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Jan. 17, 2024 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:13:55
American Journalist MURDERED In Ukraine Jail?! What The F*CK Is Going On?! - Stay Free #286
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In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello there, you Awakening Wonders.
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
We've got Rav Arora coming on the show to talk about extraordinary government-funded experimentation that seem to be undertaken in order to prevent the effectiveness of new substances becoming known.
Also, given that this is an independent media organisation, an independent movement, Well, we need your support.
Remember, you can become an Awakened Wonder by pressing the red button and joining our movement, supporting our endeavour, becoming part of what we're trying to create together, genuine opposition to the corruption that threatens to immerse us all, particularly now, is it disease X o'clock?
We're going to be talking about Julian Assange and his potential freedom.
There's a hearing coming up.
And Gonzalo Lira, who, as he predicted, died in jail. Even though your president Joe Biden said
that journalists and a free press were fundamental to American democracy or American
republicanism, call it what you want.
I mean your individual and correct collective freedom. That's what I'm interested in. Remember,
if you're watching this on YouTube, we'll be available on that platform for the first
15 minutes on YouTube, then we'll be exclusively available on the Rumble stream. Now, let's
have a look at Joe Biden making his way through a bike shop in a state of near bafflement.
I'm working the shoreline.
This is Morgan Sherwin and Sam.
Personally I'm beyond the point of derision now and I'm into the area of concern.
Joe Biden there doesn't look like he understands what's being explained to him.
I, as a person who loves the Lord, who considers it my personal duty to participate somehow as best I can within my limitations in our mutual awakening and changing the world, think it can't be right to lead this fella through a bike shop pointing at helmets that he thinks potentially could be people.
This is Morgan Sherwin and Sam Cerruti.
They're our team members here.
They help us, they help us, you know, service themselves.
Now I suppose with the establishment media continuing to support the effectiveness of
Biden's presidency it remains vital that we have a free press.
Even Biden himself at the famous White House press dinner said that it was absolutely vital that journalists and independent journalism in particular must be protected at all costs.
Our message is this.
Journalism is not a crime.
As long as they are American hostages that are supportive of the Biden God.
Is it okay to call it a regime or are we still calling it an administration?
change abroad. As long as they are American hostages that are supportive of the Biden God.
Is it okay to call it a regime or are we still calling it an administration? Let me know in the
chat because Gonzalo Lira was a journalist that was very critical of Zelensky and critical of
the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict and he's recently died in prison as he himself predicted.
Here's Tucker Carlson's response to that.
Gonzalo Lira Sr, his father, says his son has died at 55 in a Ukrainian prison where he's being held for the crime of criticising the Zelensky and Biden governments.
Gonzalo Lira was an American citizen but the Biden administration clearly supported his imprisonment and torture.
Several weeks ago we spoke to his father who predicted his son would be killed.
His son is now dead.
Fellow Rumble host Glenn Greenwald posted on it.
Neither Biden nor his top officials ever once uttered a word about Gonzalo Lira despite his being an American imprisoned by Ukraine for speaking out and despite the most unhinged Ukrainians threatening his life.
I suppose what he's becoming increasingly difficult to ignore ...is that when principles such as freedom, freedom of speech, democracy, autonomy, challenging tyranny are spoken about, it's highly conditional, i.e.
journalism that amplifies and normalizes the agenda of the powerful will be supported, will be funded, will be protected.
If it's critical, it won't be.
Here's Gonzalo Lira's last statement where he plainly had an inkling that his life was in danger.
The start of the genesis of this whole situation is because I had an opinion that went against the narrative.
And that's why I went to prison.
And that's why, if I'm arrested again, I will die in prison.
So I ask you, please, as many people as possible, The American State Department knows exactly who I am and the situation I'm currently involved in.
And they know the fate that awaits me.
They know it.
You know, they have that saying that, uh, that I...
I forget the wording exactly.
I'm a little stressed out, as you can imagine.
But they have that saying that people are fundamentally good, but for evil to triumph, all you need is the indifference of good people.
May God rest the soul of Gonzalo Lira, a journalist who, as he predicted, died while detained, whose rights, it seems to me, were not respected, considered or prioritised because his views and opinions were oppositional to the preferred state narrative.
An American journalist has died in conditions and circumstances that might be thought of as suspicious.
Would that have happened if he'd been saying, continue to fund this war in Ukraine.
BlackRock should be able to come in and set up digital currencies.
NATO impingement on former Soviet territories has not contributed to the escalation of this war.
And if any of you doubt the danger of speaking truth to power, then consider Julian Assange who is still in Belmarsh prison, but there is at least some good news.
He is getting a public hearing on the 20th and 21st of February.
The two-day hearing may be the final chance for Assange to prevent his extradition to the United States, if extradited.
Julian Assange faces a sentence of 175 years, fundamentally for exposing war crimes committed by the United States in the Afghan and Iraq wars.
Visit freeassange.org for more information and to support Julian and his family.
The only person in the political sphere that has openly said he will pardon Julian Assange, and of course, additionally, Edward Snowden, is Bobby Kennedy Jr., RFK.
Let's have a look at how he's polling.
As part of that campaign, I'm going to give a civics lesson to the American public by pardoning Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
My first day in office.
In the same day, I'm going to sign an executive order ordering all federal employees, including the FBI and the CIA, to refrain from colluding or communicating with media or social media companies to censor Are these popular ideas?
Are these the kind of ideas that you would support?
Would you like to hear Donald Trump saying that Assange should be pardoned?
That he would pardon Assange or Snowden?
Extraordinary.
Let's have a look at RFK's polling.
Seems like he's doing extraordinarily well, but is it possible for an independent candidate to rise in a famous two-party, uniparty system?
Surely now, in the era of anti-globalism, in the era of anti-establishment politics, which I suppose is what is fueling much of Trump's ascent.
The more anti-establishment he's regarded, certainly the establishment hate him, the more he maintains or even grows his popularity.
But there are numerous ways in which the establishment might be challenged.
Have a look at this.
in Germany this movement continues to gain momentum as firefighters join farmers in protesting.
If working people across the world begin to unite against the establishment it will be
impossible to resist significant change.
Unified but decentralised.
Sovereignty of the individual, sacrosanct.
Ability to run communities, absolutely vital.
Power as close as possible to those affected by it.
An end to globalisation.
An end to the kind of legislation proposed in the WHO treaty.
An end to the endeavours and agenda of Davos.
New empowerment respectful of individuals and indeed cultures.
An end to the nihilistic and unwinnable culture wars.
Mutual respect For the myriad ways in which human beings might live together, an end to the leviathans surging upwards from the depths, a beheading of the behemoth that is attempting to control all civic life and indeed consciousness itself.
Meanwhile, in Italy, this nun don't seem very happy about this photo shoot.
Have a look at this.
Now, if you're watching us on YouTube, you can see my interview with Rav Arora.
You'll be familiar with Rav because he's reported extensively on, for example, state funding of COVID-19 propaganda.
In addition to that, he has some wonderful stories that he's sharing with us first and exclusive on some state-funded, apparently Ill-intentioned clinical trials that appear to have been influenced by the desire to support the ongoing prescribing of SSRIs.
Do you remember there was a time when we didn't trust the pharmaceutical industry before they became great heroes in around 2019, 2020, 2021.
If you're watching us on YouTube, we cannot report on this story Within the guidelines that YouTube subject themselves for.
So join us over there now.
Thank you for staying with us on Rumble.
If you're joining us for the first time from YouTube, welcome.
If you are an awakened wonder, if you're supporting our community, thank you.
Joining me today is, as I've just said, Rab Aurora.
Rab is an independent journalist based in Vancouver, writing on a wide range of topics, including violent crime.
MDMA therapy, which we're talking about today, identity politics and vaccine mandates.
You can find his work at Illusion of Consensus or go to illusionconsensus.com.
Those links are available.
Rav, thank you for joining us.
Thanks Russell and great to see the millions of awakening wonders yet again.
The way this movement grows, it seems that as the establishment doubles down on its mission
to destroy independent thought and the possibility of independent opposition, people continue
to tenaciously grip onto deeper truths that are very empowering.
Now, you're obviously interested in who isn't the nature of consciousness, and you've bought us an exclusive story prior to publishing it, even on your own sub-stack, and you are one of the best investigative Young, up-and-coming journalists out there, so we're very excited about this story.
We talk a lot about psychedelics and psychedelic therapy, and indeed, awakening is very significant in our community.
Can you tell us exactly what this story is, what the therapies are that it pertains to, and how it intersects with some of the issues we are already interested in?
Like, for example, the kind of control that's exercised by the pharmaceutical industry and their kind of territorialism when it comes to IP.
Yeah, so I came into contact with Dr. Joseph Freeman, who authored this incredibly compelling and striking study on the mRNA vaccines being associated with a 1 in 800 serious adverse event rate.
I know you've talked about that study before on your show, Russell, you might recall.
Yeah, so on our podcast, The Illusion of Consensus on Substack, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was interviewing Freeman and Freeman just mentioned like early on, I was doing studies on MDMA specifically, known as the pathogen of psychedelics, the heart opener, a drug used for PTSD, individuals with severe trauma.
It's a great compound shown in the studies to go through and process severe traumas and difficult emotions.
He mentioned he had worked with this drug and then I reached out to him and I said, oh, that's interesting.
Psychedelic research is something that I'm interested in as someone who is intrigued by awakening consciousness and healing mental health issues, etc.
A person, I would say, who's struggled with mental health issues and knows a lot of individuals struggling with trauma, depression, PTSD, etc.
And then when I spoke to him, he started telling me the story that he's never told before, and that became this exclusive piece which I'm very excited to tell you guys about, which is how in Dr. Freeman's early research in the early 2000s, the early aughts, He was part of three peer-reviewed studies focused on giving MDMA to rats in rat studies.
And essentially, the nutshell is that, I guess, unsurprisingly, given the war on drugs, the war on psychedelics, and the politicized mission to demonize this specific class of drugs, the studies were done in a way where there was a very clear political and scientific narrative to amplify the negative findings associated with MDMA in these studies and to obscure or downplay or sort of defocus any positive findings.
And remember, these studies were NIH-funded, specifically NIDA-funded, the National Institute of Drug Abuse.
And Freeman tells me a story about how in three of these studies, one study in which they found That actually adolescent mice were more resistant to MDMA neurotoxicity than adults.
And they found that this was a very striking finding because they would think that maybe in the younger mice, there would be more potential neurotoxicity, which is also this kind of big myth that has led to the criminalization and suppression of MDMA is this idea that it's neurotoxic, which is based on some other In some cases, fraudulent or misleading studies, not the ones that Freeman was part of, but some other ones as well.
It turns out MDMA is not neurotoxic in the doses given in any kind of therapeutic range.
But this particular finding about adolescence and MDMA, about it being more safe than using adults, this finding was the most interesting finding, but Freeman was not able to focus on it.
Because of the NIDA funding against what they're exactly looking for.
They were giving repeated doses of MDMA in adolescents and as well as another dose when the rats were in adulthood.
And they found that repeated doses of MDMA in adolescents actually prevented neurotoxicity from MDMA in adulthood.
And this was a very striking finding again that went against kind of the narrative.
But they, Freyman told me, they deliberately didn't emphasize this in the study because, remember, the studies were designed and conducted and pushed in a certain way to demonize psychedelics and to show particularly negative findings and not actually talk about any potential benefits.
And so here you have this kind of narrative Seeping into or contaminating the science, which is exactly the opposite, Russell, of how we want science to be.
We want science to be about, let's do a study, let's find out what happens, right?
Let's see the harms and the benefits and weigh them.
But here, these government-funded studies were explicitly conducted in a manner to demonize a class of drugs that had these political and Ideological and kind of weird spiritual associations that the government wanted to make illegal and to discourage individuals from taking.
And so here you see ideology and politics trumping objectivity and the scientific method.
Another example, and thank you for sharing this with us exclusively and primarily, of how the claims of objectivity of science can be thwarted or at least compromised, as you say, by ideology.
Your claim is that the NIADH only even undertook These trials in order to discredit these substances.
That's the claim.
The claim is based on the amplification of negative findings and not correctly covering or conveying positive findings.
Is that right?
Yes, yeah.
And this has since been confirmed actually by someone, Dr. Robert Malone.
He came across the piece and we were communicating over the weekend and his wife was part of some early research in the 80s and 90s and she actually confirmed this.
And this is going to be another follow-up piece that's going to be available on the Illusion of Consensus Substack tomorrow or the day after.
And she confirmed this exact same thing and said at that time When she was not part of MDMA research but in the drug research area, she was told and it was very clear to her that if, for instance, she used the example of marijuana, if they found some positive effect with marijuana, which is a drug being studied, funded to study by the NIDA, the government agency,
That would essentially be career suicide.
Like, you couldn't do that.
If you were funded to study a particular class of drugs by the NIDA, which are heavily politically pressured to paint this narrative, you can't focus on any positive findings.
The goal is you're getting money, you're getting rich and wealthy, Based on you doing these studies to support the government agenda.
So that all has to work in this systematic, precise way.
And if you go against it, you could lose funding at your lab.
And this is what Dr. Joseph Freeman shared in his particular experiences.
There's one other thing as well that he shared, which in some ways is the most interesting one.
There was a third study he was a part of, where they were Kind of comparing SSRIs, particularly citalopram, which is an SSRI, an antidepressant in mice with MDMA.
And there was this hypothesis based on other studies that maybe if you gave mice citalopram before you gave MDMA, there could be some neuroprotective or some synergistic effect potentially.
And in the study, they were comparing and contrasting these different groups.
And they were expecting to find neurotoxicity from the MDMA, and potentially citalopram could help with that, or they were going to investigate what would happen.
And they ended up finding, unexpectedly, that when the mice were actually given the SSRI, that itself had produced serotonin damage in the mice, something they didn't expect to find.
They were looking for that in the MDMA and they did find that later on because remember they were giving the mice like very high doses of MDMA like extremely high like a person would have to take like a ridiculously large amount of MDMA to get some sort of equivalency there and the you know the temperatures are really high they did all sorts of things for it to find the worst possible outcome.
And they found the citaloprime actually caused serotonin damage, which they didn't expect to find.
And Freeman, he was stunned by this particular finding, because this is a drug that's widely prescribed in America, in the UK, in Canada.
If you go to your doctor and say you have depression, it's very commonly and easily prescribed antidepressants like Halloween candy.
And they're finding this particular finding about this commonly used drug, Yet, Freeman again was told by supervisors, basically, no, we can't touch this man.
Like, no, we can't badmouth or emphasize any negative findings with SSRIs because we don't want to interfere or damage any relationships with these pharmaceutical companies who gave us these agents and these medications for various studies.
We want to maintain a good relationship with Big Pharma because we want to keep getting funding and access to pharmaceuticals to maintain our studies.
Yet, Let's focus on all the negative findings we can get with MDMA because, well, the government wants to criminalize and to demonize this particular class of drugs.
This is nothing less than systemic corruption where there are fait accompli prerequisite outcomes at the point at which they embark on the endeavor.
You could assume that if those clinical trials were undertaken by a private enterprise, That there would be a different outcome because it would mean, perhaps, that the FDA had approved the possibility of licenses being afforded to those drugs.
In a sense, if it's a government-funded clinical trial where there is no predetermined partnership with a private pharmacological entity, it's likely that the clinical trials are being undertaken to condemn tarnish and curtail the use to, as you say, demonize, in
this case MDMA, and if it was undertaken by, I don't know, Pfizer or another giant
organization, it's likely that they might, using the same drugs with slightly different methods,
reach a positive outcome because at this point the drug is ready to be licensed.
So in a sense, would you say that in all likelihood we're at a phase where the profitability of
SSRIs is too significant to be countenanced, challenged and diminished by rival substances?
And beyond that, Rav, do you imagine that there are...
Reasons that pertain to the general well-being.
Because a lot of time when you're globally covering the kind of subjects that you cover and that we cover over here, you get the sense that there's a requirement that people, the light of the human heart remains dimmed.
That people feel Repressed, subdued, hopeless and despairing.
And I know a lot of people in our chats will identify with that.
It's almost as if part of the function of the culture is ongoing disempowerment, the creation of division.
And when you hear, for example, of emergent substances that might be beneficial for mental health, they are controlled until there's a point where it might become profitable and then At that point that they could be in some diminished or distinct or evolved way be utilized.
So I guess what I'm asking you is, do you think it's just for the cause of the profitability of SSRIs?
That's one part of the question.
Second part of the question, do you reckon if like these products were licensed, they'd just trial it again and go, actually it works quite well now.
And do you think there's a sort of a broad, do you get the sense that there's a broader appetite to keep people sort of subdued and despondent?
Yeah, those are all great questions.
Yeah, there's a great quote from Brett Weinstein recently.
He was on Tucker's show.
He put it perfectly.
He said, Pharma is healthy when people are sick.
And I think that's true in many respects.
You have big pharma corporations and government entities that are essentially monetizing and profiting off of disease states.
It's not exactly in the best interest to give, you know, Holistic mind-body healing to deal with the core of our mental health and physical problems.
In many cases, you're seeing across the United States and across the West, we're moving more and more towards just giving pills and handing off prescriptions to deal with very complicated Issues like PTSD, like depression.
I mean, we're talking about SSRIs and antidepressants.
The idea, Russell, I totally challenge this.
The idea that in any way you could cure depression with a pill is ludicrous to me.
It doesn't even make sense just as a premise.
Because what is depression, right?
Depression, someone who's lonely, lacking social connection, lacking spiritual connection, have unhealthy relationships.
Isn't working out, isn't exercising potentially, has this gray cloud over their head.
Usually a lot of people with various traumas in their life from childhood to adulthood etc etc.
There's all these kind of issues you know maybe someone left a job and now they're despondent and in despair because they don't know what to do next and now they feel depressed or they just had a traumatic breakup with someone that they loved and that they invested all their life in but yet This person doesn't love them anymore and now they feel depressed.
That is a very complex human problem that's existed since the dawn of time.
The idea that you could fix that with a pill makes absolutely no sense.
These are very complicated problems that you have to deal in a holistic manner.
And psychedelics like I want to be careful and make sure people understand like I am not some guy here just promoting drugs or like in any way some kind of influencer or who wants to say you should take these things willy-nilly or in some recreational way.
I personally have grown up in a very conservative traditional kind of Hindu upbringing with my parents who are immigrants from India.
I never smoked any marijuana or did any drugs when I was a kid.
It was strongly condemned And in fact, I have a very strong or did have a very strong bias against psychedelics and marijuana.
It was very kind of anathematized or condemned in a way.
Yet over the past few years, as I see the rise in mental health issues across the West, right?
Depression, PTSD, anxiety, ADHD, in researching what works and what doesn't work,
you quickly begin to realize if you're looking with an open mind
that psychedelic therapies are incredibly effective and probably the most effective therapeutic we have
on the market for dealing with some of these complex problems.
And it makes sense, right?
It makes sense.
It's not like an antidepressant that numbs you or makes the highs less high and the lows less low.
It's kind of what some people experience on SSRIs.
It's for MDMA, going back to the specific topic.
MDMA, for example, there are now incredible studies done by Rick Doblin at MAPS, um, who I've recently interviewed and recent phase two study that showed 71% of individuals who had undergone this MDMA therapy protocol, which involves three sessions of MDMA over the span of six months with psychotherapy before, in between, and after these sessions, 71% of these individuals with PTSD, people who are replaying and constantly
Being plagued by these past traumas and past experiences are now in these sessions where basically you're in seven eight hours per session and you're working through and then and re-experiencing and reprocessing difficult emotions and traumas that you've experienced and This isn't a podcast, we're going deep into psychedelics, but that's kind of the gist of it and something that's very powerful for folks.
This therapeutic, 71%, Russell, for those that don't know, is incredibly astounding.
And that's similar and basically the same figures for psilocybin for depression, great studies at Johns Hopkins.
Other studies with LSD and DMT being done as well, but psilocybin, ayahuasca, MDMA, astounding efficacy, unlike SSRIs, which basically seem like a placebo at this point.
And the dominant theory for prescribing SSRIs was that there's a serotonin imbalance in the brain, therefore we can chemically correct that with handing off this pill, when in reality that story has now been widely debunked and If you ask psychiatrists, they don't have a lot of solutions in the toolbox, and a big reason why psychedelic therapies, which are showing to be more and more effective with these incredible studies at Johns Hopkins and Rick Doblin at MAPS,
These drugs have been demonized from the early 70s and 80s and 90s when they were coming onto the scene.
And there were a lot of complications with it.
Some of the people that were advocating for these things, you know, TuneIn, Dropout, the whole Timothy Leary thing who he had conducted some misleading research and it kind of became this politicized mission.
And some of the psychedelic advocates were quite irresponsible in what they were advocating for in society.
And so that really Frustrated or scared the powers that be.
And there became these federal regulations were being passed.
There was this idea that if you allow people to take psychedelics, then people are going to tune it, you know, tune out and drop out of society and not participate in a responsible, obedient, civil way.
But what ended up happening is instead of having an honest conversation about risks and benefits and putting in the
proper guardrails with this with the stuff, there was just a complete elimination of the conversation and pushing to
criminalize these drugs.
Republicans and Democrats were in favor of this, and there was this perception that we can't let the kids take the LSD,
otherwise they'll go crazy.
And a lot of those studies, like I said, Dr. Joseph Framon's testimony, which is incredibly powerful, and by the way, we
were talking about this and it's like, we were worried, like, Joseph, if he wants to continue doing research, you
know, how, how is that going to happen if he's now revealing these political narratives?
And he's basically, at this point now, with his research on COVID vaccines and other things, not wanting to rely anymore on NIH or NIDA.
It's more important for someone like him to reveal these bombshell, these revelations about how this research was conducted, then, you know, being in good favor with NIH and NIDA who, as we're finding out more and more Russell, The way in which we perceive and understand pharmaceuticals, drugs, and vaccines is not exactly how they're conducted or how they're designed.
We look at the conventional wisdom on drugs, medicines, and vaccines as being absolute gospel, right?
Whatever our doctor says, whatever Fauci says, whatever the FDA and the CDC say must be true, right?
And that's something that I would have thought before as well.
But as it turns out, as I do more and more research and follow these threads in my career, the way these things are ...processed and kind of propagandized to the public.
The way these things are studied, it's not just vaccines.
It's not just whatever drug is most effective and what is the most safe.
We saw this with the COVID vax as well.
There are a lot of financial and political and ideological interests at play that we don't get to see as the public.
We just get to see, oh, vaccines are safe and effective.
Oh, psychedelics are dangerous and we don't want to go near them.
And oh, antidepressants are actually the solution to your problem.
And oh, ADHD medications, which more and more youth, more and more kids my age or younger in Gen Z are
being prescribed ADHD medications because they can't focus. And there's this great Adderall
and Ritalin crisis now, this shortage of these drugs, Russell, where doctors are
prescribing this more and more and more and more kids are heavily medicated with these stimulant
drugs because they have ADHD, which means they can't focus, which is like everyone these
days.
And now we're moving further and further towards medication rather than focusing on the holistic solutions.
And I think big pharma, the government and the media is largely to blame.
than the curation of reality.
Initially, at the point of clinical trial, the type of trials that are undertaken with a particular objective in mind, But the good news is we are able now to provide competing narratives to the dominant narratives that, as you say, suggest an empirical and unimpeachable reality as offered to us by the kind of interests that you are currently investigating.
Now I'm very excited by your revelation and again very grateful to you for the exclusivity.
What I would like to say is that it was only a brief period of time where the pharmaceutical industry was granted a kind of I would say equivalency with the other aspects of the medical industry, i.e.
that we saw Big Pharma as participants in a philanthropic endeavor to save society during an immersive and terrifying pandemic.
Prior to that, you know, in the United States in particular, the opioid crisis meant that the pharmaceutical industry was regarded with a great deal of cynicism.
And now, with various inquiries being undertaken across the world, the pharmaceutical industry's position as a respected institution is once again being challenged.
What's interesting to me, Rav, and also as an area that you have covered in your work, is the point where the state have been providing additional funding to propagandize medical and pharmaceutical solutions, in particular to the COVID-19 pandemic.
We know of course that 55% of TV, certainly cable news advertising, comes from pharmaceutical companies and indeed a significant amount from Pfizer itself.
But in addition to that, you revealed in some of your reporting that the state were funding what amounts to now COVID-19 propaganda, or at least vaccine propaganda.
Can you tell us a little bit more about that story?
Yes, and I appreciate you guys covering the story I saw on YouTube.
I was like, watching on YouTube your video just because I watch your stuff, and I was like, oh, this is a topic I covered about how the U.S.
government paid media outlets to promote the COVID vaccine.
And I go on, I'm like, oh, this is my article.
It's like, that's cool.
Appreciate it.
Yeah, so this came to a surprise initially, but it made sense given the experience I had before.
I don't know if I want to go into it all now, but last year in the summertime I published a couple of essays about how How I was writing for a number of major mainstream outlets, some left-leaning, some right-leaning, and I've decided not to name these outlets because I don't want to pick a fight with a big multi-million dollar media corporation.
I don't want to badmouth any People I was working with in particular, but basically I was writing for a number of outlets very consistently, having published many times before, and I started investigating vaccine side effects, particularly myocarditis and hearing about cases of vaccine myocarditis.
And I wanted to report on this and write about it in some of these places.
And time and time again, the response I was getting, Russell, this is quite shocking and the antithesis to what I think journalism should be.
Rav, we're a pro-vaccine publication.
We can't publish content like this because we want to promote vaccine hesitancy.
Like, we're not going to be, like, time and time again, this was the response I was getting from editors.
Like, no, our publication is going to promote the COVID vaccine, so we're not going to platform this vaccine skepticism or this, you know, your coverage of side effects.
And I was like, whoa!
I was like, hold on here.
I thought journalism was about Honestly, investigating these hot button topics free of an agenda, free of, is this going to promote hesitancy or is this going to, you know, align with a certain political ideology or not?
I was just looking for the truth, similar with my recent reporting on psychedelic research.
And I was quite frustrated at the time and that drove eventually my migration to Substack and creating the Illusion Census and making a name for myself instead of relying on these major media outlets.
So recently I came across this story and investigated it further and found out that many of those publications that I was in contact with, and just many publications in U.S.
media, publications that we all read and know about, were getting direct funding from the U.S.
government to promote the COVID vaccine.
And I went and looked into their advertisements.
I know you did as well.
And they contained advertisements about these vaccines are safe and effective.
Your kids should be getting it.
Myocarditis is just a small temporary issue.
COVID is a bigger threat.
If you get the updated COVID vaccine, it'll prevent long COVID.
And to me, it was like, wait, again, this is the opposite of what I thought journalism was supposed to be doing.
I thought we were supposed to be questioning those people and those people in white lab
coats who are putting out these decrees and propagandizing to the public about the safety
and efficacy of these experimental vaccines, when in reality what's happening is you're
getting funding from them.
And so that, and how explicit this problem actually is, I'm not sure.
Like, how exactly these stories are turned out in mainstream media, what happens behind the scenes.
I'm not in those newsrooms, so I don't know.
But we saw what happened in mainstream media with the Reputational decapitation of Joe Rogan for talking about myocarditis and talking about early treatments for COVID.
We saw the constant, you know, defenestration of anyone who was asking questions about vaccine side effects and yet at the same time these publications were getting funding to promote these vaccines.
I think this is why independent media has risen so much, Russell, is because there has been now, I think, this is a very important point, I think there's been a great unveiling in the public, Russell.
Like the Gutenberg printing press, now we're in this age of media where establishment narratives are being challenged, questioned, and eviscerated in real time, right?
We're no longer just relying on the medical establishment and the CDC and the FDA.
We're in the age of podcasts and sub-stack newsletters and the internet.
And I know some people like, individuals like Sam Harris talk about The problems associated with that, and it's true, there are problems associated with this, right?
if all you have is Substack and podcasts and people like yourself who aren't scientists
and people like myself who aren't experts in vaccines talking about this issue,
yeah, there are gonna be some people, some grifters and some anti-vaxxers
and some people with extreme rhetoric or people who are not reliable
because they don't have the relevant background.
But the problem is the people in authority, people with power have been wrong repeatedly
again and again and again, when it comes to vaccines, when it comes to pharmaceuticals
like SSRIs and ADHD meds, right?
When it comes to psychedelic therapies and the suppression of these therapies
that can help so many people and uplift them out of their suffering,
whether depression, PTSD, anxiety, et cetera.
And so these establishment narratives are being questioned more and more.
And like I said, we're moving more and more towards medication as an establishment
and more and more towards vaccinating and medicating and following our mainstream primary physician's advice
on these complex mind-body problems.
But I think for those of us that are more politically conscious and tuning into this, Great awakening in podcastistan.
We're seeing the days of SSRIs, ADHD meds, and trusting people in white lab coats being gone in the age of morning sunlight, sauna, cold plunge, ashwagandha, Taking supplementation, psilocybin, MDMA, therapy, working through your traumas as now being in vogue increasingly so.
So we're moving away from centralized authority and kind of mainstream medical propaganda to individuals taking their health in their own hands and exploring their own traumas and their own issues without just medicating themselves with a pill or trusting advice that's proving to be more and more dangerous and misinformed.
And Rav Arora, I think you have precisely described the nature of the problem but also the nature of the solution.
Our individual awakening is a threat to ongoing centralized power and your work is so far extraordinarily effective and Unfolding, exploring and explaining exactly how that pans out.
Rav, I'm so grateful to you for coming on the show.
You can follow Rav on illusionofconsensus.com.
You can find more of Rav's reporting and his work with Jay Bhattacharya, another guest of the show and fantastic and reliable medic by going to Substack and looking at Illusion of Consensus if you want to support Rav's great reporting as we do.
Rav, thank you very much for that story.
Thank you for the other work you've done and I'd love to have another conversation where we get more into this stuff, the kind of things that you've been touching upon towards the end of our conversation.
I'd like to do a deeper exploration into some of that stuff in the coming weeks.
Would you be available for that?
Absolutely.
Yes, thanks for the mention.
Substack, if people can support us, that's where we have, if you can subscribe for free if you want, but if you want to support us, people, individuals can become paid subscribers.
That really helps us out.
That's the way independent journalism is done.
So you can check that out, Illusion of Consensus.
And Russell, thank you again for the platform.
I really appreciate what you've been doing the last couple of years.
A big, big fan of yours.
And yes, I would absolutely love to go deeper into some of these topics.
We have not yet talked about any of the mental health crises that I've gotten myself out of over the last couple of years.
And some of your early videos about heartbreak, about depression and anxiety actually were quite helpful a couple years ago.
And now, most people actually don't know, but I'm in university, I'm basically majoring in Eastern mysticism and Buddhism, Hinduism, psychedelics.
It's like the other world that I occupy and that we haven't actually talked about.
So, I look forward to another conversation where we get into matters more contemplative and mystical, because I think you and I align on a lot of those things.
So, look forward to it.
Thank you, Rav, so much.
You can find the links to Rav's work in the description right now.
Rav, thank you so much, mate.
That was brilliant.
Yeah.
Thanks, Russell.
You can find more of Rav's work at Illusion of Consensus or go to illusionconsensus.com.
Now stay with us as we explode the vowels and illusory matrices within which we are usually confined.
Here's the news.
No, here's the effing news.
Thanks for watching Zipfuckzine.
Here's the news.
No, here's the fucking news.
Trump stormed Iowa with more power than the blizzard that was consuming it
and the legacy media are in meltdown.
But what is the reason for Trump's inevitable ascendancy?
Who is making the Democrats unelectable?
Is it Donald Trump or is it the Democrats themselves?
The legacy media are falling apart assuming that Trump 2024 is an inevitability.
How can they maintain that Joe Biden, visibly waxing and cadaverous before our eyes, can oppose this force?
It seems to be the beginning of the end for Biden.
Ten months to go yet, but it seems like an insurmountable surge of popularity.
Is Trump the biggest threat American democracy faces, or is he an inevitability of institutional corruption, banality and hypocrisy?
I'm sorry I just have to do a little bit of business just for a second.
Certainly one person who seems to be terrified of a Donald Trump victory and even Donald Trump verbiage is Rachel Maddow who says that Donald Trump's speeches cannot be broadcast presumably to protect us or just in case he does a misinformation or he slips out a malinformation or an untruth but of course anyone that knows anything about MSNBC knows that they regularly broadcast misinformation whether that's around the pandemic the medications that grow grew out of that era, the Russiagate hoax, the Hunter Biden
laptop. It's just which flavour of misinformation and which flavour of authoritarianism you,
or indeed they, prefer. When you watch this, does this make Trump less appealing to you, or does
it make him feel like some sexy elixir that can't even be shown on TV? Particularly if
you actually watch the speech where he's just like, Nikki Haley, nice lady, Ron DeSantis,
well done.
I want to congratulate Ron and Nikki for having a good time together.
We're all having a good time together.
And I think they both actually did very well.
Very smart people, very capable people.
It's not like he said, smash the state, fight the power, blah, blah.
At this point in the evening, the projected winner of the Iowa caucuses has just started giving his victory speech.
He's not Voldemort.
We do not speak his name.
You can't name him.
The projected winner, he that must not be named, has got, oh my god, 51% of the entire vote!
Anyway, we can't broadcast his speech in case he's so damn charismatic, even dyed in the wool, liberal voters turn over.
The best thing that their liberal establishment could do right now if they wanted to damage Donald Trump is say, let me tell you something.
I like Donald Trump.
You should vote for him.
You should get out there now and vote for Donald Trump.
Then it'd be like with UFOs.
What?
They're putting UFOs on the news now?
UFOs, they ain't real.
That's a hoax.
The reason I'm saying this is, of course, there is a reason that we and other news organizations have generally stopped giving an unfiltered live platform to remarks by former President Trump.
I don't know if you could make him sound any more sexy if you tried.
He's somewhere between a bourbon, a new strain of cannabis, and Jimi Hendrix.
We cannot give you unfiltered Donald Trump.
Better put some water with that Donald Trump.
He might come out and thank Vivek for a bravely fought campaign.
And honestly, earnestly, it is not an easy decision, but there is a cost to us as a news organization of knowingly broadcasting untrue things.
Uh, Rachel?
It stops with you.
You take this thing, it stops.
Is it still on YouTube?
It's still on YouTube.
Now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person.
A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else.
That is a fundamental truth of our business and who we are.
And so his remarks tonight will not air here live.
In a sense we have the problem in microcosm right here.
It's not misinformation, it's misinformation that's inconvenient to the establishment.
It's not authoritarianism, it's authoritarianism that's inconvenient, if not to the establishment, their version of the establishment.
It's absurd that you show a speech by Rhonda Sanders or Nikki Haley and not by Donald Trump, particularly if you've watched that speech.
It simply could have been done by Jimmy Stewart.
He's just sort of like, hey, thank you.
I'm trying my best.
It's Christmas.
We will monitor them and let you know about any news that he makes.
Also, you're giving him so much power, even, like, if I was advising strategy.
Don't say he makes news.
Don't say he's so, sort of, sexy and cool that if he's on there, you're making him into an outlaw, you lunatics!
You're making him more appealing than ever.
Stop indicting him!
You're indicting him all the way to the White House!
It's because the basis of his candidacy is he's running against politics.
He's running against politicians.
He's running against policy.
He's running against the whole idea that a Congress does a thing.
In a way, I actually agree with that.
And I also feel that why would you not analyse, why would you not scrutinise, with the same degree of disdain, the activity within the Biden administration?
Why would you not say, possibly the reason that people are against politics, policy, the function of Congress, is because there has been so much corruption, so much deception.
How do we feel about the ongoing vilification of Donald Trump because, like, oh, those kids in cages?
when we find out that Barack Obama built those cages?
How can we deal with the constant vilification of Trump because build a wall, build a wall, build a wall, when Joe Biden's gonna build that wall anyway?
The whole thing seems like hysteria, tribalism, favoritism, an inability to face the emergent id of the angry working American people.
And why are they angry?
Why are they angry?
It's because of this stuff.
In a country that has a strong man leader.
He's running for a situation in which he is the leader.
There is no government.
There isn't a policy process.
It's weird though, because Donald Trump has actually been president for four years.
So there's data available, some of which we'll share with you, about what actually happened while Donald Trump was in office.
He didn't go, right, you're all under arrest.
OK, Don Lemon, you're out.
I mean, people weren't lined up against the wall.
What happened was is there was a rise in some jobs.
There was a fall in unemployment, broadly comparable to the preceding Obama administration.
There was a lot of late night talk show riffs and gags.
It's very difficult, if you ask me, to make significant change within the turgid system of conventional American politics.
That's certainly my position, is you're not going to change it that much because there's so many layers of infrastructure.
Indeed, Martin Gurie, who's a brilliant source on this and A Liberal Democrat, broadly speaking, he wrote the amazing book, The Revolt of the Public, said, if you expect to become an authoritarian, you have to wield absolute control over a key institution of government, such as the military, like Franco, Perón or Pinochet from Spain, Argentina and Chile, of course, or a mass movement with a paramilitary wing like Lenin, Mussolini or Mao.
Neither condition applies to Donald Trump.
Every federal institution is ferociously set against him.
What would happen if Trump ordered the FBI or the 101st Airborne Division to start shooting Democrats?
It's ridiculous.
Donald Trump does not have a paramilitary wing at Mar-a-Lago.
The hysteria around Trump has reached a pitch where you have to ignore it.
Similarly, from the same article, Martin Gurry, what kind of person becomes an authoritarian?
Well, it may look like fun, but authoritarianism is really hard work.
You need to be in the prime of life in your 30s or 40s, like Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Mao and Castro.
Very rarely an exceptional person such as Julius Caesar is granted literal dictatorship.
The Romans invented the entire idea in his early 50s.
So there you are.
And isn't it more likely the reason that Trump is so appealing is because of his vitality, vivacity, rhetorical skill, ability to reach the emotional heart of Americans everywhere, and because what the Democrats are telling you the solution is a waxen cadaverous near-zombie in the form of Joe Biden, who had this to say, He's the clear frontrunner for the other side at this point.
But here's the thing.
This election was always going to be you and me against extreme MAGA Republicans.
It was true yesterday and it will be true tomorrow.
In short, the legacy media and the establishment themselves are doubling down on the idea that this is an extremist movement rather than a populist one.
Populist is opposite to extremist.
It means it's spread out across a vast population.
If we are worried about the rise of authoritarianism in this country, we are worried about potential rise of fascism in this country.
We're worried about our democracy falling to an authoritarian and potentially fascist form of government.
It's all black people that have worked within the Democrat Party, all people that are clearly affiliated with the Democrat Party, sort of pretending to be the sort of goodies and this is the sober, somber analysis.
But really, this is just more hysteria, more propaganda.
People have seen through that now.
What they are doing is making the situation much, much worse continually.
And the American electorate is made up of two major parties.
One of those parties has been flirting with extremism on the ultra right for a very long time.
They've brought them in in a way that they haven't been central to Republican electoral politics ever before.
And I know because I've been studying this.
It's very interesting to make such sweeping statements about taxonomies and use terms like extreme right while simultaneously indulging post-structuralist ideas like there's no such thing as identity or masculinity or femininity, all ideas that I'm absolutely open to in the infinite morasses and molasses of space.
But if you say there is an absolute thing called extreme right rather than democracy, because what's just happened is a Republican candidate has gone up against a bunch of other Republican candidates in Iowa and every single district has gone, that guy!
That's, I think, democracy.
And yes, Trumpism is sometimes what we call it.
MAGA movement is probably a better way to do it.
But there is an authoritarian movement inside Republican politics that isn't being bamboozled by Trump.
They are pushing Trump to get more and more extreme because the more extreme things he says, The more they adhere to him.
And that is coming from a very large proportion of the American right that adheres to the Republican Party.
And that's why this is a Republican Party problem more than it is the problem of one man and his leader.
Since Trump, we've had four years of Biden.
If Trump is as extreme as the legacy media are saying, surely we will have seen extreme fluctuations and extreme changes.
Let's compare some of the data between these administrative periods and see if there's another reason why the Democrat Party might have gone into decline.
Looking at the three years before COVID-19 made a mess of things, the US economy under Trump performed about the same as it had during the last three years under President Obama.
The last three years of President Obama's administration saw an increase of 8.1 million jobs and a 2% point drop in the overall unemployment rate, decreasing from 6.2% in 2014 to 4.9% at the end of 2016.
Under Trump, the number of jobs increased by 6.5 million in his first three years and unemployment dropped from 4.4% to 3.7%.
Similar.
Comparable.
Not a massive swing in either direction.
So whether you're fervently pro Donald Trump and you love him and his charisma and his easy style, or if you love Barack Obama and his classiness or whatever, you have to say that looking at these numbers, it's not that different, is it really?
After losing the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton variously blamed WikiLeaks, Bernie Sanders, misogynistic voters, white women, former FBI Director James Comey, and above all, the Russian government for her defeat.
And certainly the legacy media that won't show Donald Trump's victory speech in Iowa supported all of those stories pretty vociferously.
Many of her supporters, not least those in the media, leapt to embrace her excuses.
Just as many of Trump's supporters convinced themselves that the Biden campaign stole the 2020 election from their candidate, Democrats have found comfort in explanations for their failures that place the blame on others.
But Clinton's 2016 defeat, in fact, was the culmination of a slow decay that first took hold within the Democratic Party half a century ago.
So, none of these problems are being addressed.
None of the scrutiny that's being applied to Trump, and even if Trump goes, and is he authoritarian, and what will he do if he wins in 2024?
No one's saying, should we have a look at this party that we're unquestioningly supporting 24 hours a day?
What are they doing?
What have they done?
If this guy's so bad, why is it that we have to ban him in order to defeat him?
Surely you would just go, do you want this guy?
Or, you know, like, apparently he's so bloody charismatic, intoxicating and alluring, you can't even show him giving a polite appraisal of an Iowa caucus without all of us sort of losing our minds and follow him into the forests.
The Democrats today are increasingly becoming a party of upwardly mobile professionals and creatives.
The party has shed much of its traditional working class base, which has started to show up in its legislative priorities.
When you look at that panel of people, do you think, oh, these are working class Americans.
These speak to ordinary working class people.
You see Rachel Maddow or Jen Psaki.
I don't know anything about their backgrounds.
They might be from blue collar backgrounds.
They might.
But they don't appear to be talking about, I don't know, The white working class exodus from the party has been particularly severe, putting states like Ohio, which former President Barack Obama won twice, out of reach for the party.
American people. The white working-class exodus from the party has been
particularly severe, putting states like Ohio, which former President Barack
Obama won twice, out of reach for the party. In 2020, less than a third of white
working men, the very backbone of the old New Deal coalition, voted for Biden. And
that was an improvement over the meager 23% of white working men who backed
Hillary in 2016. We cannot continue to fight this system of corruption and
injustice without your loyalty, power and support, and without the partnership of
the wonderful people we work with to keep the lights on, both in and outside
of our hearts.
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Drawing attention to the importance of being prepared for medical emergencies, with close to 90% of pharmaceuticals in the U.S.
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It's disease X and you ain't got no medicine, baby!
Countries clamp down on exports.
You know that.
They stockpile.
The price of drugs rise and the pharmacy shelves in America end up barren.
It's already starting to happen.
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OK, let's get back to fighting this bloody system.
In the 1990s, the Democrats were in free fall.
After losing the biggest landslide election in American history to Reagan, they had suffered 12 straight years of Republican control of the White House.
Much of their industrial white working class base had defected to the GOP, alienated both by the cultural radicalism of the new left professional activists who had commandeered the party's intellectual infrastructure and by a democratic economic ideology that was increasingly indistinguishable from that of the Republicans.
I think we all remember that Bill Clinton primarily became like, look, it's going to be basically the same steps.
I've got a saxophone and there's going to be some crazy stuff going on in the Oval Office, kids.
Desperate for a new strategy, Democratic operatives formed a centrist pro-business network called the Democratic Leadership Council to build the Democrats back into a nationally competitive political party again.
Similar things happened in our country under Pony Blair and similarly it's created a kind of homogenized political space where no one feels that they really identify, I think, with either party.
I don't think there's anyone that's passionate about like I really love them.
There is no British equivalent to Trump, even, where you'd go, oh, this guy really is speaking to ordinary British people.
It's just a banalised space of career politicians who you feel would prefer to be at Davos than in Parliament.
The DLC sought to co-opt the Republicans on economic growth and free trade while countering the New Left's radicalising influence on the party's social and cultural agenda.
The DLC found a perfect champion in Bill Clinton, when he wasn't on holiday.
Clinton was a free market true believer with enough affinity to the politics of the 60s to bring the new democratic intelligentsia under his wing.
As a candidate that corporate CEOs and former student revolutionaries alike could get behind, Clinton forged a new electoral majority and brought the Democrats back into the White House.
And from an outsider's perspective, it seemed like, oh, this guy is really charismatic and good in front of a camera and people seem to like him, rather than this person is invested in serving American people.
It was part of the show businessification of American and subsequently British politics.
Where, oh, as long as you've got someone who's good on camera and sounds all right, it doesn't really matter what they believe in.
And I think that Clinton was like that.
Obama's like that.
In our country, Blair's like that.
They say a bunch of stuff and seem kind of lovely when you're looking at them and listening to them.
And then it comes to, like, the 2008 crash and they're like, Wall Street, we're on your side, baby.
And that has made ordinary people think...
I don't trust this lot.
Donald Trump, as Dave Chappelle is fond of saying, came out and goes, you know that stuff you think we're doing in there?
That is what we're doing.
I know all these tax loopholes because I use them.
He said, I know the system is rigged because I use it.
I said, God damn!
All of her donors use them.
You're like, oh my God, this is amazing.
If you can't see why that would be appealing after the preceding 20 or 30 years, then that's a deep strain of myopia that is much more likely the problem than Donald Trump's evident charisma.
In office, however, Clinton bungled his careful balancing act.
In his campaign, he had purported to speak for the forgotten middle class.
But as president, he seemed to speak more loudly for Wall Street.
He pushed for NAFTA, the founding of the World Trade Organization, financial deregulation, and permanent normal trade relations with China.
China.
China.
In part, thanks to Republican overreach, Clinton persevered through two terms in the White House.
But his new Democrat rebrand did nothing to bring white working class voters back to the party.
Eight years later, Barack Obama met and even surpassed Clinton's electoral success, but likewise failed to stem the blue-collar bleeding for the long term.
And again, in office, doubled down on the betrayal of ordinary people, legislated for and governed for elite and establishment interests.
And the kind of perspective that you probably have and I have is You can't trust these people.
And when Rachel Maddow says they're anti-political candidates, that's why that's happened.
Because I made my bones publicly in my country, the UK, saying there's no point voting for anyone on a political TV show.
You can't trust any of them.
They're all the same.
I basically said that.
Why vote?
We know it's not going to make any difference.
We know that already.
I say when there is a genuine alternative, a genuine option, then vote for that.
But until then...
Don't bother.
There was a lot of outrage and controversy around it at the time, absurdly enough, but now I know we are the biggest constituency.
Elsewhere in there, Rachel Maddow says that America is made up of Republicans and Democrats.
No, it isn't.
People are just like, oh, is this what we've got to deal with?
That's why RFK is polling so spectacularly, because there's a significant number of people in your country, in my country, and I think across the world, that want something actually different.
Obama twice ran on an even more explicitly populist message than Clinton, but like Clinton, staffed his cabinet and administration with Wall Street ideologues.
We've seen that happen again and again.
We've seen people under Biden from Big Pharma getting jobs, from Wall Street getting jobs, from Big Tech getting jobs, and all these contracts being awarded.
We know what the game is now.
That's the real problem.
This is why I think Rachel Maddow and the legacy media have to amplify the hysteria, because so many of us now go, yeah, but it doesn't really make any difference, you can't trust any of these people, they're all in the clutches of establishment interests.
And now we have to go, no, no, the democratic does mean something.
Congress does mean something.
Don't you dare invade the Capitol.
They have to sort of invest it with meaning because the meaning is drained out of it because of conduct, because of behavior, because of history, because of what we've all seen.
This betrayal was even starker than it was with his predecessor, coming as it did in the immediate wake of the global financial collapse.
Obama prosecuted no high-level financial executives for the crimes that led to the meltdown, and allowed his Wall Street advisors to mismanage his economic recovery plans.
Unlike Clinton, he succeeded in creating the Democrats' long-sought universal health insurance program, but the law was a barely coherent patchwork of regulations written by healthcare lobbyists, which provided inadequate subsidies and drove up premiums for millions of middle-class Americans who weren't covered by their employers.
Again and again you hear pledges and promises made.
We beat Big Pharma this year.
We beat Big Pharma this year.
We beat Pharma this year!
And then you find out that what it means is a few drugs are going to be capped from 2025 or whatever.
Or that no one is prosecuted for Wall Street.
Or healthcare is actually quite sort of temperate really.
In a sense, the meaning has drained out of the type of politics that Rachel Maddow is advocating for.
So anyone that is anti that is more appealing.
That's my analysis.
And that's why the results are in every single district in Iowa against Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, Donald Trump all the way.
And based on that, he's going to be the candidate.
And I would say similarly, based on that and looking at the total lack of trust in Joe Biden, even among Democrat voters, 69% of them say that Biden does not have the mental sharpness to be president.
It's unlikely that Biden can beat Trump fairly.
Hillary Clinton shared Obama's reverence for Wall Street, but none of his talent for pretending to be a populist.
Indeed, she didn't even try.
Instead, she ran a campaign that was explicitly scornful of white working class voters, maligning them as racist and misogynist.
In sharp contrast to Obama's unifying message, Clinton directly appealed to the identity-based grievances of various constituency groups largely centered in the prosperous post-industrial metropolitan regions of the country.
While accusing her opponent Donald Trump of campaigning on hate, she ran the most polarizing campaign in living memory.
Clinton rallied the educated professionals of the new American knowledge economy to her side by leading their culture war against the denizens of the dying manufacturing towns and agricultural rural and ex-urban swathes of the country that had been emptied of jobs and stripped of community and social purpose by decades of deindustrialisation championed by both parties.
In that paragraph, you get an economic understanding of the social realities that have led to Donald Trump's rise and the deterioration of the Democrat Party.
And in a character like Clinton, with her inability to reach people through charisma,
the problem becomes calcified because prior to her, there was Obama and Clinton, Bill
Clinton, who knew how to perform on camera, and Donald Trump knows how to do that.
And if you look at even his Iowa victory speech, it looks like he's adopting a more conciliatory
tone, and I would suggest learning the lessons of the Robert F. Kennedy campaign, that there's
a lot of anti-establishment people out there that aren't down with the high revs, argh
type of aggressive populist politics, but are open for a kind of convivial, conciliatory,
statesman-like return to anti-establishment populism that's somewhat more inclusive.
Certainly that seemed like a different side of Donald Trump in that speech.
She couldn't have been a more useful foil for Trump if she had tried.
While frequently spilling over into hyperbole or even outright bigotry, Trump merely played the other side of the culture war Clinton was waging.
He lambasted the professional class's moral crusades on immigration, race and criminal justice as cynically as Clinton celebrated them.
But he also excoriated the free market orthodoxies of both parties, a critique that resonated with every working and middle class voter who had lived through the Great Recession.
Trump embraced protectionism and an industrial policy to restore American manufacturing.
He rallied against the cultural elites, especially their loudest spokespeople in the media.
And white working-class voters, including ones who had voted twice for Obama, rewarded him for it.
This isn't the kind of analysis that you see on legacy media, is it?
Because it's inconvenient.
And one of the things I've had cause to reflect on lately is Albert Maisel's famous claim that tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.
Well, the nuance is always stripped away in this new puritanical establishment legacy media propagandist machine.
When they're talking about Trump, He's dangerous.
He's racist.
He's awful.
They don't describe the circumstances of his rise.
They don't describe his appeal.
They don't describe their own culpability.
They don't describe why they cannot amend and adjust because of their affiliations and funding and because of lobbying and because they're ultimately owned by financial interests comparable to the financial interests that have traditionally owned the Republican Party.
They can't have those conversations.
So there's nothing they can do except continually condemn Donald Trump, continually lambast Anyone who might be interested in Donald Trump's appeal without ever addressing the causes of this problem.
It was principally Trump's mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic that led to his loss to Joe Biden, who in his campaign distanced himself from the avant-garde professional class social justice politics that had come to dominate his party.
Democrats hope that Biden's everyman appeal might win back some working class voters to the party.
That hasn't happened.
In fact, now the Democrats are losing non-white working class voters.
Every election cycle, Democrats lose more and more of this demographic.
Despite his virulently anti-immigrant rhetoric between 2016 and 2020, Trump gained support among Latino voters.
Joe Biden did 16 points worse among Latinos than Hillary Clinton had four years earlier.
The Democrats have an increasingly tenuous hold on the Asian vote, and their support even from black non-college educated voters has begun to slip.
As of last summer, Biden fell short of earning the support of a majority of non-white voters without a college degree.
A third of these voters prefer Trump.
Today, the Democrats and the Republicans are virtually tied in voters' perception of which party is best for the middle class.
Americans as a whole no longer take the Democrats for granted as the party that fights for ordinary people and are just as likely to regard the Republicans as such.
This is a historical sea change.
So you have a historical result in Iowa, where Donald Trump, the most indicted president in history, is on the rise.
You have a Democrat party that is flailing.
You have a legacy media that is unwilling and unable to offer a mere culper.
You have a Democrat party that's unwilling to give a meaningful and viable candidate.
At this point.
So the way things look after the Iowa caucus is Trump victory 2024.
But that's just what I think.
Let me know what you think in the chat.
See you in a second!
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