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Dec. 27, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
41:54
Neil Oliver - on Populism, Faith & Sprituality

Joining me today is author and critical thinker Neil Oliver.We will be talking about the demonisation of populism, faith and spirituality, how science doesn't address the spiritual & how elites have caused divisions amongst people.You can watch Neil Oliver on GB News on YouTube, his personal channel @Neil-Oliver and his new book ‘Hauntings: A Book of Ghosts and Where to Find Them Across 25 Eerie British Locations’ is out now! --💙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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How are we going to progress to one another if our hearts are closed?
We must wake up together.
I know you're going to enjoy this conversation.
Hello, Neil.
Thanks so much for joining us.
My pleasure.
Yes, I very much enjoyed our last chat.
I was, I make no, I'm sure, I don't make any preparations for these things.
I just, I'm always excited by the possibility of where the conversation, any conversation might go.
I think that's the, I think that's the joy of these exchanges.
Well, Neil, I've prepared enough for both of us, so you don't need to worry.
I've got a carefully- You've done some homework?
It's almost intrusive, actually.
It's almost a violation of any privacy acts that may yet remain.
I've been in that fireplace for the last couple of days observing you, and you have not been found wanting.
You are a brilliant and wry Gaelic poet.
I enjoyed our conversation last time and I'm interested to talk, as you might imagine, more about globalism and more about freedom and more about, you know, like what might have happened here.
Let me tell you this because I sort of ask you this because I trust you.
Now, over the time that I've been broadcasting in these kind of spaces, I've developed an affinity for what might be called populism that previously I might have been sceptical about.
I have a deep understanding, for example, why people in Ireland are so frustrated and why they may be considering Vote in for Conor McGregor.
I'm sympathetic to nations like the Netherlands where you're seeing the rise of figures like Geert Wilders, particularly while Dutch farmers are under such incredible pressure and they're exerting, I say they, and by that I mean corporate globalist forces appear to be trying to control agriculture.
In order that people do not have direct access to their own food.
That's, you know, that last bit is an assumption.
But it's very difficult to deny that centralist, globalist forces appear to be trying to regulate and control agriculture, usually under the auspices of helping the climate.
But it just seems that whenever we're helping the climate, we also penalize ordinary people and people's ability to run their own lives.
But these were just illustrative examples, Neil, to point out how You know once I would have been considered a person that was of the left who would automatically be in opposition to the kind of populist movements that I've already referred to and in some cases listed.
Have you always been someone that's affiliated with the right or conservatism?
Are you an old-school liberal lefty?
And how do you feel when you find yourself navigating a new political landscape that seems to be much more about people versus the establishment, periphery versus the centre, rather than left and right as we used to understand it?
I've never been overtly political before.
I never was.
I've never been a card-carrying member of any political party.
I was never somebody who marched or protested.
I can't honestly say why that was.
I think it was probably ultimately down to a certain kind of laziness, really.
I think I was letting other people get on with things political.
And I do reproach myself for having been Apathetic or disengaged for as long as I was.
But that said, I would never have characterised myself as being of the left or of the right or of the centre.
I didn't really think of myself in those terms.
I'm very interested, that said, in the way in which populist has become a pejorative term.
You know, it's bandied about in the same way as, you know, Hillary Clinton's basket of deplorables and whatever, white van man.
You know, there's a whole slew of terms that are used to make people feel bad, isolated one from another, as if their points of view are somehow crude or crass or base.
And I find that fascinating, to put it mildly.
Populist just means, as you know, of the people.
And the way in which that's been maligned is, well, I think it's unforgivable, actually.
And like you, I do feel a great deal of sympathy for populations all over the place.
Who, in a very short space of time in the scheme of things, have been left with no alternative but to accept major change, major demographic and cultural change that they didn't ask for and weren't necessarily ready for.
You know, weren't bought so much as a gin and tonic and a bunch of filling station croissants before certain couplings were forced upon neighbourhoods.
And why wouldn't people be alarmed by sudden change?
People generally are alarmed by sudden, unasked for change.
And I do get very frustrated at the way in which people are set against one another.
People have been moved, you know, whole civilizations all over the world have been deliberately displaced, damaged, carpet bombed, flattened, messed with.
People have been unseated and unsettled and are on the move as they would be for all sorts of, for as many different reasons as there are people.
And we are all the time invited to get angry with each other rather than where we should be angry, which is with the people up above us who punch down all the time and then encourage us to punch each other.
So I find I have a great deal of sympathy for everyone, because I think we have been collectively messed with en masse for decades.
Yeah, decades.
And I feel like that, you know, points in your answer there, you touched on the idea of migration and the cultural and social impact of migration.
Interestingly, mate, we've got a lot of topics to cover over the course of our conversation.
We'll talk about how the pandemic uniquely shifted cultural values, social attitudes,
created an acceptance of regulation that didn't previously exist.
It was a time of unprecedented international deception, I feel, and international shaming.
And those two things obviously correlate.
But before we get into the pandemic and the unique revelations of that recent period,
I'd like to sort of touch upon Ireland.
When we made some content about what happened in Ireland and how the rhetoric that was being used to condemn Irish people protesting about migration in the aftermath of several violent acts involving children and, as reported, Migrants, or, you know, members of the migrant population.
When we put that content up on various sites, YouTube and, of course, our home here, Rumble, I was struck by the number of, like, I noticed Brazilian people that were resident in Ireland, Polish people that were resident in Ireland, saying, migration has gone out of control in this country.
Like, people, Irish people feel disturbed.
There was some brilliant reporting at the time that made it clear that Ireland doesn't have the same kind of trajectory in history as a country like England or the
Netherlands or any country that has a colonial past. Ireland of course is historically
oppressed and their ethno-nationalism is a necessary part of their identity as they confronted and
opposed external oppressors.
I felt...two things I'd like to point out.
It's plain that you can have concerns about migration and not be a racist.
It's plain that people do not feel like, as you said, like they are being consulted about the direction of their nation.
And it was just something about what happened in Ireland because of the inability to sort of evoke guilt and shame in the same way you might be able to in a country like France or England or the United States, obviously.
That meant something was revealed to me.
And what I feel is, is that globalist rhetoric, it's shallow, it's manipulative, and it's dishonest.
And then when I started to sort of unpick that, I thought about a lot of the rhetoric around Brexit and a lot of the rhetoric around Trump.
and this is something you referred to in your first conversation as well.
There's a large appetite to condemn people just for having an opinion,
and the solution for this can only be democracy, because all of this anti-populist rhetoric is predicated on
the idea that there should be authoritative institutions
that dictate to people the direction of a country.
You could call that leadership if you want, but when there's been as much deception as we've
experienced lately, when there's so much contempt for the population,
when there's so much mistrust for the media, which are now essentially part of the establishment,
it's difficult not to argue that perhaps people should be able
to make decisions for themselves, that they shouldn't have information that's kept from them,
that they shouldn't be condemned and judged in the sort of way that we've kind of circled around,
even in the first 10 minutes of our chat.
I wonder what you feel about Ireland in particular and how that's relevant when it comes to this issue of globalism versus, I
won't just say nationalism, because nationalism is a pretty freighted term, but perhaps
even localism?
Well, you're so right about Ireland being a very different case than, say, England, Britain,
the Long Island of Britain, you know, a completely different experience and a completely different
means of operating in the world historically.
There is, there's definitely something very pernicious about the way in which everyone is discouraged from daring to hold multiple thoughts in their head at the same time.
You know, as you said, you can be simultaneously worried about rapid and mass immigration to your neighbourhood without being, while at the same time being a human-loving, life-affirming, welcoming person.
You can hold those two thoughts simultaneously.
We're constantly invited only to pick a side.
Yeah.
Just take a line, a single line on every issue.
And if you haven't got the time to think up one yourself, here's a laminated card with all of the pre-prepared lines that you might just help yourself to take.
And the people in Ireland who are concerned about the speed at which large arrivals are coming, They're instantly just, if they raise a voice about that, they're instantly xenophobic.
They're instantly racist.
They're instantly small-minded, close-minded people.
And it's so unfair.
And so people, knowing that that's how they're going to be dealt with, that's the way they'll be responded to, they just keep their heads down and intend and prefer to keep their mouths shut.
And it's I find that a terrible calumny that's been that's been inflicted.
But it's not just true of Ireland.
It's true of all sorts of there's there's no denying that all over the north of England, you know, communities have been radically altered by the demographically radically altered.
And people are just discouraged from so much as voicing an opinion about that.
Without being dismissed as some kind of, you know, racist xenophobes.
And I feel it's part of a direction of travel.
It's all about the way in which there's not to be any nuance in discourse.
There's not to be people having the time to air multiple coexisting points of view without instantly being shouted down for the first thing that you let out of your mouth.
I think a lot of us liked the Long Island of Britain as a phrase.
Ian Drummo just said that in the chat.
I liked that as well.
I wonder if you're familiar with the writing of Martin Goury, and in particular his famous book, The Revolt of the Public, in which he talks about how the availability of information that the communications age has brought about, particularly in the last 10 years, or he notes in 2001, there was as much information published as in all history up to that point, and it's doubled every year since then.
That it's such an enormous transformation that it in itself demands a change of all of our systems of governance.
I suppose it's kind of obvious, isn't it, that whether it's Congress or Parliament or whatever system of government, if it's a democracy in whatever country you're living in, is uh that is in a way based on a kind of pragmatism we send a representative to a central point to convey the perspectives of that community that selected him like that that in itself like the horse was the technology they were using the building was the technology they were using language was the technology they're using
He said, Martin Gurry, that now the terms left and right are redundant now or use establishment versus periphery has come about because it's a taxonomy-busting technology.
In the last few days, Neil, We've seen Elon Musk host Spaces on X, where figures that are complete pariahs like Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, and talking with a candidate for the Republican Party, Vivek Ramaswamy,
Yeah, and the world's richest man, you know, there or thereabouts.
And those are all figures that sort of, you know, in the New York Times or on MSNBC or CNN, perhaps with the exception of Musk, just because of the sheer cargo that he wields, are persona non grata.
That means now that not only do we have two cultures, or beyond two cultures, numerous cultures, and the teleology is that they're moving, the bifurcation has happened, and they're splitting and moving further and further apart.
If you can have, you know, 2.3 million people watching that.
If you have spaces like Rumble where You know, you can have uncensored speech.
And then, you know, even places like YouTube have been co-opted and are now ultimately sort of legacy media spaces when it comes down to it.
Certainly, you know, take the example of the pandemic, the WHO's laws or regulations are applied there in the form of the community guidelines of YouTube.
What we're experiencing is the inability of centralised authority to control a population, the inability to control information, and their obvious prognosis that that is going to lead to either disintegration or decentralisation.
It's going to lead to dissent.
It's already happened.
Whether it's Napster, the Arab Spring, Brexit, Podemos, Trump.
There's a long list of success.
The Five Star Movement and Beppe Grillo in Italy.
There's a long list of dissenters.
And I think what we're experiencing is that they are trying to use the leverage of crisis to reassert control.
And people are resisting it.
And I think my fear is that crises will continue to escalate until they have the means to impose that control.
Do you think, therefore, Neil, that we're at a pivotal moment?
And do you think that it's a battle that can be won by those of us that are interested in free speech and democracy?
Very much so.
I believe, you know, Christmas is, we're in the season of Advent, you know, the coming, the imminent arrival of.
And people, I've heard people more and more than I ever have before using, you know, the word apocalypse seems to be coming into people's conversation quite a lot.
And apocalypse is a Greek verb that means to take the cover off, to expose.
And I think that, as you're quoting there, this mass access to information has had unintended consequences.
I don't know what was the objective, necessarily, or all the objectives, when DARPA put together the fledgling internet back in the 50s and 60s and so on.
Maybe they genuinely didn't foresee What would be the consequences of so many people having so much, well, hitherto unfettered access to so much stuff and being able to draw their own conclusions?
And I think that collectively what has happened, I think it's happening faster and faster.
You know, there's a kind of a, there's some kind of, it's moving quicker and quicker.
That the I do wonder at the extent to which we have lived under an illusion for a long time, even an illusion of democracy and the reality with which we were presented.
It seems to be.
Falling apart as more and more people are able to access and read more and more otherwise esoteric information, you know, the old edifices like left and right and the way in which democracy was portrayed and offered up to us, it's starting to look thinner and thinner, worn out, And I just think there's no doubting that we are at a pivotal point, because whatever you want to call them, the globalists or the cabal, I think are exposed.
I think we can see them.
I don't know the extent to which they mean to be seen.
Or whether they are simply being revealed for what they are, that the mask has come away.
And next year, I think, is going to be a very interesting year going into, obviously, the US elections.
And by then, by the end of the year, we won't be far away from our own elections in Britain and all of the rest of it.
And I am fascinated by the potential of the globalists having to finally take the mask off and say, Democracy's gone.
You're not having democracy anymore.
You're going to have authoritarianism.
That's just the way it's going to be.
It almost feels as if they're going to have to fish or cut bait.
I'll tell you what.
Sorry to interrupt you, forgive me, but it feels like that is what's happening, because have you noticed how much in American media in particular they are talking about dictatorships and tyrants?
We made a joke the other day, it's almost like Shark Week in the United States, but it's Dictator Month.
Because they're continually saying, if Trump wins in 2024, he will turn America into a dictatorship, he will exile, he will execute, he will ban elections going forward.
And like you say, I feel that authoritarianism has a different hue than we'd ever anticipated.
It's not a progression of the militaristic despotism of the last century.
It's of course, technological dictatorships In the form that is the vision of Bill Gates that we should be fearful of, not the visions of the military leaders of Europe and Russia in the last century.
And I think you're right that 2024 is going to be significant.
Guys, if you're watching us on YouTube, we are going to exclusively broadcast now on Rumble.
We're going to exclusively stream on Rumble.
You'll have to click the link in the description to join me and Neil over there because I'm about to ask him about dictatorship.
Is it Trump that's a dictator or is it the current American administration that is trying to create a dictatorship?
A dictatorship on behalf of globalism?
I'm also going to be asking Neil about what was revealed to us during the coronavirus period.
We are talking specifically about the AstraZeneca jab being labelled defective, Pfizer being
sued by Texas, the lack of authority in the COVID inquiry, and new information that suggests
or even reveals that the US government paid the media to promote vaccines.
All of this, Neil, just because you said then that access to hitherto esoteric information
means that you can't hold together one consensual public sphere.
The public sphere keeps seemingly infinitely splitting.
Another thing that has taken shape.
Well, I've become aware of that.
You know, I'm I'm open about the fact that, you know, I was I was in a state of slumber for who knows how long before I properly started paying attention to all the things I'm paying attention to.
But increasingly, it feels that we're being discouraged from being seen in the same space as certain people.
Which is something that, it feels like something from another, it's medieval.
It's where people were, you know, beyond the pale, people were cast out into outer darkness, into perdition.
Do not be seen, or in the communist era, you know, where people, if you were seen in the same room as someone, it was as though you picked up their contagion of inappropriateness, whether you were interacting with them directly or not.
And for me, I've always anyway wanted At times, the company of and to talk to people with what I suppose you might be describing as outlandish ideas.
You described that X space, that Twitter space, with what a disparate, unlikely fellowship that was, you know, that lineup that you described.
Yeah.
You wouldn't have expected to see them in the same space.
And there they were, all these people, some of whom would, a lot of people would think, oh God, I can't be seen in a photograph with that person because that might affect my career prospects.
Or, you know, it might see me being, you know, debanked or whatever, whatever.
That inducement to stay away from people has the reverse effect on me.
That makes me even more determined.
If I'm being told by the state and the establishment not to be seen with that person, not to talk to that person, that only makes me ten times more desperate to fight.
Why?
What is it that you think is going to happen to me if I talk to them, if I listen to them, if I breathe the same air as them?
And I think that is part of what you're talking about that's going to fall apart.
It didn't hold together for very long, that idea that some people could be exiled, cast into perdition.
I think like me, people are thinking, well, if I'm not supposed to talk to him or her, I'm jolly well going to, because clearly the state thinks I might learn something that they would rather I didn't know.
Or that's the way it affects my psyche.
So many, I think so many things are becoming harder and harder to hold together.
And I think that's what's so difficult for so many people, because we are, we are having to re-evaluate everything, re-evaluate everything.
An old picture has just ceased to serve us anymore.
It's worn through, you know, a bright light's been shone on.
It's like one of those old masters where it turns out that there's another painting behind it because the artist reused the same canvas.
It's as if too many people can see that there's something else there that might even be much more interesting.
And that, I think, in the year ahead, and certainly in the short to medium term future, I think the authoritarians or the would-be authoritarians have no other option than to try and censure and silence and label as misinformation and keep people away from information that they don't want them to read, because the knowledge The resources, the different points of view, the alternative perspectives that people can readily and easily access and share means that that whole edifice just starts to fall away like confetti to reveal something else behind it.
Yes, even if you take a contemporary and contentious example like Andrew Tate, you have to genuinely believe that the moral outrage generated by the establishment is, as they say, motivated by his alleged misogyny and indeed the crimes that he is alleged to have committed.
Where that begins to break down is in my near certainty that there is no moral authority in the establishment anymore.
Indeed the example of Trump's rise being amplified indictment by indictment is a further indication that even if you put aside your own moral judgment of the whatever figures in question, me, Tate, Trump, Tucker, Rogan, you, whoever they eventually determine they don't like today, you have to say, up until now, what is it about their modality that has led you to believe that they care about feminism, that they care about public health, even without tying it to a condemned or exiled individual?
At the advent of the coronavirus pandemic it was my own um now deeply inculcated cynicism skepticism and fear of the establishment that guided me put into a simple uh understanding or um sort of what do i want to say framing like this hold on a minute if this is all about the sanctity of life like we've got to be locked down in our homes take these medications social distance because of the sanctity of life
Is this idea that life is sacred playing out generally across our culture?
Let's look at it in terms of economics and finance and social regulation and poverty and our moral standards.
Just take the issue of homelessness.
If life is sacred, what would be one's attitude to vagrancy?
What would be one's attitude to a whole host of subjects?
So, like you said, you get a kind of intuitive and visceral sense of a kind of glitch that you're being given one set of data and another set of data is deeply felt.
Hang on, these people don't care about me.
And then time passes.
and you learn, ah the AstraZeneca jab, they're suing them.
Pfizer's getting sued. The lockdowns were based on modelling, not empirical science. Pfizer
never clinically trialled for transmission.
They granted indemnity at the beginning. They're not reporting accurately on adverse,
adverse events. They're reporting people have died of Covid when they died.
They're not talking about sudden death.
They're not talking about like eventually your one's intuition is verified.
They don't care about the sanctity of life.
They care about control.
Let's go back and look at Trump again.
Let's go back and look at Tate again.
Let's go back and look at me.
Aha!
Control.
Are any of these figures Virulently anti-establishment in some way.
Now like you know people who watch our channel a lot know that I enjoy Donald Trump's rhetoric and I enjoy his anti-establishment positions but I don't think that without significant systemic change and decentralization and I would say the dissolution of several significant deep state agencies that America can meaningfully change.
But I recognize now that these operations care about control, not about the
sanctity of life. I'm sorry that I saw you wanted to come in Neil, I'm sorry I kept talking. Yes,
no it's, I don't believe that there's any, that the people that are, that have the temerity
to pontificate and to lecture to us about, about you know, the sanctity of life, they are in no
moral position so to do. As you, as you pointed out there, that it's hollow.
The people that we are having to listen to are sock puppet hollow.
There's nothing there.
They don't emanate any credible, any believable belief in anything.
You know, they just have all of the appearance and all of the sound of people who are just working from the contents of today's inbox, from whatever script they're working to.
None of it's coming from a place of belief.
And, of course, what happened during the course of the pandemic?
It's now apparent that there was plenty of advice to the authority figures who laid down the diktats that locking people in their homes was going to be catastrophic.
I mean, like, you needed the wisdom of Solomon to see that anyway.
But there was plenty of strident advice being given behind the scenes saying, don't do this.
You don't lock people down like this.
Don't separate families.
Don't keep children out of school.
Don't do those.
Don't do those things.
Because all of the constant, well, and so it came to pass.
That the consequences have been desperate.
Likewise, there was plenty of information out there in advance that they knew that whatever, that the injectables hadn't been tested to see if they would stop transmission person to person.
There was plenty of suggestion that there were going to be adverse side effects and all of the rest of it.
And the things were rolled out anyway.
So with three years worth of hindsight or two years worth of hindsight, it's plain that there was no real heartfelt concern for people.
I mean, I feel so, so desperate at the moment about what's happening in Israel, Palestine, Gaza.
The fact that whatever horror unfolded on the 7th of October, it then means that other babies have to die, not just by the hundreds, but by the thousands.
I can't countenance that.
I certainly can't condone it.
Anything where someone says other people's babies have to die because... I don't feel ready to hear the second half of that equation.
If it involves killing kids, I just can't accept it.
You can't do that.
I don't care.
Don't take me any further into that.
If that is what it means, the deaths of thousands, and that we're coming into the time of Christmas, where we're very focused on our kids and our family.
And we're supposed to, you know, the dissonance of that, that we celebrate our own children and our own families, while simultaneously knowing what's happening to thousands upon thousands of people in Gaza.
I find it makes me feel physically ill.
The thought of it, and there's an anti-human agenda.
Elon Musk in that space that you talked about, he talked about how he wants to see more people born, that he is pro-creation, that he thinks that the populations of the world are in steep decline and that depopulation, not overpopulation, is going to be the existential crisis that we'll face in the decades and centuries ahead if we don't get out of this tailspin.
And I don't feel that the authority figures have any love of life, that they have any love of our species at all, such that I think that so much of what is being done and will be done in the future will come from that place of thinking, people aren't worth it anyway.
We have voided God from the heart of our systems.
I think that we coasted on materialism and rationalism undergirded by clear progress in areas such as technology and medicine.
We forgot perhaps that we had neglected and allowed to atrophy that aspect of the spirit that makes all other progress notable, valuable and worthwhile anyway.
What you said before, about October the 7th and subsequent action is I suppose
what it would sound like if you had irrefutable principles and values at the core of your
system.
Now of course I think we know what the arguments are that are continually made by people advocating for Israel's right to defend herself and those kind of arguments I'm sure have a great deal of validity if you're personally affected or ideologically or religiously affected.
And I've tried throughout this to maintain a position where I can continue to be useful and I try to simultaneously hold in my mind the people that have been affected from a variety of perspectives when it comes to that issue and I try my best with all issues but what is Irrefutable is that if we don't have anywhere in our institutions the kind of simple principles like actually the sanctity of human life, like the reason that we have to preserve our society is because for us the killing of children is unconscionable.
I suppose if we don't have that within the values that we're purporting to protect or espouse then In a sense, all that's left, and I think we've touched on this before, is a kind of escalating tribalism and, you know, let the devil take the hindmost, because there is no... And so the reason that I try on this channel to continually talk about, you know, to talk about the presence of God, like there is a highest principle,
There are values that are transcendent.
There are things that are worth sacrificing our life for.
There are things that are worth sacrificing revenge for.
And it can't be enough to say that, well, if you found yourself in this position, then you would, you know, if there was an intruder in your home, if you were similarly aggrieved.
I sense that throughout our culture, and in far less incendiary issues than the conflict in the Middle East, we're being invited to pursue our lowest values.
We're being invited to engage with our lower selves.
As an addict in recovery, I cannot help but note how often the media and professions connected to commerce, marketing, advertising, continue to solicit Fear, desire, objectification of the body, or many sacred aspects of life, humor, sexuality, continually are objectified and mobilized in order to, in a sense, desacralize us and promote our animal nature.
Both fear and desire, I would say, being almost atavistic aspects of our Our pre-civilized or pre-evolved or pre-awakened nature.
We need all of that.
We've had whatever it is, 300, 400 years of science, and like a new shiny bobble, you know, our species has been transfixed by science.
All it can do, and I'm not denigrating that or running it down for a moment, it's astonishing what science and then technology have delivered unto us in the recent centuries, but it has also provided an incomplete You know, the thirst that from the soul doth rise, doth ask a drink divine and all that.
There are other questions which science cannot and does not address itself to.
And therefore there are answers that science will not give us.
And with the dark side of great works like Darwin's Origin of Species was that once and for all, The people of the West were invited to think that, well, we're nothing special.
We're not, you know, we're not the work of a creator God.
We're part of a mindless process of evolution.
And we've just kind of happened because we, you know, some of our ancestors had characteristics that gave them an advantage in an ecological niche and so on and so on.
And the dark travelling companion of that undermining of that kind of sanctifying of the human species was eugenics and all that that led to, you know, if humans are nothing but other animals, the accidents of evolution, the accidents of a process, then might we not experiment on them the same way we experiment on any other animals?
And so science Takes as well as gives, unless and until people are simultaneously invited to eat from another menu at the same time, you know, to draw upon other flavours.
Which are different and separate from what science and technology delivers, but we still need them.
You know, man cannot live by bread alone, as it says in Deuteronomy.
You know, we need more.
And my experience over the last two or three years is I've been receiving thousands of letters.
People started sending letters to me without an address on them.
People send letters to, you know, the hairy guy in Stirling, and they come to me, and so on and so on.
And the envelopes are funny, but inside the content is heartfelt and sometimes, many times, has brought me to tears.
And a lot of it's about faith.
At least three quarters of the people writing to me have declared themselves as being people of faith, that it was the faith that enabled them to, say, resist the vaccine products, enabled them to stand up to employers that were threatening them with this, that and the other.
They quote scripture to me.
You talk about the battle between light and dark, good and evil, and the sheer weight of it, the deluge of that kind of thinking from so many people from all over the world has meant that I have kind of renewed my comfort in having those conversations.
I had muted almost a conversation that I instinctively wanted to have.
And to be a part of, and I know that you talk on here about spirituality in all its many forms, everything that that means, and I feel the need of that.
And I think if you don't have that, if that component of life is not welcomed into the daily consciousness, then we are the less.
We are made the less for it, and we will function far more happily if that other aspect of our natural thinking, if room is made for it once more.
Neil, it's so beautiful talking to you, and I could talk to you for another couple of hours if I wanted to make people on my team have a mental breakdown, because we've got to go and record some other content immediately.
Loads of you joining us on lockdown, I'm sorry I didn't get to pass on your questions, I really am, but I'm just, like, there's so many good ones from Judy Denmark, Kay Kottwa, Seakeasy, Jobsdog, Viv & Carlo, Sunpatch Patriots, so many good questions, but our day got a little bit out of control, I do apologise.
Neil, do stay on because I've got something to ask you, but that was beautiful as always.
Thank you so much for bringing both poetry, reflection, gentleness, kindness to a political conversation that sometimes can feel extremely bombastic.
And I think that from bombast we won't get resolution, we won't get progress, we won't get the kind of synthesis that's required for us to move forward.
Thank you for being a gentle contributor to a complex debate, Neil, and thank you for coming on Stay Free today.
Thank you for making space for me.
I look forward to talking to you again, Russell.
If you want to see more from Neil, you can see him on GB News on YouTube.
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