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Feb. 27, 2025 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:01:32
The Battle for Power: Trump’s Plan, Elon’s Purge & the DEI Illusion – SF545
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Unless they could not understand I'm a black man, and I could never be a veteran on this record.
Brought to you by Pfizer.
In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello there you awakening wonders.
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
It's a spectacular Thursday show because it's Stay Free Oracles with Lara Logan and living Turin Shroud himself, Mr Neil Oliver of Stirling.
Thank you for joining us.
It's going to be a fantastic show.
I know it already, Neil.
Yes, yes, yes.
But it's you, Russell.
You are the embodiment.
You are the manifestation of...
We are all the manifestation of Christ Jesus from a Christian perspective, but it never becomes more obvious that God is real than when you look at...
Shall we put together Psalm 82?
You are all gods.
You are all sons and daughters of the Most High.
That is very good.
I was about to do a really brilliant link and compliment there, but Neil, we can't trump scripture.
Lara, thank you very much for joining us.
We're going to start off today by talking about standards in the workplace, which seems like an appropriate way to begin when you've worked with Neil Oliver.
What are the standards that we should all be held accountable to?
Certainly, Elon Musk's emails to government employees has ruffled some feathers, but according to CNN, it's also hitting the right note with the election.
I got this email Saturday afternoon about 3pm.
And I felt absolutely infuriated getting this email with a demand within 48 hours to provide a response on what I did within the last week or face termination.
This is clearly an attempt from Elon Musk to harass and bully and intimidate the federal workforce.
Well, look, Lara, we're all held to standards, aren't we?
In the workplace, dress codes, codes of conduct.
Why are government employees so outraged to receive this email?
Is it wildly inappropriate?
And is it a bigger fear that the departments of government will be swept clean of civil servants only to be replaced by AI? What do you think, Lara?
Well, I'm glad you raised dress codes because, you know, in the workplace you're supposed to wear clothes, not half a shirt.
You know, Russell, just saying.
Rich coming from you, madam.
This is the funniest thing.
This is really the funniest thing ever.
There's nothing more nauseating to me than having to watch some government employee whine because they're outraged that they were asked to account for their productivity.
I mean, I don't know.
I grew up in a world where you were only as good as your last story, not even the story that you were working on.
And if I would go to my boss at 60 Minutes and tell him about a problem that I was having with some story, something I was dealing with, he would just look at me and say, well, if it was easy, everyone would do it.
I mean, of course, it's hard.
That's why we're the best.
And so I don't have a lot of patience.
Just personally, I mean, you take all the politics out of it.
I have zero...
Behold my field of, you know what, because I have none to give.
I couldn't care less about people whining about having to show that they have been productive.
But I'm not sure that this is a truly serious thing.
I mean, what Trump and Elon Musk have said about the email is that they believe there are ghost employees and that it was sent out as a test because everyone who doesn't respond...
They're going to take a look there and make sure that there's an actual person that is working on the end of that email address.
So that may have been the purpose.
We don't know.
I'm big on what I don't know.
I'm big on being respectful of the fact that we're not right inside there.
We don't know exactly what they're up to.
I do think that's a legitimate reason for them to say that they sent that out because when you consider that all the people that are supposedly over 150, 160, 180, 200 years, Old, who have been getting Social Security payments.
I mean, this is a reckoning.
And, you know, for too long, civil servants in this country have gotten away with not having to be accountable to anyone.
And those days are over.
So, you know what this is, Russell?
I know you're not paying attention.
I'm going to make you look at me.
I am!
I am!
Concentrating!
This is the world's...
You know what it is?
What is this?
This is the world's smallest violin.
Can you hear it?
No, because nobody cares.
Well, I thought it was sort of that you were doing something to tempt a recalcitrant mouse.
Neil Oliver, I wonder if you feel that this type of reckoning is precisely what is required, or will it augur a new AI era where machines, rather than human beings, run the vast enterprise of America?
I think it plays into a lot of the stories that we seem to be being told at the moment.
You know, the idea that's been pushed about useless eaters.
You know, we've been invited to accept that much of the population is of no value.
And you take from that what you will.
And I do wonder, you know, at the extent to which what's being proposed here is part of that.
I mean, I live in Scotland, and it's acknowledged that here, I don't know, a third of the working population, if not more, is employed by the government or council, you know, public employees at some level.
Which invites a person to think that there's just a sponge out there that's absorbing people and providing them with a livelihood.
But in return, it's questionable how much value the people so absorbed are actually returning.
They're just being taken care of in a way.
It's like a kind of a care in the community situation that's going on.
But I think on the face of it, and in a determination to find out who's out there, what they're actually doing, how often they're doing it, if indeed they actually exist, I think is...
You know, that's an appropriate thing to do.
That's a long overdue audit of what's being done with taxpayers' money.
And, I mean, I keep on saying all the time, you know, whatever the government gives, whatever any government gives, is something that it has taken from someone else.
Your governments don't have any money.
They just invite themselves to help themselves to the products of other people's effort and then make a show of doing something with that.
But it's theft.
They take from someone else and give to whomever they think that donation will make them look good.
I mean, on the face of it, I think what's happening is right.
Find out who's out there, what are they being given, what are they doing in return for it, and then once we know what that picture is, we could collectively and usefully make a decision about what to do next.
Well, and I do just have to say this one thing, Russell.
The very people that are on television crying about having to be accountable for what they are doing.
I mean, when you look at Washington, D.C., it's supposedly 80% registered Democrats.
These are people who despise millions of taxpayers across the country.
They look down on them.
They regularly talk about that they have no right to exist.
They're Neanderthals.
They're the unwashed masses.
They're the deplorables.
They're the awful MAGA people.
But, you know, they're awful until it takes time to take their hard work, their blood, sweat, and tears, their tax money that they're paying.
So, you know, this is...
There's a poetry to this that is quite extraordinary.
It has never happened in our lifetimes.
Where the people who actually, you know, keep this country going in many respects, the people that are working, you know, multiple jobs out there very often, where they're being heard.
Their voices are being heard.
And those who disregard them and dismiss them and patronize them and look down on them.
Now they're being held to account.
And they don't like it one bit.
So it's poetic justice in many respects.
And I do have to say, I'm not a big fan.
I don't like Neuralink and all the rest of it.
But I do see here an information narrative that's being played that says, oh, Musk is doing this because he wants to get rid of human beings.
So Musk is the one who said, if you've got a government job, you shouldn't be doing it.
At home, you've got to show up to work.
Trump said you've got to show up to work.
That was one of the first executive orders.
And none of these people seem to want to show up to work or be held accountable.
I don't know what planet they're living on, but I know that I speak for millions in this country when I say this day is long overdue and they are 100% behind this effort.
I don't understand why you would be averse to turning up for work.
I mean, I've been through...
I've had loads of different bits of a career.
I mean, I haven't had one career.
I've done all sorts of things.
I was an archaeologist.
I was a field-working archaeologist, digging things, digging up things.
And then I'd retrained as a journalist.
And then I worked in PR and then I worked in internet things at the very beginning of the internet.
And at all times it was about being with other people.
That was how I let that first and foremost, being as a beginner, being in amongst other archaeologists, other journalists or whatever was how I learned how to do that.
It was a, you know, it was a collective collegiate thing.
That was what it was all about.
For me, it seemed to crystallise during the whole COVID lockdown period where people were told to go home and be in their pyjamas and maybe just connect with school or with their employer via a screen.
There is a part of all of us.
Possibly offered the opportunity to withdraw from all of it.
You might.
You know, if you could just stay at home in your pyjamas with access to your duvet, you might do that.
But it's not good.
Most of us need the spur to get out there and be in amongst the body politic and do the thing.
And now that there's this building aversion to being summoned back into the office or into the shop or into the collective, and this suggestion that you ought to be entitled to just do what it is that you're being paid for where no one can see you, it's right to jolt people out of that.
There's no future for civilisation and community.
If everyone's just back in their Paddington Bear pyjamas under the duvet, connecting with the rest of the world via, you know, via email.
Russell doesn't wear pyjamas deal.
I own Paddington pyjamas.
Russell, you don't wear pyjamas, do you?
I'm from nape to neck, from toe to top, smothered in...
In Paddington patterns, Lara, for the purposes of this conversation.
Now, it's nice to know that Neil...
I don't believe it.
Well, it's true.
It happens to be true.
It's nice to know that Neil Oliver worked as an archaeologist.
At least his own sartorial choices start to make some sort of sense now.
The neck of chiefs.
What are you trying to say?
The safari suit.
This is a new shirt.
I'm wearing a new shirt for you.
You look handsome.
You ungrateful bastard.
You look lovely and it's glad that you're making a real effort amongst us, your colleagues, though of course we are all working remotely, literally right now.
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We've discussed, I believe, in astonishing depth, the machinations and movements of Doge and how it has kind of diagnosed through its reckoning, in the words of Lara Logan, a kind of ennui in people's hearts, a kind of purposelessness, nihilism, and in the cases of many of the 80% a kind of purposelessness, nihilism, and in the cases of many of the 80% of Washington residents who are Democrat, a kind of antipathy towards the people that they are ultimately Now we're going to take a look at the subject of immigration.
Donald Trump has pledged to launch a new gold card scheme where people can essentially acquire American residency or at least access to America to some degree through $5 million.
Donations.
Immigration is a hot topic in Neil's country of Scotland, where one in three people are a postman working directly for the government, and it's a hot topic around the world.
Let's have a look at Trump's new immigration initiative and see how this changes the dynamics of a hotly contested subject.
We're going to be doing something else that's going to be very good.
We're going to be selling a gold card.
You have a green card.
This is a gold card.
We're going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million, and that's going to give you green card privileges plus.
It's going to be a route to citizenship, and wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card.
They'll be wealthy, and they'll be successful, and they'll be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes and employing a lot of people.
Is this genius or an abomination?
It's been said for a long time in the UK that Russian oligarchs were able to access British citizenry via their acquisition of real estate or through favours and connections to people in the administration or government cronyism, in other words.
Lara, what do you think?
Is this like Trump at his ingenious best or is this kind of deplorable corruption that people have long been terrified would be brought about by his second term?
Well, you know, it is true, Russell, that people have been able to buy their way into countries for a long time.
Like if you invest, in a sense, there's already a gold card.
Because if you invest a certain amount and you create a certain amount of business and you employ a certain number of people, you already have access.
So, I mean, you know, people will jump up and down.
No matter what Trump says or does on immigration, the Trump haters are going to jump up and down.
And for most Americans, I mean, just for the ordinary person out there, they're going to say, well, if America's going to get $5 million and they're going to get rid of the IRS and I don't have to pay taxes anymore, they're not going to mind.
I mean, people recognize that the government has to bring in revenue somehow.
So in a sense, it's a little bit...
Like tariffs, right?
Is that the cost is being pushed onto other people.
So it just, you know, in principle, I don't think, I think a lot of people in this country are not going to have an issue with it.
Is it vulnerable to corruption?
Yes, of course.
Does it perpetuate a system where the wealthy have access to things that other people don't?
Yes, but he's not saying he's going to replace the normal immigration system with this.
So it's not like he's shutting off all access for all other people to apply illegally to immigrate to this country.
So, I mean, I think that's an empty argument to a degree because the wealthy already have special access to immigration.
I will say, however, though, that this immigration issue is a very big one, obviously.
It's one that touches people all over this country.
This administration is really going to have a difficult time dealing with what has happened because when you've brought in 10,000 people a day, every single day for four years, when you've got 15 million you acknowledge and you've got 18 to 20 million who is the more likely figure have come into this country illegally, you have a shadow culture.
That has been imported into this country of people, many of whom, in fact most of them don't speak English, have no real, you know, they don't identify with the United States in any way.
They don't really know the culture or the, you know, understand where this country came from.
And so they're not motivated to fight for it in the same way that you would be if perhaps you were born here or if you went through the legal.
Immigration process over a long period of time and so how you extricate that from American society is something people all over the world are watching very closely because it's happened in Europe, it's happened elsewhere and this is going to be very tough.
You've already got people saying that the Trump administration is targeting unaccompanied minors which are unaccompanied children and it's not true.
Targeting unaccompanied minors.
It's all they've done is trying to put in rules to say, we want to figure out where these kids have gone.
We want to figure out if they're with family members.
We want to make sure they're protected.
I mean, the most basic protections that are afforded American children is what they want to apply to unaccompanied migrant children.
And the propaganda machine is in overdrive already.
So this issue of immigration, I don't like...
To project into the future because I'm not a prophet and so I'm always wary of that.
But I have very serious concerns right now about how this issue is going to play out.
Do you have similar concerns as a British person and do you feel that this is a...
Kind of overt and vulgar scheme by Trump, or do you think that Trump is doing what he often does, making explicit what is typically tacit in politics, that wealthy people can bypass rules?
And also, Neil, could you follow up on what Lara said about a kind of shadow class of occupants of a nation that are antithetical to that nation's consensual purpose and identity?
I think it's always...
I find it difficult...
In large part as an outsider, I suppose, to the United States.
And, you know, I'm not as familiar with Donald Trump as maybe American, well, presumably Americans are.
But it does sound like something that could be interpreted as a crass thing to say.
You know, I noticed his conflation of $5 million with people who are successful.
There's all sorts of ways by which someone could be in possession of $5 million worth of bargaining chips to get into the United States.
The child of someone of wealth, someone that has exploited criminality to have $5 million plus wealth.
Straightforwardly equate five million dollars with success, which implies, you know, somebody worth having.
You know, I would say could be interpreted as a crass statement.
And I would always lean towards idealistically or even unrealistically or not, towards a system that was attracting people of merit.
You know, I mean, the whole story of the founding of the United States of America, you know, that basal layer is made of people who came with nothing from all parts and all sorts of people and who came and who all they needed was the opportunity and then they could make something of that.
I think for the President of the United States of America to make a statement that could be That could be, I'm not saying it is, but it could be interpreted as being so crass, I think is unfortunate.
I'd rather see, I'm not talking about, I'm not even an unequivocal advocate of meritocracy, because I know what the problems are with meritocracy in as much as they, by definition, it means that you're drawing away from people who, societies who need them the very best, and those people are drawn by osmosis.
You know, somewhere else, which leaves the community and the society and the civilization that gave birth to them, the less for their absence.
But I think the suggestion that, yeah, if you've got five million bucks, however you've got it, you can get in and you can get some kind of platinum card level of US citizenship, I think is...
I don't know why someone who's the leader of the free world would...
Indulge himself in saying something like that.
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I've come to regard Donald Trump with a kind of awe.
One of the pivotal moments in my own kind of transformation in my perspective on Trump came when Chappelle memorably said...
As part of his SNL monologue when Trump was elected the first time, he started to say publicly what we've all believed for a long time, that I know how this works because I've been exploiting the corrupt and hidden levers of power in the way that all of Hillary's donors do.
That being one of the standout points.
Now, when he does something like posts...
Gaza as a holiday destination or says that you can openly acquire citizenship.
I start to get the idea that perhaps we're dealing with someone who's better equipped than I am to understand politics.
Not that that's a particularly high threshold, but that someone that makes outlandish, bold, and as you say, sometimes crass remarks that are nevertheless somehow hacked in the bureaucratic and administrative space that preceded him.
That themselves were so sort of insidious and cowardly, so duplicitous and dishonest, that I see Trump really as a...
Wrecking Ball summons from the collective imagination.
I know that sounds pretty grand, but when Marianne Williams said in the Democratic primaries last time round when they were selecting that if you think this kind of wonkish energy is going to be able to oppose dark psychic forces as summons by Trump, then you've got another thing coming.
I'm paraphrasing.
And whilst I still don't think of Trump as a dark figure, I think of him as the sort of living embodiment of America's self-image in the way that I would have seen movie stars once if you track.
The kind of movie stars that were flung up in the 80s, action heroes, the kind of comic heroes that were full of sort of doubt and self-recrimination in the 90s.
And the American culture has to talk to itself.
What I feel happened, you know, primarily after sort of the Blair, Obama, Clinton type era of showbiz leaders is that...
We kind of created a space for someone that understood those dynamics better than they did.
And because they weren't able to offer integrity or statescraft in a way that would exclude the mere showman, we were going to get a figure like this.
And I kind of feel that he might midwife into being the kind of ethical decentralization that was perhaps intended by the American founding fathers.
that somehow this kind of new trickster mentality of Musk, if you look at his email exchange on the topic we were discussing before on Doge, where someone sends a thing like I spent all last week sucking a 12-inch dick and all this stuff, and Musk, far from being squeamish about it, just goes, I said five things, not far from being squeamish about it, just goes, I said five things, It's just sort of inconceivable that political discourse is taking place on this level, posting pictures of AI selling immigration cards.
But I think, you know...
what is this better than Boris?
Is it better than Joe Biden?
Is it better than what Kamala Harris would have done?
Sort of it is.
It's sort of what they did was so veiled and darkly bureaucratic and tethered to power that ain't even national but global, corporate, commercial, and I think actually darker.
In the same way that for many years people on the left would say, I know the Labour Party aren't good enough, I know the Democrat Party aren't good enough, but they're the least worst option.
That's what they used to say.
They never used to say, I'm indefatigably connected
to the rise of someone like Bobby Kennedy, in whom I have actual sincere faith.
I know there are people that have sincere faith in Trump.
They're just like, I love this guy.
You know, when I think of the platform I'm on, Rumble, like Bongino has left to become part of the government.
I mean, I just think that's so sort of mad and novel and extraordinary.
I don't feel about, like, Donald Trump, what they do.
I'm not saying Dan Bongino.
I mean, Trump's supporter base unquestioningly believed in him in an almost religious way.
I don't have that.
What I think is, this is phenomenal and extraordinary.
When we were at Mar-a-Lago last week, Lara Logan, like, you know, I was about...
Like, I missed the bit where Trump, like, was doing a speech and called, like, everyone there up on stage because I was, hey, I don't know, maybe I take religion more seriously than most people.
I was actually doing the rosary and connecting with the Lord.
Anyway, like, after I went and...
I saw Mike Tyson and everybody sort of, like, be gathered around him on a stage.
It was you, Lara, that said, go up them stairs.
You know, you sort of might see him.
And indeed, I went up them stairs and he was coming from some cordoned part of Mar-a-Lago.
And I saw him in repose talking to a member of the security services.
And, like, because, you know, I figure he reckons he's being looked at the whole time, but I didn't want to sort of, like, be like, ooh!
Oh, Donald, can I have an autograph?
Give us a cuddle.
You know, I didn't want to be like a pest.
So I just sort of looked at him.
And when I, this is a curious and perhaps even grand analogy, but I once, when looking at Jupiter through a telescope, was struck not by its grandeur, but by its fragility.
And though there's no doubt that Trump has this ape-like potency, I won't be able to go through what he's gone through.
The convictions, the trials, the attacks, the shootings.
This is obviously someone who's impressive and powerful.
Yeah, like, in a way that I mean is sort of truly awesome, but I don't, I can't understand it, but I do know how the current political, that what preceded him has led to him.
I know that's sort of so obvious as to be redundant, but it kind of makes, it makes sense to me in that way, in a way that Lara Logan's ever-shifting dog backdrop doesn't.
Every time I look, it's a different dog there.
Neil, you were going to, Neil, are you going to say something, mate?
Just, you reminded me in your last comment there about, I wrote something years ago now, in another life almost, I think it was 2016 or something, where it seemed to me at the time that Donald Trump was a kind of a Godzilla,
in as much as he was inevitable, in as much as, because the world had been made toxic in every way, You know, physically, metaphysically, that Godzilla was the world's response to it, you know, to put mankind back in its place.
And I think there's something of that, the inevitability of someone like Donald Trump.
We were always going to get in that polybius anicyclosis The process we were going to get Donald Trump, you know, the demagogic figure that met or seems to meet the needs of so many people.
And I just think that that is, in and of itself, interesting.
I think the fact that, to refer back to what we were just talking about, the $5 million platinum, the gold card thing, It's like a process by which it's being laid bare.
And he's almost just the conduit for it.
That this is where you end up when you get to the ultra-materialist, consumerist end.
This is where you get.
You know, if you've got five million bucks, you can get a better America than It's true.
I mean, I'm sure it's true.
And it's not his fault or his intention.
It's just a fact.
I think what he does, which people either love or loathe or whatever, is he kind of says, this is where we are.
This is the reality that we have created for ourselves.
And you know that thing that he says about, you know, they're not coming for you.
They're not coming for me.
They're coming for you.
I'm just standing in the way.
In the way.
Yeah.
It's true.
That is true.
I think he articulates something that's not really about him.
He's just...
He is the embodiment of where we are.
I agree with that.
And I can see that Lara has...
As always, so much to add.
But, like, what I think additionally is when you looked at figures like Biden and him, like, kind of pretending to be all folksy, you know, in a baseball cap, talking about black people and stuff, I felt like this guy...
I felt intuitively that he didn't love people.
Who am I to make such an assertion?
But that Democrat movement, I know it's built on a kind of a metropolitan elitism, and it's the party, as is the Labour Party now, of a kind of a professional class that's very publicly disavowed and disowned working people, hates them, sees them as deplorables or Brexit racists, depending on which country you're making the assessment from of the two that we're discussing.
And with Donald Trump, I don't think Donald Trump...
I think that one of the components of this is that he does love truckers and can hang out in a Chick-fil-A and have normal banter with the people behind the counter in a way that Keir Starmer...
And in which Joe Biden would falter.
So, like, to be a populist, you have to somehow have, like, some interpersonal charisma.
And that, in essence, is a sort of a type of love.
Well, I'm saying...
It's not a value judgment on Trump at all.
Well, obviously it is.
But, you know, Trump is real.
Trump is an absolute three-dimensional thing.
Biden, by contrast, was dandruff.
There's nothing there.
There's nothing there.
I mean, Trump is real, like you say.
He can.
He can.
That montage of clips that there were a few weeks ago of him being at the drive-thru at McDonald's and stuff, he absolutely can do that in a way that is authentic.
You know, you should remind me of a conversation.
He's definitely a manifestation of something real.
Dead skin.
So you two remind me of a conversation I had in 2017, just after the 2016 election.
And it was one of these Chatham House rules.
And I can't say exactly who was there, but it was mostly billionaires and very powerful people, including Joe Biden, actually, one of them.
And he and Jeb Bush were taking turns bashing Trump.
All the reasons Trump was just worthless.
And that prompted a conversation of, well, why exactly did Trump win?
And so the host said, go around the table.
And some of them presided over, you know, I mean, when I say bid, they're the biggest hedge funds in the world.
And others.
All very, very significant people.
And the last person, including, by the way, Valerie Jarrett, that poisonous witch.
So when it got round to the very, very end, and it got to a guy called Steve Harvey, who was an African-American guy, former NFL football player, but a very, very well-known public figure.
And Steve Harvey, I'll never forget, he just shook his head and he said, man, you're all white people.
You still don't get it.
We like Trump because he's one of us.
That's it.
It seems pretty astonishing that you can pull that off in this, you know, not pull that off, but that is the, I think, essential.
I think it's essential that you can't kind of, in the end, you can't.
He's one of us!
Yeah, like Princess Diana maybe had a sort of a comparable quality.
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On our show, Break Bread, that you get if you're a subscriber to Rumble Premium, this week I spoke to the Christian rapper Lecrae.
It was a good conversation in loads of ways, and I'd love you to watch all of it.
But when we spoke about DEI, I was fascinated to learn that, in a way, we have to find...
We have to find ways of creating fair and just societies that are not to the detriment of our institutions and bring about conviviality and connection rather than conflict and division.
Here's a moment from that conversation, Lara and Neil, before we discuss the various DEI initiatives.
In particular, Neil, I'd love your perspective on the revelation that DEI experts have been employed by the British Army and are earning more than the average British squaddy.
But we'll talk about DEI in positions of competence in...
If you're saying, hey, we don't have enough African-Americans at Harvard, right?
There's not enough of them at Harvard.
Okay, based off of what?
What are the metrics?
Where are we basing this off of?
If the reality is that there's not enough because the scores are not high, High enough in the African-American community to get into Harvard, then we can't just say, well, that's it.
The scores aren't high enough and we're done.
Well, why aren't the scores high enough?
Why are they not high?
Well, because these schools that they're learning from are not up to par.
Okay, that's it.
We're done.
The schools aren't good enough.
No.
Why aren't these schools?
Is this not America?
Right?
Is this not the, like, don't we all have access?
So why aren't these schools as good?
So let's dive in there.
I'm regretting nodding my head like that now because it'd be very easy to make it look like I was masturbating, which I can assure you both that I wasn't.
Now, when it comes to standard competence...
That's a relief.
Yes, absolutely.
i don't know which one of you was talking most in our in the last part of this conversation but whichever one of you went on the least and it's sometimes hard to determine who talks most among
I wonder what you think about, you know, I was saying, when it comes to airline pilots, yeah, why would you not want there to be a kind of nice spread of sex and ethnicity across pilots?
You ultimately want to address that problem as far away from the...
Point where someone's been given a job as possible, i.e.
if you want a fair and just society, you want to address that through education, you've got to address that through economics, community building, and all of these projects seem pretty impossible unless you've got a belief in some kind of ulterior power, whether you call it God or common sense is up to you.
But without some sort of set of principles, it's difficult to think how you would create a just and fair society.
Lara, what do you make of DEI, and in particular, Lecrae's point about when it comes to institutions of excellence that you would want to address why there might be disproportionate representation of one group or another?
Well, it's interesting that he chose the example of Harvard, right?
Because if you look at Harvard...
Population-wise, there's a disproportionate number of Asians.
And so people are now saying, oh, well, you can't have too many Asians at Howard.
We've got to keep it diverse according to some kind of fictional scale that we don't really know what that is.
Because you can take, if you have a town in America that's 98% Hispanic, that's considered diverse.
If that same town is 98% white, Then it's considered an aberration, and it has to be obliterated, and it has to be reordered.
And so what exactly defines diversity?
Apparently, it's everything that isn't majority white.
And I bring this conversation back to the population of the United States of America, which still, in spite of the best efforts of those who apparently seem to despise white people, This country is still roughly 70% white.
And when I ask people, what percentage of the American population do you think is African American or black American?
What do you think most people say?
Well, people say 30%, 40%, 50%.
Well, it's actually more like around 11%.
So when you start, I mean, if you were to watch television in the United States today, you could be forgiven for thinking that 80% of American society is black.
Because there's been this...
DEI-driven, you know, self-flagellation of white people, correction in the society that doesn't reflect the society at all.
Now, I don't even like talking in these kind of numbers.
I've got to tell you, it makes my skin crawl because I grew up in South Africa under apartheid, which was an institutionalized system of racism and injustice.
And every part of my body...
Rebels against that.
I don't believe in that, and I never will.
So I hate that things get broken down in this way.
But, you know, all these issues, he's not wrong.
Lecrae is not wrong when he says it's not good enough to say, well, the scores aren't high enough.
It is true.
We should say, why aren't the scores high enough?
And, okay, why aren't?
I live in rural America, okay?
My children go to Fredericksburg High School.
They're not walking into Harvard.
From Fredericksburg High School.
How many people do you think make it from rural America, from a high school like we have here, into Yale, Harvard, and so on and so on?
They don't.
So, you know, I get a little bit...
I mean, for me, I get a little bit annoyed because this idea that it's only...
You know, inner-city schools populated by black kids where you don't stand a chance.
No, that's not true.
And I know there's a history behind that, a history of slavery and all the rest that needs to be factored into the conversation.
But, you know, there's a lot of...
Our school is majority Hispanic American and white American.
And most of those kids don't stand a chance in any kind of...
Upper echelon of American society.
Now that doesn't mean they can't work hard, figure things out, and make a decent living for themselves, especially if they have a bit of luck along the way.
I'm not, you know, I'm not whining here.
But there is an issue in American schools across the country.
There is an issue in inner-city schools that absolutely has to address.
Americans have been in an education crisis for a very long time, and no one's been willing to tackle this right now.
That's what is so revolutionary about this moment that we're in as a nation and as a society.
Because right now you have a president in the Oval Office who, contrary to the Hollywood Information warfare depiction of presidents that crept in over the last few decades, that the president is somehow just this figurehead and an idiot and isn't really running the country, right?
That was a PSYOP. That was, that was...
We're shaping the information battlefield to prepare us for the days of Joe Biden, where it doesn't even matter if a person's in this dementia because the country's being run by other people that you don't apparently see, and you don't get to hold them accountable.
Well, that whole psyop has been trashed, right?
It's gone up in flames.
Donald Trump took gasoline and he set the whole thing on fire, and they've never forgiven him for it.
You know, because of all, I mean, I'm sure you can point to his faults, but one of them is not, stupidity is not one of them, right?
And so what Donald Trump is willing to do is he's willing to get rid of the Department of Education, which, by the way, for all those people who say, oh, good Lord, you can't get rid of that.
What about all those people before the 1960s?
You know, when there was no Department of Education, they seemed to do just fine.
So, I mean, I agree with the Craig that it isn't good enough to say, you just stop here.
You do need to get back to the heart of it.
I would say, unequivocally, nobody wants a pilot who's in the sky because they're female or because they're black or because they're Hispanic or whatever.
No, you want people based on merit.
And that's never, ever, ever going to change.
And as far as DEI goes, all this DEI consultancy nonsense...
I would help them pour gasoline on it.
I would happily see it all burned to the ground.
Because there's not a single black community in this country since DEI began that can stand up and say their lives are better because of it.
BLM raised, I mean, I think from Nike Jordan, $100 million.
From Bank of America, $100 million.
I mean, the list goes on and on and on.
Billions and billions and billions of dollars.
And not one town.
Not one city, not one county in the United States of America gets to stand up and say our lives are better because of what BLM did for this black community here.
No, it's a big con.
And the sooner we get rid of it, the better.
and yet neil in the united kingdom we're seeing dei initiatives given precedence over paying troops tell me where do you stand on it particularly as someone who i imagine in your wild and picaresque journey through professions has picked up all sorts of old school liberal views i think um you know lara's right i was
You know, Lara, you really came to a point there in your last few...
You know, paragraphs of what you said.
I think it's evident that even before the nonsense of the Black Lives Matter hoax, I mean, I think it's demonstrable that the civil rights movement en masse, en balance, was bad news for Black American people.
It absolutely didn't make things better.
You know, you ended up in the US in a situation where people had been wholesale invited to embrace the whole idea of victimhood and all of the rest of it.
I buy into the idea that the civil rights movement was bad.
It was bad news for the very group of people that it was supposed to benefit.
I think that's true.
I think, you know, DEI is just bollocks, to use a traditional Scottish word.
I come back to the idea that everyone knows if you're in the sky, if you're in the sky, my God, let me be, my aircraft be being piloted by the very best human being available for that post.
And likewise, let the people in air traffic control on the ground that are speaking to my pilot be absolutely the very best selected human beings there could possibly be.
And in that context, I don't care.
I don't care whether they're white, black, brown, Jewish, Islam, Christian, whatever.
I just want all of that to be being taken care of.
By the people it has been demonstrated are the very best people technically to get that job done, to get me from A to B. That's all of it.
I've got...
I mean, I really struggle, I really struggle to buy into and debate DEI because it's absolute nonsense.
Absolute nonsense.
I want nothing whatever to do with it.
And I think we've been just, you know, DEI is just a...
It's just one of many ways in which we have been led away from what it is to do the right thing.
We all know this.
Equity rather than equality is axiomatically wrong.
You don't want to end up in a situation where everyone is the same.
That's completely wrong.
You want people to demonstrate by their dedication, by their ability, that they are the best people for the relevant tasks.
All of this, I hope to goodness that Donald Trump's administration in the US, if he is genuinely anti-woke.
DEI being a pillar of the woke nonsense.
If he genuinely can sweep that away, and it is superficial, by its very nature, it's nonsense.
It has no roots, it has no foundation in anything that any of us would take seriously, if we were being honest.
It's absolute bollocks.
And the sooner we can sign DEI and all of that nonsense, To the dustbin of history, the better.
It's right to discriminate.
We all discriminate all the time.
You discriminate with your partner.
You've decided that one person out of eight billion is the only one for you.
That's discriminatory and it's right.
And we all do.
And society discriminates because you go, right, well, in this context...
This very narrow strata of people are appropriate for the job.
That's discriminatory and everybody else is like, don't be ridiculous, go and do something else because your skill set does not enable you to do this.
I believe in discrimination.
I think it's absolutely right to be as discriminatory as possible on an individual basis and at the societal level.
It's right to do that.
To find the right people for the right things.
Maybe in this instance DEI was another of the kind of tools of bewilderment and disorientation because one of the things I felt when having that conversation on Break Bread that was a Christian spirit.
Of inquiry, asking why, why, why, again and again when confronted with injustice, whether it's a demographic injustice or over-representation in a prison population, or looking at the history of nations and which particular people have been exploited, asking why is very, very important.
It's also important, I suppose, to derive the principles around which we organise our society, around some absolute set of ethics, and certainly when we were looking at that era of bewilderment that flowed forth from globalism.
With its giddy Olympic ceremonies and its extraordinary edicts and social initiatives, it seems sometimes like what they were trying to create and engender was confusion and bewilderment and doubt around all categories and around all moral certainty.
And certainly, to me at least, it seems they achieved that.
You two, thank you so much for joining me for another episode of Stay Free Oracles.
Remember to follow Neil and Lara on all of their social media platforms.
I know that Lara has a brilliant new podcast.
We'll post a link to that in the description right now.
Thank you for joining us this week.
Wherever you're watching, just remember we're available on Rumble Premium.
If you use our code, you get it for a lot cheaper and you get access to a lot more content from me and other Rumble content creators as well as an ad-free experience.
Lara, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you, Russell.
And Neil, would you be so kind as to do this again next week and regardless again with another themed outfit, perhaps a pith helmet, a butterfly net?
Who knows what you could pull out of the wardrobe?
Good Lord, yes, Russell, I could absolutely...
Can it be fancy dress?
Absolutely.
Perhaps that's what we should do.
I'm going to button up my shirt a little higher on the basis of some of the abuse I endured at the top of this show.
Thank you both for joining us this week.
Thank you all.
We'll be back on Monday with a brilliant conversation with Asim Malhotra and coverage of the extraordinary new claim that there could be another pandemic emerging from, you guessed it, Wuhan.
Here's a little bit of my conversation with Lecrae.
There's always a tension when you're talking about ethnicity in America.
There's always this tension, but it's not even a tension that is birthed in America.
Even if you go into the scriptures, there's ethnic tension between the Samaritans, between the Jews and the Gentiles.
And so that ethnic tension and the necessity or the desire to exalt one's ethnicity over the other is an age-old issue.
I think that, you know, God is not opposed to ethnicities.
Otherwise, he would not have said, oh, the Jews are going to be my chosen people in this era of time.
And then, you know, grafting in Gentiles and just it didn't have to be that way.
He could have just made us like this, you know, homogenous group of people with no ethnicities.
But he did it.
So I think it's something that we should honor and respect.
I don't think it gives us credence to see one as greater than the other.
You can get that if you are a member of Locals or Rumble Premium.
See you next week, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
Until then, if you can, stay free.
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