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May 5, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand

01:19:21

Coronation EXPOSED | The Royal Secrets They Want Hidden! - #123 - Stay Free With Russell Brand

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Time	Text
	This is a video of the sound of a bird chirping.
	In this video, you're going to see the future.
	Have you had the audacity to awaken in a world that wants you dumb and distracted?
	Surely you haven't.
	Surely you haven't seen through the Matrix, the Simulacrum.
	Surely you haven't realized that there's a cohesive plan to keep you dumb, individualized, materialized, caught up in their crazy games.
	And if you didn't realize it yet, surely the coronation of King Charles.
	And I will not... Like, look, I've got no disrespect to the other one.
	The lady one is marrying, but...
	Diana, let me know in the chat in the comments how you feel about that.
	We will be, for the first 20 minutes, available on Twitter, YouTube, all those places.
	Then exclusively on Rumble, there's a link in the description
	if you're watching this on YouTube, I'll be talking to Barry Weiss
	and I'll be asking her what exactly she was told by the creator of the chat GBT,
	but the Google version of it, AI.
	What exactly is it gonna do to us?
	Plus, if that doesn't make you wanna click over to a free speech platform,
	we're also gonna be looking at new potential side effects of a certain medication that was very popular a while back,
	but increasingly people are starting to think wasn't as good as they thought it was then.
	Bit like... Sorry, I can't hear you.
	What did you just say?
	And when you discover what it is, that joke will make sense.
	But, you know, that'll be good.
	Pay off.
	20 minutes down the line.
	You're going to get a pay off.
	20 minutes.
	Remember what Gareth did then.
	Yeah, law makes sense.
	OK, so let's have a look at the godfather of AI, quit.
	I don't think from being a godfather he's still available to attend baptisms.
	The man touted as the godfather of AI has quit Google, citing concerns over the possibility for AI to upend the job market.
	Is that what he's worried about?
	Dr Geoffrey Hinton said he quit to speak freely about the dangers of AI, and we'll be asking Barry Weiss later exactly what he said that is so.
	Dangerous.
	Yeah, he was bought on by Google a decade ago to help develop the company's AI technology.
	Let's see how the mainstream media color this thing.
	This morning, as companies race to integrate artificial intelligence into our everyday lives, one man behind that technology has resigned from Google after more than a decade.
	Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, says he doesn't want to personify it.
	Right.
	Don't give it a godparent.
	No.
	Like, in the event that its actual parent dies.
	Do you think that he wanted that label?
	Or do you think it's... Like, how many people do it?
	Like, do they approach him at Google and go, Godfather, hello?
	I don't think he wants it.
	I mean, he's quit his job.
	You come to me on my calculator's wedding day and you do not offer respect and you don't think to call me Godfather.
	Yeah, I don't know if it's... A lot of nicknames.
	People work hard for a nickname, don't they?
	A lot of people you can tell really want a nickname to stick.
	They do, yeah.
	I wonder if old Geoffrey Hinton likes being called Godfather.
	It's difficult to know.
	Look, really what interests me is... Look, let's not pretend that a king isn't going to get a shiny new hat this weekend.
	Here we are, worrying about AI.
	Well, it's a bit worrying.
	I mean, Elon Musk is worrying about it as well.
	Elon Musk is a bag of nerves.
	Right, okay.
	He's always worrying about it.
	Is that what it is?
	Something he's worried about?
	He gets jittery, doesn't he?
	Oh no, this Twitter, that's not very well run.
	We'll have to sack half the people that work here.
	Eighty percent.
	Eighty percent, right.
	You're not going to use your job.
	You are not going to use it.
	You are going to use, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, 80% eh?
	Maybe I could do me, a cuddly German shepherd, dear old loyal Dan with his bizarre ankles.
	But no, if you have a look at that gallery there, that's a neat, lean, sparse team.
	If you defrost that window, have a look.
	I can't, you couldn't do without...
	They're a lovely little bunch.
	We're a bit lean and light today.
	Often we are on Friday show because we want to be able to focus on Barry Weiss.
	We want to be able to focus on the coronation.
	What's funny when they talk about the coronation, let's have a look at some of the headlines, is they talk as if there's ways of making it more sensible and practical.
	Look at this, King Charles to do away with outdated silk stockings and breeches for coronation.
	One doesn't need all these outdated bridges.
	A simple coronation, a simple modern coronation for a modern world.
	The whole idea is you've been anointed by God to be the figurehead of a nation.
	And all of the, however you shake this down, the wealth of the royal family is accumulated through plunder over centuries.
	Yeah, he's not losing those stockings for budgetary reasons, is he?
	Let's get rid of these expensive stockings!
	And we all remember that phone call and some of the things he wished he was, didn't he?
	Yeah.
	He wanted to be a sanitary product, a pair of pants.
	Oh, of course, yeah.
	Didn't he?
	He said he wanted to be all sorts of things.
	I do remember those details.
	I think about that sometimes.
	I'll tell you what you want to have a look on, and this is something you literally have to be careful about talking about on YouTube, because we're going to be giving you some of the best secrets about the Royals and some of the best conspiracies.
	If you watch that documentary, bizarrely made by Keith Allen, the actor, you might not be able to find it on YouTube, you definitely better find it on Rumble.
	If you have a look at Rumble, the one about Diana, what's it called?
	Unlawful killing.
	Diana.
	Ooh.
	Ooh.
	Have a little look at that.
	Was it on the telly?
	No, mate.
	No.
	Like, Keith Allen.
	What's amazing about it is, like, Keith Allen, the actor, Lily Allen's dad, just made it himself.
	So what, did you have it on, like, a legal VHS or something?
	You know sometimes when you look at, like, a Russian version of YouTube and it's all Russian mad letters, you don't know what they are.
	They're, like, spaceships and noughts and crosses and things like that.
	I watched it on... That's reductive, isn't it?
	You know Russia?
	Interpretation of the Russian language?
	Spaceships, Pac-Man, TV aerial ones, one that looks like a fish.
	That's their culture.
	It's going to a war with Russia.
	It's an easy business.
	Apparently Russia aren't hard anymore.
	They don't need to worry about provoking Russia.
	What are they going to do?
	Well, use their considerable military might to endlessly respond and grind down NATO forces.
	Well, let me know in the chat, let me know in the comments.
	You can join us on Locals and join the chat, participate in this stuff with a delightful community, wherever you're from in the world.
	Certainly don't mean to make a mockery of the set of semaphores that the Russian people use to communicate with.
	No, I think people I think anyone would have understood what you meant by that.
	It's just a joke.
	Just mucking about.
	But anyway, so you found it on, you think, some kind of Russian website.
	Russian YouTube.
	Yeah.
	It's pretty interesting.
	A lot of stuff went on.
	Let me know what you think about that.
	I don't think I would like to get into potentially murky territory around the sad and tragic death of Diana, but Keith Allen don't mind, so have a look at his documentary.
	Wow.
	Yeah, it's worth having a look at.
	I heartily recommend it. Even though, didn't you, don't you remember in the old days, you used to be able to just like,
	look at curiosities and things that were a bit peculiar?
	It's like, you know, oh, before you had to have a sort of a banal diet of pre-chewed slop, like some grey, ready-brek
	diet, like you're not allowed any spice or flavour.
	And I used to be able to like, look at things and go, well, I think that's a bit mad. I don't really agree with that.
	Quite a peculiar and wonderful theory, but I'm not sure that's actually true.
	Let's have a look at some of that evidence.
	You should be able to decide for yourself.
	The whole of censorship is underwritten by the idea that we're too bloody stupid to understand anything, and perhaps to a degree we are, because we're willing to put up with expensive ceremonies to anoint further royalty.
	Let's face it, the death of Queen Elizabeth II meant that this is time for a radical appraisal and review of whether or not we Even need a monarchy.
	And the answer to that is, no we don't, because what is a monarchy?
	What does a monarchy do?
	Well you say that, but when you know how much it's going to cost, the taxpayer, maybe you'll change your mind.
	I don't know.
	The ceremony itself?
	Yeah.
	125 million.
	Reasonable.
	Right, OK.
	What does a World Cup cost?
	I'd rather they all play football.
	Right.
	Against each other.
	OK.
	Charles.
	Or Olympics.
	Or something.
	Charles on a diving board and things.
	I'd like to see an event where Charles eats his own perfectly rendered chocolate head.
	That's what I'd like to see, and we'll be looking at that chocolate head a bit later.
	Charles and Camilla invited to use Coronation Bed the night before ceremony.
	Unfortunate wording.
	What other headlines have we got?
	Because, like, you know, using it sort of suggests that, what, for copulation?
	British public support for monarchy at a historic low, so people are actually over it.
	But you won't hear much talk of that.
	All of the paraphernalia, pageantry and ceremony is to distract you from the bizarre fact that you're kind of worshipping an ordinary family, other than the fact that they have an extraordinary amount of wealth.
	Like, they're basically normal, but they've got access to a lot of wealth.
	Shall we have a look at his choc... What are we doing first?
	His chocolate mad head.
	23 kilos, four weeks to build, and depicts Charles in the ceremonial uniform he's expected to wear on the 6th of May.
	It's made up of many different chocolates, including Twix, Milky Way, and Galaxy.
	To break down the individual types of chocolate that make up King Charles' head.
	I mean, in a way, why not this?
	I mean, the whole thing is a bizarre, surrealist experience anyway.
	Like, if you took some hallucinogens, and I don't recommend you do, not while we're on YouTube, and obviously I'm in recovery myself, and then watched that ceremony, you would be struck by its absurdity, I think.
	I guess the thing about symbolism was that it was literally meant to symbolise something that they stood for, and once those values have disappeared, what is the other symbols about?
	So you might as well have a chocolate Charles rather than all the expensive jewels that you're going to see instead.
	And now we bring out the sacred chocolate head, and then Prince William and Prince Harry try to fart its ears off.
	There they go, the two princes, one either side, straddled.
	They've taken laxatives so that their rectums gape now, and they harshly blast out arsefarts.
	Clearly in competition with each other.
	Oh, look at that.
	It's the foulest stench since the marriage to Meghan Markle.
	Yeah, it's ridiculous.
	Look at this in a minute, these medals.
	Do you know what these medals individually mean?
	Because I think they're made out of things like celebrations and heroes and dissected, like, bounty bars.
	Have a look at this.
	It's really stupid.
	Master chocolatier who put it all together, Lindsay Clark, is here.
	Tell me quickly about what... Tell me about... I love the medals.
	Yeah, we've had lots of fun using all the...
	Because this is actually still news and along the bottom the ticker, like all the British nationals are coming out of Sudan, evacuees and all this stuff, and they're talking about chocolate medals, which sounds like a practice that might take place in certain regions of the big city.
	...celebration chocolates to create the different medals from a cross-section of the bounty.
	Can we have a close-up of the medals and then we can talk about them?
	So we start with the pinkies.
	Yeah.
	That's interesting.
	Most delicate of all the fingers.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's almost like it wouldn't be disrespectful to sort of like jab it in its little chocolate chest.
	What is happening to our culture?
	What is happening to our world when you know that we are kind of surrounded on all sides by so forth?
	Like they could be talking about For example, the US encircling China and provoking China in a variety of ways, presumably in order to facilitate military-industrial complex hegemony and your taxpayer dollars, if indeed you are American, for many more years of contention and agitation.
	Well, they will kind of talk about it, but they'll talk about it as Chinese aggression rather than US aggression.
	We'll kind of talk about it while sort of scrutinizing the chocolate medals of a confectionary king.
	It's funny that it's life-size as well.
	Like, there's literally no... Unless you are aiming to maybe replace Charles with this, what's the point in doing a life-size?
	Just do, like, a little chocolate... It's just a token, isn't it?
	What's the point of it?
	What does this achieve?
	And we've also got some extraordinary facts about the royal family.
	Let's have a look at the first one now.
	Look at some of these facts about the reality of the royal family.
	The British crown legally owns 6.6 billion acres of land across the world, a sixth of the earth's surface.
	So if you took six footsteps today, you stood on a bit of King Charles's territory.
	I'm not sure it actually works like that.
	One in every six.
	British monarchs are worth almost 28 billion dollars.
	Yeah.
	All of them.
	The royal family cost UK taxpayers 300 million pounds a year.
	22 to 23.
	Sovereign grant is 86 million dollars.
	Expensive.
	Sovereign grant doesn't include 24-7, which is also publicly funded.
	Royal ceremonies are left out of the sovereign grant.
	It's interesting.
	I did like that fact about the sovereign grant.
	So the sovereign grant is what the royal family get from the taxpayer, so it's 86 million a year, but it can exceed 369 million if the palace urgently requires 30 more clocks.
	Which, you know, obviously sometimes a palace will require 30 more clocks, so that's when it goes up, what they need.
	Sometimes they need more clocks.
	It's extraordinary.
	We criticise your political systems pretty much constantly because they are bizarre.
	It is a corporatised system of government.
	Ours is obviously ridiculous and corrupt also, but many of our leaders are made of chocolate.
	The King and Queen's Consul will see the biggest military ceremonial operation in 70 years.
	So it's sort of like a war and the war is against you.
	King Charles has got 1.8 billion.
	I mean, why would you ever listen to a member of the royal family talking about poverty or inequality or really the environment or anything when that kind of imbalance in power It's what creates many of the world's problems.
	Yeah, I mean, that's the WEF all over.
	And when he's involved in things like that, you have to question.
	I mean, that's literally what they do.
	They're greenwashing themselves, or whitewashing, or whatever phrase you want to use.
	I prefer chocolatewashing.
	Yes!
	They're chocolatewashing themselves into a state of adorability, of sugary deliciousness.
	Let's go back to old Chocolate Charlie and see what else they're saying, because, like, I'd like to know, these medals that they're recreating in Bounty Bars and Mars Bars and whatnot, I bet they're for, like, sort of, valour.
	Exactly.
	People, like, have to give up their lives in needless oil wars in the early 20th century.
	We should do the medals, because it seems a little inappropriate.
	Maybe just the head.
	No, no, we'll do the medals too.
	I've made him a d*** out of Mars!
	Let's have a look.
	Peace, that's a cross-section of the bounty.
	We've got Malteser, Twix.
	Let's do it slowly.
	Maltesers, Twix.
	Bounty.
	A bounty.
	Chocolate.
	Galaxy.
	Yeah, galaxy.
	A Milky Way.
	Milky Way, of course.
	And Snickers, I think, at the end.
	Snickers at the end.
	That's really, really mundane and banal and offensive information.
	Milky Way, of course.
	Yes, of course.
	Yes, I recognise that, actually.
	Obviously, the bounty, that's plain.
	Here are some secrets about the royal family.
	They're... Oh, look, here are the... No, there's what the medics... There they are.
	Awarded to those who provided outstanding service, most noble order... The Royal Air Force Wings, most ancient and most noble order of the thistle.
	But now, in delicious Twix!
	Really extraordinary way to carry on.
	Here are some secrets about the royal family.
	Britain's royals used obscure legal procedures to hide distant relatives' wills.
	Google that and you'll find some peculiar surnames cropping up.
	Let me tell you guys, you're going to love it.
	Prince Philip's sisters were actual Nazis.
	That's the royal secret number two.
	And royal secret number three is Queen Elizabeth's cousins were hidden because of their disabilities.
	So whether it's...
	That's some unfortunate photographs right there.
	So whether it's being secretly Nazi, passing laws, costing billions or hiding people as a result of their mental health, the royal family has got something for everyone.
	They're still adored even in the colonies.
	Have a look at this Australian lady who's filled her whole life with extraordinary paraphernalia that celebrates royalty and pay particular attention to the overwhelming presence of Lady Diana, who cannot be forgotten.
	Goodbye, England's Rose.
	Jan Hugo's Royal Memorabilia Collection has long been her crowning achievement.
	Why are they using, like, that version of Charles?
	That comes from a satirical TV show, Spitting Image, who itself took its design from that famous satirist.
	I can't remember that dude's name anymore.
	But, like, that is not a flattering image of Prince Charles.
	I want to see that rendered in chocolate.
	We're heading off to the coronation over in the UK.
	I heard it at 8 o'clock in the morning.
	and locked into the Royals superfans diary the second it was announced.
	I heard it at 8 o'clock in the morning.
	Diana in the background.
	9 o'clock I was on the phone to the travel agent.
	By lunchtime, had the house...
	What it is about the Royals is you've got to carefully control a narrative.
	You've got to cultivate an idea and an image that makes it acceptable to have something so antiquated and outmoded at the centre of a society to continually distract people that not...
	Only that the institution in itself is against your interests because of the concentration of wealth, but what it represents systemically is against your interests.
	Unequal hierarchical structures.
	Now remember, I'm not talking about equality of outcomes, because I know you frantic little JP fans are typing away with everything you've got, but what I'm talking about is the kind of inequality that can only occur when you have imperialism, colonialism and its modern day replacement Globalism.
	You can't accrue that amount of wealth without piracy, without imperialism, without slavery.
	So when people are talking about historic reparations, they should start looking at deep, entrenched historic power, like the British monarchy.
	And other very, very powerful organizations and groups that have accrued comparable amounts of wealth.
	You can easily find out who they are just at a glance.
	So what we're all engaged in when we're talking about inequality and various cultural arguments that I believe are significant and important and ought be resolved through tolerance and love and acceptance of all forms of identification, including traditional ones that often apply to the native populations of anglophonic countries, for example, is tolerance and love.
	As long as you are continuing to advocate for this sort of living Disney world, this Disneyfication of culture, then people can't sort of awaken.
	And I talk about this as like, my family really, like literally my wife loves the royal family, my grandmother, God rest their soul, Love the royal family.
	You're just sort of used to it.
	I felt personally sad when the Queen died because of the set of values she represented.
	Like you said, Gareth, the point of them is to somehow represent, like a flag or a constitution or an altar, a set of values.
	What seems to be happening over time is the values are getting extracted, but the ability to accrue power and subjugate the majority is remaining.
	Yeah.
	Well, there's another thing that we were watching earlier about the fact that they're going to still try and use the same chair that almost all the coronations have been done on, and when you see it, it's all knackered, and it's, again, it's kind of like a symbol of the decay of the institution, isn't it?
	Like, this shouldn't exist anymore.
	It should have been, like, when that chair stopped being useful, when people started to use, like, bits of glue to try and make it function, it's like, it's not functioning, is it?
	It's not working.
	Although, you can, like, make, like, steel chocolate bars into King Charles.
	Sir, I've just been, uh, repairing the, uh, chair.
	Yes?
	And it occurred to me that we're trying to hold something together that's outmoded and outdated and doesn't work anymore.
	What is your point?!
	Just, maybe I should go back and continue to hold together this chair?
	Like...
	In Charles, King Charles and Joe Biden, in a sense, for all of the talk of progressivism, environmentalism, identity politics, and the necessary conversation to resolve historic exploitation, abuse, and neglect of certain communities exploited for imperialism, colonialism, and different sets of privilege, etc.
	Still, at the center of it, what have you got?
	Look at them.
	What do they represent?
	What do they mean?
	So it just shows you.
	It's theatre.
	Yeah, I don't think I'm getting knighted.
	Someone saying that.
	I don't think I'll even get near the OBEs and the MBEs.
	No.
	There was a time, I think, potentially, that you might have got there.
	When I met the Queen.
	Yeah, you did the Royal Variety, didn't you?
	Yeah, it didn't go well.
	The show went well.
	I liked it, doing a show in front of the Queen.
	It was the handshake, though, wasn't it?
	It was the handshake.
	That was a bit awkward for you.
	You could tell.
	People in that position, whether it's Oprah Winfrey, Tom Cruise, David Beckham, the Queen, they know when you're a troublemaker.
	They can sort of sense it.
	I've had the same look off all them people.
	The look of like, no thanks mate.
	Like, sort of, because I can be quite charming, but I've got something in me that's always like, hey, what's the truth of this?
	Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, steady!
	Like, the disruptiveness.
	But it's true, isn't it?
	Like, what you were just saying there.
	I mean, now you've got the kind of updated roles in the form of, I guess, like, Will and Kate.
	But nothing other than the things that they say and the way that they're rendered through the press and the charities that they belong to and all that.
	The money never changes, does it?
	These things of they're worth 28 million and have 6.6 billion acres of land.
	That never changes from one year to the next, from one coronation to the next.
	We're going to modernise!
	I'm not going to wear my shiny socks.
	Oh, you know that 28 billion?
	How about we build some hostels with that, and maybe some grants for small businesses that are affected during the pandemic?
	Also, I won't wear the breeches!
	It's the Queen Camilla!
	Arise!
	Get me on TikTok!
	TikTok made of chocolate!
	Choc Choc TikTok!
	Give us...
	Your money!
	It's like they're never going to change that.
	And the same, even though we're obviously being frivolous, the same conversation exists in American politics.
	We're talking about adjustments of cultural language, adjustment in the social dynamics, but no one's like saying, what should we do about the relationship between the government and Wall Street?
	What should we do about the relationship between Congress and the Ministry of Industrial Complex?
	No one's having that conversation.
	Well, apart from the crazies.
	Yeah, nutters out here in the far reaches of Rumble.
	Oh, what a crazy conspiracy theory.
	They want you to confine your conversations to cultural and sociological issues within an accepted framework.
	Like to sort of go, oh, what a progressive monarchy.
	The king's had his head made out of chocolate and he's not going to wear his breeches.
	Oh, I didn't think it was possible in my lifetime to not see a king made out of chocolate, not wearing his breeches.
	God bless you, mum.
	Well, come on, guys.
	I think we can do a little bit better than that.
	If you were having a sort of a ground floor up review, sort of a page one rewrite, you'd go, OK, well, surely we should have systems of government that aren't entirely beholden to corporate interests.
	Surely there's no point in having institutional symbols that embody absolute inequality and corruption and piracy and plunder and slaughter.
	You could probably, jewel by jewel, go through the crown that's going to be put on his head and then point out a country that's been exploited.
	That one came out of South Africa.
	That one came out of India.
	Sorry about that, mate.
	Like, the whole bloody thing.
	You can't get away from him.
	This is what I find interesting about certain aspects of what is regarded as the culture war.
	That if you take down statues of, say, Edward Colston, who was a slave trader who had a statue in Bristol, say.
	Like, it's like, yeah, take down that statue.
	Now let's start looking at what other emblems of that power.
	In the end, it runs right through all power.
	Right through, like, you know, they started with sort of Confederate generals, didn't they, in the United States?
	But pretty soon, you have to, you're at Washington, and Lincoln, and Jefferson, like, you have to say, okay, alright, this whole thing is founded, ultimately.
	Look, that's not about American ingenuity or British pluck.
	We all know British people.
	We all know American people and see their spirit, whether they're Italian, African, Irish American, don't matter.
	You see people that have come over with a dream and worked hard and built stuff.
	And those are the people whose businesses get crushed during the pandemic while wealth gets centralised.
	And meanwhile, we're caught up in some cultural war claptrap.
	Not Claptrap, I don't mean to be dismissive about permutations of the civil rights movement.
	What I mean to say is that while we are mired in that, we are unable to make the progress that is necessary and could be facilitated by new alliances and essentially accepting decentralized power as the way forward.
	Then people with different views can have different systems, like how we are evolved to have.
	Yeah.
	You're struggling in our country, though.
	I mean, this is one of the facts that was on those sheets earlier.
	More than a thousand laws have been vetted by the Queen or Prince Charles through a secretive procedure.
	So this is often demanding exclusions for the royal family.
	So, this is systemic.
	This is ways in which the richest family, what, in the world, with almost a sixth of the land on the Earth's surface, are literally controlling the laws of the land.
	What do you think the secretive procedure is?
	Do you think it's like when Tony Soprano meets someone down a shoe shop?
	Do you think they meet in a chocolate factory?
	I think it involves those britches and stockings.
	Gonna try on some new britches down at the chocolate factory.
	Oh God, I've got Mars bar up me stockings!
	Right, listen, don't do that bloody law there where we have to pay our taxes.
	That's a bloody disgrace.
	Don't let ordinary people have a say.
	Censor people on the internet for God's sake.
	That's what it'll be.
	Shall we click over to being exclusively on Rumble now?
	Because I want to talk about a certain little cold with a good PR campaign.
	I call it the world's sexiest cold.
	Cold plus.
	Yeah?
	McCold.
	Oh no, people are coughing and sneezing and stuff.
	Well, let's change everything!
	You know stuff that's always been happening?
	Because we're still on YouTube?
	No, I think we've gone, have we?
	Have we?
	I don't know.
	We shouldn't be.
	I don't know why I say stuff like that.
	Sometimes comedy requires that you be reductive.
	It's not what I really mean.
	Right.
	I hate that people died.
	Yeah.
	I hate that ordinary people suffered and all that you know the YouTube funerals and not being able to go and visit people in hospitals and missing your kid being born and all that kind of stuff and the tragedy and how hard people in various health facilities around the world worked and how people in New York City 34,000 health workers lost their jobs because they didn't want to get vaccinated and the fact that over in our country britain nurses were celebrated deified they drew rainbows on the windows everyone drew rainbows on the windows and now Nurses are striking because they can't get a decent pay rise, and junior doctors, that means that doctors obviously earlier in their qualification process can't get a pay rise.
	People, like, the whole thing is the same.
	Symbols, but no cojones.
	Maybe that's why you joke about it.
	I mean, I'm just interpreting this.
	This is free psychoanalysis.
	Certainly it is that.
	In our country, certainly you would say that it was a joke to the people who were in charge.
	That there was one thing that they were saying, and an entirely different way in which they were behaving.
	And they were laughing and joking their way through it, with a glass of champagne in their hands, or whatever it was.
	Don't know if it was champagne, but I wouldn't be surprised.
	What if it was wine and cheese?
	It definitely was cheese.
	And Gavin Newsom, what did he have?
	And there's just a sense, isn't there, that it was business as usual for them guys, that they were having parties.
	It's been proven in our country, it's been proven with Gavin Newsom.
	Look, that's not the world's worst thing, but it is a revelation of hypocrisy.
	And it also shows you that it's revealing.
	What it reveals is, we're better than you, we're telling you to do this, but we're not going to be doing it because we're better than you.
	And the reason that the pandemic was, the reason the lockdowns were tolerated
	for as long as they were, that it was if you had financial advantages,
	they were not that bad.
	Like you've all heard stories about people flying around, private leave, all heard stories about private islands
	and parties and all that kind of stuff.
	It's a simple, like, but that's true of all life.
	All life is easier if you're not poor.
	If you're part of an economic elite, then life is easier than if you're poor.
	I've tried both and that certainly tallies in my experience.
	What's that ringing in my ear?
	Is it sweet lady truth, or is it the tinnitus you're gonna get after getting COVID shot?
	I've not read this story yet, but it's the sort of thing that's true.
	Let me know how, like, put on the subtitles.
	How have you been since your jab?
	Have you got any tinnitus?
	When did your many years start?
	I've not, I've thought about it, Ross, I've thought about it.
	Oh man, because many years isn't, sort of, is it to do with the year, many years?
	Yeah, it is, yeah.
	And you do, you do get tinnitus as part of it, yeah.
	I've thought about it, I mean, since reading this, you know, I mean, like, we have some different ideas.
	Exactly like you said then, it's like, you don't want to, you, you have to consider all the people that died, you have to consider all the funerals, you, those, it's paramount that you consider them, it's hugely important.
	But I will admit that when I see a story like this and then I think about something that personally happened to me over the last six months a year, you do start to wonder a little bit.
	You do have to.
	You know, sometimes I think that one of their great assets is our sort of unwillingness willingness to sort of open heartedly go,
	oh no, you weren't actually blagging us on that level, were you?
	Even someone like me who sort of somehow delights in, what do I want to say, sort of iconoclasm
	or anti-establishment rhetoric, still a normal person with normal concerns
	and a family and a dog and fears and awareness of my own mortality and my own vulnerability
	and a need to trust people.
	But I suppose, you know, you and I in a sense have different ways of seeing the world.
	Obviously we're close collaborators and close friends, but I don't like authority
	and my starting point is to not trust it.
	And you, whenever I hear you talk, you're the way you analyze authority
	and even the kind of authority that is masked as progressive and beneficial and benign,
	you're very inquiring of, but we always had sort of a slightly different perspective
	around this medicinal process.
	But also we have always collaborated and spoken to one another from a position of respect
	and actually good humor.
	taking a piss a little bit rather than like I'll kill you!
	And I don't think your opinion on it has ever been, no one should have it.
	Never.
	You know, that's the point.
	I think that... I don't know.
	I don't know what you're going through.
	You have, like, older relatives and all that, that you were around all of that time and, like, yeah, it's different.
	I think even some of the most vocal critics, certainly the ones like Rand Paul and people like that, have said that there is a demographic of people that needed it and that maybe there isn't a demographic that continues to need it.
	Because of the boosters and all those kind of things and how effective they are with what we're told they are, when literally we do have the knowledge that the boosters were being brought out by Moderna, certainly I know of Moderna, that weren't any more effective than the ones that already existed.
	So you can't, that is true, he's not lying in these congressional hearings when he says things like that.
	But you know and so I think those things do have all to be factored in.
	And actually that too is a mentality that can be applied more broadly in fact I would say almost universally to any issue that if you When you're speaking to someone, you have to recognise they might have a different perspective from you, for a reason.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Therefore, immediately, I think almost, you arrive at the point where if some kind of centralised authority is necessary, it absolutely must be consensual, it absolutely must have been achieved democratically, because otherwise what you have is Authoritarianism that is not derived from consent or mandate by the people and therefore is likely to have some other motivation behind it.
	Right.
	It's not bad that we've got to this place when a minute ago we were just talking about chocolate bar medallions.
	So we've gotten away from where the mainstream media wants us, um, mired intellectually.
	So, COVID vaccine recipients have reported persistent ringing in their ears after getting the shot.
	Scientists are still investigating the connection.
	The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintains that data does not support a link between the vaccines and the condition known as tinnitus.
	Well, they would, wouldn't they?
	But the problem has become persistent and widespread enough to merit more attention.
	Over 16,000 vaccine takes in the US have reported some form of tinnitus after getting the shots.
	In a way, what The playbook appears to be, more laterally, that because it is possible, albeit with some challenges, to report stuff like this as it arises, and like even right early in the pandemic people were saying, oh I'm not sure about these vaccines, why have they got indemnity, how can they have clinically trialled them, particularly for transmission and all of that, like right at the beginning that stuff was happening.
	I think that the playbook is, well even though people have an awareness They will never be certain, because there are so many strong, central, bombastic counter-arguments.
	It's so continual.
	And over time, people just can't hold on to the outrage.
	Like now it's Ukraine and Russia, soon it's going to be China and Taiwan.
	Hey wait a minute, NATO, there was a coup in 2014, there was a battalion of Nazis, forget that baby, we're in Taiwan now, encircling China, and you can't hold on to it.
	No, and you know, the way in which people are dismissed for having doubts and smeared in the ways that they were, is unforgivable.
	You know, it wasn't done in the right way.
	You can't dismiss People's feelings about things like this, people's doubts, people's doubts and mistrust of authority from the things that they've been told, and then when more things start to come out that back up the things they're saying, and people are still smeared and dismissed.
	You can't do that.
	I mean, in our country, Brexit happened, everyone who voted for Brexit was called a racist.
	It's not the way to speak to and communicate with A population.
	And they did it in the media, they did it in the government, and the same thing has kind of happened and is playing out each time these things, each time someone says, I'm not sure about continuing to send weapons to Ukraine, I'm not sure about all the, you know, continuation of this war, and that's a pattern now that is not going to get us anywhere.
	No, let us know what you think about that in the comments guys, please.
	Let us know how you feel about being addressed in that way, and let us know personally where you stand on the idea of being able to have open discourse with people you disagree with.
	Try and think of the issues that outrage you most.
	Is it cultural and identity issues?
	Is it centralized political corruption?
	Let us know, and are you willing to listen to alternative views?
	Now, Gareth and I have worked very hard to put together this presentation.
	We're going to be taking a deep, analytical, almost granular look at a news story from this week and presenting it to you in a way that is both amusing and informative.
	Here's the news.
	No, here's the effing news.
	And after that we're going to be talking to Barry Wise.
	Here's the news.
	Everywhere you look people are being de-platformed, but let's get together and celebrate our free
	press where journalism's not a crime.
	Where Biden and Jen Psaki, people that have worked for media, people that have worked
	for government, can cosy up and celebrate how free our speech is.
	Have you noticed any censorship anywhere lately?
	You're aware aren't you that the White House press conference dinner was a great orgasmic gala of agreement that what a free wonderful world we're all living in together meanwhile there's no one mentioned Julian Assange or Jamal Khashoggi or the fact that we're continually being censored and there's such limited freedom of speech.
	Unless we have access to you as an audience, unless we have integrity between us, I think we're all in a great deal of trouble.
	And let's have a look at why.
	You remember when Jen Psaki was the press spokesperson for the White House, where every day during COVID or whatever, she'd turn up and say, oh, this is what we're doing and this is what we're not doing.
	Oh, you can ask a question.
	Do you mind if we get that question written down in advance?
	Give the poor old fella some chance to understand it.
	So Jen Psaki now, of course, by weird coincidence, has her own TV show on MSNBC.
	Weird that.
	Almost as if it's like Easy to go from working for the government to MSNBC.
	In spite of the fact that at that White House press conference dinner it was like, oh you hold us to account.
	Jefferson said if it was a free speech or government you'd take free speech and free press over government.
	Well that ain't what we're discussing here.
	What we're discussing is government and media that One of the fun parts, if you will, of the responsibilities of the White House Correspondents Association is this dinner.
	April 29th, the White House Correspondents Association dinner is happening.
	Leave me a comment and let me know in the chat if you don't.
	Have a look at this, because this is going to knock your knickers down, mate.
	One of the fun parts, if you will, of the responsibilities of the White House Correspondents
	Association is this dinner.
	Yeah.
	April 29th, the White House Correspondents Association dinner is happening.
	Yes, Nerd Prom is what we call it.
	Nerd Prom.
	Julian Assange still in prison.
	Mention it if you care about free speech!
	I remember during the Trump administration Donald Trump then President Trump did not attend the dinner.
	Let me know in the chat in the comments if you think Trump's non-attendance signifies a relationship that's actually more appropriate.
	Trump got blasted by the media regularly.
	He hated them, they hated him.
	That's more the kind of relationship that Jefferson was espousing.
	Not all cozying up to each other saying what great advocates for freedom of speech they are.
	Meanwhile not mentioning Assange.
	Not mentioning increased censorship laws by all sorts of means.
	Not mentioning that the mainstream media makes more money from selling your data now than it does from telling you the truth.
	Not mentioning, as Elon Musk famously did on Twitter, that many of these organizations receive significant funding from the government and are happy to parrot their line on most subjects.
	This now is propaganda overload.
	We're at peak propaganda.
	When the Biden-Harris administration came into office, obviously President Biden did revive that tradition of attending the dinner.
	Why is it important for the sitting president of the United States of America, you think, to go to the dinner?
	It's hugely important because it shows respect and honours the work of people who are in the media.
	Respect and honour.
	Like all the respect and honour that the New York Times showed to the story of Jack Tech's era, the New York Times collaborated with the FBI and the CIA.
	This is not a situation where the word honour should be on everybody's lips.
	The taste of disgust should be in all of our mouths.
	And it shows that in a democracy you can disagree.
	You may disagree with their coverage.
	You can get that all out in the funny part of your speech.
	And oftentimes the speech that a president delivers is one that has all sorts of funny
	critiques or funny jokes about media organizations.
	Didn't notice any funny jokes about Hunter Biden's laptop, a story that was kept out of the mainstream media in the build-up to the election.
	In fact, the CIA, the deep state, were utilised to help repress and discredit that information before its revelation.
	The idea that what we have is a free media and a transparent government is plainly risible.
	And if you are looking for evidence of that fact, look no further than Edward Snowden, still exiled in Russia because he Heroically revealed that we were being lied to and spied on to an unprecedented degree.
	And that's not just your country.
	It's my country, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, all collaborating and sharing information.
	What's been revealed is we have anything but transparency, anything but press freedom.
	Probably gets them some things off their chest.
	By the way, those speeches take years off of your life.
	If you're in the press or communications office, it's hard to deliver a funny speech.
	But a good chunk of the speech is also on the value of media.
	They're trying to keep it like this is a friendly, jocular communication between power and those that report on power, and that the tone of this, this friendly, communicative, apparently transparent tone, tells us that everything's okay.
	You know that if you speak out against the interests of the powerful, you are going to get in serious trouble.
	We on this channel are extremely cautious about the types of information that we use and the way that we convey it just so that we can keep the lights on.
	And freedom of press and how important it is to a democracy.
	And it is honouring the work, the blood, sweat and tears of the people in the room.
	Well, I'll tell you some blood, sweat and tears that you could be honoring.
	Jamal Khashoggi.
	It's all over the floor of an embassy in Istanbul.
	There's also scholarships and awards that are given.
	Well, well, well, well, those scholarships.
	And I suppose there's no strings attached.
	Who provides those scholarships?
	What type of reporting do you get from the journalists who receive them?
	But even just being present and being there as a president sends that message to the media that you value what they do.
	I think so.
	And especially, I mean, given the I think we often forget here in America, because There is a free press, a fair press, the cornerstone of our democracy.
	Yes, cornerstone.
	Free speech, very cornerstone of our democracy.
	It's not like new ways to censor misinformation, disinformation, malinformation are literally being created before our very eyes.
	It's not like we've just had the Twitter file revelations that shows you the degree to which the CIA and FBI have infiltrated not only social media but presumably mainstream media as well in order to dictate narratives and suppress narratives that they don't like.
	Even, as has now been admitted, repressing and censoring true information that they did not like.
	You can't sit on the TV and say all of this stuff unless, of course, you yourself are part of that propaganda.
	Cornerstone of our democracy is that journalists can ask the most powerful people in America, whether they be presidents or CEOs, some of the toughest questions.
	As long as you give them those tough questions in advance.
	Hey, we're gonna be asking you some pretty tough questions!
	Oh god, what are they?
	Well, this is the question, this is what the journalist looks like, and this is how you pronounce their name.
	Traitor to journalism.
	That's traitor to journalism.
	I think we forget that around the world that that is not the case.
	No.
	There's so many journalists whose freedom is being just trampled on across the globe.
	Right.
	It'd be good if the countries where the journalists are being trampled on aligned with countries that the US imperialist system wanted to invade anyway, wouldn't it?
	God, that'd be so convenient.
	But that'll be just too much of a coincidence if the exact countries that America have been planning to invade were also the ones about freedom.
	Oh, God.
	Wouldn't even like to wish for that.
	Right, and in fact when it's adversarial... Adversarial?
	The only adversarialism will come if they scratch each other's back too hard or if you feel a bit of a tooth during fellatio.
	There's no adversity between the press and power.
	They're working together to keep us spellbound.
	Let me know in the chat in the comments if you agree.
	Sometimes in the briefing room at the State Department or the Defense Department or the White House or with spokespeople for the Vice President and others.
	That is democracy working.
	That is the reporters being able to push back on a spokesperson, ask them tough questions, right?
	The only times they push back, you finish the joke.
	And the spokesperson can sometimes push back at them and try to provide information to the best of their ability.
	That does not exist in China or Russia or a lot of other authoritarian countries.
	That's convenient because actually we're having a proxy war with Russia that's quite profitable and we're looking to start a proxy war with China that will also be profitable.
	So it's good that they're baddies.
	Even in those moments of adversarial-ness, it's working.
	It's democracy working.
	Yeah, even those moments of adversarialness, like when Julian Assange, for example, he did Belmarsh, slowly atrophying and dying, squinting into his dark cell.
	Oh, that's democracy working.
	And when Jamal Khashoggi's being sworn up in an embassy and we're told that Saudi Arabia will be made a pariah before Joe Biden goes over there and fist bumps, that is democracy working.
	Edward Snowden shivering away there in Russia.
	That terrible Russian country.
	That is democracy working.
	And when people are getting kicked off YouTube for having conversations, that is democracy working.
	Democracy is working so well, we should go around the world finding places that don't have it and force them to have it whether they want it or not.
	Democratically.
	For freedom.
	But I'm probably imagining this as some sort of conspiracy theorist.
	After all, look at what I'm wearing and judge me on that, rather on the stuff I'm saying.
	Let's have a look at the actual relationships between people that work at the White House and people that work in the media.
	And if we find those relationships, well, that would be evidence, I guess.
	Right?
	The current Press Secretary Corinne Jean-Pierre is a former analyst for NBC News and MSNBC and the last Press Secretary Jen Psaki, that was Jen there, now has her own show on MSNBC.
	Prior to her stint as White House Press Secretary, Psaki worked as a CNN analyst and before that
	she was spokesperson for the State Department, so she moved effortlessly between the state
	and MSNBC and CNN and back to the state, all the while rigorously questioning, oh no, come
	on, let's really give these guys hell, oh no, back over here.
	Everywhere you look you can find extensive entanglements between the US government and
	the news media outlets that Westerners look to for information about the world.
	And that's before you even get into the way the plutocratic class, which owns and influences
	the US media is also not meaningfully separate from the US government.
	When corporations are part of the government, corporate media is state media.
	And that, my dear, dear friend, if you ask me, is closer to fascism than any of the other things you hear described as fascism by that portion of the media.
	Now let's focus on the celebratory tone that's deployed when talking about freedom of press, freedom of speech in bad countries like China and Russia and observe carefully what actually happens if you are a journalist that speaks out against power.
	The annual dinner of the White House Correspondents Association is an occasion for the media elite and top politicians in Washington to schmooze and declare their mutual solidarity.
	That is what it is.
	Our solidarity is mutual.
	Shall we have a schmooze?
	It's not like stags tussling by a brook to work out what's best for America.
	They have the same interests.
	Otherwise, the whole way through that White House press conference dinner, they'd be going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, Julian Assange, Jamal Khashoggi, what's going on?
	The censorship, misinformation, setting up new ways of controlling it.
	Is it right that we're even selling the private information about our audience without making it clear to them that's what we're doing?
	Why are platforms like Rumble being shut down in France?
	Why can't Russia Today be viewed and people decide for themselves whether it's propaganda?
	That is not freedom of speech.
	I don't know what it is, you let me know what it is, but it ain't freedom of speech.
	This is usually couched in the language of defence of the First Amendment, although that constitutional provision has been systematically trampled on by administration after administration in the interests of American imperialism, such as the current war, I would contest, between Ukraine and Russia.
	Is that being used for imperial corporate American interests?
	Sort of looks like it when you look at the way that the Pentagon budget ends up being apportioned out.
	And what about the semiconductor war that's being agitated for involving Taiwan and China?
	Illegal government spying, police violence, data capture, censorship and a rise in protest laws are everyday practices in America and the corporate media generally passes over them in silence as long as its own financial interests are not harmed.
	Plain fact.
	The reason that the media is not attacking the state and other corporations on these matters is because they are able to carry on sitting behind desks, drinking from a mug, all cozy, all happy, no problem.
	There was more than the usual measure of such hypocrisy at Saturday night's annual dinner of the White House Correspondents Association as President Joe Biden and the assembled members of the political and media elite pretended to defend freedom of the press, but only when it serves the foreign policy interests of American imperialism.
	In a way, it's just like the Met Gala.
	People just dressed up, celebrating stuff that's nothing to do with what's actually happening.
	and is doubling down on the systems of nihilism and deceit that govern our valueless culture as we slide into some kind of moral oblivion and potentially other types of cultural and maybe even ecological oblivion as well.
	Most presidential appearances at the dinner attended by every president in recent years except Donald Trump have been characterized by scripted remarks making fun of the audience, the president's political opponents and critics, and the president himself.
	But Biden devoted the bulk of his remarks to a lengthy declaration of his opposition to the repressive measures taken against journalists in Russia, China, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela.
	Sometimes I've heard of those countries.
	I keep hearing those countries.
	Russia, China, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela.
	Yeah, they must be like freedom-hating countries or something or must have oil.
	I don't know.
	It's freedom-hating.
	They're freedom-hating and undemocratic, I think, is what it is.
	Let me know in the chat what you think it is.
	And pledges to devote US diplomatic efforts to winning the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovitz recently arrested on bogus spying charges in Russia and other American prisoners of the Putin regime.
	Wrong to arrest Evan Gershkovitz.
	Obviously, he should be freed.
	The coincidence between the list of countries guilty of violating press freedom and the list of countries targeted by American imperialism for subversion and overthrow was obvious.
	Wait a minute!
	This list here of countries that you say aren't free and ones where you have an imperial agenda, it's the same list!
	Yeah, but the list's got different title at the top of it.
	This one's countries that we're going to overthrow, and this one's countries that don't have a free press.
	Yeah, but it's the same countries.
	It's a different list, and I need you to believe that it's different.
	Otherwise, you're not a journalist.
	You're a disinformationer.
	Right, so check it out that night where Biden was all cozy and kooky and funny and cute.
	I love NPR because they whisper into the mic like I do.
	Check this, Biden made no reference, for example, to the murder of Washington Post commentator Jamal Khashoggi, killed and dismembered inside the consulate of Saudi Arabia in the Turkish city of Istanbul.
	That's a pretty bad thing to happen to a journalist, I think.
	Remember, please try to remember that when Biden was campaigning for the presidency, he said Make them in fact the pariah that they are.
	But then remember in government they did not do that.
	This kind of madness where you have a whole evening dedicated to freedom of the press and you don't mention Julian Assange or Jamal Khashoggi, what is it trying to make you go mad or something?
	Khashoggi, an advisor turned critic of the Saudi monarchy, was targeted by the de facto Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose security chief sent the hit squad and directed its actions.
	Well, I only sent a security chief and directed its actions.
	Other than that, I had nothing to do with that murder and dismemberment.
	Oh, well, come on into America.
	Fist bump!
	Biden claimed during the 2020 election campaign that he would turn the Saudi leader into a pariah.
	Instead, in pursuit of greater Saudi oil production, he went cap in hand to Riyadh for talks with the prince stroke assassin.
	So there you go.
	That's the reality of politics.
	We all know that's the reality.
	Why are we pretending it's anything else?
	Oh, we're giving Joe Biden a real test.
	You know, we come at him a bit, he comes at us a little bit.
	It's very much like Marvin Hagler versus Thomas Hearns.
	Who's going to win?
	Well, both of you, because you're both Fucking liars.
	But the most obvious case of a double standard was the one that involves the Biden administration directly, the persecution of Julian Assange.
	Now I've heard people say that Julian Assange is like a right-wing issue now.
	Julian Assange revealed that there was malfeasance in the Middle Eastern wars, that civilians were killed, that you can't trust your government, that you're being spied on, lied to.
	Is that right-wing now?
	Let me know in the chat.
	I don't know what all these words mean.
	Three minutes into his remarks to the Saturday night festivities, Biden declared journalism is not a crime.
	It is if you do it properly.
	The formulation seemed a perverse restatement of a declaration issued by a half dozen major world newspapers, including the New York Times last December, when they called on the Biden administration to drop charges against Assange because publishing is not a crime.
	And if it were, they'd be guilty of it.
	But how the New York Times backing up that claim that Assange should not have to endure the espionage charges leveled against him because publishing is not a crime.
	Let's have a look.
	It is noteworthy that in their coverage of the correspondence dinner, neither the Times nor the Washington Post or any other mainstream publication made any mention of Assange or the contradiction between Biden's declaration of fidelity to the First Amendment and the continued drive of his administration to extradite and jail Assange, who published information.
	They didn't mention it because what they're doing, what they're continually doing, is establishing the frame of what can be talked about and what is not allowed to be talked about.
	And they're doing it, actually, brilliantly.
	Nor did any media correspondents or management, the bulk of the audience at the dinner, seek to raise the issue there.
	What a surprise.
	Seven Democratic members of Congress, including all five members of the Democratic Socialists of America, recently sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland urging him to drop prosecution of Assange.
	None of these representatives sought to raise the issue at the correspondents' dinner, which took place only four days before World Press Freedom Day, as designated by the United Nations.
	Nothing means anything, does it?
	Did you know it was World Press Freedom Day?
	And to celebrate World Press Freedom Day, we are gonna chop up the Saudi Arabian journalist in a little bit.
	And this Australian journalist, we're gonna leave him in prison.
	And this doctor on YouTube, we're gonna ban him for a week.
	Also, anyone, anywhere, who tries to say anything that could impede our ability to colonize not only the world and its resources, but also the consciousness of its inhabitants, will go to jail.
	Happy Freedom Day, everyone!
	Don't you dare ruin another freedom day, Lisa!
	Later in his remarks, Biden flattered the press declaring, you make it possible for ordinary citizens to question authority.
	No, you make it impossible!
	You make it impossible!
	That's the opposite!
	What is this, a Seinfeld episode, where you do the exact opposite of what you're saying you're doing?
	They do not do that!
	They criticize you, they find ways to delegitimize dissent in voices, they censor, they smear.
	That is not what they do, is it?
	Actually, the American corporate media has abandoned even a token commitment to such an oppositional stance towards the US government.
	Yeah, that sounds more like it.
	The Times, which sets the agenda for the daily coverage in the American media, is little more than an adjunct to the CIA and Pentagon on national security issues, particularly the war in Ukraine.
	Yeah, that's right, isn't it?
	And we now know why, because there's deep infiltration, and in some cases, funding, and there's an alliance of ideologies, and it's simply not separate.
	When National Guard airman and IT specialist Jack Buddy Boy, as they call him, Texera, released top-secret Pentagon documents on the Internet, The Times tracked him down and published his name, enabling the FBI to swoop in and arrest the 21-year-old soldier only hours later.
	That's literal collaboration, isn't it?
	The Times published his name, the FBI arrested him.
	They're like little nerdy poindexters.
	Sir, sir, we found out who's been smoking behind the bike sheds.
	It was Buddy Boy Texera.
	Excellent work.
	Well done, Martin.
	Biden's paean to the American media and his declaration of devotion to the First Amendment were followed by a series of obvious and banal jokes, largely at the expense of Fox News.
	Fox News owned by Dominion Voting Systems.
	Yawn.
	As well as a few references to advanced age.
	Same over the hill.
	Don Lemon would say that's a man of his prime.
	Hahaha, he's old.
	As though that was the only issue standing in the way of his re-election campaign.
	He made no mention of the war in Ukraine, which every day threatens to escalate into a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia, which remains a deadly threat to the world's population.
	Possibly because it would have ruined the vibe, along with any mentions of Assange, Khashoggi, or the truth more broadly.
	But here, on our channel, We have an obligation to try to get in the mud with you and understand what the hell is happening.
	Why is our felt daily emotional reality so different from what they're telling us?
	Whether you're watching the Met Gala or seeing people getting banned or seeing people getting smeared or listening to people telling you how free you are and how much freedom of speech you've got.
	Why does your feeling of reality not match this peculiar matrix that they are encircling us with and closing down around us?
	Why?
	Because it's simply not true.
	Simply because change is trying to be born.
	They're trying to stifle it.
	And one of the ways that they stifle change is by controlling the media space and what's permissible to discuss within it.
	What I believe is that we need more free media spaces like this.
	We need more ability to openly communicate so we discover how similar to one another we are, where it matters, and that our differences from one another are quite, quite glorious.
	But that's just what I think.
	Let me know what you think in the comments in the chat.
	I'll see you in a second.
	Thank you for using Fox News.
	You're welcome.
	No.
	Here's the fucking news!
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Hello!
	Joining me now is Barry Weiss, founder and editor of The Free Press, former Twitter Files journalist and New York Times editor.
	Thanks for joining us today, Barry.
	It's great to see you on the screen I'm looking at.
	Great to see you too, Russell.
	What's going on over there?
	What are you up to?
	What am I up to?
	Raising a baby, starting a company, you know, trying to do media the right way.
	I presume you're also having a mental breakdown if you're trying to simultaneously start a company and raise a baby.
	How old's your baby?
	She's seven and a half months, yeah.
	I mean, it's a lot.
	A lot going on at one time.
	What about the sleep and everything, mate?
	I mean, I don't look my best, but you only live one life.
	When else are we going to do it?
	And I should add, by the way, that building the company alongside some of my close friends and also my wife, a journalist that I met at the New York Times, who also left to do this with me.
	So there's a lot going on.
	There's not really like a work-life balance, I would say, in my life, Russell.
	Doesn't sound like there's very much balance.
	I suppose at least if both of you are doing nights, then I suppose that's something.
	But I won't spend any more time poring over your private business.
	Sleep train the baby.
	She sleeps the entire night.
	I don't understand people that don't choose to do that.
	Nor do I!
	I don't know what you're using, Benadryl?
	Hey Barry, I wanted to ask you some questions about the news but afterwards I'd like to talk to you about how you're convincing your daughter to sleep that long.
	Mate, I wanted to ask about firstly a little bit about That dude quitting Google and everything, Geoffrey Hinton and your conversation with him and whether you learned anything more detailed about his concerns around AI.
	Is it kind of an existential threat?
	A pragmatic threat?
	Economics?
	Is it to do with jobs?
	Is it to do with some sci-fi type end of the world scenario?
	What did you glean from that Barry?
	The guy that left Google on the podcast I had on Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which is the company that runs ChachiBT.
	And the title of the podcast, I think, summarizes where a lot of people are thinking this goes, you know, is AI the end of the world or is it the dawn of a new one?
	There's a tremendous amount of hyperbole.
	Going on around this new technology.
	Some are comparing it to fire.
	That's Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google.
	Others are comparing it to agriculture, the wheel, electricity, Gutenberg Press, you name it.
	Here's what I know.
	In the past decade, Russell, as you've surely watched, Crypto is the thing that has been absolutely hyped.
	This was the thing that was going to get rid of state currency.
	It was going to get rid of the dollar bill.
	It was going to change the world.
	It was going to democratize money.
	But my wife was just in Austin at a crypto conference and you still pay for the swag in dollar bills.
	In other words, people are still sort of casting about for the use case of the thing that was meant to change the world as we know it.
	Think about ChatGPT in comparison, right?
	That came out basically a week ago.
	Something like a few months ago, ChatGPT4 was unveiled.
	A hundred million people are using that app every day, and it's already changing the way that people work, the way they do research, the way they cheat on tests in college.
	News organizations have announced that they're getting rid of certain jobs because they're already outsourcing them to this technology.
	It's already proven its use, which is extremely exciting and also extremely unnerving.
	There's an economist that I love named Tyler Cowen, who writes this incredible blog, Marginal Revolution, if your listeners aren't aware of it.
	And he had this incredibly succinct, excellent post about this, where he basically says, as much as we have believed that the internet was a seismic technological revolution, The truth is, is that most of us that are alive, save very, very old people that lived through, you know, World War II and the advent of nuclear weapons, we really haven't lived through a fundamental technological revolution.
	We haven't lived through what he calls moving history, where we're actually feeling like the tectonic plates shift.
	This is that thing.
	And as human beings who are only able to think so far into the future, it's really scary.
	But probably the cavemen who watched their neighbor invent fire felt the same way.
	They probably thought, holy shit, this thing allows us to cook food and stay warm, but also holy shit, someone can come and burn our whole village to the ground.
	In other words, Every single time this new technology comes into being, there's a kind of moral panic around it, right?
	There's this really amazing newsletter called Pessimist Archive, and they keep track of the panics that are the reaction to new technology.
	I read one the other day where it was like, it was a poem that they unearthed from 250 BC, freaking out about the sundial.
	Right?
	There's articles about, you know, the extinction of the slide rule and how the calculator is going to ruin education forever for kids.
	For people that were living in 1600s in Central Europe, the printing press probably meant to them war and bloodshed.
	To us, it meant the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the Scientific Revolution.
	So my feeling about this new technology Sorry to go on about this.
	I'm really excited about it because I feel like it's huge.
	It's not a question of yes or no.
	It's going to happen.
	The question is, who is going to do it and what are the guardrails going to be around it?
	And those, I think, are the real pressing questions that some of the smartest people in the world, way smarter than me, are grappling with right now.
	One of them being the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman.
	It's interesting because when you talk about regulation with something like this it can sometimes seem to be at odds with where we might stand elsewhere on the subject of censorship but I've heard people say that if this isn't like that Elon Musk for example said this It ought be regulated and it's not regulated and now I know that when people talk about regulation elsewhere within social media the problem ends up being that it's not about regulation of monopolies it's regulation of it ends up being censorship of free speech essentially.
	I'm fascinated Barry to hear you say that this is a seismic shift and it is epochal and that you don't think that oh everyone having a phone in their pocket represents that or the ability to be contacted the whole time you think this is beyond that because this is beyond utility because it can actually transform it's not like well it's just a tool we use it can become a tool that uses us is this what you're saying
	I mean, that is what I'm increasingly convinced by.
	Don't get me wrong.
	I am not a futurist.
	I am not a technologist.
	When everyone was freaking out about Bitcoin and crypto in the beginning of the pandemic, I went and bought $10,000 and then promptly lost my password forever, thus losing the $10,000.
	I'm not a sophisticated technologist.
	What I know is having spent a little bit of time with chat GPT, It is eerie the way that it can imitate human intelligence.
	And do I...
	Far be it for me to suggest that the phone in my pocket that contains more computing power than, you know, what sent rockets to the moon.
	I mean, of course I'm blown away by it.
	I'm just saying that this thing, in its very, very short few months, has already proven to be extraordinarily transformative.
	And so I'm not saying that the internet and the fact that we're talking through a screen right now, and I'm in LA and you're in the UK, it's unbelievable.
	I'm just suggesting that this has the ability to be perhaps even more unbelievable, and people that are more sophisticated than me are suggesting so, and so I think it's incumbent upon all of us to learn about it.
	Now, as for the question of regulation and censorship, that really, really scares me.
	I mean, go in there and ask—other people have done this, but go in there and type something controversial into chat, type in, tell me
	about now, type in, tell me about Jordan Peterson. You'll immediately see that because, you
	know, because all technology is ultimately created by human beings, that it has biases
	and unlike Twitter, right, where we could go into the archive, because Elon Musk, you know,
	allowed journalists into the archive, of course, through the Twitter files.
	We could see the choices they were making.
	This thing is built on a text corpus of billions and billions of texts, articles, books, documents, lyrics.
	It's much harder, I think.
	It's going to be much harder to sort of ascertain the biases because you're not like, you know, it's just different.
	The scale of it is completely different.
	I think that's really worrisome.
	The other thing that's worrisome, as we saw in the Twitter files, the amazing Twitter files hearings, where Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger went before Congress, and we saw, you know, an incredible display, let's say, by some American politicians who didn't know what Substack was, who asked if me and Matt and Schellenberger were in a threesome.
	I mean, it was incredible.
	Like, do we really trust the people who don't know what Substack is to regulate You know, chat GPT and open AI, like, I don't even know if they know what a modem is, or know how the internet works.
	And so that I think is, is really worrisome to me.
	And so there are people who are suggesting other kinds of, you know, Sam Altman, CEO of open AI suggests that maybe he should be the head ultimately of open AI, maybe that's a position that should be democratically elected, because that's how significant and important it will be.
	So You know, the jury's out, but when I look at the people who are in Washington and their average age, frankly, the idea of them regulating this technology is worrisome to me.
	Yeah, that is cause for concern.
	When we have, in the media landscape, cosy relationships, as evidenced between the recent White House correspondents' dinner, and then adversarial, aggressive, punitive relationships, as the aforementioned Tybee Schellenberger a congressional hearing suggests. What do you think this
	tells us about the shifting landscape between the media and the powerful? In particular,
	I'm noting Matt Taibbi's IRS visit, the threat with jail for perjury or whatever. How do
	you feel, Barry, operating in a comparable space and both of Matt Taibbi being a peer
	and indeed colleague of yours?
	I think it is the job of journalists to hold power to account and do that even when it's
	politically inconvenient for your side.
	You know, I think that Matt Taibbi, Michael Schellenberger, me, we're never going to be invited to the White House Correspondents Dinner.
	And I'm okay with that, because when I became a journalist, I didn't do it for the money, I didn't do it for the accolades, and I didn't do it so that I could, you know, drink champagne next to powerful people.
	I did it because it's a vocation that allows you to pursue your curiosity and in which you get, you know, a salary to take your flashlight and look into the darkest corners, into the kind of corners that the powers that be don't want you to look.
	So, you know, when I see the IRS seemingly being weaponized against someone like Matt Taibbi, I think that that is something that every single journalist in this country Whether they work for an independent site, whether they write for a substack, whether they work at the Washington Post or the New York Times, should be absolutely up in arms about that.
	And I think it tells you something really concerning about the state of the legacy press in this country that, you know, the Wall Street Journal thankfully had an editorial, but there should have been editorials about that visit in every single newspaper across the West, in my view.
	Why isn't Biden likely to conduct primary debates?
	I think many of us would be interested to hear debates between, for example, Robert F Kennedy and Biden, and Marianne Williamson's doing pretty well also.
	Why is the Democrat party becoming so censorial, so afraid of conversation?
	What's going on Barry?
	Well, look, it tells you a lot about the popularity of Joe Biden among voters, that Marianne Williamson is polling at something like 9 or 10%, and RFK Jr., who announced like two weeks ago, I think, is polling at something like 20% already.
	Who knows what will happen when Gavin Newsom, California governor, maybe is reportedly maybe going to get to the race at some point.
	People realize that Joe Biden, though he won the last election, is getting slipped the questions in press conferences before, you know, to sort of be prepped.
	He's someone that they're sort of, I don't want to say hiding, but trying to protect from the probing questions of the press as much as possible.
	Why?
	Why isn't he doing a debate?
	Well, for all of those reasons, how do you think he would fare in a debate against Marianne Williamson, RFK, and to say nothing of other people that might join the race?
	So essentially, you have someone in a position of power that's being protected.
	You have a relationship between the mainstream press and the government that is consensual, as we saw with a recent report around the Pentagon Papers Part 2, that the content of the leaks was ignored.
	You had the ludicrous spectacle of Biden saying that we must protect the free press and that
	journalism is not a crime, while Assange is still away in a maximum security prison.
	And adding to this, this potentially unprecedented tool that we were previously discussing, which
	will ultimately, I suppose, end up in the hands of the powerful.
	And it seems, based on what you're saying about the inflections that AI already bears
	culturally, that it's a system, and of course we know from the Twitter files what the relationship
	is between big tech and the Democrat party in particular.
	Of course, I'm sure they would be flexible depending on which of those two parties were in power.
	It seems that the potential to govern the population is about to become, I would say, what do I want to say?
	Overwhelming.
	Overwhelming.
	With these new tools, it's possible that freedom could be further eroded.
	So, really, at a point where we ought be insisting on new independent movements, a point where we should be insisting on transparency, there is more surveillance, militarization of the police, more protest laws, an inability to conduct public discourse by the most powerful person in the world.
	What do you imagine is most immediately required, Barry?
	What I think is most immediately required and what I see already happening, and I guess this is the silver lining, is, you know, look at both of us in this moment right now, right?
	I don't even know how big your audience is at this point.
	It's astronomical.
	Here I am, thinking that I was going to be, you know, I spent my career in the legacy press, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Left the New York Times in 2020 for reasons maybe we can discuss, had no plan, had barely had a credit card, to say nothing of being an entrepreneur.
	That was like the furthest thing from my mind.
	And now I'm building a media company and I have 20 people working with me.
	So the great news is that the technological revolution we're living through Yes, can be used in extraordinarily oppressive ways, and it can also be democratizing.
	It's like all technology.
	It's neutral.
	It can be used for good or bad, like fire, like the printing press, like the computer, like the iPhones in our pocket, right?
	And so while I think we should be concerned, and while I think this technology, AI, as we were talking about before, has the potential to be the big one, so to speak, I think that, you know, If the past is prelude, it can be used in both ways.
	And so am I worried that you can go right now and create a conversation between the two of us as someone did between Joe Rogan and Sam Altman and created an episode of the Joe Rogan experience that looked kind of like them and sounded kind of like them?
	Yeah, that really worries me when I think about actual disinformation, not what people want to believe is disinformation.
	Very concerning to me.
	But there's also incredible things that are going to come from it.
	So this is something that I'm watching more as a journalist, wanting to track it, wanting to understand it, wanting to understand who the players are, what their motivations are.
	Did the people that signed that letter, including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak and others, calling for a six-month pause in the advent of increased technology, of increased AI capabilities beyond chat GPT.
	Did they sign that letter because they're pure of heart?
	Did they sign that letter because they want to catch up to the competition?
	What are the motivations?
	What are driving people?
	And by the way, what's driving other countries?
	What's driving China?
	Where are they in terms of AI capabilities?
	These are the kind of questions that I think are going to be driving the next years of our life, the next years of stories.
	And it's one that I'm following incredibly, incredibly closely as a journalist above anything else.
	Barry, I'm so grateful to you for asking these questions.
	I mean, I admire incredibly what you've done and the organisation that you're evidently building, not to mention your ability, along with your wife, to expertly manage this child through the night in ways that seem to me to be unprecedented.
	And I think what's interesting also about what you're saying is that you are Journaling what's happening but increasingly I think it's likely that to become a legitimate journalist is to become a de facto activist and perhaps this is something that began with the Greenwald and Assange and certainly it seems likely due to the ongoing increase of censorship to be a necessity that if you're going to tell the truth you are an enemy of the powerful.
	So, I'm glad that we at least have an allegiance.
	Of course, I'll give you the chance to respond.
	Yeah, I think... Look, I'm old school.
	I think the job of a journalist... There are different roles in the world, right?
	There's the job of the advocate.
	There's the job of the columnist.
	There's the job of the... There's room for activists.
	There's room for all of these things.
	I think journalism... I think the way to do journalism that maintains integrity and maintains the trust of people has to hew to sort of old school rules that frankly a lot of the legacy press has turned their back on, right?
	The thing that used to happen at the New York Times was very clear.
	You know, if a certain op-ed, and I was an op-ed editor there for years and then also wrote my own columns, if an op-ed sort of hewed to the ideological narrative, if an op-ed argued that Donald Trump was a moral monster that had to be taken down, If an op-ed claimed that, you know, Joe Biden was the savior of the world, we could go on and on and on.
	You know what the arguments are.
	It would sort of sail into the paper.
	And arguments that contradicted that, arguments that complicated it, those were ones that sort of were subjected to a much, much, much more rigorous test.
	In other words, and I think that that was to the detriment of the audience and to the reader.
	And I think that, you know, when you think about the old Manifesto of the New York Times, the idea of all the news that's fit to print and the way that it sort of has transformed, and many other papers as well, to all the news that fits the narrative.
	I just think that there is a huge, wide-open space for people that are actually interested in treating readers like adults, that are actually interested in treating listeners as sophisticated people that can make their own decisions, not just shoving propaganda down their throat.
	And so that's what we're about at The Free Press.
	We're about telling honest stories.
	We're about You know, telling the truth about the world as it actually is, not as we wish it to be.
	And we put a special emphasis on stories that are either ignored or misconstrued by the mainstream press.
	And God knows there are a lot of those these days.
	Barry, thank you so much.
	That sounds like a fantastic endeavour and I'm grateful to you for undertaking it.
	You can learn more from Barry Weiss by reading the Free Press, listening to her podcast, Honestly, reading her book, How to Fight Antisemitism.
	Incredibly creative person!
	She doesn't stop!
	This is the only liquid that Barry will consume throughout the live-long day.
	Barry, thanks for joining us and thanks for your fantastic contribution.
	Thanks for having me, Russell.
	Next week on Rumble, our special guest will include presidential candidate RFK Jr.
	We thought long and hard about the potential blowback and trouble that may ensue from this booking but we gotta give RFK the...
	20% now.
	Legit candidate.
	Joe Biden may not want to debate him.
	People may not want to admit that his book about Charles Anthony Fauci was an incredible success.
	But we want to hear from RFK.
	You want to hear from RFK.
	He's coming next week.
	We've got international security expert Max Abrams coming on.
	We've got a whole A variety of it.
	Look at him just looking off wistfully.
	Oh, national security.
	It's a bloody nightmare, he seems to be saying, almost to himself as much as anything else.
	All right, guys.
	Thank you so much for joining us for another fantastic week of freedom.
	Wow.
	Look at what we've created on Rumble.
	Isn't it extraordinary?
	It's wonderful.
	What began from a simple dream by a narcissist.
	We're not even saying who that is.
	It could be me.
	No, it's me.
	It could be you.
	That is me, yeah.
	You are that sweet narcissist.
	I'm really enjoying that shirt.
	Oh, thank you.
	You look absolutely fantastic.
	Bring him up the credits a little bit.
	Have you noticed how low down the credits Gareth is?
	He's about 9th or 10th.
	GPT bots are higher up the credits than him.
	Mind you, they deserve it, don't they?
	Join us next week on Rumble.
	Not for more of the same, but for more of the different.

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