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July 27, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:06:38
TRUMP 2024 | Can Anyone Challenge TRUMP’S UNSTOPPABLE Influence - Stay Free #177
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mann resonabe I'm a black man and I could never be a better man.
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I'm gonna roll with you, so I'm looking forward to seeing you.
Looking forward to seeing you.
In this video, we're going.
In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello there, you Awakening Wonders!
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
If you're watching us on YouTube, we're only gonna be here for the first 15 minutes.
If you're watching us on Rumble, press the red button at the bottom of your screen and join us on Locals, because we are talking about Trump, the berserker, the pedagogue, or is he the new bringer of light and messiah that many of you claim?
In a world of political turbulence and mainstream media bias, we're gonna bring you, and I'm I'm excited to tell you this.
This is an uncensored special, at least on Rumble it will be uncensored, on the presidential candidates who are taking on the hysteria surrounding one man and the impact he continues to have on American politics.
Yes, it's Donald J. Trump.
I did everything right and they indicted me.
And coming up later, our friend Ron DeSantis.
What you've seen is a collusion between big government and big business.
I mean, if you think about it, a free society has to have debates over important issues.
We'll be hearing from Dr. Cornel West on his challenge to the White House.
Big money and big military have become what the monarchs and oligarchs were many hundreds of years ago.
They have power that's unaccountable, unanswerable, and irresponsible.
Plus, the man I'm in a pull-up challenge with, RFK Jr.
They're protecting the interests of the elites.
Everything they do is about raising money for the next election.
Turn to me any whisper to me, they consider you a traitor to their class.
I think Trump is about to become physically visible.
There he is!
It's arraignment day!
Yeah!
Yes!
Let's get a-raining!
I'm gonna make it a-rain!
Yeah!
So, Trump is being arrested on federal charges.
37 federal charges.
Both Kid Rocks, to be believed.
They're not that bad.
It's been showing, like, I think it's worse that there are that many documents that have been censored.
Do you think you can handle the truth?
Let me know in the comments in the chat.
Why are they, why have they got these clandestine documents?
I can handle it.
Just tell me everything.
Julian Assange, he's in Belmarsh prison now for telling us information that we should have known in the first place.
Edward Snowden, he's holed up in Russia right now for giving us information that we should have had access to in the first place.
They're both being prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
And now Donald Trump, is he being prosecuted under the Espionage Act?
That means them spies, baby!
Let's have a look at the mainstream media's reporting on this story.
The classified records strewn throughout Mar-a-Lago, in a public ballroom, a bathroom, and strewn.
Are they strewn?
They are strewn, actually.
Look at that one, it's spilling out.
That's the definition of strewn.
I reckon that's the one that he showed Kid Rock.
Like, look, Kid Rock.
Oh, man!
That's allegedly by the way.
Well let's say what it actually says.
Trump reportedly showed a classified map related to a military operation to someone who did not possess security clearance.
In a 2022 interview with Tucker on Fox, Kid Rock claimed the former president asked his advice and showed him what he believed to be secret information during a visit to the White House in 2017.
Did he have Kid Rock at the White House?
I mean even that's a bit mad.
Looking at maps and sh- looking at maps and shit, and I'm like, am I supposed to be in on this shit, Roxas?
Let's have a look at that.
You know, we're looking at maps and s***.
I'm like, you know, I'm like, am I supposed to be like in on s***?
You didn't think you'd have a hand in it?
What do you think we should do about North Korea?
I'm like, what?
I don't think I'm qualified to answer this.
That's amazing.
It's like Chappelle's fantastic bit of stand up about jar rule.
Let's have a look at how the mainstream are covering arraignment day.
We've already seen those strewn documents.
What else is going on?
Tossed on a storage room floor are among the nation's most closely held secrets.
Of the 31 charges for the willful retention of national defence information, 21 involve top secret documents.
Do you see how the mainstream media confines us to particular topics?
Everywhere, and if you notice this, we'll be talking about how outrageous and egregious it is that Trump's in
possession of these documents.
On some platforms, you'll see people saying, well, Joe Biden, he's just as bad.
1,800 boxes of documents from when he's a senator.
And then people say, yeah, but he was in Loudoun when he's a senator.
But then people say, he had 20, and they were in his garage.
And did you see what Trump said?
That my documents were kept in beautiful conditions.
Biden, he had them on the floor of his garage.
They could get damp.
He was talking about the literal conditions of them.
But the real problem is this.
Why have you nominated a patriarch elite class that allowed access to information that you're not?
Now I'm not suggesting that all of us on an individual basis want to be immersed in the bureaucracy of government.
But the category of classified should be abolished except in matters where it's strictly necessary.
Bolton told CBS News special handling suggests a special access program which can be so secret the government doesn't acknowledge its existence.
It's so secret you won't even know.
Does it exist?
I won't acknowledge it.
That's ridiculous.
Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio said there was no evidence the intelligence was compromised.
There's no allegation that he sold it to a foreign power or that it was trafficked.
You consider Kid Rock to be a threat.
Kid Rock is mounting on our borders.
Kid Rock has got battleships in American waters.
Kid Rock is floating a weather balloon high in the sky.
Kid Rock and Donald Trump are frankly not the problem.
The problem is deep systemic abuse that we're living under.
But a 2019 incident suggests Mar-a-Lago has been a target.
out of this damn matrix unless we're willing to overcome cultural conflict and unite against
establishment elites.
But a 2019 incident suggests Mar-a-Lago has been a target.
This Chinese businesswoman was convicted of trespassing, lying to federal investigators
and deported.
That Chinese businesswoman, what's she been doing, snooping around Mar-a-Lago?
Mar-a-Lago, yeah.
Around those strewn documents.
Like, she's been checking out the documents.
There's one strewn there, there's one strewn there.
Checking them out.
I just need to visit the bathroom.
Don't nut that bathroom.
Kid Rock's in there, having the time of his life.
Give me some advice.
Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy claims Trump's records were more secure than Biden's found in a garage.
Is it a good picture to have boxes in a garage that opens up all the time?
A bathroom door locks.
Yeah, that's a good argument.
The thing is, with a bathroom door, you just lock it.
You've got to be inside there, though.
That's true.
You can only lock it if you're in there with the documents.
Having to tie it off, maybe wiping your bum on one.
That's not right.
Not with our... That's disrespectful.
...sacred documents.
Let's see what they're talking about on the mainstream media right now.
We're going to stand by for one minute.
Our special report is starting now.
Oh.
All right!
Okay.
This is their report and our report.
Special.
This is an NBC News special report.
Here's Lester Holt.
Good day, we're coming to you live from outside the federal courthouse in Miami where former President Trump...
At the end of this broadcast, my forehead will be another four inches long.
We'll be arriving shortly to surrender to federal authorities and be arraigned on 37 counts.
Mr. Trump departed his Miami-area golf course just a moment ago, a trip that should take about 20 minutes.
But Trump took 25.
He stopped to do some corruption, and he had to drive over some strewn boxes of secrets, some of which he was showing to Kid Rock.
When he enters the courthouse behind me, his arraignment will push America's legal and political systems into uncharted territory.
Never before has a former president been arraigned on federal charges, and never before has the leading candidate for one party's presidential nomination faced so much legal jeopardy.
This will be the second time in just over two months.
It's pornography.
It's ratings chasing.
They're amplifying it.
They're fetishizing it.
They're gilding and oiling the news.
This is not reportage.
It's not even analysis.
It's bombast.
It might as well be BT, PT, Barnum.
I think Trump is about to become physically visible.
There he is!
Quick, turn up the volume.
Is he going to do something?
...interpretations.
For some people, they're seeing a persecuted hero going to stand up to the system that's trying to crush their movement.
And this is live images of this motorcade looking for Elvis, right?
And then for others of us, you know, this is a dangerous scofflaw who stole a bunch of federal documents that anybody else stole and they'd be under the jail by now.
And so, that's the division.
You can literally be looking at one...
I don't know, man.
I don't trust that analysis.
I don't think any of us think that if someone else stole it, they'd be in jail by now.
We know that Biden's got classified documents, some of which were taken during his time as Senator, some of which, 20 of them, were taken during another period.
There's seemingly, according to Matt Taibbi and Shelley Berger, a credible allegation that he took a $5 million bribe while VP, and that information was repressed by the FBI.
So there is no centralised moral authority.
Look at that amazing image there.
Right now, the stopping traffic.
We're so used to the visual grammar of this post-OJ.
Even this news reporting is criminalizing Trump.
I've, as you know, got no dog in the fire.
I know a lot of you like Trump, and for me, I think radical systemic change is required.
But this news reporting is partisan, and it is ultimately designed to limit your political options.
What they want is for you to operate within a narrow bandwidth where you don't really have Any options at all.
You have no one in the political sphere that's genuinely interested in representing the views of ordinary American people.
Trump versus DeSantis, the ongoing preliminary battle has reached propagandist levels.
The mainstream media, of course, enjoying this.
CNN and sort of, I suppose, the liberal half of the neoliberal corrupt establishment media are enjoying this super PAC spat.
First up, whose video are we going to see first?
I think it starts with Ron DeSantis' on Trump.
All right, let's see what Ron DeSantis is saying about Trump.
First of all, let's have a look.
It is April 2023.
Yes, April 2023, but an early... Excited about the date.
That's just the date.
What are we worried about that for?
Yep, that's right.
We know the date.
You can trust us on CNN.
I think his point is that these are coming early when the election is next year, but it is just a man reiterating the date.
And also, like, this is the thing.
With all of their bombast and banal pageantry, they're in no position to criticise the propaganda of anyone else.
Look at that, by the way, his name, John King, came thrusting onto the screen, an unwanted graphic, priapic erection, forced in from the side of the frame.
If his point is they're doing this too early, just make a decision to not show it then.
You're doing the thing.
You're reporting on them doing it too early.
Yeah, you're getting involved.
You love it.
it and wait till it gets to the three finger yogurts.
A proxy war is underway between the top two Republican 2024 contenders.
A super PAC aligned with the Florida governor Ron DeSantis in a new TV ad
suggests Donald Trump has lost his way.
Trump's stealing pages from the Biden Pelosi playbook.
Repeating lies about social security.
Trump should fight Democrats, not lie about Governor DeSantis.
What happened to Donald Trump?
I like that shot of Donald Trump looking sort of a bit destitute, wandering home from a nightclub with his bowtie undone.
That was good.
Let's see though, I think Trump's super PAC propaganda, not necessarily affiliated with the Trump campaign, which is a super PAC thing, is better.
Because what they've gone for Is a garish, galling, gory, and awful image involving pudding.
Also, like they're picking up on a weird detail about Ron DeSantis.
I didn't know that Ron DeSantis ate puddings with his fingers.
But that's...
You know, like, have you ever been to India?
In India, people eat, like, surprising meals with their fingers, and I presume that's common across that region of the world.
Like, I was in India, and people ate, like, rice and curry with their fingers, and you just have to go, well, why not?
Maybe it's more weird to hold a little spoon or a fork.
What are we afraid of, man?
I still think even in India, they wouldn't do a chocolate mousse.
They might, mate.
They might get their fingers right in there.
If you are watching this live from India now, eating a puddin', Or if you're on DeSantis and you're watching this in Florida, with a great scoop of pud right there, cradled there in the nook of your third knuckle.
Suck that down, delicious, like Mother Nature surely intended when she granted us these crazy little hand wands, and let's know what's going on.
Now, that ad from a pro-DeSantis pack is responding to scathing ads from a pro-Trump group, including this, yes, stomach-churning dig at the Florida governor after a report that he ate pudding with his fingers.
Ron DeSantis loves sticking his fingers where they don't belong.
...is that De Santis has got a table and chair, and all that's on it is that pudding.
Just for a pudding.
That's his pudding table.
I'm going to the pudding table now, Mark.
There's nothing else there.
It's not like a TV or a phone or any distractions, just a man and his pudding.
And also, it's a non-branded sort of look.
I don't feel like that's a good quality pudding.
You get lots of those for maybe a dollar.
You get, in Walmart, I reckon you get 20 of them puddings for a very reasonable price.
And if you're fingering your way through them at a rate of knots, that's what you want.
When you're sat alone at your good, like, little jack-corner, sticking-your-fingers table, that's what you want.
Get another one in.
Like he holds up his muddy little digits.
And we're not just talking about pudding.
Yeah, we have a conveyor belt operated by an Oompa Loompa like on a bicycle. Just bring another pudding
He's like a self-fulfilling wonka. He's a one-man wonka. He's running his own chocolate factory. He's eating his own
product Hmm, that's the way to run a state if you ask me and we're
not just talking about pudding The Santas has his dirty fingers all over senior entitlements
Making the connection between the senior entitlements and that chocolate smeared. Let's face it. That's an erotic
image. Yeah Yeah, it is.
Well, I guess it's both, isn't it?
What do you mean both?
Disgusting and erotic.
Right, I see.
I mean, the erotic need not necessarily evoke a passionate or even erotic response in the recipient because the world of sexuality is a complex and wonderful smorgasbord.
Smorgasbord, perhaps.
A wonderful menagerie.
A menagerie of potential things.
And also, it's sexualising DeSantis' pudding eating.
Maybe it's just efficient.
Yeah.
He did it on a private jet, apparently.
I don't know if that makes a difference.
It was 2019, Ron DeSantis is in a private jet, flying around, and the story came out that he ate a pudding with his fingers.
Maybe there weren't spoons on the jet.
Could have been a one-off, couldn't it?
I actually, myself, have probably... I'd call it stooped so low as to eat a pudding with Digit.
But that's... it's not through choice.
I don't like getting off on it.
I'd look around for some sort of spoon or device.
If there isn't one, what are you gonna do?
Make one?
No.
Or use what I call God's sweet spoons.
God's spoonsies.
Nature's forks, these guys are.
Thanks for joining us.
Thanks for supporting and endorsing Rumble, which of course has its home in the state that you are the governor of.
Ron, when I was in Florida recently, I was struck by the amount of pride that Floridians have in their state.
You appear to be universally endorsed by the population of Florida.
I did stand up comedy there.
A lot of my stand up was talking about measures taken in the pandemic where I live in the UK and the broad and I would say spookily ubiquitous response to the pandemic in most places in the world, except one might contest in Florida.
I'm sure that the sense of state pride that Floridians have is a source of great joy to you.
I wonder how you came to the position of confidence in taking a stance that was antithetical to the stance taken elsewhere in America.
Well, I'm glad you noticed that.
I was born and raised in Florida, and while I've always loved the state, we didn't have the same type of pride growing up that, say, people in Texas have about Texas.
And yet, in the last few years, particularly since I've been governor, we've developed that pride, and I think a lot of it's rooted in the fact that we told people like Fauci to take a hike during COVID.
We were going to do it our way.
We were going to be the free state of Florida.
And obviously that meant people had a right to work, right to operate businesses.
Kids needed to be in school.
We fought back against mandates, both in terms of not letting local governments impose mask mandates, not letting government or business impose COVID vaccine mandates.
So in every step of the way, we were really leading.
And how did I come to it?
I mean, part of it was I just looked at the data that was coming in.
The whole premise of lockdown, both in the UK and in the United States, was in the idea that COVID would cause massive amounts of hospitalizations and we wouldn't even have any more hospital beds left over for normal patients.
We all got those models, all governors, all heads of state, and I'm looking at this in like March and April, And none of it was accurate.
All the predictions were bogus.
And so I said, listen, this is something that we're going to have to live with.
Sweden is living with it, and they're doing much better than most of these other countries in Europe.
Let's have people make their own decisions rather than forcing Fauci-ism on our state.
And I think that the goal of Fauci Was to have rolling lockdowns.
So you'd lock down, then COVID would go down, then you could maybe open back up.
But when the next wave started, you would have to lock down again.
And I think they would have wanted to repeat that over and over again.
Had Florida not stood in the way, I think they would have gotten away with it.
But what happened was, we said we're standing for freedom.
We remember we had a COVID wave summer of 2020.
Everyone was telling me, you've got to lock down Florida.
Fauci was saying it, the White House, the press, the left, all these people.
And I said, no.
I said, I'm going to stand.
A lot of people said, your political career is over.
And you know, at the end of the day, so be it, right?
A leader's got to do what he thinks is right.
You got to stand up for your folks, protect their jobs instead of worrying about your own political hide.
And so that's what we did.
It made the state better, and that did.
But I do think it had an impact around the country, because anytime the lockdowners wanted to do more restrictions, people could just point to Florida and say, well, wait a minute.
Florida's not doing this.
Why don't we have to do it?
So we were glad to be able to take that stand.
But here's the thing.
You still have people today, Fauci and the like, They think that what they did was right.
They think that these lockdowns worked.
And so my fear is, if this happens in the future, a lot of these people are going to want to do the same thing again.
So one of the things I pledged as president, and I think I'm the only one running on the Republican side who will be willing to do this, we're going to bring a reckoning to this health bureaucracy and this medical swamp.
Because these agencies like CDC, NIH, FDA, they failed the American people.
They become corrupted.
And they did a lot of damage with these unscientific anti-freedom policies.
Well, that's pretty heartening to hear.
In retrospect, your stance increasingly seems to have been the correct one.
And that's interesting and exciting, in fact, to hear you talk about a reckoning.
One thing that is evident from the position that you took as governor of Florida, the decentralization and the ability that you had to take that position, which must have felt like a huge risk given that it was in opposition to the proposed mandate in elsewhere, the sacking of key workers in New York City, the advocacy for shaming by CNN of people that were hesitant or reluctant to pursue certain medical propositions. It's a risk that
has doubtlessly paid off, but also it helps us to identify the importance of
decentralization. With this in mind, how do you feel that you would preside over the
United States of America if you fundamentally believe in the rights of
individual states to establish their own laws and govern in their own way?
Well, there is way too much authority in Washington, D.C.
and in the federal government right now.
And a lot of that is, I'd say, illegitimate authority that has been accumulated over many, many decades.
Some of that is because Congress has been neglectful, presidents have been neglectful.
But you have a massive bureaucratic administrative state that exist almost outside of typical elections.
They exert power over the populace regardless of the outcome elections.
None of these people are elected and they purport to tell us what kind of energy we can use, what kind of car we can drive, even whether potentially you're allowed to have a gas stove.
You know, in Florida, we made gas stoves tax-free because we believe that you should have the ability to do all that.
So, part of the project, I think, is to take power out of Washington and send it back to the states, the localities, and individuals.
That means we need a radical reduction of the federal bureaucracy.
We're going to tell our cabinet secretaries that they have to reduce the number of employees that they have inside D.C.
by 50 percent.
And that's going to probably be the biggest reduction in power in Washington In modern American history, but we cannot go down the road of letting more and more power consolidate in Washington, D.C.
Part of the reason is the founders never wanted to have consolidated power like that because they understood that's a threat to freedom.
You also have another problem that the ruling class in D.C., they get almost every major issue wrong.
And so these are the last people you would want to surrender judgment and freedom to.
They're going to lead us down the road to ruin.
So we've got a lot of work to do, but at the end of the day, part of the reason we've been successful in Florida is we fought back against the federal government.
For example, When the federal government tried to impose the COVID-19 vax mandates on the economy, you had one through the main economy, which we fought back and won.
Then they did one on the medical personnel, nurses, who a lot of these nurses had had COVID.
They didn't want to take the vax.
And so we called a special session of the legislature.
We said, you don't have to do it in Florida.
Federal government said, well, we're telling you, you have to.
And we said, go pound sand.
We're not going to cooperate.
So the federal government fined us $2 million.
But you know what?
We saved the jobs of tens of thousands of people throughout our state.
And so there's a lot you can do when you just stand up to these people to do what's right.
But there's no question that there's too much power in Washington, D.C.
Presumably this process of devolving power and breaking down centralized bureaucratic
power in Washington, if undertaken in good faith, would mean in states like California
and New York State you would get different cultural and ideological inflections, certainly
from based on a current reading from the type of cultural values that are espoused and somewhat
represented and in fact embodied by you, Ron.
And I wonder, if this process is undertaken in good faith, how will that affect the culture
war, an issue that you've been most outspoken on, if you genuinely are devolving power in
the manner that you have described?
That's the first part of my question that I may offer you, because presumably California
would have a whole different set of values, different policies on green issues, for example,
different policies on homelessness, and many of the topics loosely corralled under, let's
say, wokeness and the anti-woke discourse that's been dominating political and culture
more broadly for a while.
The second part of my question is, are you willing to approach and rebut
but centralized power in its corporate and private form in the same way that you would confront it in the state
form.
I'm talking, of course, of giant monopolies and duopolies in the areas of big tech and even energy and media.
Because, of course, one of the arguments that is advanced that is for pro-state power is that it gives us the ability
to confront corporate power, even if that isn't happening anywhere in American politics at the moment.
Well, no, I mean, I think it's a great, great issue, but I actually think it's just the opposite.
I think what you've seen is a collusion between big government and big business.
I mean, just take big tech.
A lot of the things that were being censored during COVID, for example, that wasn't just being done because Mark Zuckerberg thought that he wanted it censored.
No, he was working with people like Fauci.
They were working with people inside of government to censor dissent on lockdowns, on mask mandates, on school closures, on vax mandates.
All these things that, I mean, if you think about it, a free society has to have debates over important issues.
What more important issue have we had in the last decade or two Then whether society should be locked down?
I mean, are you kidding me?
And they didn't want to have that debate.
So I actually think that, yes, obviously when there's less power in Washington, individual states, they have certain powers to make different decisions.
But I do think if we break up the relationship between big government and some of these big monopolies,
particularly in the tech sphere, I think that's actually gonna have universal benefit
throughout the country, because there's gonna be more ability to speak freely.
You're not gonna have Uncle Sam with its thumb on the scale.
And let's just be clear about this.
The federal government could not censor you and say you can't say something about, say, lockdowns.
That would violate the First Amendment.
Everybody knows that.
But they can't subcontract out that to a private entity and have the private entity do
what the federal government couldn't do directly.
It's still a violation of the First Amendment.
One of the things we did in Florida as governor, I signed legislation expressly prohibiting our state and local government employees from colluding with big tech for any type of speech censorship or to police quote misinformation or disinformation they are not allowed to do that as a matter of law as president i'll issue an executive order basically barring federal employees from colluding with big tech like we've seen in the past but i think this whole idea
of freedom in our society has got to be viewed through the lens of, yes, we know big government can be bad for freedom.
There's no question about it.
But we live in an era where a lot of these big private concentrations of power are exercising kind of government-like power.
I mean, if you have Wall Street banks collude to deny funding for, say, gun shop owners, well, that's an indirect attack on the Second Amendment.
When you have different types of tech companies colluding with government to censor certain subjects, that's an attack on the First Amendment.
So, you've got to understand that freedom's under attack not just from government power.
There's also concentration of private power, which does threaten a free society.
In the spirit of this invitation towards unity, Bobby, I was interested to hear your welcoming of, if not the endorsement of Trump, but at least welcoming the fact that Trump likes you.
Bobby, I know that a lot of people here admire Donald Trump for the easy manner with which he engages with people.
Even when Trump says something like, we'll just take that oil from Venezuela, that seems like, to some people, refreshingly open when you have Biden making a Freudian slip and saying Iraq when he means Ukraine.
Perhaps because when he reaches inside himself words like exploitative war based on resources that is profitable and not undergirded by verifiable facts.
is the sort of contextual complication that he uncovers there. So can you tell me what
you consider to be the distinction between a political figure like Trump, what you regard
as his appeal and how it highlights some of the problems that career politicians like
Joe Biden appear to have?
Well, you know, I've been very critical of President Trump, but I try to keep my critiques
on a policy level because I think that that's a healthy thing for our country.
One of the things that I'm trying to do with my campaign is to end this toxic polarization that is, I think, more dangerous for our country than at any time since the American Civil War.
And, you know, everybody, like, if you talk to any Democrat, left-wing, right-wing, left-wing, moderate, whatever, they'll all say that polarization is one of the, you know, worst thing that's happening to our country.
But then, if you ask them, well, how do we, how are we going to solve that?
There's not really an answer.
And, you know, people criticize me for not putting hate on Donald Trump.
But I think that's where it's got to start.
I talk to anybody and I don't compromise my own values.
My values are the values of the Democratic Party that I grew up with.
They've never changed.
The values of my father, the values of my uncle, that has never changed.
But, you know, my uncles, all of them, and my dad were willing to talk to people and debate with people that they didn't agree with.
My uncle, Edward Kennedy, Has his name on more pieces of legislation than any senator in the history of the United States.
And the way that he did that was by reaching across the aisle.
So he would come home on weekends to the Cape, where our whole family was gathered, and everybody in our family is a Democrat.
And he would bring home Orrin Hatch, or Congressman Kasich, or Harry Bird.
And people that we thought were, you know, threats to our country and our society and, you know, the moral authority of America, etc.
But these were his closest friends.
And he found something in common with them that was beyond politics, that they were all chosen this very difficult life of, you know, being in public service.
And he found things to talk about and they loved each other, you know, they wrote poems to each other, they painted paintings for each other and gave them to each other as gifts.
He was able to, he never compromised his own values and he was happy about that, but he could get through those personal relationships.
He made Orrin Hatch his partner in addressing the AIDS crisis at a time when most Republicans were very punitive towards people who had AIDS, and yet Orrin Hatch stepped away from that and said, this is something that we have to address as a nation, and we have to address with compassion.
And they were able to find that in each other, and I think we have to look for You know, as Cheryl just said, we're all, we all want the same thing.
We all want healthy children.
There's no such thing as Republican children or Democratic children.
We all want the best for our children and we want to stop the school shootings.
Nobody wants that.
How do we focus on the values that we share in common rather than, you know, spiraling off?
And hatred and division around the issues that are holding us apart.
And I, you know, I think Donald Trump, I'm not a fan of Donald Trump's.
I've known him for many, many years.
I've sued him twice, both times successfully.
But, you know, the one thing I think that he's done is that he's talking to Americans who otherwise feel utterly forgotten.
And he's talking in their language and he's putting his finger on something that I think all of us need, that the people who support Donald Trump feel that they're regarded by the elites as deplorable people and that, you know, they're not part of our country.
And I think Donald Trump made them feel like they were part of our country, that they're being listened to.
He's willing to break things, and there's so many people in this country now who are so frustrated with the political system and with, you know, political leadership.
They feel like that leadership is serving the needs of this oligarchy, this corporate kleptocracy, and that they've been completely forgotten, and they want to break things.
They want, you know, and a lot of them, like I, you know, Represent a thousand families in Columbiana County, Ohio.
And you know, they have Trump signs on all like sprout, like mushrooms on all the yards down there.
And the people are living in a kind of poverty that is so desperate, so dire.
Um, that I never thought I'd see anything like that in our country.
And they don't, if you talk to them, I was with a group of them in a diner and I said, you know, what, what do you think Donald Trump's going to do with you?
And they said, we don't care.
As long as he breaks things on the other side.
And I think that, you know, at this point, they don't believe any politician is going to actually help them, but they just want to be heard.
And he seems to be able to, you know, to connect with them on that basis.
And I think, you know, my father, He used to look at Latin America and he saw the same thing there that is now happening in our country, where you have these huge aggregations of wealth above, you have these feudal oligarchies, and then below you have widespread poverty.
And my father said there's going to be a revolution in those countries.
And right, you know, up until my uncle's election, the U.S.
policy was to fortify those oligarchies because they were anti-communist and to give weapons to the You know, the juntas and the military strongmen that were, you know, that were tied in with those oligarchies because they were anti-communist, but they were keeping down the poor.
My father and my uncle said, America needs to be on the side of the poor.
They need to be, you know, in those countries.
And so they started the Alliance for Progress so that they could end run the oligarchies and give money directly to the poor.
They started USAID, they started the Kennedy Milk Program, they started Peace Corps so that they could put America on the side of the fort.
My uncle!
Made two trips abroad that were his favorite during his presidency.
One was to Ireland, which was one of his last trips right before he died, where he told them, you know, I'll be back in the springtime.
And then the other was to Colombia in Latin America.
And there were two and a half million people who came out on the street in Bogota to greet him.
And he was there with The, you know, the left-wing leader, Jaires Carmargo.
And the people were, the emotional level of, you know, when they saw my uncle, the people were absolutely, you know, they were crying and they were cheering.
And Jaires Carmargo said to my uncle, do you know why they love you?
And my uncle said, no.
And he said, because you put America on the side of the poor.
And you know, and my father said, there's going to be a revolution.
And either the communists are going to own it, or we're going to own it.
And we need to put ourselves on the side of the poor so that we can, you know, so that we can harness those revolutionary energies.
Or on the side of idealism and democracy, all the same things happening in our country today.
You know, there's going to be a revolution.
And it's either going to be Donald Trump's revolution or it's going to be a revolution that sort of restores America the idealism and the democratic values that, you know, I think my uncle and father represented.
Bobby, will you, Bobby Kennedy, get money out of politics by changing the practice of allowing donations to essentially, ostensibly, essentially run these political movements and bypass the process of democracy?
and i'm gonna we're gonna let cheryl now go back to uh do the rest of my side effects then
um okay i'm gonna let you guys finish this conversation um We've gone to the trouble of loading those into a deck, so I had to press those buttons.
If you win the presidency, don't you get so trigger-happy pressing buttons just to see what they can do?
That's the last thing we do after we narrowly avoided that Cuban Missile Crisis.
We don't want you bullsying up your legacy on that one.
We're going to replace Helen the Chief with that girl.
First of all, it's been great talking to you.
I'm going to let you guys finish this very serious conversation and I'm glad you're having it.
Cheryl, thank you.
I'm looking forward to meeting you when I'm out there having presumably lost a pull-up competition.
I'm going to be counting.
I mean, I hope I get to be the counter of the pull-ups when this goes on.
I'm going to be, you know, shouting one, two.
I don't know how many you can do, Russell.
I hope more than two, but... That smacks of corruption!
Having the wife of one of the competitors count in.
Oh, no.
Next, you'll be suggesting Dominion voting machines, which verifiably work, by the way.
Verifiably work!
Okay, bye!
Cheryl!
That's a good out.
She knows how to do an exit.
That's a professional actor right there.
So, Bobby, thank you for allowing us to participate in your relationship with Cheryl.
That was very kind and generous of both of you.
Thanks very much.
So what do you think about, like, you know, I covered a lot there, but I know you're a man who gives a long answer and I can identify.
So I wanted to talk about the censorship stuff, the stuff that's been taken down off YouTube.
But significantly, because we know that when he was talking to our friend over there, Crystal, over at Breaking Points, that she pushed on the stuff about donations.
And as I say, I'm excited by the Kennedy name and that your family have done great things.
But some people will think, well, this is just ultimately another establishment Politician.
And what about also, mate, like, you know, Trump prior to, like, I know a lot of people watching this will love Donald Trump, but it's my personal belief that in office, Trump didn't drain the swamp, Trump granted tax breaks to the richest people.
So, what specifically around this, like, you know, censorship we can cover, but also I'd love you to cover, what are you gonna do to get money out of politics through donations, through lobbying, 700 lobbyists from the military-industrial complex, more than one for each person in Congress, What are you going to do about this important and defining issue, please, Bobby?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a very difficult issue, but it's ultimately the most important one.
And if I can just go back, you know, we actually did lose our democracy at one point in American history during what we call the Gilded Age, which was in the 1880s and 1890s, in the time, the years after the Civil War, when really corruption overtook the idealism of the American experiment with self-governance.
And at that time, There were no direct election of senators, so the senators were chosen by the legislatures in our country, and the legislatures were owned lock and stock and barrel by the trusts.
The big sugar trusts, the rail trusts, the oil trusts, the coal trusts.
And those trusts were themselves controlled by interlocking boards of these big families, these oligarchical families of the American aristocracy, the Rockefellers, the Whitneys, the Fricks, the Morgans, the Carnegies.
And they were not only, so the senators were being, it was said at that time of the Pennsylvania State Legislature, There was nobody in that legislature who was for sale.
Because John D. Rockefeller already owned them all and he would not sell any.
And that really was the case in all the major legislatures in this country.
They were owned by these big social titans, these robber barons.
At that time, there was no income tax in our country.
So the amount of money, you know, Rockefeller was much richer than Bill Gates or Elon Musk is comparatively today.
He controlled, I think, 80% of the oil in the world.
And so you had this tremendous wealth.
There was no income tax.
There was no protection of workers.
There was no, you know, there was no child labor laws.
And they really suppressed American democracy because the legislatures then were involved and they controlled the party so they could choose the President of the United States, which they did time after time.
And then a group of things happened.
One, there was social movements, broad, grassroots social movements.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the populist movement, which is in the countryside, the progressive movement, which was in the cities, the reform movement, which was Republican, the populist movement was Democrat, but they got together.
And then you had muckraking journalists who played a critical role in Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis and many, many others.
McClure's Magazine, which was, you know, this font of exposes about corruption in government that played a cue that everybody in the country read back then.
And then you had one figure, Teddy Roosevelt, who came out of the aristocracy himself but was unintimidated by it and was willing to stand up to it and had these notions about bringing them under control.
And he got into office over the next few years.
They passed child labor laws, a 40-hour work week.
They gave women the vote.
They made direct elections of senators.
They passed a corporate income tax.
They passed antitrust legislation.
And for the first time, they broke up the Standard Oil Company, which is the biggest company in the world.
But the most important law they passed, which was in 1908, was a law that made it illegal for corporations to make direct contributions to federal elective candidates.
That was in 2008, exactly 100 years later, and it restored democracy.
And then we had the New Deal after that that created this robust middle class.
The 50 years following World War II, the great prosperity, when we grew the middle class into the greatest economic engine in history, we owned half the wealth on the face of the earth, and the institutions of our democracy were essentially, well, tiny bits corrupt, but essentially incorruptible.
Everybody believed them.
People believed the press.
During my uncle's presidency, 80% of the country said they believed anything that the U.S.
government told them, the same level of trust for the American press.
The courts were pretty much incorruptible, and the regulatory agencies were functioning.
So we had really a model democracy for the rest of the world, and the rest of the world imitated it, and 190 nations became democracies.
It pays pretty much on the U.S.
model.
Now, in exactly 100 years after we passed that law that really gave us back our democracy, the Supreme Court issued in 2008, I think it was 2008, the Citizens United case.
And that Citizens United did something very unusual and I think very troubling and dangerous.
Which is the Supreme Court said that speech, that donations, that monetary donations to a political candidate are the equivalent of speech.
And so they cannot be regulated.
They're protected under the First Amendment, under freedom of expression.
So you're, and there's no other country that says that.
You know, all the Western democracies in Europe allow very stringent regulation of campaign donations.
We had this very conservative Supreme Court that gave this revolutionary holding that opened up a tsunami of wealth that began pouring into the political process.
And here's the problem now is that, you know, prior to that time, presidential elections cost less than a billion dollars today for all sides.
Today, You know, this coming presidential election will probably go up to $3 or $4 billion.
And if a candidate, for example, in New York State or California or Florida, a candidate needs to raise $40 or $50 billion or even $100 million to run for elective office and get into the Senate, well, if you have to raise that money, it means that you have to make several, maybe 1,000 calls a week To people who are going to give you $10,000 donations.
When those people are giving you that money, most of them are not giving it out of a patriotic impulse.
They're giving it because they have an expectation that there's going to be a return on that investment.
And, you know, it may be a small return, meaning that you will return their phone call if they call you sometime in the future and give them your year for 10 minutes at least, or 20 minutes.
That's what they can get for that 10 grand.
But they all have that expectation.
And so if you have, you know, 3 or 4,000, 5,000 people have given you $10,000 apiece, and these are the top rungs of our society, and you have to answer all their phone calls every day, you're not going to have much time to listen to the little guy who calls you and never gave you anything.
And, you know, and for a politician, Everything they do is about raising money for the next election.
And they have an advisor whispering in their ear all the time, that guy's going to give me money, that guy isn't.
And so we now have arrived at a situation in our country where, which is the exact situation that we had a revolution to get away from, which is a rule by the oligarchy, a rule by the aristocracy, because the only person, people of the ear of Congress is this aristocracy.
And if you look, you know, recently at all the Democratic Party, the legacy media outlets, that are attacking me in this very, very vicious way, you know, ad hominem attacks that, you know, are very kind of personal and, you know, not policy related, but personal to silence me.
They all have become part of this system where they're, you know, they're They're protecting the interests of the elites.
And, you know, a couple days ago, I talked with David Remick, and I was pointing that out to him.
He said, well, you're part of the elites.
You know, you are an elite.
You were born into the elite.
And this is true.
But I've spent my lifetime challenging the rule of the elites.
Somebody the other day, I went to a dinner in Las Vegas and I made a little bit of a statement about my campaign and a guy next to me And then the people in this room were the highest level people in our government, you know, including the former head of the CIA, the head of the State Department, you know, two State Department Secretaries of State at that table.
And I said something that made everybody at the table angry, and the guy next to me Turned to me and he whispered to me, they consider you a traitor to their class.
And I think that's true.
I think that's how the press views me in our country.
And I think that's how, you know, a lot of the DNC views me in our country too, that I'm a traitor to this.
You know, this system that has us being governed not by democracy, but by the inverse of democracy.
It's governed by a new aristocracy of people who don't see themselves that way, but that's who they are.
Before we get any further, this is sort of a nice story in a way.
Joe Biden, who I believe he's the president of America, is in charge of it.
That's what they do.
They hold elections and then they get the best one, the best American, to be in charge of America.
Are those elections fair?
I believe that they are fair.
There's certainly no evidence to suggest they're anything other than fair.
Do the Russians ever get involved?
The Russians?
Some people say they get involved, other people say they don't.
Certainly there's no information that could be detrimental to the advance of the preferred establishment party that's held back, but I believe systemic change is what's required.
Here though, I come to Joe Biden With sympathy in my heart, not because he's a stooge of a system that will never deliver real change to the ordinary people of America who deserve better, but because I've been in the situation he was in.
It was Martin Luther King III's wife...
His wife, Andrea, I think is her name, it was her birthday and he wanted to sing Happy Birthday to her.
And have you ever been in that situation where you're singing Happy Birthday and then you realise that when it's going to get to the bit, Happy Birthday dear!
And you think, oh no, I don't know the person's name.
But what you can do is you can just drop out for that bit and the other people are going to sing.
There's got to be other people doing it though.
There's got to be others.
In this case it was only him.
You can't be on mic when you're doing it.
And also don't instigate happy birthday if you know that in that crucial lyric you've not got what you need to get through it.
No.
Future-proof yourself.
Future proof yourself, Joe Biden.
If you know that you've got a bunch of top secret files in your numerous residencies, don't go, right, Donald Trump's done the worst thing anyone could ever do.
He's got a bunch of secret files.
Yes, we got him.
Finally, we got him.
Get the FBI involved.
Get the FBI!
They should investigate this!
This is unconscionable!
Woah, woah, woah!
What's all these files all over your gaff, mate?
Oh, sorry about that.
Sorry about that.
I can't talk to you about it.
My lawyer said I can't talk about it.
Meanwhile, is it your birthday?
No.
Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday dear... Also, when you watch this, you see the moment when he realises he doesn't know the name, and then the thing that he comes up with instead of a name is frankly not good enough.
But congratulations today, the honorees, including your wife, who I understand, uh, is it her birthday today?
Well look, my wife has a role in our family.
When somebody's birthday, you sing happy birthday.
Are you ready?
Oh, it's weird custom.
Bloody hell, man!
It's because, you know what it is?
It's because in acting, you would call that playing the obstacle.
He's always trying to present something that's not what he's actually doing, because what he's thinking is, how can I seem normal and cogent?
How can I seem normal and cogent?
Well, normal people sing happy birthday, don't they?
Right, I'll sing some happy birthday myself, but You're not supposed to be pretending to be normal.
That's not your job.
Go out there and pretend to be normal.
Your job is be the President of the United States, be the Commander-in-Chief, represent the will of the American people at a divisive time when the systems have become corrupted, when people are terrified about globalism, when people are worried that corporatism has overtaken democracy.
That's your job.
That's your job.
But if you are going to sing Happy Birthday, for God's sake, know the name of the person you're singing Happy Birthday to.
Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday... I want you to, while you're watching, try and spot the exact moment when he realises, oh no, I do not know the name of Andrea.
I don't know it.
I'm gonna have to say something else.
Watch for that moment.
Watch for it.
Happy birthday to you.
Happy birthday, dear Lalvin.
Happy birthday, dear Lalvin.
I don't know the name.
I don't know the name.
It's about to be Lalvin.
People are called Lalvin, aren't they?
Isn't Lalvin people's names?
Martin Luther King.
Lalvin.
What if I could just get all the essence of Martin Luther King into a word?
Happy birthday, dear Lalvin.
Happy birthday to you!
Now where are the files?
There he is.
Oh dear, oh dear.
Shame really, innit?
I don't know, I mean there's another nine seconds in the clip, what's he gonna do?
Do an encore?
Happy birthday to you!
Well, it's hell turning 30, but you gotta No, that's not good enough.
Not the age joke.
I'm 21 again.
The only thing that should have followed him saying, well, should have been, I'm sorry.
Well, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry that when I'm honouring you, Andrea, I don't know your name.
And I'm sorry that I replaced your name with Lalvin.
It is a privilege to finally welcome Dr. Cornel West.
Hello, sir.
Oh, my dear brother, and I salute you there, brother.
You're the real thing, though, man.
You got the courage to be yourself.
You got the courage to take a risk.
But most importantly, you're a truth teller and a witness bear.
Thank you for saying that.
It's so kind.
I was a little bit scared to meet you because I've been going on a lot of right-wing media, what are called right-wing media outlets.
I watched you of course on Joe Rogan and we've been trying to get you as a guest before that.
I've looked at some of your master class philosophy course.
I admire you a great deal.
And when I talk about liberal politics, progressive politics, when I talk about the left, one of the voices that I hold in my head and my heart is yours.
And I've began to feel that liberal media has become so disconnected from the people that they're supposed to represent.
that the British Labour Party have become disconnected from the people they're supposed
to represent, that the Democrat Party is no longer a voice of bringing people together
but in my view uses cultural issues to drive people apart and are disingenuous even in
their apparent support of previously and let's face it, currently oppressed cultural groups.
Dr. West, what do you think is happening in our culture?
What is our duty in media spaces?
How can we bring about a new unity when people are living with so much fear?
Thank you.
I think we need two things, my brother.
One is we need a truthful analysis.
And the analysis has to be one in which it focuses on the precious lives of poor and working people, no matter what color they are, wretched of the earth from around every corner of the globe.
But that means keeping a focus on what you actually do.
Military and military complex.
The militarism abroad, and Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and big money.
Big money and big military have become what the monarchs and oligarchs were many hundreds of years ago.
They have power that's unaccountable, unanswerable, and irresponsible.
And it's so easy to get caught in issues of race and gender and sexual orientation.
It's very important.
White supremacy is vicious.
Male supremacy is vicious.
Homophobia, transphobia are vicious.
Anti-Jewish, anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian.
They're ugly.
But if we lose sight of what is going on in the American empire, in the Russian empire,
in the Chinese empire, when it comes to highly centralized forms of power
and authority that's crushing everyday people and ordinary people,
we don't have the right kind of analysis.
But you also need vision.
And this is where your stress on spirituality is crucial, on morality, indispensable.
Why?
Because people are feeling nihilistic.
They're feeling impotent.
They're feeling helpless and hopeless.
And they're feeling as if there's nothing we can do.
That's not true.
Ways of awakening, ways of spiritual and moral renaissance can take place.
They have taken place.
When?
When you got courageous brothers and sisters, artists.
Like yourself, truth tellers, like so many others, the Chris Hedges and others, trying to be honest.
The Matt Beatties and others, trying to be honest and saying, look, neoliberalism is dying.
One of the big... Neomatism is escalating.
The American empire is wrestling with spiritual decay and moral decrepitude in part because centralized power at the highest levels of our economy and tied to military with its politicians bought off by big money and war profiteering elites are making citizens feel as if There are nothing but consumers, nothing but commodified entities.
So that truth telling and the visionary work becomes crucial.
And that's what I've seen you do over these years, though, brother.
I'm telling you, man, it's a beautiful thing to behold.
Thank you for saying that, because your praise is a meaningful balm at a time where I've felt, if not attacked, because I also get a lot of love, I come from the world of entertainment, so I'm somewhat praise-oriented, I have to be honest.
But I have felt, sometimes, I've felt, am I doing the right thing?
Is this the right way to conduct this conversation?
You've brought up so much, even in your first response there.
I've been considering for a while that materialism, rationalism, and post-enlightenment values have led inexorably, even if inadvertently, to a state of nihilism such as you describe, that it's very difficult with populations of scale to instantiate a centralized set of values, ethics, and meaning And it appears with this divisiveness that I feel that somehow the culture is benefiting from has become worse and worse in recent years.
A few just like placeholder arguments to consider, Cornel, as we hopefully advance our conversation, sir, is my friend Adam Curtis, the documentary maker, who said, no one ever made a left-wing case for Brexit.
No one has, and I would add to that, no one has ever considered what the emotional timbre of Trump was, what it is that he reaches in people, what it is beyond the rhetoric and divisiveness, what it is within that emotional quality that is reaching people.
Given that this is a contemporary news show that we are streaming right now, it's worth bringing up an issue that's becoming somewhat defining of our time, the January 6th insurrection.
It seems impossible to say that both those events and the Black Lives Matter uprisings in the summer of the murder of George Floyd are in a sense a demonstration of the problems that centralised authority We'll always bring about that until we have a time where people that corral around these separate issues, these separate publics, before these separate publics, if these separate publics cannot recognize that ultimately they have to confront the same authority, we will not experience the kind of unity that both of us apparently crave.
How do you think we have to frame the conversation both for people on the neoliberal establishment left But also for people that identify with patriotism and what are called these days right-wing politics so that we can overcome and not only accept but love and embrace cultural difference in order to meaningfully confront these forms of centralised media, political, financial and military authority that are thriving in this climate of division, sir.
Yeah, I think we always want to begin with a fundamental commitment to wrestling with what it means to be human.
Because when you get to our deep humanity, that functions at a level that is much more profound than what color, than what gender, what sexual orientation.
Why we all wrestling with organized greed at the top, especially, but across the board, we all wrestling with various forms of hatred and self-doubt inside of us.
We had to be honest and candid with ourselves, just as we're honest and candid with the powers that be.
That's precisely what the legacy of the Martin Luther King Jr., and the Fannie Lou Hamers, and the Ella Bakers, and the John Coltrane, and the Aretha Franklin.
And I would listen to a little Loose Ends, and I would listen to a little Soul to Soul for my British connection here.
What?
When you listen to that music, my brother, it touches your soul.
The soul is always deeper than what color you are.
It's deeper than your gender.
That's why the arts become important.
That's why you love Richard Pryor.
That's why if Pryor was alive, he'd love you.
He'd say, oh!
This brother's the real thing.
He's like George Carlin.
He's telling the truth coming from his soul, but unique voice.
Now, of course, the voice of Black, the national anthem of Black people is what?
Lift every voice, not lift every echo.
We're not going to be an extension of an echo chamber.
Neo-fascist right wing, neoliberal Democratic Party, both of them Not just inadequate.
Both of them are major obstacles at this point for the empowerment of everyday people.
So that again, the spiritual dimension, the moral sensitivity becomes important.
And then, for example, when you go to Trump's people and you say, lo and behold, they're not homogeneous.
They're heterogeneous.
Some of them are racist.
Some of them are less racist.
Most of them catch in hell.
Most of them are wounded economically.
Most of them feeling as if they have been losers in the corporate globalization in the last 50 years.
They are right about that.
We got to bring serious critique to bear on any kind of white supremacist, male supremacist, homophobic or transphobic sensibilities that they might have, but also recognize they are human beings just like us.
And the fundamental question is the question that you've wrestled with, and I've wrestled with, What does it mean to be a wounded healer rather than a wounded hurter?
If you're wounded and then you're going to somehow demonize the vulnerable rather than confront the most powerful, you're going to end up with a right-wing populism Rather than a progressive populism, or most importantly in the language of Sheldon Wolin, my dear brother Bernard Harcourt, his new book on the cooperative movement, on Nancy Fraser's cannibal capitalism.
What are they talking about?
Solidarity.
But you can't have solidarity unless you have analysis and vision enacted by persons like yourself and others that say, you know what?
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