Here’s the News: Are We Really Heading To Civil War?
As Trump is booted from the Colorado ballot in the name of saving democracy, have seven years of Trump-fuelled panic attacks fed into dangerous liberal delusions about the state of the union, and is Alex Jones right when he says fear of domestic war fuels more government overreach? --💙Support this channel directly here: https://bit.ly/RussellBrand-SupportVisit the new merch store: https://bit.ly/Stay-Free-StoreFollow on social media:X: @rustyrocketsINSTAGRAM: @russellbrandFACEBOOK: @russellbrand
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No, here's the fucking news!
Hello there you Awakening Wanderers, thanks for joining us on our voyage to truth and freedom at a time where it seems possible to launch propaganda almost simultaneous to its counter-narrative.
What I mean by that is during the Covid pandemic, however much pushback, however much discernment, however much questioning there was of official narratives and mainstream media narratives, There was sufficient centralised power to repress dissent to ensure that, broadly speaking, there was compliance.
Now what you have is a greater ability to almost immediately challenge any emergent centralised or state narrative as soon as it emerges.
Like, for example, we're being told that America is potentially on the brink of civil war, that this is a time of fissure and fracture.
We've been told that a second Donald Trump term would be a kind of dictatorship, that America might descend into tyranny.
And more and more we're seeing people talk about civil war.
Alex Jones says that this is a way of legitimising authoritarianism and the exertion of control.
And it seems that there is a good point being made there.
Look at this post from Tim Pool, where he observes that just posting US civil war returns the result Donald Trump off Colorado ballot.
What is happening with American democracy?
Is it now impossible for the centralized legacy media establishment and the state establishment to launch a narrative and for it to stick?
Precisely because now of independent media spaces where we're involved in an immediate direct discourse with you.
So as soon as an idea like Trump's going to be the worst dictator since Hitler is out there, people are able to say, wait a minute, he doesn't have a paramilitary or what about the kind of abuse and overreach of power within the Biden administration?
And aren't they using the threat of Trump as a dictator to avoid culpability for their own slide towards different types of authoritarianism?
And this threat of civil war is almost immediately being met with counter
narratives.
You'll see this all the time, like with the UFO stories.
The UFO stories launch and people go, oh, this is fascinating.
A Congress and the Senate finally taking UFOs seriously.
Oh, this is just to distract us from the Hunter Biden hearings.
It's such an interesting media space.
And this civil war narrative is, I think, the latest example
of how the Trump-Biden story is playing out and the inability to control the public sphere.
And of course, Hollywood are making a movie about it.
19 states have seceded.
The United States Army ramps up activity.
The White House issued warnings to the Western forces as well as the Florida Alliance.
The three-term president assures the uprising will be dealt with swiftly.
Let me know if you want to try anything.
I'm just aware there's like a pretty huge civil war going on all across America.
We just try to stay out with what we see on the news.
Seems like it's for the best.
And of course, the legacy media are amplifying the idea that war, the language of war, and the framing of war is appropriate.
Have a look at this section from Morning Joe where confederalism is discussed.
And immediately, as soon as you start thinking about war, particularly civil war, you have to consider a state of emergency and the kind of actions and measures that could be undertaken and legitimized in a state of emergency.
To the Republican candidate's argument that this should be, the voters should have the say and not the courts.
Why are you standing with Confederates who betrayed this country?
And this is what they're standing with, is the spirit of those Confederates, rather than the Americans who came together after a long and brutal civil war that was fought to keep the Union together and saw, clearly saw, a threat.
That's a fascinating piece of framing.
A softball question is lobbed up.
Why shouldn't the voters be able to decide whether or not to elect Donald Trump?
Why should we just go along with a piece of legislation?
And the pundit dutifully says, why would you stand with Confederates, insurrectionists, and then claiming that it's in order to protect democracy?
Indeed, when we're discussing dictatorship, which we frequently are on this channel, I think it's important to hold in mind that the type of dictatorship that seems more likely to me is a kind of technological, bureaucratic dictatorship that presents itself to us, the electorate or the consumers, however we're regarded now, as a kind of safety measure, a protective prophylactic from the ever-present threat of populist demagogues and dictators.
We would have been having an election, but bloody hell, these insurrectionists, they get in there and ruin it.
Well what's your excuse in Florida, where Joe Biden is the only candidate on the primary ballot?
Or Massachusetts, where Marianne Williamson, is she also a terrible populist dictator?
It's becoming increasingly clear that any dissenting voice, whether it's Bobby Kennedy, or Marianne Williamson, or Donald Trump, or Vivek Ramaswamy, or people in the culture, Elon Musk, myself, Joe Rogan, Any time that there are dissenting voices that get, you know, any traction at all, I'm certainly not putting myself in the same category as those heavy hitters on a global stage, there's a massive response and the legitimization of shutting down that voice.
What would be required to shut that voice down?
And then they answer that question.
Well, if this person was guilty of this, and we just rushed straight to the conviction part of the process, if we can just say someone's an insurrectionist, if you actually see Donald Trump on that day, he literally says, I'm sure you will go over now to the Capitol and peacefully and patriotically protest.
I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building.
That word peacefully is always extracted from the analysis because what would you have to say?
Oh he was being sarcastic.
Trump with his known capacity for irony.
Just drop the word peacefully in there with a nudge and a wink.
Whatever Donald Trump is or isn't, he's Not the leader of an armed insurrection.
As Martin Guru pointed out, insurrection means armed.
There's never been an unarmed insurrection in history, because that just amounts to asking if you can run the country.
Many people have said that January 6th was a riot.
OK, it was a riot.
But what it wasn't was an attempt to take over America.
And people that are saying that it was are doing that to extract the threat of Donald Trump.
And indeed, the massive demographic that supports Donald Trump.
And that is why I think the war narrative becomes important.
Because once before in America's history, it was necessary to say, half of everyone's just crazy.
And in retrospect, it's easy to say, well, because of slavery and racism.
But the Democrat Party were famously the party of slavery.
And that seems to have been extracted conveniently from the narrative in the same way that peacefully has been extracted from the January 6th narrative.
So let's have a look at what we're dealing with here.
Is it war, or is it a new tool for propaganda?
All empires fall.
That's the ominous tagline for Civil War, a Hollywood movie to be released in April.
As the title suggests, it depicts a second American war of the states.
A bombastic trailer clip hints at the chaotic violence and destruction unleashed in the wake of conflict between the federal government and some vague rebel faction, the unimaginatively named Western forces.
It's an unrealistic and frankly absurd political fantasy of the near future, but that hasn't stopped much of the liberal commentariat taking to the proverbial fainting couch after watching it.
Chilling and scary, said Entertainment Weekly.
Shocking, said People.
Dare you to watch Civil War trailer Already when it's been framed in that way, you start to see, oh this is a cultural artefact that's being used to mobilise fear.
Even if you take away the agent of fear, it could be a foreign war campaign, it could be religious tension and conflict around the world, it could be ideological and cultural conflict between people with progressive or traditional perspectives on identity and culture and the family and a whole raft of issues.
The important endpoint is fear.
The more that we're afraid, I'm speaking from personal experience, the less able we are to be kind of discerning, stoic, calm, perspicacious, communicative, trusting.
Fear is a sort of trauma state that part of civilization was meant to have helped us progress beyond.
But it's interesting that while we're off at the spoils of civilisation, it's accompanied with an incessant jolting back into that fear zone.
Oh, there's gonna be a civil war!
Oh, bloody hell, there could be an attack!
Oh no, there's gonna be a cyber attack!
Oh, there's a new contagion!
There's a new pathogen!
Quick, have a shot!
Like, I'm sure validity to all of the geopolitical and health crises that are Being discussed in all these instances.
But what I'm interested in is how the media and systems of power utilize these threats to keep us continually afraid.
And it seems that this civil war narrative is one such agent.
But what's really interesting is it's being shot down almost as soon as it comes out.
Straight away.
Hey, this could be a civil war.
You know what this is a bit like?
It's a bit like the American Civil War.
And Trump, that's the Confederates, you know, MAGA, they're all racist.
Come on.
But people are like, hang on a second.
Could this be about economics?
Does this seem like a desperate establishment, unable to cope with the new independent media space and the emerging grassroots political movements from the Tea Party in your country onwards, and even leftist movements like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn here in this country, shutting it down, flattening it down, always able to grab some convenient reason why this person should be extracted from the conversation?
Isn't that what's happening?
And isn't the Civil War narrative just the latest example of that?
Let us know in the chat.
It's another sign of the topsy turvy times we live in.
Apocalyptic fears of the end of America used to be the calling card of the religious and militia loving far right, but now it's the liberals trying to keep up with the Alex Joneses by screeching loudly that the end is near.
So it used to be the left that was peace loving and anti-war. You remember that,
it's not actually that long ago. But now the left, the Democrat party in the United
States, if you want to call them the left, are very pro-war. They're supporting a
number of wars and suggesting ongoing support.
Similarly, it used to be the right that were apocalyptic, like the end is nigh, armed militia
as cited in this article. But now the left are doing that and it makes you wonder what,
if anything, they stand for at all.
If they're pro-war, if they're using rhetoric that belong to the right, what is it that they actually do represent?
In a sense you'll start to glimpse the nihilism that's just beneath the veneer of protectivism which ultimately stands for authoritarianism.
There were no real principles there because Look, they don't care about war anymore.
They're saying the end is nigh.
They're about to legitimise authoritarian measures, I would suggest.
That's what's behind this.
We certainly saw a good degree of authoritarianism that has been subsequently delegitimised during the pandemic era, whether that was surveillance, censorship, proposal for digital ID.
All of these things are not freedom.
They're not Liberalism, are they?
This month, the line being espoused ad nauseum by the progressive media is that we're all collectively sleepwalking into a Trump-led fascist dictatorship.
It's this sort of rhetoric that makes legal action against a former president seem proportional, even when it's bound to backfire, as yesterday's Colorado ruling seemed to demonstrate.
It begs the question, how did we get to the point where a large segment of the population, the serious rational ones who follow the science, believe that a contemporary Civil War movie is a preview of our future, although a second Trump term could be worse than Nazi Germany?
How has that happened?
What kind of climate has been created and who created it?
For one, it's the media who cried wolf.
This is year seven of liberalism's Trump-fuelled panic attack, and the volume of discourse from corporate media, politicos and social mediates has been turned up to ear-piercing levels for so long.
That only the most bombastic pronouncements have a chance at breaking through all the noise.
God, it could actually just be a way of reaching an audience.
That's part of it.
It's escalating in order to stand out.
That's the only direction of travel now, in this kind of hyper-normalisation space that we all find ourselves living in.
Recall that 2016 was once declared the worst year ever in American history.
The belief that the sky was falling didn't stop that December the 31st.
It snowballed to the point that each year since has supposedly usurped its predecessor.
Next, 2017 was said to have been on the darkest timeline.
The bad news kept on coming.
Putin hacked our elections.
Trump is the new Hitler.
The Handmaid's Tale is actually a prophecy coming true.
Where else to go if not to the end of America?
Was January 6th, as the Atlantic claimed, only a warm-up to some new stage of domestic evil?
At the heart of all this fatalistic wailing and gnashing of teeth is a profound detachment between the danger, destruction and death experienced first-hand versus merely consumed.
As our everyday lives become increasingly mediated through our digital misery machines, the lines get blurred between reality and a simulation of it.
Doom scroll on your phone enough and eventually you'll feel doomed.
It's an interesting point that we've become abstracted from the realities that we were evolved, designed to live within, to such an extreme point that we're now happy to live in a simulation, or perhaps even a simulacrum, a repeated image again and again that we are bombarded with, until we can no longer discern its validity.
We can no longer verify what's real.
We're not engaged in the growing of our own food.
The maintenance of our own homes, the protection of our own families, loved ones or groups.
We've become, in a sense, entirely endomed by propaganda and external stimulation.
This is why I think even the point about Tim Pool's tweet was interesting.
If you put a US civil war into a search engine, the reality that you're given is Trump, Colorado.
We've done stories and spoken to experts about how Google promotes certain news stories and therefore provide a version of reality that is often favourable to the interests of the powerful.
We're not living in an absolute reality.
No one could live in a reality of 300 million American citizens.
It's inconceivable.
It might as well be 20 billion.
It might as well be the universe.
We can probably conceptualise a couple of hundred relationships.
Decentralisation is a possibility.
Community sovereignty is a possibility.
It's interesting that the escalation, or decline in fact, of people's optimism about the times, as it said here, 2016, worst year ever, 2017, even worse, 2018, It's getting worse and worse.
Mirrors what Martin Gurry said about the publication of information from 2001 onwards.
As more and more information becomes available, of course, there are enclaves of people getting more and more clever, more and more communication, but there is an amplification of hysteria and a kind of fissuring and fracturing To the point where war seems inevitable, but in fact it's a simulation of war.
It's an awareness of a philosophical distinction, a partition of ways of life, and that could be mapped onto reality without the necessity of war.
You could say, oh, it seems that some people really have strong beliefs that are of this type,
and others have strong beliefs that are of this type.
As long as we don't engage in some territorial mayhem about which bits of land each side owns,
it would be entirely possible to use this technology to have decentralized community sovereignty, wouldn't it?
Some journalists have remarked lately on what the New York Times deemed the great disconnect,
the yawning gap between our perceptions of the economy under Bidenomics and the lived experience of it.
Yet the disconnect that's unpopular to talk about is between the actual preconditions of a 2020 civil war
and the anticipation of one erupting.
Call it a vibe-pocalypse.
The facts on the ground are sobering.
Even with the recent heated rhetorical battles over the Israel-Palestine war since October, there hasn't been a marked increase in political violence in the United States, just a wave of interpersonal conflict since the Covid-19 pandemic.
Elections are being safely held all over America and the Colorado Supreme Court decision is unlikely to change that.
Our governing bodies and institutions are relatively stable and new laws are being created in red and blue states alike without a shot fired.
If anything, 2023 has been marked by a turn towards apathy.
Not a violent revolution.
For most of this year, American news consumption and political donations decreased dramatically, social media feeds began to go dark, and people increasingly tuned out of the world beyond their doorstep.
Prepare then for a 2024 in which politicians and the media play Paul Revere for this phantom civil war even harder leading up to November's election.
After all, coaxing Democrats to wake up and grab their proverbial bayonets is good for clicks, donations, and votes.
It might sound contradictory, but we should be alarmed about this kind of alarmism from Democrats and Republicans alike.
Fear of domestic war can fuel more government overreach, a kind of counterinsurgency strategy against Americans that relies on demonization, over-surveillance, and even incarceration in the name of public safety.
These are definitely observable trends.
Demonisation, that's taking place on both sides, a kind of hysteria and condemnation.
MAGA extremists.
From the basket of deplorables moment onwards, there's been the demonisation of 50% of the population.
And I'm sure this is something that's on both sides when it comes to the cultural war debate.
Oversurveillance, this is being Further legitimised, lobbied for continually and even incarceration.
You know that there are numerous people still imprisoned as a result of protests that would perhaps not withstand serious scrutiny.
So it's the normalisation of measures that would previously be seen as extreme, which is part of a broader strategy.
It could be contested.
You need to legitimise and normalise consumerism as a way of life, fear as a state of mind, division and condemnation as an ordinary stance.
Even in our lifetimes, we've gone from, oh, my uncle was a bit right wing, to we can't speak to that.
But it's become militant, militarised and catastrophised even in like a decade.
So clearly something is happening.
In Atlanta, fear of left-wing activists protesting the construction of a new police academy led to draconian measures from the state, such as the arrest of concertgoers at a music festival for domestic terrorism.
Those measures were taken by a Republican-controlled state and a Democrat-run city.
My sense is, as this example shows, Republican state, Democrat city, that both political establishment parties benefit from this increased state of fear and tension.
And in making a choice between the Republican and the Democrats, you're making a choice about as serious as you are when you choose between Pepsi and Coca-Cola or McDonald's and Burger King.
In an increasingly commodified culture where the results are all sewn up, where you're a consumer consuming bad food and sugary drinks and essentially facile political ideas.
I'm furiously this one.
I'm religiously that one.
When in fact, as that example shows, and as many bipartisan movements towards war and war funding demonstrate, ultimately you're voting for the same thing.
Ultimately, however, it's fine to go to the theatres to watch a fantasy war play out on the big screen.
It's America's pastime.
Just keep in mind that this one will likely be about as relevant to current day politics as Marvel's Captain America Civil War.
So it seems that the idea of civil war It seems to me that whenever a word starts to be proliferated throughout a culture, it's a demonstration of an idea or a trend.
I suppose that's obvious.
yet further, whether it's of a Republican or Democrat persuasion, the electorate to
some limited degree, will determine.
It seems to me that whenever a word starts to be proliferated throughout a culture, it's
a demonstration of an idea or a trend.
I suppose that's obvious.
And what we're seeing now is a movement from Trump as dictator, who there is a war burgeoning.
And it perhaps says more about the way that the media behaves, the way the social media
behaves, the desire to create immersive experiences for us that in a way distract us from reality
rather than engaging us with it.
That is beneficial to a centralised authoritarian state that requires as its kind of fuel our
ongoing fear.
Otherwise we might become apathetic, despondent, disgusted and move away and start demanding
Serious models of real democracy, real personal sovereignty and real freedom.
