Tucker Carlson Show: w/ Russell Brand (Transcript)

I see sin now, Tucker, not as the transgression of stealing or lying or whatever, but as the mental state that precedes it.

When I’m in that mental state where I suddenly— I elevate myself like Lucifer, like the fallen one, I think I can create my own circuitry, my own neurological circuitry, without his angelic agency. As soon as I’m in that, I belong to the world again. I belong to empire. Forget the tyranny of those most powerful people in the world. Even in my petty, trivial tyranny, I bear their insignature, not his.

Orwell, the Boot, and the Image of God

It was you, in fact, that made the observation one of the times we met. I think I was doing one of your tremendously successful and well-attended live shows in Fort Lauderdale. I’m still showbiz. I still know how to do those bits. And we were— I showed you this bit from Orwell and you said, oh, well, you said Orwell anticipated— this is prior to the most recent American electoral cycle. You said that Orwell understood Soviet communism well. And at this point you said in 1984, he’s talking about social democracy’s tendency to evolve towards, or degenerate— one might say— towards tyranny.

And we discussed together, oh wow, what is Orwell’s most famous maxim? “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.” And in that moment, I think both you and I discussed, yes, and what is the face? That is the image of God.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

RUSSELL BRAND: They are annihilating the image of God. They remove the image of God. Once the image of God— our personal imprimatur, our signature, the hieroglyph— he’s present in us, the creator of meaning. Without whom there cannot be geometry, mathematics, or music, but even meaning itself. He is a storyteller, our Lord. He comes and tells stories to show you that meaning itself is what we must align with.

Because, you know, when people say, oh, it’s astrological, the three kings and the Virgin is the star Virgin, it’s an astrological description of movements, and Osiris was this and Isis was that and Dionysus meant that— they tried to say that Christianity isn’t unique, particular, and special, that the incarnation of God, that these principles being made flesh didn’t establish the new frequency through the Holy Spirit. They tried to say it’s just another story. When you go into the word, you feel it, you know it, it changes you. It reverses and undoes so much.

C.S. Lewis and The Great Divorce

Your whole life— C.S. Lewis says, Tucker, your whole life is redeemed. You look back at all of it, the father, and you see it differently. The career, you see it differently. You see that you were being prepared always for this. As C.S. Lewis says in The Great Divorce, when you accept him, “Your whole life will have been heaven.” If you reject him, you are in purgatory forever.

And why do they stay in purgatory? In The Great Divorce— I’m recommending read The Great Divorce— it’s because they won’t let go of their earthly identity. They won’t let go of it. We have to let go of that in order to receive the kingdom. We have to let go of who we are in shame, who we are in fear, who we are to the world. And once you do that, you’re kind of already dead, but you’re also in eternal life.

And that’s what’s been amazing about watching you in the last month in particular is the jaw-dropping boldness and bravery that sometimes can seem frightening.

On Fearlessness and Reading

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, not to me. I’ve never felt calmer. I just don’t care at all. Why would I? Winning the prizes that are held out for us— haven’t won them all, won a few. Not that great. That’s not why we’re here. But you’ve been a reader your entire life, even when you were a dissipate in Hollywood, you still read a lot.

RUSSELL BRAND: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: How is reading the Bible different from reading Yves Lenoir?

RUSSELL BRAND: Well, how it’s different— firstly, I’ve not read Yves Lenoir. What? That’s your birthright.

TUCKER CARLSON: Are you kidding?

Going Deep for the First Time

RUSSELL BRAND: I’m lazy. I’m an autodidact. And Woody Allen says with the autodidact, superficial. I’ve never been properly educated, so everything’s thin across the top. This is the first time I’ve gone deep into anything.

How it’s different, Tucker, from what I’ve accrued culturally is that it moves effortlessly into mystery. It is divine and profound truth.

Now, I think that one of the conversations we might have is— if you think during the brief time that you and I have both— I’m going to say the word transitioned now, but don’t panic— transitioned from mainstream media into whatever this is, this kind of independent media. What that’s been accompanied by, if one envisages a spectrum, and at one end of it the New York Times, the BBC, MSNBC, one might even include Fox and more particular flavors of mainstream media, and over here you’re Alex Jones, you’re David Icke— where is the needle moving? Well, it’s obviously moving radically in a direction that Alex Jones and David Icke have been in for some time. That’s not to say that either of those two men are without flaws, of course. I wouldn’t make that claim for any human being.

Dark Forces, Demonic Powers, and the Bible

But during that time, people have started to look at pedophile rings, conspiracies, global events that seem to be managed and manipulated, the possibility and potential that real power is not government or party political, but is in fact controlled by institutions that are imperial, transcendent of global boundaries, and may even be occultist and dark and demonic. Certainly the trend is moving in that direction.

And I think one of the great challenges for people that are telling the truth at a public level to a lot of people is how do we remain in that which is corroboratable? And what I feel is so important here is when you’re dealing with people that might say there are demonic forces at work, there are cultists, there are pedophiles, they’re doing child sacrifice— well, it’s all in here.

When I, prior to coming to the Lord, or rather more accurately, him coming to me, I felt I knew what was in the Bible because I thought I understood, right? I didn’t read it, but I thought I got the idea.

TUCKER CARLSON: I felt the same. Yeah.

RUSSELL BRAND: I felt it’s going to be about ethics and morality and a sort of rather obvious piety, but I sort of felt that it might be a bit anemic. But what’s really struck me is it moves between myths so powerful that it takes you to the edge of what consciousness can ever comprehend, obviously, while telling you that’s what it’s doing.

“My ways are not your ways. Do not conform to the patterns of this world. The evil one is in control of this world. We fight not against flesh and blood, but we fight against the authorities, the rulers, the dark heavenly powers.” All these things are in there. “My children, don’t worship false idols. Don’t make gods with your own hands out of metal and then stare at them the whole time.”

And you will glimpse God as if through a glass, or perhaps for contemporary language, as if through a mirror darkly. It’ll be like you’re looking at yourself and you see that Christ is in you and coming through you, but then you will return to yourself again. You will flick in and out.

The Promise of Redemption

See, the promise of Christ is redemption. That means you are owned by him and there is a restoration of the original state. It has been completed. Our God breathed life into the dirt man Adam, and Christ on the cross exhales the final breath. “It is finished.” It’s possible for us to return to absolute harmony with God, for us to live not in some utopian afterlife but in the present moment, to be in the Kingdom of Heaven, which our Lord said is here, ever-present and all around us.

I did not anticipate the depth of the mystery— that we live among forces undiscernible to the senses, angelic and indeed demonic, that there are dark energies that are affecting us and impacting us and attacking us and significantly controlling the most powerful institutions in the world. And that is not North Korea.

The Presence of God and the Fall into Self

RUSSELL BRAND: Yes, I see the work of those forces and I see the presence of God. I see continually this unfolding discourse throughout time, my own little life. I see I’m being shown this, I’m being offered that.

One of the things I’d forgotten, Tucker, is that at the point of first becoming famous, there was a kind of glory in it. And by true glory, I don’t mean personal glory, because anything that’s personal is not true glory at all. There was a moment where a world that continually said no to me suddenly, after decades, said yes. That suddenly the golden light was upon me and open. That I was appearing on television, people were saying yes to book deals, I was in movies, I was experiencing — and this is where I think I went wrong — abundant sex, for example.

And as that took hold, that’s where I feel and see the presence that I — the tempter, the accuser, the fallen one, the enemy requires our complicity. I did participate. I did participate in elevating false gods. I did allow sex to become a kind of idol, fame to become an idol. And neither of those things are possible if you don’t first fall into self.

I consider sin to be in self, in self. Once I’m in self, the sibilant es lacking vocal, the serpent has no vertical axes. I crawl upon the floor. I’m only a belly. We’re continually in the garden, and we’re continually, as René Girard obviously observed, observing Satan fall from heaven like lightning because he wants his own kingdom.

I’m continually believing the lie — the lie that I’m worthless, the lie that I’m ugly, the lie that I’m shameful, the lie that I don’t deserve, I have to be successful. I enter into that lie, and once I’m in that lie, then I belong to the world. Now I have to prove myself in the world. I have to make myself beautiful, lauded and applauded, celebrated, adored. I have to perform all of those rituals before his altar.

If I don’t stay with the one that made me, it’s an apostasy to be in this world. You don’t convert to Christianity, you let go of the false conversion of being in this world where you have been placed by the evil one, by the enemy, lured, tempted, hypnotized.

We all understand it. We all understand the idea of facsimile, the counterfeit, the emulation, the simulation. When people posit about — like the sci-fi version — perhaps we’re already in a simulation. You don’t need to use that lexicon. Through the electromagnetic moment where sensory information is converted neurologically, and that happens to all sensory input, you live in a synthesized reality in your own consciousness.

There are peculiar and inexplicable moments, as with all scientific disciplines, when you take it to its edge land — i.e., between the synapses as electromagnetic energy travels around in the brain, there’s a moment where it’s hormonal, it’s inexplicable. We’re surrounded in every direction by endless miracle, which we nullify through dumb orthodox science, as we witnessed at length and in depth through the pandemic.

We deny him continually. We are continually Eve. We are continually Lucifer. Why does our Lord say, when the hubris the apostolic disciples returned saying, “We moved among scorpions, we were casting out demons” — he says straight away, and it’s an odd non sequitur, “I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning.” “You will move among demons, you will move among scorpions and snakes and do great healings because your names are written in the Book of Heaven.” What can that even mean? You are encoded, you are encoded, you are made.

Did you see that it looks like a cross at some micro, micro, microscopically observable level? There’s a cross down in our DNA. There’s so much poetry in it. Of course it’s interpreted because interpretation is relationship. Of course people will say you can use the Bible to prove anything you want to prove. But one of my teachers said, “The main things are the plain things and the plain things are the main things.”

We’re meant to live here harmoniously with one another. We’re meant to be one human family. You have to accept Christ as the Messiah. If there’s any particular group of people that deliberately do not accept Christ as the Messiah, you might want to investigate that thoroughly. And there’s instructions for how to do that in there. There’s some powerful information in here that must be acted upon.

Now, from the other side, from the countercultural perspective, they’ll say, “Oh, this is for the Council of Nicaea and all that kind of stuff.” And I’m thinking now of the people that — we surely must pay our due to the likes of Icke and Alex Jones, who clearly are carrying — not Alex Jones actually, because he’s so sort of in the moment, isn’t he? But David Icke, I feel that he carries this weight of “I’ve been saying this for ages, I’ve been saying this for ages.” But what he doesn’t do, with love and respect to him, is honor that Christ is real, real, that this is a transcendent manifesto of all reality. The author of reality entered into his own story. The creator of the simulation entered into the simulation to establish a new way of communicating and being.

And I think, to forgive this ramble, what we’re trying to do is look at anodyne and sanitary Christianity and look at where it needs to be revived and reignited. Then we’re looking at a conspiracy culture that’s endlessly caroming and tangled. We have to look at these two worlds and recognize that the same thing is being approached. And without the cross, without him, without personal acceptance of him, we’ll just end up critiquing without energizing. We’ll end up in dead tradition, just ashes and incense. And we have to revivify this now. We have to participate in the resurrection. He says, “I am the resurrection.” He says that. When he brings back Lazarus.

What Is Prayer?

TUCKER CARLSON: Can I ask, just to move back a couple moments — you said you pray as you read. What is that? What is prayer exactly?

RUSSELL BRAND: I’m trying to recognize that there is a subjective experience, and we might be told an objective experience, and through prayer collapse that. The kind of Christianity that I feel like I’ve been called to is a kind of a quantum physics Christianity. And of course I don’t understand quantum physics — no one does, because it’s sort of unknowable. But what seems to be is that the process of observation alters physical reality, at the smallest observable level.

So in prayer, it’s an incantation to become who you really are and to be in absolute truth and to recognize, as with Paul’s great analogy, that we move in and out of Christ. Like, there are moments like now — I feel all right, I feel like I’m doing this properly, I feel like I’m not trying to get anything from you, and I’m not frantically panicking about what other people think of me. But I know there are points over the course of the day where I’ll experience either temptation or intimidation, and in those moments I’ll lose myself.

Prayer is to ensure that we establish such a strong connection with God that it can withstand — that we can sleep in the storm with him, that when the storm comes, and we know it’s coming, that we can rest in the boat in total trust and faith in him. Jail? Okay, jail. Assassination? Okay, assassination. When you no longer belong to the devil, when you belong to him — and as Paul says, “I’m only here to talk to you lot. I’ll go now. I want to be with him. I want to see his face.” I want to see his face. I love him. But I know at the moment I’m meant to be here, to be with you, to love you, to train with you, to be in discipleship and training together with you. I don’t question that. It’s not our job to question it.

So prayer is to collapse it — to collapse the wave particle, to live in the unknowable, to recognize that we are being made pure in him and through him, that in and of ourselves we do nothing. We do nothing. We saw what we did when we were in sin, and he loved us then.

I have a vision of you in DC, and I know because you’ve told me and you’ve been honest about it — cocaine and the things that I assume accompany that. And he loved you then, and he died for you then, and he brought that shame onto himself that you may know him. And then when you are not — he can’t be with us when we’re in sin. When we’re not in sin, there he is. The Holy Spirit will dwell in you. “Do you not know that your body is a temple? Do you not know?” Oh God, you’ve not realized, you poor sods. Otherwise you won’t be living like that. “Your body — for me to live in. Stop using it to get stuff. Stop putting pleasure on its sensory surfaces to try and defibrillate some synthetic spiritual experience when you’re already here. You’re already here. I’m here in you.”

He’s here. He’s here and he’s real now. So it’s quite psychedelic. And the problem is, if I’m hungry or I’m horny or I’m afraid, then they’ve got me again. And so now I try to do whatever I need to do to not go back there. And it anticipates all of that. It tells me the flesh is weak. It has so much guidance around sexual morality. It has so much guidance around power and false power. So it’s telling you, “This is what I intended you for, but I had to give you free will, otherwise the whole thing would be pointless.” It wouldn’t have time in it if there was no free will.

But through his grace and through his greatness, we are participating in something. But don’t you see — aren’t they even now observing what they are calling large structures? Aren’t they even observing that the cosmos — there’s intergalactic influence. Did you see Randall Carlson the other day sort of say that maybe things that are happening on our planet are influenced by other galaxies? Not because cows are farting or because cars are going too quickly. No, we’re in an intergalactic, eternal, and infinite poem with him.

The Globalist Trap and the Call to Christ

RUSSELL BRAND: And all systems of power attempt to impose a narrative that facilitates their further power. I realized after you, but I realized that the problem with the kind of imperialism that would have occurred if Kamala Harris had been president is it’s globalist and it’s bureaucratic and it’s managerial, and they use compassion to maximize total control.

I was not — everyone’s got 20/20 hindsight, but the videos exist. I think Trump is an extraordinarily enjoyable public figure. I think he says what’s on his mind in a way that’s sort of almost unprecedented, but it’s certainly seeming to become somewhat unpresidential.

In addition, what I didn’t enter into was the idea that Trump MAGA could be anything other than a bulwark against the annihilation of bureaucratic global imperialism. Because I think a personality like that can slow things down, and I think it’s an obstacle. But the thing that’s particularly disheartening about this war — and I know that you spoke about it extensively prior to the election of Trump with the Iranian war — is that this war would be happening if Kamala Harris was president anyway.

That’s my very distant, hazy view — if someone as particular, personal, and extraordinary on the human plane as Trump ultimately ends up doing what the globalist imperialists would have done anyway, then what are we all discussing when we’re talking about America First and MAGA and all of that stuff?

So what I’m saying there is global bureaucracies is a terrible instantiation of Satan’s counterfeit power: omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence through technology, absolute ownership. Nationalism, I thought, would instill a temporary preservation at least of the nation. But the nation is corruptible and is corrupted and is fallen.

And now I think the call is — and you seem to understand this, I know you understand it better than me — historically and geopolitically and politically and nationally and domestically, and God would run out of words in all of those ways. But what I know as a Christian is that there is something about your sovereignty in absolute submission to him that we need to tell people. There is something in the principle of democracy when practiced correctly, using the maximum technological efficiency, that gives us a chance to live truthfully. We can’t live in this loopy, lunatic illusion any longer of moving between false polarities that appear ultimately to have an ulterior, or at least superior, power that directs them regardless of the mandate offered through some phatic electoral process.

Rethinking the Defense Against Globalism

TUCKER CARLSON: I know you can double the speed of a YouTube video. I don’t know if you can cut it in half, because I want everyone to hear every word that you just said, because I think they’re inspired words and I think that they’re all true. And I won’t summarize, but I just ask people to rewatch what you just said in case they missed all of it the first time. I’m good at listening to fast talking, so I caught every word.

I think you’re absolutely right. And so let me just rephrase what I think you said. We spent all this time trying to construct a defense against what was clearly happening to us in the West, maybe the world, which was this globalist totalitarian nightmare, only to awake to realize actually we may have been participating unknowingly in the creation of it, just from the other side. Where does that leave us? What’s our duty now?

Faith, Love, and the Limits of Political Figures

RUSSELL BRAND: If we had any faith in any personality or person other than Christ, it’s only in him. What I was kept thinking about today is that verse that’s like, “By the way we love one another, let them know that we’re Christians.” That’s right. So my job while I’m here — I know you’re in Christ — so my job is to love you. That’s my job here. And with my friends Dave and Jake that I’m traveling with, and beloved Lexi, and the people that I’ve worked in here with, I’m most familiar with, just to be loving and present with them. And that’s my primary job. I can do that. And when I notice myself stopping doing that, which I will do because I’ll get hungry or something, then to intervene with myself as best I can by honoring and knowing my weakness.

Now, I didn’t believe that, and I don’t believe that there is any political figure operating within current systems that is going to bring about the type of change that’s required to at least forestall total annihilation. That’s right. I don’t see anyone — Gavin Newsom, AOC, Bernie, J.D. And in fact, what I was saying around 2015 when I first stepped into — when I stepped out of what you might call vanilla celebrity and into political opining, even though my vanilla celebrity was shellacked with a particular kind of louche decadent.

When I stepped into — because I had a girlfriend at the time that was involved with the New Statesman, and so I did an edition of the New Statesman — British, one might say Fabian, sort of fetishizing leftist ideas in order to create centralized bureaucracies that will never deliver to the people that they purport to care about, the famed ordinary Brit or average American, that poor bunch of chatter churned and tossed about on the storm of any passing breeze or fad.

Anyway, so I said yes to this thing and, man, I knew a lot of famous people back then, like Alec Baldwin, David Lynch, that Ai Weiwei dude out of China who just said that he went back to his native China. Ai Weiwei — I think I’m saying his name right. He went back there. He’s super famous and the left love him, because he left as a dissident from China and lived in Germany for a while and he’s apparently a very brilliant artist. I think he did the COVID thing along with Shepard Fairey, the ardent Democrat-supporting American artist. He just went back to China. He goes, “Germany’s worse than China. There’s more centralized control, manipulation, less freedom of speech in China.” And this guy’s a darling of the left type figure anyway.

The New Statesman, Jeremy Paxman, and the Mayor of London

RUSSELL BRAND: So when I was doing that New Statesman thing, that’s when I did an accompanying promotional interview — and our defining show was Jeremy Paxman’s Newsnight. Jeremy Paxman was Fox News Tucker. He was like the guy that people got off on watching mess with politicians. I’m not talking about — he’d probably be more liberal left than you were, sort of a traditional conservative during your sort of Fox pomp and heyday. But we got the same commodity from him.

Jeremy Paxman would sit there with a Home Secretary and just go, “Come on.” Like he was more bombastic. Like, “Oh no, I get why you think it. No, you just don’t want us to have guns, but you have them. I know, I get it. I do it.” Like he had great stuff. I loved all that.

But when I went on there, what was cool is even though I was 33 or 34, much younger, I just said, “None of my friends vote. We never vote.” And he’s like, “Oh, come on, you can’t talk about politics if you don’t vote. You’ve got no right to be in the conversation.” And I said, “What are you talking about? I see you every week on here attacking politicians for being vapid and empty and insincere and Machiavellian. And then when I say I’m not participating, you attack me. I don’t want to participate. None of the people participate.” And it caused this big national conversation.

And I was talking about, I’m going to run for mayor of London because, like an idiot — like the disciples actually — I thought: people have heard what you’ve said is true and they’re responding to the truth in what you’ve said. That’s what I should have recognized. But what I thought, being foolish and a fool, was, “Oh, I’m really great and I should be powerful.” I made it about myself. I thought that I was fantastic. And I got involved in it. And obviously it went terribly, terribly wrong, as it always does when you —

What happened? Well, I did say that I was going to run for mayor of London, and I participated in some brilliant movements like housing movements in London, and we led this big march into Downing Street. And outside Downing Street, I got into a confrontation with a reporter, and they had to talk about me in Parliament. This is 2015.

On the Radar: Britain’s Deep-Rooted Power Structures

RUSSELL BRAND: And what happened was, I think from that moment, I was on the radar of certain forces that probably monitor online threats and vocal critics of establishment power. And I would suggest that in the UK it’s a little more insidious, nefarious. The image I have is like dirty soil, like oil in soil, like toxic land. Britain’s a deep-rooted toxic land. Now I know a good deal of British UK imperial power migrated to your country in the same way that Nazi physicists migrated, in order to ensure that Babylon succeeds.

What happened was I got attacked a bunch — like seriously attacked — and I sort of withstood it somehow. But that’s what it did, it eviscerated me, and I withdrew to the country and I got married and I bought my beautiful dog Bear and I had my beautiful children and I lived out there calmly. But something was nagging at me the whole time, always: “You’re going to be participating in this in some way, in some new way. See, I’m doing a new thing. Find the new thing.”

But I always, like an idiot, I’ve been inculcated and indoctrinated by our culture. I think that individualism is our religion. Progressivism. And I don’t mean cultural progressivism as in multiple genders. No, no, no. I mean, “We’re going to the moon, so everything’s cool. We’ve got this device now that’s going to solve everything.”

Gandhi in 1940 said — check this from Gandhi — as the British were finally expelled, he said: “There’s no point in us beating the British in this revolution and then imitating and emulating the systems that have been bequeathed by them to us. India is a country of 70,000 villages. Each village should be fully autonomous, trading only where necessary. We must lose our fixation on gadgets and technology.” 1940s, he’s saying this. Of course, India — we know what happened. It emulated and is essentially sort of conquered in an entirely different and more insidious way.

Gandhi’s Fate and the Pattern of Lone Gunmen

TUCKER CARLSON: So what happened to Gandhi? Was he rewarded for that?

RUSSELL BRAND: He was. People said, “This guy is a wise prophet. Let’s revere him.” But before we do that, we’re going to shoot him in the head just to be sure. Lone gunman. And whenever there’s a lone gunman, just some crackpot. Hey, these crackpots — I noticed that a lot of the time they do stuff that really benefits the most powerful interests. I tell you what, the most powerful should start using these lone gunmen because there’s a natural alliance. It’s a good fit. It’s like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. The two of them go there, and like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and the Olympics — you know, like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, the Olympics, and satanic festivals where you mock Christian imagery. The whole thing should get together.

And if you find people that are prominent and outspoken and willing to risk their lives, probably what you should do is shoot them dead and then blame something that will work in the culture, like — I don’t know — trans people. That wouldn’t work. Knowing in your heart of hearts that Christ would love and minister to all of us, seeing us all as one family.

I’m not interested in race. I’m not interested in color or skin or sexuality, although I am a bit interested in sexuality. All of you — don’t make a god out of it, whether you’re a heterosexual, homosexual, single, celibate, whatever you are. Anyway, so I got in a lot of trouble, but it was the first time I got in trouble. I learned from it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I just want to pause and say — note to the editors of this, please clip that. That was like my favorite thing I’ve ever heard. Sorry, excuse me.

Sex, Identity, and the True Self

RUSSELL BRAND: But what I wanted to say was that, because he is real and because it is true, the very fact that as a result of presumably certain demographic information in your country, there’s a requirement even to imitate Christianity — as with that lady sort of charging her way to be first rather than last. And if she’d read the Bible, that’s not what she would do. She’d want to be last rather than first.

Then in this condition, they can’t then deny. You can’t deny what’s in there. You can’t deny the word. Once you’ve said America is a Christian country, we’re running this on Christian principles, we need to return to how Christianity informed the Constitution and the Founding Fathers. And as Charlie Kirk, God rest his soul, used to say, this was meant to be practiced in alliance and alignment with Christian principles.

If you — that telos will be used in his service because we now understand it. Now, of course, we have forgiveness, and we have anyone — he will forgive all of us. If he can forgive me, he’s taken my sin, he’s taken my shame, he’s taken yours, and he’ll take anyone’s. The most powerful people in the world, the most vulnerable and weakest person in the world. Indeed, he has no favorites. He doesn’t even care about those categories. He doesn’t recognize those categories.

So what I’m saying is, the reason that they annihilated Christianity is because it gave us a verifiable, permanent, indeed eternal basis upon which to run kingdom. It gave us instruction. It told us what’s going to happen.

Now, if as some kind of gambit people have been emulating and performing Christianity, that’s in there too. He says no problem, no problem, because people will hear the name of Jesus Christ and they’ll be saved. They’ll be saved by that name and by acceptance in their hearts.

And more practically, once those environmental conditions have been set, those of us that truly are following him and are trying our best to follow him and are trying to make ourselves smaller so that he can become greater, we can say, “Well, we’ve been looking in here and it doesn’t say that you’re meant to have a war with Iran. And it doesn’t say that you’re meant to validate people performing surgery. In fact, you are perfect already. Did you not know? You are so beloved. Let’s help you. How can we help one another?”

Because our Lord, he would have been down with the trans, down with the homeless, down with the fentanyl, down with the junkies. He wouldn’t have been going, “Ugh, this is disgusting.” How can I love you? How can I love you?

And I spend a surprising amount of time actually speaking to gay people about Christ, because obviously they’re concerned and I’m trying to understand how we love. And what I can tell them absolutely is I overly identified with my sexuality. I’ll tell you that. I made my sexuality the most important thing about me and I thought it was okay to be hedonistic and decadent and it was an expression of my sort of neo-pagan self. And can I say there’s been some consequences. So you might want to consider — there’s something more beautiful about you.

Are you saying, for example, that Jesus Christ and the Beloved Disciple John would have improved this great intimacy and total love between them by ejaculating? Is that what you’re suggesting? There is more to you than that. There is a supreme intimacy with God. He actually wants to be inside you right now. Look at the carnality. He’s incarnate. We eat his flesh and blood. There’s a — as well as the agape love, there’s eros love in that. He’s — we are his bride. We are his bride. It’s a very powerful energy, the sexual energy. And I definitely, definitely misused it extensively by worshiping it and identifying with it.

So when I’m talking to people about problems around identity and sexuality, even though I’ve never had the challenge of same-sex attraction, my certainty is that sex should not be our God, that love must be first.

In fact, the 12 steps puts it so well, Tucker, in the great big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, which I’m a student of. It says we want to stay out of this debate around sex. Some people think that sex is the be-all and end-all, and some people want to live in absolute denial of sex. This is a controversy we don’t want to enter into. Some people would have a man with no flavor for his fare, and the other camp would have them on a straight pepper diet. Someone pointed out to me that a straight pepper diet would be eating a condiment as if it were the main course or the meal. Sex is a condiment which adds flavor to the meal of love. That’s what it is according to scripture in a marriage between a man and a woman.

I’m still, for my own — I’m trying to understand how to be completely loving to all people. It says here clearly, don’t judge, get the log out of your own eye. So I guess my ministry is not about that, but what I don’t want is to be a participant in a church that prioritizes judging and condemning others rather than dealing with our own evident internal fallen broken problems. That is the truth.

“You Are No Better Than Her”

TUCKER CARLSON: We had this conversation at breakfast this morning with a wonderful person who works for us, and I was telling her about being in church a couple of weeks ago and somebody got up to read who I knew a lot about and was judging so much based on behavior that we judge or whatever. And this person gets up to read, and I really felt very strongly that God just spoke to me, which doesn’t happen every day. And the message was, “You are no better than her.”

And I turned — it makes me emotional thinking about it — and I turned to my wife, who I know was having similar thoughts, or I thought she was, and I whispered to her, I said, “We are no better than her.” And she goes, “I know.” And I think that’s really at the center of it.

RUSSELL BRAND: So much instruction. Love your neighbors. Then he removes any limited liability for the category of neighbor. Who is your neighbor? Whoever’s in front of you, that’s your neighbor. That’s your neighbor.

TUCKER CARLSON: Whoever’s in front of you. But if you begin with, “I am no better than any other person,” I think it’s clarifying. It takes the blinders off. Like, you can see things clearly.

RUSSELL BRAND: Because then you feel like you don’t have your own personal little mandate to go around telling people?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, and also — I hate that phrase — but it is true that all people are connected to all other people in some way that’s impossible to understand as a person, or for me to understand in any case, but that is absolutely real and you can feel it.

It’s almost like there are moments, these rare transcendent moments in your life — sex is one of them — where the barriers between people get thinner. They may not dissolve entirely in this life, but the membrane is definitely thinner. And you feel a great satisfaction in that because that’s kind of how it’s intended to be. So much that divides us is fake. It’s put there on purpose in order to divide us. But it doesn’t reflect reality. Our humanity, the fact we’re all created by God, is the most important fact about us.

Finding Identity in God

RUSSELL BRAND: Yes, and if we are able to receive our identity in him, then we will find in that kind of harmony — not necessarily ease or absence of suffering, but at least a certain truth. And isn’t it extraordinary that in this world of counterfeits, the identity politics, a peculiar facsimile and emulation of individual sovereignty, has come to the forefront?

TUCKER CARLSON: Can you explain that a little?

RUSSELL BRAND: Can you flesh it out a bit? Well, you were fearfully and wonderfully made, knitted together in your mother’s womb. He loves you. “Who is it you say that I am?” — “I think that you are Son of the Living God, that you are the Messiah.”

This insight — I guess from a few of the gospels — is a moment between our Lord and Peter. And after Peter acknowledges Christ as God, as Son of the Living God and the Messiah, he gives him the name Peter. “You are the rock upon which I can build my church.”

When you see God for who God is, then you will know who you are. If you don’t know God for who God is, then you will be looking for an identity in the world. “I’m an Englishman, I’m an American, I’m a proud homosexual, I’m a young black woman, I’m a little Dutch boy wearing clogs.” You start to identify with false things that you made with your own hands.

The message to people about gender identity is: go further. You are more individual than that. He loves you more than that. You are more unique than that. You’re not part of a group of people that happen to feel that you don’t fit with the arbitrary gender identities of 2026 American cultural identity. Indeed, in the word, in heaven there is no man-woman. In the supreme reality, there is no man-woman. He says that. That’s in there.

Of course, in a way, it’s a kind of a performance. But if that performance leads you to changing your body surgically, then there might be another route. We can look at the data and see if that’s working for people post-surgery and how many of them are happy with it. I guess we could make a scientific judgment. But the problem is that all of us have been recently exposed to the total illegitimacy of science, insomuch as we all know the only profitable experimentation is being undertaken.

Who’s doing and conducting the experiments to demonstrate absolutely that there is no causal link between the childhood vaccine program and the rise in autism? Who’s going to pay for that? Vaccine manufacturers? I wouldn’t have thought so. The government? I don’t know. And then that’s the end of the list. There’s no one else that can afford to.

The Deception of Science and the Vaccine Question

RUSSELL BRAND: One of the moments of a deeper awakening to the immersive, ubiquitous insidiousness of global imperialism came for me — you know when you sort of realize things yourself that then become somewhat culturally evident and obvious and exploded?

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s happened to me, yes.

RUSSELL BRAND: So when we have the vaccines, how are they clinically trialing that for the impact on pregnant women? Because which pregnant women are going to allow themselves to be experimented on in this timeframe? And how do we know the long-term effects? Because there hasn’t been a long period of time in which to witness the long-term effects. And all those questions that one might sort of ponder chewing a pencil on your own, it turns out, were unanswerable because we were being dreadfully deceived. Dreadfully deceived.

And it seems like the ultimate aim of it may have been population reduction. Of course. And then, I suppose, the additional benefits of how much authoritarianism can we leverage, how successfully? Because remember the bit when it’s like, “Well, you won’t be able to do what you did in China in America, Italy, and the United Kingdom.” Turns out that you largely can, but there was just kind of a stumbling block because people online with significant audiences were talking about it.

Okay, so that’s a problem. We can’t have significant audiences online where people are getting non-mainstream information. What do we do to annihilate that? Well, can we create some kind of ideological diaspora where they’re all arguing with one another, sometimes about important things, sometimes about dumb stuff?

And as Dave Smith — I know he’s a collaborator and friend of yours — when he said that 2008 and the Occupy movement was a kind of unique solidarity, when it came to the typical political taxonomies in your country and mine, people transcended that and recognized, “Hold on a minute, it’s financial institutions that are to blame for this. Why don’t we start targeting them?” That was the advent of identity politics. Yeah, let’s have a race war. Race war, quick, urgent race war. Super quick.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you were involved in all that stuff. I mean, you were assessing British politics in 2008. That was a long time ago, and now you’re talking about Jesus. So how did that happen? Well, you wrote a book about it, How to Become a Christian in 7 Days. What did you become a Christian in 7 days?

Russell Brand’s Christian Conversion

RUSSELL BRAND: No, I became a Christian both instantaneously but over the entirety of my life. When it happened, it happened in an instant. It happened when I was— I reckon, even though I wouldn’t have confirmed it this way at the time, probably contemplating suicide. I was probably considering, do— is this— would this— is there a way out of this?

And the reason was, of course, was because of the allegations in the UK of criminal sexual conduct, specifically rape and sexual assault, at the same time as my son had been diagnosed with a heart condition, which we’ve discussed previously. And those two things happening simultaneously did something extraordinary to me in so much as it was exposed to me that I’ve— I mean, I heard it as a voice like you just described.

Sometimes you hear these voices: “You’ve spent your whole life worshiping fame and sex. Well, now look, fame and sex have come together. Is this what you wanted?”

And all the time that I was famous, by the way, I think there would have been people that the only things they would have known about me is, “Oh, isn’t that that guy that was married to Katy Perry? And isn’t that that guy that likes always talking about sex and stuff and being all like a sexy rock star in movies?” In your country, they might say that.

So those two things sort of compounded to show me the nature of my worship. “You have been worshiping false gods. You have been idolizing yourself.” And fame can be glorious for the kingdom. He is a tool he can use. Sex, magnificent source of creation, connection, of course. But I was misusing those things.

A Dark Moment of Temptation

Now, when that hit me, even though I kind of understood it a little bit before, I didn’t understand it as viscerally as I did in the new context of your son. I’ll tell this, man. There was a moment where I was walking my dear beloved dog Bear, and check out this thought. This is, I think, the tempter. I think this is the accuser.

This thought occurred: “Would you— what if your son— Laura’s still pregnant, my wife is still pregnant— what if your son died and this could all go away? Would you accept that?”

And I sort of went, oh God, no, like that. I felt— I sort of fell to my knees and I cried. I cried for thinking it. I cried for thinking it. Like, how could you even think that? How could you even think that? And it sort of purged me a bit, that cry and that cleanse.

The Rick Warren Moment

In this period of contemplation, a friend of mine from a 12-step support group sent me a video of Rick Warren. And Rick Warren— I never heard of Rick Warren. I know that Purpose Driven Life sold 30 million. I don’t know things like that. I’m not Christian. I don’t care, right?

He sent me a video, and then I see it’s the most sort of slick televangelical TV show of like, “Hey, we’re going to be speaking with Rick Warren.” And I see Rick Warren, he’s kind of beardy and plump. I’m like, what’s all this? And then everyone’s too toothy, too tax breaky. Like, you’re not going to get me with that. You’re not getting me with proper American evangelism. I’m clever. I’m British clever. I’m British working class clever. That might be the cleverest anyone can be. You’re not getting me with that.

But he talked about his son killing himself, and the way he spoke about his son killing himself— because for me, in my mind, this is Tony Robbins, like someone who I deeply admire, as a matter of fact. Like, I’m thinking, Rick Warren, he must be like a personal coach kind of person who brings out your excellence or whatever. I didn’t even have a reference for what Christianity is, thinking about it now.

So Rick Warren spoke about his son’s suicide without shame, with pain and sorrow, but without any kind of indulgence of that. And I thought, what is that? What is that? What is that that you can— because if your child kills himself, you ain’t better not be writing no books about personal development because the worst thing that can happen has happened. So shut up.

But when I saw it modeled, delivered, when I encountered it, I felt like, oh, he’s— what is it? And that sort of somehow glitched something in me.

Green Pastures and Still Waters

And I was out there and I was in the fields by my house. You visited my house. I’m by the River Thames. Thames, by the river, by the still waters, and I’m in green pastures. And it was only when my dog died that I realized that my dog is a German Shepherd, that he was a shepherd, and that the shepherd made me sit down in green pastures and he made me be still by the waters. And I understood that I was being spoken to and that through my son I was being spoken to.

Tucker, in those moments where you— if you hand over your boy, like 12 weeks old, to surgeons and you don’t know if you’re getting him back again, like, and then when you see him with the wires and the tubes and all that, so he’s so visceral. And in those rooms, me and Laura, we felt okay, we felt fine, we felt peaceful, we felt protected.

The Media Campaign Against Russell Brand

And I was going into those hospitals in like— first time I wore a mask during that pandemic, let me tell you, was to be out in the streets in London, because every single newspaper and every single TV station was dedicated right up until October 7th, peculiarly, to saying “Russell Brand’s a rapist, we should have known, could we have done something,” like, and in plain sight, suggesting that somehow I’d conducted my entire career in anticipation of a time where in the future I would be accused of sex crime.

Brilliantly, he was flirting with every single woman he ever met on TV, on camera, and chatting up. If there was a talk show and there was a female here, I’d like to know, are you single? And if she said yes, I’d start flirting with her and try and detect is she attracted to me. And if she was, I would pursue that till its natural conclusion. If I, on the other hand, detected revulsion, resistance, then I’m like, okay, luckily I’m famous.

And they tried to somehow reframe that. I don’t know how you would even do that. But the problem is, is I created a lot of data out there during those years. I was sleeping with thousands of women and I was sleeping with women that will have sex with you immediately in a bathroom or backstage or in a corridor or in a car. That’s why I created quite a lot of— I hurt people. I exploited people. That’s greedy. That’s selfish. It’s inconsiderate, it’s mean, it’s certainly sinful, immoral. It’s all of those things. There’s no question about any of that.

Show Me the Man, I’ll Show You the Crime

So when— “show me the man, I’ll show you the crime”— if people’s phones are getting scraped, as Edward Snowden revealed, from more or less the late ’90s, just in case one day you do something we don’t like, we’re ready to go. It’s either going to be the pink or the green, the money or the honey. We’re going to get you financially or we’re going to get you sexually. Unless you’re a person that’s lived in Christ. If you’ve lived in Christ your whole life, they’re going to have to kill you for doing nothing. They’re going to have to kill you for doing nothing. Probably happen to Charlie Kirk. Probably there was nothing shady to get him with, was there? That may be what it was.

So, luckily I was a philanderer and a hedonist, so, well, we’ll just do rape and sexual assault with that guy. That’s just going to take minutes. It’s unbelievable when you see the material that was generated initially. I mean, their documentary by this company called Hard Cash— actors played the women that were making allegations that had not gone to the police or anything like that, and they used bits of my stand-up where I was saying stuff like, yeah, really in a camp— I’m a British comedian, so I’ve been super camp and crass, but using campness to take the edge off. Very vulgar anatomical and sexual and erotic jokes, which I was very explicit about.

And they would pose that next to someone being shot in silhouette, even though it was an actor, shot in silhouette, even though it’s an actor to protect the identity of an actor. Like, if you put them with music, people don’t realize a documentary is a construction. What archive music did you choose from the archive library? What music for that scene? Why? Why did you cut away there? Where’s the rest of the interview? How many times did you talk to that person? What did you tell that person when you were talking to them?

So it was an extraordinary time. And I will say this— no animosity to anyone involved, because I can see why you would do it. I can see if you look back at something 20 years ago, 25 years ago, where you had sex in a bathroom with a stranger, why would you not— like, if you see a documentary, that guy, he’s a villain, he was dressed in black, he loomed, his eyes changed suddenly. It’s extraordinary. Extraordinary.

But the reason that there were no allegations, I’m assuming, contemporaneously or during MeToo, or all the way up till there was a television program called “Russell Brand Has Secretly Been Committing All These Sexual Offenses,” I’m assuming— and then there was a phone number at the end, “Have you ever met Russell Brand?”— then I’m assuming that was a component in this.

State Involvement and the 77th Brigade

So either we believe that The Times, owned by Rupert Murdoch, are a great force for good in the world, and Hard Cash, whose name has certain indications, are there to help us and that the mainstream media at large are here to help us, or there might be some other agenda at play.

That if people are prominently talking about COVID and Moderna and Pfizer and Rishi Sunak invested in Moderna when it only had 5 employees, and then when he was Chancellor and Prime Minister, they did deals with Moderna to the tune of millions, and all of the things that we understand took place in the COVID period or the Ukrainian war, and that the CIA— CIA carve-out, I should say— made content saying “Russell Brand’s an asset for Russia” and put it into Ukrainian language, that’s indication of the presence of the state.

Or if the 77th Brigade run by Mark Lancaster, who’s married to Caroline Dainage, who’s the department head of the social media department, and Caroline Dainage on like day one of “Russell Brand’s accused of sex crimes” is like, “He should be demonetized on X and YouTube.” When did she learn what the word demonetized means? When did she learn that? Does she know about CPMs and programmatic ads? Or did she have a conversation with someone? I wonder who. I wonder if it was her husband, Mark Lancaster.

Guess what their job is in when Britain are occupying or working in Afghanistan or Syria or wherever to protect us. The 77th Brigade, what they do is ensure that there is no significant uprising by managing the social media, by de-amplifying and controlling social media in, e.g., Afghanistan or Syria to make sure that only the correct rebel factions are able to organize their information. Shadow banning, we’d call it here.

Well, 77th Brigade aren’t allowed to operate in the UK because you’re not allowed to use military ops on a domestic population, except in COVID. Special suspension was made allowing 77th Brigade to operate inside the UK, and it said this in the Times newspaper— the same newspaper in fact that published much of the nefarious and untrue reporting about me— that 77th Brigade are going to take down vaccine misinformation social media commentators. Now in the UK, that’s who I was and what I was. That was what I was doing. I was providing an alternative narrative. The YouTube channel was exploding. It was extraordinary. And I was beginning to think, I have to be involved in politics. It’s not enough. It’s not enough to just talk about this.

Technology, Democracy, and the Future of Politics

Indeed, look at what’s happened with cryptocurrency. Technology means that the same centralized financial institutions cannot control global finances in the way they once did. Don’t look too much into where that power is primarily housed, but it seems that you can generate false revenue through inflationary measures, you can control entire economies, and indeed base an economy on the one thing that’s explicitly forbidden in here— debt and usury. Thankfully, all our debts are paid by the one who truly loves us.

So technology changed currency and finance forever. Technology is changing media forever. It’s inevitable that it will change politics when people accept that we now have the technology for direct participatory democracy, where every single issue could be polled and voted on by the population, that you could have minimum centralization and minimum intervention as the principles. That the states— each state could be independent wherever possible. Each town could be independent wherever possible. Each individual could be independent wherever possible.

In here, of course, we have some significant guidelines for transgressive behaviors that would require legal intervention, and pretty much all of us know what those are. Indeed, C.S. Lewis’s primary argument, along with Aquinas, is morality doesn’t have to be engineered, and it’s not some sort of post-truth, post-structuralist, there-is-no-truth thing. We all know good and bad because we feel it viscerally and we feel it in our cardiovascular system. We have inbuilt sensors if you don’t turn them off with vaccines and bad food and bad signals continually.

Running for Mayor of London in 2028

In a manageable way, Tucker, the City of London is having an election for mayor in 2028. The reason this is fascinating is because the office of mayor is manageable. The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, right now is only in control of the Metropolitan Police Force, London transport and certain issues regarding planning and housing. All of these areas in a participatory direct democracy could be opened up to people that live in London, that love London.

All of a sudden you don’t have politics that thrives and runs on ideology and debate. You have a pragmatic democracy. Do you want ULEZ cameras that charge you if you have a certain type of vehicle? Do you want a congestion charge? Vote for it. If you vote yes, we’ll do it. If you vote no, we won’t. Do you want this type of policing where people are arrested for Facebook posts, or do you want to focus on knife crime? Which boroughs? Which areas? What time of day? Do you want us to investigate historic crimes, or do you want us to focus on contemporary rape gangs?

The beauty of it is you would say we have an opinion and we have a voice and we have advocacy. You could even, if you wanted, for free— because there’s no way I would pay people to do this— have a council of elders from the LGBTQ+ community, from the Muslim community, from the white working-class community, from the left and from the right, from all potential groups and say, “Why don’t you advocate and advise?” Because I don’t want to be in charge of London. I want to participate in an end to the kind of politics that we know is birthing, midwifing the apocalypse and Armageddon through duplicity, through conflict, through endless self-obsession, through pornography, through addiction, using addiction even where it doesn’t typically play out. Every time we look at a screen, the food that we eat, the things we believe about ourselves.

I would like to run for mayor of London in 2028 so that the people of London would run it, so that politicians are not involved in politics, so we have true open-source transparent democracy. That technology for polling and electing could be used to determine where you want your local budget spent, who you want running a particular area of public life if there is a requirement for any representation. And most importantly, you will be in control of your own lives, and we don’t need to quarrel and squabble about Islam and Islamic invasion.

If the people of Epping don’t want to have migrants in their community, then let them vote on it. Now, that’s not an area that the London mayor controls, but certainly if the polling was available, it would be difficult to impose that on the people of Epping. Perhaps if people in other communities are very pro-refugees, they would get a budget for and the ability to house refugees.

There’s no point in us living in this Tower of Babel madness of incessant, unending conflict online and sometimes in person when we have the opportunity for real community, real change. At this point, Tucker, we know that the Republicans aren’t the answer, the Democrats aren’t the answer, the Conservatives aren’t the answer, the Labour Party, the Greens, Reform, whoever. What you want is for people to be absolutely empowered in their own lives, as our Lord suggests. Each of us has direct access to divine truth, and you can participate as much as you want to.

So I want to tell you as well, that my intention amidst all this madness with a forthcoming trial and a book out that I’m

Facing Trial and the Path to Faith

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re going back to the UK? Well, yes, possibly to serve a jail sentence. I wasn’t going to ask you about this because I’m upset about it, and I just want to say for the record as clearly as I can that I, by your explanation, corruption completely. And I think this is a lie and that you’re facing a real jail term because you spoke against the people in power. I don’t think there’s any other way to interpret it. So that’s my position, just to be clear. But what exactly are you looking at? What happens next?

RUSSELL BRAND: I’ll be on trial in October. Of this year? Yes. And I don’t want to be willfully ignorant, of course, but I tend not to ask what will happen if I’m not acquitted because I’ve got a wife and 3 young children.

Also, by the way, I do believe if someone committed a rape 20, 25 years ago and that’s proven to be true, that person should go to jail. Rape is abhorrent. I watched the other day, something like Pretty Woman with my wife, and when there’s an attempted rape by the brilliant Jason Alexander, it is an appalling, abhorrent, jarring moment. The worst thing.

Yeah, when I watched it from the position I’m in now, I was like, that’s what— what the f*? How dare you say that I would do that? How dare you say that I would do that? Exactly. I have a kind of a magnetic allure. I’m not saying I wasn’t a pretty appalling lowlife of an individual, but what I was not doing was imposing, forcing, coercing, attracting, charming, seducing. Anyway, of course, that’s the pleasure in it.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s like fishing. That’s why dynamite fishing is no fun. Fly fishing is lots of fun.

RUSSELL BRAND: Do people use dynamite in fishing?

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course they do. Right.

RUSSELL BRAND: That should be banned as well. I mean, but I’m just saying, if I’m mayor of London, that goes on day one.

TUCKER CARLSON: But most men, yeah. I mean, I know that there are rapists out there and I think they should be severely punished. Most normal people think that. Yes. But most men — I’ve never met any man who got drunk and told me his secret desire is to force sex on anyone. That’s the opposite of what I think most men want.

RUSSELL BRAND: Yes. Correct. Because the currency is love and sex.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s exactly right. And it’s also like, “I lured this person with my charms.” Isn’t that how men feel? I think they do.

RUSSELL BRAND: I think primarily, and I pray ultimately, most men, yes.

Choosing to Stand Trial

TUCKER CARLSON: So why? Okay, so this whole thing happens, you get charged. I was actually in the British Isles the day this happened and I called you. I’ll never forget it. And I gave the bad advice I give to everyone who’s charged in a political case like this, which is run as fast as you can to a country with no extradition treaty, which is an option. It is an option, of course, run away. This whole system is rigged against people who question its most basic premises as you have. So why are you submitting? You’re choosing to participate in this, to take the risk, to meet. Why?

RUSSELL BRAND: Firstly, because I believe all things are from God, and I recognize that this is what it took for me to accept that my life is not my own, that I belong to a higher calling, a higher purpose. I recognize that. I also recognize that what I demonstrated and how I lived for a long time was wrong.

I also believe in trial by jury, as a matter of fact, even though the United Kingdom — they’re trying to obliterate that, and that’s not a good sign. They’re trying to remove that, except for murder and rape cases. But they are trying, as well as advancing surveillance technology, facial recognition, digital ID, all of the things you’re aware of in the dystopian UK. They’re trying to get rid of jury trial.

And I believe it is possible to have a fair trial, and I believe it is necessary to confront and stand up and stand firm in your conviction — in this case in my conviction. Conviction about the truth of what I have done and what I haven’t done. Because as a Christian, we’re all forgiven for all of the things we’ve done wrong, but you don’t need to be forgiven for things you haven’t done.

And there is, of course, in a way, no choice. You say that I could go to a place where there’s no extradition treaty, and in the moments of my worst fear, those are the kind of things I think about. But in reality, Tucker, it says in here, the Book of James opens: “We consider it pure joy when we face trials of any kind.” And there’s no exemption in the Christian life. It’s not like, well, except unless you actually do have a trial, in which case, go and get yourself to Bora Bora quick smart. This is what I’m called to do. This is what I am called to do. This is what we are being called to do.

I’m not trying to drag you into my terrible trial with me. I’m saying that your trial, I think, is of a comparable nature because in a sense it’s sort of inadvertent that we find ourselves in this position. You had an enormous audience on Fox, and then you become an independent journalist and become even more successful, and you go from advocating for Trump for reasons that are perfectly understandable to condemning Trump for equally evident and obvious reasons. Let’s even if we take personalities out of it, the Iran War — where does that go for you now? What are you going to be called to do?

You will note that most of the people that get called in here are like, “No thanks, I’d rather not.” I’ve always been sort of a bit of a glory hunter. Well, that’s actually the wrong way to put it. I felt so worthless and inferior as a child, so unapproved of, unwanted, and unloved. That’s not to do with my parents. They really did their level best. And then as a drug addict — anyone who’s the kind of drug addict I was — you’re moving among poor people, prostitutes, broken people. And all of that time I felt a kind of an emptiness and a worthlessness.

And when my identity was fulfilled, it seemed at least to me, in a kind of stardom and acceptance and being lauded and applauded and celebrated and loved and given the kind of attention that I thought would work — it was really quickly meaningless and empty after this beautiful golden moment of feeling like, oh wow, Lord, you love me.

I feel that there is nothing for us to do but to lovingly participate in whatever he puts in front of us. And the examples are alive in here, that all of them are persecuted and often just killed for what they believe in. Normally because at some point they encounter conflict with real power, either the kind of cultural Pharisaic power of the early Christians or the monarchical, oligarchical, terrifying despotism of the kings of the earlier empires.

And for the first Christians, their role was to — well, indeed, isn’t that the primary character of their conversion? All these people that were willing to look into the eyes of people, including the 12-year-old girl at the fire, and Peter said, “I don’t know him, I’ve never met that guy,” where minutes ago he was willing to sort of get in a fight for him. But these people, these men, these ordinary men and women, these ordinary Christians, when they’re confronted with a moment where they might have to die for what they believe in, take it.

Now, I recognize I’m not standing trial for being a Christian. I’m standing trial, according to the lexicon of the British Judiciary, for the crimes that I’ve already discussed. But what this is my opportunity to do is to show that I believe in truth. I believe you can have a justice system because there is a God. If you don’t believe in God, you can’t have absolute justice or absolute truth. They are by definition constructs of the human mind, arrived at using a mind that by its own belief is itself an arbitrary system born of chaos. You can’t have morality.

And when you live in that culture, and most people do — a lot of people seem to anyway — because I’m talking about a lot of Christians who aren’t living like, “Oh my God, this is actually real.” And that’s of course forgivable. The first Christians had that problem. They found it hard to live as Christians, as disciples of Christ, yoked to him, following him, eyes on him at all times.

This is, for me, a difficult thing. I wish it would go away. I wish it would go away. But what I pray for is the strength to be who I am in him as I walk through it and to go where he wants me to go.

I don’t want power anymore. I don’t want the power of being a celebrity or the mayor of London or a Lothario. I don’t want that. All I want is to know him intimately. And I forget that sometimes because I’m weak and I’m easily distracted and I’m fallen. But in him, I am none of those things. He made me and you and everybody to know him, to know him and love him.

And it doesn’t all have to be on a big grand global stage in great big trials against a fallen nation. Britain’s fallen apart, that’s obvious, it’s evident, it’s on a different trajectory from your country. It’s still owned by dark imperial power. And the thing about the idea of participatory direct democracy, Tucker, is I don’t care — I don’t want to sit in an office somewhere making decisions. I want to pray all of the time, I want to be with God, and I want to be with my children and the people I love, and to tell people to do what it says in the Great Commission, tell people in a language that they’ll understand: God is real. Christ is real. Stop worshiping the world. You’re going to die. You’re going to die, and it’s all meaningless.

All of us, evidently, all of us have experienced grief and death. I can’t even get through the death of my dog without Jesus. In fact, but with Jesus, the death of my dog shows me — ah, my God, I may find it hard to think of a Galilean man 2,026 years ago laying down their life for me, but I know that dog would have done it. I know that dog would have done it. And that opened enough in me for me to receive him more deeply when my beloved dog died.

I don’t want to be in any other communion. I don’t want to be in any other conversation. I don’t want any of the world’s power anymore. I know how broken I am and how corruptible I am, and I know I can’t take my eyes off him for a second. But thankfully, I see him everywhere now.

From Pagan to Christian: The Conversion

TUCKER CARLSON: So you began this process — well, you began the process at the beginning of your life, but you began the conscious change from pagan to Christian, or whatever you were before, to Christian after your son was diagnosed with a very serious ailment and you found out you’re going to be indicted for rape?

RUSSELL BRAND: That’s what it takes. I’m not easily converted. No. Hey, there was this guy, he helped people. Yeah, so what? That’s probably not true. He’s the Son of God. I don’t care. People are doing miracles. You’re in trouble. Okay, all right, okay, okay, you’ve got me. What I need to do, explain it. I—

TUCKER CARLSON: So I watched it carefully, and you and I talked about it as it was happening, and I just thought it was one of the most wonderful things. And by the way, I just have to pause for a 2-minute story, which I think I’ve told before, but it’s my favorite story ever.

We went to Easter a few years ago, and we had dinner the night before, and you were talking about how you’re getting baptized. And we went to this Easter service. It was an outside Easter service on the beach. And these two kids come up to me. They were college students from Purdue in Indiana. And they said, “Is that Russell Brand?” This is the next morning after we had talked about baptism. And I said, “Yeah, that’s Russell Brand. My friend Russell Brand.” They said, “That’s incredible. We have been praying in our church that Russell Brand would get baptized, and we just find ourselves here this morning at this church service.” There’s nowhere near where they live.

And I said — I felt emotional hearing this — I said, “We were just talking about his baptism last night,” and then they walked up and introduced themselves to you. And I just thought, wow. I mean, I guess I already knew this, but there aren’t coincidences. We are in the middle of a drama that we didn’t write.

So then you get baptized, and then you start talking about Jesus, and immediately people say, “Well, the guy’s an actor and a comedian, he puts on personas for a living,” and they don’t believe you and they make fun of you. What was that like, that experience?

The Foundation of 12 Steps and Surrendering Identity

RUSSELL BRAND: I didn’t really mind that, actually, because it’s always a different reality at that point. You guys, and also remember, I’ve got this good foundation of 12 steps. The 12 steps too requires that you surrender your identity as an alcoholic and as a drug addict. Amen. You come to believe there’s a power greater than yourself. You hand over your will and your life to the care of God as you understand God.

But the problem I think with paganism is you will always— one will always revert to self immediately. If everything is God, then anything is God. And I know what I tend towards— me. I’m God.

TUCKER CARLSON: I should be in charge.

RUSSELL BRAND: That’s what I incline towards. So when I was in there, I don’t like people saying that, you know, if it was up to me, people would only say nice things about me all of the time. But I reckon that would be bad for us if that happened, don’t you think? Yes, I don’t think that would work because I tried to surround myself in a little sycophantic bubble at various points in my life, and it hasn’t worked out too well for me. So I don’t mind about that. I don’t care about that at all, actually, because really—

TUCKER CARLSON: Because it infuriated me watching it, really. Because I actually— because I knew it wasn’t true and it really bothered me.

RUSSELL BRAND: Thank you, that’s really kind of you.

TUCKER CARLSON: But it had no effect on you. That’s funny.

Baptism in the River Thames

RUSSELL BRAND: Well, actually, I was around really good Christians that were like sort of going, “Well done.” I was so encouraged. Like, I would send people— like, when I got baptized, because those kids, they were trying to— I remember those kids from hanging out with you that time around Easter, they were like, “Hey, I baptized her, can we baptize you? We baptize each other.” It’s like they were going to gang baptize me there and then.

And I knew that Bear Grylls had been saying to me, “Hey,” — he actually turned it this way — “Should we get baptized?” is what he said. And I thought, oh, me, because I had been so solipsistic up to that point, I didn’t know that Bear Grylls is a pretty passionate Christian and had been public about it. So I thought, oh, Bear Grylls on this trip, is he? I’ll get baptized with him.

Well, when he arrived, it was quite plain that only I was getting baptized. Then there was the obvious and evident demonic coughing. Like, I could not stop coughing. The pastor arrived by boat. My friend Joe, who’s a Catholic, was one side of me, that hefty fallen man, and the Bear on the other side. It’s like, you know, it takes for me sort of career criminals and the SAS to baptize me.

We got in that water and I couldn’t stop coughing. You know, you get an embarrassing cough. Oh yeah, one of them happened. They were looking at each other. We got in that River Thames. I went under, I came out and I felt different. I felt different.

Now, a lot of companies in the UK that are in charge of water franchises have not behaved responsibly with that river, so it could be diphtheria, it could be all sorts of things. Yeah, it could have been many of those things. But I came out and I felt different.

Growing Closer to Christ

And I’ve not really— I felt an increasing— look, anyone that’s Christian or has come to Christ as an adult knows what it’s like. There is a subtle vacillation. There is at least temptation, a calling to go back. “What if I did this?” There is— I can feel the old identity. Wasn’t it Spurgeon who says, you know, “You are drowned in Christ, but sure enough the old guy can swim.” The old man can really swim. I feel the old man. I feel the Adam man in me, the old earth man, the fallen man calling back. But I feel closer and closer to him all the time.

I feel like I’m able to have this conversation with you in Christ, enough so that it doesn’t seem to me to be a problem if some people go, “I think you’re only going—” I don’t know if you know how the British legal system works, but there is no contingency for Christians. Britain has just made abortion legal till your 25th birthday. Like, we can abort you now if we have to. We can euthanize you if you say, “I’ve got a headache.” “Euthanize him! Euthanize him!” They’re changing the law to put the power of God into the hands of man right now.

So saying I’m a Christian, it’s not like— in Britain, the way things are going right now, where they— I pray for revival. I pray for revival.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, I do too.

The Collapse of Justice Without God

RUSSELL BRAND: No one seems to be questioning the fact you can’t have a justice system without a God. Without God, there is no justice, because justice means absolute right, absolute truth. That’s what it means. It means it’s possible to aspire to, that it’s there, that there is a path, that there is a way. No one’s thinking about these things as they churn through mad post-Enlightenment despair and atrophy and entropy. The whole thing seems to dissipate and degenerate.

And as we nominate AI to be our moral center and create new false consciousness, new false gods at an alarming rate, no one’s considering that we’ve got no ground standing in truth. And until we have systems that represent our true role— yeah, we are stewards of the earth, that’s why we love the earth, we are its stewards— we must love one another because that’s what we’re here to do under God.

When we get rid of that and put ourselves at the top, then we’re just quarreling about ideologies. Hey, how much longer in American politics do you want to go between, “Right, we won, let’s spend the next 4 years desecrating the beliefs of this group,” “Right, we won, let’s desecrate the beliefs of this group,” before we recognize, “Well, this isn’t real, what are we doing?”

The agenda is carrying on in plain sight. And it seems to be a geopolitical agenda that has some weird connection both to energy, which is another word for power, and indeed occultism, which means hidden ritual, hidden power. Something is going on, something that I don’t think any of us really understand. And you, more than anyone, it seems to me at least right now, appear to have been nominated to describe it to people.

The Religious Nature of the Powerful Elite

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re doing a good job. Well, I don’t understand it at all. No. And luckily I do understand almost everything on a dog level. It has to be very obvious for me to pick it up. But I do believe that symbols are resonant. That’s why people use them. And if all around you, you see obvious signs that people have a religious agenda, I have been around powerful people for so long that one thing I’ve learned is they’re the most religious people of all.

And they all pretend to be agnostic, or, “I don’t believe in anything, I believe in science.” No, no, no, no, no. They are observant religious people. They’re just not worshiping the same God, but they think their power is supernatural. There’s no doubt about it. I know them, and they believe they are special because they’re getting supernatural power. And I think it’s demonic power. I think it’s really obvious. Look at the fruits. But they know it. They know it. They’re observant religious people.

RUSSELL BRAND: You mean through practice?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. Through ritual?

RUSSELL BRAND: Correct. Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, yes, absolutely. I mean, and it’s always the same. It’s the temptation of Christ. “Bow down before me and all this will be yours.” But I mean, there’s no question in my mind that the killing, the ritual killing of other people, whether through war, abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty— it’s a religious ritual, of course. And through killing, the shedding of blood of others, especially of innocents, they derive power.

What’s child molestation? There’s no sexual attraction to children in nature because there’s no reproductive possibility. So normal people are not— of course, there’s nothing sexual about molesting a child. The point of it is to defile, right? I mean, that’s why it’s so common. Yes. It’s not because they have weird sexual urges, nothing sexual about it. It’s like, “When I destroy purity and beauty, I gain supernatural power.”

Hidden Power, Ritual, and the Conspiracy Vocabulary

RUSSELL BRAND: I think that can be eroticized by— sure. But the eroticization is in itself a kind of charge, I believe. This is where again we would look to the outliers in the conspiracy community of— I know that we talked at the beginning of how we’ve moved from mainstream media purview where just to say that I’m from the New York Times or the BBC is insufficient. That is not a badge of honor and authority anymore. Those days are gone, except for the kind of nostalgia around it, I suppose.

But then people that are eccentric and are kooky, and perhaps because our culture hasn’t afforded the roles that are emerging from this new kind of Jungian psyche that we’re creating— we’re creating a new consciousness through AI, through the internet, through mass comms. And so you will have the dark woman, the shadow woman that tells truth, and mad and frantic red-faced preachers screaming, or broken wounded men in— you will have converts and apostates too. That’s you and probably me too.

And like, see David Icke, what I always feel about him is why can’t the culture accommodate him? And what on earth was it that happened even in the brief time that I was in media where we could— I used to have a radio show on the BBC, BBC2, very popular, normal. I got thrown off it, of course, because I did something ridiculous, as usual.

But like, David Icke, he used to just come on, I go, “David, so tell us what, the Queen’s a lizard?” And, “Oh yes, there are reptilian entities.” Now, what David Icke would say about the rituals that involve child abuse are that it generates an energy that I believe they call Lush, that sort of is being utilized. And all that adrenochrome stuff is starting to seem eerily— we’re not moving away from that direction, is what I’m saying. It’s like there’s one vocabulary that describes it that seems conspiratorial, somewhat sort of baroque in its imagery. And it’s right.

But the other one is in here. I mean, it’s like child sacrifice is clearly what they play at those high altars for Moloch and Baal and Beelzebul. They’re demanding innocence, and there is some sort of weird right component. And what was Jezebel doing when Elijah had to take all that time out, drove himself? None of this is—

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, it’s all bad, but it’s certainly not anomalous or strange. It’s like the story of every civilization from the beginning of recorded history always operated on the basis of what we’re describing.

The Decline of Trump and the Limits of Power

RUSSELL BRAND: I saw you say what you think — all of a sudden, like throughout time immemorial, the elites and most powerful people have had access to sexual pleasure. You think that’s all of a sudden stopped now? You think they’re not doing it now because of rationalism? Because of what? It’s so silly. Of course they’re doing that.

And I suppose, isn’t it strange? Because now we can’t— we can’t talk around power anymore. And that’s what the decline of Trump does, I think, is it means you can’t have this convenient, albeit temporary, symbol of resurgent American pride and nationalism through common sense and free market and America first. When there’s a war with Iran that appears to be beneficial to extra-American interests, you can’t have that anymore. Now it’s like, “Oh, right, so you too, huh?” And that’s—

TUCKER CARLSON: But what do you mean we can’t talk around power anymore?

The Limits of Political Power and the Call to Principles

RUSSELL BRAND: That’s when we talk about power now. Of course, even though I don’t particularly read it, one can sense the hysterical glee of the Democratic left. “We told you, Tucker Carlson, that Trump’s a madman. We told you that he was a narcissist. We could have had Kamala Harris in that White House right now. She would have never have gone to war with Iran. Kamala Harris would have stopped for— you saw the way that woman described problems and definitely wasn’t drinking in the daytime. She would have resolved all of this. Get her now. Is it too late? Would she do it? She might run again. Quick, it’s not too late. What about Gavin Newsom? He’s got nice hair. AOC, she was a bartender, you know. Come on, see reason. See reason.”

But also, Republican Party — oh, who are we going to get excited about? What I used to criticize when I was affiliated with the left by virtue of the class of my birth and the champagne socialism version of that as a sort of a star type guy — the argument I used to really find quite repugnant was, “Well, of course we know the left’s not perfect. We know that Tony Blair is compromised. We know that Keir Starmer at the CPS was dreadfully authoritarian.” As I heard you once say, you won’t convince me even at gunpoint that that guy’s making decisions himself. I love that.

We just let them because the alternative is so much worse. And using that polarity modality, they’ve bounced us around for about 100 years, at least, if not longer.

And now, so when I say real power, surely we should be considering — okay, so even though nationalist, America First, populism, conservatism with kind of allusions to Christianity without heeding Chesterton’s warning: “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and not been tried.”

For us to recognize it’s hard to be a Christian because it starts with you. Like, I’m the problem. As Chesterton also said, I’m the problem. That’s the truest thing. And like you said — yeah, I see that resonates with you.

The Beginning of Healing: Confession and Accountability

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s the price of admission. I just think that’s the beginning of liberation. The beginning of healing a fractured relationship is always the same — you acknowledge that it’s your fault. And it stays fractured. This is true of a relationship between another person and a relationship between you and God. It only begins to be healed when you admit what you did wrong. That’s just true. That’s just a fact. It doesn’t work otherwise, does it?

RUSSELL BRAND: No, it doesn’t. And I’m trying to do that in the areas where I have been wrong, while in the difficult situation of being accused of things I haven’t done. And that’s been a real little tightrope walk, and certainly more than I can— What’s your—

TUCKER CARLSON: So are you going to get a chance to say this? I want to come, by the way. Will you? Oh, obviously.

RUSSELL BRAND: I mean, I don’t know if they’ll let you in. I like you in there. They got excited when I had a Bible in there — someone came and took the Bible off me. She was a lovely lady, actually. But I was holding the Bible, I was in there.

And also, when the news put out — my father-in-law, my beloved father-in-law, God love that Catholic, devout, lovely man, Bernard Gallagher, who’s a serious — but like, he’s a golfer, he’s a Ryder Cup captain, he’s a beautiful guy. And when I saw him last month, I said, “Okay, what are you doing, Russell?” It says that it said in the paper that you stood up and started trying to preach in the courtroom. I was like, no, I did not do that. I didn’t grab the Bible and start going, “Now hear this, there is only one true justice, and it’s not the corrupt justice of the British judiciary.” I didn’t do that. I just was quietly holding it.

Then I saw someone else clutching his Bible. There’s nothing that they won’t metastasize.

TUCKER CARLSON: “Clinging to” — I think that’s the term we use.

Principles Over Party: Rethinking Power and Democracy

RUSSELL BRAND: “Clinging to his Bible,” which I think we saw him sexually assault earlier in 1992. Like, they won’t miss an opportunity to turn everything negative.

So when I say we can’t be confused about power — you with your constituency, you with your voice — how can you ever again say, “All right, I advocate for this party or this group?” It’s got to be principles. These are the principles.

And the one that I keep coming to is democracy. It could work, but it can’t work at the scale of nations. You’re going to have to look at what the limits of democratic reach are. And we’ve got to let go of some pre-baked-in ideas.

Individual sovereignty — beautiful. But individual expressionism, the ridiculousness of “you’ve just got to be who you truly are” — what do you mean? Well, people are truly violent, they’re truly corrupt, they’re truly broken. Be who you are in God. Be who you are in God, not who you are according to your mad culture. That’ll turn you into all sorts of crazy things on any given Sunday afternoon.

Individualism doesn’t work as an idea. Materialism doesn’t work as an idea, as a highest principle. Of course, I recognize we’re in a reality that has edges.

And progressivism — the idea that we’re advancing, that people in the old days were idiots, that we’ve understood this now, that they needed the Bible back then because they were dumb, that we’ve advanced beyond that — that idea has to go as well.

Seeking God First: The Foundation of Real Power

We have to move to a position of humility and righteousness. Righteousness means: I know you’re real, God, and I know me because I am me, and I know you’ve been with me all the time. So you know how broken I am, you know what I’ve done, you know what I’ve not done. So that’s the basis now for the rest of my life. “Seek thee first the kingdom of God, and all this and his righteousness will be granted to you.”

If I’m in the right position with God now, I can do what God wants me to do, not what I want me to do or what the culture wants me to do. So real power is God’s power.

But as you already alluded to in both Luke’s telling and John’s telling of the temptation — when the devil tempts Christ, he says, “I’ll give you power over all of this. It’s mine, and I can give it to whoever I want.” And Jesus doesn’t go, “Well, steady on.” He goes — I’m paraphrasing — but the Christ recognizes. And as it says in John’s first epistle, we know that the evil one is in charge of this world. And as Saint Paul reminds us in Ephesians, we’re fighting against dark spiritual power.

So real power — I saw it on one of your shows, actually. It was a good video title, by the way, whoever came up with that: “Everything is downstream of spiritual warfare.” Everything is downstream.

So if we operate on that basis of — how is this, what is this doing spiritually? What value is this promoting? What role is this casting me in? What lie am I believing in thinking that if Congress goes this way, or the executive branch goes that way, or the Senate does that? It’s not enough anymore. We’ve got to look rigorously at what’s happening.

And I think the one principle is maximum power to individuals, to communities, to families. But you can’t go around making people be Christian at gunpoint. So it works for me. It took the breaking apart of my entire reality in order to recognize that he’s real.

The simple fact — he’s real, he’s here now. He rose, he didn’t die, he ascended, he granted us the Holy Spirit. It’s within you. It’s not just a poem, it’s a deep essential reality. It’s more real than: you’re called Russell and you can speak this language that you didn’t invent, using lungs that you didn’t give yourself, walking on a land that you didn’t build, in an infinite space that seems to be expanding, with a molecular world that’s full of weird paradox and miracle.

You didn’t do any of that, but you can, through his grace, participate in it through truth. First truth — like you said, confession. Confess: “Well, this is all of my brokenness, this is who I am, do what you want with me.”

And in a way, that is liberating, because there is part of me, Tucker, that doesn’t want to be convicted of rape and go to jail.

Fear, Faith, and Facing the Trial

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, there’s a part of you.

RUSSELL BRAND: Hey, there’s a bit of me in there. I’m trying to get rid of that little guy. But there’s a part of me that also thinks, well, hang on, if this can happen, anything can happen if you can conjure it up.

And also, by the way, watching your content, I’m thinking, “Oh man, am I just some guy banging on about his divorce? Like, oh, this thing happened to me. It was not fair. I can show you.” I know that guy. He better not be coming to dinner.

Are you afraid? Sometimes. Yeah, sometimes. And in that fear — “fear of God is the beginning of wisdom,” but 365 times: “Do not be afraid.” So what is the fear of God? It is the beginning of wisdom. It’s not the end of wisdom, it’s the beginning. So if I sort of recognize that God is the person that must be my focus, I will be taken on a journey. And obviously God wants me to go through this because this is happening.

But it’s also sort of kind of not odd in a bunch of ways, other than the odd anomaly of I didn’t do the things I’m accused of. It really makes sense in a lot of ways. I worship the world. I was exploitative and greedy, and there are loads of ways that it makes sense. I kept missing opportunities to live a good life. Like, God would show me, “Hey, look, you’ve got this amazing wife and these beautiful children. Shouldn’t you be grateful now?” And I was like, “No, I should have more. Shouldn’t I be powerful?”

I keep falling into — I obviously am a person that needs clear instruction, and I’ve received it.

TUCKER CARLSON: So are you going to start your campaign while you’re in London on trial?

RUSSELL BRAND: I’m starting it now.

Running for Mayor of London

RUSSELL BRAND: Right now. And it’s in 2028. You have to, like, the business end of running for mayor of London is pretty practical. You pay £10,000, you get some signatures in every single borough of London. But this is the thing that I think is important. It doesn’t matter if it’s me. It matters about the ideas.

If you have a Green mayor of London or a Reform mayor of London or a Conservative, or even if Sadiq Khan continues doing it, you know what you’re going to get. If you vote for participatory, open-source, direct democracy where every single decision where possible, and I don’t see why all of it wouldn’t be possible and open for referenda. Switzerland does it 4 times a year, massive referendum. That’s a whole country. You have the opportunity to change London meaningfully.

Now that is populism, and populism is a kind of dirty word. People sort of seem to think that the population are dirty, that there’s something wrong with people. Mob rule. But I’d say what we have now is closer to mob rule. Oh yeah, mafia, mob, mob mentality. We know what mob means.

And also, by the way, I rather object to the fundamental principle of contemporary politics by leadership and governance by appointed leaders that you don’t understand, you’re stupid, you don’t know what we know, we need people that have been through these institutions to run government. I don’t like that. I object to it on the most sort of personal, sociological, and relational grounds. Some of those beautiful people I meet haven’t had formal education. Some of those intelligent people I meet haven’t had a formal education. And the idea that power belongs to an elite is, for me, it’s disgusting.

And I think for a minute, if I can be entirely honest, I was so sort of blindsided and overwhelmed by the events that, you know, we’ve talked about a lot over the course of this conversation, that I actually forgot you’re supposed to be doing something for other people. You’re not meant to be here just for you. You’re supposed to be doing something for other people.

And the idea that someone as self-involved as I have been, as narcissistic, solipsistic, hedonistic, and indulgent, as Epicurean as I’ve been in my life, would now say, listen, it doesn’t even matter if it’s me, it doesn’t matter if I’m the mayor of London. The system, this idea, is what matters. Open source direct democracy where you vote for if you want Ulez cameras or this kind of policing or that kind of policing. Is it Facebook or is it knife crime? What do you care about? You’re not stupid. You’re not an idiot.

Democracy, Identity Politics, and the Real Issues

And indeed, it is possible to transcend this hysterical, endless conflict between Muslims in the UK, gay people versus straight people. It’s pointless. It’s irrelevant. It’s abstract. I care more about my dog dying than the horrors in Gaza, because when my dog dies, I’m falling apart in grief and I’m coughing and I’m puking up. And that’s how God made me. Of course, I should do everything in my power to prevent genocide and destruction and war and hypocrisy and lies. But I’ve got a lot of that in-house. And until I deal with that, I’m no good to anybody. I’m no good to anybody.

Maybe people in London shouldn’t be thinking about Israel-Palestine all the time. Maybe they should be thinking about how to run London themselves. How do you want it run? It’s up to you. Why are you an idiot? Did you believe what they told you? Do you want to live what they told you forever? Or do you want to take this precious gift of life granted to you by God, or an unknown cosmic force of random molecular chance that somehow ended in your consciousness and everyone you love, and grief and mourning and poetics and archetype, and participate in it while you’re here, all too briefly, unless you accept him, repent, and enter into eternity through him? That’s one route, and yeah, we’ve got a book about that.

Also though, you could be running your community. If it’s bothering you at all, then the post-Epstein file release era, we’re still just like, “Maybe we should have this one or that one.” “Well, dude, what do you think?” “Look, we’ve been told they’re mad occultists having sex with children on an island. What do you need to know? How much longer? How much longer?”

On Media, Representative Democracy, and Systemic Corruption

I’m just so glad there’s the footage out there of me on YouTube or on Bill Maher or wherever saying, “Hey, listen, Fox News is no worse than MSNBC or no better.” You know, it’s out there. I’ve said it on the television, and I’m saying it now, and I’m saying it now from a version of, I recognize the position I’m in, I recognize my own fallibility and brokenness, I don’t think I should be in charge, I don’t think anyone should be in charge, they’re all broken and fallen.

The problem with representative democracy is on that little horse ride from their constituency to Congress or to Westminster, where 400 years ago representative democracy at least had a rational undergirding as well as no obvious technological solution, it seems that other interests get in the ear of these people and say, “Maybe would you vote this way,” or “Maybe would you never say that again,” or maybe “Shut your mouth right now.”

And if we don’t change that fundamental flaw, then you’re going to live in an endless whirling downward cycle, a senseless spiral of their insanity, which we could intervene in with the one gift we know we have: consciousness, love, life, glory, inclusive of everyone beyond. It’s not your job to worry about whether someone’s a Muslim or a Jew or an atheist or homosexual. You worry about running your own life here. You vote. Do you want that? Yes or no? No. Okay. 67% of people voted no. We’re not doing that anymore. We want another vote. Okay, we’ll have another vote. Not like Brexit where just keep voting till we can do what we were going to do anyway.

Not like every single general election till — or even Trump, even someone who seems pretty in themselves, eventually over time — I thought it was a great post you did, by the way. Like, eventually, give him some grace. That was great. Like, even someone like him can be just turned into whatever they want. And then like the people that are ultra conspiratorial, and I think probably closer to the truth than any of us, would say, “We told you all along, it doesn’t matter who you vote for, you’re going to get the same results.”

The Beauty of the American and British People

Like, you know the macro picture, you know the geopolitical picture better than anybody. But I think the only way to do it is this thing that I’m starting to trust from being in your country. The American people are beautiful. They’re brilliant. They’re not full of hatred. I’m like down there in like the panhandle. They’re not all like caught up in racism and bigotry. They just want to love their families and stuff.

I saw a brilliant thing in my country. The farmer movement in my country is lively. The people love their land. You know, John Bull. John Bull is like a British archetype. Yeah. And like they’re getting into it and it’s kicking off, as you will be obviously aware, in Ireland.

And like I saw something on the BBC that said like, in the countryside it’s too white and farmers are too racist. And it like made me laugh out loud because I thought like, imagine being a farmer at the sort of graft involved, the jobs, the duty, the toil, the trial. Right, we’ve got to get up, we’ve got to plant those crops, we’ve got to till that field, we’ve got to feed those cows, we’ve got to get in there and cleanse that soil for next year. Then I have to stop for a while, burn some Qur’ans. Then I’ve got to go, then I’ve got to shout hate language over a hedge into an adjacent field. This field goes fallow. This one here, this one’s for my bizarre rituals of racial hatred. That’s my homophobia.

Farmers don’t have time. So they’re telling you that people have got problems that they don’t have. The British countryside’s white because that’s where British white people have lived for ages now. Like, what are you making people hate one another for? It’s reached a kind of an absurd frequency.

The Mayor of London Run and Open-Source Democracy

And I feel that I believe in him. He’s real. So either I’ll run for mayor of London and nothing will happen, or I’ll run for mayor of London and I’ll run and go to jail, or I’ll run for it. But what will happen if people talk is the idea of, hold on a minute, yeah, hold on, that technology they’re saying will work for our digital ID, wait a minute, that would work. And then we wouldn’t have Dominion voting machines that might be maybe centrally corruptible and compromised. You put the democracy in the hands of the people, open source it. The technology exists now.

That’s why dear Joe B. Weeks is on House of — you should talk to that guy, by the way. He was a Bitcoin entrepreneur. He did some mining early on. He got rich too quickly. The FBI just came, took all of his equipment, put him in jail. They’ve confiscated billions from this guy. He’s under house arrest to this day. He’s awaiting trial. You should meet him.

So we’re in these areas of innovation. The ingenuity exists, the grace exists, the righteousness exists, the talent exists. This whole country that came from dirt and paganism, and in 250 years is the most powerful and unprecedented and glorious nation in history, which by the way, I think it is Jerusalem now, because if Israel was the original people and Paul says go to the Gentiles, and our Lord says be a light to all nations and everyone will come from everywhere, I mean, it’s starting to sound familiar.

And all of these railroad entrepreneurs and all of these miners and this rich soil and the furriers and the trappers and the banks and everything, then all of a sudden it gets captured in a peculiar way that I don’t quite understand, and it’s got another agenda. This is the greatest country on Earth. This, this, this could be Jerusalem, but that won’t happen with current institutional biases.

Don’t you reckon if the founding fathers of your nation were alive now, they’d say, “What should we do to implement the changes that are possible now as a result of extraordinary advance?”

Russell Brand’s Trial Date — October 7th

TUCKER CARLSON: Russell Brand, How to Become a Christian in 7 Days. I think it’s pretty obvious that God is using you, and I’m going to your trial.

RUSSELL BRAND: Oh good, thanks. October 7th. Is it actually —

TUCKER CARLSON: Is it actually October 7th?

RUSSELL BRAND: Oh my God, I didn’t even see that. Yes, it is.

TUCKER CARLSON: Your trial is October 7th.

RUSSELL BRAND: You know, one of my friends said to me, he goes, what I know about the state and the kind of interests we’re talking around is they do things preemptively. Like, if they think, right, if we’re going to take this course of action, what are the potential obstacles in this reason? All right, well, preemptively get rid of that one, get rid of that one, get rid of that one, right? That’s the puff. I didn’t realize.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I assume your pre-trial hearing is on 9/11. I’m guessing. I don’t know.

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