Bret Weinstein and Robert F Kennedy Jr discuss the upcoming Rescue the Republic Rally in Washington D.C. on September 29th, 2024.
We delve into the alarming rise of totalitarianism across Western republics, emphasizing the urgent need to protect civil liberties and democratic values.
This rally aims to unite Americans against censorship, the erosion of informed consent, and the encroachment of the surveillance state. Be part of the movement to reclaim our freedoms and restore the Republic!
My guest today is one of my great and old friends, Brett Weinstein, and we're going to talk about our big rally coming up in Washington, the Rescue the Republic rally, and that is on September 29th, 2024.
I hope all of our listeners show up.
It's a rally, and In protest of the rise of totalitarianism across all of the western republics now, we saw Brazil ban Twitter and I think a couple of other social media companies this week, and then we've watched the rise of the censorship state in Europe, the European Commission.
Europe is now openly censoring all of the social media platforms.
The arrest of Pavel Durov two weeks ago when he landed his plane, the head of Telegram, the founder of Telegram, really just a show of autocratic strength by the cartel, I'll call it, this anti-democratic cartel that has now taken over the Western world.
And then two weeks before that, we saw the European Commission, Commissioner Brenton, or Thierry Brenton, Threatening Elon Musk with criminal and civil prosecution, if he interviewed a former president of the United States alive,
without having any clue of what they were going to say, and incidentally the nominee of one of the two major political parties in this country, That the European people aren't allowed to hear that because that might put dangerous thoughts in their head.
They're protecting Europeans, of course, totalitarian.
The excuse, the justification for totalitarian always is security and compassion and humanity and Protecting the public, and we're seeing that now all over the place, and we've got to make America, the United States, a redoubt, a fortification against this.
This rally is a call to the barricade.
So, Brad, why don't you talk about what's happening?
Sure.
Well, frankly, you set it up beautifully and you see it clearly exactly as I do.
I'm sure you have the experience Almost every day of looking at what's taking place and just thinking, I can't believe that I've lived to see the West descend into this tyrannical madness.
And this rally, and I don't know that rally is the right word.
I don't feel that any of the normal words are correct in the same way that Woodstock was a music festival, but that's not really what it was historically speaking.
This, I believe, is going to be the bookend to the era that dawned with Woodstock, and it hopefully will be the bridge to a new era in which we repel this autocratic cabal and we begin to turn the tide on all of the degradations of our civil liberties that have been brought to bear.
So, as you know, we have a great lineup of Speakers and comedians and musicians.
I would encourage people to go to the website, which is jointheresistance.org, and take a look at our eight pillars.
They will recognize that almost any patriotic American would agree on all of these things without question.
We need to make war happen.
The last resort.
Obviously war is occasionally necessary, but one must exhaust all other options for it to be morally considerable.
We need to restore informed consent.
This was a principle that was so significant that at the end of World War II, the Allies literally hanged seven doctors for violating the informed consent of their patients, even though it had not yet been codified.
And we have now thrown informed consent out the window, which was made quite plain during the COVID madness.
The third pillar is that we need to end the censorship industrial complex and stop the control of information and the official propagandizing of the population.
The fourth is the academic industrial complex has to be shut down and we need to return our truth-seeking institutions to their original mission.
We need to end lawfare.
We need a rational border policy.
We need to head off the central bank digital currencies that are going to be used as a backdoor to a Chinese-style social credit system.
And we need to restore family sovereignty and take the government out of the business of telling parents how to raise children.
So all of those are obviously things that any rational person should agree to.
And my concern about the rally is that people won't understand how important it is.
That they show up, if they at all can, that in an environment like this one, where the blue team has shown a dedication to cheating in every conceivable way, that the only way to restore the democratic order is to win a victory so large that it exceeds their capacity to cheat.
And part of doing that is showing up in large numbers in the Capitol on September 29th, To demonstrate that this is a new American movement.
This is not MAGA. It contains MAGA, but this is much bigger than MAGA. This unity movement is much larger, and frankly, I think a lot of us detected it galvanizing at the moment that you showed up on stage with Donald Trump, and it became clear that this was not a rerun of any campaign we'd seen before.
This was something brand new.
And the guests are going to be Fred Weinstein.
I think, is your brother, is Eric going to be there too?
I do not believe so.
Tulsi Gabbard, me, Russell Brand, Zubi, Laura Logan, Dr.
Pierre Corey, Dr.
Robert Malone, Matt Taibbi, really great lineup here, Heather Haying, Corey DeAngelis, Colonel Doug McGregor, Jimmy Dore, Mary Holland, and some really good musical performances by Skillet, TN Jet, The Defiant, Human Garage, Five Times August, Deepak, and Struggle Jennings.
Yeah, it's going to be a great show.
It's free.
Obviously, getting to D.C. might be a hassle for a lot of folks.
But if you can at all make it, it's going to be a great show.
And if you can't make it, we could obviously use some help.
There's a donate tab on our site.
And probably the most important thing, if you can't make it, is to spread the word.
There are enough people in this country who are fed up with our system and have stopped voting that if they were to come off the bench, they can swing any election.
So my message to them is this is the election to come off the bench.
We need it.
It's not clear how much democracy is left in four years from this point.
It's already been hollowed out.
So I think this is the election to come off the bench and make yourself heard.
Yeah, and people can go to www.jointheresistance.org.
That's www.jointheresistance.org.
You know, I was interested in Vice President Harris's boasting during the During the debate about how important NATO is,
she doesn't understand that NATO has gone from becoming an institution for promoting peace in Europe To an institution for promoting war and promoting U.S. domination of the globe.
And she doesn't understand that.
And she boasted about receiving these endorsements from this week, from Dick Cheney, from John Bolton, from 225 neocons, from Mitt Romney's group, from George W. Bush's.
A group and from John McCain's coalition.
Those people are joining her campaign, not because they've changed.
These are the people who gave us the Patriot Act.
These are the people who introduced to us the surveillance state, the extraordinary renditions, the torture.
The deprivation of our rights, the spying by NSA and CIA on the American people, the rise of the security, the surveillance, the censorship state in this country.
These are the people who created that.
They're the people who gave us the war in Iraq, a war that has led directly.
That war in Iraq, we ended up killing more of Iraq.
We went in there on false pretenses that they created, these same people, that they were weapons of mass destruction.
We obliterated this country that had done nothing bad to us, that was a traditional ally of ours.
Saddam Hussein was not a good man, but he was a bulwark against Iranian expansion in the region.
And we had supported him and armed him in his war against Iran.
And we destroyed that country.
We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein ever did.
We transformed Iraq into a proxy for Iran, which was exactly the foreign policy outcome that we'd been trying to avoid for 30 years.
Iran today, we left this little country As an incoherent battle between Shia and Sunni death squads, we created ISIS. We created the spillover war in Syria.
We drove two to four million refugees up into Europe and destabilized Europe for the next several generations.
That led to Brexit.
It led to The rise today of totalitarianism across Europe and the destruction of democracy.
These are the people who created that mess.
They were exiled even by the Republican Party.
They were traditionally all Republicans.
They were exiled by the Republican Party.
And now they're getting their way back into power and control by By endorsing Kamala Harris.
And she welcomes that endorsement rather than repels it.
And she thinks that that's a good thing.
And the Democrats are proclaiming it.
They become the party of war, the party of surveillance, the party of censorship.
This is exactly the opposite of the Democratic Party that I grew up with, the Democratic Party of Robert Kennedy and John Kennedy.
It's become the party of Wall Street, of big tech.
Big pharma, big data, the big banking industry, the Fed, and the war machine.
They are the primary proponent today on clamping down these totalitarian controls on our country.
I'm very, very happy that you took the initiative to begin bringing all these people together from every different End of the spectrum, of the political spectrum, to stand together for democracy, for liberty, for freedom.
Well, I appreciate that.
I think I've been working one side of it and you've been working a different side of it.
Watching you join with President Trump is really, it's the one vessel that might actually have a chance of succeeding here.
But to your point about Cheney and the other neocons joining the Democratic Party and the Democrats welcoming it, I agree with you.
This is the inverse of the party that I signed up for.
But there's something interesting here, because it's not even that the parties have swapped places or something like that.
You have now Dick Cheney and Barack Obama supporting the same ticket.
Now, Dick Cheney was part of the administration that ushered in the Patriot Act, and Barack Obama is the president who signed the NDAA of 2012, which contained onerous provisions of indefinite detention until the end of hostilities in the War on Terror, which is, of course, an absurdity because how does a war on terror get declared over?
But to have those two polls now joined together inside one party, it's a change from what the American public is used to.
The duopoly that we're used to thinking about and rolling our eyes about is now really housed in that one party.
And the Republican Party, while it has some remnants of the party you and I remember as the GOP, Looks to me like it is actually transforming into something different, and that's exciting.
It's also frightening.
I worry about what might become of the Republican Party now that it seems to be in play, but I wanted to run this by you.
I've heard you say things that are similar to what I've been saying about MAGA, that MAGA is more or less The labor movement that had been cut loose by the Democratic Party.
I would say they were cut loose largely beginning in the Clinton administration.
And that they have now found a home over under the GOP banner.
And the neocons have moved over under the blue banner.
Do you see that?
You see that same picture?
I mean, I think we're in the middle of that realignment now.
I mean, it was interesting because You know, not only that, but on environmental issues, you're seeing, you know, the Democratic Party, which used to be the party environment, but that's slowly constrained to be just about carbon, this carbon orthodoxy, this carbon kind of monoculture.
And that's put them in the position to serve the interests of Goldman Sachs and BlackRock.
Which are using the excuse of, you know, reducing carbon to build these giant windmills that are so environmentally destructive that are privatizing the ocean, killing the whales, destroying the fisheries, destroying small fishermen, raising the price of energy,
and that these big $100 billion carbon capture projects that are A part of the methane industry and the oil industry, and they're owned by BlackRock and Smithfield, a Chinese company, and all these sovereign wealth funds that are building carbon capture.
Pipelines across the Midwest and use the eminent domain to steal agricultural land from regular people.
And the Republicans are now becoming the party of the environment, of habitat protection, of species protection, of wildlife protection, of clean water, clean air.
Restoring our soil.
If you really care about climate, the most important thing you could do is restore our soils.
If we restore our soils, it can absorb enough energy to put us in pre-industrial levels in terms of carbon in our atmosphere.
And that's what we ought to be doing.
And agriculture is the biggest producer of carbon gases.
So in two ways, you reduce carbon, and then you do all these other good things.
I was at a talk the other night with J.D. Vance, and he was talking about the evils of mountaintop removal mining.
Well, that is an inversion.
Tucker Carlson taking on endocrine disruptors, that's an inversion.
I gave a speech, and J.D. Vance gave speeches at the At the International Association of Firefighters in Boston, and in his speech, he endorsed collective bargaining.
The Republican convention, Sean O'Brien spoke for the first time in history, the head of the Teamsters, and the biggest union in our country.
And so we have this really—we're in the middle of a huge realignment.
I've made the point that in 2020, The Republicans, President Trump got roughly 50% of the vote.
President Biden roughly got 50% of the vote.
But the 50% of the vote that went to President Biden owned 70% of the wealth in this country.
The 50% that voted for President Trump owned 30% of the wealth.
The Republican Party has become, you know, when I was growing up, the Democratic Party was the party of the cops, the firefighters, you know, of labor people.
Today, that is becoming the Republican Party.
There are still some of the union heads that are traditionally Democratic.
If you look at the rank and file of almost any union in this country, it's going to be Republican.
We're seeing this incredible realignment happen right now.
Probably most of my old friends are in the Democratic Party.
They haven't seen it yet.
And they're just horrified by anything that is Trumpy and a Republican.
It's like we all have this capacity to judge ourselves by our intentions rather than our actions.
And they still see themselves as wearing the white hats They're the ones who are clamping down oppression, censorship on the rest of us, and they're shameless about it.
You know, Tim Waltz has said that he doesn't think that the First Amendment protects misinformation or disinformation, that the government gets to decide what is protected by what kind of speech protected and what is not by the First Amendment.
And as you know, and I know, During COVID, the government was the biggest promoter of misinformation.
Everybody knows that now.
Not only the biggest promoter of misinformation.
Kamala Harris has said the same thing, that if you promote misinformation and misinformation, we're going to punish you.
You've abused your privilege.
In other words, the First Amendment is a privilege.
It's not a right.
That's not correct.
You know, the First Amendment protects misinformation and disinformation.
It protects lies.
It protects every kind of information.
And when we give government the power to be the arbiter of what, you know, speech is protected and which is, and that is the end of democracy.
Yeah, I think it's important to say people don't really understand intuitively why it is that you have to protect misinformation and disinformation.
Malinformation is, of course, an insane absurdity invented by these people in order to get out of jail free.
But the point is, and this was made so clear during COVID, Nobody knows what the truth is.
There's not a book or an oracle you can consult to know that.
The process of discovering what is true requires us to be able to advance ideas that will later turn out not to be true, Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
I wanted to return to your point about the environment because you're a lifelong environmentalist, as am I, and I have watched the same thing.
I've watched the party that used to be the party of the environment become completely deaf to any mention of the environment that was not about carbon and anthropogenic climate change.
And this is a very troubling pattern because you and I both know the number of environmental disasters and different kinds of jeopardy and pollutants is proliferating at an incredible rate.
And it is making people sick.
And many of the processes that are being disrupted in nature get pushed to a point that they can never be recovered.
So, you know, we're talking about destroying the birthright of future generations and not even talking about it.
And it is at first surprising to see this very genuine, they resent being called environmentalists because they've for so long been told that that is about climate.
So they prefer to be called conservationists, which frankly I think is fine.
But to see this powerful conservationist impulse emerging in the Republican Party is heartening, to say the least, because I haven't seen it in a decade anywhere.
It's been just absent.
So what would you think?
I've been playing with a couple of things.
I don't know whether they'll stick, but GOP doesn't really fit anymore.
I was thinking the GNP. It's the Grand New Party.
Well, that sounds good to me.
I guess I don't really care what they call themselves.
Yeah.
I guess the reason that it matters is because it sounds like you're having the same experience that I am, where I have a good many friends and family members who are hanging on in the Democratic Party because they haven't noticed that the rhetoric is completely decoupled from the policy.
To the extent that they're being given reasons to vote blue, it's symbolic.
And that if you really listen to what's being advocated for, it's an inversion of what they once believed.
But as long as they're just following, you know, the symbolism, as long as they limit themselves to reading a certain set of publications in which the narrative is presented in a perfectly consistent way, they think people like you and I have lost our minds.
And frankly, Those people are victims.
They've been hypnotized by something.
They're not driving this.
So I would love to wake them up and I would love for them to be able to see that, oh, you think you're an environmentalist?
Well, why don't you come on over to this big tent that we're pitching over here and discover that the people that you think are villains are actually speaking a language you'll find familiar.
They're the ones who care about the environment being polluted and the habitats being destroyed.
And, you know, wouldn't you be happier...
As soon as the spell breaks, I think we're in a very good position.
I agree.
Well, Brett, thank you very much.
Thank you for putting this together, and I look forward to seeing you in Washington.
September 29th, 2024.
What time do the festivities begin?
They begin at noon.
I'm really looking forward to seeing you there.
Yeah, there's going to be some amazing speakers, and it's going to be, you know, the beginning of the revolution.
