Stay Free — Russell Brand and Dan Bongino on the Attempted Trump Assassination

Hey, everybody. Here's part of my conversation with Russell Brand and Dan Bongino. It's on Russell Brand's show called Stay Free. It's a wonderful conversation.

I think you'll really enjoy it with the great Russell Brand and Dan Bongino. Get involved with Training Point USA at TPUSA.com. That is TPUSA.com. Start a high school or college chapter today and join the movement and become a member today. Members.CharlieKirk.com. When you become a member, you get a free copy of our Never Surrender shirt that is members.CharlieKirk.com. Buckle up, everybody.

Here we go. It's incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

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Go to NobleGoldInvestments.com. Now, one of the things you were saying just before Dan Graces with his incredible presence, which I'm still basking in somewhat, was that the Republican Party is more united than it has ever been. So there are no obstacles, you know, outside of the kind of nefarious things to which have been alluded and have recently been experienced to the ascent of Donald Trump. How do you imagine, this time round, the ascendant political power of Trump will contend with the kind of state power, deep state power, blob power, use whatever term you want, once in office? Yeah, so the second term is going to be a lot different than the first. First of all, personnel is policy, and there are some really great people that are going to be going into this government.

Secondly, J.D. Vance is going to be keeping the eyes on the federal government every single day when President Trump might be handling higher level type of diplomatic issues. Look, President Trump's agenda day one is going to be securing the border, ending the war in Ukraine, ending the war in Gaza, and making sure that we have our commitment to Israel.

That's like the first week or two. Under the current, though, we need to build a government, put cabinet secretaries in, and also we have a looming list of like 50 or 60 immediate reforms and firings that need to happen. There's a reform called Schedule F that allows you to fire federal employees at will, but there's also a 1960s era act that allows the President of the United States, it's the President Reassignment Act, I'm getting the name wrong, but it's something of that sort, that essentially allows, if there's duplication in government, the President can merge agencies or officials together. No one knows this exists. Vivek told me about this, and I went and did all the research on it.

It's amazing. So, for example, if there is duplicative type of work happening in the federal government, in the Department of Education, and also maybe in the Department of Education, maybe in the Department of Interior, or Department of Interior, Department of Energy, you can then merge government agencies together and effectively sunset and end them. Now, it'll be a challenge in court, but it's pretty clear that the executive branch has far more power than people realize, and there needs to be an immediate message if President Trump were to win and take office in the first couple of weeks that every bureaucrat is worried that they might be next. That there needs to be volleys and salvos of firings and terminations, and this needs to continue for quite some time.

And then, yeah, look, again, it comes down to the human beings that actually execute the policy as well. Thank you very much. That's so beautifully explained, but I'd expect nothing less from you, Charlie.

You're an astonishing man. Now, listen, we have to leave YouTube right now, so if you watch us on YouTube, there's a link in the description, click that, join us on Rumble. After all, we are Rumble creators, they're free of us, and we need you to join us there because, well, Dan, who knows what further illuminations await us from that direction.

Charlie could be turning verbal pirouettes at any moment now, and I get the sense that there's information that these two men are not willing to tell me while we're still on a platform like YouTube that regulates in the manner that it does, is a member of the TNI and is ultimately part of the systems that constrain our freedom. Click the link in the description and join us in that sweet stream of freedom that we call Rumble with some of the best. Now, we're here on Rumble. Oh, God, I can relax.

Why should we take our time? Wait, no, I can talk about the vaccine. No, my favorite one was the third booster. That's when I started to feel very, very powerful indeed. Dan, do you want me to leave you for a minute over there just to sort of deal with some stuff? No, no, no, I'm always doing show.

I have a FOMO thing if you're missing out. I do. Charlie, you ever get that on the show? Like, you feel like I'm going to miss a story or an angle?

All the time. Well, I mean, there's no news going on right now. Listen, as a content creator, Russell, here's my biggest fear. My shows are live, live every day, four hours a day. I'm proudest of the fact, you know, knock on wood or whatever, that despite having a Fox show, a radio show, and a TV show, I can tell you with a straight face, I'm yet to have gotten caught on the air where someone says something, I go, you know what, I just don't know.

It could happen. I don't obviously don't know everything or even close to it. But as a content creator, you damn well, it's your responsibility for the audience to know what everything is, the face act, the save act, all that stuff. So I always have this FOMO like I'm going to miss out, you know, so would you hear what Trump just said? And if I don't hear it, like, what's the point of listening to me?

I screwed you over. So you know, it's a responsibility. How do you what is driving that in you, Dan?

And how do you connect? A little crazy, brother. Yeah, yeah, clearly there's a sort of an energy in both of you. I'm normal and I got the crazy eyes. You're crazy. He's crazy. I'm bringing some rationalism to this conversation. Russell Brand is the sanest person. I'm actually the shortest person on this couch today, too, which is freaking bananas.

That never happens. I'm six one and you got Charlie's like seven feet tall. Charlie's not even, I don't even know the same species.

Charlie's legs are longer than me. Nephilim, we've been over this. Nephilim. He's part of the Nephilim. He's a biblical character. He's literally from scripture. He strode right out of Genesis and into our lives and broken our hearts.

That's Charlie Kirk, everyone. You know, like that kind of dedication and devotion that you had in your previous incarnation as working for the security services. Do you feel that level of devotion and dedication as a rumble creator? There is something that you obsess about, making sure that you have the accurate information, the correct information and the information available immediately.

Is it something you're very devoted to? You know, I think I get it from my father. You know, obviously we're you know, I'm not getting into social psychology, but we're all social models, right? We model what we see around us.

You look at old Bandura work and stuff like that. And I grew up around my dad. You know, my father was a plumber and a building inspector and he worked his way up. He ran the entire buildings department and he had an apartment out in Long Island, was connected to his house. So when I went out to work in the Secret Service in the Long Island office, he said, hey, you want to rent the apartment? And the driveway was right near the apartment.

So four o'clock in the morning, every morning I'd hear or something. He had this old Mercury Cougar and my dad was the boss. He ran like a 20 person department in town of Smithtown. There was zero reason whatsoever for my father to get to work before nine o'clock. No one else was there. It was just him. But he got there and I think 435 because it was important to him that everybody knew he was the first guy into work and that he was. He didn't knock anyone else for showing up on time. He was like, hey, you should be here at four. He wasn't trying to be a showman.

He was trying to set an example. And I got to tell you, man, I never forgot that. And I feel like I don't know if you feel the same, Russell. I know, Charlie, you do. Like, I don't mean this in an insulting way to us, but we don't have real jobs. Military folks, you know, engineers, railroad workers, UPS, they have real jobs. America, the UK, the world works because of them, not because we talk for a living. It's an important job.

I'm glad we can impact people's lives. But it's not a real job. And I say that all the time to my audience. And they're always like, no, no, Dan.

I'm like, no, no, no, Dan, nothing. Like, this is not real. What you guys do is real. And I respect that. And if you're going to give me a fake job like this where I talk for a living, then you're damn right. I'm going to do the damn thing the right freaking way and not talk a bunch of... That's my job, man. And, you know, I'm not sitting here digging ditches for a living. There are real people busting their... We owe them that.

That's a pretty beautiful set of values. I wonder how those values and the constituency that Dan is speaking to and for have over the last 20 years somehow been so casually demonized and condemned. I saw it in my country, in Brexit, and certainly the rise of the MAGA movement has been accompanied with condemnation of an entire class of people as racist and various forms of attack. How has that happened? How did America turn on its inhabitants, Charlie, by your reckoning so insidiously and cruelly? And how did they get away with it, continually framing themselves as the protectors of the vulnerable? After the wall fell and we declared victory over the Cold War, the ruling class of this country decided to care much more about corporate profits and their own enrichment and the welfare of the American citizenry. And they got away with it for the first 15 years because we were living on the multi-decade inheritance of winning World War II. And so they decided to open up markets to liberalize everything. We literally had the book by Francis Fukuyama where he said it's the end of history.

He's like, this is it. That was the actual title. Literally. The title was the end of history. Liberalism will take over the entire world.

You know, the whole idea of dictatorship or oligarchy or conservative rule is over and liberalism is the best way of ruling ever and it will just spread with any sort of restraints. And that was a lie. And it was a lie because they made a series of, again, what was on full display here at the RNC is a reputation of that doubles bargain that occurred in the late 80s and early 90s, which is neoliberalism is built on invade the world, invite the world and import a bunch of cheap stuff at the expense of your own citizens. And we've lived through the excesses of that because our leaders, the last 20 years especially, have contempt for the people that they are tasked to govern. It's pretty extraordinary that those military endeavours are no longer supported automatically and reflexively by the kind of people that you describe. Now those people have become cynical, full of doubt. The idea, as Charlie described earlier, Dan, that presumably Trump and Vance will ascend into power on an anti-war mandate that, as Charlie said earlier, is an incredible recalibration.

How has this change in temperature been achieved? How has it happened that the Republican Party movement now is the party of anti-war? And what do you imagine is going to happen? Where is all of that power, all of that lobbying clout, all of that manipulation going to go once they no longer have the pathways that were available to them?

Isn't it incredible? I mean, you're a guy, comedy, acting, you've been around, people have known you forever, you've been surrounded essentially by liberals your entire life, and they prided themselves on the idea that they were the peaceniks, right? And now they're the war hawks.

You know what, my position on this, I've actually run for office of laws, but you can go back and watch my campaign commercials and everything else. I've been consistently anti-foreign intervention when there's no actual game plan. I was against the Iraq war, Afghanistan, there were portions of it we had to do after 9-11, but I certainly did not support a long-term footprint. And I'm going to tell you something that changed me, and I'm trying not to get all choked up, because I'm trying not to be a wussbag, but you know, my uncle served in Vietnam, a war where the message at a minimum was confusing to people. They didn't understand what we were doing.

I'm just saying the message to the American people was off, okay? My uncle was supposed to come home. The day he was supposed to come home. We owned a bar, it was called Gibby's Bar, Myrtle Avenue in Queens, New York. They had signs up, Welcome Home Greg.

It was the actual day. Two soldiers walk up, it's not Greg. And my grandfather, who was a little bit of a bit actor and he would do commercials, he was the bar owner, my grandfather was about 500 pounds and 6'7". He was a big guy, so that's why he was an actor.

And you'd see him, he used to do Rupert Beer commercials. And my grandmother was upstairs. Now, my uncle who died, my grandmother's first husband had died, that was my uncle's dad, so this was his stepfather. And these two soldiers walk in and they said, you know, my uncle, my grandfather knows right away.

And they said, we're looking for Eileen, Gregory Ambrose's mom. And he said, you're not going up there. I'm going to do it. He didn't let him. He said, no, no, you don't. They said, we have to.

He said, I know you got to, you're not doing it. And I'm going to tell you something, my grandmother was never the same, ever. There was 1968, he was killed. He was shot in the back and through Duck Vietnam, saving his friend.

He was given the Bronze Star with a V cluster. My grandmother was never, ever the same. My grandmother died, you know, 40 years, 50 years later. She could never, ever have the name Greg mentioned in front of her without breaking down.

And Russell, I get it. I don't want to oversimplify war. The human condition is something not easily simplified by one-page narratives in a book. However, if I, as a political leader running for office when I did, I'm not anymore, am going to commit your son into combat or daughter, and they're going to come back in some freaking body bag, then I better damn well have some kind of game plan as to why they died. And I think the Republican Party has always been the party, at least on the economic front, of results.

And I think we just applied the same guiding ethos to war. Where's the spreadsheet? Where's the result? What are you doing? Why are we, we're giving them money exactly for what? What's the game plan? What are we doing in Iraq? And no one can answer these questions. And what's our history of success?

And if I may, last evening, the kicker of J.D. Vance's entire speech was that we are rejecting abstractions. And think about, oh, we're spreading democracy in Iraq. Go send some more money.

Or Zelensky's the new Churchill. These are all abstractions. When they come under criticism or scrutiny, they have no backing in any sort of facts, data. By the way, how do they respond when you criticize? You're a Putin puppet.

They cannot have a conversation about any of these things. And neoliberalism is built on weaponized name calling. Oh, well, you're a protectionist. You're an isolationist.

Or you're a misogynist. You're a racist for not wanting to have mass migration. And so we just kind of back off. And when you have a political order that can fall apart as soon as the name calling ceases, maybe those ideas are really bad.

And they're hurting a lot of people. I'm sorry, Russell. Just to add, Charlie is 100 percent correct.

The mildest of scrutiny, it collapses. You ask him a basic question. Listen, I am not the chief of staff. I'm not the head of military operations at the Pentagon for Special Forces.

I don't need to know surgical strikes. I'm just asking you a basic question. Okay, what does victory look like in Ukraine? Are we taking back Crimea?

I'm not really sure. But what happens if we do and Putin launches a tactical nuke because then his power is threatened and he's a maniac and he's not going to leave power without sending a message by dropping a tactical nuke first? And then they go, is that victory now? Because then there's no Crimea because the nuclear war breaks out. And then they look at you and go, man, I never really thought about that. Well, maybe you should, bro, before we get more people killed and send 100 billion more dollars. I mean, can you imagine?

Let's make the simplest analogy. You get a script for a movie. They're like, Russell, we have the greatest script ever. Your comedy skills are so amazingly suited for this. And the script is blank.

And you're like, well, how much? Is this a joke? No, no, we'll get it to you later.

No, no, bro. I'm not signing a contract with a blank script. That's what they want us to do. Charlie is so right. You ask basic questions, basic questions, Russell.

There's no answer. Don't nearly call me Russia because I have been called. I've already been called a Putin apologist. We've all been called.

They make a little video about me saying this. In Ukrainian, I hasten to add. But what do you think is indicated by that lack of a script and by the lack of an inability to outline a clear agenda? What is revealed by this inability in your view, Dan? This is what if you ever go to business school, they do SWOT analysis.

Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Modern American politics has solely become about not, you know, weaponizing the ability to take advantage of opportunities to make America great. It is shifted almost fully into let's just mitigate a threat and stay alive. So in relationship to wars in Ukraine, I can almost guarantee you swampy Republicans, because it's a bipartisan show, what's going on? And Democrats, weak Democrats, said, well, we don't want to look weak by having Putin invade Ukraine because it's going to politically hurt me. So let's just marginally do something, whether it works or not, and let's just ride it out to the next election.

Never attribute to, you know, incompetence where you can attribute in politics to sheer malice. They just want to stay alive. It is about mitigating threats to power. It's not about actually advancing a cause because they can't tell you what the cause is. Charlie just said it. They don't even have a basic idea.

And because they can't admit what the actual cause is. So, I mean, I saw Lindsey Graham here. I asked how many Ukrainians have died in the war. He can't tell you.

And think about how sick and evil that is. He's the number one cheerleader for Ukrainians to get money. And he can't tell you how many Ukrainians have died. Like I said, can you give me a ballpark?

10,000, 100,000, 150,000. He's like, I'll have to get, you know, he's like, you know, his staff came in and just like, I didn't film it because I'm not there for sensationalism. I'm not here to, I just like, I'm actually interested in a policy question from somebody who like kind of just no idea. Okay, fine.

By the way, I got that from Tucker who goes around and asks that question, everybody. But we must understand that after the wall fell, it all goes back to the wall. We had a decision, which is, are we now going to keep this NATO project alive? And what is the reason for NATO? And Russia wanted to join NATO, repeatedly wanted to join NATO and just end this chapter.

And we don't have to have this Russian bear adversary. But NATO is the GAE, the gay, which is the Great American Empire. And that is why when NATO was in town, it was in America, it's as if this is the neoliberal project is housed within NATO.

And so when Putin invaded Ukraine, first of all, he was provoked to invade, provoked by Kamala Harris going to the Munich Security Conference and saying that Ukraine should become a member of NATO. And we have all this weapons and all this armament on the border. What American liberals saw is that they saw a questioning of the outer edges of their empire. Because we as Americans are – we are much closer to mercantilism than we are to anything else, which is we're not actually a nation. We are a deteriorating homeland with outer edges colonies and an oligarchy that makes a bunch of money off of the underclass. A permanent war is the oxygen of the oligarchy. What's terrifying to me, both you and obviously I want to hear your perspective on this, is that if we were living through a period of de-dollarization where America's economic power is indeed under collapse, then what will be the – how will there be and how will they be able to resist, even with this presumed mandate in post-November, the ongoing struggles that are presented by the potential threat of a rise of China or the rise of Russia, if indeed what is playing out really on a geopolitical level is the threat of the BRICS currency and what is the emergence of genuine threats from China and Russia? Do you see that under this administration, on the geopolitical level, to go right from the micro of the anguish and agony of losing a family member in war to the vast potential for the apocalypse, which I think many people are terrified could become a reality under the Biden administration, were it to be granted time to administer it.

How do you think that those kind of problems are diffused, or do you not consider them to be problems that can't be resolved dramatically, both of you? Look, here, it's going to take work. You're not going to reverse 40 years of neoliberalism overnight. But President Trump, he has a mandate, hopefully, from the American people coming into November, which is that we're not going to have any more of these adventurous wars.

We're going to put the American worker first. And we still hold all the cards. Here's the thing.

BRICS is this like fake thing. America is still by far the strongest country. I have a good friend here in the audience.

I don't think – I just stepped out. He's like the king of American energy, Harold Hamm, great American, by the way, one of the most valuable and largest American energy companies. We have more – we have two neighbors that are not going to – well, we are being invaded, but we have largely friendly neighbors. We have an incredible population. It just takes leadership to reverse it. And China has a lot of looming problems.

So does Russia. And I don't see it to be an issue at all if President Trump's able to win. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us, as always, freedom at CharlieKirk.com. Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.