Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh gives Russell an exclusive first interview since his Substack article went viral on what happened to the Nord Stream pipeline.https://seymourhersh.substack.com/And James Schneider, Communications Director for Progressive International, joins us in the studio to talk activism and instigating radical change. For a bit more from us join our Stay Free Community here https://russellbrand.locals.com/Come to my festival COMMUNITY - https://www.russellbrand.com/community-2023/NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/
Thanks for joining us today on Stay Free with Russell Brand, bringing you the truth behind mainstream media narratives and giving you a different, hopefully illuminating and encouraging perspective on global events.
Wherever you're watching this right now, we do the whole show.
Exclusively on Rumble because we are granted the ability to speak freely so we can bring people together from across the spectrum in and from the peripheries to confront centralised power.
And what does centralised power want you thinking about today?
Is it balloons?
Is it UFOs?
Later in the show we'll be talking about that and we'll be meeting James Schneider, who's a political organiser whose sworn intention is to disrupt the establishment.
We'll be talking to him about new democratic models and methods and ways we can disrupt the aforementioned power.
Then, once we click over just onto Rumble, we'll be having the first interview that Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize winning conspiracy theorist, journalist, You know, conspiracy theorists, whatever they are now, about his story about the Nord Stream pipeline.
He revealed that it was allegedly, allegedly, I've got a button that says that.
Allegedly!
It was America that blew that up, as Jocko Willink on this show said it will be.
His first interview, Seymour, is with us.
He's coming up on the show.
The White House has already denied this story, so does that make it more or less likely to be true?
Let me know in the chat, let me know in the comments whether or not you trust the White House or your own lying eyes.
But... What do you think that says about us that he's come to us first?
Is it good?
Because we're also Pulitzer Prize winning conspiracy theorists ourselves.
That's how you're taking this are you?
I see this as us Pulitzer Prize winning journalists have got to stick together in our task of bringing the mainstream media down.
Presenting people with the opportunity to confront power.
What we're talking about actually in this episode is where your attention is being directed and what you actually should be looking at.
The world wants you looking up into the skies at balloons or potentially UFOs.
We'll have Jeremy Corbell on the show talking about recent deep state disclosures around UFOs so we can get some sort of handle on that stuff.
Let us know if that's an interview you're interested in.
What fascinates me is the way that we're being invited to observe particular narratives.
I reckon we're at the point we were at maybe five, ten years ago with the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, that we're seeing the incremental movement towards hostilities with China, and they're giving us almost childlike, identifiable images of infringement and attack.
There's a balloon over our country.
Apparently, this is common practice.
It's been going on for ages.
And certainly, we're not including in the narrative the ongoing encroachment of Chinese territories by US military bases getting into their waters.
And it's extraordinary stuff.
What you've been invited to look at are potential external threats at a time where there's a lot of domestic dissatisfaction in the United States, when Biden's approval ratings are falling, as may his bowels be.
Tumbling.
His tumbling viscera.
And what you're not being invited to consider is the normalisation of AIs and potential lethal robot dogs.
Klip Klop, friend of the show, the Klip Klop dog.
You know him?
Scary dog robot who scares himself, who's already being, I believe... It's not actually called Klip Klop, is it?
Is his actual name Clip Clop or did he invent that?
Let me know in the chat.
Is he called Clip Clop in his home life?
Clip Clop's at the Super Bowl.
It's the Super Bowl if you're into that sort of thing and I don't disrespect you if you're a sports loving American person.
We love sport over here, just the ones that are from our little old country and across the world in the case of football.
That's not a point.
The point is Clip Clop's at the Superbowl.
Yeah.
Clip Clop starring at the Superbowl with this lad.
He's dancing around all over the gaff.
They're normalising Clip Clop.
They're making Clip Clop a celebrity.
So when you see him marching down the precinct or pinning you to a wall, shooting guns at you, taking your temperature, forbidden!
You are not allowed to leave the house!
You think, oh, it's that dude from the Superbowl.
I like him.
Have a look.
[MUSIC]
[MUSIC]
Oh, Clip Club.
He's doing some nice moves.
I think they're a bit embarrassed.
They know that they're meant to be used for military purposes.
Yeah, like, that's... This is not my function.
This is not my purpose.
Clip Club wants to oppress domestic population.
Yeah, because when they're doing stuff like that now, it's undignified, isn't it?
It is, yeah.
Like French maid-looking dances.
Ready sexualising Clip Clop.
Sexy now.
They've only had Clip Clop ten minutes, they're sexualising Clip Clop.
Poor Clip Clop.
There's no way that robot is sexy.
No.
The point of dance, dance in a sense is about fertility, expression of human potency, confluence, grace, movement, semiotic and semantic power that ain't issued verbally.
But Clip Clop don't know none of that.
That's old Clip Clop.
Let's not forget as well that Clip Clop and his half-arse don't want to be dancing at the Super Bowl.
Clip Clop have got another agenda.
Have a look.
So that's when you see Clip Clop marching down your street, scaring himself with his own bullet-y grooming, you'll go, I like that guy, I see him at the Super Bowl, he's a friend of mine.
So we're being invited not to look at the robotisation, the militarisation of the police force, the normalisation of robots, you're being invited to look at what?
Balloons.
You know that film, Don't Look Up?
You remember it, that film, Don't Look Up.
Well, We're in a situation that's similar to that, because that was obviously a film about where people were not looking at an impending disaster.
It was written by David Sirota, a friend of the show, and is sort of a metaphor for climate change and perhaps other looming catastrophes.
Well, now what you're being invited to do is do look up.
That's why we've made that asset.
Do look up!
Don't look up.
Look up into the sky.
Don't look up.
Don't look down and around you at what's happening.
Don't look down.
There's the Nord Stream Pipeline down there.
Don't look down there.
Don't start looking sub-aquatically about what them Navy SEALs are doing to that pipeline.
That's what we'll be talking to Seymour Hersh about a little later.
Don't be looking down there in the depths, down in the fathomy places.
Don't look at the Pentagon and the government of your country, United States of America, campaigning to maintain their budgets at a time where interest in the Ukraine war is starting to wane, where new narratives are starting to emerge.
People are starting to see that a lot of economic interests are being met, i.e.
the Black Rock reconstruction, digitalization of Ukraine stuff,
the military industrial complex and their endless profiteering,
the $100 billion package that's already been issued.
Don't start looking at the increasing tensions between the US and China and the US's role in that.
And don't look at Biden's constantly tumbling popularity and evident ineptitude.
Just look at this nice balloon.
Have a look at how the mainstream media are covering this story.
And while you're watching it, I don't want you to think that the newscaster looks like a sexy lady Michael Jackson.
Unidentified flying object shot down by the U.S.
over Alaska.
This, of course, follows the downing of that Chinese spy balloon last weekend.
CBS2's Bradley Blackburn live in our newsroom with the latest on this.
Bradley?
Andrea, before it was shot down, pilots were able to get close enough to that unknown object to see that it was unmanned and drifting in the wind.
But there is still a lot of Why is he talking so poetically about that?
It was drifting in the wind.
It was lost.
It was a mystery.
Why is he politicizing that balloon so much?
Yeah, also the way that they're already tying the balloon and these UFOs, if that's what they are, together is amazing because it's basically a way of kind of saying UFOs are scary.
As long as there are external threats, domestic disruption and dissent is less likely.
You escalate the fear and the doubt.
So this news report concentrates on, this is a sort of mysterious thing, As we all know, these are common practices to have various weather balloons and even spying balloons.
It's not been proven.
There's not a shred of evidence that it's a spying balloon yet.
Not a shred.
But even if it is, that is normal.
It happens all the time.
It's not a cause for escalation of tensions.
Unless, of course, you want to escalate tensions because people are getting a bit sick and tired of the lethal aid packages that go, curiously, via the Pentagon.
You might think, oh, if you want to help Ukrainian people, why don't you give that money in humanitarian aid directly to the Ukraine?
Why don't you broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine rather than disrupting them?
No, it's curious that that aid passes via the military-industrial complex.
I think up to 70% of weapons don't even reach their destinations.
It's not confusing and complex, it's...
It's a racket, is what it is.
Also, let's not rule this out, Biden gets to posture on temporary AstroTurf rouge carpets as a commander-in-chief leader with Washingtonian prestige, as someone with some military clout shooting a balloon out of the sky.
Wow!
Rather than what many of us have come to see him as, a sort of doddering, financially corrupt sort of fella.
Allegedly.
Okay.
Object shot down over Alaska, Mr. President.
Success.
There he is, just wearing the aviators, saying the word success.
We haven't been able to say success very often since he's been president, so.
No, take those opportunities.
Yeah, exactly.
When you can actually blow a balloon up the sky, it's nice to be able to say the word success.
Is that success?
Akin to popping a balloon in the sky.
I don't want to drill down into it.
What about that cannabis package where ultimately no one got released from prison?
Was that a success?
What about leaving Afghanistan?
Was that a success?
What about the response to the pandemic?
Was that a success?
What about your pledge to stand up for union workers?
Was that a success?
Look at the way that the mainstream media presents you with information.
You'll all be familiar with Corrine Jean-Pierre.
She's the White House Press Secretary.
Look at how She goes on mainstream media for a softball interview where, you know, this is an inviting mainstream environment where people are going to facilitate that kind of narrative.
You feel like, how does she mess this up so badly?
If I was briefing her, I'd say, right, OK, you're going on mainstream news.
It's going to be an easy interview.
Just don't use your hands in a weird way because it'll make you look like you don't know what you're doing.
And don't forget the vital word that's very important in the world of diplomacy.
A pact, okay?
NORAD is part of like a, part of a, it's a, it's a,
what you call a coalition, a consortium.
A consortium, a pact of nations.
A pact, exactly.
Also, don't shut your eyes too much during the interview.
And whatever you do, do not forget the name of the country that are our chief allies in this endeavor, okay?
We didn't do it on our own.
We did it in, in, in, clearly in, in, in, in step with Canada.
Yeah, Canadia.
Even the news anchor there is like looking at her like, come on, what are you doing?
I'm here to help you, for God's sakes.
Nosing it right up.
It's alright though, she doesn't go on a job like Press Secretary or anything.
So your job doesn't involve being the interface between the public and the media and the government, does it?
Oh, yeah, that's actually all my job is now talking about the media's intervention and role in presenting news stories.
We're fascinated by the Project Veritas James O'Keefe story.
Now, obviously, remember, we are, broadly speaking, a transcendent news organization interested in true democracy and moving beyond the old labels of left and right so that we can create a different type of populism, new coalitions, Whether you have a traditional identity or a progressive identity, if you have democratic control over your own community, then you don't need to worry about other people's lifestyles and traditions and orthodoxies or lack thereof.
It's none of your business.
As long as we're all locked together in a cultural war, how can we form the alliances that are necessary to displace and disrupt centralised power?
Something we were talking to James Snyder, our guest, about in a minute.
If you're watching this on YouTube, we're going to have to click off in a second because we're bringing another Pull its prize-winning conspiracy theorist onto the show a little bit later, Seymour Hersh.
But I just wanted to touch on this James O'Keefe story.
James O'Keefe is in a lot of trouble there at Project Veritas.
And even though it's an anti-establishment organisation, Gary, I suppose it still sits within conventional, would you call it libertarian, right-wing politics in terms of its funding?
Absolutely.
I guess they are still there to make profits, you would imagine.
And when profits are put at risk by people getting a bit angry about the kind of stuff, it just shows the power.
I mean, look, if this is linked, it just seems odd that at a time when people are coming out and saying that he's a bully at work, which obviously no one likes a bully at work, but why is this happening now?
He's literally just revealed these things about Pfizer, which we don't know whether they're true or not.
Fascinating stories about Pfizer, if they are true.
And of course, while we're still on YouTube, we have to be careful.
Shall we come off YouTube now and then get right into this?
Because I can't believe the way that Rolling Stone, who used to be regarded as an anti-establishment, radical magazine, I seem to remember that I adorned the cover once.
The last version of the radicals.
The last time they were relevant was when I was there with my top off.
I think I was going a bit like, "Oh yeah, come on, we would take a dance with this."
I did my Jim Morrison shtick back then.
We're gonna leave you on YouTube.
All you gotta do is click on the link, join us on Rumble, 'cause I'm, baby, I'm flexing.
I can tell.
I'm getting ready to bust some truth, to drop some bloody old truth bombs,
or bring people together against the establishment.
And here they come, YouTube, click over.
Like, this thing, like, of course, right.
So no, we're just on Rumble now.
So we can say that, like, they exposed that they were involved in that barmy--
It's evolution.
Which is so close to mRNA.
Directed evolution could, with a couple of tweaks, become mRNA, which is the sort of thing they're involved in.
It's one little bat microbe away from becoming mRNA.
Basically what he was saying is that Pfizer were involved in a business of creating new versions of the virus in order to then create the solutions.
Just so happens that the solutions are extremely profitable to Pfizer.
And that's such a massive story, and that's so much more significant.
Of course, being a bully in the workplace is horrible.
I sometimes think, Gareth, simple human values ought to be enough for most of us without getting into particular ideologies.
Sesame Street values, as some call them.
If you are kind, That means you'll be kind to people regardless of what their beliefs are.
Like the basic principle of be kind, be kind, are you being kind, are you being kind?
These are some things I have conversations I have to have in my own mad head.
But some of the things that old James O'Keefe was doing at work were quite funny.
According to one complaint, he took a sandwich from a pregnant woman because he was hungry.
Hey, that's my sandwich!
But I am hungry!
I just think it's funny that they're the things that they're trying to tack him on anyway.
So obviously there has been pressure applied from somewhere, hasn't there?
That he's ruffling the feathers of people that you shouldn't ruffle the feathers of.
Albert Boyle.
Albert Boyle being one of them.
But what they're obviously trying to get him on is, what can we get him on?
And one of the main things is that he took a sandwich from a pregnant woman.
Yeah, it's a bit like, of course that's not a very nice thing to do.
We all know that if you see a pregnant woman, with or without a sandwich, you shouldn't disrupt her.
Be nice to her.
Be like, hello, can I help you?
Or just leave her alone.
Snatching her sandwich, that's bad behaviour.
But I wouldn't say it's worse than profiting from a pandemic.
No.
I don't think it's worse than not doing clinical trials for transmission, then suggesting that it would inhibit transmission.
I don't think it's as bad as taking billions in public funding, then profiting from it.
I don't think it's as bad- Well, this at the moment, It is just opinion, Ross.
Allegedly.
Even on Rumble.
See how responsible we are?
That's how you get Pulitzer Prizes.
Like our man coming on in a minute, Seymour Hersh.
Before that, we'll have James Snyder talking to us about, who's this guy?
Oh yeah, Moon.
Now we're disrupting some systems.
I regret that.
I regret that.
As soon as I see it, I regret it.
It was how low the jeans were.
That's the bit I regret.
Do you know what I regret most of all?
The lower thumb.
Yes.
That's right.
When I see that guy, I think, there's no need for that, Russ.
No.
You shouldn't have let yourself down there.
I remember that shoot.
But then were the days, Gal.
That's what I was doing back then.
Were you there?
I was there.
You poor sod.
I know.
Part of some absolute crap, haven't you, over the years?
Let's go back to the last... Yeah, because the funniest thing is, like, when you're trying to bring down James O'Keefe, who sounds like, you know, who knows, because these are, at the moment, simply claims.
Yeah, they're claims.
But, like, what he was saying is that Pfizer have exhibited a level of profiteering and potentially corruption that means they
should be subject to a lot of investigation. What they're saying is he put on a
production of Oklahoma in Virginia and spent 20 grand on company expenses for the
staff to come.
Yeah, to take the staff to see him in Oklahoma.
What's this? $5,000?
$5,000 for a cowboy costume?
You dare to say that Pfizer are corrupt?
How dare you?
It's not like he said everyone's got to stay in their house for two years while he's in Oklahoma.
It's not like everyone's got to take some medicine while he's in Oklahoma, is it?
It's certainly not that.
It's not as bad?
No.
I would say.
No, I mean... I'd like to go.
No one's even asked the staff.
Also, did you enjoy going to see it?
It was brilliant.
Oh, my God.
I've never seen anything like it.
The atmosphere.
Oh, to be alive at all was fantastic.
But to be young and to go to that, that was very heaven.
It was bliss to be there.
I'd love to go.
Do you know any songs from Oklahoma?
No.
How does it go?
Oh, what a beautiful morning.
Is that in there?
Is that in there?
I think so.
Do you know what we need to do?
Go and see a performance of Oklahoma.
And I'll fund it!
It's not taxpayer money!
Ordinary taxpayers didn't have to pay for that and then he made a profit of billions from it.
That's not what happened.
Absolutely right.
So even if this dude ain't great, and certainly it seems if they're a right-wing organisation, their politics are different from our politics, but we believe left, right, We should unite.
There's no left and right no more.
It's right and wrong.
Truth!
Justice!
And that's what we're interested in talking to our next guest, James Schneider, about.
James is a political organiser who wants to instigate radical change within the system.
He's a supporter for Make Amazon Pay, the author of Our Block, How We Win, and he's an international chess player.
James, thank you so much for joining us on the show.
Thank you for having me.
It's a pleasure to have you.
Your hair looks fantastic.
Thanks very much.
That's a bloody good start.
We've been speaking to Christian Smalls, the leader of the union in the United States,
and what struck me about him is the way that his perspective was transcendent of the ordinary
left-right divides that sometimes prohibit, I think, advancement in a political landscape
that seems to be increasingly defined by centralism versus the periphery.
How do you think we can order democracy to make it more meaningful so that people have more investment in democratic process?
How can dissent be incorporated into this process when you have now mostly central political parties that, broadly speaking, agree with one another and are not representing the interests of ordinary people, whether that's in our country, the UK or America or wherever else, mate?
So I think the point that you're making, which is right, is that ordinary people have basically the same interests and want, broadly speaking, the same things.
Some people have some differences this way and the other way, and they don't have power in their lives to do that.
So take, if you're an Amazon worker at work, you're monitored by an algorithm which knows everything about what breaks you're taking, how much you're lifting, how far you're walking, all of that stuff.
You don't have any control over your life.
So what is, I think, important, what most people want, what people feel is missing, is that control and is that democracy in their lives.
So that goes for, you know, if you're a striking nurse now, if you're an Amazon worker, if you're worried about climate change or whatever that might be, because you don't have control in your life, you can't do anything about it.
So the thing to do It's for people who are in the same type of situation to get together to work with each other against whatever power they're confronted with.
So that means if you're a worker with other people that you work with, because you've got the same boss, you can deal with them.
If you're a tenant, work with other tenants so you can deal with landlords.
If you're paying rip-off energy bills, work with other people who are paying or can't pay their rip-off energy bills.
And together, bit by bit, and And, you know, we can build our own power and we, you know, that's not going to be, there's no simple solution.
You can't just elect one party and everything will be better.
And also has to happen on a global scale, not just in our own countries, because there's huge systems of power and control, which keeps some people rich and particularly hurt most of the countries on earth.
And it's clear that those powers now are globalist.
They are ultimately transcendent of national sovereignty.
We talk a lot about how organisations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation exert incredible control over another unelected organisation like the WHO, how WEF policies keep finding their way into national governments and how the pandemic period Broadly speaking, exacerbated that trend.
Now we're talking about the way that Amazon treats its workers generally.
Now that Amazon are, I think, the ninth, if Amazon were a nation, they'd be the ninth most powerful nation in the world as I understand it.
And in the post-war Ukraine environment, there's an assumption that the digitalization of Ukraine is is utmost among their goals. We get this sense that people
are piloting these modalities, piloting new ways of surveillance, digital ID scores,
tracking people, new methods for a certain control. And I liked the way you described the
necessity for forming new alliances placed perhaps on community where you live or unions around
the way that you work and indeed the way that various unions can come together in
common cause.
What we essentially need, it sounds like you're saying to me, James, is new ways of forming alliances.
I know there are groups like Don't Pay UK in our country that are trying to confront the energy crisis at a time where Shell and BP are experiencing record profits at a time where the Nord Stream pipeline has been blown up, seemingly in accordance with an agenda that the United States of America have to control the natural gas market which they've explicitly
talked about though I have make no claims to access to information that nobody
else has. How do you see the role of unions around big tech companies like
Amazon and even some of the movements around health workers that are happening
in our country the UK being influential for global solidarity movements for
ordinary people mate?
I mean, these are new things, but they're also old things.
The ways in which people have stood up and resisted power and oppression throughout history are basically the same kinds of ways.
They're people who have the same interests coming together to fight back and then forming alliances with other groups of people who are doing the same thing.
And I think, you know, if we're going to get substantial change in this country, in Britain, that's going to be in large part due to the trade unions and the workers who right now are saying, I don't want a pay cut.
I don't want to have lower living standards.
I don't deserve it.
I work hard.
And the reason why they've got so much popular support is because almost everyone is in the same position.
So that is a really big basis for a democratic moment for Do you want your water to be owned by the public and owned democratically?
you know, how, what all their voting history is and all of that because when
you poll people on all of these issues like do you want your water to be owned
by the public and owned democratically or do you want you know shit pumped into
your rivers, almost everyone like three-quarters of people say yeah yeah we
want that publicly owned.
If you say, should Amazon workers be paid?
Should they get the £15 an hour minimum that they're going on strike for in the UK?
Very few people go, oh no, I don't think they should be paid decently.
People don't think nurses should be getting a pay cut.
So that is the basis that you can start to bring people together.
And that doesn't make it easy.
It doesn't make it obvious.
If it were easy, it would have already happened.
But the interests of the many, as it were, are so much more aligned.
It's interesting how much work goes into keeping these divisions entrenched.
It's also fascinating working in the media space, James, to see how a figure like Bernie Sanders, who's strongly, of course, connected to the left wing, one might say, of the Democrat Party, is now Right in on Fox News, how it's conventional to see a traditional or conventional right wing space like Fox News talking about demonopolization, establishment corruption.
And we've had guests on this show from Adam Curtis to Martin Goury talk about how these labels are becoming increasingly redundant as establishment power of the in the United States of the Democrat left comes alloyed to the kind of financial interests that you know, at the time of the Iraq war would have been, we
all knew what Dick Cheney, Bush, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, we all understood, oh, what it is, is
they're agitating for conflict, then they profit from that conflict, then they profit from
the reconstruction. Similarly, and much more anecdotal and on a more parochial scale, like
I live in an area that is conventional, what you might call conservative.
That's, I guess, Republican in your language.
And we went to a sort of an anti-water protest because the water facilities where I live are owned by QA and China and various foreign investors.
And they are indeed pumping raw sewage into the rivers because it's too expensive or not profitable enough
to spend money on filtration systems that exist that would mean that it's not necessary
to pump shit into the rivers.
And it's so interesting that when you have that mentality, when you have that modality, that is where you end up.
And to agitate for change at that level, at some point you do require a political movement, don't
you?
And America don't have that in the Democrat Party, we've seen that, it's evident.
We don't have it in a Labour Party led by Keir Starmer, I wouldn't imagine.
So do you think this is a time for the organisation of new political movements and how ought they be framed, James?
The leader of Tanzania's independence, Julius Nyeri, said the US is also a one party state, but just with traditional American exuberance, they have two of them.
And we've got, you know, not exactly the same, but we've got some problems like that here.
And I think We do need big political movements, and they need to be movements of movements.
They need to bring together your people from, you know, they might vote Conservative, but they're worried about the river.
They want that to be managed properly.
They want proper water.
They don't want to be ripped off.
They don't want shit pumped into the internet.
So I think it's going to come about through bringing together Those actions that people are doing.
I think verbs are better than nouns.
If you say, I'm about this thing, then we'll sit here and we'll argue about that thing.
If we say, no, we're going to do something, we are going to stand up against our boss.
We're going to stand up against the privatised company.
We're going to stand up against health privatisation.
We're going to do something together.
Then you build trust.
Then you build alliances, then you build solidarity.
And I think once we've done some more of that, then we'll be able to have a political movement that can transform the country and go much further.
Do you think that independent media is going to become increasingly necessary?
It seems there's quite deep collaboration between most media spaces and conventional establishment-oriented politics in the manner that you described.
Two parties in a one-party state, ultimately.
What is the role and the significance of the media in disrupting these systems of governance that are becoming increasingly adept at nullifying dissent?
The media's got a long-standing role in shaping public opinion.
It's not perfect, it's not like it's completely planned by a small group of people, but they have a role in shaping public opinion and generally to the interest of the establishment.
So places that give you a way in, whether that is independent media or the openings that do open up on the mainstream corporate media, although there are not very many of them, are extremely important to take.
And also people doing things with each other.
You know, one thing is watching something and that's good because you learn.
But when you learn by doing, you learn through the experience of being part of something.
That's also how, you know, so I find people will get way more education, for example, about what's going on with the water system by going down to the protests at a river or on a beach and talking to people.
They'll feel it.
They'll know it much more deeply.
Then, of course, it's good to watch videos and read you know read books and all the rest of it that's that's great but I think if you can move people from passively finding out how the world works and how the world is generally not speaking not set up in their interest and move towards action then you get from just knowledge to actual power.
That's good Yes, and also, as you say, finding new ways to formulate alliances, not being trapped in the conveniently placed silos that prevent us from finding new ways to work together.
We've got Christian Smalls, leader of the American Amazon movement, who I feel like, and we'll check this when he comes, maybe voted for Trump at some point.
So it shows you that populism in the United States is an anti-establishment ideology, That is now appears to be coming from a surprising direction, although I know a lot of you will disagree with that.
Let me know what you think in the stream and the chat.
Now I can sense, Gareth, because I know you well, because I hear your breathing patterns change, that you want to say something.
Just as I was warming up.
A chess question with James about strategy and stuff.
No, I was just going to jump in.
I think what he said, I remember when Christian was on, and he was saying that a lot of the people that he had to kind of convince to come along with him on, you know, the unionization around Amazon were Republicans, were Trump voters, were people from all backgrounds.
He was saying that there were, you know, lots of kind of poor people he had to bring together.
Different gender identities, he was saying.
And he was saying that that was what worked in the end.
He seemed a bit mad, didn't he?
Because everyone was getting fucked over by Amazon.
But do you think that there's obviously this issue at the moment when you're talking about coming together and actually doing something, tackling some of these issues, there's obviously these protest laws that are coming in at the moment worldwide.
Is that as a kind of reaction to the kind of things that you're talking about?
Yeah, so I want to say one other thing, just to come to the protest thing.
When a system of control starts to break down, and that's what we're seeing, that's what we've been living through since 2008, the system is struggling to reproduce itself.
In the economy with debt and with consent.
People don't trust the system in the way that they used to 20, 25 years ago.
And either you can make people's, from the perspective of the system, you can make enough people's lives better that you gain consent.
Or you have to police it much more aggressively.
And obviously, they don't have any plans to make people's lives better.
So policing is going to get going to get, you know, stricter, more aggressive, shut down dissent, shut down protest.
But one thing I want to say about this, you know, left, right pop this point that you're making.
There is a difference.
And the thing you have to focus on is ultimately, is something about giving people power and making them more powerful than their allies?
Is it genuinely about the many versus the few?
Or is it a kind of phony version of it, which says, yes, no, we're on the side of the people.
But ultimately, let's take Trump.
It gives the biggest, you know, handout to corporations in the history of the US.
He says, I'm standing with the people, but then he stands basically with his billionaire mates in his actual policies.
I think that's the thing that you have to, you have to look at.
I think the thing that in the, in the, sorry, carry on.
Ultimately these things will become measurable in policy and economics.
How did these, the measures of the Trump regime, not regime, era, how did they affect your life?
Did things improve for you personally or was it more of an emotional catharsis?
I'm so fascinated in what it must have been like to live in that country during that period.
Certainly I would agree with you that the establishment are not offering solutions to the problems in your life because they don't care, because it's not a bug or an error, it's a feature.
You're going to find and follow James on Twitter at SchneiderHome.
Thank you, James, for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
We'll get to talk about chess on another occasion.
Now, we've got a fantastic Pulitzer Prize winning conspiracy theorist joining, sorry, journalist joining us in a matter of seconds.
But before we talk about the Nord Stream pipeline and how that narrative shifted, the ludicrous tricks and skullduggery that was at play during that narrative, Joe Biden's announcement, believe me, we will stop them.
We will stop them.
My chat with Jocko Willink in which he revealed Navy SEALs will be a piece of cake.
I don't think he used that phrase for them to disrupt that pipeline.
Let's get up to speed with the Nord Stream story before I bring yet another Pulitzer Prize winning journalist into your life.
Here's the news.
No, here's the effing news.
Have a look at this.
You know what they'll tell you on the mainstream media?
Russia blew up their own pipeline in an act of inconceivable, senseless, unprofitable self-destruction.
Certainly wasn't America doing it.
There are no clues or evidence to suggest that America did it.
Today's story is fantastic.
The evolution on the Nord Stream Pipeline story is a piece of reporting from a very credible Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who, get ready, is about to be called a conspiracy theorist, a whack job and condemned For whatever they can find.
Is he old?
Oh, yeah, he's old.
That's bad though, is it?
Well, is it?
Yes, because he said something that's inconvenient.
Yeah, old is bad.
The bombing of the Nord Stream underwater gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea was a covert operation ordered by the White House and carried out by the CIA, a report by a veteran investigative journalist claims.
And we all knew that anyway, because it was bloody obvious.
Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, has claimed that US deep sea divers using a NATO military exercise as a cover planted mines along the pipelines that were later detonated remotely, as Jocko Willink said when he was on our show about three months ago.
Once hailed the greatest American investigative reporter, Hirsch, 85, who broke stories such as the mass murder of 500 civilians at Mai Le in Vietnam and the torture of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, said that the black op was ordered by President Biden and that the attack was carried out by the CIA in cooperation with Norway.
Many of us were discussing this possibility just because it seemed plausible, just because it had been explicitly stated that the US had an agenda to take over trade of natural gas between Russia and Europe, that they saw that as a market that they should own.
Because Joe Biden in public said, well, I tell you, we'll blow up that pipeline.
Just because Condoleezza Rice about 20 years ago explicitly said, You simply want to change the structure of energy dependence.
You want to depend more on the North American energy platform, the tremendous bounty of oil and gas that we're finding in North America.
You want to have pipelines that don't go through Ukraine and Russia.
For years we've tried to get the Europeans to be interested in different pipeline routes.
It's time to do that.
I suppose it wouldn't be a big deal were it not for the fact that the whole thing is framed by a war that we're continually told is humanitarian when every day new evidence emerges that it is financially motivated, that Zelensky and his government have unusual financial relationships, that Ukraine is corrupt, that it was okay to say Ukraine was corrupt before the start of this war, peace deals have been suggested and then sabotaged until it's convenient and enough profit's been extracted.
It just goes on and on and on Until in the end you think, well, what is it we're being told right now that's not true?
Because we could start just adjusting a bit more quickly.
Here's a few guesses for me.
We're going to find out more stuff about the pandemic.
They're going to use new ways of introducing lockdowns and digital IDs and surveillance.
And they're going to agitate for a war with China.
Those are just some of my guesses.
Let me know your own conspiracy theorists that will just be normal news in a few months in the comments and chat below.
And as for this Seymour Hersh that Conspiracy theorist with his crackpot stories about the mass murder of 500 civilians in my lane.
Oh yeah, the Vietnam War.
Of course now we all know that was unethical.
Necessary war that wasn't a mad giddy proxy war carried out by lunatic corrupt presidents and unnecessarily draining American lives and resources and wasting the life of the good people of Vietnam.
And what about this Abu Ghraib prison?
Oh, what a lot of hocus pocus that turned out.
It's all well and good.
Complaining about conditions in Abu Ghraib, but may I ask, how are we to reform these Iraqis if we don't attach electrodes to their genitals?
So Seymour Hersh, with his crazy stories about Vietnam and Abu Ghraib, is just some sort of nutcase.
He should have his own channel on Rumble.
We're joined now by Seymour Hersh who's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who already would have seen the ineptitude of that link and probably been astonished by the standards and how they've fallen in media in the last 10 or 20 years.
We're speaking to Seymour Hersh because of his recent Substack article I'm glad to be here, I think.
Let me ask you a question.
Yes.
which of course suggests that the US involvement was contrary to their very public denial and
even why the denial itself was significant in avoiding congressional permission. It's a fantastic
piece of writing from a prize-winning journalist. It's an honor to have you, Seymour. Thanks for
joining us. I'm glad to be here, I think. Let me ask you a question. Yes. What's your hat?
It's probably attention-seeking on some level, Seymour.
I've come from the world of entertainment, probably haven't entirely let go of the idea that I'm sort of a physical representation of the radical stance that I take in my own journalism.
One journalist to another.
I don't know if the word radical is the right one, but we'll let that one stand.
Do you want me to take the hat off?
Because I'll do it out of respect for you and your prize.
I don't want to see what's there, but I will tell you something.
I was fascinated.
As I told one of your aides just a minute ago by the Condoleezza Rice quote and I'm my pay my pay for this this performance here will be somebody send me a link to that we will send that to you it's not it's it's It's you're ahead of the curve with that idea.
But that's that's been a prominent theme in the American conversations about oil.
And it is a fact that Norway which did help us has more than doubled the amount of oil natural gas rather is shipping out to Western Europe.
It had about 9 or 10 percent its way up.
And so you can't work, you can never cut out mercantile interests, but there were probably much more immediate interests of war in Ukraine, etc, etc.
But that's a fascinating point that you were making.
Anyway, so I got something out of this.
I'm happy.
Look, can you stop being so generally cynical about my hat and the entire experience of this interview?
I get something out of it.
You don't need to overplay the, I'm a well-worn journalist.
I was around during Wargate.
I've got a Pulitzer Prize.
I get it.
You're senior.
You're world weary.
You've become cynical about establishment power.
It's much more ephemeral than that.
It's just, you know, it's amusing.
The hat is amusing.
I don't think there's anything profound in me talking about it.
It's what I see.
Sir, firstly, I will credit Gareth, who makes the show with me, for his research that
led to our use of the Condoleezza Rice clip.
And our general approach is to challenge the dominant narrative that we are
given through mainstream media, which all and once was the domain of ordinary investigative media, which
seems to have become deeply sanitized in the last 20, 30 years.
Increasingly, we're seeing, whether it's Chris Hedges, or Glenn Greenwald, or yourself, journalists
that have been prized for their investigative work being, if not demonized, certainly subject to something
amounting to smears.
The White House has already denied your story.
And I'd like to ask you what you think has happened to journalism in the last 20 or 30 years,
and why we are not presented with complex narratives that undergird reporting with the kind of economic, financial,
military, and geopolitical interests that usually lead to events like the Ukraine-Russia conflict,
or indeed, an event, broadly speaking, within the remit of that narrative,
like the Nord Stream Pipeline sabotage?
Well, I think one of the problems--
look, you're asking-- you're throwing the ball to me.
You know, this is, this is all I brood about a lot because I worked at the New York Times in the seventies and, and had a great time, was never sort of blocked from writing stuff.
And it's a different world now.
I, you know, oh, come on, stop it.
The bottom line is that I think what a secret source now is for the people, many of the people who write for the major newspapers, is a press secretary who says, come over here, I'll tell you something a little different than I've told the other guys.
I just don't understand why they're not jumping on certain stories.
Certainly this story is, I could just tell you a friend of mine, I have a wonderful old friend who escaped from the Middle East, became an oil man, became very rich and very happy, living in France now.
He wrote me after this, after the story, and he said, he said, oh, oh Sai, he said, my nickname, he said, you have become a master in the deconstruction of the obvious.
I mean, what was so hard about this story?
We know Russia didn't do it, because if they wanted to, they could turn a valve.
And so, I guess, is Macedonia a member of the NATO?
Maybe they did it.
You know, where do you go for the next possible suspect?
Who is it?
It's purely us, since the president basically said it.
But the bigger question is, what's going on with journalism?
I don't know.
My old newspaper, the New York Times, to which I probably went, I did all sorts of stuff on the CIA and Watergate and Vietnam for them, hasn't touched the story.
Neither has the Washington Post, which is another two great main sheets.
I don't think the Wall Street Journal has.
The rest of the country, some people have.
It's just like a blank.
It's like, it could be.
It's as simple as we're coming off the Trump years, and we made big divisions in the media.
We're either going to be for or against Trump.
It could be the same sort of dichotomy plays out.
We're now in the Trump corner.
And if we write something critical of—we're now in the Biden corner, rather.
If we publish something critical of Biden, we might be leading ourselves open to more Republicans, the guy in Florida, etc., the scientist.
I don't know what the fear is.
But it can't just be about the fact that I don't name sources.
I spent, you know, nine years at the New York Times writing about the CIA going after Allende and going, you know, and all that stuff, killing people abroad without naming sources.
I mean, you know, either trust what I do or you don't.
Yes, I know that you also wrote about Abu Ghraib, significant revelations there, and about the mass murders in Vietnam of civilians.
And the banalization of the media space is a theme that we touch upon frequently, the infantilization of us as the audience class.
Even with the current escalation of tensions between the USA and China through the sanctions around semiconductors and of course the rather more visually stimulating and sensational story that accompanies the balloon and indeed the shooting down of the balloon.
Can I tell you about the balloons?
Can I tell you a little bit about the balloons?
Yeah!
I asked somebody about it.
I have friends.
And I said, well, what's going on with the balloons?
Of course, they've been there forever.
Maybe you could argue they could take photographs of what a satellite can see much better.
But basically, the last wave of the unnamed car like with American press so full of it.
It turns out the federal government has a contract with the meteorology department or whatever it is, weather department at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, and that is one cold place.
It's way up there.
Most of the classes are underground.
You go underground to classes.
I've spoken there.
I know about this firsthand.
And over the Arctic Circle, the Arctic Circle is a Everybody flies the polar route from Asia to America and there's no weather station there.
So the university has these little vehicles that goes and reports.
Pilots want to know if there's any unusual weather going on.
That's what you have to do.
And they are reporters of that information.
And that's what was shot down.
One of those things was shot down was one of those units that is sent up by a university but paid by the government.
To go over the Arctic Circle and report on, you know, in case there's an extreme wind.
I don't know what the cliche is when the wind goes down in a downdraft.
And since there's no official station there, who wants to be there to run a weather station?
And so they're basically a remote weather station.
That's what they shot down.
Whether they're going to talk about it in the next couple of weeks.
And we've put about, what, Honestly, I don't know how many hundreds of billions of dollars into a new fighter, the F-22, that's coming online.
We had one called the F-1.
We put $203 billion in to make about a hundred of them.
But in the 80s, so far, seven exist.
It's just, money just floats.
But we paid a lot of money for the F-22, and its first kill was the first balloon.
That one came over, was discovered over Montana.
And the pilot, and I'd like to think, That he knows exactly what he's doing.
When he landed, you know, in World War II, your guys and your Spitfires and us and our P-51s, you took care of every mish-mish.
You put a little, you painted on the side a decal for the kills.
We did the same in Asia when they are P-51s.
So the pilot of this F-22, getting the first kill of this plane, painted a balloon On the side of a socialized.
I'd love to think he was joking.
I don't know that.
I know he did it.
I don't know whether what was in the state of mind, but that's what we're reduced.
Now.
We've got to kill.
We kill the balloon and that's worth a couple couple, you know, few hundred billion dollars for a plane.
Yeah, a small price to pay for dispatching some hydrogen and some helium.
It's over-the-top, it's over-the-top crazy, that's all I can tell you.
How do you feel then about the context that has to be said frames the Nord Stream Pipeline story, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the years of infringement upon former Soviet territories, the 2014... You're not allowed to say that!
How dare you say that, that there might have been reason Behind, you know, the language used.
The language, it was done in 1990, the first agreement not to go east, but when East Germany joined West Germany, that was in NATO.
We wanted to make the combined country, and don't forget, the Germans had a real problem because after World War II, when they wanted to get back into civilization and be accepted by other countries, get into international groups like NATO, they spent a long time murdering people in Western Europe and bombing it and destroying it.
And so Willy Brandt was the guy that said, we're going to be a money bank for you guys.
We're going to be great neighbors.
We're going to trade with you.
We're going to show you we belong.
Willy Brandt did do that.
He got that started for all of his faults.
And so in 1990, when they joined, Gorbachev agreed to let this unified Germany into NATO and the price was a commitment by us in writing that I have a um I live in Washington so I know people I have a friend that has access to the classified part of the embassy and our embassy in Bonn and he ran him he went and read the cables for me there's nothing fantastic about it the language used by our Secretary of State James Baker was the equivalent the equivalent in the in the documents
The agreement we made with the Corbett shop it wasn't a treaty but it was an understanding not one inch we will not go one inch east and then we've now NATO was initially was 19 when it was set up in 69 49 rather it's now what about 170 countries Macedonia you know stuff like that I'm exaggerating but you know NATO is a far cry from what we It's not Europe anymore.
It's all over.
I don't know.
Maybe one of the tropical islands in the South Pacific will become a member of NATO next.
And so here's the Russians eating this.
Here's Putin eating this.
And then we start putting missiles in the border in Poland that we claim are defensive, but in a half a day they can be turned into offensive weapons.
There's no question about that.
It's a fact that can be just diverted.
It'll take some time, a half a day, but you can fire your seven minutes from Moscow.
And that's another reality.
So, what I hate to see in the paper, in Mildew's paper, for example, they keep on describing the Russian attack as being without provocation, unprovoked.
Well, it was really provoked.
I'm very troubled by my president and his immediate foreign national security team, Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland, whose husband He's one of the leading neocons who helped convince Dick Cheney that the solution to 9-11 and Al-Qaeda was to attack Iraq.
One of the great non-existence relations.
I mean, just so crazy.
But anyway, those three, I call them Winkum, Blinkum, and Nod.
Nod, I don't know if you have that child story there, but we have it in our country.
The first thing they do is they meet the Secretary of State in Alaska with the Chinese and start telling the Chinese what to do about their own domestic problems.
And now we push the war.
You know, I don't know things, but I know things.
The initial agreement, the initial decision To plan for the pipeline was an option for leverage for the president against Putin.
It was started a year ago, 13 months ago in December, and bled over to early this year.
And the idea was to ask the community for ideas.
I wrote about this, whether kinetic or non-kinetic, and the word was kinetic, that means we're going to hurt somebody.
And so of course it emerged, we're going to take out the pipelines.
We've been complaining about the pipelines for a dozen years.
The first one, Nord Stream 1, and the new one.
The new pipeline is interesting because the first one was cut off by Russia.
The second one was cut off by the Germans.
They put a sanction on it.
So Germany always had the chance option of opening up the pipeline anytime they wanted.
And who cares about the pipeline in summer?
But comes fall, comes winter, and that's when you're going to need it.
The Russian natural gas has been supplying Germany and Western Europe with cheap gas for, what, a dozen years, and the economy's boomed based on cheap gas.
Now, uh europe suffering it's getting cold they had a mild winter but it's getting very cold now the leading companies are all getting the price of gas is going up enormously companies like basf which is the largest chemical company in germany in the world has been talking to china about maybe moving some assets there the consequences of knocking out the pipeline economically are disastrous uh as again as you said norway's getting more gas and norway was a big player in us with the project but the key
The key thing is, when the president told the intelligence community, I want this, I want this, I want to see if I have an option, I think the thought of, in my understanding was, the thought of the community was, we're going to do what the, we do what the president wants.
That's what, that's the whole idea of having a CIA.
I mean, if you're the President of the United States right now, this guy can't get a thing through Congress.
But tomorrow, if he wants to, he can take a walk in the Rose Garden with the CIA director and somebody can get hurt the next day.
That makes you feel pretty good, particularly if you can't have your way anywhere else.
And so, I mean, that's one of the reasons I think the CIA is a very dangerous community, but full of a lot of smart people.
Anyway, it was always to be an option.
And what happened is, he didn't exercise it.
They were going to do it at one point when they had cover in the summer.
They had cover because of a, there was a big, the Baltic Sea is not, there's no oil there.
And the idea of having a bunch of deep sea divers start digging around would have been exposed any problem, any thought of getting away with taking out the pipelines.
It just would have been too obvious, too seen.
But there was an exercise, NATO exercise last summer, there's been one every summer, For 22 years now in the Baltic, and then maybe you could slide it in then.
That was the idea.
But the president didn't pull the whistle then.
In late September, he did it.
And by that time, the community itself had thought there was no reason to do it anymore.
You know, it was there as a potential threat, but he'd already started the war.
And by September, the one thing that was interesting, I've always been among a group of journalists and people in the community have been very skeptical about the chances of Ukraine to win a war against Russia.
You know, if you know the history, when in Stalingrad, when the Germans got their great defeat, the Russians were losing 2,400 dead and wounded every four hours in the final days of the battle, and one just kept on They are tough.
So far, in the war against Ukraine, I'm sure in the beginning it's correct that Putin or his generals underestimated the willingness of the Ukrainians to commit hara-kiri, as they have been.
But by September, it was clear there was real trouble.
Among other things, the corruption was so wild among the top, even including Zelensky.
They were all fighting for what percentage of the money they're going to steal.
There was a lot of fighting and brooding about that, even today.
And so it was a corrupt regime.
It never was going to be accepted in the NATO.
And it wasn't going to win the war.
And so Joe, then in late September, wants to hit.
And he gets it.
And at that point, I think there were people in the intelligence community who thought it was, at that point, that didn't make sense.
That was just crazy.
And what's he doing?
He's throwing in, for whatever he can, the fear he had was that since Germany controlled the new pipeline, Nord Stream 2, the one that was just built and was just stopped, they just finished it in 2020.
And it was full of gas even then.
The gas that came up was, it's a 750 mile pipeline from Germany all the way to near St.
Petersburg and right up near Estonia, the border with Russia and Estonia.
So the long pipeline was full of methane gas.
That's what the gas is, methane.
And anyway, and that's what bubbled up.
It wasn't pumping any, it just had, just stored there, would have been perfectly safe.
And so I guess Biden's thought was, I want to keep any possibility that the Germans and the rest of the Western Union, which is going to start getting cold, he did it in late September, will open up the pipeline and then be at the mercy of Russia.
In other words, the way they put it, that pipeline, the Russian gas, was a weapon for the Russians.
A weapon.
And once you took away that weapon, West Germany, if West Germany cannot open up the pipeline anymore, Germany rather, and the European allies of NATO, well, then they'll keep on supporting us in the war.
They won't have the option of saying, we quit.
We'd rather have Russian gas than join you in a war that you can't win.
And that's what I think the dominant thinking was.
Yes, I think you're right.
The US were incentivized by the suggestion that it created the opportunity and necessity, in fact, for harmony between Russia and Europe.
It created conditions that were not advantageous, that that solutions became evident and suggestible.
It was interesting that you touched upon Ukraine in corruption
and the current clear out that Zelensky enacted, even though in reporting from The Guardian prior to this
conflict, of course, when The Guardian's perspective on Ukraine was
radically different and much less simplistic and reductive,
they talked about Zelensky's ownership or previous ownership of offshore assets.
We know that the oligarch who's recently been ousted, who funded Zelensky's entire career, I understand it,
did have a relationship with Hunter Biden, you know, through his corporation Burisma that was paying Hunter
Biden.
It's just it's fascinating, Seymour, to speak with you with your evident experience and cruel sarcasm
when it comes to sartorial matters and hats in particular, to learn that these patterns appear to be increasing
and exacerbating over time.
A short time ago you could rely on an organisation like the New York Times for anti-establishment, radical reporting and now they are a mouthpiece of the establishment.
It's interesting that the Ukrainian conflict, you know, much of the aid that's being offered to Ukraine passes from the Pentagon through the military-industrial complex.
Many of those weapons and assets appear to be quite difficult to track.
And in the subsequent post-war reconstruction of Ukraine, BlackRock are handling that, and there is an aim for 100% digitalization of Ukraine. So it's certainly, it seems to be a nexus of a
great many stories that coalesce around corruption and globalism. A lot of people, by the
way, I will tell you Seymour, on our online chat, adore you and your casual radicalism.
Although I'm getting there's a lot of people saying you should not have said that about my hat.
So it's, I think you've had a bit of a better time than you thought you would have.
I think you've enjoyed this a little bit, haven't you?
You started off a little bit curmudgeonly in your favourite chair that only you're allowed to sit in, but over time you've warmed to us, as if being warmed by beautiful Nord Stream gas.
The only gas you can trust.
Your gas is a lot more expensive than my gas, but you also create gas.
You're good at creating gas yourself.
You're a good gas machine.
That's great.
All they need to do is fit a pipeline to my face and we could have world peace.
Well, I'll tell you one thing about you.
You know what you're talking about.
So that's very, it makes it much easier for me because you do understand what the world's, what's going on.
My only shock is really, to be honest, it was, is the, Including the press in London.
I must say the London Times was one of the few people that figured out the story I was writing had some relevance.
But most of the cheerleading for Ukraine was madness all the way in the war.
I'm sorry, it doesn't mean I love Russia.
I certainly don't want to admit to any fondness for anything in Russia.
That would make me out to be really in trouble.
I'd have to have my wife start the car for the next year, you know.
And there's so much hostility to Russia that it overrides common sense.
That's what it's done.
It's just overridden the notion that the Russian army is going to lose to Ukraine.
It's just not going to happen.
And when Biden wanted to whistleblown, blew it up, the people who in the community, we're talking about really the creme de creme, We're really appalled by it.
They saw it as him making a political, him deciding I'm going to keep Germany and Western Europe cold and broke because I want to try and win this war in Ukraine, a war that he cannot win.
The trick that you must, that I will tell you that I've learned in my long, as you said, many, many years, is presidents love wars because they're good for ratings.
All right, I got to go.
You got to go.
Put your headphones down.
Listen, I'm getting a bit sick of the level to which you're directing my outfit.
Do you want to pull in a surprise for wardrobe next?
I'll see you guys.
By the way, one thing I didn't know.
A lot of people asked me, why Substack?
Substack, I'm my own producer there.
It's an amazing place.
In other words, there was more than a million hits on that story within less than a day.
And I get all these emails from people saying, wow, here comes somebody really telling a story now.
And they're onto the media.
They are onto the media.
They're onto the idea that there's either one side or the other, there's no middle.
And that means there's no good reporting.
And so it's fascinating.
I think the economics of the newspaper business are going to change enormously in the next decade.
Yeah.
Goodbye, I've got to go to work.
This isn't work.
You can't call this work coming on being vaguely offensive, making some gas jokes.
The only thing missing is the pub and the beer.
Goodbye, talk to you later.
God bless you, Seymour Hersh.
Thank you so much.
You can find Seymour's incredible work at seymourhersh.substack.com, where as well as providing investigative journalism, cruel barbs come for free.
What I thought was that had basically the dynamic of the film Up and we were talking about balloons you know there's that that curmudgeonly old man and that little boy's called Russell in the film Up who's sort of like a little bit optimistic and stuff.
I'm optimistic.
Well but like he's obviously so brilliant Seymour Hersh and like even in the times when he was talking about all the times because they were they were the only newspaper that kind of published it in mainstream newspaper in this country and even in that they were like the veteran reporter now aged 82 like really trying to do him for like being over He's so brilliant!
I feel like we've lost the basic and positive aspects of tribe and hierarchy, i.e.
that person is an elder, so when you're talking to that person you think, oh well I'm dealing with someone I would speak respectfully to, like I would if it was in a family or community environment.
when everything becomes this sort of mindless damning of patriarchy, even though there are doubtless
corrupt things that have come from authoritative and power-oriented structures,
doesn't mean that you lose regard for wisdom.
That's how people move forward, is by like, all right, take on board what this dude's saying,
then we'll apply it to what we've learned and what people younger than us are observing
about the cultural trends and priorities of their generation.
Needs to be some cohesion.
Every direction we have, I think, like a kind of de-racination and separation,
that we're not connecting to one another, we're in good faith and in love.
There's so much antipathy that in the end, to maintain their line, they have to start dismissing people that are clearly plausible, credible, and in the case of Seymour Hersh, I would argue, quite brilliant.
And it's also like, that's the, yeah, like he was taking a piss of it, wasn't he?
He was having a laugh.
Absolutely.
sounding you out when people do that.
"Hey, what's with the hair?"
They sort of fuck with you a little bit so you respond to it.
And also that sort of feeling is like old and can't be bothered to wear it off.
"Hey, fuck you!"
With a nice attitude.
Fantastic.
Well, hey, tomorrow we've got Michael Tracy coming on the show.
He's an investigative journalist.
He'll be talking about the ongoing propaganda push for another world war, which I think, if you live on the world, isn't necessarily a good thing.
If you want to join us for the show behind the show, Stay Connected, that we make every week, as well as getting access to my new stand-up special, When It Drops, become a member of the Locals community.
They're on here right now, all of our friends on Locals.
Look at what they're saying.
Look, oh, they want us to talk about football.
Some people want me to be president, although some people like you as well, Gareth.
Oh, right.
I could be your press secretary.
I could be your press secretary. I could do this a lot.
Yeah, do that. If you wiggle your fingers around, it'll be great for everybody.
People talking about, yeah, Zahex 3133, "Why doesn't Russell get the Nobel Peace Prize?"
I think you speak for millions when you say that, Zahex 31333.
All right then, hey, why don't you sign up to our Locals community?
We'll read your comments out during the show and you'll get access to all of this additional content.
