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Dec. 9, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
23:22
Here’s the News: Could This Be The End Of Democracy?!

The Florida Democratic Party has scrapped its presidential primary, only submitting Joe Biden’s name for the 2024 ballot. But of course, it’s a Trump victory that would mean the end of democracy, right? --Please visit https://taxnetworkusa.com/brand to get tax help or call 855-225-1040Support Me Directly HERE: https://rb.rumble.comWATCH me LIVE weekdays on Rumble: https://bit.ly/russellbrand-rumble

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No, here's the fucking news!
Hello there you Awakening Wonders, thanks for joining us on our mutual voyage to truth and freedom where we're able to discern between, for example, a democracy and a dictatorship.
A democracy being, I don't know, you get to vote on stuff, you have some agency in your community, your own individual life, you're not continually beholden to centralised authoritarian systems that seem to act autonomously, remotely, inaccessible to you.
It's extraordinary that the Democrat Party continually whip up hysteria around a potential Trump victory in 2024.
He'll Put people in jail!
He'll exile people!
All the while pretending that they are the defenders of democracy.
And yet, Joe Biden will not debate any other presidential candidate for the Democratic Party nomination.
And in Florida, they've just scrapped their entire primary.
Meaning you can vote for anyone as long as it's Joe Biden.
Continually in the legacy media say, if you don't vote for the Democrats, you're voting for a dictator.
Trump will turn the USA into a dictatorship.
Despite the fact he's already been president, didn't turn into a dictatorship.
So what is all this hysteria and hyperbole?
And what does tyranny look like these days?
Is tyranny now a sterile, desacralizing, banalizing force of centralized authority that pretends it cares about you, that pretends it's taking yet more authority through censorship and control in order to protect vulnerable people and to protect you from the real tyrants?
Let's get into this story.
And here was Cheney this morning on Trump's threat at her former colleagues in Congress.
People who say, well, if he's elected, it's not that dangerous because we have all of these checks and balances, don't fully understand the extent to which the Republicans in Congress today have been co-opted.
They certainly have been co-opted.
They're co-opted by lobbying.
They're co-opted by donations.
And the Republican Party's new preferred candidate, Nikki Haley, seems to be the property of big energy and MIC interest.
What does Liz Cheney mean when she says that politicians have been co-opted?
What is she talking about?
What she's talking about is the threat Trump poses because he's an odd anomalous populist politician rather than a sanctioned ordinary centralized politician that represents the interests of elite globalist corporate interests.
That's really all they're talking about.
One of the things that we see happening today is a sort of a sleepwalking into a dictatorship in the United States.
Often when Republicans and Democrats or even a Republican politician like Liz Cheney and a centre-left neoliberal outlet like MSNBC collaborate, it's shown as a sign of a healthy democracy.
Look, from across the aisle people are coming together.
But I don't see it that way.
I see a homogenised Liz Cheney opposes any challenge to establishment power, the same way that MSNBC does, the same way that the Democrat Party does, in a very literal way.
For example, they scrapped the Florida primaries because they know that basically anybody might defeat Joe Biden, so you can't have him debate anybody, you certainly can't give people the opportunity to vote for anyone else.
And even if a popular figure like RFK emerges Hey everybody, what happened in Florida yesterday is a tragedy and a travesty.
The Florida Democratic Party decided, just a handful of people, decided to disenfranchise millions of Democratic voters in Florida by saying we're not going to have a presidential primary.
I'm running for president.
There are others running for president as Democrats.
And this is the kind of stuff that happens in Tehran, not in Tallahassee.
He's a member of the Democrat Party.
Comparing it to Sharia law or tyranny or dictatorship elsewhere is extraordinary.
But we're witnessing a time where some people are being pointed as tyrannical because they may be charismatic populist demagogic
figures but the real problem if you ask me and I'd love to know
what you think in the chat the establishment itself has become so autocratic the
populist politicians seem favorable to this machine that doesn't care about what
you think and literally removes the opportunity for electoral democracy
every opportunity we've got to do something about this I've been a lifelong
Democrat you know that supported our party since I was in my 20s been a
member of Congress for three terms and was a member of House Democratic leadership.
I've never seen something so absurd, so disenfranchising, and so suppressive of Democratic voters.
So please help us out.
Go to Dean24.com and support our effort to pursue legal channels to rectify this absolute nonsense, tragic day for electoral democracy in America.
Thanks everybody.
Wow.
So what is a dictatorship?
What is tyranny?
The legacy media are keen to promote Liz Cheney's book because she condemns Donald Trump as a populist, coining the phrase orange Jesus, which you know he'll own and love.
The legacy media is keen always to present these kind of neoliberal centrists who are no threat to authority because they will never truly represent the interests of ordinary American people.
They're willing to platform them.
But the legacy media aren't so interested in covering what seems to be a real threat to democracy, the literal scrapping of democratic processes like the Florida primary, where lifelong democrats like Dean Phillips are sort of aghast and baffled by the collapsing of the democracy within their own party.
Let's see how Karine Jean-Pierre, still waiting for her MSNBC show any day now, handles questions about the collapse of democracy within the Democrat party establishment.
Does the Florida party then effectively cancelling the Democratic primary also constitute voter suppression?
I can't speak to that.
Why not?
You have to speak to the campaign or the DNC.
I don't think she believes it anymore, Kareen Jean-Pierre.
She looks absolutely exhausted and beleaguered by the entire process.
I can't speak to that.
I don't know.
I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing.
Can I just have a talk show already?
Poor woman.
It's absolutely shattered.
But we're asking an important question.
What is tyranny, really?
We're being asked to accept that Donald Trump is a dictator, that if he gets in again, people will be imprisoned, executed, exiled.
We're being asked to accept that January the 6th was not a protest or even a kind of gentle, kooky riot, but an attempted insurrection.
Why are certain pieces of information being amplified and promoted and other stories entirely ignored?
What is dictatorship in 2023, really?
Does the White House have any thoughts on those voters being... I can't speak to that.
Is it because of the hatch act?
You're talking about 2024 election.
You're talking about a primary.
I'm just not going to speak to that from here.
Okay.
I don't think that her TV show is going to be very good.
She won't answer any questions.
She's going to be like, listen, just put the commercials on.
I can't speak to that.
OK, let's dive a little deeper.
Unlike Jean-Caribbean, let's speak to that.
Across news sites, Democrats are warning of the imminent death of democracy.
Hillary Clinton has warned that a Trump victory will be the end of democracy.
That's quite a claim.
Trump victory is the end of democracy, scrapping primaries, not having Biden debate anyone.
That's the beginning of a democracy.
That's the democracy we have to protect.
Odd.
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is warning of executions.
Remember, they accused Trump of using inflammatory language.
He said the word vermin the other day.
Execution's a pretty incendiary word.
Even actors like Robert De Niro are predicting that this may be our very last democratic election.
I think we've already seen the last democratic election.
It was the one before, the one they scrapped in Florida.
I mean, they're not scrapping that election in Florida because they think it's going to go brilliantly for Joe Biden.
It's a foregone conclusion.
What's the point in holding elections?
This guy is so brilliant, you wouldn't want to see anyone else.
You don't need to see this guy have a debate.
You don't need to see why there's regular payments made by Hunter Biden's company.
You don't need to discuss why there are all these cheques coming from Ukrainian and Chinese energy companies.
There's simply nothing to discuss except one thing.
Trump is corrupt and Trump will turn this country into a dictatorship.
That's it.
Yet these harbingers of tyranny are increasingly pursuing the very course that will make their predictions come true.
The Democratic Party is actively seeking to deny voters choices in this election, supposedly to save democracy.
That's yet more of the Orwellian double think that we've become used to.
In order to protect democracy, we're going to have to scrap elections and debates.
And if you vote for someone else, you're voting for a dictatorship.
OK.
Henry Ford once promised customers any colour so long as it's black.
Democrats are adopting the same approach to the election.
You can have any candidate on the ballot as long as it's Joe Biden.
This week, the executive committee of the Florida Democratic Democracy told voters that they would not be allowed to vote against Biden.
Even though he has opponents in the primary.
The party leadership has ordered that only Biden will appear on the primary ballot.
And if you want to register your discontent with Biden with a write-in vote, forget about it.
Under Florida law, if the party approves only one name, there will be no primary ballots at all.
The party just called the election for Biden before a single vote has been cast.
That's the kind of story that if it was about President Xi or someone in Iran would be used to suggest that there was a lack of democratic procedure, that you were being guided in a very particular direction.
I've been thinking continually as all of the calls for a Joe Biden impeachment have been made, Is this the best they could do?
How does that party work?
Why were they so determined that it should be Hillary in 2016?
Why were they so determined it was going to be Joe Biden in 2020?
Didn't they say, oh no, this guy's had all these payments from energy companies, it's messy, it's too old, it's ridiculous, given that our whole ideology is meant to be built on diversity, inclusivity and the inherent badness of the patriarchy and old white men in particular.
And yet he was the candidate that they put forward and he's still the candidate that they're endorsing to the exclusion of debate or any potential opposition.
This is not unprecedented.
It happened with Barack Obama in 2012, and on the Republican side with George W. Bush in 2004.
It was wrong then, and it's wrong now.
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Let's get back to this content.
As Democratic presidential candidate representative Dean Phillips, Democrat,
Minnesota noted, Americans would expect the absence of democracy in Tehran, not Tallahassee.
Our mission as Democrats is to defeat authoritarians, not become them.
In Iran, the mullahs routinely bar opposition candidates from ballots as guardians of the ballots.
We're guarding that ballot!
There is good reason for the Biden White House to want the election called before it is held.
A CNN poll found that two out of three Democrats believe that the party should nominate someone else.
The vast majority, then.
A Wall Street Journal poll found that 73% of voters say Biden is too old to run for president.
The party leadership is solving that problem by depriving Democratic voters of a choice.
In other states, Democratic politicians and lawyers are pursuing a different strategy.
You can have any candidate as long as it isn't Trump.
They are seeking to bar Trump from ballots under a novel theory about the 14th Amendment.
In states from Colorado to Michigan, Democratic operatives are arguing that Trump must be taken off the ballot because he gave aid and comfort to an insurrection or rebellion.
So, there's a few things here that are extraordinary.
Like Ukraine's war against Russia, the first thing you think is, you can't beat Russia in a war, it's too big a country, it's a nuclear superpower.
Eventually, a few years later, that is revealed to be the case.
When you see Joe Biden, you think, he shouldn't be the president, he's too old.
A few years later, that's revealed to be the case.
The majority of even Democrat party affiliate voters don't want Joe Biden to be the presidential nominee.
And for Trump, looking for reasons to bar him from the ballot, to indict him, to impeach him, to imprison, to incarcerate him, seems less and less like the pursuit of justice and more and more like the removal of a potential opponent from the ballot.
And saying that he should be removed from the ballot because he gave aid and comfort to the insurrection.
Well, he was helping me at Comfort.
He's OK.
Was the insurrection OK?
There's a really sort of extraordinary loopholes that are being looked for when actually what they're
advocating for the whole time.
Remember, every time that Trump is condemned as a potential dictator, what they're saying
is we have to protect this democracy.
Even the outrage around January the 6th was this is our sacred space where we conduct
the business of running America.
But when those institutions fail, when you have no faith in the political class,
when you can't trust anyone from Hillary Clinton to Nikki Haley, also in the Republican Party, and Barack Obama just
disappointed vastly, Joe Biden, clearly a career politician, tied up with his affiliation to the donor class.
Like he said before he was elected, nothing will essentially change.
You are creating the conditions where people will look for different ideas.
Populism and great communicators are likely to reap the benefits from that.
Whether you love Trump or loathe Trump, you have to Except that the conditions for his success has been created by a total lack of democracy and no one seems to be amending it or attempting to address it.
They're doubling down and making it much much worse and continuing to call Trump a dictator.
It doesn't make any sense.
Other Democrats have called for more than 120 other Republicans to be stripped from the ballots under the same claim tied to the January 6th Capitol riot.
Yeah, another way that that event is being utilised to prohibit democracy, increase police expenditure, increase surveillance, increase censorship.
In recent filing supporting this effort, figures as prominent as media lawyer Floyd Abrams and Berkeley Dean Irwin Chemerinsky have told the Colorado Supreme Court that preventing voters from being able to cast their votes for Trump is just a way of fostering democracy.
So long as courts believe that a candidate's speech is capable of triggering disqualification, that speech is unprotected in their view.
This appears to be part of a global tendency that's become evident in the new censorship laws that are being lobbied for in Ireland, have been passed in the UK and Canada, are being proposed in the EU.
a presumption to understand what democracy is, what free speech is, what hate speech is,
who should be allowed to speak and who isn't.
All of this is being undertaken at a time of crisis and fracture
where many of us have a total lack of trust for the institutions that are making these bold claims
and in some cases, draconian laws.
The assumption that if Donald Trump speaks, that in itself is anti-democratic.
That's a threat to democracy.
But you'd feel a lot more faith in those kind of proclamations if the other side wasn't behaving in such an observably undemocratic way when it comes to their own preferred candidate and the process that got him into that position and the abandonment and suppression of any process that could be a challenge to him.
So far, these efforts around the country have met with defeat in court after court, but the effort continues with the support of many in the media.
Some national polls show Trump as the most popular candidate for the 2024 election, while a few show Biden slightly ahead.
Yet, despite 74 million voters supporting Trump in the last election, these Democrats are insisting that voters should not be allowed to vote for him in the name of democracy.
Yeah, that's true, isn't it?
On a very simple level, if 74 million people like someone enough to vote for them, saying that they cannot vote for that person cannot be called democracy, can it?
Yes, that is what we're calling it.
Let me know in the chat if that is the pivotal and fundamental problem.
The presumption that what they think is more important than what you think.
In fairness to democratic partisans like Clinton and Maddow, they could well be right.
The 2024 election could well prove the end to democracy if these efforts succeeded in purging ballots of opposing candidates.
It's extraordinary that the forces that claim to be supporting democracy appear to be the biggest threat to democracy.
Is it therefore true that those that they claim are the biggest threat to democracy are required in order to save it?
Does that follow?
Let me know in the chat.
It's all part of an electoral variation on the Vietnam War claim that it is sometimes necessary to destroy a village in order to save it.
And I never thought that was a very good argument.
What the hell are you doing to that village with all of that napalm setting it on fire and killing all those children?
It's funny you should ask.
I know it's confusing, isn't it?
the children, the chickens or the straw hats. I know it's confusing isn't it? Anyway vote for Joe Biden.
Democrats claim to be right and to have the best motivations which is why they feel justified in
saving democracy by denying it to the voters. After all it's all about motivation where any
means are justified. They're trying to save democracy by limiting it. This is the kind
of language we're continually seeing.
The Member of Parliament in Ireland saying that we are curtailing and controlling freedom in order to protect freedom.
We are protecting free speech by shutting down hate speech.
Their ideology no longer makes sense.
I think there's a pretty important reason for this.
They're ultimately interested in control and profit, which sort of amounts to the same thing in a way because they're so interwoven.
Because there is no set of values, like we will never do X or we will always do Y. Because there are no set of principles, whether they're religious or humanitarian or socialist or capitalist or fascist.
Because there's no principles at all, except the accumulation of more resources and power.
There's never any continuity in the arguments.
One minute they're telling you this, the next minute they're telling you that, and often they're telling you things that Just don't make sense.
Even the fundamental idea that they require incredible authority in order to protect the vulnerable doesn't make sense because in a society where the vulnerable's needs were a priority, you wouldn't have so many desperate and vulnerable people.
There's paradoxes throughout it and it's not because of complexity, it's because of deception, I believe.
Let me know if you agree in the chat.
Thus, it is an assault on democracy for Republican lawyers to challenge elections based on alleged problems with
voting machines.
But it is protecting democracy for former Clinton general counsel
and founder of the Democracy Docket, Mark Elias, to claim that a machine could flip the result in favour of
the GOP.
In Tehran, a popular joke emerged after the Guardian counsel
approved only one candidate, Chief Justice Ebrahim Raisi, to appear on a ballot.
Democracy, the joke went, was safe because the Guardians would allow Raisi to run against six other spellings of his own name.
The American election guardians in Florida did one better.
They've arranged for there to be no ballot at all.
Who needs the pretense of a primary when you can simply dictate the results?
Yet rest assured, you may be able to cast a vote for an approved slate of candidates of healthy choices.
Consider it a type of big gulp election, where you are protected against your own bad choices, like a sugary drink at 7-Eleven.
Actor Seth Rogen has pledged to vote for whoever is the Democrat.
That's all I need to know.
If these efforts are successful, many voters could be left with that single liberating choice and no other.
It seems like the ongoing demonisation of all opponents, and beyond even their political opponents, anyone that has voted for them, which as we know amounts to 74 million people, has led to a state where the only way you can have democracy is by voting for a single party with a single candidate who is not allowed to be challenged, who is not allowed to be debated, who is not allowed to be discussed, whose financial affairs seem a little dubious, who made numerous pledges before election that he's been un-elected.
able to fulfill. And all of the condemnation of Trump and the people that need to be deprogrammed,
the basket of deplorables, all of those condemned Americans are being dismissed as supporters of a
dictatorship and leaving you with one solitary candidate as the only choice to oppose tyranny
and dictatorship. What seems clear to me now is that dictatorship doesn't look like it did in the
It doesn't look like Mussolini or Mao or Stalin or Hitler and neither does it look like populist rhetoric and hyperbole or ethnonationalism or what's regarded as racism as a result of a lot of anti-migration rhetoric, which by the way appears to be largely accepted by both sides of neoliberal democracies these days anyway.
What it looks like is banalised career politicians talking about protecting the vulnerable, talking about how particular crises, whether they're geopolitical and military or health pandemic crises, legitimise and require new powers, new control to protect you or for your convenience.
The tyranny that we are confronted with now is technological and technocratic.
It's a kind of dictatorship that was impossible before.
Because there was no means to control and observe people in the way that we can be controlled and observed now.
We are facing a world where there will be no cash, where the ability to turn off your finances is becoming a reality, the ability to track your movements and prevent your movements, to control where you're able to travel, what social activities you're able to participate in, justifying this control all the while by protecting the vulnerable or helping you or a necessary measure that we have Dictatorships and tyranny now has a very different face.
It has a very different tone.
It's the friendly bureaucratic language of a platform telling you that you can no longer communicate, or you can no longer earn money from your content, or you can no longer travel.
Because we've not been schooled in what new forms of dictatorship will look like, we're not able to recognize it.
Or their preferences we won't be able to recognize it.
But when people start cancelling elections, demanding more control, demanding the ability to censor or surveil, panicking when platforms get purchased by someone who releases information and demanding more control within those platforms that the deep state had already penetrated, you start to get an idea of what dictatorships are going to look like in the future.
They are going to be globalist.
They are going to be corporate.
They are going to be technologically advanced.
They are going to always take actions in order to protect you and to protect people that are even more vulnerable than you.
It will always lead to you having to make sacrifices because of the planet, because of poverty, because of poor people elsewhere, because of a disease, but it will never involve the elite establishment having to change their trajectory.
You will notice ongoing wealth transfers, you will notice the way the political parties are funded, and you will notice that their opponents are always discredited and removed.
That whether it's a popular figure like Conor McGregor in Ireland, he'll be dismissed in order to continue to implement centralised Globalist authority.
And I think that this battle is taking place primarily in the United States of America.
And I think the battle began with the election of Donald Trump.
Because whatever Donald Trump is or isn't, they do not want him in power.
Plainly.
They want Joe Biden in power.
And that seems to be quite a difficult ambition to fulfil because he's such a ludicrous candidate who can't even be trusted in a Floridian primary against dear Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson.
RFK has to be expunged from the party.
Outrageous though it may seem, No.
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