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Aug. 8, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand

01:20:13

WAIT…Why Aren’t They Talking About THIS?! | Trump’s Third Arraignment - Stay Free #185

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	In this video, you're going to see the future.
	Oh In this video, you're going to see the future.
	Hello there, you awakening wonders.
	Welcome to the limitless glory that you participate in through the miracle of your own consciousness, through which you can control your anatomy and indeed your life.
	If liberty should ever return to a planet, there's increasingly interested in centralizing authority, surveilling us, controlling and censoring us.
	Not here, though.
	Well, for the first 15 minutes, we are on YouTube, so there will be a degree of censorship.
	But after that, we're going to be on Rumble.
	And of course, today we're talking about Trump's Third arraignment and we're talking about what this means for free speech, what this means for democracy.
	In our item here's the news, no here's the effing news, we'll talk a little bit about Tucker's interview with Hunter Biden's former business partner and whether or not there are significant revelations in there that ultimately amount to the criminality of the Biden family.
	Once we get to being exclusively on Rumble, our home, where we revel in free speech, where we bathe in the ambrosia of free speech, where we sup upon the sweet teat of free speech, we'll be talking to Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, pioneer, investigator, friend and Co-conspirator over on Rumble.
	But first, let's talk about your free speech, my free speech, everyone's free speech.
	And if you want to enjoy a little bit of free speech right now, press that red button on your screen.
	You can join our locals community where free speech is our watchword.
	They're speaking in there so freely even now.
	People are talking about the federal government.
	Close-up pictures of dear Dianne Feinstein.
	That's from USA Now.
	People want to hear an interview, huh?
	They want to hear an interview.
	That's Deb Hart.
	You want to hear an interview with Glenn Greenwald?
	Yeah, but you're gonna hear one.
	Ash Eller is there chatting to us.
	Some people saying that they want to hear free speech.
	Yeah, you'll be getting free speech.
	That we can guarantee you.
	Should we have a little... Well, let's have a look at this headline.
	Biden's Department of Justice has just asked the court to limit what Trump can say, which is absurd, isn't it?
	Because it's a free speech case and they want to not let him speak freely?
	Is that...
	A bit crazy, my on-screen assistant, associate, co-writer, partner, friend, Gareth Roy?
	Yeah, it seems a little ironic, you could say.
	Is that literal irony?
	Ah, who knows?
	Who knows anymore?
	I mean, the fact that, you know, this is all about whether Donald Trump made knowingly false claims, whether he had the right to make those claims, if he honestly believed that the election results were wrong, and that that's what this whole thing is hanging on to.
	It's extraordinary because it's a high court case where a former president is potentially being indicted that hinges upon epistemology and ontology.
	What does he know?
	What is happening in the private hermeneutics of Donald Trump's mind?
	You knew that that election was fair and yet you're saying it's not.
	That's led people to say that they must have some evidence as yet not revealed.
	Do you think they've got evidence they've not revealed yet?
	Let us know in the chat.
	My favourite bit is when your man there, Smith, what's he called?
	Jack Smith.
	Jack Smith said that he was sowing doubt.
	Where is that bit actually?
	Yeah, so Smith's is just a little bit down that paragraph.
	You'll just hear...
	Smith's indictment cites Trump's speech on January 6th as a feature of his effort to sow doubt about the election and allegedly organise a conspiracy to overturn it.
	Sow doubt?
	Sowing doubt?
	That's such an odd, almost phony Don't you dare!
	Don't you ever so doubt in me!
	Because that sort of suggests you can control the consciousness of other people,
	that you're responsible for what other people think.
	It's becoming a bit diffuse, a bit tangential, and a bit abstract.
	One person who is never tangential, abstract, or in any way anything less than robust in his discourse
	is Donald Trump. Let's have a look at him addressing these charges now.
	Those indictments aren't worth the paper they're written on.
	Former President Donald Trump keeps fighting back after being charged with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election.
	This weekend, he ramped up his attacks, railing against the man who was leading the grand jury investigation, Special Counsel Jack Smith.
	Deranged Jack Smith.
	He's a deranged human being.
	And on social media, Trump deranged.
	That's good, isn't it?
	That's what he is.
	He's a berserk.
	He's crazy.
	He's a lunatic.
	Posted, if you go after me, I'm coming after you, which prompted prosecutors to ask the judge to limit Trump's outbursts.
	That means prohibit his free speech.
	The problem is, I suppose, is that with the ongoing conversation, which we'll be covering later in the show, around the Biden family's business dealings and the degree to which Joe Biden knew about and was involved with Hunter Biden's business interests, in particular with Burisma in Ukraine, If corruption becomes part of the system, not a bug but a feature, how can a charge of corruption in any way harm Trump?
	You'll be aware that since these allegations have amped up, since these prosecutions have increased in intensity, so has Donald Trump's Popularity is extraordinary to find ourselves in a time where our trust in the establishment is so low, our loathing of conventional politics so charged, so heady and high, that if an anti-establishment figure is significantly attacked, we like them more.
	Not less.
	This leads us to an important question, and I'd love you guys to answer it.
	Do you think that the Democrat establishment are strategically attacking Trump, knowing this will increase his popularity, because they would prefer Biden to face Trump in 2024 than any other candidate?
	Or do you think they're making a mistake?
	Let us know now.
	We had a poll a little bit earlier.
	Let's have a look at the results of that poll and remind me of the question, would you guys?
	Do you think the Democrats' pursuit of Trump is strategic because they want to face him?
	A distraction from Biden family corruption.
	You have resoundedly answered that at least 91% of you think that this is a distraction.
	What about those of you on Locals right now?
	Do you agree that it's a Distraction.
	Certainly Tulsi Gabbard says that the Trump indictment is a political kit job.
	Let's have a look at Tulsi Gabbard saying that now.
	This is yet another example of how far President Joe Biden's politicized Department of Justice is willing to go to try to destroy his main political opponent I suppose that's what Trump himself and Trump supporters would say.
	Is this what you guys would say?
	of what the Biden administration is doing is really the thing that should be most concerning
	to everyone.
	I suppose that's what Trump himself and Trump supporters would say.
	Is this what you guys would say?
	If this was happening in Venezuela or Colombia, we'd say, hang on a minute, this is an attempt
	to take out a political opponent, in fact, the most potent political opponent.
	How do they address that?
	They say that he's just a corrupt guy.
	These are legit indictments.
	He did incite an insurrection on January the 6th.
	I guess the events of January 6th, I mean, hence why the media use that imagery so often, that, you know, the violence, whatever you want to want to call it, plays into, I mean, they use it all the time in that respect.
	But obviously we know, you know, we know the reaction of Hillary Clinton to Trump winning and the whole Russiagate thing.
	So this is something that there's precedent for.
	We know that Democrats have denied election results, and if Stacey Abrams did it in Georgia.
	This is not something, it's not you're not at this point taking something that has never happened before.
	With politicians essentially maybe lying even.
	It's kind of standard, isn't it, for politicians to deny the outcome of an election.
	Standard.
	It happened in 2016 throughout, as you say, the whole Russiagate thing.
	And a further complication is most people's belief now, or at least a significant number of you believe, and hasn't it been proven that there were FBI operatives in the crowd on
	January the 6th and it's possible that their actions contributed significantly to the escalation of
	events. So it's by no means as plain as they claim and the degree of piety with which they attest to
	this corruption is delegitimized by significant suspicion around Joe Biden's involvement with
	Hunter Biden, keeping the Hunter Biden laptop story out of the press, the Russiagate stuff
	and how that was handled, the fact that there are deep state operatives working on January the 6th,
	the whole thing is very difficult to hold And one of the things we talk about continually when discussing the war, in particular say the Dianne Feinstein vote, her saying aye when plainly, visibly and televisually being coached to say aye, is not only is that sort of ridiculous and sad and to see yet another elderly, gosh forgive the word, cadaverous political figure being coaxed, coached and cajoled into obeying what?
	A pair of cheeks?
	Elites?
	Who is it that's guiding these votes?
	Because it certainly isn't you, the electorate.
	More important even than that is the fact that what she was voting for is yet more military expenditure.
	Record military expenditure.
	What we're being invited to accept is no scrutiny, appraisal or auditing of these military budgets.
	What I reckon, guys, and what we discuss all the time here at Stay Free, is the significant fact that we're not participating in the discourse around our politics.
	We're not participating in elections.
	What's happening is our attention's being funneled into single issues.
	Was Trump corrupt?
	Is Trump corrupt?
	Is this a Trump versus Biden thing?
	And all the while we're caught up in this sort of cacophony of odd racket around these issues.
	We're unable to gain sufficient perspective and view the fugue of corruption that pervades All of these institutions.
	We can't get a moment to ask the significant questions, although we will be asking Glenn Greenwald some of those significant questions when he joins us on Rumble in just a few minutes.
	If you're watching us on YouTube, there's a link in the description.
	We're only going to be on YouTube for a few more minutes.
	But I think, you know, as Tossi Gabbard says there about, you know, how this is being used, I think it's showing in the polls how this is being viewed.
	People are I think growing tired of what's happening with Donald Trump.
	And again, as we've just stated about Stacey Abrams or Russiagate or whatever it is, even with Trump and the last charge when it came to keeping those documents and war with Iran and things, people are starting to see there's another side to this story and that things are being used in ways that could definitely be called politicising them.
	We see again and again in the conversation over here in locals, people saying, I didn't used to like Donald Trump.
	I was cynical about Donald Trump, but the way he's being treated here is revealing.
	Again, with the boxes of censored governmental material, It seems like a lot of political figures do comparable things and more significant than that was the fact that they pertain to a plan to attack Iran.
	I've already forgotten that because I'm caught up in this latest arraignment.
	Oh, did he know?
	Was he deliberately sowing doubt?
	Such bizarre, almost metaphysical questions.
	You did know that that election was legitimate.
	I know a lot of you guys still have questions around the legitimacy of that election.
	Certainly not a claim that I'm able to make on YouTube.
	No, you wouldn't.
	But as we've said, the Democrats have done the same thing.
	They've questioned elections themselves.
	This isn't happening in a kind of vacuum.
	This is happening as part of a corrupt political system as we know it.
	This, I think, is one of the biggest points that we've found ourselves discussing and iterating again and again on our show, Stay Free.
	There is no one that has the moral authority anymore to say, we'll handle this.
	We'll determine whether or not Donald Trump is corrupt.
	We'll determine whether or not you should be able to talk about the Hunter Biden laptop.
	We'll offer you a mea culpa for the events of the last three years, the censorship, the shutting down of legitimate experts.
	I think all of us are suffering from a kind of fatigue now, of recognising that our media
	institutions and our governmental institutions and our corporate institutions are being dishonest,
	that we don't have enough power in our own lives.
	And that exhaustion, blessedly, is somehow metabolising into the kind of outrage that
	hopefully we can use for a new independent media movement and new independent political
	movements because I think we need them.
	And figures like Tulsi there crossing the aisle, or Cornel West standing and making
	some moves and making some racket, and friend of the show, Robert F. Kennedy, making a significant
	impact in independent media, if not within the Democrat Party, which all of us know is
	going to shut him down.
	If they shut down Bernie, they're sure as hell going to shut down RFK.
	At least it shows now that there are new emergent possibilities for communication.
	And indeed, that's why we believe these censorship laws are being pushed for.
	That's why protests are being shut down all over the world, even in places like Florida.
	Ron DeSantis came on our show and it seems to me that a lot of you that are sort of right-leaning and interested in the Republican Party do not see DeSantis as a legitimate alternative for a very interesting reason.
	We were discussing this earlier, let's have a look at the headline, because people don't see him as humorous Or human.
	There he is.
	Trump's soaring away, as we all know.
	But let's have a look at the reason for that.
	Many people think that Ron DeSantis lacks humour and is not an interesting political figure.
	Let's look at that story right now.
	Yeah.
	Can we... Have we got the text on that somewhere?
	So I can...
	See it, guys.
	Where is that?
	Gareth, do you have that on you?
	Yeah, I do have it.
	So it's on your second page.
	I can find it for you.
	Yeah, you find that for me because I think it's interesting.
	One of the things that we sort of talk about with Donald Trump is the fact that, in a sense, his appeal and his impact is predicated on his persona and his charisma.
	Whenever you see him talk, it's what's most striking of all, is the fact that he doesn't sound like other politicians.
	Now, when Ron DeSantis came on our show, I don't know about you, Gareth, but I was sort of struck by how statesmanly he was.
	He did seem like an authoritative figure.
	Even when coming on a show like ours, his set-up looked most presidential.
	But I guess I'm coached into seeing political figures in a particular way.
	And someone like Trump, who talks in that anachronistic, idiosyncratic, peculiarly humorous, blunt, occasionally rude way, is more appealing.
	When you have someone saying, yeah, we just invade Venezuela and take their oil.
	When you hear someone say, I know about these loopholes because I use them.
	That has authenticity.
	I think you can also see that without being a Trump supporter.
	Right.
	Although you're not allowed to discuss it, are you?
	It's sort of somehow taboo in many media circles.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, if you say, I can see why Donald Trump is popular, I can see why he appeals to people, even apart from the politics or the reactions of, for example, Obama's reign as president, even apart from all of that, just in the way that he conducts himself, if you say that, it's like you're, you know, I don't know, You're saying something that you shouldn't.
	This is an odd passage from this New York Times piece.
	It says, the share of Republicans who said Mr. Trump was more fun than DeSantis, that's 54 to 16 percent, and he doesn't come across with humor, many people said of DeSantis.
	That's odd, isn't it?
	because these are very human characteristics, the kind of human characteristics that the Chrome orb,
	that world crypto will be looking to detect when it reads the information in your irises
	as we drift towards dystopia, almost on every front.
	Starved of humanity, starved of authenticity, we crave it in our political figures,
	we crave it in our media spaces.
	We demand it now more than ever, because we know that what you're getting from Joe Biden
	is inauthentic for all of his R shucks, homespun corn pop yarns.
	We know that what we're looking at there is an atrophying schooled political figure,
	lifelong in Congress, lifelong in those kind of relationships and arrangements
	that we know Washington DC runs on, granting access for money.
	And indeed that is the subject of our.
	Here's the news story a little later.
	If you're watching this on YouTube, we're only going to be there for a few more minutes.
	Glenn Greenwald is even now preparing to answer some pretty challenging questions on this Trump phenomena and the issue of free speech that it brings to the forefront.
	If you want to stay for that conversation, you can have to click on the link in the description.
	And if you're with us on Rumble already, why not just take that extra plunge?
	Go from being, and I was going to use some terrible analogies around addiction there that will not be appropriate on YouTube, where people are That's a pretty good statement there from you, mate.
	There's a lot of intelligence in this locals chat.
	It's very important, I think, for you guys to continue to write in and to keep us attuned to what you're feeling.
	Sanders tried to peel away populism from Trump but he's failing because big-money
	republicanism and gratuitous fake smiling have possessed him. That's a
	pretty good statement there from you mate. There's a lot of intelligence in this
	locals chat. It's very important I think for you guys to continue to write in
	and keep us attuned to what you're feeling. Hey listen, have you heard?
	Zelensky says there will be no compromise with Moscow.
	There certainly won't be, because Russia is a military machine that will stop at nothing.
	And yet, most Americans who are in the main funding this war, do you know that you, the United States of America, have spent more on this war than Russia?
	Americans have spent more... America, who are not in this war, because it's not a proxy war, have spent more money on it than Russia, and 55% of you are sick of that.
	55% of Americans said US Congress should not authorize additional funding to support Ukraine, and 45% say that Congress should continue to.
	That's what strikes me most of all as surprising, Gareth, is the significant number of people who are happy with it, but you said that's sort of an odd way that American demographics and politics Yeah, I mean, look at any election in the United States and how close that they all are.
	I mean, this ultimately is starting to come down to lefty-right.
	You know, there's certainly a large number of Republicans now that are at least trying to counter some of the actions in terms of the increased military spending that's going on with the Democrat Party.
	We saw the way that Dianne Feinstein was kind of coached by her cohorts into No, no, that's not what we're saying today, Diane.
	The world's changed a lot since the 1960s.
	that as well, was it? Because she sort of momentarily, there's where she was like,
	no, no, we've got to stop. We've got to build a better world, build on diplomacy
	and communication. How can we ever end this war by continually funding it? And
	how can we continue to claim to the American people that this is a humane
	and humanitarian war, rather than a war driven by profit?
	No, no, that's not what we're saying today, Diane. The world's changed a lot since
	the 1960s. Now war is good. You're unpatriotic!
	If you don't support war.
	Oh, so what do you want me to say then?
	I just say I and she duly did so.
	Well a lot of people said I as well when it came to should we stop this audit from being formed into spending on Ukraine as well because that's been voted down also.
	Isn't that astonishing?
	All that is is do you mind telling us what you're doing with that money?
	I mean if someone popped out at lunchtime to get me a sandwich or yoghurt and a tin of pop I wouldn't mind seeing the receipt.
	Last time I saw you that was many years ago.
	What I want is some macrobiotic thing.
	A tube of protein.
	Just put it directly into my anus!
	Also, Biden has had to ask Congress to include military aid for Taiwan in the next Ukraine spending bill.
	You can We can have a war with Ukraine and you get Taiwan for free.
	This is an extraordinary culture.
	This is an extraordinary time where wars are being bundled together.
	A two-for-one war is never going to be a bargain, even if you're enjoying some of the footage of the Ukrainian attacks on Russian warships in the Black Sea, which I think is pretty strongly connected to and affiliated with Russia.
	If you're watching us on YouTube, we're going to have a look at this bit of mainstream media reporting on Ukraine attacking a Russian warship, which again represents a sort of a pivot and change of direction in this conflict.
	Ukraine now aggressively attacking Russian naval targets, that's no longer a defensive measure.
	I'm sure you'd agree, let me know in the comments.
	But more importantly than that, we're going to be speaking to Glenn Greenwald about free speech, the ongoing Trump trials, this ongoing bifurcation throughout our culture, the inability to openly communicate, the meaning of morality in a system that is as ethically moribund.
	That's right, moribund!
	This one currently is.
	So if you're watching on YouTube, click the link in the description.
	Join us over on Rumble right now with our Rumble cohort and compadre, Glenn Greenwald.
	See you in a second.
	If you're on Rumble, why not join us on Locals?
	Should we talk to Glenn straight away?
	Is Glenn available now?
	Is Glenn with us?
	Yes, he is.
	Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Icon, leader, role model to us all, dog owner and man of great beauty.
	Hello Glenn, thanks for joining us.
	I think you're muted, either your end or our end.
	Come on, Glenn.
	I wanted to say that was a very insufficiently effusive introduction.
	I'd like you to try that again.
	I'll go again.
	Why don't you re-mute?
	I was like, Glenn Greenwald, a man who cannot operate a laptop, even in front of a beautiful mountain scene, live from a shack.
	Much better.
	Thank you.
	Much better.
	I appreciate that.
	What do you think's on the line with the Trump arraignment, Glenn?
	Do you feel that, given that this is a trial that's about free speech and free speech is being curtailed, where do we find ourselves now if the Dem establishment continues down this path?
	I was just actually reading a very good and interesting article, and characteristically so, in the New York Times by the former Bush Justice Department, Harvard Law professor Jack Oldsmith, who seems to think Trump at least acted very poorly, if not criminally, but nonetheless is warning about the widespread perception that already exists that most of our institutions of authority are corrupted and politicized and can't be trusted, which is always dangerous in a democracy.
	The only institution that polls well these days is the military, meaning the soldiers and the armed forces, not the people who run the Pentagon.
	And that's never good for a democracy when the only thing people trust is the military.
	And, you know, his argument is, is that no matter how you slice it, this actually is a case where the current government looks at polls, sees that there's only one person who's likely to be able to challenge Joe Biden and defeat him for reelection.
	And that's the person whom his Justice Department happens to be prosecuting in multiple cases, two so far and counting, and not just cases that have been brought, but ones that rely upon highly dubious interpretations of law.
	It's not like these are murder cases or rape cases or bribery cases, things people traditionally think about when they hear of criminal accusations.
	They're very, you know, kind of distant and vague accusations that do depend a lot on free speech rights.
	And it's just only going to worsen perceptions that the Justice Department and justice system generally can't be trusted.
	It's often a sense that America is a somewhat solipsistic nation.
	Do you imagine that if this were happening elsewhere, it would be regarded as the kind of corrupt antics of a banana republic, a takedown of a powerful political opponent?
	How much have our institutions altered that we can incrementally move into this position without identifying that that's what's happened?
	As you say, not egregious criminality, but somewhat diffuse and tangential.
	Amoral, immoral conduct.
	Do you think that this is something, if we were seeing it in Latin America or Central America, forgive the dismissiveness of that appraisal, we would regard it as crackpot, banana republic conduct?
	Yeah, I mean it's interesting the reporting that I did in Brazil in 2019 and 2020 that ultimately led to my indictment but that nonetheless freed Rua da Silva from prison was based on exactly that argument that he was in prison, Rua was, at a time when he was leading all public opinion polls for his re-election in 2018.
	He had a 15-20 point lead on everybody including Jair Bolsonaro.
	And what was obviously a politically inclined prosecution and a politically inclined judge, namely inclined always to be against BT, ordered him arrested, convicted him quickly, and rendered him ineligible to run, which let Jair Bolsonaro run and win in 2018 without having to face the law.
	Maybe he would have won, we'll never know.
	And now they've turned around.
	The establishment in Brazil hasn't done exactly the same thing to Bolsonaro, knowing that he's probably the only person who can So of course this is the sort of thing that happens in countries that don't trust democracy.
	It's ironic, Russell, because when I first started writing about politics in 2005, the first book I wrote was an argument that the Bush and Cheney administrations and the top officials in it had committed obvious crimes, war crimes, through things like torture and rendition and warrantless spying on Americans.
	And when Obama got into office after promising to let his attorney general prosecute the people who did that if it warrants, immediately he announced there will be no prosecutions.
	He said we have to look forward, not backward.
	And the entire DC class agreed with Obama saying only banana republics prosecute their political opposition.
	And that was for real crimes like torture and kidnapping and You know, killing people and spying without warrants, not these kind of attenuated theories of criminality on which the Biden Justice Department is now relying to prosecute Trump, their primary political opposition.
	And yet Obama arrived in office on waves of optimism, ushered in under a banner of change and hope.
	It's pretty plain that the scepticism and cynicism that many people feel for their institutions is well earned.
	And is experiential.
	We did a poll earlier and most of our audience, like 90% of our audience, believe that the Trump prosecutions are a distraction from corruption and criminality within the Biden family.
	And how effective can prosecuting an opponent be for corruption when most people think that the institutions themselves have lost all moral authority, and in the case of the current American government, that the Biden family in particular criminal. How much do you think, as Trump's lawyer, one of
	Trump's lawyers, suggested this case is a retaliation to and response to
	matters that pertain particularly to Hunter Biden and Joe Biden's relationship
	around his business and Burisma in particular, Glenn?
	Well I think that's the other key part of the context and that's one of the things that Professor Goldsmith
	in that article I mentioned in the New York Times this morning highlighted
	was that at exactly the same time the Biden administration is prosecuting
	Donald Trump, they are also protecting and shielding Hunter Biden who is guilty of
	far more blatant and obvious criminality, just blatant political corruption,
	tax evasion, a refusal to pay taxes, hiding assets, misaccounting for
	things.
	In a way that most people go to jail for many years and Hunter Biden gets this incredibly generous deal that was so shocking to the judge that it immediately crumbled upon the slightest bit of judicial scrutiny because she couldn't believe that the Justice Department was really offering him this full-scale immunity given how many other crimes are pending and given how he was allowed to plead guilty to misdemeanors for what she has seen many times in her short judicial career are treated as serious felonies.
	So when you set that aside, that kind of You know, sweetheart deal given to Hunter Biden, aside to this politicized prosecution, it becomes even worse.
	And Russell, I think this is the key question that is central to everything that was embedded in the question that you asked, which is, I know, like me, you're often accused of having changed your political views or having moved from the left to the right, etc., etc., even though you haven't changed any of your political opinions at all.
	As somebody who's listened to you for quite a while, I know that to be true.
	The reason that's happened is because what is the relevant metric now is not so much left versus right, But it's anti-authoritarian versus pro-authoritarian or anti-establishment versus pro-establishment.
	Namely, do you think the loss of trust that these institutions of authority have suffered is valid or not?
	Do you think that they deserve the contempt in which they are held by a large portion of the population?
	I believe it's absolutely justified to hold in contempt these political agencies, the U.S.
	security state, the corporate media, big tech, for all kinds of reasons.
	And I think standard classic liberals, you know, by which I mean just Democrats, ordinary Democrats, even the part of the left that claimed they were launching a revolution under Bernie Sanders and AOC and the like, Have come to view these agencies as their allies and therefore legitimate and that more than anything is the relevant fundamental distinction that I think define defines our political spectrum much more so than old definitions of left versus right.
	Yes, and the deserved contempt that you described appears to be accompanied with an unwillingness to enter into a good faith conversation and advocacy for censorship.
	One of the defining issues of our current news cycle is this ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the manner in which it is funded, primarily of course by US taxpayer dollars, and yet it's not something that can be When did advocacy for war become a liberal standpoint?
	When did an unwillingness to discuss the expenditure on American tax dollars become an ordinary policy?
	Was it the same as this in the Bush-Cheney administration that you publicly criticized and referred to earlier?
	Is it them that have shifted their position rather than people like you and I?
	You know, I think the media, the corporate media, was notoriously pro-war on terror, pro-Iraq war, pro-Bush.
	The New York Times had to apologize institutionally for the lies they spread to sell the invasion of Iraq to a liberal population.
	A lot of the lies came not just from Fox News and the Republican Party at the time, but also, and more importantly even, from leading institutions in American liberalism like the Atlantic and the New Yorker.
	And the New York Times, which were battering liberals every day to believe that the invasion of Iraq was necessary, that the excesses of the war on terror from the Patriot Act of torture and the like were all necessary.
	And so there was really a kind of closed system that didn't really tolerate a lot of dissent.
	That's actually the reason, the primary reason why I started writing about politics in 2005 was a reaction to this inability for dissent to be aired.
	But I have to say, Compared to the war in Iraq and that whole era after 9-11, where at least we have the excuse that the U.S.
	really had suffered a cataclysmic attack on its soil, there is so much less dissent and so much more homogeneity.
	Now, on most questions, but certainly the war in Ukraine, in the EU, where you used to be, and now I think good for you are not, but still near it, the EU at the start of the war made it illegal For any social media platform to host Russian state media like RT and Sputnik.
	That's the reason why this platform, Rumble, is not available in France because Rumble refused to remove RT at the orders of the French government.
	The attempt is to just close the information system completely so that the Western population is completely propagandized.
	All around the world, Russell, you know, especially in like these so-called BRICS countries and developing countries, Almost everybody is against the war in Ukraine, views it as something that NATO and the US provoked, assigns 50-50 blame to Moscow and the West, if not more to the West even, for having provoked it, refuses to join in with the sanctions regime.
	And yet in the West, we're constantly told the entire world, the entire international community is united behind the United States in this noble effort.
	And I think now, as that polling you referenced demonstrates, that shows that a majority of Americans 55 to 45 no longer want the U.S.
	to continue to fund the war in Ukraine.
	They've had enough.
	They're starting to realize yet again that they were propagandized about a war, that they were convinced at the start they should support and are now coming to oppose.
	And I should say, if we look at the ideological breakdown of that poll, overwhelmingly, by far, the group that most supports the U.S.
	financing of the war in Ukraine are self-described liberal Democrats, 75% of them.
	Support this CIA-NATO war in Europe.
	If it weren't for that, the margin would be even much bigger.
	It makes me wonder if people have any intuitive or essential morality at all.
	Or are they rather just fielded, shepherded from opinion to opinion in accordance with the preferences of the centralist authority?
	When we have the bizarre spectacle of yet another cadaverous statesperson being cajoled into compliance, this time in the form of Dianne Feinstein, do you feel that there's almost an archetypal truth emerging in the political space?
	That our institutions and those denizens of it are beginning to visibly decay before our eyes?
	That this will not be resolved in the typical cycles of A bipartisan electoral oscillation, but will require an institutional reckoning, significant change.
	In fact, the kind of things that rhetorically great political orators have always referred to, hope, change, an America where communities and individuals are empowered, whether that's Trump saying that or Obama saying it, God knows they all say it.
	Do you think that figures like Robert F. Kennedy could ever flourish within the Democrat Party?
	And do you think that what's required is a kind of new political mechanic emerging from these new independent media spaces that we participate in?
	Do you start to feel, and I know that this is a big part of your journey and you've been an activist and an advocate and much much more over the last 10, 15, 20 years, but you're starting to feel that independent media will become politicised as a Yeah, I mean, it's basically the only thing about which I'm optimistic.
	You know, on my show last night, my Rumble show, we interviewed The director of this documentary that was released last year, I don't know if you saw it, but if you haven't, I really recommend it, called The Orders of War, which used FOIA requests to unearth all of these documents showing how producers and directors in Hollywood of the biggest mass-marketed films work in complete partnership with the Pentagon and the CIA to the point they give them script approval,
	They can only get films made if the Pentagon and the CIA approve of these films for the most part, in part because Hollywood's a huge business and doesn't want to alienate the US government, but also because a lot of these films need access to things only the Pentagon can provide.
	And the film really is about how potent propaganda is, how it kind of infiltrates every component of our, not just political eyes, but our cultural eyes, where it's even more insidious when our guards not up.
	If you go to the film to see Godzilla, you don't know that the CIA and the Pentagon has helped shape the script.
	And yet they have.
	And so when I look at things like the history where every time the US has a new war to present, every time the ruling class of Washington has a new war to present, the population gets on board with the war at first and then turns against it, which is what happened in Ukraine.
	I think it's because propaganda is very effective.
	They know how to play on people's emotions, including positive emotions.
	If you show somebody the victims of a war, the civilian victims of a war, the way they did constantly when it came to Ukraine, but never do for U.S.
	wars.
	Like, when do you ever see a victim of an American war in Iraq or Pakistan or, you know, Yemen or Afghanistan or Syria or Libya talking about, you know, the lives lost and the ambitions crushed?
	Never.
	You only see it when you hear from Ukrainians talking about Russian missiles that fell, and so people connect to this.
	They're stimulated emotionally, and sometimes it's a good emotion, but they're being so manipulated by a propaganda science that has been developed over decades.
	And then you combine that with this newfound fixation using the Internet to censor more than we've ever been censored.
	This relentless campaign to take off the Internet, anything that raises questions or dissents
	from the establishment narrative.
	And you can see why it's an incredibly potent weapon. And I absolutely think that the only
	thing that matters in my view, in terms of looking at myself, not as a journalist, but as a citizen,
	is fortifying the parts of the Internet that still are devoted to permitting dissent and
	protecting free speech and free discourse and free inquiry.
	Because without that, we have nothing.
	We're all humans. This is top-level propaganda. Even those who think of ourselves as resisting
	it, you need alternative voices. And it's being rapidly removed from the Internet. And places
	like Rumble and a few others are like it, this kind of independent media that has emerged.
	That's why I say it's the only source of optimism for me.
	And it's why I spend so much time protecting its prerogatives and freedoms that are
	constantly under assault.
	So, Sam.
	And yet, as you've observed, Rumble is already not available in France and perhaps elsewhere in the EU because of Rumble's refusal to de-platform Russia today.
	Seems to me that forces and legislature is being marshaled to prohibit and certainly inhibit the rise of independent media spaces and that we're kind of Sleepwalking into the normalization of censorship and even your cited figures on support for the Ukraine, ongoing financial support for Ukraine in their conflict with Russia, suggest that many people will just blindly and blithely support ventures such as this.
	So whilst you say you're optimistic, I sometimes feel Like pretty scared that in the end they're going to just say you're not allowed to have rumble anymore.
	They'll just shut it down.
	And I feel like something is happening in Brazil with a significant podcast being censored.
	And do you feel that there is a kind of consensus among the powerful, even though they may have conflict elsewhere, to manage emergent voices such as the ones that we're discussing in independent media spaces?
	You know, what's happening in Brazil is very scary, and it's also very illuminating.
	I mean, I've lived here for almost 20 years, so obviously I focus on it in part for that reason, but also because Brazil is a huge country.
	It's the sixth largest country in the world, second largest in our hemisphere.
	It has a lot of, you know, environmental resources like the Amazon and major oil resources.
	It's a country of great geostrategic importance, and it has been part of the democratic world for, you know, since 1985 when it redemocratized.
	It's been basically a democracy.
	But what has happened over the last four years, first in the name of fighting Bolsonaro, just like everything in the US is done in the name of fighting Trump, like it used to be justified in the name of fighting the Soviet communism.
	And after that, Muslim extremism, there's always some enemy that justifies authoritarianism to keep the population fearful.
	But in the name of fighting Bolsonaro, they've essentially adopted a completely authoritarian mindset and implemented a system Uh, censorship so extreme that it's genuinely impossible for me to exaggerate or overstate it.
	It's so extreme, in fact, that the New York Times, before the 2022 election between Lula and Bolsonaro, when they were obviously rooting for Lula to win, raised flags on two occasions about how extreme it was becoming.
	They consolidated all the power to censor in the hands of a single member of the Supreme Court, who is very pro-PT and anti-Bolsonaro.
	He has no opposition.
	There's no trial.
	There's no process.
	He just issues decrees and orders saying this person shall hereby be removed from the internet.
	This person shall be denied access to be able to speak.
	He imposes massive fines if this isn't immediately obeyed.
	There's that person that you referenced.
	He was once called the Joe Rogan of Brazil because he's in his mid-20s.
	He built this enormous audience, was the most influential podcaster in Brazil.
	Millions and millions of views every show, every day on YouTube.
	He got banned off YouTube, booted off YouTube.
	He went to Rumble, where Rumble signed him, and now the judge has ordered Rumble to de-platform his show and has, because Monarch found a way, his name is Monarch, found a way to kind of circumvent it, he opened a criminal investigation, this judge did, fined him $300,000, which is the equivalent of $75,000, all without an accusation or a formal trial or anything else like that.
	He's banned from speaking.
	He can't speak in his own defense.
	He can't speak about politics, even though he's been convicted of no crime.
	And all the people who defend this stuff, like the influencers and the academics and the government officials, constantly are flying to Paris and Berlin and London and Amsterdam, where they have these conferences that they're studying Brazil as a test case for how far the EU and then the US can go.
	The difference with the US is that there is a First Amendment that Brazil doesn't really have.
	It's kind of been whittled away.
	But that's what's coming.
	That's what they want to do.
	In general, if establishments, by definition, see something that threatens their hegemonic hold on power and on people's brains, they will Feeling to attack it.
	It's what they did to the Internet broadly.
	The Internet was supposed to be this revolutionary tool of liberation and innovation.
	They looked at that and they said, we can't allow that.
	They centralized everything in the hands of four corporations that are easily manipulated and controlled by the US government, the corporate media.
	And now they are trying to implement formal laws.
	That is the thing that I do worry about.
	on the internet, if that really takes hold, what hope is there? That is the thing that I do worry
	about. As you said, I do think there's reason to be concerned as well. Oh, that's pretty cool.
	Plus you explained something really important to us there that I'd not properly understood before.
	That by corporatizing and commercializing a formerly truly free space, you create a meaningful and manageable ally, even whilst creating the tension between what is regarded as old media And these new emergent titanic spaces.
	But that is a much easier tension to manage than the potentially disastrous and cataclysmic scenario where there are all manner of free diffuse oppositional voices existing online with sufficient power and ability to accumulate and grow to attack and even bring down a government.
	I suppose after they saw it in corporate spaces like, you know, with Napster and political spaces, perhaps, you know, with Brexit, Trump, Even Podemos and Sarita, possibly these kind of online spaces, contributed to those successes.
	They had to, as you've just said, generate a large corporatist entity that could become enmeshed with and that they could have true complicity with in order to have the kind of corporate power that in the last century would have been rightly regarded as literally fascism.
	Absolutely.
	They cannot tolerate anything that they don't control.
	And I think one of the things that's interesting to remember, especially for people who are old enough, unfortunately, that includes you and me, to remember what the internet was like in that kind of advent in the early stages when it was all euphoric.
	is that it was completely decentralized and anonymous.
	You could do anything on the internet and you wouldn't be tracked, you wouldn't be connected to your name.
	There was a great freedom that came from it.
	And the idea of the internet was supposed to be that it would be a way to empower individuals to speak with one another, to exchange information and ideas, to organize without having everything mediated by centralized corporate and state authority.
	That was the vision of the internet.
	A lot of the people who run these big tech companies were the pioneers of that kind of era, and they do still have this thing in them that resists this control.
	But when you have a public company worth hundreds of billions of dollars, when your personal wealth is a billionaire, and your acceptance in good liberal society is dependent upon social acceptance, which all human beings are kind of constructed to crave, it's in our DNA because we're tribal animals, There's so many different weapons to control, even people who seem very wealthy and powerful, you know, like Mark Zuckerberg or the head of Google or, you know, in the previous regime, Jack Dorsey.
	Where if you threaten them with enough legal and regulatory reprisals, or you print enough New York Times articles accusing them of having blood on their hands for their refusal to censor, eventually they will start to capitulate because they are, no matter how wealthy they are, susceptible to being controlled and co-opted by other institutions that are more powerful than they are.
	And as you said, as long as you keep it in the hands of a tiny number of corporations, it becomes very manageable.
	Monopolies, duopolies, and this kind of centralized authority, even if it's under the auspices of private enterprise, can be controlled in the way that you described.
	That's pretty fascinating.
	What struck me is that there are sort of historical precedents in social spaces.
	Two examples that come to mind is in Orwell's accounts of Barcelona in homage to Catalonia, in the first flushes of revolution, there's this genuine sense that there's syndicated, localised or consensus-derived authority that eventually coalesces into more overtly communist organisations and eventually into Franco's right-wing dictatorship.
	And then in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, there are these accounts of this rather blissful Paris, where people are giddy on sort of utopian revolutionary sensation, which ultimately becomes militarized, centralized, colonialist.
	In a sense, that template is, it seems to be one that has an almost archetypal power.
	And the way that you describe the seduction of even these oligarchical, or certainly potent The figures in the tech world, Zuckerberg et al, is in a sense just a large-scale version of what we're all experiencing when we're propagandized.
	When we're like, oh yeah, I suppose you do have to have a war against Russia.
	Oh, I guess I probably should censor people on social media.
	In the end, we are all susceptible to quite primal forces and quite deep psychological stimuli.
	George Orwell has this preface that was supposed to be, I think, the preface to his book about the Catalan movement.
	Maybe it was Animal Farm.
	I don't recall exactly which book it was supposed to be part of because it never got published.
	It was right after the war, the World War II, and it was just simply deemed too offensive to publish where he talked about Soviet communism under Stalin and all of the obviously repressive weapons they used to control the population and crush dissent.
	But he then said we in the West are really in no position to boast about how we're so free because oftentimes The way more effective means of controlling human minds is not the overt means of putting prisoners into camps or into prison, or dissenters rather, into prison or camps, or sending people in black uniforms with guns to kill people who criticize the government.
	The much more effective way is through these subtle and insidious means of controlling the means of communication, which is through mass media.
	And putting the prison, not putting people in prison, but putting the prison in their mind so that they're just never exposed to dissent.
	They believe they're free.
	You know, the socialist activist Rosa Luxemburg once said, he who does not move does not notice their chains.
	Where, you know, you can think you're free, but it's only because you're so conformist and so compliant that nobody considers you threatening.
	Nobody considers you enough of a danger to try and do anything against you.
	And so you say, look, I'm saying everything I want and nobody bothers me.
	But that's because everything you're saying serves establishment interests and establishment orthodoxies.
	I think that's very much the world in which we live.
	And bizarrely and paradoxically, the Internet is making it worse.
	The Internet is, you know, when I was doing this reporting, the Internet in my view, became the single greatest weapon of coercion and monitoring ever created in human history.
	It is also now becoming the single greatest weapon of propaganda and thought control, even though it was supposed to be the opposite, because they've been so successful in commandeering control of it, centralizing how it runs in the hands of a tiny number of people, and then controlling them.
	That's the reason why so many people, these people hate Elon Musk with such a passion, because even though he's been far from perfect in it, He's at least saying that he won't comply with these dictates and threatening their control over the flow of information.
	And that's why they feel like he has to be destroyed.
	And I think that shows you how much this control is of the most vital importance to them.
	Indeed, in the documentary Citizen Four that covers your investigation and the revelations that Edward Snowden made, the way that I observed him was as if he were patient zero in a real-life Bentham Panepticon.
	He is the first prisoner that recognizes that he is indeed being observed thought by thought, action by action, data point by data point, that this insidious form of control can now be enacted through the omniscience of a kind of cyber panepticon where we are all observable from every conceivable angle through recourse and observation and correlation of our actions.
	Yeah, you know, just quickly, it's funny when Snowden first contacted me at the end of 2012, he was very worried about disclosing to me any information about him or saying much of anything.
	And he kept saying, essentially, I can't because we're constantly being watched and it's too dangerous.
	And of course, even though I was a critic of the NSA at the time, a harsh critic of the U.S.
	security state, I was thinking to myself, this guy seems kind of crazy, like very paranoid.
	And of course, as it turns out, he was right because he had in his hands the documents proving it.
	He had seen it all firsthand.
	And even though I thought I was kind of immune from the propaganda, I immediately started thinking, oh, this guy's kind of paranoid and crazy.
	Of course, that's not true to that extent.
	And only once I saw the documents was I able to really see the full extent of it.
	It just shows you How again, even those who think we're kind of resistant to propaganda are really susceptible to it because it's not just a superficial field of discipline.
	It's something developed over, you know, many decades involving the study of psychology and sociology and all kinds of other fields of discipline.
	It really works propaganda does.
	Yeah, even your most cliched crackpot, your aluminum foil hat-wearing nutjob, now looks eerily prescient.
	It's like, they can read your thoughts!
	They know everything that I've typed!
	Your search history!
	They've got access to that!
	They can turn on the microphone whenever they want to, yo!
	Okay well let's get you back to your ward now!
	So we were like talking earlier about how like stuff that almost you get disoriented by extreme conspiratorial discourse like there are nanobots in these medications and you know the earth is flat and then when they say oh there's this chrome orb that's going to read your retina and we're giving that data directly to the government and we're piloting that now in Kenya you think well that's not as bad.
	Carry on!
	You know, you've been primed to accept things that would have just 10 years ago seemed extraordinarily dystopic.
	Yeah, it's exactly how it's done.
	I mean, the thing that amazes me Russell is if you go back and look at the weeks after the 9-11 attack, when obviously most Americans were traumatized, everybody was like, look, whatever you have to do to prevent this from happening again, go fucking do it.
	You know, I'm for it.
	Let's go.
	The Patriot Act, when it was introduced, even in that climate, was still a bridge too far.
	They knew it was an incredibly radical act.
	The New York Times and Washington, bipartisan Washington ruling class, had to keep coming and saying, look, we know this is radical.
	It's only temporary.
	The law itself says it will expire in three years.
	Congress has to renew it, so it's going to go away.
	Here we are 22 years later, the Patriot Act just gets automatically renewed with no reforms.
	Every time it pops up, it's a quick, not even a debate, it passes 92 to 6, and it just has
	faded into the political woodwork.
	It's now just part of our reality.
	No one thinks about the Patriot Act anymore as being this grave threat because it's been normalized.
	And every time we let one of those things go, we allow a little more censorship on the internet, we allow a little more dissent to happen, we allow the EU to make it a crime for social media companies to platform Russian media if they want to and close our information circle just a little more.
	Every time somebody starts having a political awakening because of their age and they start paying attention, what they're connecting to, the reality and the normality of it, is totally different than it was even 10 years ago.
	And the things they're conditioned to automatically accept and not even realize they're accepting becomes more and more extreme.
	And you're so deluged with stimuli that there's a kind of much commented on cultural amnesia that you almost can't be bothered to recollect that three years ago these measures were introduced, this was why lockdown was conducted, this is the reason that we had this set of regulations.
	It all seems like it passes so quickly.
	We're in a sort of state of hyper-stimulation and we're so overwrought and fraught and there's so much information that to be steadfast and principled becomes so superhuman that I think one would have to be devout.
	That the only way that you can have principles now is if you believe in If not God, something that's so like God that it may as well fall under that term, i.e.
	some values and principles that are not swayed by what you are materially offered and what you are given as information, what you are offered as truth, that ever-changing carousel.
	Thank you, Glenn, for being someone that operates on that plane, for having endured what you've endured in the I'm sorry.
	It's not.
	I apologize.
	What can I do?
	I didn't create Rio de Janeiro.
	I just enjoy its beauty.
	But Russell, it's always great to talk to you.
	investigative journalism should look like, what good communication sounds like, and what a...
	That better be a false backdrop for your standing in front of. That better be green screen, Glenn.
	That better not be real.
	I'm sorry, it's not. I apologize.
	What can I do? I didn't create Rio de Janeiro. I just enjoy its beauty.
	But Russell, it's always great to talk to you. Thank you for having me.
	There is Glenn Greenwald, just come down from that mountain with a tablet with 10 edicts
	that he will be sharing with us in just a moment.
	You can, of course, catch Glenn on System Update live on Rumble 7 p.m.
	Eastern Time.
	That's about an hour from now, wherever you are in the world, always worth watching Glenn.
	Still to come this week, we're going to be talking to Vivek Ramaswamy.
	We've got so many fascinating questions for this renegade Republican presidential candidate.
	My friend Nick Ortner will be on the show.
	You're going to love Nick.
	He's going to help you disrupt your inner systems of anxiety and despair with fantastic methods that I personally use.
	Click the red button.
	Join us on Locals to get early access to the great interviews we do.
	For example, we had Jordan Peterson on just yesterday.
	You could have been watching that live as old Leather Harlequin himself.
	He was wearing like a weird leather patchwork suit.
	And I kid you not, a wooden tie.
	Wooden tie.
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	Look at them now.
	Ellen, Sophia, Imagination, SensitiveHeart25.
	All the greats, they're in there right now.
	Now, as Glenn talked about there, one of the problems with the ongoing persecution of Donald Trump, whether his wrongdoings are real or imagined, is the fact that so many of you, 91% of you, according to a poll, believe that the indictments and arraignments are a distraction from the corrupt actions of the Biden administration.
	Tucker's recent interview with Hunter's former business partner gives us a fascinating insight into that, and we contrast Hucker spoke to Devon Archer, Hunter Biden's business partner.
	He said Joe Biden knew about Hunter's business deals and yet Joe Biden said he knew nothing.
	Which president needs igniting?
	Tell me baby!
	Hey, did you see that Tucker spoke to Devon Archer, Hunter Biden's business partner, who claims that Joe Biden knew about Hunter Biden's private business dealings?
	And you would think that maybe he would know.
	I mean, let me know in the comments.
	Do you think he knew?
	Do you think he was valuable?
	Do you think that Hunter Biden's text Saying, hey, the big guy's here.
	He's sat in a chair.
	He's furious about this.
	Are legit text messages?
	Do you think if you're Hunter Biden doing a deal with Ukrainian or Chinese businesses, you're going to mention and leverage your father's position as the VP to make those deals move more smoothly?
	Let me know in the comments in the chat.
	Let's have a look at the conversation between Tucker and Devon Archer and his crazy, made up, moralistic Dickensian name and see what we think together.
	Washington's not a money town.
	People aren't in business in Washington for the most part, and most people don't have business skills that I noticed in 30 years of living there.
	So really, the business of Washington is selling access.
	That's what it looked like to me.
	Not just under Biden, but that's what people do.
	I think that's one of the core misconceptions.
	It seems like understanding a regulatory environment means selling access at the end of the day.
	Selling access is the business of Washington.
	This is a city built on lobbying, donations, finding loopholes, manipulation, knowing the law, manipulating the law, having a wife who regulates big tech companies, and investing in big tech companies.
	Finding ways to do things legally that should be illegal.
	That's how I interpret it, and I think that's how most people on Wall Street, whether they admit it or not, interpret it.
	It's been reported, and you have said that there were occasions when Joe Biden would call in with clients present on a speakerphone.
	Right.
	How many times do you think that happened?
	I mean, over a 10-year partnership, I would, you know, the number I'm going with is 20.
	That's probably the amount that I kind of record.
	So a lot.
	Yeah, a lot, you could say.
	So Joe Biden, who is very much a product of Washington, of course must have known that he was calling in to effectively a business meeting that his son was having.
	I mean, he must have understood that that was kind of what his son was selling.
	Well, that's, I mean, it's hard for me to speculate on that.
	But like, I guess my question, just to keep it to the facts, Joe Biden, then the sitting vice president, knew that there were Hunter's business associates in the room.
	Yeah, I think I can, I can definitively say at particular dinners or meetings, he knew there were business associates and he, you know, we, or if I was there, I was a business associate too.
	While Donald Trump fights for his freedom at this time.
	We're asked and invited to consider what the symbol of Washington represents.
	We're told it represents democracy, integrity, transparency, and ethical clarity.
	But if, as our man Devon there alleges, it's simply a town that grants access, a kind of knocking shop, a brothel for access, a place where you lube and grease the wheels of commerce, Well, what is Washington a symbol of, really?
	And is what Donald Trump knew, or didn't know, or deliberately said, or didn't deliberately say, of less significance than the fact that the whole system is just a corrupt soft-sell for the interests of the powerful?
	Now, the allegation is that Biden must have known.
	This revelation contradicts past comments made by the President, who said in 2019 that he never spoke with his son about business dealings.
	I suppose that is what you would say if you wanted to avoid controversy.
	I've never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings, Biden said in 2019 in Iowa.
	You should be looking at Trump.
	He's doing this because he knows I'll beat him like a drum.
	That's an awful way of describing beating someone.
	Also, that's a weird analogy to use because you beat a drum almost in complicite.
	That means rhythmically as his partner, possibly on his buttocks.
	The drum isn't subjugated by that.
	The drum kind of enjoys it.
	He's getting a pretty good sound out of that guy.
	And he's using an abuse of power and every element of the presidency to try and smear me.
	Ask the right questions.
	Don't you sometimes feel that the very things that they accuse others of doing they're doing themselves?
	Let me know what you feel in the comments.
	Do you kind of think that Hunter Biden probably was to some degree using his father's position as vice president and a long-term congressperson to get business deals that he might otherwise not have got?
	I mean it's basically obvious isn't it?
	So I think Or if, you know, any of the other colleagues from the D.C.
	office or the New York office were there.
	So, yeah, at times there were from the, you know, to be, you know, completely clear on the calls.
	I don't know if it was an orchestrated call in or not.
	It certainly was powerful, though, because, you know, if you're sitting with a foreign business person and you hear the vice president's voice, that's prize enough.
	I mean, that's pretty impactful stuff for anyone in the world.
	It's been reported, and I know that it is true, that the Hunter and his brother were very close to their dad.
	Absolutely.
	Which I think is great.
	I've got a lot of kids.
	I'm very close to them.
	Talk to them every day.
	Never called them on speaker during a business meeting.
	That's weird.
	You understand D.C., right?
	So the power to have that access and that conversation, and it's not in a scheduled conference call, and it's a part of your family, that's like the pinnacle of power in D.C.
	100%!
	Yep.
	In the rear view, it's an abuse of soft power, I'd say.
	An abuse of soft power.
	So that's ultimately what's being alleged here, an abuse of soft power.
	While most of the media's ire and focus is on the Trump indictment, isn't it worth simultaneously considering the impact of these allegations, particularly when we know that the Hunter Biden laptop story was deliberately kept Out of the press and social media, to a degree, with the collaboration of the CIA.
	As this story continues to unfurl, doesn't it look more and more likely that at its heart is real, legitimate, destabilising corruption?
	Last week, Hunter Biden appeared in court for charges related to tax crimes, and prosecutors alleged that he received over $600,000 from a Chinese Communist Party-backed company.
	I started a company in 2017 called Hudson West, Your Honour, and my partner was associated with a Chinese energy company called CFC, Hunter Biden said.
	When asked by the judge if he received $664,000 from the Chinese company, Hunter Biden said, I believe so, yes, Your Honour.
	However, during a presidential debate in 2020, Joe Biden said, my son has not made money in terms of this thing about what you are talking about, China.
	My son has not made money.
	Now, that was a confusing sentence, but I think, at its heart, was a denial of Hunter Biden making money from relationships with a Chinese commercial entity, which appears to have been the case.
	During the 2020 debate, Trump made numerous comments about Biden's alleged connection to China, including one moment where he said, Hunter Biden makes millions of dollars from China.
	China ate your lunch, Joe, and no wonder your son goes in and he takes out billions of dollars, takes out billions of dollars to manage, he makes millions of dollars.
	The problem is with the ongoing condemnation and attacks on Donald Trump is that he regularly is able to point to examples of corruption made by his opponents.
	The only way to ever oppose a figure like Donald Trump is by saying, look, we are not corrupt.
	What Donald Trump does is corrupt.
	What we do is by the book, is legit.
	Is it even worse than that, though?
	Is it even worse than the Biden administration being corrupt?
	There is deep systemic corruption.
	The very conditions that have allowed Trump to arise to this position of prominence continue to be committed, continue to be doubled down on.
	This won't be sufficiently and significantly reported on.
	You won't see Joe Biden saying, look, I was wrong.
	I have been involved in Hunter Biden's business dealings.
	I have made speaker phone calls during meetings.
	I was aware of these dealings.
	They'll just find a way of navigating and negotiating the cracks of this story.
	Long enough for us to be deep into the election cycle and for another victory to be gleaned.
	Without the kind of honesty that dealings of this nature appear to demand, the legitimacy of everyone involved is questioned.
	All of this underscores Joe Biden's horrendous judgment in blending his son's business with his duties as Vice President.
	Yeah, you can't blend those duties.
	Better vice presidency, better supporting Hunter Biden.
	Also, I'm a recovering drug addict myself.
	It's very difficult to run an international energy business if you're smoking any crack at all, I would say.
	So if this is true, he's doing bloody well and he deserves that money.
	Mr Biden was the Obama administration's point man for Ukraine, which was fighting Russia's first invasion.
	And he can't claim ignorance about his son's dealings.
	Amos Hochstein, a senior energy official in the Obama administration, warned the Vice President in 2015 that Russia-backed media were using Hunter's presence on the Burisma board to undermine the US anti-corruption message.
	The problem with all this corruption, go on, it undermines our anti-corruption message because it's corrupt.
	No, that is a problem.
	Just lie about it.
	The following year, a top diplomat in Kiev, George Kent, was even more blunt in a message to state.
	Ukrainians, Mr Kent said, heard one message from us and then saw another set of behaviour with the family association with a known corrupt figure whose company was known for not playing by the rules in the oil gas sector.
	It's one thing to develop relationships in office that turn into business opportunities later, the way Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law, did in the Middle East.
	It's another to leverage the office while in office to promote the family business.
	As Mr. Archer said, the advantage of the Biden brand is that legally people will be too intimidated to mess with them.
	This is another example of how the condemnation of Trump and Trump affiliates starts to look ridiculous when there are comparable events within the Biden administration.
	What there should be, it seems, is a thorough investigation, and perhaps Hunter Biden's trial is precisely that, into What exactly has gone on between the Biden family and all these energy companies?
	This is no longer a salacious scandal about a man's behaviour while under the influence of addiction.
	This is deep institutional financial corruption involving a vice president who claims that he is the new figurehead for a brave and bold new government.
	But really, this is the kind of corruption that we're all used to, isn't it?
	Whether or not Joe Biden took a dime from these dealings, this is a form of political corruption.
	Covered up by the press in 2020, it will be an issue in 2024.
	Democrats should worry that as more facts emerge about the Biden mix of politics and business, it could help Mr. Trump neutralize his many legal vulnerabilities.
	That's precisely what is happening, is that the charges, allegations, and attempts to indict Trump seem less significant and legitimate in light of this information.
	How many times do you think you met Joe Biden during the course of your relationship with Hunter?
	Probably same thing, 20.
	We found this letter.
	Kind of amazing.
	Dear Devin, I apologize for not getting a chance to talk to you at the luncheon yesterday.
	I was having trouble getting away from hosting President Who.
	I hope I get a chance to see you again soon with Hunter.
	I hope you enjoyed lunch.
	Thanks for coming.
	Sincerely, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
	P.S.
	Handwritten, happy you guys are together.
	This is not a criticism of you.
	I would think as a business guy, you use every advantage.
	These are not business guys.
	This is the vice president of the United States.
	He's not allowed to be working on businesses with foreign governments while he's vice president.
	I don't think.
	Not that I know of.
	But here he is!
	Right.
	Amazing.
	Joe Biden's official position is that he's had nothing at all to do with Hunter Biden's business dealings.
	That Hunter Biden is like some sort of plucky street urchin who's made it in the wild world of Ukrainian mineral energies and gas and Chinese business just as a sort of coincidence.
	Like, by God, I was just being vice president over here.
	Meanwhile, over there, What's Hunter doing?
	He's becoming an international business person!
	So there's no connection between those two facts.
	Here's Hunter Biden's business partner producing a letter from Joe Biden saying, oh sorry I couldn't get away from President Who because I'm the Vice President and I'm probably supposed to be engaged in protecting American national security rather than babbling in Hunter's business dealings.
	Can you see that even if they can't demonstrate that Joe Biden financially benefited from the situation, it's pretty plain that he was involved.
	It's pretty plain that at very least there's nepotism.
	It's pretty plain that at least he was using his position as vice president to advantage Hunter Biden.
	In a way, I can get myself into a state where I don't care about that, where I'm like, oh, well, this is the world, isn't it?
	I mean, I do stuff for my kids.
	I'd probably offer advantages to my children over some stranger's children.
	But Guess what?
	I'm not the Vice President of the United States, and I'm not denying that that happened, and we're not in the middle of a great and glorious fiasco where Donald Trump is supposed to be indicted, one, because of his relationship with Stormy Daniels, two, because of some financial corruption issues, taking those boxes, three, because of inciting an insurrection inside his mind.
	We can prove he did it inside his mind.
	What I'm saying is that no one has a fortress of moral authority or a pulpit from which to address us as people who say, listen, this guy's corrupt.
	We're not corrupt.
	I would never do anything like that.
	Because plainly, that is the business of Washington.
	That's the way it operates.
	It's only bad when your opponents do it.
	It's normal, ordinary, and to be accepted if it's within the Pelosi family or within the Biden family.
	Presumably within the Clinton and Obama families.
	What we're offering you is an alternative vision, a different line of questioning.
	It's the behaviors themselves that are a problem.
	It's the principles themselves that have gone awry.
	Forget your relationship with either party or either side and ask yourself, what do you believe in?
	How should America be run?
	Is this the kind of president you want?
	Is he meaningfully better than an alternative candidate that you are supposed to despise?
	Or is he, in fact, much worse?
	Do you acknowledge that Hunter spoke to his dad about Burisma?
	Do I have knowledge?
	Yes.
	Do you know that Hunter spoke to his dad about Burisma?
	Did you ever see them talk about it, hear them talk about it?
	No, I don't have knowledge of that, though I'd assume it.
	So if you think that that guy's lying there, Devon, he could easily have lied then, couldn't he?
	Yeah, I saw him.
	I went like, hey, I'm going to help you with Burisma, kid.
	Hey, that's not tobacco!
	But like he's saying, I didn't see that.
	Personally, when I see stuff like that, let me know in the comments if you agree.
	I think, all right, well, he's probably telling the truth because, you know, you could say, oh, maybe that letter's not real or maybe this guy's making it up.
	He's got his own reasons.
	I wonder how the Biden family and like a Kareem Jean-Pierre will address this.
	They'll just brush it off, won't they?
	They'll ignore it.
	Oh, it's Trump.
	Trump's saying this because he knows I'll beat him like a drum or I'll play him like a pan pipe or some other extraordinary musical analogy.
	But the fact is, Something that we're all beginning to understand, I think, is that the Biden administration was never going to be the answer.
	It's simply doubling down on a problem.
	So it's enough to be sitting at a meal at Lake Como with your new Ukrainian friends, and while your dad happens to call, let's put them on speaker.
	That would be, I think that's enough.
	That's the second most powerful man in the world.
	It's possible that Joe Biden thought he was calling someone else.
	Hello?
	Hello?
	Where's my pizza?
	This is Burisma.
	Okay, but just add pepperoni!
	It's just how the world works.
	It was very clear that the Burisma guys were hoping to leverage Hunter's relationship with the Vice President and his father.
	Yes.
	At one point, They told Hunter to, quote, call his dad?
	Yeah, I mean, I think referencing the email that you put earlier, there was constant pressure to send signals, to leverage all of his, you know, his dad included, but the Biden brand, all of the, you know, the D.C.
	insider and relationships to help Burisma survive.
	I think that's the You know, at the end of the day what we're talking about.
	That's what he brought!
	It was that ability to help on the geopolitical stage, keep them out of trouble, keep them out of investigations, unfreeze assets.
	If that litany of advantages that come with Hunter Biden's name are to be believed, then it's not an appointment that's based on Hunter Biden's business, prowess, instincts and insights.
	It's a very real set of advantages that come with having Hunter Biden involved in Burisma there in Ukraine.
	It's not like we're bringing Hunter Biden onto the board and did you know that Joe Biden's actually his dad?
	It's like we're getting this guy because Joe Biden's his dad so that we can unfreeze assets, so that we can avoid investigation.
	What else do you imagine they're paying dear Hunter Biden 664 grand for?
	What's it for?
	Insights?
	Places to get laptops fixed?
	A good place to hook up for a little bit of wacky tobacco?
	This is not an appointment where his relationship to Joe Biden is inadvertent.
	His relationship to Joe Biden is essential.
	That means the $664,000 is payment for that relationship.
	That means the whole system's corrupt, right?
	They were not consulting him on, like, pipeline construction or wellhead design.
	No, no, no, no.
	We need to construct some pipeline.
	Well, I've constructed this one.
	It's pretty good.
	Okay, no, maybe we can use that.
	Good work, Hunter.
	But also, could you get your dad on the phone?
	He's already on the phone.
	Hunter!
	Why are you not speaking?
	I'm busy.
	It was hiring lobbyists and law firms and various NGOs to help clear the path from regulatory roadblocks at the end of the day.
	This is what we all believe, isn't it?
	With the Melinda Gates Foundation, with the Clinton Foundation.
	But all of this stuff that's dressed up as philanthropy is either tax evasion and avoidance, or it's ways of legitimising connections or exerting influence that will later play out financially.
	Oh, we think that you guys should use these medications!
	Buy up a load of stocks in those medications.
	You don't need to use those anymore.
	We've seen this again and again and again.
	The problem comes when a political figure claims that they're different.
	The problem comes when there's actual criminality, tax evasion, tax fraud, payments that are being made plainly for influence rather than expertise.
	But the idea was by having that relationship and by saying, I met with the vice president in Washington, that gives him the swat.
	Yeah, I think at the end of the day, that's the...
	You know, the prize or the, you know, being able to have, whether it's on speakerphone or in person, the prize is that contact and that access to power.
	The reaction to what you've said in public, to what you said to the committee on the Hill in Dallas, to what you've been telling us in this interview, is that like, There's no corruption here at all.
	This is totally normal.
	Joe Biden had no role whatsoever in his son's business or knowledge of it.
	Right.
	I mean, that seems false.
	Yeah, I think that's categorically false.
	He was aware of Hunter's business.
	He met with Hunter's business partners.
	I mean, you found a letter that illustrates that he knew me.
	And he's thanking you!
	He's thanking you for his efforts!
	For your efforts.
	Yeah, I think that's not factually right.
	Whether or not Joe Biden took a dime from these dealings, this is a form of political corruption.
	Covered up by the press in 2020, it will be an issue in 2024.
	Democrats should worry that as much more facts emerge about the Biden mix of politics and business, it could help Mr Trump neutralise his many legal vulnerabilities.
	Whether or not Devon Archer's claims lead to a kind of legal indictment or proof of corruption, in my view, they're not nothing, are they?
	When you consider that so far what Biden's spokespeople have offered is, oh, this is just a bunch of kerfuffle and claptrap and balderdash coughed up by the Republican Party as a distraction, nitpicking, just an attempt to bring down a good and honest man of integrity, that plainly isn't the case.
	Sooner or later, Biden's going to have to give a speech, isn't he, where he goes, look, Look, I know I said I had no dealings at all, but I did come on speakerphone.
	I did have direct dealings with Devon Archer.
	I did create at least the impression that I was an ally and supporter of my son that enabled him to get jobs with companies he wouldn't otherwise have got, with the assumption that he could leverage his relationship with me to ensure that meaningful advantages could be leveraged by Burisma when it comes to things like unfreezing assets and avoiding investigation.
	Seems to me these are pretty significant claims and significant charges.
	Added to which Ukraine finds itself the center of a geopolitical disaster that's costing the
	American people billions by the day.
	It seems that what's needed is a reckoning, an investigation and a conversation.
	Quite possibly this hypocrisy and corruption is worse than anything that's being leveled
	Let me know what you think in the chat.
	of democracy are being attacked.
	That's where Hunter Biden gets all of his deals done.
	That's where Nancy Pelosi and Paul Pelosi never talk to each other about what stocks
	and chairs to trade.
	When the system is as corrupt as it is, how can you bring down a political opponent
	on the basis of their own corruption?
	They haven't got a leg to stand on, have they?
	But that's just what I think.
	Let me know what you think in the chat.
	Until next time, stay free.
	Thank you for choosing Fox News.
	The news.
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