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July 3, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:12:05
EXPOSING THE CENSORSHIP INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX | Part 2 - #159 - Stay Free With Russell Brand
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Time Text
I'm going to go ahead and get that. I'm going to go ahead and get that. I'm going to go
ahead and get that.
I'm going to go ahead and get that.
In this video, you're going to see the future.
We've got a live shot there.
Hello there, you Awakening Wonders.
Thanks for joining me.
If you're watching this on YouTube, we can only do the first 15 minutes here because we're diving even deeper into the censorship industrial complex and actually offering solutions.
Once we're off YouTube and exclusively on Rumble, the home of free speech, we're going to be talking about the Arbitrary distancing laws that were introduced and how many of the lockdown decisions were political rather than scientific.
What happened to follow the science?
Well, it was lost because there was no conversation, because the discourse was shut down by the censorship industrial complex.
In my conversation with Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger, we began to discuss actual solutions.
How, together, through community, boldness, bravery, solutions that have been somewhat lost, press the red button and join our conversation in Locals, and let me know where you think those kind of values and ethics have gone.
We actually start to present and discuss solutions.
Plus, unbelievably, a surprise appearance from Tim Robbins!
Can you believe that?
Mr. Shawshank himself!
Cropping up in the holy name of free speech as well as Stella Assange making a heartbreaking plea for clemency and indeed justice for her husband Julian who's still in Belmarsh now.
Do not let Julian Assange become a martyr.
Let me know in the comments in the chat where you think this stuff is going.
See you in a minute.
The situation is now critical.
Things are being inverted and flipped.
We lose sight of the fact that we're all here for this very short period of time and then we're gone.
We don't want to be ruled by the police.
We don't want to be ruled by our military intelligence and security services.
They're not just watching a few people.
They're watching everything.
Most of you are probably aware that my husband, Julian, is on... He's in a very precarious position right now.
You might say, well, this is different to the censorship industrial complex, but it's not.
These are two sides of the same coin.
My sense is that something seismic happened at the point of Assange's revelations and arrests, and the legacy media became in some way simultaneously castrated and indoctrinated, unable anymore to alloy themselves to principled journalism of integrity.
There was a requirement to adopt a kind of aesthetic of cultural piety.
And when you say religion, as Nick Cave said, it sometimes feels like religion but stripped of forgiveness, redemption,
salvation, unity, aspiration, love, glory, beauty, service.
Yes.
And the way we undertake the content that we use on our channel is we make sure that either you or you have written
it and then we use that.
I don't know.
That's dangerous, man.
No, what we did... No, yeah, I've seen you two in Congress, you pair of so-called journalists.
How much exactly are you making from Twitter?
How much?
Let me see your bank account.
My time.
This is my time.
This is my time to shine.
It's like a real showbiz attitude from Debbie Wasserman Schultz there in a congressional hearing.
Extraordinary performance.
Admirable, in a way, that level of narcissism for those of us that have flirted with it previously.
I have brilliant people that work with me, like my creative partner Gareth, who is the
first person to turn me on to your work and your work ensures that what we do, you know
you have to sort of dance a legal tango to ensure that you're not publishing information
that hasn't been published elsewhere.
And the fact is that within our small team, there are people with quite strongly opposing views on Issues that define our conversation, not something like the ability to communicate freely in good faith.
I think most of us believe in the absolute necessity for that, as you indicated in your rather statesmanly opening speech.
It's perhaps one of the crucibles of a necessary value system for true democracy, you could argue.
So I'm lucky that I work with Gareth, Roy and Leon and people that put a lot of effort and work into ensuring that there is rigorous journalism in the source material and in our presentation of it.
And I do feel...
Because also, obviously, my background is in entertainment, and I am a comedian, and I want to muck around and have fun.
And comedy, as well, requires good faith, and that we know that we're not trying to hurt one another.
That's a sort of a requirement of it.
There needs to be a consensus that we're playing, and that we love one another, and no one's trying to hurt anyone.
You know, and errors, of course, happen.
Oh, thanks, yeah.
I'll accept.
That's a smattering of applause.
But Russell, can I ask you a question?
Oh yeah, this is taking a turn, isn't it?
Finally!
Outside all these years of experience and journalistic integrity, I just find out what I reckon on hunches.
I mean, I'm curious if you have been censored or warned or given a strike by YouTube.
I think, I don't know if people have seen, but YouTube appears to be engaged in a new wave of crackdowns.
We've seen some conservative voices, you know, Jordan Peterson, I think Daily Wire is being demonetized.
And then I'm a huge fan of this British doctor, I think, John Campbell.
Do you guys?
He's lovely.
Love that guy.
And I think I watched him with Norman Fenton, who is someone that we also love, yeah.
My colleague, Alex Gutentag, who's a genius on the COVID issue, introduced me to it.
And I can't understand.
I'm not a good person at math, but he explained the statistics of it.
But they did a whole YouTube, and he had to be very careful in how they talked about the efficacy of the vaccine.
And I was curious, have you been censored?
Has it changed how you do your approach?
Do you do some things on Rumble that you don't do on YouTube?
Well, absolutely we must because the advantage of Rumble is that they have made an absolute commitment to content creators not to censor.
The assumption that this commitment is afforded only to facilitate hate speech is precisely the kind of sociopathic framing that has been touched upon already.
The idea that you would only use free speech to hate people.
Of course, finding myself in new territory with new alliances has been at times confusing
for me.
But I have found very helpful the analysis offered in Martin Guri's book, which I think you turned us on to,
who is a former CIA analyst, to recognize that the diagnostic tools we were using
were no longer appropriate, and even our vocabulary had to shift.
And this is all from, as best I understand it, not from an ideological perspective,
but from the perspective of a data analyst.
He says you can no longer use the terms left and right.
You have to think of power dynamics in terms of the center and the periphery.
There are centralized authoritarian forces within media and within government,
and then there are peripheral voices that are advocating for values
that transcend the traditional affiliations that we have with left-wing and right-wing thinking.
But as Matt already outlined, there's been this peculiar inversion of those values anyway.
The idea that free speech would become a bastion of, let's call it, the right is sort of surprising, and that pro-war rhetoric and not being patriotic would be tropes that you would see emerge out of the left, where questioning the necessity for violence seems to be a moral position transcendent of any potential party-political affiliation.
That's a deep moral choice.
So the way we make our decisions is that we I estimate that we can be entirely open on Rumble, and on YouTube we have to skip like Nijinsky around minefields and pitfalls, which has created this system of entendre and innuendo, but also a kind of intimacy with our audience who know.
Because the reason that Martin Goury offered this analysis is because he said technology has changed, the ability to communicate has changed, Centralized authoritarian structures recognize they cannot control the population in the same way that they used to be able to because there are no longer the gatekeeper relationships with either state or privately funded media outlets that will more or less toe the line, other than rare instances where their interests don't converge.
And as we have been taught by George Carlin, where interests converge, there is no need for conspiracy.
And on this subject of conspiracy, I would like to ask you, Now that so many of the ideas that have left the realm of conspiracy to become verified fact, how can this continue to be used as a smear?
And do you both, as credible journalists, that are well-educated, that have done things like...
Lived in Iraq and stuff during wars and proper hardcore journalism, flak jacket journalism, ducking as a bomb goes off in the background journalism, the sort of thing that used to be credible and admired.
How do you cope with having such a sort of slanderous term daubed across your door, along with letters from the IRS, I understand?
Yeah, it's weird.
I mean, you know, my own personal journey started to take a really dark turn when the Trump-Russia story started to happen.
And I had lived in Russia for a long time, so I got a lot of phone calls from colleagues and wanted to know what I thought about it.
I didn't really say anything that hardcore at first.
I just said, well, we should, you know, given what happened with WMDs, we should probably wait to see what the evidence is before, you know, we make any conclusions about this.
And suddenly, you know, old friends stopped calling me.
And before I knew it, I was out of the business.
And That was weird enough.
The weirder thing, though, is when, you know, I turned out to be right about this, people hated me even more.
And, you know, when the Twitter files happened, it wasn't just, I mean, I knew going into it, I think we all knew that No matter what we found that it was not going to be covered by NBC, CBS, CNN, The New York Times, Washington Post, no matter what the content was, they weren't going to take that stuff and really digest it and do anything with it.
In the old days of journalism, you would always, when you did an important story,
you were kind of always hoping the cavalry would come afterwards and that the story
would get moved forward.
We knew that wasn't gonna happen, right?
But what I didn't expect was the level of vitriol and hatred, which was like sincere.
Like, people were really, really angry that we were just putting emails out on the Internet.
And, you know, there was information that I thought was in the public interest, clearly.
I mean, it seemed like the public would want to know that the FBI and The Department of Homeland Security and what they call other government agencies, you know, the CIA maybe, is meeting on a weekly or monthly basis with
20 or 30 of the biggest tech companies in America.
That seems like relevant information.
Why wouldn't you want to know that?
But they weren't just indifferent, they were angry.
And that is new.
And I think that's why I was trying to talk about the psychological aspect of this, because they successfully constructed a kind of A news consumer who only feels sort of, you know, enthusiasm for the cause and then total disgust.
Like, they're the only emotions that people feel.
And that can be very dispiriting to deal with, you know?
I mean, it does, even after the Twitter files, you know, we thought we might make some headway a little bit there with some of those stories, but it really didn't, you know, make much of a dent with traditional media and I don't know I mean what do you I was
gonna say the response was it's not censorship and there should be a lot
more of it right yeah exactly you know that was I mean that was in front of
Congress it was I mean you we just had you know sorry to say Democrats who
were like we need more censorship basically
I mean, they couldn't quite, I think part of the anger was they couldn't quite say we want more censorship.
And that was part of the thing is that like, because at first when, if you start to use, I mean, this is the other thing that Orwell teaches us is that words are so powerful and that when, it's like, we're just fighting disinformation.
Like, how could you be against fighting lies?
Um, and and then you're like, well, isn't disinformation just like another word for like things you disagree with?
And, you know, that was when it was like, I think that I think they realized that they were in that situation and and then externalize their anger at us about it.
Just really quickly, there were there were other things about the Twitter files to the, you know, I thought were People were coming at us with this legalistic argument.
Oh, well, that's not technically a First Amendment violation, so this story's bogus.
Well, okay, fine, but...
Why don't you care that the FBI is sending emails to Twitter about somebody in Arizona who's got eight followers and is making a joke, basically, like that?
And I thought that was a significant piece of news, because what does it tell you?
They're watching everything, right?
They're not just watching a few people.
They're watching who's making likes to what accounts.
You know, these very, very small accounts were on lists that were sent in by all kinds of different federal agencies.
And that, even that in alone sends a signal to people that they have to be conscious of this stuff all the time.
And that by itself is...
It's counter to the values of a free society.
It makes it hard to do things like just sit and enjoy a book because you don't feel alone when you're doing it, you know?
But nobody wanted to hear it.
It's curious how many times the template that appears to be described involves the reversal of a type of charge, that things are being inverted and flipped curiously.
Perhaps it is significant that in this technology, backed by the right ideology and the correct values, we now actually have the potential for unprecedented levels of cooperation, democracy, autonomy, decentralized leadership, discourse, debate, almost as if the tools of for an entirely different social, economic, and political model have been created.
And it has become necessary to colonize in the way that imperialistic powers have always colonized new territories under the guise of benevolence.
You wouldn't know what to do with those diamonds.
You'll hurt yourself with that oil.
Put that down.
We'll organize where you put your borders.
This was in the good old days when the British ran the empire.
Perhaps it is no different than that.
A new territory has been emerged.
The territory is neutral.
It lacks a moral charge.
It requires a moral charge and that will be designated by and determined by the powerful.
Sometimes I wonder when I'm listening to you describe this These terrifying emergent phenomena, if it's as simple as the way that the economic model is shifting, with mainstream media outlets now bundling and dispatching data with more profligacy than even porn sites, I gather.
This is just academic research, Matt, you understand.
And of course, the fact that their advertising models have collapsed as independent media now has a greater access and ability to promote goods and services more effectively than their rather clumsy, centralized, behemoth models.
We're going to take some questions from the audience.
If you have a question, Please raise your hand.
Although we have been chatting to the star of everyone in the world's favorite movie, the Shawshank Redemption, Mr. Tim Robbins with a question.
A round of applause for the great Tim Robbins!
APPLAUSE Can we have that mic?
Thank you.
Well, I wonder what all of you feel about the way forward.
As far as communicating with people that perhaps felt a different way in the past three years, and how do we reach out to these people in a healthy way to start a communication again in such a tribal environment?
Go ahead, Matt.
Solutions.
That's tough.
Russell?
All right, then.
Well, what I'm planning to do is to continue to be open-hearted and loving and faithful in the conversations I have with other people, particularly people that I disagree with.
I suppose this is a unique opportunity, a divisive time that seems to be defined by conflagration, conflict and opposition, and yet, as we touched upon, In the earlier part of our conversation, the facility for an entirely different society already exists.
Sometimes I think what's required is a gratitude for the institutions that we have been imbued with.
Now we have the facility for great media, we have the institutions for wonderful health, we have incredible technological and scientific advancement.
And even in the opposition that we have with others, we have to, I suppose, if we're approaching things in good faith, assume that people we disagree with have comparable values and principles to us.
I suppose that, in particular, my worldview is undergirded by spiritual principles, and I don't mean that in a deracinated, woo-woo way.
I mean that kindness, service, a willingness to forgive and be forgiven seem to me to be an absolute Necessity, if we're going to progress.
It's more than that, though.
It's more that it's morally correct to be forgiving and loving to other people.
It's that it is a necessity of the necessary victory, in order that we do not yield to centralized authoritarianism.
Of course, for me, it seems like that's where this is going.
It seems that it's almost like you can see the shapes forming of, hold on a minute, the American government are using taxpayer dollars to acquire private data of its citizens from private companies in order to bypass its own legislation.
The military-industrial complex appears to require forever wars in order to underwrite its economic model.
We're going to find ourselves literally somewhere between the twin dystopias of those great literary prophets, Orwell and Huxley, and already the name has been evoked, of course, of Orwell by Matt Taibbi.
Of course, though, Michael Schellenberger's references are usually the Bourne identity, and he's going to give a ten-minute speech in a minute based on part two of John Wick.
So I think good faith, good humour, good grace, and a willingness to acknowledge that we've all made mistakes.
How are we going to get anywhere together?
Or what are you going to do?
You're the one who's clearly going to try and become a politician any minute.
Yeah, I mean, there's obviously something like is broken, you know, with us with the internet.
I mean, there's the treatment of each other on Twitter.
We lose sight of the fact that, you know, we're all here for this very short period of time, and then we're gone.
And we lose that we're losing that humanity.
And I think we're also losing that sense in which we don't want to be ruled by the police.
We don't want to be ruled by our military intelligence and security services.
I think that most of the people in those agencies don't want to do it either.
They don't want that responsibility.
The best people want to be of service.
I guess the last thing I would just say is, I mean, this whole thing came because I was feeling really drawn to London right now.
And particularly earlier this year, there's so many people here who I admire.
And Francis, who gets up here, does this incredible podcast that's very...
psychologically rich and very humanistic and I knew I wanted to come but I didn't have any reason to come until we figured out that there was the censorship industrial complex and then when we put out the call to come and we see people that we know We see their faces and so there's something that's been missing and then you feel like you you're coming back to it when you're together.
So I hope that I thought that during the pandemic that there would be this moment when we would have sort of the pandemic is over day.
You know where it'd be like, it's, you know, September 1st and the pandemic is over and everyone burned their masks, you know, you know, in mass and that never happened.
And and it feels like everybody wants to get back together and they want to travel and they want to be together.
So I hope this is the beginning of a series of international in-person gatherings of people
that love freedom and that love community, because I think we really all, I know I need
it and I think that other people really need it too.
Yeah, all I would say is I remember, I've told this story before, but I remember in
August of 2016, the New York Times came out with an article that was called, Trump is
testing the norms of objectivity in journalism.
And it was a column by a guy named Jim Rutenberg.
And basically the premise of it was that journalists no longer needed to worry just about being true, but had to worry about being true to history's judgment.
And what I think they meant by that basically was the old version of what we do for a living, which was we just gather facts and give them to you and trust you to do the right thing with that information.
That doesn't work anymore because we don't trust you.
So we are going to shape the information in such a way that you do the right thing with it.
And I think this is just deeply off-putting and Inevitably unsuccessful.
And I think the only thing that you can do if you're in media, for instance, is to continue to invest in that relationship with your audience and say, I do trust you.
Whatever I see, I'll pass it along to you.
And I don't need you to behave one way or the other.
I don't need you to draw one conclusion or another.
And I think people can sense that, what's a genuine attempt to connect versus what's didactic and directional and ordering and using techniques of fear to try to manipulate.
I think those things are inherently unpopular.
They will fail.
And when we see it in the way that the ratings are going in the States, a new thing will come up.
You just have to stick with it.
And eventually, I think, you know, this thing, it just doesn't have an ability to appeal to people organically, I think.
Yeah, that's a fascinating take.
I've been very encouraged by how often during this conversation we've returned to a subject matter that feels interpersonal and emotional, that it's not entirely about cybernetics and networked power and the way that machines integrate and interact with one another.
It's encouraging to deal with it on an emotional level.
It occurred to me then when dealing with that sort of great chimera and weathervane that is Donald Trump that with both of the recent, two recent examples of whistleblowing have demonstrated again One example of whistleblowing and another the story around the classified documents that Trump has in his possession.
And the other story that I'm referring to is a young buddy boy, Texera, I call him, the lad that did the Pentagon Papers that revealed that there was an entirely different perspective on the Ukraine war within American military circles than was being conveyed through
media and the stories around the Narrativization around the story was all about the
individual and the morality and virtues of the individual and similarly with Trump who?
Obviously is a much more divisive figure. No one is talking about what the
Censored material is and there's at least one article by a Branko
Marketage based on fairly reliable sources I understand they indicate that the plans for a war with Iran
Is some of the censored information and it's like we've become unable to
identify What information is important?
And also the idea that people want to be subject to censorship.
That should be censored.
Don't tell me that information.
In the post-Assange, post-Snowden world, you can't take on good faith that what's being censored is for your own good.
You can't have that perspective anymore.
We've been stripped of that.
And I think I find your sort of easy neutrality coupled with what appears to be virtue encouraging.
Not governed by bombast and zeal and evangelism, which I rather like myself.
But a kind of, well, no, these are the facts, here's the information.
I'm enjoying the various ways that it's being sketched out.
Do we have another question?
Yes, there's a human female, I believe, over here in that area.
And here's a gentleman offering you a microphone, mate.
You can say your name if you want, unless you were also in Shawshank Redemption, in which case we'll work that out.
No, I was not.
Hi, thanks, this is fantastic.
My name is Jennifer Ewing.
I have a question for Michael, actually.
I know you ran for governor in Nuisance Recall, I did vote for you, and I was wondering how much You experienced during that time of whether it's this, you know, the censorship industrial complex or any sort of forces of people being kept away from each other.
I look at this room and we all seem to kind of come from different places, different political backgrounds.
But one thing I've noticed in this country, where I've lived for 20 years, as well as when I go back to California, is kind of the old school liberals getting together with some of us on the center right, shall we say, And saying, OK, let's forget these pet issues because we're not going to have a country or countries unless we get the basics right.
Obviously, free speech, free movement of money, civil liberties, all of that.
How much did you experience when you were running for governor?
And do you have any hope for California going forward, seeing as that, you know, the statement
as goes California, so goes the rest of the nation?
One thing that one benefit for running for political office is that you are supposed
to have somewhat more protection of your speech.
And so I'm not a fan of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.' 's position on vaccines or his position on nuclear power.
But I admire him actually responding to the call and speaking out for freedom of speech, and I'm disturbed that he's having his videos taken down from YouTube.
This is, I mean, a very significant form of censorship, and I'm troubled by it.
I'm very troubled by my adopted state of California.
I mean, we had a woman on the streets.
She was suffering from schizophrenia.
Addicted to fentanyl and meth.
They would not take her off the streets.
The lower parts of her legs rotted.
They took her to the hospital.
They amputated her legs and they put her back on the streets.
I don't understand how anybody can think of that as the humane, compassionate thing to do.
We're letting ideology overtake just basic human response and You know, those of us that have been in recovery or are in recovery and understand that all addiction requires a form of intervention.
And so, yeah, for me, I think California requires an intervention.
You know, we need to stand up and say this is not, this is at some fundamental level not right when you're not intervening in the lives of people who are destroying themselves in the downtown of your cities and you're destroying your cities.
You know, businesses are now fleeing San Francisco, Westfield Mall.
Nordstrom's leaving San Francisco.
So I'm sorry.
I don't have a more positive thing to say about it.
I think that when my book San Francisco came out in 2021, people were like, that's really rude.
I can't believe you would say that.
And now I think a new study came out today that shows that it's like of 170 cities in the country, San Francisco is considered the worst managed.
Not like you needed a survey to show it.
So I'm afraid I don't have a lot of optimism about it.
I think that reform may need to be reversed and that reform may need to start in the East and sweep West rather than the other way around.
It seems to me likely, possible, perhaps even necessary, that independent media will, by virtue of the role it will play in this issue among others, become politicized.
In fact, it already is and will necessarily become activated and organized in ways that I think are becoming clear and in fact that you're perhaps expediating through your actions and through your foresight in holding this event.
I saw some hands... Oh no, Stella Assange is in!
in which case please ladies and gentlemen how about a round of applause for Stella Assange
I'd like to thank you guys for making me nervous again Because I speak all the time, but for some reason right now, probably because you guys are on stage, I'm really nervous to speak.
But anyway, as you... Would you feel more comfortable coming up here and join me?
Yeah, probably.
APPLAUSE You can have that seat and I'll sit over here looking sort
of all vaguely prophetic.
Okay.
Hi.
I'm genuinely nervous.
This is strange.
Okay.
Most of you are probably aware that my husband Julien is in a very precarious position right now.
This High Court of England has made the completely inexplicable decision to not even allow him to appeal to the High Court.
He made an application to appeal in September last year, and it took a single judge ten months to issue a three-page decision, which, without engaging in any of the arguments, said that Julian is not allowed to appeal.
He still has one final opportunity to go to two different high court judges, but the situation is now critical.
You might say, well, this is different to the censorship industrial complex, but it's not.
These are two sides of the same coin.
Whereas all of you have experienced and seen the censorship that occurs on social media, this kind of unseen You know, effect kind of turns you a bit paranoid.
Am I paranoid?
Is it really happening?
We now know, thanks to you guys, that we have the evidence that it was happening and is happening and how it's happening.
But in Julian's case, this is the overt side of censorship.
This is a publisher, someone who received information from a source, Chelsea Manning, who was a U.S.
soldier in Iraq, posted in Iraq.
An intelligence analyst who witnessed, who was reading reports showing information about civilian killings, and there are tens of thousands of civilian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan, evidence of war crimes, including a video that was released, collateral murder in 2010, showing how a helicopter gunship mowed down civilians, literally picking them off.
Including two journalists and critically injured two children.
And mowed down the rescue vehicle who came to try to bring one of the dying journalists to a hospital and killed them all as well, except the two children survived because their father threw his body on top of them and they were severely injured, but they survived.
Collateral murder.
It's age-restricted on YouTube because it might hurt your sensibilities to witness a war crime.
Well, Julian and WikiLeaks put that into the public domain.
And the record of tens of thousands of civilian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan and evidence of torture and evidence of how the U.S.
government was using its embassies to inhibit and derail the investigations in Germany and Spain and Italy of CIA renditions to stop the people who were responsible for being brought to trial for having their day in court because it is an enforcement of impunity.
And the case against Julian is of impunity against accountability.
And the fact is that Julian is in prison because he published the truth.
Because he exposed the criminality of the country that is trying to extradite him.
And that country also plotted to assassinate him when Pompeo was head of the CIA.
How can this country, the UK, possibly extradite him to the United States?
The country that plotted his assassination, the country that he exposed committing war crimes for whom no one has been held accountable.
There has been a campaign of smearing Julian for years in order to pave the way to his incarceration.
Julian is a Symbol.
He's a deterrent.
He's a message to every journalist to not publish the truth.
To not publish the truth if it angers sufficiently powerful people, because they'll come after you.
That is the message, but that's also the message to all of you.
That's the general message that has been sent out and we have to push back.
We have to regain our rights.
It's not something about going back to, you know, like hoping for a pre-COVID war or pre-war on terror existence.
We have to fight back.
We have to organize because the other side is organized and they're abusing Legislation, they're abusing the complacency of the public in order to get their way.
Please follow Julian's case.
Like, get engaged.
It's critical now.
We're at the endgame.
He could be extradited.
He's facing 170 years, 175 years in the U.S.
under the Espionage Act.
There's no public interest defense.
He can't say why he published what he published.
He can't say that it was war crimes, that the U.S.
government was responsible, etc.
He has no defense.
Defense, the last defense, is decent people around the world, here in the United
States, defending the truth.
On Saturday, there's a concrete thing you can do, which is to come here at one o'clock.
There's going to be a statue here in Parliament Square, there, somewhere, of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Julian, and there's an empty chair next to them.
They're standing on chairs, these statues, and there's an empty chair.
It's called Anything to Say.
You can stand up.
And say whatever you need to say.
We all need to speak out.
We need to use our speech, because our speech is the only thing that can shape the world we live in.
Because otherwise, other people will occupy that space or try to silence us.
So, anyway, thank you for your attention.
Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
First of all, I want to thank Stella for everything that she said.
Just a couple of things.
Number one, the behavior of the U.S.
media in ignoring this story.
Especially over the last five years is just totally inexcusable.
It's one of the things that turned me off to quote-unquote mainstream media is their inability to recognize not only the cruelty of what's going on, but the The significance of Jillian's case for the future of journalism, it shows their total myopia and blindness.
And it's just, it's horrible.
A couple other things, though.
Daniel Ellsberg just passed.
And, you know, we should, this is the sort of analogous figure from the 70s.
Once, much celebrated by, quote-unquote, sort of liberal America, in fact, they very recently made a hagiographic movie, The Post, celebrating the heroism of The Washington Post in bringing the Pentagon Papers out and defying the government that would censor it.
That's sort of the cover story.
The reality is something we found in the Twitter files.
There was an episode that we discovered where A number of journalists got together.
This was connected to the tabletop exercise that Michael talked about.
Stanford University academics, members of the US government, for a year preceding that exercise, planned to overturn what they called the Pentagon Papers principle.
They wanted to change this idea that journalism was about bringing dangerous truths to the public.
They believed that they wanted to reverse that whole concept, that journalism was actually about protecting the public from things that it didn't need to know.
And so we see this dramatic shift in values Where even the Washington Post, which again was taking credit for the Pentagon Papers as it was doing this, so they're about to try to send Julian Assange to jail for 170 years.
for 170 years, is that how much it is? 175?
And at the same time, they want to turn journalism into this thing that is about keeping people
from knowing what the truth is.
And that's, it's completely backwards, and I can't be condemned enough, I don't think.
Thank you.
No, we can do one more.
I'm getting told that we can do one more question.
Sure.
Do you want to add anything to what Matt said regarding Stella and Julian?
Just that I'm totally moved by the case and I have a lot more learning to do and I look forward to getting educated and speaking out on it.
Stella, I'm very grateful to you for bringing that spirit to our conversation.
And he's very fortunate to have you as an advocate and an ally.
And we are fortunate to be reminded that this is not a hypothetical conversation about a foreboding and potential problem.
It is a tide that has already risen and claimed some territory has already been yielded and seeded and it is I'm very grateful to you for explaining that so articulately and with such evident and obvious emotion as a campaigner and as a lawyer but also as a wife and as a mother.
Thank you very much for bringing that.
Thank you.
Maybe we could get someone from Britain?
Oh yeah!
I love Americans, don't get me wrong.
Though you are censoring.
We kind of take over a little bit.
Prove your Britishness by being awkward, bashful, asking a long, tangential, and confusing question.
Yes, you sir.
Like he was plainly stood up, that geezer.
We'll get a mic for you, hold on a second.
They are English because they're fucking awkward, I'll tell you.
I'm an independent broadcaster.
I run a show called The Pandemic Podcast and I've seen first-hand the implication of censorship.
We had our channel cut down from YouTube after 5 million views.
We've had endless suppression on Facebook and Twitter.
But I'm not alone.
We've seen the beacon of truth that is illustrated by Julian Assange as a permanent reminder of the heights that we may not reach to, but now we even have a bar within these technological platforms that we know we cannot cross, so we dance and we walk the line, or we go to a desexualized platform, Odyssey, Rumble, which offer us the opportunity to speak our truth, but to a smaller audience who perhaps are where we're preaching to the converted or the choir already.
So how then do we tackle The likes of Facebook and YouTube and these other mainstream platforms without another moneybags who's free spirit to come and buy up all these channels.
How do we fight back because there are thousands of broadcasters around the world right now
who are unable to speak the truth because the line has been set and we can only dance
around it or go to another platform where we can't reach the matters who need to hear
this information.
That's a huge question and I'll attempt an offer some way forward but honestly that's
part of the why we're here is to figure out some answers.
I mean the first part starts with your passion, sir.
We need it.
We need some fight in us to go after this issue.
I think the other issue the other thing is that we We have to fight back.
We have to fight back.
We have to be on every platform.
There's censorship on every platform, including Twitter.
And we can debate how much of that is the fault of its current owner, how much of it he can control, how much of it he can't control.
You may have seen that Elon Musk was just in Europe this week and basically made the same agreement that he did with Turkey.
My own view is that governments should mandate the owners of all the social media platforms to be transparent about their censorship decisions and give the right of response.
Our own laws make it very difficult to require a social media platform to carry particular forms of speech, because compelled speech is considered a violation of the First Amendment.
That may be different in different countries, but I think it's going to be very hard to compel them to host different speech.
That means that you need multiple platforms.
When Facebook censored Seymour Hersh, We denounced it on Twitter, and we did see a response, a lessening, not an elimination, but a lessening of the censorship.
I'm personally being censored on Facebook right now.
To give you a sense of it, the story that Matt and I broke on the first three people to get COVID had 5 million views on Twitter, and even though I posted it on Facebook at the same time, it had only five people sharing it.
Not 5,000, not 5 million, five people.
So I think we have to be like water and just move to where we can move in this very dynamic environment.
I mean, I never thought I have the similar concern with rumble as anybody going there, but Russell's there now.
I think we're interested in going there now.
We need to be able to go to these places where we can find openings and opportunities.
But I also think we have to get out of this thing of like you were.
I think you were intimating of appealing to these powerful billionaires for mercy. We need
to demand that our governments require that they be transparent in their
censorship demands.
It's got to be a citizens movement because we can't just be appealing to
authority.
I would just quickly say two things. Don't suck and tell the truth and well
you know, will do well.
I mean, look at Russell's show, right?
I mean, it's killing other shows in the ratings because people enjoy it, because it's real, it's genuine.
You can't fake that.
You know, that's the problem that corporate media has right now.
They're losing audience, they're desperate, and they don't have a strategy for getting it back.
So just be real and you'll get audience.
That's important.
But even more importantly, I think, is the example of Julian Assange.
What they want to do with cases like Julian is prevent the next person from trying that, right?
That's the whole point of being as cruel and as heavy-handed as they are in that case, is the next person who gets collateral murder, they want them to think twice about publishing that video.
Don't think twice.
Do it, right?
Those things will always get attention.
And they will expose the, you know, the media that's not doing those stories as the frauds they are.
And I think it's just important to follow that sort of courageous example.
And, you know, independent media will always do fine.
It may not make a million dollars, you know, but it will do well.
It will require... Oh yeah, round of applause for Matt.
It says the require for a kind of personal moral fortitude that in the end becomes a
very personal choice.
You alluded briefly to recovery earlier, Michael, and because I live within a template of personal requirements where I have to observe my own tendency to want to control, My own tendency to be competitive or petty or trivial, I recognize I have a personal responsibility that I see other people tackling far more gracefully, even on this stage, an ability to be open-minded, an ability to be intrepid and investigative, and the contribution from Stella reminds us of the necessity for sacrifice.
The thing that I have continual recourse to that inspires me continually, actually, is that I marvel at the endeavor involved in creating these systems of control.
The shutting down of protest, the endless surveillance, the censorship, the legal tools that are deployed, the technological tools that are deployed, the willingness to overrule democracy, national sovereignty, to smear even the most truthful endeavors as being somehow mendacious Or duplicitous.
It also reminds me that there is a necessity to overtly, obviously, and plainly refute the claims that are often made, to be clear about inclusivity, to be absolutely open-hearted and loving towards people of all forms of identification, all forms of religious, cultural, national identification, have to be openly embraced.
There has to be As we saw there, when one man at least favoured another person's free speech above their own.
When we have recourse to simple, I call Sesame Street values, kindness, service, sweetness to one another, I feel then that we have a great power.
a great power that they wouldn't be working nearly so hard if they did not fear us.
And while we have in the figure of Julian Assange a potential martyr,
we don't have to allow that to be the case.
We have to bond and bind and be vocal together and willing to sacrifice
and willing to support the great work and bravery of journalists where we find them
and be forgiving of other people who don't have those values.
It's difficult to be outspoken. It's difficult to be brave.
Sure as hell it must be difficult to endure life without trial in Belmarsh
or the potential of 175 years without trial in a country he may yet be exiled to.
We must learn to recognize heroism when we see it.
We must be willing to forgive fallibility in ourselves and others.
We must recognize that we have a deep and powerful resource within us and it is available to all of us in this instant now.
Thank you all very much for your personal contributions.
Thank you for attending.
Michael, well done for putting all this into it.
APPLAUSE Well done, everyone.
Thank you very much.
Stay free, stay free, stay free!
Thanks for refusing Fox News' video.
No, he's the fucking news!
A former FDA commissioner revealed that social distancing laws were, and this is a quote,
arbitrary.
Meanwhile, a UK expert said politicians intervened to establish the concept of lockdowns.
So where's this science that we're supposed to be following when it's arbitrary and political?
Chris Whitty, who was the UK strategist and scientific expert whose guidance was followed during the lockdown period here in this country, has revealed that he would not have recommended lockdowns without political intervention.
Meanwhile, in the United States, a former FDA commissioner has said that social distancing rules were arbitrary.
So remember how that whole discourse was conducted.
Follow the science.
This is what's necessary.
You're not an expert.
You're not a doctor, are you?
That was the kind of rhetoric that was deployed throughout that period.
Isn't it interesting to see that dismantled and fall apart?
What is being revealed to us?
What is being revealed as the real agenda behind it?
I'm not interested in conspiracy theories.
That's not true.
I am actually interested in conspiracy theories.
I don't think this is a conspiracy theory.
I think what we are starting to be able to observe is either the conscious or unconscious biases of powerful interests and how they led to a set of measures and legislation that was either financially favorable to the corporate class or politically expedient to those already in government.
Let's unpack it now.
Scientists would not have proposed lockdowns without ministers suggesting them, the UK's most senior doctor said.
Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, told the COVID inquiry he would have been surprised if scientists had included national shutdowns as part of the planning for a pandemic.
It's interesting that lockdowns were a key component of the strategy when it wasn't derived from science.
Where did it come from then?
If scientists weren't proposing it, where did it come from?
We were all assumed that there was a reason, not an abstract reason, a scientific reason.
And this was the one I thought it was.
You can't go out because it will lead to the disease spreading more rapidly and killing more people.
Therefore, are you willing to compromise and stay in your house?
The answer of any sane person is yes, of course.
I don't want people to die as a result of my actions.
So yeah, I'm happy to stay indoors.
Well, that wasn't ever scientific.
So what was it then?
Let me know in the comments.
What could have been the idea if it wasn't derived from science?
If it doesn't come from science, I suppose we should be grateful that there is an inquiry.
Not suggested, requested.
be grateful that there is an inquiry. Sir Chris said planning for such an extraordinarily
major social intervention would not have occurred unless a minister had requested it. Not suggested,
requested. Ask for it. Sir Chris said that lockdowns were a leap of imagination. That's
not what you want in government, is it?
Okay, what are you doing now?
I'm just using my imagination to leap around.
You're not a poet.
It's not Lewis Carroll.
It's not Alice in Wonderland, is it?
It's not Herman Melville.
Wait a minute.
What should we do?
There's a national crisis.
Well, I'm going to go firstly into my imagination.
And once I'm in there, I'm going to start leaping and bounding like a poet rather than an administrator who's supposed to use taxpayer dollars or pounds in order to administrate favorably for the people that I was elected to serve.
That's what they're meant to be doing.
He's not leaping about in their imagination.
He also claimed that a lack of radical thinking had hindered the country's planning for the pandemic.
Of course what this pertains to is the idea that potentially lockdown in some ways may have caused more deaths than they prevented.
If not specifically related to the pandemic, then related to heart disease, people missing cancer treatments, people ending their own lives, the impact on mental health and addiction more broadly, diabetes, operations being missed, the list goes on and on and on.
It's not a leap He became the latest senior figure to admit that the UK had a longstanding bias in favour of influenza when it came to pandemic planning and admitted there should be a separate plan for other types of viruses.
So what's the other reason? Tell me in the comments.
As Jordan Peterson says, never assume malfeasance when ineptitude will do.
So perhaps these people that we're paying are just inept, rather than malfeasant, and didn't recognize that this is not influenza, it's not behaving like influenza, and measures that are required for influenza will not be successful in this instance.
But, given that we know it wasn't scientific anyway, what else could it have been?
Asked about some of the interventions used during the pandemic, Sir Chris said social measures such as quarantine and individual isolation were not new and some went back to the middle ages.
Could we maybe put leeches on their skin?
And maybe some of these people are witches.
So if they float, I think that means they are a witch.
And if they sink to the bottom, they wasn't a witch.
Wait a minute.
They're already dead.
Ah, never mind.
Let's just do that anyway.
You can't say that something was scientific and followed the science when the ideas come from the medieval days when people didn't even understand stuff like germs and Atoms!
We're following the science.
What science?
Well, this is my lucky chicken.
And this stick I use to determine whether or not there's evil demons and stuff.
Oh, that sounds pretty scientific.
I know!
It's my favorite one of my lucky demon sticks.
However, he said that lockdown had not been considered in advance and that scientific committees would rarely plan for such extreme measures unless asked to by a minister.
So what many people thought is that political objectives were being masked under the orthodoxy of science and that the science itself was particular sets of scientific data utilized in order to undergird political thinking.
That some information was included, some information was rejected.
So it was unfair and and disingenuous even to use the word science to describe
something that was plainly a political agenda. That's the theory that I'm offering you, or
hypothesis to be more accurate. The very big new idea was the idea of lockdown. I'm talking here very,
very specifically about the state saying people have to go home and stay home except under
very limited circumstances.
A very radical thing to do, he said.
So Chris Wheat, he's sort of not circling back on that because he said he didn't think it was a good idea in the first place.
What it seemed to me, just as a, like you, a person that was just affected by the pandemic and the subsequent measures, was China, as a very authoritarian, centralised state, tyrannical country, were able to use a lot of stand in your house, like, you know, get out of Tiananmen Square otherwise we're going to run you over type stuff.
And we went, oh, should we do that then?
But we're not Men are be like that, aren't we?
Aren't we always claiming freedom, liberty?
We're going to war with that country.
Why?
Well, they're like liberty and freedom and we love it, as you know.
So when we see other people not doing it, we kill them.
Particularly if they've got, I don't know, oil over there or if we could sell some weapons off the back of it.
But the main thing always has been liberty and freedom.
People have the first opportunity to bang people up in their houses when it's not scientifically necessary and there's no evidence to suggest it's something you should do and the ideas come from the Middle Ages.
Starts to challenge the whole model, doesn't it?
I would have thought it would be very surprising without this being requested by a senior politician or similar that a scientific committee would venture in between emergencies into that kind of extraordinarily major social intervention with huge economic and social impact ramifications.
That's the dude that was in charge of the science now saying something that six months ago would have basically made you Joe Rogan's schizophrenic cousin.
High on horse paste.
So let's say again, it would be very surprising, without being requested by a senior politician, so someone basically like the leader of a country, a president or a prime minister, the scientific committee, right, that means people that are just interested in data, would venture in between emergencies into that kind of extraordinarily major social intervention with huge economic and social impact ramifications.
The very things that we were talking about.
Go back and have a look.
Go check the date.
Go check our YouTube videos from that exact time and see what we're saying.
It's very difficult for the committees to go beyond a certain level unless they are asked to do so externally.
So they don't even have the authority or power.
So what was always framed as scientific was always, in fact, political.
Now, you have to ask yourself, what forces do you think determine political outcomes?
Ask yourself some questions about this.
How are political parties funded?
Where do they get their money from?
Is there such a thing as lobbying?
Who benefits from this?
So Chris was asked about written evidence from Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, as to whether there was focus on worst case scenarios.
He was the health minister at the time.
He was one of the people that was in charge.
A bit like our, not like our Fauci, but he was in a guiding, leading role during the period.
He said that lockdown would not have worked against many previous outbreaks or pandemics such as HIV, swine flu, plague and cholera, but was adopted around the world as countries struggled to stop COVID.
It was kind of like a mass panic and a mass hysteria and that's being kind about it because many of you will point out, won't you, in the comments that they've planned for events such as these.
Event 201, those things that happened in 2016 that gamed out this stuff.
You'll probably be interested in what happened in those scenarios.
Let's try our best to be kind and compassionate and say, well, everyone just sort of panicked and went into a hysteria.
But all the while that the rhetoric was around science, shouldn't we have been saying, well, is this working?
And is this effective?
And what's happening in countries where they're not doing it?
We should have used the data to reach conclusions that had the maximum benefit, risk-benefit mitigation strategies incorporated, and then regulate on that basis.
Comments?
The inquiry also heard from Sir Patrick Vallance, the former chief scientific officer, who said he regrets how long it took papers from SAGE, that was the body that was coordinating the response, to be made public.
Oh, are you surprised by how long it takes for information to be made public?
The real problem is Donald Trump and his little box of secrets, isn't it?
Whereas regularly information is kept back.
Why?
To protect us or could there be some other reason the information is kept back?
I think, in principle, the science advice, unless it's national security related, should become public, he said, adding, the advice took longer than it should to be published.
So now we know it's political, it's not scientific, and it was, if not censored, it was contained and kept back.
What does that start to suggest?
Professor Dame Sally Davis, who was Chief Medical Officer for England from 2011 to 2019, before Professor Sir Chris Wee, bloody hell, how many names has this guy got?
Professor, Sir, Your Highness, Chris Whitty.
Yes?
Do what we fucking tell you.
Told the COVID inquiry that lockdown damaged a generation of children.
People were saying that at the time, weren't they?
Are you exhausted?
Scientists from Johns Hopkins University and Lund University examined almost 20,000 studies on measures taken to protect populations against COVID across the world and said their findings showed that the draconian measures had a negligible impact on COVID mortality and were a policy failure of gigantic proportions.
But of course, the nature of the pandemic is it had an international impact.
There were many, many suggestions that were made and enforced, proposed, put forward aggressively, where people were shamed, shut down if they didn't toe the line.
Another one was social distancing, right?
Stand two meters back.
And again, if this is in order to save lives, if this is scientifically verifiable information that's come from scientists, then of course we're happy to obey, right?
Because human life is sacred and we're all here to protect each other.
That's the way we run the world, right?
In December 2021, one of former President Trump's commissioners of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, told CBS's Face the Nation, the six-foot social distancing rule created to slow the spread of the coronavirus was arbitrary and has decreased confidence in the pandemic response.
Yes, when you present something as science that is in fact arbitrary, that will decrease the authority of the people that make those suggestions.
If you say, do not stand any closer than six feet, that's scientifically because of the vapor you see and the spores, what they do.
Let me show you a diagram here.
The spores will go from here and then just go, I made it up!
That's what arbitrary means!
They made it up!
It was just made up!
That will decrease people's trust in the authorities.
The six-foot rule, Gottlieb said, was a compromise between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which had recommended 10 feet, and an unnamed political appointee in the Trump administration who called 10 feet inoperable.
10 feet?
That's too far.
Nobody can do 10 feet.
How about Six!
Yeah, I say six.
Both the ten-foot and six-foot recommendations were unfounded, Segaleep.
Even the ten was made up.
I reckon ten feet.
Why?
I don't know.
Ten.
Ten fingers, you know?
Ten original states.
Ten.
Who don't like ten out of tens?
Lists of ten.
Ten!
Yeah, but isn't this meant to be about science?
And show the lack of rigor in how the CDC made public health recommendations.
We're going to make these recommendations based on numbers that we pulled straight out of the air.
Here's one.
Six feet away.
What about 10?
No, that's inoperable.
Six.
What about 32 feet?
If I don't take 10, I'm not going to take 32.
How about four feet?
I don't like four.
Four's unlucky.
Six.
Should we vote on six?
What's the point in voting?
It doesn't do anything.
Hey, you can't say that.
Many people assume they're all traces to some old studies on the flu, which found droplets won't travel further than six feet, Gottlieb said.
Well, I got these old studies on the flu, and they say droplets don't travel further than six feet.
Okay, well that'll do, I suppose.
Oh, come on!
I like ten!
Ten!
Ten!
That film with Dudley Moore in it!
Ten!
The number, the Pele and Maradona war!
TEN!
The six-foot rule was probably the single costliest recommendation that the CDC made, Gottlieb said, because the whole thing feels arbitrary and not science-based, which lowers public confidence.
Well, in our country, we're locking people in their house for the same reason.
Feels like the sort of thing you might do.
Superstition!
Medieval laws!
Old science papers!
We were told this was science!
Oh, these people!
These people are idiots.
These various anti-vaxxers and these conspiracy theorists and nutjobs that are not respecting science of numbers that we've made up and measures that we've gleaned from the medieval times.
These idiots, these nutjobs, obviously ain't very patriotic and they deserve everything.
We should shame them!
We should shame them!
How dare you not believe in our hocus-pocus superstitions of made-up numbers!
So there you are!
As we continue to review the impact of the last three years, the general medical, psychological, ecological, economic impact of that time, we now have further evidence to suggest that the scientific experts did not have the authority that was claimed.
In fact, many of these decisions were political, some of them were arbitrary, some of them
were made up on the spot.
The very kind of things that were levelled at Canadian truckers and nurses who lost their
job because of refusing to take certain medications and people that were cynical and suspicious
and whole communities of minorities that are cherished when it's bloody convenient, they
were cast out as nut jobs and voodoo practitioners when in fact much of the science was simply
stuff that was convenient and made up.
The word arbitrary suggests that it was random, lucky.
But could there be another objective and agenda?
I'm not saying there is, because I like to base things on evidence and science.
That's the difference between us and them.
When we say science, we mean science.
When we say liars, we mean liars.
When we say corruption, we mean criminals.
When we say inquiry, we mean an inquiry that brings these people to the forefront in order that they may confront justice.
A justice derived from a set of values and principles that mean something.
Not just ways to establish dominion over people and to extract profit from the world's population when it's convenient.
But that's just what I think!
Until next time, stay free!
No.
Here's the fucking news!
It's our biggest week on Stay Free, exclusively on Rumble.
This week, RFK Jr., Jack Dorsey, and one guest that's so exciting I'm censoring myself here.
I scarcely dare say his name like some benevolent Voldemort.
I'm of course being joined by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I've come here today I will announce my candidacy for the Democratic nomination
for President of the United States.
I will announce my candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.
tweeting out his statement saying it's official.
He resigned as CEO.
We've got such an exciting guest coming up.
I wish I could tell you.
See if you can guess who it's gonna be.
No, don't guess, because then you'll give it away.
I'll give it away.
I'm so excited about this guest.
I won't text him.
Oh, them!
Oh, he's done it!
I knew it!
Look at it!
He's killed himself!
Uniquely, primarily and extra specially on Stay Free with Russell Brand live in studio, Tucker Carlson!
It's Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson is out at Fox News.
They're afraid.
They've given up persuasion.
They're resorting to force.
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