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Jan. 9, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand

01:08:27

Happy New War? Is History Repeating Itself? - #054 - Stay Free With Russell Brand

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Time	Text
	you you
	you this video
	You're going to see the future.
	11th century, you're pretty high, aren't you?
	We're getting to breaking news. We've got a live shot there.
	It's a new year.
	There's new titles.
	Happy New Year.
	Welcome back to Stay Free with Russell Brand.
	Look, can you see we've made things look slightly different?
	Isn't that beautiful?
	It's lovely.
	Got that now.
	Blue now.
	Saul Richer, I'm Russell Brand.
	I'm the host of Stay Free with Russell Brand, live on Rumble.
	We're also live on YouTube, but we won't be live on YouTube for long because some of the content coming up would literally get us banned from YouTube.
	We simply can't talk about it on this platform, not because it's in any way spreading hate or misanthropy or anything other than love and a deep faith that within you is all the power you need to change the world.
	Thankfully, that power is not fossil fuel.
	Otherwise, they would think of a reason to go to war with you and nick that fossil fuel.
	Gareth Royce, the producer of the show, we make it together with a dedicated team of radicals with a variety of beliefs.
	It's inconvenient, actually, how much variety there is in the beliefs.
	Now, in 2023, the stories you'll be interested about, and the story we're going to give you a different take on, are McCarthy.
	He's the Speaker of the House now, after lots of little mini-mini elections, after Donald Trump's name appearing on a phone, after someone happened to be sort of mouth gag handled like that.
	I didn't like them having to do that to that poor little fella.
	No.
	Dragging it backwards like that from a melee.
	We'll be talking a little bit about that.
	We're going to be talking about Prince Harry.
	You probably care a little bit about that, don't you?
	Is it an indication that there's some deep state involvement in the interest of powerful institutions and the way that media relays information?
	Let us know what you think in the chat.
	This we're going to be taking a deeper look at today.
	BlackRock are going to be buying up much of Ukraine.
	It's astonishing to learn that there's going to be an investment firm of that degree of notoriety and potency involved in the reconstruction Of Ukraine.
	It's extraordinary to me how unilateral the data is that's available on mainstream media about this conflict when there's evidently a good deal of complexity.
	But that's one of the things we're going to be asking you about.
	Who cares?
	Who cares what I think?
	There's the Three Amigos Summit.
	We're going to tell you a little bit about that.
	It's not what you think it's going to be.
	We're going to be looking at different flavours of New Year propaganda, whether it's Joe Biden's propaganda, Rishi Sunak's propaganda or Russian propaganda, which is sort of amazing.
	The best one.
	It's more light-hearted, I think, as propaganda goes.
	It's more glitzy.
	It's extraordinary.
	In our deep dive presentation, here's the news.
	No, here's the effing news.
	We're going to be looking at the Canadian truckers and the redefinition of the word violence and the way that language is being mobilised, utilised, metastasised and altered in order To fit the intentions and incentives of the powerful.
	And of course, we've got a guest on the show.
	It's Branko Marticic, who we're going to be talking about.
	Is it a proxy war in the Ukraine?
	You tell me.
	We're going to learn a little bit more about that by simply by asking people who know more about it than we do, of which there is an abundance.
	But first, I want to assure you that the system is fine.
	Don't collapse into existential despair.
	And the reassurance can be offered on the basis of, like, did you see that now the powerful are so keen to do well on TikTok that all of their propaganda is being managed and manipulated into sort of, like, nice little 30-second pieces?
	Now, I was of an understanding that if the deep state wanted to control a social media platform, they simply infiltrate it with their agents, like Elon Musk has revealed has been happening at Twitter.
	Give them $3.5 million.
	Pay them a bit of money.
	Over Twitter and they'll fulfil your agenda.
	But also there's an aesthetic consideration.
	Did you see this?
	Of Joe Biden just glibly signing bills like they're autographs.
	That's the machinery of government.
	That's government live that you're watching.
	An elderly man risking his wrist to sign things at a pace that I think is frankly inadvisable.
	Let's have a look at that.
	Folks, we're wrapping up one of the most productive, one of the most productive legislative sessions in decades.
	Today, we've got 65.
	65 bipartisan votes.
	Why would you caress a stack of bills like that?
	What's he going to do next?
	Sniff its hair?
	I think he's worried that they're going to fall on him.
	He'll be crushed.
	We think he's sitting like Jenga.
	For me to sign the law.
	Ready, get set, go.
	It's not about the speed that you sign bills, isn't it?
	It's about the efficacy of them.
	This one, this was paid for by Pfizer lobbying.
	This is the military-industrial complex.
	It's meant to be how it affects and improves the lives of ordinary Americans.
	Did you see how quickly he signed those things?
	That's very bloody impressive.
	Yeah, races should be about things that, like, warrant races.
	Even an eating competition, you can see some legitimacy, although in these times of crisis, maybe not.
	But signing bills seems a step too far.
	There's no value in it.
	Ridiculous that they've even bothered to do that.
	Similarly, Biden still doesn't seem to understand how fentanyl is affecting America.
	Now, I think fentanyl originated from America.
	Certainly the Sackler family were heavily involved in the opioid crisis.
	Bedevilled and destroyed the lives of millions of Americans.
	Now, Joe Biden seems to think the main reason that there's fentanyl in America is because it's coming from Mexico, even though he somewhat underestimates the potency of a lethal drug.
	Stay with us if you're watching this on YouTube.
	We're just going to be with you a few more minutes, and then on the other side of the line, only on Rumble, we're going to be going into some depth about this propaganda.
	Let's have a look at Joe chatting about fentanyl.
	For example, since August of last year, Customs and Border Patrol has seized more than 20,000 pounds of deadly fentanyl.
	That's enough to kill as many as 1,000 people in this country.
	20,000 pounds of fentanyl.
	Oh, look at that.
	All that fentanyl.
	All that bloody fentanyl.
	How much fentanyl would that actually... 20,000 pounds of fentanyl would kill 4.5 billion people.
	Well, if you want population control, as some people say they do, that's the way to do it.
	Through the old fentanyl.
	It's 50 times stronger than heroin, 100 times stronger than morphine.
	A record 100,000 people in the US died from opioid overdoses in 12 months.
	So you don't need to worry about it coming from Mexico.
	It's already in America.
	I mean, that was the opioid crisis, wasn't it?
	That's what it was.
	The fentanyl was already there.
	That fentanyl has had to go from America to Mexico.
	It's coming back in.
	Someone should build a wall.
	You need a wall!
	Then you could just lob the fentanyl over the top of that wall.
	It's not like he's saying the word deadly as if it's become deadly since it was in Mexico.
	It's not like they've put chilies in it.
	Right, when we said, what have you done to this fentanyl?
	And when we sent it over the wall, it was delicious.
	It was definitely when it was part of OxyContin, which Purdue Pharma were producing, which they gave money, and then they gave money to the US government in lobbying.
	The problem with fentanyl is not Mexico.
	And before you think that there is no racism or certainly no negative classification of Mexican folk still ongoing, Look at this.
	Migration issues cast long shadow over Biden's visit to Free Amigos Summit.
	They're literally calling it the Free Amigos Summit.
	Don't call something Free Amigos Summit if Justin Trudeau's involved.
	He's one of the amigos, isn't he?
	That guy don't need much of an invitation to dress up.
	Look at how, when he had a brief opportunity to talk to Vladimir Zelensky, look at how radically he changed his voice to talk to Zelensky.
	Hello, Vladimir.
	It's Rishi and Justin.
	Oh, hello, Vladimir.
	Dissolve your friends.
	Can we put on combat fatigues and pretend to be tough leaders like you?
	Look how Rishi Sunak's leaning into that phone, for God's sake.
	What are they on, Snapchat?
	Are they worried that that image is going to dissolve?
	I think Sunak was excited to be in that situation at the time.
	They're buzzing, aren't they?
	They're buzzing their little tips off.
	So don't call it something like The Three Amigos because you know that Trudeau will be looking to get a costume on and be trying to recreate this little move.
	We're The Three Amigos!
	At least when Chevy Chase did it, he didn't apply any facial makeup, is what I would say.
	But these stories... I was going to say, it's kind of rife with hypocrisy, this whole thing, isn't it?
	Because you've got Biden there talking about, you know, deadly fentanyl, when we've just spoken about the kind of relationship between the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma and the deals that they've done in order to not be, you know, I think they've paid out six Billion or something when they've made 30 billion out of the oxycontin thing in the first place.
	Did they do that thing where they went, we ain't got a company no more.
	They did do that, yeah.
	We've shut down that company.
	Yeah.
	Have you got any money somewhere else?
	No, no.
	They were always pulling that little move, weren't they?
	They said, well, we weren't Purdue Pharma.
	That was a company, yeah, alright, it was something to do with us, but the other sackler was running that.
	All those bastards at Purdue Pharma, like Johnson & Johnson.
	Whenever Johnson & Johnson allegedly, allegedly get Allegedly.
	For carcinogens in baby powder, which they've never been done for because they've always settled out of court.
	They always go, that's not us, Johnson & Johnson, that was Johnson, preferred Johnson, like a middle titty, a middle titty of bad baby milk and wretched baby powder.
	And then the other kind of hypocrisy within this is that, you know, he's talking about this happening at the border wall, that, you know, this deadly fentanyl is coming in at this border wall, that when he was being elected, he spoke so much about the wall, then I won't build not another foot of the border wall.
	And yet actually news is that he has restarted building elements or parts of the border wall.
	So it's just these inaccuracies and hypocrisies within lots of the things that we're hearing coming from Biden in this case.
	So if you're watching this in YouTube, we're going to have to leave now because we are going to show some content from Russia today, which is, I think, absolutely banned on YouTube.
	And even on this platform, Rumble isn't allowed in some countries.
	I think there's ongoing action between Rumble and the country of France.
	We're not showing it in any way because we're in support of Russia.
	We think this is crazy propaganda the same way as US propaganda is crazy, UK propaganda.
	All propaganda has the same end, to distract you from reality, to bludgeon you into a hypnotized state so you're more compliant.
	We're not supporting Russian propaganda, but we're going to show you it so we can laugh at it together.
	Now, if you're watching this on YouTube, go on over right now to Rumble so you can enjoy us ridiculing a little bit of Russian state propaganda, which I think is a bit better and more enjoyable in some ways than US propaganda, but still propaganda.
	We'll never show that on this platform.
	If you're part of the six million awakening wonders over there, join us on Rumble right now.
	So let's have a look at this propaganda on Russia.
	Russian television propaganda has got a different Flavour.
	You can certainly see recognisable archetypes and figures.
	Flavour was about 40 years ago, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	It's very dated.
	There's something about it.
	The lighting.
	I don't know what it is.
	But let's have a... Can we have a little look at some of it, please?
	Firstly, I like to... It's like, who is this guy?
	Is this guy, like, Regis or, in our country, Bruce Forsythe?
	Put them on, because they're doing jokes and everything.
	It's amazing.
	Today's toast will be somewhat unusual.
	In the outgoing year, the West tried to destroy Russia, without even thinking that in the construction of the world, Russia is not a subject.
	Also their rhetoric is a bit more, I would like to say, sort of blunt and brutal, like that Russia is the load-bearing structure and they talk about resources.
	There's a sort of pragmatism and a plainness to their propaganda that I actually find a bit unnerving.
	I suppose maybe because I've grown up on UK propaganda and US propaganda that I recognise it as sort of saccharine and dumb and stupid and turds rolled in glitter, whereas this stuff's like a turd rolled in spikes, so it has a sort of, I don't know, sort of balls to it that I find a little threatening.
	Yeah, I know what you mean.
	Although, I think you only have to watch a bit of it.
	I think because, as you say, you've grown up with it.
	But American propaganda.
	I mean, Mitch McConnell was talking about Ukraine the other day.
	And he literally said, the most basic reasons for continuing to help Ukraine degrade and defeat the Russian invaders are cold, hard, practical American interests.
	Like being so overt about the fact that Well, this is the reason we're in it is for American interest.
	It's so bold and it's something that I know it seems a little different when you see it from Russia, but it's not a million miles off.
	No, I suppose it's certainly not.
	They certainly aren't wearing lovely little velvet smoking jackets to get their message over.
	...construction.
	Russia is expanding.
	Do you know what it takes to make Ukrainian borsch, French onion soup and German sausages?
	Without Russian gas!
	It's really haunting.
	Hunger Games vibes isn't it?
	Yeah man, that's some heavy propaganda.
	I think it's sort of useful to look at the other side's propaganda just to get a better perspective on our own.
	For propaganda surely we consume.
	If we got unbiased news reporting in the mainstream media, if we had news that was not fundamentally a television show, then we would be aware of the complexity that's led to this conflict and we would be able to note the Corollary between this conflict and previous conflicts, many of us remember, obviously most of us remember, recall or have learned about the Iraq war and how ultimately it ended up servicing a lot of corporate and economic interests.
	So it's startling to learn But BlackRock, the world's biggest investment company, are going to be heavily involved in the reconstruction projects in Ukraine that inevitably will follow this war when the military-industrial complex of Adler go.
	Again, none of this is to say that Putin isn't a tyrant or Russia's invasion of Ukraine is not an incredible imposition that's causing a galling humanitarian disaster.
	In Ukraine, for Ukrainian people.
	But continually, I suppose the way that I think about it is why is the war in Yemen not reported on in the same way?
	And that's one of the things we were talking about with Branko, our guest in a minute.
	Here's the story.
	Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink agreed to coordinate investment in rebuilding Ukraine.
	Kiev announced Wednesday following a meeting between the two men.
	read out from the Ukrainian president's official website said,
	Zelensky and Fink had agreed to focus in the near term on coordinating the
	efforts of all potential investors and participants in the reconstruction
	of our country, channeling investment into the most relevant and impactful
	sectors of the Ukrainian company. Now BlackRock are an investment company that have like, you know,
	presumably thousands of investors, so I'm not saying this is a conspiratorial
	matter, but the idea that BlackRock invest in endeavors that are
	not profitable is pretty visible.
	And when you look at what's happening currently with firms like Raytheon and Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems, there's an enormous amount of profit being gleaned from this conflict.
	Remember Assange's edict The point of the Afghanistan war is not to end the conflict, but to prolong it because it's profitable.
	Remember, that can still be true while saying that Putin is a malign figure and that Ukrainian people are suffering needlessly.
	All you have to look at is history and recognize that there is a pattern.
	Or is there not a pattern?
	I mean, is there any comparisons that could be made between the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia and the West's invasion of Iraq, which is now widely accepted to have been undertaken with malign intentions?
	So, with that in mind, we bring you the top five ways that this is definitely nothing like the Iraq war.
	At number five, of course, one difference is the Iraq war was undertaken because he had to depose an evil leader in Saddam Hussein.
	I don't remember if at the time they were always saying, oh, Saddam Hussein's got bad health.
	He coughed the other day and a bit of his bum fell out.
	Like, so that's one way.
	Because with Vladimir Putin, he's not depicted as evil to a hysterical degree.
	Number four, in Iraq there was a precious, profitable fossil fuel in the form of oil
	that a lot of people wanted to get their hands on.
	And of course in Ukraine, oh no, there is gas as well in Ukraine.
	At number three, another way that it's different is during the Iraq war, George Bush Jr., George
	W. Bush was president.
	He was widely regarded as being a puppet, was ridiculed and mocked for his sort of R. Shucks mannerism and cowboyish dance.
	And now, of course, we have Joe Biden, who, I mean, if he is a puppet, who's operating the strings for heaven's sake?
	Have you seen that man try to teeter off a stage?
	Number two, here's another way that it's different.
	The Iraq war cost you, if you're an American, two trillion dollars, although I'm sure most Western nations contributed in some way, and this current conflict has cost a hundred billion plus over in Ukraine.
	Much of... More money, in fact.
	I think it's true, it tells you, and it seems ridiculous to say that America have spent more money on this war than Russia.
	I'm going to check that again with Branko.
	How can that be true?
	I think in terms of military budgets, America has spent more than Russia's budget for this year.
	So is it a proxy war?
	You tell us, let me know in the chat, let me know in the comments.
	And who are the largest benefactors?
	Of course in the Iraq war, Halliburton, who Dick Cheney was heavily involved with, became the benefactors.
	And now we know that BlackRock, unless they're doing this philanthropically, like Pfizer said, they would undertake the development of a vaccine in the pandemic, you know, in exactly that manner.
	It looks like BlackRock will at some point financially benefit from the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
	Also, it kind of tells you that they're pretty confident in the outcome.
	Like, you know, because my understanding is BlackRock are not in a position to make giddy, hysterical, Risky investments.
	So presumably this war will continue for long enough for the military industrial complex to make a suitable profit to continue to take these, although McCarthy's election means that military budgets, Pentagon budgets, have been cut by 75 billion dollars.
	Let me know if you think that's a good thing.
	Or indeed a bad thing.
	Let me know, let me know, let me know.
	So that's just five ways that you can see clear correlatives between those two conflicts without suggesting that, again, the suffering of Ukrainian people is anything other than terrible.
	There's also an inherent link between BlackRock and the US government.
	It says here, BlackRock's Managing Director Eric Van Nordstrom was hired straight into the senior advisory position in the Biden Administration's Treasury Department just this past August, explicitly to shape U.S.
	economic policy on Russia and Ukraine.
	And of course, one of the worries about this is that BlackRock is essentially going to privatize the Ukraine.
	That's now what's going to happen, much in the same way that BlackRock have done with the housing market in the U.S., like buying up huge swathes of the housing market and essentially Forcing a lot of Americans into never being able to buy their homes.
	So this is like a trend that's already happening in the U.S.
	And rather than the U.S.
	government saying that's something that we've seen and we don't want repeated, it's now joining with BlackRock in pushing this agenda in the Ukraine.
	And much like when you were talking about the colliery between Iraq, Hillary Clinton said at the time, in 2011, just at the end of the war, she said it's time for the U.S.
	start thinking of Iraq as a business opportunity.
	JP Morgan was selected by the US government to run a key import-export bank in Iraq.
	In 2013, it plans to expand its operations in the country.
	ExxonMobil signed a deal to redevelop Iraqi oil fields.
	Coincidentally, JP Morgan collectively paid the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation at
	least £450,000 for her speeches.
	ExxonMobil donated over $1 million to the family's foundation.
	So these links are everywhere between these corporations who stand to benefit from being, you know, taken into these countries, whether it's Ukraine or Iraq.
	And members of the US government.
	So elsewhere in the world, democracy continues to feel unstable.
	This I mentioned in connection to the hundreds of who've been arrested after Bolsonaro supporters stormed Brazil's Congress in what's being regarded as Brazil's January the 6th, even though they'd done it on January the 8th, two days later.
	Supporters of former president invade federal government headquarters in the capital, Brasilia.
	Which is one of them cities that they just made up to be a capital.
	I don't like it when you go to a country and the capital city is not the main city.
	London!
	That's the capital.
	Even Washington, really.
	It should be, like, one of their main cities, I think.
	Police are accused of colluding with the rioters.
	Hey, this is really similar to the January 6th reporting.
	The riot, an apparent attempt to overthrow President Luis Infecio Lula da Silva, just one week after he was inaugurated, caused significant damage to the headquarters of three branches of federal government.
	Let's have a little look at that storming.
	Bleak!
	Also though, there are some brilliant comparisons to be made.
	Like, one of the great... I mean, I don't think it's right to say heroes of January 6th because it's... We probably can't.
	It's not a hero of it, an icon.
	One of the icons was this guy.
	And look, Brazil got their own version of that.
	Now, do you think that... Firstly, I think that's a copyright infringement.
	Yeah.
	First and foremost.
	It'd be furious, wouldn't it?
	Yeah, he's going to be in his cell because I think he's serving a lumpy sentence for that skullduggery that day, thinking, man, you've nicked my whole look, my image, my stance.
	The whole thing seems to be, you know, when people sometimes suggest, talk about the idea of controlled opposition, that sometimes, well, we know that they are.
	We know that the FBI, for example, funds groups that they can then sort of arrest and go, oh, you're a terrorist.
	Actually, it's a sort of a long history.
	Post 9-11.
	I'm not suggesting that's what's happening certainly on the capital or in Brazil, but I mean they are using sort of an identifiable template there and Glenn Greenwald, friend of the show, fellow Rumble commentator, has posted this picture of Bolsonaro not doing a very good job of eating KFC.
	No.
	And also a weird sort of odd poem.
	Remember that Jair Bolsonaro himself left Brazil on the last day of his presidency for the US where he's living in the house of an ex-MMA fighter in Orlando.
	He's yet to comment on these events.
	He's not commented much since the election at all.
	Just odd life.
	Interesting life.
	Going to an ex-MMA fighter's house.
	Popping down KFC.
	What's going on, man?
	What drives you?
	You were president a minute ago.
	How does all this work?
	Okay, so listen, we've taken a deeper dive into matters of democracy and the veils that present themselves as democracy only to be revealed as the agenda of globalist interest in our look at the Canadian trucker protests and, in particular, the redefinition of the term Violence to mean violence against economies.
	Like, once language is messed with in these kind of ways, you can find yourself in peculiar situations.
	Let me know in the chat and the comments what you think about the sort of manipulation of language and words and how that's being used by power to alter reality itself.
	We're having a look at that with regard to the Canadian trucker protest.
	In our item, here's the news.
	No, here's the effing news.
	Here's the fucking news!
	Good news!
	Justin Trudeau has said that the Canadian truckers are tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorists and the word violent now has been expanded to include violence against money.
	This should be really good for freedom.
	Justin Trudeau has called the truckers conspiracy theory, believing, tinfoil hat wearing, Nazi, misogynist, racist.
	Like that's what they got together for, to do some tinfoil hat wearing and some racism and some misogyny.
	Not what they said, that they were protesting against vaccine mandates and restrictions against their rights as workers.
	No, they They got together to do some misogyny.
	Also, and this is amazing, remember at the time they were accused of being violent?
	Well, there was no evidence that they ever were violent.
	So, do you know what you do to solve that problem?
	Just change what the word violent means.
	That's no problem.
	You were violent against what?
	Was it people's hearts, people's minds, people's feelings?
	No, against money.
	You were violent against the globalist state's ultimate goal, to accumulate wealth.
	Once they start changing the meaning of words, we are in serious trouble.
	That's beyond Orwellian.
	Let's get into this story.
	During a recent interview with CTV News, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau doubled down on his remarks regarding the trucker protest of 2022, referring to some of the activists as tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists who engage in disinformation and misinformation.
	You did a bit of disinformation, but then worse than that, you did some misinformation and you did that while wearing a tinfoil hat.
	Well, at least I wasn't wearing blackface.
	When someone believes that your government is trying to inject a vaccine into you to control your mind and track you, and there's a microchip in it, that's almost the definition of a government conspiracy theory.
	I would say when governments are closing down bank accounts of people that are donating to a protest, that is a conspiracy theory.
	When a government is evoking emergency powers to shut down a legitimate protest, that is tyranny.
	When a government is accusing its own population of being misogynist and racist simply to shut down dissent, that is tyranny.
	Now I don't think there are many people that are saying that the vaccine is put in microchips, and one of the things that the mainstream does is elevates fringe ideas to dismiss legitimate dissent.
	And if there is dissent, if there is opposition to their corporate globalist goals, they simply Amplify certain voices within it.
	If you get a protest of 100,000 people, like if you get a sporting event with 60-80,000 people at it, you're going to get people that get drunk, people that shout crazy stuff.
	As long as you can continually condemn and criticise individuals within an ordinary population, you don't have to address the real issues.
	And this is what I would say the real issues are.
	National governments have been co-opted by globalist interests.
	We have increasing surveillance, a march towards centralising currencies, a march towards preventing individual freedom, controlling your ability to have meaningful democratic traction in your community.
	These are real problems that go beyond left-right type arguments.
	Remember, here on this channel, what we believe the problem is, is that we're being turned against one another by centralising, globalising interests, and Justin Trudeau, I believe, used the mask of wokeness to distract you from the fact that he's operating on behalf of globalist interests.
	However, this statement by the Prime Minister differs from his remarks during the onset of the protest when he referred to the demonstration in its entirety as a fringe minority.
	So first of all, you say it's a small number of people, but if it's only a small number of people, how can you invoke emergency actions?
	You don't need to.
	Both those two things can't be true.
	It can't be a small fringe and a necessity to invoke emergency actions.
	So you have to say, God, there's only a small number of them, but by God, are they racist.
	I think in all my communications, in the frustration that Canadians were feeling, not just around that, but around the pandemic in general, there was a sense that Canadians really stepped up for each other.
	People went out and got vaccinated to a higher degree than just about any other country.
	Also, you might argue that Canadians coming together to protest mandates is an example of Canadians sticking together.
	Unless what you're saying democracy is, is everyone believing the same thing and the impossibility of a public discourse and conversation.
	Unless that's what democracy means now, is that everyone has to believe one thing.
	And to argue with that is undemocratic.
	The fact that there were some people out there who were actively spreading Harmful disinformation and misinformation.
	It's very interesting to conflate the idea of spreading the information with spreading the infection.
	It's a very curious linguistic trick that's being practiced there, that you're spreading disease, that there's something malign and malevolent about it.
	The fact is, if you're going to have a nation state where you're going to say there's a centralised government authority that represents 50 million people or 100 million or 200 million people, then you're going to have to have diversity of opinion.
	If diversity is a good thing, and I believe that it is actually, then that means different communities are going to have different beliefs.
	Some people are going to be traditional, some people are going to be progressive, some people are going to be religious, some people are going to be materialistic.
	We can't have one uniform expression of what it is to be Canadian.
	And if you shut that down altogether, then you don't have democracy anymore.
	So you have to, of course, smear and malign any dissenting voices to say that these particular voices have no right.
	Because if indeed people are deeply racist or deeply misogynistic, then those voices shouldn't be amplified.
	I don't believe in racism or misogyny, but I also don't think that those truckers were misogynistic or racist.
	I think what they were protesting was the thing that they were saying that they were protesting.
	Like, this is real.
	There were real tragedies, and there were people trying to gin that up and to expand the divisions and the fear.
	Yeah, you!
	And sense of conspiracy that were out there.
	We had, as a government, always and will always be extremely patient with people who are hesitant about getting a vaccine or whatever.
	Oh, thanks.
	Thanks for allowing me to hesitate.
	That's so kind of you.
	What kind of relationship is he demonstrating that he believes the government has with a population?
	I believe the government is a service position.
	They work for you.
	Here's some money, do some stuff.
	Not, thank you!
	Like, what is it?
	It's already implicit in the tone, timbre and content of what he's saying, what he believes the relationship between the government and people to be.
	We've been so patient with people that are hesitant.
	We're not children in a school.
	We're an adult population with free will in a democracy.
	There needs to be an adjustment of the entire perspective of what these relationships are.
	Also, they weren't that patient, were they?
	Because they were mandating vaccines for certain workers.
	We've been so patient with you.
	Now, if you want to keep your job, take this fucking medicine.
	And the information around that is continually evolving.
	The way that this narrative is developing is not, See?
	We were right.
	See?
	Pfizer made all that money.
	See?
	There's been no adverse events.
	See?
	It's really, really worked.
	This is not the I-told-you-so moment for draconian authoritarianism under the veil of liberalism.
	But those people who were actively putting people's lives in danger by spreading falsehoods... Or pepper-spraying protesters?
	Or saying that there were Nazis at a protest?
	Or freezing the bank accounts of people in a democracy that wanted to fund a protest?
	What about those people?
	You can't call it just science when it is corporatized and commercialized to the degree that it has been.
	Until you have a model where pharmaceutical companies are meaningfully regulated by an independent body and where their profits are at least not so outrageous, You can't pretend that that's science and not a subset of a commercial hierarchy.
	And save our economy and save lives.
	Save our economy?
	Now, I think the economy is a reflection of trade and commerce and financial responsibility and financial health of a population, sure.
	But when the economy becomes the protection of central interests, then you have a problem.
	Then you start to see what's really happening here.
	In a way, there is a deep revelation in changing what is meant by the word violence.
	You are violent against the economy.
	Who do you mean by the economy?
	Do you mean my economy?
	Do you mean ordinary people's economy?
	Or do you mean the economy of certain centralised global corporate interests?
	Now, in trying to justify the government's behaviour, senior Canadian officials appear to be trying to redefine the meaning of physical violence to make sure their actions fit within that definition.
	The most controversial ones undertaken to stifle the protest, such as deploying riot police and freezing participants' bank accounts, were done by evoking the Emergencies Act, in itself a move controversial enough to warrant a Commission inquiry.
	The Public Order Emergency Commission has issued a summary of a panel interview of four senior officials from the Prime Minister's office, while the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and several others were interviewed by the Commission separately.
	The summary shows that the panel identified areas that they hoped the Commission could comment on.
	One of them being threats to the economic security of Canada, which carry with them a threat of tangible physical harm and violence.
	One of the PMO officials, the Prime Minister's Senior Advisor on Strategist and Policy Issues, Jeremy Broadhurst, is cited as saying that economic disruptions can cause real direct and personal harms in people's lives.
	This is spin-doctoring.
	This is saying, well, in a way it's violence, because if this were to happen and then that were to happen, That's not what we mean when we say violence.
	There was a really violent protest, was there?
	God, where are the casualties?
	Well, Goldman Sachs lost a fortune.
	That's not what people mean by violence.
	By violence you mean they were throwing stuff and smashing things up and that they were rioting.
	The reorganisation of language in order to create the conditions to use more power is tyrannical trickery.
	The truckers whose work and livelihoods were first disrupted by covid vaccine mandates and other restrictions and then by the government seizing their bank accounts would no doubt agree but they had no government to protect them in this matter.
	So in a sense, the policies of mandating vaccines were considered an infringement on the human
	rights of those truckers by those truckers.
	But no one wanted to have that conversation.
	And when we've spoken to representatives of that protest on this channel, what they pointed
	out is no one came to talk to him.
	No one wanted to have a conversation because it was important to convey a unipolar perspective
	and not to allow any conversation or dissent.
	Whether you agree with the truckers or you don't agree with the truckers, the word democracy
	is supposed to mean an open discourse where you have representatives of the views of the
	public in congressional or parliamentary spaces so that the will of the powerful is
	not just arbitrarily inflicted on ordinary people without opposition.
	Instead, the government appears to have focused on protecting itself from political dissent back in February and continues to do so today, as Broadhurst suggested that a threat to jobs, free movement of goods caused by protest, is a threat impossible to separate from the threat of violence, including physical violence.
	It's not impossible to separate it.
	Just go, that's physical violence and that's a potential economic disruption.
	By this mentality, people will be prevented from protesting or striking.
	What do you think had a bigger impact on the overall population?
	Pfizer having their record year of profits, or some truckers bibbing their own in Ottawa.
	What had the bigger impact? What could be more easily classified as violence?
	Do you think that there are other types of violence that could have been practiced?
	Who is benefiting from the reordering of words?
	From what is presented as disinformation, misinformation, and what is presented as violence?
	The question of what passes off as violence these days in Canada is important because
	in order to justify using martial law like the Emergencies Act, the government must meet
	the requirement of facing an unmanageable threat to Canada as defined by the country's
	Security Intelligence Services Act, Section 2. The Emergencies Act relies on the CSIS Act definition.
	In a previous exchange between a Freedom Convoy lawyer and the Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner, however, the former stated, to your knowledge, there was no credible threat to the security of Canada as defined under Section 2 of the CSIS Act.
	To which the Commissioner replied, that would be my understanding, yes.
	So, legally, there was no threat of violence, unless you change the meaning of the word violence.
	In November, True North reported public safety Canada officials admitted in internal updates that the Freedom Convoy protests were peaceful and that no violence was taking place despite claims by Minister Marco Mendicino.
	The Freedom Convoy so far has been peaceful and cooperative with police, an internal memo stated on January 27th.
	Up until February 11th, officials monitoring the situation stated there were no major incidents, that no violence took place, that disruption to government activities was minor, that there were minimal people on Parliament Hill, and the situation remained stable and planning was ongoing.
	In contrast, Liberal cabinet members including Mendocino and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau So now we know that when people say conspiracy theorists what they actually mean is dissenter and that your opinions and your views are not valuable and if there's a requirement to introduce more state power in support of corporate interests they'll find a way of doing it.
	calling them extremists who don't believe in science.
	So now we know that when people say conspiracy theorists what they actually mean is dissenter
	and that your opinions and your views are not valuable.
	And if there's a requirement to introduce more state power in support of corporate interests,
	they'll find a way of doing it.
	They will conflate violence towards an economy, which is very difficult to diagnose with so
	many contributory factors.
	They will claim that a protest has been violent to an economy in order to judge it as violent
	and therefore shut it down.
	It seems that language and the meaning of language is being altered and changed to accumulate more power, to centralise authority and to justify more and more draconian measures.
	In short, if you want No.
	Here's the fucking news!
	where individuals are monitored, where bank accounts can be frozen, where
	ordinary people don't have the right to come together and protest, you simply
	have to alter the tunes and meaning of language until there's nowhere else for
	people to go. And I believe that that's what this story demonstrates. But that's
	just what I think. Let me know what you think in the comments, let me know what you think in the chat.
	Thank you for choosing Fox News.
	Here's the news.
	Here's the fucking news.
	I've broke this. Look at that.
	Look at that.
	I've only had it five minutes.
	Broke it already.
	That's my favourite bit of the studio, that.
	This guy.
	This was what I was relying on, gal, to get me through my interview.
	You've broken the studio already.
	We want to just have it done.
	Just have this done.
	Look at it.
	It's fallen apart in my hands.
	This... If Branko Marchetic finds out that the kind of level of idiocy... Let's hope Branko doesn't do that in the Jacobin offices.
	Branko is a professional.
	Who can be relied on.
	And Branko is joining us now from Jacobin magazine, a regular contributor to that magazine covering like war and nuclear tension and censorship.
	And I now see has a damn fine head of hair.
	Branko, thank you for joining us.
	What is that, by the way, that you brought?
	I'm curious.
	What it is, Branko, is part of the arm of this rather expensive microphone, which was made by Lockheed Martin, who they actually sponsor the show.
	They're a lovely little firm, Lockheed Martin.
	They make microphone stands and some very nice missiles, which are available now, especially for your humanitarian conflict.
	For a price that's right.
	For a price that's right.
	We don't give these things away at Lockheed Martin.
	We're in it.
	It's a business.
	It's a business that they're involved in.
	Branko, I've not brought you on here just to be silly.
	I've also want to ask you a very important question, and this is that question.
	Why is it that there are no over-attempts to hold peace talks between Ukraine and Russia.
	Why is that not an absolute priority?
	Why are we hearing nothing about diplomacy?
	Why are we only continually having highlighted how egregious Russian actions are and were and how awful and physically ill Vladimir Putin is?
	That's a very complicated question.
	And I'm going to have to give you a very complicated answer.
	So, I mean, I think the Biden administration is divided on this question.
	You've got someone like Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
	He said, you know, a few months ago, basically, Ukraine has finally reached this position of strength from which it can negotiate.
	But there is, he got a lot of pushback, as did, you know, the dozens of progressives that put forward a letter that said, basically, you know, it's time for for the Biden administration to kind of push for diplomacy
	a little more. And I think part of it is one, it's that some segment of the Biden administration
	views this war as a way to weaken Russia, and not just the Biden administration, but
	the entire Washington establishment. And that's not me making stuff up or putting words in the
	people's mouths. I mean, people like Leon Panetta, for instance, former CIA director, he's called it
	a proxy war.
	Adam Schiff, one of the most hawkish Democrats in Congress, he's talked about, you know, before this war, using Ukrainians, you know, they're fighting the Russians so that we don't have to fight them.
	There was actually just an op-ed recently in the Washington Post by Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates, you know, former national security figures in the Bush and Obama administrations, basically saying, well, you know, the good thing is we have this willing partner in Ukraine that is willing to bear the consequences of war so that, you know, we don't have to fight this battle later on.
	And I'll also point to the comments by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who Uh, way back, uh, you know, many, many months ago said, um, you know, the goal here is to weaken Russia so they can't do these kinds of things.
	So I think there's a segment of the Washington establishment that, that, you know, uh, this, this gets called Russian propaganda and all this kind of stuff.
	But again, I'm telling you things that are coming straight from the mouths of us administration officials themselves, uh, that, that views this as an opportunity to kind of weaken Russia.
	I think the other part of it is I think there's been this kind of, it's the result I think of 2016, and you know, Putin bears responsibility for this because he did that completely pointless hack, which ultimately just inflamed public opinion in the United States.
	But because of that, it has, you know, it's been very difficult to talk about a sane and rational policy towards Russia and the United States and other Western countries.
	I think in large part because of that.
	The climate that has erupted since this invasion, you know, of course, the invasion is terrible and criminal.
	And, you know, the longer it goes on, it just gets worse and worse.
	But it's been a sort of almost September 11 like political climate that has come up.
	And when you get into these kind of jingoistic environments, it's very difficult to talk about anything
	other than military solutions.
	And that's when the appeasement talk starts coming out.
	That's when the World War II comparisons start coming out.
	So I think at the moment, a lot of anti-war voices, or even just pro-diplomacy voices, are kind of cowed.
	They don't feel like they can get an airing.
	And again, when people have come out and tried to say, hey, you know what, maybe it's time for all this killing
	to end, and let's try and actually find some way to stop this without this just dragging on over and over
	for months and years ahead, people get viciously attacked.
	And then other people see that, and they go, well, I'm not going to put my neck out then.
	I don't want to get attacked as well.
	So I think it's multiple things going on, all of it leading to a very bad place in my opinion.
	Yes, it seems, Branko, that what you're saying ultimately is there is no negotiation for peace because US interests ultimately do not want peace.
	That is not the desired outcome, whether it's for economic reasons, for strategic geopolitical reasons, that is not the desired outcome.
	And yet Kevin McCarthy's recent assent to Speaker in the House
	was somewhat predicated on a deal to diminish Pentagon budgets by $75 billion
	at the insistence of what would formerly have been regarded as the harder right edge
	of the Republican Party, Trump supporters et al.
	So what does that mean, Branko, when the only anti-war voices
	are coming from that political destination?
	And is that a kind of benevolence or financial prudence?
	What is the motivation?
	What is the connection between what would have once been regarded as the right of the Republican Party
	and a kind of desire for peace, which typically when I was a
	kid would have been the position of Pinco, Lefties.
	I mean, it's a real shame.
	I mean, I'm on the left, you know, Jacobin is a socialist publication, traditionally, you know, wanting to cut the military budget and kind of wanting to look for diplomatic solutions, instead of waging in this war, as you say, that was a traditionally left wing position.
	And to be clear, many voices on the left voice that position.
	But I think unfortunately, when it comes to Congress, Because of the climate that has come up, particularly on the liberal side, I mean, it's mostly liberals, again, because of 2016, that came to view Russia as this kind of existential evil.
	And so, you know, even these left-wing congresspeople, because they have to work within You know, liberal public opinion.
	They're kind of accountable to liberal institutions.
	I think they don't want to be seen as, or they don't want to be attacked by these, you know, outlets or think tanks or, you know, commentators.
	That's basically what happened with the withdrawal of that letter, the pro-diplomacy letter back in November.
	You know, it was this army of kind of liberal commentators saying, you know, what are these people doing?
	How dare they?
	This is appeasement.
	They're going to undermine the Biden administration strategy.
	And they all got scared and said, actually, we didn't mean it.
	Sorry, we're backing away.
	But, you know, I mean, I talked about this, you know, even before the start of the war.
	I, you know, I noted that that you had people like Tucker Carlson making, you know, I think Tucker Carlson is abhorrent in so many different things that he believes.
	But, you know, he happened to have this one sane position on the war.
	And there were a few other right wing voices that had similar positions.
	And I said, you know, you can't It's not a good thing.
	It's not a good thing for the left to cede that ground to the right, you know, for them to be the only anti-war voices, because then, you know, they may start getting purchase from viewers who go, well, you know what?
	They're making a lot of sense here.
	Maybe they're right about some of these other things as well.
	So I think it's a really Disappointing thing is the only way I can put it.
	And I think the other disappointing thing about it is that, you know, I mean, because of the political polarization in the US, you have on the democratic side and the liberal side, you have this kind of gung-ho, you know, let's have this civilizational war against Russia attitude.
	And then the right says, no, we don't want that.
	But then what does the right want to do?
	They want to have the same civilizational fight and, you know, go to nuclear brinkmanship, but against a different country, China.
	So, you know, I think what would be good is if there were voices that were consistently against, you know, military escalation and war against, you know, both of these kind of American adversaries, rather than having this kind of bifurcated situation that we have now.
	Seems that there's the same appetite for a unipolar world ultimately behind both wings of the American administration.
	And when it comes to war reporting, if it was more... I sometimes wonder, Branko, if they were even more overt about the nature of their agenda, i.e.
	like, you know, we consider Russia to be an existential global threat, we have to have this proxy war.
	I don't know, even though that would be less than ideal, at least it wouldn't be hiding behind the kind
	of humanitarianism and peculiar and novel jingoism that's emerging.
	And when it's contrasted with a subject about which I know you know a great deal, the US stroke Saudi involvement
	in the conflict in Yemen, just hear us a few facts, which I'm sure you're more than familiar with.
	The war in Yemen has killed an estimated 377,000 people through direct and indirect causes and 33,000 people have died is an estimate in Ukraine as a result of this war and of course all of those deaths are unimaginable tragedies to the people involved.
	So why is there such a diversity in the nature of reporting on these two conflicts?
	How do the interests differ and how do the conflicts significantly differ in terms of the way the media report on them, Branko, primarily?
	I mean, it's not a groundbreaking point to make that, well, in any country, but especially in the United States, you know, the media tends to kind of take its cues from whatever administration is in power.
	I mean, you know, the establishment media, you know, people call it that not as a sort of pejorative, but because there's a very real link.
	I mean, a lot of these people, because of access, they have to sort of rely on and to some extent, you know, Right the stories that people in power want them to it's part of the whole Transactional nature of reporting and so what you end up getting is the people that report on all this stuff You know very much.
	I think start adopting the worldview of the people in power and actually in some ways I mean And I think again 2016 had a lot to do with this I mean journalists the media has shockingly been kind of some of the most aggressive and gung-ho From the start of this war you know I mean They were reporters at the White House press corps who were pushing Biden to go into a no-fly zone at the start of the war.
	There were a few videos of this of just reporters saying, well, why aren't you sending more military?
	Why aren't you doing this?
	Why aren't you doing that?
	So incredibly, it's actually, to some extent, Biden and some of the people around him who taken on this kind of a more restrained approach in the
	face of of media pressure.
	And so I think it's one of these like feedback loops.
	You know, I think I think on the one hand, it's because U.S.
	government interests tend to kind of dictate what gets media coverage, which wars get covered,
	get attention, what the particular framing of that coverage is.
	But then also that kind of climate can take on a life of its own.
	And then it sort of ends up pushing the administration to maybe take more hawkish stances than it
	would have otherwise.
	And I mean, you can see the same thing in Russia.
	I think, you know, Putin clearly played on nationalism to sort of get his domestic base on board with the war.
	And then that nationalism sort of takes on a life of its own and has gone kind of beyond Putin.
	You got commentators in Russia calling for the use of tactical nukes and the like and saying, you know,
	why don't we just bomb the hell out of Ukraine? And, you know, Putin has kind of gone, well,
	actually, you know what, maybe we won't use nukes. But, you know, he still is having to be responsive
	to that public opinion. So often in times of war, I think, you know, these climates that sort
	of get purposefully inflamed to some extent by people in power, because it seems to serve their
	uses temporarily at one point, they end up, you know, just becoming monsters of their own.
	And then you end up kind of having to somehow reign them in or tame them or kind of, you know,
	tiptoe around them.
	It makes me feel that the media has been co-opted now to a degree that is untenable and that we
	might be in a a media environment where independent voices will be continually marginalized, maligned and ignored, and certainly won't be allowed to be proliferated to a degree where the counter narratives will be relevant.
	Do you find it difficult to undertake the type of reporting that you do?
	I know you met with quite a lot of condemnation and criticism, for example, for the way that you've reported on this conflict.
	Oh yeah, I mean, you get all sorts of crazy people saying all sorts of things about you, but you can't really care that much about that because your job as a journalist is not to be popular or to be well-liked.
	It's to try and shed light on things that aren't being talked about.
	It's to cover stories that would otherwise go amiss.
	It's to challenge conventional narratives if they happen to be flawed in some way.
	It's to tell the truth.
	A lot of the times when I'm writing stuff, I'm just reporting accurately what the facts are.
	I think there's a kind of demand almost from people that journalists like myself and other people who are more critical of some of the stuff to basically lie and to pretend that we don't know things that we know.
	I'm supposed to pretend that, for example, the Azov battalion really has reformed.
	is no longer a neo-Nazi regiment, or that the Ukrainian far right wasn't a problem.
	And so I'm supposed to pretend that NATO expansion had no role in this war whatsoever, even though
	there's copious evidence, and that anyone who knows anything about the subject has been
	reading for decades and hearing from decades from a variety of experts.
	So it's kind of a ridiculous situation.
	But again, it's the same with your show.
	You're going to say the stuff that you believe and the stuff that you know is true, or at
	least give your perspective.
	And you can't cater your coverage or what you believe to what the overriding climate
	I mean, I think actually when it comes to something this important and when things are kind of this crazy, I think it's actually very important to be a voice that's kind of challenging and saying, hey, well, hold on, let's hold up a little bit and let's maybe think about this.
	Does this make sense?
	Is this smart?
	Are there risks involved here?
	I mean, we're talking about potentially a nuclear war.
	I feel like that's a pretty Pretty important subject.
	I don't know, maybe you disagree, but that's my opinion.
	It's one of the most important subjects is nuclear wars because of the potential annihilation of the Earth and also our species.
	There is a clear amnesia.
	We looked a little while at an article from the Guardian in 2014 where it talked about the escalation escalation in Ukraine and of course it was prior to the
	Trump administration and it was entirely and the events in 2016 that you keep returning to
	Branko and it was obviously an entirely different and I would say a more unbiased take
	available in a legacy media outlet where they said we've got to stop provoking Putin
	through the actions of NATO and it talked about the complexity of Ukrainian politics and the sort of
	the far right element and then just, you would not get something like that in the
	Guardian now.
	There's a kind of a degree of self-censorship that seems to be taking place.
	That's partly what frightens me, as a matter of fact.
	What we're trying to do, obviously in a more conversational and sometimes more populist way, is to look for alignment between figures on the Right and left and increasingly the meaninglessness of those categories when it comes to creating significant shift or at least a conversation around a significant shift in the way that in particular American politics and their globalist interests are organized.
	It seems that via the culture war and the kind of censorship and type of reporting that you're talking about, it's becoming increasingly difficult to find ways to bring people together to find some optimism That's really become our focus, although sometimes I feel a little delirious in the face of that task.
	I think it's really important to know that when I talk about US interests, I'm talking about The elite of the country and what they see as American interests.
	And I actually don't think there really is a U.S.
	interest in trying to, you know, make this war, to sort of Afghanistan for Russia and to, you know, even collapse the Russian state.
	I think that's incredibly dangerous, actually, for ordinary Americans.
	But it's important to know that there's a distinction between, you know, the elite and what they see as the interests of the country and the actual people themselves.
	And I think it is important That a lot of surveys show, actually, you know, I mean, obviously, there's going to be disagreements on a variety of policy issues between Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, so on and so forth.
	But actually, Americans in the whole approve of a more restrained foreign policy.
	They don't actually support these, you know, these wild adventures that American politicians have taken the country on over the decades.
	And this particular war, surveys have also shown that there is bipartisan, cross ideological consensus around needing to negotiate, needing to find a diplomatic solution to, if not come to some sort of Permanent peace settlement at least stop the fighting and have some sort of stability.
	I'm not sure totally what the surveys say about policy towards China, but I would love if there was some more crossover of that.
	I would love if there were And there are some figures on the right who are saying this, but I wish there were more right-wing or conservative voices who were telling the audiences, by the way, hey, if you think what's happening with Russia and Ukraine, if you think that's dangerous, if you think that's bad for the people of Ukraine, if you think it's all these things, well, it's very much a similar case with Taiwan and China.
	We should take a similarly pro-diplomatic, restrained, less militaristic approach to
	that particular crisis as well, because that could also erupt into all manner of chaos.
	It's such an important revelation and point, Branko, that when we're talking about the
	US, we're not talking about US influence.
	interests.
	We're demonstrating that the interests of the elites that ultimately dominate American foreign policy are entirely at odds with ordinary American people, and that most American people would like diplomatic solutions to the current conflict, and as you say, likely to any potential forthcoming conflict between the U.S.
	and China.
	Thank you so much for joining us today.
	You can find Branko in his work at Jacobin Magazine.
	Well, don't worry, you can find literally Branko.
	You can't go there and stalk or hunt Branko.
	Let Branko be free!
	And as you've just heard, Branko is incredibly lucid, illuminating and valuable with regard to these topics.
	Thanks, Branko.
	Thanks for joining us.
	I hope we'll speak again, mate.
	That'd be great, thank you, very kind.
	Nice chatting to you.
	Hey, Gareth, I want to tell you that we've got an incredible week coming up.
	Oh yeah?
	We're going swimming.
	Oh!
	Just you and I. But also on the show, Michael Schellenberger is going to be talking about their latest Twitter Files revelations.
	I want to know about the Fauci revelations.
	On its way apparently, Fauci Files.
	Give us them Fauci Files.
	He's not coming to swim with us, is he?
	He can't, I'm afraid, because he says it's very dangerous and you've got to wear a lot of swimming masks.
	You need three snorkels to safely swim.
	Boost a snorkel?
	You've got a snorkel, you put one in your mouth and you've got to have at least one snorkel in.
	Where's that going?
	That has to go in the anus, Gareth.
	I thought it might.
	You were doing that before Fauci!
	Fauci says that!
	What, the guy that was talking about the AIDS medication in the 1980s?
	I was snorkelling myself like it was 1990.
	Bloody nine!
	We've got Schellenberger on the show.
	He's going to be talking about the Twitter files, Gareth.
	That's what he's going to be talking about.
	The Fauci files.
	We've got Rick Rubin's coming on here.
	Cool.
	I love Rick Rubin.
	He's going to be coming on.
	I'm going to ask him questions about Johnny Cash.
	Battle of the Beards.
	Well, he's won that battle.
	He's won it.
	I can't compete.
	But I'm going to talk about, what am I going to talk about?
	Hip Hop.
	Oh, yeah.
	I'm going to talk about Hip Hop, Johnny Cash.
	I'm going to talk about that show he did with Paul McCartney.
	That was really good.
	Hey, listen, if you're watching this on Locals, which is our Stay Free AF community, We're not doing the additional 15 minutes after the show anymore.
	Oh no, we're going to do one special, one hour long show just for members of our community each week, as well as so many other opportunities, including a forthcoming stand-up special, which will be available to view on local.
	So join us, excuse me, on locals now.
	Why are you laughing at me?
	It's the old kombucha, isn't it?
	It's the old sweet lady kombucha.
	My dark brown buddy down there.
	Oh no.
	Gareth, something just happened.
	I had an upstairs mishap.
	Do you think anyone's noticed?
	No, no.
	Fine, you're fine.
	Gareth, tell me my part.
	Does my hair look as nice as Branko's?
	I would say... Does I need more root lift?
	I need more root lift!
	They've got a lot of lift, don't they?
	Branko's root lift is like a young Hugh Grant!
	I've never seen root... Oh, thank you.
	Someone put me up on the monitor.
	Oh, I see.
	You've done the old sweep to the side.
	The Branko sweep, I call it.
	Oh, Branko, sweep to the side.
	Oh, Branko, will you give me some pride?
	Branko, I'd like to feel you inside of me.
	No?
	I think you'd like that.
	Not like that.
	I think you'd like the song, I mean.
	Yeah, and also, I mean, inside me in a... Soulful way.
	Spiritual.
	Spiritual way, not a bit of Branko.
	I'm not talking about Fauci snorkels.
	I'm not talking about you Fauci snorkel me, baby.
	No.
	That's not what this show's about, mate.
	Do you think that this shirt goes alright with the black background?
	With the blue background, you mean?
	I didn't mean to say that.
	I meant to say blue and background, but it came out as blackground.
	Blackground.
	Yeah!
	Yeah, it's just shades, isn't it?
	It's just shades!
	Shades of blue.
	It's just shades of blue, baby.
	It's my new jazz album, it's called that.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Shades of blue by Russ.
	I need someone who can play the French horn.
	Do you know anyone?
	I have no idea.
	Okay, well if you meet anyone let me know because I find that they are some of the world's sweetest, sweetest people.
	So Rick Rubin's on the show helping me record Shades of Blue, my new album.
	It's gonna be very stripped back.
	Very raw.
	It's very raw, Cal.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's very raw.
	I don't need all of the... It's not Phil Spector!
	I don't need trinkets and claptrap.
	Anyway, if you can watch that live if you want by signing up to locals 10.30 PT, 1.30 ET, 6.30 GMT.
	Still don't know what any of that means.
	Next Monday, we've got a great show coming up.
	It's the WEF Royal Rumble Special.
	It's Davos.
	It's a big club and you're not invited.
	We are streaming live.
	We're going to bring you some of Klaus Schwab's best bits.
	You know who's at Davos this year?
	Who?
	Me?
	Zelensky.
	I think it might be via Zoom.
	He's pretty busy isn't he?
	Going underground, he's got to do all that war stuff hasn't he?
	So he's going to pop in by Zoom.
	Do you know who I'd like to see in there?
	Charlotte Church, voice of an angel.
	Next Monday, WF Royal Rumble special.
	We're doing an extended live show on that.
	That's 7 a.m.
	PT, 10 a.m.
	ET and 3 p.m.
	GMT.
	That's what we're doing.
	Is there anything else on teleprompter?
	I've said everything that's on there.
	Should I just say goodbye?
	Is that it?
	That's the end of it.
	Wrap-up show.
	No locals.
	So if you're watching this on locals, We ain't on it.
	But we will be.
	You'll be looking at nothing.
	That's what you'll be watching, an abyss.
	But we'll be back tomorrow with Schellenberger.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	Oh yeah.
	Rick Rubin.
	He's a big deal, Schellenberger, these days.
	Tell me why.
	Well, Twitter files, it's elevated all of them.
	Look at Tayibi now.
	What is he?
	He's a rock star.
	Is he?
	Well, he used to write for Rolling Stone.
	He'll be starring on the cover soon, you'd think.
	Drunk it, if he is.
	Exactly.
	That kind of voice came only sound in the 70s.
	Steve Wright drooled.
	Very cool.
	Show's over now, isn't it, really?
	I mean, this is just riffing, isn't it?
	This ain't a show.
	You can't call it that.
	I'm just hoping Branko went to get a cup of tea or something.
	Where's me ad reads?
	I haven't got any ad reads.
	Do one for something, if you want.
	This is nice.
	Do you think good enough?
	I think they'll be very happy with that.
	Encouraging?
	Yep.
	This is nice.
	The money'll flood in.
	I'm thinking of launching a range of products myself.
	Eh?
	What do you mean like?
	Lift.
	Hell, root lift.
	Root lift with Ol' Russ and Branko.
	Me and Branko, it's black and white, we're on a beach.
	You know like when you come out to sea and your hair's a bit nicer.
	We've got salt on us.
	I don't think he needs any product, Branko.
	Of course he doesn't.
	Branko don't need product.
	Natural, isn't it?
	Branko, you know when people don't wash their hair?
	They go, don't wash me, I'll let it.
	You know when people go, you don't wash your hair, it washes itself?
	No, it doesn't!
	It doesn't.
	It gets oily!
	That's oils!
	It washes itself.
	They think it comes back around and starts again.
	Like fascism.
	That's right.
	And communism.
	Like if you go... Like flares.
	Come around again.
	And fascism, fascism and communism, they meet round the back and do a little handshake.
	That's it.
	With the Fauci snorkels.
	All right, that's enough.
	We've tried our best.
	This is all we have.
	Welcome to 2023.
	Hopefully not the last year on planet Earth for us as individuals or as a collective, although inevitably people will die.
	Oh, that's a given.
	Seems to be the pattern I've been watching over the years of YouGal.
	One of those years it'll be us.
	Not together.
	It'll be a year and that'll be that.
	Not like a pact.
	Unless of course there's a nuclear attack because we keep provoking Putin, in which case there'll be a huge number of casualties.
	Maybe it'll be like a rogue nation that we don't expect.
	Coming in.
	Like Peru or something.
	Coming in, I know, where's Peru?
	Yo, we're shamans.
	Bam!
	Take that.
	Getting on our nerves.
	Yeah, it could be them.
	Like Morocco in the World Cup.
	Right.
	Surprise.
	I know, they're good.
	They're good, aren't they?
	Of course they're good.
	I've been building that nuclear arsenal.
	ZH.
	Very good.
	All right, that's the end of our... This is the end of our show.
	You can continue watching if you want, but it's going to be a total sequence.
	Let us know over social media in the comments if you like all the hard work we've done.
	Sounds a bit better, isn't it?
	It is better, yeah.
	Yeah, it's a bit like the set of the Blue Man Group or something now, is it?
	Do you think it is?
	Is it a little too blue?
	Too blue?
	Maybe.
	Too blue.
	That's going to be my second album.
	Second album.
	When I'm a bit more moody then.
	Some say it's lovely, look at that.
	More moody?
	Little Renegade, The Blue is Gorgeous, Happy Crappy, Love to All, Blue Man Group, someone sang Purple.
	That makes sense.
	All right, time for us to go.
	Shall I go?
	Yeah.
	We're going now.
	Some of us have got children.
	Goodbye.
	Bye.
	Stay free!
	Switch on.
	Switch off.
	Man, you switch it.
	Switch on.

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