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Sept. 17, 2024 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
57:54
HILLARY COMES FOR TRUMP After Second ASSASSINATION Attempt + Shooters’ BLACKROCK Connections! SF454
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So there you Awakening Wonders.
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
You've got to stay healthy.
You can't get the scurvy.
You've got to keep the vitamin C when you are riding the storms of a world of near total chaos.
The maelstrom continues.
Another day, another assassination attempt, another would-be assassin with extraordinary connections to Black Rock.
What's going on in the world and who will explain it to us?
Well, Michael Schellenberger is the person that will be explaining it to us, but he won't be appearing.
Until we're well out of the choppy waters of YouTube, that little globalist citadel.
You can't speak openly and freely there.
That's the sort of places where they will amplify the messaging of corporate media.
That's the kind of places where they'll stoke division and hatred.
On Rumble we can speak and stream freely so after 15 minutes we will be there speaking with Michael Schellenberger not only about the sort of odd increasing regularity of assassination attempts but the battle of the bureaucrats Andre Breton and Ursula von der Leyen have in spats Breton?
Is it T.I.
Breton?
Andre Breton's a surrealist artist.
Oh Breton, he's the person that's sort of part bureaucrat, part gangster anyway.
He's resigned.
Is this something of a victory for free speech?
Are these bureaucracies being closed down?
Let me know in the rumble chat if you're paying attention to that.
Dixie Mintz says Black Rock will fail.
But will they though?
Will they fail?
And also, someone explains to me once, now the thing is with BlackRock, there's so many different people that are invested in it, it's not a centrally controlled organisation.
But I wonder though, don't you?
Do you wonder?
But we'll get to the bottom of it.
We've got so much fantastic content for you today, as well as an enchanting and brilliant guest.
Michael Schellenberg is one of the people that's taught me the most about how this space works.
And as the ongoing condemnation of Donald Trump continues to resound, people saying he's not...
Have the electric Steve on the Wake and Wonder chat.
Russell, what pimp did you nick that hat from?
I borrowed it.
And his name's Leslie.
Now, let's have a look at this.
This is a nice little meme that, in a way, perhaps helps us to understand what's going on from the never-less-than-successful posts of End Wokeness.
Ten wars, no wars, no hitmen, two hitmen.
That's a sort of post that's a good community post, Luke, for you to bear in mind, mate.
Take a note of that if you would.
And here is an eerily prescient Time Magazine cover.
In trouble.
Do you what?
Is it?
Are we in a glitching matrix?
Let me know.
Are we in a?
Yeah, this is live.
Blessed old bird.
Yeah, we're live.
Game too long.
Thanks for complimenting the hat.
Crooks was in a Blackrock commercial.
Yeah, that's right.
And our man Ryan Roof.
Ryan Ralph.
He's in a As Of Battalion promo video.
I mean, what's going on with these assassins?
It's extraordinary, isn't it?
Yeah, so thanks for joining us in the stream.
If you are watching us on YouTube, we'll be there for about another 10 minutes.
Let's have a look at the view calling for social media to regulate political hate speech.
Which, I mean, I don't know if they're watching their own posts on there.
There's quite a lot of antipathy on that platform.
We have to elevate our rhetoric.
That's the problem is for like 10 years, there's been a normalizing of, oh, he didn't, he or she didn't mean that, or they were just speaking that way.
The way our politicians are speaking right now, we never would have seen that 20 years ago.
There's a point where there's an out of.
Someone just said in the rumble chat that Blackrock own rumble stocks and I suppose they will won't they because don't they own stocks and everything and don't they own entire indexes not own entire indexes but invest in entire indexes yeah I don't know man it's difficult to work it out and it's complicated I'm certainly not claiming to understand it.
I certainly don't have the kind of certainty that defines the pundits on The View's world outlook.
Bounds.
And there's no longer bounds at all.
People will say and do anything.
And it's not just on the national level, this trickle down, if we're seeing it in politicians, but somehow that's come all the way down and a lot of that's due to technology and social media, the reach.
There's always hate speech, there's always been awful things said, but now the reach of that hate speech is great.
There are countries, even in Europe, that have created like the council, the no hate speech movement,
which the one step before violence is that hate speech. And we have no regulation because we live in a country that, I
understand, values the First Amendment, but there's got to be a way that whether it's regulating social media,
right, that communities have to come together and change this.
The spectacle of the view oddly proselytizing on matters of unity...
It could make you feel sick, couldn't it?
It could make you feel extremely nauseous and sick.
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Will Hillary Clinton ever learn?
Will she?
Hillary Clinton seems to be demanding absolute homogeneity when it comes to legacy media output.
She don't want no diversity.
It's a little bit like the pandemic period all over again.
You're free to say anything you want to as long as it's...
Get in your house right now, put on a mask and take that medicine and don't ask any questions about VARs or yellow card events and certainly don't start inquiring about excess deaths.
When it comes to the forthcoming election, the very fact that Tulsi Gabbard and Bobby Kennedy are joining Trump would seem to be, to the casual observer, an indication that an anti-establishment alliance is forming Just at the time when it's most immediately required when globalism is in the ascendancy.
But the forefathers and foremothers and mother effers of the globalism movement are getting ready to fight back.
Here's Hillary Clinton demanding that everybody sing from the same hymn sheet and pray on their knees like Monica in the Oval Office to the gods of globalism.
I am struck by the fact that as his campaign careens into very, very offensive territory, the association with Holocaust deniers and the... He's been shot at once.
There's been another assassination attempt.
They've been calling him Hitler for years and years and years.
They loved him when he was just a billionaire or a reality TV show host.
Are you going to take any responsibility for this?
Rachel, take one shot and it stops.
Maddow?
Outrages at Arlington National Cemetery of all places, the insults to recipients of the Medal of Honor, the recent incredibly racist and dangerous lies about specific groups of immigrants, Haitians in this case, and Venezuelans in the case of Colorado.
I am struck by the fact that as much as we thought we might have been inoculated against sort of outrage tactics like that, where everything else gets thrown by the wayside and everybody starts responding to his outrage.
Did they cover Kamala Harris saying there are no US military personnel in combat zones?
Here are those military personnel filming her saying it.
Did they cover it?
They didn't, did they?
Now, like, when you watch us here, I don't believe that within the institutions of our current democratic setup, we have parties that are not so owned.
By corporate interest in the machinery of war that we will get the kind of nations and communities and individual freedom to which we are entitled.
But I can tell you plainly that if what you're interested in is disruption of globalism, if what you're interested in is preventing the advance of these technologically feudalistic bureaucracies, you've got no choice but to look into the alliances between Tulsi Gabbard, Bobby Kennedy and Trump And to wherever you are watching this in the world, recognise that parliamentary, congressional, apparently democratic nations are completely owned by powerful globalist interests, or owned to a degree that makes any distinction broadly irrelevant.
We've got Michael Schellenberger coming up in a second.
Let's first understand how Rachel Maddow and Hillary Clinton are going to edge us closer to truth.
It's a way of sort of yanking everybody's chain.
I sort of feel like we haven't learned.
And he's still being taught, especially by the media, that the more offensive he is, the more he can dominate the media space entirely.
And I feel like you've been a good diagnoser of that, not only from when you were up against him, but from when others have done so.
Do you have an antidote for that or a way that people can talk themselves out of taking that bait?
I think that's really a critical question and I think there's a couple of things going on here.
You mentioned the press and sadly the press is still not able to cover Trump the way that they should.
They careen from one outrage to the next.
What was outrageous three days ago is no longer on the front pages even though it threatens the physical safety of so many I think it's been very consistent.
That's basically all they ever say.
Trump is dangerous.
have decided to demonize and I don't understand why it's so difficult for the
press to have a consistent narrative about how dangerous Trump is. You know
the late great...
It's been very consistent that's basically all they ever say.
Trump is dangerous, Trump's a bit like Hitler. Oh it's a shame that person
missed his head.
If it had just rotated a bit that way we could have ended all of this chaos.
He's a criminal, he's a racist, he's a rapist.
I've never seen such a wonderful concord of constant disinformation.
And again, I'll reiterate as I feel it is my duty to.
That my interest in Donald Trump and the MAGA movement comes mostly from his more recent alliances with Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi, etc.
I know loads of you love him, that you're full MAGA, and I respect you, and I believe in your right, and I am 100% aligned with you in your view, The Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party are more closely alloyed to globalism and therefore a greater threat to individual freedom, international freedom, and all forms of freedom than anything that might emerge from the numerous political figures that they decry.
But none so heartily or so consistently as Donald Trump, who Hillary Clinton believes they have to do better with.
Do you even notice that the entire Democratic Party talks to you like you're a child, whether it's Tim Walz's wife, Telling you to turn the page.
Whether it's Kamala Harris lying outright about military personnel not being in combat zones.
Or whether it's the haughtiest of the haughty.
Hillary you're in a lot of trouble.
Clinton chiding you like a school mum.
How she dealt with Bill is a mystery to me.
Journalist Terry Evans, you know, one time said that, you know, journalists should, you know, really try to achieve objectivity.
And by that he said, I mean, they should cover the object.
Well, the object in this case is Donald Trump, his demagoguery, his danger to our country and the world, and stick with it.
You know, they were merciless about what they saw as President Biden's, you know, problems in the debate.
They were not merciless!
They actually wrapped him in cotton wool and handled him with kid gloves and lubricated him with praise and distracted us from his decline and didn't mention Hunter Biden's laptop and didn't go on about the numerous peculiar deals or his voting record or his obvious ineptitude.
Neither did they mention Russiagate, a word that that should be stamped upon Hillary Clinton's forehead.
Not in an aggressive way, I don't believe in violence.
Maybe, I don't know, use glitter or something.
But it's not something that we should be allowed to forget.
And it's still not enough for Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton needs more and more and yet more still.
No wonder Bill Clinton went scurrying to the Oval Office The poor fellow must have been shattered.
I'm calling for him to withdraw.
I believe Donald Trump has disqualified himself over and over and over again to be a presidential candidate, let alone a president.
The second thing though is that Part of what Trump is counting on is for people to get desensitized.
I mean, oh my gosh, did you hear what he said yesterday?
Did you hear who he attacked?
Did you hear the viciousness?
And it's just like with a shrug, okay, fine, we're moving on.
Well...
Americans need to understand that they have to take Trump both seriously and literally.
He has said what he wants to do.
He and his allies with Project 2025, his desire to be a dictator at least on day one.
Right, saw that.
That was a joke.
Project 2025 was put together by the Heritage Foundation.
It's kind of Christian, a kind of Christian sort of doctrine.
But yeah, there seems to be, he says there's things in it he disagrees with.
He's answered questions about that directly.
If there's a think tank that you want to concern yourself with, think about the Atlantic Council that are one of those CIA set-up organizations that march us ever closer to Armageddon.
Remember all of this ongoing condemnation of Trump.
Remember all of this Calling for an unending choir of condemnation for Trump, perhaps as a supplement to the assassination attempt, ignores the fact that we are marching towards global apocalypse, that the Ukraine war continues to be funded with Russia, which ought be ended, and I say that without a single penny from Tenet,
Where's my tenant money?
Not because I think Russia's a great place.
I bet it's terrifying to live in Russia.
But because I believe in peace.
But because... Because I believe that diplomacy is the answer.
Because I believe that we have to find a solution.
Because I believe nuclear wars are a bad thing.
I believe that all of the conflicts in the war...
...in the world currently should be moving towards peaceful solution and the might of NATO and the affiliate countries ought be used to bring about this peace rather than profit from perpetuating these wars.
But these aren't popular opinions these days, are they?
All of that is in the public record.
And I believe that more Americans have to be willing to endure what frankly is discomforting and to some extent kind of painful.
To take him at his word and to be outraged by what he represents.
And then finally, the hopeful side of this.
Is that I do think more and more Americans are, you know, rejecting the kind of chaos that he represents.
We can't go back.
That's what the Harris campaign says all the time.
We're not going back.
We're not going back.
That's one of our messages.
We're not going back and that we're turning the page and we're not demonic figures who You know, what he failed to do to protect American lives during COVID.
We're not going back to the, you know, romance with dictators that puts, you know, innocent lives at risk and America's... Romance with dictators?
Security.
Look in the corner from Russia with Lev, like they're promoting some show.
I wonder if they will cover the ongoing Russiagate hoaxes that Hillary continues to perpetuate.
We can't go back and give this very dangerous man another chance to do harm to our country and the world.
Yeah, somebody should shoot him probably.
Oh yeah, they try that basically every single day.
So there you go, what's the real problem?
Is it 20th century style demagoguery?
Is it resurgent nationalism and understandable response to the advance of globalism?
Or is it technological feudalism all good under the auspices of oddly reptilian individuals claiming that they're here to help us and they require the media to be more compliant?
I believe that you're better off With the berserkers and disruptors than with these terrifying bureaucrats.
But that's just what I think.
Why don't you let me know what you think in the comments and the chat.
If you're still watching this on YouTube, start the countdown.
We are leaving now.
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Remember turn on the notification bell or they simply won't tell you that we're making this content and you will miss fantastic conversations with my friend Michael Schellenberger who's going to give us some brilliant insights into the censorship industrial complex.
He's going to talk to us about his own criminal complications and hopefully give us some hope for this advancing conflict that we're all involved in.
Michael hello!
Click the link in the description YouTube.
Michael it's so good to be looking at your face right now.
So good to see you Michael.
You look So well as I look at your face.
I can't see Michael's face.
Thank you.
Thanks.
All right, Michael.
Hey, so lovely to see you.
How are you getting on, mate?
Very good.
I'm back from Brazil.
I survived.
I was not arrested.
So I'm very happy and relieved.
And yeah, I'm feeling good.
I feel like it was one of the biggest free speech protests in history in Brazil.
And it was amazing to be a part of it.
And I didn't get arrested.
So it was a win-win.
You've become a global activist when it comes to opposing the censorship industrial complex.
You've staged events in my country, the United Kingdom, over in Ireland and now in Brazil.
The global nature of this threat, I suppose, makes sense even from the perspective of our opponents, as information these days is truly global.
But what is it do you feel Michael, about the ongoing advances of censorship that makes it a... I don't know.
Why does it continue to be the most important issue that we're facing even when there are so many things to consider?
Advancing wars, democracy, elections being stolen.
Why is this the issue, Michael, that is so central to your life and activism?
I mean, obviously, I mean, maybe not obviously, but probably for your listeners, certainly, you know, if you don't have free speech, you don't have anything.
You don't have your basic humanity.
You don't have democracy.
You don't have free markets to the extent that some markets are still free.
You don't have basic human rights because you can't blow the whistle on abuses of power by the government.
So for me, it's fundamental.
I think it was fundamental for the people that created the United States of America 250 years ago.
I think it's just I think when you remind you to remind people why it's so important, but you know what you said is right.
I just think you know, I have become a free speech advocate in addition to being a journalist and it just is necessary.
I mean, I think People imagine that somebody's already doing things sometimes, and it turned out that really nobody has been building a global free speech movement.
And the groups that you would expect to do it, like ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, are not only not doing it a pretty significant amount of the time, those groups are actually demanding more censorship.
So yeah, I've been on the road and it's been a wonderful journey.
The Brazil issue in particular, Michael, appeared to be an advance that was difficult to anticipate and it seems like we're just getting used to things like Rumble being kicked out of Brazil, X being kicked out of Brazil, like it's become normalized and like you said, sometimes we assume someone else is dealing with it I wonder how close you think we are to being in a, to the point of no return when it comes to the issue of free speech and censorship.
And I wonder what you think in particular is the importance of the November election.
Like, you know, like Bobby joining the Trump campaign has at least made free speech like one of the three central campaigning issues.
So how significant do you think this election is and is there, is there still hope?
Yeah, I mean, I have very dark, pessimistic moments personally around free speech, around free and fair elections, around The pillars of civilization, you know, equal justice, meritocracy, cheap energy.
These things are fundamental to having good lives and lifting people out of poverty and protecting our loved ones.
There's security problems all over the world, particularly acute in my home state of California.
But we have we just don't have we have bad security and so you see it all over the place.
There's been a lot of dishonesty about what's been going on in terms of crime and violence.
The numbers are not actually being measured properly in part because people don't report many crimes and there's reason to believe that people have been reporting crime less.
So yeah, I worry.
On the other hand, it was really nice to be in Brazil.
I mean, it was a couple hundred thousand people.
The organizers said it was 500,000.
The government media said it was 50.
So if you kind of come more in the middle, it's hundreds.
We couldn't see the end of the crowd.
And it was for free speech.
It was to protest the government's blocking of X.
I think you're absolutely right.
The biggest enemy in many ways is the normalization and acceptance of totalitarianism.
It has to be resisted every step of the way.
Our opponents are going to demand totalitarianism.
Totalitarians are going to totalitarian.
And that we should just not, I mean, that's what's going to happen.
And so it's really what we do.
It's about building this movement.
It's about standing up, speaking out, not allowing these guys to take any inch.
And so in many ways, you're right.
I think that Brazil, in many ways, it was a huge loss.
I have X there.
On the other hand, Congress is about to introduce legislation.
I think it's fair for me to announce it today.
It's going to happen very, very soon.
There will be a significant investigation by many people into what Brazil's doing.
It just, it went too far.
I mean, it froze the assets of a completely different company than X. And I think that that starts to worry people that have been making big investments in Brazil.
I mean, Brazil's not Haiti or Guatemala.
You know, sixth largest country in the world by size.
It's a source of huge amounts of meat and soy and other agricultural products.
It's also got a big manufacturing industry.
So Brazil has nuclear.
It's a significant superpower.
So hopefully there's more to come on Brazil.
That chapter is not over.
Not a closed chapter, but there's no real indication that X or Rumble or any of the Forbidden sites will be permitted to return to their former state and we were speaking once before and you said like one of the things that concerns you I think when you were taking consensus or doing some kind of survey
In Ireland is the number of people that were kind of a on board with censorship to have agreed that yeah no under those circumstances and you talk to me about the framing of questions and if you know if you set up a question the right way people go no I suppose people shouldn't be allowed to you know spread dangerous information.
I suppose Michael the reason I continue to be kind of Nervous is because that within legacy media spaces, and I suppose that's still the majority of people, there's a kind of broad acceptance that this isn't a significant problem, that it's regarded as a marginal issue, and more than that, that
The people that are interested are regarded as marginal, as right-wing.
It's still framed as people want to be able to speak freely so that they can speak racistly.
And I don't know how they've managed to keep that perspective so live.
And I don't really... like sometimes I'm like...
Like, when Bobby Kennedy joined the Trump movement, I thought, oh wow, this is gonna really sort of change people's perspective on this, but this sort of hasn't really, because they just don't cover it, or they only cover Bobby as a crackpot, and then Tulsi Gabbard, and I don't know, they'll find ways of condemning her, and yeah, so...
I don't know, man.
I don't know how... Like, do you think that with Thierry Breton resigning from the EU, and Thierry Breton, for those of you listening, although Michael will give you a far better pricey, I'm sure, was one of the most sort of vocal Critics of Elon Musk and of X using sort of gangster style language to attack him and like, you know, we're coming for you and we're going to shut you down.
Do these sort of internal spats within bureaucratic bodies that have incredible power indicate that there could be, you know, some light at the end of the tunnel or a change in the way this issue is regarded?
Yeah, I mean, so much there, Russell.
I mean, I think your first point I 100% agree with.
I mean, let's be really clear.
These are totalitarian moves that we're seeing.
I mean, gradually banning all of the free social media platforms from your country is the way you create a dictatorship.
I just don't think we should mince words about it.
That's absolutely what's happening.
And there is a significant chance That the whole world is headed towards totalitarianism.
I don't want to beat around the bush about it.
It's alarming.
It's why I am out there campaigning on it.
I will say also on the Irish thing, which you reminded me of, the good news is that really persuading people to come around to free speech is absolutely doable.
One of the things that we realized was that many of us, particularly those of us that are Gen Xers, We're a little bit older.
We were actually taught free speech and First Amendment rights.
We learned about, in the United States, we learned that we allow Nazis to march through, you know, and be insensitive, grossly insensitive, march through neighborhoods not only of Jewish Americans but Holocaust survivors.
That's a very radical thing we do.
But we also learned that free speech has this wonderful history going back thousands of years, certainly, you know, hundreds of years in the modern world, but thousands of years back to the Greeks.
And we learn why it's so important.
Younger folks haven't been taught that.
And so one of the things I found on the streets of Ireland, and even among older folks, is that just slowing people down, the big scientific finding of those qualitative research, of those qualitative interviews, was that you have to get people to go from fast thinking to slow thinking.
And when you slow people down and you ask questions, for example, Like, do you think people might disagree about what constitutes hate?
And if so, do you worry that there might be the arbitrary application of that law?
In other words, do you worry that maybe the police and politicians would arrest people for saying things they don't like and call it hate speech?
Slow people down enough, I think that a lot of people, if not most people, will agree that that is a significant risk.
Similarly, if you say, you know, we might disagree about what's misinformation, right?
Like, you may notice that the voters in our country are divided over what's true and not true.
And so can you imagine also that being a problem to have the government arresting people or censoring people for Same things that aren't done are true and then you can inform them.
In fact, we have many court decisions at least in the United States I don't know British Britain as well, but certainly in the United States many court decisions that say you can't you can't censor people for even deliberately being misleading, you know, everybody lies and you know, therefore you'd have this arbitrary application of justice, you know in terms of I did want to say, too, on the Brazil thing, we're about to make a big deal about the U.S.
role there, and there's also this problem of the United States encouraging censorship.
You see Hillary Clinton out there, the Democrats, the Labour Party in Britain, and many parties in Europe demanding this.
Um, you know, at the same time, I think that the Brazil case that they did go too far, even the sort of the architects and leaders of the censorship industrial complex were quoted in mainstream news media saying that Brazil had gone too far, which I think was true.
I don't think they were just saying that.
I think they really do worry that that move is both kind of tactically bad for them because it, you know, created this worldwide uproar, but also what they want is to control the information platforms.
They don't necessarily want to shut them all down.
And so I think that it was a wake-up call as well.
You know, we're only five, we're about five, there are five votes away from having enough senators in Brazil to start impeachment proceedings of the Supreme Court justice.
So there's absolutely a possibility that X could return to Brazil In the future, you know, when you read the free speech histories, and there's a really good one out just called free speech.
And I'll butcher his name, but it's Jacob Machinanga.
If you just look free speech on Amazon and Jacob, you'll find it.
But he describes how there's a lot of back and forth over time that like the French or the British or the Americans will really crack down on speech.
But then there will be a backlash.
There will be a free speech movement.
And there have been movements for hundreds of years.
And then they will win back their free speech rights.
So it's definitely not something that we should feel cynical or helpless about.
It makes a big difference to have hundreds of thousands of people on the street.
Russell, it makes a big difference for you and Matt Taibbi and me to have that event in London.
It really was seen by the censorship industrial complex as an expression of public concern around the growing censorship.
So we should recognize the threat.
And we should also recognize that pushing back against it really does make a difference.
They were there!
I mean, some of those NGOs and agencies attended that event.
Of course they would.
Why wouldn't they?
Some of the people that de-amplify, censor, set up bots in the comments, they attended.
some of the organizations that participate in the coordination of stories after those
attacks in September and are now working with the Biden-Harris administration were there.
They attended the events.
So our enemies care about what we're doing.
There's no question about that, Michael.
That's fascinating.
Now, in a minute, I'd like to ask you, and I'm actually quite proud of this question.
You'll remember Fukuyama's declaration that we were at the end of history, and of course
the world has oscillated wildly since then.
Several other narrative strands have sprung up.
We've seen the resurgence of Christianity.
We've seen new forms of totalitarianism and dictatorship.
But while you were talking just then, I started to wonder if indeed we could be, like at the end of history and totalitarianism, Share equality.
It's homogeneity and control.
And I'd like to answer that question but first we have a message from one of our... Everybody's talking about weight loss injections because the results are so dramatic and who doesn't love drama?
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I see you smiling at my commercials, Michael.
I see you in Envision, smiling at my sensitive handling of that commercial.
So Michael, Fukuyama's claim that we're at the end of history, like sort of preceded, it was after the fall of the Berlin Wall, because it's assumed, alright, these two great ideological Monoliths are now longer battling because there ain't going to be a communist future.
Capitalism has won the day.
But it seems since with the advent of the kind of technological power that we're utilizing right now and sometimes like for example A minute ago I was watching John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs explaining what the connection is between the Cheneys and Kamala Harris and it's like it would make sense that those they would find affiliation and talk about like Victoria Nuland.
I thought my god what a miracle it is that we have this kind of independent media and often when I'm Like looking at your sub stack and reading your articles that I'm a subscriber to.
I feel like, yeah, new media sources give me access to information that I wouldn't otherwise have and in a way that was impossible before.
One of the common laments about online spaces, in particular Instagram, TikTok and all that, is it's reducing our attention spans.
It's bombarding us with those sort of like bite-sized, soundbite economy of mind.
But the reverse is true, you know, because of like Joe Rogan and his many imitators, we have long-form conversations where it's possible to learn a whole bunch about archaeology or nutrition or whatever.
When it comes to the subject of free speech, it's easy to see how vast, sprawling, heavily funded bureaucracies like the EU or military alliances like NATO, alongside a compliant Global legacy media and a cuckolded democratic system in countries like yours and mine could lead to a kind of end of history, a kind of stasis, a book burning, an end of opposition.
Indeed, wasn't the pandemic a kind of rehearsal for the, um, for the kind of airport future that they see for us where everything is anodyne sanitized and controlled?
What do you reckon about all that?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting because, of course, you're referencing this famous book, The End of History, where he says, you know, after the end of the Cold War, there's going to be no more kind of major civilizational geopolitical conflicts.
That lasted a few years.
Then you had 9-11 and all these wars in the Middle East and, you know, just awfulness suggesting that, in fact, There are fundamental different views for people that are pro-liberal, democratic, western civilization, people that really hate it and want to tear it down.
And that many of those people live in our societies, that many of the people trying to undermine the basis of civilization are here.
The people attacking free speech are in our countries, and as you said, they come to our events.
And I think it's important to understand, yeah, it's helpful to put it in context, in the context of history.
I mentioned before that, you know, this fight for free speech, you know, it has wins and losses, it goes back and forth between the totalitarians.
I also read this incredible history recently that describes totalitarianism.
He says that the most defining part of totalitarianism is the hunt and attack on heretics.
And it's brilliant, and I think it's, you know, so obviously he's reduced the argument, he's simplified totalitarianism, but he says that's at the core of it.
And you see it, right?
So he starts with the Inquisition and he goes through, you know, all of it, all the totalitarian movements, the most famous of which, of course, are Nazism and Communism.
You put that together with this other brilliant book by someone named James Burnham who wrote a book called the managerial revolution which George Orwell wrote the preface for even though Orwell was a socialist and James Burnham was a conservative you know we're dealing with very early horseshoe politics but nonetheless Burnham argues and this is in the 40s he says the next totalitarianism is going to come out of liberal democracies meaning
Out of our societies.
In other words, we think of Nazism and communism as these really alien, foreign, other countries, other times, primitive almost.
And compared to us who are modern and progressive, but Burnham says, no, the totalitarianism will come out of our societies against like 40, I think I want to say like 47 or something, early 40s.
And Orwell then picks that up and writes 1984 based on this insight.
So I think when you combine these two things, this hunt for heretics, And the hunting coming from the state, from the people in the government, and that's exactly what we've seen.
Since we spoke last time, we now know that Mark Zuckerberg sent this letter to the members of Congress, particularly to Congressman Jim Jordan, Who has been very effective in documenting the abuses of power by the government.
Zuckerberg, in that letter, says that the FBI had specifically warned him around Hunter Biden and Burisma.
That's an additional detail to what he told Joe Rogan in the summer of 2022, when he told Joe Rogan that FBI had told him they had prepared him, arguably brainwashed him, or programmed his staff and him to then view the Hunter Biden laptop story as something illegitimate, as Russian disinformation, as something that should be censored, which of course Facebook did, so did Twitter, which didn't just block the information, it really changed how people perceived that event.
They thought there was something, as I did, thought there was something illegitimate about the laptop.
So what we're seeing here is, in real time, For people with totalitarian tendencies, I think we can call them totalitarians when they behave in those ways, undermining democracy, attacking free speech, spreading disinformation, demonizing and dehumanizing people, all motivated out of
The hunt for heretics, really this kind of, it's really out of a kind of dogmatic belief in their particular worldview and seeking to stomp out voices that don't conform.
And so when you ask why do folks like you or Matt Taibbi or Glenn Greenwald or me or You know, people like, you know, many, we come with many names of people that are speaking out against abuses of power who traditionally came from the left.
Well, it's because when we, when I came of age on the left, we were all about questioning authority.
We were all about divergence.
You know, we were all about being different and unique.
And I mean, it was actually part of the narcissism of Gen X.
So to then know that the state is actually prosecuting a war against heretical thought, and that it's coming directly out of the government, and that the people in it, because we sometimes go, is this organic?
Is it coming from the people or is it coming from the government?
It's particular people in the government who are then engaged in these kinds of activities, taking advantage of their positions in places like the FBI and CIA.
To engage in this kind of illegal persecution of people who think differently and have different kinds of thought.
And so I think once you understand that that's actually what's going on, it does help to, I think, more quickly shine a light on their bad behavior in real time, which I think makes it much weaker.
Like this, you know, to give one final example, and I'll shut up.
This recent thing where they went after Lauren Chen because she was allegedly taking money from Russia Today or from Russians.
It was kind of a two-day news story.
I think a lot of people skeptical on the right were like, we just don't care or don't believe it.
But it didn't really even have much traction on the left, which is why you saw Hillary Clinton in that clip you just showed.
Trying to say the media should be covering that even more.
We should go back to the kinds of campaigning against Trump that we did in 2016 and 2020, but which was basically accusing him, you know, of being a puppet of Russia and trying to undermine democracy.
Oh, Michael, that was a lot.
this attack, the attacks, no no no no, thank you, the the when you appoint legitimate targets to
condemn and I suppose in extreme cases kill, you're kind of engaging with your you know
persecution of heretics argument or at least the argument you're relaying, isn't it?
That's an interesting psychic force that's being engaged there, because I have the tendency, Michael, to regard bureaucracies as somewhat sterile and certainly rationalist and kind of held together under purview that's quite Ultimately rational, that it's not harnessing dark psychic energy, but when you've sort of used that example, and because I've got personal experience of being a heretic, and the way that arguments can be made, but what do you need to say about someone in order to hate them and condemn them?
Well, here's a list of things that if they were true of a person would legitimize hating and killing them.
What if they were a rapist?
What if they were a racist?
Oh yeah, well then you'd be okay to kill them.
Well, shall we do that then?
Can we create those conditions using the tools at our disposal?
So there's obviously a sort of a personal aspect to it that's given me like some sort of rather a visceral Insight, but but obviously beyond the personal the idea that from social democracy Tyranny will emerge is I didn't realize that that was an idea with such a long lineage because my assumption was that Orwell's prognosis that from Soviet communism which some people on the left in my country were pretty optimistic about
Until bloody 20 years ago, actually.
Like, you know, like, um, there would come forms of totalitarianism.
And what I felt that we've been, you know, grappling with, or at least trying to understand, was the, you know, to put to the Fukuyama point a minute ago, Is that we had ideologies that emerged from industrialization, the successes and failures of industrialization, the ability for mass industrialized warfare, you know, from 1914.
The ability for mass manufacture, the ability to have forms of colonialism and imperialism that were unimaginable prior to the technological advancements of the Second World War and even after the Second World War.
But the fact that this, the sort of the palliatives of social democracy, social democracy that's offered as the kind of panacea To the extremism of the Second World War and the Cold War, and brings about, in the victory of the West and the fall of the Berlin Wall, social democracy for everyone?
Question mark?
And if you don't agree with that, we've got some, we're coming, we're coming to give you that democracy.
And the sort of the hypocrisies that that spawns, Michael, like, you know, we have to get the Ukrainian democracy, we have to fight for Ukrainian democracy.
One media, no elections, jailing of dissidents.
You know, this is not an attack on Ukraine or Ukrainian people, but democracy and social democracy are functionally a cult now, or if not a cult, an ideology.
It's not anymore The process by which the electorate chooses how they are governed.
It's not that, because if it were, you'd have referenda on migration, you'd have referenda on free speech, you'd have referenda on nationalism, which is the obvious sort of secondary beneficiary to totalitarianism and the kind of bureaucracies we're discussing and their incredible power, are either ethno-nationalist or just nationalist political movements, which is a somewhat Rational response to globalism and the threats that it brings, whether it's bottom-up migration or top-down corporatism.
So, yeah, I appreciate you explaining that, because social democracy has, of course, presented itself as something that's almost the neutral, sensible alternative to tyranny, rather than what it perhaps is, the midwife Of a tyranny that was unimaginable to your Mussolini's and your Stalin's and your Pol Pot's and all of the monsters of yesteryear and their killing fields and their killing games.
And I suppose in a way it's obvious that it would be augured by Bureaucrats that are so bloody boring.
They bore you into tyranny with their reason.
So I wonder if you'd talk about that for a moment as well as my earlier offering that there seems to be a sort of a dark psychic force within it because of that hunting and killing of heretics idea that you introduced.
Yeah, so I think we have a much better picture right now of the censorship industrial complex, what it is, where it comes from, why it exists, than we did a year ago or a year and a half ago, or a year and a few months ago when we had our conversation in London.
So what you see is after World War II, the U.S.
puts in place Really Pax Americana, the United States policing the world.
It's trying to prevent the kind of populism and nationalism that it perceived led to the fascist and later communist regimes in Europe, but also in Japan.
And arguably in China, too, where you of course have Mao and really the worst atrocities of communism and totalitarianism.
So you have a, I think you do, for me, and obviously I'm a beneficiary, as you are and most of your listeners, of this Pax Americana of the United States.
Kind of keeping the world safe after a very terrible, terrible war, you know, war that is like apocalyptic when you really look at what it was, you know, particularly including the Holocaust.
So naturally, over time, because this is the nature of the world, things become their opposite.
And so the system put in place to prevent totalitarianism It's Shakespearean, becomes totalitarian, and becomes the main driver of totalitarianism.
Now, the bureaucrats that you're talking about, I think it's important to understand, these are people that have a very high sense of entitlement, a very strong sense of desire for power, and a lot of grandiosity.
Those are all, for people that are listening that know their psychology, those are all characteristics of cluster B personalities.
There's a very famous, or not famous, not famous enough book, And there's a lot of truth in that story, too.
by a Polish psychologist who says that Zoltarianism, his version, is that Zoltarianism
is about when the psychopaths and narcissists take over institutions. And
there's a lot of truth in that story too.
So you kind of, and these things all fit together, right? It's these people that
it's either in, these bureaucrats are in these institutions, they are
Remember, if you're psychopathic, it's really about not caring about others and also being willing to take much more significant risks, such as spreading disinformation about a laptop that could hurt a presidential candidate, such as changing the intelligence reports to suggest that the Russians favored Trump when they actually favored Clinton.
Which actually happened.
It's lying about vaccines.
It's saying you need to do lockdowns no matter the consequences for kids.
I mean, these are behaviors of people that have a very strong sense of entitlement.
Grandiosity and heartlessness or lack of compassion are also paired with genuine fear by the system of populism and nationalism.
Remember, the whole problem with populism for the system is that populists can be majorities.
Not always, but the system is absolutely terrified that populists and nationalists will basically come to power and that's what the CIA has spent the entire time since World War II trying to prevent, and so you get that with the revolution of social media, 2016, Brexit, Trump, and then 2018, Bolsonaro in Brazil, also Duterte in Philippines, and the system responds with totalitarian measures, frankly, illegal measures, unconstitutional measures.
Of which censorship is, you know, one of the worst, but also, you know, just trying to incarcerate your political opponent, for example, on pretty flimsy grounds and grounds that kind of everybody knows are flimsy, even if they might claim that they think that they're stronger than than they are publicly.
So, right, I think that our opportunity is to have this clarity about what's going on, call it out in real time when it's happening, and not just denounce it.
This was the other point that the author of Ponerology makes.
His name is Andrew Lobajewski, I think if I pronounce the Polish right.
But people can find it on Amazon.
But the other point he makes is that you must also describe what's going on psychologically
for the people that are doing this.
And I'm not saying that you should just call your opponents narcissists and psychopaths
because I think people will tune that out.
That just feels like rhetoric.
But I do think it's appropriate to say, look, these folks are motivated on the one hand
by insecurity and fear that they're going to lose power.
And on the other hand, they have inappropriately high levels of entitlement to decide what we are allowed to read and write online.
Entitlement over breaking the rules.
Including, and the norms, including incarcerating your political opponent, or spying on people, or spreading disinformation, and grandiosity, you know, the sense in which they're entitled to do these things in order to save liberal democracy.
So, of course, it's classic Shakespearean villain stuff, where the person, the people trying, the people that are actually creating the totalitarianism are completely in the grips.
Of this idea that there are heroes saving democracy from these evil, dangerous populists and nationalists.
Michael, thank you for explaining that so beautifully.
Thank you for your ongoing campaigning and leadership in the fight for free speech against censorship.
I'm glad that we get to walk this path together and I get to learn from you.
And I will continue to pray for your boldness and bravery and that your words will be fueled and that your words will reach many, many people.
I'm so grateful to you for coming here today, Michael.
Thanks for joining us, man.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Speak to you again soon, mate.
Take care.
Well, there you go guys, we're almost at the end, but before we leave I'd love the opportunity to let you know about our Awakened Wonder channel.
So what you can do is you can let go of Michael now for me visually, because that's a distraction for me.
Well done, excellent.
Thank you.
Because we've got all sorts of stuff available for you, beautiful and presumably very young and vibrant and awakened people, including among them, not leastly, my personal favourite, the ability for you to ask me questions like Rachel Wilkie.
Look at this question from Rachel Wilkie.
This was from yesterday's chat.
Have a little look at this.
I love all of your stuff and I just wanted to ask what Is it that keeps you from getting pulled down by the negativity of all of the news and all of the bad things that are going on in the world that you keep us informed of?
I don't know, man.
It is hard to go around.
Alpine Suite, remember Jesus hired you.
You're here to represent.
And that is how I see it now.
That is how I see it now.
I sort of feel like, just let go, surrender, moment by moment, imperfectly follow Christ.
That's what I believe now.
And we'll see where that goes to the truth.
I am trying my hardest to make sense of it all.
Well, thank you so much for joining us today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
Thanks once again to our fantastic guest, Michael Schellenberger.
Remember, we will be back tomorrow, not with more of the same, but with more of the different.
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