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Feb. 12, 2024 - Stay Free - Russel Brand

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“Nikki Haley THREAT Isn’t Over!” | Vivek On Establishment’s 2024 BIG MONEY Agenda - Stay Free #304

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	In this video, you're going to see the future.
	Hello there you AwakendWonders!
	Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
	It's a fantastic conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy that I'm sure you will enjoy.
	Is Nikki Haley an establishment stooge?
	What did he learn from campaigning?
	Will the 2024 election even go ahead?
	That was a question posed by a member of our AwakendWonder community that you can join by downloading locals and becoming a member of our community.
	The app is free, the content is free, but there is additional content for our supporters,
	like the ability to join us for live conversations, like one exclusive video per week,
	like this fantastic conversation that is about anti-authoritarianism and reclaiming your individual sovereignty.
	Have a look.
	It's a wonderful thing to learn to be able to stand up and yell bullshit,
	because so much is being slung and nobody is talking about the primacy of experience
	and the dignity of the individual.
	The dignity of the individual.
	We went a long way with this in America before we betrayed it.
	And it wasn't only betrayed by the clowns in Washington.
	It's also betrayed by anybody who clusters themselves around the feet of some self-proclaimed nabob.
	I don't know what nabob means, but I like the idea of the dignity of the individual, because say if you're a libertarian of the right, you believe in tradition, you're Christian, whatever, or you're a very progressive person that believes in non-binary fluid forms of identity.
	Terence McKenna is saying that should be respected, the sovereignty of the individual.
	I hear that spoken of a lot, that within you as an individual is something that should be regarded.
	That's why you don't tread on people, you push people around, you don't know what it's like to be them.
	You allow people to be who they are and try and find ways of frucinpatico and consent.
	Cooperating with one another, I suppose like Sesame Street.
	Cooperation!
	The first 15 minutes of the conversation will be available on YouTube.
	Oh, let me have a spritz of the old Charlize.
	Keeps me young and beautiful and powerful.
	But then we'll only be on Rumble.
	So, as you know, Vivek Ramaswamy is a Republican presidential candidate.
	He's founded multi-billion dollar enterprises, led a biotech company, is CIO, trained as a scientist at Harvard, and you can follow Vivek on X at VivekG...
	Ramaswamy.
	Here's the conversation.
	Remember, we recorded this earlier with our locals community, which you can join at any time.
	And then you'll be a part of our conversations with brilliant auteurs and anti-establishment figures.
	But now without further delay, Vivek Ramaswamy.
	Thank you so much for joining us for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
	It's lovely to see you.
	Good to see you, man.
	What an adjustment you have made.
	You've gone from campaigning and therefore I suppose to a degree on the very front line to being in this new position of advocacy.
	I was very much enjoying some of the interviews you were doing with CNN when you spoke about January 6th.
	How do you feel now that your role is to support Do you feel relieved?
	Do you feel excited?
	And will you be, do you imagine, part of the administration in the event of a Trump victory?
	Yeah, so I'm not a big advanced planner.
	It's one of the things that my life has taught me, Russell, is your plans are stupid.
	At least for me.
	I don't know about you, but whenever you sort of made dead set plans and plot everything out, it never goes according to that plan anyway.
	I did run for president with the sole intention of being the next president.
	The beauty of this country is that's up to the people, and the people made clear who they want this time, which is the other America First leader who's tried and true, who's done it before, and that's Donald Trump, and he has my full support.
	But my strategy, I think, going forward, whatever I do, is going to be the same as it was during the campaign, which is to speak the truth, speak in an unvarnished way, or at the very least, at least my true view, what it is.
	And I think that we don't have enough of that in our culture anymore amongst politicians, amongst media personalities.
	And so that's what I'm going to continue to do, is to especially speak hard truths that maybe are a little bit beneath the surface of what the rest of the corporate media is scratching on issues that matter to me.
	I think I'm paying a lot more attention increasingly to what is, I think, a smokescreen around the current border debate in the United States.
	I think that going deeper into some of the themes that I raised in the campaign trail about the media's dishonesty remain of interest to me, from the truth of what happened on January 6th to the truth of what happened with the origin of COVID.
	I mean, we can go straight down that list.
	I've even had some more recent experiences with the media's intentional distortion of things that I've said late in the campaign or towards the end of it.
	Regardless, I think restoring media honesty, or at least the public's understanding of the media's dishonesty, remains a passion of mine after the campaign as it did during the campaign.
	And I think all of that is going to be helpful in making sure that not only is Donald Trump elected as the next president, but that our America First movement, our I would say a George Washingtonian movement that began in 1776 is able to be carried forward another 250 years, and then some.
	And so that's my focus, and whatever form that takes, be it inside government or out, I'm all in for doing my small part to make this country's future a reality.
	One of the reasons that we were excited about you on our channel is your ability to communicate, your ability to pull together a variety of ideas, to present cogent arguments spontaneously, and I've been fond of saying that you are the first true social media political figure Because of course, you know, RFK has benefited hugely from the way that legacy media has lost its stranglehold on the minds of American people.
	Donald Trump, through his use of Twitter, was able to sort of govern through social media and certainly influence powerfully.
	And even like in countries like Greece and Spain, there were movements like Syriza and Podemos that were doubtless anti-establishment movements.
	Do you feel That it's going to be impossible for the legacy media to ever again regain the kind of control over the minds of the American and indeed global population.
	Do you see this raft of censorship laws like the online safety bill in the UK, the laws being passed across the EU in Canada and some of the stuff proposed in your country as a direct threat to independent media?
	And do you think that we'll see more political figures like you emerging across the world?
	They're essentially bypassing authoritarian centralised legacy media and their affiliated groups, be they corporate or state.
	Yeah, so I like the way you framed that, by the way.
	Affiliated groups.
	I mean, in the U.S., you do have a quasi-state media.
	It's not really the traditional version of what you think of as state media, but it's like a game theory, right?
	In a game theoretic, repeated game, they start behaving as though they're like state media because they get a pat on the back when they do.
	So I'll make a couple of observations, Russell.
	One is, the trend is definitely in the direction that you just mentioned, which is, I think, bypassing that corporate media.
	But a couple of observations to make beyond that.
	I think that we're nowhere near that being the sole decisive factor.
	To the contrary, one of my learnings in this campaign is that for better or worse, I think it's for worse, the legacy corporate media still played and continues to play in this election a major role in defining the public's perception of individual candidates and the issues that are put in front of them.
	People like to think of themselves as independent, but I think it's part of our human nature that most of us still behave like sheep.
	Right?
	There's a sheep and there's a lion inside each of us.
	And I think it's true of you, it's true of me, it's true of every human being.
	It's wired in each of us.
	But as much as we like to think of ourselves as independent consumers, it's less about the top-down battle between independent media and corporate media, but more, what is it inside each of us that makes us want to bend the knee to some kind of authority?
	And I think that element that makes you still even think, okay, I'm not believing what I'm being force-fed by CNN or cable news or whatever, There's an element of it, the sheep inside each of us, that views that as a legitimizing filter.
	And one of the things I learned during the campaign is, even as much as people will seek independent alternative opinions, right now we're still in a place where, if we're being honest, most of the electorate, especially people above the age of 40, View that as still, even if they're consuming some of their information independently, they still view that as the alt, as the alternative, as the indie track that they want to hear, but it's not necessarily, it causes them to question what they still view as the traditional means of consuming information.
	So, Where I think is, yes, the optimistic side is what you said is true, that's the evolution we're seeing.
	But the realistic, even I would say somewhat pessimistic side is that's a very gradual trend and something that I might have wished to have happened over a matter of years, that we would already be there.
	No, we're far from it.
	I think it's going to be a slow trajectory in weaning away the impact of that legacy corporate media.
	The other thing I will say is the kinds of candidates that you're talking about, it's not just, what should I say, an implementation question, right?
	Some people think, you know, well, why don't you just serve this up to, and I don't want to pick on any other individual candidate in this election, but pick your favorite professional politician.
	Why didn't they do it like you're doing it?
	And if so, they would have been far more successful.
	Okay, fine.
	I'll just use a specific example that I hear all the time.
	Ron DeSantis, right?
	I think that, okay, why didn't he run the campaign that you ran?
	And, you know, wouldn't that have just been better advice that his consultants could have given him?
	Maybe that'd be some of the answer.
	Or pick any other candidate, too.
	It's not limited to one person.
	I think part of this is it's not just, oh, you turned that on and then you did the social media.
	Part of what that modality demands is the ability to spontaneously respond, to actually share what your own independent thoughts are.
	In order for you to do that, first, you have to have independent thoughts.
	Second, you have to be willing to share them.
	And I think that that's something that most political candidates, both in the United States and traditional politicians who run for office around the world, don't actually have.
	And I don't say that cynically.
	I say that what politics has become in much of the developed world, certainly in the United States, is an assembly line, right?
	The politicians are the products.
	The system churns them out like they're on an assembly line, a motor conveyor.
	Henry Ford would be proud in terms of the repeatability of producing these kinds of products.
	But one thing about being a product is that you lose the ability to either have independent thoughts, or even for those who still have the vestige of the ability to have those independent thoughts left, have a reluctance to share that without going through the normal assembly line procedure.
	And so, you know, I think that in the case of other candidates, one of the things I've learned about as many more good people, you know, I think that maybe the candidates that competed against Not all of them, but many of them are good people, but they're not wired in a way that allows themselves to either have those independent thoughts or to share them with the public at large, Republicans and Democrats alike.
	And so it's not just a matter of coaching more candidates that you're going to see using social media.
	That makes it sound like an implementation or a plumbing experiment.
	I think part of what you're seeing is far more what kinds of candidates are selected for.
	Is it the kind of candidate that's going to speak in an unfiltered way and take some risk?
	I mean, there's good reasons people don't want to do this, right?
	Something you'll say on the medium that you and I are having right now will inevitably be helicopter lifted from this conversation to the modality of linear cable media.
	And they will take something disproportionately out of context.
	Maybe it's a joke.
	This happened to me in the last couple of weeks.
	Say something in a joking tone, and then legacy corporate media purposefully knows how to exploit that in the context of an hour.
	It might be a joke in reference to something that you and I said half an hour ago, but if you're doing a two-minute clip, that is the perfect fodder for lifting that out and having that distorted in a way that penalizes the person from using that media in the first place.
	Which then sees a confluence between both the kind of legacy corporate media and the kind of political politician creators, how those two things converge, is they create the disincentive for politicians to engage in new media in the first place.
	Because so long as legacy media matters, and as I said before, it actually does, like it or not, it still does.
	It's a slow burn away from it.
	That's legacy media's effective attack on new media, is you create the disincentive for political participants to engage in that new media, because if they do, you increase the risk of the consequence of the price they'll have to pay by the price that legacy media extracts from them.
	And so that ends up becoming a complex game, a cat and mouse game between legacy and new media, using the politicians and the incentives you create for them as a way of reclaiming what otherwise would have more naturally gone in the direction of decentralized media.
	So I'm sure I'm rambling, but maybe some...
	No, it makes a lot of sense because in a sense what you're, it seems, illuminating is the idea that this type of media for an anti-establishment candidate is successful.
	In an environment where recently there was a poll in the UK, which politician would you like to lead the UK?
	current PM Rishi Sunak, leader of the opposition Kirstarma of Vladimir Putin.
	And Vladimir Putin won by 90% just because there's been so much bombardment.
	It was a poll of 40,000 people.
	And if your position is, I do not trust the establishment, whether that's deep state agencies,
	the government itself, corporations, legacy media, you can operate in these looser, long-form spaces,
	knowing that people almost have a, if not a sophistication, a tolerance that if you make some joke or reference about
	Nikki Haley or the Koch brothers, or some reference to Ron DeSantis, that people recognize,
	or Trump saying I'll be dictator for a day, people seeing that...
	Oh, that was a joke.
	They won't deliberately extract it, narrativize it, knowing that it will have a certain amount of impact.
	In fact, I was really struck by a speech that Barack Obama gave at Stanford immediately prior to some proposed legislation to introduce further censorship to social media spaces, where what Barack Obama said was that independent media, even when people don't believe it, it muddies the water.
	And I thought, actually, the reverse is true.
	It's the legacy media that muddies the war, even when you're at the point where you think, no, hold on, Ukraine can't beat Russia in a war.
	It doesn't matter how long we perpetuate it.
	Ultimately, Russia will be successful unless it escalates to being a conflict that involves more nations.
	But you're able to sort of Hold at bay that obvious conclusion by muddying the water or it seems like they never clinically trialled these medicines for transmission.
	Why on earth were they saying you'll kill grandma?
	Hold on a minute, the six feet distance was arbitrary.
	Why were we doing that?
	How can we ever trust them again?
	Through legacy media, through various talk show hosts dancing around dressed as vaccines, through each demographic having their own musical number, whether you're gay or black or country, whatever it is you're into, they found a piece of propaganda for you.
	It's the legacy media that creates that.
	Have you found that to be true, for example, around January 6th or even 9-11 or many of the subjects you've spoken about quite boldly?
	Okay, we're going to stop the conversation now, Vivek, because we are getting dangerously close to breaching the YouTube guidelines as downloaded from the WHO.
	To see the answer for that question, click the link in the description.
	Get over now to Rumble, where we don't speak hatefully, we speak freely, and I pray that we bring people together from across all cultural groups that we can unify, unite, And fight against establishment power.
	See you there in a few seconds.
	Is the countdown nearly done?
	It's nearly done.
	Okay, join us over there.
	Remember, become an Awakened Wonder and you could have seen chats like that live and post questions to Vivek.
	See you in a second.
	You know, absolutely.
	I mean, I think that my view is you shouldn't ban any modality or you shouldn't put negative pressure against any modality.
	It's leave it up to the people to decide.
	So there's two elements of this, though, Russell, is when Obama makes comments like that, what he's actually doing is it's not just tipping the scales towards some type of censorship regime, though it can go in that direction, too.
	But it's planting the seeds of doubt in the mind of the electorate or the consumer of that information.
	And it goes back to, I think this is one of the things I've learned in this campaign, is the problem we have in this country, I think in the modern West more broadly, There is a major top-down problem, no doubt about it.
	But it's not just the top-down problem of the government working with private actors, each scratching each other's back, and it happens using tech companies to silence speech either directly or indirectly through the back door.
	And it's not just silencing through suppression, silencing through shadow banning or otherwise, as a favor for the government, that the government then scratches their back with lighter regulation or vice versa.
	That's what I call the top-down problem, the rise of this woke industrial complex in America, and where I've focused for much of the last several years.
	And I remain focused.
	But it's not just that.
	I think equally pertinent is that other half of the problem where When we lose our own anchoring of what matters to us, right?
	You could have different things fill in the blank.
	Faith, patriotism, hard work, family, self-confidence, achievement, whatever it is.
	The things that give us our own mooring and sense of self-confidence.
	When we lose that, Then there's something about each of us inside that leaves this vacuum in our heart that causes us to look for legitimization externally.
	And that's what causes us to want to bend the knee.
	So if you don't pledge allegiance to the real flag, you're going to pledge allegiance to something else.
	Maybe it'll be the transgender flag.
	Maybe it'll be the Ukraine flag.
	Maybe it'll be CNN.
	Right.
	And so I think that that is something where we, especially in the conservative movement, have not done a good enough job of really admitting to ourselves is that human beings are fallen and we have in our very nature a desire to believe in something bigger than ourselves that almost legitimizes ourselves and our own beliefs.
	And there's something about the history of the way legacy media and the role it's occupied in culture that causes, it's not just the government's foisting of it that causes its continued existence, it's a kind of psychological insecurity in the general populace that says even in a world where people are able to access you through local or rumble, locals or rumble or whatever, That they still need what they view as the baseline arbiter of truth, against which you are the alternative, versus the other way around, which is to say that there's an even marketplace of ideas, and I truly am independent and able to consume and form my own opinions on my own merits.
	And I think there's especially younger people, more of them are maybe heading in that direction, but that's a slow shift.
	And so when Obama says something like that, it's about sowing the seeds of doubt in people who might have otherwise taken that step anyway, but to awaken in them that inner sheep.
	within. And that's something I'm increasingly more so at the later phase of this, after having
	finished the campaign, drawn to, than even I was in the very beginning is, it's not just a top-down
	problem, it's a bottom-up cultural revival that we're going to need as well. And it's not just
	going to happen through political leadership. It's going to happen through leaders in other
	spheres of our lives, causing people to awaken their own independent selves as well, as opposed
	to being a bunch of automatons doing what program to do on a given day.
	That's what the country looks like to me on certain days.
	And I think that that programming of our automaton mindset is equally part of the problem we're going to have to tackle in this country.
	It's pretty clear that there would be anthropological reasons to align yourself with a group, or at least not nominate yourself as an outlier, that that exposes you to potential persecution.
	And it seems important to make this distinction That even when people are sympathetic to the views of Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson or people enjoy the punditry and prose of Vivek Ramaswamy, it's by default by your reckoning being
	Opposed to what they might hear from Carrie Jean-Pierre or Joe Biden as this is the establishment rhetoric, this is the alternative.
	To establish a kind of levelling, that's a sort of a bold idea.
	Often in this space, and it's something I'm sure you're familiar with now because you've mastered this space, certainly you've learned how to
	utilize this space very successfully, the term controlled opposition, like it's something that I've
	been accused of, that Alex Jones has been accused of, Tucker Carlson gets accused
	of, these are controlled opposition.
	And I started to think, well, in a sense, on the basis that you've just described, perhaps
	People sometimes might think it's enough, because certainly I'm not in any complicit way getting told here, say this, say that.
	Because, you know, my strongest, deepest, most vehement belief, Vivek, is that wherever possible, authority should be decentralised, that the sovereignty of the individual is paramount, that communities should be autonomous wherever possible, that we should Debate, discuss and vote on how our shared collective and individual resources are aggregated in order to create a sense of nation or state or city or whatever is, I would say, the smallest denomination is the most favourable.
	You know, that's what I believe in myself.
	And I know I don't have relationships with legacy media.
	I know they see me as an enemy and they treat me like an enemy and they have treated me like an enemy.
	But I still wonder if What is it that we're doing that allows people to think this is just a condiment, an alternative, before we comply?
	I don't mean to get overly psychological here, but that's where we're going.
	I think it's actually a projection.
	I think for many of the people who might say that about you or Alex Jones or Tucker, I've heard my share of that as well.
	It goes back to that element that resides within each of us.
	And so there's an element inside each person who is even an anti-establishment viewer or consumer or voter or audience member.
	Who still senses their gravitational pull to bend the knee to something, but I think that that guilt ends up showing up in the form of self-love.
	Well, if that can happen to me, then you know what?
	It's probably true of Russell Brand, you know, or whoever else that's speaking to me too.
	Controlled opposition.
	When in fact, I think that that's a little bit of a Often a projection of just what's part of each of our own human nature.
	I think if we all admit that about ourselves, it's true of me, it's true of you, it's true of probably every other individual you mentioned too, that there's something if we just admit that about ourselves.
	We're human beings, we're fallen, and so there's a part of us.
	Now once you're conscious of it, that's your path to liberation.
	But if you're conscious of it, that there's something inside me that makes me want to bend the knee to authority or to supplicate to something, no matter how independent I might think of myself as being, that even subconsciously there's some element of me that's going to comply with some sort of higher authority that I may not recognize, but I know that that's going to exist.
	That consciousness, I think, is the liberation.
	Now, what I see happening, it descends into sort of this tug-of-war-ism, is that many of those audience members may see the same thing in themselves, but then use that to sort of point the finger to you or, you know, whoever else, Tucker or Alex or whoever else they would say the same thing about, instead of actually all recognizing, it's true of all of us, great, now we're free, we understand that.
	Now we can actually engage in honest discourse and recognize that amongst each other or amongst even within ourselves, what elements of our own bias may be as anti-establishment as we might be, still have some vestige of a bias that we didn't recognize.
	And then say, hey, we're all open to that.
	I think that's actually the place to go.
	And then the other thing I would say in terms of what an alternative media institution looks like, and I've been given very recently a lot of thought to this as well, is right now, legacy media institutions are built In a central command and control kind of way.
	If you look at most cable news operators, it almost doesn't matter who's on the air.
	All that matters is they're part of a general machine and they're a mouthpiece.
	Whereas the thing about independent media is the locus of trust is actually built at the level of the individual.
	But there is no, by definition, one-stop shop or centralized place to go.
	And so I wonder if there's some element of creating kind of an inside-out model where the business model is run such that the actual individual who's the locus of trust, people like yourself, etc, are uncapped upside in the amount of money they generate, etc, are completely unfiltered in terms of the content they can bring, but still has some sort of hub and spoke where there still is a hub just in terms of the level of organization of how it's set up.
	That's what a long run competitor to the New York Times or CNN, I think it's got to look like.
	In order to really eliminate the existing need that people still have to go to that centralized one-stop shop kind of place.
	Does that make sense what I'm telling you here?
	Yes, it does.
	But there needs to be a facility.
	I think that's what's going to happen.
	And I think that that's a vacuum.
	It doesn't quite exist in the marketplace today.
	But based on what I saw as, you know, I would think of myself certainly as an anti-establishment candidate, That base need that consumers and audience members and voters have to still have their default against which you're the interesting alternative to say that, no, it's actually just one level playing field of equal.
	Everyone's an alternative among equals of alternatives.
	I think that in the media, you have to give people that sense that they're still having some blanket of permanence and Dare I say security?
	It's just part of a human nature that people have.
	But actually, the way that it's run is still completely, you know, 100% unfiltered.
	The people who are making the money are actually the people who are looking the audience members in the eye.
	But there's still just an established alternative to an existing centralized command and control operation.
	I think that's where the equilibrium will ultimately settle.
	And we're not there right now.
	But without that, I think that there will always be Because of our human nature, that kind of trust deficit against which the alternative still is an alternative, rather than actually on an equal playing field relative to the status quo incumbents.
	That was one of my learnings, at least in the campaign, is, you know, the debates.
	I'll give you one example of this, Russell.
	The presidential debates.
	You saw most of them?
	Of course.
	Yeah.
	So one thing I learned through the campaign is that the true audience of those presidential debates is not actually the viewership or the voter base.
	It's the media filter that distills what happens on the debate stage.
	Because here's just the arithmetic of it.
	Of the 330 million people in the United States, a tiny, and I'm talking like very tiny, certainly by the third and fourth debates, which I thought were some of the best ones, certainly, you know, the ones where I had the most fun, but I think actually were some of the best ones.
	We're talking like tiny, like 0.3% of the voting public.
	ever saw even a portion of that debate in any actual form themselves.
	But you're talking about hundreds of millions of people who read the media's distillation of what actually happened, you know, from the combination of the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, you know, you go straight down the list.
	And then you actually look at the juxtaposition between what the people who distilled the media, the media distilled the debates, what did they say happened?
	Versus actually seeing what actually happened.
	And it might have been two completely different worlds.
	You might as well have been living in two completely different worlds.
	It might have been two alternative events.
	A person who reads what happened and a person who watched it would recognize them as not even being descriptions of the same phenomenon.
	But it doesn't matter.
	Because the real audience was never the people in the first place.
	That was just a charade to make you think that this thing called debate happened, when in fact most people's experience of the presidential debates came not from watching the presidential debates at all.
	It came from reading the descriptions of what happened during the presidential debates, which means that if you figure that out and you realize that's your actual audience, it then shapes what you say on that stage.
	And so it's an interesting game that you see firsthand that this idea that you were reaching the people directly at all was an illusion in the first place.
	And the people who played that game well, or really, I think, professional politicians who understand who their audience actually is, versus the people on the internet or whatever that even saw clips of the debates, let alone actually the debate itself, understood that the reality of what happened was very different.
	A lot of those were my supporter base, but it turns out that that is a tiny fraction of the overall viewership.
	And so it creates this game, and until we've created an equal playing field where the people at home themselves, the people who said, I don't need to watch it, I can just read what the summary was the next day, that's most people.
	And until those people view alternative sources of media consumption in the same way And with the same level of implicit trust that they have from legacy media institutions that they should have no basis trusting in the first place, we're not going to see major change, which is why I think alternative media needs to move one step further in leveling up the psychology of how it interfaces with the people who are actually consuming it, not as some alt-alternative, but as really just in an even playing field with the legacy media institutions in the first place.
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	Okay, let's get back into our conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy.
	Perhaps this point could be extrapolated further, Vivek, that we would naively on the surface assume that an orator or candidate is directly addressing a voting population.
	But the experienced politician, perhaps even a figure like Joe Biden, knows that he's talking to the electoral college or some smaller democratic unit.
	And it's clear that from the strategies of a politician like Biden, like against Trump round one, it's just keep this guy out the way, let the anti-Trump sentiment of our, inverted commas, natural audience abide, and he will reach the people that he is required to reach.
	And perhaps there are a whole sort of modalities of donor, of legacy media, of corporate interest, that all interact and ultimately where we like sort of giddy and passionate and carnal assume oh wow look at this person's doing really well in the debate oh that was a zinger oh that point destroyed Nikki Haley oh this is funny man that that's just taking place that's might as well be sport and yes and it's interesting to know how these function because
	I think that the fear of populism and the ongoing perjuring of the term or decimation and attacks of populism, the attempt to make populism itself a negative idea, is the terrible threat That there might be, because of the way the independent media is altering and radically evolving, the potential exists for individuals and movements to emerge where what happens is the power of the population is directly harnessed and bypasses all of those gatekeepers, all of those institutions.
	And if you look at say the farming, like gosh this sounds quite tangential Vivek, but the farming movement It's not tangential.
	It's not tangential at all.
	protesting in Germany, they're protesting in Holland and France.
	No.
	It's not tangential at all. No.
	It's, they're taking power unless they're not, they're not, they're not waiting and going to, you know,
	whatever the national broadcaster is in France or Germany or to De Spiegel or
	Figaro or, cause they're happening in Spain as well. And sort of saying, Oh,
	do we have your permission? And would you support our campaign?
	They're just doing it.
	And then you have a figure like Tucker Carlson going to Russia to talk to Putin.
	And obviously the threat is that if on X we have the opportunity to watch
	Vladimir Putin and we hear Vladimir Putin say, stay out of Crimea,
	allow some freedom of, uh, of cultural expression in the Donbass for the people that
	affiliate with Russia and don't let Ukraine join NATO.
	If we hear Putin say, you've got a deal, the war's over, then the American taxpayer, the
	British taxpayer, all of us that are funding NATO might go, well, what is it that NATO's
	done for me lately?
	And start to question the entire damn narrative.
	I mean, that's the threat of populism.
	Even if you're right that there's some way to go before these monoliths of the New York
	Times and the WHO and NATO, all of these powerful institutions are obviously in a death match
	right now.
	But, you know, the outliers are sometimes quite easily subsumed back into the system.
	So what do you think about, I'd love to know what you think about, what is the real threat of Tucker interviewing Putin and what is the real power of the kind of activism we've seen in Canada with the truckers and across Europe with the farmers?
	This is what the American Revolution was actually thought of.
	Do we actually trust the people to self-govern?
	The negative valence attached to the term populism that you talked about, what is that about, actually?
	It's about, do you believe that the people can be trusted to self-govern?
	That the elected should be responsive to the will of the people?
	Or do you believe that they should be responsive to a different will, something other than the will of the people?
	There's two things.
	Either the will of the people, that's really what modern populism is about, giving the people what they want.
	Or should you give somebody else what they want, other than whoever the populace is in the elected population?
	That's what the American Revolution was really about.
	I mean, in the American Revolution's terms, it was about the monarchy.
	Who are a small, selected group of enlightened elites?
	What do they think is right for the rest of society at large?
	Do you want that or do you want what the people want themselves?
	But here's the rub at the heart of this, Russell, is it's not even in their own minds nefarious, right?
	This idea we're talking about on the debate stage.
	Who do you view as your audience?
	I viewed my audience as the electorate of the United States.
	The people of this country, the 330 million American citizens.
	But it turns out most of the trained professional politicians understand that that's a joke, because that doesn't matter.
	The system is set up for a 0.01% of those people to be your audience, who are then the filters of deciding what the rest of the masses can and cannot hear or consume.
	Here's the dirty little secret at the heart of this.
	That 0.01%, they don't think that they're acting nefariously.
	They don't view this as betraying the interests of the broader 330 million.
	They view themselves as actually acting in the interest of the broader 330 million because the whole premise is that the people could not be trusted to self-govern in the first place.
	So I think you've got to understand that it's not even in their own minds coming from a place of ill will.
	It's coming from a place of benevolence, actually.
	So bring that to the Tucker question.
	What this relates to is the same thing as it relates to the origin of COVID-19 or the Nashville Transgender Shooter Manifesto or the truth of what happened on January 6th.
	You can go straight down the list of every other truth that's been suppressed.
	The people cannot be trusted to deal with the primary information.
	It's up to us, for the good of the people.
	This is the key part to understand, is the mindset.
	It's for the good of the people, we have to make sure that the people are served up what they can actually handle.
	It's like at the end of the movie, did you ever watch A Few Good Men?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it's like Colonel Jessup at the end of the movie.
	It's what he embodies.
	You can't handle the truth.
	In his mind, it wasn't that he was trying to do something that was ill-begotten for the American people.
	He viewed himself as, and in some sense our country has been structured for a very long time as, him being a patriot.
	This is a guy who makes the sacrifice that needs to be made, that bears that cross on his shoulder of knowing the actual truth but serving as the gatekeeper in the filter because you can't handle the truth.
	That's the albatross, that's the cross that the true leader bears, is to say that I will bear the truth of the actual reality so that you can give the populace What they can otherwise handle, be it the truth of what's happening in Russia and Ukraine, the truth of what happened on January 6th, the truth of where COVID began early in the pandemic, which we knew and should have known, the truth of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax that never was, the truth about the Hunter Biden laptop story on the eve of the last election, the truth of what, you know, you could go straight down the list.
	Bubba Wallace, you go straight down the list of the last 10 years.
	I could probably rattle off 10 more instances of what you will call the noble lie.
	I don't think it's a noble lie, but it's described as the noble lie.
	This is ancient.
	I mean, if you go back to Socrates, he would talk about, Plato would talk about the noble lie, that the people could not be trusted with the truth.
	And the beauty of 1776 in the American Revolution is we said hell no to that vision.
	That we said, for better or worse, and maybe sometimes it's for the worse, But for better or worse, we the people can be trusted to self-govern.
	We the people demand the truth.
	We the people demand free speech and open debate in an unfiltered way, which is the path to the truth.
	And maybe sometimes in the short run we'll get it wrong and we'll do some stupid things.
	But in the long run, we still believe that that is what is right and what is just for a free people to be able to self-govern.
	That's really that age-old question that reared its head during the American Revolution, that in some sense even reared its head again 13 years later in the French Revolution.
	Although that was, I think, a more complicated form.
	Rears its head again every century or so, and it's rearing its head again now.
	Can we, the people, be trusted to self-govern or not?
	And I think that there are most in modern institutional life who believe that the answer to that question is no.
	It's a crazy idea that you get to speak your mind freely as long as I get to in return.
	That every one of us gets a voice and vote that counts equally in a democratic constitutional republic.
	And the thing to realize about this, Russell, we gotta admit this, is people like you and I, we're the weird ones, actually.
	Because for most of human history, it was done the other way.
	I mean, if you look at the totality of all human history, not just Old World Europe before the American Revolution, but just all of human history.
	I mean, go back to Plato, Socrates, etc.
	The conventional wisdom amongst the wise for most of human history has been societies can't function this way if you trust individuals to be able to immediately have an institution or a government that's responsive exclusively to their interests.
	The whims of people would cause themselves to be defeated, to be dead.
	And that's what modern climate change's claim really is about.
	If we leave this just to the people, we're going to burn the planet out of existence, and we won't have a planet left to inhabit.
	So what a silly idea that would be to leave it to the people to self-govern versus a group of enlightened elites that have to save the very existence of the planet itself.
	That's the modern climate change version of it.
	But it's an age-old question that's always been played out this way.
	But once we embrace that to say that, no, no, no, we're the weird ones, and in America, I say this, We're the weird ones on this side of 1776 in the new world, in the United States of America.
	Yes, we are the departure from the rest of human history.
	Once we embrace that, that's what makes America great.
	That's what makes America itself.
	That's where America, I think, can then be still that shining city on a hill, that last best hope for the rest of the free world that can use that as, you know, I say this with an American conceit, but I think it's true, as their last best hope of what's possible.
	But when America itself, that shining city on a hill, no longer still shines, The rest of the free world then has no hope as well, and it's old world Europe all over again.
	That's what the Great Reset, that's what the Davos World Economic Forum vision is all about.
	It's not some modern, new, nefarious tendency.
	I think what we have to actually view this as is, this is nothing more than a reversion to the norm, actually, for what's been the case of most of human history.
	And once you see it that way, I think we're closer to being over the target, that actually it's not this new pernicious force threatening our way of life.
	It's that our way of life is actually what's the modern post-1776 American way of life is what's threatened the historical equilibrium of power held by a group of enlightened elites that once we recognize that we realize we have to continue to fight for that existence.
	If we don't, if we just assume that we passively inherit it, as my generation, I think, has, that's when you lose it.
	And so anyway, that's, I think, what once you got to see what's going on, you get to the bottom of it.
	That's how you actually preserve that rare exception that post-1776 America represented in human history.
	I've got three more questions and they're all pretty good and we've only got you for one more minute.
	Can I ask my three questions?
	We'll go rapid fire.
	Lighting fire.
	They're pretty good.
	Everyone in America, other than the native people, was an immigrant at some point.
	Do you think that in order to morally legitimize the Rigid closure of American borders.
	America has to withdraw from foreign wars to recognize that there's a connection between foreign wars and destabilized migrant populations.
	And if it's not directly because of wars, it's sometimes other aspects of globalism and America having a punitive relationship with states.
	For example, a significant number of people crossing the border will be from Venezuela and Ecuador.
	So does the end of American interventionism abroad have to be a part of a rigid and closed borders policy?
	So, does the end of American interventionism abroad have to be a part of a rigid and closed
	borders policy?
	What are your thoughts on that, Vivek?
	I mean, these are two sides of the same coin.
	It's a deep point you're touching on, Russell, but I'll make it much more simple and practical.
	Rather than focusing on sealing somebody else's border using our military halfway around the world, let's focus on sealing our own border in this own country.
	At a very pragmatic level, that's how I would say it, but there's a deeper philosophical connection here, too.
	I was on a trip recently, you know, just for fun with family.
	We met a guy.
	He was an art dealer, okay?
	What drew me into his shop was he had this beautiful rendition of the American flag, so my wife and I went and we had a conversation with him.
	He was a Nicaraguan immigrant to the United States, but he had a wild story where he was actually, he came here to go to art school, get an education.
	And then the US tried to recruit him, this is back in I want to say the early 80s, to play a role in the Contras in Nicaragua.
	And he refused to do it.
	But then he ended up getting in all kinds of getting all kinds of hot water in the United States.
	And he would talk about his own friends in the U.S.
	arguing, hey, with these Nicaraguan people, they're so violent.
	What's going on?
	What's going on with all that violence down there?
	He's like, no, no, no.
	I personally have been almost recruited by the national security establishment to play a role in the Contras in Central America.
	And yet you wonder why these people are actually as violent as they are, as though there was no connection.
	So that's actually the deeper point that you're making, is the more that you actually create—Ron Paul, I think, did a good job of making this point during his presidential run—is a lot of the problems you create at home come from actually the meddling in foreign affairs abroad that you wouldn't have created as a backlash against the United States had you not gone out of your way to create it.
	But the simple terms I would put that in, to summarize it in a very simple way, is instead of worrying about using our military to seal somebody else's border somewhere halfway around the world, let's first actually start by using our own resources to seal our own border in this country and to restore the idea that I'm a citizen of this nation, not some nebulous, vague, global citizen fighting climate change somewhere, but that I'm a citizen of this nation, the United States of America.
	And had I been elected president, That's certainly the vision I would have restored and, you know, in whatever way I can, I'm going to make sure, and I think Donald Trump is a great option, is the option, who's going to be the person who actually leads us in that direction in the next four years.
	But I'm going to do whatever I can to restore that vision of national identity in the United States.
	Is Nikki Haley a uniparty stooge, the preferred candidate of the establishment and the Democrats?
	Is the Nikki Haley candidacy an attempt to retain control over both parties in the event that there is an election in 2024, if it goes ahead, in order to not have any candidate that is an inverted commas anti-establishment candidate?
	Is that your position on Nikki Haley?
	That is my view on Nikki Haley, yes.
	I don't think that the establishment's going to be successful at it.
	I think one of the great learnings for me is if you want to prevent something bad from happening as a problem, first name the problem.
	And once you name the problem, it becomes a lot more difficult for the people who are propping it up.
	And so I've been saying this for months at this point, Russell, even when it was very unpopular, even within our own conservative base and America First base.
	Many people excoriated me for saying it, but I think it's the truth.
	The entire system has been conspiring, I believe, indirectly to, you know, it's a game-theoretic conspiring, not a back-closed-door-cigar-smell-filled-room conspiring, but a game-theoretic conspiring.
	Which is a repeated tacit game theory of narrowing this down to two candidates, Donald Trump and Nikki Haley, in one way or another, eliminate Trump from contention, and then trot their puppet who they can control into the White House.
	Now, the more you've named that problem, the harder it becomes for them to pull that off.
	And that's also part of why I dropped out when I did.
	And through my support behind Donald Trump, I got about 8% in Iowa.
	I was going to get the same or so in New Hampshire.
	I wanted to be clear that Nikki Haley should not come anywhere within striking distance of being anywhere close to the presidency or any of the levers of power.
	And so thankfully, I think after New Hampshire, this primary is indeed done.
	And I think that it's now about Moving to the general election phase, where I think that establishment is now likely, I do think the Nikki Haley threat here is not completely eliminated until she officially drops out, but for all intents and purposes, I think it's off to the general election.
	And you're going to see that same establishment now prop up another puppet who they can find within the Democratic Party itself.
	I think they tried to do it within the Republican Party.
	I think that has mostly failed, you know, all but the final steps of having failed.
	to then turn to the Democratic Party as a vehicle to do what they couldn't do through the Republican Party.
	But it's not Republican versus Democrat so much as an existing pervasive bipartisan uniparty establishment that I think has lost their use for Joe Biden as a puppet.
	So I do think that once it's Crystal clear.
	I think it's already basically clear.
	But once it's crystal clear that Donald Trump is definitively the Republican nominee, they will turn to then finding a better puppet who they can use through the Democratic Party to advance their objectives than Joe Biden is able to do for them right now.
	So you envisage Gavin Newsom, Michelle Obama, someone more capable emerging.
	And do you feel that this is a question from Neo Grammarian in the chat?
	Actually, our live members get to pose questions to our guests.
	They ask, do you feel that there will be some concocted emergency used to cancel the elections in the event that Trump isn't incarcerated?
	Do you envisage a free and fair election in 2024?
	And if it is Trump, who do you imagine it will be Trump versus of those potential candidates?
	So I think that Trump versus fill in the blank someone other than Biden is not crazy.
	I think Trump versus Michelle Obama is not crazy.
	I mean, you know, I've no base other than just watching and observing what I see publicly transpiring.
	I think this system has decided they will stop at nothing to keep Donald Trump from returning to office.
	And I think they tried to use Nikki Haley as their first stooge to do that within the Republican Party.
	Thankfully, I think we managed to have staved that off.
	I think they will then turn to the Democratic Party as a vehicle to do it, turn to the legal system, the extrajudicial system to do it.
	So, I'm not God, you're not God, and so none of us can... I'm not in the business of...
	Predicting, like, what exactly is one individual thing that's gonna happen.
	I'm in the business of observing what the collective facts are, and incentives are, that are hiding in plain sight, and just connect those dots.
	Make those observations.
	The future, as we human beings perceive it, is what?
	A distribution of probability.
	Is a probability distribution of potential outcomes.
	Okay?
	But what we can do better, and this isn't conspiracy theorizing.
	Conspiracy theorizing is assuming a bunch of people get together in some smoke-filled room, and are plotting out how to take over the universe.
	I don't think that's how it works exactly.
	I think the way it works is you have collective incentives.
	that are hiding in plain sight, an amalgam of those incentives.
	They're often difficult to see, but you have to connect those dots, and that makes the future possibilities that much more clear.
	And so I think that's what led me to my view about what they were trying to do with Nikki Haley, name that problem, and then it becomes harder for them to act on those incentives.
	I think the same thing goes for, okay, if it's not that, then they're gonna turn to the next thing and use the Democratic Party as a vehicle to do it.
	And if they can't successfully do that, I think they will then turn to the next thing.
	So I think that's what this year holds in store.
	And our best way to prevent that from playing out is to name the problem.
	Once you just unsparingly name it to be true, actually call out that otherwise Obtuse or obfuscated set of incentives that they were able to use to achieve an outcome.
	Once you smoke that out, it becomes a lot harder for them to continue to act out and play out that same part.
	And so that's that, I think, game of cat and mouse.
	I think that's where it's important for folks like yourself, for independent voices, to be able to You know, connect those dots in a way that once you've named the problem, it becomes a lot harder for that problem to transpire.
	And for my part, that's something that I will continue to do over the course of this year as well, is once you utter the words that should not be spoken, it becomes a lot harder for those unspoken words to then become the reality.
	And so I think we have to be vigilant.
	And so I'm not going to sit here saying, OK, this is exactly what's going to happen over the next nine months.
	What's going to happen over the next nine months is in part a product of how vigilant we are to those possibilities.
	And I think it is vital that Donald Trump is successfully elected as the next U.S.
	president, lead the America First movement for the next four years.
	But let's keep in mind, that's just the next four years.
	We have another 250 years and then some still left if we do this right.
	But it requires us to be vigilant, as our founding fathers would admonish us to do.
	We can't just passively inherit this country that we call home.
	To the contrary, what we enjoy, the freedoms we enjoy, that's the exception, as I said earlier, to most of human history.
	That exception doesn't last automatically.
	It's not something you just get to passively, lazily inherit.
	You have to consistently fight for it.
	Each generation does, and now it's up to us and the balls in our court to continue doing.
	So I'm going to do my part, whatever I can from the outside.
	Part of that is calling out each of these issues, which is no small part of it, but Ultimately, to see this through, we're going to have to shut down that deep state in Washington, D.C.
	We're going to have to shut down those illicit relationships between that deep state, that managerial class in the three-letter government agencies and the private sector, from tech companies to media to banks to financial institutions.
	I think we then create the space for that revival of individual self-confidence and purpose that makes sure that we no longer are sheepishly bending the knee to what we're force-fed.
	I think all of those things are going to be required to revive this nation.
	Vivek, thank you so much for your time, for your participation.
	Well done in a great campaign.
	Thank you for popularizing some important ideas and for coming from nowhere and generating so much intrigue and excitement.
	And I wish you all the best in your ongoing political career.
	I'm sure there's so many exciting things to come.
	Thank you, Vivek.
	Good seeing you, Matt.
	Thank you.
	Okay, well, I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Vivek.
	If you are an awakened wonder, remember you can join us for these conversations live, as well as meditations.
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	It's a wonderful thing to learn to be able to stand up and yell bullshit.
	Because so much is being slung and nobody is talking about the primacy of experience and the dignity of the individual.
	The dignity of the individual.
	We went a long way with this in America before we betrayed it.
	And it wasn't only betrayed by the clowns in Washington.
	It's also betrayed by anybody who clusters themselves around the feet of some self-proclaimed nabob.
	I don't know what nabob means, but I like the idea of the dignity of the individual, because say if you're a libertarian of the right, you believe in tradition, you're Christian, whatever, or you're a very progressive person that believes in non-binary, fluid forms of identity.
	Terence McKenna is saying that should be respected, the sovereignty of the individual.
	I hear that spoken of a lot, that within you as an individual is something that should be regarded.
	That's why you don't tread on people, you push people around, you don't know what it's like to be them.
	You allow people to be who they are and try and find ways of frucinpatico and consent.
	Cooperating with one another, I suppose, like Sesame Street.
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	No, here's the effing news.
	Stay with us.
	So why is the left falling apart?
	And why can't it utilize powerful advocates like Joe Rogan?
	Now, Joe Rogan has just done the biggest deal in independent media history.
	He's survived some of the biggest attacks that the legacy media have ever tried to impose upon an independent voice.
	The n-word attacks, the horse-paced attacks, the, he shouldn't be allowed to have this audience, why are people listening to People are infuriated, but there it is.
	The genie's out of the bottle.
	It's no question now that Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan are the biggest voices in independent media and people are losing their trust and leaving legacy media resources in their droves.
	They're losing viewers, they're losing power, they're losing advertising.
	Could there be a connection between this decline of trust in the legacy media and the breakdown of neoliberal values, or what Joe Rogan referred to as the lunatic left?
	I know Joe Rogan, I've been on that show a few times and I think he's a great person.
	And I would say that he has what you'd call liberal values, like he just wants to sort of be left alone, doesn't care about people's identities or cultural choices, believes in democracy and representation and voting and all that kind of stuff.
	So why is someone that the left could have grabbed and turned into a hero rejecting the left?
	Is it because the left has gone kinda crazy, lost all its values and principles, and doesn't mean anything anymore?
	Let's have a look at what he said in the framework of this being the most significant voice in independent media.
	I used to be a part of the blue bubble.
	I was 100% a left-leaning person who lived in Los Angeles.
	I suppose I was as well.
	I worked in Hollywood, worked in British media, and when I was part of that establishment, it seemed kind of ordinary and necessary that your values would be Democrat, or Labour, or Progressivism.
	And for me, that was always based on kindness, that everyone has the right to express themselves how they want to.
	And I kind of, I suppose, didn't notice how the rights of people that had traditional values, like, say, Christians, were always alloyed to power structures that were regarded negatively.
	How the framing around pro-choice versus pro-life or pro-gun versus anti-gun were always skewed in the media in a very particular way.
	And how one of the perspectives that we were never offered is decentralization.
	Allow different communities to be run differently according to the principles and values of the people that inhabit that community.
	That was oddly never discussed.
	And now you have a left that's taken progressivism into some interesting areas which I frankly don't trust.
	I don't think the left is all about looking after what they would call vulnerable communities.
	I think the left is about censorship and centralised authoritarianism, corporatism and globalism.
	That's what I think defines the left now.
	And if you look at the great experiments of the left, Maoism, Stalinism.
	Perhaps it was always this way.
	Perhaps all of us massively understood that aside from a cultural blip in the 60s, where it's like, oh my god, hippies, Black Panthers, women's rights, and the uprisings of trade union movements, maybe the left has always been about authoritarianism.
	I don't know.
	Certainly Joe Rogan's rejecting it.
	Over time, this is what we're seeing.
	So over time, you and I, who used to be on the left, are now like, where's the left?
	Where are you guys?
	You guys are so far away!
	I know a lot of people feel politically homeless, a lot of people that would say, I'm not a Republican, I don't think, or I'm not a conservative, or I'm not a right-wing person.
	I mean, what are you if you say, I believe in free speech, I believe in communities being controlled by the people in them, I believe in leaving people alone, I believe in minimum government, I believe in opposing rampant corporatism and extremist capitalism, particularly as it's practiced on a global level, I believe in freedom to worship, freedom to identify, freedom to love, freedom!
	I believe in freedom!
	And I recognize that other people's version of freedom might be different from mine.
	And if I leave you alone, you leave me alone.
	Is that cool?
	What's that now?
	I can't even see you!
	You're out of your mind!
	Even if you look at the idea of Tucker Carlson's recent trip to Russia, it's the left that's saying, well, this is treason.
	He shouldn't be allowed over there.
	Russia are the baddies.
	That's what the right would have said 20, 30 years ago.
	He's a traitor against our nation.
	These are the kind of tropes and ideas that were not of the left.
	Authoritarianism.
	Take the shot.
	All of this emergent authoritarianism in the name of cultural progressivism Makes me feel that it was never about freedom.
	That the left was never about freedom.
	Certainly it doesn't seem to be about freedom now.
	Why are you just accepting this?
	It's a noble thing to blurt out.
	So everybody goes, you're on the right team.
	That's what it is.
	Above all, the left used to be about supporting working people against the establishment, whether that establishment was the state or corporations, which were largely believed to have captured the state, which is still what I actually believe.
	But there's no way that you could say that the left are the party of working, ordinary Americans, ordinary British people now.
	It's elitist, it's progressive, it's exclusive, it's condemnatory, it's patronising, supercilious and haughty.
	They clearly represent professional, educated, city-class people.
	There's no doubt about it.
	If you see someone in a white van flying the flag of their nation, the left hates those people.
	Whatever you think about those issues, the fact that we can't talk about them is the biggest problem.
	Shouldn't free speech and the ability to communicate be a shared value across all political spectrums?
	Why are we defunding the f***ing police?
	What are you doing?
	Yeah, you can't say any of those things.
	If you say any of those things, you're a Nazi.
	Whatever you think about those issues, the fact that we can't talk about them is the biggest
	problem.
	Shouldn't free speech and the ability to communicate be a shared value across all political spectrums?
	I would say the side that wants to shut down debate are not the goodies.
	Whatever your view is, if you're like, I believe the opposite to Joe Rogan and everything.
	Early release for criminals, compassion to people, belief in true reform.
	Even if you absolutely believe in that, you should be willing to have a conversation about it.
	We all should be willing to have a conversation.
	Otherwise, what are we ultimately going to get?
	We're going to get conflict and fracture and the breakdown of cultural values.
	And I start to wonder if that is the name and the point of the experiment.
	Austin people are great people. They're really nice. They're nice. They're not shitheads. They're not Hollywood people.
	They're not lost in this fake world of leftist ideology that everybody's trapped in.
	They're just people. They're just regular people, man.
	I gotta say that when I first went to Florida and met all the people that I work with at Rumble and people that are
	conservative, they're often Christian. They believe in traditional values and you can ask them outright, are you a
	racist?
	Do you believe that white people are superior to people of other colors? And if we go, no, I don't believe that,
	Well, what are you going to do?
	Oh, you're a liar.
	You are a racist.
	I mean, if people are being secretly racist, well, then if you're not going to trust anybody's views, what I found was speaking to conservative people is they don't care what I believe in.
	They just want basically to be left alone.
	I'm sure we could tear each other to shreds over the right to bear arms or pro-life, pro-choice values.
	I'm sure I could argue with numerous people on numerous subjects.
	But the fundamental principle of being able to freely and openly discuss our values, that shouldn't be up for negotiation.
	Because that leads to hysteria when Tucker goes to Russia to speak to Putin.
	It leads to censorship.
	It leads to the legitimization of controlling social media spaces.
	It leads to government interventionism.
	It leads to being told things like war is the only route to peace.
	It's leading to a kind of madness.
	Even from a strategic perspective, if you can't get your movement together to get Joe Rogan on your side, you're a mess.
	I was 100% I never voted Republican my whole life I was very left-leaning.
	Even from a strategic perspective if you can't get your movement together to get
	Joe Rogan on your side you're a mess. Like this is someone that could be going
	out to bat for the Democrat Party. They could be going hello I'm Joe Rogan here's
	Gavin Newsom on my podcast here's Joe Biden. Joe wake up Joe wake up! But we
	don't like him he's a meathead he's an idiot. Oh my god who do you want to exclude next?
	And as I've said to you before I think it's become an elitist authoritarian
	organization that doesn't like working or blue-collar people.
	That's been insidiously creeping in for a while, from Clinton and Blair in our country onwards, and that was enshrined in policy, in our country at least, and in yours.
	You saw different kinds of financial deals and deregulation took place under Clinton.
	Basically, ordinary people got abandoned, so the left had to justify that by saying, those people, we should abandon them.
	And who we're looking after is vulnerable minority groups.
	That's what it's done, in my view, in order to give itself a moral backbone, which it now lacks, because it has no raison d'être.
	It has no purpose, because it's essentially the same as any party that goes, we're here to support the interests of big business and globalism.
	There isn't anything else they're offering except for, oh yeah, we think these groups are getting a hard time.
	And those groups historically have been getting a hard time.
	But again, most people are willing to say, you do your thing, we'll do our thing.
	That, along with an ongoing dialogue, is the only solution to this as far as I can see.
	Especially with, like, any social issues.
	When it comes to financial things, I'm a little bit more conservative, but at the end of the day, I'm way more left than I am right.
	But California went nuts, man!
	It's gone, like, full communist!
	It's out of its f***ing mind!
	And their approach to law enforcement is so insane!
	It's so insane!
	The no cash bail, the letting people out for committing violent crimes, the f***ing not
	stopping people for stealing up to whatever money it is, what is it, $900 now?
	I think they raised it.
	I think they made it a little higher.
	San Francisco is non-existent.
	San Francisco, most of San Francisco is emptied out of like big chain stores and big department
	stores.
	I won't even do stand-up there anymore.
	It's crazy.
	It would be ruined.
	Amazing and interesting.
	And again, if someone who plainly speaks to so many ordinary Americans in the way that Joe Rogan does in an unprecedented way can't be reached, that is a barometer that should be paid attention to.
	If you're part of the Democrat Party establishment, you should be like, that idiot, then you are unelectable.
	I'm in the middle now.
	I'm in the middle.
	I'm in the middle.
	I never thought I would ever say that.
	Never.
	It only happened in this last year.
	Right.
	Exactly.
	I just went, I can't do it anymore.
	People that you thought were aligned with you are now mad at you about sh**.
	They're in a cult.
	They're in a cult.
	It's got all... I mean...
	Mark Andreessen, who's a brilliant venture capitalist guy, explained it to me in very clear terms.
	Like, what the definition of a cult is, how you can get excommunicated, how you get shamed for having differing opinions, the groupthink.
	He's like, it's a cult.
	And he's right.
	He's 100% right.
	It's just hard to say, because then people in the cult will attack you.
	You get excommunicated.
	You get treated like you're a Nazi.
	When did this transition take place?
	Perhaps the most identifiable and obvious point was during the pandemic when left and right bifurcated at a point when everyone could and was supposed to come together.
	When the cult of wearing masks and taking medicines and posting on TikTok and shaming people and then acknowledging, wait a minute, Minority communities are particularly vaccine hesitant.
	How do we move the pieces around on the board to facilitate that?
	The point about a cult is an important one because that is where authoritarianism and the refusal to engage in discourse really take hold.
	If your ideology is quaking, shaky, and not solid, then you don't want to engage in conversation because you know you don't have a robust ideology that can withstand discourse.
	Ultimately, what's clearly necessary in this age of mass communication is decentralization.
	Is the ability for communities to be governed differently according to the will of the people that occupy those territories, whether they're physical or online spaces.
	The idea that you can now have a country split down the middle with one half oppressing the other half is ridiculous and laughable.
	The pandemic period was when authoritarianism became normalized.
	Initially, well, you have to stay indoors because you're protecting other people.
	There's no evidence that it protects other people.
	There's no evidence that social distancing works.
	The whole argument fell apart and I think helped us to recognize that what neoliberalism in the form of this peculiar new form of leftism was masking was authoritarianism, a desire to control, a desire to signal virtue rather than practice principles and actual virtue.
	And if the left can't house the biggest voice in independent media, a person who's plainly not a communist because he's just done a massive, massive media deal, who says he's never voted Republican in his life, who clearly speaks the blue-collar America in a way that's unprecedented, if you can't get in alignment with that voice, then your political movement, I would say, is on its way to expiring.
	But that's just what I think.
	Let me know what you think in the chat.
	See you in a second.
	Thank you for using Fox News.
	Good game.
	No.
	Here's the fucking news.
	Thank you very much for your support and comments.
	Remember, become an Awaken Wonder over on Locals to, for example, see the full Tucker conversation.
	Did you notice this moment in the chat with Tucker?
	Most of the divisions being foisted upon us, all the race stuff, totally a con- it's, it's, it's an op.
	Yeah.
	Most people are not that inter- I mean, there are racial differences, but there are way more commonalities between races than differences, way more.
	On the show next week, even more fantastic guests.
	Andrew Bridgen, who's the MP that stood up to Parliament, will be joined by Meryl Nash in studio.
	Then we've got Max Blumenthal coming on the show to talk about war, anti-war, and independent media versus legacy media.
	And this Friday, ahead of Julian Assange's hearing, In London, where it will be discussed whether or not he's going to get extradited, we're talking to Stella Assange, his wife and leader of the campaign to liberate Julian Assange.
	So, fantastic guests next week.
	Remember, press the red button to get additional content, to be a part of this movement, to watch the Tucker Conversation, to join conversations with Vivek Ramaswamy when they happen.
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