Our primary goal now is to help people recognize that old taxonomies of Left and Right, as we once understood them, are atrophying to a point of redundancy, and that there is a requirement for a new political discourse that includes an understanding of personal spirituality. But we’re further advanced down the pathway to materialism, individualism, and a kind-of unconscious tyranny than perhaps we realize; there is an obligation to question centralized media narratives and establishment ideals and interrogate them wherever we find them — to approach with humility complex subjects, recognizing that no one has a monopoly on truth, and to encourage new forms of alliances, whether that’s between people from previously divergent backgrounds and beliefs and ideals, or between previously disparate ideas, such as spirituality and politics. Our aim is to bring about a new populist reckoning, so that the establishment power has to be held to account by some genuinely new, rigorous voices.

It has accelerated in the last few years. And, of course, there are so many ways that story could be told. The only version of it that I’m qualified to speculate on is the conflation between liberal ideals and traditional economic, financial, and corporate interests that probably began to accelerate around the administrations of Tony Blair in Britain and Bill Clinton in the United States. These developed as a repackaged neoliberalism that showcases ethical and moral issues while ultimately supporting the same kind of financial interests that conventionally would have been regarded as corporate and right-wing.

I feel that the obligation ultimately lies with the powerful. What I mean by that is this set of elite establishment interests that broadly coalesce around control of media, financial interests, and the state. Many of the arguments that are being advanced around misinformation and disinformation are an attempt to censor narratives that are adversarial to preferred centralized agenda-led narratives. Of course, not all of it is an attempt to shut down dissent and smear dissenting voices. I think there’s an overt attempt to conflate the more hysterical and baroque aspects of counter-establishment narratives with a more reasonable and inquiring argument.

But where do people draw the line? I don’t really know. Personally, my tendency is somewhat antiestablishment. And it always has been. That meant that, a few years ago, when I wrote that book, Revolution, I was kind of regarded as a febrile lefty and almost a communist. But it’s never clear whether we [critics of the establishment] are crossing the line or if the line crossed us at some point. Previously mainstream views started being regard as antiestablishment — started being associated with a totally different set of beliefs.

I think the problem that you’re circling around is one of enormous distrust — I would say legitimate distrust — of the establishment. Whatever the issue, whether it’s the pandemic, the current conflict in Ukraine, climate change — take any one of a number of the issues that tend to determine the cycle of most news outlets. When it comes to policy, what interests me is, are the policies that are being proposed advantageous to a set of establishment elite interests or not? Elites never respond to these crises by insisting that there’s gonna be less opportunity for profit for Big Pharma, less opportunity for profit and power for Big Tech, and more ability for citizens to regulate by the state.

The barometer for where the truth is in this stuff should be: Are the solutions being proposed ultimately going to penalize ordinary people? Are they like, “Oh, we’re gonna have to impose this tax where ordinary people are gonna get taxed; we’re gonna have to introduce these measures where ordinary people are not going to be allowed to travel”? Or is the average person going to be alright?

We should respond to this by saying that we’re ending lobbying. We’re ending profits for these corporations that are monopolizing institutions. We’re nationalizing these municipal facilities, collectivizing them, making them democratic. We’re going to ensure that workers for Big Tech companies have the right to unionize, are encouraged to unionize, and have correct conditions.

I think we have to focus as best we can on outcomes and inclusivity. I know that things I believe in are the rights of ordinary workers to earn good money, the demonopolization of all corporate power; I believe in freedom of speech and freedom of expression. I think that you should be free to have a traditional lifestyle if that’s what you want or a progressive lifestyle. Increasingly, I think these barriers are falling away. When you get Noam Chomsky saying that Donald Trump is one of the only viable anti-war voices, when Tucker Carlson is one of the only people in the media that’s willing to talk about monopolization, you have a deep problem.

Those of us who have had affiliations with what was once known as the Left must acknowledge that the establishment is now using the aesthetics of liberalism in order to mask corruption. Bernie Sanders was right to go on Fox News and talk about Big Pharma. His doing that was inconceivable ten years ago, that a figure to the left of the center of the Democrat Party is appearing on what would have once been regarded as a right-wing outlet. Perhaps you still regard it as that — I don’t really care.

Look at the newly elected president Lula of Brazil: he just said stuff about [Ukrainian president Volodymyr] Zelensky that, if I were to say anywhere other than Rumble, I’d be a heretic. And I don’t really like the feeling of political vagrancy that’s been brought around, but I would rather be a vagrant than not be able to speak the truth. Those appear to be the options now. Frankly, I think that this is caused in part by the smearing of dissenters.

When we discuss Chris Smalls on our show, someone who’s heading up a unionization drive at Amazon, I do that because I believe that low-paid workers have the right to unionize. I’m against the collusion that’s taken place between the state and Big Tech and social media platforms during the last few years.

I may be wrong from a spiritual perspective; I’ve tried to continually recognize if I don’t know what I’m talking about. I just want to be open and stay connected to what are called Sesame Street values: kindness, compassion, openheartedness. And there is no advantage in cutting other people out of the debate. I know that my heart is about democracy, that I don’t know what’s right for you and your community in your family. And I don’t even know what’s right for myself, sometimes. What I want is the ability to assess information openly and not to sense continually that there’s a thumb on the scale, that the only information that we’re given is information that will lead to advantages for elites.

I remember that, first and foremost, my beliefs are spiritual rather than political: my political beliefs are a reflection of my spirituality. I believe in God. I come from a background where I’ve experienced poverty, where I’ve experienced the addiction. I’ve been through this giddy carousel of fame and accessed its abundance, its voluptuousness, the saccharine treats that it offers you. In its own way, it’s sort of delightful, and it’s certainly distracting. But I’ve never forgotten — you can’t forget, it’s stitched into you — who you are and where you’re from.

When I witnessed the condemnation that took place during Brexit and Trump, something didn’t sound right to me, something didn’t feel right — the attempt to demonize and marginalize ordinary working people — to find critiques that would justify the silencing of those voices made me sick. I’m not politically adept enough to understand whether or not Brexit was the right thing to do, whether close ties with the European Union is economically advantageous for the majority of Britain. But what I do know is that I do not like to hear great swathes of the population have their interests condemned and neglected and their beliefs criticized.

The professional elite establishment decided that they don’t like working people and that they’re not willing anymore to stand up for their rights. And if that means demonizing them, and finding ways to say that their rights should be neglected, then so be it. So, I feel like a necessary component of being an effective voice is facing the ire of the establishment. And I know what I want, I know what my shortcomings are, I know that I can be vain and self-interested. But I also know that I care about people and that I’m willing to be of service and I’m willing to change, that I’m not so caught up in being right about this stuff that I’m not willing to be open. I don’t think that we should be contributing to the ongoing polarization that’s taking place. We have to move toward each other in a somewhat openhearted way.

In a sense, that’s happening culturally anyway, because of necessity. A few years ago, you wouldn’t have had Chomsky describing Trump as one of the only antiwar voices. You wouldn’t have had Bernie Sanders appearing on Fox News. Some people argue that the terms that we ought to be using today should be centralized authority versus peripheral dissent.

The problem facing voices of peripheral dissent is we often come with critiques and without solutions. Maybe the real problem is that we’re unwilling to face, at this point in history, that centralized authority, at this scale, is no longer tenable — that you can’t live in nations of 300 million people or 60 million people. Democracy ought to be as absolute as possible, and power ought be devolved. To live in a nation or on a planet means having to cohabitate with people whose views you do not share.

I think what you’re saying became clear when Marianne Williamson, former Democratic candidate, came on my show. By the way, that was lovely. She came on our show, and she said that she felt that the Democrats would rather lose and have Trump than win and have Bernie. Do you think that’s true?

I think we have to create a new political movement. You’re not gonna have so many people flocking to the periphery of any political movement, if they feel they have a home somewhere in the center. I believe we have to create a new political movement that is perhaps international and certainly decentralized, that represents exactly the class of people that you’re describing.

If you remember the hysteria that surrounded the election of Joe Biden on the Left, it was as if some geriatric messiah had risen like Lazarus from the grave to save us all. But Biden ended up appointing people with ties to Big Pharma. How can Biden be what you’re offering and, at the same time, you’re saying we beat Big Pharma this year, and then expect people to argue that liberal democracy is working?

We know that if we were to ban lobbying, if we were to ban members of Congress from owning stocks and shares in the in the companies that they regulate, we would see a completely new configuration that will change the political class forever. Why are these ideas not being offered to the electorate? We know why. Because that will change things.

I don’t want to be reductive. But one of the things that I picked up as a kid was, if voting changed anything, they’d ban it. When I said publicly, “What’s the point in voting?” the reformists came out and said, “It might be a small gap, but millions of people live and die in that gap.” We’ve seen what that leads to now: it leads to the rise of demagoguery.