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Oct. 10, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand

01:29:00

Israel Palestine Officially At WAR!!! Is THIS What’s Coming Next? - Stay Free #220

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	So, I'm going to go ahead and do that.
	I'm going to go ahead and do that.
	I'm going to go ahead and do that.
	In this video, you're going to see the future.
	Hello there you Awakening Wanderers, thanks for joining me wherever you are.
	For the first 15 minutes we'll be widely available, then we'll be exclusively available on Rumble.
	Click the link in the description to join us there.
	Whilst the world may appear to be in disarray, while there appears to be ubiquitous crisis, holy war, global war, deception, lies about turns, We have to continue to awaken together.
	We have to find within ourselves the resources that are going to be required to face what potentially looks like an apocalypse.
	Thank you for supporting us.
	It's plain that you have to support independent media now because the institutions are broken and require either radical re-evaluation or total dismantling.
	Are we on the brink of revolution?
	Let me know in the chat.
	And if you support us directly, thank you.
	But we need your attention much more than we need your money.
	Although we do have to keep going because now it's pretty plain that there are forces that want to shut down independent media.
	We're going to be talking about Biden flipping on the wall.
	Walls are good now.
	Do you remember when walls were bad?
	When Trump was racist for the wall?
	Well now they're building the wall.
	We're talking to Michael Schellenberger, an actual journalist who believes in freedom of speech, open debate.
	We're going to be talking about the FBI targeting Trump supporters.
	We're going to be talking about the censorship battle in Ireland and across the world.
	So contribute to that.
	For a while, we'll be widely available.
	Then we're going to be exclusively available on Rumble, where we can speak freely.
	And if you like and subscribe, it helps us.
	And if you want to press that red button and become an Awakened Wonder, you get all sorts of additional content.
	Plus, you support Our voice at a time where independent media news is going to be invaluable because of course it looks like, I don't know if you're a religious person or a spiritual person, but with escalating tensions in the Middle East, the Pentagon is saying they will support Israel, Netanyahu has declared war against Palestine or Palestinian militants at least,
	And Mike Pence has used this as an opportunity to score points in the Republican primary battle, saying that this is a problem that's been exacerbated somehow by Vivek Ramaswamy, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.
	I mean, I don't know how.
	He also uses it to double down on the mainstream matrix legacy media propagandist establishment view that Russia v Ukraine doesn't have a history and isn't somehow beneficial to establishment interest.
	Have a look at Mike Pence on the mainstream and look at how you are presented information without nuance, without complexity and in a very exploitative fashion.
	But I also believe this is what happens when we have leading voices like Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis signalling retreat from America's role as leader of the free world.
	I don't know that you can actually blame Donald Trump for the historic conflict between Israel and Palestine, an issue that has divided humanity for millennia.
	that seems to be somehow at the root and the core of all of our global problems.
	Something that we're going to somehow have to come together to collectively resolve.
	To use an issue like that to point score against Ron DeSantis seems absurd.
	To suggest that somehow domestic matters within the US have caused this, I think,
	is preposterous because it is a historic conflict.
	It is ongoing.
	It's something that's going to require, I think, from each of us, and let me know if you agree with this in the chat, it's going to require that we all somehow re-evaluate and radically revise what we believe.
	For me, I sometimes think Prayer is the only answer.
	What is it we're going to have to call from ourselves to resolve this?
	And over the course of the coming weeks, should we survive, this is something we're going to discuss and look into together to try and find ways that there could possibly be a resolution.
	But given that it's hard to try and find ways for, within America, people to communicate peacefully and affably, this issue is one that I think is, let's face it, It's the big one, isn't it?
	It's the most complex issue on the agenda.
	So Mike Pence using it in this fashion is astonishing.
	Look.
	What happened in Ukraine was an unprovoked invasion by Russia.
	What happened this weekend was an unprovoked invasion.
	Why would you use this to reiterate a talking point that's plainly not true?
	This is what happens if you get your information from mainstream media.
	You're given reductive, simplistic takes.
	Lee Fang, who comes on our show a lot, tweeted, this is a moment like January the 6th, September the 11th, or early moments of the pandemic and George Floyd, where mass fear and anger takes hold.
	Politicians and media will use black and white thinking to polarise the issue, to manipulate you, to demonise dissent and shred nuance.
	Don't let them.
	So note this, whenever there's a crisis, look at how it's exploited by politicians and by media.
	We know enough to know that this is an issue that's going to require incredible insight, delicacy, prayer, new forms of thought, new forms of diplomacy, plainly innovation, because it's an intransigent, ongoing issue that has defined global politics, religious politics, if there is such a term, and Has been divisive for, well, you know, for as long as there's been monotheism, almost.
	So we'll be talking about it in more depth and consulting some interesting and important voices and relaying the truth as best we can to you over the coming weeks.
	Obviously, Hillary Clinton is someone that has a very particular and specific view when it comes to complex and divisive issues.
	Note the way that Mike Pence tried to use this to double down on on an existing policy and perspective.
	Have a look at this conversation with Hillary Clinton, where she talks about Trump supporters as kind of terrorists, I guess.
	She says extremists, which is adjacent to terrorists, and actually calls for reprogramming in the way that sort of wacky people used to demand gay folks were reprogrammed.
	Check this out, because this is something I've not seen before.
	It's an extraordinary use of language.
	Hillary Clinton I think might be the symbol of what is wrong with politics.
	More than Donald Trump.
	I know loads of you absolutely adore Donald Trump and whatever you think about him, plainly the establishment do not want him in power.
	I think that much can be said at this point.
	I believe that Hillary Clinton is somehow the mouthpiece of neoliberal establishment power, of this perspective and position where you claim to care but your actions do not connect with the rhetoric.
	She somehow manages to talk as if she's an anti-establishment figure while being an avatar of the establishment.
	She condemns people that are, I would say, disadvantaged from a position of victimhood.
	It's rhetorically extraordinary what happens here.
	And we had very bitter battles over all kinds of things, gun control and climate change.
	Do you think that using terms like basket of deplorables makes things more or less bitter?
	Do you imagine that the role of the Clinton Foundation on the global stage makes tension more or less bitter?
	Do you think that the ongoing condemnation of people that are basically conservative or republican makes things more or less bitter?
	What is Hillary Clinton's role in bringing about world peace?
	That's an extraordinary image and I think belies considerable ignorance.
	Isn't this little tale of extremism waving, you know, wagging the dog of the Republican
	Party as it is today?
	And that's an extraordinary image and I think belies considerable ignorance.
	There are so many times where the Democrats lost their moral authority.
	Was it under Bill Clinton for a variety of reasons, some related to scandal, the deregulation
	of the financial industry?
	Or was it under Obama, where all of the optimism seeped away into 2008, a massive financial crisis, bank bailouts, which many people believe led to a new kind of nationalism, precisely because Globalism plainly isn't working.
	A global economic crisis destroyed American financial life and no one was penalized, no one was punished for plainly criminal activity.
	To not include that as a kind of tail wagging a dog or as a dark scene for American cultural life is interesting and an attempt to say that there are these others, there are these dark demonic forces, for me shows an incredible lack of awareness and I think is out and out deceptive.
	Sadly, so many of those extremists, those MAGA extremists, take their marching orders from Donald Trump who has no credibility left.
	Do you think that's what she really means?
	That they are MAGA extremists and that Donald Trump has no credibility left?
	Or do you think what she means is Donald Trump does have credibility left and we are afraid to face Donald Trump in an election and we have to remove him from political life by any means necessary?
	I don't know.
	Let me know what you think.
	But what I sense is, is when you hear discourse that nominates and others a group of people and claims that they are somehow demonic and dark, you have an inability to address the psychological truth of what it is to be a human.
	That as Solzhenitsyn says, the line between good and evil runs not between nations, races or creeds, but through every human heart.
	A willingness to acknowledge errors made.
	I don't think I've ever seen Hillary Clinton on the TV say, we made mistakes when Bill was president.
	Under Obama, the 2008 bailout was ridiculous.
	It's outrageous that after everything we said in 2020, Joe Biden is continuing to build that wall.
	We should acknowledge that even George Bush's historic and corrupt wars in Iraq were undergirded by support from Joe Biden.
	Until someone starts talking like that, we can't trust any of them.
	As long as they try to create some demonic other force that is creating the problem,
	we can't rely on them.
	Now you could say, well isn't that what you do Russell when you talk about the establishment?
	In a sense what we're saying is there are sets of impenetrable systems that are dependent
	on sets of allegiances, alliances and are intransigent.
	Like if it wasn't Hillary Clinton it would be someone else.
	It doesn't matter if you replace the Republican party with the Democrat party, the shifts
	are insignificant.
	What we believe is that power itself has to be devolved, that you have to have more power
	You have to have more power in your own community.
	That you have to break this parental relationship between yourself and the state and the media.
	And if that doesn't happen, it seems to me that this sort of descent into dystopia will not be interrupted.
	He's only in it for himself.
	He's now defending himself in civil actions and criminal actions.
	And when do they break with him?
	You know, because at some point, you know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members, but something needs to happen.
	There you are, Hillary Clinton literally suggesting brainwashing and deprogramming for the supporters of her political opponents.
	Our friend Glenn Greenwald tweeted, as she gets increasingly bitter about her 2016 defeat, even when you think there's no way she can, Hillary Clinton is more and more the liberal id.
	She just spews out what liberals really think and feel, but know not to say.
	That's where basket of deplorables came from.
	That's an interesting take.
	Let me know in the chat and the comments if you agree with it.
	And once again, we see this othering mentality, the idea that there are demonic dark forces out there, which seem to me to be a displacement of US establishment's interests and own unipolar goals.
	Here's Antony Blinken claiming that it is China that want a unipolar world, that it is China that are on the rise, becoming more aggressive and are attacking American interests.
	It's an extraordinary reversal of what, to me, appears to be reality.
	It is the one country in the world that has the military, economic, diplomatic capacity to undermine or challenge.
	The point that China are powerful is legitimate and true.
	But the idea that it's a rules-based, rational world, that's a very old system of analysis and attack.
	That was applied to the Islamic world.
	It's been applied to the opponents of the dominator class for a very long while.
	We are reasonable.
	We are rational.
	They're crazy over there!
	We have to stop them.
	So, which country is surrounded by military bases of their enemy?
	Uh, well, that's China with our military bases.
	Okay, so, who is it that's attacking?
	So, there is a tendency to demonize and attack and, I would say, displace Their own agenda onto not only other nations or their political opponents.
	Hillary Clinton talks about Trump in the same way Antony Blinken talks about China.
	Mike Pence talks about complex issues in the very same way.
	Displacing it.
	No ability to handle nuance.
	This is what's happening now.
	The world's breaking apart.
	You can't have centralised authority in the way you once did.
	The technology we have is a kind of instantiation of a more complex reality, where people return to a more anthropomorphic reality of self-organisation, local autonomy.
	There's no reason for us to be corralled into populations of hundreds of millions, bombarded with propaganda, until we're absolutely subjugated and compliant.
	It's not working anymore.
	...is falling apart.
	They're unable to acknowledge that, so it seems that every crisis becomes an opportunity, and everything, the most ordinary media, has to be utterly propagandized.
	We care so much about and are determined to defend.
	But I want to be very clear about something, and this is important.
	Whenever someone says, let's be clear about something, you know what's coming.
	It's an absolute out-and-out lie.
	Our purpose is not to contain China, to hold it back, to keep it down.
	Definitely is, then.
	It is to uphold this rules-based order.
	Well, it's definitely not.
	They're not upholding a rules-based order.
	Oh, no, the rules-based order.
	What can we do?
	That just means do what we tell you.
	The rules-based order means authoritarianism.
	Actually, that was sort of true.
	That China is posing a challenge to.
	Anyone who poses a challenge to that order, we're going to stand up and defend it.
	That is true, actually, isn't it?
	Anyone who opposes our order, we will attack and destroy it.
	And believe me, they will.
	I know you say the goal is not to contain China, but have you ever seen China be so assertive or aggressive militarily?
	I've been watching China, and have they ever been?
	I mean, they're getting a bit too big for their little Chinese boots, aren't they?
	Why don't you just mind your own bloody business about China?
	We haven't.
	I think what we've witnessed over the last several years is China acting more repressively at home.
	Andy Blinken may have the wet eyes of a beautiful doe, but he has the menacing rhetoric Of a dystopian tyrant.
	It's his own country where there has been more domestic control practiced.
	It's America that are getting more aggressive aboard.
	Do you see?
	They're just reversing everything.
	Donald Trump's crazy!
	He's an extremist!
	You're crazy!
	You're an extremist!
	China's crazy!
	They're an extremist!
	You're crazy!
	You're an extremist!
	Stop gaslighting the whole world!
	No!
	No!
	I'll tell you a fact!
	The United States is doing that!
	Moving from Middle Eastern and North African wars to European wars for economic interest!
	It's clear!
	We can see it!
	We're awakening!
	For God's sake, awaken now!
	Supporters, press the red button!
	Keep us going!
	Something crazy's happening!
	What's China's goal?
	I think that over time... Now look, this is almost like a psychological exercise.
	If she had asked, what's America's goal, he never would have said it.
	But if you say, what's China's goal, he'll tell you what America's goal is.
	Look at this.
	China believes that it can be and should be and will be the dominant country in the world.
	Is that why they keep doing all these proxy wars and reversing the meaning of words?
	So actually, Antony Blinken, if you change the word China for US imperialism and globalist interests, Tells you the absolute truth of the situation.
	So whether it's Hillary Clinton demonising Trump and Trump's supporters, whether it's Mike Pence using an escalating holy war to score political points in the Republican primaries or Antony Blinken attributing China with the very qualities, tendencies, traits and agenda of America, you can see how the legacy media Amplifies the message of the powerful and disables our ability to communicate openly.
	That's why it's so important that you support us.
	And could there be a story that more clearly exemplified the hypocrisy of the establishment than this one?
	Biden is building that wall.
	What?
	That wall that made Trump racist?
	That wall that you didn't need?
	That wall that was the visual instantiation and realization of all Trump's corruption?
	Yeah, we're building that wall.
	We like that wall now.
	Now the wall is good.
	But I thought that the wall was bad.
	No, you've gone mad.
	The wall is good.
	Are you sure you're not gaslighting me?
	We always said the wall was good.
	We were always going to build a wall.
	Here's the news.
	No, here's the effing news.
	No issue defined the difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump more than the wall.
	Donald Trump was bad and mad and racist for building that wall.
	So why is Joe Biden building that wall?
	Was Trump right or is Biden a liar or both?
	Today we're talking about one of the stories that's defined the last couple of years politically.
	Donald Trump's wall.
	There was no idea that demonstrated the distinction between Trump and Biden more clearly than the wall.
	Trump was going to build a beautiful wall, a magnificent wall, and make Mexico pay for it.
	Mexico's going to pay for the wall.
	Biden and his supporters said it was disgusting that a wall was going to be built at all.
	There will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration.
	And yet Biden is continuing to build the wall.
	So whether or not you think this wall is a good idea, you have to acknowledge that now Biden has said Saudi Arabia will be a pariah.
	They are not.
	He won't lead us into a proxy war with Russia.
	He has done.
	And now there is going to be a wall.
	Let's have a look at how the legacy media report on this and see if we can make sense of this extraordinary story in this peculiar, divisive time.
	A new effort to build a border wall tonight coming from an unexpected place, the White House.
	In an official notice, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas saying there is an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers to prevent unlawful entries into the United States.
	Well then, I suppose on that basis you have to say that Trump was somehow perspicacious and ahead of his time.
	Because the current analysis sounds a lot like Trump's rhetoric, albeit without many of his flourishes.
	And the counter position was, don't be disgusting, that's racist, you don't need to build a wall, we should welcome immigrants.
	An extraordinary transition.
	And in a way, I suppose what it demonstrates, in the same way that the transitioning of positions around vaccines did, that there are no clear values and principles.
	When Trump was in charge of the vaccine program, you might not remember this because it's sort of been obscured by the tumbling months of deception, Kamala Harris said, I wouldn't take one of those vaccines and Joe Biden said, how do we know these vaccines are going to be any good?
	And when their administration took the reins, oh, these vaccines are fantastic.
	It shows you that the issues themselves are not important.
	What matters is political expedience.
	That war was a defining issue.
	The opposition to Trump's position on immigration, and in particular the war, was one of the points of difference.
	That was one of the things that people were waving flags for, marching for, feeling indulgent in their values about.
	Well look, it's happening anyway.
	So what does that tell us?
	What does that tell us about the distinction between these two political groups?
	And what does it tell us, importantly, about the honesty and our ability to trust Biden's administration?
	Facing a growing influx of migrants illegally entering the country, the administration is waiving 26 federal laws in order to allow more wall construction.
	What about those laws?
	They're just being waived.
	Do you start to feel that you live in a nihilistic space where the interests of the powerful will be pursued regardless of preconditions?
	Remember the pandemic period.
	How many customs, rules just fell away.
	The word science was used to mean just be obedient.
	Everything is flipping, reversing, traversing.
	I think many of us have a sense of impending and even present crisis.
	And this is one of those stories that points to that.
	Like, unless Biden's done a speech somewhere where he said something like this.
	I know we vehemently opposed the building of Trump's wall during the election cycle.
	In fact, we openly mocked it, ridiculed it, and used it to make Trump seem like a ridiculous racist.
	Well, we're building that wall now and here's what...
	As has been that kind of a speech, this is another one of those examples, like the laptop, like the evident involvement in the business dealings, allegedly, like botched Afghanistan, like not making Saudi Arabia a pariah but embracing them, that shows you, like the claims about the farmer, we beat Big Pharma this year, then a sort of mealy-mouthed, half-arsed bunch of legislation.
	I suppose what we're offering you on this channel is they're not going to do anything to help you.
	They're just going to say what they need to say, and the legacy media will amplify, mitigate their message, normalise their Meanwhile, we seem to be ignoring the fact that the world is falling apart around us, that there is a radical requirement for systemic change, decentralization, real democracy, a radical review of all of our institutions, probably the banishment and abandonment of many of those institutions, and we're sort of just watching this spectacle unfold.
	Are you starting to feel that this is getting pretty serious?
	Let me know in the chat, let me know in the comments.
	Using money allocated before President Biden took office.
	It's a sharp policy shift for a president who once called a wall spanning the southern border a waste of time.
	Now, notice NBC's propagandist position in the phrase, sharp policy shift.
	It's a sharp policy shift.
	Oh, that's good.
	He did a sharp policy shift because he's so sharp and quick.
	Look at him, boom, boom, shifting policy sharply.
	If that had been Trump, it would have been Trump lied.
	Trump lied.
	He told a lie.
	He said he was going to do this, then he did that.
	That's not a sharp policy shift.
	That's a lie.
	It exposes either ineptitude or total deception.
	Which is it?
	The new construction will be along a stretch of border in Starr County, Texas.
	And tonight, former President Trump, who built his successful 2016 presidential campaign around a promise to build a border wall, is claiming vindication.
	How can he not?
	If your policy that was vilified in opposition, ridiculed in administration, is continued after an election loss, how can you go, well, hold on a minute, didn't you guys say that you would never do this under any circumstances, and now you're just doing it?
	It astonishes me.
	Tonight, a major reversal.
	The Biden administration announcing it is waiving 26 federal laws to permit more border wall construction in southern Texas, amid a record 3 million migrants crossing the border in the past year.
	The head of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, overnight declaring, there is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads to prevent illegal crossings in Starr County, Texas.
	But President Biden today appeared to contradict his own DHS secretary.
	Do you believe in border walkers?
	No.
	There's no actual cohesion, is there?
	Is this it?
	Is this the evidence of things falling apart?
	Middle Eastern wars amplifying, European wars increasing, a sense of total detachment, absolute loss of trust in institutions, a president building a wall and saying, what wall?
	It's extraordinary.
	I feel that, in a way, we're just standing blithely on the shores of Armageddon, watching it unfold.
	I don't know what it's going to take to activate us sometimes.
	Insisting his administration is not building more wall because of the surge in migrants, but because they were required by law to spend money Congress allocated during the Trump administration.
	There's no way through that that makes sense, because if he can't stop it, what was the point in all of the pledges?
	Why bother having elections at all if you can't reverse, impede, alter the trajectory?
	Isn't the campaign entirely based on change?
	They're doing this.
	We're going to do that.
	He's building a wall.
	We're not going to build a wall.
	We're better than them.
	Oh, I can't do anything about that.
	Even the stance on Big Pharma.
	Oh, we've managed to have this victory.
	A victory that is minor and clearly based on agreements shows that the relationship between the government and actual ulterior or superior interest is one of service, sublimation, supplication.
	They can't deliver on anything except for deception, management of decline, population control.
	This government is not delivering on a mandate to the people.
	Hi, you guys really wanted this and we're going to do that.
	We need to have it.
	What we're living in is it.
	We can't continue to ignore our slide into dystopia.
	The press secretary of the president says he doesn't believe it's effective.
	So either they're building a wall that they don't think is effective, or they're lying, or they're building a wall they don't believe in.
	There's nothing here except the revelation of total chaos.
	We're seeing this continually in the reporting around the war, the escalation of the war, while denying that there is a war.
	We're seeing it throughout the pandemic period, revelations of the efficacy and even injuries caused by certain medical products denied.
	We're living in a kind of deliberate chaos.
	I wonder sometimes if we're in a kind of snow globe of madness that prevents us finding just some route of veracity to guide us, some sort of principle of what is it we can rely on now.
	And late today this from the DHS secretary traveling in Mexico City.
	There is no new administration policy with respect to the border wall.
	Still it comes after the president repeatedly slammed the wall and former president Trump during the campaign.
	There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration.
	Another thing, I never say this, but Joe Biden actually looked younger before the election, didn't he?
	You know, that famous thing of, like, president's age in office.
	Joe Biden, I didn't think, like, that guy was really sprightly when he was campaigning.
	But look at him there.
	He looks like Chris Hemsworth compared to how he looks now.
	Tonight, Mr. Trump arguing he's been proven right, posting, there are only two things that have consistently worked, wheels and walls.
	Will Joe Biden apologize to me and America for taking so long to get moving?
	The latest NBC News poll shows Americans give Republicans an 18-point advantage when asked who would better handle immigration.
	That wall was a symbol for Trump.
	It was a symbol of a clear, vivid image of American interests prioritized over global interests, you could argue.
	It was a symbol for Biden, his point of difference from Trump.
	And now what is it a symbol of?
	Deception?
	Corruption?
	Ineptitude?
	Dishonesty?
	All of them?
	Let's get into it.
	Joe Biden has changed course on building a border wall as the US struggles to cope with a surge in migrant arrivals.
	Surge is a word we didn't used to hear much.
	Surges in pandemic spikes, surges in migration.
	Curious.
	The United States has a right and a duty to secure its borders and protect its people against threats, President Joe Biden said in a proclamation the day he was inaugurated in 2021.
	But building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution.
	It's a waste of money that diverts attention from genuine threats to our homeland security.
	The argument that's used when politicians change their mind, the only argument that could ever make sense, is that there's been an evolution in policy based on an altering and evolving reality.
	But that only works if there's an ongoing dialogue, doesn't it?
	Unless you see Joe Biden say, I know I said this, but now we're doing that because of this.
	Unless you have that as a component.
	Remember, during the pandemic, people said, yeah, but at the beginning, we thought lockdowns were effective.
	Yeah, but at the beginning, it seemed that this medication would be effective.
	But do you know how there was never a public addressing of the changing of the idea?
	Just a gentle seeping out of facts.
	Just a gentle dissipation of policy.
	No one ever said we were wrong about that, did they?
	Up to 20 miles of barrier will be built in Stark County, Texas, despite campaign pledges from the president not to erect another foot of war along the border with Mexico.
	They say two things are inevitable in life, don't they?
	Death and taxes and Biden's lies.
	Taxes, though, are inevitable.
	The IRS October the 15th deadline is just days away.
	The attorneys at Tax Network USA have saved clients over, get this, $1 billion in tax debts.
	So whether you're in the hole for $10,000 or $10 million in debt, they are ready to help you.
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	So, go to taxnetworkusa.com forward slash brand before the clock runs out.
	Give yourself a promise that's kept, unlike recurrent administration.
	Okay.
	Democrats have been fiercely critical of Donald Trump's use of executive powers to build a barrier on the southern border, but now Mr Biden is using the same powers to try to staunch the flow of migrants along a section of the frontier, which according to official data, has seen 245,000 illegal entries in the past year.
	The move comes as officials in Democrat-controlled Chicago and New York have admitted they are unable to cope with the rising number of migrants arriving in their cities.
	It seems like a rather divisive form of representation to wait until it's democrat controlled cities before making amendments.
	Also the issue of migration appears to be spoken about on a number of different levels.
	In some places you hear rhetoric that is based on compassion and unity and support and then The general policy shift seems to be towards accepting that you can't have limitless migration because it destabilizes nations.
	So again, like with COVID, when are these shifts taking place and where is the conversation around it?
	We used to say this, now we're doing that.
	In the absence of that kind of open discourse, I think what you have is a kind of a bewilderment and a kind of chaos and an untethering of like, what is it we're supposed to believe now?
	What is it we're doing?
	What is it we voted for?
	Because you're not doing what you said you were going to do.
	Mr Biden is also under pressure from voters to act with a Washington Post-ABC poll last week showing that 62% of Americans disapprove of his handling of the crisis at the US-Mexico border.
	The President has insisted that his position hasn't changed and that his hands were tied by Congress.
	We had no choice, Homeland Security Alejandro Mallorca said at a press conference Thursday.
	It was mandated by law.
	But in defying over two dozen laws, including environmental rules to resume the war, a stark reversal of his definitive campaign and presidential promise, the president has opened himself up to withering criticism from allies and gloating from the MAGA crowd.
	If it was mandated by law and they have no choice, how come they're able to overturn those other laws, particularly environmental rules that they campaign around and claim to care about?
	In a sense, I'm not even offering you an evaluation on whether or not there needs to be a wall.
	It doesn't seem to be something I'm particularly qualified to offer you.
	What I feel that we are able to discuss on our channel is the evident deception, lying, gerrymandering, manipulative language that is accompanying this issue, and a lack of discourse and conversation.
	If it's mandated by law, then how come you can break the other laws?
	What are your priorities around the environment?
	Do you remember the East Palestine rail crash?
	It was an environmental disaster.
	No one did anything about it.
	Remember Hawaii when it was clear that there needed to be emergency funding?
	They didn't do anything about it.
	How could anyone continue to ignore the obvious fact that there's just an exercise in deception, manipulation, propaganda, lying.
	In fact, that's almost all it is.
	What else is it other than that?
	The Democrats who demonised President Trump for his focus on stopping illegal immigration and characterised his quest to build such a barrier as racism have been mugged by reality.
	That's a very good phrase because now you have to shift all of the rhetoric and perception around what the wall represents.
	Now it represents something that's mandated by law, something that's absolutely necessary.
	So what did that mean then?
	This was actually the symbolic issue of the campaign.
	Those that wanted that wall were racists, or lunatics, or extremists.
	Those that didn't want it were said to be, by the legacy media, compassionate, tolerant, progressive.
	So now the wall is happening anyway, how do we make this shift?
	How do we adjust?
	Oh, so what, a wall is needed!
	Yeah, because it's mandated.
	But what about the laws you're ignoring?
	Oh yeah, they're sort of a different type of law.
	So what did it mean when you were saying those people were racist?
	What this tells us, with stark clarity as lurid and as obvious as a 50-foot wall dividing a country, is that you can't trust anything But there's no meaning, no truth, no honesty, no goodwill behind the words of the government and those that amplify them in legacy media.
	We're sort of participating in a chaotic and deceptive game where it seems that part of the function of media and government is to maintain a state of disorientation and deception.
	So it's very difficult to know what's real and what's not real, what's right and what's not right anymore.
	If an administration that would have rather done anything than complete construction of Trump's wall is now going ahead with a project, that tells us all we need to know about their hypocrisy and the bankruptcy of their policies.
	Even if they won't admit they were lying when they called Trump a racist for wanting a wall, their actions speak louder than their words.
	This is a story that demonstrates the inevitability of deception when what you have instead of a government for the people is a government that simply operates in order to instantiate the interests of the powerful.
	It's almost impossible to put yourself back into 2016 or 2020 and say, The wall was meant to represent this.
	The wall was bad.
	Now is the wall good or is the wall necessary?
	What reality are we being invited to live in?
	Let alone what vision of a future are we being offered?
	What solutions are we really being offered for many of the apparent catastrophes, whether they are geopolitical and military or ecological or economic?
	What visions are we being given by them?
	All that's happening is the deck chairs are being shifted on the Titanic, the chess pieces arbitrarily move around the chessboard with no relation to reality, because there is no vision.
	All that there is is the maintenance of establishment interests, the amplification of the message, whatever message they're putting in front of you.
	The war is humanitarian!
	Two weeks to stop the spread.
	This war is to help people.
	This is necessary now.
	The wall is mandated.
	The wall's racist.
	In a sense, the only option we have is to somehow detach from the reality that they're offering us and start to begin to think about, well, how do we organize reality differently?
	On this channel, I feel that, really, we have to move from media reporting to the overt discussion of how do we organize society differently?
	What kind of reality do you want to live in?
	It seems like an Extraordinary problem.
	The global wars, the religious wars, the despair, the lying, the ecologic, economic, ideological fractures all around our culture.
	It seems insurmountable and I think it's meant to.
	And then you walk out into the world and everything seems okay and people seem alright.
	It seems that there is a solution available to us in that vision.
	Individually and communally, human beings have a chance.
	But as a part of this globalist nightmare of deception and ongoing lies, we are doomed.
	A war can mean one thing one day and another thing the next day and no one tells you that the meaning has altered.
	That is because they don't live in a grounded reality guided by principles.
	They live in a kind of deceptive, dystopic matrix of total consciousness control.
	But that's just what I think.
	Let me know what you think in the chat.
	I'll see you in a second.
	So let me know in the chat if the emblem of the Trump Biden election was indeed that wall
	and they can prevaricate and change the meaning of the wall.
	If the wall was good then either Trump was right all along or they're more wrong than ever.
	Beyond trust.
	As our institutions fall apart, as our legacy media becomes more corrupt, as your trust in the government erodes to the point where it's barely even measurable, we need to communicate with reliable journalists.
	And as you know, there are still a few left in independent spaces.
	We've seized one of them from the morass.
	It's so-called journalist Michael Schellenberger, founder of Public on Substack, the Twitterphile inaugur, author of Apocalypse Never, Thank you for joining us, Michael.
	Great to see you, Russell.
	Those viewers watching this will be aware that Michael is doing this in front of what you might call a strobing image, which I'm sure is part of your mind games mentality, presenting to us in the middle of a visual cyclone.
	If you're watching this anywhere other than Rumble, we'll only be available for a brief while.
	Press the red button to support independent journalism and Michael, can you tell us a little bit of what you've been doing recently in Ireland and how that impacts what's happening with legislation globally around online safety and hate speech?
	Yeah, well, I mean, you and your listeners may remember that Ireland proposed one of the most draconian crackdowns on free speech.
	It was legislation that would literally allow the police to go into people's homes and confiscate their cell phones and laptops and read what was on them.
	And then if people refused to do it, they could be carted off to jail.
	I mean, it was shocking to think that this was something that was being proposed You know, in a country like Ireland, which has long been a place really committed to free speech, you know, land of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde.
	And so we, you know, so we were there in, you know, in September.
	And it was incredible.
	I mean, I went and interviewed people on the street.
	Most people had no idea this was going on.
	But when people learned about it, most people were against it.
	We found out really upon arriving that the Justice Minister, who's also a member of Parliament who had sponsored the legislation, that really her career is in trouble because this legislation is so unpopular.
	So we're feeling pretty good about this.
	The event itself was amazing.
	I mean, there was 800 people in this huge lecture hall.
	The spirits were very high.
	I think that the folks on the ground in Ireland, the free speech advocates, Our feeling like the wind is in our back and that there's a good chance to defeat this thing.
	You know, it's very unpopular.
	People love their freedoms around the world.
	And even though I think people in Britain, I mean, sorry, people in Ireland are very, they're very, you know, concerned, obviously, about intolerance.
	But when I asked people on the street, we recorded videos of me interviewing people on the street.
	You know, has there been an increase in hatred and intolerance in Ireland that would necessitate such a thing?
	And basically everybody said, no, the Irish are more tolerant than ever.
	So I think it helps.
	I wrote a piece over the weekend where I talked about, I think it helps to remind people just how much more progressive everybody is, how much more sensitive and tolerant everybody is.
	I think it also helped when I would ask people, I'd be like, what would James Joyce and Oscar Wilde think about this legislation?
	And most people, I think, said they don't think they would like it very much.
	And also, you know, it's helpful to remind people because it's funny, people don't think that they'll be victims of censorship.
	Most people tend to think they go, oh, there's these hateful people that are out there and there's none of that in me.
	You know, it's kind of a classic.
	You know, I'm, you know, a good person.
	Everybody thinks they're a good person.
	They never think that they would be subject to such censorship.
	But when you kind of remind them about how subjective hate speech supposedly is, and how many people will think, some people will think some things are hateful and other people won't, I think it really did help to turn people's minds around.
	So I wrote a piece this weekend that just said, just make people think about it for a minute, and I think people will end up siding on the side of free speech.
	Yeah, what you wrote in your piece, because obviously I read your journalism on Substack, on Public, which you founded, you said that you offer an alternative framing.
	It's pretty easy to see how, if you ask people the question, and wow, censor takers for time immemorial have known, If you've said, do you think hate speech is good?
	Do you like child pornography?
	Generally speaking, people say, no, no.
	Would you like to stop child pornography and hate speech?
	Yes, yes.
	But it's interesting that the framing of the argument is, of course, designed to ease us into censorship.
	Like that when you think that the end point is police storming your home and grabbing your laptop the only thing that would legitimize that would be oh well it's there's child pornography on that laptop but of course the law doesn't say exclusively and specifically in cases of child pornography which is already illegal and doesn't require additional legislation so in a sense those points are Redundant, and they are sort of in a sense using, I don't know, neuro-linguistic programming, cyber warfare, hypnosis, to create conditions where we, like we the turkeys, vote once again enthusiastically for Christmas.
	Yeah, I think that's right.
	I mean, there's this famous distinction between fast thinking and slow thinking, which comes from the, you know, the great psychologist Daniel Kahneman, a contributor to something called behavioral economics.
	But look, it's a very ancient idea.
	I mean, this goes back to the Greeks and this idea that It's easy to manipulate people when you can short-circuit their thinking and make them think quickly and emotionally, whereas this kind of dialogue, it's essential.
	It's essential to being free.
	It's essential to democracy.
	And so that was sort of, I was joking, I was teasing my readers.
	I just said this one simple trick.
	And the trick, of course, is to get people to think slowly about these things and to have that conversation because Irrationality lives in fast thinking, and reason and liberalism, in the best sense of the term, and democracy depend on slow thinking.
	Yes, and dialogue, it might be assumed, would lead to consensus.
	And whilst there's offered, whilst the framing we're offered is this is to protect you, it seems that actually what's really being lain are a set of traps that prevent people realising, wait a minute, we could organise society radically differently.
	We don't need to centralise power in the same way that we once did.
	There are opportunities for communication, discourse, consensus, autonomy that just simply didn't exist
	even 20, 30 years ago.
	And to prevent that sort of momentum and tendency from naturally unfurling,
	a sort of what you might consider an ordinary evolution of the way that technology and communications has evolved,
	you have to use atavistic, reductive, and to use your phrase, fast thinking models
	to prevent people rationally moving in the direction of our shared interests.
	Yeah, that's right.
	I think the other thing you said that's so important is this idea that we're doing this to protect you.
	In fact, these measures would make ordinary people more vulnerable to abuses of state power.
	And that also, that was part of the subjectivity I was pointing to, which was that You kind of get people thinking a little bit about it and you kind of go, you know, these are these are, you know, human beings that are going to be making decisions about what's hateful and what's not.
	And could you see how people might abuse that or start to manipulate that or that even just innocent mistakes might be made and get people entrapped in them.
	And so I think that it helps to get people to slow down on it and it helps to do it in person.
	And it was a delightful thing because I think sometimes, you know, even myself, I was sort of imagining that that That I think you want you think you tend to think that one person holds a particular point of view and what you're reminded of is that when you talk to somebody that we hold a whole jumble of opinions and that actually the people will change their mind or they have different views in different circumstances.
	So I think for me the watchword right now is just rehumanizing the conversation and there is just so dehumanizing the ways in which the media culture work.
	And the way that I think when people get afraid and they get into this panic and particularly the elites and this desire to control, it leads them to engage in really dehumanizing forms of rhetoric and of manipulations.
	And I think that there's just something so powerful to coming back to just the simple Recognition of our shared humanity and of our flawedness.
	And this is why one of the it's made me more appreciate the American system more, but the enlightenment and sort of the sense in which we're flawed.
	And so we have to create systems that that check that create checks and balances against these abuses of power.
	This dehumanisation is perhaps exacerbated and amplified and weaponised by a polarising political space.
	I think it was in your article that you pointed out at least that the Democrats that favour increased censorship has itself gone up from 40% to 70%.
	In the last five years and I suppose what undergirds that is not an appetite for censorship but the assumption that who's going to be censored are your opponents.
	That's what's going to be shut down is things that you generally disagree with and take in that democrat case you might say oh they think it's good to censor pro-life arguments or pro-gun arguments or libertarianism or MAGA extremism and in a way that's a call for Humanitarianism and humanism as you've just mentioned and that perhaps that even if you're not a spiritual or religious person and you know I feel that both you and I are Michael that that's an appeal to a set of values that transcend self-interest that hold on a minute that might you know and even if from a self-interested perspective you might
	deduce that in the future, hold on, the same this legislation
	could be used by an opposing ideology that sees me with the enmity that currently I regard the MAGA hat wearers or
	whatever it might be in this instance. So do you think that this
	oppositionism and this polarizing culture is creating a environment where people are more susceptible to
	authoritarianism, because I think that they're going to benefit or their side is going to benefit from it.
	Yeah, I mean, I was trying to, you know, it's one of the things that we talked about before with your producers before the show was this declining trust in the government.
	I mean, of course, we're watching this horrible dehumanization occur in the Hamas attack on Israel, but then we see a lot of dehumanization.
	And people hate it when you say it, but there's people that are engaging in dehumanizing rhetoric on both sides.
	You know, is it worse now than it was a hundred years ago?
	I don't know.
	I mean, it was obviously pretty horrible a hundred years ago.
	I mean, you start to look back at periods, I find myself looking back on periods like the 90s and being like we were all, we were in a much better way back then.
	There was much less this dehumanizing rhetoric.
	I definitely think that social media Has contributed to it.
	You know, there's the experience that we have and I'm having it right now with several people where, you know, you're being attacked online and you feel like everybody's watching and it makes you very scared and paranoid and small and then you can kind of go in one of two directions.
	You can try to you can be smaller and hide and be quiet and not say not take any risks or you can reaffirm.
	I think what we would call more spiritual values, which is The value of embracing all of humanity, of viewing ourselves as children of God, at least that's how I talk about it.
	I mean, I struggle with it, because as a Christian, for me, the hardest thing is the most essential part of Christianity, which is to love thy enemy.
	And it's not the easiest thing to do when people are attacking you and trying to destroy you, to be like, I love you.
	You know, having that as the goal and holding that up as a really as the highest value, I think makes us better.
	And so for me, that's something to strive for.
	Yeah, as our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ says, if you just love people that love you, well that's expedient and ordinary.
	So it's only in loving your enemy, on bestowing blessings upon your enemy, that you are able to transcend this material state and this material paradigm.
	And often when we talk, and like indeed you're one of the journalists that I'd most cite as being a symbol of this, I need to talk to people that I recognise are credible, but I usually mean by that intellectually credible, like yourself or Glenn Greenwald, and I think, oh no, God, I've not gone mad.
	I have just remained anti-authoritarian, and the system has shifted around me, and the rules have all changed.
	It's gone all mad and dark.
	And unless we're able to derive our values from somewhere outside of rationalism, that in a way can always make an argument for ultimately self-interest.
	There is no meaning.
	We're just like rushing towards nothingness.
	Billiard ball universe.
	Consciousness is random.
	Love is simply reciprocal.
	Altruism, just a sort of a rational set.
	It's a pretty despairing model that we're offered.
	And indeed, when you feel that you are Under attack, when you feel that you're living in a system that doesn't have values, it's pretty easy to yield.
	And in a way, I suppose, yeah, a greater demand is made that you find within yourself a depth and a beyond faith, I think, Michael, even trust like that.
	Well, I believe in God, so God's got to have a plan.
	I'm looking forward to see how this one unfolds.
	It's extraordinary, isn't it?
	But our systems, Whether they are media, judicial, like, yeah, they are not organized on that basis.
	We can say even values that are advocated for and declared as, you know, just accepted values, innocent until proven guilty, that doesn't seem to hold a great deal of sway.
	Where from where Do we derive these values?
	And I've, you know, like, I hope you don't feel, gosh, shortchanged by me.
	I would never have assumed that you were a person who's primarily, because if you are a spiritual person at all, you have to be primarily spiritual.
	Otherwise, what is it?
	A sort of a safety net, I guess.
	So it's fascinating to hear someone who's so well-researched, thorough, direct and astute, relying on religious principles.
	It helps me, man.
	Yeah, I was going to say something.
	I mean, I came back to my faith in a dark time when I needed it.
	And at first, there was something rational about it, which is that I knew that there's a lot of evidence that having faith is good for you.
	But there was also a leap of faith, and this is something that comes out of the existential tradition too, particularly out of Soren Kierkegaard, who was a brilliant Christian existentialist, but it's also in Friedrich Nietzsche, who was a very famous atheist.
	And it's a view that I hold very strongly, which is that faith is not something ultimately that you can reason towards.
	Faith is something that you must leap towards.
	It's an act of faith.
	And I think it's disparaged quite a bit, including by many people who I love and agree with on many issues in the secular community that really think that faith is irrational and that we should get rid of it.
	For me, it's absolutely essential.
	And so, I think that we can get unity and agreement beyond people with different faiths, but there is some leap of faith that says we have a faith in humankind and in humanizing rather than dehumanizing.
	And I can make a bunch of reasonable arguments about it, But I do think that ultimately it's hard to get your way there through logic, that you're making a leap of faith to believe in God or to believe that we have a soul or to believe that humanity is basically good.
	And I think even for things like liberal democracy, I just think that those numbers that your colleague sent me showing the declining trust in government, I mean, it's really scary.
	Particularly at a time of so much trouble in the world, and I think we have to affirm it.
	We can argue for it, but I do think if you are pro-human, you must be pro-civilization.
	And if you're pro-human and pro-civilization, you must be in favor of liberal democracy, and of free speech, and of innocence until proven guilty, and of all of the other foundations of civilization, because You can't be pro-human and against civilization because if you don't have civilization or you don't have these rules of liberal democracy, then the outcomes for humankind as a whole are far worse.
	Plainly they don't believe in these principles except when it's in their service, I say they, and I'm, you know, in a way I'm just doubling down on the point I made about the increase in Democrat support for censorship.
	They obviously don't believe in free speech because it has no value unless you believe in free speech that you don't agree with, in much the same way that you and I are just talking about spirituality, unless you are willing to Love thine enemy then all you're talking about is rationalism and logic.
	Now logic and rationalism are by their nature based on measurement and discernment and faith in a sense is an invitation to hurl yourself into the mysterious abyss and pray that it's not made of nothing but of something that there is some telos other than just blind expansionism and I mean that in the cosmological sense rather than the imperial sense. Now, what do we do, mate, when you have
	figures whose primary pose appears to be around morality and ethics?
	Say, take Justin Trudeau, please.
	And like, take him!
	Like, he seems to be all about kindness.
	Yeah.
	kindness and sweetness and I see him joshing along with the leader of the opposition, taking
	the speaker to the seat, but that speaker had just before condemned the trucker protests,
	or last year at least, as Nazis on the flimsiest of evidence, no evidence actually to suggest
	that Nazism is what they're interested in.
	Meanwhile, they applaud an actual Nazi and then sort of ask us to sort of forget it and
	consider it as potential Russian disinformation as usual.
	And also that they are similarly introducing new streaming laws and the ability to regulate
	podcasts.
	How is it that the new aesthetic of authoritarianism is so couched in this floppy-haired liberalism?
	How have we found ourselves here?
	Yeah, great question.
	There's, we're working on a new, we've really planned a lot of this.
	I mean, obviously there's two things going on.
	There's the, there's a censorship industrial complex, which we've seen funded by governments, both in the UK and the United States, the Five Eyes nations as well.
	We see the involvement in intelligence and security organizations.
	But there's also this cultural desire, and I think that some of that is coming just from a place of privilege.
	And just to put a point on it, I think some coddling, where there's this idea that I shouldn't have to hear disconfirmatory information.
	You know, I think that hearing people that disagree with you or that are debunking your views or challenging your views is uncomfortable.
	And so there's some extent to which I just think there's a lot of privileged people in the society that are saying, I shouldn't have to hear those views.
	So it's gotten, in some ways, it's a magnification of the filter bubbles that get created from social media platforms.
	The intolerance is coming from privileged elites.
	I always point out that the people demanding censorship are not, you know, bagging your groceries or filling up your car with gasoline.
	They're not making products to the factory floor.
	They're working at universities like Stanford, like Harvard.
	You know, that's where Jacinda Ardern, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, went to.
	And so it's coming from the elites.
	It's a kind of demand for privilege.
	It's absolutely oppressive, obviously.
	No movement for human liberation has ever demanded censorship.
	They've always demanded the right to speak.
	That's been the first thing that's been part of movements for human liberation.
	So I think what you see with Trudeau is somebody that really believes there's a fanaticism in it.
	You know, that he is absolutely, he's pure.
	There's no, he's never wrong.
	He's never mal-intentioned.
	This is not the view that our civilization is based on.
	Our civilization is based on this idea that we are all flawed, that we are all wrong at one point or another, that we have very mixed motives, that we all behave in ways that we regret later.
	Like all of us.
	Literally, there's not a single one of us that doesn't have that.
	And that we're better off when we are in an environment where we have people that can challenge us and criticize us and I mean, I find myself whenever I have to make these little soliloquies about the importance of free speech, I go, God, I can't believe I have to justify free speech, but we do.
	We have to make the case.
	In particular, I think we have to make it towards younger folks.
	I think those of us.
	that were not raised on social media and that weren't raised in this culture of fear tend to be more open to free speech.
	I think older generations tend to be more favoring free speech.
	But setting that aside, I think that we do have to find ways to make this case to folks about the importance of free speech, particularly younger folks, and how wonderful it is to be wrong.
	I mean, I wrote two whole books About that explore the ways in which I was wrong and and you know, you can use your narcissism against your narcissism in the sense that you can it's very fascinating the ways that I've been wrong.
	Let's talk more about how I've been wrong in the thing that I regret because I do think that I think it inspires something from people that's not defensive that will actually allows us to kind of be like, yeah, I was wrong about that too, or I have those regrets too and You know, let him that's never sinned be the first to throw the stone.
	And it's just such a simple basic lesson.
	I mean, that lesson of Of humility.
	I mean, it's in every wisdom tradition on earth.
	It's in the Constitution of the United States government.
	It should be really fundamental, this sense of humility and the potential to be wrong and the potential to be bad.
	And I think some of that has traditionally existed on the left in terms of the support for free speech.
	Some of it's existed on the right.
	In the sense of having a darker view of human nature, but it's in all the wisdom traditions.
	And I think we have to elevate it once again is the sense of humility and the chance that we might be wrong.
	And and for that reason, especially that's why we want to have a fair and equal justice system.
	And that's why we want to have freedom of speech.
	Nick Cave, the Australian singer-songwriter, said that we are experiencing in this new culture all of the piety of religion just extracted of important ideas like redemption and salvation.
	And I again feel like there's this kind of, you know, I've written books in which I talk about, you know, doing things wrong, but there's this sort of subsequent metastasization into sort of ethical failings, into something far more monstrous And it seems to me that this has a kind of cultural context that's curious.
	For example, you know, obviously, free speech equates to hate speech is an interesting idea.
	Your opponents must be demonized.
	You don't need to hear their ideas.
	You shouldn't hear their ideas.
	What do you feel about this?
	The FBI targeting Trump supporters for 2024 and the kind of equation of opposition With terrorism, the use of language, you know, from Hillary Clinton specifically like, you know, extremists if not terrorists.
	What do you feel about that?
	Yeah, I mean, so this is a very important investigative piece that ran in Newsweek by a journalist named Bill Arkin, who's a very well-known and respected journalist in the United States.
	He quoted many FBI officials anonymously, confirming that indeed this was what was going on, and the FBI has been Focused on exaggerating the threat of domestic extremism and domestic terrorism.
	We have also written about this extensively.
	We think that there is clearly an effort by a politicized FBI.
	To spread disinformation that basically frames Trump supporters as wanting to overthrow the government.
	I think there's reasons to suspect that a significant number of federal agents undercover were instigating violence on January 6th.
	We now know because in the fake FBI entrapment that led to the kidnapping plot
	against the governor of Michigan, those defendants have now been acquitted
	because the government was involved in entrapment.
	So this is really scary because what we're talking about here is basically a disinformation campaign
	by the federal government to frame political, people expressing their free speech rights,
	to frame them as terrorists.
	This is basically secret police information operations.
	This is all illegal.
	It's unconstitutional.
	It's extremely disturbing.
	It has to be rooted out.
	You know, I think that, you know, there's another thing here, which is the ways in which the intelligence and security agencies that are involved in this, they're manipulating the confusion that people have in their own minds.
	And I discovered it when I was interviewing people in Ireland, and I keep finding it, where on the one hand, people kind of are saying we should not allow incitement to violence.
	And everybody basically agrees with that.
	We have a lot of legal cases where you can't immediately incite violence.
	But you can see it's already, it's a little subjective.
	In other words, it's easy to be like, we have to go kill that person because they're part of this religious group.
	That's immediate incitement to violence.
	Well, you start to then get into it's not immediate or how immediate is it?
	And so in that sort of subjective gray zone, you start to see the expansion or what psychologists call concept creep, where the idea of harm and what's categorized as harm grows, grows, grows.
	And then other thing I was mentioning where people are more intolerant of different views
	than justifies itself by saying, oh, well, we have to protect people from that harmful speech.
	So again, it's one of those things where it's like it takes some time to sort of explain what's going on and to help
	people to see that.
	You know, I mean, there's this has come up with with Twitter now, X, where Elon has allowed, you know, more so-called
	hate speech on the platform.
	I mean, in other words, you know, hate speech is subjective, but certainly, you know, you can find, and it's, you know, I think Elon, there's some questions around whether there's really been an increase, but certainly you can find people saying horrible anti-Semitic things online.
	We just saw over the last several days, people saying really terrible dehumanizing things.
	The question is, is it better to be able to argue back against that and say, look, that's really gross.
	You're justifying this horrible violence against people.
	Is it better to be able to have that conversation, or is it better to just have a small committee of experts decide to censor it?
	I obviously, and you and our friend Matt Taibbi and others, we obviously side with the idea of allow that debate to occur.
	Allow people to say terrible things.
	They will regret it later, I believe.
	Most of them will regret it later.
	But allow in that moment to say, hey, that's horrible.
	How would you feel if that was your daughter?
	How would you feel if that was your child that that happened to?
	You're justifying something that's really inhumane.
	And I think being able to allow that exchange to occur, you know, online is wonderful.
	Now, of course, I'll say I think there are There's always exceptions.
	There's limits to that.
	But I do think we need to get back to allowing more of that conversation to occur because, you know, I think down the road of we just have to have more censorship decided by unelected people and by special secret committees.
	That's a very that's a road to totalitarianism.
	It's a road that we appear to be travelling down at pace in a variety of areas.
	Yes, with the censorship industrial complex.
	Yes, with matters regarding world health.
	Yes, with matters regarding war, increasing ongoing war, without, it seems, due democratic
	process, without the ability to debate or discuss it, without a vision for peace in
	sight or even really discussed in some instances.
	This thing you said about the concept creep and the increase in what constitutes harm,
	I suppose by its nature legitimizes authoritarianism.
	And it seems that that is the trend.
	Because of X, we must increase authoritarianism.
	We must have these new regulatory powers.
	And these regulatory powers are seldom deployed or even designed to be deployed against other
	powerful entities that you might imagine have considerable influence in global outcomes.
	It's usually the ability to restrict, impede, control the actions of individuals.
	That's usually where it ends up.
	So I suppose on that basis, it's clear to see why trust in institutions is in decline.
	Only 4% of Americans say the political system is working well.
	The vast majority say that it isn't.
	And when we're talking about this, Michael, I know that at least from the way you present,
	it seems that you have some faith or hope at least that these institutions can improve.
	Now for the first time, it seems in this sort of cycle leading to 2024, people are saying
	we would disband the CIA, we would disband the FBI.
	This institutional mistrust appears to be reaching levels where people are at least
	just, you know, rhetorically I suppose.
	Discussing, suggesting the possibility of what might have been regarded as revolutionary change.
	Is that what is required?
	Or do you believe that reform can be effective, even in the areas we've discussed, where I know a lot of people think, oh my god, this is seismic.
	We are on the edge of something absolutely terrifying, not just because of the loathing and distrust of the media and the government and many of our institutions, but because it appears That there is a trajectory towards centralisation in many, many areas of public life and it's beyond national.
	It seems to be a global and somewhat coordinated issue.
	Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question.
	I mean, I think there's a lot of ways in which I and many others, I think, see the current moment as very similar to the 1970s.
	The 1970s, though, we had a reaction to Watergate in the form of something called the Church Committee hearing of 1975.
	But it was the Democrats that were running that hearing, and it had the support of Republicans.
	And they really put it, this is where they exposed MKUltra, You know, the drug, the drugging of people without their permission.
	I mean, shocking experiments were done by the CIA.
	But we also saw abuses of power by FBI, of course.
	And there's still things from that era that we, that we don't know.
	But you saw sort of reform of institutions.
	And I think this is what America's founding fathers meant when they said we need a revolution every, every few decades.
	You need to clean out these institutions.
	I personally think it would be going too far to completely shut down the FBI, you know, the CIA.
	I mean, every government has spies.
	It's hard to believe if you got rid of the CIA that you wouldn't have spies operating through State Department or something else.
	On the FBI question, do you need a national police force?
	I mean, there's ways in which a lot of the positive improvement of policing occurs when there's some standards being put to it.
	For example, we've seen a decline in the use of violence by police forces since the 1970s.
	So I think that just abolishing these institutions is just too radical.
	I think it goes too far.
	But you definitely need new heads of these agencies who are psychologically healthy and apolitical.
	I think that one of the things that I've been very interested in is the ways in which Totalitarianism is characterized by psychopaths and narcissists taking over important societal institutions.
	And that means people that use their charisma to mesmerize and hypnotize people basically with this
	line that we have been talking about, oh, I'm here to protect you and protect you from all of this
	hatred and domestic extremism and the psychopaths who will basically destroy people's lives.
	The entrapment that the FBI has been engaged in is often entrapment of people that are mentally
	disabled or mentally ill.
	That's pretty gross.
	It's pretty uncaring person to be able to destroy somebody's life in order to achieve a broader
	So you need to be able to take over.
	Now, the problem is, and I pointed this out in this piece I wrote about Jim Jordan, who's the head of this subcommittee investigating the weaponization.
	He's a lot like.
	Frank Church, the member of Congress, was in the mid-70s.
	The difference is that the Democrats are against Jim Jordan.
	In fact, they demonize Jim Jordan as sort of anti-democratic, even though Jim Jordan has done the most to sort of surface the abuses of power, both by Department of Homeland Security in terms of censorship, also by FBI.
	But I will say, you know, the United States, we're still we still have a constitution.
	We have a really strong First Amendment that protects free speech and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in considering Missouri versus Biden, which is the lawsuit around censorship.
	Recently came back and actually expanded the injunction preventing this Department of Homeland Security agency from talking to social media companies.
	And I do think the Supreme Court will decide to hear this case.
	I do think the Supreme Court will side with us.
	So when I look, you know, it's like a knife by the phone booth.
	You know, it's like we're definitely in having some setbacks all around the world and the demonetization
	including people, including you and others is really disturbing, really scary.
	That's YouTube is out of control.
	I mean, Facebook and YouTube and Google are absolutely out of control.
	Happily, we have X, you know, Elon has made it much freer.
	We have Supreme Court in the United States.
	We have the pushback in Ireland that appears to be working.
	Similarly, our friends in Brazil say that as soon as they said, as soon as they explained to people that what you're proposing is censorship, it did start to change the conversation in Brazil.
	So I do think that, I mean, what I, you know, it's cliche, but I will just say really fighting for free speech does matter.
	I think the event that we did in London had a big impact.
	I think the event that we did in Ireland is important.
	It's quite lovely, I will say, just at a human level to be able to have these conversations and have these exchanges.
	I've made some really lovely friends around the world.
	Almost everybody has been cancelled.
	Everybody has been sort of personally hurt.
	Um, including quite badly.
	And so to be able to find each other and build a community has been one of the most satisfying and rewarding parts of building this free speech movement.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	You're right to have done that, man.
	I guess one of the, I feel like I've got no choice now, you know, like I can't have one foot in each camp anymore.
	This is real, you know?
	Um, I want to add Rumble to that list of people advocating for free speech, obviously for some reasons that are pretty bloody obvious.
	Also, I want to talk about the, Our idea of transparency, whilst the population from various nations have less and less ability to live privately, privacy is being equated with criminality, another one of those peculiar conjunctions that we've been discussing throughout this chat.
	There is no transparency in government, or perhaps insufficient transparency in government.
	A conversation I had recently with Scott Adams, we discussed the possibility of absolute transparency at the level of government.
	What would happen there?
	If you were able to witness all expenditure, if you were able to plainly witness all funding, if it was open source and accessible, is that possible?
	Would they?
	Would it ever be possible?
	I feel like even with the subject, when we talk about, oh, you know, well, there are many Republicans that are pretty anti-war, but those, generally speaking, they're anti the war between Ukraine and Russia, and they're pro Yeah, intensifying hostilities between the US and China.
	What does that mean then?
	You can't vote for anybody that doesn't want to have a war against an opposing superpower.
	That seems kind of crazy now, pending RFK's announcement in Philadelphia, which will have happened by the time we broadcast this, so subsequent to that you could vote for Bobby Kennedy there.
	But I wonder if, when it comes to free speech, this issue of transparency, I wonder, do you think that's possible?
	Do you think that would ever happen?
	Is it feasible?
	And also, do you think that in the same way, after your point about Brazil, that we could end up with free speech kind of exiles in the same way that you might have once had tax exiles, that there might be principalities and regions where free speech is tolerated outside of the kind of Five Eyes countries, for want of a better phrase?
	Yeah, great question.
	I mean, I think it's, you know, right before the recent war and attacks in Israel, everybody was focusing on the United States on the border.
	And I mean, here we have in the United States and so, but it's also similar in Europe.
	I mean, here we have people around the world fleeing To free countries.
	People want to come to the United States and Europe because they want to be free.
	They want to be able to speak their minds.
	They don't want to be victims of censorship and state oppression.
	So at the end of the day, I do think that what we have going for us is that most people do want to be free.
	I have arguments with some people about this because obviously there are some people that do want totalitarianism and you are people that want censorship.
	But I think that's often that fast thinking you get into slow thinking you make people start to make you require people to slow down and think about it.
	I do need a side with free speech similarly with transparency boy.
	Are you right about this?
	I just had I just was reminded.
	How frequently the U.S.
	government is moving money around to hide various projects.
	Now, sometimes if you're making a new secret weapon, a defensive weapon, it might be justified.
	But even then, you're supposed to have congressional oversight.
	There's been far too much secrecy on these issues.
	We do need a whole new era of transparency.
	You know, on COVID, to give one example, you may remember there's this moment where one of Anthony Fauci's aides said, I'm going to use my private Gmail to avoid future Freedom of Information Act requests.
	And they ended up getting those emails anyway.
	There is this sense in which the people that are in charge, they know, obviously, that what they're doing doesn't look good and is probably bad.
	And they really don't trust the public.
	I think in some sense, they really don't like the public.
	They don't really think the public has a right to know.
	And yet that's been so foundational.
	It's, I think, one of these other reforms.
	So, I mean, I do sometimes, like you, I think you kind of go, man, I mean, if there's really a crackdown here, do we have to go somewhere else?
	But it's like, where else do you go?
	I mean, if the United States can't remain steadfast in its commitment to free speech, Equal justice under the law.
	Innocent until proven guilty.
	Transparency into how our tax money is being spent.
	Then I just think Western civilization is over.
	You know, I think you can start to lose some liberal societies in the Western alliance, but you start to lose the United States and I think it's game over.
	And so I do think I think we are going to get a victory on Missouri versus Biden.
	I will say America has been in some pretty dark moments before.
	You know, most recently was sort of the 70s and the abuses of power that we saw in the in the late 60s, early 70s.
	But we really do have an amazing system here.
	And I think that culture is still here, but people forget it when they get caught up in the emotions of social media and fast thinking.
	And I wonder if that culture is being diluted by this, simply by almost technological advancement, in a sense, the same way that the industrialization of war made, you know, the First and Second World War much worse than their predecessors.
	And perhaps that doesn't, that doesn't tell the whole story of the preceding appetites.
	I read something about the brutality of the early days of the French Revolution that was
	sort of an indicator that the sort of venom was still present.
	It's just they didn't have the mechanization that would facilitate murder on the scale
	of, you know, 50, 60 years later.
	Sorry, 200.
	Anyway, my point is that what concerns me is now the machinery is in place for dystopia,
	and it appears sometimes that legislatively moves are being made that suggest that the
	idea of a consensus between those that are governed and the governing is breaking down.
	I spoke with Glenn Greenwald a little while ago and he says, you know, anti-protest laws, pro-surveillance, pro-censorship, It seems that now, once there was a kind of necessity for billionaire philanthropists to toss dollar bills from the window of a passing limo in a gesture of appeasement, whereas now it's just like, well, we're just going to have robots on the streets of New York that, at the flick of a switch, can be utilised to absolutely control you in the militarisation of the police forces.
	But one of the components.
	So obviously you have to be, if not optimistic, you have to be hopeful to live in the space that we live in.
	Otherwise our plan would have to become, we better get some land off Nicaragua and get the hell out of here and start thinking about communes that are off grid or whatever.
	And I do think about those things.
	But you also have to think, no, hold on, there is a battle here, there is a war, and it's significant what's happened in the last 5-10 years, and the capacity that we have now to regulate and control, if that is undergirded by new legislation, like the safety bills that we've talked about in both the UK, Ireland, Canada, then that is a significant step towards the end of America, in a way.
	Yeah, and I will say I don't hold those apocalyptic views of AI.
	I just testified to Senator Paul inviting me to testify in front of the Senate about AI.
	In fact, I worry that that discourse around AI actually suggests that humans aren't making these big decisions when they are.
	You know, everyone, there's a big thing you always see people do online where they're like, oh, I asked Chad GPT this question and they answered with this, you know, super politically correct response.
	Well, somebody's making that decision for Chad GPT.
	I mean, I just think I'm a little, I worry a little bit about that conversation on AI because I also think I see people that sort of say, oh, it's this big threat and that means I have to control it.
	Often the people hyping that threat are often people that want the control.
	It definitely needs to be regulated.
	It definitely needs governance.
	But I do think at the end of the day, for example, in the case of the censorship, of course they were using these tools to be able to do mass censorship on Facebook and on Twitter, but on the issues of what they were censoring, it was people making those decisions.
	It's Mark Zuckerberg that's going to decide, and it's Elon Musk who's going to decide.
	You know, I think, um, I mean, you know, the thing that really freaks me out is I'm like, what would have happened if Elon hadn't taken over Twitter?
	I mean, that's, I, that is really scary because I don't think we really knew how bad it was.
	There was, there was some legislation already on the censorship of Facebook, so hopefully it would have come out.
	But I do think, no, I think that we can't escape the West.
	If you move to Nicaragua and start your commune, of course I'll come and visit.
	But you're not, I mean, these are peripheral countries.
	I mean, it wouldn't be safe if there was some global totalitarian crackdown.
	And I just think, yeah, I mean, I just think, look, humankind is, you know, we've come up from really, you know, authoritarian rule over time and really violent rule.
	You know, the long sweep is pretty clear that we've evolved towards greater democracy and less violence.
	And there's been some backsliding for sure over the last few decades.
	And these recent trends are alarming.
	But to some extent, that distrust of government Some of that's healthy, right?
	We don't want too much trust in government.
	We should not want the government to decide who can be paid for their YouTube videos or who should be censored online.
	I think it's a very, very dark moment right now, but I think we should You know, remind ourselves that this too shall pass and that nothing is permanent and that reality swerves, that trends tend to be non-linear, in many cases not linear.
	I like that.
	Do you, though, as a Christian, ever concern yourself with the idea that there might be some terrible apocalyptic showdown on the horizon that we're all going to be invited to participate in?
	I mean, obviously nuclear war is just the most realistic possibility for apocalypse, and I think everybody should be scared about it.
	I mean, that's how nuclear weapons sort of work, is by scaring people.
	It's deterrence.
	You know, I'll say, though, that my understanding of it and I've done some amount of research and writing on this is that the most dangerous moments around nuclear were when we first got them when the Russians and Americans first got them and we were sort of.
	Not sure, you know, how to handle them.
	So we had the worst scares, you know, the Cuban Missile Crisis being the closest that we came.
	Since then, we've created much better communications.
	You know, I think there was a recent instance, as you may know, between, you know, the Ukrainians asked Elon to expand Starlink support up into new areas, and he declined out of concern for nuclear war.
	So I do think that, you know, we also saw India and Pakistan.
	Everybody thought that if India and Pakistan got nuclear weapons that they would have nuclear war, but it actually ended up helping them to de-escalate the situation.
	The most dangerous moment is when people first get the nuclear weapons.
	So I think You know, I've been misunderstood on this issue before.
	We should be scared of nuclear weapons.
	At the same time, we have put in place some means to prevent their being used.
	But this is all the reason why we have to negotiate a peace in Ukraine.
	I mean, at this point, I think most people want to see something negotiated.
	And there are nuclear weapons that protect all NATO countries.
	And so there's going to be some negotiation over Whether that protection is going to be extended to Ukraine, whether it's not, or whether partly or whatnot, but ultimately, yeah, it is scary, but I do think there's also risks of becoming too apocalyptic and too hopeless.
	I do think we need to keep our eyes on the prize.
	Which is for, you know, peace and freedom and prosperity and the older values, including humility, especially humility, especially the balance of power, because without those things, I think you tend towards a totalitarian mentality.
	Yeah, that's good.
	Like an arcane honouring of principles like humility and an acknowledgement that technology appears to be moving in the direction of allowing less centralisation, more communication, more dialogue.
	And it feels to me that what's being cultivated is a mindset that's like, no, no, no, we should use all this centralised power and Create a centralized global entity that can regulate above them, whether it's the WHO pandemic treaty or these eerily similar set of legislations across anglophonic countries to increase surveillance, or whether it's we have to rely on the largesse of Elon Musk to prevent escalating wars, you know, between proxy, or at least between superpowers.
	Michael, thank you so much.
	Thank you for covering so much territory in such Good faith.
	That's what I feel is perhaps lacking in the conversation around social, cultural, and political issues at the moment is a sort of an open-hearted intention towards resolution rather than a further validation of a polarizing position.
	Yeah, I feel that you're doing a lot of good, mate.
	Thank you so much.
	Thank you, Russell.
	I appreciate you too.
	Back at you.
	I appreciate the love and the faith that you're bringing this.
	Cheers, mate.
	Thank you.
	What choice do we have now?
	Thanks, man.
	It's the right choice.
	Thank you, Michael.
	You can follow Michael's work by going to public.substack.com and follow him on X by searching at Schellenberger, which is well worth doing because as you just witnessed, his contributions to the conversation are always enlightening.
	He has become, I think, an example of what he espouses.
	He indeed is the change that we would like to see in the world.
	On the show tomorrow, Kim Iverson is joining us.
	We'll be talking about RFK's announcement.
	Can an independent win in this new America?
	Is that the only option we really have?
	Who's going to be most hurt by it?
	Trump or Biden?
	Does it mean that Trump or Biden may not run?
	What will it mean?
	And of course we're going to be talking about events in Gaza.
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