Chappelle, Shane Gillis & Tucker - The TRUTH About The Culture War In 2024 - Stay Free #339
https://www.twc.health/brand and use code BRAND to save $30 + FREE SHIPPING at checkout. In 2024, we've witnessed significant cultural shifts in the United States, marking pivotal moments for our society. While these events have the potential to enlighten us, it's essential to heed Terence McKenna's words: 'Culture is not your friend.' This thought-provoking quote invites us to critically examine the role of culture in shaping our perspectives and behaviors.--💙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
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Thanks for joining us for this very special episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand where we're talking about culture and cultural war using Shane Gillis' appearance on SNL, Dave Chappelle's special and the Jon Stewart v Tucker War.
All fantastic subjects, subjects excuse me, that tell you how America is shifting.
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Although, cancel war, cancel culture, excuse me, is part of the problem.
Shane Gillis did the whole journey, didn't he?
Shane Gillis shows you why cancel culture can't be trusted.
Shane Gillis, is he the best comedian to come out of your country for a very long time?
Let's have a look at what he represents and what SNL's willing, welcoming embrace means for our culture.
Here's the news.
No, here's the effing news.
Thank you for choosing Fox News.
The news.
No, here's the effing news.
Shane Gillis has done SNL after SNL cancelled Shane Gillis.
So what does this tell us about SNL, cancelled culture and the requirements of the mainstream and its inevitable hypocrisy as it struggles to stay relevant while getting rid of all of its best performers?
SNL, just a few years after sacking Shane Gillis because of stuff he said in his podcast that weren't, I don't know, woke enough or right on enough, has had to bring Shane Gillis back as host of SNL.
Now my feelings about Shane Gillis is he's probably the best American stand-up comedian since Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock.
That he's on point, he's radical, he's easy, he's accessible.
And I would say, in America 10, 15 years ago, What you would have in Shane Gillis and the way he would have been used and operated by the culture would be somewhere between John Candy and John Belushi.
A little less cuddly, perhaps, than John Candy and a little less, well, let's face it, drugged than John Belushi, but a skilled character comedian, a brilliant stand-up comic, someone who takes an on point in a difficult cultural moment.
but since those kind of figures have died, the culture has changed,
has become unable to accommodate, in some cases, literally, comedy itself.
It cannot accommodate comedy.
I want you to remember that SNL is the show that after Joe Rogan,
who doesn't make any pretenses of being a cultural leader or thought leader,
continually identified himself as just a bloke, just a guy, just a comic,
when he said, "Hey, this is how I got better from COVID.
"I used ivermectin,"
the whole media establishment went crazy, including SNL, who did sketches to attack Joe Rogan.
So SNL, as a cultural artifact, has made itself pretty clear
about which side of the divide it's on.
Indeed, they had Nikki Haley on a couple of weeks ago.
They are anti-MAGA, anti-debate, anti-conversation.
You will not see anti-globalist, anti-war issues discussed on SNL.
I hosted SNL a mere one time and I thought that it was a sort of brilliant and magnificent institution to tell you the truth.
Lorne Michaels, a genius and great patron of comedy and perhaps the arts more broadly.
The cast at that time included brilliant people like Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader.
Skillful, excellent comedians.
But even that was much earlier.
In the cultural moment that you and I are experiencing right now.
What I will say is that Shane Gillis, in a sense, is a perfect vessel for us to analyze and understand what's happened in our culture in the last 10 years.
Someone who would have once just walked straight through the door into a bunch of national lampoon movies, would have been seen as a star and celebrated, is now an odd chaotic mercurial figure precisely because the culture doesn't know what it's doing anymore.
Let's have a look at Shane Gillis' performance and appearance.
It doesn't know what its principles are, primarily I would say because it's become a utensil
of the establishment rather than a radical anti-establishment entity, which is what it
would have been in the days of, I don't know, Eddie Murphy, Mike Myers, all of the great
comics that all of us that love comedy grew up on and adore, even if we're not actually
American.
Let's have a look at Shane Gillis' performance and appearance.
Let's have a look at Shane Gillis as a figure.
But more importantly, perhaps even than Shane Gillis, is let's look at how our culture
My mom asks me, she's like, when did we stop being best friends?
And she's right, we used to be best friends.
You remember that?
When you were a little boy and you like, you loved your mom and you thought she was the coolest.
You're a Boralus, that's a self-consuming serpent, and could we have a better image
for the legacy media?
My mom asks me this a lot and it's kind of an intense question.
My mom asks me, she's like, "When did we stop being best friends?"
And she's right, we used to be best friends.
You remember that?
When you were a little boy and you loved your mom and you thought she was the coolest?
You remember when you were gay?
He's gonna use gay in that way on TV.
And even that is, I suppose, a marker of the challenges in our culture.
Have you seen the South Park episode where those other geniuses that refuse to be chained by a peculiarly puritanical culture, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, argue that the pejorative form of gay is not connected to the sexual identity usage of gay, that it can be separated from it.
You can be gay and not be a fag!
Yeah, a lot of fags aren't gay.
I happen to be gay, boys.
Do you think I'm a fag?
Do you ride a big, loud Harley and go up and down the streets ruining everyone's nice time?
No.
Then you're not a fag!
When you're invited to look at culture in the way that Google AI asks us to look at culture now, like, yeah, why not portray George Washington as a person of colour or Vikings as having a variety of hues and pigments in their skin?
Is it not possible that you could use the word gay without it being a hate crime against gay people?
Do we really believe that Shane Gillis has malice in his heart when he uses that term in the same way that kids from his background presumably use that word to this day without hating on people that have sexual preferences for people of the same gender?
And this kind of deliberate myopism that leads to censorship, that leads to communities of people that doubt themselves and doubt one another, Where people get all uncertain, we're all in a McCarthyist frenzy against one another.
I think benefits the establishment in subtle cultural ways.
America can't have the robust certainty that it had in the 70s and 80s, and God knows America had its problems then, if it's uncertain about the use of language and the intentions of its individual members, or cultural artifacts, or comedians, or artists.
If it's uncertain about where it stands on those issues, if it's forever heading towards more division instead of more union.
Like most men, I know exactly when me and my mom stopped being friends.
It was, uh, it was the first time I whacked off.
Before that, you're like, oh, where's my mom?
I love my mom.
She's so cool.
One nut, you're like, when's that bitch gonna leave the house?
In a sense, these are recognisable stand-up comedy tropes.
Your mother, masturbation, and there's a whole Freudian angle to leap into right here.
But in a way, isn't what Shane Gillis is doing there exactly what a comedian should be doing?
Gently approaching taboos in a way that's celebratory and amusing and joyful and mischievous and playful.
And when you can see him as an individual, it's pretty clear that this is not a man who runs on malice and hate, who you imagine Festering alone in some room, hating on people because of some minor cultural difference, he has the mind of a comedian that assesses information solely on whether or not it's amusing to him and then takes the risk of publicly exploring those ideas as comedians are supposed to.
Now when you live in a puritanical culture that seemed to have as one of its predicates
create division, create hatred, create kind of a dull low expectation of what our social
discourse is permitted to be, then figures like that who 20 years ago would have just
been "oh he's funny that guy he's funny" become like "whoa that's not Lenny Bruce"
in fact Shane Gillis is pretty clear that he's not a Bill Hicks type comic. Shane Gillis
is not about "I hate the establishment, I want to destroy it" he just wants to make
people laugh and for a comedian what better goal could there be?
But it shows you, doesn't it, where the establishment is when the sanctioned comics of a culture are only allowed very particular perspectives.
Challenges are met when it is a person of colour like Chappelle or Chris Rock who do not play ball and have the skills to not play ball.
Bill Burr, or now most specifically, Shane Gillis venturing into those territories.
What you've got is a peculiar lens to look at a culture that no longer knows what it wants or who it is and is operating, I think most of all, on ungrounded principles.
I wonder if you'll see the kind of comics that are sanctioned by the culture exploring ideas like the current Forever Wars.
The culture's comics won't offer you that, so it's not like they went the direction of Bill Hicks or Lenny Bruce or Pryor.
It went in the direction of some kind of anodyne flat, non-controversial, non-interesting iteration of comedy.
But people like you and me like people like Shane Gillis, so I guess you gotta make the booking.
I do have family members with Down syndrome.
It almost got me.
I dodged it but it nicked me!
It's lovely to hear that actually the audience are uncertain as to whether or not Down Syndrome is a topic you're permitted to laugh at in New York City liberal establishment circles.
So the claim of a artefact, a cultural artefact like SNL to be popular and populist is challenged there because it's Clearly governed by a paradigm that's strictly establishment left these days.
I mean left in terms of Clinton, Blair, authorities and censorship.
I don't mean left as in, you know what, working people are getting a bit of a rough deal at the hands of corporate.
That's left.
I don't know where that is anymore.
Hello?
You can hear that the people in that audience are uncertain as to whether or not it's permissible to laugh at Down Syndrome.
Well, what Gillis has done, because he's a brilliant comedian, he's told you, I've got more right than you to laugh about it because I've got family members.
So allowing them, he's rolling out a carpet upon which he can walk into that joke, but they're still nervous.
Are we allowed to joke about this?
Are we allowed to joke about this?
And actually, in effect, You should be allowed to joke about bloody well anything at all.
In fact, it's a valve.
It's a necessity.
I heard.
Laughter is the shame.
What tears are to grief?
How we could get back together as a culture without people making jokes about race, about sexuality, about mental health, about war, about despair, about the conditions we find ourselves in.
Oh, look, yes.
Yet another avenue that could bring about congeniality and collective action shut down.
Even something as potentially abstract as being able to laugh together.
My niece has Down syndrome and I thought that was going to get a bigger laugh.
What you can't negotiate with is a comedian's instinct, which he has.
It's always about finding edges.
It's always about gently crossing it.
It's always about curating and orchestrating the audience response.
But that can't organically occur in a pre-cultivated and pre-bunked environment.
That's what's dangerous about the culture war, that the kind of things we would joke about and laugh about together that would bring us closer are now being designated as points of avoidance culturally for all of us.
And it takes a comedian like Shane Gillis to guide us back into that space.
They're doing better than everybody I know.
They're the only ones having a good time pretty consistently.
They're not worried about the election.
They're having a good time.
Actually funny.
My sister, my niece's mother, she didn't know she'd get pregnant so she foster cared and then adopted three black kids and then she finally got pregnant and now she has a kid with Down syndrome and her husband is from Egypt.
He's an Arab guy.
You go over to their house, it's like getting in the craziest Uber pool you've ever been in.
Oh, man, that's good, that's good.
It's like, how did you guys meet?
This is... What you can actually see is that, well, those of us that are not American, that talk about America, are mostly impacted by America's wars and America's influence on the culture.
Shane Gillis reminds you that America is this kind of cultural melting pot where that most ordinary and maligned of beasts, the white American male, is actually a rather enjoyable entity.
He is not a product of the metropolis.
He is a red state product.
He is an ordinary American man.
And he is a funny, amusing, open-hearted, non-cynical, beautiful American man.
He's the kind of comedian America needs right now.
All the while, it's telling you, what we need are people that tick these boxes.
Just let it be.
Just stay out of comedy.
Comedy will look after itself.
You've done a bad enough job at organizing the geopolitical landscape without diving into the arts, and in particular, comedy.
Just leave it alone.
We'll handle it.
Also, the nuances, the nuances of culture.
Think of the kind of analyses that surround MAGA and Jan 6th and Trump.
The idea that there's this homogenous blob of Americans that are racist and hateful Well, let's peer into that blob a little and see who occupies it.
And you will see intermarriage.
You will see inclusivity.
Because, like you, you know people that have different sexual identities.
You know people that have mental illnesses or genetic conditions or different religions.
It's a media creation and the media creation that led to the cancellation of Shane Gillis is now having to backpedal because through the merit of his skill and the way that the media landscape has changed, let's face it, he's a creation of independent media, podcasts, Joe Rogan, all of the stuff that exists in the Similar channels that we're in right now.
Now it's having to reassess.
But Shane Gillis isn't safe.
Nobody is safe.
This is why cancel culture is a bad thing.
Because it's a bad faith approach.
That's what it is.
It's the assumption of negativity.
It's the assumption of malignance.
When a little more exploration, a little more conversation might reveal that perhaps people have a greater hope of integration, peace, ease and evolution than the culture will ever let you believe.
It's like a nice moment.
Yeah, you guys... You said cracker.
Here's another take on Shane Gillis' appearance.
So the man deemed morally untouchable, unworthy to be in SNL's regular week-in-week-out line-up, just a few years ago, returned to host an episode of his own, one of American Entertainment's most coveted guest spots, usually occupied by Hollywood A-listers.
Gillis' fall and rise is a reminder of how brutal cancel culture can be, and how spectacularly it can backfire.
I know a lot of people in the movie space are starting to say that the success of Barbie and the success of Top Gun Maverick is also an indication that if you make movies for an understood demographic, in the case of Barbie, presumably in the majority females, and vice versa in the case of Top Gun Maverick, you get Success.
Whereas if you take genres that are traditionally or conventionally, whatever word suits you, intended to, the fact is 65% of people that go and see superhero movies are male.
And if you try to turn those products into something that carries a particular message, and I believe there are really important messages that need to be carried through movies, but when those messages are at odds with the story, when those messages don't make sense and they're disingenuous, what you're gonna get is a hodgepodge of odd Disingenuous crap instead of successful movies like Barbie or Top Gun Maverick and also what he exposes is that it's an illegitimate endeavor I don't actually know what they're trying to achieve with all this stuff when he was named as a new SNL cast member in 2019 Gillis was unknown beyond the stand-up circuit within days of him being handed the opportunity of a lifetime alumni include Bill Murray Eddie Murphy and Tina Fey
A journalist dug up a clip of him using the racial slur chink on an old episode of Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast, a podcast he does with fellow comic Matt McCusker.
While Gillis was, he says, impersonating a white racist when he said it, saying it was enough to damn him.
That's precisely the kind of explanation that should be taken into account.
Well, I was doing an impersonation of a racist.
Doesn't matter.
That impersonation was so good, you cannot have a career now because of the quality of the impersonation and our inability to assess nuance, which is Absolutely necessary in comedy.
It was all over before he had taped a single episode.
SNL briefly tried to ride out the controversy before unceremoniously dropping Gillis.
A statement described the language in his previous work as offensive, hurtful and unacceptable.
But again, if you were to perhaps look at the work of Bill Murray or Mike Myers or Tina Fey through the lens of today's cultural rules, you might find similar adjectives being required.
In fact, if you look at comedy at any time, cruelty is sort of literally a necessity in much of comedy.
Gilles refused to issue a grovelling apology, nor did he refashion himself as a conservative culture warrior.
He just kept making comedy.
He put out a brilliant special on YouTube, Live in Austin, which currently has 24 million views.
He put out viral sketches, he toured what you might call the Joe Rogan circuit, the hugely successful, decidedly un-PC podcast orbiting the 56-year-old comic-turned-podfather.
Meanwhile, Matt and Shane's secret podcast exploded in popularity.
It's currently the biggest pod on Patreon, with tens of thousands of paid subscribers.
Following his 2023 blockbuster Netflix special Beautiful Dogs, Gillis is now on the verge of arena act status.
You can see why SNL came calling.
Notoriety alone doesn't do this, of course, but now 36 year old Gillis is also easily among the best stand ups of his generation.
He is also that rarest of things in the achingly right on superficially diverse but socially monocultural world of American comedy.
I think that's an important point.
Monocultural socially, but diverse superficially.
That's an excellent assessment.
A child of Fox News watching lower-middle-class suburban America.
In the post-2016 age, Gillis is the imagined villain of the liberal elites and the living, breathing antithesis of all their deadening pieties.
Brought up in central Pennsylvania, Gillis was a high school football star turned Army College dropout.
He looks and talks and jokes like someone's older brother from back home.
He says gay and retarded with abandon, but largely to mock his own meat-headed tendencies.
He'll send up his new woke Brooklyn friends, whose every social media post boils down to, see I'm not racist, just as much as he does his conservative, somewhat dysfunctional family.
His material about his dad watching Fox News every night until he's too drunk and or outraged to continue is a wonderful case in point.
Fox News is basically black church for old white dudes, Gillis observes in Live at Austin as he watches his father vigorously agreeing with absolutely everything the anchors say.
Mm-hmm.
Preach, Tucker.
So it is with his routines on the Donald.
Gillis has had some of the best Trump material you'll hear precisely because he isn't blinded by any Trump fury.
He gets how funny, intentionally and unintentionally Trump is, his outrageousness, his bizarre tics and cadences.
But nor does he serve up endless pronoun gags and tirades against the Dems and SJWs.
Gillis says he didn't vote for Trump, although he has joked that he has early onset Republicanism, given he's a history buff.
There are plenty of people who are unhappy that Gillis has been re-embraced by the mainstream entertainment biz.
His SNL rehabilitation proves how effortlessly the comedy industry forgives racism, reads one typically breathless Vox column.
But you can't help but feel that those kind of people are becoming more shrill precisely because they know they're beginning to lose ground.
The triumph of Shane Gillis reveals that there is a vast ecosystem of platforms and shows that can outstrip the reach of the dwindling mainstream.
An episode of The Joe Rogan Experience reportedly reaches twice as many people as your average edition of Saturday Night Live.
And now some of the gatekeepers are beginning to realise the talent and the viewing figures they can miss out on when they confuse the mob for the country.
It seems that four years after sacking him, SNL needed Shane Gillis more than Shane Gillis needed SNL.
Often we talk about how journalists like Chris Hedges and Glenn Greenwald could be used to monitor the decline of the legacy media.
Both of those men won Pulitzer Prizes and worked for organisations like the Guardian, a legacy media British newspaper, or the New York Times in the case of Chris Hedges.
And now those reporters do all of their reporting online because the legacy media has become an amplification device for the establishment and a tool to normalise its agenda.
The same can be said of the culture.
If you watch late night talk shows or SNL, it's pretty clear that they operate in lockstep with the agenda of those kind of print organisations.
And similarly, perhaps they are suffering as a result of the inability to include genuine diversity of opinion that is It's easily accessible to those of us that operate entirely now in independent media spaces.
So I suppose the appearance of Shane Gillis on SNL does, as the author of that piece indicated, show you that the balance of power is changing.
It will be interesting to see how that reality plays out in political spheres, how it plays out in terms of censorship, how it plays out in terms of cancel culture and the culture's ability to rehabilitate or reclaim its discarded icons.
The thing is this, of course, As the dynamic and relationship between independence and establishment continues to alter, many more people won't want to be involved in the establishment and its accessories, precisely because they are tools of an agenda that independence and freedom are ultimately opposed to.
But I'm glad to see a comedian of Shane Gillis's quality getting the opportunity to host a show that remains a comedy institution in spite of its obvious current frailties.
No.
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Now before we get even deeper into this, I have to tell you that if you're watching this anywhere but the sweet, sweet stream of Rumble and you want to know what we've got to say about Dave Chappelle, what we've got to say about Jon Stewart versus Tucker, you're going to have to click the link in the description.
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Click the link to see the Dave Chappelle special.
Now, Dave Chappelle's new special has caused a detonation at the heart of the culture.
He's uncancellable.
He's too brilliant to cancel.
Let's have a look at how that special changed the way the culture sees itself.
Here's the news.
No, here's the effing news.
Thank you for choosing Fox News.
The news.
No, here's the fucking news.
The legacy media accused Dave Chappelle of punching down and abusing trans people
in his news special.
But why do the legacy media continually remove nuance and dilute joy?
How do they benefit from people being caught in constant conflict?
Dave Chappelle's special is obviously incredibly popular and maybe marks a transitional moment in the culture wars.
Certainly what it does mark is that when it comes to it, if something is profitable, people will back it.
This is going to be an interesting thing that plays out over the next 12 months, I would imagine.
How can you still deploy the rhetoric of wokeism while acknowledging that there are growing markets for people that are critical of some of the ideals within it?
One of the things I think is particularly interesting is while Dave Chappelle clearly makes jokes in the special about trans folk or disabled people, he's obviously joking.
And also, significantly, there's a point in his stand-up special where he talks admiringly of trans people.
Beyond acceptingly, admiringly.
And none of the news outlets that are critiquing him mention that because I believe to include that nuance would dilute their own arguments. In short, they enjoy their own
outrage. They're high on the smell of their own gaseous outrage. They don't want to go, "Well,
actually, Dave Chappelle's probably joking about that." So let's have a look at some moments from Dave
Chappelle's special and talk about the way that the mainstream media likes to use deliberately denuanced
attacks on cultural artifacts in order to stoke tensions and conflict. "And the
only thing that got me out of that space was a comedian friend of mine, the late, great Norm MacDonald."
That's right.
Shout out to Norm.
And what Norm did, which I'll never forget, is he knew that I was the biggest Jim Carrey fan in the world.
Now, I'm not gonna go all into it, but Jim Carrey is talented in a way that you can't practice or rehearse.
What a God-given talent.
I was fascinated with him.
And Norm knew that.
And he called me up and he goes, Dave, I'm... He says, I'm doing a movie with Jim Carrey.
Do you want to meet him?
And I said, fuck, yes I do.
And it was the first time I could remember since my father died being excited.
And the movie was called Man on the Moon.
I didn't know any of this.
And in this movie, Jim Carrey was playing another comedian I admired, the late, great Andy Kaufman.
Yes, and Jim Carrey was so immersed in that role that from the moment he woke up to the time he went to bed at night, he would live his life.
That's Andy Kaufman.
I didn't know that.
When they said cut, this nigga was still.
Andy Kaufman.
So much so that everybody on the crew called him Andy.
I didn't know any of that.
I just went there to meet him, and when he walked into the room where we were supposed to meet, I screamed, Jim Carrey!
And everyone said, "No!"
(audience laughing)
"Call him Andy."
(audience laughing)
I didn't understand.
And then he came over and he was acting weird.
I didn't know he was acting like Andy Kaufman.
He's just like, hey, how you doing?
And I was like, hello.
Andy?
Now, in hindsight, how fucking lucky am I that I got to see one of the greatest artists of my time immersed in one of his most challenging processes ever.
Very lucky to have seen that.
But as it was happening, I was very disappointed.
Because I wanted to meet Jim Carrey.
And I had to pretend this nigga was Andy Kaufman.
All afternoon.
And he was clearly Jim Carrey.
I could look at him and I could see he was Jim Carrey.
Anyway, I say all that to say, that's how trans people make me feel.
Even that taken at face value, it's plain that what Dave Chappelle is doing is playing with the
outrage of previous comments around trans people and trans issues.
It's obvious that it's a kind of mirth-oriented endeavour.
It's comedy, after all.
And I sometimes feel that the new Puritanism that's at play in our culture is deliberately trying to extract aspects of our nature that are rather beautiful.
the ability to playfully ridicule, the ability to joke.
The areas that are seemingly most under attack include humor, sexuality in an extraordinary way.
And I think that's about shutting down natural impulses, making people feel constantly concerned, twitchy,
paranoid, uncertain.
And figures like Dave Chappelle, who meddles in and directs, rather artfully, obviously,
chaos and uncertainty and ambiguity are under attack precisely because they're willing
to walk into these areas.
As I said to you, elsewhere in the same special, Dave Chappelle talks admiringly of trans people
and like what it takes to be a man and what it takes to be a dreamer
and how you don't need to be able to understand somebody in order to be able to respect them.
And in any honest critique of that show, you would have to say, he does also say this,
so plainly he's got a quite evolved perspective, but they don't want evolved perspectives.
What they want is a kind of state of stasis and nervousness and anxiety.
There's a kind of relish behind attacking other people.
as a person that's been subject to public attacks myself, what I recognise is that nuance is stripped away.
Anything that doesn't make a situation look as bad as possible is extracted,
diluted, denied, removed, eliminated, as if what's being offered is objective analysis
from a group that have no skin in the game, when in all actuality what you have is participants
in a cultural endeavour offering a very particular perspective on a subject in order to achieve
a particular result.
So in the case of Dave Chappelle, that result is just ongoing tension, conflict,
creating disorientation around where people are supposed to stand with their social roles.
Most people from across the political spectrum are generally speaking, if they're living lives where they're free from agitation and oppression, broadly kind and polite to other people.
I think it's very rare that you see people hyped up into states of hatred.
Indeed, I think it requires a degree Of instigation to create it.
But if your cultural environment is one of uncertainty, censorship, doubt, denial, removal of nuance, removal of humor, it, I think, increases the problems that these legacy media outlets are claiming to address.
He's plainly joking when he says, I love Punching Down.
All of the stand up around disabled people is ironic and layered and nuanced and sophisticated.
And this nuance and sophistication is going to be necessary if we're going to continue to navigate territory like this.
What is the ultimate end of the cultural Do you think that one side's going to win and one side's going to lose?
You're going to eliminate all people that are traditional, eliminate all people that are conservative, or eliminate all people that are progressive?
Of course not!
It's more or less a kind of, I don't know, it may not be 50-50, I don't know, because one thing I've learned is professional metropolitan biases are loud voices but potentially small demographics.
But nevertheless, the obvious answer is we're going to have to become tolerant of one another, tolerant of people that live differently, even if that living differently means conservative, or traditional, or taking time with one another to understand that at the deepest possible level, a level that can indeed be attained by using the sophisticated type of thinking and analysis deployed expertly by a genius like Dave Chappelle, that we actually can find common ground with one another.
Who do you think has a better, more open-hearted perspective on cultural issues?
Oppression, personal change, personal transition, corruption, bias, prejudice, bigotry?
Dave Chappelle or a legacy media hack that's plainly there to generate and amplify hatred?
It's pretty obvious, isn't it?
But what's required is more of this kind of comedy, more exploration around the complexity around sexuality, power dynamics, different emergent cultural groups.
For hundreds of thousands of years we've lived in tribal groups that wouldn't have known very much about the cultures and customs of other groups.
For hundreds and thousands of years we've known that members of communities have different ways of identifying that don't fit within narrow biological parameters and it hasn't been cause for Outrage or aggression or condemnation, there's no question that there's prejudice and bigotry across society, but by continually highlighting a particular type of prejudice and bigotry, you once again veil and marginalise a greater set of inequalities that are practised at the economic and class level.
And rhetoric like Dave Chappelle's, again, offers us the kind of gelignite to reimagine the kind of territories that we live within.
And also gives us all a degree of interpersonal and social freedom to engage in discussions and conversations with one another in good faith.
So I would say that comedy and good humour like this is a necessary tool.
And the censorship of it, and indeed were it not for the financial success of Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais and the success of their shows, they would be cancelled and shut down.
Netflix would cancel it, but they've looked at Oh, people like this stuff.
You know, when you get Dave Chappelle on Rotten Tomatoes, 3% critic score, 97% audience score, they start to notice in the end, oh, OK, we're going to have to let this pass.
We're going to have to let this succeed.
And what we're getting now is a culture that's fracturing all over the place.
There are whole new demographics.
There are new emergent market forces.
There are new independent media forces, whether it's Oliver Antony or Sound of Freedom.
It's clear That new markets are appearing, and beyond markets, because I don't think it is just economics, and I hope it gets beyond economics, because what needs to be served is complexity and nuance itself.
The fact that we can live alongside one another if people are Republican or Conservative or Liberal or Progressive or Leftist, it doesn't actually matter that much, particularly not once you recognise this key idea.
It doesn't benefit any of us.
To aggregate power centrally to the degree where whole nations are being subjugated by globalist ideology.
I think that the culture war is utilised in order to generate conflict and division to distract us from issues that are more significant.
And when I say more significant, I don't mean that identity issues or the struggles of oppressed people across the world are not important.
Of course they are.
What I'm saying is, is the people that are using these arguments don't care about them and they care Even less about developing movements that could generate actual change, that could prevent Congress being so beset with corruption that you can't do anything to stop people investing in stocks and shares of companies and organisations that they regulate.
There's no possibility of developing meaningful cultural change as long as we're all at war with one another under the most bogus of pretenses.
In this case, the pretense being that Dave Chappelle is a malign and malignant force.
I don't think anyone who watches that special could come away thinking anything other than, You know, he has respect for trans people and he's making jokes.
He's simultaneously joking about the culture, the reaction to a previous special, the ludicrousness of the situation that Jim Carrey was in, playing with the idea of identity itself.
He makes loads of jokes about race.
He's clearly interested in creating conversation and a dynamic set of circumstances.
And that's what good comedians are able to expertly do.
And if you watch that special, that's what you'll see happen.
What you won't see happen is the generation of division and hatred.
Where you will see the generation of division and hatred is in the legacy media outlets that are claiming to be policing, curtailing, controlling it.
We're here to help you.
No, what you're here to do is to amplify the message of the powerful,
disempower ordinary people, primarily by turning them against one another,
and not highlighting the many, many thousands of issues around which we could be galvanised, mobilised and united.
Now Jon Stewart and Tucker Carlson are two significant figures in the media landscape,
They're both powerful, they're both very funny in their ways.
I know loads of you don't like Jon Stewart no more because you see him as a person who just essentially amplifies the narratives of the establishment.
But I know Jon Stewart to be a brilliant, funny man and a great professional.
So it's a pretty fascinating take.
Tucker?
He has my heart.
I love Tucker Carlson.
Let's get into this episode of Here's the News.
No, here's the effing news.
And also let's look at what their contretemps tells us about the nature, excuse me, about the nature of America.
Here's the news.
No, here's the effing news.
Thank you for choosing Fox News.
The news.
No, here's the fucking news.
Tucker Carlson has called Jon Stewart a tool of the establishment, where Jon Stewart thinks
that Tucker is just, well, a tool.
But in this phony polarisation and culture war, are we missing the real message here?
That both these anti-establishment figures have more to teach us than anyone from the homogenised, uniparty, authoritarian centre.
Surely this is an important moment where a figure like Tucker Carlson, despised and loathed on the left, but adored by many, and Tucker Carlson, let me say it outright out front, I consider him to be my friend.
And the reason I like Tucker Carlson is because I see him as like an old school conservative, Maybe.
Who is willing to just come out and say I'm a free speech absolutist.
I'm absolutely against war.
He's come on our shows.
He's been clear and open.
And I would expect to disagree with anybody on a variety of political subjects.
But with Tucker Carlson, I think he has good values and good principles.
That is not what I've heard him say that Tucker Carlson is deliberately evil.
And on his return to The Daily Show, he's made Tucker Carlson one of his targets.
And that makes sense when you understand the old rubric of left versus right.
But I think politics has changed since Jon Stewart has last on television.
Let's be clear here.
Jon Stewart is an excellent comedian.
Excellent!
He understands comedy, he understands delivery, he understands character.
He's an exceptionally gifted comic and I think a vital, incredible voice in our cultural space.
That's why I think it's fascinating to see the two of them at Loggerhead.
But are we going to miss a real opportunity here?
When Tucker Carlson is a figure of the right, let's say for simplicity's sake, who is virulently anti-establishment, John Stewart is a figure of the left who is very pro-ordinary working people, who is critical of the establishment and yet is confined to certain areas of topicality and we'll point them out as we go.
But is there more to There's more to learn from both of these figures, their popularity and their ability than we could ever learn from the centralised, homogenised, authoritarian, centralist figures that dominate our cultural space these days.
I.e.
Jon Stewart is whip funny, fast, amusing and right on.
Tucker Carlson understands how to reach a wide audience with ethics and morals that clearly resonate with vast, almost incomparable numbers of people.
This is show us in a way that politics and media have changed since Jon Stewart was last on TV and if we were to find an energy and a charge between these two poles rather than repulsion in that magnetic power we might find the source for new political movements that could be a genuine challenge to the American war machine and global corporatism.
Let's get into it.
Just out of curiosity as a student Firstly, how Jon Stewart did this was well funny.
He sets up the bit that he's learning from Tucker Carlson as a journalist, not a lie about what you do.
He did this in a very, very amusing and brilliant way.
As someone who does this kind of thing for a living, when I see Jon Stewart do it, I think, wow, that guy, he's really good at this.
They turn these ideas around fast.
They find the comedy in the ideas.
But what I'm interested in is why Why Jon Stewart never points out that Tucker Carlson is consistently anti-war.
Watching Jon Stewart deconstruct and attack Tucker Carlson on the basis of his interview with Putin is interesting but I also would argue this was a really important interview and that in attacking Tucker Carlson Even though he does it brilliantly and amusingly, he is, to a degree, doing the job of the establishment, because if the Democrat Party could press a button and prevent that interview from happening, they would have pressed that button, because I think millions of people who never would have had access to it before saw Vladimir Putin clearly conveying a very particular perspective which could be called, easily, propaganda, but certainly includes things like, we are interested in a diplomatic solution, we always made it clear that if Ukraine joined NATO it would be a problem,
And not only that, these are things that we were all aware of and discussing prior to the interview.
The 2014 coup in Ukraine and the way that's played out.
And subsequently, even newspapers like the New York Times have published that the CIA have bases inside Ukraine and have been agitating and provoking a war.
So you can't call it an unprovoked war anymore.
So what I'm saying is, I wonder, is it possible that you could feel, as Jon Stewart does, a kind of antipathy and even disdain for Tucker Carlson, and yet acknowledge Tucker Carlson's right, and therefore his audience's right, to share the views that they clearly do.
And to oppose the opinions of Jon Stewart, but find common ground when it comes to a general agreement that you can't trust the American military-industrial complex, a subject upon which Tucker Carlson is very strong and to which this interview is integrally related, because isn't the big establishment fear here that we'll hear Vladimir Putin say stuff that makes us not want to fund an When you're sitting there interviewing Putin, and you don't plan to challenge his utter bullshit, but you don't want to really be that obvious, what do you do with your face?
might be better than continuing to allow Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, et cetera,
all to profit from that ongoing war.
When you're sitting there interviewing Putin and you don't plan to challenge his utter bullshit,
but you don't wanna really be that obvious, what do you do with your face?
(audience laughing)
Oh, I see.
(audience laughing)
Okay, so it's not really a straight face as much as you try to convey a mixture
of what appears to be shame, arousal, and...
(audience laughing)
I'm gonna say irregularity.
(audience laughing)
For instance, like you're constipated while jerking off to a Sears catalog.
This, I suppose, shows you the power of comedy, because that's an entirely constructed idea designed to ridicule, and it's a successful one, and it's the kind of thing that comedians should be able to do, and clearly do rather well.
And it's one of the things that's slowly getting extricated from our culture, the ability to be cruel in good faith.
Although this is, of course, not a well-intended bit, this is a polarising bit.
I maintain, Jon Stewart ...is an anti-establishment figure when it comes to being critical of corruption.
Did you see his interview with that Pentagon official when it came to the subject of failing audits?
An $850 billion budget to an organisation that can't pass an audit and tell you where that money went.
I think most people would consider that somewhere in the realm of waste, fraud or abuse because they would wonder why that money isn't well accounted for.
What I'm trying to drive us towards here is the possibility of a kind of acceptance that there's a space that's neither Democrat or Republican in the former sense, but is a more decentralized, autonomous, truly democratic, anti-establishment position.
Could it ever emerge?
Here we go.
So I guess you put in 10 rubles here and you get it back.
When you put the cart back.
Now possibly with his well-intentioned and enthusiastic appraisal of Russian supermarkets, Taka may not have done himself any favors.
So it's free, but there's an incentive to return it and not just bring it to your homeless encampment.
I didn't realize America's homeless problem is caused entirely by easy access to grocery stores.
But it's odd actually, because what is causing America's homeless crisis?
Lack of infrastructure, lack of support, and where are those resources currently going?
Evidently to the Pentagon, to the ongoing war.
So I suppose what I'm inviting is a spirit of conviviality, mutual acceptance, trust and even love.
Even though I adore comedy, I adore ridicule, I adore the ability to poke fun and even attack in good spirits.
And both of these men are, in the case of Tucker Carlson, a person I consider a friend.
In the case of Jon Stewart, a person I admire.
But in terms of how is this playing out in the media?
How is this playing out in the culture?
And isn't it It's possible.
But what we're missing here in this polarity is the opportunity to identify, acknowledge and move into new cultural spaces rather than let this just sink into the morass of the culture war as just tit-for-tat spat that don't really go anywhere.
Perhaps if your handlers had allowed, you would have seen there is a hidden fee to your cheap groceries and orderly streets.
Ask Alexei Navalny or any of his supporters.
In Vladimir Putin's Russia, political repression is everywhere.
And hundreds have been arrested for daring to honor Navalny so publicly.
Right.
This is a point where you have to question the legitimacy and editorialisation that's happening literally in that moment.
It would be a perfect opportunity, one might say, for Julian Assange's name to come to the forefront of this show's mind.
Julian Assange who's in prison, awaiting potential extradition to the United States for journalism.
And now we, of course, are beginning to understand that it's likely that Navalny died of...
A blood clot.
Because the difference between our urinal caked chaotic subways and your candelabraed beautiful subways is the literal price of freedom.
But also the literal price of freedom is America's ongoing imperialist projects around the world.
The escalating tensions in the Middle East.
Some people are calling it a genocide in Gaza.
The increasing tensions in the South Pacific between China and the agitation of Russia that's been continually framed by the media that I'd love to see Jon Stewart hold to account in the
same way, continually advocate for as an unprovoked attack
that needed addressing, when increasingly we now know, from New York Times reporting that the CIA had bases in
Ukraine for ten years and were agitating for that war,
and we know that NATO also understood that if Ukraine were ever to be granted membership of that organisation,
it would lead to an escalation of tensions between Ukraine and Putin.
So when it comes to imperialism, colonialism and the management of information, the establishment,
the neoliberal left establishment, because in my view there is no left anymore, have a lot of questions to answer
as well.
And I think that as long as you have Tucker Carlson, It's much more critical of both parties than Jon Stewart, who still appears to be somewhat tribally affiliated with a Democrat organization, in spite of being willing to criticize Biden.
And there was a hell of a lot of blowback when he did, even on something as risible as his age.
If Jon Stewart were to apply his comedic wit and incredible abilities to addressing the hypocrisy within the Democratic Party, I think it would relieve a great deal of tension.
I know I felt excited just by seeing Jon Stewart attack Joe Biden and attacking Donald Trump.
I thought, yeah, this is what I I don't want to hear.
This is what I need to hear.
Now, my satisfaction scarcely needs to be prioritised, but I think that what is being revealed by these two cultural orators, two polemicists, two polarised figures, is that the uniparty space is becoming increasingly less relevant and movements and individuals from the periphery have a lot more in common with one another ultimately, even if there is a variety of cultural issues that may separate us.
I figure that if you were to acknowledge that on the subject of war, the military-industrial complex, deep state involvement, the establishment of a censorship-industrial complex, all of which has been underwritten by both the Obama administration and the Biden administration, all of which Tucker has reported on extensively, if we were to see those issues discussed in these spaces, we would start to recognise, hang on a minute, there is an affinity here.
But you don't tend to see those issues discussed.
Why?
Because it seems to me that the establishment's primary weapon now, maintaining control of political institutions is to
continue to portray Trump as a terrifying tyrant and dictator in waiting hysterically
rather than ever addressing the failures of their own organization
and their own party particularly when it comes to economic inequality.
John Stewart is a figure of the left that I continue to admire precisely
because he does reach out to what you might call ordinary Americans.
His work with the first responders after 9-11 and his affinity with ordinary American people is one of the things, and let me know how you feel in the chat, that makes me still feel affection for Jon Stewart and makes me still feel hope that out of this incendiary space of this type of cultural conflict, new alliances may yet emerge.
But the goal that Carlson and his ilk are pushing is that there's really There's really no difference between our systems.
In fact, theirs might be a little bit better.
The question is, why?
Why is Tucker doing this?
Here's why.
It's because the old civilizational battle was communism versus capitalism.
That's what drove the world since World War II.
Russia was the enemy then.
But now, they think the battle is woke versus un-woke.
I think the emergence of woke owes a lot more to the fact that the Democrats now operate on behalf of metropolitan elite and have abandoned ordinary working people and therefore have to emphasize the cultural areas where they are more inverted commas progressive in order to distract us from the fact that now truckers are pro-Trump.
To regard Trump as the source of the problem rather than a response to the failings of the American left is I think a similarly myopic perspective and also conveying a kind of go and live in Russia if you love it so much.
That's exactly the sort of thing that you would have heard from And in that fight, Putin is an ally to the right.
John Stewart in his spats with Bill O'Reilly, there was a kind of conviviality and a sense
of hope that somehow there was a shared vision of America that might lead to mutuality, respect
and trust.
That kind of conversation seems to be disappearing from the public discourse.
And in that fight, Putin is an ally to the right.
He's their friend.
Unfortunately, he is also a brutal and ruthless dictator.
So now they have to make Americans a little more comfortable with that.
I mean, liberty is nice, but have you seen Russia's shopping carts?
I suppose at this point you'd have to estimate for yourself how much of the United States' military-industrial complex and your tax-dollar resources are being expended in the Ukraine-Russia conflict because of a humanitarian crisis, and how much of it is being expended because, as Julian Assange said, The goal is to create long unending wars rather than successful ones.
You mentioned Jon Stewart.
The two of you have a bit of a history.
I don't know if you've seen it, but he kind of grilled your supermarket and subway videos.
But his other point was that I was somehow a partisan or a mindless partisan, which is definitely not true.
It is true of him.
He is a mindless partisan.
But I am not.
And I haven't been for I really haven't been since I got back from Baghdad at the beginning of the Iraq war.
And I realized that The Republican Party, which I'd voted for, you know, my whole life to that point and had supported in general, was like pushing this really horrible thing that was going to hurt the United States, which in time it really did.
I am a figure that came out of what you might call the cultural left.
I've got a lot of friends that feel much more affiliated with the politics and ideals of Jon Stewart than Tucker Carlson.
One of the things they continually say about Tucker Carlson is he's interested in things like displacement theory.
never heard him talk about Tucker Carlson's continuing opposition to war, from the Iraq
War to contemporary wars, his willingness to interview people that are truly anti-establishment
on a variety of subjects, and even a memorable piece where he spoke to Ben Shapiro, those
were the days when them guys were communicating, on the subject of AI and whether or not he
would pass laws to ensure that trucks could never be driven, for example, automatically
because of the impact that would have on that particular sector of American working people,
where he spoke in favor of government regulation of private corporations in a way that you
would never hear anyone from inside the Biden administration talking in support of ordinary
workers.
Would you, Tucker Carlson, be in favor of restrictions on the ability of trucking companies
to use this sort of technology specifically to, you know, sort of artificially maintain
the number of jobs that are available in the trucking industry?
Are you joking?
In a second!
In a second!
In other words, if I were president when I say to DOT, Department of Transportation, we're not letting driverless trucks on the road.
Period.
Why?
Really simple.
Driving for a living is the single most common job for high school educated men in this country, in all 50 states.
The problem, I suppose, is I generally find more affinity with people that say this system is broken.
These institutions are not worthy of our trust.
We need new political models.
You can't trust the government.
You can't trust corporations than people that appear to be advocating for one side of a broken political system.
For me, by continually being hysterical about Trump and Trump's impact, you're failing to acknowledge that the Democrats in your country or the Labour movement in our party have failed ordinary people to the point where populism, nativism are But I would just say this, Jon Stewart's a defender of power.
feel there is a global agenda, there is a cartel of interests and institutions
that are impervious to the democratic will of ordinary people and for me
Tucker Carlson has been brilliant at attacking and addressing exactly those
subjects. But I would just say this, Jon Stewart's a defender of power, like Jon
Stewart has never criticized, like what's Jon Stewart's view on, you know, the aid
we've sent to Ukraine, the hundred billion dollars or whatever.
Like, what happened to that money?
What happened to the weapons that I bought?
He doesn't care.
He has the exact same priorities as the people permanently in charge in Washington.
If you're going to pretend to be the guy who's giving the finger to entrench power, you should do it once in a while.
And he never has.
There's not one time when he said something that would be deeply unpopular on Morning Joe.
That's all I'm saying.
And so don't call yourself a truth teller.
You're a court comedian or a flatterer of power.
OK, that's fine.
There's a rule for that.
But don't pretend to be something else.
What I'm struck by when watching these two figures communicating, presumably primarily to their own audiences rather than each other's, is surely at this point there is a growing constituency that quite like Jon Stewart, quite like Tucker Carlson, and hate the establishment, hate the Uni Party.
That's what I think is being exposed by this era and by the great Stars of this era is that the establishment and its institutions are failing.
In fact, they're over.
And what we're living through now is their frantic attempt to reassert control that used to be possible and plausible when you had centralised media.
Welcome to NBC.
Welcome to CNN.
Now you don't have that.
You have me.
You have Tucker Carlson.
You have Joe Rogan.
You have all sorts of people.
And back into that space you have one of these, not Old Guard, I don't mean this in a dismissive way, Very, very brilliant comic who could succeed in any environment because of his skill adapting to what has changed since then.
Because I feel, and I hope in a way, that there are more of us that think, not the Democrats, not the Republicans, something else, please.
than are just like thirstily and happily backing up our chosen opponent in a culture war
that does all of us a great disservice.
'Cause guess what? While we're culture warring and clapping and applauding our preferred pugilist
in this phony battle, the establishment is business as usual. And business as usual
is ongoing war. And it's this subject, beyond all others, that led me to understand
that what Tucker Carlson is doing is significant and important.
The measure to me is, are you taking positions that are unpopular with the most powerful people in the
world, and how often are you doing it?
It's super simple.
Not for its own sake, but do you feel free enough to say, you know, to the consensus, I disagree.
And if you don't, then you're just another toady.
That's my view.
Well, I think he probably feels free enough to do it, but you're saying he doesn't do it.
On the big things.
The big things, this is my estimation of it, others may disagree, the big things are the economy and war, okay?
The big things government does can be, I mean a lot of things government does, government does everything at this point, but where we kill people and how, and for what purpose, and how we organize the economic engine that keeps the country afloat, those are the two big questions.
And I hear almost no debate about either one of them in the media.
And I have dissenting views on both of them.
I mean, I'm mad about the tax code, which I think is unfair.
And the fact that we're creating chaos around the world, like, is the saddest thing that's happening right now.
And nobody feels free to say that.
So that's not good.
These are valuable questions to ask about the establishment media.
Are they willing to interrogate war expenditure?
Are they willing to interrogate and provide the reckoning that the pandemic period surely demands the The disease is the same name as the lab.
There's been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania.
a significant mainstream figure who said there's been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness
in Pennsylvania with regard to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the ridiculous coincidence of the emergence
of coronavirus from that period.
The disease is the same name as the lab.
There's been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania.
What do you think happened?
Like, "Oh, I don't know.
Maybe a steam shovel made it with a cocoa bean."
Or, "It's the (bleep) chocolate factory."
So what I'm saying is our culture needs both of these figures.
It represents the end of these systems.
Is it possible that we have in the figures of Tucker Carlson and Jon Stewart, even while they're in the middle of a highly publicised spat, the kind of A fusion that's required for solution.
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Is this conversation and this polemic an indication that our old institutions are dying, new institutions are required, new conversations will have to take place in order for that to be achieved, and perhaps a conversation between Jon Stewart and Tucker Carlson could certainly contribute to that solution.
No, here's the fucking news!
Thank you for joining us for this Culture Special.
Now, on Monday we've got Dr Latipo, the Floridian Surgeon General, a man who stood up to the establishment throughout the pandemic, who's written a new book called Transcend Fear, which is fantastic.
You can watch it right now if you want, simply by clicking the link, becoming a Locals member and use the code GODISGREAT.
To get one month free, you'll also get early access to interviews, a weekly book club that you'll love, meditations, and a free exclusive weekly here's the news just for you.
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Thank you.
Thank you for joining us.
Thank you for your trust in us.
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Join us next week, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
