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April 17, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:10:09
“You Just Lied!” Elon’s Rant & Pentagon Papers BOMBSHELL - #109 - Stay Free With Russell Brand
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So, we're going to be doing a little bit of a walkthrough of the game. So, I'm going to be showing you a little bit
So, I'm going to be showing you a little bit of the game.
of the game.
In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello you Awakening Wonders.
What's been going on in the one week that we have been absent?
Has the Lord Jesus risen again?
Resurrected?
Has France continued to protest against its government robbing it in plain sight as the Dalai Lama Gone all unusual?
Have little lads been making Pentagon paper, press releases and leaks out into chat rooms?
Has everything gone really, really strange?
Is the Matrix starting to break down?
These are just some of the questions we'll be answering over the next hour on Rumble.
For the first 15 minutes we'll be with you on YouTube.
We're talking about the pen and paper fallouts.
Plus we'll be speaking with Michael Schellenberger from the Twitter files and from the congressional hearings where he was derisorily referred to as a so called journalist, along with other actual journalist Matt Taibbi.
Once we click over to being exclusively on rumble, we're going to tell you an unbelievable story.
I Has Zelensky been embezzling?
Has he been?
Has he been?
Let us know in the chat.
Apparently 400 million dollars of unusual acquisitions.
Do we doubt Seymour Hersh?
That's the thing.
It comes from Seymour Hersh who, whilst he may once have been a Pulitzer Prize winner, like many Pulitzer Prize winners, he has since turned into a conspiracy theorist.
Almost as if the standards of journalism have radically declined and the mainstream media establishment now is devouring its own if they don't toe the line.
You can join us for an exclusive Q&A by becoming a member of our Locals community.
There's a red button somewhere on your screen right now.
I'm simply not young enough to know exactly...
You look very young the way you're doing this.
It's like a young person.
TikTok's actually illegal now.
I think you'll find it's still Chinese.
It comes from China is where it comes from.
Nothing good comes from there, let me tell you.
Hey, while we've been away, guess where your president, if you're in America, Joe Biden's been?
He's been in Ireland and he's been mistreating one of our favourite WEF stooges, Rishi Sunak, who's currently our Prime Minister, used to be a hedge fund worker.
His wife's very, very closely affiliated to technological giants that have their own affiliations with WEF.
You can Google all that stuff for yourself for now.
Look at him.
He can't wait to get off of a plane.
We know that Joe Biden is uncertain as to who runs the United Kingdom.
Many of us are uncertain.
Sometimes I forget which Prime Minister we're at because we turn them over relatively quickly.
At least we went for a period of doing that.
But he's so eager to get to the King's personal representative for County Antrim, Lord Lieutenant David McCorkle.
A man whose name's never been said even on the internet before.
He's so eager to get to him that he shoves Rishi Sunak to one side.
You have to watch quite closely to see it.
And the only excuse we can think of is that Rishi Sunak's wearing glasses and Clark Kented himself in some kind of obscurity.
Have a look at that moment.
Look at him heading for David McCorkle, who is a very prestigious figure.
Have a look.
Getting off Air Force One in the last half an hour or so, shaking hands with Rishi Sunak who was there on the tarmac to greet him in the wind.
Not bad for Rishi Sunak because he's sort of hanging at the side there trying to re-engage Biden.
But there's no way it was a mistake because Biden introduced a succession of other individuals, doesn't he, to Lieutenant David McCorkle?
Does Biden think that's our leader?
Is that what he thinks?
We are not a military junta, are we?
It's not like Pinochet's Chile.
We've got people that still wear suits.
We've not progressed to the stage where it's like, it's a geyser in camo now, in charge, or an actual robot.
We're still going with, here's a geyser in a suit.
We've gone for that sort of Trudeau mode.
Someone with nice hair.
Talks about liberalism.
I'm wearing glasses sometimes.
Sort of like an older model kind of person.
Yeah, he seems pretty keen to get to the dudes all strapped up in the military gear.
Let's have a look and see how it plays out.
That guy's not important enough to meet all the Biden's people.
He is the King's personal representative for County Antrim, my man.
Meet everyone.
Meet everyone I've brought with me.
Have a look at Synac.
bringing them all on. That guy's not important enough to meet all the Biden's people. He is the
King's personal representative for County Antrim my man.
Meet everyone, meet everyone of court with me. Have a look at SYNAC. SYNAC in glasses
don't look significantly different from SYNAC out of glasses.
So it can't be that he just didn't recognize him.
Once in Ireland, Biden gave one of his fantastic speeches, coining a new phrase.
Let's have a listen to that.
There's nothing our nations can't achieve if we do it together.
I really mean it.
So thank you all.
God bless you all.
Let's go.
Let's go lick the world.
Let's get it done.
Paused for a moment before saying it, that's what worries me most.
Like, hold on, what am I going to say?
There's nothing we can't achieve if we do it together.
Yeah, that's nice.
It's phatic, it's empty, it's hollow, but it's the kind... It's perfect.
It'll do.
It'll do for now.
So let's, hmm, let me not make one of those blunders.
Let me reflect for a moment.
Let's go forward and lick that world.
Lick it good on its little tongue.
This is a time where you don't want people, octogenarians or otherwise, Talking about tongue suckery, even if it's an idiom that's inoffensive in the native tongue.
It's the wrong week for that, isn't it?
It's the wrong week.
Let the dust settle on that.
Once again we have to draw your attention to the fact that the mainstream media That has a vested interest in inducing a state of near idiocy in you so that you're so depressed, bewildered and apathetic you can't discern truth from fiction and significance from the insignificant.
Look, Trump's plane got more TV coverage than Biden killing healthcare for 15 million.
Now you might be a person who doesn't believe in healthcare.
I believe in healthcare.
I'm English and everything like that and I like the National Health Service.
I think it's a shame that junior doctors and nurses are forced to strike Because in particular, during the pandemic, they were told that they were heroes.
We were told they were heroes.
When it was convenient to have them as heroes, now they're outstriking.
They can't get a proper payment.
Now, look at this.
We spent hours and hours studying Trump's plane on the tarmac, and I myself watched Spellbound As it cut a diagonal strip across the sky.
But while that was all going on, Biden was killing a health care bill.
Look at this, 15 million people are now expected to lose their insurance in the coming months.
Reporting on their Medicaid cuts was almost non-existent compared to the amount of coverage given to Trump's indictment.
Now we did watch ourselves actually.
Yeah, it was great.
It was pretty interesting.
Pretty exciting.
It was exciting.
There was a bit where he held his hand up like that.
That was one of the best bits.
There was that lad that got, remember, like a lad got an exclusive with him.
That was one of my favourite bits as well.
Let's have a look at, look at how that was covered.
Look, 19 seconds on CBS, a minute and 30 on ABC.
Compared to the sort of B-roll coverage of Trump's inactive plane. Should we have a little look at the... this is just
a just a... we chose this almost at random this is 45 seconds of Trump's plane coverage. Have a look.
Former president's going to get out of that car and
we're obviously at quite a distance to see if that is he going up the steps the back of the plane.
It's only probably gonna go straight up those stairs. Von Hilliard from your vantage point
and you're monitoring the routines there.
Check out this from Terence McKenna.
Terence McKenna, as you know, is a sort of ethnobotanist and cultural crusader, a man who took quite a lot of psilocybin in order to bring shamanic realms of divine consciousness to ordinary folks.
He said, The reason we feel alienated is because society is infantile, trivial, and stupid.
So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.
I grapple with this because I'm a parent, and I think anybody who has children comes to the realization, like, what will it be?
Alienated, cynical, intellectual, or slack-jawed, half-witted consumer of the horseshit being handed down from on high.
There's not much choice in there, you see?
All we want, our children, all of us want our children to be well-adjusted.
Unfortunately, there's nothing to be well-adjusted to.
And when I watch the coverage of this, or we read the coverage around the Pentagon Papers, and in a sense it's a story about nihilism, because the kid making the revelations, releasing that information, this was not like a Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange style, Prisoner to their own conscience, like, oh my god, I just have to do this!
Or in the case of Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, Julian Assange had a sort of a higher mission.
This was a kid just impressing people on a chat room.
Do you feel like that there's this sort of immersive nihilism now?
That even these leaks, which to a degree appear to reveal that the version of events were being given around the Russia-Ukraine conflict, are not even how the US government sees them.
They're reporting like, you know, that things are going well, this is fantastic in private, so this ain't going at all well.
You know, there's a disjunct between those two things.
Always what we're told is that these revelations are unpatriotic because they put like service people at risk, and if indeed they did that would be a terrible thing, but I feel like it's true that Chelsea Manning's revelations and Snowden's revelations didn't put A single, well anything could have put them at risk but
certainly no one came to any harm as a result of them.
Look, while we were being distracted by Trump's static plane and speculation on how he might
shimmy up the stairs, this is I think CBS is reporting of that healthcare.
I think this is MSNBC potentially.
It is one of them.
That's that little I in the corner.
I don't know which one the little I is.
That's their watermark.
See that I?
Who's I?
That's CBS's little I, that.
So listen, this is 18 seconds of reporting, so this is going to presumably succinctly convey all of the facts that we need to know about these expiring health care benefits.
Check it out.
All right, tonight, a lot of Americans are just hours from losing their Medicaid benefits.
During the pandemic, the federal government suspended rules that remove people from the Medicaid rolls, but that protection expires at midnight.
The government estimates 15 million people will lose their health benefits in the next few months.
Good night. Now back to the Trump jet. See what he's doing now. Has he got out the car yet? What's he doing?
The irony of this all is that this Trump, I mean they don't mention it there, but it was Trump who
signed this into being in the first place. So this was something that supposedly I guess when you
break down right and left in the in the United States, the left traditionally for healthcare and
the right aren't. Trump brought this in and now it's Biden doing away with it so it's obviously quite ironic.
Yes and we don't really want to be caught in these sort of tiny fissures between the two parties.
What we want to examine is the possibility of an entirely different set of rules.
Let's have a look at how Schellenberger explained whistleblower stories will be handled.
This is how we've been primed to deal with leaks.
Listen to this.
He told us that what will initially happen is that the source of the leak will be attacked.
God, that's been happening with that lad.
Two, don't publish the leaked information and discredit the leaked information.
Okay, so let's have a look at just how some of the mainstream media outlets reported on the leaks of this youngster.
Check it out.
This is Bill Maher.
And just to clarify, I've been on Bill Maher, both on his podcast and on that show there that he does.
I like him.
I think he's a nice person.
But I was very surprised by the way that this story was reported on because they didn't talk at all about the content of the leaks.
They just talked about the guy himself, which seems sort of odd because I feel like the Bill Maher real-time show is meant to be a kind of somewhat highbrow, analytical, idealistically driven show, but it's very surprising.
Listen to the jokes that he made about the kid doing the leagues.
That's him, the Intel incel.
Jason born yesterday.
What the fuck?
You know what he named the group they were in, this little clubhouse?
The Thug Shaker Central.
Thug Shaker Central.
Also will be the name of his ass when he goes to prison.
Once again, I like Bill Maher, but I was pretty surprised to not see the content of the leaks themselves.
In particular, that apparently Ukraine are suffering pretty heavy losses and privately the US believe that there will be no chance for a peace deal in the next year and that Ukraine will never reclaim any of the lost territory.
That seems to be significant information that's not being duly covered.
It's about views though, ultimately, isn't it?
I mean, even like going back to the last story that we were talking about, you know, reporting on that healthcare thing, it just doesn't get the same kind of views as with Trump.
And yet, you could totally argue that 15 million people losing healthcare, whichever side, whatever you kind of think of that, is a bigger story than whether Trump has got on a plane or not.
And in this case, the bigger story is the revelations, not what that kid looks like.
Have a look at Noam Chomsky's famous quote.
Those of you that look at a lot of alternative media will perhaps associate this with the rather more outlandish reporters on the fringes.
The method is called problem reaction solution.
They create a problem, In this case these leaks.
A situation to cause some reaction in the audience so that this becomes the norm of the measures you would accept.
I mention this because the mainstream media are now talking about more internet censorship laws being introduced.
Let's have a look at that right now.
Now let's have a look.
I always say this.
Is that not a clip?
Let's have a look at the clip guys.
There we go.
ABC News is learning tonight that intel agencies are looking to change how they monitor chat rooms and social media online according to multiple sources familiar with this after that huge leak of sensitive Pentagon documents on Discord.
Apparently they're looking to expand now how many kinds of sites like this they watch after all of that classified information was exposed.
It was mostly related to the war in Ukraine.
So the information will be either ignored or discredited.
The whistleblower don't seem right in this instance, but the source of the information will be smeared and just the way that the story is conveyed focuses on interesting details.
You would think in a Responsible and independent media, what you'd be interested in is the content of the leaks themselves rather than the personal details of the kid making the leaks or fetishizing his arrest.
We're going to have a little look now at that Zelensky story.
I'm pretty interested in this and then we're going to go to our main story on the Pentagon Papers.
Let's have a look at this.
So this is from our friend Seymour Hirsch.
CIA knows Zelensky and top generals are skimming hundreds of millions in USA.
Now if that's true, that's pretty astonishing, isn't it?
Because the whole... I've always regarded it as a pretty simplistic narrative, but such as it is, it was that Zelensky is a hero, Putin is really bad, and the idea that there's skimming going on, That seems pretty astonishing.
We'll just exclusively cover this on Rumble.
If you're watching this on YouTube, we're going to switch that off now.
Okay, so let's have a look at the story.
On Wednesday, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a report on Substack that alleged the CIA was aware of widespread corruption in Ukraine and the embezzlement of USAID.
The report said the Ukrainian government has been using U.S.
taxpayer money to purchase diesel from Russia to fuel its military.
Hirsch said Zelensky had been buying the fuel from Russia, the country with which it and Washington are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments.
Hirsch said, according to one estimate by CIA analysts, at least $400 million in funds were embezzled last year.
They've been purchasing diesel from Russia, so they've been involved in trade.
It is pretty surprising.
During a meeting CIA director William Burns presented Zelensky with a list of 35 generals and senior government officials whose corruption was known to the CIA.
Zelensky responded by dismissing 10 officials who were engaged in flagrant corruption.
So prior to this conflict it was commonly reported in the mainstream media that Ukraine was, if not a Basket case nation than certainly a country with a lot of corruption issues.
And perhaps that's true of all, you know, like maybe the UK is the same.
Maybe the USA is the same.
Maybe all of our countries are similarly engaged in corruption.
But it seemed like Ukraine was particularly renowned for corruption and that Bill Gates said it was the most corrupt government in the world, I think, at one point.
Bill Gates says a lot of things.
He does.
He says stuff and the share price has changed and he says something else.
It's astonishing to watch the way that guy carries on.
I think the surprising part probably is because of the reductive narrative that we all Buy into in a certain way, I guess.
Even if you're kind of doing the kind of research that we do, we still, I guess, absorb in some way a reductive version of this war.
And so when something like this comes out, and you kind of go, hang on, this is more nuanced, and this is strange, and how are we getting these kind of stories?
Sometimes even when I'm saying stuff like this, 400 million dollars being skimmed, they were buying Diesel or Fresh, I think, nah.
Can't be.
I've seen that guy in a hoodie, I like him.
Oscar?
I see him getting short.
You don't just give Sean Penn's Oscar to a skimmer.
Do you?
No.
You give it to a... and I also like that he, you know, he used to be in a show about a president, then became a president.
I also don't think it at the same time means that he can't be a hero and that you Ukrainian people aren't suffering.
It's just the whole point is this is more complex than what we're told.
You can never appease people, I don't think, Gareth.
Like even however many times we say Definitely Ukrainian people are heroes and maybe Zelensky is to some degree heroic.
They won't have it.
They won't have it.
They'll just say no you're being disloyal by bringing this up.
Zelensky pretended to be a president then became one.
I'd like to see Christian Bale pretend to be Batman and then become Batman.
I'd even like to see Christian Bale pretend that he was going to be really thin and then actually become really thin.
Well he has done that.
He's done that loads of times.
He pretends to be thin so convincingly The pounds just drop off the queue.
There's nothing of him.
There's nothing of Bale.
Hey, shall we have a real in-depth look at the Pentagon Papers story, and in particular the way it's been reported.
Use the confrontation that Elon Musk had with that BBC journalist, which we all love.
Let us know in the chat in the comments.
It was brilliant, wasn't it, to see the way... Elon, do you see Elon Musk getting sort of excited by it as it went on?
Yeah.
No, no, actually.
No, you thought that I'm going to interview you.
Well, you're lying.
You're lying right now.
You don't have one example.
Give me a single example!
It's a lie!
He's turned almost Italian at one point.
I sort of like the way he carries on.
Yeah.
He got more confident as that interview went on.
Oh, he was loving it.
It's like sometimes, like I've had that happen to me before.
Sometimes I think, hold on a minute, I'm winning.
You get sort of a little bit excited by the whole victory.
Like in an argument with maybe a loved one.
Do you ever win those arguments?
I'd say not to, but... Sometimes I think, hold on, how am I not winning this argument?
I'm so clever, I should win this, but I don't win it.
No.
Guess who's coming on in a minute?
Michael Schellenberger.
Oh, he's great, isn't he?
I love him.
Don't get in an argument with him that you need to win.
He won't let you.
As part of seducing Schellenberger, if I have to argue with him, I will.
To lure him in.
I mean, I think he'll be so happy that we're not like that Debbie Wassenberger Schwarz, or whatever she was called.
That woman who said, like, you ain't a proper journalist.
You coming here, you son of a goddamn bitch!
How much money you made from this?
You shitcake!
You don't deserve nothing!
Oh, we're off.
We're off!
Swear to your heart's content.
Live a little, enjoy yourself.
So let's have a look at, like, this is a good story because what we've done is we've combined Elon Musk and his argument with the BBC reporter with the way that the mainstream media functions.
And, like, my favourite bit in this report is the bit where there's those, the questions asked in a press briefing.
This is my favourite bit.
See if you like this bit as well.
Because in the press briefing, like the press, like a bunch of little ninnies all queue up to go, oh, what are we going to do about this whistleblower boss?
Like, instead of going, you've been lying about that war!
Because you told us that he was going brilliantly!
No one asked anything like that!
They're like such a bunch of little nerfs.
Like, when I used to have to work for MTV and that, and you have to go and interview Superman, and you have to say, Superman, why are you so great?
And why is this film so brilliant?
And why have we all got to go and see it without our hard-earned money?
He wasn't happy about that, Ross.
Instead of staring into space.
That's why, look, you're meant to interview... You're meant to call him Brandon Routh, is what you're meant to call him.
Superman!
Are you?
Actually you.
Anyway, that's still happening in actual politics.
That's what you think because of all the badges and all of the pageantry and all of the apparent prestige and the italics that you're dealing with legitimate organizations.
You're not.
There is no legitimacy.
There is no authenticity.
There is no one that has more right than you to run your community.
Let's empower one another to start a madcap new democracy where we do what we want.
I mean, I tell you, baby, it's time to embrace the chaos.
I mean, are you a mentally ill person?
Because believe me, I am.
Listen to this.
The reason I like this is because it's by Mark Fisher, right?
Mark Fisher, it turns out, was mentally ill because he eventually killed himself.
Mark Fisher, you know, as you know, coined the phrase capitalist realism, meaning like we can't envisage anything beyond our current system.
Our imagination has been shut down.
So it's sort of like continuing the work of like, I don't know, Huxley, Orwell, where these dystopias have been sketched out for us that are so thorough and all encompassing, we can't think of nothing else anymore.
But he also cared a lot about mental health.
And I know a lot of you are mental.
Otherwise, why would you be watching?
No, you are, aren't you?
You're suffering.
But check out what Mark Fisher's got to say.
The vast numbers of people who suffer some kind of mental illness under capitalism can either think there is some failing with me.
If only I could fit into this system better.
If only I were working harder.
If only I could enjoy these empty pleasures more, then things would be okay.
Or the problem is with the system that is making me ill.
Why would this system work?
Why would it work to fill yourself up with sugar and empty imagery?
Let's have a look at how the zoetrope of idiocy continues to spin in this brilliant piece of reporting by us.
Here's the news.
No, no, no, no.
Here's the effing news.
No, here's the fucking news!
The Pentagon Papers, released by a 21-year-old whistleblower, reveal more media lying about the ongoing war.
So is Elon Musk right about the media's role in lying to you?
Zzzzzzzt!
You'll have heard of the Pentagon Papers and how they reveal that privately the US have concerns that they're not sharing in their jingoistic appraisal of ongoing events between Ukraine and Russia.
Elon Musk has recently said that the state media operates as a propagandist machine.
What's interesting about the Pentagon Papers is that in private the US accept that the war will go on for another year and Ukraine have little hope of regaining any land lost in this conflict.
Why then are the media only asking questions about the identity of the whistleblower and questions that lead to doubling down on censorship rather than investigating the validity of the revelations?
Let's have a look at how the mainstream media reported this story.
We are breaking news in the Pentagon.
We are standing a little too close to one another in this clip.
Pentagon's leaked classified documents.
In fact, the opposition could be seen as a convenient metaphor for how close the government and the media are A member of the Massachusetts National Air Guard has been taken into custody.
Federal authorities identifying him as 21-year-old Jack Teixeira.
Firstly, he's not old enough to be in the army.
That's the first thing that I'm going to point out.
A dramatic arrest caught on camera in connection with the Pentagon's leaked documents probe.
A man walking out of a Massachusetts home with his hands above his head before he's handcuffed and taken into custody.
Seems like overkill for arresting that little lad.
They could have just sent a couple of staff from Disney World.
Get in the fucking truck!
Okay, I'll get in the truck.
Can I have a lollipop?
Oh, okay.
No more leaks, though.
No, I promise.
This comes after a teen, whose identity was withheld, spoke with the Washington Post, with permission from his mother, claiming to know the alleged leaker.
So where's this whole story taking place?
Mickey Mouse Club?
People need permission from their mothers?
Little tiny whistleblowers?
The teen calling the leaker O.G.
O.G.?
This is children's leaks!
Saying O.G.
began posting classified information to Discord last fall.
I bet he's glad that that nickname's sticking.
Those documents rapidly spreading across similar groups causing a global diplomatic fallout.
Okay, so what's in the documents that that tiny tot radical, O.G., has leaked?
The documents on the war in Ukraine leaked from the Pentagon and other U.S.
security bodies only confirm what anyone paying attention already knew, that the United States and NATO are massively and critically involved in arming and training Ukraine and providing detailed intelligence to the Ukrainian armed forces.
The leaked document also says the US doesn't expect Russia-Ukraine peace talks in 2023.
Another leak that was also reported by the Washington Post says the US thinks it's unlikely Ukraine will regain any significant territory and is expected counter-offensive.
A stark difference from what the Biden administration has been saying publicly.
What I suppose that tells you is there is a paternalistic and propagandist approach to the way that we are informed about current events.
You might be alright with that.
Maybe you think like, oh yeah, I'd only want a propagandist version, I can't actually handle the truth.
But for me, that gap is not about how we are protected and kept safe, although that's always what they'll tell you.
It's about affording opportunity to kind of keep the public at arm's length.
Also, there's an important moral question here that doesn't involve the 21-year-old Mickey Mouse Club whistleblower.
It's this.
We're continually given a version of events with regard to Ukraine and Russia.
We have to keep supporting another billion dollars worth of arms that will go through Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, et cetera.
But in private, what they're saying is this war is unwinnable.
If you're funding this war through your taxpayer dollars, do you have the right to access the truth about what they actually think?
I believe that you do.
When they're making decisions to continue to fund and continue to support, that should be on the basis of, look, this is what we really think.
Ukraine aren't getting any of that territory back.
No way.
It's not happening.
And the war will go on for another year.
Do you want to carry on funding it?
You're funding it.
Your relationship with the state can be evaluated and understood here.
They're telling you one thing while they believe another.
They're extracting your tax dollars that's ultimately ending up in the hands of the military-industrial complex.
And when there's a whistleblower, the media just report on the whistleblower and fetishize him and whether or not he should have said it and how long he should go to prison for, whether or not it constitutes espionage.
How come all of these institutions are between you and the truth and actually your money?
Researchers say the leak ranks high among other prominent recent revelations about the clandestine US government activity.
A list that includes information from Edward Snowden about the NSA's bulk surveillance activity.
So we now know that the state are lying to you about how they regard the Russia-Ukraine conflict to play out.
That's interesting because they want you to continue funding it.
Now how are the media holding the government to account?
What type of questions are they asking?
Are they operating as a media might, an independent media might, as conveying to you information so you can determine and decide how you view this?
Or are they essentially in partnership with the government in helping them to shape the narrative in a way that keeps you from understanding the truth?
Here's a tweet from Michael Tracy, friend of the show, that might help you understand that relationship even more.
Look at the questions that were asked by journalists at the Pentagon press briefing today.
They're all about demanding answers for how the government plans to improve its ability to conceal newsworthy information from the public.
Tara Cop, AP.
What steps has the Department of Defense taken to reduce the number of people who have access to not only these classified briefings, but classified material in general?
Did you go to school with people like that?
Sir, sir, can we stay behind and do some extra homework?
Great question.
Yes, you can stay behind.
Why is the person not asking, hey, what's going on?
Is it true?
What other intrepid inquiries are being relayed by the press?
Jen Griffin, Fox News.
You say that there are strict protocols in place, and yet a 21-year-old airman was able to access some of the nation's top secrets.
How did this happen?
And isn't this a massive security breach?
So again, like, why did this leak happen?
They should be interested in the content of the information.
Steel Griffin from Fox News.
What is your message to anyone who might be thinking of leaking these kind of documents in the future?
Sir, sir, if anybody else would try to look at the test papers, what would happen to them?
Oh, good question, Janice.
Yes, they'd be in a lot of trouble.
Like, they're propping up the narrative that the government wants conveyed.
This is brilliant.
This is David Martin from CBS.
Are you going to release this airman service record?
So, look, they want to fetishize the individual, make it about the individual.
Brandy Vincent, Defense Scoop.
What technologies is the Pentagon applying right now to both spot leak documents online and spot potential indicators of leaking-type practices?
Having heard that list of suck-up, obsequious questions, is Elon Musk right that the mainstream media essentially functions as propaganda for the state?
Last week, Twitter labeled NPR and PBS as state-affiliated media before changing the wording to government-funded media.
The BBC and Voice of America were also tagged.
Look at the dynamic between Musk and this BBC report.
The BBC report sees himself as an avatar for an advocate of truth.
But Elon Musk simply says, who are the BBC?
We've spoken to people very recently who were involved in moderation and they just say there's not enough people to police this stuff.
Particularly around hate speech in the company.
What hate speech are you talking about?
I mean, you use Twitter.
Right.
Do you see a rise in hate speech?
The journalist wants to keep things general.
Musk astutely makes it particular.
And by making it particular, the guy's argument breaks down because he can't go, which wouldn't probably be that hard, here are a bunch of tweets that I've personally seen that I find offensive.
It's not Danny's research because he doesn't really believe it because he's just been given a bunch of talking points to hit Elon Musk with.
He's not even brought a knife to a gunfight, he's brought an ice cream to a gunfight.
Describe a hateful thing.
Yeah, I mean, you know, just content that will solicit a reaction, something that may include something that is slightly racist or slightly sexist, those kinds of things.
So you think if something is slightly sexist it should be banned?
Is that what you're saying?
No, I'm not saying anything.
I'm just curious.
I'm trying to understand what you mean by hateful content, and I'm asking for specific examples.
What's really important, and this applies to all aspects of the story we're telling you today, is what do you focus on?
Individuals, like the 21-year-old kid that's made these revelations, or individuals that are saying racist stuff that they shouldn't be saying on Twitter, or do you look at how these tools are being used by the powerful?
That's much more important.
Are you analysing something that pertains to the movement of power?
Ultimately what's important and what's interesting is Twitter was being co-opted by the same centralist media interests that that dude works for.
He's not comfortable moving away from generalizations, he doesn't have particular and specific information, he's not willing to talk about how powerful establishment interests want to use social media as a tool for propaganda because he is participating in that, probably not knowingly actually.
And you just said that if something is slightly sexist That's hateful content.
Does that mean that it should be banned?
You've asked me whether my feed, whether it's got less or more.
I'd say it's got slightly more.
That's what I'm asking for examples.
Can you name one example?
You can't name a single example?
I'll tell you why, because I don't actually use that feed anymore because I just don't particularly like it.
I don't even go on Twitter!
I don't even like Twitter anymore!
Shut up!
Leave me alone!
Those cars don't charge quickly enough!
And actually, a lot of people are quite similar.
I only look at my following.
We've said you've seen more hateful content, but you can't name a single example.
Not even one.
The dynamics change now.
Somebody's saying, yeah, I've got a note.
I'm not coming to school tomorrow.
OK, let me see this note.
Hold on a minute.
It says here that you're feeling slightly sick.
I don't even go to this school!
I'm not sure I've used that feed for the last...
How did you see the hateful content?
Because I've been using Twitter since you've taken it over for the last six months.
Okay, so then you must have at some point seen, for you, hateful content.
And I'm asking for one example.
Right.
You can't give a single one.
And I'm saying... Then I say so that you don't know what you're talking about.
Really?
Yes, because you can't give me a single example of hateful content.
Not even one tweet.
And yet you claimed that the hateful content was high.
That's a false.
Your surname sounds like a type of perfume!
Right, and as I already said, I don't use that feed.
But then how would you know?
I don't think this is getting anywhere.
You literally said you experienced more hateful content and then couldn't name a single example.
Right.
And as I said, I haven't... That's absurd.
I haven't... I haven't actually looked at that feed, I would say, for a few weeks.
Then how would you know this local content?
Because I'm saying that's what I saw a few weeks ago.
I can't give you an exact example.
Let's move on.
Let's move on to the topic of COVID, because I'm much more confident that nothing weird went on when it came to reporting on COVID.
This is the BBC.
The BBC could be saying, was there a wealth transfer during the pandemic?
Did it benefit powerful interests?
None of these questions are getting asked.
COVID misinformation.
You changed the COVID misinformation rules.
Has BBC changed its COVID misinformation?
The BBC does not set the rules on Twitter, so I'm asking you.
No, I'm talking about the BBC's misinformation about COVID.
This is awkward.
I'm literally asking you about, you changed the labels, the COVID misinformation labels.
There used to be a policy, then They want to have a conversation about minutiae, not that hate speech is unimportant, but compared to centralised control and an inability to have the significant and important conversation about whether state interests and media interests align to such a degree that we're no longer being given anything approaching the truth, we're continually given only propaganda.
That's the important conversation, whether you're talking about the Pentagon Papers or more broadly the relationship between the mainstream media and the public and the government.
That's the significant question.
Is responsible, objective, transparent reporting taking place?
Is state media essentially a propagandist unit?
And it's pretty clear, even from the discomfort revealed in this exchange, that that is the role of the state media.
And if you're within it, you don't even think about it.
Why would you?
How could you?
Does the BBC hold itself at all responsible for misinformation regarding masking and side effects of vaccinations?
And not reporting on that at all?
And what about the fact that the BBC was put under pressure by the British government to change the editorial policy?
Are you aware of that?
This is not an interview about the BBC.
Oh, you thought it wasn't?
Here's Kaitlyn Johnston critiquing the relationship between the state and the media.
The US State Department...
...is using Fox News...
...to do...
...no, here's the fucking news!
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Now let's go back to the other version of me who cares a great deal about corruption within the government, within big tech, how they all work together, bloody media.
Hey!
Starman's 1977 goes, it's clearly the CIA's last ditch attempt to reinforce their position on Europe, but we can all see right through it.
Marvin underscore Brando, this journo is no Schellenberger.
Well, we'd know, because Schellenberger... I bet Schellenberger's watching us right now.
Of course he is.
For all of his talk of not wanting people to be surveilled, he's probably surveilling us right now, I bet.
Joining us now is the editor of Public on Substack, and renowned so-called journalist of the Twitter files, is Michael Shelley Schellenberger.
Hello, Michael Schellenberger.
How are you today?
Good to be with you, Russell.
It's good to be with you as well.
Exactly how much money are you making out of all this?
When do you get off?
Not nearly enough.
Not nearly enough is the answer.
You're doing better.
You've got so many more Twitter followers since last time I saw you.
Hey, you explained to us last time about that, I don't know, that Aspen thing, some Aspen Institute, where they explained, you said, like, oh, wouldn't it be bad if there was a laptop leak?
This is how to cover it.
Like, and I think in that case, it was the Hunter Biden laptop.
Almost like you were saying that the media are primed in advance so that when stories break, they've been sort of, you know, primed, groomed to report on it in a particular way.
What can we learn from this round of leaks?
I know it's you that taught us about how they will teach you to focus on the individual and not focus on the content of the leaks.
Is this a classic piece of reporting by the mainstream when it comes to this round of leaks, Michael?
Sure.
I mean, I think it's important to understand, Russell, that the Pentagon Papers was this really triumphant moment in American journalism.
1969, New York Times, Washington Post decide to publish these top-secret Pentagon Papers about how bad the war is going in Vietnam.
Steven Spielberg made a whole movie about this called The Paper in 2018.
Meryl Streep, as the publisher of the Washington Post, making this difficult decision to basically go against all of her social, her friends, including the defense secretary at the time, to publish these papers is hugely considered a hugely courageous act.
Of course, it was upheld by the courts because the First Amendment is so strong, it protects this.
So when I discovered that there had been a workshop hosted by the Aspen Institute in the summer of 2020, Basically, training journalists not to focus on the substance of the leaks, of any leaks, but instead to focus on the leaker, it literally sent chills up my spine.
I found it the creepiest thing in the world.
And it was a workshop attended by the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, all the major media, Wikipedia.
The main censors at both Twitter and Facebook.
I then discovered afterwards that there had been a previous white paper by people at Stanford, including some people that I think have very close ties with the national security state, making the exact same case that they should break the Pentagon Papers principle.
So, of course, when this latest leak happened, this latest leak of Pentagon Papers, Sure enough, there the journalists were focusing very heavily on who this person was, calling him a racist, saying he was anti-Semitic.
Maybe he is.
We don't know.
But I think it was striking how much of the focus was on the person and what a terrible person he apparently is, and much less so on some of the pretty extraordinary revelations in the documents themselves.
I was very surprised to see even commentators that I admire following that principle.
It seems in this instance that the protagonist is almost irrelevant, that it wasn't necessarily
ideologically inspired, that it was just a sort of a kudos move in a chat room, just
oh look, see, I can access these things, that's at least how it seems, or one telling of the
story. But in any event, I'm still narrativizing the individual rather than focusing on the
content and it seems that what's of particular interest is that the story that we've been
told about the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, as many people have suspected, is
being one that's been told to us in a pretty biased way and sort of, kind of in a sense,
Michael, legitimizes many of us that have been cynical about the humanitarian situation.
uh a perspective that we've been invited to view this through it sort of seems that that's is not legit mate well can like um what do you think are these particularly significant revelations and Why is it that they continue to exaggerate the damage that these revelations do?
I mean in particular around Snowden and Chelsea Manning and the fact that it seems that the US personnel have not been harmed as a result of those revelations.
Yeah, well, I mean, I think the first thing we should emphasize is that we have not heard from the accused.
And the accused has a right to tell his story, you know, and describe his motivations.
Maybe it's just exactly like the mainstream news media and the Pentagon are saying, but we don't know.
And I think we have to emphasize that before we jump to some conclusions.
Of course, there were very important revelations in the documents.
Maybe the most important one is that There's no hope for a negotiated settlement until next year.
That's a very similar sort of story that we saw from the Pentagon papers in the 1960s, that the war was not going as well as people said it was.
We also saw a revelation that Zelensky was demanding the ability to fire missiles into Russia.
With, of course, U.S.
advice and their U.S.
missiles, that's pretty serious stuff.
I don't think we've really had a proper debate in the United States or the rest of the Western world on what happens in terms of escalation.
There's obviously understandable concerns about escalation, given that Russia is a nuclear-armed power.
So, yeah, I mean, it seems to me that the behavior in particular of the news media Where it really is acting like propagandists for the Pentagon, rather than people really opening up this debate and discussing the content.
And perhaps considering that maybe we don't know everything at this point and shouldn't rush to conclusions.
So it's really the opposite behavior that we saw from the 1960s where you may remember that one of the ways that Hawks demonized the leaker of the Pentagon Papers in the 1960s, Daniel Ellsberg, was that he had visited a psychotherapist and this was considered to be a terrible thing or some sign of his mental instability.
So in the past that was viewed as a very right-wing reactionary kind of attack and now it's just considered par for the course that we would demonize this person as a racist and anti-Semite.
Yeah that's right and I suppose the other aspect of this is that the revelations are in and of themselves and patriotic and they're dangerous and it was really interesting to see the text of that press conference the kind of the questions that were asked during that none of them were like investigative it was all questions like what are we What are we going to do?
How are we going to stop this kind of thing happening again?
Nobody asked any questions at all about like...
So you know when you said that it sort of sent chills through you down your spine when
you were at that, you know, when you heard of that Aspen Institute and the institutionalization
of the process of investigation.
What I suppose interests me, mate, is why are people so susceptible to that?
Why do people think, well, we're not going to bloody well do that.
That's ridiculous.
That's not what journalism is.
It just seems odd to me that people have been so easily co-opted.
Why is it happening at such a scale?
I don't understand.
Well, that's right.
I mean, so 1 of the ways to think about what journalism is supposed to be is that it is supposed to be a kind of check and balance on the government.
So, for example, when we get access to the Twitter files, we want the content of the files.
We don't really care how we got them.
Like, if there's a journalists are supposed to be information.
Just seeking out information wherever we can get it.
We're just desperate for information.
If it's leaked from the government, if someone breaks the law to give it to us, we want the information.
We want to publish information.
That's how it works.
We're not supposed to be concerned about, oh, what is the Pentagon going to say, or am I going to lose access?
So that kind of behavior, when you see media organizations promoting The kind of public relations or propaganda functions of the military.
You're not doing the journals anymore.
You're dealing directly with propagandists.
The other thing I would notice that there is a significant amount of and a significant history of the CIA and other intelligence community organizations.
Infiltrating the news media, placing stories in the news media.
This happened all throughout Vietnam.
We know it happened with both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, where millions of dollars was paid.
This is all in the New York Times, by the way.
This is not a controversial statement.
The U.S.
government and other governments spend millions of dollars paying for propaganda stories in other countries.
One of the things that we've seen with the Twitter files, but also with the lawsuits by the Attorney General of Missouri, and Louisiana is that you start to see these propaganda
operations that the U.S. government had run abroad turned inward against the American people on
multiple instances now.
We've documented it now on basically the claim that Trump was a Russian agent and that there
was this memo supposedly showing that Putin controlled him because of prostitutes urinating
It was totally ridiculous.
It was the basis for the whole Russiagate hoax.
We saw the Hunter Biden laptop was dismissed with a conspiracy theory that it was hacked information, even though We knew from the first time that those materials came out that there was an FBI subpoena and the FBI had the laptop since December 2019.
We also, of course, see state propaganda with COVID, where you saw the person leading the response from the United States, Anthony Fauci, dismissing an extremely reasonable hypothesis that the virus may have leaked from a lab and insisting through, you know, so-called scientific journals like Lancet And also with the New York Times, Washington Post and others that anybody who said it was anything other than a zoonotic virus was was engaged in a conspiracy theory.
Those are propaganda efforts.
Those are propaganda efforts by the US government aimed at the American people using the mainstream news media.
Those are the kind of things that the United States used to do abroad.
As it sought to overthrow governments or prop up governments, we're now seeing it turned against the people of the United States and the Western world, and we should be extremely suspicious of the official narrative on this Pentagon Papers leak on everything else.
Hey, can you tell us a little more about Rene Diresta and the use of think tanks to utilize and mobilize more censorship, please?
Absolutely.
So there's this person named Renee DiResta.
She's very little known.
She's often sort of the number two person at various organizations.
In our research, she kept coming up as really the smartest person in the room.
She was always the person who was the first to sort of create justifications for censorship.
Her story itself always struck me as kind of fake.
She sort of suggested that she was fighting anti-vaxxers online.
In 2014, but the next thing you know, she's advising the Obama White House on how to fight ISIS.
It then came out accidentally because her her supervisor at Stanford.
Is sort of slightly clumsier, maybe not as bright as she is.
He accidentally revealed that she had been a CIA fellow.
And we had badgered her about it.
I mentioned it in my testimony.
I mentioned your Rogan.
She felt the need to respond.
She confirmed this.
She's a CIA fellow.
So, I think she's maybe the most important person on the outside.
of the censorship industrial complex making the case for greater censorship and i would note she just they just published an article just true to form uh in foreign policy renee did with her colleague called how gamers eclipsed spies as an intelligence threat so now renee diresta is out there making the case for So, of course.
And so this is what we're going to see, Russell, is that every new problem for the national security state, every new crisis, whether it's climate change or COVID, Or a leak of sensitive information is going to be used as justification by sort of the people on the outside who are ostensibly independent, but have very strong ties with the Pentagon or the CIA.
They're going to be using these incidents to demand greater censorship.
And that's what she does in foreign policy this week.
Oh, that's cool.
So like what you saw at the Aspen Institute, where they groom the journalists to watch out for a certain thing, that happens on a mass scale through the kind of public facing organizations of which Rene Diresta is a representative.
Start watching out for chat rooms.
You're going to hear a lot of things about kids in chat rooms releasing dangerous information.
They're probably Anti-vaxxer, ISIS terrorists, these terrible new hybrids.
They love chopping off heads.
They hate taking injections.
Watch out for them.
So then when these stories start coming out, we're particularly primed for them.
And do you think that this story about their kid doing these releases, you know, the recent Pentagon Papers, Pentagon Papers Part 2, the confusingly named, do you think these will be used to mobilise legislation that allows for more censorship?
Absolutely.
They're constantly trying to create new pretexts or predicates or justifications for censorship.
I think the other thing that's come out in our research, Russell, that's super important and really interesting, is that they use these national security types, CIA fellows like Rene Diresta, who use woke language to justify censorship.
And at first I would sort of hear it and it seemed incongruous because on the one hand, I associate the woke with more of the radical left and extremely progressive anti-imperialist types.
But then you start to hear it coming out of the mouths of people who are also talking about Russian disinfo and national security.
And it always struck me as really incongruous.
And then I started to understand that really it's been going on for a while.
There's all sorts of organizations that talk about countering digital hate.
And so you see it all the time.
There's a group in Britain that's called the Institute for Strategic Dialogue that's targeting climate denialism, including Jordan Peterson, Bjorn Lomborg, myself.
It's countering hate.
So they're using racism online.
They're using climate denialism online as justifications for censorship.
The other thing I would note, Russell, is that we started seeing a pattern where there was basically a set of countries, the United States, Britain at the heart of it, but also New Zealand, Australia and Canada.
And somebody pointed out, because I'm sort of new to this space, someone pointed out, they go, well, that's the Five Eyes intelligence and spying network that's existed since World War II.
That network of surveillance, one of the characteristics of it, Is that the countries, because they can't spy on their own citizens without violating their constitutions, so they spy on each other's citizens and then they share the information with each country.
That's been going on for decades.
Now they're doing it with censorship.
So it's the British think tank that's attacking me.
It's the Australians who's attacking us.
And then similarly, our people attacking Brits and Australians.
So the same thing that they've been doing in terms of using each other in these different countries to spy on other people to get around constitutional protections against surveillance, they're now doing the same thing on censorship.
So I think those two new things are things to build our resilience against the censors, is to be aware of the ways in which the censors are using wokeism, they're tapping into preventing real world harm is one of the things they say.
Yes, increasingly abstract motivations for control and censorship.
Initially, out-and-out wars against nations, then wars against terror, then wars against germs, then wars against hatred and hate speech.
And I see, in order to avoid legislation that prevents nations spying on their own citizens, they can have a pact.
I'll spy on your citizens, you spy on my citizens.
Almost like a mutual handjob pact to allow the maximum amount of spying.
That's the analogy.
It's an evocative image, Russell.
Yeah, for sure.
I'm not sure I can get that out of my head now.
I want it in your head.
I want you to imagine five hands linking around the world, a masturbatory sort of circle of mutual benefit.
And in the middle, that's just data.
That's just the quivering pile of data in the middle, Michael, that needs to be analysed.
Do you feel That as this crusade of yours, if indeed that's an appropriate word, continues that you become increasingly alienated from what once would have been regarded prestigious figures in legacy media.
Are you able now to go to a New York Times style banquet and meet, I don't know, Bruce Wayne and people like that?
Or don't that happen anymore because you are now a detested outsider?
Well, it's a really interesting question.
So I just did a very long, I did two very long interviews with BBC, which is working, which have been working on a, I think it was a podcast on nuclear power.
And so nuclear is now much more fashionable in Western countries, people recognize that you need nuclear energy to deal with climate change.
But I'm also somebody that has pushed back against the climate alarmism.
And on this interview with the BBC, they asked me a bunch of really hard questions.
Basically, are you a climate denier?
And do you think climate change is happening?
And they did it in a way where I knew that actually the producers wanted to include me in their story, because they were writing about they're doing a thing on nuclear, and I'm a pretty well-known advocate of nuclear.
But it was almost like the sense I had was like they had to prove to their audience or to their senior supervisors at BBC or elsewhere that I wasn't a climate denier.
And so my sense is that there has been a concerted effort against me, at least since 2020 when Apocalypse Never came out, to basically key me out of the mainstream news media, to demonize me, to slander me.
This particular group, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, has been taking the lead on it.
So, yeah, I mean, for sure it has.
I think it's hard for mainstream journalists to include me in their stories because I think they get a lot of flack from these think tanks that put a lot of pressure on them.
We also know that many of these people that are complaining about bot networks operate their own bot network.
So Rene Diresta, for example, at the Aspen Institute was once asked, she was asked about her own bots that she operates.
We know that and again, this is the former CIA fellow.
We also know that she was involved in a dirty tricks campaign in a 2017 Senate race.
Yeah, I mean, I think these things are going on.
I think the real wild card, though, I would just say is Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter.
the Russians. Somehow she got away with it and is considered still a legitimate voice even though
she was involved in what was potentially illegal campaign activities. So yeah, I mean, I think
these things are going on. I think the real wild card, though, I would just say is Elon Musk's
takeover of Twitter. That was not something that anybody saw coming. And it revealed both the
extent of the censorship apparatus, but also how close they came to having control over all the
the social media platforms.
So I think that's changed things a bit.
It's opened up things a bit.
And you saw his famous now interaction with BBC, where he pushed back against BBC's own misinformation and censorship.
So I think we're in a very dynamic time.
On the one hand, sometimes I feel like we're up against a really You know, intimidating power and force and coordinated effort.
And on the other hand, I think that the Internet and people want to be free and they want to be able to use the Internet and say what they want.
And people don't like being censored.
People don't like the idea that governments around the world are working to censor us.
And so that gives me hope that I think that the light will shine through the cracks that we can, you know, can basically put into this huge effort to censor us.
I suppose one of the things that conversation revealed is that there is now no authority that we all unthinkingly grant our faith to.
Like, I don't know if it was ever the case, but, like, being British and stuff, you know, like, there's the sense that in the 1940s, the BBC and the voice of Churchill and the Righteous pipes against fascism. And now all of these acronym
institutions, whether they're financial or media, are understood to be, broadly speaking, corrupt.
And at the very least, you can say, it appears they don't operate primarily on behalf of the
people that they claim to represent and report to. It seems that they mostly propagandize on
behalf of elite institutions and organizations.
When you see that exchange between Elon Musk Um...
And that BBC reporter, do you think that this is an indicator of a shift that's taking place?
Even though Elon Musk, it's difficult to sort of frame him as a kind of a radical when, you know, he's the richest man in the world and stuff.
What do you think?
What do you take from that exchange?
Well, no, you're absolutely right.
So in the United States, it's the same as in Britain.
I mean, we trusted CBS or NBC, ABC.
That trust has now declined massively.
So I think something like a quarter of Americans trust the mainstream news media.
That's the lowest point, I think, in recorded history.
The problem for the mainstream news media, and it's sort of a vicious circle for them, is that when they don't report on true facts in the world, when they don't tell us about vaccine side effects, when they don't tell us that natural disasters are actually declining in frequency, or when they tell us false things like Hunter Biden's laptop was a result of a hack, Then people get the truth elsewhere.
That hurts their trust in those news media outlets.
So you get a vicious circle where the news media end up appealing to a smaller and smaller audience.
They want to retain the support from that audience by telling that audience what they want to hear, but then by excluding certain facts or outright lying about other facts, They then undermine the trust with the rest of the public.
So I do think we're entering into a period, and you saw in the Elon exchange, where Elon, I mean, the killer moment, of course, is where he goes, give me one example of a case of misinformation you've seen on Twitter.
And the reporter couldn't do it, even though he himself claimed that there was widespread evidence of it.
And we saw this afterwards, too, where people, they were pointing to the exact same think tank that I had mentioned earlier, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, this little nefarious think tank with some sort of relationship with national security entities, with various financial interests, claiming that there'd been all this misinformation and anti-Semitism.
Well, I go into the report, and I look in the report, and they were counting people criticizing the World Economic Forum and George Soros with no mention of Judaism or anti-Semite, anything, they
counted that tweet criticizing the World Economic Forum in Soros as an example of anti-Semitism.
So that kind of stuff does not breed trust in the public. And when you can see online the
active mistrust of organizations like the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, I think they're going
to have a hard time regaining that trust after being caught red-handed lying or misleading or
just excluding information that other news outlets like yourself or Joe Rogan or
others are including in their coverage.
Oh no, man, that's really worrying, isn't it?
Because you feel like that... Because antisemitism is a real thing in the world.
Acts of antisemitism do occur in the world.
It's, you know, like the desecration of a graveyard, a synagogue, hate speech, legit hate speech.
Like, in real life, if someone shouted in the street, I don't like the WEF, you wouldn't go, Hey!
That's anti-semitic!
You'd think, oh, this person is against globalism.
The continual reframing that's changing of the meaning of words.
All these things are happening that seem to be organized in order to create new systems of control, the new ability to shut down dissent.
And with this new emergent ways to censor, it's pretty worrying.
And that's why one of the things I keep I'm trying to return to, Michael, is our ability to find new union, to try and find something of spiritual value in this, to accept that we actually oughtn't be resorting to bigotry and prejudice, and that we should make an effort to respect people who want to do life differently from us.
Because as long as that remains a kind of a hypersensitive area, we're able to be neatly corralled.
And, you know, just that example that you gave then sort of gave me a little jolt, perhaps like your chilling Aspen Institute moment.
Thanks for joining us, Michael.
It's always fantastic to hear from you and indeed to see you looking so well-groomed and handsome, made up and beautifully styled.
Thank you so much.
Back at you, Russell.
Thank you.
Good to be with you.
I hope we get to see you again soon, mate.
You can follow Michael's work by going to public.substack.com.
He does really brilliant things, and there was a video of him recently analysing, I think it was, Rene Diresta, talking about an announcement she made that sounded pretty anodyne, and in real life she was actually saying something that sounded perfectly reasonable, like, this is going on every day, and we should stop it!
And what it meant was, We're going to censor everything that everyone does all of the time.
Oh, it sounds reasonable.
You know, you sort of get coaxed along on these little waves.
Hey, listen, we're going to flip over now to being exclusively available on Locals.
You join us on YouTube, you come on to Rumble, you come on to Rumble, we're off to Locals.
Then there's a really, really exclusive thing where I just shout down my own trousers.
Do I have to be in that one?
Actually, no one's allowed.
It's just me and you, that one, Gareth.
I'm in it, man.
Yeah, you're in it already.
I'm afraid I can't let you leave now.
It's too late for you.
So, hey, tomorrow, Dave Rubin's coming on here, plus we're going to really try and understand what the hell Macron's up to.
He keeps Ignoring his own people rioting in the streets.
I don't know what he's up to.
I don't know what he's prioritising.
I don't know who he works for.
Perhaps it's BlackRock or something.
We're going to be streaming a bit longer here, but you have to join us on Locals.
There's a button somewhere on your screen.
Press that button.
Join us.
Join me and Gareth for a live Q&A like people now.
Like people like, look, CU Corpus talking about Trump there.
You know, there's people talking about critical thought.
Yeah, there's all sorts going on.
They're arguing, actually.
The fact is they're arguing, but that's their right to argue on there.
We'll be on Rumble tomorrow, same time, for another fantastic show, fantastic guests, difficult, unpalatable truths sometimes, but hey, what are you going to do?
The world's gone nuts.
Join us tomorrow, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
And until then, stay free.
Switch off.
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