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Oct. 1, 2024 - Viva & Barnes

01:36:30

Live with Topher Field: Australian Covid Madness & More! Viva Frei

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	As a result, many individuals have noted the importance of distinguishing between patients admitted to hospital or the ICU for COVID-19 versus those admitted for other reasons, such as a broken bone or appendicitis, but also test positive for COVID-19.
	As a result, we have asked hospitals to update their daily reporting to include this important information and expect to begin receiving it.
	As well as adjusting our public reporting in the coming days.
	But the other important thing is that if you look at the children who are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID.
	And what we mean by that, if a child goes in the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID.
	Tell me what you mean by that.
	And they get counted as a COVID hospitalized individual.
	When in fact they may go in...
	For a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that.
	So it's overcounting the number of children who are, quote, hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID.
	Amazing. Fascinating.
	When was that, by the way?
	When did they start changing the narrative?
	I'm going back to my tweet on the subject.
	January 4, 2022.
	You know, just a cool...
	What was it?
	January 2020.
	It started March 2020.
	So just a cool...
	Damn near two years into the so-called COVID pandemic, they decided maybe, maybe in our infinite wisdom, we should be not counting people hospitalized with COVID, because everybody gets a cold, but hospitalized from COVID.
	A minor distinction, you know, a year and a half late, upon which the statistics, public policy had been governed with tragic consequences for a year and a half.
	Unbelievable. Now, I'm playing that.
	There's a lot of other more contemporaneous stuff that I could have started the stream with today, which I will not do because I'll save it for tonight's debate.
	Some, you know, Kamala Harris classics.
	But today we are doing a podcast live stream, an interview with Topher Fields, who, if you don't know who he is, you will know who he is.
	Came highly recommended by a number of people.
	And then, you know, I looked into his story.
	He told me his story.
	Shared with me his documentary called Battleground Melbourne or Battleground of Melbourne.
	It's Battleground Melbourne.
	And I watched it this morning and it brings back a level of trauma that is actually hard to describe.
	If you've never seen the movie Swingers, it's a good movie, but there's one classic scene where the guy who breaks up with his girlfriend is in some, I don't know, Vegas hotel and he hasn't gone out in months and his friend is telling me, you know, his friend doesn't want to go out.
	Who was it?
	The guy broke up with his girlfriend.
	The other guy comes in and says, look, you're going to get over it.
	It's going to hurt every day, but it's going to hurt less and less until it doesn't hurt at all.
	And when it doesn't hurt at all, you're actually going to want it to hurt because you're going to miss the feeling of it being hurt.
	I'm never going to get to the point where I'm going to miss the feeling of hurt from what was done to the world for the last four years that they haven't apologized for or even recognized that they were wrong about.
	Watching that documentary, I mean, it applies.
	Perfectly and almost identically to what was done in Quebec in particular, but to Canada in general.
	It'll enrage you and it'll blow your mind.
	We're going to talk about it.
	This guy is amazing.
	But before we even get in there, and first of all, by the way, tonight we will be live streaming the debate, so stay tuned for that.
	You may have noticed as you stepped into the stream, people.
	Apropos sponsors of the day, because...
	Thank our two sponsors of the show.
	Before we get into the show, let me ask you a question, everybody.
	How many of you are concerned about your privacy, about it being attacked by the radical left?
	The deep state, including the DOJ, is invading individuals' private messages and targeting them based on their political affiliation.
	That's why we've partnered with Freedom Chat, a private social media app that believes in the value of privacy.
	Freedom Chat offers true end-to-end encryption, built-in screenshot protection to ensure that no one can screenshot your conversations, no storage of messages on their servers, and no commercial use of user data.
	It's an amazing app.
	Some people will stop at nothing to maintain power, making privacy protection more important than ever.
	I called it, by the way, with the first failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump, that they're going to use that as a basis to go after encrypted apps.
	We'll see where it goes, but for the time being, download the app right now by going to Freedom Chat.
	FreedomChat.com forward slash VivaFries, my full name.
	No one can see the channels you are subscribed to and post your react to.
	It's your own private news feeds.
	And if you're Android, you can use the QR code on your screen to subscribe to the waitlist.
	FreedomChat.com.
	I guess they're developing it for Android.
	Speak freely and message privately with FreedomChat.
	The link is in the description.
	And last one, easiest one, best one.
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	First of all, Dunkin' Donuts tastes like crap.
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	You don't have to sacrifice quality just because you want convenience.
	Go to 1775coffee.com, grab your 24-pack, and show corporate coffee.
	Who's boss?
	All right.
	Now we can get down to the other business of the day.
	Who's ready to relive the last four years of trauma?
	Oh, my goodness.
	Actually, we're going to start before 2020, and then we're going to get into the amazing documentary that Topher put together.
	Crowdfunded and developed.
	What's the word I'm looking for?
	Produced. Wrote.
	Edited. It's amazing.
	And then I'm going to have to needle.
	Topher, because it was made in 2022 before the election, the re-election or the next elections of Dictator Dan.
	None of these dictators got punished in the next elections.
	Not in Australia, not in Quebec, not in Canada, but we'll talk about that.
	Topher, bring you in in three, two, one.
	Sir, how goes the battle at the risk of asking the obvious?
	Look, the battle goes on, ever on and on.
	But this is the thing, David, and you know this very well.
	This battle was going long before either of us were born.
	It'll continue long after we're dead.
	Our job is just to play our part when it's our turn.
	And if you're breathing, newsflash, it's still your turn.
	So the battle goes on, but it always will.
	Now, I have to specify this to everybody.
	You are in Aussie land, which now it is 2 o'clock or 2.30 in the morning.
	2.30 in the morning.
	It is, in fact, strong cup of coffee o'clock, yes.
	All right, well, hopefully it's 17. Okay, I'm joking.
	Of course it is.
	Thank you very much for doing this at this ungodly hour for yourself.
	For those who don't know, I mean, give a 30,000-foot overview, and then we're just going to, I guess, going to relive some trauma together.
	Yeah, look, reliving that trauma seems to be my life at the moment.
	It's what everyone wants to talk about, but I think it's important to talk about.
	There are lessons that still haven't been learned.
	But basically, I started as an independent libertarian political commentator in 2009.
	I was addressing issues like water mismanagement, freedom of speech, the right to bear arms and self-defense, something that we don't really have here in Australia.
	I was talking about over-regulation, red tape, green tape, the climate change con, all these sorts of topics.
	And then when COVID came along in 2019 or very early 2000, All of a sudden, I went from relative obscurity to people looking at me and saying, Oi, you, what do you think about all of this?
	And I ended up speaking at one of the very first anti-lockdown protests.
	That video went viral and then all of a sudden, my life has never been the same since.
	Born and raised in Australia?
	Born and raised in Australia, I spent most of my life living in the city of Melbourne, which is where, of course, we became, we didn't know this was going to happen, but we became the most locked down city on earth.
	And I can't tell you how surreal it is for a city that you've lived in since you were two years old to suddenly become the epicenter of something like that.
	I mean, I say watching your documentary, Quebec and Montreal was not quite as locked down, but it wasn't that far off.
	I mean, it was...
	Just a difference of maybe one or two degrees in terms of temperature.
	You're born and raised in Australia.
	Where are your folks from?
	What's the lineage?
	Did you come over on a boat of criminals from England?
	Came over on a boat of criminals five or six generations ago.
	It's not entirely clear to us whether we came from the criminal side or from the prison guard side because the Field family name arrived in both contexts on the same fleet.
	So there's a bit of a break in the chain there.
	We don't know whether they're the criminal side or the enforcement side.
	As a child growing up, I was raised as a good cook.
	You cut a conservative, and I really hoped I was descended from the lawful prison guard side.
	I've got to tell you now, though, as a 42-year-old advocate of civil disobedience, I'm really rather hoping I come from the criminal side.
	You know, it's funny.
	Mack Wallace, he said, don't ask him how old he is.
	I didn't even have to.
	You told me.
	42 years young.
	And I actually said the criminal on a boat joke as a joke.
	But so it's not a joke.
	I mean, the history of Australia is that it was...
	Had criminals implant, or the descendants, families of criminals, implanted from the British Kingdom.
	Correct. Yeah, absolutely.
	And people deported, some for serious crimes, but many for not serious crimes.
	Stealing a loaf of bread, these sorts of things could get you deported.
	This was one of the sort of famous big government experiments in creating a utopia.
	They believed that if they just exported enough of their criminals and got rid of that underclass, then they would, of course, create a perfect utopian island in the British Isles.
	It's the same idea as what Marx and Stalin later applied, only instead of deporting, they just shot people.
	Subtle difference there.
	But so they thought if they just deported all of the criminals to Australia, then the UK would become a utopia.
	And I've got to say, it hasn't worked very well.
	If you look at the UK right now and what's happening over there, I'd have to say that we were kind of the winners, the ones that got on the boat and left.
	So six, give or take five or six generations you've been in Australia.
	Yeah. That's wild.
	On both your parents, on both mother and father's side?
	Almost all of my ancestors, yes.
	There is, of course, a mix and a handful of others, but if you actually trace the family lines, and my wife's family as well, we're actually about as Australian as you can get without being Indigenous.
	I do want to, if I may, it's sort of way off topic, but the Indigenous situation in Australia...
	I had a podcast with Elijah Schaefer who was describing it, and I have no understanding of what the situation is, the dynamic between the Indigenous or the Native Australians and the European descent and how that is playing out.
	Now, what is that interplay between Indigenous and British ancestry?
	It depends on which group you're talking about.
	There's an enormous number of Indigenous Australians that have simply integrated and gotten on with life.
	You wouldn't necessarily know that they're Indigenous, or you might, but they're working jobs, running businesses, being successful, raising families, and they've just gotten on with life.
	There's an enormous number of those.
	There are also a large number of Indigenous Australians that are choosing to try and continue to live something resembling a traditional life or in a more traditional location.
	That tends to be very, very difficult because these people tend to be in very remote communities.
	And there are some real challenges that come along with that.
	But again, there are many people that are trying to do their best in that situation.
	But there is a third group that are essentially living their life playing the victim.
	And these are the ones that get all of the attention.
	These are the ones that get all of the money and the funding.
	And there's an entire industry that's been built up around them trying to basically funnel money to them.
	And, of course, the ones running that industry take a good chunk of that money as it passes them by.
	And as we say, the people that they're fighting for live in poverty in remote communities, but they live on a waterfront mansion driving a Porsche in the prettiest parts of Sydney, of course, these people that run this sort of scam.
	So when people talk about Indigenous Australians, there really are very, very different subgroups within that.
	I have tremendous respect for anyone that works hard and makes their own way.
	Indigenous or not makes no difference to me.
	And there are a lot of Indigenous Australians that fit that category.
	But unfortunately, there is a whole industry that's been built around the ones that want to play victim.
	You got your Al Sharpens of Australia.
	And is the situation similar to in Canada where you have what they call reservations where...
	Aboriginals or natives can live and the government sort of funds them or limits what can be done on those properties and it leads to the same sort of social problems that we have in Canada?
	Look, we've arrived there from a very different direction, but broadly speaking, yes, there was a High Court decision called the Mabo decision a little while ago that conferred land rights to Indigenous Australians in certain contexts, and since then we've got Indigenous and Native title claims going on, and this is becoming a bigger and bigger problem going forward.
	They're increasingly claiming land that has been settled and developed and has people's houses and people's businesses and infrastructure on it.
	It's becoming a bigger and bigger problem.
	But one of the things that really, really bugs me, so I've spent a considerable amount of time in remote communities in Australia from a place called Dumaji, which Australian viewers or those that know Australia well will know Dumaji is one of those notorious places where it really has gone wrong and it's become really horrible.
	And many other places, Wilcannia and so forth, through inland New South Wales and up into Queensland and parts of the Northern Territory.
	And one of the really consistent tragedies that I saw was the way that this collectivised ownership of Indigenous land led to a complete disincentive of any sort of work or productivity, as it always does.
	Collectivised ownership always does.
	And unfortunately, what we've done through these land rights decisions is we've locked these Indigenous Australians into a communist experiment, essentially.
	We don't call it that, but that's effectively what it is.
	We've locked them into communal ownership where they can pour their heart and their soul and their blood and their sweat and their tears into something and find that the others there can simply take it away from them, having done nothing and contributed nothing to that work.
	So unfortunately, we've created a really awful situation.
	And yes, we have a lot of the same social dysfunction, a lot of substance abuse.
	Okay, very interesting.
	If I may ask, what did your folks do and how many siblings did you have?
	What was your childhood like that turned you into the adult that you are today?
	Oh, gosh.
	So my dad is a pastor.
	I'm the son of a preacher man.
	And my parents had seven children, same parents, seven children spanning 22 years in total or 23 years in total between all of us and a really amazing sort of family dynamic.
	I would say a really wonderful upbringing, but not without its challenges.
	My parents never had a lot of money.
	We were lower middle class, I would say.
	Never really truly poor, but we certainly had moments when things were...
	We're pretty tough, and we didn't really have moments when they weren't tough.
	That just wasn't a part of my childhood.
	But we grew up in a family where my mum was a dedicated stay-at-home mum, and she was always there for us.
	She was always around.
	She did everything that she could to raise her seven children, and I was actually homeschooled.
	It was one of the most significant things for me, one of the greatest gifts I think that my parents ever gave to me and has contributed enormously to me becoming who I am.
	For my own self-interested reasons, when your parents homeschooled you, did they impose the same school-type structure at home learning, or was it sort of a free-for-all?
	At first, yes.
	At first, they were trying to replicate school at home, but that died very, very quickly.
	That was when I was in primary school, around about grade three or the third year of our primary school system here in Australia.
	And that died very, very quickly.
	And by the time I was in my early teens, it really more resembled just complete unschooling is really where we headed.
	And the focus shifted away from academics and towards character and towards the ability to teach yourself and learn what you needed to know when you needed to know it.
	So in the year, I experienced the whole sort of spectrum of those things.
	And I would say that the unschooling side of things...
	Is the one that has had the greatest influence on me and the greatest positive impact on my ability now to research, to assimilate information.
	To sift through large data sets and find a story and find the truth that lies within that and then be able to communicate that effectively, which is essentially what you've seen with Battleground Melbourne, etc.
	With my book, Good People Break Bad Laws, it's an effort to take what can be very complex topics and can be very confusing topics.
	And some people choose to speak about those things in ways that are deliberately confusing because they want to try and impress people.
	And I have an ability, I believe, thanks to my upbringing, to take those things and then communicate them and package them in a way that...
	It's very cool because my community knows why I'm asking you.
	It perked my attention because we just pulled our youngest out of school in grade 3 because it's not just that they were not learning anything.
	They were learning the wrong things.
	And I'm struggling.
	Do I impose the same type of structure?
	It feels like if it's not a day that goes by where I don't teach them basic multiplication, I feel like I failed as a homeschool teacher.
	A lot of people in our community on Locals is like, don't import the school system that you pulled them out of.
	It's a totally different thing.
	So the teaching character is actually phenomenally interesting.
	But we're only in month three of the first year, so we'll see how it goes.
	So you had seven kids from a preacher dad and your mom, I guess, was a stay-at-home mom?
	Oh, yeah.
	She worked harder than anyone.
	My dad was the one that worked, but my mom worked harder than anyone.
	And that's often the way with larger families.
	And she set a great example of someone who was just willing to be there and always be there for us as a mom and work hard and keep the family running.
	It's crazy.
	It's like if you don't get paid for it, nobody regards it as work.
	If you don't get paid enough for it, they don't respect it.
	If you get paid too much for it, then they also have some judgment.
	Youngest of five, my mom was a stay-at-home, but we still had help.
	Now that we're parents, it's unremunerated, therefore nobody regards it as work, but it's 24-7.
	You're born and raised in Melbourne under these circumstances or in this life situation.
	Melbourne, when you're growing up, it's even pre-COVID because there's a lot that I want to ask you that actually predates COVID that relates to immigration policies and what some might actually pinpoint as being Melbourne or Australia being transformed from what it...
	What it had been for the last, whatever, six or seven generations.
	What was Melbourne like when you were a kid?
	Genuinely really, really fantastic.
	And as any kid does, I completely took it for granted.
	I look back now and I recognize we had an enormous amount of freedom.
	And the pre-internet world was also, I think, that's something that humanity has lost probably forever.
	The ability to be able to go out and no one actually knows where you are.
	Your mum has to guess.
	And if they want to try and find you, they literally get in the car and they're either ringing different people's landlines and if no one answers, it's because they're not home.
	If they're outside of the home, no one's answering the phone.
	Or they're actually driving the car and looking for where your bicycles are stashed.
	You know, whose front porch is your bike on?
	And that's how they know that you're there.
	There was a level of freedom that was enjoyed throughout society.
	And Australia has historically been a relatively safe, high-trust society.
	And that allowed us an enormous amount of freedom to just roam and just enjoy life and have fun and grow up and be kids.
	And I really, I took that for granted far more than what I should have growing up.
	Australia, of course, has been changing.
	Canada's been changing.
	The UK's been changing.
	The US has been changing.
	And people point to things like immigration.
	I'm very, very happy to field whatever questions you've got and have whatever discussion you've got planned.
	But honestly, I think the problem is, the fundamental problem that we've got in the West today is that we've idolised government.
	We have this idea in our mind that we've killed God.
	We've removed God from public discourse, you know, getting Ten Commandments out of schools and prayer out of parliament and these sorts of things, depending on where you are.
	There's been these various efforts.
	And we have this idea that we're now in a secular society.
	And I don't believe that's true.
	I believe what we've actually done is we've taken government and we've placed government on the throne that used to be occupied by God within our culture.
	And as a result, now, I think that's where most of our problems are coming from.
	I a thousand percent agree.
	It's a very bizarre thing.
	Like, I didn't always realize this or think like this, but I always said, you know, politicians fancy themselves as gods.
	But when it came time to, like, first of all, the commies always went after the religious folk first because that was the biggest competition to people idolizing and being subservient to the government if they were subservient to God, a greater power than the government.
	But, you know, even when the government took over everything during COVID, they went after the basically...
	Religion, education, family, and social activities, which is what not religion was, but what religion really helped and facilitated.
	So, Australia, you look back at your childhood, and I do the same thing.
	You say, I never realized how free we were then, but I presume that we were just as entrapped back then, but only with the technologies that existed back then.
	And some people say we were never free.
	The government was always in control, always lying, and always restricting our freedoms, but with whatever means they had at the time.
	You look back and things look rosier in retrospect, but when do you feel that it started changing in Melbourne and Australia at large?
	So people who say it's always been like this are correct.
	This isn't a new phenomenon, but I would point to the number of laws and the nature of the laws that we have today and say that something has ramped up.
	There has been a change over time.
	For me, I think the...
	Voting in or the removing of a Premier that we had called Jeff Kennett back in 2001, I think it was, when he lost his seat and his time in Parliament came to an end.
	And with one exception for one three-year period, we've had nothing but Labour, which is the equivalent of our American Democrats.
	I don't know what the equivalent is in Canada.
	The Liberals, who are anything but Liberal.
	They're Liberal tyrants.
	So here's the irony.
	In Australia, the party that we call the Liberal Party actually was founded on small L liberal principles, which is actually small government principles, originally.
	That word has come to mean a very, very different thing since.
	But to this day, here in Australia, the party that wears the liberal name is the more conservative of our major parties, but none of them are conservative anymore.
	They are all big government, tyrannical type.
	Parts of the machine, different wings of the same big government bird, essentially.
	But we had a period of reform in Victoria from Jeff Kennett when he was Premier.
	Not all of that reform was popular, but it certainly was effective from an economic point of view.
	And we were prosperous, we were relatively free, and life was good.
	And that's the life that I sort of grew up into as I entered adulthood.
	That was the world that I was entering.
	Since then, we've been run by our more left-wing party, and I would describe Melbourne now as the California of Australia.
	And what I mean by that is that it's a state that rode on its laurels, that had a lot going for it, rode on its laurels, got lazy and complacent, and became a one-party state.
	And the problem with being a one-party state...
	If you have at least two parties that are vying for an election win, either party could win, then what they have to do is appeal to the swinging voters in the middle, the ones that will actually change their vote.
	They kind of have to take their base for granted a little bit and appeal to that centre.
	And that has the effect, it's by no means perfect, but it has the effect of tending to keep these political parties a bit more in touch with what the centre kind of wants to some degree.
	The minute one party can take a win for granted and the other party no longer matters, then the only thing that matters for them is not the middle and winning votes.
	They've got those.
	It's winning the factional battle to become the top of that particular totem pole within the party.
	And that's all about appealing to the most extreme members.
	It's all about appealing to the base and, in fact, the most radical elements of the base.
	And so this shift in dynamic from a two-party state where power goes from one to the other on a regular basis to a single-party state where one party can take it for granted that they're going to win...
	Always comes with a radical shift towards a much more radical version of whatever ideology that party holds.
	And that's what we saw in Victoria.
	They became a one-party state.
	They took the win for granted.
	And the party has been heading down a hardline Marxist road, totalitarian Marxist road ever since.
	And Daniel Andrews has thus far been the greatest embodiment of that.
	Now, I guess maybe very briefly, just summarize how Australian politics works.
	I think the system is similar to the Canadian system, but for Americans, you have the states.
	How many states are there for the purposes of government in Australia?
	Yeah, so there are seven states, effectively.
	I mean, there's a couple of territories as well, so it does get a little bit more confusing, but each state has its own government.
	It's our state government that has a premier.
	That's what we call our version of a US governor.
	I'm not sure what the word is in Canada.
	We have a premier, but then we also have a federal government where we have a prime minister, and the prime minister is the one that runs sort of the federal government.
	And our system is, yes, it's broadly similar to the Canadian system.
	It's quite distinct from the US system in the sense that our federal government, any time it passes a law, overrides and supersedes all state law.
	And so we don't have competitive federalism in that sense, where the states are able to create really different regulatory environments.
	We actually have most things being decided by the federal government, and they are uniform across all of the states, and there's really only a minority of things that states can actually do and change to distinguish themselves from the other states.
	So we are a federation, but we are not really a functioning competitive federation.
	We are somewhat monolithic under that federal government.
	Yeah, because one of the questions I've been asked when we get into it is how various states, how, you know, I don't know what region.
	It's the Melbourne region that Dictator Dan was covering, and then you had Victoria.
	Victoria is the state, and Melbourne is the capital city.
	It's the second most popular city in Australia.
	It's the capital city of the state where Daniel Andrews was the premier.
	Okay, my question is only how some cities or how some areas were treated so radically different than others, even within the federal system of Australia.
	Backing it up just a little bit, and I don't know if you're...
	Yeah. Absolutely.
	Absolutely. Change the trajectory of Australian society.
	Yeah, it's really interesting.
	So 1996 was the Port Arthur Massacre and that looms large in the Australian psyche as a very significant cultural event.
	And out of that, we had the Prime Minister at the time, John Howard, who was one of our Conservative Party Prime Ministers.
	He did what he still regards to this day as one of the greatest things that he ever did.
	I disagree, but this is what he regards.
	He disarmed Australia of all of its semi-automatic rifles and a large amount of even other types of rifles that weren't semi-automatic.
	And we already fully automatic weapons, machine guns and so forth were not an option in Australia already.
	There was a government buyback scheme.
	They destroyed an enormous number of firearms, and this was all out of the outrage that came from 30-something people passed away or were killed, were murdered in that Port Arthur massacre.
	Now, in terms of the details of the Port Arthur events itself, I'm not going to go there.
	There are enormous inconsistencies in the official story.
	Does that mean that the conspiracies are correct?
	I don't know.
	What I do know is that the court documents and an enormous amount of information has been sealed.
	I believe till long after all of us are going to be dead.
	I don't think the public will know the truth about that until long after I'm dead.
	And from my perspective, that always rings an enormous amount of alarm bells.
	But let's set that aside for a moment.
	The response was that people were outraged, people were horrified, and we had the then-Conservative Prime Minister, John Howard.
	Banning semi-automatic rifles.
	The promise, of course, was that that would lead to a reduction in the murder rate and firearms deaths and that sort of thing.
	I've actually done a deep dive with this.
	I had the privilege of speaking with Davey Barker, who's an American statistician who's done a lot of work on mass shootings in the US.
	And I interviewed him some years ago for a radio show that I was doing at the time and did a deep dive into this entire topic.
	And the simple reality is that...
	Broadly speaking, Australia's homicide rate continued to decline at a similar rate to what it had already been declining over time prior to the gun ban.
	There was some displacement away from firearms murder and towards other methods of murder, but the overall murder rate really continued on the trajectory that it had already been on up to that point in time.
	As for whether that really allowed Victoria to become locked down the way that it did and really stopped us from fighting back, I'm going to say that it probably didn't change anything.
	The reality is, you know, you had California, right?
	I mean, I remember seeing footage come out of California of police walking down a street and telling people to get back in their homes and shooting them with a paintball gun because they didn't get off their patio fast enough.
	I mean, sure, California has very restrictive gun laws compared to the rest of the US, but they have very permissive gun laws compared to a place like Australia, and it didn't stop them from tolerating and putting up with some really horrific things.
	The argument that could be made is that Places like Florida and Texas and others, it really wasn't possible to enforce such strict restrictions because of the attitude towards freedom and the attitude towards guns.
	That's a kind of a counterfactual to say, well, what would have happened in Texas if they didn't have guns or what would have happened in Victoria if we did?
	It's not an open and shut case.
	And it's also very, very dangerous to assume that we should have just pulled out our guns and started shooting the enforcers that showed up on our doorstep.
	When people say that the Second Amendment is why it never went as far in America as it did elsewhere, I don't think it's the fact that people have more guns.
	I think the Second Amendment is itself an element of cultural identity that the people will not put up with crap.
	The fact that America still has the Second Amendment is an indication of something of a cultural And that's where I was leading with that, was to say that I think gun laws and cultural freedom have a sympathetic relationship, not a causal relationship, and that the freedoms that we saw being maintained in places like some of the Dakotas and in Florida and Texas and elsewhere.
	More because of that culturally entrenched attitude than it is because people have AR-15s, you know, in their bedrooms.
	As a statistical matter, just to put a bow in the Port Arthur massacre, but my understanding on the one hand, and I presume they do the same thing in Australia, like when they refer to gun deaths and don't distinguish between murder and suicide or confound the two because they want to jack up that number for the purposes of policy.
	My understanding is like the murder rate.
	The firearm murder rate did not wildly decrease or even remain wildly lower than the pre-1996.
	It had already reached a sort of a low by 95, 96, and it's sort of about that level 20 some odd years later.
	Yeah. Yeah, broadly speaking, it's sort of, the trend is kind of flattened out, which is to be expected.
	It was already an exceptionally low murder rate.
	And statistically, anything that's already close to one extreme or the other, it gets much, much, much harder to push it any closer to that extreme.
	So it was always going to kind of flatten out.
	That's exactly what it's done.
	There has actually been analysis from an Australian university.
	I was trying to think of which one it was before, but I just don't recall.
	But there was an analysis by an Australian university that wanted desperately to show that the gun laws had saved lots of lives.
	And they actually came back and concluded that there was no statistically significant deviation in the overall murder rate.
	And I don't recall if there was a statistically significant deviation in the firearms murder rate or not.
	But to say that it saved lives is a tenuous argument at best.
	And now, not pointing any fingers as to the reasons, but has crime increased over the last, say, 10 years, but maybe more specifically over the last five?
	So this is a funny thing.
	People will culturally tell you that crime is up and it's a horrible place to live, etc.
	The numbers don't tend to support that with a couple of key exceptions.
	The worst kinds of crimes, the most violent and particularly sexual crimes, are up.
	Most other types of crime are actually down.
	And if you dive into the numbers deeper, I moved out of Melbourne from the southeastern suburbs.
	I no longer live in the state of Victoria.
	I got out after all the COVID madness.
	I just couldn't be there anymore.
	But the last place that I lived in Melbourne, we were under what the media had dubbed a crime wave as a result of what they were saying were all these Sudanese and African migrants that have been coming into the city.
	And the reality was when you dove into the statistics...
	There were a handful of about 40 individuals that were very, very well known to police that were repeat offenders and kept on being released and re-released and re-released by our court system.
	Regardless of the fact that they'd bashed people, broken bones, hijacked cars, and in a few cases actually killed people, these people were back on the streets on bail awaiting trial of these various things and they kept on re-offending and they kept on being re-released.
	If you removed that handful of individuals from the statistics, all of a sudden the whole problem went away.
	And unfortunately, what happens in the media, because they're looking for a big beat-up and they're looking for a big story, those individuals were almost exclusively those ones that had really become a big, big, big problem.
	An enormous proportion of them were relatively recent migrants, a lot of them African migrants and a number of them actually Maori migrants and other sort of subgroups.
	These were the ones that were causing all of the trouble.
	And so the media, of course, reported that migrants were the problem.
	Well, no, no, no.
	Those migrants, those specific individuals were the problem.
	If we had a functioning justice system that actually stood up for the rights of victims and punished people when they committed violent and sexual offenses and these sorts of things, then that problem would have gone away because those people wouldn't have been released to get back onto the streets.
	That's very interesting.
	I was looking up and it does seem that murder rates might have gone up a small amount.
	Sexual assault has gone up, I'd say, more substantially.
	Property crime is whatever.
	It's not good, but it's...
	Not as bad as the others.
	You consider yourself to be a libertarian.
	The most reasonable libertarians I've met happen to be European or Australian, for that matter.
	You're surprisingly normal for a libertarian.
	The libertarian party in America, if you follow what they do, is quite eclectic, to put it politely.
	Did you run for office?
	Should I have known that?
	I did.
	I ran at the last federal election.
	I was basically a ballot stuffer.
	I was a paper filler.
	I think our system's a little bit like yours in Canada, where parties just kind of need to, if they want to try and get their number one candidate elected in a given state or in a given election, they usually run a panel of candidates.
	And I ran as the number one candidate in a state that we really weren't going to win.
	But we actually came, I was the first of the candidates to not get elected.
	I had the most votes after preferences of anyone else that was not successfully elected.
	So that makes it sound like I almost got elected, but the truth is the gap between me and the next person that did get elected was really rather large.
	We doubled the libertarian vote in the state of Tasmania where I ran, but that really sounds a lot more impressive than what it is because we doubled it from one person to one person plus my mum.
	It really wasn't that many.
	However, the Libertarian Party here in Australia is actually going gangbusters at the moment.
	They just had 15 councillors elected in the New South Wales council election.
	So councils are the smallest, most local governments that we have here in Australia, kind of a third level of government at the most local level.
	And they're expecting to do similar in the Victorian State Council elections that are coming up.
	They have an elected member of parliament in multiple states in Australia right now.
	And I expect that at the next federal election, Sometime early in 2025, we're actually going to have a libertarian senator, which we had previously, and I think we'll actually achieve that again.
	So, unfortunately, very much a minor party, but a minor party that is genuinely on the rise, and I don't say that as a matter of marketing.
	You can actually see that in the electoral results that are happening at the moment.
	We have a lot of similarities here.
	I ran for the People's Party of Canada in a district of Westmount, Neufeldame de Grasse in Montreal, which had gone liberal for the last...
	30 years.
	And I tripled the vote from 500 to 1500.
	But they had doubled or tripled across the country because I think people were getting fed up with the lame Conservative Party.
	And the PPC has been described as a libertarian-ish type party.
	What year was that when you did this?
	Gosh, that was 2022, I believe that election was.
	Post-COVID, post-everything.
	You've been on the internet for a long time.
	I went back and checked out some of your repertoire, and it goes way back.
	So how did you get into where you got now?
	When did you start off publicly commentating?
	So my cousin Bob, yes, I have a cousin.
	His name is Bob.
	We worked in the same place.
	I'm very blue-collar, hardworking.
	I didn't go and get a trade.
	I thought about it.
	I decided not to.
	I ended up working in a refrigerated logistics warehouse.
	We were shipping all the fruit and veg that went to our main supermarket chains across the southeast of Australia.
	It came through this one warehouse where I worked as a forklift driver and picker, packer and truckloader and everything else.
	And I got my cousin Bob a job there.
	And one day he walks in and he says, Topher, you need to audition for Project Next.
	And I said, what's Project Next?
	And Andrew Denton, a very well-respected Australian journalist who was running a program on the ABC, which is our state broadcaster, our government-funded broadcaster.
	And the idea was that he was looking for the next generation of news presenters, researchers, producers, writers, journalists, etc.
	And in order to audition, you had to audition by a video.
	You had to submit a video.
	And I went, oh, that looks like a lark.
	I studied acting back in the day and I'd done some stage acting and I learned how to hold a camera because my dad was involved with community television back in the day.
	He was a preacher and he had a preaching program every week.
	He preached a sermon on community television in Melbourne.
	And I used to do his editing for him and his camera work for him and his audio work for him and these sorts of things.
	So I knew how all of that worked.
	And I thought, oh, that looks like fun.
	So I knew, though.
	That the ABC, being a state broadcaster, is very, very biased, and I don't agree with the bias of the ABC here in Australia, broadly speaking.
	So I wanted specifically to make my video about a story that was going to piss them off a little bit, because I wanted to know that if I did happen to get onto the show, that I was actually going to be free to speak my mind and not forced to speak somebody else's.
	So at the time, we were in the grip of a water crisis.
	There was a real water shortage coming on, and we had water restrictions.
	People weren't allowed to water their lawns.
	You had to keep your showers.
	It was really short.
	You were down to 155 litres of water a day was the target that you were given to use each day.
	And we were waiting for the rain to come back.
	And of course, the climate change alarmists were all telling us that this was a new normal and the rains would never come back.
	Newsflash, they were wrong.
	We've had huge floods since then.
	But that was the situation we were in at the time, and the government was building a desalination plant, $1.4 billion white elephant, in order to try and rescue the city from this water crisis.
	And so I did a video saying the desalination plant's a dumb idea and we shouldn't do it, but what we should do instead is build a new dam on the Mitchell River, which is a river in Gippsland not far from Melbourne.
	And, of course, new dams are sacrilege to the new green religion that dominates the ABC and other places.
	So I thought, if I can tell this story...
	And I tried to make it funny and make people laugh and make it engaging and interesting.
	But if I thought if I can tell this story and they accept me onto the show, then I know I'll have editorial freedom.
	I'll be able to actually speak my mind.
	Sure enough, I never heard back from them.
	They never even bothered to say no, thank you.
	I just never heard from them.
	So I had this video and I had nothing to do.
	I didn't know what to do with it.
	So I started a brand new YouTube channel, zero subscribers.
	I uploaded the video and I sent it to my mum.
	Well, she must have really liked it because she watched it about 30,000 times or someone watched it about 30,000 times very, very quickly.
	And remember, this is 2009.
	Now, I don't know what the internet was like in Canada in 2009, but if you didn't live in a relatively small inner city area within a capital city in Australia, you did not have fast enough internet to watch videos.
	You had to let them buffer first and let them load, and then you could watch part of it.
	And then once it sort of caught up, you had to wait for it to buffer again.
	And so YouTube was not a big thing in Australia at the time, and most people couldn't even actually interact with it very, very effectively unless you were in one of those inner-city areas, and yet somehow this video kind of went viral.
	And this is not a cat video, a funny cat video of a cute kitten falling off a bed.
	This was a 10-minute long dissertation on water policy in Melbourne.
	This wasn't a viral video in the modern sense of the word.
	And yet it really reached a lot of people.
	And people began to reach out to me and ask me to cover more topics.
	Can you do a story on this or that?
	Or, you know, we've got this problem over here.
	Will you do a video on that?
	And I said no to all of them until eventually someone came to me with an idea and a problem that I looked at.
	And I went, you know what, I will do a video on that.
	And it was another water-related topic.
	And I made that second video.
	And that really, in my mind, was the moment when Topher, the political commentator, was born.
	Because that first video I did is an audition tape.
	It was just kind of a lark.
	But that second video I did because I wanted to try and make a difference.
	It's fantastic.
	I mean, I watched it.
	It was...
	Clear of your politics even before COVID, but let's get into the enraging, stomach-turning portion of the show, which was supposed to be the bulk of it.
	So, Topher, okay, let's hear.
	I mean, I was following what was going on in Australia, but only through Avi Yamini, or primarily through Avi Yamini.
	I say nobody could believe it except even watching it in real time.
	It was only off from Canada by a matter of degrees.
	You know, the five-kilometer...
	When it got really bad in Australia.
	The radius.
	In Quebec, we had zones.
	And they weren't by the kilometers, but there were zones.
	We had a curfew.
	How does a society descend into that?
	And just describe for Americans who are watching right now.
	They had it mildly fortunate, but if you lived in New York, Michigan, California, you had it pretty much just as bad, but not quite.
	Tell us how that works, like the evolution from two weeks to flatten the curve to we're now two years into this and it's only getting worse.
	Yeah, look, how long have you got?
	I mean, parts of the US were terrible.
	I was on the Mel Kay show a little while ago and she was in New York and it was a terrible experience for her and other parts of the US.
	Here in Victoria, Australia, in the state of Victoria, we saw COVID get weaponised by egomaniacal politicians in a way that I think Justin Trudeau tried to keep up with, but even he just couldn't quite keep up with the madness that was Daniel Andrews.
	One of the really fascinating things for me that I think is going to be studied for a very, very long time that explains that dissent is the way that society split in half.
	And Daniel Andrews, as the Premier, was spending millions of dollars during COVID on focus group testing, message testing, and psychological profiling and advice, consultants that were giving him advice on how to achieve the psychological outcome that he wanted on the people of Victoria.
	We know that because the money that was spent is now a matter of public record.
	We know that he was doing this.
	And what that looked like...
	Was a really beautiful...
	You've got to respect the politics.
	I despise the man's principles, but you've got to respect the politics.
	A beautiful process that he went through that split society in half into the obeyers, the good people and the evil people.
	It works like this.
	You're familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs?
	Yes. But, you know, basic shelter, safety, security, then food.
	Absolutely. Down the bottom, you've got the essentials for life, you know, oxygen, water, food, shelter.
	Up the top, you've got this thing called self-actualization, this sort of ultimate life where you're living your best life fulfilled and happy and all of your needs are met.
	You have purpose and love and everything's great.
	The reality is most of us live somewhere in the middle, right?
	But then along come lockdowns.
	A whole bunch of people's jobs being declared non-essential.
	You can't work 23 hours a day in your own home.
	You're only allowed to leave your home for one hour a day, and then it has to be for one of the approved reasons.
	And if you're caught out without a mask and da-da-da, then we're going to lock you in prison.
	Society gets split in half at that point because there are the essential workers.
	Oh, no, excuse me.
	Let's start with the other group.
	So there's this whole group of people that had previously been around the middle of the hierarchy somewhere.
	They're not self-actualized.
	Life's not amazing.
	But at the same time, their needs are being met.
	They're moderately happy.
	They've got some social connection and family connection, and life's okay.
	And all of a sudden, they're being pushed down to the bottom of the hierarchy, closer than they've ever been before in their lives for many of them.
	They're stressed about money.
	They're stressed about bills.
	They're stressed about putting food on the table.
	Their survival is being threatened in a way that...
	That they have never experienced before.
	That's relatively obvious.
	What's less obvious, but actually more important, is what happens to the other people that are not immediately devastated by lockdowns.
	Now, these are people who are considered essential workers, so they get to keep going to work, or they're laptop workers, they can do their work from home, or they're on welfare, they're retirees, they're on disability benefits, they're on unemployment benefits, or other things like this.
	They have, not only are they not pushed towards the survival end of the hierarchy for themselves, but Daniel Andrews gave them a psychological gift, an opportunity to live with a sense of purpose and meaning and belonging and saving the world that they had never had before in their life.
	And the way Daniel Andrews did it was this.
	He showed up on our television screens for a press conference at 11 o'clock every single day for hundreds of days in a row.
	And in that press conference, he would basically give you information that could have been a four-line email.
	Like, if you've ever been in the corporate world, you've had that experience where you get sucked into a meeting that takes two hours and by the time you're walking out, you're like, damn, that could have just been a memo.
	That could have just been an email, right?
	And it was exactly like this with his press conferences.
	And he would be making these constant, minute adjustments to the rules.
	You know, are you allowed to remove your mask whilst drinking alcohol outdoors or not today?
	You know, when is the curfew?
	How far are you allowed to travel?
	What are the things that you're allowed to buy in the supermarkets?
	Because you were only allowed out for essential shopping, shopping centres had to cordon off or shops had to cordon off the aisles that didn't contain essential items.
	You could buy bananas, but you weren't allowed to buy a get-well card for somebody.
	They had to literally split their shops down the middle, and these rules were being constantly, minutely massaged and adjusted.
	And the psychological reason for that was so that people had to tune in in order to be up to date.
	If you missed two or three of his press conferences in a row, you'd be out of date and you wouldn't know what the rules were.
	And the water cooler conversation for those that were allowed to go to work and have water coolers, obviously with their masks on, the water cooler conversation or the online chat was all about what are the changes, what are the rules, what have I missed?
	And everyone's hanging on every single minute detail of every word that this idiot premier of ours has to say that could have just been a four-line email.
	And the psychological effect of that was this became almost an object of worship.
	Instead of going to church and spending two hours worshipping and hearing about God, etc., you got up in the morning, made yourself a mug of cocoa and sat on the couch and listened to Daddy Dan, Daddy Daniel Andrews, telling us how he was keeping us safe today.
	And he used language like, you're a part of a team.
	We're all in this together.
	Staying home saves lives.
	Staying apart keeps us together.
	These were all phrases that were focused grouped by those psychological manipulation consultancies that we, the taxpayer, were funding to the tune of millions of dollars.
	And they had the effect, for those that were willing to buy into it, they had the effect of giving them a sense of purpose and a sense of belonging.
	It's slacktivism.
	You know, people like to click like or post a little frame around their social media profile.
	They don't want to have to actually do anything, but they can virtue signal and feel good.
	This was the ultimate slacktivism in real life.
	You're saving the world by doing less than what you normally do.
	You're saving grandma because you stayed home and didn't go to work to that job that you hate and don't want to go to anyway, right?
	So he just tapped into this wonderfully, this deep vein of psychology.
	And the result was, and the tragedy is, that for the people that really bought into the narrative, not only were they not pushed down towards the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy, they moved up it closer to self-actualization than they've ever been before.
	And I think deep down inside they know, closer than they will ever be again.
	And for them, they look back on that era with nostalgia.
	That was, for them, the greatest year and a half of their life.
	And they're constantly wanting to recapture that feeling.
	And when someone like me comes along and says, that was just a bunch of baloney and human rights violations, they're not hearing...
	A criticism of the policies and the government's response.
	I'm criticizing the period of their life where they felt the most special and the most wonderful and the most like they belonged and like they were wanted more than any other time in their life.
	And that's why they defend it so irrationally.
	I'm going to do this not because of the subject matter because I'm going to post this entire thing to YouTube on the Viva Clips channel tomorrow or this afternoon, but we're going to end it on YouTube just because I have the power to do that and I almost forgot to.
	Give me the link one more time and it changes nothing on our end.
	We're just going to vote with our feet and vote with our eyeballs and head on over to Rumble right now.
	What you're describing, first of all, it's amazing, and I almost called you Dan Topher, because I've got that dictator Dan.
	You got Captain Dan, you got dictator Dan.
	It's fascinating when you describe it like that, because I never really thought of it as empowering the powerless, and I'll put that in quotes, or at least giving the utmost of authority to those who...
	Whether or not they should have it, they've never had it.
	They get that authority for doing less.
	It's phenomenal.
	It's like Parkinson's law of mundanity at a global scale.
	The only thing is though, what you described, it's exactly what we saw in Quebec and Canada.
	It's exactly what we saw in the US.
	I remember going to the bank and it had these fucking things on the floor that said further apart, closer together by being further apart.
	Something stupid.
	Like George Orwell's freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
	Peace is war.
	War is peace.
	But you have to explain why it was so much different and so much more accentuated in Dictator Dan's province of Australia than it got anywhere else in Australia or anywhere else in the world for that matter.
	What was it about that state of Australia, Melbourne and I guess Victoria?
	Did Dictator Dan have control over all of Victoria?
	He's the premier for Victoria.
	The premier of the whole of Victoria, yeah.
	So that really does come down to the individuals that are making the decisions.
	But the psychology for them is really interesting.
	And there's a reason why we saw jurisdictions all over the world doing similar things.
	And on the one hand, yes, they're all getting fed similar information, similar lies, and they're under similar pressure from places like the UN, the World Health Organization, World Economic Forum.
	These various bodies are trying to apply pressure.
	I don't discount that at all.
	But actually, it's the incentives.
	There is this incredibly perverse incentive in politics that you have to do something.
	And if you're a politician and there's a crisis in the media, it doesn't matter whether the crisis is real or not.
	Your political incentive is to do something.
	And it actually doesn't matter whether you do the right thing or whether what you do works.
	If you do something, politically, you can no longer lose.
	Because if the problem turns out to be fake, but you did something, then you can claim credit for it becoming a non-problem.
	You don't have to admit, oh, the problem was fake.
	No, no, no.
	The problem went away because we did something.
	If the problem turns out to be real...
	And you did something, then you get to say, well, can you imagine how much worse this would be if we hadn't done anything?
	It doesn't actually matter whether what you did helped.
	You can still claim credit to some degree, no matter how bad things get.
	It would have been worse.
	But then imagine if you do nothing.
	If the problem turns out to be fake, you don't get credit.
	You get pilloried in the media.
	Our do-nothing Premier is going to let us, you know, he's going to let Grandma die.
	If the problem turns out to be a non-issue, they don't go back and print a headline, Premier was right!
	Okay, they don't go back and give credit.
	They move on to the next issue.
	And if you do nothing and the problem turns out to be real, well, of course, your career is over.
	You're destroyed at that point.
	So all of the political incentive is towards doing something.
	And so then you go, okay, well, you know, New South Wales does something.
	Victoria does something.
	These various states with the respective state premiers, they all start to do something.
	West Australia, Mark McGowan was a terrible premier during COVID in West Australia.
	What's the incentive for them?
	Well, the incentive for each and every one of these people is to be able to say that they're doing more.
	We're doing more than anybody.
	We're doing the most out of every state in Australia.
	And that adds another layer of this political protection, this shield, where they actually become untouchable as long as they can say, well, don't blame me for how bad it got.
	We did more than anyone.
	And so there's this one-upmanship that kicks in, and it happens globally between national leaders, and it happens within countries between different state and district leaders as well.
	Then when you take that psychology and you add on the fact that Daniel Andrews, I believe, is a genuine psychopath, and I don't use that expression in the Hollywood sense of the word.
	I mean it in the actual clinical sense.
	I believe he's an actual psychopath.
	I know people that went to school with him.
	And he had this amazing ability, according to them, these are anecdotes that are told to me by other people that I cannot and do not verify, but these are the anecdotes I'm being told, was that they regarded him as a pathological liar.
	Someone who felt the need to lie even when it was completely unnecessary.
	And he would get caught out in his lies and he would then double and triple down on those lies on the schoolyard being called out by everybody.
	And he would just absolutely stick with his version of events.
	Now let me fast forward that through to a contemporary example that would suggest that that behavior continues to this day.
	Daniel Andrews and his wife were on their way home from an event one night.
	This is now over 10 years ago, I believe.
	And they had a collision with a cyclist.
	This is the bike boy scandal.
	If you want to find out about it, go online and go, Daniel Andrews, bike boy scandal.
	The boy was sent to hospital with broken bones.
	The police attended and they found that the driver of the car had done nothing wrong.
	They found that it was his wife that was driving.
	Not him.
	They weren't properly breath-tested.
	There were a whole bunch of procedural things that weren't done properly.
	And they concluded basically that the cyclist hit the car.
	The problem is that if the cyclist hit the car, why was the car's windscreen smashed?
	And why was the damage on the front of the car, not the side?
	And how was he so badly injured and hospitalized?
	And a now-retired police officer actually went through and did a forensic analysis and found problem after problem with the police response that amounts essentially to a cover-up.
	And problem after problem with the police description of how that accident supposedly happened.
	And this is an ongoing scandal.
	This is an ongoing, slowly boiling scandal behind Daniel Andrews, who's now stepped down.
	He's no longer our state premier.
	And this is one of the scandals that just refuses to go away for him.
	Now that you mention it, the search results that are coming up are from this year.
	Daniel had a car crash under the microscope.
	Yeah, correct.
	This is a problem that has not gone away for him.
	But in the past, throughout his life, he's been able to just lie and then problems go away.
	He is a masterful manipulator.
	And politics rewards people with no principles.
	And the reason for that's very, very simple.
	If you have principles, politics is about negotiation, getting the numbers, getting things passed, getting support for motions, etc.
	And if you need support for a motion or a policy that you want to get up, you don't go and talk to the people whose principles are opposed to that motion because you know they're not going to change.
	They have principles.
	The people you go and negotiate with are the people that don't have principles, the ones that are open to some argy-bargy.
	I'll give you this if you give me that.
	And so the less principles you have, the more negotiations you get to be a part of.
	The more negotiations you get to be a part of, the more favors you end up being owed and the more leverage you end up getting.
	So politics, whether by design or as a design flaw, whatever the case may be, it rewards the people with the fewest principles.
	And Daniel Andrews is a consummate.
	Politician. He has no principles.
	He just wants power.
	And he believes that he is fit to wield absolute power.
	And we saw that really when COVID arrived.
	He just took one look at it and said...
	Well, this is my, not that he believes in God, but he's like, well, God has appointed me into this moment to play God with these people's lives and to save them all.
	And I genuinely believe that he thought he was saving us.
	I genuinely believe that he thinks he was the saint through all of this, just as he thinks he was the saint with the car crash and was the saint with everything he's ever done.
	I think that that is, I think he's a literal, genuine clinical psychopath.
	That is my personal opinion.
	And that's why we saw him go so much further than any other Australian state.
	I mean, I obviously tend to agree as well.
	The only non-psychopathic politicians are the ones that don't really succeed.
	When I look at a dictator, Dan, I see a Justin Trudeau.
	I see a Francois Legault.
	Who's our Premier of Quebec.
	Not to give you the kick in the teeth, the documentary ended with, you know, the elections are coming up, let's stick it to Dictator Dan.
	And not only did he not get outed in 2022, they gained a seat, much like in Quebec, Supreme Leader Francois Legault picked up seats in Parliament like the people didn't, you know, they wanted more of this.
	So, okay, so you get different states.
	Dictator Dan covers Victoria.
	Melbourne is like a five and a half, 5.2 million population.
	So Melbourne is...
	80% of the population of the state of Victoria.
	And so that obviously was the biggest problem to manage.
	I mean, everybody's got to go watch the documentary because the way you do the timeline of the shifting, the moving goalposts, it was never about COVID zero.
	And I remember this and it drives me nuts looking through this.
	I was going back through my Twitter feed.
	It went from two weeks to flatten the curve to COVID zero.
	And like you mentioned in the documentary, Assume you ever get to the impossible goal of COVID-0, because it's impossible, no colds, no nothing.
	What's your exit plan then?
	Because the second you lift the measures, you're going to go back from COVID-0.
	That's right.
	And it was enraging.
	So how it started, we both had the two weeks to flatten the curve.
	Yeah. And the excuse was your hospital healthcare system overwhelmed as well.
	Have you got universal healthcare in Australia?
	Yeah, we do.
	We do.
	And, you know, even as a libertarian, I can say, well, if the Black Death was coming and they said to me, hey, we need to do this to try and boost capacity, bring people back from annual leave, bring in some new equipment, make some preparations, convert some hotels into emergency hospitals, blah, blah, blah. I can see a justification for a short-term intervention of that nature.
	I don't like it.
	I don't think the government should make anything like that mandatory ever.
	I don't think they have the power to do that.
	But I can understand where they would be coming from to try and do something like that in response to a situation like that.
	It is at least politically defensible.
	And yet, for me, the alarm bell was the minute they added on the third week.
	So for us, it was two weeks, and they're like, oh, we're just adding one more week.
	And at that point...
	I went, no, absolutely not.
	Everything just fell into place for me.
	And I went, I can see exactly where this is going.
	And so from then I began to speak out and that was where I released my first video.
	So my very first video actually on the topic of COVID because I held my fire initially and I normally do this.
	I'm not someone who tries to be on the bleeding edge of the latest cutting news.
	That's not what I do.
	I wait, let the dust settle a little bit, let the counter arguments and a bit more information come out, and then I will sift through that to try and determine as best as I can.
	I'm a human being.
	I'm not always right.
	But to try and determine as best as I can what's true and what's not and what we should do about it.
	And so I didn't post on COVID initially.
	I waited a little while.
	And then a bit of data began to come out of Italy, out of Israel, out of Sweden and other places that had really good age stratified data.
	And in the case of Sweden, it was age stratified and stratified by comorbidity.
	So you could actually really go through and figure out how does this virus statistically affect these different categories of people?
	And it was very, very clear that the risk to anyone under 50 in good health was negligible.
	It was similar to the risk of going for a long drive in the car.
	That was the rough equivalent of mortality rates for young people who were healthy.
	And so I released a video volunteering to be infected with the coronavirus.
	And that wasn't a publicity stunt.
	Yes, it was designed to grab attention.
	But I released a video and said, hey, everyone my age...
	Needs to just, like, go and get a mouth swab from your GP that's infected with COVID-19, take it, go home for two weeks, and when you're recovered and you've got individual immunity, re-emerge back into society.
	And if enough of us do this, then we will have herd immunity in just less than a month's time.
	And then the elderly people, who in the meantime would be sheltering and staying away and blah, blah, blah, those elderly people can re-emerge into society and be safe because the reproduction rate of the virus is now below one because so much of the population has immunity.
	Rock-solid logic that made perfect sense all the way up to 2019.
	And in fact, even in 2020, there were genuine world-class epidemiologists basically making the same argument in much more professional sort of ways.
	And yet that was rejected.
	And I was mocked and pilloried and, you know, you just want to kill grandma and all of that sort of thing.
	And what we were told instead was that we were going to lock down and get to COVID zero, which of course begs the question, well, how do you get out of COVID zero?
	Well, the answer was they're working on a vaccine.
	Well, that's interesting because actually humans have been working on safe, effective vaccines for coronaviruses.
	Let's not forget the coronavirus is the same type of virus as the common cold.
	We've been working on vaccines for that for over 20 years.
	Every single one of them has failed.
	Numerous of them, interestingly, got to human trials.
	And they were then abandoned because it was found that the vaccine over time had a negative effect on that individual's immune system.
	And that person became more vulnerable to coronotype viruses as well as other viruses than what they had been prior to beginning to take these vaccines.
	So we've tried and we've failed every single time.
	And as I said, on April 25th, 2020, I spoke at the very first anti-lockdown protest.
	It was the first illegal protest that I'd ever participated in.
	And I said then at the time, we are squandering our today, we're destroying our today, and we are gambling our tomorrow on a long odds gamble of a safe and effective vaccine against a coronavirus, something that humans have never achieved before in history.
	And we were literally saying, Australia-Victoria was literally saying, we will stay cut off from the world.
	We will keep our borders closed.
	We will stay in lockdowns until we've developed this mythical vaccine that we've never been able to develop before.
	Well, of course, only a year or so later, they come out with, oh, we've got the vaccine.
	The problem's solved.
	Yay, everyone isn't this wonderful.
	I smell the rat straight away.
	There's a reason why trials are supposed to take years and years and years.
	You cannot, by definition, you cannot get long-term data in under a year.
	By definition, that's just not possible.
	And, of course, with the amount of money on the table, the risk of corruption, the risk of cover-up, the risk of people rushing their work was just too extreme.
	And so I immediately made the decision, I'm not taking this.
	There's no way I'm taking this thing.
	And sure enough, as time has gone on, if you follow the work of Ed Dowd or Naomi Wolf or various other people that are documenting this, or if you're in Australia, look up the work of dystopian underscore DU is her name on social media.
	Rebecca Barnett, wonderful West Australian journalist who's got a lot of details on this.
	The more data that's coming out, the more we're seeing that, sure enough, there were some really big safety issues with that vaccine.
	It wasn't effective.
	People have had six boosters and still get the virus, so it wasn't effective.
	And it is now following the exact same trajectory as every other attempted vaccine against a coronavirus, that the people taking it are getting sicker than they would have been had they never taken it.
	It's wild.
	I had on...
	I want to say Aseem Malhotra.
	I think it was Dr. Malhotra.
	Dr. Malhotra, yeah.
	I've had a number of doctors.
	I'm trying to remember who said it because I used the term Vades and I didn't mean it in any derogatory manner.
	And he said, you know, like, I prefer to distance myself from that term because it has a certain connotation.
	But the idea that you're actually training your immune system to be less responsive and weaker and thus creating some sort of...
	Vaccine-induced autoimmune disorder.
	It's funny, a lot of the stuff that people were saying back in, let's just say, when they were developing this jibby-jab has proven prophetic.
	What was the account that you were mentioning?
	Dystopian underscore?
	Dystopian underscore DU.
	Rebecca Barnett is the journalist.
	I commend her to you and to all of your viewers.
	Please go and follow her.
	She's very active on Twitter and she has a substack.
	Done. I'm actually just following her right now.
	I noticed she was following me.
	Let's just show it to everybody.
	Rebecca, make sure my DMs are not open.
	Okay, here we go.
	Rebecca Barnett.
	So I was looking back through my Twitter feed to see when it was that I got skeptical.
	I'm happy to say it was like end of March, and I'm going to go back and re-watch the stream that I did with Barnes because I remember him saying, let's just assume this is as bad as everybody said.
	Well, not as bad, but...
	What sense does it make locking down and if the old people are the most vulnerable, you shut down businesses and you cause kids who are the ones transmitting it but not at risk to be with the people who are the most at risk?
	From day one, Barron said this makes no sense.
	I remember my light was when I...
	The definitive switching point.
	I forget when the New York Times ran the article.
	You can protest for BLM but not be at a Trump rally.
	But it's when I went to the dog run and the dog run was...
	Chain bolted shut outdoors and the swings were zip-tied together.
	I'm like, yeah, we're governed by idiots and none of this makes any sense.
	So you were a vocal opponent of all of this, but Dictator Dan, it was exponential, much like what we saw in Canada.
	It went from two weeks to flatten the curve to basically indefinite.
	In Quebec...
	I remember the first year when that piece of shit Francois Legault says, you're all going to have to celebrate Christmas different this year.
	Celebrate it alone because it's what you have to do.
	You have to suffer and die alone to avoid the even worse catastrophe.
	And I remember some old people saying, screw this.
	I didn't live to 75 to die alone and not celebrate Christmas with my family.
	And then it went to celebrating Christmas alone.
	Then it went to, well, then they got the jibby jab and it was mandatory.
	They made it mandatory with a vaccine passport in Quebec.
	Did you have a QR code system Oh, yeah.
	All that happened here.
	We had apartheid.
	We had medical apartheid.
	If you weren't jabbed, you couldn't go to restaurants, to cinemas, to church, to sports games, all those sorts of things.
	We had all of those.
	That was very much a global phenomenon.
	And I'm sure you're across this, but...
	The issue, one of the issues here in Australia was that very early on, we began to identify, actually some Australian doctors were instrumental in identifying the benefit of hydroxychloroquine in the right therapies with the correct other things along with it, and also ivermectin.
	Both of those had Australians involved in the initial discovery and the realisation that, hey, these things help.
	And we saw the absolute demonisation of those here in Australia, and for the reasons that I think would be similar is in the UK.
	That under Australian law, an emergency use authorization to something like an untested jab can only be given in a situation where there's no other viable therapy.
	And so what we saw was our government deliberately and maliciously and knowingly...
	Denying people access to something that they knew would help, because if they did that, they wouldn't be able to give the emergency use authorization to these upcoming jobs, which at that point in time, by the way, hadn't even actually reached the point where they were available.
	They were doing all of this in advance to protect what was going to be the biggest money laundering scheme, in my opinion, that's what it is, the biggest money laundering scheme in history, out of taxpayers' pockets and into the hands of the pharmaceutical companies.
	The level of criminality that has gone on here goes so far beyond just locking people in their homes, etc.
	We're now in a world where the government has claimed that it has the right to force you to participate in what our own health minister, Greg Hunt, called the largest clinical trial in history.
	That's what he called it.
	Oh, Obama said the exact same thing.
	Well, we've now basically clinically tested on it.
	Sorry, what was the guy's name?
	Because I'm going to make fun of it.
	Greg Hunt.
	Greg Hunt.
	If you say his name quickly, it sounds slightly different.
	Greg Hunt.
	Oh, yeah.
	We can say that.
	I mean, you're Australian, so you guys get to use that word.
	I'm thinking it.
	I'm not going to say Greg Hunt is what he sounds like.
	But, yeah, that's what his name sounds like.
	Yeah. Oh, okay.
	There was one thing I was going to ask you.
	It was about Dictator Dan.
	It was about...
	Oh, for goodness sake, I'm going to forget it.
	Oh, it'll come back in a second.
	But the evolution in Australia where it got to people couldn't go further than five kilometers from their home and they said you couldn't exercise more than an hour a day outside.
	I mean, it's not this...
	It makes me...
	I mean, I'm a very, very...
	I'm a passive person, maybe even to a flaw.
	It makes my...
	Effing blood boil to rehash these memories when they sat down with their stupid conferences and they were doling out these idiotic rules.
	What was your method of protest when this starts going on under those conditions?
	What choice do you have?
	So for those of us that are committed to doing what's right, regardless of what our government thinks, those of us that are guided by our conscience rather than by, you know, outsourcing our morality, as a lot of people unfortunately do.
	But for those of us that wanted to stand up, there were really two key ways.
	There was just simply disobeying in private, private civil disobedience, secretly spending time with your friends, you know, secretly...
	You know, doing whatever, running your business, you know, black out the windows.
	And, you know, there were hairdressers that were secretly giving haircuts and these sorts of things.
	Imagine this.
	I was not allowed to get a haircut in my home state for months on end.
	For months on end.
	I had to go and get...
	Yeah. I was halfway to where you are at one point.
	I had to get an illegal haircut.
	Just stop and think.
	That that sentence can even exist in a Western democratic country.
	I had to go and find a hairdresser that was willing to give me an illegal haircut.
	Just, like, stop and think.
	So there's the civil disobedience that goes on in the background, people just getting on with their life and not following the rules.
	And that's important and that's valuable.
	But in situations like this, especially where your government has specifically said you don't have the right to protest, guess what the most important time to protest is?
	When your government tells you you don't have the right.
	That is the single most important moment, when you have to hit the streets.
	And that's exactly what we did.
	So April 25th, 2020 was the first one.
	There were about 70 people there.
	I spoke at that one.
	And then we persisted for 18 months continuously.
	The first roughly six or so months were hell.
	There were only ever a few hundred of us at the time.
	Everyone was aligned against us.
	The politicians, the media, you know, family, friends, etc.
	You were the devil.
	If you were one of these evil, dirty, scum, granny-killing, probably neo-Nazi protesters, right?
	That was the whole narrative.
	And, of course, you know, I was one of those people.
	And that was a really, really unpleasant chapter in history.
	And that was really awful for me personally as well because I was one of the few public figures.
	One of the few people willing to put my name and my face, even a lot of the protesters that came, they would cover their faces and they wouldn't talk about it online.
	And I get why.
	Like, I'm not criticizing them.
	They had tremendous courage just to even show up.
	But I was one of the few that I was live streaming from these things.
	I was putting evidence all over the Internet saying, hey, I'm at this and I'm supporting this.
	And so what happened was an enormous number of people who were hurting for any one of a number of different reasons began to reach out to me.
	They would send me emails, they would send me messages in Facebook, and they would reach out to me, and they would want to tell me their story.
	And this started happening right after that very first protest.
	I live-streamed that.
	The video went viral.
	Over 100,000 people had seen it within a day or two.
	And I just got this avalanche of people crying out for help.
	Well, that's what I thought it was at first.
	I was sitting there reading as these started to come in and they're just stacking up in my inbox.
	I'm thinking, why are these people telling me these things?
	I'm sorry that you've lost your business.
	I'm sorry that your child who's had mental health issues has now taken their life because they can't deal with lockdowns.
	That's tragic and I'm sorry, but I can't fix any of this.
	I can't help you.
	And then I kind of realized, and this actually, in a way, it kind of made things worse.
	I realized they're not reaching out to me because they want me to help them.
	They're reaching out to me because no one else will even listen.
	They've given up on anyone helping them.
	They know no one's coming to help them.
	And they're literally just looking for someone that's actually going to read their story.
	And so when I realized that, I made a commitment that I was going to reply to every single one of these people and let them know that they'd been heard, that someone had cared enough to spend the time to read their story and reply.
	And so those months became for me kind of this nightmare.
	I moved my office into the garage because I could lock the door away from the family after the kids had gone to bed.
	And I would sit in the garage and I would just read message after message from these people.
	And I would read it in detail and I would reply.
	And I would make sure that my reply included some of the details so that they really knew that I'd really read it.
	This wasn't just a copy-paste thing that I was saying to them.
	And I committed myself to making sure that every single person that messaged me...
	Got a reply on the same day.
	If it was humanly possible, they would get a reply on the same day.
	Because I didn't want them to have to face a night of darkness thinking that there was still no one that heard and there was still no one that listened.
	And unfortunately, what I didn't pay enough attention to was the effect that that began to have on me.
	And I developed, in hindsight, I can see I ended up having a breakdown over the 18 months.
	It was just like a slow motion.
	Train wreck.
	But I developed a severe anxiety.
	I developed a shake.
	I couldn't bring myself to just click the refresh button to refresh my inbox in my emails because I was so afraid of what was going to be inside some of those emails and what people were going to be sharing with me.
	And so I began to drink to calm the nerves and to deal with the anxiety around that.
	And, you know, first it was a glass of wine, then it was a bottle of wine.
	And I'm not proud to admit that there was an extended period of time where I was going through.
	A couple of bottles of wine and a couple of bottles of whiskey every week.
	I was just drinking myself into oblivion in an effort to try and be able to keep facing what was in my inbox.
	And then on the weekend, of course, I'm out protesting again, getting chased by the cops.
	I used to call it my game of dodgem cops.
	You go out there and dodge them cars.
	You try not to get hit by the cars.
	This was dodging cops.
	You're out there protesting.
	And to be clear, when we speak of a protest in Australia, it's more like what Americans in the USA, what they would call a rally.
	I'm not talking about Black Lives Matter, Baltimore, burn it down, take over the centre of the city stuff.
	I'm talking about initially there were children as well until the police started bringing massive amounts of violence.
	People thought, hey, this is just a family event.
	We're going to bring placards.
	I'm going to paint a slogan on my shirt.
	We're going to sing songs and do chants.
	That's what I'm talking about and we were always moving away from the police.
	And the police were always trying to trap us.
	And any time they got their hands on us, that's when the violence happened.
	There were a handful of regrettable exceptions.
	Unfortunately, there are idiots in every crowd, and our crowd was no different.
	But with only a very small number of exceptions, the violence was always from the police.
	And when they trapped us, despite our best efforts not to get trapped.
	And so this was kind of my life.
	My business was falling apart.
	I lost my business completely.
	By night, I'm sitting there trying to be a suicide counsellor to people.
	By day, I'm trying to be a dad to a kid that's locked at home.
	My wife's pregnant, expecting a second kid.
	And then on the weekend, I'm running around playing Dodgham Cops.
	And over an 18-month period.
	And yeah, in the end, that nearly broke me.
	Yeah, I'm going to pry a little bit.
	There's a moment where it reaches, say the drinking reaches a cataclysmic awakening point.
	Can I ask what that was?
	So the cataclysmic awakening point, I'm not sure specifically, you know, I mean, the drinking continued until really into 2023 was when I began to actually get that back under control.
	And now I have a healthy relationship with alcohol.
	Again, I can go to a pub, have a few drinks and be completely fine.
	I don't need to drink myself into oblivion or anything like that.
	But there was a point where I realised that I was going to have a breakdown.
	I was going to break completely.
	And this was now, we're fast-forwarding into late 2021.
	This has been going on for 18 months.
	I've been awaiting my arrest now for months because we've seen throughout the previous 18 months, everyone else has been arrested.
	And I haven't yet.
	And at the protests, I'm very tactical.
	I'm very careful.
	I'm very aware of what's going on around me.
	And so I was able to stay out of trouble.
	I never got arrested at a protest.
	But we'd seen viral videos time and time again of the police showing up, battering rams on people's doors, charging in, tackling people, some people getting hospitalized, getting these very, very violent arrests in their own homes.
	And my face and my name was all over the place as someone who was calling on others to join these protests and to support them.
	We had, you know, by this point, we had the police out there with armoured vehicles.
	They were shooting people with rubber bullets on the streets.
	Like, the level of violence was insane.
	And they still hadn't come to arrest me, but I knew it was going to happen sooner or later.
	And I've become hypervigilant.
	I'm still drinking heavily at this point.
	The number of messages I'm getting has subsided, but I'm still every night dealing with a couple of messages from people needing to be replied to and sort of living that recurring sort of hell.
	And my mental health was shot to shit.
	I was gone.
	And I finally went to my wife and said, yeah, I don't think I'm okay.
	She's like, yeah, no shit, Sherlock.
	No kidding.
	You know, she'd been able to see it the whole time, obviously.
	But she also knew better than to be the one to, you know, tell me that I needed to talk about it because I wasn't going to receive that very well.
	Pro tip for everyone out there.
	If a man ever comes to you and says, hey, I think maybe I'm not okay, you need to take that as like a DEF CON 5 level because for a man to get to the point where he's actually going to say that, things have to be pretty bad.
	And they were.
	And my wife reminded me.
	She said to me, you haven't done what you promised.
	I said, what do you mean I haven't done what I promised?
	Like, what do you mean?
	How could that possibly be true?
	And she said, before you proposed to me, do you remember what you said?
	I said, yeah, I told you that I, this is now 10 years ago, right, long before COVID.
	Before I proposed to her, I said, you need to know that I expect I will go to prison someday because of my work.
	I'm a political commentator and I can see the direction the world is heading in and I know myself.
	I'm not going to walk past something and pretend I didn't see it.
	I'm going to speak out and that's going to lead us to bad places.
	I fully expect, and this isn't ego or bravado, I just expect that at some point in my life I'm going to go to prison for what I do.
	And you need to know that before you say yes to marrying me.
	And she looked at me and said, well, just make sure I know who to call.
	When that happens.
	And she said, you haven't done that.
	You haven't done what you said you would do.
	And so I sat down and I wrote a four-page actions on document.
	Actions on my arrest.
	If you don't know where I am, if you do know where I am, if I'm injured, if I'm released on bail, if I'm being held without bail, all the different possible scenarios.
	Up to and including if I've been killed in an arrest gone wrong.
	Right? All of the scenarios.
	All of the phone numbers and names are the people that she needs to call in what order and a one-sentence description of the conversation that she needs to have with them.
	Why is she calling them?
	What is the purpose of this conversation?
	So that in the event of my arrest, all she had to do was pull that document.
	We printed up multiple copies and stashed it in different places around the house and she had it digitally backed up where she could access it even if they took our computers and things.
	You know, I made off-site backups of my computers, my phones, everything.
	We taught my son.
	To not go to the door when he was four.
	We taught him to not go to the door when there was a knock at the door because if the police were about to smash their way through or if there was noise at the door and he went up there and they were smashing their way through with a battering ram, he was going to be in the firing line.
	You know, we prepared ourselves essentially with a siege mentality, you know, as if we were drug lords or mafia hitmen or something like that.
	Every time there was a sound on the street outside the house.
	I would wake up instantly.
	I became an extremely light sleeper.
	So not only was I sitting up late at night trying to reply to people and trying to help them get through the night, I would then be awake at 5.30 in the morning because one of the tradies that lived across the street would have gone to work.
	And the minute he touches his car, I hear it.
	And I hear a door and I'm waiting for an engine because if there's no engine within about 30 seconds, I'm thinking maybe it's not someone leaving.
	Maybe it's someone who just arrived.
	And you better believe I'm getting up to look and see whether it's the cops about to smash through the front door.
	And I lived like that for months.
	And then finally I wrote that actions-on document for my wife.
	And something about that changed everything in my head.
	And suddenly I could sleep.
	And there was just this sense of relief.
	The circumstances hadn't changed at all.
	The arrest was still impending.
	It was going to come sooner or later.
	In fact, I was almost starting to feel offended that they hadn't arrested me, that they'd let me go for so long.
	I'm like, have I not done enough?
	Have I not, like, pissed you off enough to deserve an arrest?
	Plus, people are going to start calling you a fed if you don't get arrested.
	Yes. But writing that document changed everything inside of my head.
	And it didn't stop the drinking and it didn't stop the trauma and the anxiety.
	And to this day, I'm still working through the PTSD of that era.
	Having that document gave me enough peace that I started to sleep again.
	And it was actually, it was only about a week after I did that that the arrest actually happened.
	And that actually was a relief, to be honest.
	Once it had finally happened, the only thing I felt was relieved.
	We saw all of those viral videos of them.
	I mean, some of them were out of the UK, some of them were out of Australia, arresting people for social media posts, for organizing events.
	What did you ultimately get arrested for?
	So they charged me with a thing called incitement.
	Yeah, it's the conspiracy.
	Just catch all.
	If you didn't do anything, it's incitement to do something.
	And this is such a great example, an object lesson in how laws that are sold to us for one purpose are then repurposed by politicians to do something different entirely.
	Incitement laws were introduced in order to be able to catch...
	You know, organised crime bosses or terrorist ringleaders who didn't necessarily do the crimes themselves, but they told others and encouraged others to do the crimes.
	It's a criminal offence and it can carry prison sentences and so forth.
	And it was only supposed to be used to catch ringleaders guilty of encouraging others to commit serious crimes.
	But they were throwing out incitement charges like confetti at all sorts of different people.
	I wasn't the only one.
	They were throwing those at us because we were encouraging other people to break the chief health officer's orders.
	Now, breaking the chief health officer's orders is not even a crime.
	It's what the Americans would call a misdemeanor.
	For us here, it's just a little procedural thing.
	You'll get a fine in the mail.
	That's all it is.
	And yet, they were charging you with criminal offenses that could give you a criminal record in jail time for the crime of encouraging people to do something that wasn't a crime.
	And they took this law that they sold to us, oh, we need these laws to keep you safe from organised crime and from terrorists, and they weaponised those against people that simply wanted to exercise their human rights to protest against government tyranny.
	Have you gotten convicted or acquitted?
	So they chased me with those for two and a half years, cost the family a fortune and all the anxiety and stress that goes with that.
	And then, here's the funny thing.
	I don't believe in conspiracies, but here's a really, really funny, two little funny details, and you can make up your own mind.
	I was arrested and charged one week after I publicly announced that I was going to make the documentary Battleground Melbourne.
	Pure coincidence, I'm sure.
	I announce I'm making the documentary with Daniel Andrews as the villain.
	A week later, I'm being arrested.
	Now, they released me quickly, and they were actually lovely.
	I was the luckiest of everyone in terms of my experience being arrested and everything else.
	But then they pursued me with criminal charges for two and a half years.
	And over that time, Daniel Andrews won another election, regrettably.
	And then he chose to step down on his own terms.
	And you know what's funny?
	The charges were withdrawn at the very next court appearance that took place after Daniel Andrews resigned.
	That's not a coincidence.
	That, I would say, is not the coincidence.
	The coincidence might have been them charging you a week after announcing the documentary because, as you mentioned in the documentary, it allowed you to crowdfund to finance the documentary.
	A good coincidence.
	Yeah, that was brilliant.
	They dropped the charges.
	Just two and a half years of dragging you through the court system to drop the charges, much like what they did with a lot of the political prisoners up in Canada.
	Just cost you money, ruin your life.
	It's nothing for them.
	It's taxpayer dollars and taxpayer-funded terrorism on the citizens.
	And then you're a free man at that point.
	Yeah, well, a free man minus a couple of years of anxiety.
	Money that could have been invested in a mortgage, invested in re-roofing new windows.
	I remember what I wanted to say earlier, and I had to write it down so I wouldn't forget again.
	It's no longer the right time of the conversation.
	The videos, it was in the documentary, and I go back, the propaganda terror campaign that they waged on the people by airing those videos of people dropping dead in the streets of China, teachers dropping dead during online courses.
	Like, how stupid do we have to be to fall for that and to not be able to realize, in retrospect, even if you fell for it at the time?
	I don't remember my reaction at the time.
	I think I remember what they were, but I don't want to mischaracterize them.
	To not look back on that and say this was something of a collective training campaign.
	This was a collective Milgram experiment to see how far the government could go, and they might have gone a little too far.
	To relive that, I remember seeing these videos, spraying the streets in China, people dropping dead, and it never happened again.
	It's amazing how it only happened when they were trying to terrorize us into submission to staying in our houses indefinitely.
	So this is something that really, really gets my goat, is people that want to try and tell me now that, oh, look, I can see in hindsight that you were right, but you were still irresponsible because you couldn't have known at the time.
	You couldn't have known at the time that COVID wasn't going to be that bad.
	You couldn't have known at the time that the jabs weren't going to be effective and might actually be done.
	You couldn't have known that at the time.
	So I'm still the righteous and right one because I went along with all of that at the time.
	And I go, well, no, you're an idiot, first and foremost.
	If you think that I can be batting, you know, I don't know what baseball analogies.
	I don't do baseball.
	But if you think I can be batting an innings average of 100 in cricket, which is a century, which is a good score, just off the top of my head, just with guesswork, then you're an idiot.
	But also, just let's actually take stock at what was put in front of us.
	You don't have to go searching for conspiracy sources and alternative experts.
	No, no, no.
	Let's just look at what they put in front of us.
	They put in front of us images of people falling over.
	And they said, these people are dropping dead from a respiratory virus.
	Maybe they stopped breathing.
	They had been walking and stopped breathing a kilometer earlier.
	If you know anything about respiratory viruses, you know that you are not going from healthy walking around to dead in a matter of seconds.
	That's not how this works.
	You go from healthy and walking around to irritated and coughing to in bed with a fever and choking on your own mucus to perhaps dead.
	And in an extremely aggressive case, that might happen over a period of just a few days.
	In an extremely aggressive case.
	You don't go from out shopping to dead like that.
	The moment you see that and they tell you that that's what happened, you know something's wrong.
	You know something cannot be right.
	And anyone that saw that early propaganda in late 2019 and didn't have a little alarm bell going off in the back of their head needs to slap themselves in the face whilst looking in the mirror and go, you're an idiot.
	Smarten up next time.
	Topher, do you have 15 more minutes, give or take?
	I have genuinely as much time as you would like.
	My record on a podcast is five hours.
	Okay, well, we're not going to do that.
	It's four o'clock in the morning, your time.
	What I want to do, there's one subject I've been saving, and that's going to be the quarantine hotel, the scandal of the guards banging the inmates.
	We'll talk about that over on the local side, because we're going to bring it over there.
	Everybody, come on over to vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
	But before I get there, because we have the biggest audience now, first thing.
	Biltong is one of the most protein-dense foods in the world, packed with B12, zinc, iron, creatine, and more.
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	Thank you for the rumble rant.
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	This isn't even a sponsor.
	It's amazing stuff.
	It's like prosciutto but made out of beef.
	Where can people find you and what can they do to support you?
	The documentary is Battleground Melbourne.
	It's free on the internet.
	You just go to battlegroundmelbourne.com.
	I shared it with our locals community this morning.
	What can people do to support you?
	I'm going to throw a few things at you.
	If you want to follow me on social media, Topher Field, where's my name?
	They're at Topher Field on all the socials.
	So just put the at symbol in front.
	No space, no underscore, no nothing.
	Just at Topher Field on all the socials.
	Now, if you want to watch Battleground Melbourne, which I highly recommend that you do, you can watch it completely for free at BattlegroundMelbourne.com.
	You just go there, you click on it.
	It's the first video that you'll see.
	It's won 14 awards around the world.
	It's an internationally acclaimed multi-award winning documentary.
	I'm very proud of it.
	But what I suggest you do, and David, you might not be aware of this, if you scroll further down the page, you will see a second video on the Battleground Melbourne page.
	It's hosted on YouTube.
	You have to be logged into YouTube because it's been age-restricted.
	That is a thing called Battleground Melbourne Live.
	I did that at the CPAC conference in Australia two years ago.
	That you will need a box of tissues for.
	That is quite literally my proudest achievement.
	If you only watch one thing, watch the documentary.
	If you can watch two things, watch the documentary and then watch that.
	And actually, I'm doing that again this weekend at the CPAC conference in Brisbane, in Australia, with a different group of people.
	We're doing Battleground Melbourne live at CPAC again this coming weekend.
	So battlegroundmelbourne.com is where you see.
	So that's the one that's age-restricted.
	You have to go across to YouTube to watch that.
	What would make it age-restricted?
	It talks about suicide and alcohol abuse and stuff like that.
	So YouTube just went, oh, yeah, no.
	Nothing, nothing crazy.
	But the thing that I would love for people to do, because the big lesson out of COVID is civil disobedience and the need for us to get comfortable with the idea that we're going to do what's right, even if our government is wrong.
	And I wrote a book on this.
	It's called Good People Break Bad Laws.
	You can find it at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.
	It is my slogan.
	It is what I live by.
	And I think it's one of the most important conversations that we need to be having.
	Is about civil disobedience, understanding its limits, understanding its powers, understanding how it works, when to use it, and realizing that the only thing in history that has actually worked to limit the power of government is the people reaching the limit of their obedience.
	That's the only thing that actually works.
	Things like bills of rights and separation of powers and so forth are great, but they have to be backed by people willing to back them up with disobedience until their will is honored by those in power.
	It is only...
	Disobedience that actually limits the power of government.
	So goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.
	You'll find my best-selling book there, along with shirts and hoodies and other sort of merch and things.
	But that's where you'll find my book.
	And that is, I think, the most important thing that we just need everyone to be reading and talking about.
	All right.
	You're going to send me all the links I'm going to put up in the pinned comment afterwards, and I'll pin it there.
	Ending on Twitter.
	Let me do this.
	And I'm going to end on Rumble, everybody.
	I will be live tonight with the...
	Talking about stomach-turning stuff, we're going to be live-streaming the Tampon Tim, No Balls, AWOLs, Stolen Dallar Walls versus JD Vance.
	So I'll see you later tonight.

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