Jan. 30, 2024 - The Tucker Carlson Show
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| Back in September, media outlets around the world, almost all of them here in the West, in the English-speaking world, ran headlines that shocked a lot of readers and viewers. | ||
| Russell Brand, the movie star, the comedian, now the podcaster, was a sex criminal, a bad man, a sex criminal. | ||
| Now, none of the outlets ran the names of the accusers. | ||
| Who had been sexually abused by Russell Brand. | ||
| That was conspicuously absent. | ||
| But the judgment was overwhelming. | ||
| This is a very bad man, and he needs to be taken out of public view for the sake of the rest of us. | ||
| What was interesting about this is that, in fact, it was the final scene in a long movie that had been playing out for the preceding couple of years outside of public view. | ||
| This was an attempt to make Russell Brand shut up. | ||
| Russell Brand has views that diverge from those of most Western governments on big issues, not small things, big issues, questions of economic policy and war and peace. | ||
| And they decided we have to make this man be quiet. | ||
| Why Russell Brand? | ||
| Well, because in contrast to a lot of us who give our opinions for a living, Russell Brand had the capacity to win people over from the other side. | ||
| He hadn't spent a life identified with the far right, just the opposite. | ||
| Russell Brand was a man of the left. | ||
| And to most people, a cultural figure. | ||
| Everyone knows who Russell Brand is. | ||
| And so he had the power, the capacity to persuade. | ||
| And that was the threat. | ||
| So we thought it'd be interesting to go through in some detail what happened to Russell Brand. | ||
| None of this has ever been aired before. | ||
| The censorship campaign against him began with governments, not private organizations, but governments, their intel services and their policymakers. | ||
| And as we said, it played out outside public view. | ||
| And we thought it would be very interesting and important for people to know what exactly happened. | ||
| And so to find out, we are now joined by Russell Brand himself, and we're grateful to be. | ||
| Russell Brand, thank you so much. | ||
| Tucker, thanks for having me here. | ||
| So I didn't know any, I just want to say I didn't know any of this, and I experienced you because I didn't know you as a viewer, and I remember thinking, boy, that is one of the most articulate critiques of the brand new war in Ukraine I had ever seen. | ||
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seen. | |
| I saw one of your videos on the war in Ukraine. | ||
| And this was in the winter of 2022, two years ago. | ||
| And you were making kind of a remarkable case, not against the Ukrainian people and certainly not in favor of Russia, but that there might be real implications for the West if we get involved in a war that is not our own. | ||
| And you, I thought said it so well. | ||
| What I missed, and I'm now seeing, is that in March of 2022, you were denounced by an organization connected directly to the US government as an agent of Chinese propaganda. | ||
| For your views on Ukraine. | ||
| So let me just ask you your experience of this. | ||
| Did you know that you were being attacked as a Chinese propagandist for your views on Ukraine? | ||
| I actually didn't, and still at this point struggle to... | ||
| See entirely what the connections are between those two issues and how I would develop and cultivate a strong affinity with China. | ||
| I've never been to China. | ||
| I don't purport to understand China. | ||
| I certainly don't advocate for Chinese policy. | ||
| I've just got a relatively superficial dilettante knowledge of geopolitical matters in the South Asian seas. | ||
| It's not something that I would tie my colours to the mask for or be willing to be publicly ashamed, attacked and even jailed. | ||
| So, it happened, though. | ||
| And a lot happens on the internet that we miss. | ||
| But these, in my reading of it, and we haven't, by the way, talked about this off air, but my reading of it is these were the early seeds of a very deceptive plant that flowered more than a year later in September when you were accused of these crimes and demonetized and censored as a result of that. | ||
| But looking back, so you were accused by a group called CodaStory. | ||
| You published a story on its anti-disinformation newsletter. | ||
| Now, CodaStory is connected to the UK government, but it's also connected to the CIA. | ||
| How does it make you feel to know that you were in the crosshairs of two of the most powerful governments in the world and their intel agencies? | ||
| It seems to me ridiculously grandiose to even imagine that I would stir and arouse the interests of such powerful agencies and groups that the British government, if indirectly, would spend considerable sums on observing and de-amplifying content. would spend considerable sums on observing and de-amplifying content. | ||
| That true information shared through our platforms in the period of the pandemic was censored, was cited as high risk. | ||
| That companies like Moderna had spent considerable revenue tracking our content and again de-amplifying it. | ||
| That Dame Caroline Dynage, whose husband is a psyops expert that worked abroad in terrorism before deploying those methods and techniques and to some degree those teams to observe what they call disinformation and misinformation in the UK. | ||
| I recognize that the new emergent media spaces present a lot of possibilities, even with your kind compliments about our reporting on the Ukraine. | ||
| All we've essentially done is listen to... | ||
| Brilliant academics talking about the history of NATO and the coup in 2014 in Ukraine and Putin's explicit declaration that he would... | ||
| Let's put it mildly that Ukraine were not invited into NATO. Some of the regional disputes, how they're escalating tensions. | ||
| This is information that because of independent media is available. | ||
| And perhaps the function that we, our media organisation, have fulfilled has been to collate that information and convey it directly in an accessible manner to give people an alternative perspective to the homogenised mainstream opinion, which amounts to what I've learned over the last few years. | ||
| The amplification and normalisation of the agenda of the powerful. | ||
| That no opinions can be allowed into that space. | ||
| And I'm astonished by how jealously it is guarded. | ||
| There are points in my life where my personal self-regard would have loved the idea that I would be considered important enough to attack on this scale, to spend this amount of revenue and resources on. | ||
| But I'm now seeing that independent media itself is an extraordinary threat. | ||
| That independent media inevitably leads to independent politics. | ||
| I'm not sure, and I'm not sure if anybody could be sure of where this is all heading, what the exact teleology is, but it seems to be to do with mass centralisation, globalisation, significant attempts to control the information space that are so rigorously adhered to and protected that even what you might imagine to be a marginal voice is considered a significant enough threat to... | ||
| Warrant coordinated media attacks, expenditure on peculiar, clandestine, non-government organisations and think tanks that take their money from the military-industrial complex, from the legacy media, who, by the way, when they're critiquing independent media, they've got skin in the game. | ||
| They're not able to independently assess your work or my work or the medical opinions of Joe Rogan. | ||
| They have a vested interest in destroying those organisations. | ||
| In the last few years, I've learned about the Trusted News Initiative, which has extraordinary connections again to big pharma and sets of interest around the reporting on war that decided and determined that they are no longer competing with one another. | ||
| You in particular come from a journalistic background where it would have been commonplace for the great institutions of American media to compete with one another for scoops. | ||
| The New York Times versus the war. | ||
| Those days are gone. | ||
| It explicitly states on the Trusted News Initiative website, we are no longer in competition with one another. | ||
| We have to curtail and stay. | ||
| I think it even uses the word choke independent media and it's clear that there are now sets of globalist organisations funded by government but also corporations that are making deliberate, profound attempts to shut down any dissent in an astonishingly aggressive way and to be sort of caught up in it is... | ||
| Terrifying on one level, absolutely terrifying, particularly due to the nature of allegations I faced, but also revealing. | ||
| More importantly, it's revealing about the way that I believe the world and in particular this space will be affected and the way these events will continue to unfold in the coming years. | ||
| What I love about your critique is that you're coming to all of this pretty cold since you had a midlife career change. | ||
| You're doing something very different from what you did 15 years ago. | ||
| And I'm wondering if your assumptions haven't been completely blown up. | ||
| You're a British citizen, lived in the country for life. | ||
| How strange is it to know that your tax dollars are being used against you by your government, which they are, and how bewildering is it to find that the open contest of ideas that we were promised here in the West made the best idea win is a sham? | ||
| Yes, it's a... | ||
| Well, I suppose... | ||
| I went into the entertainment industry really with the giddy trajectory that propels a lot of people into those spaces, believing that there might be some fulfillment and certainly there would be excitement. | ||
| And when I was a denizen of that world, I was fostered and adored and celebrated and facilitated and lived the kind of lifestyle which I think is kind of common for people in that area, for single people, in my case, drug and alcohol free. | ||
| But certainly with an appetite for a promiscuous lifestyle, when I was part of it, I found it empty and unfulfilling, of course, as it would be, as anyone who's had those kind of experiences ultimately realises. | ||
| When I departed it, as a result really of various spiritual crises or commercial failures or a combination of those events, I really felt like a coming home to the type of values that I grew up with. | ||
| I grew up in a normal blue-collar town, greys, kind of like a place that's like New Jersey, I guess. | ||
| A kind of suburban, outside of the city, normal people, good values kind of place. | ||
| And what I feel like... | ||
| What happened is like, well, since I've had a family, since, you know, I've got a young son, I've got a couple of daughters, is I've felt like... | ||
| That I was able to deploy the skills learned through working in entertainment, as a man in recovery, in a new space. | ||
| And what simply began with myself and my partners is tell the truth about things you care about. | ||
| Kind of over time, it began to... | ||
| I spoke to Glenn Greenwald the other day and he goes, you know, you shouldn't be surprised that if you attack the most powerful interests in the world, the deep state. | ||
| Powerful corporations, the machinery of war, that you yourself are the recipient of tax. | ||
| Why is that surprising to you? | ||
| I know. | ||
| Because sometimes it just feels speculative, doesn't it? | ||
| You're talking about these really powerful organizations and the way that it's funded and the way that it crosses over and their malfeasant, underhanded, insidious activity. | ||
| And then as it starts to become more popular, as more and more people realize that it's actually true, as more and more people become willing to take back control in their own lives, as more and more... | ||
| People refuse to consent to being treated in this sort of infantile way, having their autonomy and personal and mental and spiritual freedom undermined, their connection to their land undermined, their connection to nature devoided. | ||
| You start to realise that you're actually operating in quite a powerful territory, that while power is very serious and it has to work very hard to maintain its grip. | ||
| So these organisations, it doesn't surprise me to find that... | ||
| The British government, through the Department of Culture and Media and Sport, the very person, the very people that sponsored the new, rather draconian, online safety bill personally contacted the height of these allegations and attacks on me, contacted social media platforms and asked if I would be demonetised. | ||
| But they're the body that regulates them. | ||
| They have the ability to find those organisations. | ||
| They're the very person who is sponsoring the online security bill. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| I understand what you're saying. | ||
| So these accusations appeared. | ||
| There were, I don't know if this has changed, but at the time, there were no names attached at all. | ||
| You were accused anonymously of committing crimes. | ||
| And then your own government, which you pay for, reached out without telling you to online service providers and media organizations and said, please kick him off and censor him and take his money away. | ||
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Before any kind of trial, before any... | ||
| Proof that you were guilty before any names were attached. | ||
| That happened. | ||
| Yeah, and it's the same people that are sponsoring online safety bills, which amount to facilitating further censorship. | ||
| But what a betrayal by your own government. | ||
| Well, it's astonishing if you regard your government to be in a position of service rather than a position of domination and control. | ||
| But what's become apparent in recent years is what the nature of our relationship with government is, that they are there to rule and control and dominate. | ||
| And whilst they may now do it with an aesthetic of care and with the language of inclusivity, I believe the threat of authoritarianism is far, far greater from those that use the language of... | ||
| of liberalism than these emergent, somewhat nationalistically oriented populist movements present because they are leveraging that power now. | ||
| They're interested in censorship. | ||
| They're militarizing the police force. | ||
| They're introducing protest laws. | ||
| They're introducing censorship laws. | ||
| Through their actions, we can observe them. | ||
| Through their fruits, can we know them? | ||
| We can see. | ||
| And if you try to dissent, if you try to oppose even what I consider to be a relatively marginal scale, then the consequences are severe and immediate and robust and terrifying. | ||
| I think what makes your specific case so compelling is that if they could do it to you... | ||
| A person who had the admiration of a lot of people who weren't interested in politics and was pretty famous and had some means, etc., then the average person stands no chance against these forces. | ||
| So with that, if you don't mind, can we get specific about a couple of things that you mentioned? | ||
| The first is Moderna, which is a drug company. | ||
| It's part of Big Pharma. | ||
| Tell us how you intersected with pharma and what you... | ||
| With Moderna and what you think they did to you. | ||
| During the pandemic period, we reported continually about some of the We talked about a government official called Jonathan Van Tam, who was the public face of the government, saying, you know, we should be taking vaccines, recommending that the measures escalate. | ||
| Jonathan Van Tam subsequently took a position at Moderna. | ||
| We reported on that. | ||
| People within the FDA. We took positions at Moderna. | ||
| We reported on that. | ||
| We accurately reported that both Pfizer and Moderna were making $1,000, like a second or a minute. | ||
| We reported accurately and thoroughly about the degree to which Big Pharma were profiting from a situation in which Albert Baller explicitly said it would be inhumane to profit from this global crisis. | ||
| This meant that we were tracked by agencies employed by Moderna. | ||
| They had like us on a high-risk category. | ||
| This is the reporting of Lee Fang on his sub-stack. | ||
| Not just me, Jay Bhattacharya, Michael Schellenberger, Alex Berenson, a number of what you might call anti-pandemic measures voices or strong critics of the way that the pandemic unfolded were under observation by agencies that were either funded by Big Pharma, sometimes the government. | ||
| And in a sense, what I've started to realise, Tucker, is this cartilage. | ||
| between the state and the corporate world is often provided by these unusual organizations that are claiming to be observing disinformation or monitoring, but they're actually crushing dissent. | ||
| That's what they're doing in practice. | ||
| Dissenting voices are being aggressively crushed by almost any means necessary. | ||
| Media organizations are collaborated in a way that is unprecedented in order to shut down dissenting voices. | ||
| And it appears to me that this is part of something I don't know that we've seen anything like this before. | ||
| So what you're saying is that these organizations which purport to be independent are not actually independent from government. | ||
| They merely give government, the politicians and the intel agencies, especially some... | ||
| Plausible deniability, some distance from what they're doing. | ||
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
| I'm saying that, Tucker, that seems to be the function. | ||
| There's a group called Logically, and Logically have received millions of pounds of taxpayer money. | ||
| And what they do is observe dissenting voices around, in particular, COVID and pandemic measures. | ||
| But they are now working in the United States, apparently, in order to regard misinformation around election campaigning. | ||
| It seems that this group received... | ||
| government money in order to control online spaces. | ||
| So if you're worried about the security of electronic voting machines or absentee ballots who are denounced by these people and censored by them. | ||
| That's precisely how it works. | ||
| And of course, they employ former FBI agents, CIA agents. | ||
| In a way, I suppose, what happened during the pandemic period, because of the Twitter files, for example, we started to learn the degree to which the deep state were involved in social media companies, the degree to which they were censoring and shutting down information, information that we now know to be true. | ||
| Of course, you'll be aware that Mark Zuckerberg said we did censor true information. | ||
| The category, in fact, of malinformation is information that's... | ||
| True, but harmful to the agenda of the powerful. | ||
| Well, it seems like groups like Logically and the Public Good Project are specifically empowered to control, censor, de-amplify information that is harmful to that agenda. | ||
| This seems totalitarian. | ||
| To control what people are allowed to think, I think that's the definition of it. | ||
| I suppose that's in essence what I've started to feel and report on consistently as you I'm not someone who's affiliated organically with conservatism or what you might regard as right-wing politics, although I, of course, recognise the legitimacy of a whole variety of political views and the right of people to hold different views from one another. | ||
| But it seems to me that authoritarianism now is being deliberately veiled in the insidious language of care, concern, safety and convenience. | ||
| It seems to me that we're in a time where we lurch from one crisis to another, that the crisis is always used to legitimize certain solutions. | ||
| And a docile or terrified public is willing to participate in this proposed solutions that usually involve giving up their freedom. | ||
| We are continually being invited to give up our freedom in exchange for safety or convenience. | ||
| And it seems that this process is radically escalating. | ||
| And I feel that this is something that we will see yet more of in the coming year. | ||
| I feel like you've spoken publicly about this, that we're potentially on the precipice of serious, and to use your term, a hot war with Russia. | ||
| And that's being reported on in my country right now. | ||
| It's like we're being prepped, groomed, primed for war is coming. | ||
| That we're being kept in a state of constant anxiety in order to induce compliance. | ||
| That the ongoing stoking of cultural tension is to ensure that people don't begin to recognise that actually we have far more in common with one another than we do with these curious sets of establishment interests that seem to be Transcendent of national democracy. | ||
| To be explicit, I'm talking about organizations like the WHO, NATO, the WF, and their astonishing influence. | ||
| Added to that, the types of groups we've discussed already that have been exposed due to Lee Fang's reporting. | ||
| Think tanks and apparently independent organisations who are not independent when you look at where they get their money. | ||
| Big Pharma or the government or the military industrial complex or the kind of people they employ. | ||
| People from deep state agencies such as the FBI and CIA that have extraordinary affinity with the legacy media and their ongoing agenda. | ||
| So what I suppose I'm sensing is that totalitarianism now will not bear the inflections or aesthetics of the 20th century military. | ||
| Guys in medals with moustaches thumping their fists on a desk will be calmly told by gentlemen with beautifully coiffured hair or elegantly speaking ladies that just for our safety and just for our convenience we will be returning to our homes. | ||
| And anyone that has an audience or a base or an ability to communicate with people to disrupt those types of narratives will be identified and destroyed. | ||
| Well, they've identified you, and they're trying to destroy you in the most obvious way, in a way that hurts not just you, but your family. | ||
| Was there ever a moment when this happened in September where you thought, you know, it's just kind of not worth it to be doing what I'm doing? | ||
| This is so painful and so threatening to my family that maybe I just bow out and stop talking. | ||
| My son was born with a heart condition, and while this was happening, he was undergoing heart surgery. | ||
| He was 12 weeks old. | ||
| And I suppose what that did, Tucker, is it revealed that what we were experiencing was a public concoction. | ||
| I am aware that I put myself in an extremely vulnerable position by being very, very promiscuous. | ||
| That is not the kind of conduct that I endorse. | ||
| And it's certainly not how I would live now. | ||
| I've been shown a good many things as a result of these events. | ||
| The value of my family, the value of friendship, the value of being able to speak publicly. | ||
| And I mentioned my son because throughout it, I was able to maintain what is really important in life. | ||
| And as you have actually said, we all know how this ends. | ||
| Attacks like this, a crisis like this, hurtful though it is to be accused of what I consider to be the most appalling crimes, to be accused of this is very, very painful and very hurtful. | ||
| But I am being shown that there are consequences for the rather foolish way that I lived in the past. | ||
| Although, of course, again, to reiterate due to the nature of the world we live in, of course, I deny any allegations of the kind that have been advanced. | ||
| But what I've seen is the significance of family, the importance of Having values that are transcendent of this, the importance of God. | ||
| It's very easy to talk about God. | ||
| I talk about God all the time. | ||
| But when you need God is when the outside world shows you the reality of your powerlessness. | ||
| This can just happen. | ||
| This can be undone. | ||
| This can be unspooled at you. | ||
| With our boy, and to be in environments, as you understandably and obviously are, when you have a sick child, you're in environments with other people that are in the exact same position. | ||
| And you are shown what is real. | ||
| And you are shown what is truthful. | ||
| I'm invited to look at life very differently. | ||
| So there are many things that I'm grateful for, as a matter of fact, even though it's not a situation that I welcome. | ||
| As I say, these are allegations that I object to in the strongest possible terms. | ||
| The fact that it happened concurrently, while I had the opportunity to see the strength and dignity of my wife and the beauty of my little son, and the reality of the people in this world that care for sick children, that perform heart surgery on tiny babies, shows me, like, look at all of these realities. | ||
| How can you live in the ridiculousness of their version of events? | ||
| I couldn't have been more open and public about the way that I lived when I was younger. | ||
| I was promiscuous. | ||
| If anyone wanted to have sex with me, I'd have sex with them. | ||
| I publicly announced it at the beginning of all shows. | ||
| The idea that that was some sort of a smokescreen for criminal conduct is absurd. | ||
| But I recognize now that unless you're willing to be a participant in these systems of compliance and distraction, then you pose some kind of evident threat. | ||
| A big threat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, obviously, the response proves. | ||
| The power of the threat that you posed and still do. | ||
| But again, just quickly back to my question, because this was so intense and it happened as your son was born and undergoing the surgery, did it ever cross your mind like, I clearly have hit the third rail and I'm out. | ||
| I've seen that happen a number of times. | ||
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Have you? | |
| Yes, I have. | ||
| And yes, with well-known people. | ||
| But you didn't do that. | ||
| And here you are. | ||
| You clearly thought about it and you've decided that you're going to continue. | ||
| Forward. | ||
| Was that a hard decision? | ||
| Do you sometimes think that there is no choice? | ||
| You have no choice. | ||
| Did you ever really have? | ||
| Yes, I do feel that way. | ||
| Strongly. | ||
| There is no choice. | ||
| We have no choice. | ||
| Something strange is happening. | ||
| Something ulterior is moving. | ||
| Something very important is happening. | ||
| I'm not purporting to be a person that lacks self-interest. | ||
| I feel fear. | ||
| I feel anxiety. | ||
| I'm a recovering drug addict. | ||
| You know what that kind of psychological baggage that comes with. | ||
| But I feel like, what is the purpose here? | ||
| What are we doing here? | ||
| I've been shown, in a way, lived a pretty amazing life. | ||
| I grew up in a normal background. | ||
| I got super famous. | ||
| I experienced all of that giddiness, all of that hedonism, found it empty and hollow, and have been returned to a position where people could actually be connected. | ||
| I actually feel incredibly optimistic because of things like the ongoing agricultural protests around the world, the trucker protests, the lengths that people will go to to criminalize not just an individual like me, but whole movements will be criminalized as far right as Nazis, whatever language is required but whole movements will be criminalized as far right as Nazis, whatever language is required to delegitimize the rejection of this global authoritarianism So when I say no, I didn't think for a second about doing anything different. | ||
| You know, I didn't think that. | ||
| I don't think like that. | ||
| And it's not out of bravery. | ||
| It's something beyond that. | ||
| Because I think, you know, sometimes I would like to just be with my little daughters and my wife and my son and just live peacefully. | ||
| But I don't know, Tucker. | ||
| It doesn't seem like there's a choice. | ||
| There isn't a choice. | ||
| There isn't a choice. | ||
| But, you know, even under those circumstances, some choose cowardice. | ||
| And again, I've certainly seen it quite a bit. | ||
| Dynage, you mentioned a person called Dynage. | ||
| Can you explain? | ||
| What you mean by that, who this person is, and what role she plays in what has happened to you. | ||
| When you become accustomed to dealing with American politics, it's huge sums of money. | ||
| It's powerful agencies that you see depicted in Hollywood movies, characters played by great movie stars. | ||
| And so when you return your gaze to British politics, you feel like you're dealing with some sort of drudgery, some sort of ludicrous heritage porn. | ||
| Who are all these dames and baronesses and titled individuals? | ||
| They can't be doing anything. | ||
| Serious. | ||
| Someone called Dame Caroline Dynage, who sounds like a Downton Abbey regular. | ||
| But actually, though, Dame Caroline Dynage put forward the online safety bill. | ||
| She's married to a dude that does military psyops and now uses those very psyops with the domestic population. | ||
| She's the person that got in touch with the social media platforms demanding that I be demonetised. | ||
| They seem to have an extraordinary agenda. | ||
| Like, the term... | ||
| Can I just ask you something? | ||
| I looked up because I'm not as familiar with your politics as I should be. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I looked her up and I think what I was so struck by was that she's a member of the Conservative Party. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that suggested to me that there isn't a choice in British politics. | ||
| There's really just one party. | ||
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Of course. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| It's a uni party. | ||
| But they're not even... | ||
| They're not really pretending. | ||
| Here's an extraordinary thing that appears to be playing out. | ||
| In addition to just being casually informed by the legacy media that we're on the precipice of war with Russia and that conscription might be reintroduced in 2024, there was a COVID inquiry in our country, which, by the way, I don't imagine for a second would have happened without independent media reporting, without voices like Jay Bhattacharya, who was shut down. | ||
| Or voices like Michael Schellenberger or Berenson, people that have been shut down and vilified at large and extensively. | ||
| The COVID inquiry has already cost £145 million. | ||
| It's been booted off and delayed indefinitely, but at least until after the general election. | ||
| Like many countries, there's an election in our country this year. | ||
| But as usual, it's between two neoliberal, what you might term centrist parties that are ultimately dominated and controlled by the same concerns where an extraordinary focus is spent. | ||
| On the tiny, minute differences. | ||
| But the party nominally of the left is ultimately a centralist neoliberal party. | ||
| The party nominally of the right is a neoliberal centralist party. | ||
| They may quibble about some issues that seem significant and certainly those issues are stoked and amplified. | ||
| But neither party will say, we are going to have a thorough investigation into what went on in that pandemic. | ||
| That clearly was a lab leak. | ||
| It looks like it was a bioweapon. | ||
| It's been concealed. | ||
| The people that we entrusted with our response to that pandemic These kind of stories are never told. | ||
| There are no legacy media organisations that worked in conjunction with one another to attack me, evidently, and by their own reckoning over a series of years. | ||
| They are not conducting investigations into... | ||
| Epstein Island. | ||
| They're not conducting investigations into the nature of the pandemic, how it was funded, where the money went, where it came from, the efficacy of lockdowns. | ||
| Where are these investigations? | ||
| Even the fabled Times of London? | ||
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The fabled Times of London! | |
| Such garbage. | ||
| It's astonishing. | ||
| So there's nobody, and pardon my ignorance, I'm peering in from the outside, but there really isn't any big media organization in your country that's even trying to answer the question, what was that? | ||
| Where'd this virus come from? | ||
| No one's doing that. | ||
| Do you know one of the things that I find terrifying about becoming more educated about this space, Tucker, mostly by listening to more educated voices than my own, is that many of the things a person might instinctively feel, such as you feel like, you know, forgive my ignorance, I don't know much about British politics, but the way that one might intuit, hey, should we not be provoking Russia into a war? | ||
| Don't they have nuclear weapons? | ||
| Should we think very carefully about that? | ||
| I mean, how much do we want Ukraine in NATO? And do we even need NATO anyway? | ||
| The kind of things you might think if you... | ||
| Didn't go to university. | ||
| If you're a regular blue-collar person working for a living, maybe in the police force or the fire service or as a nurse or as a teacher, something that gives real value to your nation, the kind of things you might think, they're true. | ||
| Those ideas are true. | ||
| And in order to prevent you from reaching those ordinary everyday regulations, a machine is put to constant work to conquer the space of your attention, incessantly and relentlessly, filling your mind with dumb ideas and dumb distractions. | ||
| Making you believe that some sugar or a screen might be a convenient palliative as your children are marched off into an unwinnable forever war. | ||
| We've been thinking lately with the hoofies and stuff. | ||
| I'm being deliberately glib. | ||
| You go from not ever having heard the word hoofy to being invited to hate the hoofies. | ||
| We've got to hate the hoofies now. | ||
| Just to move a battleship into that region. | ||
| Think of the taxpayer dollars. | ||
| And it's not as if the Pentagon are going to be passing an audit any time soon and telling you where this money is actually going. | ||
| And $2 trillion was spent on Afghanistan. | ||
| And if you think of the before and after picture of Afghanistan, oh, well, thank God we spent that $2 trillion because before Afghanistan was, and now Afghanistan is. | ||
| It's very difficult to fill in those sentences, isn't it? | ||
| And like, so what I'm saying is, is like your sort of easy dismissiveness of what British politics amounts to is probably right. | ||
| Two corrupt parties pursuing the same ultimate end. | ||
| Keep people tyrannized. | ||
| Keep people distracted. | ||
| Keep them turned on one another over minor issues that will not ultimately affect their lives or the lives of their children so that the agenda of the powerful can be pursued without opposition. | ||
| War, the economy, public health, food supply. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Water supply. | ||
| I mean, these are the energy. | ||
| These are the things that matter. | ||
| And they're the things that are never discussed openly, ever. | ||
| Why can't we have conversations about that? | ||
| With the global farming protest, it's not accurately reported on. | ||
| When it is, it's reported on with a particular accent and always with the insinuation that farmers have suddenly moved their attention from the raising of crops to racism now. | ||
| The farming's more of a hobby. | ||
| I've got to return to my true love. | ||
| That's having strong views about varying ethnicity. | ||
| There's no question that a rise in nationalism is an understandable response to rampant globalism. | ||
| But the ongoing sort of finger pointing and condemnation of ordinary people I identify with, I recognise it because I grew up in those communities, professional metropolitan people don't like working class people, don't like ordinary people, and now they've found a way to legitimise their hatred. | ||
| Oh, they're all disgusting. | ||
| They're all racist. | ||
| Look at them in their MAGA hats. | ||
| Look at them with their white vans and their flags. | ||
| look at them with their perspectives, with their unearned views and their belches and their beer. | ||
| It's a kind of legitimisation of a loathing of the people that are most connected to the nation. | ||
| People that, generally speaking, a couple of generations ago were asked to sacrifice the lives of their sons and daughters for the idea of nation, an idea that they're now being told doesn't exist. | ||
| For me, what we need to see is an emergence of a different type of populism that transcends the boundaries of left and right. | ||
| These things are happening organically and naturally anyway. | ||
| And what I think is happening is, Because the internet is ultimately a creation of the military. | ||
| Clearly they didn't accurately... | ||
| And I think that we're at this crux point. | ||
| Which way is it going to go? | ||
| Are people going to wake up to the reality that we are being confronted with? | ||
| Or are we going to sort of nervously cling on to the idea that somehow through comfort and panaceas we might hold on to some old life? Increasingly, I think is over. I watched some of that speech you did in Ottawa or wherever you were in Edmonton, Canada. | ||
| And two of the things I thought were important is knowing that you are not God. | ||
| You are not God. | ||
| It's not about you. | ||
| You have to have some purpose in your life. | ||
| And secondly, people must... | ||
| Re-learn a connection to their land. | ||
| Our connection to our lands has been broken. | ||
| Now, many countries, particularly in a post-colonial world, have complex relationships with their land. | ||
| Sometimes that is a relationship with a land that had inhabitants prior to our arrival, or the arrival at least of settlers in your country, for example, or in Canada that you were describing outlining. | ||
| But we are divorced from nature. | ||
| We are divorced from our lands. | ||
| We are divorced from one another. | ||
| And we are fed such an empty... | ||
| Hollow, vapid, fatic, dire of lies. | ||
| And you said at one point, oh, you should, you know, this is this vast country. | ||
| You could all have six acres each. | ||
| And I felt like, oh, the crowd responding to that. | ||
| People are frightened of the people of Britain or the people of America or the people of Canada or Australia or the people all over the world. | ||
| For surely those pharma protests are happening in Sri Lanka. | ||
| They're happening in India. | ||
| They're not just happening in Europe or Anglophonic countries. | ||
| They're happening everywhere. | ||
| They're happening everywhere. | ||
| And I feel that that's precisely the direction. | ||
| We need to return to sovereignty of the individual, sovereignty and sanctity of the connection between people and their land, maximum amount of power in your own life and the life of your community and your loved ones, not this transition of power to increasingly centralized forces and this infantilization and neutralization and castration of individual and familial power. | ||
| Can I ask you a question that you may be able to answer that I've been... | ||
| Meditating. | ||
| I'll give it a go, Tucker. | ||
| I'll tell you that. | ||
| Well, you're just uniquely positioned to answer it because you've seen both sides. | ||
| So the things that the people in charge hate include nature. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And the class of people who are most useful to your nation. | ||
| You described them. | ||
| Cops, firemen, teachers, nurses. | ||
| All of them were crushed during COVID, by the way. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And farmers. | ||
| And it's indisputable that if you don't have those people, you don't have a society. | ||
| You could get rid of every think tank and every sociology department and every liberal arts university and probably be okay. | ||
| You get rid of your farmers, you starve to death. | ||
| So it's not obvious why the leadership of a country would hate the very people they need most and hate the most beautiful and valuable thing they have, which is nature. | ||
| Why do they hate those things? | ||
| It terrifies me to contemplate, Tucker, that... | ||
| People like Alex Jones and in our country, David Icke, who aside from some views that are impossible to corroborate around quite occultist and shall we call them marginal ideas, difficult to corroborate ideas, when it comes to the subject of globalization and the increasing authoritarianization of our planet, appear to have been ahead of the curve. | ||
| You can see them 20, 30 years ago saying the empowerment of NATO, the empowerment of World Banks and the WHO. It's extraordinary. | ||
| And it seems to me that the disempowerment of ordinary people, the condemnation, the demoralisation of the public to create people that just are weary and broken. | ||
| And if not enslaved, then so dependent it amounts to a form of slavery cannot be inadvertent. | ||
| It seems to be a denial of something fundamental that I, in my language, I would call spirit, the right to be who you are, that there isn't something fundamentally ugly or wrong with you, that you are allowed to be who you are. | ||
| And I see that as a universal principle that will be applied all the way from the left to the right across various ways that people claim their individual. | ||
| It seems to me that if you start to attack those pivotal infrastructural roles, I was struck when speaking to some of the people that you work with, a man that's been a cop for 26 years in New Jersey, 35 years in the security services. | ||
| These are people that give their lives for a country. | ||
| So to tell those people that your country doesn't mean anything or to alter the meaning of what a nation is or alter what your contribution has been, it seems to be about a kind of disorientation. | ||
| And it's difficult, actually, sometimes. | ||
| The reason I mentioned at the beginning of this rather corroming answer, figures that are broadly condemned as conspiracy theorists, but then aren't we all these days? | ||
| The reason I mention them is because they talk specifically about ideas to do with spirituality, morality, and ethics. | ||
| And it's hard for someone like me to consider that the goals of this global establishment are anything other than power, finance, dominion. | ||
| But when you talk about this loathing of nature, whether that's human, Yes! | ||
| Because there's no rational explanation for that. | ||
| How could you want to despoil nature? | ||
| How could you hate human nature? | ||
| How could you want to hurt people? | ||
| Those are not rational responses to anything. | ||
| What we're watching are the fruits of spiritual war. | ||
| If you can give a better explanation, let me know. | ||
| Certainly the solution seems to me to be spiritual. | ||
| And even when they're talking about ecology and evoking words like Gaia, like the spirit of the planet, it seems oddly utilitarian. | ||
| The earth is a resource. | ||
| Even when claiming to care about the types of energy industry that might be most beneficial and those which might not be as beneficial, I don't see reverence. | ||
| I don't see an acknowledgement of the sacredness of the earth, that the earth is not a resource. | ||
| It's not, you know, obviously the left and right are classically almost at this point divided around the subject of climate change. | ||
| And what I feel is who... | ||
| Who among us ought not love our planet and behave respectfully and reverentially and lovingly to our planet? | ||
| And how is that going to happen if no one has a relationship with it? | ||
| I think like 90% of, in my country, 90% of the land is inaccessible to most people. | ||
| 90% of the land is privately owned. | ||
| Like land that used to be commonly held is now all privately owned. | ||
| There has been successive law after successive law that has moved power and control and the land and nature herself into the hands of an elite. | ||
| And it's this, I suppose... | ||
| Even where it would have been risible. | ||
| You're getting back to feudalism. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's get back to good old feudalism. | ||
| What was wrong with feudalism? | ||
| Why were we making such a fuss about it? | ||
| The idea that you and I are people that operate on different sides of a political spectrum becomes exposed as ridiculous when the anti-authoritarian aspect of what we both clearly believe in has to become the clear and pivotal point around which all... | ||
| Political views have to now start to coalesce. | ||
| You are either going to oppose what's happening when it comes to globalization and centralized authoritarianism, or you are going to be crushed by it individually and collectively. | ||
| How do you see, and I'll stop with this, compound question. | ||
| How are your family and friends holding up in the face of this assault on you and your family? | ||
| And how do you see this playing out, the battle that you just described? | ||
| Are you hopeful or no? | ||
| You know, because I've been subject to personal attacks, I have a program of recovery. | ||
| I've been in recovery for 21 years. | ||
| In a sense, it's what enshrines and helps me practice my relationship with God. | ||
| It's the most important thing to me. | ||
| The thing I have to most be observant of and have to keenly avoid is descent into self-centeredness when I am very frightened. | ||
| It's very easy for me to drift into becoming quite myopic and insular. | ||
| What I've observed, like, in this period, from a personal perspective, is that, like, I'm incredibly fortunate. | ||
| I've got an amazing wife. | ||
| I've got amazing, beautiful children that are healthy and doing well. | ||
| I've got incredible people that I work with. | ||
| Like, oh, my God. | ||
| And another thing that's been amazing is, like, for a month, publicly, continually, I was, like, you know, called the worst names you can call a man. | ||
| And then I'd go out in public and people were like, Russell! | ||
| We support you! | ||
| We support you! | ||
| And one time I was wearing a family with all their daughters that were aged between 15 and 19. I was thinking if there were one group that would be negatively affected by what's just been publicly said about me, it would be the parents of teenage kids. | ||
| And people aren't. | ||
| People aren't buying it. | ||
| People aren't buying it. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| People are waking up. | ||
| People are starting to think, well, Jesus, is there going to be a better example than your former and perhaps future president? | ||
| The more they hate him, the more people like him. | ||
| The more people like him because what they know is they don't trust the establishment anymore. | ||
| They cannot trust the establishment anymore. | ||
| Speaking from the perspective, look, this isn't the first time I've known personal crisis. | ||
| I'm a drug-acting recovery. | ||
| I'm a product of a single-parent family. | ||
| I'm a normal person from a normal background. | ||
| But what I would say is that, in a sense, a crisis becomes an invitation. | ||
| A catastrophe is an invitation. | ||
| And it seems like whether you're on the left or right, everyone believes catastrophe is coming. | ||
| And it will be an invitation. | ||
| It will be an invitation. | ||
| Because if what we're being offered is a slow grind into endless war and more and more authority, And more and more control of our personal lives and our ability to worship, our ability to affiliate, our ability to pray. | ||
| If what we're being invited to accept is the colonisation of the self, of our ability to think freely, then what have we got to lose when all they're offering us is more war, endless pandemics that are being legislatively enshrined even now through the WHO treaty. | ||
| What have we actually got to lose? | ||
| I think in a sense, perhaps they are, you know, if there is one God, one all powerful God, then surely that God is at work now. | ||
| And surely that God is creating the perfect conditions for our mutual awakening. | ||
| And perhaps what's required is the spur, the ignition of something so unbearable that people will awaken rather than endure it, rather than endure it any further. | ||
| And perhaps that's what we're being offered now. | ||
| Yes, of course, it seems like we're on the precipice of catastrophe geopolitically and from various potential health pandemics, but also it's. | ||
| It seems to me like a potential offering to awaken, and I don't think we have any choice other than to see it that way. | ||
| Russell Brand, you have not been broken. | ||
| You are at your very best. | ||
| Your very best, and I really appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks, Taka. | ||
| Free speech is bigger than any one person or any one organization. | ||
| Societies are defined by what they will not permit. |
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