Aaron Maté (The convenient framing of US politics)
Russell chats to Aaron Maté, an investigative journalist from The Grayzone about the expansion of NATO in Finland, the convenient framing of US politics with Donald Trump and the shutdown of dissenting voices, whether it's the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in Russia or the US wanting to extradite Julian Assange from Belmarsh Prison in the UK.You call follow Aaron on Twitter: @aaronjmateRead Aaron's articles: mate.substack.com 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 me on Rumble for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
If you're watching this on YouTube right now, join us on Rumble, particularly after about 10, 15 minutes or so, where we will be using freedom of speech to say the most uncanny, absurd, and ultimately truthful things.
Things that might not please the establishment, but will certainly present opportunities for you to awaken, form new alliances, and ultimately new systems that will replace This corrupt carnival that's taking place even now, particularly around Donald Trump's arraignment and ongoing criminalization.
We'll be talking about the criminalization of Trump and how it distracts us from significant global events like Finland joining NATO and speaking to Aaron Maté about that at length.
Aaron Maté, our fellow conspiracy theorist and far right wing, not just right wing, Far right.
We see, we look over our shoulder, there's Mussolini, Oswald Mosley, and the big little guy.
They're just back there going, come back!
Come back to neoliberalism!
Come back to the lack of inquiry that passes for mainstream media reporting.
How are you today, on-screen assistant, Mr Gareth?
Yes, very well, very well.
Oh, you feel quite well, do you?
How are your old biochemical and immune systems holding up?
Doing alright.
Thanks, Ross.
Fortunately, this is a period of grind, of sustained broadcast.
How you know that the Trump trial is being exaggerated is the fetishisation and amplification of the smallest detail.
Have a listen.
to this reporter trying to discern and diagnose anger from the side of someone's head like using it still listen to it like I mean I've been obsessively in love with people over the course of my love life over the course of my life I've been obsessively in love with people but I've I've never, like, scrutinized a person's face, like, trying to discern some sort of real emotion in quite the manner that this CNN reporter scrutinizes Trump, trying to divine anger as if it was some hidden stream being pursued by a rod.
Let's have a look.
If we could go back to the picture that we just showed a second ago, he was looking off to the distance.
He looked really irritated and annoyed.
It was a profile photo that we just showed.
There it is.
The one before, that wasn't it.
Oh no, that wasn't it.
It's this one.
This one, see?
It's very distinct, this one.
Look at, like, that, like, also, wouldn't you just freeze someone?
Like, and actually, one of the ways that I can tell a really good actor in a movie is, you know, sometimes when you press pause in a movie, not for any nefarious or onanistic reason, you're just pausing it because you do now, the same way as you watch everything with subtitles on now, the way the world's all changed and everything.
Do you watch everything with subtitles?
I actually do, yeah.
It's weird, isn't it?
We do what everyone does.
Like, when you pause it... That's my dog, Bear.
Bear!
Stop it!
Stop it, Bear.
We're trying to understand the news.
You might as well analyse Bear doing that now and say that that has got some sort of mythic, archetypal connotation.
Something I would do, actually.
Staring off into the distance, as he was.
Bear, staring off into the distance.
Could it be because of these dog treats?
Or is it because he knows that he made an illegal payment to Stormzy Daniels?
There he goes.
What the hell was that hush money all about, damn you?
Was it a misdemeanor or a felony?
It's a felony.
It might have started as a misdemeanor, but by God, we're going to amplify it.
It'll be a felony by the time we've finished with it.
It's either amplify this to a felony or address the fact that our political movement offers no meaningful alternatives to systemic corruption.
And we ain't going to be doing that anytime soon.
Yeah, if you pause a film, you can tell.
Like, say if you pause Daniel Day-Lewis, probably at any moment in there will be blood.
You'll always be sort of going, Hey!
My milkshake!
I stole... I mean, he'll always be being that dude.
Sure.
Like, you won't catch him just sort of going, what's that?
That's the mark of a good actor, I'd say.
I imagine that was what you did on the set of... I'm another example.
Sure, Sarah Marshall.
Sarah Marshall, Arthur, the one where I'm a rabbit, the one where I'm a mouse, the one where I'm a troll.
The one where you kiss Dalek Baldwin.
The Baldwin one.
Any one of those, you pause me, I'm conveying exactly the right emotion.
I hope you understand life a bit better now, having seen that, having heard us explain to you how abstract ideas, like, you know, you will own nothing and you'll be happy, can gently become implemented as policy, and how the financial industry are now able to enter into territories that would have been unthinkable just 10, 15 years ago and how 2008, a financial crisis for many of you, was a financial opportunity for some of the world's most powerful interests.
It's just an ongoing theme.
Gareth, it's exciting.
Another day, another Maté.
I like to speak to at least one member of the Maté family every single day of my life.
Today, we're speaking to the friend of the show, a journalist for the Grey Zone and co-host of the Useful Idiots podcast, Aaron Maté, conspiracy theorist, far right pundit, probably far, far right.
If we're far right, he's got, I don't know where he is on that particular spectrum.
He has the honour of being known by The Guardian as the most prolific spreader of disinformation.
So let's, while we're having this conversation, carefully observe and pay attention to make sure he's not misinformationing us right where it hurts.
All right, Aaron, it's good to see you.
Good to see you too, Russell.
Happy to fill your quota of Maté family members and disinformation spreaders, so good to be here.
Thank you for coming on.
Straight after you, we're going to be speaking to Oswald Mosley, the far-right British politician from the 1940s and the starter of the Brownshirt movement.
See what he's got to say about stuff.
Mate, we wanted to talk to you actually about the expansion of NATO.
Finland recently joining NATO and also the sort of broad framing of NATO as a force for good in the world.
And if you wouldn't mind tying that all into the sort of current show trial of Donald Trump and how the exaggeration of these misdemeanors into felonies is a convenient way to maintain a convenient framing of American politics at a time when perhaps we could be looking at more important geopolitical issues.
Well, the indictment of Trump ties into issues like the expansion of NATO because back when Trump first broke into the political scene in 2015-2016, one of the things that he was saying that really freaked out the political establishment in the U.S.
and other NATO states like the U.K.
was that he was questioning the existence of NATO.
Uh, and people couldn't believe he, someone could possibly in the political spectrum say such a thing.
And I think that was one of the factors in all this freak out about Trump and all the motivation to then paint him as a Russian agent is because he was actually saying things that you're not supposed to say, uh, inside respectable NATO state politics.
And, uh, we've seen now in the real world, the results of NATO and this drive to expand it in this proxy war in Ukraine.
The fact we're having this war now is an outgrowth of a, you know, three-decade-long policy of pushing NATO to Russia's borders, trying to bring in states like Ukraine and Georgia, and doing so despite pledges to the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War that we're not going to expand NATO one more inch to the east, and that's been violated, and that's a major reason why we have this war today.
So, Finland joining the club is just one more provocation.
It's not to me as serious as the attempt to bring Ukraine in, because Ukraine has an actual historical tie to Russia.
There are millions of people inside Ukraine who consider themselves to be ethnic Russians.
Parts of Ukraine used to be apart.
Of Russia.
And Russian officials have long warned that any attempt to bring Ukraine into NATO would put Russia in a bad position because basically, as William Burns, the then ambassador to the US, wrote back in 2008, if Ukraine joins NATO, Russia feared that that would trigger a civil war and that would force Russia to intervene on the side of people who support Russia.
And that's pretty much what has happened.
And so Finland joining NATO, I don't think is Something Russia is too concerned about, but certainly expanding NATO's borders to Russia does increase the tensions.
And the idea that NATO is supposed to be defensive is just, as you've talked about, is a joke.
I mean, look at its recent record, destroying Libya, invading Afghanistan.
They have an explicit relationship with the military-industrial complex.
states. That's the real nature of NATO. The idea that it's there to protect people is just
completely undermined by its own record. RAOUL PAL: They have an explicit relationship with the
military industrial complex. Is there any evidence that they are involved in the brokerage of arms
deals that they facilitate that an expansion of NATO somehow leads to the expansion of the
military industrial complex? Also, Aaron, I just want to say that is fascinating. When Trump,
who I'm not broadly speaking a...
He's not something I blithely support.
I enjoy him as an establishment wrecking ball, I do have to say.
But when he sort of mentions something like, you know, don't have to be in NATO, there's something that I enjoy about that kind of anarchic and sort of outsider perspective.
So yeah, I just wonder if you can just talk about NATO's relationship with the military-industrial complex and the possibility of disbanding NATO.
Yeah, well, on Trump, I mean, that's why elites hate him so much.
Not because he's actually a threat to their agenda, but sometimes he blurts out the wrong things.
So he'll question the existence of NATO, while still policy-wise, he encourages NATO states to spend more on the military-industrial complex.
So policy-wise, he pretty much continued the NATO agenda, but sometimes, occasionally, he'll speak the truth.
And he'll say the wrong things.
Also, in Syria, for example, when he announced that US troops were staying after he initially tried to withdraw them, he said, we're staying to take the oil.
And you're not supposed to say that.
You're supposed to say we're there to fight terrorism and spread democracy.
So that's why they don't like him.
And that's why there's constantly attempts to undermine him, not because he's actual policy-wise, he's a threat to the conventional agenda, but because sometimes he just speaks out of turn.
And yes, in terms of NATO's relationship with the military-industrial complex, If you look at the multiple rounds of NATO expansion.
And how that's been received in the US Congress, which has to vote to approve these expansions.
Every time that happens, there's a massive influx of lobbying money by the military-industrial complex in support of NATO expansion, because the military-industrial complex recognizes that NATO expansion is hugely profitable for them.
Back in the 1990s, there was a lobby group in the US called the Committee to Expand NATO, or something like that.
And it was headed by a guy named Bruce Jackson.
But that wasn't Bruce Jackson's only job.
Bruce Jackson's day job was that he was a vice president at Lockheed Martin.
So he recognized that expanding NATO was very good for Lockheed Martin.
So yes, I mean, because if you expand NATO, your military has to be up to NATO standards, which means spending billions and billions of dollars on weapons.
So there is a huge connection there.
And that's why Jan Stoltenberg, the NATO Secretary General, He's not really a general of anything.
He doesn't have a military role.
He's just basically an arms dealer.
He's an arms lobbyist.
That's what he is.
He's there to sell the public on the need to spend more money on weapons.
Aaron, you know, Russia arrested that Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gerskovich, and the Biden administration are up in arms saying you can't just arrest journalists and put them in prison without trial.
What do you think?
You can't just use the Espionage Act as a catch-all way of arresting people of dissident voices that you don't agree with or approve of.
What do you make of that while dear old Julian Assange is banged up in Belmarsh here in Blighty and dear Edward Snowden abides in exile in Russia?
Is there some hypocrisy there?
I mean, yes, I mean, I think this arrest of this Wall Street Journal happened just as Assange marked 1,000 days inside Belmarsh, this maximum security gulag inside Britain.
And that was on top of all the years he spent locked up in the Ecuadorian embassy because he couldn't leave, or else he would be Put in prison then.
So yes, of course, it's massively hypocritical.
It's a joke to see NATO state leaders in the US and UK and elsewhere complain about the arrest of this Wall Street Journal reporter.
And it's just like, I can't even think about a song sometimes it's so depressing.
I don't know how you feel about it but it's so depressing.
It's like I have to try and think there must be something I'm not understanding about this because otherwise it shows that aside from aesthetics We do live in a kind of banalised tyranny, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to put journalists in prison without trial and claim it was somehow legitimate.
So yeah, I went to see Julian Assange when he was in that embassy.
He later described that in his diaries as the worst day of his incarceration.
I'm in touch with Julian Assange's wife, and I feel like it's, in a way, I hold on to the idea of Assange and Snowden when I'm attacked for being far-right or a conspiracy theorist, because they're kind of the ace, aren't they?
They're dual aces in the pack.
You know your liberal, righteous agenda?
What is it doing about this, and why can't it address it?
It's kind of a Vulcan death grip on their bullshit, because they have to sort of go, They have to sort of shut down the debate there.
And that's when you know what the establishment is.
So I suppose, aside from the sort of deep personal agony that they as a family and the individuals must be facing, I feel that they are sort of avatars of what the reality of our sort of deep state corruption is.
Absolutely.
I mean, no one in the world has done more to expose state crimes than Julian Assange.
And Forest Services, rather than being given every journalistic award in the world, which he deserves, he's being caged in a gulag with no sign of him being able to get out.
I think the plan From those torturing him and imprisoning him, it's just to hold him for as long as they can behind bars and hope he dies behind bars.
That seems to be the plan.
And the media in the U.S.
especially is totally complicit in this.
There are sometimes, you know, establishment journals speak up in defense of Julian, but not nearly to the level that they should be.
And they still run all these smear pieces That take part in the propaganda effort to demonize him and so it and we're all just sitting by and watching it happen as you know this the most important Journalist in I think in Western history is being murdered tortured It's it's just unbelievable.
And so yes, so what Russia has done to this Wall Street Journal reporter is By all accounts, it looks terrible.
I do, though, have to question the wisdom of his editors who sent this reporter to a really sensitive Russian military industrial complex site and asking questions of people.
They must have known that this would arouse suspicion from Russian authorities and would possibly put this reporter in danger.
So, I hope, of course, that he's freed Uh, you know, immediately.
But I do have to question the wisdom of whoever sent him to this really sensitive site to ask these questions, especially at a time of such high tensions between the U.S.
and Russia.
People are going to be used as pawns to negotiate for the release of other prisoners, and it looks like this Wall Street Journal reporter has gotten caught up in that.
Yeah, well, you would say that, Aaron, because you are a conspiracy theorist and you never miss an opportunity to attack the establishment.
Aaron, I'm going to have to wrap it up there.
It's always fantastic to speak with you.
Thank you for your honesty and your wisdom and your ongoing integrity.
Aaron Maté is an investigative journalist for the Grey Zone and co-host of the Useful Idiots podcast.
We'll put a link to both of those in the chat straight away.
Aaron, thanks for joining us, mate.
Thanks Russell.
Cheers, take it easy.
I always feel mad saying mate to a mate because their name is spelt mate but that has got that accent on it that makes it mate.
Do you know who's coming on tomorrow?
Go on.
Gabor Mate.
No.
Another day, another mate.
Every single day we talk to a mate until there are no more mates.
What's a mate mate?
Tomorrow we're going to be talking to Gabor Mate having an in-depth conversation that's At here, our Stay Free HQ.
If you want to come and see me live at Stay Free HQ, you can.
I'm going to be talking to, and this is live, I don't think we're even going to broadcast this now.
We probably will broadcast it in some form.
It's not another matter, is it?
It's not.
It's Brian McDermott, former Premier League manager and my personal friend who has recently just joined NATO.
He's being militarised even as you speak.
Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are putting missiles all up and down the nape of his neck and they're... I'm sorry to say that they're aimed at Russia.
So that's going to provoke even more problems.
You can come and see me talking to Brian McDermott about his recent membership of NATO on Saturday, April 15th.
Doors at six, tickets 45 quid.
All profits go to the Stay Free Foundation, which I own and keep.
No, I don't keep them.
We give them to drug addicts.
That's where that money goes.
We don't need no more money.
Hey, listen, thank you very much for joining us, Gareth.
Let people know Brian McDermott and a bit of context there or?
Yeah he's going to be talking about, alright I will.
Brian McDermott used to play for Arsenal, top flight football club.
He managed Reading when they got to the Premier League.
He managed Leeds, one of the biggest clubs in this country and he's talking about mental health, winning and losing and how our framing of success is built on materialistic and individualistic notions.
Rather than on community and connection.
And from his personal experience as a top flight athlete and manager, he tells us that winning and losing have to be accepted as part of life.
And you can't tether your identity to external success and plaudits.
You have to find a deeper connection with meaning and purpose.
Nice.
But he would say that because NATO... Exactly.
They told him to say that.
Told him to.
Probably Raytheon, Lockheed Martin.
They've probably gotten in his ear as well.
Of course they have.
Of course they have.
They're not fools, these people, are they?
Hey, thank you very much for joining us for the show.
We've got one more show this week before we take a little well-deserved break, but we'll continue to put out content every single day while our Lord Jesus Christ is resurrected As if by magic, something beyond magic, the miraculous.
Almost as if there is a field of unmanifest energy that can be channeled and directed by us if we are able to overcome the limitations of the self.
And that is real, Gareth.
Don't Gareth Roy look to the side there as if negatively, I would say, well, I've seen that's not defiance.
That's pure loathing.
That's what that is.
Join us tomorrow.
Not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
