Russell chats to Michael Shellenberger, the editor of 'Public' on Substack and most recently known for his journalism on the Twitter files. Michael has been exposing how the network of U.S. government agencies, private academic and “think tank” organizations have been secretly censoring millions of Americans online.Follow Michael's work: https://public.substack.com/WATCH the full interview: https://bit.ly/40n8jIm 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/
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?
Has 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'll be talking about the Pentagon 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 journalists, Matt Taibbi.
Once we click over to being exclusively on Rumble, we're going to tell you an unbelievable story.
I don't know if it's true, so that's why we'll be cautious around it, but has Zelensky been embezzling?
Has he been?
Has he been?
Let us know in the chat.
Apparently 400 million dollars of unusual acquisitions.
Well, 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're doing a great job.
You look very young the way you're doing this.
It's like a young person.
It's like a new dance.
TikTok trend.
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.
And 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 has 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?
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.
Like, we've got, like, people that still wear suits.
We've not progressed to the stage where it's like, it's a geezer in camo now, in charge, or an actual robot.
Like, we're still going with, here's a geezer in a suit.
We've gone for that sort of Trudeau mode.
Someone with nice hair.
Now wears glasses sometimes.
Talks about liberalism and 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.
So we'll see how it plays out.
Occasional little blast of rain here in Northern Ireland this evening.
They'll have a meeting face to face in the morning ahead of the President's speech that Emma was referring to there.
That guy's not important enough to meet all of Biden's people.
He is the King's personal representative for County Antrim, my man.
Right, right.
Meet everyone.
Meet everyone I've brought with me.
Have a look at Synec.
Synec in glasses don't look significantly different from Synec out of glasses.
So it can't be that he just didn't recognise 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 late.
Let 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 of... 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.
Stay free with Russell Brand.
See it first on Rumble.
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 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.
It was 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, perspective that we've been invited to view this through.
It sort of seems that that is not legit.
Mate, 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 rest of the Western world on whether 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 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 gonna do?
How are we gonna 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 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 one 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.
You know, 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 dealing with journalists anymore.
You're dealing directly with propagandists.
The other thing I would note is 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 on him in a bed.
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 twenty nineteen.
We also, of course, see state propaganda with covert where you saw the person leaving 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 engaged in a conspiracy theory.
Those are propaganda efforts.
Those are propaganda efforts by the U.S.
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, uh, 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 supervisor at Stanford It's 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 Joe Rogan.
She felt the need to respond.
She confirmed that 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 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 expanded censorship and expanded surveillance of gamer chat rooms.
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 organisations 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 when these stories start coming out, Coming out, we're particularly primed for them and do you think that this story about their kids doing these releases, you know, the recent Pentagon Papers, Pentagon Papers Part 2, the confusingly named, do you think these will be used to mobilize 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 Renee 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 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 like 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, oh, 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 sensors is to be aware of the ways in which the sensors are using woke is and they're tapping into preventing real world harm is one of the things they say as a main justification for for censoring and they're also using their allies in these other countries.
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'm going to 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, and they did it in a way where I knew that actually the producers wanted to include me in the 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, Renee 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 that used fake Russian bots To create the perception that the Republican candidate was being supported by the Russians.
Somehow she got away with it and is considered still a legitimate voice, even though she was involved in, you know, 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, you know, and how close they came to having control over all 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, I 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 or the Righteous 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 and...
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 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, you know, relationship with national security entities.
With various financial interests claiming that there had 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-Semitism, anything.
They counted that tweet criticizing the World Economic Forum and 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 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 Trying to return to you, 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.
Does really brilliant things.
And there was a video of him recently analyzing, I think it was, Rene Diresta, talking about like an announcement she made that sounded pretty anodyne.
And in real life, she was actually saying, she said something that sounded probably 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, am I?
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 prioritizing.
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.
