Stay Free - Russel Brand - The Voice of the People — or a Threat to Democracy? - SF617

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July 21, 2025 - Stay Free - Russel Brand

01:09:36

The Voice of the People — or a Threat to Democracy? - SF617

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	Financially rewarded for that, as well as it being reassuring for my family's future in an economic time of strife, trouble, chaos, disillusionment, fracture, and diaspora, which are some of the things I'll be talking about.
	Yes, with Marjorie Taylor Greene.
	Is she the kind of politician that we need?
	I.e., she has integrity, she's kind of earthy, she's connected to her voter base, her demographic, her constituency.
	We'll be talking about all of that.
	Let me know what you think in the comments and the chat.
	Remember, on the show tomorrow from DC, we've got Dr. Oz, head of the CMS, and his wife, Lisa Oz, joining us in studio to talk about the complexity of Maha principles in government.
	If your personal health, spiritual and psychological sovereignty is contingent on the falling of many behemoths, on the capture and fall of many Leviathans, what chance is there for it happening?
	Also, what we're going to be talking about today with Charles Eisenstein, whose influential book, Sacred Economics, really preempted the cryptocurrency revolution and indicated that even financial and fiduciary exchange ought be undergirded with spiritual goodwill.
	If there are any of you kind of crypto bros out there, let me know what you think about that in the comments and chat.
	And if you're watching us on YouTube or X or any of those places, get on over to Rumble where we can talk freely about Barack Obama and the recent revelations around the Russia hoax.
	Join us here where we can talk about AOC, Marjorie Taylor Greene's just outright causer of fraud.
	You're going to love that kind of stuff, I reckon, aren't you, guys?
	But remember, come to Rumble to watch this show because YouTube is restrictive.
	It's part of the Trusted News Initiative.
	It's ultimately an arm of legacy media that controls and constricts your ability to even receive truth, let alone understand it, if such a thing were possible.
	Now, Charles, if you could get on mic for us, one of the things that like, like we've chatted a few times when I've seen you in and around the Kennedy campaign when he was still running as an independent and even when he made his extraordinary and now one would have to argue successful alliance with the Trump administration.
	But before that, many people will be familiar with your writing, Sacred Economics in particular.
	But when you wrote that book, not books, long essay on coronavirus, I thought it was a kind of a pivotal moment, certainly in my own understanding, where you identified that what coronavirus had brought to the forefront, if I'm understanding what you wrote correctly, was a kind of inability for us to address mortality because of a sort of spiritual crisis, a spiritual crisis at the heart of our culture, even beyond America.
	A pandemic by its nature is global.
	Where do you think that crisis, that spiritual crisis, that inability to process death, that inability to accept reality is now?
	Now that we have Trump in office, now that we have Bobby Kennedy, Secretary Kennedy, excuse me, as head of the HHS, now that we have the disappointment and disillusionment of the Epstein file, that peculiar synecdoche that essentially stands for, you didn't let us know about the baddies and the Gates and the Clintons and the Obamas and all of their occultist practices.
	What was revealed in COVID and where is that revelation now?
	Now that Trump is not a sort of a renegade totem of nationalist and populist and interests, but he is the president of the United States and a man with significant power, seemingly still controlled by some of the interests that would have existed if Kamal Harris was in office.
	Well, that's an awful lot.
	Yeah, but you've got ages.
	You can take a long time to answer and you can ponder it.
	Plus, you could use the time when I'm asking the questions to think of a few.
	Well, you're so entertaining to listen to that it paralyzes all thought.
	I hope you put that to good use sometimes.
	I've used to actually use it to sleep around a lot, but it turns out that I should have been more circumspect about how that could be utilized subsequently.
	Yeah.
	You know, one thing I'll say, Trump, as his name indicates, you know, a Trump card in a deck is a wild card, a joker, which can be any card.
	So he's almost custom-made to be a projection screen.
	Like the actual man, Trump, who he is, is very different, very different than the totality of all the projections of what he is.
	And that lends him very well to mythological narratives.
	So one of these narratives is the archetype of disclosure, where all of the secrets, all of the truth, all of the secret history is going to be made plain, all of the crimes, and we're finally going to have justice.
	We're going to know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.
	We're going to understand how the world works.
	Because the shadows will have been revealed.
	I don't think that that day is ever going to come until we are psychologically and spiritually prepared for it.
	Man, the archetype of disclosure, I was about to say, well, what is that?
	And then I thought, Hermes and stealing Apollo's cattle and Prometheus stealing fire and any mythic figure that has granted fire stolen from the gods and given it to the population.
	I suppose that is that archetype.
	Now, I myself in my own museums have considered that Trump sit, like that, I know what I projected onto Trump.
	I know why I became and remain to a point enamored of Trump.
	My am more towards Trump is no different than any one of a billion metropolitan Democrat intellectuals that would say, well, you know, we know the Democrats ain't great, but they're the best of a, you know, the best, least, worst option, all that kind of stuff.
	I came to realize during the campaign, Trump is a bulwark and an obstacle to globalist imperialist interests, which if not interrupted now, I believe could reach a kind of Huxley-esque, Orwellian, and perhaps most alarmingly of all, Kafka-esque level of bureaucratic control, where the fugue of their compassion will consume us all, and we will all be carrying ID, and we will all be inoculated from everything, perhaps, but breathing, and maybe on some occasions that.
	And what I personally projected onto Trump was this guy is anti-media, which he is, you know, like he certainly understands media very well.
	When he's saying you can't trust the media, they're liars.
	And I'm a person who feels like I've been lied about by media.
	I'm like, yeah, there he goes, my guy.
	Now, it's not as simple as that because I, you know, I admire his entrepreneurialism, I enjoy his rhetorical style, I enjoy his sense of humor, and I respect the office of the President of the United States.
	But this idea that he somehow has a set of attributes that allow us to project onto him, do you think that all political leaders have that?
	Or do you think that's particular and unique?
	It's especially true of him.
	But, you know, I think one thing that COVID did is it really, for a lot of people who hadn't questioned normality before, it really dissolved the veil and showed us like people had like a deep-seated anxiety about the direction of our civilization.
	And COVID kind of gave us a preview of where we were going anyway.
	You know, the trend toward more and more of life happening online, the trend toward fear and technocratic control, the distancing of human beings, the migration of shopping, education, dating, conversation onto digital media.
	Like none of that started in 2020.
	These are all trends that have been going on for a long time.
	So it kind of showed, COVID gave us a preview of where we were headed and said, is this what you actually want?
	Because this is where we have been on autopilot going.
	And by making an unconscious choice conscious, it actually gives us a choice.
	And a lot of people welcomed the interruption of normality that happened with the first lockdowns.
	But underneath it, the fear narrative and the intensification of not just technologies of control, but also the mentality of,
	I would even call it progress, that says that human progress means that we exert more and more precise control over the body, over transactions, over economics, over human choices, over society.
	We put everything, this is the dream, you put everything into a data set.
	And then you can use essentially mathematics and predictive technologies to prevent crime, to reduce carbon emissions, whatever your goal is.
	As long as everything is surveilled and accounted for, then you know what to do.
	But what is the purpose of life?
	Is it to be as safe as possible until you die?
	And this is what you were talking about before, like the phobia of death and the avoidance of death and the pretense that we're not going to die that comes through in the obsessive worship of youth, the sequestering of old people away in nursing homes, the euphemisms and the regime of safety that is used to justify everything, which is also fundamental to fascism.
	Fascism is also about security.
	And finding something, see, you have to find something external to control, to fight against, to dominate in order to gather the fascistic us.
	You need a them.
	And so that could be a virus.
	It could be, you know, a racial or ethnic minority.
	It could be immigrants.
	Right and left both do this.
	It could be right-wing extremists.
	But the basic pattern is, let me tell you who the bad guys are.
	That's the first step.
	Once the ringleader, the bully, has pointed the finger at the bad guys, then mob psychology does the rest.
	And nobody dares get close to you, Russell, because you have been tainted.
	You've got cooties.
	Even an accusation is enough because then all of us have this grade school level instinct to stay away from you.
	Like I got flack when I was first on your podcast a number of years ago.
	People were like, you were on a podcast with the same guy who also interviewed Jordan Peterson.
	Please denounce and repudiate Russell Brand so that I can stay associated with you because you now have his cooties because he has Jordan Peterson's cooties.
	And now I've got Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s cooties and he has Trump's cooties.
	So it is unsafe to be associated with you.
	And now, because I'm talking to you, with me.
	This Cooties pandemic that we're going to have to tackle, I suggest a vaccine.
	We've clinically trialed it on up to eight mouses.
	Moderna will be releasing the Cooties vaccine any moment now.
	It does have some side effects.
	A little bit of myocarditis.
	You might get some dizzy spells and you might find that you don't have the ability to get, maintain, or even look at an erection.
	But all these things are a small price to pay for Sweet Lady Freedom.
	Now, I've got a lot of questions for you, Charles, and here they are.
	It's going to come in the form of a great big long monologue.
	If you're watching this on YouTube or X or wherever you're watching us, make your way to Rumble Rumble Premium or Rumble Premium.
	Remember, if you get Rumble Premium, it really helps me in a variety of ways.
	We'll stay on YouTube for a moment longer and X for a moment longer because I want to put this question to you and provide some additional context for those of you watching and those of you chatting.
	Let me know if you have any comments or, well, obviously, comments you're going to just do freely.
	You free speech advocates, you raconteurs, you maniacs, you lunatics, you dinglings.
	This is what I want to say.
	Charles comes from a sort of, I don't know about this if I'm if I'm characterizing you correctly here, but this is how I encountered you in the culture.
	You're kind of one of them intellectuals that emerged out of an era that kind of brought together ayahuasca, psychedelics, new for understanding of technology, a sort of nouveau shamanism, an attempt to sort of extract meaning out of this increasingly nihilistic world.
	When you were offering, and I know that, you know, you have a particular kind of contamination.
	Yeah, you've got cross-pollinated now because you've got RFK cooties, you've got RB cooties.
	I mean, you are a kind of menagerie of viruses at this point, Charles.
	But in a sense, I always saw your kind of natural home as a kind of, you're an intellectual, you're an accredited intellectual, you're sort of a liberal progressive intellectual.
	Something very strange happened in our culture a little while ago, and I don't feel like the pieces have really coalesced well enough yet for us to make out the mosaic and new patterns that may emerge from this endless fracturing of taxonomies and this tumbling of false idols.
	This is what I feel is when this safety control dynamic that you're describing, that we can keep you safe, there's a peculiar eschatological position that's being taken here, that when you deny God, part of what you do is you sort of somehow attempt to replace God, that there is a requirement for God.
	And I know of apologists, notably Joseph Boot, who makes the claim that the state, and of course, that the state, in its secular claim that there is no God, that God is dead, is attempting to replace that very God that it is renouncing and claiming doesn't exist.
	And in the following ways, some of the things you said in your first answer, other than the repeated use of the term cooties, which I didn't allow to diminish the tone of the whole show, is you talk about worship.
	You talked about fear of death.
	You talk about purpose and meaning.
	In this visit to DC, I've also going to be having, I've had a conversation with Margaret, excuse me, Marjorie, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
	That's coming up in a minute.
	But we've also spoken to the head of the CMS, Dr. Oz, and his wife, Lisa Ros, who's running the Maha Movement.
	I know you were affiliated with the Maha Movement and Moment.
	And that was very extraordinary, I think.
	And with a more objective media, I think it would have been noted that something strange was happening when a figure as marginal, peripheral, and controversial as Robert Kennedy, a man who has said, you know, who's allowed himself to be affiliated with an idea such as it's possible that vaccines contribute to childhood autism.
	We should examine that.
	A man who is a lawyer has taken from some pretty significant corporations, the court, and has won.
	A person who's, if, you know, when I read the real Anthony Fauci Charles, I was like, oh my God, I can't believe someone is saying this about Anthony Fauci and then have stood back in near awe as more and more of Kennedy's claims in that book have been proven to be true.
	Now, there's a lot I want you to unpack here, but I see now that your answers are as long as my questions, so I feel kind of safe.
	And what I want you to touch upon is what's happened to this sort of there are now people that still claim to be kind of almost metropolitan intellectuals, avant-garde intellectuals, and they still are ultimately, in a sense, carrying water for the Obama administration.
	We all knew that the Russia hoax stuff would have had powerful figures behind it.
	We all know or intuit or sense that even if there is no literal Epstein list, and maybe even if there weren't literal occultist sex parties, it's, you know, Ghislaine Maxwell's in prison for something.
	Jeffrey Epstein killed himself for something or was evacuated from that place.
	We all sense that there are elite institutions that are corruptly contributing not only to our personal incarceration, but maybe even the manifestation of deep evil.
	The liberal left, that's over, isn't it?
	That's not happening anymore.
	There are a few people sort of shivering back there in the caves, unwilling to leave, pointing fingers at you, notably actually.
	What's happened to Charles Eisenstein?
	Why is he hanging out with you, whether it's Russell Brand or Bobby Kennedy or whoever?
	But what I say is populism now is we have to popularize whatever messages we believe to be true.
	And surely can we, Lord, trust the technology we have now to disseminate and proliferate the message.
	Allow, as the right-wing folks would say, the marketplace of ideas to succeed.
	And I, personally, I've become baptized, I've returned to Christ, and I kind of experience and receive what, given the nature of our relationship and the nature of this conversation, a kind of psychedelic, vivid, living Christ that is talking about consciousness itself.
	He's talking about the light itself.
	On the crucifix, we don't have to live in the undifferentiated, primordial superstate of potentiality that shamans and druids might do well in.
	But some of us that are easily defeated by the flesh, that are easily defeated by the world, that are easily defeated by mental demons, we need to cling to that cross.
	And in fact, why take the chance of clinging?
	Now me on, baby.
	So I wonder what you feel is going to be the revivifying movement in this weird death cult moment.
	I wonder what you feel about the position of the intellectual left, the direction of the Democrat Party, the significance of Maha.
	And we're going to be going to an advert after that.
	So hit us, Charles.
	Gosh.
	First, I might just say.
	Some other things you want to argue with as well.
	Yeah, you don't need to accept it.
	We do live in a kind of a secular religion.
	And the priesthood would be the people we call scientists and doctors who administer the rituals that draw from their religious metaphysical views and contribute to those.
	For example, the metaphysical views basically, these are the religious doctrines of the scientific rational worldview that you and I grew up in and that seemed to be the very essence of enlightened thought.
	It's that Reality is something objective, that things that happen either happen or they don't happen independent of our consciousness, that everything real can be quantified, that there is no intelligence operating outside of what we humans impose upon the world.
	We are the source of intelligence, but the events of the world are just the random concatenations of force and mass, atoms and void, bouncing around according to mathematical laws.
	Therefore, progress means the progressive colonization of an empty, meaningless universe with human intelligence.
	And this religion has really been dissolving because its promises have not been manifested.
	The promises of social and technological utopia.
	I mean, we were supposed to have, you know, we were supposed to have conquered all disease and eliminated crime and eliminated poverty and living in a paradise by now.
	But instead, this is what's fueling the populism you talked about.
	Things are actually getting worse and worse, even when the numbers say they're getting better and better.
	But when the average child in America spends something like seven minutes a day outdoors unsupervised, when addiction and depression and autoimmunity are at epidemic levels, then no matter what the numbers say about GDP and educational attainment and poverty and all those kind of things, like we know something is wrong here.
	And it goes all the way to the foundation.
	So a lot of people are turning toward either new or ancient religions, other views of the world.
	And the primary thing, whatever, you know, whether you're like a New Age shamanistic pagan or have returned to Orthodox Christianity, what all of those have in common is that they understand that there is an intelligence in all things, that this isn't just a random accident, and therefore that the purpose of life isn't simply to survive it.
	I mean, if there is no purpose to life, if meaning and purpose are something that human beings invent, then there's nothing left but to pretend that that's not true and to survive.
	Or create some sort of perpetual orgasm machine.
	That's what you could do, is a machine that got you to a state of orgasm, then kept you there.
	Because all you've got is pleasure.
	You've tried that urban pleasure.
	I tried that, but that became hell after a while.
	Yes, I couldn't escape and I couldn't turn the machine off.
	Nope.
	Sometimes the machine talks.
	I mean, this is an absolute, it's a nightmare scenario, really, Charles, the old orgasm machine, as was the heroin machine.
	All of the machines don't work.
	Don't trust the machines.
	So yeah, in the end, you're left even with Hedonism, nihilism.
	It doesn't take you to a good place.
	And also, even when you were describing chaos, you talked about mathematical laws.
	And so the evidence, the hieroglyphic poetry of intelligence is all about us, endless, redolent miracles and golden scales.
	This started to break down in the 60s and 70s when chaos theory and the idea of emergence in non-linear dynamic systems came about, where order comes from chaos everywhere.
	Life is an innate property of the universe, and God is in everything.
	So this is what we're all coming to, to understand that there is, see, if there is an intelligence operating outside of ourselves, then our purpose is no longer to dominate the rest of reality, but to participate in that intelligence and to ask, how can I serve that which wants to be born?
	Serve.
	Serve.
	Yeah, it's serve.
	It's serve.
	Hey, thanks, Charles.
	Hey, what we're going to do now, if you're watching us on YouTube, get ready for Marjorie Taylor Green.
	She is coming up.
	You can fire that graphic, Dylan, and if you can find it, if you've got it, there's a 30-second countdown because YouTube, you bastard, we're leaving you.
	And why wouldn't we leave you after all the deception and your participation in rumor-mongering and skull duggery and propaganda and filth and the way you use that algorithm?
	You should be ashamed of yourself, Rumble.
	We don't even have an algorithm.
	You come over here.
	If you're doing well, you'll be rewarded.
	If you ain't got Rumble Premium, you ain't get Rumble Premium now.
	And if you want to see Marjorie Taylor Greene really sort of quite aggressively attacking AOC, then join us.
	But I think that's going to be the headline.
	Also, she sort of seems to suggest that she's, you know, funded by Israel, which is a good position to have hit.
	Hey, so get over.
	Not Marjorie Taylor Green, incidentally, AOC.
	Come on over and join us in Rumble.
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	This is Russell Brand.
	Stay free.
	I'm live in DC.
	Let me know in the comments and chat if you have any questions for me or MTG or Charles Eisenstein here.
	We'll be with Dr. Oz and Lisa Oz tomorrow.
	Dr. Oz is, of course, the administrator of the CMS and is therefore under the stewardship, one might say, leadership certainly, of Secretary Kennedy, who worked with Charles Eisenstein for some time, I believe in an advisory capacity, because Charles Eisenstein, this is me characterizing him, and you can probably see him wince and tighten his anus as I go through this description, a kind of progressive intellectual influence by sort of psychedelic movements, kind of in a way, like you were just saying of Marjorie Taylor Greene, how she represents the collapse of left and right.
	You might argue that you and I both represent the collapse of left and right.
	And in a way, a good way of understanding or perhaps analysing it for a minute will be through the terms of Martin Guri's book, The Revolt of the Public, who many of our viewers will be aware was a former CIA analyst who wrote that in 2001, he noted in his position at the CIA that as much information was published that year as in all history up to that point.
	And it kept doubling every year, as it has done subsequently, all the way up to 2025.
	And he offered us this.
	Oh no, the old elites and centralized institutions will not be able to control information being disseminated at this scale this quickly.
	It's over.
	New elites have not yet been instantiated or certainly infroned that will be able to handle the new dynamics.
	What we will see will be arguments to centralized authority, centralized authority, excuse me, through fear, likely war, crisis, pandemics, and to break down authority and to return to localized forms of government, community and control, which is, of course, what we continually advocate for on this show, partly to diffuse the constant, incessant, unbearable arguments in the culture around identity, to name but one thing.
	If you have localized authority, if you use current technology to maximise our ability to run our own communities, wouldn't that represent huge, huge progress, real progress at this time?
	I wonder, Charles, how you see that broad argument.
	Are we in a struggle to control information?
	As you seem to indicate earlier when you were talking about safety, like safety and control, the desire to turn the world into one sort of giant airport where to keep you safe, you've got to take your shoes off and maybe have your bottom looked up.
	That's not a suggestion, by the way.
	I trust that there's nothing in anyone's bottom.
	Yes.
	I start from that premise.
	Yeah, so this collapse of left and right, this is where I came to see the division in society as the fundamental problem.
	Because all of our other problems are technically easy to solve if we simply agreed on solutions that are even pretty obvious.
	But instead, we are expending 95% of our energy fighting each other.
	And so this left-right dichotomy, I think I've heard you even say this before.
	It doesn't make sense.
	Like, since when is advocating civil liberties now right-wing?
	Or since when is suspicion of mega pharma corporations right-wing or opposition to the weaponization of the Justice Department and the courts?
	Since when is that right-wing?
	Well, when you see the solution to whatever problem as winning a battle over the other side, in other words, when you see that your side, when you believe that your side is the good guys and they are the bad guys, then any means is justified in order to win the battle.
	So the formula is, for example, Donald Trump evil.
	Donald Trump Darth Vader.
	So yeah, so okay, you know, we cheated in all these different ways, but it's justified because, you know, if he gets into office, it's going to be the second coming of Hitler.
	And, you know, we have to use any means necessary, even inventing entire Russian collusion hoaxes in order to stop him.
	And if you don't exert every iota of your being to join this battle, then you are responsible for the ascension of the next Hitler.
	So it's this casting of the drama into terms of good versus evil.
	That is itself the problem.
	Because once you've done that, then you yourself become evil because any means is justified to attain your end.
	And your end simply becomes the brand logo of your team in its campaign of total war against the other.
	This mindset, this mindset is itself the problem.
	Because look at any time you set up an other and you set up A drama where healing, transformation, et cetera, et cetera, comes through defeating the other.
	You get Gaza.
	You get Palestine.
	Those are the others, and here's the self.
	The Republicans are the other, and the good people, we're the good people.
	And so when I got involved in politics, and then when Bobby Kennedy joined Trump, I was like, look, guys, you're not understanding the situation.
	This is not Bobby joined evil.
	This whole global template that you have to make sense of the world is an inheritance of an ancient mistake that puts us in opposition.
	Because where did evil come from?
	That whole concept.
	Originally, evil was the wild.
	It was the barbarians.
	And it was the wild beasts.
	And good was cultivation, civilization, the city walls.
	And outside of that was chaos.
	So originally, good was order, and evil was chaos.
	And it was a program of conquest.
	So the legacy of that way of thinking traps us into the same results again and again and again.
	The same results of the war to end evil, the war to end all wars, the final solution.
	Same thing.
	And so I said, look, guys, if you're going to cast the entire MAGA movement as just a bunch of crazed xenophobes and bigots who are, you know, just channeling the worst impulses of the human being, then there is no, you're, You're not going to understand their situation.
	And you're going to replicate the same pattern that has locked humanity in horrific drama ever since history began.
	So, like, that, and for saying that, people blame, you know, me personally, actually, for getting Donald Trump elected.
	And I'm like, no, even if you had defeated Donald Trump, there will be another one and another one and another one as long as you do not recognize and acknowledge the way that your own party and your own movement has betrayed its original ideals and used those simply as a brand logo.
	Also, that betrayal now, I think, is so entrenched and the ideals are so remote, so lost, almost invisible in some fallen garden by this point, that it's a claim that can no longer be made.
	And I now see sort of Trump as the harbinger of a different type of politics forever.
	And I don't even mean with the aspects of his character that pertain to entrepreneurialism or nationalism or bombast or charm or a good sense of humour or like, you know, take good or bad.
	There's, of course, a variety of attributes in the human being.
	What I mean is there's something more significant than that is changing.
	And I think you can see it even in the first year of his administration in the fissures and fractures that are emerging within it, whether that's around the Epstein list, whether it's the sort of Elon Musk's rhetoric and potential action around new parties.
	I think the changes are going to be enormous and significant and rapid and fascinating.
	I would take issue with your notion of the emergence of issue of evil, excuse me, because I recognise that from a sort of a social perspective, settlers versus itinerant people is an ongoing source of tension, the nomads v the settlers.
	I understand that.
	But from a scriptural perspective, what I note is that the position of submission that might come from one who accepts this God and would serve this God that we discussed in sort of broader terms, but obviously I'm discussing from a Christian perspective, comes about mostly when one is able to reject this premise.
	And there's a bit of verse that really helped me with this.
	It is Luke 10, 18.
	And it was this, that when the disciples, when the 72 disciples go out and do healing, not just the 12, they are casting out demons and conducting healings.
	And they return somewhat hubristically, one might imagine, from Christ's response to them when he says, after they went, we were healing people.
	We were casting out demons.
	It's unbelievable.
	He says, I was there.
	I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning.
	You will conduct many healings.
	You will move among snakes and scorpions for your names are written in the heavens.
	I see this in this way, mate, and obviously all of you as well.
	That Lucifer's true crime, Satan's sin, the original sin that chronologically at least must precede the sin of mankind, us, the sin of disobedience, the sin of not following basic edicts, of not following authority of eaten from the tree of knowledge.
	And I recognize there are many metaphors that you could use there when it comes to altered states and transcendence, surely.
	But what I would like to acknowledge and highlight is that in the disobedience of Satan, what was brought forth was the idea that we are sovereign.
	I am God.
	I am in charge of my reality.
	This is Lucifer's hubris and pride.
	I want to compete with God.
	I don't want to surrender to God.
	What I note as a convenient adjunct and analogy in myself is when I close the circuit that one might see as neurological in myself and collapse into a kind of self-service or self-pity or anything that's dominated by self, I become kind of redundant and you might call it evil, like somehow inertly evil, because I will tender to the urges.
	I will worship the pantheon of inner humours or deities.
	I will worship my own assertiveness or my own will or aggression or my own urges or my own lasciviousness.
	All of those things are driven to the forefront.
	In this state of submission, this openness, which is referred to elsewhere in scripture, particularly in the Old Testament, as a kind of living flow of water that we oughtn't interrupt with a system, that we oughtn't try to foreclose.
	Allow the flow to happen.
	You are part of the living flow is offered again and again in Jeremiah and Isaiah, throughout the Psalms.
	Allow the holy water, consciousness itself, the light, allow it to flow, allow it to flow.
	That in this state, the dynamic of we are not available to evil in that state.
	As soon as we sort of collapse from a kind of wave into a particle, as soon as I, absolutely myself, as soon as I collapse into self, I'm not available for God anymore.
	So whilst I can see that what you're saying is to some degree accurate when it comes to sort of social dynamics, preceding social dynamics must be the individuals and indeed the consciousness that fuels the individuals.
	And how I recognize the value of scripture, which of course is preempting all of these conversations about meaning and purpose and sex and lust and power and all of these things, is that when I remain in this state of submission, not to any authority other than God's, to no authority other than God's, not to government authority, not suddenly to the authority of my own imperious urges, that I become a participant in God's grace, almost to the point where it could be aspatial and atemporal.
	And it's interesting that that has sort of packed in it a bunch of kind of quite Eastern and maybe Buddhist ideas about identity and not worshiping identity.
	And in fact, they're not being a self or an I. And also, though, what I get in Christ that I can't get anywhere else is that without him, without the actual and literal surrender to the man Christ as much as the God Christ, I am no longer centrifugal.
	I'm no better than anybody else.
	I have no value that no one else, that isn't shared by anybody else.
	Not that I don't have unique attributes or qualities or whatever, but that I don't have a value unto him that is worth anything else.
	And for someone like me that was so devout to the culture, which leads us to individualism, I think it's so clear that rationalism in the end, without God, without the divine, I'm not saying that reason itself isn't a good tool.
	Of course, it obviously is.
	But reason without divine principle leads to individualism, materialism, selfishness, Epicureanism, not in a good way.
	As you earlier said, what else is there?
	Only pleasure.
	Like, you know, there is a God.
	So without God, I'm God.
	And I just can't ever be in that position again.
	And thankfully, I don't have to be because someone took that on themselves.
	God, God, in the end, it isn't even really just pleasure.
	You know, I mean, you've had the experience of being an addict, you know, and it's a lie.
	It's a deception.
	I mean, maybe there's pleasure the first ten times, but eventually you just need the fix even to feel normal.
	And ultimately, I understand God as being significantly different.
	God is not opposed to our pleasure.
	Pleasure is not something that we have to sacrifice in order to serve God.
	We have to actually get really serious about what gives us actual pleasure.
	Pleasure comes from meeting a need.
	That's why it feels good to eat when you're hungry.
	But we have a lot of needs that are much, much deeper than those that can be met by food or sleep.
	Yes.
	There is only one breath, Charles.
	All of these things are in there.
	That's the thing.
	I thought that my brilliant, brilliant, fast little brain would eventually find some sort of quirk anomaly that I could use to sidestep him, the hound of heaven, as he's been called in poetry.
	But everywhere, through a metaphor, meaning is provided.
	The ultimate storyteller tells stories.
	The ultimate storytellers tell stories, and you can't have story without meaning.
	It's the embodiment of meaning.
	Meaning, meaning self is impacting the Christ.
	Now, I know you could probably do two hours on that, but the simple fact is this.
	I'm hungry.
	I'm very, very hungry.
	And when you said, when you're hungry, something in me captured me very, very powerfully.
	The barbarians burst through that gate.
	They grabbed me by the gullet and they demand to be fed.
	Charles, thank you for joining me today.
	It's magnificent.
	I hope our conversation goes on in a variety of arenas and forums because there's lots of talk about.
	We've got to talk to you about, you know, God and theology at some point.
	We've got to.
	What are we going to do?
	I'll have something to eat now.
	Come to the Bible Museum.
	Come back.
	Hey, thanks for joining us, Charles.
	That was really good.
	What are you doing?
	Running?
	Hey, staying fit.
	I always ask you that.
	I know I do.
	And then I think you always say you don't do any running.
	You don't look like you've got much.
	Swim in the ocean.
	Swimming in the ocean.
	No, I think I just have some kind of genetic anomaly.
	You certainly just do.
	Can't put on weight.
	You can't do it.
	It can't be done.
	Hey, thanks for joining us, Charles Eisenstein.
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	Thanks for joining us, Congress.
	Thanks for having me.
	I'm with Marjorie Taylor Green, of course.
	Marjorie, when I first met you, it was at the Milwaukee RNC Republican National Convention.
	And what I felt was that Marjorie Taylor Greene, and this is given that I come from a somewhat more liberal background and I'm British and stuff, I don't know if you know that about me, I felt that it was, I thought this is the kind of person that you want in politics and it's politics that should change rather than Marjorie Taylor Greene if politics can't accommodate her.
	What I mean by that is people that seem connected to their class, to their community, to their nature.
	And I said before also, I think in one of your spats with high-profile feminists of the left, likely AOC, but possibly others, I said that were Marjorie Taylor Greene a figure of the left, her femininity would be celebrated, but it's regarded as kind of obnoxious.
	And I think there are some narratives around class about that.
	But also I feel like I also feel it's obviously a sort of a partisan idea.
	Now, like one of the things I've generally felt for a while is that politics has become divorced from the people that it's supposed to govern.
	Indeed, one of the obvious components of Trump's rise to power has been that he seems like a person who's connected to people.
	Can you please tell me how different it's been from moving from the campaign phase that we were plainly at when we met at the Republican National Convention to where you are now in office, in Congress, in government, in administration, in power?
	You've been quite outspoken about some of the areas where you feel that you have been let down.
	I wonder if you could reiterate what you think those differences and distinctions have been now so I can understand.
	Broad question, deep issues.
	Well, I'll give you an example.
	So just this past week, when we were in session here in Washington, Congress was in session, and we were having an important vote on our Department of Defense Appropriation Bill.
	That's the funding bill that funds our military, extremely important bill.
	And I widely supported pretty much everything in the bill, especially pay raises for our military men and women, as well as supporting the defense of the United States of America.
	Within this bill is foreign aid, foreign aid for foreign countries and foreign aid for foreign disasters, etc.
	So I entered in amendments to strip out the foreign aid, and I'll go through what they were.
	One of them was $15 million to educate soldiers in Africa about providing activities for education about how to not get AIDS.
	Russell, I really hope to God that by now people know how to not get AIDS.
	And I don't know why the American people have to pay $15 million for that for soldiers, adult men, adult soldiers in Africa.
	It's simple.
	So I'll keep going, though.
	It gets more ridiculous.
	$118 million for humanitarian aid in situations like floods.
	In Texas, we just had a catastrophic flood that killed hundreds of people.
	It's so devastating.
	And $118 million has to be funded on the front end to help other countries and their floods.
	I'm sorry.
	Not that one had happened, but just in case one did, we would love to see that $118 million go to the people in Texas.
	Okay, here were the other ones.
	$500 million for Jordan.
	$500 million for Israel.
	Yeah, $500 million for Taiwan.
	So I had entered amendments to strip those monies out.
	And here was the hypocrisy.
	They all failed.
	All of these amendments failed.
	I also had an amendment to block any funding to go to Ukraine.
	Ukraine is not a member of NATO.
	We are not obligated contractually to fund that war, fund that government, pay for anything there.
	The American people are so tired of it.
	So when you talk about the disconnect between leaders in Washington, D.C. and the American people, the disconnect is broad and wide.
	But here was what was exposed, and I'll just go on one of them.
	The amendment that pulled, that would strip the 500 million that goes to Israel.
	Now, here, I want to give some context on that because I support the people of Israel.
	I support people in all kinds of countries all over the world.
	I want the best for everyone.
	I sincerely do.
	I wish everyone well.
	America has $37 trillion in debt.
	Israel is less than $400 billion in debt.
	They're doing really well.
	Israel is doing so good.
	Their government provides government-funded health care, government-subsidized college tuition.
	That's not happening here in the United States for the American people, but yet the United States government gives Israel $3.8 billion every single year.
	And then in our defense appropriations bill was an additional $500 million to go to Israel.
	So my argument was, hey, we're hurting over here in America.
	We're $37 trillion in debt.
	We are not taking care of our own people.
	Can we stop funding these foreign countries, no matter who they are, friend or foe, whatever, stop funding them?
	Here was the vote count.
	Only six.
	We had only six people that voted for my amendment to strip that.
	Do you know who was not on that list?
	AOC.
	AOC, the darling of the progressive left, the one that claims to be against all the wars and wants to lead, cares about people, cares about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, wants to stop the genocide.
	She did not vote for my amendment.
	She would not do it and she got called out hard.
	So there's a lot happening and there's a lot of details that are important.
	Even in the answer to this one question, which was as you identified, admittedly a broad question, there's quite a lot for us to unpack and diagnose.
	One, it seems that the kind of misadventures that were characterized by the USAID Farago continue in a more diffuse way.
	I think most people will think it's ridiculous to hear that 15 million of aid is being sent to an African nation in order for people to be educated about AIDS, adult male soldiers makes it especially ridiculous.
	I suppose possibly I try to, as I'm sure any sensible orator does, envisage the response of an adversary.
	And I'm sure they would say, no, Marjorie Taylor Greene has mischaracterized that $50 million.
	It was for this.
	It was for something totally valid and exceptional or useful.
	But we all know that a significant part of the mandate of Donald Trump was America first.
	That's what people, it seems, were largely galvanized by.
	And I don't particularly see that as selfish, solipsistic, inward gazing, or hateful or unchristian.
	I see it as a country that needs to pivot in order to retain, in some instances, the dignity of your great nation.
	I suppose the aspect of your answer that's going to elicit the most interest for our audience is the fact that there are still significant, there's still significant financial, in addition to military aid, going to Israel, even though there's a wide conversation publicly about both the ethics and expedience of that.
	And I see that you're approaching the argument primarily financially and from the perspective of an American politician, which, of course, is your actual perspective and the position you stand in.
	And I obviously strongly identify with that.
	Now, do you see no, as you seem to indicate in your answer, no distinction between giving aid to Ukraine, Jordan, or Israel?
	Do you think there's anything in particular about the relationship with the United States of America with Israel that's not shared with America's relationship with Ukraine, which seems to have sort of a military, geopolitical component, a financial component, seems to demonstrate the ongoing power of the military-industrial complex?
	Jordan, there are some people, detractors of Trump, so think his relationship with the United Arab Emirates nations is dubious, even somewhat visibly and laughably.
	Hillary Clinton mocking him, of course, for that jet, even though through the Clinton Foundation, they took significant aid from comparable nations much earlier.
	But it is Israel likely that people will be interested in, and I wonder if you consider that for good or for ill, there is something unique about your country's financial, military, and ideological relationship with the state of Israel?
	Well, I think it's important to recognize that Americans are the most generous people in the world.
	They donate compared to any other country, Americans on their own privately donate more money than any other country in the world.
	They donate to all kinds of causes all over the world, to hunger, to AIDS, to educating children, stopping child sex trafficking.
	Americans are genuinely generous people.
	Now, Israel, of course, is our ally.
	However, Israel is a nuclear-armed nation, and everyone seems to forget to talk about that.
	Their government is also a secular government.
	This needs to be separated from Israel of the Bible.
	So there is that separation there.
	And then we can just make the financial argument that America is flat out broke.
	We're $37 trillion in debt.
	We don't spend, we give $3.8 billion every single year to Israel, even though Israel is less than $400 billion in debt.
	Even though Israel is a nuclear armed nation, we don't give $3.8 billion to end homelessness in America.
	We don't give $3.8 billion to end the mental health crisis in America.
	We don't give $3.8 billion to help the drug crisis in America.
	And I think the American people are looking at all of this and saying, why not?
	And it's become an unfair situation.
	And then also when we speak of Ukraine, Ukraine, everyone knows what Ukraine is.
	It is a money laundering war.
	It's a CIA operated war that didn't start in 2022.
	It started back before 2014.
	And that war has been going on.
	And we are not obligated in any way to defend Ukraine.
	We're not.
	We're obligated.
	I'm a representative.
	My job title is literally representative of the people.
	We're obligated to fund and defend the American people and solve our problems here.
	And so this is becoming such a loud cry that it spans the left and the right.
	It's completely all across all political boundaries that Americans are getting so fed up that they're seeing past the lines of politicians, past the lines of Republican and Democrat, and they're saying, who in Congress is actually going to finally stand up and say no more foreign aid, no more funding of foreign wars, no more foreign intervention.
	And when is our representative government going to represent us?
	So in fact, your position is, and you believe it's the position of the majority of Americans, and I find it hard to dispute that, is we don't want to aid foreign wars anymore.
	Neither do we want to fund really anything.
	And even if it's a sort of a comic example like Sesame Street in Iran or sort of condoms for people in a war zone or some of the ridiculous USAID examples, or even if it's something that's somewhat more legitimate, you would say in a simple matter of prioritization with America having the various crises that it has had,
	whether they're economic or geological, the recent tragic floods in Texas, and the ongoing drug crisis, mental health crisis, homeless crisis in your country, all those things should be put first, which in some ways are, would it be fair to say, sort of, I'm a Christian, I know you're a Christian, but some people might argue that that's a sort of socialist position, like that social care and welfare should be afforded to drug addicts, the mentally ill, the homeless.
	If there were some miracle where the administration of the United States would say, like, yeah, we are going to stop military aid, and gosh, Lord alone knows what kind of obstacles there would be to stopping military and financial aid to Israel and Ukraine and Jordan.
	You can imagine the fanfare, the conflagration and the hysteria.
	But if that were miraculously achieved, are you saying that your position would be that you would support social projects that are helping homeless people, getting business owners back on their feet, helping the mentally ill, ending the drug crisis, which we all know in the end amounts to attacking large interests in both in real estate, in pharma?
	We know how the fentanyl crisis came about.
	So if you are going to represent the people, doesn't that mean in the end, initially, there should be a stemming of the hemorrhaging of American financial aid to foreign nations, whether that's for war or other projects, all of them, maybe.
	That's what I guess I'm inviting.
	And two, would you support and how would you support, at least in the context of a contemporary political environment, socialist projects that amount to welfare for the poor?
	How do them things tally, Congresswoman Green?
	Yes, good questions.
	Let's take it from the context of where we are now.
	We're $37 trillion in debt.
	So I'm a business owner.
	If my business is exceedingly so far in the depths of debt, that means I'm going out of business.
	That means I'm literally not going to survive.
	That's where the United States government is here.
	So it's hard to make an argument for socialism because we already can't afford what we're doing, literally cannot afford it.
	Here's where the American people are today, young people.
	So my children are 22, 25, and 27.
	Two of them are already married.
	One is still in college.
	Their generation, the 20s, even the 30-year-olds, and then of course the kids coming up behind them, they literally have no hope for the future.
	Right now, rent is ridiculously expensive.
	Buying a home is totally out of reach.
	They don't know if they'll ever be able to buy a home.
	And a few of them have, but most of them cannot.
	They cannot buy a home.
	They cannot afford it.
	Their credit cards are maxed out.
	They go month to month, credit card bill to credit card bill, paycheck to paycheck.
	Their cost of living is extremely expensive.
	And then let's look at their insurance.
	Health insurance is unaffordable in America.
	Absolutely unaffordable.
	That came on from the Affordable Care Act, which is Obamacare, which totally started, laid the groundwork for government control of health insurance.
	And what it did is it reduced the amount of competition in the industry.
	And a lot of health insurance companies went out of business.
	Prices have skyrocketed since then.
	Car insurance is unaffordable for them.
	Absolutely unaffordable.
	Every single year, car insurance goes up and up and up.
	They're taxed in every single way.
	They're taxed when they buy something on a sales tax.
	They're taxed when they renew their tag every single year for their car.
	They pay taxes on every single part of their life.
	So here we are at $37 trillion in debt.
	And these young people are going, what the hell are you doing?
	How am I going to survive in the future?
	So how can we even make the argument for socialism?
	It's literally out of reach.
	It literally is out of reach.
	It's hard to say, oh, sure, we're going to fund your health care.
	Really?
	How are you going to do that?
	I mean, this is what kids, young, they're smart.
	Young people are smart.
	They're looking at leaders going, oh, really?
	How are you going to give me government subsidized health care?
	We're $37 trillion in debt.
	And they were going to say, oh, we're going to give you free college.
	Really?
	How are you going to do that?
	We're $37 trillion in debt.
	Every single time a leader is saying, we're going to give you free stuff.
	They're looking back at the leader and going, well, you're funding this war.
	You're funding this foreign country.
	You're sending billions every single year, hundreds of billions of dollars all over the world.
	How are you ever going to fund anything for me when you won't stop funding everything for the entire world?
	We have military bases all over the world, but yet we don't have military bases lined up along our southern border.
	It's just, it's the hypocrisy of all of it that is becoming so exposed that young people today are literally checking out.
	It's becoming unbelievable.
	I know you've been in Congress for a while.
	You've been a public figure for a while.
	It's my fifth year.
	So as you move closer to the center of power, it seems to me as an observer that it's extraordinary that you could have such robust views that are so antithetical to how these systems and structures operate and continue to operate.
	You are a kind of independent media creator's dream in that you're clickbaitable, you're aggressive for the way you speak.

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