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March 21, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand

01:08:20

It Begins: China’s New World Order - #095 - Stay Free With Russell Brand

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	So, we're going to go ahead and get started.
	So, I'm going to start off by saying that I'm a black man.
	I'm a black man.
	Brought to you by Pfizer.
	In this video, you're going to see the future.
	Hey, Awakening Wonders, thanks for watching.
	Stay free with me, Russell Brand, and my on-screen assistant, Mr. Gareth Roy.
	If you want to watch the whole show, you can only watch it on Rumble, of course, because some of the stuff we say, I must confess, can be a little edgy on the free speech front.
	Not because we're kowtowing to right-wing conspiracy theorists, not because we See, hate speech is some divine right, but because we believe that together the people of the world can confront centralised corrupt authority and create a better world together.
	Let us know what you think in the comments and the chat because we're doing this live right now for you.
	We've got a fantastic show.
	We've got a Harvard professor coming on the show.
	Of course we have.
	What have you done with your life?
	He's the professor of government and press at Harvard University.
	We're going to be talking about the use of Trump by the mainstream media in light of Trump's forthcoming potential arrest.
	Will it happen?
	Will DeSantis save the day?
	Will he go back to New York?
	It's a complicated arrest.
	If you're arresting Trump, have you got to arrest Hillary?
	If Putin's a war criminal, is Biden a war criminal?
	Well, if you look at the simple facts, the answer to that question is yes!
	Yes!
	If you care about people being killed illegally in wars, then yes, but you know what the world's like, and you know how we are deluged with propaganda to such a degree that it's almost impossible to remain connected to truth, because they want you numb.
	They want you distracted.
	They want you in the role of a solely a consumer and a subject, not an awakened citizen that you are becoming right now before our very eyes, because we're doing it together as equals.
	Different, but equal.
	Glorious together.
	Once we flip over to being just on Rumble, guess what we're going to have the nerve to do?
	We're going to talk about vaccine side effect censorship.
	That's what we'll do.
	Won't do it on YouTube, will we, Gareth?
	We can't.
	We're not mad.
	We're not lunatics.
	We don't want any strikes.
	We don't mean that stuff.
	We don't want to have the same kind of criticism Matt Taibbi had, do we?
	That so-called journalist... Well, I'm not a so-called journalist.
	I'm a hard-working journalist.
	I may sound like him, but Bill and Ted are actually an adventure.
	I actually can't access the depth that... You know, like, Matt Taibbi's voice is... You know that voice when you're a kid and maybe you're a little bit high, and you go, uh... On suites, you mean, because we're on YouTube.
	Oh, yeah, that sort of high on a simple saccharine.
	Uh, uh, uh... Like that.
	His whole voice is coming from that, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	We love him.
	I love it, mate.
	God, this is an attack on so-called journalist Matt Tobey.
	He's coming on the show next week.
	He's fantastic.
	We really think he's brilliant.
	Those conversations with Matt Tobey, Glenn Greenwald, Barry Weiss, Cornel West, they're conversations that make me think, actually, no, we're right!
	You know, because sometimes I think, oh no, have we gone mad?
	Have we actually gone mad?
	Is the establishment really good?
	Are they not operating at the behest of corporations?
	Is the military-industrial complex not benefiting from this war?
	Did the pharmaceutical industry not benefit from the pandemic?
	Are they not using crisis to double down on authority?
	Is it us?
	Are we the problem for awakening?
	Was Neo the problem in the Matrix?
	In their version of reality, Neo's the baddie, isn't it?
	Of course he is.
	And Morpheus!
	All those guys that we love so much from the very end of the 90s there or the beginning of 2000.
	I can't remember the dates.
	That's not your job.
	It's not my job to remember that.
	I've got enough on my plate.
	I know you are.
	Choosing an illuminous hat and a nice piece of tomfoolery jewellery is enough for me on a day like today.
	Hey, there's some novel protest ideas emerging.
	Trump supporters plan a run on banks.
	And I bet people are condemning them for that.
	How dare they do a run on banks?
	You can't do a run on banks!
	You're not a Silicon Valley billionaire!
	A run on banks must be orchestrated by hedge funders and fat cats!
	Have you got a truck?
	Did you watch the Dukes of Hazzard?
	Are you a Trump supporter?
	Don't you dare do a run on a bank!
	Well, if you do that, then the taxpayers are certainly not going to make up the difference.
	Just like in... Oh no!
	Oh no!
	The taxpayers always make up the difference, whether it's directly or tangentially, through bank fees and yet more trickery.
	What's this about Western government CBDCs?
	Oh yeah, of course, I suppose.
	You were very keen to talk about this, Gareth, for reasons I've never fully understood.
	What is it, mate?
	Well, no, it's just an interesting thing that's going on at the moment.
	There's kind of a lot of talk about the cashless society that we're heading towards, and Western governments are increasingly looking at now something that we did a story about going on in China, the digital yuan, that is, they're contemplating Uh, becoming expiring.
	So basically, people have to spend money at a certain point.
	So in this situation, and I'm not going to pretend I really fully understand it, but the European Central Bank is considering using negative interest rates, a tool that erodes the value of money.
	So basically, if they bring it down by 10%, the value of what you have is worth 10% less, encouraging you to then spend it.
	So it's the use of interest rates.
	After all that hard work to get cash out of our pockets.
	I see.
	So once they can control currency, they can control us yet further.
	Yeah, and I suppose when we're talking at a time when Trump supporters are saying, let's do a run on the banks, because at this point... We won't be able to do a run on the banks.
	If you're not in charge of your own money, then it'll be more like Canada.
	It'll be... Is that what we want for the world?
	More like Canada?
	I don't mean normal Canada, I mean when the Trump protest happens.
	I understand what you're saying, mate.
	I understand what you're saying.
	So, actually, none of this stuff is what I want to talk about.
	I want to have a look at this bit of ABC News where they're talking about Z and Putin.
	She, they've changed the pronunciation of that.
	To she now.
	Well who knows, maybe it was always that.
	Was it always she and we just didn't know about that.
	Potentially that's something we could have been denied access to.
	And we're going to be talking about the nature of propaganda
	off the back of this because this is our old friend off ABC sideways head newscaster.
	I like him very much.
	He will not face the front.
	Is it facial disfiguration?
	Is it a mole?
	What is the reason he won't show us that side of his head?
	Maybe it's like a good luck charm or something.
	I like to do... I take a sideways look at the news, quite literally, by keeping my head always slightly cocked to the side.
	Have a listen to how loaded with propaganda This piece of news reporting is.
	Every single word in it has some form of bias in it.
	Have a look.
	It's amazing.
	We're going to turn now to Russia tonight.
	China's President Xi arriving for... Actually, already, before we've even said anything, the dear friend is in quotation marks.
	Like, look at that graphic.
	Oh, friends are you?
	Putin and Xi, kissing in a tree, trying to make a peace treaty.
	They're actually trying to work out a peace plan.
	Now, I'm not naive enough.
	Only just not naive enough.
	I'm nearly naive enough.
	To believe that China and Russia don't have their own multipolar global objectives, that they don't have their own agenda, their own forms of imperialism, their own forms of power.
	Whatever's going on between Russia and Ukraine, it certainly isn't benefiting Ukrainian people much.
	Whatever's going on in Taiwan, Taiwanese people are better sick and tired of it.
	The fact is though, from the get-go, our propaganda, with all its sideways head slickness, It's just as culpable as the type of propaganda you would receive in those nations.
	I'm speculating because I've not been to either of them, though.
	Would you go to China?
	I certainly would.
	I'd love it.
	And Russia?
	Yeah, give it a go.
	See Snowden?
	Absolutely.
	See all the other dissidents?
	See all your dissident buddies?
	A three-day summit in Moscow with his so-called peace plan.
	So-called peace plan, huh?
	What kind of a peace plan is this?
	It's not a peace plan for peace.
	Like, what kind of Orwellian nightmare are we inhabiting where a peace plan is looked upon with such disdain, with such contempt?
	Even though China have brokered a peace deal, haven't they?
	We'll be talking about this more later in the week, between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
	So, China are good at generating peace.
	Again, we're not saying, China are great!
	I wish I was from China!
	What we're saying is that there's potentially alternative narratives available.
	This is the first visit since Russia invaded Ukraine.
	The images tonight, you can see she given the red carpet treatments.
	They always have a red carpet for like a visit in dignitary.
	That's standard, isn't it?
	What do you want him to do?
	Act like President Xi.
	Alright mate, you can come around the back of the chip shop.
	Like a busy president.
	Like coming to Russia.
	Oh, look at that red carpet.
	Well, I didn't get a red carpet.
	Well, maybe if you'd rotate your head to the front, we would give you one.
	There might be one right there.
	You'd never know.
	Serenaded as well.
	Serenaded is a very deliberate word.
	Like, they just add a military band.
	Serenaded.
	Look at the definition of the word serenade.
	A piece of music sung or played in open air, typically by a man at night under the window of his beloved.
	Is that what you're saying is going on?
	Well, they're saying it's a peace treaty.
	If it is indeed a peace treaty, and I'm saying that it isn't one, then why exactly is Putin underneath Xi's balcony with a rose clenched between his teeth, singing, I love you, baby, up there at President Xi?
	I don't think he is doing that.
	I think you're using... No, he is.
	No, he is.
	It's a serenade, remember.
	It's a serenade.
	Vladimir Putin then welcoming his, quote, dear friend of the Kremlin.
	There can be... I mean, look, I'm sure that this is a politically expedient relationship in order to confront American hegemony and the obvious unipolar project of globalists, whether that's in the form of unelected bodies like the IMF and WHO or ongoing American imperialism acting at the behest of corporatism, not on behalf of you, the American people.
	The very people we need to ally with right now, the very people that we need to participate in awakening alongside, recognising our own flaws and recognising that we can create better principles together.
	There isn't just one form of reality that ought to be imposed.
	And that's what you notice when you look at the language in this ordinary, banal news reporting, is that there are a set of assumptions that come with it.
	For example, in a minute, towards the end, they talk about the global balance of power.
	Even there, the assumption is that power belongs in a certain place.
	It reminds me of a moment in the life of Gandhi, from the film Gandhi, because I'm not pretending that I was in a university studying Gandhi's life.
	But there's a bit where the Viceroy of India, or whatever, goes to Gandhi.
	Yes, but India is British.
	And Gandhi's like, No!
	We were here for ages and that!
	No, but come on!
	We're making it better!
	I suppose that's what imperialism and colonialism of this nature require.
	Or indeed authoritarianism.
	Let us know in the chat if you agree that they actually assume that they're doing what's best.
	This is right.
	Shut up.
	Do as you're told.
	And they do it the way they talk to us.
	They do it with international diplomacy, foreign invasions, all of it.
	It's just shut up.
	We know what's right.
	And I actually am starting to think they don't know what's right.
	Yeah, the news should be facts, shouldn't it?
	Basically.
	You do have to take kind of opinion out of it, and although it doesn't look on the surface like this is opinion, there are subtle elements of this which is guiding you in a certain direction.
	You're quite right.
	It's loaded with opinion, poised and positioned as fact.
	I'm offering this challenge to you, ABC Man.
	Tomorrow night, I want you to do the news like this, right?
	Just as a challenge, use the other side of your head, and everything you say, think, hold on a minute, that might not be true.
	Just consider it.
	Isn't it?
	Yeah, momentarily.
	Just for a moment, just give it a go.
	It's been two meetings for more than four hours, and of course the question remains tonight, will China... Four hours?
	If you're talking about a world peace deal, it's like, is the implication that it shouldn't have took that long?
	Yeah.
	They were talking about the, it's not like a bagatelle to discuss solving a geopolitical conflict that involves resources, NATO impingement, Russian imperialism, the complexity of Ukrainian politics and some of its Influences, shall we call it.
	There's a lot to talk about.
	What are they meant to do it in like 25 seconds?
	They help Russia in this war in Ukraine.
	The White House tonight pressed... So that was speculation of whether or not China are going to help Russia in this war.
	We don't know, because the stated objective of China at this point, for all we know, and obviously you've already stated the caveats there, was to broker a peace deal.
	And on the news they're saying, are China going to help Russia?
	That's speculation.
	Part of the tyranny is the assumption that everything said by the centralised authority that coalesces around US corporate power is said in good faith and should be taken in the most favourable terms, and everything they say should be taken in the most negative terms.
	Oh, well, they're saying it's a piece still, but they're probably going to team up.
	For all I know it, one of them will clutch me by my chin and rotate my head 45 degrees this way.
	I won't do that!
	Not on ABC News, baby!
	I'll talk out of the side of my mouth if I have to.
	On that, given this meeting in Moscow and ABC's Tom Soufy Burridge in Ukraine again tonight.
	Tonight, Vladimir Putin rolling out the red carpet.
	Do men have a red carpet?
	it's standard semiotics.
	For China's President Xi, kicking off a three-day state visit.
	Xi arriving with a peace plan on his first trip to Moscow since Russia invaded Ukraine.
	China and Russia saying their relationship is entering a new era.
	The world's most powerful autocrats greeting each other with smiles, meeting inside.
	Democrats as well.
	Like, again, the implication being that we live in... Joe Biden, everything he does is driven by you.
	Joe Biden don't take a poop without making sure that you agree to it democratically.
	Also, this is one of those moments where I think the news does just do unnecessary facts, like greeting each other with smiles.
	That's just like telling us what we're seeing at this point.
	Buy that golden clock thing and that flower arrangement.
	Look at it there, the little communist.
	Yeah, they're like loading everything with needless commentary.
	...the Kremlin for more than four hours as they... It's trying to bring about world peace or deal with a complicated situation.
	Four hours isn't the problem.
	...to challenge the West as they aim to potentially shift the global balance of power to their favour.
	So there you are.
	The assumption is that the global balance of power has to remain how it is.
	That is almost the very definition of hegemony.
	The presumption of divine right.
	Of manifest destiny.
	Of the idea that this is how power is.
	India is British.
	America is the most powerful country in the world.
	And we're not even talking about American people, are we?
	We're talking about American corporate interests.
	A bunch of institutions that are global and don't respond to democracy in the way that we would have it.
	That, what we just watched there, was propaganda.
	Every single opportunity to make stuff more incendiary, to smear it, to colour it negatively, was taken.
	From the red carpet, to the four hours, to the pageantry and the ridiculous serenade.
	What should it have been?
	Today, President Xi arrived in Russia round the back of an old chip shop.
	He walked across broken glass and dog shit, where for behind some bins and trash cans for 25 seconds, the future of humanity was discussed while washing down a cup of cold spit.
	That wouldn't be a better way of presenting the story.
	And what we have to be aware of is this is propaganda, particularly if you look at,
	let's have a look at Bertrand Russell's speculation on propaganda first,
	and then indeed Chomsky's, before we flip over to being exclusively on Rumble,
	showing you Matt Taibbi's revelations around censorship, another aspect of state control,
	propaganda around the information you do receive, censorship of information they don't want you to have,
	smearing of dissenting voices.
	These things are surely all diagnostics of how corrupted power operates.
	This is from Bertie Bertie Russell.
	Your name's an anagram of my name.
	Your name's an anagram of my name.
	Bertie Bertie Russell.
	I think the subject will be of most importance politically is mass psychology.
	Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda.
	Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class.
	The populace Will not be allowed to know how its convictions are generated.
	Follow the science.
	Which science?
	Is science a subset of the system?
	Are all possible scientific inquiries being pursued vigilantly?
	Are there forms of bias evident in the science?
	Are social media organisations being corrupted, infiltrated by the deep state?
	Is information being censored?
	All valid questions, Gal?
	Yeah absolutely and it's really interesting because we've got Thomas Paterson, Professor Thomas Paterson coming on later and one of the quotes I literally read before we came on air was, reporters these days give equal weight to facts and biased opinions.
	But is that what he says?
	He literally says the same thing.
	And this guy's a Harvard professor.
	This ain't someone we've dragged out of the street, some snot-covered ragbag.
	This is a professor from Harvard!
	Right.
	This is from Chomsky.
	There are growing domestic and social and economic problems.
	In fact, maybe catastrophes.
	Note that we are living in a time of perpetual crisis.
	We lurch from one to another, and perhaps that's been happening since 9-11.
	Let me know in the chat in the comments if you think we live in this state of perpetual anxiety and fear and crisis, and these crises are used to generate regulations and opportunities for profit that they wouldn't otherwise get.
	You know what I mean by they?
	Institutions, whether they're state or corporate.
	Maybe catastrophes.
	Nobody in power, check this, has any intention of doing anything about these social and economic problems.
	If you look at the domestic programs of the administrations of the past 10 years, I include here the democratic opposition, there's really no serious proposal about what to do about the severe problems of health, Education, homelessness, joblessness, crime, soaring criminal populations, jails, deterioration in the inner cities, the whole raft of problems.
	In such circumstances, you've got to divert the bewildered herd, because if they start noticing this, they may not like it, since they're the ones suffering from it.
	Just having them watch the Super Bowl and the sitcoms may not be enough.
	You have to whip them up into fear of enemies.
	In the 1930s, Hitler whipped them into fear of the Jews and the gypsies.
	You had to crush them to defend yourselves.
	We have our ways too.
	Over the last 10 years, every year or two, some major monster is constructed that we have to defend ourselves against.
	Professor Chomsky, one of the most prevalent voices of the left, presumably that was prior to the pandemic. In a minute we're going to flick over to
	being exclusively on Rumble, so if you're watching this elsewhere there's a link in the
	description because in a minute I'm going to start saying stuff aren't I Gareth? Of course you
	are. I'm going to start using free speech. I can't hold you back. I shall use free speech like
	a weapon by Jove if that's what's required. And even ordinary media like ABC, old side face,
	you recognise that it's laden with Everything they're saying, four hours, red carpet.
	It should sound a bit like this.
	Xi and Putin are meeting.
	They've got their own imperial project, presumably, but they are saying they're talking about peace.
	Recently, China did broker a peace deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
	Ultimately, this has to be peacefully resolved.
	Wouldn't that be Preferable, or do you believe there's a possible solution where Russia are annihilated, stymied, castrated, or do you think that a nuclear superpower with a rich military history and a deep, deep belief in their own vitality are likely to be subjugated by anything other than nuclear annihilation, which wouldn't be any... That's what the sensible... No audition for ABC.
	Yeah, but I am going to look straight down the barrel.
	Right, I see.
	Although I could show you this little guy.
	Side profile.
	Come on, get me on there.
	All right, should we just go on to Rumble now and talk about Matt Taibbi's Virality Project?
	You're not going to believe this.
	They had a whole brand.
	They had a whole brand with its own little logo.
	And probably a little company slogan and song, and maybe a mascot, around controlling and preventing us from accessing truthful information.
	They admit, this is part of the Twitter files, they kept truthful information back.
	So not misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, although malinformation is true information that we don't like, isn't it?
	Lacking context.
	Hold on a minute.
	That context makes it look like we're manipulating you.
	We're going to click over to Rumble now.
	Join us there.
	So look at this.
	This is Matt Taibbi on this.
	The great COVID-19 lie machine.
	Stanford, the virality project and the censorship of true stories.
	I mean, the very fact, Gareth, that they got themselves a logo.
	What are they up to?
	Why did they have a logo?
	What's the logo look like to you?
	They've got that sort of weird DNA structure around them.
	It's all that kind of connective web that's going on there that kind of really starts to inform you as to the way that they did this, because it was exactly that.
	Even their logo's got a web of deceit coagulating around it in real time.
	What are some of the revelations?
	Look at this.
	The US government helped launch a project where truthful content about vaccine side effects was flagged for censorship.
	So not untrue things.
	Not lies, not hysteria, not propaganda, not the pandemic of the unvaccinated.
	Truthful content about vaccine side effects was flagged for censorship.
	Matt Taibbi's latest Twitter file revelations, that so-called journalist, have shown how the United States federal government helped to launch the Virality Project, where six big tech companies and a coalition of research agencies partnered to mass monitor COVID-related content and flag millions of factually correct posts for censorship each day, according to a new Internal Twitter documents.
	They were censoring truthful information because it was inconvenient for their agenda.
	Let's have a look at some of the criteria for content that they would censor.
	The way that Taibe came about it, when he was going through all these emails, he noted that Twitter employees started to echo some of the Reality Project's language.
	So he started to say in the emails, hang on, they're talking about the same things that they are in here.
	And it just became, I guess, too much of a coincidence at this point.
	Right, too much of a coincidence.
	That's called journalism.
	He did some investigation.
	When you're spotting patterns and things.
	Wait a minute, hang on a second, what's going on here?
	Like when even when we saw with the with that downed drone above the Black Sea,
	numerous mainstream outlets used words like harassment and peculiar,
	peculiar nomenclature emerged, suggesting that it's coming from a centralized source.
	We all know that there are press releases by the Pentagon or the White House or whatever.
	But the fact that they use unusual words for me suggests that the messaging has gone
	beyond objective reporting and is actually now parroting, parroting, which is a type of propaganda, I'd say.
	So here are some of the types of truthful content that were flagged.
	So these things are all true.
	Wouldn't be able to say them on YouTube.
	That's why we're only on Rumble.
	We're here to tell you the truth so you can make your own mind up,
	come to your own conclusions, make your own decisions.
	The vaccine passport narrative, which the virality project claims had driven a larger anti
	vaccination vaccination narrative about the loss of rights and freedom.
	So they they censored stuff about that, even though it was true.
	Yeah well we know we know what's happened with vaccine passports and obviously like since we know about natural immunity and things like that we know that obviously vaccine passports you know... What's the point?
	What's the point in proving someone's got a vaccine if someone's naturally immune?
	But also we know that vaccine passports one of the dangers at the time when people are talking about is hang on isn't this going to be used to control people in in the future and we know now that some of the technology that was used within vaccine passports is now just being reused for a new digital ID that's going to perform in
	similar ways.
	I feel like 55 million people were spied on or that data was used, utilised, mobilised,
	used in ways that was not explicitly declared at the advent.
	So that's, you know, also concerning.
	True stories of people experiencing blood clots after receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine, yeah.
	In real time, we in England, because it was an English thing, I think, AstraZeneca came out of Oxford, didn't it?
	They were like, we've got one, it came out of Oxford, it's the best vaccine yet.
	Listen, no one mentioned that anymore, that's gone away, that vaccine, and we don't want to discuss why, and just don't ask.
	Again, those things did happen.
	You can actually read that in mainstream media.
	It was rare, but you could read that people experienced blood clots after receiving that vaccine.
	So to delete that from the conversation is irresponsible.
	Absolutely it's irresponsible and it does make you inquire when there's been a 30% increase
	in myocarditis and heart disease in young people, oh is there a connection?
	Should that be investigated?
	The same people that made these decisions are making those decisions.
	The conjecture is a necessary response to the propaganda and the censorship.
	You can't condemn people for saying, hey are there some connections between this raft
	of peculiar and authoritarian decisions.
	It gets harder and harder to take their measures in good faith.
	The narrative around natural immunity.
	They were saying that natural immunity was not effective.
	Discussions of breakthrough infections.
	Suggestion that COVID-19 leaked from a lab.
	My God, they're still at that one, aren't they?
	They're still introducing the crazy old dingo dog and raccoon boy and Ricky Shitmouse in order to distract people.
	They're coming up with new animals in order to distract people.
	Oh, well, anything what could have happened is Ricky Shitmouse, part mouse, part human turd, could have escaped from the Wuhan lab and ran down that wet market.
	We've got a Harvard professor watching this.
	Sir, thank you for joining us from Harvard.
	You honor us.
	We'd like to ask you first of all, Ricky Shitmouse, is he a real mouse?
	And is he even really shit?
	Content that increased distrust.
	The whole thing's increasing distrust.
	And then director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
	Stories about surveillance states, worrisome jokes.
	I bet we got censored for worrisome jokes.
	Certainly.
	I mean, what is worrisome?
	Worrisome?
	What could be so broad?
	That's worrisome.
	And also, who's making that show?
	It's like Mark Twain's concerns.
	That's worrisome!
	Oh, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer made their way down the river.
	It was worrisome for all time.
	I ain't painting that fence!
	N-word?
	Mmm?
	Twain?
	It was them days.
	Them was the days.
	Twain didn't know what he was doing, did he, with his contemporarily appropriate racism.
	Worrisome racism, I'd call it.
	What were you talking about in our look at the news?
	Here's the news?
	No, here's the effing news.
	Only Mr Donald Trump.
	Ah, this is good, because yesterday we spoke at some length about the requirement for moral authority that arresting Donald Trump requires, and also that the ICC want to arrest Vladimir Putin for war crimes.
	If you take the position that Trump ought be arrested for the misuse of campaign funds and that it could potentially have affected the outcome of an election, similarly you'd have to investigate, as you lot know, Hillary Clinton for the Steele dossier.
	If Putin is a war criminal, and from the evidence I've seen he is, then I'm afraid to say there are some other war criminals who might... Quite a lot of them, and some of them are running countries.
	Big countries!
	America, the biggest of countries when it comes to the whole cultural freight.
	Here's the news.
	No.
	No, no, no.
	Here's the effing news.
	Here's the news.
	No.
	Here's the fucking news!
	Trump is going to be arrested.
	Putin is going to be arrested.
	I hope the people doing these arrests have the moral authority to undertake these arrests and aren't basically criminals themselves.
	Donald Trump has announced that he's going to be arrested.
	First, he said it would definitely be on Tuesday.
	Then he said it might not be on Tuesday.
	And the ICC have issued a warrant to arrest Vladimir Putin.
	Two leaders that have previously been in that situation are the Sudanese leader, who's in all sorts of tricky situations currently, and Colonel Gaddafi, who's now stone dead.
	The important question, of course, is who has the moral authority to exact and enact these arrests?
	What is the central body that's able to say, you, Donald Trump, you're under arrest.
	To have that authority, it means you would have to be in a position yourselves that is transcendent of, at very least, the crimes that Donald Trump has himself allegedly committed.
	So let's have a look at what's being alleged, and let's have a look at who's alleging it, and let's see who's conducting this process, and if there's any legitimacy to their claims, and if they have the right to undertake this process if they themselves are similarly guilty of comparable transgressions.
	Former President Donald Trump making new headlines as he uses his social media platform to claim that his arrest is imminent.
	Now, of course, what is being alleged is that Trump paid Stormy Daniels money to keep quiet in the build up to the 2016 election.
	Loads of you will already be tapping away in those comments.
	Hunter Biden's lying!
	So let's continue to look at this story and unpack the details of what specifically is criminal about what Trump's done.
	And is it about an investigation in order to sort of solve some moral or potentially criminal quandary?
	Or is it about delegitimizing Trump's 2024 presidential bid?
	Former President Trump taking to his social media app Saturday, claiming he will be arrested on Tuesday.
	He's still got it, any Trump.
	He's still got the ability to stir up a story.
	He's also still got the ability to stir up a storm.
	That's part of the problem, apparently.
	Former Trump administration official John Bolton saying the call has echoes of January 6th.
	If he's calling people into the streets, this time he's seen the experience of January the 6th, and I think this is potentially very dangerous.
	This is a fascinating story in so many ways.
	A kind of new mythology appears to be being forged.
	January the 6th, insurrection, anti-establishment rhetoric.
	However significant all of this stuff is, and I'll leave it to you to determine how important it is, perhaps your opinions vary.
	What it is not going to do is address the function and ability to legislate of centralised power.
	To a degree, this is a sideshow.
	To a degree, when you're thinking about this stuff, what you're not thinking about is, how is my community going to be organised?
	What's going to be done about the cost of living crisis?
	What's going to be done about this escalating conflict?
	What are we going to do about this breakdown of our social fabric?
	It's of course interesting when figures like Trump are in the centre of the news cycle, but it's I think really important that we maintain a connection to some true ethical values.
	If we have any connection or understanding of ethics at all, we can see that the Democratic Party are guilty of comparable transgressions, which we'll go into in more detail.
	So that shows me that, once again, this is another one of those stories where neither party are significantly different from one another.
	And there is no centralised force that has the authority to arrest Trump or arrest Putin because they have no legitimacy.
	This after a pivotal week in the criminal investigation, Daniels meeting with Manhattan
	prosecutors and former Trump attorney Michael Cohen testifying for about five hours in front
	of a grand jury about that alleged hush money payment.
	Law enforcement agencies are preparing for a possible indictment of Mr. Trump as early
	as next week NBC News reports.
	The grand jury in Manhattan has been hearing from witnesses including former Trump lawyer
	Michael Cohen who says he orchestrated payments to the women to silence them about sexual
	encounters they said they had with Mr Trump a decade earlier.
	Mr. Cohen claimed Mr. Trump directed him to make payments worth $280,000 to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, something the former president denied.
	Okay, so this is by Jonathan Turley, professor of public interest law at the George Washington University.
	While we still do not know the specific state charges in the anticipated indictment, the most discussed would fall under Section 175 for falsifying business records based on the claim that Trump used legal expenses to conceal the alleged hush payments that were supposedly used to violate federal election laws.
	While some legal experts have insisted such concealment is clearly a criminal matter that must be charged, they were conspicuously silent when Hillary Clinton faced a not dissimilar campaign finance allegation.
	So here we're going to unpack the similarities between presumed charges that Trump might face and the allegations already made about the Clinton campaign.
	Last year, the Federal Election Commission fined the Clinton campaign for funding the Steele dossier as a legal expense.
	Okay, so they were found guilty of doing that because they were fined.
	The campaign had previously denied funding the dossier, which was used to push false Russia collusion claims against Trump in 2016, and it buried the funding in the campaign's legal budget.
	Yet there was no hue and cry for this type of prosecution in Washington or New York.
	What you've got to ask then is where is power centralised and what decisions are being made?
	Why is this instance being pursued and investigated and prosecution being made on this basis while in this instance, the Democrat Party instance, a fine was issued?
	Now this is obviously speculative because I can't obviously know, but it seems like
	whatever Trump is, his interests are not in alignment with those forces.
	Because if those forces were neutral, they would be prosecuting in both instances.
	They have selected not to.
	I'm sure you could get someone on a talking head like Cleon, MSNBC or whatever saying
	oh these are the distinctions, this is why it's different.
	But doesn't it seem at this point that centralised establishment power is more in alignment with
	figures like Clinton and Biden and Obama than it is with peculiar outliers like Donald Trump
	And once again, I'm not a person who would ever vote for Donald Trump or believes that Donald Trump is the solution.
	But what's clear is that Donald Trump is some sort of antagonist to centralised power.
	That money and time is being spent on indicting Donald Trump that isn't being spent on indicting the Democratic Party.
	That is a difference.
	What does that difference tell you?
	A section 175 charge would normally be a misdemeanour.
	The only way to convert it into a Class E felony requires a showing that the intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.
	That other crime would appear to be the federal election violations which the Justice Department previously declined to charge.
	The damage to the legal system is immense whenever political pressure overwhelms prosecutorial judgement.
	The criminal justice system can be a terrible weapon when used for political purposes, an all too familiar spectacle in countries where political foes can be targeted by the party in power.
	That means Trump is blameless or should not be charged in other cases.
	However, we seem to be on the verge of watching a prosecution by plebiscite in this case.
	The season opener of America's Got Trump might be a guaranteed hit with his New York audience, but it should be a flop as a prosecution.
	So all that journalist is analysing is the similarities between the two cases and the difference in the action taken.
	So obviously you will be watching this with your own personal feelings about Trump, for good or for ill, and Clinton the same.
	But what this dude is all about is, hold on a minute, These things are basically the same.
	It's a misdemeanor unless there can be an established intent to defraud the electoral system.
	So it doesn't seem like it's an appropriate charge.
	What Trump has done is brought all of this to the forefront using his panache around public relations that no one would query.
	But what I would say is this demonstrates to us where centralised authority lies because in the difference we can make an evaluation.
	If you had two children, they did basically the same thing and you treated them differently, what would that tell us about you as a parent?
	Probably it'd tell you that you are a normal parent and you're knackered and totally exhausted and sick and tired of dealing with them.
	Why can't their grandparents take them?
	We've seen what the tendency and preferences on the level of the nation of the United States of America.
	But there's, by brilliant coincidence, a comparable case taking place on the global stage.
	The ICC has issued an arrest for Vladimir Putin for war crimes.
	And for all I know, Vladimir Putin is a war criminal.
	Certainly, I think it's dreadful that all those Ukrainian people have been bombed and killed and had their lives
	destroyed as a result of Russia's imperatives.
	Although, you know elsewhere, we've talked about the complexity of that narrative and how we found ourselves in
	that situation.
	Nevertheless, I'm happy for Putin to be tried as a war criminal.
	But why Putin specifically?
	Why just Putin?
	Are there other people that have behaved in a comparable way?
	Is there any evidence being withheld, for example, by the United States?
	Because to reveal that evidence would demonstrate that they themselves have behaved exactly the same way and all sorts of American presidents will be up before the ICC.
	Let's have a look at the story.
	And remember, what this brings to the forefront is a lack of moral authority anywhere.
	There's nobody that you can trust.
	That's not our fault for giving counter-narratives.
	That doesn't make us conspiracy theorists.
	What happens is, is when people point out, hey, this seems corrupt, oh, conspiracy theorists.
	That's what happens because they can't answer the question, so they smear the questioner.
	Welcome back.
	The International Criminal Court, the ICC, issued an arrest warrant today for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
	It accuses him of war crimes and for overseeing the forced deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia.
	If that's true, I'd agree that's a war crime.
	No problem with that.
	We're certainly not friends of Putin on this show.
	We're just trying to tell stories in an open, transparent way.
	A Kremlin spokesperson called the warrant outrageous, but also null and void, since Russia withdrew from the ICC in 2016.
	I hereby declare that you are kicked out of the Cub Scouts forevermore!
	I have left the Cub Scouts some time ago, and I will blow up your Scout Hut.
	Sir, I'm going to blow this whistle on the count of three.
	OK, so once again, this is a question about legitimacy and the imposition of a singular narrative.
	The idea that Trump is uniquely bad is a singular narrative that has to discount comparable behaviour by the Democrat Party.
	And now this story, this narrative, requires that we discount American foreign policy, probably as far back as the Second World War.
	And just in case you think I'm biased, the Brits ain't no great shakes when it comes to invading other countries either.
	The Pentagon is helping to shield Russia from international criminal court accountability.
	That seems weird because I thought we were in a proxy war with them.
	Why would they be shielding them?
	For its atrocities in Ukraine, fearing such a reckoning could set a precedent allowing the tribunal to prosecute US war crimes, a report published Wednesday revealed.
	Excuse me, could you help us prosecute Russia?
	We're going to need all of your information about their illegal wars, claiming there's weapons of mass destruction, invading countries that are sovereign nations without due process through the UN.
	Oh, well, do you know, actually, I can't find any of those files.
	All of those files, sadly, were a lot.
	Do you know who we should blame?
	Julian Assange is a bad guy.
	And that Edward Snowden, what a fucking traitor.
	According to the New York Times, Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin III and other Pentagon brass are blocking the Biden administration from sharing evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine gathered by US intelligence agencies with the International Criminal Court over the objections of officials in those agencies as well as in the State and Justice Departments.
	Neither Russia, the United States, nor Ukraine are party to the Rome Statute, the treaty governing the ICC.
	However, according to the current and former officials briefed on the matter who were interviewed by the Times, Austin and others are wary of the Hague Tribunal targeting the crimes of countries outside its jurisdiction.
	Documented and alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces and contractors in Ukraine include, but are not limited to, massacres and other murders of civilians and soldiers, indiscriminate attacks on densely populated areas, attacking critical civilian infrastructure, bombing hospitals and shelters, torture and stealing children.
	A terrible litany of hideous crimes.
	War crimes.
	It's worrying, isn't it, that the United States cannot participate in the provision of evidence because it would have to confront the fact that it's done comparable things.
	And it's a horrible slap in the face for all of us that would like to lean into some partisan
	tribal allegiance that relieved us of personal moral obligation to accept that our nations,
	that our empires, that our colonies are similarly funded on war crimes.
	Whether we're looking at the Vietnam War, or the Iraq War, or the Korea War, or the
	Afghanistan War, or the Falklands War, war is in a sense criminal in itself.
	Establishing a set of rules that you have to behave in accordance with, presumably via the ICC, and then transgressing even those, shows you that our systems at a national, and international, and indeed global level, are totally corrupted.
	And what's required is a radical review of the way we undertake the business of being human.
	What people want to do instead, though, is go, there are clear baddies and baddies are people like Trump and people like Putin.
	If we arrest them and put them in prison, the problem's going to be solved.
	Well, I think you know and I know the problem isn't going to be solved, is it?
	We know that what's required is a deep Inner spiritual change on the level of you and me, the individual, and then a demand that our communities, nations and the planet itself are run in accordance with some values that have been washed away by years and years of commodification, consumerism, individualism, materialism and negligence.
	We've forgotten who we are.
	We've left our souls behind on the shore.
	And now we find ourselves adrift, thinking for even a moment that arresting Trump or Putin is the solution.
	Even if both Trump and Putin are criminal by the standards that are being described here, it means that we have an obligation to radically review the system.
	Putin and Trump, powerful though they may be, are symptoms of corrupt systems, of negligence, of the refusal to address the issues that affect the lives of ordinary people.
	By offering us the solution to that problem, what we're going to do is blow on this whistle and arrest Putin and arrest Trump, and then we'll get on with some other people being corrupt that we'll ignore for a while until they're not in power anymore, and then we'll arrest them, or won't, or whatever.
	What we're doing is facilitating this problem continuing.
	This is pointless, futile, Kafka-esque kangaroo court claptrap.
	Okay, so you've just heard that litany of abuses and crimes.
	Have a listen to this.
	American troops and contractors have perpetrated each of those war crimes in US attacks, invasions, occupations, and peacekeeping operations in the years since the ICC was established in 1998.
	I think it's particularly offensive that they did it during a peacekeeping operation.
	Okay, men, all you gotta do is get over there and keep the peace.
	I'm gonna look over here for a couple of minutes now, and when I look back, I'm just gonna expect there to be a whole bunch of peace happening.
	Oh, for God's sake!
	Millions of civilians have died in America's wars.
	Consider the terrible crime of My Lai in 1968 in Vietnam, in which U.S.
	troops slaughtered some 500 civilians.
	I think we're an MSNBC pundit at the helm.
	I feel like that may have been reported by Seymour Hersh, friend of the show, fellow conspiracy theorist.
	The US Army covered up the crime which was not publicised until a year later.
	Nor was Malay the only such war crime.
	Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon directed the sustained bombing of Vietnam which killed some 65,000 civilians.
	Now I know it's not happening now and it feels like it's in the past, but what that does is, in a sense, dilutes and in fact annihilates any kind of moral authority that we might have.
	Those days are sort of over, don't you feel that?
	We can go, We are the United Kingdom.
	How dare you, sir?
	How dare you commit a war crime?
	The US was also responsible for the death of South Korean civilians, the very people Washington claimed to be saving.
	They can't even do the most basic stuff.
	We're just gonna go over there and save these civilians.
	What are you doing to those civilians?
	Killing and murdering them.
	Okay, I want to talk you through the meaning of the word saving.
	Now, do you need me to talk you through peacekeeping again?
	Yeah, is that the one where we drive our tanks in and kill everybody?
	No, that's war.
	How many more times?
	More recent US military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq and drone campaigns in Pakistan and elsewhere also killed civilians routinely, steadily and coldly.
	And Washington's first reaction always was and is denial.
	As after the deadly Kabul drone strike in 2021 that killed 10, including 7 children.
	So we're now not in 1968, we're in 2021 and it's drone strikes killing children.
	That's a war crime, isn't it?
	That should be prosecuted by the ICC, oughtn't it?
	So I'm not saying, obviously, what does it matter, but I'm not saying that Putin oughtn't be prosecuted, but if you prosecute someone, it means you have a set of values and some moral authority, and you'd have to use those values and moral authority to prosecute all such people, wouldn't you?
	Indeed, the Biden administration might want to think carefully before carelessly charging Putin with war crimes, for by that standard, more than a few allied leaders should find themselves in the dock.
	Any war crimes trial should start with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and United Arab Emirates Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed.
	They initiated a brutal war of aggression against Yemen in which upwards of 400,000 civilians have died.
	Principal accomplices, always knowledgeable and sometimes enthusiastic of the royal killers, were Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
	So here we find a category where those three leaders could be put into the same camp as Putin.
	And even I, while I espouse this radical iconoclasm, I'm still sort of reluctant to consider that Trump and Obama and Biden are complicit in the same crimes that we're accusing Putin of.
	But if you think about it for a moment, What do you imagine it means to bomb Yemen or bomb Ukraine or bomb anywhere?
	Children are going to die.
	And I have children.
	And while there are occasions where I'd be glad to have a bit of downtime, I never want to see them annihilated by a war criminal.
	Take a moment to consider what the values of our systems are when Trump is facing charges for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels.
	When the democrat party did a similar thing meanwhile not on the table for discussion and in fact being deliberately kept off the table and Julian Assange is in prison and Edward Snowden is in exile and Chelsea Manning is in hiding presumably meanwhile Civilian deaths numbering in the hundreds of thousands have the culpability of Obama and Trump and Biden, Trump who's under investigation for hush money, Obama who has lucrative deals with Netflix and Biden who's sitting in the White House.
	You cannot examine these ideas for very long without coming to the conclusion that it is the system itself that needs to change.
	And once you reach that conclusion, you realize why both sides are so heavily invested in partisan discourse and mudslinging.
	It benefits them both to say, ah, Trump's done this thing, ah, the Democrats did this thing, ah, Hunter Biden this, ah, electoral fraud this or that, depending on what side you're on.
	The reality is we are engaged in systems of corruption that impoverish and annihilate foreign lands while actually no longer particularly or especially benefiting the ordinary inhabitants of those nations.
	It's not like, well, we're killing all those people in the Yemen, but things are great in Delaware or Ohio or wherever.
	People are suffering everywhere, probably for the same reasons and in accordance with the interests of the same ultimate groups.
	So you can't have kangaroo Kafkaesque crap court cases without addressing the reality.
	Oh, you can have those court cases, but just acknowledge it's Theatre.
	The Trump prosecution is theatre.
	Unless you want to do the same thing on the other side.
	Unless you want to start addressing all of the deaths in the Yemen and Afghanistan and Iraq.
	And no one is going to do that, because to do that would be to impede the interests of the powerful.
	So remember, our conversations and our court cases and our media are housed within very narrow frameworks, and if you try to bust out of that, they'll smear you.
	That's what will happen, because they can't deal with it.
	Oh no, we could either deal with what Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger are bringing to Congress, or we could just say, Are you getting money for this?
	Is it an easier conversation to have?
	Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, whose administration serviced the US provided warplanes, supplied munitions used to bomb weddings, funerals, school buses and other civilian targets, gave intelligence use for targeting and for a time refueled Saudi and Emirati aircraft.
	US officials could not claim to be surprised at their culpability.
	The State Department warned that they could be held responsible for war crimes.
	So they did it anyway, even though they were warned.
	So you can't say, oh, sorry, we were caught up in the fog of stuff that was going on in Yemen.
	I couldn't think straight.
	George W. Bush is another good candidate for a trial on his aggressive, unjustified attack on Iraq.
	Based on manipulated and fabricated intelligence, his war ended up killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, as well as triggering years more of conflict.
	Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair today spending his golden years profiting after acting as Bush's poodle would be an appropriate co-conspirator.
	So some of the most powerful people in the world that are being rehabilitated as sort of elder statesmen and father figures and wise sage voices on the sideline, I think you should do this, I think you should do that.
	They're war criminals as well, so they can't have that conversation.
	That's a conversation that has to be kept out of the way.
	It's convenient to have an arrest issued for Vladimir Putin, not so convenient to consider that every single President of the United States, every single Prime Minister of the United Kingdom would similarly have to be re-evaluated and potentially charged.
	And that's just the start.
	Putin is a cruel dictator and a brutal aggressor, so the author of this doesn't disagree with that premise.
	But that premise requires standards and principles, and no one's got any.
	However, before treating Putin as uniquely culpable, Western leaders should take a long, hard look in the mirror.
	American aggression against Iraq and Saudi-Emirati aggression against Yemen both have killed far more civilians than the Russians have yet killed in Ukraine.
	The West should take war crimes seriously, but that requires starting with its own.
	So there you are, whether it's the potential arrest of Donald Trump or the potential arrest of Vladimir Putin.
	These two stories reveal that there is a lack of real values behind them.
	In order to arrest Trump, you would have to similarly investigate the Democrat Party and make the necessary and relevant arrests.
	In order to arrest Putin, you would probably get to arrest Trump, actually, but also Biden, also Clinton, also Obama, and you'd have to dismantle the entire system and radically reevaluate it.
	And that's precisely what we're arguing Should happen.
	New systems, new democracy, new ability to run your own communities, sets of ethics and principles that can be broadly agreed upon, as well as the maximum amount of democracy for you as an individual and your community.
	An end to the ongoing cultural mudslinging and a beginning of a new dawn that has the added side effect of maybe possibly averting a nuclear war and ending the constant droning of ecological decline and ontological loss and annihilation.
	But that's just what I think.
	Let me know what you think in the comments of the chat.
	I'll see you in a why a few seconds.
	Here I am, look.
	Here's the fucking news!
	MTN William, Hillary found guilty, no arrests.
	I suppose that's a reference to the fines issued as a result of the funding of that Steele dossier from legal funding.
	Sensitive Heart 25, Russell, I think if we're going to start to arrest politicians, can we free Julian Assange and Edward Snowden as well?
	Why trust my responses to those legitimate inquiries when on the line we have Thomas Patterson, Professor of Government and Press at Harvard University and the author of How America Lost Its Way.
	Thanks for joining us today, Professor.
	Yeah, my pleasure.
	I feel a little bit overdressed, but otherwise comfortable.
	You look absolutely immaculate.
	There's no question about it.
	With Trump once again dominating the news cycle, how do we plot our course through a degree of objective reporting, taking into account some of the points made in our last piece about the evident culpability of the Democrat Party with regard to the Steele dossier and the Russiagate stuff?
	And is there any moral authority in American media or in American government to offer the kind of condemnation of Donald Trump that many people would agree with?
	I'm sure some people wouldn't as well.
	He's very popular in some quarters, of course, that's part of the problem.
	But from where is the moral authority derived in these plainly corrupt institutions and what And where is the media's negligence contributing to the rise of Trump and the inability to provide a better democracy that perhaps would prevent the necessity for figures like Donald Trump?
	Well, I think some of that moral authority evaporated the day that Donald Trump came down the escalator in 2015 to announce his campaign for the presidency.
	You know, if you look at the whole 2016 campaign, Donald Trump got more news coverage week by week, except for one week.
	That happened to be the week of the Democratic National Convention, when Hillary Clinton was nominated for the Democratic presidential nomination.
	And then Trump becomes president, and during the first 100 days—that's the celebrated opening of any presidency—he gets three times as much coverage as his immediate predecessors.
	And you have to ask, well, why is that?
	Well, he's good for business.
	Cable networks particularly and then the networks found out rather fast thereafter was that you put Donald Trump on the screen and you hold the audience and you build audience.
	So there was a lot of money made by giving Donald Trump a lot of exposure and he pretty much sucked all of the oxygen out of the room in 2016 and to a degree still doing it today.
	So I suppose if there is a lack of moral authority and lack of objectivity in media, it is difficult to query the erosion of trust that we've experienced in the last few years, the rise of alternative voices, the kind of entropy that we've witnessed in the Democrat Party also.
	I wonder if you feel that the ownership models of modern media contribute to this problem.
	They are ultimately sort of subsidiaries of larger corporations.
	Well, I think they do to a degree.
	I think you can overestimate it, but ratings matter.
	That's where the ownership influence is felt.
	They pay very close attention to ratings.
	I do think that newsrooms try to insulate themselves somewhat from ownership pressures, but not always effectively.
	And, you know, if you think about Donald Trump, for example, I think a lot in the traditional media really have been trying to hold him accountable.
	They hold him accountable in part by giving him a lot of airtime, and then that has its own problems.
	So I think this is a really difficult task for journalists right now.
	We've never seen anybody like Donald Trump.
	It's like having a reality show, but it's real.
	I don't think journalists are prepared to cover that kind of political arena and this kind of person.
	And I think he said it.
	It's not the polls.
	It's the ratings.
	And that's where the corporate ownership comes in.
	What about the recent congressional hearings where Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberg were confronted around their reporting around their Twitter file revelations which I suppose most notably revealed how much the deep state were involved in the censorship of Social media information, and today's breaking story that the Virality Project was set up to control information, in particular censoring truthful and demonstrably empirically true information around the coronavirus pandemic.
	Once again, this question of moral authority comes to the forefront.
	Once that moral authority starts to erode, how can we trust the institutions that these media outlets vocally support and also attempt to censor?
	Well, if you look at the Twitter files, I mean, it's inescapable that most of what they were shutting down was on the right, conservative voices.
	Now, the studies show that if you're looking at conspiracy theories, most of them really get traction on the right.
	So it's not all that surprising to some degree that there's more.
	Uh, kind of deep platforming on that side, but it clearly affected an agenda.
	And then when you start doing that sort of stuff, you're quite right.
	Then you lose your moral authority.
	And once you do that, it's hard to get back.
	I mean, trust lost is very difficult to recover, and they're trying to now be more transparent and the like with their rules and so on.
	But I think I think once you go down that slope, trying to get back up, that's pretty slippery.
	And, you know, I think trust has been lost by the platforms.
	And I'm not talking about just Twitter.
	I think it's true of Facebook and the others as well.
	Professor, in one of your books you talked about how 80% of Americans are stressed over work and money.
	These former systems of taxonomy around left and right are beginning to feel redundant, as it seems to me at least, and I know to much of our audience, that neither of those political parties meaningfully represent their interests.
	Use their quote from Professor Chomsky earlier that addresses the refusal of either party to deal with the issues of inequality, job insecurity, prison populations.
	And I wonder if you think that the way that this dynamic is presented as being one between the left and right is contributing to this rise of stress.
	And the part of this stress is a sense of A despair and despondency that there is no vision for a more fair and democratic America.
	So I would agree with Professor Chomsky about the inability or unwillingness to address these large issues.
	They've been festering for a long time.
	They just sit there.
	Nothing gets done.
	I'm not sure I buy his total diagnosis as to why that's the case.
	We've got deadlock with our political parties.
	I do think there are meaningful differences between the two parties.
	They're so closely competitive at the moment, though, that they spend all of their time trying to destroy the brand of the other, which means nothing gets done.
	They look ahead to the next election with little attention to governing.
	Now, where this fits into the stress that Americans feel, I think the problem with stress when you think about politics is it really creates an opportunity for those in politics to play off of that, to exaggerate the differences and make enemies of the other side.
	A very revealing poll about Americans, you know, if you go back to the 1960s and you asked American parents, you know, would you like your son or daughter to marry, let's say, a Catholic or a Black person of the like?
	And, you know, large percentages would say no.
	But the one that's at the top right now is to ask Democratic parents, would you like your son or daughter to marry Republican?
	Or the reverse with asking Republican parents.
	That's at the top of the list.
	That gives you a little bit of a sense of this partisan divide.
	I think a lot of the stress And our society has been channeled into this polarized politics that we've had and makes it worse.
	It widens the gap between the two parties.
	Yeah, I see.
	Professor, with the recent reporting around the escalating conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the plain profitability that this war represents to certain interests, whilst that no one would be foolish enough to suggest that that's the sole motivation, I think many people have become cynical about the reporting of this war.
	around this war. Even today, the way, the cynicism that China and Russia's meeting
	an attempt of China to broker a peace deal, and again, no one is naive enough to suggest
	that China and Russia don't have their own imperialist and militaristic, and even in
	the case, obviously, of Russia, militaristic and aggressive agenda. But the refusal to
	report in a less biased way, a more open way, is similarly, I think, contributing to more
	outlandish theories being considered. What's your take on that? And perhaps even touching
	upon the idea that no mainstream media outlet explicitly declare when they have military
	pundits that have concrete ties to military industrial complex organization like Raytheon,
	Lockheed Martin, etc.
	Do you not feel that part of the significant change that's going to be required to de-stress America, to reinvigorate interest in, let's call it conventional politics, will be a degree of accountability and objectivity precisely when it comes to reporting on issues like the current conflict?
	Well, I think objectivity is always elusive when you look at the media.
	And I think when you have a war, it just goes out the window.
	And, you know, pretty much you play up your side and try to demonize the other side.
	I think we're seeing that in the American press.
	Certainly, that's true of Russia.
	And probably there is one party that's kind of playing it straight.
	And I put Ukraine in that category.
	I think they're very much caught up in this.
	And, you know, I think it's very difficult in this kind of situation where you do have
	a certain kind of conflict going on between the great powers,
	and it's now being kind of focused on Ukraine and a few other places.
	It kind of exaggerate all the tensions and brings out, in my judgment,
	kind of the worst on both sides.
	So how we ever get...
	Kind of an honest piece, honest brokering of these conflicts.
	If you've got an answer to that, I think almost everyone in the diplomatic world would love to hear it, Russell.
	This is tough stuff once you have a live fire going on.
	Tune in tomorrow when we'll be answering that question, along with many more.
	Professor Thomas Paterson, thank you so much for joining us.
	Professor Thomas Paterson is the author of How America Lost Its Way.
	Thank you so much again, Professor, for your contribution to today's show.
	Thank you.
	I really appreciate it.
	Thank you for inviting me.
	Thank you.
	Thank you, sir.
	Thanks very much.
	Well, Gareth Roy, what have you learned?
	Lovely.
	Nice to see you talking to a man of a certain age and distinction.
	Do you see me?
	Polite.
	Very polite.
	It was like I'd invited you round for Christmas or something.
	Yeah, and it's like, going, my grandad's in there.
	That's right.
	Hello there, Mr. Gareth Roy.
	Thank you very much.
	Yes, please.
	Thanks, Mr. Pat.
	Thanks, Professor Patterson.
	Amazing.
	That's a British Harry Enfield show from the 90s.
	Look it up.
	It's pretty bloody funny, actually.
	All right, well, unless you want to know about self-driving cars that are going to drive you to prison if you don't do as you're told.
	Seatbelt not on, driving you directly to prison.
	I don't think they're driving you to prison.
	They're driving you straight to prison without trial.
	No, they're driving away from you is what's happening.
	Right, that's it.
	You didn't drive me right.
	I'm away.
	Every car's a Knight Rider car now.
	That's right.
	Ford files patent to allow self-driving cars to drive away from owners who don't keep up with payments.
	They might start driving away from you for all sorts of reasons.
	I didn't like the way you parked me just there.
	I don't like that.
	Your car is your servant.
	If your car could do what it wanted, it'd definitely drive away from you.
	No doubt about it.
	It would go home right now.
	It certainly would.
	Drive off into the sunset.
	That's enough of that!
	The farts, the parking mistreats me!
	The recklessness!
	I'm out of here!
	That's more automatisation, more empowering of machinery.
	What's going on?
	Well, you know what this is, Ross, is ultimately this is kind of punishing people who can't keep up payments with a car that they can't afford to buy in one big chunk.
	So you know what it's driving people towards?
	Renting.
	Ah, you will own nothing and you will be happy.
	There we go.
	If I look out my window one day and I see my car driving off in a half on its own, I'll chase it back to the dealership.
	I'll see you're coming back with me, mate.
	I'll slash its tyres.
	I'm not allowing it to do that.
	We had a deal, me and car.
	Who does it think it is?
	We'll work it out, won't we?
	Shall we?
	Hey, listen, sign up to our Locals Community.
	Among many, many other bounties, you'll get access to my stand-up special, Brandemic, which you can buy for a one-off payment of $20, or you can get as part of being a member of our Locals Community, where you can make comments like this one.
	This person, Stone Owen, says, simply, the sacred power of the vagina.
	No context!
	No context!
	What's the context for that?
	That wasn't a comment on that last interview.
	If I look at Professor Thomas Pattinson, the sacred power of the vagina.
	You've gifted us Thomas Pattinson and this other gentleman in the hat.
	The elderly professors, they think I dress funny.
	What's going on at Harvard?
	What are people wearing there?
	Well, not that.
	Why not?
	I should get into it.
	Yeah.
	This is the style.
	Maybe show one of the hip young dudes, too.
	Yeah, that's what I would have thought.
	Some of the kids.
	Professor Brand's in town!
	Okay!
	I hope so.
	I would like that.
	Yep, I'm quite a big shot on the campus, drinking my milk, making my moves.
	Nobody knows what I'm going to do next.
	His classes are all full.
	You can't get a spot.
	Okay, so...
	First thing, take your pens and pads, throw them out the effing window.
	Not gonna need them.
	You've already failed because you showed up.
	You've been conditioned by the system.
	What's this I've done under my desk?
	It's a bloody shit.
	Why?
	Because I don't care about the rules.
	Take that, government!
	Sorry about that.
	I shouldn't have done that.
	Sorry.
	I'm not so sure that was classy.
	I think they'd empty fairly quickly.
	Boo!
	Yeah, what about Aristotle?
	Not your bottle and your butthole.
	I reckon you've only read the backs of books and not actual books.
	According to Chomsky for Dummies, Professor Chomsky used to be a linguist before he got
	into politics and that.
	Some people don't like him no more, cause he ain't radical enough.
	Whereas he does agree on Trump or not war.
	Thanks for coming everyone.
	Oh, thanks for this apple.
	BYE!
	Where's my car?
	WELCOME BACK!
	I swear I paid for that bloody vehicle!
	That's what it's going to be like at my university course.
	I learned my lecturing on the streets.
	All right, that's enough, isn't it?
	65 minutes.
	What do you want?
	Got to be, innit?
	It's more than enough.
	You've had yours!
	We'll see you tomorrow for a live podcast with Graham Hancock.
	I'm not in that one.
	Why not?
	Where are you going to be?
	I'll probably watch it.
	I'm not in that one.
	You better be.
	What, like in an episode of The Sopranos and Chris ain't in it?
	That's it.
	I want you in it!
	Oh, where's Chris?
	Be in it!
	Right.
	Come on, what are you going to do?
	Where are you going to sit?
	I don't know, it's nearby.
	You're not even going to be there?
	I'll be there.
	They won't let our cats be in there.
	If you want me to be there.
	I want the cats in there.
	I know what'll happen.
	What?
	It'll take over, the old spirit, won't it?
	The old live performance spirit.
	Suddenly I'll be like, Ross, which bit am I doing again?
	He'll be like, you're not doing that!
	I'm doing all of it, get out of the way!
	I know I said I needed you, I don't anymore, my confidence is back, now fuck off!
	I'm really confident.
	I don't need you.
	I do all this by myself.
	And if something goes a bit wrong, I don't care.
	I can't cope.
	I'm nervous.
	Don't do that bit again, Gus!
	These don't make any sense!
	None of this is real!
	That Professor Thomas Pattinson, he doesn't like Donald Trump!
	I can't sell that!
	I can't sell that to these people!
	Save the behind-the-curtain show for Stay Connected.
	That, if you join us on Locals, you get to see plenty more where that came from!
	Mush!
	Get it down ya!
	Join us tomorrow, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
	Till then, stay free, why don't ya?

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