, you lot, we stream a lot of stuff only to our Stay Free AF community.
When we were making Here's the News, No Here's the Effing News earlier, where we were talking about the New Zealand farm protests.
How possibly the globalist climate change agenda is, well, essentially to drive anti-working people policies.
It's a really good piece of news.
You're going to love this, the way that we break it down and the way that we show that even like the COP26 and COP27, those latest two sort of apparently environmental events, don't produce meaningful results that are pro-environmental.
And also we're sponsored by environmental polluters!
It's a really pointless little thing.
Anyway, that video we've done on Slay Free AF, that's our members community that you can join right now.
And welcome our new members, RiseUp429, Ms.
Bojangles, Ms.
Bojangles, StormCrow59, HeidelbergGirl and IrishViking.
You're all welcome here.
So we're going to be talking about supporting the agricultural farm movement worldwide.
Essentially, what I'm looking for, I'll tell you the absolute truth, I'm looking for ways to support local action that can challenge centralised power.
That's what I'm all about, Gail.
I know you are.
Yeah, that's what we're using our platform for.
It does seem strange, doesn't it, at a time when we're talking about the cost of living, when prices are going up.
And I know when we're talking about the midterms, it's one of the things where Democrats are getting most criticism, is that they're not addressing these points, these fundamental points about inflation and recession.
And the Republicans are addressing that, or at least talking about it.
At the same time, you have situations where farmers are potentially being put out of business with the incentive of making food costlier.
Because, you know, one of the things that we're talking about in New Zealand is that they're being incentivized to actually make food in ways that is, say, organic and things.
Again, not to say that organic Food is not the way to go, but it is for the elites.
Yeah, they're making food for the elites, they're finding new ways of claiming land for the elites.
You know who America's biggest farmland owner is.
Prydefault says use your teeth.
Now, we're only going to stay to peel my orange.
Not to keep the farmland.
You get off my farm!
Hey buddy, stay away from my corn, my monocrops!
I'll chew your ass off!
We're only going to be on YouTube for another minute.
When we flip over to Drum Rumble in a minute, we want you to follow us.
On Rumble, for a start, I can swear, I don't know where you stand on cursing, but we can talk in depth not only about Elon Musk's Twitter takeover and the complexity of the culture war and freedom of speech, but we'll also be talking about the global uprisings that are being repressed and the uprisings themselves are trying to address, in my opinion, a centralist Agenda to disempower ordinary people.
We're going to be talking about that in the context of the midterm elections.
Is there real democracy?
Can it do anything meaningful?
Have the Democrats made a massive misstep?
And also global democracy.
Do any of us have any real power in our lives?
Particularly when I, a simple Englishman, cannot reliably peel an orange without hurting my thumb yesterday with an axe.
I don't know if you can see that.
Nice.
OK, so now it's just us on Rumble.
I'm not going to start swearing, but I feel... Hello, you lot.
It's nice to see you.
Mama make art.
He look like even HR3, HR3.
Do you think so?
He's not popular over here.
I didn't think that dude, because of my hat.
Use your teeth on their thing, yep, I've told you that.
Gareth doesn't read too much into Russell, or he does normal things, says Jenny Orchid.
Joe Sullivan, hopefully Elon bought Twitter to build the platform into something useful.
Will Pillsaker, most millionaires want less humans, he wants more that's unique.
Shh, the YouTube, well said, Larry Jim Bob.
Okay, so, all right, Gal, what do you?
What's your take?
I mean, do you wanna start off with Trump, understand this?
Just a little bit of a funny... Yeah, I want to have a bit of fun first.
Let's start off with a bit of fun.
Firstly, I'd like to see Trump coming up with yet another nickname and turning on DeSantis.
Then I'd love to see that woman accidentally saying, or that woman saying, we've ballsed it on the Democrats.
You know, the one saying we've focused on the wrong issues.
So let's have a firstly let's enjoy a bit of Donald Trump who many of you love and who many of you loathe coming out with a new nickname.
But I used to come out and it used to drive the fake news crazy but today I have the highest poll numbers I've ever had perhaps Partly because the Democrats are doing so badly running our country and people want our tremendous success of no inflation, energy independence, military victory.
Remember, I defeated ISIS 100%.
That's who he's taking credit for.
I defeated ISIS 100%.
I as well.
It's amazing.
That's one of the things that amuses me most about Donald Trump is his ability to use language in an effective way, whether it's coming up with nicknames or sort of individually taking credit for creating that vaccine and for defeating ISIS.
Of course, it does bring to the forefront the curious question of where ISIS went during the pandemic.
Donald Trump defeated them.
That's what happened.
Don't have ISIS no more.
I remember when ISIS was all you could talk about.
Every time we turned the news on, they're going to chop someone's head off.
Oh, they're coming to a town near you.
Everyone's going to be in ISIS.
Watch out.
Watch out.
Yeah, schoolchildren from this country.
They'll be in ISIS.
All of them.
They're all in ISIS, these little ones.
Watch out for them.
Your mother-in-law, she's off.
Suddenly, oh, hold on a minute.
Don't talk about ISIS, it's the COFF now!
It's the COFF you want to watch.
You've got to watch out for that.
I'm not saying that the pandemic wasn't bad and didn't have incredible, terrible consequences.
You and I differ somewhat on the consequences, do we?
I'm not sure, I don't know.
Tell us your views then.
Views on the pandemic and ISIS.
Make it make some sort of sense.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, pandemic is complex, isn't it?
Obviously, there was definitely a Covid.
I don't feel there's any doubting.
There was a Covid.
Many, many, many people lost their lives.
Many people, you know, lost family members, weren't allowed to go to funerals.
There was a lockdown.
So, you know, there's some dreadful elements of the pandemic.
Although I noticed a lot of world leaders carried on going to parties as if they weren't scared or something.
It was interesting.
This is the thing we got.
Well, we couldn't risk another strike.
But obviously, what's her name?
Janet Smalls.
Jane Small.
Janine Small, she comes from Pfizer, she said they never even tested it for transmission.
That was a thing that we had to be super careful over on the YouTube.
I don't want to do conspiracy theory stuff because it diminishes the argument.
If this is ever going to become a popular movement that meaningfully changes society, and I mean because of you, not because of me.
Look at me, I can't even peel an orange.
How can I peel back a global system of corporate domination?
Then, it can't be sort of marginal crazy ideas at the forefront, but what you can say is, did it seem to you like the vaccine was promoted as something that might stop the spread?
In fact, did stop the spread become a sort of phrase?
Was shaming the unvaccinated a thing?
Was sacking unvaccinated workers a thing?
Because apparently they might give the coronavirus to other people.
So, When we talked to Jeffrey Sachs, when he came on the show the other day for an hour, what he did was brilliant.
He explained to us that the origins of the Ukraine-Russia conflict go back way further than the stated start date of this war.
and even in terms of modern history, go back to 2009, 2014, various events that involved
NATO and US intervention and an evident policy to influence the energy markets and economic
relationships between Russia and Europe in order that North American countries could
take over those relationships.
So the idea, what that tells you is that there are political movements that are trans-administration,
i.e. they began when it was a Republican in office, then there's a Democrat in office,
then there's a Republican, but the agenda, the military-industrial complex agenda, the
American war machine, as Jeffrey Sachs called it, can continue uninterrupted.
If you want to see that interview in full, it's up on this platform.
I think with all these things, all these events, the common thread is how are they used?
How do governments use these opportunities?
And who sees them as opportunities?
Rather than tragedies.
And it's quite obvious that plenty of people do see them as opportunities.
You know, you don't have to be conspiratorial to look at the way in which surveillance increased massively over the pandemic.
Has that surveillance or those powers that have been given to governments been pulled back or not?
Or do they continue to be present? And the answer is that they do. So plenty of
people have benefited and profited from the pandemic, just like they do in all of
these, whether we're talking about ISIS, there'll have been an opportunity there,
some kind of foreign intervention there, the same with Ukraine at the moment.
And even actually with this New Zealand agricultural protest, you can see
that the reason that the farmers are protesting is because New Zealand is
instantiating a policy that's come from a, if not a globalist agenda, certainly it's
not a national agenda, it's an agenda that's emerged out of COP26, the WEF
and the Climate Change Committee.
And it's ultimately penalising New Zealand farmers and could lead to them losing their land in massive numbers.
And comparable things have happened elsewhere in the world.
Willie Bond over on our Stay Free AF chat is saying, which is available to you on locals, there's a link in the description if you want to join it.
Willie Bond says, you're another useless twit brand if you don't save Britain yourself.
You could easily do it and you're not stupid.
You're right.
I've got to do something.
Certainly the orange has been peeled.
So there you go.
There's the election campaign sorted.
Who peeled the orange?
Me, that's who.
It was me that peeled it.
Shall we watch more of Trump?
Yeah, I just want to see the other stuff he says.
Oh no, it's me and JP.
By the way, our chat with JP is available.
It's going to be on in full tomorrow, but you can watch it right now if you remember the Stay Free AF community.
We had a fantastic chat, beautiful chat, very important, very, very important.
See the rest of this.
We'll go back to the beginning probably, won't we, Will?
Tremendous success of no inflation, energy independence, military victory.
Remember, I defeated ISIS 100%.
Daddy, so many other things including crime, we had it weighed down.
Crime is way down, 100% ISIS.
Best poll numbers, where are they?
Are they putting them up on the screen?
I think so.
Put them up, look.
The way he breathes the use of his arm.
Normal politicians are, put them up, look.
Incredible.
Who talks like that other than the Cowardly Lion from Wizard of Oz?
Like, he talks in an unusual way and likes to overtly diss the other potential contenders for the Republican nomination in this manner, including Rhonda Sanders, who I know loads of you guys like.
Remember, here on this channel, we don't think the Republican Party or Democratic Party are going to make any difference, and we use the Jeffrey Sachs example to demonstrate that one agenda pursued across 30 years.
Do you think that there will be any meaningful differences for ordinary Americans under either administration?
And with your particular enthusiasm for our man Donald Trump, who is an orator I certainly admire, you've had four years.
And I know some of you go, oh, but there was more manufacturing jobs.
It's not going to make any meaningful difference at the level, the level that's required.
There is a real need for actual change.
Oh no!
I've done it again!
I've done it again, so I can only press pause, don't press play.
I think it's different from the other system.
It is.
It's different.
We need stickers.
Yeah, yeah, it's misleading.
I can't take responsibility for pressing buttons.
Did the orange, didn't I, for God's sake?
The orange was a success.
Go on, go back to 100%.
Oh, he's looking at the thing.
Did you use the hand gesture?
Young Putin there is controlling the footage.
Let's have a look at what Donald says when he's breaking down these dudes.
Go on, you press play, Will.
Put him up!
Yeah, we're putting them up.
We're winning big, big, big in the Republican Party for the nomination like nobody's ever seen before.
Let's see, there it is.
Trump at 71.
Ron DeSanctimonious at 10.
Great nickname, wrong to thank Timonius.
Is that going to stick?
Oh, you'd think it would, wouldn't you?
And when he says things like, no one's ever seen before, he just throws that away.
I mean, that's obviously based on nothing.
That can't be a fact, can it?
No.
No one's ever seen that before.
Really?
Yeah, never.
It's never happened.
Come on.
This is unique.
This is unique.
Like whenever they said, more votes than any standing president.
Just says stuff.
He ran people to kind of convince you everything's alright just through sheer force of personality.
It is that, isn't it?
It's like we were saying beforehand, it's kind of politics with playground rules, but there's a simplicity to that that appeals.
And in a sense it's like, well, It's really hard, isn't it, to hold two things in your mind at the same time.
One thing that politics is really important because it affects all of our lives.
And the other thing is politicians don't seem to treat it that way.
They say they do, but they've all got stocks in military industrial complex and pharma and all these things.
So obviously they don't really, and at the same time they're trying to bankrupt farmers.
How are we meant to hold those two things at the same time?
Yeah, and also, when the people he's competing against use dull rhetoric rather than raw truth, then there's no chance.
Because he's just better at doing what they do badly.
It's not like people are able to go, look, we're going to be 100% authentic.
We're going to tell you the truth about how this country's run.
So when he was saying stuff about how the parties were funded, about them evading tax laws, even when campaigning for the presidency the first time round, you can't defeat that.
He takes them places where they can't win.
When Matt Taibbi came on the show, he said that when he was campaigning in the primaries against Jeb Bush, Low energy, Jeb.
Low energy.
He said that Jeb Bush isn't going to do anything.
He's backed by the Johnson & Johnson family.
What's he going to do about Big Pharma?
You can't counter that argument.
The only way To defeat this type of populism is with a true, authentic populism, with a politics that's all about empowering ordinary people, ending cultural conflict by creating decentralised community.
Yeah, you have to have authenticity and ultimately even a figure like Obama.
Now you watch Obama speak and obviously they've brought him out at the moment because the Democrats desperately need his help and he's amazing.
You watch him and there's no arguing with the charisma and the abilities he has as an orator.
Before Trump he's the last example of someone who Can deliver an incredible speech, but like at this speech, he was given those these stop the war protesters and they were making the point of what about all these attacks and you know, the droning that he was responsible for under his tenure in the war.
I mean, I think there was a comment of the day that you know, Trump is the only president whilst his use of droning was quite I think severe almost as much as Obama maybe even more that he wasn't actually technically
at war whereas Obama was and I think that's the thing isn't it you can't you
Can't if but Obama's gonna say these things he needs to come from a position of well
I didn't do any of that stuff I lived by the I lived by our code as a Democrat and Joe
Biden has to and we know that that's not true simply untrue
And these mid-term elections are the most... they've invested more in campaigning... 10 billion.
Was that between the two parties?
That's between the two parties.
They've both been focusing on cultural hot-button issues but the Republicans have focused more on economic issues and inflation and as a result we're likely to see what has been called a red wave.
Yeah, that's right.
So that 10 billion is more than they spent on the last proper election in 2020. So it just shows that the amount
of money that's being spent is just ramping up all the time.
But yeah, we've got a little clip here from Hilary Rosen, who's a
Democratic strategist talking about why, where the Democrats have failed, if you want to have a look.
I'm a loyal Democrat, but I am not happy.
I just think that we are, you know, we did not listen to voters in this election, and I think we're going to have a bad night.
And, you know, this conversation is not going to have much impact on Tuesday, but I hope it has an impact going forward.
Because when voters tell you over and over and over again that they care mostly about the economy, Listen to them.
Stop talking about democracy being at stake.
Democracy's at stake because people are fighting so much about what elections mean.
I mean, voters have told us what they wanted to hear, and I don't think Democrats have really delivered this.
Interesting.
Yeah, that is interesting.
It's an interesting diagnosis there.
What keeps coming to mind for me, I don't know how you lot feel about this, is that when Biden came in, he talked a lot about the necessity for unity in America.
Since then there's been those peculiar Empire Strikes Back looking rallies that are all red backlit.
A lot of talk about The MAGA movement being undemocratic when clearly it's a significant American cultural force and using divisive rhetoric is not the solution.
Although what I tend to think is that they want a divided population.
By creating a divided population it somehow nullifies the possibility of new political movements that would meaningfully help people.
emerging. It seems that the Democrats spent 20 times more than it did on
abortion related ads in the 2018 midterm so they're really highlighting divisive
issues. Biden also warned Americans they must vote to save democracy at the polls
after the January 6th 2021 attacks. So as I saw pointed out elsewhere if you're
saying that this election is to save democracy then democracy is already over
because you've only got one option.
It's a self-defeating argument.
It's like saying that there is only one democratic option, and that is plainly a form of ideological tyranny.
I've got an example of that, actually.
This is Peter Strzok, formerly of the FBI.
Interesting backstory for Peter Strzok.
But if you listen, I think if you look at the scale in terms of a threat to democracy, I mean, 9-11 was a tragedy.
We lost thousands of lives in a horrific way, and we still mourn to this day.
But when you look at something that is an attack on democracy, something that could actually bring about a fundamental change to American governance as we understand it, 9-11 is nothing compared to January 6th.
So, you know, the way in which Jan 6 is being kind of weaponized into a kind of fit, well, clearly a fear mongering tactic.
And Biden saying that, you know, the only way that you've got a vote to say it's to save democracy.
It's amazing.
I mean, to compare those two seems, first of all, why even use that example?
You know, why use?
It's always like we'll go back to 9-11 because that's the worst example that they can kind of think of.
But Peter Strzok, he was a former member of the FBI.
He was fired in 2018.
So he was part of and launched the Russiagate investigation.
He was fired in 2018 for swapping anti-Trump messages with his mistress, who was then an FBI lawyer.
So he was obviously had to be let go because of those situations.
He was clearly anti-Trump and in charge of this Investigation.
But it shows that this fear mongering is is going on rather than being, as you said, Russ, like we should be using this as a chance to not polarize even even more.
And that's the same with Paul Pelosi at the moment.
You know, again, Biden's bringing up the thing of, oh, you know, it's MAGA people.
This is what happens when you when you have this kind of rhetoric is that Paul Pelosi gets attacked.
And I don't know if that's based on anything.
It's just an opportunity, isn't it?
Yeah, it doesn't seem very helpful to escalate conflict in the manner that they do, except unless, of course, you look at it from the perspective that regardless of whether you vote for Republicans or Democrats, the ultimately powerful institutions will remain unaffected.
That's what the Jeffrey Sachs example demonstrated, and that's what Our belief is primarily that Noam Chomsky, oh yeah, said that the point of contemporary democracy is to have lively debate but within a very narrow framework so people are distracted from the reality that anything that neither party opposes you already have a tyranny on.
So if no party is suggesting decentralised power wherever possible, support communities in this variety of ways, control
corporations in this kind of ways, demonopolize in these ways, unless that's on the
agenda, unless someone's explicitly going to do that. And no one has done
that, no administration has done anything like that in the last sort
of 30, 40 years.
You know, Paul Pelosi's backdoor indeed.
Innocent women wanted, they just wanted the nude photo.
There's some interesting stuff going on in the chat.
So whether it's at the level of American democracy or global democracy, it seems that corporate power is able to circumvent ordinary process.
And I think that becomes in the end a little destabilizing, debilitating and creates a sort of an apathy that you can't do anything.
So I think what we forget sometimes is that we're human beings.
Animals.
Tribal animals that have lived in very particular ways for tens of thousands of years, still at the deepest and most atavistic levels, adjusting to living in urbanised culture, living spellbound continually by screens.
We're losing our own humanity and I think agitating us into a state of conflict is one of the things that serves that.
To bring this conversation to a global level for a moment, we're going to turn our attention,
oh no, to the freedom of speech debate.
Let's have a little look at whether or not conversation that's being conducted on the
social media platform Twitter is improving democracy or further denigrating democratic
Do you think that Elon Musk is a force for good in American culture or a force for evil?
However you see Elon Musk, it appears that he is regarded uniquely.
He's spoken about in unique ways, condemned, criticized and celebrated in unique ways.
Ways that typically aren't applied to other billionaires.
Why is that?
What does he represent?
Is Twitter going to be better now that Musk is in control?
A few overt and explicit libs have been booted off the platform in the last couple of days.
A lot of you, I reckon, will be right into that.
But is Twitter now going to become a genuine place for public discourse and conversation or will it remain as polarised forever?
Shall we have a quick look at Here's to News?
Let's have a look at Here's to News.
No, here's the effing news.
Let us know what you think in the hits up in the chat.
Will his acquisition of Twitter aid democracy or damage it further?
And how do his actions stand in the way of a potential unipolar world rather than a geopolitical triangle of terror between the US, Russia and China?
And more importantly, why won't he answer my texts?
So Elon Musk has acquired Twitter.
Some people are really into it, some people are vehemently against it, broadly on the lines of whether or not they're a sort of libertarian free speech advocate or a neoliberal centre-left Democrat who seem to me to be increasingly interested in authoritarianism in order to meet certain moral and ideological ends.
An opinion that I think is worth contemplating when discussing this is the opinion of Edward Snowden.
Here's a person who made a pretty difficult moral choice when it came to censorship, surveillance
and doing the right thing.
He said, This is going to cause controversy, but platform censorship
has clearly gone too far.
Content moderation should be an individual decision, not a corporate prison.
Let people make their own choices, and not just on Twitter.
Over on Rumble we'll be talking in more detail about FBI infiltration into big tech platforms
and how their involvement in censorship and guiding the policies and publication ideologies
of these platforms is much more extensive and deep than we'd ever realised and amounts
to a kind of authoritarianism that we could only have dreamed existed before.
A few of the more prominent Musk critics are claiming merely to be upset at the prospect
of wealthy individuals controlling speech.
This is a bizarre thing to be worrying about all of a sudden since it's been the absolute reality in America for a while, perhaps even prior to big tech platforms.
The public sphere has long been controlled by barons and media moguls.
It's nothing new in that sense.
Jimmy Kimmel, late night talk show host and comedian, was much more succinct in his condemnation.
The host of Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC tweeted, after Musk did this, I suppose that that's useful to see that read, even including expletives on mainstream media news, suggesting a tonal change in the reporting on the subject.
Now just to let you know where I stand on this, whilst I'll be fascinated to have Elon Musk On our show, as a guest, and it's something I've been trying to achieve for a little while.
I'm obviously curious about the ways in which Elon Musk differs from any other billionaire.
What's his relationship with the state?
How is his business funded?
What is his relationship with his workers?
Having spoken to Elon Musk on one occasion and exchanged a few communications, I recognize that this is a highly alert and amusing individual.
But is he distinct and discreet from a figure like Jeff Bezos?
And in what ways is Musk different?
Certainly his advocacy for free speech is interesting and Edward Snowden, right there, agrees with that.
Clearly Jimmy Kimmel sees things differently.
Where do you stand?
Do you want to blindly assume that Elon Musk is a kind of a toxic individual?
Or, similarly, think of him as some kind of post-Richard Branson, big tech, Willy Wonka genius?
What do you think is most likely to be true?
Or, as is often the case, is it more complex than that?
Media figures everywhere are openly complaining that they dislike the Musk move because they're terrified he will censor people less.
A professional journalist who opposed free speech was not long ago considered a logical impossibility.
That's already an extraordinary thing to consider.
Journalists used to just uniformly oppose the idea of censorship, knowing that even if they disagreed with something that someone was saying right now, the principle of free speech was vital.
Now obviously the world has changed.
We now have so much access to information that it's possible for very marginal views, let's call them marginal, to enter The mainstream, but I would argue perhaps more pertinently, is more necessary than ever for centralised forces, be they governmental, corporal, media or communicative more broadly, to have absolute control over the space.
That's why we're seeing the rise, in my opinion, of terms like misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, and a kind of willingness to morally underwrite censorship in a variety of ways, usually for safety or protection.
But safety and protection are generally used to increase regulation of public space.
It's for your safety.
How many times in the last couple of years have you heard it's for your safety?
Whether it's getting on a plane, taking a medication, for your safety is the mantra of regulatory forces.
Safety and convenience.
That's how they'll finally imprison us forever.
Things are different now, of course, because the bulk of journalists no longer see themselves as outsiders who challenge official pieties, but rather as people who live inside the rope lines and defend those pieties.
It's increasingly clear over the last six years that these people want it both ways.
They don't want to break up the surveillance capitalism model or come up with a transparent, consistent, legalistic, fair framework for dealing with troublesome online speech.
No, they actually want tech companies to remain giant black box monopolies with opaque moderation systems so they can direct the speech policing power of those companies to desired political ends.
An authoritarian framework already exists in the speech world, just with different billionaires at the helm.
So there you go.
Is Elon Musk significantly different from other billionaire oligarchs, albeit with a slightly different aesthetic hue?
Or do you consider him to be fundamentally different?
A person with a completely different perspective?
This is what I'm inviting you to think about and let me know in the chat.
No, Musk is a different kettle of fish altogether.
His rise was different from other billionaires.
His politics are different from other billionaires.
What is so unique about Elon Musk?
let me know in the chat. Jake Johnson in Common Dream says, A self-described free speech absolutist has proven in
practice to be anything but.
Musk is accepting financing from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud and the Sovereign
Wealth Fund of Qatar, two countries run by repressive regimes.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar are hardened bastions of free speech.
Earlier this month, the Saudis sentenced a 72-year-old US citizen to 16 years in prison
over tweets criticizing the regime.
I suppose, then, the continued financial support of the Saudi and Qatari regime does question an absolute commitment to free speech.
You could argue that that's just the way that global capital operates.
It doesn't have ideological tendrils monitoring the nature of the capital
in all these spaces. But I suppose now that we know that, we have to incorporate that
into our understanding of what is being described as free speech absolutism.
Musk's stated openness to free expression appears not to apply to his employees, Tesla
customers or journalists covering his companies. In November 2020, former Tesla employee Stephen
Henk said he was fired from his job at Tesla after raising safety concerns internally then
filing formal complaints with government offices. Last year, the National Labour Relations Board
upheld a judge's ruling that Tesla unlawfully fired an employee involved in union organising.
The Labour Board also affirmed the finding that Musk illegally threatened workers with the loss of their stock options if they decided to form a union.
Now I'm not saying it's right or wrong that Elon Musk did that.
Or, indeed, that it's true.
It just seems that a judge upheld a ruling, but we know that the judicial system can be complex.
I suppose that this is just an alternative take on the idea that Musk is a unique figure in that space.
If he isn't unique, then perhaps he shouldn't be uniquely regulated or despised or condemned by the establishment.
Seemingly is doing that, that's the news reading out a defamatory tweet, but perhaps he oughtn't be uniquely admired as some sort of outlier in that space.
It seems to me, not knowing Elon Musk very well other than a few pretty minor interactions,
that he is a tech, marketing and business genius who has understood some important ideas
about how to create very successful visions and successful organisations. Beyond that,
one would have to examine the situation a little further, I suppose.
David Nassau, Emeritus Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Centre, wrote that Musk
is the face of 21st century tech-based extreme capitalism.
Mr. Musk has exploited the opportunities emerging in a rapidly disintegrating regulatory state apparatus and acquired a small army of investors and a fleet of lobbyists, lawyers and fanboys known as Musketeers.
Good name.
We must recognise that he is not the self-made genius businessman he plays in the media.
Instead, his success was prompted and paid for by taxpayer money and abetted by government officials who have allowed him and other billionaire businessmen to exercise more and more control over our economy and politics.
Once again, this is a common narrative.
The idea that there are these emergent, brilliant figures.
I bet if we were to look into Rockefeller and Carnegie, And other culture-defining billionaires of the last American century we would discover, hold on a minute, there was taxpayer money involved there, there were all sorts of breaks and collaborations and deals.
That seems to be the real nature of free market capitalism, that it's ultimately at certain points funded by public
money, that they have unique ways of avoiding taxation
and participation in civil duty and civic duty, and that the myth of the great man
doesn't hold up that well to scrutiny and analysis.
We've seen over the last 20, 30 years how brilliant cultural heroes, Gandhi, Martin Luther King,
have been subject to a level of scrutiny that's exposed what I would essentially call humanity,
and brought them down and exposed them as having feet of clay.
Well, perhaps in the business space as well.
There's a tendency to say, my God, you know, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, these brilliant people, these great entrepreneurs.
And perhaps that is true.
But perhaps similarly, they have been operating within a system that affords them certain opportunities and ultimately is costly to ordinary people.
These, again, are questions I'm offering you in the chat.
Is Musk a unique figure?
Has he been held up by a system that facilitates this kind of endeavour?
This is an article by Dave Troy that I'm interested in because of the introduction of the idea of long-termism.
Is there a geopolitical game being played in a larger, broader timeline between nation states like the United States and their corporate partners, China and whatever set of interests they represent, and Russia and their own imperialist projects.
And does Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter and long-term plan, which Dave Shroy posits is about space exploration and populating like Mars and the Moon, somehow bring him into conflict with US hegemony and unipolar ambition?
Long-termism, the heavily marketed philosophy being promoted by Musk and his friend William McCaskill, asserts the only thing that matters is humanity's future in space.
And that the only goal of the living is to maximise the number of future humans alive as well as the number of artificial intelligence instances that could possibly exist in the future.
If that's true, and I don't know because I've not done enough research to know if that is true, but if what Musk believes is that it's necessary to populate other planets and that there can be an AI revolution that can support humanity beyond terrestrial That's a fascinating philosophy and obviously at odds with what most of us believe or are even capable of contemplating.
There's obviously an ecological movement that's based on saving the planet in order that humanity can continue to exist on it.
There's obviously division around whether or not man-made climate change is the problem or whether there are solar and cosmic influences beyond our control.
But if there's going to be a point where the Earth is uninhabitable, then the idea of exploring other planets becomes fascinating, but it's sort of at odds with my sense that we are the Earth made conscious, and we are the Earth's ambassadors and emissaries.
We are integral to it, we came from it, we are of it.
But, you know, perhaps there are ideas that go beyond that.
Clearly there are.
This mandate is most often used to brush aside calls for improving conditions and alleviating suffering among the living here on Earth now because, the theory goes, giving a poor person a blanket isn't likely to be as useful for the future of humanity as building a rocket to Mars.
Long-termism is heavily influenced by Russian Cosmism and is also directly adjacent to effective altruism.
Musk's stated mission, which he intends to fulfil in his lifetime, is to make humanity a multi-planetary species.
The anti-democratic urge at long-termism is rooted in the belief that mob rule will lead to nuclear annihilation.
We should, Musk thinks, be guided by wiser minds.
Now, obviously there is a lot to unpack there, but the idea of diplomatic solutions to the current war, for example, seems sensible.
And the idea that Musk's acquisition of Twitter might be part of a strategy that's much broader than one that is financially motivated is a fascinating thing to contemplate.
Also, there is an immoral abstraction in the notion that Helping the poor people of the world is not our priority if we have the goal of saving all humanity.
But obviously that's comparable to many of the ideas of the last century that led to the annihilation of whole populations in pursuit of a superior goal.
And in this case, the transcendent is not a spiritual transcendent or economic or sociological or even psychological transcendent.
It's a literal cosmological transcendence of this planet into other realms.
Obviously I'm not suggesting that Elon Musk has the kind of tyrannical goals of the dictators
of the last century, but it's fascinating to contemplate that this is someone who has
an ideology that goes beyond terrestrial domination.
Because at the moment what we appear to be seeing is tectonic shifts between America,
Russia and China, deep geopolitical factions appearing as Russia pursue their right to
have their own imperial ideology, as China assert their right to have their own realm
and territory, and America are literally politically pushing back right now, for example by saying
that tech workers in China ought return to the US or risk losing their citizenship.
So we're seeing the beginning of sort of semi-sanctions and certainly the beginning of hostility in those relations that relate precisely to an issue like this.
Unipolar power versus multipolar power.
And here we have to consider that in the mix there are entrepreneurial forces that look beyond even this planet.
Putin and Musk seem to think a multipolar world is a good thing because after all shouldn't Russia get to do its thing and not be bothered by anyone else?
That's free speech and opposes cancel culture, right?
But Putin himself doesn't support free speech, his government censors wildly, but it does support speech that breaks the hegemony of Western elites, as do Musk and his friends.
This is internally inconsistent.
Musk and the people backing all this are more interested in reshaping the global order than in earning fake fiat currency.
Their real goal is to usher in hard currency and rebase global currencies around scarcity and physical assets.
What a fascinating take on a complex issue.
Perhaps Musk's acquisition of Twitter is not just about the culture war and free speech and who can say what when.
Perhaps it disrupts global geopolitical narratives, a long-standing effort by the United States of America to be the only power in the world.
Certainly our conversation with Jeffrey Sachs told a story along those lines.
Potentially, the United States of America, through apparently global agencies like the WHO or NATO, wants to assert a true global power.
And Musk's acquisition of Twitter could potentially interrupt that geopolitical goal.
That's a pretty heavy thing for me to think all on my own.
Let me know what you think in the chat.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
I'll see you in a minute.
Do the do.
No. Here's the fucking news.
Hey.
So it says here, Drew Block on our locals chat says, check out
They've got a framework for decentralized fractal governed organizations.
I think one of the things we fear is that we live in a stymieing and stagnating time, that the old ideas are clearly dying as embodied by even the Appearance of current global leaders.
What could be a clearer living sign of democracy's evident decay than dear Joe Biden tottering off stage left or right in the wrong direction towards a yawning grave?
Back on the subject of Elon Musk's Twitter takeover and whether this is a win for democracy.
Loads of you think that it is.
A lot of you are saying that Musk is charismatic and a true advocate for free speech and he's unique and different and neurologically different and stuff.
With the blue tick thing, like, you know, being charged for blue ticks.
The negotiating was weird, wasn't it?
It was like, $20, all right, $8, all right, 50p, all right, just have it, have the blue tick.
Someone on Twitter was saying, Twitter employees were selling verification for upwards of $15,000 for certain accounts, mine included, that would refuse to verify you for the standard application, then privately offer to verify you for dollars behind the scene.
For a minute, I thought that he was never gonna take over Twitter at all.
I thought it was just like, one of those things that won't actually happen, that it was
just sort of posturing and like it's been really peculiar the way that it's unfolded, revealing
that Twitter was being sort of run as a peculiar fiefdom populated by bots and people selling
blue ticks for 15 grand. But I still wonder if Twitter is going to become a better place.
It's sort of like, you know, me personally, I don't go on Twitter because I think of it as a gaping, horrifying, hell mouth, just sort of full of ugliness and polemicism.
Although I guess you could just be on there looking at football or just one particular... That's basically what I do.
Right.
You don't need to get sort of caught in that.
You do get caught in it.
Yeah, it's like a fraught space.
It doesn't seem like somewhere where people go to be open-hearted and convey love and genuinely look for self-improvement.
I hope that's where this channel can be different, that we can talk about the potentially divisive
political and cultural issues and navigate a way together to find new alliances to confront
real power, centralised economic and political power.
There's really no sense with quarrelling with one another over these cultural issues.
Although I will tell you that Dr Professor Jordan Peterson, who was on the show, we've
done an episode with him which is going to play out tomorrow on the stream.
It's an amazing conversation.
I would say, Jordan Peterson, like you've never seen him before, talking about some of the things for which he is most known.
But in a context of, I certainly, I respect Jordan Peterson, I value him and I actually love him.
But have a look at this part of the conversation.
Tell me if you think that this, you know, if you've seen this aspect of Jordan before.
You tell me to call you Professor Jordan Peterson.
No problem.
You say to me, I like to be called... No problem.
I'll do it because kindness.
I've already got that covered.
So first of all, generally speaking, that's what I would do.
Now, I wouldn't invariably do it because I'm not going to address someone in a manner that I don't think is good for them.
But I only object... You can't make that judgment.
Yes, you can.
You can.
I don't think you should.
Yeah, but you do it all the time when you're a clinician.
There you go, so we're having a conversation that's sort of open and I hope a valuable conversation, but with me pushing back on some... No, I'm not... Oh, are you the lot talking to each other?
Fuzzy V says, are you angry?
Are you talking about me or are you talking about someone else on the chat?
You know, what I wanted to do is have a conversation with Jordan Peterson where I celebrated the aspects of his work that I really, really I agree with and learn from but challenge him in the areas where I've always felt that it was more important to prioritize compassion.
I think he wants that though.
I don't think he wants an easy ride.
I think he enjoys the discourse.
I mean he agrees to go on all sorts of podcasts.
I don't think so that everyone agrees with him.
I think it's great to challenge him.
A lot of the comments that we had on Underneath were people saying that it was good to be able to see two people have different opinions but to actually find a space where you could do that and not resort to kind of reductivism or like taking petty shots at each other.
It does show that it's possible to do that.
Yeah.
I think it's really important to diffuse some of these cultural arguments in order that we can focus on what's truly important.
In tomorrow's show we're going to be talking about the New Zealand agricultural protests and how this highlights once again the great reset agenda playing out in real time.
They have found a way to confiscate land and make it look like it's an ecological advancement.
Make it look like really what they're trying to do is protect the environment while destroying the livelihoods of thousands of farmers.
And this is something that's happening worldwide.
You know that on this channel when we talk about Klaus Schwab, people see him as Santa Klaus Schwab.
That's how he's been sort of regarded.
You will get no presents and you will be happy.
I think it's really important that we're able to keep the conversation contained in areas that might meaningfully change in significant outcomes for a significant number of people.
Now, Gareth, back on our Elon conversation there.
You were saying that there's a sort of a fundamental paradox between liberalism and a sensorial attitude.
Yeah, I think there's paradoxes all over the place.
I mean, I saw someone comment the other day that it's really amazing that Elon Musk has managed to charge people $8 a month and make them feel like they're really sticking it to the man.
I mean, that is an amazing thing that he's done that.
First of all, it was $20, now it's $8.
And he's made people He's turned that into a positive thing.
I think that's where we see comparisons with something like Trump through their rhetoric and their manner and their style.
They're able to bring people along to their way of doing things where it's seeming like, yeah, I think it's a good thing that I'm parting with $8 a month now.
I think it's interesting that he can do that.
And it's part of, obviously, his charm.
How he's kind of built what he's built.
But yeah, this is a piece by Ben Burgess in Jacobin, which is like a, you know, left-leaning or something.
Yeah, left-wing magazine, I would say.
So he says, now that Elon Musk's long-anticipated takeover of Twitter has finally gone through, many liberals are angry for all the wrong reasons.
They seem to be worried that Musk will allow too much free speech on the platform and that this will enable bigotry and misinformation.
As a democratic socialist, I reject that view, root and branch.
Empowering ordinary people to run society in their own interests is the whole point of a socialist project.
And that's flatly incompatible with a technocratic liberal view that ordinary people can't be trusted to decide for themselves what to believe.
And I guess at the heart of it, that's the paradox, isn't it?
You can't on the one hand say, are we believing people having the power to form their own societies?
And on the other hand say, but you can't say what you actually want to say.
We're going to have to do something about that.
Yeah, that's what's offensive about new authoritarianism is the assumption.
That you don't know how to run your own life, that you don't know how to make the choices that are best for you as an individual and best for your community.
I mean, yeah, that's sort of, I guess, what I'm like personally.
It's a little bit, you know, when we're talking about the New Zealand farmers, it's got, you know, it's got a similar tone to it.
They are being instructed to do something and a lot of I mean, the video will be showing it tomorrow.
But obviously, a lot of the farmers themselves at these processes are saying, we care about climate.
They were not anti-climate.
You know, they're not saying, oh, it's not important to respect the climate or to do things.
They're saying, you know, we plant lots of trees.
We do our best with the land.
We know the land better than, you know, like, for example, maybe a Bill Gates coming in and treating all the land in the same way would be.
And yet they're being kind of told what to do with their own land.
And again, it's a similar kind of thing, is that the kind of power is being taken away
from people.
And when you discover, like we have discovered, that by doing things like this, you'll bankrupt
people, potentially bankrupt farmers.
And through some of the goals around that we were discussing about lowering the value
by saying that this is indigenous land and things like that.
What's happening is that you're lower systemically like lowering the value of that land So that ultimately what ends up happening is that does get bought by for example Bill Gates again That is a an example that we literally have Bill Gates a lot of the land that he's bought was indigenous land and so this is a pattern that is
emerging it's not like a conspiracy this is happening. It's extraordinary that this tyrannical and
centralized authority is masked by liberalism rather than what we assumed would be a kind of overt fascism.
We've been kind of bewildered and tricked by I suppose any centralizing force that will use bureaucracy to nullify local power, whether it's the power of farmers or truckers or ordinary working people across the world.
you ultimately have to judge it according to its actions. I felt a similar thing was perhaps at play
during the pandemic. What was the result rather than what was the declaration? Again, I don't
like to lean into conspiracy theories mostly because we're trying to create a meaningful
and inclusive movement. But if the result of the pandemic was that the richest interests
in the world became more powerful...
Governments gained more ability to regulate.
Big Pharma were able to get pretty close to mandating particular profitable medications.
Then you have to consider that that is perhaps the intention.
What's the result of what's happening as a result of the Ukraine?
What's the result of actions between Ukraine and Russia?
Where does it appear to be leading us?
Is it beneficial to ordinary people?
Is it contributing to a cost-of-living crisis?
Is it enabling energy companies to become more powerful, to charge more money, to glean record profits?
If the outcome, the outcomes in a sense, will tell you what the intention always was.
And I feel like the type of authoritarianism that we're experiencing now has become masterful at masking their authoritarianism as a kind of care, a kind of concern for people.
Well, look what's happening today.
I mean, the news literally just before we came on, ExxonMobil's record-breaking $20 billion profit nearly matches Apple's now.
So, ExxonMobil's reportedly, this is in the quarter, this is a quarterly profit of nearly $20 billion, $4 billion more than analysts had forecast.
This is a time when, you know, Biden is talking about greenhouse gas emissions, where he's talking about controlling these big companies, but it's not happening.
And then at the same time, we know that 28 US senators have got investments in the fossil fuel industry.
On the subject of Apple, at the same time, senators own up to $25 million of stock in big tech.
So, these things are all connected.
You know, when we're talking about, as a result of this Ukraine war, ExxonMobil are making record-breaking profits.
The military-industrial complex are making record-breaking profits.
It's not nothing, is it?
And when Jeffrey Sachs came on, he alluded to that.
You know, he said that there have been opportunities for this war to end.
There have been negotiations that have been ended.
That isn't nothing when you then go, oh as a by-product all these things are happening as well, these products.
There is a connection and whether or not, we just don't know how overt that is.
I'm surprised they're still keeping records for that and still looking at it as if it's a hundred yard dash.
So in a way, whether we're talking about the midterm elections and the massive expenditure, or if we're talking about New Zealand and the agricultural protests, there is a sort of a common strand.
On one hand, you have the presentation of reality, where all of the lobbying and campaigning money is apparently spent, creating a spectacle and an illusion.
Meanwhile, very powerful interests seem to do very, very well, regardless of the outcomes of those elections.
Or, you know, while in New Zealand agricultural protesters are being sort of vilified or ignored, the powerful interests are able to acquire more land, legitimately claim former farms and centralise their ownership.
It's extraordinary to me that there are sort of consistent themes in apparently diverse issues.
Young Putin, what did you just pull up just now about phones?
Did you just have something there for me?
Yes, the CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans were following lockdown rules.
Yeah.
I don't know even if this was consensual, where they just basically tracked it without anyone's consent.
Yeah, again, that was something that was, at the time, you would be ridiculed if you'd said that.
That's another of the themes that we pick up continually on in this show, that just six or seven months after an event, you're able to get an entirely different perspective, but invited to forget it.
Did you see about the sort of suggested pandemic truths?
Did you see that, like there's an Atlantic article saying, We should declare a truce now about all of that stuff that went, let's just forget about the things we talked about in the pandemic and I'm all for peace and I'm all for people coming together in pursuit of a common goal but I think that a kind of to have amnesia about what went on in the pandemic isn't like a
A peace-oriented movement is a kind of a dangerous negligence.
Well that is what Jeffrey Sachs is talking about now with this war, isn't it?
That we are encouraged to look at it and almost put aside all our, everything we remember about the past wars.
It's like to say, just to forget Afghanistan, Iraq, all the kind of things that we've later discovered about those wars and just go, this time is different this What about Afghanistan where they were using that to take public money and funnel it towards the military-industrial complex?
Forget it.
What about Iraq when they said there were weapons of mass destruction and there weren't and it was about bringing about a regime change as a result of the next American century project that was sort of publicly discussed and that anybody can learn about?
Forget about that now.
This is genuinely a unique situation and again like I'm not claiming to know enough about the tectonic plates of geopolitics to say for certain that Putin isn't an imperious and imperialistic figure but it does seem at least according to Jeffrey Sachs who's dedicated his life to the The study of these matters that there is one agenda being consistently pursued that crosses various administrations, which in itself shows you that there's an agenda that is unaffected by democratic process.
So while we're getting whooped up about the midterms, it's probably important to remember that whoever you vote for or don't vote for, you're going to end up in a pretty similar position.
Yeah, I think it comes to narrative, doesn't it?
That's what it always kind of comes down to.
And an interesting one, returning to Musk and Bill Gates, we've just talked about, it are those two when it comes to two very rich billionaires.
Bill Gates often, I mean, really has He's done very well through the pandemic, certainly in terms of his public perception.
He's treated as a kind of hero of the pandemic in some quarters.
And yet we literally just talked about him buying up great swathes of American farmland, much less reported on.
Elon Musk is getting demonized in a lot of quarters at the moment for what's going on at Twitter.
And again, that's not to say that he's, I mean, you know, reading here, he's deeply connected to the national security state, giving him a vested interest in enabling the US's giant surveillance regime.
He's culminated a $300 million military contract.
He's been paid by the US to equip Ukraine with Starlink, which he said was charity, but it wasn't.
So there are all sorts of... Again, with all of this, it's not to suggest, oh, Elon Musk is just, he's great, and there's nothing to worry about.
These things would suggest maybe there are some things to worry about.
But the narrative is Elon Musk bad, Bill Gates good.
And I guess what we have to do is challenge those narratives.
Yeah, both of them.
Both are in either direction.
Neither needlessly vilifying or deifying either figure.
Looking instead at the systems that they apparently represent.
Chadcore89, Russell and Gareth look very tired today and very subdued.
I'm not complaining, just noticing a difference in energy.
I hope all is well.
Also, we're in an entirely different room and we are tired.
It's like doing this show every day. It's knackering. Rosie Free says, have you
watched the Adam Curtis documentaries on BBC iPlayer? One of the episodes
covers this topic. What if people get it wrong? It's a good watch. Yeah, I love all
of Adam Curtis's stuff.
I think he's an amazing communicator and tells some fantastic stories.
So listen, we're going to wrap up the show in a minute.
I just want to let you know that that Jordan Peterson conversation is available in full tomorrow.
I'll also be doing a meditation for you a little later, available now in our Stay Free AF communities.
There's tapping and breath work techniques because talking about this stuff
can be a little bit debilitating and depressing.
I certainly know that in dealing with this content, I sometimes feel overwhelmed by the vastness of it,
the magnitude of it, the seeming indefatigability of a machine that appears to want to devour the world.
But I remain optimistic that individual awakening and collective action can change the world.
I'm interested in new forms of government.
Genuinely new forms of government that empower people.
That's why I, in particular, work so hard to defuse unnecessary dispute.
Not that you can't have a moral position.
You can have a moral position.
But for me, spirituality is about your own behaviour.
Not about other people's behavior.
And if you want to see when me and Jordan Peterson ended up in that conversation, watch the show tomorrow.
It's fantastic.
Now, those of you that are members of our Stay Free AF community, we're going to flip over onto the stream in a second that's available on Locals.
There's a link in the chat and a link in the description right now.
But I'm going to do it sort of on my phone.
So it's ever more intimate than usual.
So this stream will shut down and then we'll be available to you on that one.
We've got some great guests tomorrow.
If you're a member of Stay Free AF, you can join me for our conversation with Dr. Joe Dispenza.
7.30am PT, 10.30am ET, 3.30 GMT.
They're changing all the time.
Of course, on Wednesday, we've got our Books with Brad series.
We're reading Alice in Wonderland.
We're looking at how these great works of literature can meaningfully change your perception and understanding of what's happening in the world.
Right now.
So we're creating fantastic content all week.
It's all for you.
Thank you for elevating and educating us.
Tomorrow we'll be talking about the New Zealand agricultural protests and how they are ultimately a reaction against globalist edicts.
And it's quite complex, but it's very, very beautiful.
And I know you're going to enjoy it.
I'm going to turn this stream on my phone for our locals community on StayFreeAF.
The rest of you, see you tomorrow, but join us over here because it's always fun.
Take care.
Stay free.
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