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June 30, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:08:32
EXPOSING THE CENSORSHIP INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX | Part 1 - #158 - Stay Free With Russell Brand
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I'm a black man and I could never be a better man I'm a straight up, you watch me move I'm a straight up, you
watch me move I bought a Rolls-Royce, so I'm looking for the CEO
Looking for the CEO I'm a black man and I could never be a better man
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I bought a Rolls-Royce, so I'm looking for the CEO Looking for the CEO
In this video, I'm going to be using a new product. I'm going to be using a new product.
In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello there, you Awakening Wonders!
Thanks for joining me for an extra special Friday show.
You know that we participated in the Censorship Industrial Complex event with Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger.
It was a fantastic conversation with incredible participants, surprise guests, and more importantly than any of that, vital information around how a new, unelected series of institutions are coordinating an attempt to shut down free speech
worldwide. If you're watching us on YouTube, we're only going to be available for the first 15 minutes,
then we'll be exclusively on Rumble. Why?
Because Rumble is the home of free speech and we can't speak freely
on a platform which I love. I love you 6.4 million Awakening Wonders.
By God, I love you, that is still governed in part by the WHO and that has commercial and corporate interests that literally prevent free speech.
I know increasingly that Rumble's work is going to be vital.
Later on in the show, in our presentation, here's the news.
We have an in-depth look at Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg's upcoming cage fight and ask is their real fight going to be
against the censorship industrial complex with the EU threatening to kick, you won't believe
this, Twitter right out of Europe and with Zuckerberg admitting that he regrets taking Fauci's
lead allegedly and censoring debatable and sometimes true information, it's heating up
to be an incredible fight.
First of all though, let's have a look at this live event in London.
Me, Matt Tybee, Michael Schellenberger, those so-called journalists, those that were so vital in breaking the Twitterphile story, here speaking openly in an incredible environment about the censorship industrial complex.
If you're watching this on Rumble, click the red button and join us on Locals and let us know where you think we're going to end up.
Hello.
Please, let's have a warm round of applause for Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi.
Who hates the speech?
It's the elites.
There's this relentless effort to sort people into categories.
Around the world, we see censorship.
We're meeting for the first time because we believe that free speech isn't just an enabling condition for civilization, for democracy, that it's a fundamental human right.
And this is, I think, more than a speech crisis.
It's a humanity crisis, and I just hope we're not too late to fix it.
What is the nature of these organizations?
How have they been granted a power that to any rational, ordinary person would require consensus and democracy to achieve it?
How have those safeguards been so expertly bypassed?
That's a great question, and actually, this is, well, of course, yeah.
Plus the shirt.
APPLAUSE CHEERING
Hello.
Thank you.
I'm so excited that you've made the effort to come here to see Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi.
If, yeah...
If our age is to have a Woodward and Bernstein, ethical journalists that care about truth
and narratives and representing the truth to the people that matter most, willing to talk truth,
you Yeah, Barber to Bar, who's on this?
Barber to Bar.
I mean, this is the censorship issue we're discussing.
You can't even do a vaguely flattering intro to two fine journalists without the censorship industrial complex.
Stepping in, in this hallowed territory established by the Methodists, who had to revivify Christianity after that orthodoxy became draconian and oppressive, to re-evoke once more the divine, to ensure that we can speak freely and openly, for it's our only tool against corruption and hypocrisy.
When Michael invited me to participate in this as a facilitator, because watch a minute, it's going to blow your mind how quiet I'm going to be in a second.
This is it.
I'm going to say this, then I'm going to self-censor like you wouldn't believe.
Matt Taibbi is shattered.
He's just arrived here.
These people care about what they do.
Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi are precisely the journalistic voices that we require because, like Wesley's Methodist movement, our movement already has martyrs.
I believe we have supporters of Julian Assange in the room right now.
We already have people that are willing to sacrifice themselves for a higher good in
Edward Snowden is a supporter of course of this event and recognizes the significance of the work that Michael and Matt in particular are doing.
This is a conversation that we are facilitating for two men that I believe in, who I believe are working very hard to do a necessary job.
Some of the topics that we're covering are What is the nature of this new centralizing authoritarian system?
How long can we allow convenience, safety and security to enable centralized authoritarian systems to shut down communication and free speech?
What is the misanthropy that lies at the heart of a discourse that believes our speech needs to be controlled?
Where is the moral authority that is entitled to make those decisions on our behalf?
Thankfully, there are people in this room that can answer those questions tonight.
Please, let's have a warm round of applause for Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi!
Thank you, brother.
Thank you.
Thank you.
What a pleasure.
Thank you, guys.
Wow, thank you so much.
People say there is no censorship industrial complex.
People say the idea that there's a censorship industrial complex is a conspiracy theory.
It's disinformation.
And yet we know that Facebook censored what its own executives called often true stories of COVID vaccine side effects.
We know that Facebook censored the New York Post in February 2020 when it published an opinion piece that said maybe COVID came from a laboratory.
And we know that Twitter and Facebook censored an entirely 100% true accurate story about Hunter Biden's laptop just two weeks before the US elections.
Now people say it's not really censorship because censorship is when the government censors you and the government was just flagging misinformation.
They were just being helpful, helping Twitter executives and Facebook to correct the misinformation out there.
And yet Matt Taibbi and his colleagues at Racket have identified 50 large, powerful organizations around the world that take government funding that are staffed by former government employees that work hand in hand with the U.S.
government, the U.K.
government, The Brazilian government, the Canadian government, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, around the world we see censorship.
And censorship at the behest of governments is a violation of the First Amendment and a violation of your laws too in the great nation of Britain.
So we're here tonight to get into it.
What is the censorship industrial complex?
How did we allow this monstrosity to take hold in our societies?
It's every time we think we get to the bottom of this story, the floor drops out from under us.
Most recently, just a few weeks ago, we started getting emails from people around the world.
From Australia, from New Zealand, from Canada, the United States, saying, did you know that there's a piece of legislation going through our Parliament, our Congress?
It's not being covered by the news media.
What is it?
In the UK, there's legislation that would allow the government to read your private direct messages on WhatsApp, Signal, Telegraph.
In Brazil, a single judge on the Supreme Court is demanding the right for the government to read and censor private text messages.
In Canada, they're seeking legislation that would promote official government media sources over independent news media sources on social media platforms.
In the United States, They've been trying to sneak through legislation that would criminalize the use of VPNs, or virtual private networks, to gain access to forbidden websites.
In Ireland, this is the most shocking thing of all.
They're trying to get the right to go into your homes, into the homes of people in Ireland, including the staffs of social media companies, search their phones, search their computers without authorization, and presume people guilty until proven innocent of spreading hateful material.
Hateful speech should be condemned.
We should use our freedom of speech to condemn it.
But our societies are more tolerant of racial, religious, and sexual minorities than they have ever been.
Think about the attitudes of your grandparents and great-grandparents.
In 1958, four percent of Americans approved of the rights of whites and black people to be married.
Today, over 95 percent do.
Who is driving the hate speech?
Who is demanding the censorship of hate speech?
I would say it's some of the most hateful people in our society.
Who hates the speech?
It's the elites.
And they want to censor the people.
They want to censor the authentic voice of the people.
And I tell you tonight, they will not succeed.
And I know they will not succeed because all of you are here as lovers of freedom to demand your rights to freedom of speech.
We have already won.
We have put a stake in the ground in this hallowed, sacred space.
There's always been a debate about whether or not you need free speech to make democracy work.
We know we do.
You can't choose your elected representatives if you cannot freely debate who they are, what they stand for.
People make the case that you need freedom of speech in order to have free markets work.
You can't know what to buy or sell if you aren't allowed to discuss those products freely and openly.
We have very few restrictions on our freedom of speech.
You can't lie to people to steal from them through fraud, and you can't incite violence against people in the immediate term.
But beyond that, our rights are very strong.
They're the strongest in the United States of anywhere in the world, but they're very strong in Britain, and they should be stronger.
We are here to launch a campaign, a new free speech alliance.
We've brought people from around the world.
I just met many of them, and these are people who I only see online.
These are people fighting for their freedom in Brazil, in New Zealand, Australia, Canada.
We're meeting for the first time because we believe that free speech isn't just an enabling condition for civilization, for democracy, that it's a fundamental human right.
Free speech is what makes us human.
It's tantamount to our ability to breathe and to eat and to love who we want to love.
And so I say to you tonight, this is the moment where we start to fight back against the censorship industrial complex.
We intend to defund it, dismantle it, and demand a new standard for freedom of speech worldwide as strong as the one that we enjoy in the United States of America.
Thank you all for coming.
Thank you. Thank you all.
The most painful thing, and there's a lot of painful things that one goes through, is
losing almost all of your friends as a consequence of using your speech.
Thank you.
The only positive thing that's come out of that has been to make new friends.
And it's not the most obvious thing in the world to lose all your friends in your late 40s.
The ones you keep are so dear, and the ones that you make, dearer so.
And there's few people in the world that I admire more than Matt Taibbi.
I've admired Matt Taibbi for almost 20 years, I think.
I think.
When I was invited in to work on the Twitter files, meeting Matt Taibbi was one of the most special moments in that adventure.
And when we testified in front of Congress, at that moment that we were testifying, the Internal Revenue Service, which is our tax police, visited Matt Taibbi's home and attached a note to his door, which is completely, completely against the standard practice of the Internal Revenue Service.
This is a person who has sacrificed significantly and he's seen what life is like for journalists in totalitarian societies.
He knows and has been friends with people that have died for the cause.
I have few greater pleasures than the opportunity tonight to introduce you to the great Matt Taibbi.
I'm going to sit.
So let me say one more thing.
It is an equal pleasure to be up here with Russell Brand.
And truly, truly one of my favorite, favorite comedians and someone that has demonstrated great courage
in his own personal recovery and courage in speaking out against the orthodoxy on so many issues.
Whether it's COVID or free speech, he's here tonight like we are, without asking for anything in return.
We're so blessed to have Russell Brand with us.
So please join me again in thanking both of them.
I'm going to remain seated because Michael tricked me, actually.
Before the event, he texted me and said, we're going to do prepared remarks to begin the event.
And I'm not an orator.
I'm a writer.
So what did I do?
I spent the last 48 hours meticulously writing an essay, which I'll publish tomorrow.
You can all read it.
It's very carefully argued.
I think it's pretty eloquent in places.
I'm not sure it entirely holds together.
But once we get here, Michael tells me, no, I'm just going to wing it.
I'm going to go up there and talk extemporaneously.
So out of spite.
I'm not going to read that entire speech that I had written, but I'll read excerpts of it because there are a couple of important points that I do think we want to make before we get to the larger discussion with Russell, which I know you're all anxious to get to.
I originally started by talking, saying something very pretentious about George Orwell.
I'll now read it.
And then from there it led into sort of an introduction to what the Twitter file story was, and it was full of sort of unforgettable asides about Elon Musk and all these other things.
We can skip that.
And then there was a quote, and basically the idea here is that I went into the Twitter file story, probably like Michael, bringing my old school, legalistic, kind of Enlightenment era notions of free speech with me.
And I was hoping to answer maybe one or two narrow questions about Twitter.
You know, for instance, did the FBI maybe once or twice intervene to, you know, get in the middle of a speech question?
Quickly, we all realized that it was something sort of bigger, scarier, and weirder than that.
And here's what I wrote about that.
The quote is, a sweeping system of digital surveillance combined with thousands or even millions of subtle rewards and punishments designed to condition people to censor themselves.
So we're going to get into The concrete examples of how they did use government and government did work with these companies to actually censor people.
But the larger, scarier issue is the construction, I think, of this gigantic Internet age system that is designed to get people to preempt dangerous thoughts by getting people to avoid having them in the first place.
And then there was another pretentious thing about George Orwell.
And the idea here was that one of the things that Orwell focused on in 1984 was this notion of binaries, that in the world that he described in 1984, There were no shades of grey.
All ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged.
And it wasn't necessary to have words for everything.
You didn't need to have words for warm and cold.
You could just have warm and unwarm, for instance, right?
And this is what we saw a lot of in the Twitter files.
We saw a lot of taking very complex issues where there are lots and lots of shades of meaning and finding ways to whittle it down to basically two things.
All right, and a great example of this was the virality project that was led by Stanford University.
This was basically a catch-all program where Stanford took in information from all the biggest internet platforms, Facebook, Google, Twitter, some others, and they aggregated all the things that they were hearing about COVID and their experiences about what content moderation decisions that they made, and they made recommendations to each of the platforms about how they should deal with these things.
And the really fascinating thing about this, well first let's start with the headline sort of scary moment in these emails.
There was one email in which Stanford suggested to Twitter that you should consider, as standard misinformation on your platform, Stories of true vaccine side effects or true posts which could fuel hesitancy as well as worrisome jokes or posts about things like natural immunity or vaccinated individuals contracting COVID-19 anyway.
And basically what they were doing here is they were trying to get into the minds of millions of people through algorithms.
If a person was telling a true story about somebody who got the vaccine and got myocarditis, they didn't have to say that they got it because of the vaccine.
Even if they just told the story, even if in the next post they said, I'm all for the vaccine, the way the Virality Project interpreted that original post was that this could promote hesitancy.
Therefore, even if it's true, it's untrue, right?
So you have, in reality, you have shades of meaning there.
There's a true story that, you know, suggests that maybe you should be cautious about the virus.
The person might be pro-vaccine, but they see it as anti-vax material.
So it's vax, anti-vax, right?
And this is Constantly throughout.
They just took things that were really somewhere in the middle, and they moved them in one direction or another.
Another amazing moment was when there was a company called Grafica, which described the dangers of undermining what they called authoritative health sources, like Anthony Fauci.
They were very against even the use of puns like FAUXI, F-A-U-X-I.
And their quote was, this continual process of seeding doubt and uncertainty and inauthoritative voices leads to a society that finds it too challenging to identify what's true or false.
Basically what they're saying is questioning authority.
Who here is old enough to remember the 70s and the VW bugs that had the questioning authority stickers?
Questioning authority, which was of liberal value then, is now disinformation.
So if you apply these techniques 50, 100 million times, a billion times, a billion billion times, eventually what happens is that people see that they are either going to be defined as approved, having approved thoughts, or unapproved thoughts.
There's no middle that they can occupy.
They will just naturally self-sort and self-homogenize.
And we're doing this all throughout society with politics, entertainment, and everything.
That's how you can get, you know, somebody like Russell, who is clearly not a right-winger, but they define him as a right-winger anyway because there are only two categories of people in the current media environment.
There are people who Believe in everything true and decent and democracy and puppies and all that, and then there's right-wingers who are wrong about everything, right, basically.
And so that's what they've been doing.
They've been creating binaries over and above the direct censorship that we saw.
There's this relentless effort to sort people into categories.
And the other thing that I think is really important to point out and is another Orwell concept is double think.
And this is the idea.
How did Orwell define this?
Basically, it's the idea of holding two ideas at the same time.
He defined it as the act of holding simultaneously two opposite individually exclusive ideas or opinions and believing in both simultaneously and absolutely.
Now, We do that.
We do that constantly now.
With news stories, things that were true yesterday turn out to be completely the opposite tomorrow, and people are totally fine with that.
We just completely skip the fixing process.
There's no stopping to say, oh, sorry, we got that wrong.
We just move to freaking out about the next thing seamlessly.
So just to take an example, It wasn't that long ago that we were told in no uncertain terms that the only suspect in the Nord Stream pipeline bombing was Russia itself.
And just a couple of weeks ago, we were told by the same U.S.
government that they were actually aware since last June that this was planned by Ukrainians with the assent of the highest officials in the Ukrainian military.
Now, I don't know what the true story is, but those two stories are completely different.
And they don't stop and say, oh, well, we're sorry.
Let's resolve that.
Let's square this discrepancy.
They just want you to forget.
And there's no way for people to live normally with these contradictions and stay sane.
The only thing they can do is live continuously in the moment, because that way you don't have to think about the past, you don't have to think about the future.
You are sort of charged affirmatively to forget everything that you were told before, because it might turn out to contradict something they want to tell you tomorrow.
So we live in the present, continually, and in the present, there are only two choices.
So we're living in this very, very narrow intellectual world, and this is over and above the problem of authority that would come in later.
If you somehow manage to get past all these obstacles and actually be an independent, free thinker, like I think most of the people in this room are, then they're going to have censorship and other obstacles to try to stop you.
But their aim is to prevent that from ever happening.
And we saw that over and over in the Twitter follows.
I think that's the lesson that I ended up taking away from it.
And this is, I think, more than a speech crisis.
It's a humanity crisis.
And I just hope we're not too late to fix it.
So thank you very much.
Thank you very much, and I hope you have a great day.
Thank you.
I think in the 20 minutes that you've both been speaking, it's already become plain that we are dealing with an issue
of considerable, perhaps even unprecedented, scale.
And thanks mostly to some of the territory that Matt outlined, there is an entirely subjective experience also that will individually affect all of us in ways that seem to be more rooted in behaviouralism than politics, even in the most dystopian technocratic version of that, that attention itself, the experience of being you, is being curated and directed in ways that could only have been theoretical at the time of B.F.
Skinner, for example.
To return to the broader framing of our conversation, Michael, seeing as how you seem to be in charge.
Making poor Matt write a whole essay.
And then publicly redact his affiliation with George Orwell.
Plainly a device used to curry favour with the British.
Can you tell us how something as vast as the censorship industrial complex can possibly exist and come into being when it necessarily requires the participation of numerous agencies that one would assume would not be explicitly connected?
I know Matt has done work in revealing 50 NGOs that participate in this censorship industrial complex, which I believe is a phrase that you have coined.
Can you tell us how both state And private authorities, be they media or governmental, are participating in the creation of and execution of this new idiom that you have coined.
Sure, I mean, I think we have these various moments on the Twitter files where you would just get really creeped out, like you would discover something and you would just get chills up your spine.
And for me, it was when we discovered that the Aspen Institute had organized a workshop they called a tabletop exercise that had New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Facebook, Twitter, you know, 12 to 20 people there.
All talking in the summer of 2020 about how to debunk a story about Hunter Biden and Burisma.
This is three months before the Hunter Biden laptop had come out.
And it was just like, what is going on here?
We sometimes ask, you know, is this a conspiracy or is it just a culture?
Because there is a way in which you know that looked like a like conspiracy that looked like a secret coordinated effort that was obviously not public to pre bunk a story that would come out several months later.
On the other hand, it's also a culture.
You know, these are people that are in Washington, D.C.
together.
They go to the same parties.
They went to the same prep schools.
They went to the same Ivy League schools.
They got jobs at the top newspapers.
When they come to London, they hang out with the same particular, you know, group of people.
But I think we're constantly asking ourselves, to what extent is this, you know, an inorganic phenomenon of a censorship industrial complex?
And to what extent is it an organic part of cancel culture?
I mean, I thought Russell, what you said is really to the point, which is that there's, and also to Matt's comments about Orwell, is that there's a psychological, there's something that's unhealthy psychologically about this.
And we've all become obsessed, my colleagues and I, with this totally obscure book by a Polish psychologist who lived Under both Nazi, under the Nazis, then also under the other communists.
And the book is called Political Ponerology, which is this crazy word I think he invented, which is the study of evil or the study of totalitarianism.
And what he says is he says people that are in totalitarian societies, the people in charge, he says the way that you get to totalitarian societies is that psychopathological people Or what psychologists call cluster B personality disorder type people.
These are antisocial personality disorder, which is the new name for psychopaths.
Narcissist, borderline personality, and histrionic disorder.
These are all cluster B personality.
These are the folks who, like when you're around them in your life, you always feel a little bit like you're walking on eggshells, because anything you say might set them off or might offend them.
And I'm also struck by that Orwell, where Orwell is saying, in a totalitarian society, you know, it's either, you know, black or white.
And that's actually one of the characteristics of cluster B personality disorder people is that I mean, these are people that are marked by grandiosity, self-centeredness, and then this concept that we just learned, which is called splitting.
So these are people for whom you're either with me or you're against me.
And it's just, that's the way their world is.
And so, and when we start to, you know, without naming names, you start to learn some of the characters in the censorship industrial complex, and you look at, you sort of watch them, and you realize you're dealing with people that there's something Pathological about the way that they're, you know, the way they look at the world, the way in which it's like you're either with the program or you're dead to me, you know, you're and there's no sense of play and of like humor is impossible in that situation.
There's a reason why you feel scared to make a joke around to those kinds of people.
And so it's dark and I think there's like I think it's you know, it's it's I mean these two gentlemen are so lovely to work with and there's something so... I went to Russell's office or his studio not far from here and so well treated this like all of his people are really fun and sweet and healthy and there was no like
Weirdness to it, and yet everybody's enthusiastic about it.
That's a really different vibe than when you go to some of these more pathological institutions.
And so that's why I felt like, you know, getting us together and being with each other in person and being like, wow, there's some other people that we can have fun with and play with was an important part of our fight against totalitarianism.
Of course, any architecture of this nature, difficult though it is to envisage and track, must have its origins in the human psyche.
Where else could it come from?
Therefore, I suppose it's natural that it would have traits recognizable at the level of the individual.
I'm interested, Matt, to learn a little more about these 50 NGOs, and in particular, I'm interested in the way that they are frequently framed as philanthropic, and indeed, the entire Telos of the censorship argument is predicated on the idea of there being a moral authority with the integrity to execute that kind of censorship in addition to the misanthropy that I mentioned before that would require it.
What is the nature of these organizations?
How have they been granted a power that to any rational, ordinary person would require consensus and democracy to achieve it?
How have those safeguards been so expertly bypassed?
That's a great question.
And actually, this is well, of course, yeah.
Plus the shirt.
Plus the shirt.
This also gives me an opportunity to thank Michael and give him credit for something
enormous, which is coming up with the term censorship industrial complex, which I think
was crucial to naming this whole phenomenon and giving it an identity that people could
grasp and rally around.
Before that, I think it's similar to what the Occupy Wall Street movement did when they came up with the idea of the 1% and the 99%.
Just the nomenclature, I think, is really, really important.
And he came up with that name, and the reason it struck a chord with me, and I'll just go through the chronology quickly of What happened?
In February, early February, I was looking through the Twitter files, and we started to run into emails about an organization called the Global Engagement Center.
How many people here have heard of the Global Engagement Center?
Almost nobody, right?
Which is so fascinating.
So the Global Engagement Center was created in the last year of Barack Obama's presidency.
Technically, it's what they call housed in the State Department.
It's actually a multi-agency task force whose official remit is combating foreign disinformation.
And we found an inspector general's report that said basically that the Global Engagement Center,
in its first year, I guess it was FY 2017, had funded roughly $100 million worth of projects,
and it listed 36 different organizations, or 39.
And of course, 36 of them were redacted.
And I got the idea that it might be a good thing try to figure out what those organizations were.
We brought in some more people to start looking.
And the instant we started trying to figure out how many of these organizations were, the project Completely spiraled out of control.
You know, Michael mentioned 50.
The real number that we're looking at now is somewhere in the 400s.
It's like 400, 450.
You know, we've begun keeping sort of an Excel type spreadsheet with all these organizations.
And we think even that is only scratching the surface of how many of these quote-unquote anti-disinformation organizations that are out there.
A lot of them are receiving public money.
What are they doing?
What's the genesis of these groups?
Well, in the case of the Global Engagement Center, the real origin of this is, as was described to me by somebody who worked there from the very beginning, This started with the counter-proliferation movement in the U.S.
military.
Essentially, they were having trouble countering the messaging of ISIS, which they were finding difficult to understand.
ISIS was somehow reaching Basically, white suburban kids in Britain and in America.
And of course, when something happens to white suburban kids anywhere, then it becomes a crisis internationally.
They started pouring money into it.
But that was the original remit of the Global Engagement Center.
And so they went from counterterrorism to basically what they do now is counterpopulism.
It's the same people, they're using the same technologies, and they're using the same techniques to try to identify people that they consider problematic and try to find ways to diffuse that messaging, either using counter-messaging or de-amplifying the messaging or removing it from platforms or whatever it is.
To them, it's the same thing, and that's what's so frightening.
I think that people have to understand is that this all starts in a wing of the government that was looking at what they considered a terrorist threat that, you know, you could use basically any technique against, and it would be legitimate, up to and including droning them.
And they turned that entire mechanism inward, and that's really what the censorship industrial complex is.
It's just Taking the techniques that we were using to try to reduce the impact of sort of foreign terrorist communication and turning it inward on domestic unrest, people complaining about things.
People complaining about the electoral process.
People not getting vaccinated when they're told.
Whatever it is, there's always some emergency.
And they've learned that they can continually apply that over and over again.
And that, I find that terrifying.
I don't know about you, Russell, but I think it's very scary.
Yes, the idea of perpetual and never-ending crisis being a precondition for authoritarianism is by its nature terrifying, as is the shift that a mechanic designed in order to deal with an apparently external threat being inverted to deal with an internal threat, particularly using some of the Psychological critiques that have been touched upon, that indicates a kind of implosion that's difficult not to equate with pre-apocalyptic thinking.
Furthermore, to see the figures, and I'm referring directly to both of you, of course, that would once have been cherished by identifiable legacy media outlets, even if they're glib, somewhat cultural artifacts like Rolling Stone or legacy media outlets like the New York Times that it's unthinkable that Matt Taibbi or Michael Schellenberg could reliably and consistently write for those kind of outlets.
This too is indication that things are changing and they're just two examples of course Chris Hedges has had a comparable trajectory and most obviously perhaps Glenn Greenwald who's gone from breaking of the seismic stories around WikiLeaks and Snowden and Chelsea Manning to being a literal exile And Pariah, these are all, I would say, significantly terrifying alterations and changes.
Might I ask, if there is an underlying ideology here, because sometimes to hear the way that Matt has described it, then it just feels like a kind of utilisation of a creation just because it's there, it has to be used.
But I wonder, Michael, if the imperatives that undergird this new fast-moving, observably fast-moving trajectory towards authoritarianism, censorship and centralization is primarily motivated by dominion, power, money, or is there something ideological and political taking place, or is it both, and if so, how do they intersect, please?
Yeah, I mean, This thing where I think that you guys have both just tapped into this central issue, which is that there is an authoritarian mentality among the leaders of the censorship industrial complex.
I always think of this, do you guys know the Bourne movie, not the one with Matt Damon, but the other guy?
And they go in to kill Rachel Weisz?
You guys know what I'm talking about?
Okay, everybody remembers that scene with Jeremy Renner, right?
Do you remember the scene where, like, they go into her- I'm gonna spoil the movie for you guys if you haven't seen it.
But there's, like, I guess it's, like, CIA or FBI, and they go into the house, and they're, like, trying to be, like, empathic with her, because she's been through this trauma.
And then they sit her down and then they just look at each other like now and then like try to kill her and that's kind of the scene that has kept coming up in my mind as I like as I'm like reading these documents and listen and like reading the things that people are saying it's like I feel like There's a lot of like they're running an operation.
You know, you feel like you look at these people.
I wrote a piece about one person who's a former CIA fellow.
I'm very sensitive about not wanting to personalize this.
I'm even hesitant to use this person's name, but I did write a whole piece about her.
And, you know, it was like her story was she was just this hobbyist, you know, and I was just concerned about anti-vaxxers.
And then, you know, and then the next thing you know, I was advising Obama on fighting ISIS.
And I just remember being like, I don't think it works like that.
You know, like, I think it's like, these are like really hierarchical military intelligence organizations.
And that this is a person who came out of, you know, and I don't know if she, you know, was recruited out of the The NSA, which does all the spy satellites and whatnot, but, you know, this particular kind of a peculiar career.
And then she's been, I think, one of the most important intellectual architects of the censorship industrial complex.
And, you know, you would listen to her and it'd be like talking about like reducing harm in the real world and using very progressive language, like that's like language of compassion.
And we have to reduce harm.
I mean, that's been a big part of it.
We have to reduce hatred in the society.
And then it just feels like that moment from, you know, the Bourne movie where it's like, and then we have to, you know, fight the disinformation.
And so, you know, I have to say, I think like that seems to be, I mean, that seems to be like the undercurrent is that I think that there's that what brings us all together is a kind of suspicion of authority.
I mean, my dad had not only did he have a beetle, VW bug, we had the question authority sticker on
the car. I mean that was who we were and so for me that was a part of it and I
think one of the delightful parts of it is that there's there's people in
this anti-censorship movement, this free speech movement, who you know like
there was a guy that had blocked me because he had we had been in this huge fight
about nuclear power which is something I support.
A lot of the folks that are very anti-authoritarian are anti-nuclear, and I actually asked him recently to stop blocking me on Twitter, and he did, because we're on the same side of this.
And so but I do feel like that seems like that's a big part of it is that if there's an ideology, it's just some of it's like, just questioning authority and, you know, being able to have a conversation and ask hard questions of people and not kind of not wanting to be in a situation of just following orders.
My concern is that the end point of this is an inability to openly communicate in good faith, in particular with people that you disagree with.
It's interesting that Matt Taibbi uses as his framework George Orwell, and you use a lesser known Bourne film.
Not even the main ones.
Do you think Matt, that this oddly mercurial shape-shifting, probably shouldn't use conspiracy theory type language, should I, in this context.
Do you think that this odd pathology might afford the possibility that many of the agencies and key figures that profess concern around misinformation and its linguistic acolytes Mal and Dis, I think, are the other ones you can have, aren't there?
Miss Mal, Dis.
Miss Mal, yeah.
Mal, Miss and Dis, yeah.
Like Scrooge's nephews in the DuckTales films, which I reckon Michael will probably use as a paradigm in a minute.
Do you reckon that some of them agencies that are like, oh no, we've got to watch all this misinformation, are actually culpable for themselves spreading misinformation?
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, but I don't think they...
Russell, I don't think they see it as disinformation.
I think they see things as politically true, even if they're factually proven untrue later.
Michael and I, just in the last week or so, we've gotten in the middle of this story involving the origins of COVID-19.
This is really a fascinating episode in world history, because this thing happened, And immediately before we had any answer as to, you know, the cause of the pandemic, a whole
The universe of possibilities was ruled out.
We were basically just told, it can't be this, so let's not look over there.
And that is something that maybe you might see somebody in the military think, but a journalist should never think like that.
First of all, we shouldn't really care.
All the old journalists that I know would be in They would start with indifference, you know, I'm happy to report this if this is true, I'm happy to report that if that's true.
But we were told, you know, basically, no, this is the new version of how we do information in the world, is that things are right and righteous, and that you have to get behind them emotionally as you're reporting them.
Therefore, there's this extraordinary incentive to become a believer.
It's much more like religion than journalism, I think.
And that, you know, I think that's kind of the same precondition you have to have to fight a war.
You know, you have to believe in something.
You have to have it.
You have to believe it in your gut in order to press a button to drone somebody.
I don't know.
I mean, I think it's very strange.
It's so different from how I was raised to view journalism, but what they've succeeded in doing, and I was going to ask you about this because you're in this very strange position with YouTube and Rumble and everything, where you have to be constantly thinking What are they going to consider real?
And what are they going to going to consider off limits?
And how do you do humor in a situation like that?
How do you do reporting in a situation like that?
If I mean, look at the New York, the New York Times had to basically write around, you know, stories about Nord Stream, the Wall Street Journal is now having to write around Stories about, you know, the COVID leak.
There was a story last week about, you know, neo-Nazi emblems in Ukraine, and they had to frame it as this might hurt the war effort by making Russian propaganda look good, as opposed to just reporting it.
So they've turned us into believers instead of just sort of passive consumers.
Judgers who are interested, and I just wonder, what do you do when you're doing your show?
Do you have to give in to that urge to consider it all the time?
To return to the broader framing of our conversation, Michael, seeing as how you seem to be in charge, making poor Matt write a whole essay, To the star of everyone in the world's favorite movie, the Shawshank Redemption, Mr. Tim Robbins with a question.
Round of applause for the great Tim Robbins!
Please ladies and gentlemen, how about a round of applause for Stella Assange?
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are having a cage fight.
But is their real battle going to be against the EU, who are introducing new censorship laws that threaten to bring down free speech altogether?
Thanks for joining me on this voyage to truth and freedom at a time where we oppose serious forces which in my opinion have observed the trend that independent media can provide voices to people that oppose centralist authoritarian narratives and are beginning to shut it down.
Even Elon Musk has capitulated to EU laws to censor Twitter.
Let's have a look at Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg's fight being spoken about by the mainstream news.
As if it's a real fight between actual fighters, which is weird.
What kind of circus world is this?
What kind of hysterical clown spectacle are we living in when this is seriously discussed?
I'll tell you what kind of world we're living in.
One where they want to distract you from the fact that vast, giant, unelected, bureaucratic bodies are imposing power like racketeers and gangsters in a way that is completely unprecedented.
I believe because they recognize that independent media and independent politics is on the rise and could capsize the establishment.
A tech billionaire cage match could become reality.
Can you imagine that?
Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg in the cage and they say they're absolutely serious about trading blows in the octagon.
It's funny that they're absolutely serious about it because when they recognize what the EU and the Five Eyes countries are going to do with these new censorship laws, they're going to have different concerns.
It's interesting that during the pandemic, Fauci was exchanging letters With Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg was saying I'm available to help you.
But now Zuckerberg has on Lex Friedman's podcast said they went too far.
They censored stuff that they shouldn't have done.
Asked for a bunch of things to be censored that in retrospect ended up being more debatable or true.
It's amazing that Elon Musk has acquired Twitter and seems committed to free speech.
But similarly astonishing is the fact that the EU have been able to get him to agree to this legislation.
If the The world's richest man cannot oppose these forces, who can?
The answer to that rhetorical question is only all of us.
Only all of us.
It all started with a tweet.
We all thought Musk and Zuck were joking about it on social media, but this week Zuckerberg posted on his Instagram story, send me location.
Send me location.
So there you go, an extraordinary thing to ponder.
At this age where we're fascinated again by the Titanic, billionaires threaten to brawl.
Surely this is a ridiculous spectacle, and surely this has to be considered in the context where giant bureaucratic bodies are looking to impose never-before-seen measures to regulate and control speech.
Now the simple question we have to ask, and let me know in the comments if you agree with this, while you simultaneously subscribe if you don't mind, Let me know this.
Do you think that there are any giant legislative bodies that have the moral authority to regulate your life?
To regulate your free speech?
Who is it that you trust?
What government?
What NGO?
Who do you trust?
Do you trust the IMF, the WHO, the World Bank, the WEF, the American government, the Republican Party, the Democrat Party, the British government, the EU, Macron, Trudeau?
Who?
Who do you trust?
Who would you vote for?
Who do you want censoring you?
Twitter CEO Linda Iaccarino, along with owner Elon Musk, met with the EU on Wednesday.
At the top of the agenda for the EU was ensuring that Twitter is going to comply with its upcoming censorship law, which is scheduled to be enforced on August the 25th, 2023.
Not far off.
Coming up soon.
Enforced.
The censorship law is entitled the Digital Services Act, It's just the Digital Services Act.
The EU has been pushing for Twitter to commit to complying with it.
Ever since he took over Twitter, Elon Musk has been under fire from various political and media corners.
That's right, because, you know, they care about you so much that they're attacking anyone that's talking about free speech.
Remember, I don't have unmitigated, unregulated, unbounded faith in any individual, actually, because I'm an Adult.
But broadly speaking, I think that Elon Musk has been a positive influence in the world of free speech, discourse and debate.
He's not censoring either side of any conversation.
And God, in the end, I think that's where we have to get to.
Let me know in the comments if you agree.
He's teasing the Brussels bureaucrats by promising that his social media company will respect EU laws designed to fight disinformation and hate speech, saying if laws are passed, Twitter will obey the law.
And I suppose in a sense that's bloody obvious, isn't it?
Because what's the alternative?
Twitter will break the law.
But the problem is, of course, that hate speech and disinformation are terms that are used to censor.
Who in the world, in their right mind, other than a few, Lunatics think that hate speech is a good thing.
What?
Hate speech?
I like speaking hate to people.
I want to malign vulnerable people.
I want to speak hatefully about people that are different from me in some way.
The number of people that are doing that, you know, I know that there are people doing that.
But they are not as significant, I would contest, as the ability of astonishingly powerful bureaucratic agencies who want to censor and control counter-narratives that, in my view, are designed to democratize increasingly authoritarian spaces.
Are you beginning to understand that your alliances with people who are culturally different than you, that the cultural differences are, whilst they are important to you, and this is my point in fact, I welcome how important they are to you, if you are not willing to form alliances with and stop criticising people that live differently from you, these giant bureaucratic bodies are just going to steamroll through your freedom, while you're going, I agree with this part of it, they're legislating in my favour, woohoo!
And disinformation, of course, is an arbitrary term.
It just means information that we don't like.
Just look at the last few years.
Information that was regarded as disinformation a few years ago proved to be information.
Where's the apology?
Where's the reversal?
Where's the compensation?
Instead of any of those things, we're gonna pass massive disinformation laws!
This comes after France's digital minister, Jean-Noël Barraud, threatened the social media platforms' access to the bloc.
Disinformation is one of the gravest threats weighing on our democracies, said Barraud.
Our democracies?
It's not democratic, is it?
It's not democratic if you can't, using the ballot and the electoral mechanisms, alter the trajectory and machinations of power.
Twitter, if it repeatedly doesn't follow our rules, will be banned from the EU, the French minister added.
So Twitter could face being cut out of, like, that's probably, what, a fifth of the planet's population?
Significant and advanced economies, just due to the way that society and civilization rolled out.
So obviously, Twitter can't afford to do that.
So the point I'm making here is not, oh, Elon Musk, he's a coward.
It's no one can oppose force of that magnitude.
It's irresistible bureaucratic power.
In May, the European Union's Internal Markets Commissioner Thierry Breton warned that the platform cannot hide from obligations to censor content.
You can run but you can't hide, Breton threatened in a tweet.
When did we get to the point where like bureaucrats from the EU started saying you can run but you can't hide?
There's just someone in the office at the EU.
You pull a knife, we'll pull a gun.
Brings a knife to a gunfight.
You'll send one of ours to the hospital, we'll send one of yours to the morgue.
Hashtag, that's the EU way.
They're not gangsters, but they actually are though, aren't they?
They actually are.
Their rhetoric is starting to be laced with the true violence that is always just out of view when power is asserted.
Beyond voluntary commitments, fighting disinformation will be a legal obligation under DSA as of August the 25th, Breton continued.
Our teams will be ready for enforcement.
What a terrifying statement!
Our teams will be ready for enforcement.
You will comply.
You have 20 seconds to comply.
I don't know.
I don't want to be hysterical, as we say in my line.
If it's hysterical, it's historical, i.e.
if something makes you go crazy, it's probably triggered something from your past.
But our teams will be ready for enforcement, and words like, beyond voluntary commitments, fighting disinformation will be a legal obligation.
That's saying you are going to do what you're told.
No wonder the cage find stuff's coming into the public conversation.
Because we're getting to basic animal freedom.
The animal freedom.
The freedom of your body.
How are you going to make me?
We're going to make you with force.
Is that how people talk when they're trying to protect you?
We are going to protect the public from threatening head speech.
Oh yeah?
And how are you going to do that?
By threatening head speech?
Let's have a look at Breton, a man who talks a good fight.
Let's see what he looks like.
My mission is just to make sure that as of August 25th they will don't like the old desk slam much they will they will respect the law or they will not be able to Where's this power coming from?
They're barely visible, unremarkable bureaucrats saying stuff like, you can run but you can't hide.
That's where power is.
That's power, to say you won't be able to operate in Europe.
Let me know in the comments what you think.
Bretton was referring to the censorship law, the controversial Digital Services Act, a new set of rules for social media platforms operating in Europe which require them to actively police content or risk fines of up to 6% of global turnover.
No one's going to be prepared to risk that.
No one.
Because when you think of like a Twitter or Alphabet or Meta or Facebook or those companies, 6% of a turnover is meaningful.
They won't be able to do that because they're shareholders.
It's a rigged game.
People have looked at the way things are going.
Wait a minute.
Donald Trump, RFK, five years, ten years, carry the one.
Oh no, there's going to be independent media voices, independent political voices.
We have to shut this stuff down.
They won't be able to do it if we control the social media platforms.
We already control mainstream media.
Let's exert that kind of control over social media.
Otherwise, there's a genuine threat that you'll get political movements that are opposed to this kind of bureaucratic economic and state power and where those three things intermingle and coalesce.
They'll be able to attack that, but they won't be able to do that if If we hit them where it hurts.
This is what these measures are about.
Do you seriously believe it's about protecting you?
It is a mad, crazy idea.
Oh, we're going to propose this thing.
What do you think?
Would you like to vote for it?
Vote yes.
If you would like it, vote no.
No, don't ask them to vote for stuff.
They vote for people we don't like.
They vote for stuff we don't want.
The current code of practice, which is voluntary, includes obligations for social media to stop the monetization of disinformation, monitor political advertising, and allow third parties to access their algorithms.
Access their algorithms means manage which information is promoted and manage which information disappears.
So, shadow banning and the ability to control the flow of free information.
End of freedom of speech.
Wow.
So you have to make free speech sound like a bad thing.
When I'm talking about free speech, I'm not going, hey, free speech, I want to be able to abuse people that are different colours or genders or whatever.
I'm like, no, no, no.
If we can't speak freely, we're not gonna be able to attack power.
What do you think power cares about?
Vulnerable people or powerful people?
Tell me in the comments.
In February, Twitter did not submit a report on its implementation of the code.
It was the only major platform to fail to do so.
Props.
Unlike the code of practice, the DSA is legally binding and large platforms, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat and LinkedIn will have to comply if they want to operate in Europe.
In April, the Digital Services Act just got enriched by a new law that will allow the bloc to declare a state of emergency on the internet.
Oh, like those truckers.
Small fringe minority holding unacceptable So if you don't agree with the state, you're like, oh, we'll protest.
Oh, I'm afraid it's an emergency.
Comply.
And this is bureaucratic power at the level of the state that's bypassing democracy, now interconnecting with big tech power, which, as you know, is moving towards surveillance and social credit scoring.
It's just a matter of time until they could just fade down your economic in a bit.
You are a non-person.
You've got no money.
You can't vote.
You can't travel.
Do you not see this is where this is heading?
Do you genuinely think they care about rainbows and stuff?
Hey, come on, help the key... Well, hold on a minute.
Remember we cared about nurses last week?
Did we care about the nurses this week?
No, we're firing them all.
Remember you cared about key workers and lorry drivers and... No, we don't care about truck drivers anymore.
Oh, wow, it's almost like you've got no principles other than the principle to maintain power and to control information.
Oh, I'm sorry it looks like that.
You can't run and you can't hide and you must comply.
A state of emergency normally gives governments extraordinary powers and suspends normal laws and regulation in order to preserve lives and property, something that has thus far been used in case of war or natural disaster, i.e.
those events affecting a country's physical security, economy, etc.
But now the 27 EU countries will be able to do the same in imposing extraordinary control on all key public-facing elements of the web, social platforms, search engines and e-commerce sites.
What they're doing are taking measures that they trialed during the pandemic and applying it to the internet.
They're mapping the concept of emergency onto management of information.
Many people said, hey what if this pandemic and the subsequent measures are a kind of trial run?
Yes, it looks like it was, and in ways that are sort of difficult to preempt actually, because they're applying it to a sort of cyber realm now.
But it's plainly about control.
I'm a person that's always in the past believed that the function of the state was to protect the people potentially
from commercial and corporate interests becoming too gargantuan
and out of control as well as obviously protecting us, the people, from foreign
invasions, war and stuff.
But now I think that the state does not do that and cannot do that and will not do that and I don't think of
myself as like, well, it should be all private economies and free market.
I don't think that because I think that's out of control and mental and greedy.
But this stuff, this is the beginning of the end right here in legislative form.
Daphne Keller of Stanford's Cyber Policy Center has been quoted as telling Wired,
It looks like the war in Ukraine created a political opportunity for advocates of tighter restrictions to push
their agenda.
That's pretty normal politics, if bad law. People have always said, what?
What happens is, is there's a crisis, then the crisis is used to present a solution, then the solution permits legislational regulation, which then enhances the power of centralised authority.
They're right!
That's happening whether it's a pandemic or this war.
They're being used to usher in new legislation and regulation that normalises control.
It's of interest to note that big tech has been playing along pretty well so far, making this latest legislative push somewhat unclear.
Both during the Covid and Ukraine war events, these large corporations have been heeding political messages and catering to political needs, basically to a fault.
Reports suggest now that the bureaucrats in Brussels may just want to make their job simpler.
Instead of having to go to the sanctions regime and relying on big tech to obey, like they did when they blocked Russian media outlets like RT and Sputnik, they will now have a whole new law that enforces all this in one fell swoop.
So instead of politely asking that RT be shut down, which Rumble refused to do and they are now banned in France as a consequence, you know Rumble's where most of my content is now because of free speech, is precisely because what was once a request is now becoming an order.
All of this politeness, all of this kindness, all of this compassion, all this apparent care and concern for vulnerable people appears actually to be a way of crowbarring new legislation in which will serve the powerful.
This is happening as big tech, both from the West, like Google, Facebook and Amazon, and from the East, like TikTok, are yet to make any comment.
And now it's up to EU member countries to approve the law and allow the crisis mechanism to kick into gear.
It gives us an interesting perspective, doesn't it, on the recent TikTok congressional hearings in the United States.
Perhaps the real problem with TikTok is it's a company that's outside of the anglophonic axis or the European tradition and therefore potentially beyond the legislative power of bureaucracies like the EU and the United States and northern American countries like Canada.
Perhaps the fact that TikTok exists outside of that remit that makes it a problem.
If even Elon Musk, with his buccaneer attitude to rules and regulations, with his appetite for free speech, recognises that what the EU is proposing is serious, then obviously what we're dealing with is a potentially existential threat.
I would regard this legislation as the beginning of the kind of globalist, centralising, authoritarian horror that we've been discussing mostly in terms of a somewhat Distant threat.
This is the legislation that brings a globalist mechanic even closer into fruition.
It makes free speech harder.
It makes opposing power harder.
It makes new alliances more difficult.
I don't see the opportunity to oppose it electorally.
Anywhere!
So, Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, instead of fighting one another, should probably unite.
But if neither of those men have the power to oppose these kind of institutions, then it's down to us, individually and collectively, to demand the free speech of those we disagree with.
Only then, do we have a chance of confronting this new, racketeering, bureaucratic mob.
But that's just what I think!
Until next time, stay free!
Many switches, switch on, switch off.
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