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July 14, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:06:15
So This Is WHY Movies Are SH*T Now?! With The Critical Drinker - #168 - Stay Free With Russell Brand
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I'm a black man and I could never be a better man on this land.
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I want to rule the world.
So I'm looking for the CEO.
I'm looking for the CEO.
In this video, you're going to see a video.
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Hello there you Awakening Wonders!
Thanks for joining me on Stay Free with Russell Brand.
I'm very excited about today's show.
For the first 15 minutes I'm going to be on YouTube and that's going to be relevant to you 6.5 million Awakening Wonders over there because you surely love the critical drinker.
A man who has analysed and critiqued contemporary cinema with a perspective that you're unlikely to see in the mainstream.
I think We are definitely stuck in a rut as a culture when it comes to just relying on the past.
As you say, the motivation behind these IPs and these franchise movies is no one's willing to take a risk.
What they lack with these modern characters that they try to do is that they're not willing to take that step of have them fail and be vulnerable and have flaws and weaknesses.
We're going to talk about Sound of Freedom.
Why is this movie causing so much controversy?
I'm also going to start referring to The Critical Drinker by his actual human name, and I'm going to ask you to remove them aviators.
Not yet!
Not while we're still on YouTube!
Stay free with Russell Brand.
See it first on Rumble.
It is The Critical Drinker.
Drinker, welcome to the show.
Thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me on, man.
I can't believe it.
I'm sandwiched right between Tucker Carlson and Ron DeSantis.
I've got a lot to live up to on this one.
You better come up with some pretty powerful right-wing ideology right now.
It better be sliding into your reviews somehow, if you can.
Otherwise, you simply will not fit in with the roster.
Thanks for joining us, mate.
Nah, it's a pleasure to be here.
Thanks for having me on, man.
One of your most recent videos that I enjoyed watching was your analysis and review of the latest Indiana Jones movie.
It seems you kind of reached a, in a sense, a zenith of your analysis in itself, or what Lynch might call the ducks Aye, the point within the point.
It seemed to me that what you were saying is that our culture is incapable of coming up with new and novel and innovative content, and it's kind of like a Tomb Raider dragging cadavers from the soil, reanimating them, and then not even respecting them.
Is that the essence of your perspective on sort of mainstream movie franchises, and what do you think that tells us more broadly, if indeed that is your perspective, Drinker?
I think that's wildly wrong, because that metaphor you just gave me would have at least been entertaining, unlike this movie.
No, I think we are definitely stuck in a rut as a culture when it comes to just relying on the past and just digging up old ideas, like you say, bringing back old characters, old actors, and just...
We've lost the ability to create new, innovative stuff.
and trying to use them as this weird springboard to launch a new generation of characters,
but they're never any good.
They're always unlikable idiots who just bore people to tears.
And that's the fundamental problem.
We've lost the ability to create new, innovative stuff.
What we do now is just reiterate the things that have been done before.
And you can apply it to movies, TV shows, music, We're just recycling the same things we've done so many times already.
It's such a sad thing to look back on.
Generations from now, they're going to look back on this time and just think of it as the time when everyone just lost their imagination.
They lost their spirit of creativity.
It's very interesting that you take it to something as essential as the spirit of creativity itself.
I've got young daughters, they're five and six.
Their favourite band is the Spice Girls.
Like, we listened to the Spice Girls and then, like, some other kids were getting dropped off at the school, like, similar age.
They were listening to the Spice Girls.
It doesn't even... Even something in the culture, which I think at the time I would have certainly regarded as a sort of a commodity, even though it had a great deal of spirit, and there's aspects of the Spice Girls that I liked, Details I certainly won't be going into right now.
What I'd like to say is that it's odd that even something that's commercial, you know, we're not talking about like Joan Jett, we're talking about the Spice Girls, even like those kind of commodities aren't being replaced.
And also with like Glastonbury, Elton John being the sort of closing act, it makes you wonder, well, where is it going to go?
Now, do you think this is because of economics?
Do you think it's because of technology?
For example, it's been sort of oft stated that There isn't a new raft of movie stars coming through anymore.
Is that because of the culture?
Is that because of technology?
And of course, I know those two things are inextricably linked, but what do you put it down to?
Yeah, I mean, I think the last movie star that we have still active really now that's relevant is Tom Cruise, and he's got Mission Impossible coming out soon.
That's probably going to do really well this summer.
Top Gun Maverick did great last year.
But yeah, like, There's a problem now in movies, particularly, where we don't have movie stars anymore.
We have characters that people are excited to see.
Particularly with comic book movies, with all this superhero stuff, it'll be a case of, hey, we're going to go and see the new Captain America movie.
We're going to see the new Thor movie.
We don't care about the actor that's playing him, really.
It's just the character that we're going to see.
Then doesn't translate into a star who can sell movies who can get people to go to the movie theater and see his latest film.
You know, back when probably you and I were kids, the dominant forces at the box office were like, Oh, I'm going to go and see the latest Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.
I'm going to see the latest Stallone movie, the latest Bruce Willis movie.
All people like that.
They were stars that could sell films just on their star power.
We don't have that anymore.
And it's the same problem with You know, with, um, films in general, you know, we, um, we don't want to take the risk now of inventing new things, because, one, movies are massively expensive, and so they don't want to take the risk of investing 200, 300 million dollars on something that's completely unproven, and so all they'll do is say, well, what's a surefire hit?
I don't know.
Star Wars used to be popular.
Let's do that.
Indiana Jones was popular.
Let's do that.
Let's just keep recycling the things that older people remember.
And two, we don't have the talented writers with really interesting life experiences that they can translate into scripts.
And so they don't have the ability to create new things that are really interesting and cool.
It seems like Mark Hamill has almost been trying to publicly say that he don't like what the franchise has done to the character of Luke Skywalker, that he personally feels offended and affronted by it.
Sometimes it seems to me that you're driven by a kind of a love of narrative and story and almost like Joseph Campbell-like ideas of how a hero should function and what a story should do.
I've got a few things I want to run by you.
Like, I used to think, it's like a little hypothesis of mine, that American movie stars somehow embody how they regard how that nation in particular, and let's face it, it's still the nation that defines our planet, like how it sees itself at a particular time.
Like, when it was Schwarzenegger and Stallone, it was a kind of rebooted 1980s America with heft and, you know, an overt masculinity.
Adam Sandler, who I did a movie with, actually, and who I think is a really interesting and brilliant performer and comic, and he, like, at a time when we were starting to learn, for example, that there weren't actually weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Adam Sandler had this kind of, oh shucks, I didn't mean it, like, kind of mentality that aligned neatly with an America that's trying its best, and erring sometimes, Now perhaps what we have is an America that doesn't know what it's trying to sell itself anymore.
Trying to present a kind of ethical and moral face to the world while clearly being backed by commodity.
As you say, the motivation behind these IPs and these franchise movies is no one's willing to take a risk.
Matt Damon says that you'd never get a Good Will Hunting type movies no more because no one will back a $30 million movie like that.
They need to have IP behind them.
But what I want to get into just before, while we're still on YouTube, before we leave YouTube, so do bear that in mind, Drinker, that we're still in a place where censorship is possible, is how do we marry together the idea that you don't want movies all to be big, buff, white movie stars.
You want diversity.
You want good, like, as a father of daughters, I want good, strong theater.
Strong female character!
I want strong female characters in movies, right?
I do, for my girls.
I want them to watch films and not always to be it's just guys and blokes and, you know, I want there to be diversity.
But how do you marry that?
What do you think is the concession that should be made to make movies more, for want of a better word, more diverse?
Where do you stand on that, mate?
What is it like?
Yeah, interesting points you've made there, because it's like when you talk about the stars of their different eras, like the 70s was like De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, like the interesting character actors, you know, the 80s was the big buff muscle man.
It was the time of like American confidence.
We're going to kick ass.
We're going to dominate.
We're going to do awesome.
The 90s, it moved into, like, more, um, you know, ambiguous, like, slightly more, uh, vulnerable heroes.
The 2000s was very much reflective of the War on Terror, so there was a lot of, um, you know, uh, military-themed stuff.
There was a lot of, uh, thrillers.
There was a lot of, uh, secret agent things going on.
Uh, and then, yeah, you look at now...
There's nothing.
I literally just said there ain't no movie stars because the country doesn't even know what it is now.
It's in a conflict of identity.
So I think that's a self-evident point of it doesn't even know what it wants to be anymore.
So that's kind of really sad to see because as a Brit, I always looked up to America as the model of the world.
This is the country that leads us, the free world.
Um, but yeah, when it comes to, to marrying what you talked about there, like the, the, um, rather than just having straight white guys as like the movie stars, how do we, how do we include, um, people of different genders, ethnicities, all that stuff?
I guess what I would say, hey, we did it!
20, 30, 40 years ago, we just didn't make such a big deal out of it like we have to do now.
And that's the thing that annoys people.
That's the thing that turns people off.
When you make the identity of the main character, the main actor, the sole focus of everything, people are just like, well, why are you making such a big deal of this?
Why should I care about this?
They used to just do it without having to make a big deal out of it.
When we talk about the great female characters in cinema, we have characters like Ellen Ripley.
She was an alien from the 70s!
That's before I was even born!
They got this right.
You've got Sarah Connor from the 80s.
Again, fantastic.
Fantastic action hero, fantastic flawed character, really interesting.
You had Trinity from the Matrix from the 90s.
They got all this stuff right, they just didn't...
Feel the need to make that the sole focus of these characters.
They were interesting characters first and foremost.
Whether they were female, whether they were women, sorry, whether they were black, white, whatever, it didn't matter.
The main focus was that they were a well-written character.
That's the difference.
That's what we can't do now.
Yeah, it offends you because it's, in a sense, hasn't got any art or care in it.
So you're contrasting the character like Ripley from Alien or Sarah Connor from the Terminator movies with, say, an example off the top of my head, which I know will go over well on these platforms, Captain Marvel and the way that Captain Marvel was kind of presented as a hero.
It offends you, I think, Because as I've said before, I'm a fan of your content, that you don't get to see a vulnerable character evolve, a vulnerable character learn lessons, a character that is flawed and has to overcome obstacles.
In a sense, this is the function of story that precedes the medium of cinema.
We need to see that a character in position A at the start of the film is unable to achieve something but by, you know, they go through catharsis, challenges, whatever, and at the other side they're able.
And you think that this new ideology that's about presenting figures or characters in a particular way is unable to serve story and the function of story.
Is that what you're saying, Drinker?
What's the fundamental thing, like you said, that gets you to identify with a character?
Is you give a person that's somewhat likable, give them an obstacle to overcome and have them struggle to do it.
Have them lots of things that get in their way, like they fall down, they pick themselves up, they eventually overcome.
That is the fundamental essence of what makes you like a character and identify with them.
It's so easy, it shouldn't even need to be said.
But what they lack with these modern characters that they try to do is that they're not willing to take that step of have them fail and be vulnerable and have flaws and weaknesses.
Either because the writers don't know how to do it or because they've got this kind of Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of.
Prickly defensiveness when it comes to writing things like female characters where they don't want them to be perceived as weak, and so the only alternative they have is well, they just have to be great at everything.
And so they're they're brilliant.
Everything right off the bat.
They have all the skills they need.
They don't need to learn everything.
They don't really have personalities because they don't Them being amazing and being up here and the rest of the world having to learn to accept how awesome they are and eventually come up and accept them.
There's no character arc there.
It's just a straight line.
People don't find that satisfying.
That's the problem.
That's why nobody watches these movies anymore.
That's why the box office returns just go down and down.
Yeah, because when we meet, let's take the example of Sarah Connor, we find her as a waitress, drifting through life listlessly.
But down the line we see that, ah, this character is going to be a revolutionary figure that's met the challenge of
knowing that she's carrying perhaps the most sort of significant thing that a character could carry, like the,
you know, the essence or a symbol for the future.
Hey, listen, we're going to come off of YouTube now and here are the reasons you should join us on Rumble.
We're going to talk about Sound of Freedom.
Why is this movie causing so much controversy as it appears to be beating Indiana Jones in the box office?
What does it tell us about films?
What does it tell us about new funding models?
What does it tell us about the appetite of us as movie audiences?
I'm also going to start referring to the Critical Drinker by his actual human name, and I'm going to ask you to remove them aviators.
Not yet, not while we're still Not while we're still on YouTube.
They can't handle them piercing Scottish eyes of a colour that I can't even begin to conject until I've seen them.
So if you're watching us on YouTube or anywhere else, click the link in the description.
Join us over on Rumble.
If you're on Rumble now, press the red button and join us on Locals.
You get to see content live when we record it in the event that it's pre-recorded.
You get meditations from me.
You get to be a member of our community and I would welcome you there.
I'd love it.
There's loads of great people in there.
Look at old Barry John Fox.
Simply expressing himself with an emoji, even as we speak.
Zypher2000, speaking of our man Will Jordan there.
Will, get the fucking sunglasses off, mate, and you're allowed to swear now, significantly, so you can be your true... Whoa!
I wasn't ready for them brown eyes!
You're beautiful!
You've seared right into me soul there, for God's sake!
So, he's saying... What did he say there?
He's gonna get lost in his gaze, and that has happened.
That has happened in almost every sense of the word gaze, in every possible spelling of that word.
Okay, so hey Will, what do you think's happening around Sound of Freedom?
What do they object to?
Because I've heard, oh, what it is, is Sound of Freedom, because someone told me about it a little while ago.
A friend of mine actually said, you've got to see this movie, and you know, asked me if I would...
Support it, which I plan to do.
But I've subsequently seen people say, oh, it's connected to QAnon, and it's a conspiracy theory movie.
But of course, the plot of the movie is about a former Homeland Security agent who's rescuing children from child sex trafficking.
What's the issue with that, Will?
Why has it caused such controversy?
I mean, honestly, you'd think it would be a no-brainer.
I think we can all Come to the same conclusion that children being sold into child sex trafficking is a terrible thing and should absolutely be stopped at any cost.
And so a movie about trying, you know, a main hero who's trying to prevent that is trying to rescue children from the most horrifying situations imaginable.
Wow, that should be the sort of thing that you should really have no qualms about supporting.
And the fact that so many people in the mainstream media are against this, Wow, it really makes me question what their values are.
I do not understand it at all.
Yeah, I don't, because I... Look, we're all familiar now with, like, the Jeffrey Epstein story, and it does appear that paedophilia is, let's say, more popular than I'd imagined it was as a young man, blessedly.
But it's odd that a film like this, where, as far as I can understand it, the only roots for saying that there's a connection to QAnon or conspiracy theories is that once maybe Jim Caviezel, am I saying his name right, the lead actor, Yeah, Caviezel, I think it is.
Caviezel.
Caviezel.
He commented on that slightly wacky wardrobe manufacturing story where they were saying it was a front for paedophilia.
He maybe commented on it.
Maybe the lead actor commented on it, and I know it's funded by the same people that made The Chosen, and I knew the guy that played Jesus in that.
The guy that played Jesus in The Chosen, Will, body doubled for me, I think, in Ballers, an HBO show that I did.
Jesus is my body double!
That's my new catchphrase, man!
I'm taking that down!
My stigmata!
So, you know, do you think, this is a question I want to put to you as an expert in movies, or at least an authority on movies, do you think that what actually, you know, of course there's the idea that, oh wow, is there actually, is there something to hide around all this paedophile network stuff?
Let me know in the comments, guys, I know that's a subject you lot get into.
Or is it, or additionally, is it because of this is a funding model and a distribution,
not necessarily distribution model, but a PR model that's bypassing a lot of the gatekeepers?
You know, they're going on podcasts, they're, you're promoting it.
Tim Pool, I've seen talking about it, but you know, it doesn't seem to have to go through
the, I don't know, green tomato, red tomato, fresh or whatever stuff.
What do you think about that?
I mean, it's twofold, really.
Like, first of all, the movie doesn't try to make any connections to some, you know, ring that's, like, operating at the top levels of American society or anything like that.
It's very much like, this is stuff that's going on in Colombia, Mexico, that sort of thing.
It's just a guy trying to rescue kids from a hostile situation, you know?
And that's really the limit of it.
So it's not trying to make that connection at all, which is so weird that people seem to be getting
so defensive about that.
And two, it's a cheap movie.
Like it was made for like well under $20 million.
This isn't like an Indiana Jones job where it's like 300 million plus,
God knows how much on marketing and stuff.
And so they don't have the budget to do TV commercials and all the fancy advertising that you can ask for.
They do this grassroots stuff where they just make themselves available to talk to podcasters and stuff and sell the movie on its own merits.
Imagine that.
Imagine a movie that's just actually good and people watch it because, hey, it's actually a really rewarding experience and it's tackling an important issue that we should learn more about.
Imagine that.
It's almost like that's foreign now to us.
Yeah, therefore it's an example, isn't it, of it's quite guerrilla and quite radical because it doesn't have to go through the processes that typically a movie would do.
The amount, as you've described, that's typically spent on advertising.
And you know, you work in independent media, I work in independent media, and sometimes what I start to feel, and I wonder if you feel the same, is they're attacking the content.
They don't agree with my ideology, but Actually, I'm starting to think what they don't agree with is us existing at all.
That it's more like an economic problem.
Oh no, this is where people are going to spend advertising.
Shit, we can't keep up with this.
What do you think about that?
Well, I mean, put it this way, like when I work here making my videos that I do, it's me in my office at home.
I got 0% overheads.
I spend zero dollars on anything, but I get millions of views because people are interested to hear what I've got to say.
And that's the thing that they hate, where you've got news networks and you've got studios with dozens if not hundreds of employees, they've got huge expenses that they go to, and they get a fraction of the viewership that people like us get because people just don't care about them anymore, because they know how fake they are.
I've heard it said before, it was a very smart man named Robert Meyer Burnett who said, the currency of our current age is authenticity.
And it's so fucking true.
People care about presenters, whoever it is, who care about the subject matter they're talking about, who actually are authentic.
They might not be as polished, they might not have the big production values, it doesn't matter.
They're talking about things that they care about and that they're invested in.
That's what people want, honesty.
Yeah, in a sense, that's the Joe Rogan superpower, isn't it, Will?
Like, whether he's talking about mixed martial arts, or whether he's talking about politics, or psychedelics, or hunting, or diet, or supplements, or whatever, you get the impression, because in my opinion, it's true, that he's saying what he believes, and he's saying what he cares about, and that seems sufficient to stand up against, you know, clear attempts to take him out around the Ivermectin horse pace time, which, again, similarly, like, I reckon as well, there.
They just don't want that.
You know, Carlin famous, George Carlin says it's like a, you know, you don't need conspiracy where convergent, where interests naturally converge.
And the mainstream media don't want powerful, independent voices that are able to just bypass their models.
Because like you say, you've got zero overhead, you can operate on your own.
And plainly, you're in a position where if you like a movie, you say you do.
And if you don't like a movie, you say that even more.
Yeah, and nobody pays me to do this as such.
I don't have relationships with studios that I can damage by slagging off their movie, and that's the thing.
I can just be honest about it.
But I always try to be fair.
That's what I always want to be.
I don't want to just hate on a movie because it's made by a director I don't like.
Whatever.
Be fair.
That's all I expect from what I do.
And hopefully people understand that.
And that's why they watch my videos, because I'll give you an honest opinion about things.
In the Indiana Jones one you listed movies where you sort of where you're you were wrong you said like I thought Dungeons and Dragons wouldn't be any good and you were wrong about that and I feel like even some of the Disney TV shows you've sort of gone oh actually that's pretty good and you've you know so you've like I guess that to your point about authenticity being the currency and in fact this is a broader point we find ourselves continually making on our channels you need principles if you If you have a principle, then sometimes that principle is going to cost you, sometimes it's going to support you, but it remains consistent.
When you're just like, oh, when I'm talking about this, you know, when cluster bombs, here's an example from the news this week, when cluster bombs are being used by Russia, they're bad.
When cluster bombs are being used by America, they're good!
Or Ukraine, sorry, via America.
You know, so that means, you know, that is the opposite of what you're discussing in terms of veracity and an ability to trust.
Yeah, humane cluster bombs.
I like that idea.
But yeah, I mean, it's like, yeah, sometimes I'll watch the trailer for a movie.
I'll give my thoughts on it and, like, make some predictions about what the film's going to be like.
Sometimes I'm right, or most of the time I am, but sometimes I'm wrong.
And, like, I'm happy to admit that.
If a movie, I go and watch it and it's better than I expected, I'm a happy man because I got to watch a good movie.
So that's okay, as far as I'm concerned.
So yeah, for me, there's nothing wrong with admitting that occasionally you call it wrong.
That's okay, as long as you're honest with people.
I think that's all they want.
What about, do you sometimes get a bit, let's say, supercharged by the Like, you know, if something isn't, for want of a better term, woke, do you think, oh my god, do you think it almost gets an extra bit of juice because of that?
I'm talking about films like maybe, you know, Maverick or even the Mario Brothers movie, just by virtue of the fact that it's not pushing that message.
Or do you think that by not having the kind of gravitational lag The wokeness can apply because it prevents, to use but one example, a character from having a meaningful arc because they're already presented as perfect on the basis of identity, which shouldn't be what's presented at the center of a film.
And if it's freed of that, it's a little bit better.
Or do you think that you're sort of like, oh, thank God, bloody Mario Brothers isn't doing that, and you get a bit excited?
There's the initial emotional reaction of like, hey, wow, this movie doesn't fucking hate me because I'm like a straight white man.
That's nice.
Like, that's a change of pace.
But, you know, you try to be, you try to break the movie down, like into its component parts and say, well, okay, this one I enjoyed.
Why did I enjoy it?
Like, was the plot good?
Were the characters good?
Whatever.
So you try to be a bit more objective about it.
But it's also possible, this is an interesting discussion about, it's possible for something to be woke by the normal standards, but also be good if it's well written.
The example that I've given before is a TV show called Arcane.
Which puts forward a lot of what we would consider to be woke politics, like an extremely diverse cast, gay relationships front and center, a class struggle at the heart of the plot that's driving it forward, very strong female characters, all that stuff.
That might be considered woke in other movies because it's badly handled, but it's extremely well integrated into a really good story in that TV show.
And so I was happy to say, hey, this is an example of, say, progressive politics or progressive ideology done well.
It can be done, but you've just got to write it well.
That's what we look for, a good story.
Right, don't use it instead of structure.
I suppose another film like The Matrix, Matrix is a good example, I'm talking about the first one obviously, of how sort of different ideals and identity transcendent of homogeneity and heterodoxy is presented as aspirational and cool and then the Wachowskis of course, Wachowskis, I can't remember their name no more, Like uh like they had a sort of uh obviously they changed gender during like you know the trajectory of those movies like that maybe that's something for you to touch upon but i also like again with my personal uh position as a father of girls and also as a person that do i do believe there should be stories for everyone there should be stories for everyone but i think i agree with you as a aesthete or as a critical thinker you know to sort of use the phrase from which your name is derived
Like, I want things to reward me and to make sense, I suppose.
So, um, would you touch on, like, you know, sort of the Matrix and the Wachowskis, if I'm saying the name right, and also what films would I direct my girls to?
Because I don't even like it.
Sometimes if I watch an old Simpsons and Bart goes, girls are shit, or whatever, I'm like, oh, I don't want my daughters watching that, you know what I mean?
So, sort of touch on that sort of side of it as well, if you could.
Yeah, I mean, in terms of, like, if you're looking for movies with good female role models, like, damn, where do I begin?
Like, you've got the Terminator movies, I suppose.
Like we mentioned before, you've got, um, uh, you've got Ripley from the first two Aliens films.
You've got Marion from, um, from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Uh, you've got Trinity from The Matrix.
You've got, um, Geena Davis from Long Kiss Goodnight.
Like, all of these, these are very interesting characters that, that kind of, You know, they've got flaws, they've got weaknesses, they've got problems along the way, but they overcome those things.
So yeah, there's been movies all throughout cinematic history that have given us this stuff.
It's just, really, in recent years, in trying to highlight this stuff and in trying to correct a problem that didn't really exist in the first place, they've made it infinitely worse.
That's the problem.
What about that analytic tool, like I only know because I saw it in Rick and Morty, where they say, like, an analysis of a feminist, a movie from a feminist perspective is, are there two female characters that have names that are talking about something other than a man?
Like, and also like, There is an imbalance between films that, uh, don't you think?
Do you agree?
Like, that are sort of built around, like, let's call them, you know, white males or whatever.
There is a... Do you think there's an imbalance that could be addressed?
And what do you think about, like, why is it a critique like that emerged?
Like the one that I learned on Rick and Morty that's got a proper name.
Someone tell me in the post.
It's a proper technique.
It's called the something test.
Yeah, the Bechdel test.
It's funny, because the Bechdel test was actually created as a bit of a joke.
Is it a 4chan thing or something?
No, no, it was created by a woman, but she just did it as a bit of a laugh.
And it was meant to poke fun at the feminist critique of movies and stuff.
So it was never meant to be taken seriously, but it's become the benchmark across the industry for how movies are rated.
And so, OK, it's a meme that became reality, I suppose.
But yeah, in terms of...
How do you square that up?
I suppose part of the reason is, like, it depends what genre of movie you want to look at and how mainstream you want to go, because the biggest movies at the box office tend to be action movies, they tend to be superhero movies, all those kind of things, but they're generally very male-oriented movies, and so the natural result is you tend to get a man in the lead, because that's what guys look for.
But if you're looking for other stuff, you just have to go into different genres.
It could be dramas, it could be romance, it could be historical epics, whatever you want to be.
There's plenty of movies with characters like that in it.
They're just not the big blockbusters.
Get it.
Hey, I get it.
Because what it is, is it's not like, hey, we really love white men.
It's economic.
It's economic.
They just, these movies will sell well.
That's all.
They don't care.
They don't care at all.
Like the Bud Light thing.
They don't care if you're blue collar.
They don't care if you're trans.
They don't give a shit.
They just want to sell you Bud Light.
So this is the same thing with movies.
And so maybe this is what perhaps, and this is a question, Like maybe what offends you is like they still want their cake of Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, a powerful IP from the 80s or 90s, but they also want to sort of attack, you shouldn't have these figures as the dominant figures, so they sort of live out their own dilemma almost in the movie of attacking and deconstructing the archetypes that they resent but rely on.
Is that a good bit of made-up analysis?
Yeah, what they want to do is use them as a springboard to launch their own new characters.
But it's like trying to take a character that, you know, you've bonded with over a period of years, if not decades, like you grew up with and stuff, like Indiana Jones being a great example, or Luke Skywalker, for example.
Characters that you've really come to know and love, and then what they'll do is present them as old men who are Sad and lonely.
They've given up on life.
They are broken down and they're kind of pathetic now, and they use that as an excuse to say, Hey, they were never that good in the first place.
And then what they'll do is they'll bring in a new diverse female replacement
who is stronger than them, smarter than them, more capable than them,
doesn't have any of their weaknesses.
And it's like they're trying to say, hey, see this guy that you really liked?
Well, we've got a new and improved version here, so you have to like them even more now.
Of course you do, because that's how human emotions work.
People don't think that way.
And so the more you try and slot these, like, fake pod people replacements in to, like, supplement these classic characters that we loved, the more people reject it.
And that's why Indiana Jones is fucking tanking at the box office.
This movie cost $300 million to make.
It needs to make, like, $900 million just to break even.
It ain't gonna get to $500 million.
No way!
There's a really funny line from Seinfeld that reminds me of you.
There's an episode of Seinfeld where his dentist converts the Judaism Seinfeld offers so that it affords him to make Jewish jokes.
And Seinfeld's rabbi says to Seinfeld, does this offend you as a Jew?
And he says, no, it offends me as a comedian.
That's what's offensive about it.
It's almost like that you're offended as a cineast and as a cinephile that the movies that you adore and love are being dismantled and deconstructed in ways that's clumsy and not even artfully done that there could be a version.
And also I think it's important what you're saying about like that kind of hate for their own audience because I think this has broader social connotations.
I think the movements we've seen like you know and I'll expand this out like the emergence of Trump, the emergence of Brexit, is the sense that people feel like the professional and media class hate them and don't do not represent them whether that's politically or through the cultural content they provide this is something i talked about sort of like for a while with uh the filmmaker adam curtis who i very much admire that and it's been something i've learned more and more about over time is that you have a professional class in journalism now that don't speak respectfully of this for one of a better phrase working class people working class culture there's a kind of
There's a sort of an antipathy and loathing towards them.
They don't like working class people or in America blue-collar people.
There's a kind of condescension and a snobbery and it seems like in a sense this is one of the narratives that's playing out in film.
I also want to mention like in South Park when they did and that was with the last Indiana Jones movie you know like where they went like they had I think Kyle coming out of a movie theater puking.
Oh my God, what did they do to Indy?
I can't believe what they did to Indy!
And like, what about that Imaginationland one, where they were like, um, these characters are more real to you, like, you know, whether it's Jesus, and, you know, I'm religious as it turns out, I figure you might be an atheist, but I believe in God and all sorts of stuff.
But, like, they're saying, like, that these characters are more real to you.
Luke Skywalker's more real than, like, maybe your teacher, or people that, you know, these are people that you know, and that you're, they've been vessels for your own personal development, and your own understanding of your own darkness, and your own aspirations, and to see those things commodified, when perhaps they don't even care about identity issues anyway, it's, um, insulting, maybe?
Is that a good way of describing it?
Yes, and it's, uh, I best described it as, like, a lot of these franchises are things that have been created by geniuses and inherited by morons.
And that's the problem, because they don't have this creative skill to be able to make stuff like this by themselves.
Like, if you wanna make a shit movie with shit characters, like, eh, fine, I don't care.
Like, maybe you're just not very good at this stuff.
I'm not gonna get offended by it, though.
But if you want to cannibalize These existing characters that were made by someone way more intelligent and way more creative than you, and humiliate them and try to use them to launch the shit things that you've made, that's when I've got a problem.
Because you are exploiting someone else's work.
You are raping someone else's creativity.
That's what you're doing, but you're not adding anything productive to it.
You're creating something worse to try and replace it.
As a writer, as a storyteller, that really offends me because I hate to see other people's work get taken advantage of.
Yeah, nice one, mate.
We've got some good questions.
This is some stuff from our community.
Donny Jep, question for The Drinker.
Do you think there'll be a time in the future when Hollywood is making great movies again, or do you think that that time has passed and something else like gaming will take its place?
I think we're going to see a lot of gaming adaptations.
The Last of Us was a real benchmark for that.
I think we're going to see a lot more, yeah, movie or TV show adaptations of video games because it's a massive, massive market.
But I think also the time of this sort of mega blockbuster that costs $300 million is coming to an end.
And I think we're going to see a lot more smaller things that they take more risks on.
And yeah, they're going to have to start making better stuff.
Otherwise, they will just go bankrupt.
Yeah, that's interesting because that's almost like decentralised, localised movie audiences, the same way that everything is perhaps becoming federalised in that way.
This is from Barry John Fox.
Alright Critical Drinker, what are your top five films and have you seen all of David Lynch's films?
I have not seen all of David Lynch's films now, but he does.
He does some good stuff.
But like, yeah, he goes down some disturbing roads with his things.
Top five films.
It's definitely not going to be done in terms of artistic merit or anything, but probably Terminator 2, Big Trouble in Little China.
I think probably The Menu.
I really love that.
Probably Nightcrawler and yeah, I'm not sure what my last one would be.
I'll come back to that one in a minute.
The menu, the recent movie, The Menu.
Yeah.
I ain't seen that.
That's really good.
Really interesting.
It's a very good critique of how we understand art.
Are you gonna do a video on My Arthur remake?
My Arthur?
My Arthur!
My Arthur!
When I remade the film Alpha.
Now, maybe not Alpha.
What about Get Him to the... I want to see a video by you on Get Him to the Greek or Sarah Marshall.
The last thing I want to see is Alpha.
Maybe I don't even want to see the... My Alpha!
Like, when you were saying that stuff about reboots, I was thinking, oh man.
Like, because I love Dudley Moore.
I loved ARFA, the original film.
And I see, actually, in a way, I've got an inside scoop on how that stuff happens.
Like, you know, I've done a few successful movies in Hollywood.
They recognize that there's a window for me, a moment for me.
Like, they've got the rights to ARFA.
It's cheap.
To do it, then they say, you know, generally what I found out afterwards is that they were going to make, before Dudley Moore done Arthur, they were going to make it with Belushi, with John Belushi, like, and I thought, like, after, when it was too late, when the, you know, when the damage had been done, I found, I was like, oh, That's the version of ARFA you want to do.
It's an 18 or R-registered version.
You can see another take on that.
But because it's economically motivated, they want it to be PG.
It gets softened to the point where you can't even show him drink driving!
And at the time I'm thinking, this ain't gonna work.
And also, someone should have told me, don't do that voice.
Those two things could have saved us all a lot of time and trouble.
I'm not going to push you to make videos on films that I've done.
That's mental.
I can't even believe I brought it up.
I'm crazy.
Vulcan Liv says, Critical Drinker, I'm more excited about this than Dorsey, Tucker, or RFK.
And then TNBaseGirl says, his eyes look blue to me, but Russell said brown.
Oh, maybe they are blue.
Yeah.
Yeah, they are though.
Hold on.
Oh, you've got the eyes of a husky.
Pure killer!
Oh, but this from Thomas Beard.
Getting to the Greek is like fine wine.
It gets better with age.
What film that I've been in or done are you willing to be nice about?
It might be Getting to the Greek, actually.
It got a chuckle out of me back in the day.
So, yeah, it's been a good long time since I've seen it, but I do remember quite enjoying it.
Well, you better watch it again.
Come on, mate.
Let's try and build a relationship here.
Instant Drinker recommends.
Um, okay.
So what do you think about stuff like, um, the re-editing of the Roald Dahl books and the sort of conversation around, like, life of Brian and change and stuff like that?
Where do you stand on that, mate?
It makes me fucking sick.
I hate this idea of, uh, we need to, like, soften and we need to start altering these movies from the past without the permission of the people who made them, uh, just to make them more palatable to modern audiences.
Because God forbid someone might get offended by them somewhere.
Uh, no, leave them the fuck alone.
As far as I'm concerned.
Yeah, they should.
These are works of art.
They should be left alone as they were intended to be shown.
Yeah, both with like in the case of Roald Dahl and in the case like because I know that people well, Roald Dahl has in interviews outside of his fiction said some like overtly anti semitic stuff like you've sent some mad shit.
But like I mean, but like within the work, he doesn't say that in like Matilda or like Charlie in the chocolate factory like that, like an Again, it's what people like, they want.
I tell you why, do you know why that happened?
I think.
I think Netflix did a deal and bought the Roald Dahl estate.
Netflix was like, oh shit, we live in this sort of territory where those things are monetized and mobilized, i.e.
issues around identity.
Let's push for the Roald Dahl estate to reissue those books with Edits and stuff and I feel like I even like you know when I'm I would never use the n-word I would never make a racist joke.
I'm against racism.
I'm against hatred.
But like I feel like you know like Enid Blyton books and in a sense these are artifacts of their time.
It's interesting because this cannibalism we talked about earlier like that they have to use IP in order to keep their economic models going is in a sense what the culture is doing Anyway, it's what the whole culture is pulling itself apart.
It's pulling itself apart without recognizing, actually, what you're going to have to do if you continue down this line is you're going to have to have a totally different set of principles almost around everything.
You can't, you know, like the royal family, our whole class structure, everything is predicated on colonialism, imperialism.
You'd like, in a sense, you, as Kehinde Andrews, who's a sort of a professor of black studies that I've spoken to, is that once you start this conversation, I mean, I'm not a big fan of trying to erase history or trying to alter it to make it more palatable to people because it's like you're trying to pretend that things like mistakes that were made in the past didn't actually exist.
And so it's like you can't There's like the good and the bad that comes with it, and I think you should just be honest about this stuff, and it filters through to movies and things like that.
Like, you can look at movies that were made like Gone with the Wind or whatever back in the 30s and 40s.
Yeah, they don't align with our current standards or our current, like, cultural zeitgeist.
But they're not meant to because they were made in a very different time, but we respect the time in which they were made and we can look back on them now and say, well, yeah, OK, that's that's changed since then.
But it deserves to be shown because it's an artifact from when it was made.
Mate, thank you so much.
You're quite right.
It's pretty plain that all of your work comes from a place of genuine love of cinema and storytelling and, as you say, the currency of authenticity.
Thanks so much, Will, for joining us on the show.
I really hope we get to do some more stuff.
I'd love to come on your show if you'll have me.
Thank you so much for making time for us.
Absolutely.
Thank you, man.
It's been a pleasure.
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Stay free with Russell Brand.
See it first on Rumble.
We have got a massive week next week.
Oliver Stone and Ron DeSantis all on the show.
Hit the red button, sign up to our locals community where you've got access to new interviews for the first time.
You can join us live for the Ron DeSantis if you want to.
Live for Oliver Stone, as well as meditations, behind the scenes stuff, all sorts of things.
Now, this weekend, I am going to Community, which is our festival where Vandana Shiva, Wim Hof, Callie Means, Hiran Gracie, Brilliant thinkers come together to talk about new ways to organize society.
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We'll be posting content from it on this channel.
Please watch out for it if you're not joining us on person.
So, I'll see you next Monday, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
Until then, here's the news.
No, here's the fucking news.
Thanks for accusing Fox News.
Here's the news.
No, here's the fucking news.
RFK says he's glad that Donald Trump likes him.
Yet, CNN say that they would never do a town hall with RFK like they did with Trump.
So, is RFK officially more dangerous to the establishment even than Donald Trump?
Donald Trump likes RFK.
RFK welcomes his endorsement even though he disagrees with Trump.
And of course these are two figures from different political perspectives, different political parties.
Certainly CNN are not willing to house RFK.
And my personal experience of RFK, just to be plain, is that I believe he's the very kind of figure we need inside the establishment, the very kind of candidate the Democrat Party should be endorsing.
But if they shut down Bernie, making the decision they'd rather lose against Trump than win with Bernie, how are they going to treat a figure like RFK, who says he wants to end the forever wars, heal the cultural scars of America, bring people together from across We interviewed him recently on our show, there's a link in the description if you want to watch it, and we posted on Twitter a pretty innocuous clip of his wife, the actor Cheryl Hines, just talking about spirituality and being married.
Nothing controversial, nothing weird, and yet when it was reposted by another source, this graphic appeared.
Like, look at the graph in itself.
Extreme, left, left, centre, least, biased, right, centre, right, extreme.
Who in the world has got the right to tell you how that graph works?
Hello, I'm God.
Here is the absolute graph of where extreme is on both sides and where the middle is.
And to control that, it's Twitter.
Twitter and social media.
So I think it's a good sign that you have a dyed in the wool Democrat figure from the
Democratic aristocracy, a man who confessed in our interview with him that he is part
of the establishment elite by the virtue of his Kennedy surname, but that he doesn't share
the values of elitism, he believes in a new form of populism.
The fact that he welcomes Trump's support, or at least goodwill, is interesting and I
think something we should investigate.
You say that you're a Democrat, but you're getting a lot of support from a lot of leading
voices on the right, like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, former President Donald
Trump.
Many Democrats fear that you're a spoiler in the race, that you will damage President Biden in the primary and grease the skids for former President Trump to return to the Oval Office.
Even that aspect of the question is strange, like the assumption that the best thing to happen is for Biden to have an uninterrupted path back to the presidency.
He's the kind of president that deserves to face a challenge from a man with integrity, who's authentic, who has some views like anyone I agree with, some views I don't agree with, welcomes the opportunity to bring people together from across the divide.
This is what politics is crying out for.
Radical change.
Not more of the same.
Radical change.
This week, former President Trump said about you, Kennedy is smart and he's a common sense guy.
What kind of man do you think Donald Trump is?
Well, you know, here's what I'm not going to do in this race.
I'm not going to attack other people personally.
I don't think it's good for our country.
And I think, you know, what I'm trying to do in this race is bring people together, is to try to bridge the divide between Americans.
And so I'm proud that President Trump likes me, even though I don't agree with him on most of his issues.
Because I don't want to alienate people.
I want to bring people together.
Let me know in the comments if that's exactly the kind of political conversation you think your country needs.
A open-heartedness, a willingness to talk to people you disagree with, good faith conversations.
I mean, what's the alternative?
Just flinging mud at one another from across the aisles.
Where is that going to get any of us?
The complication comes when the establishment wants to harness the views that a divisive polarising figure like Trump brings, but still wants to condemn him as an outlier and a maniac.
If Trump is dangerous but can be platformed in order to get views, what is the reason for not giving RFK his own town hall?
Are they saying that RFK is more of a threat to the establishment than even Donald Trump, who I thought was the worst human being that ever existed, he should be killed, put in prison, hanging's too good for him, and yeah, oh, get him on the television, he's quite good, bravo, bravo!
Woah, look at the revenue, it's flying baby, we're relevant again, thank you Trump!
So what do they think about Do you think on the democratic side you would do a town hall with someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?
I wouldn't.
because he's done things like win court cases against Monsanto.
The condemnation of RFK requires all sorts of contortions of thought and it amounts to
we just don't like this guy because he's anti-establishment.
Do you think on the Democratic side you would do a town hall with someone like Robert F.
Kennedy Jr.?
I would not.
Okay.
Because he spreads dangerous misinformation.
In 2005 was when he began, in earnest, his anti-childhood vaccine campaign.
He wrote a story for Salon.com that was jointly published with Rolling Stone, both of which have since retracted the articles, and Rolling Stone just completely disappeared it.
It was like it never happened.
That's always a good sign when media start disappearing information.
How about people are allowed to have opinions and views and share them and discuss them and decide for ourselves?
Wasn't one of the things that troubled us during the pandemic the fact that legitimate voices were shut down and debatable and even true information was censored?
And I'm quoting there Mark Zuckerberg.
I asked for a bunch of things to be censored that in retrospect ended up being more debatable
or true.
Anyway, I just dealt with him and he was so dishonest in that experience and since then
he lies about the experience frequently as an example of how the media is co-opted by
Big Pharma.
That lie that the media's been somehow co-opted by Big Pharma.
I mean, if only there was like some evidence that they'd been like, I don't know, sponsoring them or something.
As you know, we did a censorship industrial complex event with Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi, two hardcore journalists.
Matt Taibbi used to write for Rolling Stone.
That's not possible now because Rolling Stone are an establishment publication and Matt Taibbi is an anti-establishment journalist.
What I mean by that is he tells the truth and if you tell the truth that will be antithetical to establishment interest because the world has become centralised and authoritarian and has gone out of control.
Here he describes what the Virality Project is.
The Virality Project was a cross-platform information sharing program led by Stanford University through which companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook shared information about COVID-19.
They compared notes on how to censor or de-amplify certain content.
The ostensible mission made sense, at least on the surface.
It was to combat misinformation about the pandemic and to encourage people to get vaccinated.
When we read the communications to and from Stanford, we found shocking passages.
One suggested to Twitter that it should consider as standard misinformation on your platform stories of true vaccine side effects.
Hmm.
How can true vaccine side effects be misinformation?
True posts which could fuel hesitancy?
Well, that just means anything that's not positive.
We're starting to move closer to propaganda, aren't we?
As well as worrisome jokes.
Well now it's actually gone beyond propaganda into mind control.
Like a worrisome joke!
I don't even know how to define a worrisome joke.
Any joke could be worrisome because it's sort of disruptive.
Hey, what bees make milk?
Boobies!
Hey, that's a bit worrisome.
What are you saying?
That boobs and bees?
There's nothing that's not worrisome if you investigate it for long enough.
Or posts about things like natural immunity.
It's conflated scepticism, inquiry and curiosity with unacceptable non-compliance and propaganda
in order to advance its own agenda.
That's what Matt Taibbi reveals.
That's why it's necessary that figures like RFK say, yeah, yeah, Trump supporters, Trump,
cool, we're not going to see everything the same way, but critiquing the establishment
is necessary.
That's why a figure like Jake Tapper saying, oh no, we can't have RFK on.
But hold on, I think I've seen stuff on CNN that's not true.
Like I feel like you said a bunch of stuff about Russiagate and I feel you didn't report
on the Hunter Biden lab story.
And isn't there something about either mectin being horse-paced or vaccinated individuals
contracting COVID-19 anyway?
But vaccinated individuals did contract COVID-19 anyway.
That's just true.
This is straight out of Orwell.
Instead of having ambiguities and shades of meaning on COVID-19, they reduced everything to a binary.
Vax and anti-vax.
That's dangerous.
We don't all need to agree with one another.
We don't need to.
It's okay.
We can all get along with one another.
You can have strong views about a subject, as long as you're alright with me having strong views on a subject.
We can't say if you don't have the same opinions on medical matters that I do, particularly when the science, it appears, was somewhat ambivalent when we were told it was certain.
Do you see how certain conclusions were rushed to?
Certain sides of the conversation were shut down.
I wonder if we can see the outline of an ideology by tracking these factors.
They eliminated ambiguities by looking into the minds of users.
In the Virality Project, if a person told a true story about someone developing myocarditis after getting vaccinated, even if that person was just telling a story, even if they weren't saying the shot caused the myocarditis, the Virality Project just saw a post that may promote hesitancy.
So this content was true, but politically categorised as anti-vax, and therefore misinformation.
Untrue.
Think about that graph again.
Who has the right to say this is extreme right, this is extreme left, this is acceptable, balanced information?
Who?
You could only ever aggregate that from a variety of sources, through consensus, through democracy.
There's no one point of fallibility, a phrase I learned from Jack Dorsey, that should be afforded that ability.
A person who talks about being against vaccine passports may express support for the vaccine elsewhere, but the Virality Project believed concerns about vaccine passports were driving a larger anti-vaccination narrative.
So in this way, a pro-vaccine person may be anti-vax.
They also wrote that such concerns inspired broader discussions about the loss of rights and freedoms.
Also problematic.
We don't want to be inspiring conversation about the loss of freedom.
Why's that?
Because we're taking away people's freedom.
And if they discuss that, they're going to be pissed off.
That's what led us to the ridiculous situation where people who were pro-vaccination in so much as they had invented vaccines, taken vaccines, were banned from speaking because they were anti-vax.
That doesn't make sense unless you create new systems of meaning and And then use those new systems to censor the public space.
It makes you wonder what the intention was.
And even if it wasn't an intention achieved through conspiracy, it was an intention delivered through momentum, through a convergence of interest.
It was the same with someone who shared true research about the efficacy of natural immunity or suggested that the virus came from a lab.
It might all be factual, but it was politically inconvenient, something they called malinformation.
In the end, out of all these possible beliefs, they derived a 1984 binary, good and un-good.
They also applied the binary to people.
This was new.
Old school speech law punished speech, not the speaker.
We saw NGOs and agencies like the FBI or the State Department increasingly targeting speakers, not speech.
The Virality Project brought up the cases of people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The posts of such repeat offenders, they said, are almost always reportable.
They encouraged content moderators to make assumptions about people, And not to look on a case-by-case basis.
In other words, they saw good and un-good people, and the un-good were almost always reportable.
The filmmaker Albert Maysles once told me, You know from your own life that you have complicated motivations, that you have flaws, that you're not always perfect, that you've made mistakes.
But you know you, right?
You know you're trying your best, that you err.
Sometimes you have to do a little recalibration or a re-correction.
All human beings are like that.
There's not another class or caste of human beings that are exempted from that in politics or media or social media regulation.
That's why it's dangerous to grant authority to any set of individuals.
That's why, in a way, democracy is the only game in town.
And the more local that democracy, the more controlled by the people affected by it the electoral process is, the safer it is.
The last thing any of us need are centralised authoritarian models where discussion is shut down, where freedom of speech is controlled, And you mustn't fall into the trap thinking, well, on this issue, I happen to disagree with that person, so I'm glad that their free speech is being shut down.
For them, you must fight all the harder.
That makes you a person that has principles.
That means it stays straight.
And I don't think that this set of values, graphs with extreme on either end, determined by AI or a guy, are the way to move forward.
That's why figures like RFK and Donald Trump are interesting.
They are anti-establishment figures.
Even if you're not into Donald Trump, even if you're not into RFK, they are people from outside the establishment.
I believe the establishment is a greater threat than anti-establishment voices.
That's what I personally believe.
That's why there are new alliances forming.
That's why RFK says, I'm not really a fan of Donald Trump, but I'm proud that he likes me.
And that's why it's interesting to hear Barack Obama, who at the time when he was elected in 2008, I thought, this guy is a hero.
This is what America needs.
This is a man of color with principles, integrity, he was a good speaker, but now he's saying there's no serious threat to Joe Biden.
That's code.
That's like, don't take any of these other people seriously.
And then when you learn that Barack Obama has taken advantage of tax laws that while in office he said should be shut down, you recognize, wow, Maybe that guy wasn't as great as I thought he was.
So that's why it's interesting that Barack Obama's saying, no, Joe Biden's the only possible option.
Well, that's the best.
And that's why I dislike most of all about the neoliberal establishment that claims to be on the side of the people.
Do you know what they're basically telling you?
This is as good as it gets.
Shut up.
Shut up and vote for Joe Biden.
You don't deserve any better.
Take what you're given.
I think Joe Biden has done an extraordinary job leading the country through some very difficult times.
I do not think that there's going to be any kind of serious primary challenge to Joe Biden.
No, because we'll shut it down like they did with Bernie Sanders.
When there is a serious threat or a serious challenge, when someone comes along saying, I'm not sure that the party should be funded in this way or, hey, could we do this better around Big Pharma or do we need these forever wars?
Yes, we bloody well do need these forever wars.
They're good for business.
I think the Democratic Party is unified.
You know, there was a lot of talk.
You'll remember when he was first elected, because Bernie Sanders had run, that somehow there was this huge split between progressive Democrats and more centrist Democrats.
And the truth is, is that partly because of how Joe has governed, those divisions have been bridged.
The example he's used is what demonstrates exactly what's wrong.
There was an alternative voice within the Democratic Party, and that voice was ignored.
It's not been bridged, it's been shut down.
And what they're trying to do with RFK, whose rhetoric at least, and in my view he means it, is even more anti-establishment than Bernie's, The reason he's appealing to people on the right is because all of us, regardless of these sort of almost made-up affiliations to Republicans or Democrats, basically want to be left alone, don't want the state all over our lives, don't want big business to have so much power that democracy becomes worthless and pointless and futile and facile, and are willing to get along with people that are different as long as they leave us alone.
So what's worse?
Harmful misinformation like, for example, RFK's views on a variety of subjects.
Remember, this guy's a lawyer that's won cases against big agri-companies that's fought for the rights of rivers.
Aren't they supposed to care about that, the Democrats, the environment and stuff?
Oh yeah, we care about it.
Until a train falls over in East Palestine and spills toxicity all over the land, then we don't care as much, then we don't turn up.
What I'm starting to think is they're not willing to deliver and that the Democrat Party has been like that for quite a long time.
And by the way, I don't think the Republican Party is any better.
This is by Robert Reich, writing in Right Wing Magazine, The Guardian.
In the first two years of the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress.
Yet both Clinton and Obama advocated free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who consequently lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.
Clinton pushed for NAFTA and for China joining the World Trade Organization, and Obama sought to restore the confidence of Wall Street instead of completely overhauling the banking system.
Both stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class.
They failed to reform labour laws to allow workers to form unions with a simple up or down majority vote, or even to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated labour protections.
Clinton deregulated Wall Street before the crash.
Obama allowed the street to water down attempts to re-regulate it after the crash.
Obama protected Wall Street from the consequences of its gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout that allowed millions of underwater homeowners to drown.
Both Clinton and Obama turned their backs on campaign finance reform.
They also drank from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans.
Big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy.
The most powerful force in American politics today continues to be anti-establishment fury at a rigged system.
Heroes of the Democratic Party like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama created and doubled down on this problem, turning the Democrat Party into the party of Big Finance, Big War, Big Agra, Big Pharma.
Anti-establishment rhetoric, whether it's from Trump or RFK, terrifies them.
They would rather lose to Trump than win with Bernie.
And RFK, they don't even want in the picture at all.
That's why they're denying he's a threat.
That's why they want you distracted.
That's why they're creating machinery for censorship.
In the United States, in all anglophonic countries, in the EU, because they don't want figures like this rising to political prominence Insisting we have a conversation.
Insisting that they are confronted when they offer us propaganda that amounts to wishful thinking and expedient ambition for those already in power.
There can be no real change without real conversation because we all have to be included.
So conversation is going to be part of it.
They know that.
That's why they're trying to shut conversation down by saying this is extreme, that's extreme, this is just right.
RFK, extreme left nutter.
Donald Trump, extreme right nutter.
We'll handle it right down the middle.
They got you in their sights down the barrel of a gun called establishment thinking and anyone who dares to question it becomes a target.
But that's just what I think.
Until next time, stay free.
Switch off.
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