Russell chats to Max Blumenthal, Editor and investigative journalist at The Grayzone about the politicisation of fundraising as GoFundMe freeze donations to his organisation, citing "external concerns". Max shares his thoughts on what's really going on as well as tell us about his new fundraising efforts to back his team's journalistic work. To support Max and the Grayzone, go to: http://spot.fund/DefendTheGrayzoneAgain Become an Awakened Wonder: https://russellbrand.locals.com/Come see me LIVE: https://www.russellbrand.com/ NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/WATCH the FULL SHOW: https://bit.ly/stayfree-204-Elon-Prevented-This
Over the month of September I'm doing a handful of live shows that are a combination of spirituality, breathwork, 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 inventive all gutted 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.
Are you happy with your current government?
No.
With you live in theatres like Hayes on the 12th of September, that's a little intimate London gig.
I'm at Wembley Park Theatre on the 16th of September.
Windsor on the 19th of September.
Plymouth on the 22nd.
And Wolverhampton on the 28th.
To get tickets go to russellbrown.com forward slash live.
That's russellbrown.com forward slash live.
The link is in the description.
Stay free.
Hello there, you Awakening Wonders.
Thanks for joining me on our mutual voyage to truth and freedom.
Together, we can create new systems, new communities.
We can analyse these extraordinary times together, independently.
Those of you watching us from the United States of America, take this opportunity to reflect honorably with you on the lives of those lost on September the 11th in particular as someone who behaved so astonishingly at the time because that's what I was a crazy young man back then and some of you'll be aware of my mad behavior on MTV way back in those days and now I'm able to share with you in acknowledging the horror of those events and actually
Look at them from a new perspective, how it changed history, how it altered our perception of the world, how it was utilised, how the Patriot Act was mobilised, how the war in Iraq came about as a result of those tragic events.
We're looking also today at the new revelations that Musk prevented a Ukraine attack on Russia last year because of his, what's it called, Skylink, Skynet?
Starlink.
Starlink.
Sounds too much like a train.
I struggle to accept it as such a significant technological advancement.
Sounds like Starlink.
I also think of an attack on Crimea, which is a clear distinction there.
You know, as in Musk's point is that when Crimea is a red line of Putin's, that could lead to nuclear war.
Then he's got a bit of a bigger point there.
Let us know in the chat if you agree with Musk's actions.
If you're watching us on YouTube, give us a like, give us a comment.
If you're watching on Rumble, you can't rumble us no more.
Our rumbling days are over.
It's like the like has usurped the rumble.
as the way of acknowledging your approval and registering your content with us.
We'll be talking in more detail about the, like Musk's actions in preventing an attack on Crimea.
And later in our, and here's the news, we'll be talking about Fauci being questioned
by CNN on masks and a new take on some of the data that emerged from that period,
which I will not discuss with you, you 6.5 million awakening wonders on YouTube,
because you know how that platform is regulated and we love you and we adore you,
but in a few minutes, we're gonna want you to click the link in the description
to join us for a conversation with Max Blumenthal, who will be talking to us, presumably at length,
about that conflict and revealing stuff that simply wouldn't be safe to talk about
in heavily regulated mainstream spaces.
Mmm.
Max, hello, mate.
Thanks for coming on.
Great to see you.
How are you doing?
Yeah, you know, man, we're operating in a beautiful space.
I'm sure you'll agree that working in this independent media space is free from consequences.
It's a giddy, buccaneering affair, and you never get the sense that the forces of evil are co-aligning and coalescing to, for example, shut down your GoFundMe.
Can you tell us a little bit about that story, mate?
Yeah, well, it's a giddy buccaneering affair for independent swashbucklers like ourselves and our ship was targeted by...
Apparently national security state pirates.
We have no idea who they actually are because they hide behind the veneer of these supposedly private Silicon Valley based companies like GoFundMe.
As you said, you were saying before in the run up to this interview, the FBI has honeycombed its places like Facebook or Meta and Twitter with its own operatives.
You even have former CIA people there.
But these crowdfunding sites do the same thing, and it's poorly understood.
So I'll just tell you what happened to us, and I think your audience will better understand
how dangerous it is for them to work with, to try to raise money for anything remotely political
when you have the national security state operating behind the scenes,
telling them that they may have to sanction people if their political views go against their own objectives.
So we launched a crowd funder for three of our contributors.
You've had one of them on named Kit Clarenberg.
Three of our most dedicated contributors to provide them with long-term positions.
And so, for our audience, it was a chance to just support independent media that they like.
We went through GoFundMe.
People are now calling me naive.
And GoFundMe was failing to transfer the money.
We had raised about $90,000 in three weeks.
in three weeks.
And I went over to GoFundMe's form to ask them what happened to the money.
And it took a while.
And I finally received a message from a trust and safety officer, only named Sabrina.
I had no idea who she was.
And she said that due to some external concerns, they have frozen the money
and they're not transferring it to us because they need to verify it.
That's all I heard from her.
And so our donors didn't know that this had happened.
So eventually I had to announce it, which means that I was basically,
when you announce this and go public, you're sabotaging your own fundraiser
because no one's gonna wanna donate if the money's being frozen.
But they wouldn't explain why.
And eventually, we had to force GoFundMe to refund all the money to everyone and move to a different fundraising site called SpotFund, which has been much more trustworthy and responsive.
We were able to get their chief technology officer on the line who promised us that they would transfer the money immediately, and they've done so.
But with GoFundMe, It's obvious that they're working hand-in-glove with the national security state and applying financial sanctions on outlets and causes that threaten the imperatives of the powers that be.
And I'll point directly to the Canadian truckers, the Freedom Convoy.
You know what happened there.
Back in early 2022, GoFundMe froze their $10 million that they had raised, $10 million US dollars they'd raised, and then announced that they were transferring it to, quote-unquote, established charities.
So they were stealing the money from donors to the Canadian truckers protesting Justin Trudeau and the Liberal government's vaccine mandates and the lockdowns, and just giving it to charities of their choosing.
And they eventually had to relent because this was a violation of U.S.
law.
Several attorney generals in the states were going to investigate them.
But they wanted to steal the money.
And why were they doing that?
Because that liberal government of Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland had declared emergency law in Canada, had told GoFundMe to do that, and they were telling the banks to basically Take people's money who are donating to this because the protest was threatening their policy.
And so that's what we think happened with us.
And we weren't going to let them reroute the money somewhere else.
So we just shut it down.
And the crazy thing is now they're telling journalists like our friend Matt Taibbi, who actually called them at GoFundMe, that this was a totally normal procedure and that we voluntarily shut it down as though we were just going to sit there and allow them to continue this complete Banking fraud forever.
It's astonishing.
Like Lee's story, we're talking about the relationship between Elon Musk and the American government, and how Elon Musk is able to intervene in the military imperatives of, in this case, the Ukraine.
I know your views on that war have been pretty well and widely expressed.
Here we have a story where, once again, the relationship between big tech and the government becomes Quite curious.
It's interesting and exciting when there's an obvious adversarial component, such as in our last story.
But when you see this kind of cohesion, this kind of collaboration, like you cite with the Canadian trucker story, and obviously now you've been a personal, oh my gosh, should we say victim of it?
You've certainly experienced it.
It makes you realise that ultimately what we're sliding towards We are more and more normalised, centralised, authoritarian models, centralised currency, ability to close down people.
We're hearing more and more stories about the intervention in people's financial affairs.
It's something that's becoming more prevalent and I'm not surprised that you're a prominent and high profile organisation to be subject to that kind of obvious corruption. What does it make you feel about the
future of the grey zone and your ability to report independently, for example, on the ongoing
conflict between Ukraine and Russia?
Does it make you feel that you are being persecuted? Does it make you feel that it's
kind of a threat? Or do you think that in this new space, everything is sanitised, technocratic,
and yet a digital tyranny pervades invisibly like a binary gas where there's no baddie to locate,
but just an ideal that can be conveyed and a new type of oppression without clear villains?
You know?
Yeah, exactly.
I interviewed an author and satirist who's based in Germany, who's American, named C.J.
Hopkins, who you might know.
He did a book called The New Normal Reich, which is just a send-up of the Covidian regime that prevailed in Germany, across Europe, and across the West.
His book cover features a play on William Shire's The Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich.
It features a swastika embedded within a mask.
And for that book cover, Germany, the German court has found him guilty of glorifying a national socialist organization and sentenced him to 60 days in prison or $4,000 fine.
And the way, I mean, he's facing kind of a jackboot in the face, the hard censorship.
Germany doesn't really have freedom of speech, although it pretends to be a liberal democracy.
But what we're facing in the US, which has a First Amendment,
is kind of the national security state, which we never elected,
bunch of faceless individuals who are able to meddle in elections across the world,
including in our own, meddle in politics, is this kind of soft totalitarian model.
Sheldon Wolin, the late sociologist, called it inverted totalitarianism,
where liberal democracy is used as cover for a more authoritarian project.
And you can get quietly shadow banned from behind the scenes by some operative in an air-conditioned office and disappeared or suppressed or censored without having any recourse or due process because it's being done ostensibly through a private corporation, which just is saying, hey, we're just enforcing our terms of service.
And so that's an insidious, it's dangerous, it's deeply anti-democratic.
And the public, whether it's us or anyone else who's been censored financially, like our friends at Mint Press News or Consortium News, they never know who actually pulled the trigger and censored them.
So who's responsible for this?
Was it the US government?
Or could it have been the Ukrainian government?
Because we know For a fact, because of the Twitter file that my colleague Aaron Maté obtained, that the Ukrainian Security Services, known as SBU, called the FBI, sent them messages containing a list of Twitter accounts they wanted banned.
And the FBI went to Twitter and told them to ban these accounts.
And these accounts included Americans and Canadians.
Like Aaron Maté.
And it was solely on the basis of their political views that they were disrupting the official narrative that Ukraine was just fighting this glorious war for democracy.
And Twitter, this is in the pre-Elon regime, actually refused because it was too extreme for them to just ban Americans and Canadians on the basis of foreign government telling them to do so.
But who told GoFundMe to do that?
Who were these external concerns?
Was it the Ukrainian government?
Was it the British government which detained and interrogated our contributor, British citizen, Kit Clarenberg?
I know you've interviewed him about that.
Or was it the U.S.
government?
We will probably never know.
And so we're existing in this inverted totalitarian model behind the guise of liberal democracy, where most of the public still believes that they have due process and free speech.
They don't, as long as we're relying on these private companies managed by the national security state as our digital commons, as our kind of speaker's corner.
God, man, there's so many points I want to pick up on there.
There were sort of Orwellian images, of course, with the boot on the face of the man who used that image in a mask in a plainly satirical way.
the sort of when satire and comedy gets challenged to that degree. You know, bloody hell, Germany,
they should be encouraging. Robin Williams' famous line, why are Germans so unfunny?
And he said, because you killed all the funny people. But I'm also minded of Huxley,
like being the sort of sanitized version of tyranny, this inverted tyranny that you describe,
as well as the kind of Kafka-esque idea, which I'm sure, I guess, was more of a critique of
Stasi-style, Soviet-style, communist oppression, bureaucracies that were masked and oddly
diaphanous and impossible to locate. This now seems to have migrated to our countries, the
United States, the UK, as well as when you were talking about this inverted tyranny, I'm sort of
minded of a moment in my conversation with Sam Harris last week.
It was a point that the great philosopher and friend of the show, actually, Brad Evans first made, I believe, that we've been sort of trained to regard jihadist violence or certain type of violence as extreme.
And of course, you know, I'm not sort of obviously endorsing any type of violence, but he made the point that he imagined jihadists to be in ecstatic states and sort of That, for him, made the violence all the more nefarious.
but the kind of violence that's carried out, for example, under Obama,
who we made a really good item about earlier today, are these sort of sanitary, as you say,
air-conditioned rooms, where either your funds are shut down
or a wedding adjacent to a potential terror suspect is bombed, where progress, technology,
rationalism themselves are used to mobilize a type of tyranny that, to misquote Wilde,
dare not speak its name, tells us that it's liberal and democratic
all the while gently closing in on our freedom.
And in one more Orwellian tag, Max, what do you feel about the war, good, peace,
bad NATO members' concerns that any opposition to a proxy war
might drive Ukraine to pursue, oh no, peace talks with Putin?
Well, there are a number of obstacles to peace talks because it's obvious now that Tony Blink in the US.
Secretary of State, was recently in Kiev for a more extended period than usual to probably put the idea of negotiations on the table.
And this is because of the colossal failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which the U.S.
has been heavily involved in.
They failed to capture any real territory.
They were supposed to cut off the land bridge between Russia and Crimea.
It's not going to happen, and soon there's going to be rain in the eastern regions, the eastern plains of the Donbass region, and it's going to be impossible to get armor through there.
So it was a total failure.
Why can't they negotiate?
Number one, why should Russia negotiate at this point when the West has just completely cut off the possibility of negotiations and sabotaged negotiations at every turn leading to this proxy war?
Back in April 2022, the U.S.
cancelled negotiations between Zelensky and the Kremlin and said, keep fighting.
And they sabotaged the Minsk Accords before that, so why trust the West?
And why negotiate when you could actually start capturing more and more territory, given this terrible state of Ukraine's military, and the hundreds of thousands of casualties they've suffered?
They don't have much left, apparently.
So there's that factor.
Then there's the factor of Tony Blinken himself.
This guy has major skin in the game when it comes to continuing this war.
He founded a firm called West Exec Advisors, which finesses contracts for the arms industry and big tech through the Pentagon and the State Department.
Him and his former colleagues from the Obama administration got together and started this firm to basically profit off their connections With the major winners of the Ukraine proxy war, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Palantir, all the Beltway bandits as we call them here in Washington.
And so if Tony Blinken leaves government, he could make a lot of money off of this war as long as it's still continuing.
And that could be either through a kind of frozen conflict where Ukraine is transformed into what Zelensky has called a big Israel, and it's just constantly at war with Russia and its entire society is securitized and mobilized.
The tech industry will love that as well, because everyone's going to be under surveillance, you know, drones and cameras everywhere.
And so, you know, you have all these people who, why would they want to end this conflict?
They're the real winners of this war.
And then finally, you have the ideological investment, just the hatred of Russia that prevails, particularly among the Democratic Party foreign policy elite, but also within the Republican Party.
The idea that we just can't lose this war and that this is about democracy.
So there are all these obstacles to negotiations, but obviously the war isn't going.
There's no progress for Ukraine in this war.
They should have negotiated over a year ago, but they've been drunk off of these delusional fantasies spun out of Washington that they can somehow win when victory is never even defined.
Oh man, those are the kind of home truths that you do not want being funded under any circumstances.
do avoid going to spot.fund forward slash defend the gray zone again and donate in to
max blumenthal's incredible endeavors there at the gray zone we'll post the link in the description
now they've got to do it all over again precisely because the news they convey is a threat to
mainstream narratives and look what happens astonishing astonishing the price you pay for
telling the truth max that's exceptional Thank you so much for that.
We're always grateful to spend some time with you.
Thanks for your contributions.
I'm going to make a donation myself.
It's a GoFundMe, right?
Couple of hundred pounds.
Guy, just give it to someone.
Give it to someone you think I'd like.
I don't know what I want.
I'm an idiot.
You decide for me who I should support.
Well, none of it's going to me.
The $1 is going to me.
It's going to three of our bravest, most dedicated contributors.
Wyatt Reed right now, our managing editor, he is in the Donbass region.
He's in the conflict zone right now.
And he's been cut off from Venmo and PayPal for his reporting.
He's basically financially sanctioned.
It's going to kick Klarenberg, who you've interviewed before, and his bombshell expose on 9-11.
It is 9-11 today on how the CIA actually recruited two of the hijackers, completely factual report based on public court documents, recruited two of the hijackers and then refused to tell the FBI about their plot as it developed.
He was interrogated about that article.
By British counter-terror police when he arrived to his home country in London.
So, I mean, these are the people that deserve to be supported.
These are the journalists that deserve to be supported, and that's who our fundraiser is for, to provide them with long-term support.
Amazing.
That is a way to fund real news, real truth.
We'll post that link.
You guys there should support that.
Thanks once again, Max, for joining us.
It's fantastic to see you, as always.
Make sure your donation is not anonymous, because we'd love to have it up there.
All right, let's leave a donation under my name.
I'm looking around, like if someone's going to solve that for me, like The Dog or Gareth or someone.
