Briahna Joy Gray on the Democratic Dilemma: Passion vs. Policy
Russell chats to Briahna Joy Gray, co-host on ‘The Hill: Rising’, host of the 'Bad Faith Podcast’ and political consultant who served as Bernie Sanders’ Press Secretary in his 2020 presidential campaign. Together, they talk about the rumours surrounding Barack Obama, questioning our collective obsession with the scandal over his substance in office, and why does Trump's emotional allure captivate so many, while the Democrats seem to miss the mark? Watch Briahna on The Hill: Rising - https://www.youtube.com/@thehillCatch Briahna's podcast, Bad Faith: https://www.youtube.com/@BadFaithPodcast Watch the FULL INTERVIEW on RumbleBecome an 'Awakened Wonder' and join our LOCALS CommunitySee my new LIVE SHOW 'Bipolarisation'
Over the month of September I'm doing a handful of live shows that are a combination of spirituality, breath work, individual awakening, community building and challenging authority.
How do you bring down the system while bringing up children?
Go and sleep! Go and f***ing sleep! Sleep while I have you set them all on fire now!
How do you try to bring down Bear Grylls while you're on Running Wild with Bear Grylls?
And Bear Grylls is much better at that stuff than you.
How do we find new ways of challenging authority while trying to live normal lives?
So I'll be doing stand-up, breathwork, meditation, as well as conducting polls and votes because I believe democracy works.
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No.
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Stay free.
Hello there, you awakening wonders.
Welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand, where deception and tyranny go to die because you kill them with your own awakening consciousness.
Where spirituality fuse with political discourse and suddenly there is hope.
You see the old institutions quake, rattle, and eventually roll like heads in a revolution, baby, for surely that is what's coming.
We're going to be on YouTube for the first 15 minutes.
Then we will slide glide and glide over to the other place where we can speak more freely to our fantastic guest, Brianna Joy Grace, who's going to be talking to us about what's going on within the Democrat Party right now.
What's happening to its patriarchs, forefathers, icons and heroes?
We'll be talking a little bit about the Obama-Tucker situation.
We put a poll out and I know you guys want to see it.
We're going to be talking about We've got your man there, Donald Trump, giving a pretty interesting speech.
being Let me know if you agree in the comments.
Obviously, at the time, Gareth Royer, on-screen assistant, friend, wonder man.
At the time, Donald Trump was obviously pretty pro the vaccines, taking credit from numerous times.
I don't think a comment on the vaccine is necessary at this point.
We'll leave that to you guys, especially if you Press the red button and join us in our local's AwakendWonder community.
You can speak freely in there right now with Book Wench and Neon Grammarian and Claus.
They're chatting away right now even as we speak.
Become part of that beautiful little community.
You'll love it.
So Trump's position now is non-compliance.
This is actually interesting.
Given he's a man who's been indicted Wrongly or rightly, let us know in the comments what you think for his role in what's being called an insurrection.
This is a real rallying call.
This is a demand that people begin to disobey in the event of further lockdowns.
But ask yourself this question, then answer it in your own mind.
Do the whole conversation in your head if you want, then question yourself about whether or not you've been naive and really give yourself a hard time.
Do you think it's ever possible that America can be united again after this? Do you think
post-2024, whoever is in the White House that day, there can be true unity? And what patriotism can
we offer when we see the people of Hawaii suffering in the way they are? Offered
insignificant, insufficient help, no real infrastructure there when called upon. I'm not
saying your country is any worse than mine.
We learned a comparable thing in a similar disaster, though not of that scale, when a tower
block burned down, Grenfell, lots of people died there. It was sort of demonstrably due
to ineptitude, lack of safety measures, poor standards.
And when the investigations began, they couldn't find anyone that was culpable.
Your Hawaiian fires, I think, reveal similar things about deep state, ineptitude, and of course, the prioritization.
What do people care about?
So when you, you know, do you care about simply an ongoing sustained war, admittedly, apparently, to help the Ukrainian people who warrant help?
No one's arguing with that.
Or do you want to see American citizens help, particularly when Hawaii, as many people believe, was sort of a colonized place?
You know, what do you want from Hawaii?
Do you want Americans that you're going to look after?
after or do you want a mid-pacific missile base and air force base? Let me know in the
comments what you think motivates it because I know what the Hawaiian people think right
now. They think the help is not forthcoming. And to hear Donald Trump's rhetoric at this
time, to hear former heroic presidents like Barack Obama subject to all manner of peculiar
inquiry and we'll be talking about that at some depth because I'm of the personal opinion
that people's private lives are sort of no one else's business barring, you know, real
And I suppose drugs are a crime, although, to tell you the truth, as a recovering drug addict, I don't think that's anybody else's business.
But we're not going to talk about that on YouTube because of the restrictive guidelines.
We'll talk about it sensibly, freely, over in the home of free speech in a minute.
But let's have a look at Donald Trump there.
Demanding that you don't comply.
Some of you maybe don't think that lockdowns are a realistic possibility anyway.
Certainly, though, after what's been revealed in Sweden, we should be cautious before kowtowing again because Sweden, with their much more laissez-faire approach, had a lot better results than the United States.
Just hands down better results than the United States, isn't it, Cal?
Half the excess deaths.
Half the excess deaths.
How does that tally with the facts, with the lockdowns, with the masks and with the parties of the powerful?
Remember they had those parties, right?
You remember that?
While you were locked down, they were boogieing on up.
Let's see what Donald Trump's got to say on the potential future lockdowns.
He's a man who don't hold back.
Did he look interesting in front of this painting?
Remember, join us, press the red button, join us, and give us a rumble if you're watching on Rumble, and give us a comment if you're watching on YouTube.
And if you're in the UK, I'm doing a handful of live shows.
There's a link in the description telling you how you can come and see me live, should such a thing interest you.
Let's check out Donald Trump.
Lunatics are trying very hard to bring back COVID lockdown.
Lunatics!
Mandates with all of their sudden fear-mongering about the new variants that are coming.
Gee whiz, you know what else is coming?
An election.
They want to restart the COVID hysteria.
You know what, and I'm going to ask Brianna Joy Gray about this, because Brianna, you know, she's close to Bernie, she's close to a lot of Democrat insiders.
Do you sort of like, this is what I want to know, is like, here what Trump is able to do, is he's able to diagnose and address problems that many American people believe are endemic.
Oh yeah, just because there's an election coming up, they're doing stuff, oh they're using this.
You know like, now they have not been able to actually actually address the problem of Trump, yes because of a
lack of charismatic leadership, but above all else because I can't say, listen this isn't
what we're like, we're not like that, they are like that, that is the problem, you know when you
have that big farmer bill introduced.
That's exactly what I just thought then Russ, well exactly you know when you say that the way
that people respond to Trump versus the way that people see the Democrats at the moment,
when you have Kamala Harris go and deliver a speech about how successful the Democrats have been,
how historic this bill is that we're you know bringing down Medicare,
we're allowing Medicare to negotiate prices, when you then find out that it's
Ten drugs, four seniors, it's actually probably more like six of the ten, that you're paying a thousand times more as Americans than people in other countries for the same drugs.
It's rubbish and that's why people gravitate to Donald Trump.
And just on an interpersonal social level, the way that Kamala Harris makes that announcement, she's sort of smiling, super pleased, she refers to Joe Biden as a hero, she's chuckling gleefully.
I'd like to almost say this, Like, from the most cynical perspective, if you were a Democrat Party insider, go, look, see this?
That don't chime good.
Like, see this, Donald Trump?
That has an emotional resonance.
Like, what Kamala Harris could have been saying is, look, we initially came out and said, well, you saw Joe Biden say we beat Big Pharma this year.
I'm afraid because of Presumably all of the lobbying or the donation money because of the complex relationships with people in Congress and pharmaceutical companies investing in firms they regulate because the FDA accept money from the pharmaceutical companies that they are supposed to be regulating.
What we've ended up with is not all drug prices capped far from it. Even some pretty egregious examples of
exploitation, certain cancer medications that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that could
have a white label alternative introduced. We've not done none of that. We've not done
that. What you're going to end up with, I'm afraid to tell you, is six to ten drugs, as Gareth
just said, as long as there's no generic competition and as long as they've been on the
market nine years. This is, and it's only for seniors and it don't kick in until 2026.
I mean, that don't sound so good.
Then this dude comes on the TV said, there's an election coming.
They're going to lock you down again.
They're lunatics.
You're like, well, hold on.
This sounds more like reality to me.
This sounds more like reality.
It feels more like reality to me.
And you guys know, if you're a fan of our show, you know, we do not think voting in the Republican party, even under Trump, is going to make your life any better.
There needs to be significant Systemic change.
More democracy.
Decentralisation of power.
Stopping this globalist project immediately in all of its forms.
And only a strong America can do that.
Allied to a strong UK, we pray.
And these kind of polemicists, well-intentioned or not, whether you love them or hate them, are not the answer.
Because how many times have you been round the merry-go-round?
If you're a Democrat-inclined person, you may remember Listen, I hope you don't sound naïve of me.
You let me know in the comments if this sounds naïve.
When Barack Obama became president, I was happy.
I thought this is good for America.
This is good for the world to see that family of colour.
This is cool.
This is cool.
A country that's gone from slavery to having a president of colour.
Oh my God.
But what happened?
Drone strikes is what happened.
More war.
2008 bailout.
It created the conditions and crises that immediately followed it.
No one's addressing that yet.
What they give you is, here's a cadaverous version of Barack Obama.
You know, the cool version that, you know, didn't work anyway.
Here's a really old, decrepit version.
A sepulchral creature emerging from the tomb to bring you more gloom and less democracy than ever.
So they need to shape up and shape up fast, I would say.
I also think a lot of the kind of commentary as a result of what Trump's saying now is, you know, Trump's jumping on the bandwagon.
He's done a U-turn on vaccines.
You know, he's now using this politically.
I think if anyone has used COVID politically, it was the mainstream media or the legacy media.
They are the ones who politicized COVID.
And also when we're talking about vaccines and again, saying that Trump was a fan of his own vaccines and was very pro vaccines.
I'm a fan of his own everything.
He's got his name on his building.
He's got his name on water bottles.
He likes his stuff.
And so people may say, oh, you know, Democrats may say, oh, he's done a U-turn on that.
He's now using it against us.
Who was using vaccines against Trump when they came out?
Joe Biden, Kamala Harris.
I won't take it.
I won't take that vaccine.
That's what they all said.
So they've all been doing exactly the same thing that they're accusing Trump of doing.
The cluster bombs.
Everything up is down.
Everything's reversed according to convenience.
These are things I want to talk to Brianna Joy about.
Brianna Joy Grey, excuse me.
Because, like, this is a person who understands the Democrat Party better than we do.
And we've got to start understanding this stuff, because bouncing between them two parties ain't doing nothing for nobody, is it?
It's not helping us.
And I think that there are crises that need to be addressed.
Whether you see them as left-wing crises or right-wing crises, whatever your Weltanschauung, your perspective, shit's got to change.
Forgive my language.
Let's have a look at Donald Trump.
They can justify more lockdowns, more censorship, more illegal drop boxes, more mail-in ballots, and trillions of dollars in payoffs to their political allies heading into the 2024 election.
Does that sound familiar?
These are bad people.
These are sick people we're dealing with.
But to every COVID tyrant who wants to take away our freedom, hear these words.
We will not comply.
So don't even think about it.
We will not shut down our schools.
We will not accept your lockdowns.
We will not abide by your mask mandates.
And we will not tolerate your vaccine mandates.
They rigged the 2020 election, and now they're trying to do the same thing all over again by rigging the Most important election in the history of our country, the 2024 election, even if it means trying to bring back COVID.
But they will fail because we will not let it happen.
When I'm back in the White House, I will use every available authority to cut federal funding to any school, college, airline, or public transportation system that imposes a mask mandate or a vaccine mandate.
Thank you very much.
Oh man, what do you imagine is going to have more resonance with the American people from across the spectrum?
That kind of bombast and, you know, is it hyperbole?
Let me know in the comments.
If you're watching us on YouTube, we're going to slip over to the other place in just a
few seconds because you voted in your droves, if our voting machines are correct and can
be relied upon, for us to talk about Tucker's latest Obama revelations and interviews and
the complexity around that story and conflating people's private behaviours with their character.
We want to talk to you about how you feel about all that stuff.
I say this is a man in recovery.
Yep, let's have a look at that poll result.
You said 20,000 of you voted and it was 83% said yes.
Now contrast Trump's rhetoric just then to our man, Joe Biden, announcing yet another
bloody uh, prosperous, I forgot that was on YouTube.
Joe Biden announcing a potentially helpful new medical breakthrough that you've funded.
Let's see, is this him talking about the new booster, yeah?
New funding for a new vaccine.
New funding, new vaccine.
Same old Joe, and boy is he old.
Have a look at this.
Mr President, can you say anything about the object of Covid cases and the new variant?
Yes, I can.
As a matter of fact, I signed off this morning on a proposal we have to present to the Congress a request for additional funding for a new vaccine.
That is necessary.
That works.
Oh, well, the other ones, but I thought the other... We're on YouTube, Joe!
We're on YouTube, because it sounds like what you're saying is that the other vaccine... I mean, they all, surely, I mean, like, jeez, I'm going to have to do this for Joe Biden.
Allegedly.
That's just protect Joe Biden there.
He's in danger of getting a strike from You could fall foul of the guidelines there, Biden!
Don't you dare!
There's not enough allegedly's on our button boxes there to handle this kind of chaos.
So extraordinary.
What do you think's going to be more resonant?
That kind of hokey folksy lying about the Hawaiian fires?
And his own one isn't the Hawaiian fires, his own fires, which are pretty minor.
Again, I think when you look at the speech that Trump just delivered, and you again say, why are people gravitating towards that?
The Democrats at this point should be addressing, like with the Hawaii fires, yes, we send this amount of money to Ukraine, and only this amount of money to Hawaii.
Yes, we're giving this amount of money to the makers of these vaccines, even though they're guilty of all these things in the past, but that's just the way it is.
The more and more they don't...
You know, give people the facts on this, that they're transparent, and address the issues that people have, and then just go on the telly and say, yeah, we're putting more money into a new vaccine.
People are going to have questions.
It's going to create cynicism.
It's going to create doubt.
Psychodram33 says, what are they going to do with this one?
Give it to 10 mouses rather than 8?
That might be a reference to the Moderna booster shot that I believe was only tested on 8 mouses.
Allegedly.
Just in case.
Just in case we were incorrect.
Because we don't get a lot of latitude, baby.
If you're one of our 6.5 million awakening wonders over there on YouTube, by God we love you.
By God.
We are glad that you are with us on this journey to a mutual awakening.
In a moment, though, we're going to slink off into the clandestine spaces where free speech truly does reign free.
In fact, let's get over there now because I want to have a little conversation about this stuff.
So click the link in your description, guys.
If you're watching this on YouTube, get over Get over to the other place where we're going to talk freely about Tucker's latest interview, its connotations, and how do you frame the legacy of great leaders, okay?
If you're watching us on Rumble, get into the chat.
They're going crazy in there, these guys.
Psychodrama and Maz64, all of this lot.
Beth in Wonderland, oh yeah, you're talking about that stuff.
Even I'm not willing to talk about some of that.
You lot will love it in there, because they're going for it in that place, so it's really worth joining.
And if you become an Awakened Wonder, you get all sorts of crazy advantages.
You would have already seen the Sam Harris chat that we had that's gone viral.
I see our friend on Rumble, Dave Rubin, was talking about that earlier, and talking about his own feelings.
I like to have conversations where you engage with people with a different perspective.
If you've not seen that on Locals yet, if you're not an awakened wonder, you can see it on Rumble tomorrow, uncut, unexpurgated, and in some cases, unforgivable.
I was very, very tired.
I got my gander up, didn't I?
Well, it's an extended episode, I would say.
Because I was meant to go home!
I had Timothy Spool around me out in the garden.
No.
People, we should make it a selling point.
Extended episode.
Oh, extended.
This is an extended episode and we are definitely not building a cult.
I'll tell you that for sure.
Isn't that right?
Absolutely right.
Come one!
Come all!
Pilgrim!
Join us!
Join us here!
We're building communities!
We're building them!
Step aside!
Step outside of the mainstream!
Free yourself!
Free yourself from the financial shackles!
Don't pay back your debts!
Don't pay back your taxes!
Join us!
Demand new systems!
Glory unto the limitless light that's within us all!
Bow only to the authority of the immanent Lord that you feel within you!
Not to the authorities of these corrupt systems!
I'm gonna keep paying my taxes for now.
Just...
Just for now, yeah.
Don't do it yet.
We'll do it in a coordinated way otherwise we're going to get in a hell of a lot of trouble.
They really do pay your taxes.
We'll just wait for the moment where we decentralise all authority and then we can work out actual true government by consent where you pay for the things you want to pay for and it'll make sense to you because it'll affect your own life and your own sense of community that you derive from the relationships you have, not some imposed top-down dystopian nightmare where you're surveilled from the sky.
You know me, I'm a drug addict in recovery, and I lived a pretty crazy life, baby.
So, like, you know, when it came to the Hunter Biden laptop, and when it comes to this story about Barack Obama, and this man who my wife consistently describes as her darling, what's he called?
Larry Pipsqueak.
Like, Larry Pipsqueak is like, this is Rumble, so we can say what we want.
Larry Pipsqueak says, he had it off with Obama back in the day, or what's he says?
He's noshed him.
That's what he said.
Not sure the exact... The exact vernacular.
Not sure.
But he said, like, I mean, like, well, listen, I would say, OK, fine.
Yeah.
Although someone did offer me one once.
It was a fella.
And being a heterosexual, as I've always thought of myself as being, perhaps due to a lack of spirit inquiry, I had to, in that case... You had to decline, didn't you?
I had to decline.
I thought about it and I thought, I could just, I suppose it wouldn't matter, wouldn't it?
And I thought, no, that's something I don't feel right.
But I always think, be who you are.
Be who you are, as long as you're loving, as long as it's consensual.
And I even think, with drugs, even as a recovering drug addict, that one day at a time, please, Lord, I'll never take drugs again.
I don't think it's my job to police whether you take drugs.
You might be able to take drugs!
Yeah, also, drugs, I mean, we know all the experiments they're doing with psilocybin and all that.
I mean, drugs, again, is like a...
It's a conversation to be had about drugs, surely.
It's a conversation to be had.
And Larry Pipkin's having it with Tucker.
So let's have a look at this.
And let me know, guys, what you think in the comments about people's private lives.
Do you think this is a unique case?
And make sure that you don't just use it to leverage existing feelings of disdain, you know?
Like, say if you are predisposed to really like Barack Obama, and you hear this and go, oh, yeah, OK, it's cool.
Or imagine if you don't like Barack Obama, and it's become something like, ah!
Because I feel like there's an appetite for destruction behind many news stories these days.
That people have a pre-existing agenda, particularly the mainstream, they're monsters for it, the legacy media.
They'll go like, we hate this person, let's find something we can say about this person, let's ring around everyone.
I'm a person in the public eye, I know how this stuff works.
And then they just try and find a way of destroying you.
It's not like, okay, we're just in neutral, is everything okay?
Oh no, this thing!
The mainstream media got no morals.
I guess maybe a way of looking at it, you could say, is that for many people, I think they feel like Obama was not what he was purported to be.
That what Obama came in, hope and change, all the things he said he was going to do, those things didn't end up, you know, being done.
And that maybe this is the kind of manifestation that people can now turn to to say, you see, it was a lie.
He wasn't what he was purported to be, wasn't what he was saying he was.
And maybe it's about something I mean that's always what's offered when people report on people's private life.
Devin Watson in our chat says, ah so the people that Edward Snowden informed us was spying on us don't like it when it happens to them.
TNS Base Girl says that's what matters about it, all the cover-ups.
Okay so that's interesting.
And it's also a curious moment to take the temperature of how the legacy media is squaring up against new emergent independent media.
You can bet that legacy media ain't going to want to cover this story at all, even to disparage it and deny it, I would imagine, because they're not going to want to give it any air.
They're not going to want to elevate it.
And many people are saying that this story has been out there for a while.
Well, also, Joe Biden at the moment needs Obama's help.
I mean, Obama is kind of sweeping in there to save Joe Biden, to get the numbers back up, to get his popularity back up, so this coming out this time is not ideal at all.
Well, I've not watched this yet because I'm always sort of like, as I say, it's not really my bag, but let's check it out.
Well, we were talking about this earlier because we'll probably look at it in more depth over the coming weeks as we get a bit more of a handle on it all, so to speak.
But what Gareth said, as Gareth always says in such times, is What about the fact that during Obama's presidency he carried on droning?
Innocent people died as a result of drone strikes.
What about 2008?
The fact that the banks were bailed out instead of ordinary Americans when there was a perfect opportunity to reform and reshape America organically.
And populistically.
Populism is not a dirty word.
Populism means ordinary people en masse come ahead of establishment elites.
But because their model requires supremacy of government rather than consensus and governance by consent, they have to assume that people are somehow engaged in skullduggery, dirty, incapable of making decisions for themselves.
Take a look at the pandemic approach by Sweden, Versus the pandemic approach in countries like ours, the UK and yours, the United States.
They emulated China when it came to it.
Unlike Sweden who went, look, let's just let people do what they're going to do.
You know, this ultimately is meant to be motivated by the sanctity of life.
All life is sacred.
Let's do what we can to protect each other, even if it means we compromise our freedoms for others.
I mean, isn't that the very model that marches men and women to war in foreign lands?
We've got to protect these people.
We've got to.
But who believes that's the truth anymore?
And with Fauci's recent acknowledgement that masks across populations were not effective but at the level of the individual they were effective, that's essentially saying the same thing.
If you need a mask, wear a mask.
If you need a vaccine, get yourself a vaccine.
Otherwise, crack on guys, live your own lives, be sensible, love one another.
But because there is no love in the culture, because it's Built on hatred, condemnation, divisionism, divisiveness, cruelty, condemnation, materialism and individualism.
They've got no recourse to that rhetoric.
Authoritarianism is all they know.
So we've got to see how this story fits into that landscape and acknowledge that it's unproven and it's ultimately allegations about a person's family life.
But let's have a look at it anyway.
We're on Rumble, baby.
You're just a guy who's in town for the night and it sounds like you're looking to party.
Yeah.
Pulled up in a bar outside and there's this guy.
I like Tucker's face already.
It sounds like you're in town to party.
And Tucker's like, oh, who's this now?
Who's this I got in my cabin?
Hi, let's introduce to me as Barack Obama.
I had given Barack $250 to pay for coke.
I start putting a line on a CD tray to snort and next...
I start putting a line on a CD tray to snort.
We've all been there, mate.
A CD tray.
That ages this piece.
Whoa, Grandad!
I don't know my day.
We took the old cocaine out of CD cases.
Varmints!
I used to brew up me old cocaine out there.
Moonshine, we called it.
Me and David Crockett doing it off of Raccoon's Tail.
I can change the world, baby!
I know he's got a little pipe and he's smoking.
So I just started rubbing my hand along the stop.
He's, I would say, not the perfect.
Like, with the wrist things, always a concern, isn't it?
Yeah.
When someone's wrists need the constraint.
Look, he's lovely.
The same humanity and love that I would extend to Barack Obama, I extend to, what's he called, Larry Pipsqueak?
I would extend to him.
Because, like, he's a human being, he's plainly a man in recovery.
I mean, the old gnashers seem to have fallen by the wayside, so I'll take his testimony on the crack use.
I read he was a convicted con artist.
He does cons, does he?
I did read that.
Wait a minute, what if I... Look, I bet you lot, you will believe it anyway, innit, because you're just like, you're rabble rousers, innit?
You're like, ah, cool!
Madness, we love it!
Makes me think, why has he not been killed yet?
All that kind of stuff.
What do you lot think so far?
Are you using the Malcolm Gladwell blink test?
You're sort of thinking, is this guy telling the truth?
Is this guy telling the truth?
Remember to check your own sort of biases.
Yeah, if someone goes meh, someone else says cringe, a lot of Well I think it'd be better that we're reminded about Obama's record in office.
On his foreign policy.
I think we should be reminded of this every single day.
About what our former presidents and our former leaders do in other countries.
About how many people they are responsible for killing.
About how many children they are responsible for killing.
That is what, again, the legacy media do not do.
They talk about Obama in glowing terms, like Obama was the kind of saviour for America, and that he'll then go in and save Joe Biden.
No!
Let's be reminded, ten times more drone strikes than George Bush, 90% Daniel Hale revealed, 90% didn't kill the intended targets.
These are massive things that result in innocent civilians dying, and we're not reminded of it, ever.
It's whitewashed.
Let us know in the chat if you think that Gareth's making the points that need to be made.
Join us on Locals, press the red button and join us there.
Or tell us if you think Larry Pipsqueak's making the right points.
Let's see what he's got to say.
I see where it was going and it went the direction I had intended it to go.
He's talking about a drone now.
I hoped it was going to bomb that wedding all along.
It could be a terrorist, I don't know.
They looked like they were having a good time.
You had sex with him twice.
You did cocaine with him.
Watched him smoke crack twice.
You had no idea who he was.
I had no idea who he was.
Let me just ask the obvious question.
What was Obama like on crack?
Is it your sense that that's who Obama is?
Just transactional?
Or that he's bisexual?
Or like, what is this?
It definitely wasn't Barack's first time.
And I would...
Oh man, this is, the world's gone, this is intense, isn't it?
Like, that's it, the mainstream media, how are they going to handle this?
How are they going to handle this?
Because Tucker, this is going to get hundreds of millions of views.
Hundreds of millions of views.
So listen, when they talk about disinformation, malinformation, misinformation, are they trying to protect you, or are they trying to protect you from pretty crazy, potentially seditious content like this?
Because I guess, you know, it's all fair game now.
Yeah, again, I don't know.
I mean, obviously a reaction will be this is just salacious gossip.
This shouldn't be aired.
You can't take talker seriously.
You can't take independent media seriously.
This will be used by the legacy media to kind of smear independent media, I would say.
But like, again, kind of what's worse, like Obama used the Espionage Act More than any of the presidents before him.
That's essentially silenced whistleblowers from revealing things about what the government is doing.
The way they're spying on you, the use of drone warfare, all those kind of things.
What is worse, Tucker revealing something like this, whether it's true or not, or those things, the way that Obama and his administration silenced whistleblowers.
That's very good.
We'll do a video on this and I'll be saying those things tomorrow.
You'll be able to watch that happen.
Look at this one from txabad.
This sort of lowers the bar sort of thing.
We lose the moral high ground.
That's txscubabad.
We lose the moral high ground.
And that's an interesting thing because we live in this kind of nihilistic, materialistic, slanderous, salacious, ghastly, filthy place.
All of this mud slinging, no access to the limitless light, to the principles of love and service and empathy and compassion.
This kind of stuff, this is the way it's going to roll, this is the way it's going to go.
Let's talk to a serious political contributor, co-host on The Heel, host of Bad Faith podcast, former press secretary to Bernie Sanders, it's Brianna Joy Gray.
Welcome back Brianna, thank you so much for coming on our show again.
Thank you so much for having me, Russell.
Brianna, I wonder if you, I suppose you fundamentally would agree with Gareth's analysis that salacious stories of this nature are going to be the type of phenomena that emerges from a fragmented and fractured independent media space.
But when it comes to Barack Obama's record in office, do you think it's fair to say that holding him up as a champion and as a patriarch of the Democrat movement feels Unreasonable and unfair in light of some of the facts that Gareth just cited.
The drone strikes, the wars, the failures in 2008.
And you as a Democrat Party insider, how do you feel about that aspect of Barack Obama's life?
As well as touch upon this if you feel inclined.
Yeah, I completely agree with Gary.
That is the point that we need to be nailing home.
But the reality of the situation is that people do pay more attention to kind of salacious, personalized gossip than they do to a war crime from 10 years ago.
And I do think it's been the struggle of a lot of very serious-minded independent media to try to figure out what kind of balance they can strike to get people to tune in once they've gotten tired of hearing about East Palestine, Ohio, or a homelessness crisis, or even Maui.
Do you go ahead and engage with some of these stories, mix it in, do a spoonful of sugar?
I think that approach largely works, but in this particular story, it's a little awkward because unlike 2008, the country's moved a really far way to the left in terms of how they perceive homosexuality, the idea that a president might be bisexual or have had this kind of interactions in the past.
Don't seem as damning as they might have been at a time when the legacy media might have buried this kind of story in order to protect Barack Obama.
So it does sort of feel like it diminishes the broader project of independent media in some ways to be talking about it.
At the same time that I completely understand why if a story like this falls in your lap, you would want to cover it.
I think the question is, what is Tucker Carlson's framing going to be?
And why is he going to say that this story matters?
Well Tucker Carlson has been on this show and had a significant interview at that.
It was his first one since he left Fox.
I feel he has a pretty unique ability to frame information and connect emotionally with his audience.
Many people have noted that it was young people that were tuning into Fox to tune into Tucker.
Now Fox is perhaps the most significant figure by Joe Rogan in the independent media space.
It further highlights that there is this great uncrossable schism between the mainstream
media who I imagine won't touch this story, or if they do, they will in the most euphemistic
terms.
And perhaps the problem that we're left with, Brianna, is their inability to say we can't
keep heralding and holding Barack Obama as a hero given the truth of his record in office.
We can't continue to be surprised.
I was saying at the beginning of the show when we were covering Trump's bombastic speech, rallying and rallying cry to disobey any potential future lockdowns.
I was thinking, you know, like this has more emotional calibre and and resonance than watching Kamala Harris and Joe Biden
announcing a muted and watered down pharmaceutical bill that amounts to, and I'm citing mostly
David Sirota's piece in the leather here, uh that amounts to a handful of medicines that haven't got
generic competition. It's just such a lot of nonsense that that kind of rhetoric remains
appealing. What are the Democrat party going to do to address this lack of resonance and possibly coming soon
relevance? I mean frankly I would love to see Barack Obama not just hammered on his foreign
policy but on having a trifecta with a filibuster proof majority in the senate and still making
such horrible compromises with health care.
Yes, was Obamacare a significant step forward?
Sure, but only viewed in the context of all of our peer countries across the world.
It's a sad state of affairs for the American healthcare system, but that's still heralded as the biggest advancement in our healthcare system since the 1940s.
So, you know, I do think I would One of my critiques, I think, of the way the independent media is going, and I see this as someone who has her own podcast and is an independent media person who has all the critiques of legacy media, who has been personally blacklisted by Joanne Reed.
Like, I say this as someone who is rooting for independent media.
There is this frustrating need to kind of chase An algorithm.
If you don't have a corporation that's forcing you onto somebody's TV screen, you've got to figure out how to make it work.
And I've heard you dance around the kinds of sanctions.
You know, if you say something about the vaccine, you might get censored on the social media.
The Hill got taken down for, I believe, a week for simply playing a Trump speech, like C-SPAN style, in which he did, which he denied the election results.
And then the channel, The Hill, got stung for it.
So that is happening at the same time that you're trying to bring people the kind of news that benefits you in the algorithm.
And that can lead you in one direction or the other.
And I've realized that for myself, I don't just want to criticize Barack Obama for not going far enough on health care or Joe Biden for not going far enough on health care.
Certainly, Donald Trump didn't do anything meaningful for health care in this regard as well.
But I want to be applying pressure prospectively to the politicians that are fighting for our votes right now to be fighting with each other about how much more they can do than the politicians of yesteryear.
And sometimes I think the balance of criticizing people for past actions versus pressuring people who are still in contention today to do better for us is a little out of I really do appreciate articles and outlets like The Lever for making very clear what the potential is in the current moment so that we can use that information to try to extract more prospectively.
you know. Do you think that this new collision and fusion between radical, if that's the
appropriate word, outsider candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy over there with the Republicans,
who's been on our show and people dig him, and like Robert F. Kennedy, who also has been
on and people love him, and actually I love him a bit as well. I like he's a man in recovery.
He's about to beat me in a pull-up competition. Do you think that their ability to gain traction
in spaces like this, bypassing legacy media, suggests that perhaps the Democrat Party,
apparently as it is in thrall of a donor class and a kind of odd hereditary principle between
Clintons and Obamas and Bidens and whatnot, or embrace as they perhaps ought to have done
in the time of Bernie Sanders, a campaign that I know that you were significantly involved
in, the emergence, the organic...
As it were emergence of a figure like RFK and say, look, let's go this direction.
What prevents that from happening?
What prevents this kind of change and this kind of embrace happening, Brianna?
Look, as heartening as it is that outsider candidates can get some traction and chart on the board as if you will, despite not being embraced by legacy media.
At the end of the day, we see that the legacy media still has an enormous amount of power.
So, you know, Bernie Sanders got pretty far.
Twice.
But at the end of the day, when there's double-digit millions of earned media for Barack Obama, sorry, for Joe Biden, for Joe Biden after he wins South Carolina, after he lost catastrophically the first three primary contests.
Remember, I think he came fifth place in one of those first three primary contests.
The media didn't a heap Negative media on him following that.
In fact, when Bernie won Nevada, there was a flood of negative, negative media for Bernie Sanders.
I think that was the moment where they started saying that he was in Putin's pocket and Chris Matthews did his whole screen about how we're going to have beheadings, socialist beheadings in Central Park if Bernie Sanders wins, you know?
So they do have an effect to put their thumb on the scale still.
And RFK Jr., despite having a kind of breakout moment, is kind of stalling, declining in the polls.
I think that's largely because of the positions he's taken on Israel-Palestine, which feel very establishment,
poll-tested, frankly, and completely out of step with the outsider image and outsider, I think, credibility
that he has in other areas.
And it is also worth noting that RFK Jr., unlike some other outsider insurgent candidates,
has gotten the benefit of some pretty big players.
Elon Musk said he was going to offer any presidential candidate the opportunities
to have Twitter spaces.
Marianne Williamson took him up on that immediately, both publicly and as I understand it, privately reached out.
He has declined to follow up with that.
And Fox News has offered RFK Jr.
platform multiple times in a way that it hasn't Marianne Williamson.
So there, you know, I wouldn't say that he has not had the benefit of legacy media.
I would say that he hasn't had the benefit of liberal legacy media.
Bernie of course was an independent before he joined the Democrat party.
Cornel West now is calling out figures like AOC and Bernie for becoming co-opted by the party that they were supposed to oppose and certainly improve.
Do you think it's a time to recognise that the way that Independent media is changing media spaces and that legacy media, whilst as you have explained, still have influence, are ultimately atrophying and that new political movements could similarly emerge, particularly if there were alliances between independent media and new independent political parties.
Or is the system just too rigged, Brianna?
So I do think that independent media is useful and helpful.
I don't think that, for example, Bernie would have gotten as far as he did if there hadn't been a kind of consensus among what at the time was just an emergent independent media system.
Channels like The Young Turks, people like Kyle Kalinske of Secular Talks had big, nearly million, you know, million plus subscriber followings.
And when Bernie came, it was at just that moment where they were able to flex their newfound power.
And create a kind of public consensus and counter-programming to what we were hearing on the mainstream news.
And I think that that mattered.
But I do think that what we've learned from those last two Bernie campaigns is that it's simply not enough.
And that the Democratic Party specifically has argued in court that it is not obliged to hold a free, equal, fair election.
That it is a corporation that is allowed to pick winners and losers and put its thumb on the scale.
We heard Donna Brazile I argue this as well, say, admit this.
We learned of the mechanism they were using to manipulate the press from some of the Podesta paper leaks.
So there's no mystery there.
So the question then becomes, how do you win despite those odds?
And I do think that some of the labor gains that we've been seeing across the country,
the strike waves, the unionization of all of the Starbuckses, the Amazon victory, the writer strike in California,
obviously, the prospective railroad strike that Joe Biden, who claims to be
the most union-friendly president since FDR struck down, that really, I think, illustrates the power
of organized labor.
And I do think that part of the real thing that buoyed Bernie Sanders' campaign
was that he had so much of organized labor behind him.
the nurses unions, for example, coming out strongly for him.
And we're not seeing that right now.
We're seeing all of those old groups that fell in behind Bernie immediately been the need to endorse Joe Biden, despite how anti-union he has demonstrated himself to have been in recent history.
And to me, that's much more disappointing than, you know, Rachel Maddow going on some nonsense screed about Putin controlling whomever.
Yeah.
Yeah, I hear you.
Cornel West coming on next week, by the way, so make sure you have a little look at that.
Brianna, how do you feel about this kind of evident gap between what is declared publicly and what is happening privately, whether it's around the coronavirus pandemic, whether it's the war between Russia and Ukraine, likely outcomes, predicted outcomes, nature of funding, the inability to connect with people, in Hawaii, the misstep around the East Palestine disaster
that you've mentioned, but most notably this peculiar, and I mean this sort of literally, Orwellian
inversion of terms like war and peace.
Eastern European NATO countries are apparently scared of a peace deal in Ukraine. I'm sure there
are political reasons for that, like, oh no, then Russia will come for them next, you know,
propaganda. But where do we get off, so like, you know, like claiming that peace oughtn't be
desirable, that the United States oughtn't be using their considerable influence to assert
that as the most favoured outcome?
How have we ended up in this place of inversion, distinction and this lack of connection between ordinary people and those that govern?
I mean, the American public has been the victim of a well-funded, harsh propaganda effort since before the end of the Cold War, obviously.
And the terms have changed, but the effect has not in the least.
And I'm so grateful, again, to have independent media outlets like, for example, The Grey Zone, who has been Covering these particular issues, sending reporters to South Africa to cover the BRICS conference and the induction of new members into that economic alliance.
I just spoke to Anya Parampil on Bad Faith, my own podcast, recently.
And I do think that we are finally breaking through in seeing that the United States,
through its own militarism, has sowed the seeds of its own destruction.
It has pushed other countries through sanctions and war to a point at which they're no longer willing
to bend the knee to a unipolar, American-dominated economic system.
And the war in Ukraine was that tipping point in many ways.
The global South took the biggest brunt of the consequences of Ukraine,
the breadbasket of Europe, no longer being able to provide goods to the global South.
The Nord Stream pipeline, who knows who blew that one up,
but the willingness to hurt a stated ally in Germany and a multimillion-dollar infrastructure project,
multi-billion-dollar infrastructure project in order to force them into allegiances with us
against the interests of their own people.
All of this is being laid increasingly bare and the global South, the rest of the world is realizing that they no longer have to be in the United States.
I do think Americans are going to have to unlearn so much of what we've learned about the idea that our personal prosperity and American prosperity is linked to our military might and dominance over the rest of the world.
I think China has been modeling different ways to provide Benefit to other countries to secure favorable trade terms, building infrastructure instead of building bombs.
And I do think there needs to be more global solidarity and understanding that my interest and the interest of the average Ukrainian citizen, the average Russian citizen and the average Somali citizen are much more aligned with the leadership of all of these countries who are invested in maintaining a system of power where they I'm optimistic about the mask coming off of what's been going on, but there needs to be a focus again on pushing our prospective and currently elected leaders on what they're going to do about it.
I'm optimistic about the mask coming off of what's been going on,
but there needs to be a focus again on pushing our prospective and currently elected leaders
on what they're gonna do about it.
There is a lot of rhetoric coming out of the right right now
about being anti-war in Ukraine.
But when you push particular elected officials in the way that very few journalists do
about whether or not they're actually willing to cut the military budget,
you often find that they are not.
I interviewed Marjorie Taylor Greene on that on Rising a few months ago.
And I asked her that specific question.
Are you against the war in Ukraine?
Because it is also being framed as Biden's war and it's a way to come off as anti-Biden.
Are you sincerely anti-war regardless of who's president and support a cut to the military budget, the likes of which we basically never had?
And she said, no, I like our military.
The military needs to go up.
We need to support our troops.
So those are the kind of questions we need to be asking so that I think a good faith populist anti-war sentiment that is being shared on both the right and the left, the anti-establishment sentiment that's out there isn't going to be exploited by certain bad actors.
I would argue Vivek Ramaswamy has similarly said things that would point to an escalation in a war with China despite being critical of the war in Ukraine.
So we have to look at the bigger picture here and not allow our sincere desire to be anti-war, to be exploited by people who still take money from the same old people, still take money from the same old corporatists, or independently funded, but aren't getting small dollar donations, the likes of which would keep them accountable to the people.
We've got to be really circumspect about what people are saying or whether or not they have the bona fides to back up that they're really going to fulfill our populist desires.
Brianna, you do such a great work in presenting the nuanced approach that you suggest that all of us take when attempting to address these significant and intersecting issues.
Even something as evidently salacious as the topic that we began our conversation with has to be understood, undertaken and analysed from that perspective.
What are we talking about when we're talking about power?
What are we talking about when we talk about media, independent or otherwise?
And what do we mean when we talk about populism and a deliberate and authentic anti-war stance?
Thank you so much for joining us, Brianna.
It's always a great pleasure to speak with you.
The pleasure's mine.
Thank you so much.
You can catch Brianna Joy Gray on The Hill pretty regular, plus her podcast Bad Faith is worth listening to if you want to hear a different perspective articulately conveyed.
And I'm sure, and I can see that you're applauding Brianna in the comments there, you will do just that.
Nice one.
We got some fantastic stuff coming up over the course of the week.
Sam Harris.
It has already gone viral, which means that if you are a member of our locals community, you might already have seen it.
All you have to do is press the red button and become an Awakened Wonder.
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That, along with Vile Slops, our new Designed to compete with prime drink can put you but with a difference don't put lead in your pencil mate.
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I'll tell you that great interview with Brianna.
Oh, okay Yeah, very good.
I'm Brianna.
She's amazing enjoyed it a lot One of the things we're trying to do, you lot, is we want people from the left and the right to come on and sort of, and you start to hear a kind of converging anti-establishment sentiment that gives you some hope instead of, like, when you watch the extremes of both parties as they're sort of known, you think, oh no, man, this is going to be crazy, this is going to be some sort of, well, there's no way of things ever being resolved.
Yeah, I thought that was a great point at the end.
You know, do we want a decrease in the military budget and spend the money on American people, not just to Ukraine?
Or do we want to send it off to military in China?
I mean, that's absolutely right.
What do you want?
What do you think?
What do you think, Aso7846?
Join us on there, by the way.
Guys, you get early access to the interviews, you get meditations, podcasts.
It's pretty bloody good.
As you can see, we've raised enough money.
I've got great news.
I'm going to have to be humiliated by an old man.
No, I'm not going on a date with Larry Pipkin.
I'm going to have a pull-up competition against RFK.
Although I may also go on a date with Larry Pipkin.
I mean, that dude knows how to party.
You could use those wrist straps of his to do this.
Actually, Pipkin, I'm gonna need them wrist straps.
I'm taking an RFK, and I might need a little dose of the other stuff to get me over the line.
Gee, Russell, you've got a lot thinner in the last couple of reps.
