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Jan. 21, 2025 - Stay Free - Russel Brand

01:32:39

Budget Cuts, Fires, and the Failures of Leadership – SF523

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	Thank you.
	Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
	It's a brand new week and it's going to be a fantastic week for all of us.
	We've got a brilliant show coming up on Thursday where you'll see me preaching.
	There's no other way of putting it.
	Has this show gotten too preachy?
	How about some actual, literal preaching?
	Also, I'll be talking to my friends, Neil Oliver and Lara Logan, for our new group show.
	I don't want to say group show, really.
	Not all of the gang stuff that's going on in the UK. It sounds so disgusting.
	But nevertheless, you'll love it.
	Me, Neil, and Lara.
	It's a group show!
	We're going to groom!
	Hey, I might be British, but I don't get involved in that stuff, let me tell you.
	But today's show is going to be fantastic.
	It's Michael Schellenberger.
	If you don't know who Michael Schellenberger is, Michael came to prominence during the Twitter files.
	He was one of the journalists that when Elon Musk acquired Twitter, now X, he let in and he revealed the depths to which the FBI and CIA had infiltrated those organisations and were curating and controlling the information that we get, priming us.
	Debunking, rebunking, bunking, cunking.
	It was all going on.
	Here's an official bio of Michael Schellenberger.
	He's an American author, journalist, and environmental policy writer known for his critiques of mainstream environmentalism and advocacy for alternative approaches to addressing environmental challenges.
	But he talks about it a lot more than that.
	I guess he's pushed that to the forefront because he's going to talk about those fires a lot.
	In recent years, Schellenberger had continued...
	Has continued to engage in public discourse on various topics, including renewable energy, free speech, censorship.
	He's the first endowed professor, sounds filthy, of University of Austin, serving as CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship and Free Speech.
	He also founded Public, a substack publication that I use a lot and that you should use too.
	It's a brilliant conversation.
	We talk about cancellation, my cancellation personally in particular, how that pertains and relates to extraordinary stories in the UK like grooming gangs.
	Of course we discuss the California fires, the unique cultural position of Elon Musk and the requirement for radical spiritual change and the importance of nationalism and decoupling nationalism from racism.
	It's a brilliant conversation.
	You'll absolutely love it.
	If you're not a Rumble Premium subscriber, yet become a Rumble Premium subscriber now and you will get to watch I used to chase this kind of thing all the time.
	I mean, you know, 10 years ago, the notion of having a show that had reached this level of success would have been the dream.
	And the meetings that I'm having with people in Hollywood, I would have killed to meet with the people who were working for the people that I'm meeting with.
	And God took all that away from me.
	I mean, you know, you've had this recent conversion towards Christ.
	And I think you would probably agree that the thing that preceded it was a brokenness.
	And this week's break bread will be fantastic as well, because I'm talking to... Nathan.
	Nathan Pinocchio.
	I've got to stop saying Pinocchio.
	I've got to stop saying that, haven't I? Nathan Pinocchio.
	There he is.
	Absolutely fantastic.
	Okay, well, without any further...
	Without any further hullabaloo or ridiculousness in this crazy, beautiful world that we all inhabit together, let's introduce Michael Schellenberger.
	We'll be streaming on X and YouTube initially, but eventually we'll be solely available over there on Rumble, which has always championed free speech, and we'll be up on local.
	So please continue to watch us on X or Rumble or, excuse me, or YouTube, that filthy place, wherever you're watching us, but ultimately we will be available just on, excuse me, this bloody drink!
	Exclusively on Rumble.
	Michael Schellenberger, thank you so much for joining us.
	It's always such a pleasure to see you.
	Great to see you, Russell.
	Should we run through a few potential backgrounds before we get into the content, or should we just start talking about a whole host of pretty significant and important topics?
	Once again, nothing's really going on in the world, right?
	It's very boring.
	Oh, man.
	Like, I was reading the book of Revelation and the book of Genesis.
	Yeah, I'm doing a kind of top-and-tail thing with the Bible.
	And, like, in Genesis, it's talking about Sodom and, like, the kind of what sound like...
	Rape gangs targeting angels inside Lot's house.
	And in Revelation, it's just obviously like, you know, sort of fires and celestial activity.
	Just like, well, this simply sounds like antiquated language describing my ex-feet.
	You know, there's drones in the sky, there's rape gangs across the UK, there's fires across California.
	Do you think that the ability to communicate more instantaneously simultaneously is creating the sense that there's a greater density of events, or do you think that we're entering into some extraordinary end time?
	I mean, just those two events are huge news.
	I mean, we didn't know about the United States.
	I know it was covered a little bit like 10 years ago, but we really didn't know about the grooming gangs until Elon Musk decided that it needed to be on the agenda.
	And obviously it's one of the worst sexual abuse and assault scandals ever, and certainly the worst since the Catholic scandals of the last couple of decades.
	And then the fires in Los Angeles are completely unprecedented.
	The problem is actually much worse than people realize.
	I mean, we are looking at estimates of up to $250 billion, 12,000 homes and buildings destroyed, at least two dozen people dead.
	And Russell, you know because you read public, but the evidence is now overwhelming that it was the budget cuts that led directly to the delayed response and to the lack of prevention that caused the Los Angeles fires.
	And my friend Rich McHugh from NewsNation.
	Just published this devastating video, which shows them, like, literally the proof, hard proof that it took 45 minutes for the helicopters to arrive and just start to dump some water on the Pacific Palisades fire, which is one of the worst fires, the most deadly and destructive fires.
	That's insane.
	I mean, you know, I interviewed two, I've had two whistleblowers, firefighters come forward.
	The response time is supposed to be three to five minutes.
	I mean, that's how quickly firefighters are supposed to be on site.
	45 minutes.
	They could have had that fire contained.
	You can't stop fires, but they could have had it contained and said, 45 minutes, it was just too late and it was everywhere.
	You're right.
	I do look at your report, and I'm looking at it right now, Public, which is available on Substack, and you're talking about LA Mayor Karen Bass claiming that the fire cuts did not, the $17.5 million cuts, did not impact the LA Fire Department's ability to contain, control, or ameliorate, I suppose, these fires.
	Michael, I suppose that the general shape of debate is this.
	Is California's unique status as the ultra-liberal, inverted commas, woke state, impact...
	In serious municipal matters and emergency matters.
	Crime has long been discussed.
	Now there's a crisis in California that much of the commentary surrounds the connection between, for example, DEI hires and the manner in which this is being handled.
	Do you think it's possible to be objective when a state and therefore issues within that state become so hotly and heavily politicized so urgently and the discourse becomes so dominated by tribalism?
	Do you think it's possible to discern it?
	Is that why your investigation looks at budgetary cuts and the amount of time it takes?
	I mean, look, it's a reasonable question.
	I mean, obviously there's super political atmosphere.
	People are prejudiced against California in general because it's the most, you know, radical left state in the United States.
	But in this case, I mean, here you had the fire chief herself.
	You know, who's a famously lesbian fire chief who didn't want to kind of acknowledge the role of budget cuts, but there was a very feisty local Fox News reporter who just kept pressing her on the issue.
	And she finally said, yes, of course it had an impact.
	Specifically, it was a little confusing at first because she kept talking about they couldn't afford to pay the mechanics.
	And you were like, well, what do you mean?
	What do you need mechanics to fight these fires with?
	They had 100 fire engines that were in the shop that needed to be repaired.
	They could have also had another 100 fire engines.
	You can buy used fire engines for half a million dollars.
	And the idea is you should station them around.
	Los Angeles.
	I mean, Russell, you live there.
	You know, this is California.
	It's the most beautiful state.
	And it's also the most dangerous state.
	And we deal with that.
	We're willing to pay for that.
	It's a premium state.
	You know, we retrofit our homes.
	We have all sorts of precautions.
	We create little earthquake kits.
	We're very diligent about it.
	We know that there's a price to be paid for living in California.
	But that means that everybody down the line, from the governor to the mayor to the fire department, the chiefs, they need to be focused like a laser on this issue of public safety.
	First of all, half of all fires are set by homeless people who should not be on the street creating fires.
	When you're focused on anything other than merit in hiring for firefighting, whether it's DEI or anything else, your eye is not on the ball.
	I mean, this is a hard job.
	Firefighting involves both brawn and brains.
	It actually, you know, you have to look at a structure and decide, can we get in there and out safely?
	There's a lot of experience that's required, so it's a really tough job, and they've been starving them for funding.
	I just found out...
	That they owe the firefighters a huge amount of back pay, tens of millions of dollars of back pay.
	They won't pay them.
	They could have easily doubled the firefighter budget in Los Angeles.
	We estimated something like 2% of what the state spends annually on climate change, homelessness, and migration.
	Well, we haven't fixed the fire engines and we haven't paid the firefighters, but other than that, it's a pretty tight ship.
	Typically, budget cuts would be the purview of a leftist and therefore pro-big government argument.
	Isn't it rather odd that that is a component?
	Totally.
	Totally!
	I mean, you would think...
	The Democrats are supposed to be in the pocket of the labor unions.
	Here's the case where I really wish they had been in the pockets of the firefighters.
	Another thing I learned is that the firefighters are prohibited by their contract from striking.
	And I can appreciate that.
	You don't want the firefighters to strike.
	But I mean, look, they told me stories, Russell, that are just heartbreaking.
	Firefighters are just everything that we imagine from television and movies.
	In 30 seconds, you've got to be out the door.
	You're supposed to have responded to a call in three to five minutes.
	They're showing up 30 minutes after they get called.
	People are having heart attacks and dying in those 30 minutes.
	This whistleblower, this firefighter, told me a terrible story of a child where they were 30 minutes late getting there.
	We still don't know if that child survived.
	But the family, of course, you get there and the family's outraged at the firefighters and the firefighters who are like parents themselves are just wrecked.
	They're heartbroken.
	I've covered stories in the past where like EMTs...
	Show up late, try to save somebody, they lose somebody, and they burst out crying because they're just really actually invested in saving lives.
	And when they can save a life, it's just this incredible, natural high, the greatest experience that they have.
	And when they can't save a life that they know they could have saved, it drives them absolutely crazy.
	It leads them to quit their jobs.
	And so now we have this shortage of firefighters.
	I mean, they are genuinely American heroes.
	I mean, they're just out there constantly.
	They're not taking the breaks they need.
	So, I mean, hopefully this crisis, this disaster, helps to shine a light on the need to take care of our first responders.
	These are the people who maintain our civilization.
	And I think that tells you everything, that the City of Angels has got its head so far up in the clouds that it's failing to deal with the civilization on the ground.
	That's pretty good.
	Nice work there.
	Well done.
	I'm going to let that pass without compliment.
	The religious subtext.
	Over egging the pudding?
	I mean, it's so awful.
	It's so dramatic.
	I mean, it's dramatic enough.
	We don't need the angels.
	I'll take your analogy and I'll raise you like that.
	In this...
	You know, like the fallen angel, the Luciferian false light, is what's primarily being omitted from that place.
	There's a deep tragedy, I suppose, in the waste and lack of the human resource, because as you say...
	Firefighters and first responders are people that have been drawn to these frontline places of crisis by a deep desire to serve and be of help.
	And what I suppose the California fire example appears to illustrate is a level of ineptitude.
	That means that that resource, the resource of people's goodwill, bravery and courage isn't being correctly served and directed.
	Perhaps any governor or high-profile political figure that has access to media and something of a...
	Profile or legend is auditioning for further future office.
	And it seemed for a minute in the early spasms of democratic decline that Gavin Newsom was being groomed for greater things.
	So I suppose this will likely for some time be seen as the incineration of his dreams to be anything other than governor of California.
	I mean, it's hard to believe he's got a political career after this.
	I mean, there's now a new recall is already underway, a new recall effort.
	There's an effort to force the mayor to resign.
	I mean, you know, for all these catastrophes...
	There's always a series of failures on the way to them.
	It's never one thing.
	I mean, there's also this incredible, the second largest water reservoir that feeds Los Angeles and is part of the, both the drinking water and the fire system are the same.
	In most cities, they're the same.
	In Los Angeles, they're the same.
	This reservoir was empty.
	I mean, it's just complete madness.
	It was empty for, it looks like it was empty for years, at least for one year.
	That is the responsibility of the Department of Water and Power, the city utility.
	That person works for the mayor.
	If the mayor can't do her job, then the governor has to step in.
	So basically, at every level where all these failures are occurring, you can trace it right back to the governor and the mayor.
	I mean, the buck stops with the governor.
	I mean, he's an incredibly powerful position in the state, and he's just incapable of acting decisively.
	He's somebody kind of at a character level that he acts as though he's a leader and as though he's in charge, but he's always looking to other people to figure out what to do.
	He's always looking for permission to act.
	That's not what you need in situations of danger.
	You need decisiveness.
	You need authority.
	He's obviously not able to provide that.
	I mean, he is the quintessential, you know, weak leader created by good times.
	I mean, he was someone, you know, really born into and sort of adopted by the Getty family, was kind of handed everything in his career, handed his wealth.
	So he's just not somebody that's a take-charge person.
	And he's just like a lot of the people in Hollywood and a lot of people in Los Angeles.
	just really caught up in ideology, in this identity politics, in this climate apocalypse, and just not really grounded in reality, not really connected to the function of civilization.
	The rest of this conversation will be exclusively available on Rumble.
	Join us over there.
	And if you don't have Rumble Premium yet, consider getting Rumble Premium.
	Why don't you?
	You get access to all of my content, including some really interesting and fascinating stuff I've been doing, like preaching in churches, going to Mar-a-Lago, hanging out with Mel Gibson there, extraordinary, shooting on firing ranges, and so much more.
	Have a look at this trailer.
	Mar-a-Lago.
	Mar-a-Lago.
	I've been here before then.
	It's nice here, isn't it?
	Russell Brand is here.
	I knew because there were Secret Service here.
	I'm very grateful to be in a double act with Mel Gibson all of a sudden.
	My life's changed quite a lot.
	A little while ago, I was a vegan living a simple life in Graves, Essex.
	Now I'm eating steak at Mara Margo.
	Funny how the world changes.
	When we awaken to the continual and perpetual interconnectivity and flow that he grants us, then we are powerful and real change becomes a possibility.
	Amazing.
	I gotta follow that.
	Would you like a very good one?
	Yeah.
	Sure.
	Come here, you soppy sausage.
	Stick to delivering the presents and choosing who's naughty and nice.
	Mel, you made a very...
	You hit me one time when I heard you...
	Finish that sentence.
	It was like rain, it does not give a fuck what falls on.
	and there's no umbrella for the truth.
	Pretty amazing.
	Thank you.
	Is this real life or are we in a dream?
	This is what happens every day at Mar-a-Lago.
	Just at Mar-a-Lago and of course then with a troupe of pipers and drummers.
	Independence is not easy when you've got this accent.
	But you are cut from the same cloth, sir.
	Thank you.
	You are cut from the same cloth, and I see what you are wearing on your chest.
	Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
	Dear Lord, bring your saving graces upon Russell and the super work that he is continuing to do.
	Do you have a cup?
	You can take my pee.
	My pee is good.
	It's clean.
	You wait till he's here.
	I think you could.
	You could probably be drinking.
	Sober journey has inspired me a lot.
	How are you getting on?
	Doing alright.
	Two years, just the other day.
	One day at a time.
	We don't drink, we don't take drugs.
	One day at a time.
	Okay, let's get on with the rest of our conversation with Michael Schellenberger.
	Sorry to interrupt you, Michael.
	There's this kind of shared and pervasive sophistry that defined the political debate in the period leading up to the election.
	We're attempts to kind of rewrite scripture or forge from the minds of man new ideologies, new sanctions, to make prohibitions, to cast aside taxonomies, to enter into the domain of God.
	And it's, I suppose, been sort of roundly truncated by the Maga Maha tradition.
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	Do you see your role altering Michael as one of the...
	Appraisers and reporters, journalists, that we rely on, for example, on the subject of the censorship industrial complex, a term that if you didn't invent, you certainly popularised.
	How do you see your role as a journalist shifting and altering post-inauguration and post-Trump presidency?
	Do you see it as not altering at all?
	But the simple fact is, if you take a few symptoms...
	Not so many pronouns in the bios.
	Zuckerberg moves from California to Texas.
	Zuckerberg puts Dana White on the board and Mia Culpers his way around Mar-a-Lago.
	How are these changes going to affect people like you and I that work in independent media spaces?
	Do you imagine, do you suppose there might be a risk that we become sort of the conduits for their preferred information as many would contest we already are, the detractors of that movement.
	Do you feel...
	Excited by the fact that men like Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makari, people that you will have known for the last couple of years and had conversations with and reported on, are now in positions of actual power.
	Does that seem astonishing to you?
	How can that not result in America's pharmaceutical, health and food industries being significantly impacted?
	I know that was a lot, Michael, but you talk a lot anyway, so I might as well give you something to try.
	I mean, there's so much happening, right?
	I mean, so you have just at the secrecy level.
	I mean, the government has so many secrets.
	If you just go down the line, the Russia collusion hoax.
	COVID origins, COVID vaccines, Hunter Biden laptop, the JFK files, the UAP slash UFO slash drone files.
	Each of those is a gigantic story on their own with many books and thousands or millions of articles written about them.
	I have very high expectations.
	I want a lot of disclosure.
	We want the Twitter files from the U.S. government.
	We should not settle for less.
	I think we saw Tulsi Gabbard apparently made some compromise on the FISA warrants.
	Of course that's concerning.
	I would be very disappointed if we don't get disclosure like the level we've seen.
	And we should have high expectations, and we should put pressure on the Trump administration to follow through on those commitments.
	That's very important.
	I also think that the other issue is the preference cascade, to use a bit of jargon.
	In other words, people feeling more comfortable taking the pronouns out of their bio.
	Mark Zuckerberg feeling more comfortable firing the content moderators, moving them to Texas.
	Using Elon's community notes, which is crowdsourcing fact-checking.
	Everybody, by the way, they said Facebook is ending fact-checking.
	That was misinformation.
	They're improving their fact-checking by making it crowdsourced rather than committees of pointy-headed misinformation specialists.
	So there's so much going on.
	I think that we're going to see this pressure, for example, on California, I think, as fresh.
	The local news, before anything happened, the local news in Los Angeles, the progressive news, the New York Times, they start out by being like, there was literally an LA Times story that was like, did Karen Bass, the mayor of LA, did she really cut the budget for the fire department?
	And they go, it's complicated.
	It's complicated.
	It's like, yeah, no, not really complicated, actually.
	And it took the fire chief coming out and saying that.
	that.
	I think she felt some more comfort, like there was more room here.
	Obviously, a disaster creates some of that room.
	But I just think that the power of X now, I mean, it's been like two years calling Elon Musk an anti-Semitic racist.
	That didn't work.
	He held strong.
	The traffic from to conventional news media is just massively down.
	I think they're in a real challenge.
	And then you see, out of nowhere, the new Los Angeles Times owner who comes out and goes, it was a mistake to...
	Endorse Kamala Harris.
	And then you may have seen his latest thing.
	He comes out and he says he's seen cancers in kids and he thinks that there's some role from the COVID vaccine.
	And he's not some, you know, he's not a fringe scientist at all.
	He's one of the, I think he's like the wealthiest person in LA precisely because he's a specialist in medical sciences.
	So, you know, who knows what's in store.
	I've heard some very interesting things about things that are happening in FDA. There's a lot there to be revealed, including what happened with the vaccine.
	And as you said, it's like the guys in charge, Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makari, these are guys that had been censored, and now they're in a position to release and reveal what really happened during COVID. Yeah, I mean, it's just interesting, Like personally, like to go from kind of, as you say, faceless, pointy heads, whether that's fact checkers at Facebooks or other entrenched bureaucrats in state roles to suddenly, you know, Jay Bhattacharya, I know whether that's fact checkers at Facebooks or other entrenched bureaucrats in
	Like I've not hung out of him or anything, but there have been moments where I've been talking to Jay Bhattacharya.
	You know, say if you do a Zoom interview, there'll be a bit at the beginning where you're like, hey, like we just had.
	And like in those moments, like sort of Jay Bhattacharya being like, hey, are you okay?
	Like in that sort of seeing his humanity and kindness or say Marty Makari, like meeting him briefly and chatting to him and just sort of seeing like he's sort of like febrile kind of furtive commitment to fact finding.
	Well, these are actually, like, right, decent people.
	To your point about the misinformation within Facebook and the fact-checker story, that they're improving it by deploying technology of aggregation, which is, yeah, diametrically different from...
	Those kind of groups like CRISP and Logically AI that enter into social media spaces and attempt to impose a kind of aristocratic control over information, technocratic, I suppose, more appositely, but both are applicable.
	These technologies of aggregation are precisely what could radically change politics.
	I've long thought why isn't there a kind of political equivalent of Airbnb or Uber, i.e.
	the aggregation of disparate resources.
	Decentralized through communication in order to disperse and disseminate power information and relationships in ways that are beneficial.
	And of course, that's because there's an advantage to centralizing power.
	Now, like, you know, Elon Musk, he continues to be massively attacked and smeared in my country precisely because he's...
	Of his influence and his impact on British politics at the moment because of the grooming gang scandal and his reposting of Tommy Robinson's film.
	And I note that it's the EU and Thierry Breton in particular that are being most aggressive around Elon Musk.
	And I reckon, is it true, Michael, that Elon Musk is an unprecedented figure, even though as an archetype he could be seen as a tycoon entrepreneur, and in particular, I suppose, with regard to his power when it comes to information, although that is on a foundation of financial power that reaches into all sorts of areas.
	He's a media magnate.
	He's a Rupert Murdoch.
	And does it interest you that the left have always embraced some billionaires, George Soros, Bill Gates, and regarded their influence as sort of acceptable, and even Zuckerberg, they like him when he's on that side, but they don't like him when he's on this side.
	What is Elon Musk?
	Is he a new type or is he merely an order of magnitude higher of something that we've always had and just of a different, more libertarian and trickster hue than your Soros is and your Gates?
	What do you think is his functioning role?
	And if you could touch upon the EU, Thierry Breton, the ongoing attacks on Musk outside of America.
	If you could, you could look at some of the stuff that's going on within MAGA, like, you know, Bannon's a little down on him and the impact on British politics. - Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting.
	I mean, so just first on Elon, I mean, what is the archetype?
	I mean, we know this archetype really well.
	It's just creative destruction, to use the word by Joseph Schumpeter.
	Schumpeter, this great Austrian-American, I think he's from Austria, came to the United States.
	He was this economist in the early part of the 20th century.
	He borrowed from Marx this idea that capitalism really radically transforms things through technological innovation.
	And so he came up with this idea that really economic growth is driven by technological innovation.
	It used to be that we thought about growth as fundamentally about specialization.
	That was Adam Smith.
	And then through trade, which is really another form of specialization, through Ricardo.
	You get to Schumpeter and it's a completely different picture of economic growth.
	The main event now is technological innovation.
	And, I mean, we've really never seen anything like it.
	I mean, the closest you can get to is, I mean, people compare him to Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford.
	I mean, he's definitely at that level.
	The role in the media is just so game-changing because In the past, you definitely had these tycoons or industrialists having some influence on politics, and I think you want that because you're trying to get rid of all the capture of the institutions that the older bourgeoisie, the older capitalist class had imposed.
	You get these new entrepreneurs that are able to revolutionize politics, and in his case, it really happens through X. I mean, X ends up becoming this, you know, Creative destruction of the news media, where when it was captured by the existing establishment, it reinforced the power of the blob, of the uniparty, of the elites.
	Now you see it playing this incredibly disruptive role.
	He's probably going to help the ADF and Germany to become, to be elected, you know, come in second place.
	And then what is happening at the exact time as all of that is that the EU prevented the Romanians from electing a new president.
	I mean, it's just incredible and nobody's talking about it.
	But it's like literally the EU and NATO blocked a sovereign democratic country from electing their own president because he was so successful on TikTok.
	I mean, and meanwhile, of course, they're all, oh, we have to, you know, we have to save democracy.
	They're undermining it.
	They've completely undermined it.
	I just saw another thing that Polish representatives in the European Parliament are having a chance to write about.
	They're demanding censorship.
	But I just think masks are off.
	You can see where people stand on these things.
	You've got people that want free speech and democracy, and you've got people that clearly don't want it, and they're not hiding it.
	So I do think, I feel very optimistic.
	I feel much more optimistic than I did.
	In fact, I think if the disclosure happens that we want to see happen on all those different things, it's going to just further destroy the credibility of these establishment parties, and it's going to reveal the ways in which they've lied to the American people and people across the West for decades.
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	I saw Thierry Breton interviewed, Gareth sent it, on a French telly, and he talked about them Romanian elections and sort of just blithely said, you know, he intervened and stopped it, and then I think said, we'll do the same thing in Germany if we have to, all in the sweet and holy name of democracy, with seemingly no understanding or appreciation.
	Of what he was saying, and that's pretty alarming, and that's the type of, you know, to use an outflowing of Hannah Arendt's idea, that there's this sort of banal and unconscious evil that flows forth from bureaucracy that he exhibits so sort of beautifully, precisely because it is so anodyne.
	Further on the subject of Musk, when I look at him, I think of Walt Disney a little bit, because Walt Disney...
	Like, created realities.
	First through animation, notably, and then through theme parks.
	And when you're in one of the theme parks, you're like, oh, wow, this is someone that's gone from a 2D medium to a 3D medium.
	And in a 3D medium, you can't manage the absolute control, so you encounter the uncanny in Disney, because the mouse's eyes won't move.
	And on the rides, you can't...
	Some of the ones where they...
	Holograms on the faces of the dwarves, say, that seems a little more mobile.
	But I think he's a Disney-like figure in so much as he's got this Wizard of Oz-type power to create realities.
	Now, on your point of technology, as an economic leader, I suppose it shows that economics...
	It's not necessarily just the movement of currency in terms of fiat currencies or other nominal tokens of wealth, but perhaps power is the true use of the word currency, and of course it's a synonym and is utilised in that domain also.
	And I was considering, and consider frequently, Michael, Andrew Breitbart's point that...
	Politics is downstream of culture, but all of it is downstream of technology.
	And what we're living within is the fracturing of power spaces by the technological ability afforded to you and me specifically to communicate in ways that were just literally impossible.
	Because you can on one hand have...
	Sort of shoot-from-the-hip orators that might be right sometimes and are emotionally correct in ways that sort of resonates, whether it's through a kind of a type of masculine energy that people feel like they've been denied, or nationalistic energy that people feel they've been denied.
	And those people are valuable too as kind of portals, and in those examples I meant...
	Andrew Tate and Tommy Robinson.
	But then elsewhere, and more customary in the space, there are people like you, not loads of them, you're pretty special.
	Like, they are able to provide the receipts and the research and the work.
	And that, I think, is the biggest threat because there's a greater sort of crossover.
	With Musk, he, like, you know, one of his most significant acts was his empowerment of you, and Matt Taibbi, and Barry Weiss, and Lee Fang, and all of the other people from the Twitter files.
	So the other thing I think he has is this sort of puckish, maverick quality, where he's once again sort of introducing fallibility in a powerful people.
	Like, he is clearly flawed.
	And we've got to this point through sort of, like, the weird iconoclastic movements of the left, where Martin Luther King, adulterer, Gandhi, pervert, like, everyone, we're just casting people aside.
	Because of the way that media is functioning now, we're having to reintroduce the possibility of flaws and fallibility and brokenness.
	Like, not everyone is going to...
	You know, Gavin Newsom could present as perfect for a while, but how's he...
	what you've done for me lately, baby, when the fires kick in.
	So what we're seeing, I think, through this aggregation of information, as you correctly point out, is happening as a result of technology, is whilst there's a great deal of misinformation, it's the information that's the problem.
	There's so much truth out there that we can't be controlled in the same way.
	Would you agree?
	Oh, yeah, there's so much in that.
	Russell, that I want to deal with.
	I mean, I think the really interesting thing that you just talked about is this...
	Because when we were together in London, I guess a year and a half ago now, one of the points you made is that the problem with wokeism as a religion is that it doesn't offer redemption.
	It doesn't offer a sense of overcoming one's previous self.
	I think the other thing you're drawing attention to, yeah, it's this notion that we've had this idea under wokeism is that you have to be so good.
	And by being good, it meant you had to kind of conform to an existing very...
	Strict morality.
	And there was none of that.
	I mean, we see it in every single wisdom tradition, right?
	You see it in, Jesus says, you know, you can see the log in somebody else's eye, you don't see the speck in, or you see the speck in somebody else's eye, not the log in your own eye.
	Dostoevsky, the line between good and evil, runs through the heart of all men.
	And then, of course, Nietzsche, beware when battling monsters that you not become one.
	The self-awareness of either our own potential for evil, but also our just existing fallibility, as you're saying, it's so, what a relief.
	I mean, it's like you can breathe a little easier knowing that we can all recognize about ourselves, that we can issue corrections or be like, hey, I changed my mind.
	That that would be more open and welcome in the culture.
	I mean, I think it's fun when Elon will say something that he clearly knows is not true, or he'll ask about it, and he'll just kind of get the community notes to work for you.
	It's such a better model for getting at the truth than this idea that here's the really smart people that understand the true things, and they're going to tell us what's true, and they'll decide whether or not the rest of us, what we can say by what they've said.
	Totally anti-democratic.
	It's completely, I mean, it's frankly totalitarian.
	I mean, it's grotesquely authoritarian, and yet so many people bought into it, particularly on the left.
	Obviously, there is that overconfidence could show up on the right.
	Certainly, it was there under people like George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq and the invasions of our privacy.
	So we really want to avoid that.
	But I do agree with you on that point.
	I think it's so lovely.
	And I think even with Trump, There's that his narrative arc has sort of completed.
	I mean, he sort of came, he has the popular vote.
	I think people now understand that often the guy is directionally correct, even if there's sort of some things are wrong.
	So I mean, like the reservoir, there was an empty reservoir in Los Angeles.
	It's the potable water reservoir, not the non-potable reservoir.
	And so Gavin Newsom, they come out and they go, Trump was just wrong about the reservoirs being empty.
	No, he wasn't.
	You're just...
	Describing a different kind of reservoir and suggesting that it makes you innocent.
	So I do think there's some of that as well, that we all exaggerate.
	We're all guilty of bias confirmation.
	And so I think holding that a lot more lightly is a great thing to do.
	And just disempowering these scolds.
	That just were...
	It was terrifying how much power they gained to censor us and deplatform us and really destroy lives.
	Well, man, you know, it's not easy for me not to take that stuff personally, given what happened.
	Now, with your example of Gavin Newsom, you point out pedantry.
	And pedantry is a kind of form of Phariseeism, I would say.
	Actually, you shouldn't be doing that on the Sabbath.
	You know, it's like, hold on.
	Was the reservoir empty or not?
	Now, like, you know, over the course of this conversation, we've been talking about a shift in sands.
	It's hard for me when we talk about redemption, forgiveness, etc.
	It's like, I know that for years my...
	Promiscuity was exploitative.
	As a famous rich dude, sleeping around, having sex in bathrooms, sleeping with multiple people at once, using the fact that I had massive access to having sex with strangers and was doing it, that was pretty crazy and excessive.
	And there's no question that that is sinful, broken behaviour that hurts people.
	And I beg for forgiveness, and I'm given forgiveness, and I beg for salvation.
	But what happened in this weird liminal space is that...
	Behaviour got metastasised and reformed retrospectively into criminal conduct by competing media companies working with groups like Logically and Crisp, working with legacy media companies, collaborating in an unprecedented way in order to go back...
	To, for years and years, talk to people.
	Like, have you got a story about Russell Brand?
	What about that?
	Well, other people have bravely come forward.
	What if we shift that?
	What if we shift this a little bit?
	What if we tweak that?
	Now it goes from, instead of being a heel and a fool...
	And greedy.
	And, you know, and in some aspects of the culture, a playboy, a womaniser, a gadabout, a player.
	You know, it was suddenly, it was reformed into, no, this guy's not like all those other famous womanisers that we know are out there, that sometimes have to put out injunctions, that sometimes have to pay lawyers a lot of money to keep stories quiet.
	No, you're in this different category here, all of a sudden, of the most appalling criminals known.
	All the while in my country now, There's this explosion that there are Actual grooming gangs that are raping and abusing little girls and young women at an almost institutional and inconceivable level.
	And it appears that the media and government have repressed and ignored those stories for reasons that I find difficult to understand, but there's sort of a loose way of describing it as multiculturalism.
	Now, in that, Michael Schellenberger, how is it that I, as an individual, say, hey, listen, it was...
	I don't think I'm in a discreet category away from lots of other womanizers.
	So I hope you're going to get to their investigation sometime down the line.
	I've got a list of names of other people you might want to look at for womanizing.
	Not that I'm a telltale.
	But more importantly, what are we going to do about the morality?
	If indeed it is sinful and wrong to sleep around like that, what are we going to do about, firstly, the massive criminal exploitative evil grooming gangs that Let's get to that.
	The extraordinary number of people in politics that seem to have weird connections to paedophilia or various circuits, groups and rings, whether that's around Epstein or people in Hollywood and Diddy, and that's not just people in Hollywood.
	What do we do about that?
	How do I personally handle it?
	And what does it tell us about our shifting culture?
	These tectonic plates that have moved around and the people that get caught in the cogs when a culture suddenly decides, you, you know...
	And, you know, of course, I'm going to mention that it happened not when I was, you know, all over the media every day in Hollywood on talk shows, introducing movies, blah, blah, blah, and actually sleeping with loads of women.
	It happened when I started to talk about Moderna, Pfizer, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and exploitation and manipulation at the highest level.
	Yeah, I'm sure it was just a coincidence that it happened then.
	I mean, I think the grooming gangs is such a great example and such a great contrast because obviously, yeah, the system was and the Telegraph was so good in its coverage.
	It just said this was multiculturalism was used as a way to sweep this under the rug.
	And obviously you transgressed the corporate agenda of the blob.
	And that's why they went after you.
	If you were just out there doing yoga lessons, there's no way they would have gone after you in that way.
	I don't think anybody could deny that at this point.
	It's crazy because it seems like the power of the media to do that has been significantly reduced now by the takeover of X and the rise of Tucker.
	These attacks are sort of the last gasp of a dying media.
	Nobody reads it anymore.
	It's going under.
	The British newspapers are doing better.
	But no, I think your point is very well taken, Russell.
	And I hope you become a crusader against the grooming gangs because it's definitely a cause.
	It needs some, it clearly needed some leadership that it didn't have.
	Yeah, plainly too, it's an issue that needs to be handled with some nuance.
	And this extraction of nuance from these stories is something that's long defined the maneuvering of media.
	Even, as you mentioned earlier, Michael, when...
	It was Republican neoconservative power.
	When we were talking about migration and immigration then, I used to think this is not very nuanced reporting.
	When we were talking about the causes for the Iraq war, I used to think this is not very nuanced reporting.
	What's been extraordinary is that in the intervening 2030 years, there's been this extraordinary shift that we've discussed many, many times.
	And I suppose now what we're trying to discern is what will happen as these power bases rupture.
	And it looks like a lot of those centralised organisations are going to collapse and we're going to see some extraordinary new alliances made.
	Like, for example, when talking about something like grooming gangs, when talking about something like Israel, when talking about all of these issues that are contentious, I wonder, you know, is it possible or even desirable that we find a...
	Compassionate pathway through it.
	So you can discuss grooming gangs without saying I'm implying that all of Islam somehow facilitates the exploitation of children or that all immigration is bad.
	How is it that you find your way through that?
	And have you noticed over time, Michael, that you've found yourself more...
	More easily categorized amongst, inverted commas, the right, Magamaha right at least, than the way you would previously have found yourself inhabiting.
	I mean, I think on that particular specific point of how people will say things like, oh, it's Islamophobic to prosecute.
	You know, Pakistani immigrants for grooming.
	It's like, it reminds me of when they were, like, cancel culture where they'd be like, there's a New York Times reporter who was fired because he used the N-word with a bunch of students in a totally benign way, and the students claimed that it was offensive to them.
	I don't believe for a minute that those students were actually offended.
	Like, I don't think that they really thought that the guy was racist.
	They're clearly just using these things as a power move.
	When you stop believing in decent, basic morality, the golden rule, for example, or you lose some sort of basic commitment to humility or other ancient virtues, truth, honesty, then it basically becomes what Nietzsche described as sort of Will to power and nothing besides.
	There's a hedonic thrill that people get from exercising power.
	I also think it's notable that a lot of the cancellations...
	I interviewed Corey Clark, a psychologist who studies the role of women going into institutions, and it's a very feminine way of ostracizing people.
	The attacks, I think, on you and on others are very much attacks on men and on a kind of man.
	I think, obviously, Andrew Tate, not my favorite person, he describes committing violence against women.
	It's not great.
	But it definitely seems like there's been this cancel culture has been driven by a real just kind of unhealthy will to power to basically just ostracize people that don't conform to the existing morality.
	That's clearly, I mean, that's in some ways you would look at it and you kind of go, it might have peaked around.
	2020, 2021, and it's been declining since then.
	I think it's helpful to think of it as like a woke reign of terror that covered basically 2012 to 2024. 2012 was one year after Occupy, is the year of Black Lives Matter.
	And then it was sort of combined with millennials becoming really powerful on social media.
	And you get this just 12 years that was just terrifying and totalitarian in many ways.
	I think we're now reverting back much more to the mean or much more to the norm of the United States and Western Enlightenment countries where you kind of go, look, we're not going to agree on a lot of issues of morality or religion, but we can all meet at this place called the Enlightenment, which, yes, is secularized Christianity, equal justice before the law, meritocracy, free speech, you know.
	Law and order.
	I mean, these basic, you know, protection of the family, protection of children, either from predatory medical organizations or from sexual predators.
	It feels like there wants to be a majoritarian consensus and there's a potential for it.
	Obviously, there's going to be some cracks on the right, but really, the right is so well constructed at this point.
	It has so much clarity about what it is.
	There's actually a battle in Britain between are the reform or the conservatives going to be the ones that really own this new nationalist populism?
	But even then, it's hard to tell, at least from a distance, how different those two parties really are.
	And so then really the question is, what's going to happen with the left?
	And how does the left construct itself into something different?
	Because it's trapped.
	On the one hand, if it continues to pursue this awful wokeism, this awful racism, this kind of this obsession with gender and identity, it's going to alienate a majority of people.
	But if it abandons that, then it really abandons its base.
	So in some ways, it's like the right got itself kind of reconstructed, and it's in a position to have a governing majority, I think, across the whole West.
	I mean, it's not just the United States.
	It's Britain.
	It's France.
	It's Germany.
	You know, it's the Netherlands.
	Then the question is, what kind of response are you going to get from the left?
	I mean, I sort of go, the right is so powerful now in the United States with Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the death of the conventional news media.
	I'm actually slightly worried.
	I kind of, I'm like, God, I wish the left could really get its shit together to sort of...
	...posed some sort of competitive challenge to the right because, like I was saying, I just think...
	I'm looking at young men, like young Gen Z men, my son, 25 years old, and other men like him.
	They're just saying no to all this wokeism, and they're embracing a much more classical version of masculinity and much more classical virtues.
	I wonder, Michael, if we look...
	For example, the assimilation of Maha into MAGA. Note how little that was reported on within conventional media.
	Note the zeal with which someone like Steve Colbert, just for one example, attacked.
	And continues to attack Bobby Kennedy and continues to ridicule him.
	Like, you know, for Trump, it will be the misogyny, the racism, the chauvinism.
	Bobby Kennedy, ah, wacko, crackpot, lunatic, says in Scripture, as a matter of fact, like children in the square for John the Baptist, he's too ascetic for Jesus Christ, King of Kings.
	It's that he's too open-hearted to being around tax collectors and prostitutes and stuff.
	So this globalist power, which I think is at its core godless, and the reason I believe that godlessness is what defines it, is because by denying sublime, supreme, divine power, you can lay claim to the authority that belongs solely you can lay claim to the authority that belongs solely with God.
	Some other curiously rational positions that emerge from it are the kind of pagan and pantheistic worship of the planet, but...
	An odd, grafted-on rationalism that only sees the planet as a kind of human resource.
	It's curious to me how, in Christianity, the relationship between our kind and the planet is a divine one.
	And this process of desacralization, and that's why I suppose I would query, without knowing enough about it, I'll acknowledge your point that the Enlightenment...
	I feel that what that...
	What it does is it leads to individualism, materialism.
	I think it leads to everything that we've just been encountering.
	But I do share your concern that, in inverted commas, the left will atrophy into irrelevance.
	I mean, often when I talk to people on the left, I think, well, who are these people?
	They're the kind of cultural figures that you've described that just seem sort of like odd Cassandras and redundant harpies.
	And then there are, like, in my country at least, there are people from, like, trade union movements that feel like they're from a...
	A million years ago now, sort of like quaking, shaking Jurassic figures.
	But what is...
	Interesting, and the reason I began this by talking about the Maha and MAGA movement, is if you think about how, like, you know, you've lived in California.
	Think about all those people that, like, were fascinated by shamanism, fascinated by psychedelics, that kind of wellness movement.
	Like, those kind of people, that wellness, I feel, was a kind of solipsistic and somewhat narcissistic embrace.
	Of spirit.
	Gosh, I'm speaking personally here.
	My personal experience was, like a couple of months before my coming to Christ, before being saved, and let me own and declare that a significant part of that was being publicly shamed.
	Because shame, I think, is the last flaw before you either commit suicide or...
	Let the self die and become open to what you may find there.
	I'd been running a festival where I was marching around with a staff.
	Shout in Ragnarok and lead in a kind of pagan march and hosting rather brilliant and wonderful people, including like Wim Hof and Vandana Shiva and, you know, people like Callie Means, like brilliant folk, like from media space and from, you know, like an activist like Vandana Shiva, who I see almost like a living archetype.
	You know, she's so powerful and magnificent.
	Anyway, but for me, what I was doing is I'd become completely...
	Self-absorbed without really knowing it.
	Again, without drugs, without alcohol, without sex, I've become once again completely self-absorbed.
	I think that pantheonism can do that.
	I think that pantheonism can do that.
	If God is everything, then God is anything.
	And when I went back to a yoga, in inverted commas, festival after coming to Christ, there was something felt...
	Eerie to me there.
	And I now know what that was.
	It was that, oh, I saw, oh, if I am taking a little bit of Buddhism, a little bit of Sufism, a little bit of Nietzsche, a little bit of this creature, who's in the middle still?
	Who's the centripetal agent?
	Me, Russell.
	With Jesus Christ, that guy, Russell, you are down on your floor.
	You are on your knees, broken, naked, weeping, saved, not by yourself, but by his sacrifice.
	accessing now morality and virtue that acknowledges my fallibility and my flaws, aspiring to be the best that I can as an act of my faith and an expression of my faith, not because I will get anything from it because I'm already saved thanks to him, and that not because I will get anything from it because I'm already saved thanks to him, and that I am just, along with everyone else, down on my knees, broken, along with my enemies, with the people that would shame They're next to me, and I pray for them as well.
	I'm sorry, we're such a mess.
	What are we doing, Lord?
	Help us.
	Save us.
	And I don't see how without that, we're going to reorganize this.
	And the left kind of fashioned itself around atheism because of Marx and our country, UK. It's always been slightly different because they say British socialism, famously they say, owes more to Methodism than to Marx.
	Therefore it has a bit of John Wesley in the revivification of, you know, socialism because of God.
	Socialism because of Jesus.
	Socialism because we should love one another.
	Not socialism because there is no God and the state should replace God.
	Oh yeah, well where do we begin?
	I don't know Michael.
	I know that wasn't a question.
	It was an announcement.
	Yeah, I mean, it seems like this is a very spiritual moment for a lot of people.
	I mean, we're having a huge UFO moment right now.
	People are looking to the skies because they don't believe in the leadership that we have.
	I think a lot of people are coming back to religion.
	I think that when you get to politics, where we get unity, I believe, is around the core pillars of civilization.
	There's a separate question around one's spiritual journey and this revival of ancient virtues.
	I mean, I look at somebody like Sam Bankman Freed.
	You may remember the cryptocurrency billionaire who was now in prison.
	His parents taught him that he should just orient himself around what's called effective altruism.
	And there's a whole kind of cult of effective altruism.
	And it's just based on this idea that You should rationally calculate how to best help other people, but it ignores all of the virtues other than caring and compassion.
	And so, for example, he would lie, so he would violate the need for honesty.
	He would betray people, violating this important virtue of loyalty.
	I mean, you've got to go down the seven deadly sins, and he commits all of them, cowardice.
	Lack of courage.
	And so I think what we saw is the limits of this kind of extreme secular, atheistic progressivism, which became very mechanical, looking to science for morality.
	Sam Harris is the most famous for this.
	You can't look to science for morality.
	Certainly, the evidence can inform what makes for a good life and how do you get good outcomes.
	We know that people are happier when they have family, when they have connection, when they have community, when they have spirituality.
	And that's part of the challenge for the left, which has been a much more secular tradition than on the right, which has a much deeper grounding in the nation.
	I think for me, when I think about I do think it starts from this picture of the nation, which really is about community.
	I mean, a nation is a sovereign community of essentially equal individuals that share a common identity.
	One of the greatest writers on nationalism is a subject I've become obsessed with.
	She talks about nationalism as a form of consciousness.
	And a way to kind of build relations with each other.
	And so for me that's the beloved community that we need to restore.
	It's a sense of national identity.
	And from there, you need a full program of all the pillars of civilization we're talking about.
	But look, I'm with you.
	I'm a spiritual person myself.
	I identify as a Christian.
	I'm also fascinated by all the UFOs and all the unidentified things that are flying through the air and that people are seeing.
	I think people are clearly not trusting the leaders and they're looking up for some other source of guidance right now.
	I love what you say about nationalism and your fascination with it and the idea that the nation could somehow again be sacred.
	Because the fact is that we all can quickly conjure, even if there may be variation within it, the image of an Italian, a French person, the Senegalese.
	even though these are relatively recent constructs, we do have archetypes in addition to stereotypes.
	And what I suppose we saw with the, in inverted commas, death of the nation through global bureaucracies and through globalist capitalism was the resurgent interest in patriotism and nationalism.
	And maybe there's a version of it, and this again relates to what we were talking about with grooming gangs a little earlier, the idea that a patriot...
	Is a good thing, because that's a loyalty to address that list of attributes and virtues that you kindly took us through.
	These are things, these are aspects of our nature that we need to valorise, access, act upon, and form systems around.
	Because when I was talking about, like, you know, the excitement I felt about the appointment of...
	Jay Bhattacharya or Marty Makkari.
	It does feel like they're the W.B. Yeats poem.
	The best are silent and the worst are full of noise and clamour.
	The worst among us have taken control.
	And beyond personalities is aspects of the personality, the humours or virtues or attributes that might make up a human being, that might be...
	Seen as the fruits of a connection with the divine.
	And I'm interested that you too have gotten interested in nationalism, because nationalism was an idea that's gotten, I guess in my country at least, from the 1980s onwards, been subject to extraordinary attack.
	And that, I guess, now thinking about it, is concomitant with the rise of global capitalism and the unleashing and deregulation of markets.
	So maybe one of the things they had to shut down was kind of that patriotism.
	Well, yeah.
	I mean, the big lie is that nationalism is the same as fascism or the same as totalitarianism.
	What Hannah Arendt teaches us is that nationalism is a barrier to totalitarianism.
	Totalitarianism wants to destroy all relationships that people have except for the one between the people and the state, between the people and the party and the state, which are one and the same.
	And so what nationalism gets you, you know, like in healthy friendships, In healthy relationships, romantic, platonic, you want your friend to be their own person, to be a strong person, to have their own sense of identity, to have an interiority that is strong enough to match yours.
	You don't want them becoming like you.
	You don't want them trying to make you like them.
	You want them to have that.
	So when I think about Britain, I have a very similar reaction that Elon has with Britain, which is that I care about Britain.
	I also care about Brazil.
	I wouldn't say I care about all countries equally, but certainly Britain, we're all in the tradition of the British Enlightenment and this incredible British liberal democratic tradition.
	So when I look at the grooming gangs, There's two things going on there.
	One is this unspeakable cruelty and predation on vulnerable people, but it also reminds me of this really important insight by the scholars of civilization who say when civilization breaks down, it's when the elite, what he calls the creative class of the bourgeoisie,
	the creative class of people that are really running the country, it's when they stop identifying with their own working class and their own people and And I think that
	this is where...
	We've been talking, I think, a little bit about what is the relationship between a kind of political agenda, coalition, etc., and what is your spiritual commitment.
	I do think that there is a kind, I would call it spiritual, if you don't want to use that word, you could say ideological, you could say consciousness, that you need a strong national consciousness in order to be a strong and healthy country.
	Why?
	Precisely so you can protect your most vulnerable girls.
	I mean...
	Part of the issue in Britain, and you probably understand this much better than I do, I just observe it from traveling there increasingly, is that the United States is much more egalitarian.
	We're much more like, if you go to Britain and you're a university professor, they treat you so much better than they do.
	The United States is like, I don't care, I'm an electrician, you're a university professor, you're no better than me.
	And that's what's so great about the United States.
	That snobbery and that elitism led them to ignore the predation of often these vulnerable girls were poor and working class.
	A lot of them didn't have a parent in the home.
	It's very similar to the kids that are preyed upon for sex trafficking or by the priests.
	And so why do you need nationalism?
	It's so that you protect all of your citizens.
	And it's not to say that you sort of...
	Overlook the abuses of your citizens.
	It's really more like you have a common ethic and code, but it is so striking that multiculturalism, I mean, this was very clear in the Telegraph's coverage of the Greenman Gangs, multiculturalism was the ideological cover for all of this horrible abuse.
	And so I kind of go, I hope that Britain revives its own national commitment, because I do think that's necessary for Britain to be a strong, independent ally of the United States and for it to protect its own citizens.
	And for us to continue this process of maintaining this incredible liberal democratic civilization that allows us to be different individuals and not be subject to really awful confining totalitarian moralities.
	That's brilliant.
	I mean, what you said about the lack of cohesion means that the vulnerable will end up being exploited was excellent.
	And the idea that If elites of different nations are more allied to and aligned with one another than their own population that falls under their protectorate, that will lead to exploitation.
	Can the concept predate the Westphalian Treaty?
	Can you apply that to tribes?
	And of course you can, if tribes anywhere are willing to exploit their own population through slavery or human sacrifice, that will, likely because of trade affinities or affiliations of some other kind with other tribes, regions or groups, that will lead to exploitation.
	So I feel like that.
	It works fantastically as an idea.
	But prior, of course, again, now to somewhat go full circle, or at least to include ideas we've already discussed, what has happened prior to the revelation of this mass exploitation, speaking to the grooming gangs, a scandal and a disgrace, is that national identity has been...
	Deliberately unwoven and desecrated, if you consider the nation capable of being sanctified at all, that British people were told, oh, there is no such thing as Britain.
	And, like, that was a personal slur to a lot of people whose grandparents or parents had died as a result of relatively recent wars.
	And there was a particular...
	Disgust for working class people.
	Now, I recognise it is much more pronounced in my country, but basket of deplorables, you know, could easily be deployed in the United Kingdom.
	And that kind of loathing is, I think...
	What has formed a right-wing nationalist alliance is because there is a centrifugal, there was an explicit centrifugal loathing of working-class people.
	Prior to Brexit, there was a lot of rhetoric around white vans and people that have flags up outside their houses, which is perhaps the...
	They're comparable icons to a red MAGA hat or a bare chest or face paint at a sport game.
	You know, there are correlatives, even discrete though our nations are.
	And, yeah, I feel that what we're seeing now, of course it's obvious, isn't it?
	Even if you're talking about someone of seismic significance, like...
	Hitler, or more contemporaneous and likely transitory significance, like the kind of pop cultural figures of the right that have emerged out of the independent media age even in my country, they cannot have that power unless they are somehow avatars for and totems of an unexpressed feeling.
	The culture and the cultural centralised forces can sculpt Gavin Newsom and send him forth.
	But it takes aggregating powers to create the creatures that are being maligned and attacked in the UK, likely because, as we have already touched upon, they are flawed, broken individuals in some ways that are pretty evident.
	Pull back to the macro issue, that nations need people that come forth and say, we are those values.
	You've forgotten, you've cast too much shadow on masculinity.
	You denied the idea of patriotism.
	You, in particular, thought you could get away with, and pre-social media you could, just out and out.
	Desecrate and destroy and humiliate the working class.
	And it was no coincidence that it's the Labour Party and the Democrat movements that previously fashioned themselves as the representatives of those class that...
	We've abandoned them in favour of, oh, there's these other minorities, there's the minorities, actually, specifically minorities, these minorities that you don't like, you homophobes, you racists, you misogynists, and because that's so important, we're going to just get on with these projects over here, and that's not to say that all minority groups don't deserve representation,
	support, and love, that, you know, Christianity has principles for that, but when it's one suspects being used to lacquer over the abandonment of your core constituency and the foundation, Because who's going to be in it?
	Well, right.
	I mean, I think the final piece of it is that you do need this positive alternative vision for people to want to reproduce.
	I mean, you know, obviously you can maintain and grow your population, you know, either by having more kids or importing more immigrants.
	But if you just import people from different countries that don't share your core culture, of course you're going to end up changing the character of your country.
	And it's not a...
	I'm not making any generalization about what the implications are of that for immigration, but you just have to recognize there's a real reality to that, that you should come here and you have to, you know, like in the United States, I assume, and Britain too, I assume most countries, you take a citizenship test and you pledge allegiance to the new country's laws and norms and values.
	You don't have to worship the gods of people there necessarily, but you do have to respect those norms and values, including learning the language.
	I do think you have to go another step, though, because I just think there's a lot of young people that were told that the world is coming to an end from climate change, that they're guilty of white supremacy just by being white.
	They were fed and indoctrinated in this awful anti-human, anti-civilization, anti-Western, anti-Christian, anti-Enlightenment ideology.
	And it's just so dark and is so depressing.
	Why would you want to bring kids into a world that you thought was like that?
	And Christianity offered that beautiful story.
	When we became more secular, we have this beautiful enlightenment story of human progress and of human promise.
	I'm actually not super into rockets or Mars or anything like that, but I appreciate that Elon is suggesting that there's some ambition there.
	Some sense of human potential and human possibility.
	I love that from the human potential movement, the positive psychology movement.
	You know, when we were kids, Ross, I don't know if it was the same for you.
	But we were taught, and it's probably not true, right?
	But we were taught, like, you only use, like, 10% of your brain, you know?
	They're like, oh, if you untap, you're full.
	But that is such a positive, that is so much closer to, I think, what we want to be at, is that you have so much more creative potential than you're able to realize.
	And we want to be in a society and civilization that helps you to realize your most authentic and also your greatest potentials.
	So we've been teaching children, we've basically been depressing generations of children, overpopulation, nuclear weapons, climate change, species extinction, white supremacy, slavery, genocide, the Holocaust, blah, blah, blah.
	Look, we've had a rough time.
	There's been bad things that have happened, but look at where we've arrived at.
	In the United States, the most...
	We're more anti-racist than ever.
	Nobody cares.
	Nobody cares anymore.
	And so let's get on with living a fully potential creative spiritual life that we finally have the opportunity to live.
	And so for me, we need to bring some of the Maha and MAGA do Say that.
	And that's obviously why they were so threatening because they were saying, look, we can achieve greatness as a country and achieve great creativity and potential as individuals as well.
	All of our cultural fruits were foul.
	Did you not see the cloven hoof of Baphomet?
	For surely to say that all human achievement is dark is to yield to the evil one.
	To claim that everything we've done is disgusting and dirty is an outpouring of, as it says in the New Testament, three times our Lord says, you know, it's the evil one who reigns down here.
	Apostle Paul says it.
	We're not fighting flesh and blood, mate.
	It's dark power and high principle.
	We were primed to accept the fall prior to the fall.
	And all of that ecological stuff that you say, that apocalyptic cult that worships somehow the earth somehow voided of sanctity is part of the problem.
	It was curious to me that you said that, you know, yeah, you can worship your own God, but, you know, pledging allegiance to the flag is, I would say, sort of paradigmatically the same as saying you will worship our gods.
	But, yeah, why would you want to come to a culture if you don't like it?
	That is the sort of common sense, I suppose.
	And in scripture it would say, if you're not against me, you're for me.
	So it's sort of, in that, it's like we don't care if you're, like, what you are.
	I mean, Islam, of course, didn't exist yet, although I'm sure that if you weren't Muslim, you'd have a different perspective on that and how the origins of your faith through Abraham.
	But, like, at least chronologically it didn't exist, maybe cosmologically.
	I mean, but anyway, my point is this, is unless you place Jesus Christ at the centre of it, and I say this because I am a Christian, I'm a follower of Jesus, don't know if you know this about me, Michael, like, I would say that without him there, you will start to worship false gods, maybe we can go to Mars and conquer new territories, which as an archetype is a transcendent vision of going to heaven.
	Anyway, so, and I feel that those false markers of our progress, and I love the idea of the potentiality, that, you know, we're only using 10% of our brain, that lovely if anachronistic trope, like that, because medicine has in so many ways improved our lives, because technology has in so many ways improved our lives, we have not been observant of the fact that we've been worshipping false idols and heading in the wrong direction.
	And I think the reset of going, wait, we're not God.
	God is God.
	We can't have principles at all unless you have some sort of universal notion, and this is what the post-structure is, of course, if you're aware, deny that there is, that there is not, it's not even a homogenuity.
	It's endless.
	It's just a mosaic, an ever-shifting mosaic of disassociated fragments, not even a morass of nothingness.
	Worse than nothingness, just arbitrariness in fragments.
	Without the vertical principle and the horizontal principle through that, we're...
	We're in serious trouble, I think.
	I think we will remain in serious trouble.
	I do feel optimistic about Maga Maha.
	I do, because how I came to, not Christ, but how I came to Trump was like, if they hate him this much, there's got to be something he's doing right.
	I don't know what it is yet, because I was on board with it.
	Yeah, you can't say Mexicans are rapists.
	That's horrible.
	But then, I just slowly, through realising that the institutional Kafkaesque bureaucrats that ultimately...
	Try to destroy me.
	I came to think, now this guy...
	And then more and more, I think, he's...
	He's an American mystic.
	That's what I think.
	He's like some sort of silverback creature of the American imagination.
	If there were an American prophet, of course he eats McDonald's and drinks Coke and goes around with a jet with his own name on it.
	What does the American myth demand of you?
	Of course you'll have big phallic towers with your name.
	America created him.
	America needed him.
	America got him.
	And I think that he might be the end of the kind of globalism that we were fearful of before when we were doing censorship, industrial complex stuff.
	But I just, you know, none of us knows what it will beget.
	And I say without the one true God, you know, I'd be concerned.
	Yeah, I mean, it's hard, right?
	Because it does seem like the wokeism definitely comes out of liberalism, right?
	But it becomes anti-liberal at the same time.
	There's definitely something underneath I mean, there's a spiritual commitment that people sort of forgot about when we embrace a system of constitutional law and of law and order.
	But before you have Locke, you have Hobbes, and you have this kind of deep, underlying community.
	I mean, I've always been struck by...
	Because one of the things I'm always interested in is how compassion became cruelty.
	How do the people that say they care the most, why do they inflict so much cruelty, particularly on, say, homeless addicts, people with mental illness?
	And really, it's because they're not motivated by compassion.
	They're motivated by power and a desire to control and a desire to feel the hedonism of feeling powerful and control and have some purpose as an identity, as a caring person.
	That's very different from what Christianity actually was because the correction by Jesus to the Old Testament, to the earlier...
	Strictness was a correction, but he didn't want to get rid of all of the beautiful wisdom that came before, including Stoicism, which had been brought into Christianity, God helps those who help themselves, that there's some individual agency that Christianity is not about obeying.
	It's not submission.
	That's Islam.
	It's about actually realizing your own light and your own potential.
	So I agree with you.
	There's something there.
	Ultimately, we've got countries that are set up on secular terms, and so I think we've got to find a way to both encourage people to have that spiritual life, but also I just think at a political coalition and alliance level, we build support in defending the pillars of civilization like law and order, equal justice in the law, fire departments.
	That function, you know, respect for fire departments, respect for the preparatory work of fire departments, and of good education and not depressing children or letting them become subject to sexual predators.
	In some ways, it should be a straightforward agenda because it's so basic, it's so simple, and it's being actively undermined by a particular group of people who are more loyal to foreign elites and foreign people than they are to their own people.
	Yeah, Michael, I think you've summed it up there, which isn't an easy thing to have done, given it was a pretty diffuse, discursive little chat that we just had.
	But I really enjoyed talking about all of them subjects, Michael.
	Thank you for your dexterity and ability to peripatetically wander through subjects like a true garden and pull fruits hither and yon and make sense of it all, pulling it apart.
	Ah, enlightened apes we.
	How blessed we are to have had this conversation.
	Thanks, Michael Schellenberger.
	It's so great to learn from you always.
	Pleasure to be with you, Russell.
	Let me know when you're in Austin, and I'd love to see you when I'm in Florida.
	Remember, on Rumble Premium, you get additional content from me and other Rumble content creators, as well as an ad-free experience.
	If you use my code, you get a discount, plus I get additionally paid.
	So it's a real incentive for me there.
	Remember, Break Bread this week will be with Geppetto and Jiminy Cricket, and most importantly of all, Nathan Finocchio, who's made theology accessible.
	If you're a Rumble Premium member, you can join us live for that conversation tomorrow.
	But remember...
	You want to see me preaching?
	Here's me preaching!
	We're on our way to the ocean church where I've been asked to...
	I actually don't even know what I've been asked to do.
	Do you know, I'd forgotten how this had happened.
	I was thinking, why is it that I am here?
	And then Michael said, you met Becky in Seaside.
	I was like, yeah, yeah, I remember that.
	And then you did a video where you spoke and said, Pastor Michael, I said, yes, this did all happen.
	And now I'm here.
	These actions have consequences.
	I've not been Christian very long.
	Like, eight months!
	Since April the 28th.
	So you all know more about this than I do.
	So, inadvertently, I've been worshipping false idols, the false idol of fame.
	And if you do something like that, if someone's more famous than you, Then you might feel inferior because if you invested, it was Benedict Cumberbatch is who it was.
	In England, it's like they've tried to make Jesus boring.
	No disrespect to the Church of England because I've met some brilliant and beautiful people in the Church of England since coming to our Lord and they've educated me and they've helped me and they've instructed me beautifully.
	But overall, it seems like in England, they're trying to make Christianity seem like it's boring.
	And like when you read from Genesis to Revelation, there's...
	Fire and power and angels and demons and resurrection.
	And amidst us now, beyond the limitations of our senses, surely if we could but see with new eyes, we would know that we are surrounded even now that they are among us, our guardian angels and other forces yet, which if we do not submit, might...
	We've got lots of other additional content on Rumble Premium, like me and Eddie Gallagher.
	Eddie Gallagher is a Navy SEAL that was detained in a military prison after the death in custody of a member of ISIS that he was charged with the care of.
	I don't know how you describe it when it's an ISIS member.
	Anyway, the ISIS prisoner of war died and Eddie Gallagher was vilified and ultimately imprisoned without trial, but ultimately at trial was vindicated.
	The thing is, is they weaponized, in my situation, they weaponized the The Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is the military justice system against me.
	Once the government targets you, there is no getting out of that.
	They will go at any lengths to make you look the way they want to.
	They will create a narrative.
	They have the media on their side.
	A person that can be revered and lionized and celebrated and decorated, I see the amount of medals and ribbons there on you and the cover of your book.
	When it's convenient...
	You're able to go based on gossip and rumor.
	And that's the bit I recognize.
	Because while it's a million miles away in so many ways, I'm a famous movie star.
	What are you supposed to do?
	I meant to go around and have sex with loads of women.
	What were you doing?
	I was going around having sex with loads of women.
	Is there something about that that's morally wrong?
	Yes.
	Yes, there is.
	I believe everyone should own a firearm if they want to.
	This is America.
	They have the Second Amendment for that reason.
	But I say, if you are going to own a firearm, that is going to be one of the biggest responsibilities that you have.
	Because this is meant to do one thing.
	To kill.
	How's that feel?
	Yeah, comfortable.
	Yeah.
	Right, well, thanks very much for joining us.
	We will be back.
	For a glorious week.
	Neil Oliver coming up.
	Lara Logan coming up.
	Brilliant and fantastic guest.
	Let me know in the comments and chat who you want to see on our show.
	Until then, if you can, stay free.
	musique Switching.
	Switching.
	Many switching, switch on, switch on.

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