Trump “Bloodbath Hoax” EXPOSED As Elon Calls Out Media “Lies” - Stay Free #327
On today’s show: all the reaction to Trump’s “bloodbath” liberal hoax – including Morning Joe, Jen Psaki and Nancy Pelosi; plus Royal rumours; Rand Paul on the TikTok ban, and Putin’s blistering attack on Joe Biden’s lawfare against Donald Trump --💙Support our channel and become an awakened wonder through Locals:https://bit.ly/RussellBrand-Support WATCH me LIVE weekdays on Rumble:https://bit.ly/russellbrand-rumble Visit the new merch store:https://bit.ly/Stay-Free-Store Follow on social media:X: @rustyrocketsINSTAGRAM: @russellbrandFACEBOOK: @russellbrand
Hello there you Awakening Wonders on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you download your podcasts.
We really appreciate you, our listeners, and want to bring you more content.
We will be delivering a podcast every day, seven days a week, every single day.
You'll get a detailed breakdown of current topics that the mainstream media should be covering, but if they are covering, they're amplifying establishment messages and not telling you the truth.
Once a week we bring you in-depth conversations with guests like Jordan Peterson, RFK Jr, Sam Harris, Vandana Shiva, Gabor Mate and many more.
Now enjoy this episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand.
Remember, there's an episode every single day to educate and elevate our consciousness together.
Stay free and enjoy the episode.
No, here's the fucking news!
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
We are streaming live amidst an extraordinary, hazy, fluxy time of peculiarity.
If you're in the UK now, where are you?
And on Jam in the Rumble Chat, Carl Reiner's got to be English, your humble narrator.
You know, where are you guys?
Because our country's going really weird.
There's, like, so many rumours about the royal family.
Is Kate Middleton alive?
What are these extraordinary images that keep being published?
What does that tell us about the nature of power?
That there are these traditional institutions that don't understand modern media and how to operate within it.
Thanks.
It is a nice cardigan, isn't it?
Thanks very much.
That was in the stream, by the way.
I've not gone crazy.
Also, there are many, many indicators of craziness all around us.
Some people saying that King Charles is dead.
I mean, is that true?
It's not true.
It's not true.
Like, what's going on?
And what about, you know, generally speaking, why do you even have monarchies?
Are all our institutions decaying around us?
What do you think, Synchronicity525?
What do you think, Antruth2024?
I'm talking to our Awakened Wonders in the chat.
Who join us for exclusive content like a meditation that we did earlier that was pretty astonishing.
We read a little bit of C.S.
Lewis's The Problem of Pain.
I realized that now I sort of have a different relationship with meditation.
Look, we've got a lot to talk about.
And one of the things we're talking about is the framing of information.
Did you see Trump's bloodbath speech?
If you saw it, you'll know that it was a particular speech about imposing tariffs on China.
Were they to continue their practice of establishing factories South of the American border in Mexico.
But that hasn't stopped the legacy media leaping on that word.
The word "bloodbath" as if it's a glorious hook upon which to hang propaganda.
Jen Psaki's done a piece on it.
The fella from Morning Joe did a little bit on it.
He's actually as emphatic as I've ever seen him.
And Nancy Pelosi with, if I'm not mistaken, a glorious new haircut was talking about it.
And the...
I think that this is something I'd like to invite you to consider.
If the word bloodbath provokes such conjecture, what about the numerous bloodbaths around the world right now?
In Gaza, The escalating tensions between the United States and China, which has not yet become a bloodbath, I acknowledge, but has the potential to certainly consume much life and the mother of them all, an ongoing potential nuclear conflict between NATO nations and Vladimir Putin's Russia.
And indeed it is Vladimir Putin's Russia because he's just won an election there.
Many people complaining that it's not a proper election.
It's not a proper election.
The only elections we like are the ones that we can rig, either through the management of the news cycle, through a variety of other means that I won't list while we're still on YouTube, or simply by presenting you with alternatives that do not allow you to interrupt institutional power while we are still broadcasting within the regime.
I'm talking about those WHO censored and mainstream framing spaces.
I'll let you know that If you join us and become an Awakened Wonder, you get one month off for free!
Join up now and get a free month.
God is great.
You can join monthly if you want to, and you get an extra video every single week.
Next week, chemtrails.
Is it real?
Is it real?
Are there weather manipulation experiments taking place?
I mean, and would you trust Boeing?
They can't even do their normal job of getting a plane from A to B!
You can't give them additional weather management system obligations.
We'll be covering all of the news that the legacy media are manipulating, and we'll be giving you different perspectives on the significance of the TikTok bill, the propaganda around Trump, and what is being concealed.
First of all, there's, look, here's Kate Middleton.
She's up to something.
But that, even that is not a recent photograph.
Is that, is that the truth?
What's going on with this stuff?
That's an old photograph, so they're not making it any easier.
Why is Obama meeting with the Prime Minister?
I don't know, man.
I don't know why Barack Obama is in London.
It's extraordinary.
You're a humble narrator.
Rumble isn't as free as people think.
I'll tell you what I will say is I've never had any reason to think that Rumble censor content.
I really believe they are free speech, absolutely.
What I will say is when them lot were going for me, you know, the establishment and everything, Rumble were damn decent.
Damn decent!
Fighting for free speech where it matters.
So, you're sharing data.
I don't know about that kind of stuff.
Hey, let's have a look at this other Royal announcement.
Royal Family hints at major announcements at any moment amid Kate Middleton health crisis.
According to reports, BBC Events production unit has been notified to stay alert for an extremely important announcement.
What's it going to be?
Do we care?
Is it just a soap opera?
I know a lot of you don't care, do you?
Then there's this.
Pro Vladimir Putin, Russian media outlets have run a fake news story alleging that King Charles has already died.
Then this thing's doing the rounds, which is brilliant, and I suppose it's funny they've even left the hair.
That's what I like about it.
It's gonna be bad if he is actually dead, isn't it?
But I suppose What this shows you is that we live in a different media space now.
The old elites don't know how to tackle the problems of new media, and particularly independent media.
And one relic who remains at the top of a pyramid of power, and you better believe I'm using the phrase pyramid deliberately, is Joe Biden.
He's Irish!
Has he ever mentioned that before?
Has he ever sought to gain cultural capital from Irishness?
I'm one of your own!
Have a look at this extraordinary speech where he seems to imply that ERA is a company rather than a nation.
You know, just a sort of a panoply of Biden disasters.
Let's have a look.
Great to have you here and I'm very happy to see Northern Ireland's Executive Assembly reinstated last month.
Like, sometimes I just get used to the idea now that when I'm listening to Joe Biden, there will be a significant number of words that are not part of our language.
I believe, you know, that praying in tongues may be a way of reaching transcendent spiritual forces, but I don't think a president should be doing it while addressing the world.
Now Northern Ireland is a fully functioning government again, and I didn't envisage a colleague.
I didn't envisage a colleague.
People in Northern Ireland represent the great peace Dividend of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement.
So to ensure that we are not victim to the global propaganda machine, let's have a look at what Donald Trump actually said and then wait till you see how it's reported on.
It's extraordinary.
It's extraordinary.
So you'll see the speech and you'll see that it's plainly a comment on tariffs, car manufacturer, It's an attempt to reach blue-collar Americans whose jobs in industry have been compromised by globalism.
And by globalism, I don't only mean a set of establishment elites that see the world in terms of territories to be carved up, then managed by various bureaucracies, whether that's NATO, the WHO, IMF, etc.
But I mean old school globalism of outsourcing manufacture.
And then when you see how Joe, excuse me, Jen Psaki and Morning Joe and all those guys,
you can, brilliant, you can watch propaganda live.
I love Jesus one on one.
I love you and I love our Lord.
Let's have a look at the Trump speech in its unexpurgated fashion.
And then look at the propaganda machine going into action.
Remember, if you become an Awaken Wonder, we do additional content for you every week.
You can join us for live conversations.
Coming up, we've got Neil Oliver and your Health Attorney General.
Is that the right guy?
The guy?
Surgeon General.
The Surgeon General from Florida.
We've got some great stuff coming up soon.
Let's have a look at Trump's speech.
Mexico has taken over a period of 30 years 34% of the automobile manufacturing business.
So it's sort of already We're like a little way into this extraordinarily controversial piece of public oratory.
And it's actually quite tame, isn't it?
Like Mexico have taken on 30% of the American automobile manufacturer.
Think of it, went to Mexico.
China now is building a couple of massive plants where they're going to build the cars in Mexico and think, they think, that they're going to sell those cars into the United States with no tax at the border.
Let me tell you something, to China, if you're listening President Xi, and you and I are friends but he understands the way I deal, those big monster car manufacturing plants that you're building in Mexico right now, And you think you're gonna get that?
You're gonna not hire Americans and you're gonna sell the cars to us?
No.
We're gonna put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line.
And you're not gonna be able to sell those cars.
If I get elected!
Now, if I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole... That's going to be the least of it.
It's going to be a bloodbath for the country.
That'll be the least of it.
There's one guy there actually yawning because it's a speech about economics and industry and manufacture.
Look at how Morning Joe cover this.
He's talking about a bloodbath for America.
It's laid out in the terms of it.
And these idiots on Twitter... These idiots mean...
Us.
You.
Everybody.
Uh, these idiots, uh, on, on, on, on cable news, these idiots on Sunday shows going, well, our president, you know, he was talking only about the auto industry and this is one more... It's just bullshit.
Let me say that at 6.15am.
It's just bullshit.
He knew what he was doing.
We're not stupid.
Americans aren't stupid.
He was talking about A bloodbath!
So he went from talking very specifically about imposing tariffs on China over trade because of the practice of increasing industry in Mexico to suddenly making a threat that there would be an armed insurrection again.
Remember that insurrections must be armed.
You can't have unarmed insurrections.
It's just a contradiction in terms.
It was a Actually, a rather dry piece of rhetoric about challenging a rival global superpower in the context of industry.
You can only make sense of this propagandist attack by extracting the information from its context.
Sometimes a bloodbath means a bloodbath.
And when he finishes by saying, and that's just going to be the least of it, seriously, these people may be stupid.
We're not.
So a lot's packed into that.
Of course, there's an attack on the 52% of you.
I'm talking to people in the United States of America that prefer Donald Trump over Joe Biden, if it were to be a direct contest.
You are easily dismissed As idiots, and it seems like they've lost touch with the fact that now we have access to this information and can make these assessments for ourselves.
Now, Jen Psaki, in her analysis, does at least acknowledge the idea of context, that this piece of information has been taken out of context, but her gambit is to expand it and say there's an even broader context where it'll make sense again.
This is fascinating.
And of course, the full context is that this is much bigger than one single speech.
We all know by now that Trump's allusions to political violence are not merely rhetorical.
His supporters take them literally.
That's part of the big problem here.
And he knows that too.
So no, we did not miss the full context.
This was not some meandering off-message comment.
This is his message.
But do you really think that?
Can I ask you yes or no?
Do you believe that these are sort of dog whistle or tacit messages that were the election in spite of the evident polling popularity of Trump to go Biden's way that there would be armed consequences or specifically blood baths?
Or do you feel Like, it was just a piece of casual language.
And it's a casual language that's pretty... piece of casual language that's pretty frequently used.
Have a look at Nancy Pelosi jumping on the bloodbath bandwagon.
He's even predicting a bloodbath.
What does that mean?
He's going to exact a bloodbath?
There's something wrong here.
How, um... respectful I am of the American people and their goodness.
But how much more do they have to see from him to understand that this isn't what our country is about?
Praising Hitler.
Praising the Russians.
He said, what's wrong with Russia?
They defeated Hitler.
What about the millions of Americans who risked or gave their lives?
It's not like, this is as if the phrase bloodbath had never existed before and yet bloodbath is a piece, an idiom that's frequently used in media spaces.
Have a look at this.
We begin tonight with the race for the White House and former President Trump's campaign now on the defensive after his fiery rhetoric at a rally in Dayton, Ohio.
Is that the comp?
It says here, NewsComp Bloodbath.
We've got a compilation here of the phrase bloodbath being used frequently.
I'll show you now, first of all, how Google searches are directing the term bloodbath towards this story.
But let's find that NewsComp.
So here you go, if you put Trump bloodbath into a Google search, look what comes up!
Just a spate, a limitless spate of stories reiterating this decontextualized piece of language.
The reason I think it's significant It's not only because I genuinely don't think that that was Trump trying to sort of threaten an insurrection in the event that he was not successful in the 2024 election.
I think it indicates there's a complete lack of ideas within the establishment that they have nothing to offer except for the ongoing demonization of Trump.
You know, like, If you consider that there are bloodbaths currently being enacted on the people of this planet in various wars and massacres and what some people are referring to as genocides and many people believe incidentally that the current attempts to restrict control and even ban TikTok are not about protecting the American people but are about preventing
War reporting happen in an unregulated fashion.
Let me know if you're aware of those stories that the appetite to control TikTok is indeed not even to protect you from China.
There's some brilliant stuff from Rand Paul on this that you'll enjoy.
Do we have any idea where the bloodbath comp is?
Fantastic.
Let's have a look what Elon said on this as well.
He did an NPC tweet, of course.
Post, excuse me, on X. Easy to tell, isn't it?
NPC today.
Blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Okay, let me move on to this TikTok story, if you don't mind, guys.
Thank you very much.
Move on to the TikTok story.
So go up, Jim.
Cheers, mate.
So you can see the word TikTok.
So you can see the word TikTok.
Thank you very much, mate.
Let's have a look at a RAM poll on Tucker talking about TikTok.
And the ownership of TikTok is going to be surprising to any of you that have only seen it covered on Legacy Media.
Have a look at this.
You know, my concern has always been with the centralization of power, with giving up power.
I don't care whether it's a Republican or a Democrat president.
I don't want any president to have the power to ban apps that are sold on an app store.
And that's essentially what this is going to happen.
180 million Americans put dance videos up and whatever else is on TikTok.
And they choose the terms of those services the same way people on Facebook do.
And does Facebook scrape your data?
Sure.
Does Google scrape your data?
Do all of these giant tech companies scrape your data?
They all take your data.
But the thing is, there are now accusations.
They say, oh, TikTok's owned by the Chinese government.
The Chinese communists own it.
Well, that's not even true.
You can't say stuff just over and over again that's not true.
TikTok is owned by about 60% of its own by international investors from all over the world.
I think what we're experiencing now is a kind of a meltdown into total hysteria, still trying to pose itself as rationalism and progressivism.
created the app, and 20% is owned by the employees of TikTok, which...
I think what we're experiencing now is a kind of a meltdown into total hysteria, still trying
to pose itself as rationalism and progressivism.
I think that the institutions are collapsing.
They're collapsing internally.
They're imploding.
And they're attempting to exert power using methods that 10, 20 years ago would have been successful.
Maintaining the line.
Propaganda.
Denial of alternative news sources.
But they no longer inhabit that ecosystem.
Now we have independent media movements that are far more powerful than declining legacy media.
We have new political classes and cultural classes emerging that are willing to have different types of conversations and form different types of alliances.
New political systems that mirror this online technology will emerge.
Where people begin to recognize that we can have decentralized, open confederacies, new systems of representative, you call them constitutional republics because I know you don't like the word democrat at all.
The reason I used it, what I mean when I say democracy is not the preservation and protection of a set of institutions that are able to continually assert power.
I mean representation, the representation of the will of the people.
At the most local scale possible.
And of course with this technology, it becomes entirely plausible.
But it has, yeah, decentralized but unified, eh Miller?
You're absolutely right.
And what we're living in is the kind of spasms of a system that recognizes it can no longer control information.
That you can't go into an apoplectic rage because someone has used the phrase bloodbath while Biden continues to sell weapons.
Let me have a, let me just put that up.
Have a look at that.
That Biden continues to sell weapons that are literally being used to, you know, I mean, what you would have to say is a bloodbath.
In a recent classified briefing, U.S.
officials told members of Congress that the Biden administration approved and delivered more than 100 separate weapons sales to Israel in 150 days after October the 7th amounting to thousands of precision guided munitions, small diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
That works out to one new arms deal every 36 hours on average.
These transfers are classified as sales but very few of them meet that definition in the conventional sense.
The vast majority are funded through state department grants.
Biden made just two of these publicly funded sales to Israel public And the only reason he did is because he had to.
Section 36 of the Arms Export Contract Act requires the President to notify Congress when a proposed arms sale exceeds a certain value.
While Biden is loud and proud about arming Ukraine, he prefers to arm Israel in secret by spreading his military support for Israel across more than 100 sales.
Biden kept pretty much all of them under the threshold per the AECA, thereby avoiding congressional and public scrutiny.
So which bloodbath ought be covered?
Which bloodbath is worthy of the attention of the legacy media?
And indeed, what do you imagine the TikTok ban is really about?
Is the TikTok ban about protecting you from a mendacious Chinese government that has an interest in maneuvering Political issues within the United States?
Or is the TikTok ban about restricting media in your country so that you don't have access to news reporting via TikTok that you otherwise wouldn't?
I've had friends that tell me that TikTok is reports on Middle Eastern matters in a way that is, I would say, I've heard pretty bold and explicit.
Let's have a look at this.
Washington's renewed urgency for TikTok ban is due to the war on Gaza.
Let me know what you think about this.
The renewed urgency to pass a bill to ban TikTok emerged due to Washington's concern
about how its users were interacting with content regarding the Israeli war in Gaza.
Many of TikTok's users share pro-Palestinian messages far more frequently than pro-Israeli viewpoints.
The public debate between members of the House of Representatives centers around Chinese ownership of TikTok
and the Chinese government's level of influence over the platform.
However, renewed interest in passing the legislation only materialized in Washington because many
of TikTok's users share content with an overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian message.
And did you notice there that Ram Paul said is not significantly owned by the state?
Now, I'm sure if they are resident in China, they are subject to pretty significant centralized control.
But do you think that your government doesn't have control over Facebook?
We know that throughout the entire pandemic period, various deep state assets were manipulating,
censoring, deamplifying, controlling information.
We know that pharmaceutical companies extraordinarily were impacting the reporting that we were doing,
the various other independent journalists were doing.
We've got a series of Freedom of Information Acts requesting right now.
Your state, my state, the state at large are partnering with big tech to control information.
These censorship laws that are being passed around the world are being done precisely to facilitate that.
Platforms like Rumble significantly X, undoubtedly, and TikTok, peculiarly, are spaces that the American government and the set of institutions and alliances that they have are plainly finding difficult to control.
So, again, you just have to return to a core question.
Whose interests do they serve?
When they claim to be protecting you, when you see Morning Joe, hysterical, About Trump using a pretty popular and common idiom.
When you see Nancy Pelosi frenetic and frantic, if that's a fair term.
When you see Jen Psaki claiming that the only context that matters is a context that's been cultivated and created by legacy media for many years now, since dear Donald Trump first came down that golden escalator and announced his candidacy.
What is the context they want you to live within?
It's their context.
What astonishes me is we've already had four years of a Trump presidency.
Was there a bloodbath then?
What was it that happened that was so extraordinary and difficult?
And is it You!
That they're interested in protecting.
Should we have a look at... Do we have the comp, actually, of the bloodbath?
Oh yeah, of course, you told me.
Look at how... So just to sort of round off this issue, let's have a look at how commonly that phrase is used.
If you're watching this on YouTube, we'll be available with you for a couple more minutes, then we're gonna be Exclusively on Rumble.
Have a look at this compilation.
It seems like bloodbath is a pretty commonly used phrase.
But as Politico.com reports tonight on the, quote, bloodbath at the RNC, headlines calling it a, quote, bloodbath.
Not only is it going to be a bloodbath, but after they leave New Hampshire, it's a bloodbath on her home turf.
That's really tough.
Trump has left a lot of corpses in his wake.
I mean, we can count the bodies.
As part of the quote, MAGA drive to take over Maricopa County.
And the headline refers to it as an impending bloodbath.
Columnist Charles Blow has a new piece for the New York Times entitled, A Biden Bloodbath.
2018 midterms, you can bet that they 100% are fearing a slaughter.
In fact, the word bloodbath and massacre come up frequently.
The Republican Party will be destroyed.
It's gonna be a bloodbath.
There's gonna be a bloodbath one way or the other.
Bloodbath for Bernie Sanders.
It's been a bloodbath.
They're shaping up to be a bloodbath.
Head off a bloodbath in next year's crucial midterm.
Off-year elections are often a bloodbath.
This week's bloodbath for Democrats.
A bloodbath at the ballot box.
There could be a Republican bloodbath.
They'll talk about a bloodbath.
It's a bloodbath.
I have to talk about you.
It seems like it's a pretty commonly used phrase.
I don't know what the panic is about.
People saying it all the live long day.
Let's go back to Rand Paul's description of TikTok's ownership.
The fact that the CEO is Singaporean.
Much of it is publicly owned or owned by its workers.
And let's call it as a state asset.
Well, it may be true because I'm sure it's not easy to operate within China without the intervention of the Chinese Communist Party, but do you imagine that Facebook are like independent radicals who don't curate their content in order to facilitate the message of the establishment?
7,000 of them are Americans.
So there's a significant nexus of Americans in the ownership, and then there's a significant nexus of Americans using this.
And they say, oh, well, the Chinese government owns it.
It's just frankly not true.
Now, the company that owns TikTok also owns something like TikTok that is censored, and the Chinese let that be broadcast throughout China.
The Chinese government does have a member of the board.
It's called Douyin.
It's the Chinese TikTok, but they don't have a member of the board of ByteDance.
They don't control ByteDance, and the data is now kept in Oracle Cloud centered in Texas.
This has been done because the company wants to try to exist.
It's a very popular app.
It has a great deal of value, so they're doing anything they can to comply, and yet the hysterics
in the house are just, "Shut 'em down!
Shut 'em down!
Communism this!
than that.
Communism that!"
Look, I've written two books about Chinese communism and what it does both during the COVID leak and also what it did during Mao's reign.
So I am no fan of Chinese communism.
But at the same time, we can't sort of like You know, emulate the Chinese to try to protect our way of life, becoming like the Chinese and banning things.
TikTok is banned in China.
They don't have TikTok.
They have a censored version in China that the Chinese government does control, but they don't control TikTok over here.
If we ban TikTok, we're simply becoming and acting like the Chinese.
It's extraordinary that during the pandemic period, many democracies bemoaned the fact that they would be unable to perfectly emulate the tyrannical conditions imposed by China.
And yet increasingly, we're seeing authoritarianism legitimized through concerns of safety, through the promise of convenience.
And this is a further example of censorship posing as protection.
What did we learn in the pandemic period?
They continually censored information in order to protect us.
Well, what's happening now with the censorship of the conversation around excess deaths?
With the censorship of the conversation around events in Ukraine?
The censorship of the conversation around events in Gaza?
The mad and giddy amplification of Of Donald Trump's bloodbath moment euphemism metaphor while elsewhere bloodbaths are literally censored and ignored.
What is it about TikTok that is so dangerous?
Is it that TikTok is dangerous because it gives the Chinese a conduit through which they can manipulate the American population?
Or is it the reverse actually?
That TikTok presents a threat precisely because it isn't in the frual of the estate.
Facebook, plainly, is to a significant degree an asset that the United States propaganda machine can convey its message unencumbered.
Plainly, that's their intention here.
Remember, again, that Russia today is somewhat innocuous if propagandist and certainly biased news media channel from Russia is banned on YouTube.
You can watch it on Rumble because guess what?
I think we should be able to decide for ourselves whether Russian propaganda or Chinese propaganda or American propaganda or Dutch or Senegalese propaganda is for us.
Perhaps what we ought be granted is our individual sovereign right to make decisions for ourselves about What we believe in.
Let me know what you think we should believe in.
Because... Right, should we leave?
We're going to leave YouTube now.
And we're going to show... One second.
One second.
No, leave it.
Leave it, please.
Leave it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
You could put back the screen there.
That would be great.
To switch to the screen on that one.
That would be cool.
Thank you very much.
Well done.
Because what we're going to do...
is we're going to cover Putin's victory in Russia and what is the state of Russian democracy and
what is the state of American democracy. Remember, you can become an awakened wonder and if you are
an awakened wonder you get numerous ridiculous advantages.
At the moment, we're giving one month free membership if you use the code GODISGREAT.
We've got a video at the moment about Kate Middleton and the numerous extraordinary stories surrounding her.
We've got some great guests coming up.
We've got Roseanne Barr, Dr. Ladipo.
He's the Florida Surgeon General.
We've got Neil Oliver coming up on the show.
And if you're on Awake and Wonder, you can join us live for those chats.
Love Ram Paul, says Sage Hopkins on the Awake and Wonder chat.
We had Ram Paul on just a couple of weeks ago.
That interview's up on there right now.
Yeah, put on the countdown.
Thanks very much.
Hey, also, Have you considered this?
Have you considered showing your allegiance by wearing one of these glorious garments?
A white crow t-shirt to show that you are abandoning media narratives, that you cannot be controlled, that you will not comply.
They're 25% off this week.
We'll post the link and you can, you know, get yourself one.
Dress yourself up.
They're available in a variety of colours, all of them equal.
All of them valid.
See you in a few seconds.
Click the link in the description if you're watching on YouTube.
We're gonna go a lot longer, another half hour at least.
See you in a few seconds.
Okay guys, let's have a look at Putin in... This is a sort of part of his victory speech.
What we'll say is the journalist that asked this question...
Was pretty bold.
That I will say, but is this the question where that journalist goes, um, what happened to Navalny?
What happened to that journalist?
You'll dig this.
It's like he's an NBC journalist, but credit where it's due, he's gone in hard.
But he may not like the answer, because the answer sort of amounts to, well, what about your bloody country?
Kirsten is from NBC News.
Mr. President, journalist Evan Gershkovich spent this election in prison.
Boris Nadezhdin, who opposes your war in Ukraine, wasn't allowed to stand against you.
And Alexei Navalny died in one of your prisons during your campaign.
Mr. President, is this what you call democracy?
If you want my opinion in terms of whether our elections are democratic, I believe that yes, they are democratic.
Whereas in some other countries, like in your country, can you consider Can you consider democratic when one side is using the justice machine in order to attack one of the candidates?
We do not have any preference for any candidates in the US.
We will work with anyone who's elected.
Great, in the stream here, Ash66 says, optimist study English, pessimist study Chinese, realist learn to operate a Kalashnikov.
resources, justice system. This has just become a joke and international shame for the US.
Even in Russia they use the lawfare against Trump as a way to demonstrate the shortcomings
of democracy in the United States.
I know you're saying now it's a constitutional republic.
I don't mind what you mean, which particular phrase you use to describe your nation's system of government.
I would say that at this point it's an oligarchy, it's an elite establishment cartel run by powerful globalist interests where ordinary people's opinion, whether you consider yourself to be a Republican, a Democrat, a Libertarian, an Anarchist, a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew, an Atheist, are secondary to the point of almost irrelevance to the agenda of a very powerful establishment.
And Vladimir Putin, when he calls that stuff out, You know, it's difficult to... it's difficult to ignore his analysis, isn't it?
For your so-called democratic system.
And I believe that... that... I've got all reasons to believe that there's no democracy in the election process in the Western countries and especially in the US.
Yeah, it's difficult to deny that when what we have, plainly, is a legacy media that says democracy is the ability to vote for Joe Biden because if you vote for Donald Trump, why, he just told you there's a bloodbath that's coming.
That they, even from their own perspective, are unable to account in their rhetoric for the four years that Trump served as president that didn't lead to any extraordinary anomaly at all.
Even when it comes to the appeasement of Russia, you would have to say that in the preceding administration, Putin, I think, invaded Georgia.
In the subsequent administration, Putin invaded Ukraine.
It's very difficult to find a single argument for Joe Biden outside of a very niche group who are attracted to geriatrics for reasons that I find rather deplorable.
In fact, continually provoking Russia into a conflict, knowing the nature of their armory, for me has a resonance that could perhaps be visually illustrated in this manner.
No!
That will kill us!
You're in the helicopter!
You're in the helicopter!
Don't start a nuclear war, you're on the planet!
You'd die as well, remember?
That's what would happen.
Perhaps you've observed the internet's extraordinary capacity to expunge all imagery of dead serviceman Aaron Bushnell, whose self-immolation formed a protest against Gaza.
Numerous US veterans are now standing in solidarity with Bushnell and in particular his stance about ongoing wars, particularly the conflict in Gaza.
Let's have a look.
They don't have the guts to call for a ceasefire.
He died for the sins of of our Congress because they don't have the guts to call for a ceasefire because of their lust for power and their fear of being voted based on lobbyists representing a foreign country paying for someone else to run against them.
How shameful is that?
How inhumane is that?
Remember Aaron Bushnell!
Remember Aaron Bushnell!
I don't know if a fire is the best way to commemorate, commemorate, I don't know if a fire is the best way to
commemorate poor dear Aaron Bushnell Another hypocrisy that cannot be alluded to except outside of the United States and indeed our country, the United Kingdom, is the ongoing incarceration of Julian Assange, a journalist who published information that was detrimental to the agenda of the United States and in particular
their war machine who still now awaits to hear whether or not he can appeal his extradition
to America where he'll face one of those life sentences that goes on longer than the lives of
like I don't know Methuselah and Old Testament characters.
My only hope is that if we had been on that to do it at the same time that I would have
had an opportunity to let him know he was not alone that many of us had the same concerns that
he had and I would have done everything I could to be with him and help him through what
he was going through.
But he was a part of our government that was aiding and abetting a genocide.
And he didn't want to be a part of that.
And the only way I can only imagine that he felt that he could do something about it ...was to give his life in front of the Israeli embassy.
For many of us, after the Iraq war, when we found out that the reason and justification for going to war was a lie, we all have felt betrayed.
And now we're feeling like we're pawns of foreign policy.
Doesn't look good, this ongoing condemnation of U.S.
military activity, or at least U.S.
funded military activity, when veterans condemn it and come out in solidarity with Aaron Bushnell, while deals are continually done, while the pipeline of funding continues, unlike the Nord Stream pipeline, of course, which was blown up by Uh, Russia, as I remember.
This is a time of transition and change.
A hazy, fluxy, peculiar time indeed, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to speak to you directly.
That is only possible because of our partners here on this independent media site, and I want to thank our partners Charlize.
Now, Charlize, she founded this company.
She'd been in a lot of trouble with Joe Biden.
She's on one of these hit lists because she's spoken out very boldly and bravely about the pandemic and in particular medications that were mandated during that period.
Now, with her product range, which we support and are privileged to endorse here on this channel, she is supporting our right to remain incredibly masculine.
Now, you may take a glance at my cardigan and think, Come on, man.
Incredibly masculine?
Well, I am.
I smother myself in this orange blossom body butter, knowing that my testosterone will not be compromised.
Unlike with the kind of crazy, ludicrous, outlandish, and toxin-laden cosmetics that you might buy elsewhere, these products of Charlie's are pure.
And...
Elsewhere?
If you say for you to buy your body butter elsewhere, I don't know where you get your body butter.
Where do you get your body butter?
The stuff is full of phthalates.
Have you heard of them phthalates?
It's in our food, it's in our clothes, and importantly, it's in our cosmetics.
Guess what it does to your downstairs swimmers?
Them guys can't swim in the river of phthalates.
Sperm count is plummeting.
Masculinity is in crisis.
In your country, they're not doing anything to ensure that phthalates be taken out of cosmetics.
But, Charlize has done the hard work for you, so if you are a man, and you're concerned about your masculinity, and yet you want to be macho, masculine, and beautiful, why not smother yourself in this glorious body butter?
Or why not use this restorative anti-aging overnight serum?
Now I'll acknowledge, I've not been very well today, but due to Charlize and her ongoing intervention, I can stay in front of camera, I can report truthfully, To you, because of her fantastic product.
Now, we've got a deal going.
Have a look at that.
If you use the code BRAND, you get 25% off.
Phthalate-free and glorious.
For further enlightenment on our range of pristine, natural skincare products, go to charlies.beauty.com and unlock a 25% Off discount.
Now, we've brought you some incredible stories this week, haven't we?
We've told you about the Clintons in Haiti.
Have you seen that video?
Like, the Clinton Foundation went into Haiti and basically scammed hard out there, building like luxury hotels with Warren Buffett's money.
Astonishing.
They went out there with George Soros.
Have you seen that when Bill Clinton was president, he slashed their tariffs, meaning it was cheaper for them to import rice from Arkansas than it was to grow their own, their own rice there in the
country. Extraordinary the practices that have gone on there. Now, listen to me. This is, we've
got an extraordinary story now about TikTok and the TikTok censorship. We've touched on it to
some degree, but we're going to go even deeper now. I want to, I'm going to, I'm going to end
on this guys.
I want to thank loads of you that have joined us lately, like our many new Awakened Wonders.
Yeah, that's right.
Go to the new Awakened Wonders, guys.
That's right.
I'm going to come back after the Hero video.
David Fox, Tibby Forty, Lothatus, Blazed, Nicol Tomlin, all of you new Awakened Wonders, thank you so much for joining us.
Now, this bit of content is going to knock you bandy.
Elon Musk has even described the move to ban TikTok.
Which is a rival platform as censorship and government control.
Now is this hastily rushed through bill really about protecting you Americans from being spied on by China?
Or is it a Trojan horse with which to come for any platforms or websites that don't comply with the government?
Essentially, is it a power grab for the deep state?
Here's the news?
No.
Here's the effing news.
Stay free.
No.
Here's the fucking news!
Ban TikTok!
Ban TikTok!
Both parties think we should ban TikTok!
China are spying on us!
We gotta ban TikTok right now because there are no other social media sites that are used to spy on citizens by any other government except for all other social media sites and the United States government and all other governments so ban TikTok!
Right now, before our very eyes, the legacy media will say, in a rare moment of bipartisan support, both Democrats and Republicans agree that we should shut down TikTok.
TikTok is Chinese owned.
Therefore, the Chinese can use it to spot algorithms and spy on American citizens and interfere with elections.
Well, good God, there are many ways to interfere with elections.
We all know that now.
And is this banning of TikTok about protecting Protecting you or controlling you?
And I guess that's become one of the questions I would ask about any regulation or legislation that's being passed, just to take a breath, take a step and go, is this about protecting me or is this about controlling me?
Whether it's climate change, whether it's pandemics, whether it's wars, whether it's health, just look at always at protection or control.
And this is a great example.
We were just going to protect you from TikTok.
What do you mean?
What, like going like that on TikTok?
Like what you really need to be protected from are institutions and groups that are hell bent on power.
Now let's have a look at some of those and let's have a look at what's really going on together and see if we can make sense of it.
Tonight, the House overwhelmingly voting to ban TikTok, the wildly popular social media app, unless it's sold by its Chinese parent company ByteDance.
Lawmakers responding to concerns TikTok poses a national security threat and compromises the data of its 170 million American users.
Do you remember when Trump wanted to ban TikTok?
That was about the control of free speech.
Now, the neoliberal media establishment are broadly supportive of this idea.
You've already heard that it's bipartisan.
Why is that?
What's changed?
Remember when we talk about principles here, we say it's a value, an idea that doesn't fluctuate just because it happens to be inconvenient.
Telling the truth is one such value.
So what's happened here?
How come it's bad if Trump wants to do it, but it's good if Biden wants to do it?
This bill therefore forces TikTok to break up with the Chinese Communist Party.
This is not an attempt to ban TikTok.
It's an attempt to make TikTok better.
Tic-tac-toe.
A winner.
A winner.
It's interesting, Nancy.
I wonder if you've got any information that you might tell your husband, Paul Pelosi, who invests primarily in tech companies and seems to be doing quite well.
In fact, in the time that Nancy Pelosi has been in office, her personal wealth has significantly increased, largely due to the investments of her husband.
So we are not watching a person without skin in the game, even when it comes to personal investments.
But what's more important and significant when it comes to this story is the legislation Isn't particular or exclusive to TikTok, it's any websites that are accused of interfering with elections.
Another piece of vague language.
Notice how consistently the language being used to legitimize its centralized authority is often quite vague.
That's hate speech, that is!
Extremists will be punished!
TikTok will have to go!
So it's just TikTok then?
Well, also though websites What? All websites? Yeah, but in a fear of elections. What
do you mean by in a fear of elections?
Oh, don't try and tie me down, man. I'm free. I'm like TikTok. I thought you were banning TikTok.
Yeah, we're getting rid of that.
The FBI and top intelligence officials sounding the alarm, warning the Chinese government could use TikTok to access
Americans' personal information.
Oh yeah, you wouldn't want that.
Did Edward Snowden not happen?
Did that not happen?
Did we not listen to the plain fact that the agencies that you fund through your taxes are spying on you all of the time, capturing and scraping all of your data, compiling it until they need it continually, and even now, while saying they don't do it, they're deploying private firms to do exactly that, and then buying it like they say, oh we can't directly spy on our citizens, but what we can do is get private firms to cash your The problem is their ability to manipulate you.
from them. It's the same thing. They're ingenious at manufacturing methods to continue to exert
control. And this is obviously entirely about control.
The problem is their ability to manipulate you. They already manipulate your algorithm
based on what you like.
How dare you manipulate my algorithm based on what I like?
It's interesting, isn't it, to sort of apply morality to these systems that are essentially following business imperatives.
And if the fundamental concern is the relationship between TikTok and the Chinese state, then let's have a look at the relationship between Facebook and the United States of America and Google and the United States of America.
Not only their curious origins and connections to deep state organisations, but their ongoing compliance, broadly speaking, with American domestic policy, their willingness to censor, the way that they balked at being broken up and said that they would become compliant.
Remember that?
When that was a thing?
We're going to break up Facebook.
We're going to break up.
These are monopolies.
What if we help you censor everyone and control everything?
Well done.
Now you can stay as Facebook.
And that can be innocent.
All social media companies do that to try and tailor your feed.
But it's a problem when the entity in charge of manipulating can be an adversary like the Chinese Communist Party.
What about an adversary like the American government?
What about that?
What about our increasing recognition that the states and institutions that purportedly govern us regard us as enemies?
Note their deployment of words like extremism and hate and anti-terror organizations being repurposed domestically and when you know for a fact that they occupy an entirely different world economically and in many cases ideologically.
Who's your real enemy?
As Muhammad Ali once said, I ain't got no beef with the Viet Cong.
Viet Cong ain't doing nothing to me.
How can I shoot them poor people?
Just take me to jail.
But who is controlling your life?
Who is manipulating you?
Is it China?
TikTok denies those allegations, but lawmakers now warning TikTok could interfere in the election.
And then we wouldn't be able to vote for either of these elderly men!
The risk in terms of propaganda, the risk to influence our election, are just too severe.
President Biden recently launched his own campaign, TikTok, to meet young voters where they are.
I'd be worrying about meeting young voters where they are and sniffing them on top of their heads where they are.
But he says if this bill lands on his desk, he will sign it.
If they pass it, I'll sign it.
Good work, everyone.
Take the rest of the week off.
As president, Donald Trump once tried to ban TikTok by executive order.
But now, he's against a possible ban.
He says it would help Facebook, which he's railed against.
But Trump's change in tune also comes after he met with a top Republican donor who has a major financial stake in TikTok's parent company.
Oh, the financial ties influencing his political decisions.
That's no good.
You won't get any of that in the Democrat Party or from the Clintons or any of those guys.
If you check where their funding is, you could never track their donations and their lobbyists towards the instantiation of policies around war or pharmaceuticals or anything at all.
And there's simply no point looking.
Just shut up and watch the legacy media and then go quietly to your bed and eventually your grave.
New hero Thomas Massey is emerging to rhetorically condemn this bill quite expertly.
You'll enjoy this.
He's one of those Republicans that seems to be onto this stuff.
A kind of another Rand Paul figure who, whilst he might be libertarian, certainly on this issue he's got some amazing perspectives.
Well I would just close by saying that, you know, we're sitting here with phones made in China.
We're wearing suits made in China.
We drove cars here with chips that are made in China.
And they're our foreign adversary and by golly we're going to do something about it.
What are we going to do?
We're going to tell Americans they can't put a piece of software on their computer.
They can't go to certain websites that the president designates.
A while ago Joe Biden was specifically investing money in TikTok influencers because they were of some value.
It's an extraordinary world we live in.
So I urge my colleagues to oppose this well-intentioned... Well-intentioned, you know, because half of my party are voting for it.
Bill, because it will have bad consequences and I yield back the balance of my time.
Tucker had a post on it and David Sacks posted this.
The TikTok bill gives Biden the power to ban websites and apps run by a person
subject to the direction or control of a foreign personal entity.
Given that Biden routinely smears political opponents as being under the control of Putin,
the danger should be obvious.
Right, so let's get into this in a little more detail.
The House of Representatives voted 352 to 65, oh no, so it's going to happen unless something crazy interrupts it, on Wednesday for a bill that threatens to ban the social media platform TikTok.
The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act would ban TikTok from app stores unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, gives up ownership within six months.
Former US President Donald Trump, who once attempted to remove TikTok from US app stores, said on March 11th that a TikTok ban could make Facebook bigger, censoring it as an enemy of the people.
Billionaire Elon Musk on March 12th also claimed the bill could restrict access to the app, which he said amounts to censorship and government control.
All of the Musk haters out there have got to acknowledge that He's saying that a rival platform to whom he must cede some cyber territory have rights internationally, presumably because of his values, but also perhaps spotting that where this is heading is goodbye Rumble, goodbye X, goodbye everyone except Facebook and Alphabet and organisations that are compliant.
Because you'd be naive to think, wouldn't you, if you've had a look at the conversations that went on between Mark Zuckerberg and Fauci during the period of the pandemic that there hasn't
been conversations that go "be kind of convenient if there was no TikTok allowed in
America" I mean you know that might increase Meta's market share. Well what would you do for us if some
legislation made one of your competitors obsolete? I suppose if you asked us to say like
everyone should stay in their house and that and the people that said that that might not be a
bad idea and they're a contrary narrative to discuss would sort of shut those down. Win, win, win.
The vote moved America a little bit closer to Chinese-style online censorship that TikTok's
opponents decry.
Whether they acknowledge it or not, TikTok's opponents are using the same arguments that Chinese and Iranian censors can and do use to justify cracking down on social media in their own countries.
Right, so, again, values and principles.
What they're doing.
If someone else did it, they wouldn't like it.
Do you know they've banned Facebook because they're anti-free speech?
Oh, they're in those countries, which we should probably bomb, by the way, that you already know all of these stories.
And the reason this is happening is because there is no vision.
There is no ideology.
There is just the sustenance and maintenance of power for power's sake to continue to facilitate itself.
It's a peculiar serpent consuming itself with no vision, trapping us all in a perennial present, ironically, Staring at screens ourselves, lost in melancholy, nostalgia, and overstimulation, and it will not let us break out of that, and anything that could potentially be used as a vassal for awakening will be shut down and controlled.
They don't care about anything except control.
That's what I think.
Let me know what you think in the chat.
While you can.
Legislators have made exceedingly clear that the intent of the bill they're currently fast-tracking through Congress is to finally ban TikTok in the United States, as Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican New York Chair of the House Republican Conference, proudly put it.
Ultimately, the desired end result is the same one that's been long sought by Representative Gallagher, the bill's leading sponsor, to ban TikTok before it's too late.
The forced divestiture is merely a mechanism to achieve this predetermined outcome.
We're familiar now with the way that these things go, you know, hate speech, protect children, ban just these kind of people that we all agree about.
Okay, cool, cool.
Well, I suppose that's also a bit of a threat, isn't it?
So whilst this is saying, no, we're not actually getting rid of TikTok, Well, it's pretty clear that ultimately the aim is to either co-opt and colonize TikTok or eliminate TikTok and its potential for free speech.
In fact, I would argue that it's, in a sense, using TikTok's popularity among a particular generation, a generation that Perhaps aren't especially invested in the type of political processes that are currently being undertaken.
That makes it an ideal target.
And secondarily, other platforms will be targeted that are relevant, that are explicitly used for free speech issues.
Meanwhile, of course, the whole ecosystem of social media platforms will fall immediately into alignment with the establishment and their goals.
It's an extraordinary tactic.
Tic-tac-toe.
Hey, maybe Nancy Pelosi was onto something.
Tic-tac-toe.
A winner.
Why now?
Drafters of the bill are said to have received technical assistance from the White House.
President Biden swiftly pledged to sign it.
Among the factors that are said to have spurred this latest outburst of legislative activity was a secret briefing last week by the FBI, the Department of Justice and the Director of National Intelligence, Odney.
Because it was a classified hearing, I cannot discuss the details, explained Representative Morgan Griffith.
A member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee which sprung into action after receiving the Intelligence Community presentation.
Somewhat ironic that the Intelligence Community are meeting to help us not be spied on when it seems to be a significant portion of their day-to-day work.
If the bill supporters get what they want, millions of Americans would find their ability to access TikTok terminated by the government just in time for the November 2024 election.
This radical state intervention was endorsed last week by the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a unanimous 50 to 0 vote, establishing a covered bipartisan consensus in favour of expelling American users from their preferred social media platform.
This extreme action is to be carried out, as usual, in the alleged name of national security and to more aggressively combat perceived foreign adversaries.
The bill names TikTok as a foreign adversary controlled application with the adversary in question being China but it also goes further and prohibits applications associated with the standard litany of official US adversaries Russia, North Korea and Iran.
One thing that's good about this bill is you can tell which wars are coming up in the next few months.
It's less of a bill and more of a spoiler.
More additions to the list are always possible, perhaps in the event that Cuba or Venezuela develop a short-form dance video app that becomes suspiciously popular with American teens.
Another provision authorizes the President, who is currently Joe Biden and may soon be Donald Trump, to make unilateral determinations about whether certain applications present a significant threat to the national security of the United States and therefore must be banned like TikTok.
The criteria for making such a determination is left conspicuously vague.
It makes you curious, doesn't it, that when they consider Donald Trump to be such an astonishing threat to democracy and the American way of life and that he would make himself a dictator, that they're pushing through legislation that were he to become the president in a matter of months would be exploitable enormously in order to control free speech.
So maybe they know something we don't know about the outcome of the next election.
But again, the whole thing is meant to be about election interference, so it can't be that.
So if you really want to give Biden or Trump more unilateral power to control the proliferation of content online, this appears to be just the bill for you.
We can't continue to bring you this potentially paradigm-shattering information without the support of our sponsors.
We've got one for you right now.
Stay to the end, please.
Is it me, or does the future feel more insecure and uncertain?
Wars, pandemics, lies, trickery.
For those of you that are in the United States, there is a way to secure your hard-earned nest egg.
American Heart for Gold makes it easy to protect your savings and retirement accounts with physical gold and silver.
With one phone call, they can have physical gold and silver delivered right to your door or inside a qualifying retirement account like your IRA or 401k.
American Heart for Gold is the highest-rate firm in the United States with an A-plus rating from the BBB, that's the Better Business Bureau, and thousands of satisfied clients right now.
They'll give you up to $10,000 of free silver on your first qualifying order.
This offer, I'm sorry to tell you, is only for Customers from the United States of America.
Call 866-505-8315.
That's 866-505-8315.
Or simply text BRAND to 99-88-99.
Then they'll know we sent you.
Get up to $5,000 in silver and protect your future in this crazy, crazy world with some solid, precious metals literally made in stars.
Now let's get back to the content.
If enacted, Americans who suddenly find their access to TikTok terminated by federal decree would include millions of adults, not just minors, by any stretch, for whom TikTok is a primary means of consuming news and information, as well as expressing their own public speech, and in some cases, even earning a livelihood.
While China may not have First Amendment right to operate commercial enterprises in the United States, American citizens are certainly afforded First Amendment protections against their speech being abridged by the government.
Punitive state intervention to blockade Americans from a massively popular social media platform which they had otherwise used voluntarily to consume the speech of others and express their own speech would be a speech abridging action by the federal government of a magnitude that has no obvious precedent.
It's unprecedented censorship in a time where censorship is in all of our minds, when we're all concerned about it, when we've all seen what happened during the pandemic period, when we see what's going on with regard to reporting on and discussing current global conflicts.
Pick your conflict.
Pick one you care about.
note the censorship around it, unless conveniently with that conflict you happen to be in alignment
with establishment interest, then you won't notice any censorship because at this time
it's convenient to your particular perspective. But this is unprecedented and likely will be used
to establish a norm. You know, do you still take your shoes off at airports? Has the Patriot Act
been revoked? Has the threat of terror been rescinded? You could tell me for yourself in
the chat whether or not you've noticed measures to relinquish power once it is gained. If the
case for banning TikTok advanced by the intelligence community is so airtight and worthy of instant
unanimous approval, they should disclose the supporting evidence.
Otherwise, the public's only option is to credulously accept subjective, questionably motivated claims of unknown intelligent community operators who purport to assess a national security threat posed by communist-controlled teenage dance videos, before rashly ejecting up to 170 million American users from a top social media platform, partly based on evidence furnished in these secret Star Chamber proceedings.
Why not declassify and release the relevant evidentiary material so the public can evaluate it from themselves?
Why should informed democratic deliberations on the subject be reserved for those with specially approved security clearances?
Because that is how power works now and it's necessary and fundamental for you to accept the constant tacit implication that you are not able to determine for yourself what you you should do. That's a requirement isn't it? If you start
to demand well I'll decide for myself whether or not to undertake a medical procedure, take a
medication, read this information, believe this information. Once you asserted a little bit of
self-confidence, a bit of self-belief, a bit of trust in yourself and your own ability to assess
information, the whole gig starts to become a little bit shaky doesn't it?
But as long as we continue to accept that these people have our best interests and the ability to protect our best interests, then I guess we're just gonna have to sit here and be censored and controlled until there's really nothing left to discuss and no one left to say it.
In March 2023, debate over an earlier iteration of the TikTok banning bill, Senator Rand Paul said, this isn't just about the company, this is about the rights of 150 million Americans.
Allegations that TikTok functions as a funnel to the Chinese government were nothing more than innuendo and conjecture, Paul charged.
Likewise, a Justice Department memo supporting the TikTok bill last week vaguely alludes to the potential for the PRC, China, to influence content on TikTok.
But, so there's no concrete examples of this purported PRC manipulation ever happening.
If that was the problem, you would have to examine and dismantle Meta, Facebook, Alphabet, Google, YouTube, because they're all using information to manipulate you.
That, indeed, is what they do.
As they say these days, it's not a bug, it's a feature.
That's precisely why these companies are so enormous and so powerful.
Of course they're advertising, well, on a monumental and unprecedented and bespoke scale, but the ability to identify individuals and control the information they see, whether it's buy these shoes or vote for this party, is exactly the function of those sites.
And if this regulation was applied to any one of a number of social media platforms, unless they are front and centre all about free speech, then you would have to ban all of them.
And that is a possibility, but I think what's probably more likely is ban all of them that are not supportive of the establishment agenda.
The drive to ban TikTok has parallels to the European Union rushing to ban Russia Today and other Russian-owned media outlets after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Thanks to the unique inheritances of the First Amendment, the US could not be so easily compelled to take such blunt-force censorship action, however ardently American political and media elites might have shared the anti-Russian sentiments of their EU counterparts.
Those inheritances will surely be eroded if Congress plows ahead with its feverishly expedited TikTok ban.
It's true that TikTok's content moderation falls in line with the wishes of Chinese censors.
But again, foreign critics can say the same about US-based social media companies.
The US government has infamously prodded tech companies to hand over user data both overtly and covertly.
The US military and intelligence services even use advertising data to track potential targets.
For years, several federal agencies have been spending US tax dollars to buy American data from private bulk sellers.
As some members of Congress seek a new law against the practice, the Joe Biden administration is pushing back on the effort to curtail the power to buy the information that would otherwise require a warrant.
So if that was true, if what they're saying about TikTok was true, why are they simultaneously doing the exact opposite elsewhere?
They are resisting and lobbying to avoid a bill to prevent them buying literally your private data.
What do you think they're doing with it?
They're using it to track you, to manipulate you, to control you.
We've reached a point, and perhaps all of us felt this a little, when we saw Vladimir Putin talking to Tucker Carlson.
Vladimir Putin, he ain't the world's sweetest, loveliest guy.
He's a warlord.
He's a Mongol-descended former Soviet KGB murderer and tyrant who criminally invaded Ukraine.
Sure thing.
All day long.
But curiously, because he's not in charge of a country that I live in, when he talks, I feel like, The stuff you're saying makes more sense to me than the stuff they're saying.
I've got no interest in invading all these other countries.
Look, we're sort of in charge of this region.
You get me.
I've got nuclear missiles.
How far do you want to take this thing?
It makes more sense than Biden saying, oh, freedom!
We care about freedom!
We know that that's a lie.
And they know that we know.
So what reality are we living in now?
The reality that they send down the line to us or put out into the ether to us.
And they don't want us having options because we know we wouldn't choose their one.
The Biden administration has used the spectre of disinformation to push social media moderation in line with their policies.
Meta has censored Middle Eastern content that opposes US foreign policy, while Twitter has previously created loopholes for the US military to run its own propaganda accounts.
Forcing TikTok under American control is a way to block that escape route.
Instead of protecting Americans from Chinese censorship, it would bring Chinese-style censorship home and facilitate more of it, and it wouldn't be the end of it.
When they came for TikTok, I said nothing.
When they came for Rumble and X, there was no one left to say anything.
Hey, but that's just what I think.
Why don't you let me know what you think in the comments and the chat.
