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Nov. 21, 2024 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:05:33
Neil Oliver on the Rise of Independent Media, Cultural Awakening & Fighting Centralized Power –SF498
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Thank you.
Brought to you by Pfizer In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello, you Awakening Wonders fans.
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand and what an extraordinary episode it is.
Have you wondered what a Scottish mystic might make of all these bizarre globalist events unfolding right now?
Extraordinarily, mysteriously, potentially occultistically.
Well, Neil Oliver's got some perspectives on how global power will shift and manoeuvre after the Trump-MAGA ascent.
Are there things he's disappointed in?
Are there things he's excited about?
And how will it affect the UK and the rest of the world?
Because if globalism means one thing, it means the entire planet and centralised systems of power.
How does it affect the farming protests?
How does it affect Christianity?
How does it affect those of us that once were content to look at the world from an entirely material and rational perspective, to start to recognize that it seems that dark power is at work?
If you've not watched Neil Oliver before, you might know him from GB News.
You might know him as the Coast Guy on X.
He is an excellent and brilliant commentator, beloved by many people in power in secret, and I would say one of the most significant broadcasters to emerge out of the pandemic period.
For the first 15 minutes, we'll be on YouTube.
After that, we'll be exclusively streaming on Rumble, where we can speak freely.
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And if you're not on Awake and Wonder yet, become one now and see my conversation with Jack Posobiec, as well as a fantastic conversation coming up with Jonathan Peugeot, where we talk about Christianity from a variety of perspectives, but mostly how a resurgent Christianity will affect and impact politics, not the other way around. but mostly how a resurgent Christianity will affect and impact But without any further hullabaloo or senseless nonsense, let's welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand, Neil, I think my name is, Neil Oliver.
Neil, thanks so much for joining us.
I know that you're sort of in a state of bewilderment, I know that our country, the UK, seems sort of like chaotic and creepy and that there are sort of like high profile stories about the murder of children.
Where there's the sense that not all is being revealed to the public.
I also know that sort of the election of Trump is kind of one of the Clear positives is it demonstrates the power of independent media versus what you might call centralized, you know, legacy media.
Whether you like Trump or don't like Trump, what is clear now is that the axis between state and media is no longer sufficiently powerful to control the outcome of elections.
Something that we start to suspect, you know, may be with Napster.
Then the Occupy movement, then the Arab Spring, then Brexit, then Trump 2016, and now Trump 2024. And whatever these powers are that seek to prevent these kind of popular online movements gaining traction, they must now be terrified that in the UK there could be...
Popular, dissenting, disobedient uprisings that could get political traction.
Across the world, everyone must be feeling that.
How do you feel, in particular, Neil, that the election of Trump, and I know there are aspects of that that you'll have questions about, some of his appointments, for example, but how is that affecting directly the area in which much of your political expertise is spent?
UK politics.
The form of words you used, I hadn't thought about, or it hadn't crystallised for me, that the election of Trump is a victory for, or a demonstration of the power of the alternative independent media.
I think I knew that, but I hadn't actually the thought crystallised for me.
But that in and of itself is a victory, because I'm sure the deep state or whatever wanted and intended the election to go in another direction.
There's absolutely a rising awareness in the UK, a rising tide of discontent.
It's being felt, manifest among more and more people.
On the 19th of the month, just a day or two ago, there was the first of the big farmers' protests in London.
Tens of thousands, let's say, of the disaffected, of those affected by the imposition of the inheritance tax on family farms and all of the rest of it gathered in London.
People are definitely, you know, sounding off on social media.
To the extent that the judiciary, which is in somebody's pocket or under somebody's influence, is sending to jail people who are posting unwanted opinions on social media, while space is made for those people in those prisons by the freeing early of Often violent criminals.
There is without a doubt a tide rising, and I think it's unstoppable.
It's all across Europe.
We've seen the increased vote for so-called populist parties from east to west across Europe.
And the increasingly futile, blatantly futile attempts by the incumbent legacy politicians to thwart the intentions of more and more of the people.
There has been a change in the wind, and you can feel it.
Yeah, there really has.
Just thinking then that you're a person like me that's gone from having a relatively comfortable role in the culture.
Some people might not know that your early popularity was based on quite pastoral and folkish broadcasting around fascinatingly rendered stories about ghosts and the supernatural and British landmarks and British history.
And that you are a patron of significant ecological organisations in your country, Scotland.
And now, when I talk to you, like that brilliant clip in that Scottish comedy show demonstrated, we're like druid hysterics on the edge of the culture.
Me, I was a sort of a harmless and hapless Hollywood hero for want of a better alliterative construction.
And now, an attacked, maligned, outspoken, smeared and much disgust and in some course deeply loathed online pundit and whack job.
Although I did see on the front of private eye, I'm being considered for Archbishop of Canterbury.
So like, at least for one of the candidates, one of the candidates, Neil, so.
Good luck with that.
At least you've accepted Christianity, which is something that the previous incumbent of the Post did not seem to have done.
Yeah, I mean, I'm an upgrade in regard that I believe in Jesus Christ, which you would think would be the minimum requirement for the Archbishop of Canterbury.
So, Neil, I wonder how you, like me, are coping as you, you know, while you're affiliated with and very successful on GB News, which is a sort of a growing online British media platform, How are you continuing to cope with this position?
And now that we've touched on the subject of Christianity, how are you bringing together your previous experience, which was always excellent at bringing together mythical themes, historical themes, and contemporary meaning and challenges?
How are you going to bring together, and how do you continue to bring together those kind of sometimes arcane, and I don't mean that pejoratively, ideas with the ongoing political discourse?
Say, when it comes to something like farmers' protests and the power of agriculture, or why those movements are global.
Let's start there.
Well, the kind of television, documentary television, soft pastoral television that I was involved with for years, decades, I suppose if it had a unifying theme, there was something celebratory about it.
You know, it was about encouraging people to pay attention to the landscape Pay attention to the depth of history and archaeology.
There was always supposed to be a note of awe.
Trying to inspire people to look again at landmarks and stories from history that they might have vaguely known, largely forgotten, but it's always timely to look again at some of those things.
That was the idea that underpinned a lot of what I was trying to do.
Now he cast...
In unlikely, in this unlikely way, this unasked for way into the role of contrarian and, you know, as you say, you know, dismissed and ridiculed, you know, in the pages of national newspapers and my ethics questioned, my sanity questioned and all of the rest of it.
In order to try and make sense of that, I continue to reflect on the past and on the landscape.
We're just mentioning the farmers and farming.
I come from an archaeological background academically.
I've been telling stories for the longest time about the advent of farming in this part of the world.
We've been farming this part of the world one way and another for several thousand years.
And so many of the landmarks with which people are familiar in this part of the world, Stonehenge and Avebury, the Chamber Tombs, so much that people celebrate in the British landscape, were the work of farmers.
And when I think about the fact now that farmers are being driven off the land, the resident government, the resident A quasi-communist regime is seeking to grab the land, drive the people off the land who've been there from a time beyond the reach of memory.
It becomes so moving because it is of course of huge significance to the people there now, those people who expected in due course to hand on the farms and the traditions to their children and their children's children.
It's intensely important and moving and But when you know that it comes on the tail end of thousands of years of occupation of the land by people who have used that landscape to feed the people, today's generations of farmers become part of something much grander, much bigger, much more deeply rooted.
And the idea that here today, gone tomorrow, politicians would seek to uproot all of that, when all of the recent history of our species, certainly in the 20th century, has shown that any regime seeking to displace the farmers, to collectivise farming, to centralise the creation and distribution of food, is murderous.
You've only got to look back at what Stalin did in Ukraine and in that part of Russia.
You know, that led to the deaths of millions.
And not by accident, but deliberately.
It was a deliberate campaign to destroy the so-called kulaks, the slightly better off farming community there.
But tens of millions of people died.
Mao did the same thing in China.
Centralised and collectivised farming, leading to a mountain of corpses, and that Keir Starmer, leading a Labour Party, a so-called Labour Party in Britain, would seek to uproot all of that by this inheritance tax, which will inevitably drive people off of the land and, God knows, drive many of them to suicide and everything else.
It takes on a depth of wickedness that, frankly, is hard to process.
But that way that I feel about that comes from the fact that I did spend decades celebrating the landscape, not seeking to push people off of it.
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Sorry about that, Neil.
Let's get back to what we were discussing.
Do you think that it's...
Do you think that the reason there's farming protests all over the world is because there's some global concerted effort to gain control over the land?
And how do we, like, reconcile, like, watching clips on the BBC of farm protests ripping up London, or stuff we've seen on French news are the same, or stuff in Sri Lanka or India, or, you know, just happening all over the world, with, like...
What appears to be a global agenda, isn't this exactly the reason that, you know, like until God, the obvious changes that are taking place in media, independent media, and the obvious supremacy of the latter, aren't these the very kind of tropes, Neil, that get men like you and I labeled conspiracy theorists and worse?
Like the idea that there's an attempt, that the inheritance tax, you know, if you see Victoria Derbyshire talking to Clarkson, what she's saying is the inheritance tax is to generate revenue so that people's GP appointments come round in a more timely fashion.
By the way, she's saying that on a taxpayer-funded state-run media organisation, the BBC, is there's one little tax cut that could be made.
I just wonder how you reconcile something as practical, bureaucratic, tedious, if punitive as the inheritance tax with what seems to be a broader global agenda.
Well, it's facile by Derbyshire that you mentioned, the BBC journalist, but she's only repeating what Chancellor Rachel Reeves, whatever, has been given a bit of paper with a script on it to read out.
But by 2030, the inheritance tax might have raised 500-odd million pounds.
Which is enough to keep the NHS running for one day and two hours.
You know, if you compare it, if you look at the costs of the NHS at the moment.
So that basic financial justification for the inheritance tax is utterly, utterly meaningless.
And so you can set that aside and then you have to ask yourself the question, then why else would you do it?
Why else would you seek to undermine the farming community that has been on the land, managing and looking after the landscape and feeding the people generation after generation for thousands of years?
Why would you do that?
And then, and in that context, it looks like much less of a conspiracy theory to suggest that there must be a bigger agenda.
And the bigger agenda is to take control of everything.
It's becoming inescapable.
That conclusion is becoming inescapable.
The creation and the distribution of money was robbed from the people in America just over 100 years ago.
In Britain, at the end of the 17th century, the same thing happened with the creation of the Bank of England.
So that was the taking away from the people of the control of the creation of and the distribution of money.
Energy is being centralised, energy supply, this ridiculous fantasy of renewable energy.
That's just a way to profit from the creation of energy.
And now, clearly, there's an attempt to centralise the...
The growing of crops and the husbanding of flocks and herds, because to let the people be in control of that provides them with a level of independence from the state.
It's becoming inescapable to draw the conclusion that the intention is to make the mass of the population dependent in every conceivable way upon the state.
You will need to look to us for the education of your children.
You will need to look to us for the stability of your communities.
You'll need to look to us for energy, to us for food.
Because it's coming from a mindset of a minority of, frankly, psychopathic, or at the very least sociopathic, individuals Who can't sleep at night for wanting to control not just what people do every moment of every day, but what people think and say.
And that's manifesting itself in the censorship and the silencing of opinions that don't suit I mean, call me, I've been called a conspiracy theorist, I've been called a lot worse.
And frankly, it's a badge of honour.
If you're not conspiring now, you've got a lot of catching up to do.
Here's what I'd like to call you.
One of the characters from Jumanji that's in a safari suit and that, that might get caught up in some sort of escapade with Kevin Hart and The Rock.
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Now, I really enjoyed your analysis there where you talked about...
A sort of continuum between dependency, help and control.
The creation of dependency legitimizes help and the help sort of bleeds into control.
Control when it comes to what information we can believe through censorship.
Control when it comes to the generation of new people.
Currencies, CBDCs, control when it comes to what can be taken into our bodies in response to crises, obviously the pandemic.
The aim is always control.
The method is always help.
The requirement is always to create a crisis that legitimizes that flow.
What seems interesting though, Neil, is concurrent with these sort of rapacious sets of control-oriented systems that Is the possibility for their opposite.
The possibility for real freedom.
And I just mean in terms of utility and the utensils.
Like technology and communication.
They could create control.
Now the reason I think it's biasing towards the paradigm you described.
Dependency, help, control.
Is because of something we touched upon over 17 minutes ago now.
At the beginning of our conversation.
Which was simply this.
We have no guiding ethos because we have, as a culture, abandoned God.
And into that tumbling vortex and mad void has also fallen family, gender, sex, reason, right, wrong, history, all of it in a mad, chaotic, berserk havoc.
And what's being plucked out of it is, here are your new rules.
Now, one thing I was sort of struck by, and tell me if you agree with this, Is, like, Tucker Carlson reckoned that when Orwell was giving us a depiction that ultimately led to that famous image of the stamping boot on the face of humanity was a dystopia that grows not out of Soviet communism, which was already, you know, 20, 30 years into play at the time he wrote it, but that Orwell's fear was this would come out of social democracies.
Now, even though Orwell was, I figure, an atheist, what seems...
Pretty clear to me is that if you are going to prevent the state from laying claim to godly powers that it can only do once it's created a vortex into which all meaning is tumbling, a kind of chaos that gives you that Olympic opening ceremony, the kind of chaos that leads you to not know what a man is, a woman is, who can give birth, who can't give birth...
A kind of chaos that undermines the very virtues that would afford any of us, certainly any follower of Jesus Christ, to love anyone that said, oh, I actually don't identify as a man, I identify as a woman.
Oh my God, of course!
I love you!
You're a brother and sister in Christ!
Like, minor issues, not for the people going through them, I'm sure, but minor issues to socially and culturally deal with.
As long as you have a God, as long as you understand God.
And somehow we found ourselves in these maddening bureaucracies over here led by weird centrist materialists like Biden, Kamala, remember her?
And over in our country, Keir Starmer.
You know, like these odd bureaucrats that don't even have, you know, that don't have, and I think it's deliberate that they don't have, the intensity and charisma of your good old school Mussolini's, Stalin's and Hitler's, but instead these soma-schlacked bureaucratic figures that will Bore you into technological feudalism.
That will bore you into funding another five or ten years of unwinnable Ukraine-Russia war.
How is it that when Starma is confronted by someone saying, Lee, what are you going to say to the people about the idea that, you know, Russia might retaliate for these strikes that Biden just sanctioned inside Russian territory by attacking Russia?
The United Kingdom.
What are you going to say?
Well, it's very clear that Putin is the aggressor.
He started it.
He who smelt it dealt it.
Like, you know, the kind of sort of mentality that doesn't provide a lot of comfort.
Is nothing but God going to provide a solution, Neil?
Where are you on that journey?
Do you, as I now do, see this as a kind of oddly literal...
Satanism, i.e.
an attempt to control what should be God's domain.
In particular, what is right, what is wrong, and how do we derive those absolute conclusions?
And you can't in a relativist purview.
I think what's been done is...
Or the crucial consequence of what has been done relatively recently is inadvertent and was unforeseen.
I think...
The adage about let sleeping dogs lie might be opposite because what has been done during the last four years, the extremism of the blatant attempt to take control of every aspect of people's lives has awoken.
I mean, we talk all the time about awakening, but it inadvertently awoke sleeping dogs who were slumbering away peacefully.
But now, because of this shameless, blatant, no-holds-barred attempt finally to seize every vestige of control, a whole unexpected layer stratum of the populations of the world have been roused from sleep and are annoyed, not least at having been woken up.
You know, that English Arthurian legend of Arthur sleeping under a hill somewhere until his country needed him, at which point he would awaken and stand up.
What this madness of the last few years has done is awaken millions of Arthurs who would have just continued to dream on Well, things changed.
But now they're awake.
And there is no doubt that they have, amongst other things, awoken to the necessity of meaning in their lives.
Many, many people have either awoken for the first time to the need for God or for some manifestation of spirituality, or they have been reminded that once upon a time they cared to think in that way and to understand the cosmos in that way, to know that there was some aspect of everything that was out of reach and ought to be out of reach.
You know, that laws were not just something that we made for ourselves, but they were something inviolable from a transcendent realm that we had no power to alter, that we could only acknowledge and obey or ignore at the very most.
All of that I think has been the unintended consequence of this final mad dash from the finishing line by people who want everything.
I've lost track now.
I've lost count of how many people have got in touch with me.
Total strangers.
It's thousands and thousands of them have written to me.
Dozens of people sometimes in a single day stop me in the street to talk to me.
The number of them that talk about faith, either discovered for the first time or faith that they've been reminded of.
You know, they've gone back to something.
And that will be the undoing of any centralising force, because people have been awakened to what it is to be human and alive.
And part of being human and alive is knowing that there's more to life than just the acquisition of wealth, the upgrading of phones, the taking out of a lease of a second Range Rover or whatever.
So many people have been awoken to the futility and the emptiness of that.
And that consumerism, that kind of dependency, that kind of submission to and acceptance of nothing more than convenience, don't you worry a pretty little head about that, I'll do it for you, in return for your freedom, in return for your rights, has been exposed as empty, as a void.
So they've done it to themselves.
Those that are seeking to do the final damage have in the process woken too many people up.
And the resultant change that will beat our betterment is inevitable.
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I was just chatting to Lara Logan.
Do you know her?
She's a former 60 Minutes journalist.
She does amazing stuff online.
I know who Lara Logan is, but I don't know her personally.
You should have her on your show.
she's a person I reckon we'll be working with in the future, Neil.
She's one of them people, a bit like Whitney Webb, who I know you've found yourself plastered on the front page of the Times for speaking with and colluding with.
Welcome to my world.
Not a great place to be, the front page of that particular newspaper.
Like when people do that work of demonstrating how the kind of rational material power that you're sort of...
We're talking about managerial power, aren't we?
Like the control of information.
Like you said, people have been woken up because they took a piss during the pandemic.
They pushed it too far.
They lied.
Lies were getting exposed in...
Near enough real time.
Now we've got this mad situation where Bobby Kennedy, who's like book on Anthony Fauci, when I read that, like, I don't know, 2020, 2021, I don't know, like, you know, sort of seems like a long time ago.
You know how time moves these days.
Seemed like, what?!
Bio-weapons?
What do you mean?
Well, anthrax research, dual-purpose research, and then you start finding out, oh my god, this is true.
That guy's now got massive power.
It's like it's, you know, coming down the pipe at least in January.
Now, what's interesting is that there's that kind of those matters of dominion, how sort of big pharma and their regulatory agencies in conjunction with government are able to enjoy malfeasance and certainly malpractice.
But what Not so much Whitney Webb, although she gets dark when it comes to the sex trafficking, the islands, the paedophilia, all that stuff.
Lara Logan went full deep on the connection to this stuff and the hundreds of thousands of children that go missing in America.
And somehow, I don't know, even though I'm pretty deep into this sort of territory, which you might call independent peripheral media, we're out in our own wildernesses now, you and I, Neil, and seeing if this wilderness is going to formulate into something new, if there's going to be some coming kingdom, I still feel pretty scared when people start talking about satanic...
I mean, of course, I suppose you would.
Satanic child rape and stuff.
I'm like, whoa, come on, man.
When did we all become Alex Jones?
When did we all become David Icke?
No wonder, you know, David in particular is sort of in that state of perpetual fury when he sees stuff that he's been talking about for years and he's been derided for sort of edging curiously into the mainstream.
And what it seems like we're attempting to manage is like these rather baroque and peculiar ideas migrating out of the mad spaces of the conspiracy theorists and into the mainstream.
An obvious example being the one I gave a minute ago, Bobby Kennedy's writing about Anthony Fauci.
That's now, you know, the roles have flipped.
Now, Anthony Fauci's the outsider and Bobby Kennedy's in government.
So, I wonder how you feel, like, when talking about them and their power and the error they made in awakening us by pushing it too far, about the idea, Neil, that this isn't just...
A material proposition as much of the conspiracy theory stuff spoken about by your Lara Logans, your Whitney Webbs, and one of a number of online journalists and commentators of varying credibility, but even that credibility, who gets to say who's credible and who's not these days, appears to allude to the idea, as does the Bible, that the reason all this stuff's happening is not just because people are rubbing their hands together and trying to get hold of gold and power and resources, but because there is,
as it says in Ephesians, dark power in high principalities. as it says in Ephesians, dark power in high principalities.
As it says again and again in the Bible, this is Satan's realm.
Satan is working on us through worldliness, through the flesh, and through the mind.
So it doesn't become a matter of these guys slipped up.
It becomes like they're agents of some dark, higher, demonic, even worse than demonic potentially, force.
How do you grapple with that?
Because remember earlier, I talked about your own background with supernatural stuff.
So now that is actually coming into these conversations about power.
When I talked about them having, you know, their actions had unintended consequences, I don't for a moment subscribe any longer.
And I did for a while, but I haven't for the longest time accepted the notion that it was mistakes made, that the whole people were only doing their best nonsense.
I've consigned that absolutely to the dustbin.
That's not the case.
So there was no, you know...
You know, human frailty and just, you know, misjudging situations.
It was deliberate and choreographed and pre-planned and everything about, you know, malice aforethought and guilty mind and mens rea and all of the rest of it is all there in what was conjured into being and what was then applied.
But what I think, what I've come to accept is that in the centuries in which we were invited to dismiss everything but science, To worship science.
We were gulled into thinking that everyone, everyone had stopped believing in God.
That we were now all secular.
Apart from, you know, we were invited to look at other cultures and other people and frankly to consider them a little bit silly at best with all their various worshippings and all their various appeals to the transcendent.
But we had grown up and we were now secular and we knew that there was nothing but that which we make for ourselves.
But I think what I've come to realise is that the group that foist that Fallacy upon us continued absolutely to believe.
In something.
Something else.
Something other.
And you can call it Satanism.
You can call it demonic.
But they certainly continued to worship something that they invited us not to see any longer.
I mean, you talk about, you know, you mentioned Ephesian.
But you go back into the Old Testament and you look at something like Deuteronomy.
And it's there.
It's there in black and white that, you know, there was the notion for the longest time that that which openeth the womb belongs to me.
The firstborn, not just of the sheep and the cattle, but of the people themselves, that the firstborn, that which openeth the womb, belonged to God and was to be sacrificed there.
And the idea, we invited ourselves to believe that the misuse, the sacrifice of children in that way was something that was in the distant past.
I don't think it was ever in the distant past.
That kind of behaviour has always been there.
But for the couple of two, three hundred years of scientism and the worship of science and being persuaded that only science mattered and science was the explanation for everything, elsewhere other people with power and control on their minds continued to believe in dark things that they had always believed in and always will.
Yeah, they offer us secularism, materialism, consumerism, and you contest that they themselves still continue to believe in dark forms of sacrifice to their Deuteronomic law, and it was indicated by what you would say.
It appears to me that that is a recurrent scriptural theme.
And obviously it plays out in the Old Testament in the Abraham and Isaac unenacted sacrificial moment that has its partner in the sacrifice of God's Son, our Lord and Saviour.
So, and what I feel like the principle is, is the principle of sacrifice, and sacrifice is the highest principle, and the supernatural, the divine, the spiritual and the holy, being preeminent and preordinate, and at the apex of all our systems of meaning and our systems of governance.
I wouldn't take that as advocacy for human sacrifice, because the theme of human sacrifice is explored, deplored, and denounced biblically pretty significantly.
But there's no doubt that historically and totemically, that kind of sacrifice plays a significant role in our past.
And like you, I agree that it's a moment ago on the clock that God bears upon God's face.
Bye!
What I feel, Neil, is that that might be part of the real battleground now in this warfare.
And I'm even coming to look at subjects like abortion and control over life from a spiritual perspective and starting to see a new simplicity in scriptural edicts around such matters.
And as was...
I know you'll like it.
And like when Mary Shelley and the Romantics start exploring, dabbling in God's domain and revivifying and carrying out resurrection, previously the purview of Christ, that was an early indicator of the monster that would be created and the monster that has now taken our culture in its grasps, I would say.
So I know you've got a lot to say, so you crack on, mate.
Well, I mean, yeah, Frankenstein or the new Prometheus, you know, amongst much else a warning about what happens to mortals when they assume the divine power to create life.
You know, I've often thought about that.
The youth of Mary Shelley, when she ever dreamt or in whatever way conceived of that idea, I find astonishing that she was able to come up with that idea at that point in her life.
But I think...
I do wonder, you mentioned abortion, and I know it's such a difficult topic for so many people, but I did wonder, I think a lot of us wondered why the Kamala Harris campaign It seemed to boil down almost to the necessity to have access to abortion.
And so many people in the aftermath, so many women in the aftermath of the Trump win that Kamala Harris lost, their great cry of grief Was that either their 12 and 13-year-old daughters were going to be denied access to abortion rights,
and others who don't even have children yet, the first thing they could think about was how sad they were that were they to have daughters in the future, that they would not be able to have abortions.
That struck me as an extremely strange, first of all, primary policy by a would-be president of the United States of America.
But the response, the response to that, the preoccupation with that, as though that was the be-all and end-all of existence, was having access to that procedure.
I just find that there were so many other conversations to be had around fertility and around family and around reproduction that the great grief that was expressed always and only around the topic of abortion I found very difficult to process.
And I think, not only that, and not just that, but it seemed to be emblematic or a manifestation of an emptiness, an emptiness in an entire way of thinking.
You know, the whole point of being alive is life.
The whole reason for being here is life.
At the end of Ulysses, James Joyce, whatever you think about that work, what I would call a work of art, it ends with Molly Bloom embracing life.
Life is the last word of Ulysses.
She's choosing life.
The whole point of being here is to choose life and to further life.
People talk about a death cult, people talk about a preoccupation with death, but there's undoubtedly a movement towards an emptiness, a sterility, metaphorically and literally.
I'm not judging it.
I'm simply putting my hand on my heart and saying I can't comprehend it.
It doesn't make sense to me.
Well, it does make sense when you start looking at it from a different perspective.
It's funny, it's not funny, it's curious because I had a conversation with my wife yesterday because we were approached here by a sponsor.
That offers scans to women that are considering abortions.
And I spoke to my wife about it.
She goes, you can't do that.
You're a man.
And I'm like, yeah, but I'm a Christian.
And she's like, mm-mm, right?
I guess it's something that I'd like to take to the audience to some degree.
Certainly, I don't feel like I'll do what my wife tells me, ultimately, I suppose.
But what was interesting...
Is it the same?
Candace Owens supports an organisation.
It's ultrasound, isn't it?
It's the opportunity to hear a heartbeat.
Or are you talking about something else?
It probably is certainly comparable, but I think in this instance it might be a visual scan.
And I was interested by my wife's reaction to it.
But if you're having a conversation like this, like you're saying, why is it that that's so central?
Now, from a material and rational perspective, you could argue that there are so few points of meaningful difference around When it comes to the claims that the Democrat Party are able to make on the ethical grounds that they once presumed to be their purview, all those people that are still Democratic voters, aren't they sort of saying, we're the party of like Martin Luther King and civil rights and fairness and justice and the stone wall and the movements that are about fairness and kindness, right?
That's what they say.
But now, even within that aspect of governance and government, because they are so sort of swamped, and I use the word deliberately, with the interests of the powerful, all they can really offer up are points of difference.
So there's one sort of rational argument, but the super rational argument, which I don't believe to be beneath rationale, but potentially beyond it, is because in the same way that I know people that have moved against me believe themselves to be participating in something righteous is because in the same way that I know people that have Righteous and just...
They don't know that what they're doing is operating in the services of a global entity that seeks to shut down any vocal opponent and any pawn, like a little pawn, I'm not claiming I'm a big deal, that gets in the way of that thing will just be annihilated and crushed by its behemoth poor.
Maybe the reason the Democratic Party are so focused on that issue is because of what it actually on some level is.
sacrifice of children.
Now, if we start discussing that in our...
We're men of a certain age.
We're from the same country, basically.
We've got similar sorts of cultural affiliations.
And I don't feel comfortable sort of telling anyone what to do, and I don't seek to.
But as a Christian, from a Christian perspective, there are some sort of pretty clear edicts about that power.
Now, I wouldn't be happy sort of saying that power should belong to a man somewhere.
That's not what I believe in either.
What I believe in is God.
I believe in God.
And I don't have a definitive view.
My key principle as a Christian, he's laid out for me.
Love thy neighbour, love God with all your heart.
Don't go around judging people, lest you be judged.
Cool.
I'm going to bring those ones to the forefront when it comes to the Christianity of Russell Brand.
But when chatting about scripture and why a particular political issue might have so much weight and freight and get given some airtime...
If it doesn't, as you've just said, make rational sense, and I tried to offer you a rational argument, is it because of this points of difference thing?
Maybe it's because something potent and occultist is aligned with that issue.
Because where are the intersectional points between these occultist ideas that we're increasingly starting to think might be real on some level, and what we hear come out of their mouths and the way they legislate?
So what do you think about that?
I can't rule out and don't rule out the possibility that there is a deathly anti-human, anti-life motivation behind some of what's going on.
I don't dismiss it.
I believe that there is a darkness.
There's a darkness that is rising.
That has been rising, but that is being confronted and being challenged, or at the very least people, as in a conversational it is, are asking questions about it.
And again, I say it's provoked or it has inspired more and more people to think about what life is, which is surely an unintended consequence For any group that I would contend is anti-life, that wants fewer of us, that is in favour of infertility and sterility and babies not being born rather than being born.
I try to be open-minded, but I find it harder and harder to swim away from the conclusion that there is something anti-life, something profoundly and deliberately consciously dark going on.
But that it has made people step away from the superficial and the material and contemplate the eternal verities, I think is a positive and a good thing, even if it has been the unintended consequence of something dark.
You know, I like to contemplate, I mean, you said at the beginning that I was, you know, I'd been all about history and the landscape and archaeology and, you know, I love contemplating and making space for how long our species has been literally looking upwards.
You're looking into the sky in search of meaning.
And trying to make sense of its place, of the place of the species in the bigger cosmology.
Christianity is only 2,000 years old.
It's less than 2,000 years old.
But our species has been on the planet for 300,000 years.
Don't know what our consciousness has been like for the duration of that time, but we have been here.
And for thousands upon thousands of years, people have looked up into the sky.
The original deity was the sun.
People assumed that that brightest light in the sky and its repeating patterns was some kind of deity, was something deserving of worship.
And there are fascinating esoteric traditions about Jesus Christ having come to my part of the world, to Ireland.
In search of the wisdom of the people that we now describe as Druids, but that great reservoir of ancient wisdom that amongst his wanderings into Egypt, elsewhere, that he came here because it was well known at that time that there was great learning, a great depth of learning and a great depth of understanding.
Curiouser and curiouser, some of what he then returned to the Holy Land To preach and to make part of his mission was actually the product of conversations that he had had with people here.
The great depth of appreciation of something transcendent, of there being more to life And that people whose lives thousands of years ago were not just unimaginably different from ours, but in most senses, unimaginably harder, they still miraculously found time to notice the patterns of movements, recurring patterns, circles and cycles that were drawn in the sky.
I think to myself, I would never have noticed any of that.
If I had been born and lived and died on a desert island, the recurring patterns in the sky would never have come into my awareness and consciousness.
And that somehow, at this point in the early decades of the 21st century, the campaign or the race for the position of the most powerful human being in an elected position on earth It came down to conversations so pessimistic and so dismissive of the value of life.
It absolutely made me question, how on earth did we get to this point?
After all of this time here, after all of the achievements, after all of the wisdom, how did the conversations around becoming the most powerful person on earth I love your perennial and somewhat Campbellian perspective,
Neil, and it's something that I've had the good fortune to hear you unpack over a glass of wine.
You, not me, and your brilliant sort of Jerusalem, shall we call it, related analytics, dialectic rather, I suppose, around the sort of potential that Jerusalem would be positioned elsewhere.
And I love hearing all of that, and there are so many ways of telling the story, and I suppose that sort of moved me from the position, a comparable position, and I'm certainly not claiming it's a progression or that I'm in any way advancing you, and it's so evident in so many ways I'm...
It's precisely the opposite of that.
What happened is a kind of When you were describing the idea that, you know, had I lived in those days, I would have not observed cosmological meanderings and the constellations dancing in their rhythms across time.
I feel like, well, in a sense, we can't even make that claim because we don't know, you and I, Neil, what it's like to live outside of the fugue of a continually polluting culture.
Anchoring us in the material, forbidding us to venture forth beyond the terrestrial limitations of the archipelago of materialism and rationalism and into the vast oceans where Christ alone walks upon water.
But somehow when I went beyond the kind of sort of rational construction of a pantheon of which Christ was but one part, And into, wait a minute, it's literally true, look at the book of Acts, everyone went all mad, like 50 days after he was killed and rose again, and the culture never recovered from it, civilization never recovered from it.
Something can happen to me when I work on it like a mandala, although I know it's not through my work at all that I achieve understanding, but maybe I might achieve the peace beyond understanding, precisely because it's beyond the limitations of rationalism.
Something happens when I go...
What if it's literally true?
God came here and lived as a man.
And when God died as a man to achieve the atonement that's always been required, the first of the womb, God recognizing that God had to somehow honor that pact with us, his beloved.
Something happens that goes like love beyond space and beyond time.
And Molly Bloom's That the pinnacle is life becomes an acceptable yet somehow more potent synonym.
God.
God.
And the God that we action.
The God that we action through love.
The God that gives us life.
The God that is the way, the Tao, the bread, the vine, the fruit, the lila.
This God that's knowable only in metaphor.
How could it be anything other than metaphor?
Given our limitations.
And somehow when the metaphor and the history are able to sort of in the cross collapse, it does something to me that I didn't have happen before it.
For all of my new age musings, for all of my psychedelic wanderings, something like, you know, I can't believe it.
Why Jesus?
How Jesus?
And yet...
These are the conversations that I think we've drifted away from as a species in the West, and they're so enriching to have.
Before, and even without the necessity, whether you subscribe or believe or submit or obey or whatever, it's still the context for an astonishingly wondrous conversation.
You know, when you talk there about the incarnation, the coming into flesh of God, It's the basis for a really, really rich conversation, at the very least.
You know, because obviously, as you know, embedded within it is the idea of kenosis, which is that before incarnating Jesus, the Word, the Logos, divested himself of all traces of divinity, became utterly and only a man, so that he could absolutely and only experience what it was to be human and alive.
You know, that's powerful and profound all on its own.
And you mentioned Abraham And you have wondered about that and listened to people talk about that.
And is it God rehearsing through his creation what it would be like to lose a son?
Watching the pain of a father right up until the moment when the son is about to die and pulling back at that point.
And that's a foreshadowing.
Of the understanding that at some point his son was going to die.
And he was seeing what it would and rehearsing and preparing.
Or you could say that.
You could say that that was what was going on there.
And how inescapably fascinating it is that everything about Jesus Christ, what little we know about him, as we are told in the scripture, you know, his birthday on the 25th of December, which is the same as Mithras, that he was born to a carpenter and a virgin, which is the same as Krishna.
That his birth, his coming, was foreshadowed by a star rising in the east, the same as Osiris.
You know, that he would feed the multitude from a basket of bread and fish like Buddha and walk on water.
You know, so that everything about what became manifest in Jesus Christ, for believers in Jesus Christ, was all foreshadowed.
In those that went before.
And then if you like and if you believe and if you want, it all comes together in that one personification.
You know, so all of that is, you take on board some of that information and whether or not you're a believer, it's surely the basis for fascinating speculation and rumination.
You know, so much of...
Orion, the constellation, which is the constellation in the sky that most resembles the shape of a man, At least it begins to look like what it's supposed to be, which is more than you can say for most of the named constellations.
And he rises in the horizontal position, and then in the fullness of summer, he's in the upright position.
And it's in the upright position that he dies.
He dies and he sinks into the forever.
He drops below the horizon in the upright position.
And that tradition is there again in the legend of Cúchallán, the greatest of the Irish heroes.
Who at the moment of his death, he knows it would be unbearable because he's a hero to be seen by his followers to fall.
He ties himself to a stone so that he dies in the upright position.
In the same as Hiram Abath, who is the architect of Solomon's temple, You know, when he is dispatched by the three ruffians, you know, he's dispatched by three wounds and he dies in the upright position.
And you start piecing together all of these things from our shared appreciation of the cosmos across all of the faiths, across all of the great religions, and most importantly, across all of time.
And you think, how have we ended up having the empty conversations that we're invited to have about bollocks, We could be having these conversations and speculating and wondering and drawing our own conclusions as living, breathing, sentient human beings.
Don't think it's an accident, Neil, that we end up talking about bollocks when there are so many things we could be talking about.
I think it's quite deliberate.
And the only counter that I would offer is that when we remain on the realm of speculation and rumination, the challenge that we are left with is we have not departed from the framing afforded by literal rationalism.
Neil, I've got to go because I've got to go to do some other stuff.
Oh no!
I forbid it!
I know, but it's really good, isn't it?
It's really good whenever we have conversations, because what I felt like is, I'm speaking to Neil Oliver, we'll have a sort of an idea that there are things happening politically and materially in the world, but what I hope is we'll fling ourselves into the abyss as two brothers fleeing Gog Magog, looking for new territories, looking for new realms of awe to together explore before finding where the horizontal and the vertical inevitably mesh.
It's always a glory and a joy to speak with you, Neil, and I just hope that we get further opportunity to do this more thoroughly and at greater length.
Can you please ensure that you keep talked up on your vitamin D, your vitamin K and your vitamin C because I can see that you're suffering somewhat from some other allergy.
My!
Your chestal zone.
So look after yourself, because we need you.
You're beautiful to say that.
KC. I'm writing them down.
DKC. It's a sign.
It's a sign, I tell you.
Thank you, man.
Vitamin D, vitamin K, vitamin C. Get it down you.
I mean, that does nearly spell dick, but I'm gonna...
I'll give it a try.
Make your own decisions.
Make your own decisions.
Yeah, my body, my choice.
Thank you so much, Neil, for a magnificent conversation.
And more than that, thank you for joining us for this brilliant episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand.
If you want to join me for a live stream where I talk about deep ideas like these nourishing ideas that will awaken you and enrich you, become an awakened wonder, there's a link in the chat right now telling you how to do that.
On the screen, there's the information telling you how you can become an awakened wonder and join us for a live stream every single week that will change you, inform you and nourish you in exactly the way you need to be nourished and formed and changed because you can't change yourself.
You have to be changed by a great and higher power.
That's surely one of the things you must at least be pondering as a result of that conversation between me and Neil Oliver.
Thank you very much for joining me today.
Tomorrow I'll be back with a conversation with Lara Logan that is going to knock your knickers off if you'll forgive the expression.
We move around in some extraordinary territory and you will love it.
Have a look at Lara Logan.
See?
Why wouldn't you enjoy a conversation with her?
That's coming up.
Up tomorrow.
Join us then.
Not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
Until then, if you can, stay free.
Many switching, switch on, switch on.
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