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May 19, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand

01:14:45

PROOF! Biden's Fuelling Even MORE WAR! - #133 - Stay Free With Russell Brand

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	birds chirping music
	Brought to you by Pfizer music
	laughter music
	In this video, you're going to see the future.
	Hello there, you Awakening Wonders.
	Thanks for joining me on this voyage to truth and freedom.
	If you're watching this on YouTube, we'll be there for about 10-15 minutes, then we will be exclusively available on free speech, or as some are calling it now, Freach Platform Rumble, where you can freely talk about stories like NATO censoring anti-NATO rhetoric on social media.
	Who benefits from that?
	Please don't criticise NATO!
	That's a hate crime!
	Also, we're going to be talking about RFK Junior's claims about Anthony Fauci, which literally can't be discussed on YouTube, as well as talking at some length about the 4.5 million people who died in the post-911 conflicts, and let's think about how that was framed.
	when it happened. But to ensure that we remain somewhat frivolous, my on-screen assistant
	and I, we're going to bring you a story where a British regional news reporter for the BBC,
	which Elon Musk would say is what state media, Elon Musk would call that, state media are calling
	to Elon Musk. Have you seen that guy, boogie? Watch her at each...
	She ends the news with the phrase, good boy.
	I don't know.
	Does the news end with good boy?
	Well, it would if it was in your world.
	Yes, it would.
	Good boy.
	You are a very good boy.
	Yes, well, I think so.
	I don't know.
	Oh, God, is this good?
	Let's have a look.
	Tonight, Luke North is back in BBC Breakfast from 6.25.
	Good boy.
	Who's that aimed at?
	What does she do afterwards?
	Does she react?
	Does she sort of acknowledge that that was a weird thing to do?
	Nope, she just looks down at the pen and carries on.
	Look North.
	I would have loved to see the reaction of you watching that real time.
	On your own, in your bedroom.
	If I watched that on my own bedroom instrument, good boy.
	I'd be writing a fan letter straight away.
	Dear News Lady, you're the only one who understands me and what I need to feel okay.
	Also, sorry to hear about that massacre in Lincoln.
	Uh, hey, look at this.
	If you need to smuggle drugs and you don't, because drugs are bad... Allegedly!
	No, actually, no, actually, they are bad, aren't they?
	They actually are bad, aren't they?
	Uh, why not try dressing up your cat as a ba- Look at this headline.
	Woman dressed cat up as baby in attempt to smuggle drugs into resort.
	She dressed the cat up.
	Attempt?
	I mean, she didn't even get away with it.
	She went to all that trouble.
	Look at that little cut.
	That is an adorable little guy, isn't it?
	It looks quite passive, and, I don't know, is it actually, if you look right into the eyes of the cat, you can see it's a bit pissed off.
	Right.
	It's annoyed that this is happening.
	Although some animals don't seem to matter, do they?
	They don't seem to mind.
	What, dressed up in clothes?
	Yeah, they don't seem to mind.
	I think they've been, in some way, chemically neutered.
	Right, I see.
	Those animals, because that's a rob in their dignity, isn't it?
	To sort of, like, I've got children, my children want to dress all my animals up.
	We put a bow in Bear's hair once, that wasn't the right thing to do.
	How did they feel about that?
	He was actually... He was alright.
	He was alright, but he didn't know, though.
	I think if I showed him that it was compromising on him, he wouldn't have noticed.
	The thing about this is that already, like, she's... Like, they're suggesting that if she'd have done it with a real baby, that she might have got away with it.
	But it was the fact that they discovered, first of all, hang on, that's not a baby, it's a cat.
	Okay, let's just check what's going on here.
	Wait a minute, that's not a baby, it's a cat!
	And what's in its pockets?
	Drugs?
	What the hell is this now?
	Oh, sorry, the cat's addicted to drugs.
	That's what's made it think it's a baby.
	Oh, carry on, men.
	This all makes sense now.
	You're right, what drugs do you imagine it was that the drug's from?
	Um, I'm gonna say cocaine.
	Potential drugs, no.
	You've missed an opportunity for a joke, and here are all the jokes.
	Catamine, that's a potential one.
	Meow meow, which is a slang term for drugs.
	Catnip, another drug.
	Okay, but that isn't... That's not news.
	My mum grows that.
	Oh God!
	Does she dress her cat up as a baby?
	Did she dress you up as a cat?
	Do you see, this is a bit like in Fight Club when he learns, wait a minute, I'm actually, I'm on my own in this fight club!
	It's only me I'm sitting here, first of all!
	Yeah, what are you telling me for?
	I am you.
	Oh, well, you already know, so, you know, the stuff about don't talk about it.
	Yep, I know that.
	I am me.
	Okay.
	A speeding driver has found an ingenious way to foil a arrest.
	So he's pretending that his dog drove the car.
	That's worse than speeding!
	Yeah.
	Sir, can I tell... I'd like to know from you that you're travelling at 35 miles an hour and this is a 30 mile an hour area?
	Well, actually, talk to my dog.
	He was actually driving.
	Well, you are actually legally culpable for a much worse crime.
	Yeah.
	What's that baby doing in the back of the vehicle?
	MEOW!
	What kind of family are you living in?
	Sylvanian families, only from Tomey.
	Yeah!
	You'll get that if you're British.
	If you're not, you might not.
	And you might even now be frantically demanding a refund.
	Where's my free speech?
	Where's my conspiracy theories?
	Where's information that will reveal to me that the establishment is corrupt?
	That we've been lied to?
	That the mainstream media are corroborating and supporting lies
	as in the Russiagate case, then still trying to claim some moral high ground?
	Where is some analysis of succession that shows me in spite of its ingenuity,
	it still functions as a kind of neoliberal...
	Come on.
	that suggests there is a bifurcation down the centre of American politics
	where there's goodies on one side and baddies on the other when in fact the establishment is stinking corrupt
	and needs to be brought down from within.
	All those things are coming up, but first, here's my dog getting a parking ticket.
	Get in the car.
	Come on. Do you want a ticket?
	You want a ticket?
	Do you?
	Do you want a ticket?
	Get in that car!
	Bear, get in that car or we're gonna give you a ticket, aren't we mate?
	Yeah, we gotta take it.
	...is that the traffic guy understood the whip pan.
	He knew that that was the time to say...
	This is my moment.
	Yeah.
	It's good, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	Because the rest of the time, he is a traffic warden and he gave my wife a ticket the previous day.
	Did he?
	Yeah.
	But you forgave him for that?
	I didn't even... I'm on his side.
	Oh, she's a menace, is she?
	I believe that she needs to be curtailed through administrative measures.
	Yeah, did she try and blame Bear as well?
	Well, when she saw that video, she went, he gave me a ticket yesterday.
	Wow.
	I go, no, he's alright.
	I could tell he had beautiful... he has innocence in him.
	You can tell.
	Yeah.
	He's a lovely man.
	He's a real traffic warden.
	If we can look into one another's eyes in good faith and love, we can change anything.
	Even a man that's about to... What if he'd given you a ticket?
	I wouldn't have liked that.
	I'd have brought him down from within.
	I'd have lied about him on the floor.
	You've tried to give a ticket to a dog.
	A dog's not a vehicle, is it?
	A dog... At most, at best, it's a drug mule, if you dress it as a toddler.
	As a hairy boy.
	It's my hairy child.
	Don't look in his pockets or his bottom.
	I shouldn't have to tell you that.
	You're not even a customs officer.
	You're meant to be selling sweets.
	What kind of shop is this?
	Sylvanian families, only from Thurmey.
	In that car.
	You! Come on! Oh dear. Otherwise it's a ticket.
	Please sit down again. Get in that car, mate.
	How manipulative he is.
	If you've just tuned in, we're talking about animal facts.
	Also though, NATO have been censoring...
	Social media sites are censoring criticism of NATO.
	So, look, we are going to talk about serious stuff.
	Also, Biden is selling weapons to the majority of the world's authorities.
	NATO censorship.
	Now the army wants social media surveillance to protect the NATO brand.
	NATO ain't a brand, is it?
	Is it?
	Uh, well, I don't know.
	Don't speak ill of NATO!
	Well, I like them people.
	I think, oh my god, I think this was Trump.
	Trump went, what have we even got a NATO for?
	Shut it.
	Yeah.
	I think it was Michael Schellenberger when he came on here, said like that when Trump said stuff like that, it was like groundbreaking.
	Yes.
	That he is a berserker.
	And again, recent revelations that, I'm speaking particularly of the Russiagate ones, Make me feel like that all of the condemnation and even for people that I actually respect like Jon Stewart saying no Trump is a definite definite baddie and there are obvious stories in the news at the moment that are pretty difficult to decry when morally indicting Trump, shall we say.
	But in a climate where there's been cohesive, collaborative efforts between the mainstream media, funded by the Democrat Party, perpetrated by the FBI, that were known to be untrue from the get-go, as our recent story on that subject demonstrates.
	If you've not seen that yet, it's probably up on Rumble now.
	It is.
	It's up on Rumble now.
	Have a look at that.
	It's an amazing, amazing story.
	If there's no trust in any institutions, judicial, electoral, who's got the moral authority now?
	Who do you actually trust?
	Is it some really dead people?
	Like, I don't know, Gandhi?
	Nelson Mandela?
	I don't know who we turn to for any kind of moral authority.
	Who do you turn to?
	Let me know in the chat and the comments.
	This is another one of those not-million-miles-off-the-Twitter-files kind of revelations.
	So this story is the U.S.
	Army Cyber Command, you don't have to know what that is, told defense contractors, so there's a meeting behind closed doors between the U.S.
	Army and the defense contractors, already you would think, why is that happening?
	It planned to surveil global social media used to defend the NATO brand.
	This is a recording that the Intercept got hold of.
	The remarks came during a closed-door conference hosted by the Cyberfusion Innovation Centre, a Pentagon-sponsored non-profit that helps with military tech procurement.
	The mass social media surveillance appears to be just one component of a broader initiative To use private sector data mining to advance the Army Information's warfare efforts.
	So this is a way in which the Army is using, as it says here, private sector data mining in much the same way the Twitter files revealed that private big tech companies were being lent on by the government.
	To basically do the job of defence contractors in terms of helping them out, making sure that the NATO brand doesn't suffer and therefore that wars perpetuate and military equipment keeps on getting bought.
	It's such an insidious world happening behind closed doors that the army, the defence contractors, the big tech companies are all in it together to kind of create this world where we just need to keep buying weapons.
	It's pretty sad.
	Right, right.
	I think, also, that when you find out that criticism of NATO is being censored on social media, you think, oh, why is that happening?
	And then you can trace it back to because they need NATO's integrity to be unblemished in order to continue to legitimise weapons.
	When you find that out, you go, oh God, it's exactly as I've always believed it to be.
	And when you find out Now that four and a half million people were killed in the post 9-11 conflict, it makes you further query the legitimacy of foreign wars underwritten by either righteousness, war against terror, humanitarian motives.
	How much longer can we continue to legitimize the narratives advanced by an establishment that has again and again revealed what motivates This is a new report and it's called Death Outlives War.
	And I guess it's one of those things that we don't think about very often,
	about the way in which actually more deaths happen, more people, especially children and the impoverished,
	and marginalized populations have been killed by the effects of war
	rather than the war themselves.
	They were saying like, you know, a million people killed by war,
	but another 3.5 million people killed by the effects of war.
	So you're talking malnutrition, displacement, people becoming refugees,
	all these things that when it comes down to, oh, this many Russians or this many Ukrainians have died.
	It's not about that.
	It's about what's the long-term effects of these wars happening.
	There's an ongoing migrant crisis, as it's described, in Europe where people feel like migration is beyond the
	capacity of already entrenched domestic populations,
	that people can't take no more migrations.
	Like, obviously a complex issue that goes to the heart of many cultural war issues
	and indeed the idea of compassion in politics.
	This issue is not separate from these profitable illegitimate wars brought about again by the same establishment that now continues to condemn ordinary working people for their bigotry or their vaccine hesitancy or a whole host of ways of doing what the establishment has always done, speaking of ordinary people in condescending and condemnatory terms and tones.
	Yeah, when you look at how these things evolve over time, it's pretty plain that they are willing to use whatever method is necessary to legitimize whatever actions they want to take.
	And when it comes to dealing with the consequences, they find ways of kind of, what do I want to say, gerrymandering and manipulating those consequences away from them.
	And what, like, links these two things, military-industrial complex?
	The federal government has spent eight trillion dollars on these wars, and we know that half of that, or at least, you know, half of that goes to military-industrial complex.
	So it's, uh, it's, you know, appalling.
	The deeper issue here, and one that we've been talking about, is does deep state power In collaboration with globalist interests, bypass the power of ordinary democracy.
	And increasingly it's becoming clear that the answer to that is yes.
	Let me know in the chat now if you saw our conversation with RFK.
	Join us on Locals.
	There's a red button on your screen.
	You can join us pretty easily.
	We're talking to Annie Mashon later in the show, a former member of MI5.
	He's going to help us to unpack The CIA and FBI and just how corrupt they are.
	We're going to look at the worst things the CIA has allegedly done.
	In some cases you have to say allegedly because it's really lairy stuff.
	And the worst things that the FBI have done and continue to do.
	Look right up to the current news story about Russiagate and their collaboration with the Democratic Party and the mainstream media in creating lies around Donald Trump.
	even if you hate Donald Trump, it would be better wouldn't it if there wasn't this just
	ongoing conveyor belt of stories where the establishment has lied and manipulated and
	used the judiciary and the electoral system and the deep state in order like if Donald Trump is
	so bad then let's just let Donald Trump's badness deal with itself rather than this ongoing campaign
	of deception and malevolence. Let me know in the chat where you stand on that issue. Okay time now
	Now for a new item where I analyse events in the news.
	I don't know what it's going to be called, and I don't know what it's going to look like, but a graphic has been created.
	Let's have a look.
	It's confusing because I suppose like, again it's the number of elements.
	One day I'm going to interview Jack about his influences.
	Right.
	It's going to be a long conversation.
	I normally stick up for him, but I think we've reached the point.
	I think the main influences are going to be drugs.
	I think he'll be having that conversation about his influence with a cat dressed up as a little boy sat on his lap with chemicals leaking from every orifice.
	And now we're going to analyse succession.
	Everyone's talking about succession.
	Some people saying it's a modern day Shakespeare because it deals with ideas like legacy.
	Power rivalry within a family.
	What happens in the power vacuum left after the death of a tyrant, but instead of it being set in like Jacoby in England is, of course, set in contemporary America with the Roy family.
	A very obvious standing for the Murdoch family, ATN being Fox News, and characters like Mencken being sort of de facto Trumps, like Donald Trump.
	So let's have a look at, this is a preview for episode eight, so we can sort of get into some of the things we've discussed.
	Oh, there will be spoilers in this, if you're like a person that's trying to avoid spoilers.
	We're gonna spoil it.
	Have a look.
	Information.
	It's like a bottle of fine wine.
	You save it for a special occasion, and then you smash someone's face in with it.
	Once heard from someone that Rupert Murdoch actually does only care about information.
	If you talk to Rupert Murdoch, he don't want to hear anything.
	He just like, what's going on?
	Right, right, right.
	If you start going, do you know, actually, Rupert, it reminds me like, no, listen, that's what's in the opinion, what you've gone into there.
	He just wants information.
	And I once also heard that he's like Mephistopheles, that he sort of acts like he's never going to die.
	And like he just like even if he doesn't get what he wants he knows that in time it will come.
	So that little line about information and weaponizing information from Tom Wham-Gam.
	Tom Wham-Gam?
	Is that your name?
	That's good.
	Everyone, do you know, everyone's watching Succession.
	Everyone you know watches Succession, don't they?
	Yeah, everyone loves it.
	So probably we know a lot of people that work in media, probably we know a lot of people that live in cities, but one of the things I want to bring to the forefront is it is accepting the framing of contemporary political debate, i.e.
	the Republican Party and perhaps the party that's been taken hostage by this character
	Mencken, who's not a character they spend a lot of real estate on in this season, but
	the previous seasons they set him up as a demagogic figure.
	He's obviously a stand-in for Trump.
	And the Democrat Party, I don't think it focuses enough, for my tastes, on what I would call
	ubiquitous corruption between both parties.
	It gives you the idea that were the Democrats to win this election, because this particular
	episode is set on election night, were the Democrats to win, everything would be peachy
	creamy.
	But when you look at stuff like Russiagate, when you look at military industrial complex,
	when you look at Joe Biden saying nothing will change, when you look at the pledges
	that were made in, you know, when you look at the ongoing wars, the way that wars are
	funded, that kind of framing doesn't make, like the whole framing that, the whole framing
	that was prevailed around the Trump presidency, for me is like the framing at the beginning
	of COVID no longer relevant.
	You can't use those arguments anymore.
	You can't say... Look, and remember, I'm not saying that Trump is any... You know, I've got no strong view on Trump.
	I'm not a pro-Trump person.
	I know loads of you lot love him.
	But you can't continue saying, like, we have to make sure Trump doesn't get in.
	We have to make sure that Biden gets in.
	It's like as if there are clear lines between good and evil, because it's plain that the system itself, the deep state, globalist corporate interests, are able to prevail regardless of who's in power.
	It's interesting, a story we didn't get to before, but it was about weapon sales and Biden selling weapons to the majority of the world's autocracies.
	It's his weapon sales have gone up under Biden than Trump.
	So when Biden came in he was like, you talked about a battle between democracies and autocracies.
	That was the rhetoric.
	But actually weapon sales to those autocracies has gone up.
	Thank God!
	Thank God Biden beat Trump!
	Now we can sell more weapons!
	Phew, we got that deal!
	We've got so much better now.
	It's like, again, there is that headline.
	The show kind of accepts the framing of what I would call the neoliberal establishment, which fetishises what it believes to be the small differences between itself and the sort of libertarian right, and celebrates and revels in those differences.
	Oh look, we're better than you in this area, but what about these selling weapons to the majority of the world's autocracies?
	Right, we don't sell weapons to all of the world's autocracies.
	Is it the majority?
	Yes, it's the majority of the world's autocracies.
	interesting because there was that moment one day, it felt like in terms of our world
	and the way that we see it and as you say kind of what the Democrat Party get up to
	as well as the Republicans, that the more authentic view was Romans in the room when
	he was like, it doesn't matter who gets into power, that felt like the more genuine version
	and also the more in terms of in keeping with this is a media organisation that exists to
	make money, that felt like I could imagine that but maybe Rupert Murdoch isn't like that.
	I've no idea.
	Maybe he is, in terms of like the comparisons between Brian Cox's character and Rupert Murdoch.
	Stuff around Tucker at the moment that we're kind of understanding is that maybe Rupert Murdoch does have a worldview.
	I don't know.
	I feel like that I like Roman Roy, the younger son's perspective.
	I feel like he's a nihilistic individual.
	I don't care.
	It's a TV show.
	It's a TV show.
	There is There is no meaning.
	The character of Kendall, conflicted, idealist, trying to fill his father's shoes ineffectually.
	Shiv, trying to become a different expression of power, but in my view, ultimately as corrupt.
	It's definitely a really brilliant television programme.
	Brilliant.
	Because you can talk about it even in these terms.
	But what I do query is the presumption that there's a meaningful difference between the two parties.
	There were the moments, again spoilers, but in last night's show, or this week's show, where they were talking about if Megan gets in and how awful things would be.
	And that was the first time I thought, this feels a bit reductive.
	And I've never said that about Succession ever.
	Yeah, because it is ultimately, I suppose, let us know in the chat and the comments if you agree, a satire on Fox, Trump, and the relationship between the media and power.
	And it's beautifully satirised, and perhaps it's unfair to offer this kind of criticism, because perhaps you have to have certain lines between good and evil.
	For drama.
	Yeah, for the purposes of drama.
	If you were to go like, hold on a minute, both of these parties are corrupt, then there would be no dramatic tension in that episode.
	Yeah, fair enough.
	The most important election in our lifetime.
	I feel sick.
	Oh, why?
	It's fun.
	It's only spicy because if my team wins, they're going to shoot your team.
	Give me some sugar, man.
	Maybe everyone voted for me.
	We don't know.
	Schrodinger's cat.
	Schrodinger's cat.
	Tom, this is crazy.
	We all want to stop Madsen, right?
	Every vote must be counted.
	This is about the future of the country.
	False flag.
	The character of Con, he's like, sort of good value.
	Yeah, yeah.
	With his sort of narcissistic pursuit of power that he doesn't actually really care about at all.
	He was really easily persuaded that he'd like to... The woman goes, would you like to be ambassador?
	He was offered a role of ambassador in order to step down in the previous episode.
	They go, would you like a man or something?
	Seems a bit calm.
	Are we going to be in a compound?
	Is it above ground?
	It's one of those things that feels true.
	It's a bit like the crown, in a way.
	Even in areas where you feel, and the Royal Family strongly protest, that it is inaccurate.
	and we recognize that drama is about distillation and concentration and indeed exaggeration and amplification.
	That's the point of theatre, to distill and present symbols and narratives that through clarity are able to sort of
	stimulate a kind of recognition of broader and deeper themes.
	If it was like, you know, things that are ultra true are sort of boring and have to include long passages of meaninglessness.
	There's moments with him where you think, surely a wannabe president or politician wouldn't behave like that.
	But career politicians, we know it!
	What is lobbying?
	What is these politicians?
	You take millions and millions from Big Pharma, for example.
	If you were like an honest politician who wanted to do their job and represent people,
	you wouldn't take millions of dollars from the pharmaceutical industry.
	You just wouldn't.
	You'd be like, you're principals.
	So when you see a representation of politics in that form, it's not...
	I mean, he plays it quite comedically in a way, but it's not actually that funny in reality.
	I like the character of Mattson.
	I think he is a brilliant hybrid of Elon Musk and Zuckerberg, and sort of captures the geek glamour of these powerful new barons and magnates.
	And I suppose, based on what I observe to be the relationship between this show and the reality that it's satirising, I would have to guess that Mattson will come out on top, because It seems that one of the tensions we're experiencing, particularly according to the analysis of the influential Martin Goury's book The Revolt of the Public Informs, many of the opinions shared certainly by me on this show, is that what we're witnessing is the end of old elites and the emergence of new elites.
	The inability of establishment power to recognize that the game that they've been playing has now changed.
	They don't understand the lexicon nomenclature Or dynamics of emergent technology and its ability to influence power.
	And indeed the broader themes that we talk about continually on this show of centralised authority and the rise of authoritarianism apparently on the left through censorship, legitimisation of surveillance, lockdowns and the way that they were perhaps stuck to beyond their... Allegedly!
	Facility, the immoralization and imposition of certain medicines, the exaggeration... Allegedly!
	...of their positive impact all point to ways to legitimize authority.
	We're only, like, all authoritarianism says that it's doing the right thing, though.
	You know, whether that's the monstrous dictators of the 20th century, they were not like, And now, a genocide!
	It's just like, we've got to do this stuff because X, Y, Z, mythology, this, Wagner, that, trains run on time, the other.
	And of course I'm not making comparisons.
	I'm just saying that authoritarianism doesn't overtly tell you that it's wrong.
	You have to believe in the legitimacy of your own power.
	And so I feel like based on that, that this is my guess of what will happen.
	Shiv will win, I feel that that will be, just because she's on a down note at the moment, there has to be an ascent, possibly, and will become reconciled with Tom, and that Mattson will be empowered and the deal will go through, so that we get the idea that, oh no, even though this old power dynamic of these corrupt Murdoch-like individuals has been broken down, it's been replaced by a similarly corrupt... Who's the real successor?
	Yeah, right.
	Succession is a new... Not necessarily the family.
	It's the new power.
	Because from a TV perspective, I've often wanted it to be Greg.
	A hapless sort of goonish guy.
	The moment at the start of that episode where Tom was like talking about how nervous he was and what awful days got planned and then Greg just goes, I'm having quite a nice day.
	Oh, brilliant.
	Yeah, he's so sweet.
	He's really sweet.
	That's where, like, Succession, for me, like, how, you know, we're talking about, like, the one moment of maybe it being a touch reductive for drama's sake, but the way in which this stuff with Mattson and Gojo and this kind of commentary about big tech maybe taking over, and, like, the way in which they talk about Brian Cox's character being able to affect elections, the ability for big tech to now do that,
	I mean literally there was an article this week about how big tech are now richer and
	more powerful than most countries and it's amazing the way in which that's going and the way
	in which succession kind of deals with that.
	It's really impressive.
	In a way, because we have accepted taxonomies of power that relate to previous dynamics, like a nation is a powerful thing, or even corporations are powerful things, we are unable to even mentally envisage what new power actually looks like.
	I also like the bit where Greg goes, I drank things that maybe aren't drinks.
	I drank things that aren't drinks.
	I was dancing with an old man.
	It's particularly good, I think, because of Jesse Armstrong's DNA.
	It provided brilliantly nuanced and comedic dialogue, which separates it from shows that are of a comparable aesthetic.
	But perhaps take themselves more seriously.
	Yeah.
	For me, the comedy is something that I really enjoy.
	Because he talks about, even goes further with the old man, doesn't he?
	The old man, he says like he was nervous or something.
	He was uncomfortable.
	He didn't need that detail.
	He's a really good actor, that bloke.
	They're all brilliant, aren't they?
	Amazing.
	Yeah, so sort of a fantastic show.
	But let us know what you think in the chat and the comments about that show.
	Is it an accurate appraisal of the way that power operates?
	If you are a person that really believes, for example, in the Republican Party and love Donald Trump, do you sort of feel like, Good!
	Menkins won!
	F*** you!
	How does it play out that way, in accordance with your own beliefs and faith?
	I want to talk to you about some stuff that's pretty serious, as a matter of fact, that I definitely would not be able to talk about on YouTube.
	When we spoke to RFK the other day, he made some claims about Anthony Fauci and gain-of-function research, and in particular, Well, you cut me off at the point where what I'm saying gets too risky, right?
	RFK said that Anthony Fauci was doing gain-of-function research in this country.
	It got shut down by the Obama administration, should be safe so far.
	It got re-initiated by the Trump administration, should still be okay.
	Then he repoed it, because he's like, we can't do this in America.
	to a certain town in China that you may have heard of that sounds a bit like a hip-hop collective whose name ends in clan.
	Yeah, let's have a look now at RFK.
	If you watch this on YouTube, there's a link in the description to take you over to Rumble.
	Have a look at this.
	Then in 2014, three of the bugs escaped from labs in the United States, and everybody finds out about it.
	Congress has hearings, 300 scientists write letters to Obama, Sign a letter to Obama saying you've got to shut down Tony Fauci, he's going to create an epidemic.
	Obama shuts down all of Fauci's projects, orders them closed, has a moratorium, but Fauci doesn't shut them down.
	He continues doing them, and then he starts shipping everything over to Wuhan, where he can do it offshore, out of sight of these federal overseers and all the nosy scientists like Richard Ebright and the others from the Cambridge Working Group who were horrified by what he was doing.
	And that's kind of why the short story of why, you know, we're doing all this stuff in Wuhan rather than doing it at University of North Carolina in Galveston, which is where they were doing it before.
	Okay, so if that's your introduction to RFK, you won't be familiar to the fact that the guy is a sort of truth bomb, or at least extraordinary fact bomb, or indeed information... I don't know how to say it.
	I don't know if you believe RFK or not.
	Certainly he says a lot of extraordinary stuff.
	I personally really liked him.
	Let's break some of this stuff down.
	So here's the story from 2014. White House to cut funding for risky biological study prompted by controversy over
	dangerous research and recent lab accidents.
	The White House announced Friday it would temporarily halt all new funding for experiments to seek to study certain
	infectious agents by making them more dangerous, aka gain of function.
	Let's have a look at the next piece of information.
	Feds lift gain of function research.
	The National Institute of Health today lifted a three-year moratorium on funding gain of function research on potential pandemic viruses such as avian flu, SARS and MERS, opening the door for certain types of research to resume.
	That's from the end of 2017.
	Let's have a look at what's next.
	Fauci reportedly relaunched NIH gain of function research without consulting the White House.
	Now, That's something that's been discussed and they're using the word reportedly, which is print journalism... Allegedly!
	...version of allegedly.
	But certainly, RFK says in his famous best-selling book, The Real Anthony Fauci, that many claims made in extraordinarily small print across a number of pages are all undergirded by cast-iron information.
	What do you think, Gareth, about Fauci reportedly relaunching NIH gain-of-function research without concerning the White House?
	Is that something we have any more information on?
	Well look, I mean, somebody did, didn't they?
	I mean, whether it was Fauci or not, I mean, it happened.
	Oh yeah, they were doing it!
	They were doing it.
	I think the issue here is that this risky gain-of-function research was going on, and continues to go on.
	I think, you know, it's controversial for a reason, and we know what it's At the very beginning of the virus, the idea that it in any way would like... There were two sort of major things going on.
	Oh, there's just... Remember these sort of innocent days before we all had to occupy these mad little online enclaves of exchanging true information that may nevertheless be censored?
	There was a bit at the beginning where I came to it with my...
	Indigenous mistrust of authority.
	This is weird but I did take it in good faith.
	There's this virus that's coming out of this place called Wuhan in China.
	That was one thing I was aware of before it sort of crept into the popular imagination.
	There were spikes of terror before there were spikes of protein.
	And now one of the other things I was aware of was Anthony Fauci.
	This guy is in charge of the NIH.
	Oh and like people that were anti-Trump liked him because he would like Roll his eyes behind drummers.
	And I can remember people I really respect going, you know, this Anthony Fauci, this is what shows you what it is to be someone who's dedicated themselves to medicine and science for their whole career, and then come of the hour, come of the man, this guy is, like, nailing it.
	And then to find out a bit later, oh, they are, through DARPA, there are connections to the Wuhan laboratories and Anthony Fauci that potentially royalties have been received.
	By Anthony Fauci through the CDC, as a result of pharmacological experimentation.
	Like, the amount of information that has accrued subsequently means that... I mean, I wonder, do you know anyone that has still got a 2019 perspective on the pandemic?
	By that I mean, You better take those vaccines because you'll be immune and you won't spread it.
	You're irresponsible and you're killing others if you don't take it.
	You should be locked down all the time.
	You should be wearing a mask.
	If you're vaccine hesitant, that's irresponsible.
	You know, it came out of a wet market in... I mean, this is kind of what this... what RFK is talking about is the origins, isn't it?
	It's like, where did this come from?
	I don't think there's anyone How many people still believe that it came out of a wet market?
	I think almost even the mainstream, I think now, are talking about the fact that it's unlikely.
	You know, there's so many big organisations have come out and said this was a lab leak.
	They must be fuming down that wet market!
	We've run a pretty tight ship down this wet market.
	Yeah, the floor's covered in slobber and sputum and gack and gunge.
	But other than that, there are delicious snacks available for all, and at a price that's right.
	This wet market's taken a real hit.
	Not since McDonald's started employing little boys and girls has a food establishment been so unfairly derided.
	And we'll be going into this story with a little more depth later.
	Well, next week, I guess, we'll be covering this way we go.
	Yeah, sure.
	Let me see if I've understood this correctly.
	That people that were not showing symptoms were not infectious and that there was a tool available to diagnose that that was suppressed for reasons we don't know.
	We don't know if suppressed but ignored by the CDC.
	A special test was developed and the researchers at Stanford, I think this was, found that 96% of people who were PCR positive but without symptoms We're not infectious.
	That's basically nearly 100%.
	That's what 96 means.
	Remember, one of the common myths was, the thing about this, what makes it so bad and so easy to lock down a population that are increasingly difficult to control is, even if you're not showing symptoms, you could still kill your nan.
	So get indoors, you Count Nan Killer.
	Right, well that weren't true, and it could have been proven at the time.
	Yeah, exactly what this article suggests, or what it says, is it undergirded policies on, as you say, distancing, quarantines, masks, all of those kind of things.
	This thing in particular.
	And now it's kind of been proven that that wasn't the case, but not only do we now know that it wasn't the case, but that there was a test to demonstrate this at the time.
	This is just a story that Gareth and I are cooking up right now.
	Gareth and I were just discussing that before we went on air.
	It's not cooking it up, it's making it up.
	It's true.
	We're just simply discussing it now and we'll be going into more depth at some point.
	That's why it's worth joining us every day.
	That's why it's worth joining us on Locals and becoming a member of our community here.
	And it's also worth it because...
	We take a deeper look at the news.
	We tell you stories that they won't tell you.
	We give you perspectives that they won't give you.
	We feed back to you your own insights, your own intuitions.
	You knew that you were right all along, didn't you?
	And we're here to tell you that you were.
	And we're here to tell you that they will continue to lie.
	But we will continue to form new alliances.
	We will continue to grow.
	That's why it's so important that you subscribe.
	That's why it's so important you join us.
	That's why it's so important that you watch Here's the News.
	No.
	Here's the effing news.
	No.
	Here's the fucking news!
	Birth rates are declining, and in less than a hundred years, countries like Spain and Japan could have half as many people as they have now.
	How can that be a right-wing or left-wing talking point?
	What's going on, Elon?
	Apparently the fall in birth rates is a very real thing.
	There's a new documentary about it which looks into it at depth, which tries to be just a cold scientific analysis.
	But you can't have cold scientific analysis now.
	Everything is hotly politicized.
	But let's have a look at this birth rate issue and the impact it's going to have on your planet.
	And our cities are going to be choked with people.
	And they will be impossible places in which to live, and the explosions will be even worse.
	Most people think we have, like, too many people on the planet, but actually this is an outdated view.
	Coming from the world of data science, I felt I understood populations are going up, and that that's a problem.
	When I saw what was actually happening, I couldn't sleep.
	I think that the biggest problem the world will face in 20 years is population collapse.
	Collapse.
	I agree.
	How could it be that suddenly countries are having so few children?
	I needed to go and find out.
	There are obviously chemical factors and social factors.
	We know that male fertility is decreasing, female fertility is decreasing.
	We are aware that the way that a culture measures significance and value has shifted, that there is a kind of prizing of working, of females working as being significant and important, and that that has become a cherished value.
	And attacking that and saying women oughtn't work is seen as an attack on female power and potency.
	And I wonder what role nature has at all at this point.
	On one side of the argument you have this enshrinement of ecology through the climate change movement, elsewhere the nature of human beings.
	as animals or as spirits or as creatures of this planet has become detached somehow.
	We shouldn't just because we're born this or born that have to live within that framework.
	And I'm certainly not offering an opinion on a subject that's become one of the most
	defining and contentious ones of our age. I believe in people's individual freedom.
	I also believe in nature. Certainly we appear to believe in nature in other areas of the
	conversation. And I suppose what we're talking about here is primarily a demographic shift.
	We have an aging population that don't have a workforce to look after them and don't have
	children to replace them.
	So, ultimately, you're talking about economics and the distribution of resources.
	Of course, the solutions that will be offered, I suppose, will ultimately be technological.
	The fact is that we should be addressing, at some point, what is the quantitative value of ongoing life?
	Why do you want people to stay alive forever and ever?
	Now, of course, if it's someone that I love, like my own mother or father, of course, I want them to live as long as possible, as I'm sure you do with If your relatives let me know in the comments and the chat.
	But essentially, the value of life is experiential.
	What is the experience of your life like?
	How do you feel?
	Is it meaningful?
	Are you connected to yourself, to other people, to purpose?
	Are you happy?
	Is essentially what I'm asking you.
	It feels now that what our lives have become is so desacralized and secularized that we live lives of the fulfillment of tasks.
	I'm not sure how these tasks have been set.
	Well, I am sure they're cultural and economic tasks that don't In my opinion, connect deeply to essence, meaning, purpose or even nature.
	What people usually don't think about is what you do in a world where the playgrounds are empty and the nursing homes are all full.
	I keep oscillating between the idea of having my own children or adopting.
	Ready to adopt in this particular moment, like right, right now, now, now?
	Probably not.
	If I would have kids now, I will have to change all my life.
	From a cultural perspective, the value of children and the family can, of course, be critiqued and analysed.
	Some people will say that the nuclear family is a cultural construct, that tribal living is more native to our kind, to our species, where there are numerous relatives of multiple generations looking after the young and participating in child rearing.
	But when it comes to procreation, it's so deeply embedded in our coding.
	Even if you want to look at this in a solely material, rational, and let's say, from a biological perspective, procreation is pretty significant, I would say.
	The same as eating, defecating, procreating, fornicating.
	Things that seem to take place on the level of the animal body, that are not to do with the individual actually, are beyond the individual identity.
	I feel like our culture has become so politicised that we're unable, as a group, to have a shared analytic of what being human is that is separate from our kind of oppositional left-v-right, progress-v-tradition type politics.
	My personal position is you, as an individual, are worthy of respect.
	And you, as an individual, should be free to live your life however you want to.
	And I think to increasingly politicize those areas of the conversation makes it difficult to have a shared cultural agreement around what human beings are.
	Call this a birth gap, Matt.
	I haven't seen anybody do this before.
	How's Peter saying?
	Wow.
	Gosh.
	It's kind of scary.
	I'm pessimistic because I don't think people realize what's going to happen.
	I don't know how and when it's going to stop.
	I want to emphasize this.
	The biggest issue in 20 years will be population collapse.
	Here's some information that pieces together the salient points from that documentary so we can understand the argument succinctly for ourselves.
	The world is ill-prepared for the global crash in children being born, which is set to have a jaw-dropping impact on society, say researchers.
	Falling fertility rates mean nearly every country could have shrinking populations by the end of the century.
	And 23 nations, including Spain and Japan, are expected to see their populations halved by 2100.
	Countries will also age dramatically, with as many people turning 80 as there are being born.
	So certainly it appears that there are demographic shifts and changes on, well not even on the horizon, happening now.
	The fertility rate, the average number of children a woman gives birth to, is falling.
	If the number falls below approximately 2.1, then the size of the population starts to form.
	In 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime.
	Researchers at the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation showed the global fertility rate nearly halved to 2.4 in 2017, and their study published in The Lancet projects it will fall below 1.7 by 2100.
	Now, you can see why Women would say, hang on a minute.
	What you're suggesting is that a woman's primary function is to bear and rear children.
	Why is it this area in particular where the project of civilization has to be arrested?
	We've been having to create agriculture, the industrial revolution, the technological revolution, machines to do all of our jobs, animal husbandry.
	But in the area of the function of a woman, you want to stick to what's on the label, as it were.
	And I can see why, you know, a woman or women or particular groups within the gender of women would have issue with that.
	Because what civilization does is meddles with the flow of nature.
	As soon as we have medicine, as soon as we control animals, as soon as we control crops, we're starting to say, oh, we're not living entirely in harmony with nature.
	So why are you saying in this area we have to be in harmony with nature?
	And I suppose the argument that documentary is making is because the species is under threat.
	I suppose the kind of technological arguments will come will be artificial insemination, growing children in pods, we've already done a thing about that, haven't we, elsewhere, and further divorcing ourselves from nature.
	But perhaps the human project has been, particularly since civilization, one of creating distance from ourselves and the teleology that's taken us further away from the conditions of our origin.
	Let me know in the chat and the comments what you think about that.
	As a result, the researchers expect the number of people on the planet to peak at 9.7 billion around 2064 before falling down to 8.8 billion by the end of the century.
	That's a pretty big thing.
	Most of the world is transitioning into natural population decline, researcher Professor Christopher Murray told the BBC.
	I think it's incredibly hard to think this through and recognise how big a thing it is.
	It's extraordinary we'll have to reorganise societies.
	It's nothing to do with sperm counts or the usual things that come to mind when discussing fertility.
	Instead, it is being driven by more women in education and work, as well as greater access to contraception, leading to women choosing to have fewer children.
	If it indeed is the result of the choice of individuals and how that plays out across a society, then, well, what do you do?
	Suggest to women that they can't do that?
	I mean, what do you do?
	I guess you make different arguments about the culture.
	I reckon that the dream that your personal fulfillment is achieved through career is tangential to a bigger idea.
	You should be free.
	You should be free to be whoever you want to be.
	And I don't know that anymore if my working life is what gives me freedom.
	A lot of the time I think you're imprisoned by this model.
	And how do you feel about your working life?
	Unless you have something vocational that gives you purpose, whatever your gender, I'm not sure that work is what gives you your purpose anymore.
	Unless, you know, you're working in a hospice, or you're helping people get well, or you're teaching children.
	All of which align with the kind of roles we would have in a pre-civilised society, I would argue.
	Let me know in the chat.
	Japan's population is projected to fall from a peak of 128 million in 2017 to less than 53 million by the end of the century.
	Mad, isn't it?
	Because it declines quick, because people just, once they die, that's it.
	It starts to radically decline.
	So I suppose you could change it quickly as well.
	Italy is expected to see an equally dramatic population crash from 61 million to 28 million over the same time frame.
	They are two of 23 countries, which also include Spain, Portugal, Thailand and South Korea, expected to see their population more than half.
	That's jaw-dropping, Professor Christopher Murray said.
	However, this will be a truly global issue, with 183 out of 195 countries having a fertility rate below the replacement level.
	The study projects the number of under fives will fall from 681 million in 2017 to 401 million in 2100.
	The number of eight-year-olds will soar from 141 million in 2017 to 866 million in 2100.
	I know loads of you will like it because it's a direct contra-argument to the idea of population explosion, and there are too many people in the world.
	Stuff that, say, you will have heard Bill Gates say, for example, so I think a lot of people will like that.
	Ah, it's a rebuttal to many of those arguments.
	Also it's saying, never mind climate change, what about this issue?
	Which I know a lot of people will hate, and a lot of people will like.
	But it's interesting to look at this simply as data, rather than a gender-led piece of information.
	What it invites you to look at is the fact that we live on one planet, there's a finite number of people, we could organise society differently, both on a macro and micro level.
	You know that usually what I talk about is decentralisation, so that we have individual freedom, community and collective freedom.
	But it's interesting as well to look at what's happening Globally, because surely these numbers will be impactful.
	Who pays tax in a massively aged world?
	Who pays for health care for the elderly?
	Who looks after the elderly?
	Will people still be able to retire from work?
	Wow, not in France, baby!
	Professor Murray says, I find people laugh it off.
	They can't imagine it could be true.
	They think women will just decide to have more kids.
	If you can't find a solution, then eventually the species disappears, but that's a few centuries away.
	Professor Ibrahim Abubakar, University College London said, If these predictions are even half accurate, migration will become a necessity for all nations and not an option.
	To be successful, we need a fundamental rethink of global politics.
	The distribution of working age populations will be crucial to whether humanity prospers or withers.
	I think it's a crisis that we better tackle now before it reaches a tipping point which may not be reversible, lead author Hagei Levine of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Hadassah Braun School of Public Health told The Guardian.
	Levine added that the findings serve as a canary in the coal mine.
	We have a serious problem on our hands that, if not mitigated, could threaten humankind's survival.
	But perhaps the argument that this is entirely about the progression of a female's role in a traditionally male-led society and improvement in birth control is a limiting one.
	Perhaps increasing inequality, a culture where we loom between crises, is having an impact on people's goals and spiritual aspirations.
	If you move from economic crash in 2008, having just had the 2001 attacks on the culture, endless war, pandemics, do people really want to have children?
	Perhaps the deeper spiritual sense that we're living in a culture in decline and in despair does something to us as animals.
	spirits that prevents us wanting to progress and procreate.
	It doesn't feel safe here anymore does it? We don't trust authority, we don't trust any of
	our institutions. What people need, whether they're a male parent or a female parent, is a
	sense that they are safe and secure. And I know that I feel as a father and I feel that my wife feels
	as a mother, this ain't a great place to be bringing children sometimes and we're in an all right
	condition in an all right country with an all right income. This isn't just that women's roles
	have changed culturally and there's better access to contraception though of course I'm sure that's a
	factor.
	There are perhaps deeper existential changes that people are massively like, I don't want to be here anymore, I don't want to have children.
	And also the fetishisation and celebration of the individual, that your role is as I'm me, this is me, just do it man, be the best you you can be.
	Means that people don't think of service and duty and family, and I'm not making that claim against any particular gender or sex, I'm saying Look at what our culture tells us is important.
	So I would say that in addition with the factors observed within this document and that documentary, we should consider a decline in hope, a sense of spiritual despair, cultures that are falling apart more broadly, a crisis where we lurch from one crisis to another, are all factors in making people not feel like they're still nests and have a bunch of babies, because barely a day passes we're not contemplating the bloody apocalypse.
	But that's just what I think.
	Let me know what you think in the comments and chat.
	I'll see you in a second.
	Thanks for refusing Fox News.
	The dude.
	No, he's the fucking dude.
	Well, there you go.
	That was educational.
	Now, we were talking a moment ago, weren't we, about Sylvanian families.
	That was pretty interesting stuff.
	Some of you don't know what Sylvanian families are.
	Oh, is that the big thing to have come out of today?
	Oh, what do you want me to say?
	Oh, big tech's more powerful than countries.
	Yes.
	I know that.
	Joe Biden's administration was selling weapons to the worst people in the world.
	I know that.
	No one's got any moral authority anymore.
	Succession is a satire that's so biting and accurate that people go, I know that, I've always known it.
	What I don't know is, Sylvanian families, only from Tony.
	Let's have a look at those little... Oh!
	Brilliant.
	Here they are, this is what they're like.
	If you're an American person, or a Canadian person, or a Tunisian person, if you're anything other than the Sylvanian, which I think means the countryside.
	Right.
	I never knew that.
	Yeah, I think it means something like that.
	Have a look at these little guys.
	My kids have got some of them.
	Let's see what they're all about.
	Sylvanian families, only from Tony.
	Sylvanian families They come from far and near
	A brand new baby's here Sylvanian families
	Sylvanian families just don't feel complete without a little baby
	So they all have one With it's own cradle and baby bottle
	shaming what sorry go on saying that I understand that the Sylvanian families don't feel...
	Oh, you've got to have a baby.
	Don't have to.
	Oh dear.
	But I know people that feel complete that don't have a baby.
	Right, you're right.
	Although we are studying the effects of declining populations and we'll be talking about that
	next week, won't we, and how the world is changing.
	Now, if you don't know enough about Sylvanian families now, you never will.
	I give up the ghost.
	I've tried everything to educate you people, and you've let me down again and again.
	We are on the back of many of our complex conversations with figures that understand the deep state.
	We are questioning the legitimacy of the CIA, the FBI, and who better to discuss that with than a former MI5 intelligence officer who blew the whistle on illegal phone taps around the illegal, unnecessary, and I would say a bit out of order, Assassination of Colonel Gaddafi.
	We all remember seeing him in the back of that van.
	It was bang out of order.
	Bang out of order!
	Now, Annie Mashon is going to be joining us.
	Annie, are you okay?
	I am.
	And I love your jacket, rope, whatever you call it.
	You're rocking it.
	It's my wife's house coat, Annie, as a matter of fact.
	And I don't know what journey I'm on now as I learn to dwell happily in middle age, but it appears to be some form of dressing up in my wife's clothes, which used to be quite a conventional way to get through this difficult time.
	Annie, thanks for joining us.
	There's loads of things we want to ask you about.
	Let me just sketch out the parameters of this conversation.
	With it finally being revealed that all of the Russiagate allegations were unfounded and untrue, and they were known to be untrue at the beginning, and yet the FBI pursued them.
	With RFK saying that he would disband the CIA and that he believes that the CIA assassinated JFK, he's obviously not the first person.
	To say that.
	I'd like to ask you, as a former member of the intelligence community, albeit a goodie, much more James Bond than, I don't know, one of them ones that's killing people for the government.
	Do you think that these institutions are fundamentally corrupt and if the goal was to radically revise our global infrastructure in order to create a fairer and better world, do you think you'd get rid of them or do you think that they're things that can be saved or things that are necessary?
	What do you feel, Annie?
	I think there is a balance.
	There's always got to be a democratic balance, because we do need defences against other countries that are going to be using the same sort of aggressive tactics.
	But if we want to call ourselves democracies, we need to make sure that they are under democratic control.
	So there has to be a proportionality about the powers that they can exert, and there has to be a proportionality about what they can legally cover up.
	Otherwise, we don't function in a democracy.
	And so what you were talking about earlier in terms of the linkage between big tech and government is a very dangerous path to go down.
	And this is something Edward Snowden disclosed many, many years ago, a decade ago.
	Jesus.
	Yeah, I know you love a whistleblower.
	I know like you're always giving them awards and stuff like that.
	Didn't you give Daniel Howe one?
	Am I saying his name correctly?
	I feel like you gave Daniel Howe an award pretty recently, but the Twitter files revealed that the FBI were, you know, a little too involved in censorship of information that was posted on that platform, censoring information of legitimate authorities, censoring information that's been proven to be true.
	So it shows you that the deep state is a real thing, that the FBI, excuse me, and the CIA Can't really be regarded primarily as defensive organizations that are stopping us from yielding to the threat of North Korea or domestic radicals of some persuasion or Islamic terror all of the other reasons.
	I mean look at Biden pushing through the very legislation that Snowden revealed, like, you know, like the stuff, the Patriot Act stuff that was there to spy on individuals in order to defend Americans from potential attacks, that that is up for review and they want to revive it under the auspices of the threat of American, excuse me, of Mexican drug cartels.
	So, like, what is the essential function of these organisations?
	Is it to defend the American people or is it to control the American people?
	Well, the first question I would ask would be why are we only focusing on America?
	I mean, is this the, you know, the apotheosis of democracy?
	No.
	It's been shown to be very corrupt.
	And there is an issue around what is called the deep state.
	Having said that, what do we mean by the deep state would be the key question, in my view.
	So in terms of having law enforcement agencies there to try and protect basic rights of their citizens, that is a good thing.
	In terms of their being corrupted or subverted or unknowingly being used to link into things like the military-industrial complex or the military-censorship complex or whatever, that is a bad thing.
	So a lot of very good people go into these organisations trying to do good.
	And often they can feel quite powerless in confronting the bureaucratic monolith that often these organisations become.
	So this is one of the key things that Edward Snowden disclosed 10 years ago, I can't believe it was 10 years ago, when he started talking about, one, the PRISM programme, and then all sorts of other hideousness.
	to show quite how embedded the tech and intelligence agencies have become across the Western world.
	So there's a lot to unpick and unpack here.
	in terms of the interrelations and the interleaving of the spies and the corporate and government intersections.
	So where do we want to start?
	If we want to go back to Edward Snowden, that means his very first disclosure in June 2013 was the PRISM programme, which showed that there were back doors built into all the big tech global giants coming out of the USA.
	And whether or not they knew it was happening, or whether or not it was unwittingly done to them, means that it still left all of us vulnerable, so that the intelligence agencies could hoover up all our intelligence data, all our internet data.
	So we're talking about metadata, we're talking about personal data, we're talking about access to hacking our computer systems.
	And this is something I've written about, as you know, because you very kindly promoted my book, The Privacy Mission, which is shortlisted for a very nice award tonight.
	But the key point is, whether or not they knew it was going on, or whether they agreed to it going on, it means that there is this collusion, this interleaving between The intelligence agencies and the global tech companies.
	And then, of course, this also means that the vulnerabilities can therefore be exploited by the criminal hackers as well.
	There's a few things.
	One is, of course, we're not condemning individuals that join the CIA, the FBI, MI5, of course, an organization that you're a member of, any more than I would condemn a member of the police force, or the National Health Service, or the teaching profession.
	People tend to join these service positions, I would like to hope, with the motivation of becoming a valuable member of the community.
	Operating, my hope is, on the basis that through love and service you can improve the world.
	But it seems that there's a tendency through institutions beyond deep state, espionage institutions that operate beyond the tenure of ordinary law That they, broadly speaking, end up allying with the interests of the powerful.
	One of the other Snowden revelations, of course, was the collaboration between what are known as the five I countries, essentially the anglophonic countries, New Zealand, Australia, Canada.
	America sharing information about their domestic populations to bypass the complexity imposed by their legislative inability to spy on their own populations by sort of doing what are considered to be the international espionage version of wife swapping.
	What I would say, Annie, is that currently all of those countries are trying to push through legislation that enables them to impose fines on emergent pro-free speech organizations like Rumble.
	Fining them, paring them down.
	In fact, we have an asset here to show you.
	In the UK, there's the online safety bill.
	In the EU, there's a Digital Service Act.
	In Canada, there's one.
	In America, there's one.
	and there's one in that country that's either Australia or New Zealand, I can't tell,
	because frankly they made their flags too similar.
	They all know that and it's time they all owned up to it as nations.
	Now with that kind of legislation being pushed through, subsequent to Snowden's revelations,
	with us understanding, or at least you and I discussing, what the role of these agencies are,
	do you feel that it seems like there's a concerted effort to control free speech,
	to control the narrative, to infiltrate big tech companies with deep state agencies,
	in order to essentially support existing narratives at a time where it's possible for independent media like us,
	and everyone, the people that are watching this live on our chat,
	and you can join us on our chat if you want to by clicking on the red button,
	to prevent us from communicating freely, not because of hate speech,
	Because we wouldn't put up with that here and we certainly wouldn't spread it.
	We believe that everyone is equal and has the right to express themselves however they want and we celebrate all forms of identity.
	But, because they don't want people criticising the establishment and talking about the very kind of things you and I are talking about now.
	It's about control of the narrative.
	That's what they're doing.
	So, for example, in the UK there was a law that was passed in 2016 called the Investor Powers Act.
	And that retrospectively legalized what had been illegal spying, endemic spying, by GCHQ and the NSA.
	So GCHQ is the UK spying system and the NSA is the US spying system, which is part of the Five Eyes, but that is the closest intelligence relationship ever.
	And the irony was that countries like Russia and China then passed laws after 2016 saying, well, if the UK can pass these laws to snoop on their citizens, why not?
	Why can't we do that?
	And they get excoriated as countries that have over and dangerous control over their citizens.
	So we have a situation where the UK has actually led the charge in terms of spying on their citizens.
	They always have, actually, to a greater or lesser degree.
	I mean, the US has been pretty close.
	And then that can be used as justification around the world for more draconian and more
	totalitarian regimes.
	So that is the situation we're looking at.
	What we are looking at now, as you just mentioned, with things like the online safety bill in
	the UK and what is known as the C11 law in Canada, is online censorship bills.
	So it's all done to protect children.
	Well, actually, no, it's actually done to allow governments to censor what we can see or what we can access online.
	So this is completely antithetical to everything that the Internet was designed to be back in the 80s and 90s with the sort of ideologues.
	They just wanted free access to information, allowing free knowledge be spread around the world and that is what is being taken away with it from us at the moment, with what's going on technologically.
	And in the EU particularly, I mean I'm based in Brussels, I can see the EU Commission out of my window, what we're looking at at the moment is not just the European Digital Act, it's also looking at something called the EU ID card, which basically means that All our information, if you get it, because you have to have an ID card to live anywhere in the EU, means that they can have access to your taxes, they can have access to your health records, they can have access to anything they want about you personally.
	And we don't know what systems they're stored on, we don't know what systems they are controlled by, which corporations are controlling them, because lobbyists are big here, and we don't know how safe they're going to be.
	But that also means that they can access your bank accounts and shave money off your bank accounts and things if there's another economic crisis as in 2008.
	So it's a really scary thing.
	There's a very good film made by a Dutch film company last year called State of Control talking about this.
	I would recommend any of your viewers to have a look at that.
	It's frightening.
	Post a link in the description about that chat.
	Now, here are some of the worst things that the CIA and FBI have done that we could come up with quite quickly.
	Annie, you can tell us if these things are legit or phony.
	Allegedly!
	I'll be regularly pressing that button in case these things are lies.
	They were involved in the assassination of JFK, RFK at length, describing that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset.
	Successfully supported coups in Iran, Guatemala, Congo, the Dominican Republic and South Vietnam, and the 2014 Ukrainian coup, interestingly, very current.
	At least two of the 9-11 hijackers were recruited into a joint CIA-Saudi intelligence operation, according to an Office of Military Commission's court filing.
	That was uncovered by the Grey Zone.
	So that's the C.I.A.' 's three bad things from the C.I.A.
	Here's the F.B.I.
	The F.B.I.
	used the Patriot Act's business records provision to track all U.S.
	telephone calls, as revealed by Snowden's NSA leaks that we've just discussed.
	They were instrumental in perpetrating the Russiagate hoax and censoring the Hunter Biden New York Post story, which could be considered to be electoral fraud.
	Let us know what you think in the chat.
	In 2020, during the arrest of a militia group for plotting to kidnap Michigan's Governor Gretchen Whitmer, 12 out of 14 suspects were FBI informants.
	Essentially, they caused the crime, then solved it by saying, we caused this crime, so that's how we know that it was a crime.
	Which one do you think comes off as worse, between the CIA and FBI?
	And would you query any of the assertions made in that recent litany of damnation?
	I am not an expert in any of them.
	I would say, though, that all intelligence agencies around the world get involved in dirty tricks.
	I mean, this is one of the reasons why I got involved in supporting my former partner, David Shailer, trying to expose the illegal Gaddafi plot assassination in 1996, which failed and killed innocent people and was illegal.
	And then, of course, he was legally tortured and assassinated in 2011 in the world's full glare of the media.
	by the very same groups.
	So things shift in terms of the information that is available or the information that is seen to be good that the media puts out is the interesting shift in terms of the narrative drive and in the narrative control.
	But yeah, I think we all need to be aware that, you know, intelligence agencies will get up to naughties sometimes.
	The key thing about them is that If we want them to work effectively in a democracy, to protect us effectively in a democracy, they need to learn from their mistakes.
	They need to be as transparent as possible.
	There are certain things that do need to be kept secret, like ongoing operations, sense of operational techniques, agent names, that sort of thing.
	But I don't see why everything has to be a blanket ban, with national security as the issue, you know, the get-out-of-jail-free card.
	So in terms of a balance of proportionality, and in terms of protecting us all better, They need to be slightly more open.
	And that's what they're not doing.
	All these new laws you've just mentioned are dragging them back into greater secrecy rather than more transparency.
	And as aware citizens, we need to have as much information as we can, particularly on the Internet, because that's what they're trying to shut down at the moment.
	Danny, you make everything sound so smutty, dirty tricks and naughties.
	You're a very British kind of spy.
	When it's the sort of America, it all sounds so very grand and technological and jagged and dreadful.
	But you've been up to all sorts of scalduggery.
	They're very naughty boys and girls.
	Look at their bottoms smacked.
	They carry on with that.
	I can see the EU out of my window.
	I'm spying on Brussels right this second with my giant spy eyes that I've got.
	You were mates with old David Shaler.
	I remember when he came out with his revelations, he took a turn in the media tumble dryer.
	He was accused of being a crackpot, a weirdo, a pervert, a near-do-well, an errant orphan boy.
	All sorts of accusations were unnecessarily levelled at Shaler.
	We've got to wrap up the show now, Annie, so I can't give you an opportunity to respond to that.
	What are you doing?
	What does that expression mean?
	I'm gagged.
	I'm gagged.
	Yeah, we've gagged.
	See?
	More smart.
	You're a smart addict.
	You need to go to Smutterholics, in my humble view.
	You can get Annie's book, The Privacy Mission.
	Even that's a quite saucy title, isn't it?
	There's sort of a bit of entendre around that, if you ask me, Mr Roy.
	Annie, is there anything else you want to say?
	We'll post a link to the privacy statement in the chat here.
	As you know, we admire you very much on this show and we're happy to see that you're on a list as short as a mouse's leg.
	What is it for that you've been shortlisted?
	It's for the Business Book of the Year and the award ceremonies this evening, actually, in the UK.
	So we shall see, but I'm up against a very Very famous group of authors, so I have no great hopes.
	But I did enjoy writing The Privacy Mission.
	It was a sort of culmination of years of research and years of speaking to hacktivists and to cybersecurity groups and all that sort of thing.
	And also, I had a lot of advice from a wonderful organisation I work with at the moment called the World Ethical Data Foundation, and we put on an event every year called the World Ethical Data Forum, which at some point I might try and drag you into.
	I'll go.
	If you want me to give a whistleblower an award, dragged, gagged, in whatever state you'll take me, Annie, I will be there.
	Thank you, Annie Masham, for joining us.
	I wish you all the success in the world and I hope you win against those famous authors.
	Perhaps you could spy on them and maybe sabotage their efforts using your techniques.
	No.
	In fact, I really hope Cory Doctorow wins.
	He's a friend and the most amazing best-selling author, and if you haven't read his stuff, you should, because he's really damn good.
	Nope, I'm supporting you.
	The Privacy Mission's available.
	There's a post in the chat there, and I have it on good authority that that other author that Annie just mentioned is Dangerous lunatic!
	He's a Russian spy.
	He's a Russian spy!
	He's Anthony Blunt!
	He's an asset!
	He's an asset!
	He's at the pool at Cliveden now, perfume-o-ing himself to within an inch of his life.
	Shall I stop?
	Yeah, probably.
	Thanks, Andy Mashen.
	Thanks very much.
	Allegedly for.
	Oh.
	Allegedly.
	That was all made up.
	I don't know why I said that.
	Allegedly.
	He's just an author.
	He's a good guy.
	I don't even know him.
	I was just saying it to end an interview.
	Thanks, Annie.
	The Electronic Freedom Foundation for years, and all sorts of other good stuff.
	He's a real guru when it comes to tech.
	I was joking, I was joking.
	I'll go, I'll present an award, all right, if that's what I have to do.
	I'll present an award, or I'll stand there, and I'll, like, I'll use some of my spy gear that I get from them shops.
	You go to London, and guess what?
	I've got a handshake thing that goes... Wow.
	Yeah?
	Get ready for that, Annie.
	Oh, wow.
	I thought Annie was the real spy.
	No, it's me.
	I've been deep cover all these years, baby.
	Deep cover in me wife's housecoat.
	Thanks, Annie.
	I suppose she just did a thin-lipped nod there.
	What was that?
	That was a way of not having to say thank you.
	Yeah, it was!
	That was avoidance of thanks.
	Yes, it was.
	Because she didn't want to, like, that shows she's aware of what she's doing.
	Like, I'm not going to unconsciously just say thank you, because that's what people say in these situations.
	Thanks aren't warranted.
	Yeah.
	That last bit was stupid.
	That litany of madness that you just came out with.
	Yeah, I went a bit mad for a bit there.
	What was that?
	Pressure.
	I don't know.
	Work pressure.
	It's work pressure.
	Alright, that's the end of that for another week!
	That's right.
	What a week it's been!
	What have you learned?
	Let us know in the chat.
	Join us on Locals, we do this stuff all the time.
	Gareth and I are literally always accessible in this space just waiting for your call.
	Sometimes Gareth takes his top off.
	Join our Locals community for exclusive content including weekly meditations this Sunday with Dear Sweet Dustin talking about evoking deep spiritual power within himself to cope with reality.
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	Join us by pressing that red button.
	Not that one, that one.
	And join us next week, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
	Until then, stay free.
	Good boy, baby.
	Naughty girl.
	Switch on.

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