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Jan. 12, 2024 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:03:10
“We Can’t Have A Discussion!” Greg Gutfeld On Tucker Carlson, War & Fox News - Stay Free #283
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you you
brought to you by Pfizer I wrote a road to you, so I'm looking for the sea
In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello there, you Awakening Wonders.
Thank you for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
A very special show because we've got Greg Gutfield, the gut, the Feldman, joining us today.
It's a fantastic conversation you're going to love.
But before that, have you noticed that Donald Trump gets out of a car with a great deal of confidence?
Do you want to hear Donald Trump's views on Wuhan?
And do you want to hear a little more from Rand Paul on Fauci before you get Lost in the process of obfuscation and deception that this House subcommittee that provides, even though they've already admitted that six feet was arbitrary.
If you're watching us on YouTube, we'll be available for the first 15-20 minutes, then we will wade off with our heads held high into the stream of freedom that is Rumble.
And if you want to support our work further, join Locals and become an Awakened Wonder.
That means you get early access to our content.
Indeed, the Greg Gutfield interview's been up there for about a week now.
It's been there.
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It's really beneficial to see our subscription figures raise right up high.
Now let's have a look at Donald Trump.
Getting out of a vehicle with incredible enthusiasm.
USA!
USA! USA! USA!
My hero!
Yes! Yes!
So thank you sir!
Very enthusiastic and optimistic as he departs from that vehicle.
But will he ever be making the journey back to the White House?
He did, as he always does, to compete with the GOP primary debates, one of those town hall things.
And this time he talked about Wuhan.
It's really interesting to watch Trump unpack pandemic information, because I remember at the time he was pretty proud of Operation Warp Speed, wasn't he?
Let me know what you think about that in the chat.
Also, uh, he was participating, obviously, as President of the United States in many of the measures made then, but it is something of, uh, I suppose that is due to Trump's rhetorical and communicative brilliance that somehow he sounds like a person who from the beginning has known that that thing come out of a lab.
Listen to this.
When we had just prior to the China virus coming in if you don't mind I'd like to be accurate as opposed to Covid it is the China virus.
He took a lot of heat for that China stuff but now he's like he should always never have been even criticized for that is what he's basically saying.
Came out of Wuhan.
And I said a long time ago in your show, it came out of Wuhan.
They were saying it came out of caves, bat caves, 2,000 miles away.
It came out of caves, bat caves, bat man, Riddler.
Out of Italy, it came out of France.
No, it came out of Wuhan, the labs.
Labs.
And I don't, and by the way, I don't think it was done, I think it was done out of incompetence.
That's what I think.
I believe that.
He enjoys this theory and then develops it too much.
A scientist went out, said hello to his girlfriend, and that was the end of that.
She died.
Oh, it's my girlfriend out there.
Pop out, say hello to her.
Oh, no, she's dead.
Oh, this is world.
Jesus Christ.
Hey, have you guys been down the wet market lately?
The place stinks.
And then people started dying all over the place.
But who knows?
Who knows?
I can tell you one thing.
I got along with President Xi.
He always drops things like that, doesn't he?
About how he gets on with various leaders, like Rocket Man, Putin.
He's always sort of saying that they're alright people.
It's interesting.
Why do you do that?
I suppose because you want the general feeling that these people are peers and people that you can have diplomatic relationships with.
Obviously, as well, he's about to go on and say he imposed draconian, hard-arse measures on Xi, unlike Biden, who's in his thrall.
And it's difficult to deny that now, when you see Biden's son marching in and out of Congressional hearings at will.
But I took in four hundred billion dollars in tariffs and taxes from China and one of the reasons China's... It's funny that people cheer tariff.
Yes!
That was a damn good tariff.
Not doing so well today is because of those tariffs.
And Biden wants to cut them.
You know, he got paid off by China after all, so he wants to help the people that gave him a lot of money.
But he, you know, Part of Trump's rhetorical brilliance
is that it's such a sort of stream and storm of information.
Biden is corrupt, I've been calling it the China virus for ages, I impose these tariffs, they won't impose tariffs.
It's sort of like when you watch other politicians talking, like when you watch Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley communicates, oh god this is so dry.
Or if you've been on the show, dear Rhonda Sannis, good job in Florida, good job.
Or when you watch Biden as well, like when Biden and Jill Biden doing their New Year's Eve chat on that big screen in Times Square, you think, I like this bloke who's just casually slinging facts about stories and doing impressions.
He's a Manchurian candidate, in a true sense.
He got money from China, he got money from Russia.
You remember the debate where Chris Wallace, how was he doing, I wonder, but Chris Wallace, when I said to Biden, I asked him a question, I said, how come you got $3.5 million from the mayor of Moscow's wife?
And Chris Wallace wouldn't let me ask me, I said, why are you stopping this?
Now it's turned out to be a big deal.
He got $3.5 million from the mayor of Moscow's wife.
I tell you this, we're going to have a success that's so great that I won't have, hopefully, I won't have time for retribution.
There won't be retribution, there'll be success.
In a way, Trump's personal and political success, as we said yesterday, means that politics itself has taken on a different timbre, a different tone, different vocabulary, different style.
Political figures all now are post-Trump political figures.
You've got Vivek, who sort of talks in that kind of hustler, millennial way.
You've got now primary debates where people are turning on one another.
You've got figures like RFK, who a couple of years ago, you just thought, oh no, RFK, the forbidden Kennedy.
Let me know in the chat what you think it is.
One, did Trump change politics?
Two, was he the first beneficiary of a new modern world?
campaign. Trump has changed politics or either he's changed it or he's the first
beneficiary. Let me know in the chat what you think it is.
One, did Trump change politics? Two, was he the first beneficiary of a new
modern world? Let me know. Another significant figure is of course Rand Paul,
one of the only people who for a long time now had questions about Fauci that
needed to be asked.
Let's have a look at him continuing to make valid points about Anthony Fauci, points that are unlikely to be made in that subcommittee.
But the one thing that's consistent about Anthony Fauci is what he says in private is largely true.
What he says in public is largely a lie.
When asked about the masks by a fellow co-worker, Sylvia Burwell, he told her the truth.
He said the masks don't work because the pores are bigger than the virus.
Their own study revealed that about the influenza virus.
But then in public, he wears three masks.
In private, he tells his colleagues, you don't really need to wear one.
It's the same with immunity.
It's the same with the vaccines.
And it's really the same with gain of function.
In private, he said, yes, we're suspicious that the virus was manipulated, looks manipulated, and we know they're doing gain of function in Wuhan.
He describes it.
That's in a private email.
In public, to this day, he still denies that they funded any gain of research, gain of function research in Wuhan.
It's all an entire lie.
Elsewhere, we're analysing that House Committee story in some detail.
It's on Rumble, available, and now the foxiest of foxes, the wiliest member of The Five, Greg Gutfeld, is joining us for an exclusive conversation.
He's on The Five at 5pm ET, Eastern Time, excuse me, on weekdays, and Gutfeld is on at 10pm.
It's being said in this way, I think, Gutfeld.
Gutfeld!
Like that, isn't it?
It's chirpy.
It's orange.
It's cheerful.
It's chirpy.
You can see Gutfeld at 10 p.m.
Eastern Time, weeknights on Fox News.
If you're watching us on YouTube, you have to come and join us in the stream of freedom over on Rumble.
Also, become an Awakened Wonder.
Support our work on Locals.
Support our movement.
You get exclusive content like whole new videos only for our subscribers.
You get early access, especially to live interviews.
Plus, you get to be a part of a movement that is committed Thank you.
My pleasure.
I'm very excited to be here.
I love you, Russell.
on YouTube just a few more seconds now.
See you over there.
See you over there.
Now, please enjoy the conversation between Greg Gutfeld and myself.
Thank you.
Greg, hey, thanks for joining us.
My pleasure.
It's, I'm very excited to be here.
I love you, Russell.
Even though we've had a checkered past, I've always loved you.
It's interesting, isn't it?
We are, in a sense, I would say, very much the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor of the world of punditry, shall we say.
I remember the first time I was aware of you, you were saying, I knew this guy when I lived in the UK, I liked him then, and now he's become...
An asshole, I think.
Or an ass, at least.
And like, I was like, oh, what's going on?
But actually, do you think, what does this indicate?
Has the culture changed?
Because I suppose you would have once been, given that I first saw you on Fox News, associated with, you know, we all know what we associate Fox News with.
Is it libertarianism?
Is it populism?
Is it conservatism?
Is it sort of like right-wing Christianity?
There's a sort of a whole That's a good question.
of ideas around Fox News and then like um and I was a sort of uh exiled from Hollywood uh bratish
show-off or you know online so um and yet somehow we found ourselves agreeing about a lot of issues.
What do you think's changed in the culture Greg to for us to have found this alliance?
That's a good question. I I mean I feel like I was always an oddball in any employment I was
I mean, I was the editor of Men's Health and I was smoking and drinking.
When I was at Maxim, I was engaging in mostly homoerotic humor to subvert the audience.
And at Fox, I wasn't like the other anchors.
And I was, I, I was always interested in you.
I always found you interesting, and I knew there was something there that I identified with, and I think that's why I was so frustrated.
I can't even remember why I was shitting on you.
I can't remember why, but this is the flaw of doing 24-hour cable news.
I probably saw a clip, and I needed to fill a bucket, And so I used that clip and then I go, this guy, who knows what you were talking about.
You probably don't even remember.
I don't remember, but that's what we did.
And then you see it, you go, wow, why is this guy doing it?
And then you came back and then you, you said I had a face like an anus and which I, in some ways is realistic.
We, you know, there's an orifice.
That's everyone's face, Greg.
That's not unique to you.
You don't look like an anus.
And I'd like to take this opportunity to unreservedly apologize to you for being rude.
And I think what the videos were, it was when Bill O'Reilly was the most prominent Fox News voice.
And I used to, I think, do little videos commenting on Bill O'Reilly's content.
But Also, the same way that I've always done with, let's call them Fox-style pundits, over time and while watching them, developing a kind of affection, because I'm old enough to recall that when a family would contain people that were of the left and of the right, and that wouldn't be cause for actual hatred and condemnation.
You wouldn't refer to people who had different political views as a basket of deplorables.
You wouldn't say that half of the population shouldn't be allowed to vote or should be debugged.
You wouldn't escalate a kind of a populist demagogue to the sort of heights of a 20th century military dictator.
Everything has become more incendiary, more conflagratory, I would say.
So it's like then, even 10 years ago, when we were first communicating, albeit through aggressive hit pieces on one another, the world was Less filled with invective and something has become concentrated and amplified, Greg, hasn't it?
Yeah, you know what it is?
I mean, you could trace it back to the phrase political correctness, because that used to be a positive attribute in the sense that I'm morally superior to you and you have to reach this point, but then I keep getting higher and then that turned into Well, the political became so personal, and you were supposed to keep it separate.
Like when you talk about family gatherings, you could have Bill O'Reilly as your uncle, and I could be your nephew, and it didn't really matter, and you would sit at the table, and your Uncle Bill would spout about immigrants, and you would be whatever, and then you would move on to sports.
But in this case, now everything is a moral judgment, I can't sit at the same table with that person.
And then that escalated to, this person is evil and I have to cut that person out of my life.
And I think that's kind of what we're seeing now, especially in this hyper woke thing.
It's like, we cannot have a discussion, period.
And in fact, the discussion lends itself to oppression.
Just merely questioning something is an attack.
But the response, I think there's a really positive thing going on.
The response of mockery and humor is taking that away because even Bill Maher noticed it.
They're no longer funny because of this moral hysteria.
And so all of their targets now, it's flipped.
It's now like the radicals are, I wouldn't say on the right, but libertarian, free thinking, Yeah.
Illiberal.
Maybe that's it.
I don't know.
Well, there's a few phrases that I think are useful around here.
I heard the brilliant comedian Duncan Trussell say once, people have gone from woo to cue.
Like people that were previously kind of into meditation and psychedelics have become very anti-establishment now.
There's this entirely new demographic.
And the other aspect of this is this I would say it's a media construct and potentially a movement with academia.
Certainly that would be the analysis of people who know more than me like Jordan Peterson or Weinstein or whatever.
At least when it comes to the political and media class of this sort of neo-liberal, let's call it woke again just for simplicity's sake, it doesn't seem that authentic.
What I question is how much they actually do care about the rights of people with different types of sexual identity or how much they actually do care about different races, cultural groups, It doesn't make sense because ultimately I think we all know that these kind of apparently neoliberal but self-regarding leftist thinkers and orators are ultimately undergirded by the same financial and corporate interests
As everybody else.
It's still the military-industrial complex.
It's still big pharma.
So whenever you see... That's why it becomes deeply hypocritical in times of war and health crisis.
Because ultimately they will advocate for the interests of the pharmaceutical companies when in a health crisis, notably and obviously the pandemic.
In a war, all of the peace and love language sort of melts away and is replaced by the kind of patriotic language that totally would have belonged to the Republicans in the Iraq war period.
your Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld language of like, you know, it's not patriotic to talk like that.
You're going to allow Putin, Putin will be marching on NATO countries. Like you say,
Greg, everything has flipped. And the part of the reason it's flipped is because there was no
moral, certain moral values there in the bloody first place.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting to see, like, Ukraine's the best example, I think of this,
is to see people that were so anti-war, accuse you of not being a patriot.
it.
If you aren't supporting Ukraine and it's like it's not even our country.
I always look over there and see that it's a fight among relatives.
These are these are countries very and we're and we somehow I think the United States is almost like a next door neighbor or a relative that's egging it on and and for our own reasons for the for to like.
was I can't remember who it was, the Secretary of State saying like,
Yeah.
the good news is we're getting billions of dollars into our country.
And he was talking about the upside of war is that we make profits off war.
No one really has ever said that out loud.
And I think he, I don't even know if he acts, if he even, Anthony, what's his, Blinken.
I don't even know.
Yeah, I don't even know if he knew that he said it at the time, but he says,
hey, we're doing great off this.
Why are you guys complaining?
Well, there's 500,000 people dead, but I want to touch on something you said, and this is going to be a generalization, but I don't care.
I do think the reason why it's, to me, it's inauthentic is I do think, and maybe this is like a Jordan Peterson-y thing, kind of, but there's an empty hole.
When you see a lot of, The really strident voices.
There is something missing in their lives and they fill that bucket up with this kind of purpose, which really isn't a purpose.
It's just where they place their emotional meaning for attention, so they get the attention For whatever screaming they're doing, and I think at the end of the day, they're not really happy people.
They haven't found peace in their lives, in their family life, and it might not even be their fault.
It could be our society has created a weird environment where some people can't find meaning anymore and are lost.
And so they put it in these, well, the false idols of politics.
I mean, politics becomes their religion.
But the only problem with their religion is that there's no forgiveness.
So that's like the woke-ism.
Is a religion without forgiveness.
If you violate the original sin of oppression, your ancestors are guilty.
Whether it's Jews or it's whites in the United States, there's no forgiveness.
So you constantly have to take on the role of oppressor.
It is a religion without confession or without forgiveness.
But I think people treat it as a religion until maybe I hope that like there's so many young people that are into this kind of phase and I can't help but think it's it's filling up something in their lives that isn't being uh filled by other things and I think it's also I think it's relationships I think a lot of these people do not have relationships in their lives people they can talk to because like a friend a friend would tell you
You know, Greg, you shouldn't be sticking, you shouldn't be gluing your hands to a painting, or you shouldn't, why are you blocking traffic of people who are trying to get to work?
Friends would actually say that to you, but it seems like that's missing in people's lives.
You need somebody to tell you you're being an idiot, even though they say, I admire the cause, but you know that in Gaza, they don't care if you're blocking traffic.
I have some thoughts on that, as you might imagine, Greg.
Just because I don't know anything about a subject, that doesn't mean I won't have an opinion on it.
And I think it's a kind of natural end point to obsessive individualism, the kind of culturally immersive narcissism that, of course, by its nature, we must all fall to a degree prey to.
And I would say that part of my own journey is my own wrestling with That kind of locked-in solipsism, as if you're wearing an Oculus or some VR helmet, where you're just obsessed continually with self.
If a culture stripped of God, stripped of community, stripped of patriotism, stripped of failure, of a family, offers you only as the only sort of the optimal experience is self-fulfillment, Fulfill your own sexual identity, your own gender identity, your own cultural or racial identity.
These are all beautiful and noble ideas.
People's sexuality is beautiful.
People's culture is beautiful.
I always take recourse to ethnographics and anthropology and think, well, how did we live for tens of thousands or possibly hundreds of thousands of years?
Small groups of a hundred or two hundred people that You know, would have interacted with other tribal groups, perhaps through trade, perhaps sometimes through warfare.
But there's nothing in our evolution that has prepared us to be confronted with a variety of cultures and being told that that culture is adverse to us.
This is something that was written about extensively, notably by Edward Said, who in his book, what was that called?
Orientalism, pointed out how the West was condemnatory of like eastern culture and the post-ottoman
empire islamic culture that we assumed that our cultural trajectory was better and he as a sort of
a muslim living in the west said well there's different perspectives we're not allowing people to
have a different perspective on reality we've reached the point now where people are happy to say
there's no such thing as god that that that that that that that ration the the ration to sort of mangle
cs Lewis, the rationalism that we use to posit that there can be no God is itself evolved from a godless set of meaningless processes.
A set of random processes led to a consciousness that is able to ascertain that there is no meaning and no purpose in the world.
And I think that when you live in a world where all that matters is the fulfilment of your own desires, the avoidance of your own fears, you end up with these odd cultural movements and artefacts which, as you say, take on the practices, aesthetics and appearance of a religion.
Zeal, evangelism, certainty, but without the important valves and checks that are embedded in religions to ensure that we don't regard one's individual identity as the summit and apex of all potential experience.
All of us are temporal expressions of something greater, and that can be used to mobilize people to fight for a nation.
That can be used to turn people into racists.
That can be used for a whole variety of things.
But what it could be better utilised for is our life should be dedicated to service, and when inevitably, because of biology and because of cultural conditioning, we start thinking the only thing that matters is what Russell wants, this is a time to start employing some principles to get myself out of that illusion.
But no one will do that now, because galvanised I agree.
evangelical, awakened people are a threat to the globalist establishment elites that
are able to implement their goals and agenda because of this disparate and atomized population.
That's my theory, Greg Gutfeld.
I agree.
I would say that I would, younger, when I was younger, I was guilty of this same thinking
for two points.
One, when I was like 15 or 16, my identity was like a band.
I would sit and I would just write The Clash on everything that I owned.
I was a Clash fan.
I needed an identity because I didn't feel I had one.
And then I became a punk rocker.
I clinged on to things That as almost like as identity markers.
And you can kind of see that now, because you can see it as a contagion, at least in the United States, where young women, they were doing studies where they now identify as non-binary, and it's like doubling every year.
And it becomes like a costume because they are rejecting whatever was there before.
There's a theory from G.K.
Chesterton, I think it's called The Fence, Uh, theory.
It's like don't tear down a fence until you know why it was there in the first place.
And I think what we're seeing with this kind of regressive progressivism is we're tearing down all these fences without ever understanding why they were necessary.
So it was easy as a 17 year old to make fun of religion.
To make fun of your relatives or any kind of traditional stuff was a joke.
What was I replacing it with?
I was too young.
I didn't have any wisdom, but I had the ability to denigrate things that were there before.
And of course, everything before was imperfect.
We know that the United States was a melting pot, but it also had racist elements to it.
Obviously, a legacy of slavery.
But the melting pot is way superior to this potpourri of identities.
The melting pot was about people who were different coming together and cooperating and communicating.
Now we have this thing where, no, you can't have a melting pot.
We have to be separate.
And the idea of cooperation and assimilation means that you're giving in to the oppressor.
Like, even trusting somebody who's trying to help you is seen as oppression.
I mean, that is a new thing that I'm seeing.
Like, you know, you can't trust a white person because they're white.
And it's like, you do realize that, you know, white people, like anybody else, are here to help.
Generally, it's hard to find anybody.
I mean, most people just want to help.
But we're saying that that's not There's an underlying oppression going on.
And that's dividing us.
And I think the melting pot idea is under threat.
And it kind of scares me, because that's the only thing that really holds us together, is the idea of communication, cooperation, the idea of helping others.
And what you were talking about, too, is kind of like The most dangerous thing is one's ego, feeding that ego.
And I mean, I was one of those people.
And the moment you let go of that, it's probably the most freeing thing anybody can do in their lives, is to let go of that ego and look outward.
And all of a sudden, these identity markers kind of float away.
And you suddenly see that everybody is basically in the same boat.
And that's a, that's a good thing.
And then the next step is service, being able to help people.
I sound very new agey, but it's kind of like, it's not new agey.
It's the, it's just kind of what we had before, but I don't know.
I'll stop.
Yes, Greg.
I suppose that only a maniac would deny that there was not a vast project of colonialism and imperialism that exploited, killed, enslaved hundreds of thousands, millions, millions of people.
But similarly, only a lunatic or a fool would believe that the best way to navigate and placate the legacy of that would be through globalist conglomerates and global organizations and corporations.
The utilization That's quite enough out of you, Greg.
In order to bring you conversations of this quality and points of view of this magnitude, we need powerful partners like these.
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Okay, let's get back into the story.
Now Greg, pivot slightly.
One of the sort of great cultural moments of the last few years, which I think has shown us how legacy media and independent media are rubbing against one another And affecting one another has been Tucker Carlson's departure from the Fox network and his establishment of his own news network, or his own channel certainly, and his own relationship with X and social media.
As a person that works within Fox, I saw and we talked about the bit, and that's when I called you in fact Greg, When you said about like, you know, I have two words for you, Tucker Carlson, you know, like when, you know, like the corporate interests will censor voices that are anti-war or anti-pharma or, you know, like antithetical to their interests.
Tell me now what you think Tucker Carlson's time at Fox exemplifies and what his departure from Fox means without getting yourself in trouble because I realize you've got a job.
Yeah.
What I was referring to, and it's common knowledge and he's talked about it, is that galvanizing advertisers against you over time is meant to destroy you.
It's meant to censor you.
And I think that there was This was building and building and it was, you know, Media Matters and other groups had targeted him.
And that's where I said, like, you know, I think when I was talking about two words, I was talking about that's what happened to Tucker.
Over time, you know, they just wore it down and for him to survive and everybody who is, I would say, interesting, Has a an original point of view for them to survive.
It has to be untethered from advertising.
It has to be because advertisers are now the sensors and they're not they're not they're not brave.
I think this goes back to what we were talking about, this kind of the woke-ism.
They embraced the woke-ism kind of as a Trojan horse to protect themselves from their profit-making, their rent-seeking.
They can point to the fact that, look, we have DEI, we have equity hires, we're good, we have these special days in our company.
But meanwhile, they're doing exactly what a corporation does, which is the bottom line, to grow.
Their influence and their power.
I think, and I think Tucker has said this, so it's not just my opinion.
It wasn't about Fox.
Fox never told him what he couldn't say.
But you could tell from the advertising and the pressure on him that that was, in my opinion, The leading pressure on on his exit but I don't have proof that they you know there was a meeting I just like he to this day still doesn't know and but I do think that like Fox never told him he couldn't say anything no one's ever told me I can't say anything for example when I said his name people thought oh my god oh my god I never
They were like, whatever, that's what you can do.
That's why we have you here.
And I think I made it clear that it was more about this pressure from advertisers.
And I knew this in magazines, you know, that advertisers hate The customer, which is so strange.
They really hate the customer.
They think you're stupid.
They don't want to be near the editorial that the customer likes because somehow we're Neanderthals.
And that was true in when I was at Maxim.
It was true when I was at Men's Health.
The stuff that sold the magazine Advertisers hated.
So you ended up with magazines like GQ or Esquire, which nobody read, but were this thick, filled with advertising, because that's what it was.
And I think you see that in broadcasting, that those with the most advertising tend to have the emptiest editorial.
There's no perspective.
There's nothing that like interests you.
And once you get interesting or you dare to get outside this circle, then it flips on you and then they come after you.
And I think that's why, so Russell, Tucker going and creating his own network, what you are doing on Rumble, what Dave Rubin is doing, what Joe Rogan is doing, what the Weinsteins are doing, that's like creating this whole new world where people can go and create their own thing, get their own subscriber base and make a living in a career without having to think about upsetting a soap company, you know, or a shoe company.
Meanwhile, the shoe company is having shoes made by, you know, 12 year olds, but they're lecturing you on diversity and equity, but who's making their, their shoes, you know, or drug companies.
You know, the drug companies, you know, why are they advertising?
They're advertising to exert some kind of pressure.
Sometimes it's weird.
I don't know if you see these drug companies.
It's focusing on like one drug that like nobody has ever heard of or used, but they're still advertising.
Do you ever notice that?
Like some of these drugs, you're like, are there really a lot of schizophrenics?
Like, you know, I mean, don't do a drug for like a very specific kind.
I'm like going, are they, is a schizophrenic watching this show and going, ah, I don't know if that's the case.
I just think it's there as a presence to say, hey, we're here.
We're here just a reminder, you know?
Yeah, it's extraordinary the way those models must function for there to be a constant ambient presence.
I understand the cable news is, and I'll check the figure at some point, is 70% funded by Pfizer, not even Big Pharma.
Pfizer specifically funds, I believe, 70% of cable news.
And we're all familiar with that package where it's like sponsored by Pfizer.
And you see that sort of Anderson Cooper and like a variety of shows that are sort of covered.
And yes, you're right that their pressure can't be the sort of just the bespoke amplification
of a certain product.
It's not telling a marketplace, hey, if your skin is schizophrenic,
this is available for you.
You know, that's no longer about utility.
It's become somehow more immersive than that.
We were just doing a piece on Google buying up real estate and creating company towns now, a project that's been tried before with Disney and, curiously, chocolate companies.
The power of the corporation is becoming deeply immersive.
Greg, within that, you touched upon something while talking about Tucker and talking about the relationship between advertisers and broadcasters, which is fundamentally the dynamic that is shifting with the emergence of independent media, that I think is significant, that both the marketing class and the professional journalist class, I might say, hate ordinary people.
They hate their audience.
And I feel this antipathy, and I spoke to Greenwald about it, that other great GG in the public space, Glenn Greenwald.
And he said that, you know, that the establishment now is no longer sort of masking its disdain for ordinary people.
That they sense that through media control, through censorship laws, through increasing authoritarianism justified by crisis, they don't need to be like a Rockefeller tossing dollar bills out of a passing limo to maintain some plutocrat mystique and affability with ordinary people.
Now they're just like we are going to have so much power you know after the next set of wars or the next pandemic or whatever the next thing's going to be that legitimizes more authoritarianism that there's no need for to maintain good public relations.
I think too that You know, as a person that's been, like, with what's happened to me recently and sort of over the past few years, as you sort of gently migrate out of, like, oh, you know, like, you know, like, there comes a point where I feel, oh, I ain't going on those talk shows no more.
I'm not going, I'm not gonna be doing movies anymore.
And like you gain, I gained in confidence and started to criticise war, started to criticise pharma, started to attack more and more, recognising I have direct access to an audience.
And one of the things I've noticed, having been the subject to incredible attacks and what seemed to me to be a kawaii, coordinated media attack, where separate media companies explicitly work together over several years to Generate anonymized complaints and allegations and then there was a sort of a global two-week period where like it was very very concentrated and it seemed to me at least very deliberate to like to be able to observe oh wow there's a point where they will just attack you and shut you down that there is that there's an attempt to do that and one of the things I also have noticed is that the media is not the public.
That's one of the things they're terrified of, is that they can create this sort of layer of hate and bombast and attack, and then you go out and everyone's like, Hey, how's it going?
Like people like that's not, yeah, it's not, they don't have the control that they once had.
And I think that's what's terrifying them.
You could be in a news cycle for 48 hours.
And in your brain think, I can't go outside.
Yeah.
And then you go outside, and maybe you might casually mention it to somebody, and they have no idea what you're talking about.
Like, don't, I will say something on the five, and it will explode, and then I, and then, you know, my people at work will be like, oh my god, you see what's, and then, but if you go anywhere, nobody knows what you're talking about.
Think about what happened to you, but think about I hate to use the word weaponization because it's overused, but the weaponization of wokeism has become journalism.
So it's like, so-and-so said this, so-and-so did this in the past becomes investigative journalism.
Whereas before, like you had the Woodwards and the Bernsteins.
There are a few people now, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Michael Schellenberger.
These are guys that are actually doing real journalism.
But they're being ignored by the conventional mainstream media, which has decided that the weaponized woke angle, so-and-so said this about immigration, ergo racist, or any, pick any, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and that, and it's such an easy story to write.
It's like, you can, you can take a dartboard, Or actually you could take a grid and on one side you can go climate, economics, politics, fashion, food, comedy, and then on this other grid you could have race, racism, homophobia, feminism, and then you could throw a dart.
And this is what journalists do and they find a cross-section clothing, is transphobic and they had that story for that day and then they'll go they'll do a little search they'll find some stuff and then they write it they don't have to call anybody they don't have to do any like they don't have to be like a reporter and go out and actually talk to somebody with a notebook this is now what journalism has become and so what happens is how does that end up being
Dangerous.
They focus it not on just like people like you, but just regular people, the people they hate.
So if somebody on Twitter, some nobody, a plumber decides he's pro-Trump, Then somebody will pick up that tweet, go, does American plumbing supply realize that Joe Stevens actually said, make America great again, and they CC the company.
And then that guy gets swarmed or this bakery had a, you know, a menorah.
I don't know.
They were like, they, they like focus on these things.
And then they, what they do is they amplify it.
And so, The regular people that they despise learns never to touch that stove again.
And that's the self censorship.
And I'm just going to go back to my life.
Why did I go online?
Why did I say that?
I'm just going to shut up.
So the media has become an engine of censorship on behalf of whoever They're working for.
And also it becomes their work too.
They feel like when they get a scalp, it's actually enriching to them.
There are a lot like the Daily Beast.
These are companies where they That's all they do all day, is they watch TV, or they watch podcasts, and then they clip, and they put it out there, and they act as though that is journalism.
And media analysis is a form of journalism, but at least you should do the work.
It's not just clipping, but it's weaponized wokeism to shut people up.
And it's disguised, however, as journalism when it's not.
I heard the phrase vendetta journalism recently applied to I think it might have been the case between the the royal family and the tabloids of 10 years ago or so in my country here and it's also clear that You know, you sort of talked about Bernstein and Woodward, that there's very little journalism where, for example, you can watch the reporting in the pandemic, the propaganda that accompanied the advent and release of the vaccines, the censorship around legitimate questions, the shaming of people from whatever community.
Because there are no values at the core of it, You have to watch them adjust as they go.
Oh, people aren't taking vaccines.
Those people are not participating.
Those people don't care about society.
Then the information comes out.
It's a high incidence of African Americans that won't take it.
Uh, shit.
Okay.
Oh, no.
How are we going to pivot?
This doesn't make sense.
you know, like, you know, various conflicts around the world that don't align entirely
with this sort of odd, sort of ultra-anti-nature. This, I guess, what part of it is, part of this
kind of curious death cult that's built, which is not a new thing, apocaly... you know, in a,
you know, what is an apocalyptic, like, apocalyptic preaching? The end is nigh,
the world is coming to an end, the end is nigh.
That is a sort of a pretty common trope, certainly in the last couple of thousand years.
Indeed, one could argue that even within, you know, Christianity has the apocalypse, the rapture, or many religions appear to have this sort of end time as part of their, you know, part of the paradigm.
But when there is, like, all of those things tend to point, A journey of self-evaluation, a recognition that the pursuit of animalism and animal desires cannot of itself form your way of life.
And I would say that that is precisely at the core of modern neoliberalism.
The fulfillment of your desires, the avoidance of your fears and the potential to be threatened is your raison d'etre.
That is what it is.
You are worth it if you want to Be this type of person, you should be that type of person.
And these are things that I can easily agree to with a wave of a hand.
Of course, I agree with individual liberty, whether it's the issues that define the right or the issues that define the left, because I agree with individual liberty.
But I don't think that that is the apex of the human experience, because I've tried it.
That's why, because I've tried it.
I've tried.
Drink as much as you can, take as many drugs as you can, sleep with as many people who want to sleep with you as possible.
I've tried these things.
And indeed, when part of the message becomes, these things won't work for you, find a higher purpose, knowing that you will never be able to live it perfectly because you are still subject to the same kind of shackles that any human being is, that's when you start to become a threat.
Yeah, and not to get too... Well, I've noticed when people go through that journey and come out of it, they're much less judgmental politically, and they're more resistant to getting involved in this prison of two ideas, whether it's about climate or Any kind of like issue where you think there are two sides and you have to get into one pocket or this one and that's it.
For some, you know, it's kind of a superpower.
I've noticed, like I noticed this with Tucker, I noticed it with you and there are other people, it's kind of like the floating above this or to the outside of it and can see, What this is, what this actually is, which is a diversion from actually solving the bigger problem.
And I mean, I was in that prison of two ideas.
A good example would be you're talking about apocalypse, the apocalyptic ideologies, like Climate change, because of the apocalyptic warnings, created the prison of two ideas.
I was on the other side, that this was all bogus and a hoax.
But that's not necessarily the best place to be, because you should care about the environment.
You should worry about these things.
There is evidence that there are changes going on.
But I got into my prison because the other prison was so apocalyptic.
I couldn't buy into these people telling me that I can no longer use this or that because we're all going to die in 12 years, in 15 years.
So those apocalyptic visions create or predictions create this kind of opposite side and it It's like the death of progress.
That's why I kind of like, like RFK has said some things that sounded apocalyptic, but I think he's changed.
I think that when I listen to him, he's a true environmentalist without being reliant on climate, on like, inaccurate climate models.
He just talks about the stuff that he knows, that he's been through, you know, he's been, you know, from the beginning and environmental.
He's somebody I can listen to and he listens to me.
I mean, he listens to people like me.
He doesn't brand me.
Like there were people that used to say that if you were skeptic, if you were a climate skeptic, remember that you would use that phrase, a climate skeptic, You should be imprisoned.
Or a climate denier, which would put you in the same realm as a Holocaust denier.
Those were the phrases they used, and that would just create a complete negative reaction.
But I think now we're getting to a place where I mean, there's a healthy meeting of the minds, where on the right, people are talking about the environment seriously, and on the left, there are people, hopefully, saying, you're right.
These climate models have been wrong, but there's still something going on here.
But I think that that's that, you know, that has always been the problem.
But the superpower is stepping out of that.
And I think that's what you were getting at.
It's like you somehow got out of that and you can look down at it or look, I don't want to say down at it, but look at it from a side and see how wasteful this prison is, this prison of two ideas is.
Yes, and there's a lot of things I'd love to respond to.
One is like where you said that there was sort of an attempt to criminalise climate denying and there was an attempt to criminalise not taking the vaccine.
There are ongoing attempts to criminalise Uh, speech, you know, through the ideas of hate speech.
In some territories, these are extremely amorphous and oddly util laws.
Like in Ireland, if they suspect you have hate speech material on your phone, the police will be able to come into your house and take your devices.
That's authoritarianism.
Now, whether it's, you know, vaccines, in the event that vaccines were stopping transmission and were effective, of course, the strong advocacy for those medications would be legitimate.
But what one starts to see is the reason behind the reason they're giving you.
They might be giving you, we have to do something to protect the planet.
And as you say, that is not a partisan issue, whether or not we love the Earth that we live on.
If you are the most MAGA cap wearing, let's shoot some deer and some ducks and some go crazy honey. You love the
planet or if you are a vegan Birkenstock wearing individual you'd still love the
planet. The idea of this being politicized and partisan is extraordinary and
what's happening because I think of the quick response time and rapid
reaction of independent In real time, you're starting to see people say, hold on a minute, this Ukrainian war, it doesn't make sense because in 2014 there was a coup and NATO did renege on certainly verbal deals
Between the Soviet Union and US or in climate change.
How come all of these laws are penalizing ordinary people and seem designed to create 15-minute cities and restrictions on people's movement?
How come these vaccines seem to be tied to ID cards and being able to like to normalize the idea the vaccinated should be unvaccinated should be shamed.
They shouldn't be allowed into hospitals.
They should be in prison.
They shouldn't get treatment.
They should like they're starting to normalize the criminalization of sections of the population.
You marry that to the idea But the MAGA movement, which at the last election was pretty near 50% one side or the other of the entire electorate, was like a criminalized class or a demonized class.
You're starting to use the kind of language that we all like, you know, which was reprehensible in my view around like, you know, all these people are all terrorists when talking about like entire nations of people.
You're seeing it applied to domestic classes.
Now, that's not a coincidence because we now know that agencies that were dedicated to legitimizing the pursuit of certain foreign interests that didn't go well, for example, in Iraq, are now turned in on domestic populations.
That's not just in your country, but in mine.
There are units, like Counter-Terror became Counter-Covid.
This is stuff we've done content on.
It's observable.
So if you can criminalise an entire population, of course you have to increase authoritarianism.
And that's the goal.
So I guess one of my questions, as well as whatever responses you want to have, is what kind of tyranny and dictatorship do you most fear?
The populism of Trump, which legacy media are spending a lot of time, we called it Dictator Month, like it was Shark Week.
Every CNN or MSNBC show is Trump's good like Mussolini, Trump's like Mao.
Or is it a kind of more technological dictatorship?
A kind of technocratic cadre of an aristocratic class that are telling you this is the reason we have to control you.
This is the reason you have to take these medications.
This is the reason you have to stay in your house.
What form of dictatorship is most likely?
I know you've got a lot to respond to there, Greg.
That's a lot.
Obviously, for me, it would be the latter.
When you see the media going after Trump, there's not a shred of evidence, because they have four years to look back on.
He was, in my opinion, the most transparent politician.
You knew everything about him.
He never had an unspoken thought.
Everything that was going through his head, he would say something and then the media would pick it apart.
They would also distort it.
But, you know, it's like I had Greenwald on my show in which I apologized to him for what you were getting at, which was he was warning That the kind of focusing on the entire groups of people being terrorists was going to one day be turned on Americans themselves.
And I remember laughing at that, and I was obviously wrong.
And I had to go like, Jesus Christ, this just came true in my lifetime.
I'm watching it.
The criminalization of people for supporting a politician, for not getting a vaccine, People like rooting for the death of people, or when they die, they say, ha, ha, ha, he didn't get the vax, you know.
However, if anybody had done that about a different behavior that caused their death, oh, you'd be like, if you happen to be a criminal who died, that, and you said, well, you know, you live the life, you would be attacked, but, but if you didn't get the vax, you know, and also the, you talked about speech.
I've noticed the description of hate speech got so big and then it kind of changed into misinformation.
Now it's misinformation and I love how they say misinformation and disinformation and then they like to go on what the difference is and it's just like basically what they're saying is if you disagree with us, That's misinformation.
If your counterpoint is disinformation, so that's actually now the same as hate speech.
You can be criminalized.
You should be banned or blocked from social media.
This is why I like what Tucker, what Elon did with X, With the community notes is exactly what you're talking about.
When the independent media comes back and says, wait, hold on a second.
Now we have that almost in real time.
You'll have somebody like Biden come on and say something that's completely false or whoever's posting for him.
And then within minutes, community notes comes up and just says, nope, you're wrong.
And it took that, it took the power away from their misinformation.
I'm fine with their misinformation.
I'm fine with their disinformation.
I don't want to ban it, but Don't call us out on the same thing when we call you out.
And to your point, everything is now political.
Your health is political.
They politicized the environment.
These are all things that we should agree with.
They politicized crime.
It should be, if you're a victim of crime, that should be basically the primary focus.
But when you talk about a victim of crime, and it could be a woman, it could be an Asian woman, they go, well, yeah, but you look at the criminal, look at society, we have to deal with this, the prisons are oppressive, bail, the guy, you know, well, the guy was out on bail when he pushed the woman in front of the subway, and they go, well, that, Suddenly that becomes a political thing.
And now when you have crime going up in specific cities, that suddenly becomes a political issue.
And you have to defy your own common sense.
You have politicians that know it's unsafe in DC, but they can't talk about it because now it's a political issue.
Thank you so much for joining us today on Stay Free with Russell Brand.
You can watch Greg on The Five at 5pm ET on weekdays, and for Gutfeld, you can join him at 10pm ET.
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