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April 28, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:19:24
PROOF! | We’re Killing Ourselves! - #118 - Stay Free With Russell Brand
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I'm a black man and I could never be a better man I'm a black man and I could never be a better man
In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello there, you awakening wonders.
Thanks for joining me on Stay Free with Russell Brand.
It's Friday and what an incredible week it's been.
Joe Biden has announced he will run again with an extraordinary video.
Tucker Carlson has been ousted from the mainstream.
Don Lemon has left It's left us all in disarray.
We've got some news analysis coming up, as well as a fantastic conversation with one of my favorite guests that I've ever had, Dr. Ian McGilchrist, who'll be talking to you about psychology, neurology, and the way that the state is using your own mental illness as a kind of mind dagger against you, how you are being controlled, nudged, behaviorally manipulated by systems and forces way, way, way beyond your control.
We're going to talk a little bit, first of all, about Summer Davos having me a blast.
Is that what we're talking about?
That's it.
That's happening.
Davos is back!
Sometimes, on a week like this, it can seem like the world is being coordinated by a centralized, globalist force, where technocrats get together to manipulate our consciousness, and that's because, to a degree, that is exactly what's happening.
If you thought winter Davos in Davos was fun, wait till you get a load of summer Davos in... China.
China, that's right.
Once a year isn't enough, is it, for Davos?
Let's be honest.
I can't get through the year, Gareth, with just one look at Klaus Schwab in an ethnically inappropriate outfit.
I want to see Klaus Schwab with a shipping Yeah, Xi Jinping.
I thought that was a type of clothing or something for a minute.
This is a type of clothing.
This is Klaus Schwab.
That's how we estimate.
We should say we've editorialized that.
That's not a factual image.
No, that's not an actual image.
We think that's what Klaus Schwab would wear.
And will.
And will wear at Summer Davos.
Let us know in the chat, in the comments.
In fact, why don't you make your own artwork of Klaus Schwab?
Be as adventurous and as bold as you want.
Unless you're watching on YouTube, in which case you should stay within the WHO guidelines, which includes, I think... Which he certainly does.
He stays well within those guidelines.
Oh, I stay within the guidelines.
I don't like to stray.
One of ours is Justin Trudeau.
Authoritarianism with the face made up with the hair perfect.
I wouldn't like to pry.
That's right.
That's what's going on.
Summer Davos.
Who wouldn't want to participate in that?
Well, I wonder what's going to be going on, because obviously it's in China rather than Davos.
They can't call it... I don't think they should be allowed to call it Davos if it ain't in Davos.
I don't think so.
It's confusing.
What will they call it?
You'd be able to go in that top.
With this?
I think so.
I think you'd be welcomed.
Some shorts, maybe some sandals.
They'd love you, mate.
Why don't you and Lee Fang...
Guests from earlier in the week go together.
I'd love that.
Hand in hand.
I've already asked him actually.
Fang and Roy Bullock.
I've actually been texting Lee Fang myself.
No, no.
It's me and Lee.
We've got the connection.
You're hurting me.
The Biden administration has invested 1.9 million in disinformation education.
So the actual presidential administration is trying to censor and control and legitimize the further manipulation of the media.
Let me just get into the facts of this.
I'm going to read this out under the assumption that reading it is going to improve my understanding of the story.
The Biden administration is set to spend almost two million of taxpayer dollars on a media education program to train educators, media professionals, librarians, government employees and information specialists in foreign countries on how to combat disinformation according to a grant document seen by Washington Examiner.
That, I don't remember we needed that, that could have gone.
Let's have a look at the next still.
Meanwhile, Meta's oversight board recommends continuing censorship until the WHO calls an end to the pandemic.
So, according to the WHO, are we still in the middle of the pandemic?
This is still it.
Certainly is.
Do you feel like you're in the middle of a pandemic?
Let me know right now if you are locked within your house, masked up to the hilt, vaccinated to within an inch of your life.
And remember, I have no opinion on what you should do.
I mean, Just stay healthy, eat well, look after yourself, those kind of things.
Bit of exercise.
Vitamin D, bit of exercise, probably do get out of the house, actually.
Yep, I think so.
Probably the mastermind benefiting you.
Should have done that in the first place, as a matter of fact.
Probably should have done that in the first place.
Is there not anything else?
We're not going to be talking about... Well, we can discuss this.
I mean, obviously... Four minutes.
The way in which this is going to impact us is continued censorship because we know those guidelines because we're on YouTube literally now as we speak and having to adhere to those guidelines.
And those guidelines will continue to inform the way Facebook or Meta approaches censorship.
So it's like the kind of continued sweeping, I don't know, whatever you call it, of censorship that will continue.
And I guess it also highlights the kind of power that the WHO have.
And organisations like the WEF, while they sometimes seem comical, particularly when Klaus Schwab is wearing that hat, they still have incredible influence and sway.
The WHO will still be, tangentially at least, managing content on Facebook.
you still won't be able to say things like, uh, vitamin D is good for you, you won't be
able to talk about the booster trials that Moderna undertook.
Well, we can't literally do it right now.
Literally can't talk about those trials.
Can't talk about the efficacy of non-sanctioned, possibly out-of-patent medications that could
be used.
Can't talk about, uh, can you talk about traces found in breast milk?
Can you talk about that?
I mean, you know that you can't do any of these things.
I can't do any of it!
Well, why are you testing me on them?
These things... I'm testing you to within an inch of your life.
You're making a point.
I'm literally making a point.
Obviously, with, you know, Facebook and Meta, we saw the story earlier in the week as well about the Seymour Hersh and the Nord Stream and the way in which Facebook are using, I think it was Norwegian, um, legal system to censor that story. So it's just another way
in which this creep of
you know censorship and sweeping for disinformation.
Obviously the thing with the Biden administration
and the disinformation in education is it's like people like, they're training
educators, so that's teachers, media professionals, librarians, government
That's a pretty big section of the workforce that they're essentially training.
A bit like we were told by Michael Schellenberger when they were bringing journalists to... Where was it, the place that you talked about?
Aspen!
Aspen, the Aspen Institute.
But you're essentially training people to look for... I'm really happy that you felt that you could rely on me.
You're probably my go-to investigative journalist, I would say.
The Aspen Institute preempted the Hunter Biden laptop, told journalists that there would likely be a laptop story and that they should assume that it's Russian disinformation.
We now know that the Biden administration went to the CIA in order to construct that
letter signed by 50 CIA signatories to suggest that the Hunter Biden story was likely disinformation.
And now this category of censorship and disinformation is on the rise, i.e. a new threat, a new problem
has been created.
We're old enough to remember when it was just old school Cold War.
That's what the problem was, an ideological block behind the Berlin Wall.
Then it became the slightly more abstract war against terror.
Then we've experienced the war against germs, and now it's the war against ideas.
It's becoming more and more conceptual, more and more difficult to define, therefore more and more easy to oppose alternative narratives, Shut down defence, legitimise surveillance, justify control, censorship and smearing.
Yeah, and we spoke earlier in the week about that essay by Leighton Woodhouse, didn't we?
About the relationship between the media, in relation obviously to Tucker at the time, the mainstream media and the government and the way in which that has fragmented.
So that's less and less potent and powerful for the government now.
So they're turning to censorship of social media and this is like an ongoing way in which they're going to try and retain the status quo in some way.
Yes, that's right.
And I feel like, as we have said before in one of our journalistic endeavours, that Tucker Carlson's story, in a sense, is an interesting symbol of the decline in trust in the mainstream media.
Tucker Carlson came to epitomise an authentic voice, a powerful voice in particular for his detractors, but the kind of voice that ...is unlikely to be able to continue to succeed within the framework of the mainstream media that increasingly requires siloed audiences and a model that's dependent on data capture, incendiary rhetoric and the increase of polemicism, even though people that hate Tucker Carlson say that's precisely what he's guilty of, although increasingly he was talking about how both parties are equally bad, like he, you know, said stuff.
He was definitely going that way.
I mean, you could make an argument for it.
Are these some of the reasons why he might have been let go by Fox News?
Was he starting to say the wrong things?
One of the things I liked most about Leighton Woodhouse's article available on his sub-stack is his suggestion that what we are seeing now is the emergence of a genuine threat of an independent political movement within American politics.
That the bi-party system itself is under threat because of the ability to communicate new
ideas. That's why the category of disinformation has to be created so that people can be
denied access to information that will stop them being compliant. That's actually why it
is not like, oh no, people are going to start taking medicine that ain't good for them
or not take medicine that is good for them or not support a war in the right sort of way.
These are the arguments that are used to legitimise censorship.
The censorship is required in order to shut down conversations that are detrimental to the ongoing success of... Yeah, I mean that is literally happening with those Pentagon revelations that we have learnt about.
We learnt some new truths about the Ukraine war.
What is immediately coming off the back of that is new regulation and new proposals that the Biden administration are considering pushing through to target now some of those sites, those sites where people are able to share ideas, in this case obviously share state secrets, but ways in which again truth is being revealed.
We're just some guys coming together to share state secrets, hang around with our tops off, call each other OGs, Yeah, as we said many times at the time, the fact that the content of the leaks was ignored in favour of condemnation of the young man that made the leaks is telling, particularly when some of the revelations included that there are American boots on the ground, is the phrase that people like to use.
I don't like when I find myself accidentally saying things like that.
Like boots on the ground.
It's like you've inadvertently become one of the pundits.
That's why I don't like deep dive.
Same reason.
I don't like popular maxims.
What would you call it?
Boots on the ground.
Yeah, boots on the ground.
Tootsies on the terra firma.
There's American tootsies on the terra firma.
Twinkle toes.
Better story.
It is, isn't it?
Can you imagine them now, just like, they're a lovely bunch of guys, just running, scampering about.
What about deep dive?
And don't be, be careful now, we're on YouTube.
Um, I would say a profound plunder.
I mean, if you need alliteration, which some have said is the leper's bell of poetry.
Like, I feel, no, I don't know, deep dive, I actually struggle to find an appropriate alternative to deep dive.
That's why you fall into it, because deep dive entered into the language relatively recently, probably only a couple of years ago, to find an alternative to it.
Maybe this is the slippery slope.
Now we're gonna get on a slippery slope with today's guest.
Maybe, you know, maybe that's how it happens.
Before you know it, you're on CNN.
You're Brian Stelter or one of those guys.
If you meet, and I pray you never do, because I wouldn't want you to offend him, Dr. Ian McGilchrist.
Last thing, he's a respected academic and a very brilliant and influential man.
The last thing that he wants is for you to be trying to get him on a slippery slope.
Like you're in some Floridian water park.
Okay.
Trying to butter him up in a tube.
I won't do that.
I think I'm gonna meet him in a second.
It's gonna be awkward, I think.
Dr. Ian McGilchrist is a brilliant and groundbreaking author and intellectual.
I've had the great privilege of meeting you because I'm stifling a burp.
Can you tell that?
Are these the nerves kicking in?
I'm not nervous about Dr. Ian McGilchrist.
I've met him before.
I've spoke to him.
He's one of them Ians that's got too many I's in his name.
I know the ones.
You know, some people, Ian, will just have the one I. Some Ians...
I have another eye!
A little bit of the eye.
Thought you were through with the eyes?
There's no eye in Ian.
Actually, there's two.
So I've got you there.
Confused you.
His groundbreaking book, The Master and His Emissary, is often misquoted and misused, because people talk about, like, you know, people might say to you, Gareth, oh, you're very right-brained.
That sort of thing, Ian McGilchrist, you don't want to hear that.
No.
Because there's complex networks in neurology.
It's not that the left brain's doing this and the right brain's doing that, although it's not even as simple as that, because there are certain traits that are characteristic of the hemispheres, and it's these misunderstandings that we're going to be clearing up.
It's reductive.
I hate all reductivism.
Yeah, which is in itself a reductive.
Do you want me to leave now?
Don't you dare leave me, because there's a lot of actual, I would say, erotic tension.
I'm not going to start saying there's erotic tension between Dr Ian McGilchrist and myself, because I'm about to have a very serious conversation, which we're going to talk about a variety of topics, including Tucker's departure and how a figurehead like Tucker Carlson rose up.
We're going to be talking about Joe Biden, what it means when you have a Atrophy and cadaverous figure running for president for four more years presenting himself as radical when he couldn't be more corporatized and more of an establishment figure and how was the pandemic used to induce mass compliance as well as the ensuing and a demonstrable mental health crisis that was exacerbated and potentially even not caused because mental health crisis has been going on for a little while but it certainly got worse during the pandemic.
Lots and lots of things to talk about Gareth so if you would Do me then.
Why don't you throw to off YouTube and I'll... I'm not going to be throwing to off YouTube yet.
Gareth, get out of here.
There's only so much an on-screen assistant can do.
I'm going to be inviting our guest Dr Ian McGilchrist to join us now.
Stay free with Russell Brand.
See you first on Rumble.
I was brought up...
At the tail end of a culture in which it was thought good to be self-reliant, to be resilient, not to fall apart if you were opposed or criticized.
And what has happened during my lifetime is that I think we've got lazy.
I think we've got used to having everything easy.
I wonder how an epochal shift like that might have occurred.
Isn't it likely that such a significant shift has been somehow culturally brought about?
There are many, many aspects to this, but one is that we have got further and further from real community, which is local, the sense of a place and a group and a rooting, a belonging, a place of belonging.
And because of mobilization and industrialization, that basis of trust, which is there in a palpable, intuitively felt society, has been lost.
So, I just would like to query your assumption that it's the individual's negligence that has led to this infantilization.
No, Russell, that's not what I said.
I won't accept that no.
Stay free with Russell Brand.
See it first on Rumble.
Thank you very much for joining me, Doctor.
Are you happy with your introduction?
It is a very good one, a fine one.
You said that I was incorrectly anticipating the conclusions to our conversation.
Any particular instance where I've been misapprehending what's likely to take place?
Oh, I wouldn't like to prejudice our subsequent conversation.
God, you're brilliant at this, aren't you?
I think that what our viewers will be most interested in initially is understanding the nature of your work.
We've of course had a conversation before, I enjoyed very much your conversation with Jordan Peterson, and I wonder if we could start by talking about how the principles of psychiatry and psychology more broadly, even though I understand that much of your work has a neurological basis rather than just analytical psychiatry, How these tools are applied in sociology and in particular in the kind of messaging that we might receive from, for example, government authority.
Yes, I thought the things that you said were right, that there are many things in the social sphere to which my hemisphere hypothesis is very relevant.
But I just didn't think that the conclusions were necessarily as straightforward as the ones you might have outlined, that's all.
I'm afraid I have been accused of reductivism.
I think one of my main messages is that one of the problems with our era is the lack of ability to see both sides of a question.
The inability to have nuance or to finesse an answer.
Everything has to be, if you'll pardon the expression, black and white.
And that's not a good world in which to live.
We've been discussing this week in particular how the rise of polemicism is Underwritten by the collapse of the previous economic models of mainstream media outlets that could previously confidently appeal to a broad mainstream base, knowing that they would be talking to both, in the case of the United States of America,
Liberal and conservative voters.
Yes.
Now that a plain fissure has appeared as a result of social media's ability to use targeted and bespoke advertising, mainstream media outlets benefit from polemicism.
They know who their audience are and they know who their audience are not.
This has increased as you have correctly identified, as you say, black and white arguments and it's getting worse.
These kind of silos are, I think, leading to any number of problems including a sort of a cry
for more centralized authority, perhaps even a return to outmoded
ideas like ethno-nationalism, which I would say I'm sympathetic to,
but I appreciate and understand how that might happen in a bifurcated media and
sociological space.
But before we get into some of the particularities of our current affairs-oriented conversation, can you please tell me some of the common misunderstandings that are applied to your work so that I can stop making them?
Thank you.
No, the first thing I have to say to anyone who hasn't read either The Master and His Emissary or The Matter of Things, my two works on this area of difference between brain hemispheres, is forget everything you think you know, because it'll be wrong.
And what that's about is that back in the 60s and 70s there was a new operation pioneered to help people with epilepsy that was making their life unlivable.
And basically epilepsy is an electrical storm and if it goes right across the brain the person loses consciousness.
And so these people were losing consciousness very, very often.
And the idea was that if they could just divide the two hemispheres one from the other, which you can do by cutting a band of fibers at the base of the two hemispheres called the corpus callosum, then you would stop it spreading and they would have at least one hemisphere working.
And for those individuals, this was a life-saving procedure.
But then what happened was that psychologists quite rightly thought, we can find out more about the differences between each hemisphere by interviewing it on its own.
There are techniques in the lab whereby you could engage, if you like, one hemisphere at a time in a split-brain patient.
And see what the differences were.
And out of that arose a sort of quick and dirty consensus that the left hemisphere was logical and linguistic, whereas the right hemisphere was, I don't know, given to painting pictures and a bit of fantasy and rather emotional.
And all this is completely wrong.
I mean, completely wrong.
Both hemispheres take part in language and reason.
And both are involved in pictures and emotion.
In fact, the most lateralized emotion is anger.
And guess what?
It lateralizes to the left hemisphere.
And I can talk more about the differences between those two hemispheres and why that changes the world if you like, but one of the things I suggest in The Master and His Hemisphere is that we have slipped more and more into a world in which the kind of things that we know via the left hemisphere dominate to the expense of knowing really or understanding or receiving.
Any of the rich stuff that the left hemisphere could tell us.
And the right hemisphere is the one we should be listening to.
Not just because of my prejudice, but because I've demonstrated at great length in The Matter With Things, it's deluded, it's false, it's wrong, it's non-veridical, the left hemisphere on its own.
It needs the right hemisphere to guide it.
One way of thinking about this is that the left hemisphere has a targeted attention to a detail, and this is to enable us to grab stuff.
Very important for survival.
But if the only kind of attention you pay is this very narrowly targeted attention, very precisely to a detail that you want to get, You won't last, because at the same time you've got to have a completely different kind of attention, which is broad, open, vigilant, looking out for predators, looking out for your mate, looking out for your offspring, that you also need to be feeding and looking after.
So, in nature, going back at least 700 million years, all neural networks are asymmetrical, because, I think, of this need to do two completely different kind of things at the same time.
Are you then suggesting that our cultural institutions and our systems of government are unduly biased by this meticulous focus that is attributed to the left brain at the expense of the more visionary aspect of the right brain, even though I'm sort of tiptoeing down this imaginary and real equator in order to avoid toppling into misinterpretation.
No, that's right.
I mean, broadly speaking, the answer is yes, but I think I ought to do a little more unpacking first, otherwise people won't see what I'm getting at.
Yeah, I'm sick and tired of people's ignorance.
Unpack everything, if you would, please, Ian.
I don't mind if I do.
The thing is this, effectively I've described two kinds of attention, and that may not electrify people.
In fact, when I first realized that the fundamental difference between the two brain hemispheres was the way they pay attention to the world, the penny didn't immediately drop.
Because I've been brought up in this very machine-like system of psychology that, you know, it's a function of a machine, the brain.
But it isn't, actually.
Attention is something a machine can't give.
It can be made to, you can turn the camera where you like, but it's not attending.
Only a conscious person like you or I can attend.
And when we attend, we bring about a different kind of world.
I mean, if you think about it, The same body on the mortuary slab in a model's artistic setting, the body of your lover, the body of your aunt, they all evoke different things and are seen differently, but they're still bodies.
And so the way in which we look at something Matters a lot.
If we look at something in a very detached way in which we're fragmenting it and not allowing ourselves to interact with it, we see it as a thing that we can use.
Whereas I think the importance cannot be overstated of relationship.
That really, everything is made of relations, not of things.
We have an idea that the world is full of things, and then how are they related?
And how am I related to them?
But I have this view that actually the primary thing is relations, and that things are the bits of this picture that stand out for us.
But in any case.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's cool.
So there's this tendency to look at things due to utility, which would have an obvious evolutionary function.
Exactly.
But there's Deleuze's ideas that we should look at things in the model of machines, that they are interrelated systems, that are ultimately relational, that a bicycle isn't a bicycle until you use it as a bicycle.
Yes, that's true.
And that takes one to the business of context.
In the left hemisphere there just appear to be these isolated things that it targets and then moves to another target and so on.
So it sees the world as built up from fragments and they don't have any meaning until it's put them together in some kind of a way.
And it sees them as static so that it can grab them easily, familiar because it's what it's looking for, food or a twig to build a nest or whatever it is.
decontextualized, disembodied, de-animated, in other words inanimate, and effectively something that is only of use.
Whereas in the right hemisphere you see that nothing is actually completely separate from anything else, that everything is connected, In a sort of flowing web.
So it's not static.
It's changing.
And that context matters.
When you take something out of context, you change it.
That the world is embodied.
That it has emotional and moral value.
And that it is a living world.
A complex and beautiful world.
So we have these two quite different visions, if you like.
It seems, based on what you were just saying, Ian, that the right hemisphere has a capacity for atemporal and aspatial thought, not governed by the presumption of context that perhaps could be regarded as animalistic, i.e.
even concepts such as space and time are quite sort of almost specially subjective.
It's only when you live in an environment that needs to function in a particular way The ideas like time as experienced through entropy and space as it appears through the relationships one might achieve in space even become relevant.
I was wondering while you were talking also about what type of relationship might an ape such as our species have with a tree pre-linguistically?
How do we distinguish ourselves from our environment prior to language?
Before we sort of delve into That subject, and you give me a conclusive answer, please.
No beating around the bush, metaphorical or otherwise.
Before we get to that, I want to let our YouTube audience know that we're going to move exclusively to being on Rumble now, because I'm going to ask Ian McGilchrist about how, during the pandemic era, lockdowns and government control induced a degree of compliance, and whether or not there's an advantage to locating our behaviour and our decisions in this more empirical left brain.
You know, like a minute ago you talked about like how the ability to focus on detail and utility.
Yes, but that's not the same as empiricism.
Empiricism is...
Empiricism is derivation from experience.
You're going to have to get off YouTube now.
Derivation from experience is going to be explained to me and everyone who clicks over to Rumble.
If you're watching this on YouTube, join us on Rumble.
There's a link in the description.
Please explain my error.
One of the ways you can think of it is that the left hemisphere's view, this mechanical one, is entirely theoretical.
It ignores most of experience.
The right hemisphere is the one that says, well, that theory may be right, but let's have a look and let's test it in the real world.
That's empiricism.
That's empiricism.
And the right hemisphere is a very good guide to what really is going on, whereas the left hemisphere has a theory.
A map, a mechanism, a model.
But it's not the reality.
And there's nothing wrong with a map, you know.
A map is useful, but a map is useful because it leaves almost everything out.
I mean, a map wouldn't get more useful if you put in all the names of the children that live in the houses along the road.
No.
That's there in the real world, but the map is highly... If the map was for paedophiles, they would probably... Thank you, Russell.
Thank you for elevating the level of this conversation.
You can't imagine the jokes I discarded when you said if it was a lover or an aunt, when you used the cadaver on the slab example.
As I was saying it, I was thinking, is this wise with Russell?
I thought it was interesting that even in the example you wouldn't use a mother.
I thought that showed incredible sensitivity, that even in a rhetorical Example, you used a detached family member that you could survive the grieving of.
Well, maybe.
Although... Yes, yes.
Depends what relationship you have, I suppose, with your aunt.
My aunt was also my lover, so I was... Sorry, sorry.
I'm just getting that out of my system, then I'm going to ask serious questions.
Don't worry, I'm a psychiatrist, I've heard it all.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
There might be a point in this conversation where it turns into treatment.
Yeah, I don't know where to go because you've raised a number of things.
Life without language, atemporality and aspatiality.
Yes.
And more recently, what about the Covid?
Where do you want me to go?
Shall we start with Covid because it's more sensational and it will be helpful for our audience and then we'll move into atemporality, aspatiality and pre-linguistic models of cognizance.
Okay, good.
Well, I mean the first thing I'd like to say about Covid is that I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon of saying that either those who were pro-taking strict measures or those who were against it were right.
I mean, I think it's all very well being clever after the event, but when you're suddenly presented with something where people were projecting that there would be deaths so numerous that basically society would break down, the hospitals wouldn't be able to cope and so on, If people didn't take fairly, you know, drastic measures afterwards, they would have been criticized as having destroyed the nation.
So there's that.
And then on the other hand, you have to be flexible as different bits of science come in.
And so you may change your mind and swither about.
And it's, again, easy to be retrospectively clever.
But at the time, you haven't got the advantage of knowing what's coming down the line.
What I think I can say is that whatever happened in the initial phase, you can't really blame anyone, but it went on far too long and the introduction of this business of trying to keep everybody safe was a huge mistake.
But, you see, this is not just about Covid.
This is about how we now think about us and our relationship to society.
I was brought up at the tail end of a culture in which it was thought good to be self-reliant, to be resilient, not to fall apart if you were opposed or criticized, and to take responsibility for yourself.
Those were the general ideas in the culture I was brought up.
And I know I'm anti-deluvian compared with you, Russell, but you know, there we are.
And what has happened during my lifetime is that I think we've got I'm lazy.
I think we've got used to having everything easy, which is extraordinarily unusual in the history of the world, and we've also, because it's comfortable, outsourced looking after ourselves to the state.
So the state will do everything for us, protect us and make us safe.
Well, if you were made ultimately safe, you would be cocooned in a bubble and you might as well die now and order your coffin, you know, because Life is a risky business, starting from the fact that in the moment you're born you're going to die at some point.
And I'm not saying that a society has no role in keeping peace.
It clearly does.
But not by extreme authoritarianism, infantilization of the people and so on.
So we should have been in a position very soon where we were able to make our own decisions about that and not certainly tracked in the way that this technology of the mobile phone does.
I mean, I'm very concerned about that.
We can come on to all that later.
We must.
I'm anti-authoritarian myself, you'll be astonished to learn.
Never again, Russell!
What's happened to you lately?
But when you say that there's been an almost generational shift, and I can understand that argument to a degree, between a kind of attitude of self-reliance, autonomy, self-responsibility, etc, to one where we outsource responsibility to the state, I wonder how an epochal shift like that might have occurred on the basis of individual decisions isn't it likely that such a significant shift has been somehow culturally brought about and is to some degree the responsibility of the state that has now assumed this responsibility and I would say in this context another word for responsibility might be power and authority and that it isn't inadvertent or accidental but is quite deliberate and that this very technology is being used to present the idea of individuality but individuality that's usually expressed through consumer choice
Well, in important matters, the state, who ultimately, I would argue, acting as brokers on behalf of globalist and corporate interests, continue to subdue the population and induce compliance through a number of measures.
And one of the perhaps inadvertent side effects of the Covid pandemic has been increased authoritarianism and increased obedience, something that you alluded to and touched upon whilst I acknowledge also that in the initial phase it would have been negligent to have done anything other than be cautious in a relatively unique situation.
Subsequently it's quite clear that surveillance was increased, monitoring was increased, censorship was increased, very powerful interests all profited from this crisis.
And I'm not the first person to observe that we seem to be living in a time where one crisis begets another.
The 9-11 economic crisis, the sort of crises around Donald Trump, the pandemic, the endless wars, it seems to become a kind of sort of a living or literally Orwellian dynamic where the legitimization for increasing authority occurs and then that authority is imposed.
So I just would like to query your assumption that it's sort of somehow the What do I want to say?
The individual's negligence that has led to this infantilisation.
No Russell, that's not what I said.
I won't accept that, no.
But one aspect, there are many many aspects to this, and if you want I can talk about them.
Of course I do.
But one is that We have got further and further from real community which is local and involves things like extended family and embeddedness in a place which perhaps where your parents also were brought up and died.
The local, the sense of a place and a group and a rooting, a belonging, a place of belonging.
And because of mobilization and industrialization, that has shifted over 150 years towards people who are uprooted.
may come from almost anywhere and they're put together in urban settings and that basis of trust which is there in a palpable, intuitively felt society has been lost.
And in that vacuum various things come up to take control and people feel slightly afraid and when people are afraid, it's very well known, they look for a strong man who will give definite black and white answers.
This is always bad news actually but So, you mentioned Orwell.
1984 was written in 1948, so that was before the breakdown of the kind of way of thinking I'm talking about.
People had been through the war and they still thought more or less in that way.
But I think there were a number of things that happened.
One was this virtualization in which we were no longer sort of living in a place and a time that was connected, embedded in a society with whom we knew we were safe.
That was one.
Another is that civilizations get lazy.
If you look at the downfalls of other civilizations, what happens is the first sort of generation that establish it are enormously courageous, very self-sacrificing, rather authoritarian, they kind of create the state.
And then the next generation comes up and they can afford things like philosophy and science and art.
And then eventually another generation comes who just takes all that for granted and thinks, well, I'll cruise on it.
And I think what happened was that after the war, people were fed up with this, you know, the sacrifices of the war, and they wanted to have fun, basically.
And I think the 60s and 70s were great, and they were a push against lots of the things that are so terrible that we're seeing around us now.
But they were also somewhat irresponsible.
I mean, the idea that we could learn things from the past, from our culture, was somehow lost.
And I think once you lose that connection with your own tradition, with your own culture, a people is destroyed.
And tyrants know that.
They set about destroying it.
And before we go any further, just let me say about a tradition or a culture, this does not mean fossilization.
It means the opposite.
Because a tradition is flowing and changing.
If you look at the history of the West, there's been a tradition for 2,000 years, but it's been a very different world at different times.
So it doesn't rule out change.
But what it is, it's like a river in which you don't cut slices out of a river and shove another one in.
The river is a river.
A plant is a plant.
If you want the plant to grow up a wall, the good gardener chains it gradually up the wall.
Doesn't cut it off at the roots and stick it on the wall because you haven't got a plant anymore.
And that's the same way that a society, a cultural civilization is.
It's like that plant, it's like that river.
And if you don't know what the past held, you are very much at sea and very vulnerable to anything that comes along.
That's where we are now.
I'm inclined to agree with you.
But I also feel that some of those arguments are used to mobilize a kind of exclusivity and othering of potential outside groups.
I also would like to offer, potentially, that this did not take place because of the absence of ideology, but because of the presence of an insidious and invisible ideology predicated on individualism, materialism, Deracinate it from any sort of sense of, as you say, tradition.
And I'm interested very much in what you say that somehow there are anthropological cues that we might regard in the same way as we would understand diet as being informed by our evolution in the obvious example of excess sugar inducing diabetes.
Perhaps there are subtler cultural forces that play a part in our evolution that if extracted or needlessly amplified become detrimental, that an advanced civilization
ought bear in mind, precisely as you say, not only traditions which can be
sometimes oppressive, exclusive and potentially tyrannical, but traditions
that are in place to carry our relationship to the soil, our relationship
to one another, our relationship to our values and our principles. And I feel
that those things have been kind of annihilated in order that, as I say,
insidious and difficult to determine economic models.
So that they can be transplanted and transposed.
For example, take once more the pandemic, just because it provides such a convenient lens.
During this time where sort of safety was brought to the forefront, during this time of crisis, just because I believe it is an economic ideology ultimately, so by observing the economics one can or at least it plays out economically and those are observable symptoms.
You know that if there was a wealth transfer that demonstrably was there was that if like big tech platforms benefited government benefited from the ability to regulate the pharmaceutical industry saw record profits the media benefited there are sort of institutional forces that benefit from ongoing crisis and we have in fact look some facts here uh Yeah, for 2022 the total global pharmaceutical revenue was estimated at 1.48 trillion US dollars and antidepressant drugs market revenue across the US is predicted to be at 22 billion dollars by the year 2027.
Some of these statistics relate to mental health, some of them obviously relate to particular medications. But I suppose what I'm
bringing to bear is this, if people do not have an awareness of individual
traditions and do not revere their own heritage while respecting other people's
heritage, that it's very easy for our ideologies to be usurped.
And I think that this culture of consumerism and commodification of
everything is...
Well, you're right that a capitalist society is benefited by destroying human
bonds, traditions, because it will get in the way of the mechanical manipulation of
people as units that will consume.
And of course that's such a terrifically impoverished vision of what a society is.
I mean, one can hardly begin expressing how negative that is.
But I just want to comment, before I say anything else, about your point that, you know, perhaps if we pay too much attention to tradition, outsider groups will be, you know, not welcomed.
And there's something in that, because a tradition can become sclerosed.
It is true.
But to throw away a tradition on the basis that if you don't look after it, it can become sclerosed, is not a good one.
And in fact, in my lifetime, what I have noticed is that relations between the races have frankly got worse.
During my lifetime, relations between the sexes have got worse.
In my lifetime, the gap between the super-rich and the poor has got greater, not smaller.
In my lifetime, freedom has become curtailed in very obvious ways, disastrous ways, that make this look like on the way to being a totalitarian state.
So, at the time, in the sixties, we wanted freedom, we wanted men and women to get on well, the races to get on well, and for, you know, the gap between rich and poor to be closed.
And exactly the opposite has happened.
And this is partly because of the inability to think in more than one One thread, you know, this is good, this is my slogan, I can express it in a word or two words, that's what we go for.
But there is always another side to every question, and it's the neglect of the downside of what one is doing that is leading us into ruin, where our eyes are being drawn away And perhaps, if I wanted to be a bit paranoid, as you might prefer, I would think this was deliberately schematized.
But I think that we're being asked not to look at the downside of what's going on, because it's so terrifying.
Through pursuing what look like good ends, we have reached the exact opposite.
And this is to do with the coincidence of opposites.
Which would take us into another philosophical realm altogether.
But I argue that, you know, we have this linear view of life, that this is over here and that is over there, and the further you go that way, the better, or the further you go that way, depending on what you want.
But actually what happens is they curve round and come together.
Since I was young, since you were young, you probably noticed what I did, that the extreme left and the extreme right have more in common than anybody in the middle.
Yes, I think you're right.
In some ways I completely agree.
utopianism of the Cultural Revolution I like just one current media ferrari the Budweiser light
scandal in case it has escaped you. You passed me by I'm sorry. What happened was
is that Budweiser light used a trans woman to promote their beers
This provoked blue-collar Americans, the traditional, one might argue, consumers of Budweiser Light to protest.
And sort of vocally and publicly reject this new advertising model and a kind of cultural war in miniature ensued all around the product of Budweiser Light.
But of course in my view Budweiser Light doesn't care whether people are trans and progressive around identity issues or traditional and doesn't care what class you are from.
It cares only about markets.
That was a cynical marketing move.
Yes, yes, because that's the only metric by which it survives and succeeds.
It's the only necessary or relevant metric and I think that this perhaps can be mapped on to many of the conflicts of our time that people are, it was the gay rights activist Peter Tatchell that told me along Time ago that in his experience around civil rights issues whilst they are obviously significant he dedicated his life to gay rights for example said that whilst he had discovered in his personal experience that people would cede on civil rights issues ultimately and eventually when it came to matters of finance he had noticed that there was a sort of a hard and impermeable edifice that could not be breached and I feel that what's happening is the cultural conversation is being directed to into areas that cause more conflagration and infighting among ordinary people
Rather than allowing people to come together to confront the centralised authority that is better centralised authoritative institutions, be they governmental or corporate, that are benefiting from these ongoing conflicts.
I wonder if... Please.
No, no.
I was just going to say, I mean my view, based on my life's experience, is that generally speaking when things go wrong, When things go wrong, it's more cock-up than conspiracy.
And one can see these things being engineered, and in some cases I'm sure they are, and you're right.
But generally this is a drift that I would have predicted from enslavement by being hypnotized by this left hemispheric way of thinking.
Tell me what you mean, please.
Well, it's not aware of the complexities, the different strands, the fact that opposites tend to coincide.
It thinks, has a very simple map, and it doesn't deal with the uniqueness of an individual.
It talks only about categories.
So everybody is just a category, and a representative of that category.
This is how the left hemisphere works.
It abstracts, takes things out of context, Gets rid of their individuality, fits them into a mechanical model.
Now if you start doing that in society, what you will get is a great deal of opposition from people who resent this feeling that they're no longer allowed to speak for themselves but have to be part of a group and so forth.
And the more it's promoted the more resentment it will build up and eventually you will get populist people who will not be doing good but will be voted for because they alone seem to have any The possibility of moving things away from a world which I think has been generated by patronizing liberal middle-class intellectuals who basically don't...
They secretly think that people are stupid.
Yes.
And anyone who doesn't belong to their clique is stupid.
And they have made this so obvious now that they're destroying universities, they're destroying the law, they're destroying politics.
Of course technology must ultimately, not ultimately, but perhaps is currently a reflection of the human intelligence that designs it.
And the way that these models function, in particular currently, affords a great deal of data analysis.
And perhaps this data analysis is an interesting reflection of what you are saying about the hemispheric biases that may be informing our current cultural trajectory.
Perhaps this is bolstered by the ability of technology to accrue data, but only on the basis of observable data points, leading to conclusions that, while deductive, are also reductive.
Is it possible that the tools that are being used are incapable of incorporating the aspatial, atemporal qualities that you referred to earlier in our conversation?
Well, I'd have to talk about that separately if you have time, but because I don't think... We do have time!
All right.
OK.
I mean, first of all, let's talk about economics, because there are two points in economics that really demonstrate what I think we're both getting at here.
One is the old saying, well, we've shown that it works in practice, but we can't prove that it's right in theory.
That's the wonderful left hemisphere inversion, you know.
This economic thing works, but it's not our theory.
And the other observation is that, and made by economists, that over, you know, the last 20 years, events that were palpable, aspects of the picture that were very obvious, were deliberately ignored because they didn't fit into the theory.
Or maybe not even deliberately ignored.
I mean, there's something like this, that if you have a theory that says it's got to be like that, um... You're observing some of the messaging that comes through.
I do, yes.
That's the left brain.
It's another problem with AI, yes.
It's very demanding.
Yes, yes.
Dictatorial.
But basically, you know... What is the information that's not included in the analysis?
Can you give us an example of that?
Well, I'm not an economist, unfortunately, but I can see in the world around me that people deny things that seem to me pretty obvious.
And they... I want to go referring to a brilliant philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who was a German-Jewish philosopher, as you know.
Yeah, the banality of evil.
Yes, exactly.
And the first-hand experience of Nazism.
But she said a couple of things that really strike me.
One is, when there are things you cannot say, you live in a tyranny.
So right now, in 2023 in Britain, we live in a tyranny.
One we have brought upon ourselves by just not opposing these kind of moves that I think are the sort of Wokarati's moves which will eventually destroy our institutions and destroy the culture that is very important to us.
Of course it has its weaknesses but it's got an awful lot also that it's achieved and is, you know, used to be admired all around the world for that.
So there's that and the other thing she said is The best person for a totalitarian regime is not the prototypical Nazi or the prototypical communist, but the person who no longer knows the difference between true and false.
And I think that's the world we're coming into now, and it's a big issue.
There are all sorts of ways in which it's harder to know what to trust, who to trust.
And a third century Chinese emperor said, in a society you need three things, guns, food, and trust.
If you have to give away one of them, it's guns.
If you have to get rid of another, it's food.
But you should hang on to trust, because no society can flourish without trust.
The bewilderment of not having a strong foundation, and I suppose the connection between foundations and traditions is one that needn't be overly emphasized, is I suppose what we're experiencing is there is not a consensus anymore.
There is not a consensus around how we ought to organize.
No, I think there is a consensus.
I think it's very clear what the consensus is.
It's what a group of far-left leaning intellectuals decided was the only moral way, or the only right way, and they're already being proved drastically wrong by the things it's now leading to.
In other words, all the opposites of the good aims that it was supposed to be achieving.
That's extraordinary.
But that consensus is kind of cloistered.
It's not a broad consensus while it might be... I suppose you're saying it's in foreign policy.
They may be a very small number, but they have enormous influence over media, including social media and so on.
May I just mention something?
In the 16th century, the English ambassador to the Lowlands, you know, Holland basically, wrote... I still call them the Lowlands.
I will not refer to them as the Netherlands.
Anything other?
Glowlands.
The Netherlands.
Whatever it was.
The ambassador wrote home about the Puritans going around in the Reformation.
And what he said was, a rather disciplined band, a small band, went from church to church taking sledgehammers to these wonderful statues, breaking the stone glass, burning the old manuscripts.
And these were probably a handful, 20-30 people, and the population was 10,000, and they all stood at the doors and just looked, and watched these people going about their business, and did nothing to intervene.
That is where we are now.
You think we're living in a time of undue and untethered iconoclasm.
What I feel potentially might emerge as a result of the technology that is currently being used to inculcate the kind of compliance that we've been discussing is that it may be differently utilized to create, once again, localized democracy.
I suppose what I feel, Ian, is that we ought be emulating, where possible, the conditions of our evolution.
And I don't mean in a Luddite way, let's retreat to the caves.
I think we should observe how, like, you know, but there were some ideas in there that are quite Radical, and I mean literally anarchic, because it would seem to me that with the type of technology and capacity for communication that we currently have, that even ideas like centralized state authority, the nation itself might be exposed as temporal.
And that is A challenge to some of the traditions and institutions that you plainly revere or hold at least in some regard and believe have a great deal to offer us, as I do.
But what I personally am led by is the belief that at a time of ongoing cultural conflict, a way that it might be diffused is to acknowledge that there are many different ways of being a human being.
There's nothing human.
There's nothing in our evolution to suggest that we all be corralled together in groups of 300 million and simultaneously governed by one set of ideologies.
And when I've been having conversations with people that are described as being sort of right-wing, the thing I've brought to the conversation continually is, would you be willing to stand on a platform with people that you're ideologically opposite to?
Although I reckon you would refute the idea of...
Opposition from the basis of your own study and expertise.
If it meant that you were able to have autonomy in your own community, for example, like Ben Shapiro and people that are sort of openly libertarian or conservative.
They said, of course, they would stand on a platform that people had different views on the pro-life, pro-choice, pro-gun, anti-gun.
In order to, in a sense, it would seem to me that we all be emulating the conditions of our origin and our evolution where possible, whether that's Diet or the governance of a system or a group.
Yes, I mean there's a very civil society and in a different sense we've become a very uncivil one in which people are not willing to listen to someone else with whom they disagree and then say that's interesting, I would completely disagree, my point of view would be this, what do you say to that?
And you can do that without getting angry and vicious.
But, you know, the general timbre is one of anger, self-righteousness, disgust.
And this, let me say, in terms of hemisphere lateralization, this kind of emotional timbre is typical of the left hemisphere.
The right is more willing to say, hang on, there may be something else going on here, and let me form a bond with this person, so that compassion is better than anger.
Yes.
Well, would the attributes or at least traits that you just listed there in conventional psychiatry, am I right in saying, would be regarded as potentially unconscious responses?
And I'm not sure how much you value that kind of terminology.
But sometimes what I feel is that we are governing from a place of unconsciousness, from unawareness.
You talked Yes.
Extensively about attention.
And it feels like that, you know, when righteousness, anger, these are sort of, I would say, motivated by lower levels of awareness.
That's using a more sort of, I guess, a sort of spiritual dialectic to analyze it as opposed to a psychiatric one.
But you must acknowledge that spirituality and psychiatry overlap almost continually.
Absolutely.
A lot of my work is under the aegis of exactly that kind of a script.
That religion and science don't have at all.
It's a myth that they have to be at war with one another.
They're entirely compatible.
And I've written about that.
Well, so have I. Well, there we are.
Just now.
Just wanted to be sure.
Well done.
No, what I'm saying is that we ought to be able to talk about these things and it should be absolutely wrong For anyone to be denied the right to say something.
And I think one practical thing would be that government funding for universities would be depleted by 10% every time there's an event at which somebody is barred from speaking.
And, you know, that's perfectly practical.
It could be done.
And it would encourage openness.
And if an opposite point of view is obviously wrong, then please demonstrate it.
But allow the other person to, you know, have their say.
The way I was educated was to argue a point of view and then stop and argue the opposite point of view.
And, you know, I think that's really rather important.
You know, everybody should leave school.
Having had that in their head, there isn't one right answer to anything.
Shall we do that now?
You be an edgy online provocateur, and I'm a respected neuroscientist here at the Kilchrist.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for presenting these arguments, in fact, so succinctly and beautifully for our audience.
It's fantastic to speak with you.
You're such a wonderful communicator and educator.
Thank you, Ian McGilchrist, for joining us.
The Matter with Things, Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World is available now.
There's a link posted in the chat and I would recommend you read the work of Ian McGilchrist, that you become better equipped to have conversations in the confusing world.
If throughout this conversation you were thinking, I wish that bearded man would shut up and let Russell Brand just flow freely, then you're in luck, because it's time now for a...
Ian McGilchrist, you've been slowing me down throughout this conversation, impeding me intellectually.
My flights of fancy, tethered, let me fly like Icarus, who I believe flew towards the sun triumphantly without consequences.
He was fine, I believe.
That myth ends with Icarus circumnavigating the sun, successfully returning to Earth with his wings still bonded, I believe.
Time now for a deeper look... Still ablaze.
Still a blaze, yeah.
You've got to burn to shine, baby, as it says in the opening titles of The Sopranos.
Time now for a more analytical approach to a news story from this week.
Here's the news.
No, here's the effing news.
No, here's the fucking news!
Four more years!
Four more years!
But what about the last four years, Joe, you bloody old liar?
Take the head off the serpent.
Inform yourselves.
Continue to educate us in the comments.
We respond to what you tell us.
Unlike the propagandists that govern the world's most powerful nation.
Unlike the atrophying zombie cadaver that inhabits the White House, haunting its corridors with old lies and deep state corruption, getting the CIA to back him up in blags to keep laptops out of the press.
This is a time where we must change the world.
Or should we just do Four more years backed up by glossy propaganda and lies.
Let's see how Joe Biden's propaganda stands up to the hard facts.
That's what people use at the beginning of movie trailers.
Even that noise and that sort of shot and the smoke and everything.
Oh, January 6th, January 6th.
Keep frightening people about January the 6th.
Bad things do happen in the world.
But the worst thing of all is an intransigent state that will lie to you and will use propaganda
rather than ever directly addressing your needs by changing the system that's creating these problems.
Freedom.
Okay, freedom, is it?
Stay free is one of our personal catchphrases.
It's the name of our show over on Rumble.
Freedom is vital because freedom suggests that at the level of the individual, the level of the community, the level of the nation, if you need such a thing as a nation, there ought be the ability to be who you truly are.
And we hope that that includes respecting and loving one another.
Taking on responsibility and duty without an external authoritarian force.
Freedom is a very, very powerful word.
It's obviously an impactful word.
It's a word that the Joe Biden administration has chose to use centrally for this campaign.
But the problem is they've been in government for four years now, so we know what they're about.
You can't hoop up the same hysteria again.
Can you let me know in the chat and the comments once you've seen what they've been doing?
Personal freedom is fundamental to who we are as Americans.
If you believe in freedom, what you're saying is we should be who we are.
That you trust people to do the right thing.
So you don't need to, for example, surveil them the whole time and steal their data, right?
In February, the Biden administration urged Congress To renew a warrantless surveillance law that allows the government to collect messages and phone data of Americans without court order.
That amounts to without judicial process and without your consent.
When it comes to saying it, he believes it.
When it comes to legislating, he's against it.
Could there be any more literal interpretation of freedom than not locking people in cages?
I don't think so.
Let's have a look at his record on incarceration.
Biden pledged he'd cut incarceration in half.
During his administration, the federal prison population has grown for the first time in a decade.
So in spite of all that stuff, I feel like I remember.
Do you?
Let me know in the comments and chat.
He says stuff like, it's wrong that African-Americans make up such a large percentage of the prison population.
Something that I frankly believe in strongly.
Well, guess what?
The prison population is increasing.
I suppose it's just a coincidence that large corporations use prison labor as cheap labor to increase their profits.
It can't be connected to that because Joe Biden believes in freedom.
You heard him say it, didn't you?
he couldn't be lying.
But you know around the country, magic extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock
freedoms.
Much of this is clearly an attempt to address the idea that their opponents are extreme.
The idea of extremity is of course subjective.
What might be extreme to you may not be extreme to me when it comes to personal practice around culture, sexuality, ideology.
These are things that we have to be able to, as much as possible, determine as individuals.
Of course, always with the caveat that we don't harm anybody else.
But if Joe Biden loathes MAGA America so much and the MAGA movement so deeply, you would be sure right that he would never.
Under any circumstances at all, use Democrat Party funding to underwrite the campaign of MAGA candidates.
I mean, that would be hypocritical, disingenuous, evidence that you've got no real morality, that you're just a careerist strategist who cares about serving corporate interests and will get into government no matter what, even if it involves paying for the campaigns of the people you claim to hate, amplifying messages that you think, you believe, you say you believe, are harming America.
So paying for their advertisements, their commercials, that would be off-limits, right?
Wrong.
Democrats spent tens of millions amplifying far-right, they call them far-right, candidates in nine states in an attempt to ensure their candidates face less appealing opponents in the general election.
You might be a cynical, jaded individual and say, well, that's brilliant strategy.
If you genuinely believe that the messaging of these, as they say, far-right candidates is negative, then you wouldn't want to amplify that messaging because more people are going to be subject to it.
If you believe that they're racist or homophobic or against people's identities and culture later on in this piece of propaganda, the right to love who you want to love, You wouldn't amplify voices that were against that, would you?
You'd want to oppose those ideas.
That's why this piece of propaganda is so galling.
Cutting social security that you paid for your entire life while cutting taxes for the very wealthy.
Right, so it's wrong to cut taxes for the very wealthy.
Have we found a principle?
Have we found a principle in there?
Let's have a look at the facts.
The Democrats Build Back Better Bill is a gigantic tax cut for millionaires and billionaires.
Under Biden, Democratic lawmakers pushed a regressive proposal to allow wealthy property owners to deduct more of their state and local taxes, aka SALT, from their federal taxes.
This initiative provides almost no benefit to the working class but enriches their already rich donors.
Another example of using rhetoric to appeal to your audience while legislating on behalf of your donors.
You know how this works, don't you?
You don't need me to tell you this, but it's nice to see all in one place, isn't it?
It's nice to contrast it with their propaganda, isn't it?
Banning books and telling people who they can love.
So the culture war that they claim is so bad, they stoke it on two sides.
One, they fund people that say stuff that they claim is hateful.
Two, they use provocative imagery in their own propaganda.
They ain't about healing America, they're about breaking America because they benefit from the fracture.
Your wounds are their treasure.
Dictating what health care decisions women can make.
One of the things the Biden administration is always banging on about is healthcare.
Well, here's a fact.
15 million American people are currently being quietly phased out of receiving Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program benefits.
Just quietly phasing them out.
They won't make much noise because they're ill.
All while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.
Well, we know now that when it comes to claiming that elections are fraudulent, the Democrats are just the same as Donald Trump.
When the Democrats lose, they claim that they're a fraudulent electoral machines, broker machines, Russian hacking.
They'll say whatever they want to say.
Whoever wins the next election, whether it's this guy, whoever else, the other party put up, the one that wins will say, thank you, we're going to heal America while legislating on behalf of their rich.
So who do they work for?
decide that losers will go.
Electoral fraud.
In October 2021, Democrats scaled back plans for a crackdown on tax cheating,
bowing to an aggressive lobbying campaign by the banking industry.
So who do they work for?
Do they work for all these like construction workers and people of various colors and identities,
who I believe they should be working for, by the way.
That we should be healing America.
That we should be accepting diversity, inclusivity.
All these words they use are, in my opinion, the right words.
As long as you include that people want to live differently all along the spectrum of different identities and cultural values.
As long as you accept that, we're all cool, aren't we?
They bow to the pressure of the lobbying industry.
You know that.
That's why there is a lobbying industry.
And never forget this electoral pledge, because it's certainly more reliable than any other pledge Biden made.
Joe Biden told rich donors on the campaign trail that nothing would fundamentally change if he were elected president.
Great work, Joe.
Four more years!
For much of the last decade, Democrats complained that Republicans were backed by dark money.
Then came the 2020 election, where donors and operatives allied with the Democratic Party embraced dark money, surpassing Republicans in 2020 spending.
One thing we've got to stop is this dark money.
Or, I don't know, maybe we could use Dark Money ourselves more than our opponents.
Dark money is good.
♪♪ When I ran for president four years ago,
I said we were in a battle for the soul of America.
Often the rhetoric is correct.
We are in a battle for the soul of America, for the soul of the world.
But you can't access the soul without some spiritual values.
And if you don't believe in spirituality, you know that I do.
What you need are just moral principles.
Kindness, service, gratitude, community.
And we still are.
ideas that you can't just change depending on your required outcome.
We cannot allow these MAGA voices. Here's some money for some MAGA voices.
We cannot stoke this culture war, stoke the culture war.
We have to legislate on behalf of ordinary Americans.
Thank you for the banking money, we're gonna crush ordinary Americans.
You have to have principles that cost you.
And we still are.
The question we're facing is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom.
Certainly you're gonna have less sick days in spite of his pledge to ensure
that American workers would have seven days per year sick days available to them.
There's another pledge broken.
As part of his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden pledged that he would ensure all workers have at
least seven paid sick days.
In December, Biden and the U.S.
Congress forced workers to accept an agreement without sick days and made a rail strike illegal.
Fortunately, it didn't lead to an ecological disaster involving trains careering off of the tracks and spilling chemicals all over the environment, which, as you know, the Democrats love so much.
The Rail Industries Lobbying Group... Oh, this is just a coincidence, probably not relevant.
Rail Industries Lobbying Group spent more than 13 million dollars lobbying Congress, but that probably doesn't make a difference, right?
More rights or fewer?
I know what I want the answer to be, and I think you do too.
This is not a time to be complacent.
No!
It's not a time to be complacent.
And it's certainly not a time to be funneling American tax dollars towards an unwinnable proxy war.
President Biden said, let me be clear, our forces are not engaged and will not engage in the conflict with Russian forces in Ukraine.
He had made this promise many times.
There will be no US boots on the ground in Ukraine.
The recent Pentagon leaks proved this is not the case.
Or alternatively, A lie!
Soon after the Ukraine war broke out last year, Congress voted to appropriate $40 billion in aid to Ukraine.
Every single Democrat voted for it.
This is another bit of information that's probably irrelevant, but I'll just give it to you anyway, and you can decide whether it's relevant using your own powers of deduction.
The defence sector spent $25 million lobbying the Democrats during the 2020 campaign cycle, but that can't be connected to the $40 billion of aid, half of which ended up going to the military-industrial complex, and 70% of the weapons that went to Ukraine can't be traced now, and the Pentagon have failed five consecutive audits.
These things are all just probably conspiracy theories that have just somehow been proven by facts.
President Trump has not punished senior Saudi leaders.
Would you?
Yes.
One thing I remember is in those head-to-head battles with Donald Trump when Biden said he would make Saudi Arabia a pariah.
Make them, in fact, the pariah that they are.
Which is not only a catchy and almost rhyming sentence, it's a policy we can rely on and know won't have been broken.
Biden vowed not to sell more weapons to the Saudis if he became president.
Last year, the Biden administration approved two massive arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Four more years?
That's why I'm running for re-election.
The problem is with propaganda is it works.
Like the music works, the sepia imagery works, the close-ups work of vulnerable people of a variety of views.
If you're a decent, upstanding individual, and basically we all are, then you find this kind of stuff appealing.
It bypasses your ability to reason.
Because if you used your ability to reason, you would look at the facts and say, look, this Democrat party They're not going to do anything.
And the Republican Party aren't really going to do anything either.
Should we have a look at this whole system?
Because clearly the technology exists now for us to have a genuine independent movement.
You've got independent media now.
We can countenance all their false narratives.
We can build a political movement that's a genuine reflection of the varying requirements of American people.
If we have more decentralization and democracy, people with different cultural requirements could live different types of lives and the conflict between them could ultimately be ended through democracy.
Direct democracy.
Decentralized communal democracy.
Would that work?
Yes, of course it would bloody work.
It wouldn't be perfect, it would be better than this.
Now rather than letting that happen, they can keep you tethered by your heart strings into believing that some doddering old sod, who's basically a liar, career politician, deep state affiliate, who works for the globalist corporate machine, is going to do anything different in the next four years than he did in the last four years.
Even if you want to optimistically believe that Joe Biden's lovely, and on some level he will be, because he's a human being like you or me.
He's not going to be able to do anything because he works within a system that ain't changing any time soon.
Let me know in the chat and the comments if you agree.
Because I know America.
I know we're good and decent people.
I know we're still a country that believes in honesty and respect and treating each other with dignity.
Where was the honesty and respect when they were keeping the Hunter Biden laptop story out of the news because they thought it would affect the outcome of the 2020 election?
Where was the honesty and respect then?
That we're a nation where we give hate no safe harbor.
We believe that everyone is equal.
That everyone should be given a fair shot to succeed in this country.
As always, the stuff that they're saying is actually true.
That is what should happen, but that isn't systemically possible anymore.
That's what needs to be addressed.
The system is broken.
We should actually just start saying, you know, like if you're talking to a drunk or something, go, Are you?
Four more years and it's all gonna be okay.
Well, that'll be nice.
Oh, good.
There'll be no more wars like the last four years.
That's nice.
And everyone's gonna... I love it.
Okay, will you sit down?
Have a blanket?
Should we take over?
Yeah, we should probably take over.
I think he's wet himself.
So if you're with me, go to joebiden.com and sign up.
If you actually go to that Joe Biden website, it simply asks you for some money.
Let me know in the chat in the comments which one of Biden's lies you find most offensive.
Let me know which stories we've missed, which hypocrisies we've not pointed out.
Let me know if you think there's something we're missing, that they're actually doing the best that they can and maybe we should accept this total bullshit.
Let us know all of it.
Let's finish this job.
I know we can.
Because this is the United States of America.
Nothing, simply nothing we cannot do if we're going to get it.
This is a product of corporate meetings and commercial consultancy, but when people say
things like, we'll use Joe Biden's handwriting.
Now, look, Joe, with greatest respect, some people think that maybe you're a little old and that doesn't need to be a problem because we can make you look dynamic.
And we can say that the fact is that you're a statesman and it's your experience.
All of it is a construct.
When it is contrasted with the facts of the matter which point to a deeply corrupt system that is in part the result of career politicians and the inability of ordinary self-governance to emerge through assemblies, through true accountability from the military-industrial complex and the corporate and financial world, a genuine ability to run your communities, a genuine Opportunity to be different and live differently and respect different values and traditions and ideologies.
You can't ever, ever allow that to happen because that will impede the interests of the powerful.
This is, in a way, a beautiful piece of propaganda, but it's completely untrue.
It doesn't hold up very well to the facts.
Not during a time where there's been a massive wealth transfer, where there's been increased surveillance, where protest laws are on the rise, the militarisation of the police force is happening, the pharmaceutical industry, record profits.
All of these things are facts.
You have to accept and embrace these things.
Even in this propaganda video, it was an opportunity to say, look, I know things have been really mental.
We haven't been able to do the stuff we want.
We can't ever do that.
That's not how they talk.
And that's why they fall prey to people who are able to talk somewhere within the metre of authenticity, even if I don't think they're going to be particularly successful either.
Let me know what you think we've missed.
What are the worst travesties of Biden's election?
What are the most egregious uses of propaganda there?
Let me know if there's anything we've missed.
Basically, what I think that is, is a piece of brilliantly made, disgusting, deceitful propaganda.
But that's just what I think!
Let me know what you think in the comments and chat, and we'll pick up on that next week.
Hasn't it been a fantastic week on Stay Free?
Join us next week, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
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