Abby and Joe discuss the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and whether or not it was an accident or part of a larger cover-up. They also discuss the possibility that Lee Harvey Oswald may have been a member of the infamous Deep Throat Gang, and if so, what role did they play in the cover up. Also, who was the most likely suspect in the JFK assassination? The CIA? The mob? Or was it something else entirely? Joe and Abby debate this and more on this week s episode of the podcast! Music: Fair Weather Fans by The Baseball Project, Recorded in Los Angeles, CA and produced by Riley Bray. Art: Mackenzie Moore Music: Hayden Coplen Editor: Steven Kanter Editor: Will Witwer Audio Engineer: Ben Koppel Mixing: John Rocha Additional Compositions: Bobby Lord Special thanks to our sponsor, and . Thanks to caller Abby for the question of the week, and to Joe for the background music, and thanks to everyone who sent in their thoughts on the JFK conspiracy theories, and for all the hard work, and all the support, and the support they've given us the chance to make this podcast a reality. Thank you, Abby, Joe, for the questions, and we'll see you next week for the next episode! and the rest of the conspiracy theories we'll talk about JFK and MLK. Thanks again for all your support, bye bye! Love ya, bye, bye Bye Bye Bye, Bye Bye bye, Bye, bye. - Joe and Joe - Yours Truly, Caitie, bye Love, bye - Ollie, - EJ & Joe, EJ <3 - M. & K. <________________ - P.M. - E. ( ) - The Crew - AJ & J. (A. & R) - Sarah ( ) - OJ & M. ~ - R. & S. (Chad ( ) ~ ( ) . - B. & C. (NSYNCY ( ) & KJ ( ) ( ) ? & K ( ) ! ( ) . ( ) is a. (?) , ) & R. ( ), + ( ) , ( ] ) & ( )
00:00:13.000He likes to support radical politics, so he came out for the screening of the new film that we did.
00:00:18.000Yeah, he's a very unusual character in that regard, right?
00:00:21.000Because he's like this blockbuster movie maker guy, but he's also a pretty radical guy in the way in his politics and when he supports and...
00:00:31.000Yeah, he was kind of like the black sheep of Hollywood for a while, you know, doing all the radical outlier of Hollywood, basically.
00:00:38.000Yeah, but you saw the JFK movie, right?
00:01:20.000Because it's weird, because people talk about that.
00:01:23.000They say, hey, you know, in the Oliver Stone movie, they detailed all these things that happened, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but they also added a guy that wasn't a real guy.
00:01:31.000Well, I guess at the end of the day, it's a fictional film.
00:01:34.000But how is it, if it's a real president who was shot by someone, and you're trying to explain who in your movie, and you have all these real characters, but then you got this one guy you just kind of shoved in there.
00:02:58.000You know, I mean, all of these people, there's really, really sketchy things about all of them.
00:03:03.000And if we were conducting, the CIA was conducting basically an assassination program around the world to expedite U.S. foreign policy and imperialism, why would we not have been doing that here at home?
00:03:14.000You know, I mean, we know that Fred Hampton was killed outright, the leader of the Black Panther Party.
00:03:19.000So all of these things are kind of make more sense when you look back at history and see how kind of out of control the CIA was at that time.
00:03:27.000Yeah, I mean, it only makes sense that they would want to get rid of certain characters that were causing trouble.
00:03:32.000You know, I had Mike Baker on, who used to work, he was a CIA operative, and he looked into the JFK, or excuse me, the Martin Luther King assassination, and he said that one, more than any other one that he looked into, seemed like something was really, because James Earl Ray was like a loser,
00:03:50.000And then before the assassination, all of a sudden, he had money.
00:03:53.000All of a sudden, it looked like he was being steered.
00:03:57.000And he went into great detail about it.
00:03:59.000I don't remember all the details, but he was shaking his head about it.
00:04:03.000He's like, that one, out of any one that I looked into, had the fingerprints of manipulation on it.
00:04:08.000Well, you know about his family, obviously, Martin Luther King's family that had that civil trial and basically concluded that the US government had to have been involved for the circumstances to have happened the way they did.
00:04:18.000And if you look at how Martin Luther King at the time was considered the most dangerous, quote unquote, Negro in the country, that's what the government was saying about him.
00:05:00.000And things still hadn't been resolved.
00:05:03.000And then when you look at it now, I mean, Juneteenth, they had the congressional hearings and they're talking about reparations.
00:05:09.000And you see just the different polarized sides of how people look at it even today.
00:05:17.000Whether or not reparations should be given or whether or not there should be any Any sort of effort to rectify the obvious, if you look at the economic strife that's in these southern cities that are primarily African American,
00:05:37.000I mean, this is literally the remnants of slavery and it's never been fixed.
00:05:41.000It's almost like any other problem that would be in our infrastructure, any other problem that would be in anything with, you know, Pollution or anything else that people clearly did, where someone did and fucked it up, there's efforts made to fix it, and there's discussions about it,
00:05:59.000Ta-Nehisi Coates, I think his name is, he was testifying there.
00:06:02.000And he was saying that, you know, the argument is we had nothing to do with this because, again, it was more than a person to go.
00:06:08.000Why should we have anything to do with what slavery did?
00:06:12.000And it's beyond that, though, as you're mentioning.
00:06:15.000I mean, this is an institutionalized racism that we still see the effects of very starkly within the prison community, within, I mean, all these things.
00:06:23.000And he said we were still paying out civil war soldiers' families' pensions.
00:06:38.000It's a weird conversation because it's not just a conversation about whether or not something wrong was done, but it's also a racial conversation.
00:06:48.000I've seen some weird posts like, you know Chuck Woolery, the guy who's from the Love Connection?
00:06:54.000We'll be right back in 2 and 2. Remember that guy?
00:07:16.000And then not saying, how about the fucking people who's brought over here from Africa in chains and their great-grandchildren are alive today in the same communities?
00:07:25.000Well, it was the basis of our capitalist society.
00:07:28.000I mean, that's why we're the richest country in the world, because it was predicated on the enslavement of Africans.
00:07:34.000Yeah, I don't know if you can fix it by giving people money today, but I do think the money should be spent to try to fix those communities, and I think that can be engineered and done.
00:07:46.000And I don't hear anybody talking about it, other than Tulsi Gabbard talks about it, and I think Bernie Sanders has made some indications that something should be done, although I don't know if anybody has a real definitive plan.
00:08:00.000But when you talk to people that have, like, Michael Wood, who was a Baltimore police officer, I've told this story before, but it's a crazy story.
00:08:09.000When he was a cop in Baltimore, they found these papers that showed that the exact, it was papers from the 1970s, the exact same crimes...
00:08:45.000I mean, Tulsi and Bernie are the only candidates worth giving a shit about.
00:08:49.000What about Buttigiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegieg How many candidates are there now?
00:08:57.000I feel like two other ones just jumped in the race.
00:09:13.000He does look like he would be called that.
00:09:17.000But his dad actually just openly said in an interview, he's like, yeah, I called him Beto because I wanted him to get the Mexican vote because I knew he would eventually run for office.
00:10:28.000And I saw there was, like, combating supporters from Kamala Harris and Bernie at some rally or something, and they just kept shouting, we need a woman president!
00:10:39.000It's like, that's the only reason why you like Kamala Harris, you know?
00:10:45.000I saw this one speech that she was giving where she was talking about forcing children to attend school by holding their parents accountable where she instituted a policy where if the kids miss school the parents could be arrested.
00:11:05.000And she was talking about how effective it was.
00:11:08.000And that, you know, they had cops show up at the door of the woman's house who was a single mom who had these children and the kids weren't going to school.
00:11:23.000But that authoritative, authoritarian nonsense, like that way of thinking, you know why you do that?
00:11:28.000Because no one's ever done that to you.
00:11:29.000Somebody ever knocked on your fucking door and said, hey, we're going to lock you up in jail because you're a 16-year-old boy when you have three kids.
00:11:36.000Listen, if you're a single mom, anyone who's a single mom who has a boy knows, and that fucking boy hits puberty.
00:11:41.000If they run with the wrong crowd, good fucking luck trying to control them.
00:11:47.000And if she's got a job or two jobs, maybe, because she's trying to put food on the table and keep the fucking lights on, and you're going to arrest her because her kid doesn't show up at school?
00:13:09.000Find out what the military-industrial complex is really made of.
00:13:12.000Find out how much money they're really making and saying, hey, look at you guys.
00:13:16.000You made X amount of billions of dollars.
00:13:19.000And look at all these guys that we have to fund.
00:13:22.000We have to rely on charities and we have to rely on things like the Wounded Warrior Project and all these foundations that are taking care of these veterans when you're the ones who are profiting.
00:13:31.000I mean, that's where the money should come from.
00:13:42.000When we had that situation where Dick Cheney, who was the CEO of Halliburton, was giving Halliburton no-bid contracts to go over and fix places that we bombed, it's like, what?
00:13:55.000That is like a doctor breaking people's legs so he can fix them.
00:14:04.000Yeah, well, Trump was sitting down at some table with all the head defense contractors a couple months ago, and it was after the Khashoggi dismemberment in the embassy.
00:14:13.000And he was openly talking about how we cannot stop that $110 billion weapons deal.
00:14:19.000And you should see just the glee on these people's faces.
00:14:23.000I mean, it's just unbelievable how transparent it is, especially under Trump.
00:15:17.000But Trump, hate him or love him, He gives you glimpses that you're not going to get as far as what kind of influence does the military-industrial complex really have on policy change and decision-making and whether or not they take action.
00:16:09.000I mean, it's like starting a fire and then getting applauded and congratulated when you stop the fire at the last minute before it erupts and takes over the whole planet.
00:16:18.000And that's what would happen if we actually did bomb Iran.
00:16:20.000I think that people don't understand how precarious the situation is that Trump and these cronies have laid out.
00:16:27.000Not just is, but came so close to being a reality just a week ago.
00:16:32.000You mean you don't think we should go to war for bombing oil tankers and Saudi oil tankers?
00:16:37.000You don't think we should go to war over that?
00:17:19.000For the folks at home that haven't been paying attention to this, what is it that makes them want to go to war with Iran?
00:17:26.000So, we have to just look at what Iran is.
00:17:29.000I mean, Iran just won its independence less than 100 years ago in a wave of anti-colonial struggles, and we immediately, the MI6 as well as the CIA, instigated a coup.
00:17:41.000So we always talk about how we want Iran to have democracy.
00:17:45.000They had a revolution, a people's revolution that was overthrown.
00:17:48.000We overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh and instated an absolute monarchy.
00:17:52.000For decades and at the time it had the highest human rights abuses documented in the world.
00:17:57.000It was pretty unique in that sense and you know you can only imagine why Iran is the way it is today and there was such a suppression of the left and of the Communist Party in Iran that the Islamic Revolutionary Revolution happened and the Ayatollah was the leader of that political movement and that's why Iran has the political system it has today.
00:18:20.000It's always about the oil and it's always about the foreign domination of the region.
00:18:24.000They hate that Iran is an independent country and doesn't bow down to U.S. imperialism and U.S. capitalism.
00:18:31.000And Iran also is allies with a lot of states that Israel and the U.S. and Saudi Arabia do not want it to be allies with, you know, Hezbollah, Hamas.
00:18:40.000And so that's a big problem for the U.S. and it's getting in the way of a lot of kind of goals in the region.
00:19:13.000And now, you know, sanctions every month just continuing to constrict their economy and even basically sanctions on threatening sanctions on China and India and other countries that actually do deals with Iran now too, which is totally insane.
00:19:27.000So once you do that, And then you say, you know, you're hitting yourself.
00:19:33.000It's like, no, you're doing this to them.
00:19:35.000And on top of that, John Bolton keeps saying, you know, there's all these unique threats coming from Iran.
00:19:39.000We need to surround them with all these warships.
00:19:41.000And they keep sending thousands of more troops, thousands more troops.
00:19:44.000So you're getting to a position now, and now the drone, right?
00:19:47.000We're flying a drone into Iranian airspace and expecting that they're not going to shoot that down.
00:19:52.000Why the fuck are we flying a drone in Iran?
00:19:55.000What the fuck would we do if Iran flew a drone in here?
00:19:57.000I mean, it's just unbelievable the chauvinism and arrogance of the US to be doing all this shit and then be like, okay, now you guys are a belligerent threat.
00:20:07.000It's like, no, you guys are the ones encircling them.
00:20:11.000Enclosing all of their, you know, basically just encapsulating their entire territory and threatening them over and over and over again, basically hoping for something to happen.
00:20:20.000And if you look back at the Gulf of Tonkin, there was a guy who was actually on the USS Maddox, the ship that was eventually attacked and got us into the war with Vietnam.
00:20:30.000And he even said, my dad was on the ship and he said, we had no idea why we were there.
00:20:36.000And one of the generals or captains on the ship just said, they want us to be hit.
00:20:41.000They want us to be attacked so they can get into a war that they want to get into.
00:21:08.000Yeah, Stuxnet virus that they put on the Iranian nuclear program to kill it while they were in the middle of doing whatever they do to uranium.
00:21:17.000Right, the centrifuges for the enriching uranium.
00:21:24.000But the cyber attacks, weren't they effective though in stopping the nuclear program?
00:21:29.000There was like a secret nuclear program that they were doing?
00:21:32.000I don't know what exactly they – I don't think that there ever was a nuclear program, but I know that that was another crazy thing that the U.S. did was basically infect their thing and destroy all of this technology.
00:22:09.000No, dude, you're starting fires all over the world, and then you get applauded and you want to congratulate yourself because somehow he's still kind of appealing to this non-interventionist line, which is just fake to me, because you don't appoint the most rabid, war-hungry people to surround you and to carry out these policies if you don't want that to a certain extent.
00:22:28.000Well, it also created this really weird ideological rift where people were complaining that he didn't do anything.
00:22:36.000And people were upset that he was going to take action and he didn't.
00:23:11.000I mean, I guess not too shocking when you realize the corporate media is literally subsidized by oil companies and banks and defense contractors.
00:23:20.000You didn't have to deal with that at RT, but what do you think happens when someone is a pundit and they're on a television show and they're talking about something that has these global implications?
00:24:30.000And there's all this destruction going on from on behalf of your government and you're not challenging that, especially when it's war claims, especially when you have assholes like John Bolton claiming, you know, all these things are happening in these channels and bodies of water and people are just like, okay, I mean,
00:24:46.000goddamn, you should see when fucking Mike Pompeo was talking about how Hezbollah was in Venezuela.
00:25:06.000Do you think that the people that are talking about it on TV are just saying it because...
00:25:11.000They really don't understand what they're talking about, and this just seems to be a way to cover the subject in sort of a way that is acceptable to the network and acceptable to the party and acceptable to this sort of ideology, whether it's left or right,
00:25:27.000whatever ideology they're participating in.
00:25:30.000Yes, there is definitely that as well, where they know kind of the line that they can't cross.
00:25:36.000So even if you individually believe, you know, you think that climate change is an existential threat, you think that the war in Yemen is a serious thing that you should address, I think that you definitely get kind of knocked down in the editorial meeting before, and you're just like, okay, no, I can't do that.
00:25:51.000But what I can do is just, you know, talk about whatever...
00:26:04.000You've got the online stuff, which is...
00:26:10.000Some online stuff is very good, but some online stuff is so entangled with insults and bullshit and emotions and distorted perceptions and ego that it sort of discredits whatever they're trying to promote,
00:26:30.000whatever ideas they're trying to get across.
00:27:14.000I mean, I go to places that are not...
00:27:16.000This is the problem with capitalism and trying to have an independent media is that you need funding.
00:27:21.000And you need funding from donors and grassroots sources because once you get funded by these right-wing billionaires and corporations and states and governments, then it becomes very ideologically driven.
00:27:34.000And then you're kind of just catering toward what those interests want you to present.
00:27:37.000And that's why The Empire Files does what it does.
00:27:41.000We're basically based on donations now because Trump's sanctions on Venezuela shut down the show.
00:27:54.000But we're just trying to survive on a very minimal budget because I don't want to lobby to corporations or states or go that route because I don't want to...
00:28:26.000You know, New York Times, Washington Post, these so-called beltway publications that pretend to be like the arbitrators of our objective reality, they are the premier advocates of fake news when it comes to US foreign policy, you know, American exceptionalism and corporations and like the corporate line.
00:28:44.000They're always the ones towing the things that basically prop up the system.
00:28:49.000And so I think people, you know, became really, really just attracted to that whole fake news mantra that Trump was saying because people have an extreme distrust in the corporate media because of the Iraq war, because of all these things that have happened.
00:29:03.000But as you know, and as you've talked about extensively, Joe, this wave of censorship that has happened in the last two years since Trump got elected because of Russian propaganda and fake news hysteria.
00:29:15.000And it's just propped up these same institutions, and it's really just gone after a lot of alternative and independent media that have gone by the wayside.
00:29:25.000And, you know, people who have been propped up by right-wing billionaires and billionaires in general are not going to be affected at the end of the day, but all of the people who have been caught up in this censorship with the algorithms, with the deplatforming...
00:29:42.000It is scary to me because the internet in my eyes is this unique place where people can get information and distribute information.
00:29:52.000And then on top of that you have this...
00:29:57.000Almost parasitic entity that is allowing you to distribute information and gather information through it, but also controlling the flow of information.
00:30:35.000We'll call people alt-right and just change our algorithms to make it much more difficult for them to propagate their ideas.
00:30:43.000I just find that really distressing because I think that in the marketplace of ideas, You're supposed to be able to combat a bad idea with a better idea.
00:31:00.000This is how people get to communicate.
00:31:02.000You get to look at what someone's saying, look at how someone's dissecting what someone's saying, and then, for yourself, figure out what you believe and what you don't believe.
00:31:11.000And there should be a free exchange of information so that you can figure that out.
00:31:15.000And when someone's shown to be a bad actor or a liar or have deceptive news, fake news, whatever you want to call it, okay, now we know, and this is a clear example of that, so now take it with a grain of salt whenever they say anything about anything else.
00:31:29.000But when you de-platform them and shove them aside, they say, see, they're trying to silence us because they don't believe us or they don't want us to be in power because they're trying to prop up whatever left-wing socialist economy or dictator that they want to put into place.
00:31:45.000And it's this weird sort of situation where you've got people dictating and almost engineering our culture.
00:31:59.000It's a very disturbing thing to a lot of people, where they're essentially setting up blocks, and they're putting cameras in these places, and they're gathering data and information, and they're trying to engineer a utopian city.
00:32:13.000Yeah, I was reading about it yesterday, and I was like, no!
00:32:43.000I love how they always say, oh, people are being sex trafficked and this will help.
00:32:47.000It's like, no, dude, this is like.0001% of all the people that you're, you know, data mining.
00:32:53.000It says, Sidewalks Labs released more detailed plans for Toronto, the site of Google's sister company's first attempt to bring its techified digital-forward sensibility to a full-scale development project.
00:33:35.000Four-volume plan highlights ambitious and sometimes flashy innovations from Sidewalk Labs, which has pledged to spend $1.3 billion on the project if it goes forward.
00:33:44.000The company hopes to construct all the buildings with timber, which it says is better for the environment.
00:34:43.000I mean, these are the people that censored that James Damore guy and fired him for having this memo that really kind of discussed women in tech based on evolutionary biology, based on studies.
00:34:56.000And they said that he was highlighting harmful gender stereotypes, which is not true.
00:35:02.000If you look at what he actually said and what he actually wrote, he even had a page and a half dedicated in that memo trying to come up with strategic ways to encourage women to get into technology.
00:35:12.000The paper that James Damore wrote has no relation to the way he's been framed and the way people talk about him.
00:36:26.000Deregulation, to lobby for kind of the deregulation of their industry.
00:36:30.000So I think that all of the perception and the mantra of Google and YouTube and, you know, catering to like the social consciousness and, you know, what you're talking about, I think is honestly just to make more money.
00:36:43.000Well, I'm sure they're going to make more money in the process of doing this, but the idea that they're going to engineer a city to me is terrifying.
00:36:52.000You know, there was a great podcast that Sam Harris did with the guy who was explaining what Google has essentially done and what they've done with data.
00:37:03.000The data is essentially a commodity that we didn't know was a commodity.
00:37:06.000And we all gave up our rights to this commodity.
00:37:08.000And this commodity, it turns out, is worth billions and billions of dollars.
00:38:15.000Like, if you and I were talking right now, and you said, I need a new laptop, and you started getting laptop ads in your Google feed, what is happening?
00:38:23.000Is your phone listening to you say that?
00:39:41.000It's about, I mean, this was targeted to basically all extreme views.
00:39:45.000Everything that they felt like was too radical.
00:39:47.000I mean, going back to the DNI report, which is where this all started from, this kind of conclusive report that they said these 17 intelligence agencies, you know, here's all the evidence of how Russia colluded and cost the election for Hillary.
00:40:00.000They cited my show on Breaking the Set.
00:40:14.000Someone should take that and use it as a snippet.
00:40:16.000But in the report, it said she fomented radical discontent.
00:40:21.000And when you look at what all this is, sowing discord, all of these, you know, the black box algorithm from Hamilton 68 dashboard, like this U.S. government funded Twitter platform.
00:41:16.000I mean, I thought that was a fundamental thing about American democracy is that you talk about what we disagree on.
00:41:21.000And when you look at what the report says of what Breaking the Set covered, DMT, I mean, that wasn't in the report.
00:41:27.000You were on there talking about DMT. We talked about aliens.
00:41:30.000We talked about who the fuck we wanted.
00:41:32.000But because I talked about things like inequality and Occupy Wall Street and Hillary Clinton, that was all part of this grand conspiracy to sow discord on behalf of the Russian government.
00:41:43.000So it becomes very comical once you kind of poke at the underlying narrative driving Are you aware of Renee DiResta's work?
00:42:03.000They set up like a fake Black Lives Matter account and then they would talk about how as black Americans we can't vote for Hillary Clinton because of this.
00:42:16.000And they started, they developed these communities, these really large online pages, whether it was on Facebook or Instagram or whatever it was, where they spoke as like a southern separatist or as a Muslim.
00:42:31.000Yeah, I mean, they had dozens of them.
00:42:33.000And they developed these communities, and they developed these communities, and they would set up these organizations, and then they would have events where they had one where they had a Texas secession event directly across the street from a Muslim pride event, and they did it on purpose so that they would fight.
00:42:50.000They put them across the street from each other.
00:42:52.000They organize these Facebook pages and these events.
00:43:43.000I'm sure the government's doing it right now.
00:43:45.000It's fascinating that we just focus in on Russia when, my God, this is happening on every front.
00:43:49.000I mean, look at going back to Pete Buttigieg.
00:43:52.000I don't know the fuck you say his name, but he has like hundreds of sock puppet accounts that are We're all propping each other up on Twitter.
00:44:07.000I mean, I guess he thought that that was, I don't know, injected with corporate money, that he's just like, all right, make a hundred sock puppet accounts.
00:44:14.000Everyone does this shit, but when we focus in on just Russia, and then of course you have the removal of Syrian accounts, you have the removal of Pro Maduro accounts on Twitter, why is it only that we're talking about our so-called enemies, that these are the people who are sowing discord and fomenting radical discontent?
00:44:32.000What about all the other countries that we do it all over the world?
00:44:35.000What about all the other countries that are doing the same thing?
00:44:37.000So if he really does have these sock puppet accounts that are doing this, that are pretending that these are just fans, that's some sleazy shit.
00:44:52.000You're pretending you're a person who's just an independent person who's supporting you, when really just is an employee who's there for some propaganda purposes.
00:45:00.000And especially the identity politics thing, all of the different groups, marginalized groups, support you.
00:46:27.000You just have to be on the phone begging for donations when you're not, you know, jumping on tables like Robert O'Rourke is all over the country.
00:46:34.000Yeah, there's no way you're running that city.
00:46:36.000And how fucking crazy are these people's egos?
00:46:38.000I mean, they say that Trump is this existential threat, that he's the next Hitler, he's mentally incapacitated, yet they all jump in the race because they think they're the smartest people in the world.
00:46:47.000So it's like, I mean, Bill de Blasio, it's like, really?
00:47:37.000About Gulf War Syndrome, about just a political revolution as needed.
00:47:42.000I mean, he's been talking about that since he won the Senate seat initially.
00:47:46.000And you can't really say the same thing about any other candidate.
00:47:49.000And I do like what Tulsi Gabbard is saying, and I do like some of the things Elizabeth Warren's saying, but it seems like she's just making it up on the fly and adopting kind of Bernie-lite policies.
00:47:59.000And I think this is all a strategy to siphon all the delegates away from Bernie because we already know this third-way corporate Wall Street-funded organization that's like corporate Democrats have said they want anyone but Bernie.
00:48:11.000Bernie is the biggest threat to the establishment by far.
00:48:14.000Did you see when Charlemagne called Elizabeth Warren the original Rachel Dolezal to her face?
00:49:05.000And I don't know how much, you know, ancestry, Native American ancestry she has, but I do know that she was, you know, that was on like her Harvard bio and all this stuff.
00:52:08.000That what he is standing for is the downtrodden.
00:52:12.000He's standing for the people that don't catch a good break.
00:52:15.000When he starts talking about things like income inequality, I'm like, okay, I understand what you're doing and why you're saying it, but what is the cause of income inequality?
00:52:35.000There's so much that can be done that's not being done and at least he seems to be calling out to the people that are ignored, that aren't being served by Wall Street.
00:53:57.000Even though people are out of jobs, make sure that their needs are met so then they can go and find a way through this mess and then figure out a way to contribute and make an income and make a living and adjust.
00:54:58.000I agree with the concept that Yang proposes about UBI. But yeah, I think that if we give people health care and have their basic needs met, then that It's going to give them the ability to maneuver to find their passion and to be able to have that space where they can fulfill their lives.
00:55:18.000There's a way to find meaning and have your needs kept.
00:55:21.000I mean, the idea is that I don't think that people should get free money to the point where they could live a full, rich life and go on vacations and have a nice car and a nice house and never have to work again.
00:55:42.000But if you're in a job that's going to be completely annihilated by automation and artificial intelligence, I don't know what that would be.
00:56:05.000You know, and when I talked to Tulsi about that, she didn't know what that would be either.
00:56:09.000This idea of trying to promote new jobs.
00:56:31.000He's like, I'm literally instating an economic bill of rights that FDR did 100 years ago.
00:56:36.000Why am I considered a radical extremist when I'm just trying to give people basic economic rights and trying to propose jobs to rebuild this country?
00:57:33.000Like, Wall Street just makes so much money and if we just taxed Wall Street or, you know, like you're talking about taxing these defense contractors or actually trying to change the laws to not have these corporations hide billions of dollars offshore in tax havens, it solves all of these problems pretty quickly.
00:57:52.000And it's not a matter of how can we do it.
00:57:55.000It's a matter that we have to do it because students are totally crippled.
00:57:59.000There's no opportunities in this country.
00:58:01.000Inequality is the highest that it's been since the Great Depression.
00:59:48.000I mean, I don't think it's, you know, like if you're fucking 18 years old, you smoke weed once in a while with your friends, I don't think you're going to get fucked up.
00:59:55.000But, like, everyday stoners, it's terrible for you.
01:00:28.000I don't want to call it a drug, because I don't like that expression, this blanket that we throw over amphetamines and sedatives and all these different things, and you throw marijuana in there.
01:00:37.000It's a sacrament, and I think it should be used in the most general and lightest use of that term as a sacrament.
01:02:28.000Looking out for other people is super rewarding.
01:02:31.000It's a selfish thing to be generous and kind.
01:02:36.000Selfish in a lot of ways because it really helps yourself.
01:02:38.000Well, that's the whole mantra of growing up in America is you need to help yourself and you're a loser if you don't get rich and all this shit.
01:02:45.000It's all these impossible goals that we can't do without actually help from each other.
01:03:08.000Because your foundation, who you are as a person, the way you treat people, the way you view the world, the way you love your friends and your family, that's your foundation.
01:03:19.000And if you become successful and you have that foundation, I feel like you can still be happy.
01:03:24.000But if you become successful and you just shit that foundation away because you just wanted to make it, I'm just going to make it, fuck all that stuff, I don't need that, I don't need love, I don't need any of that.
01:03:33.000And then you make it and you're just sitting there alone.
01:03:38.000I think that's why a lot of people like Trump because they think of him like, I've actually heard this term, like a blue-collar billionaire.
01:05:33.000She gets a turkey baster and she squirts it in there and she kicks him.
01:05:42.000Remember how, in Fair Night 11.9, he shows just how bizarre and inappropriate Trump is with Ivanka, but there's this one talk show where the host is just like, Ivanka, she's like, what do you have most in common with your dad?
01:08:46.000And the pardoning power, usually that's supposed to be like sympathy pardons for people like Chelsea Manning, not for war criminals who have killed a bunch of civilians.
01:10:10.000I mean, he's a legitimate journalist in that regard.
01:10:13.000What he's doing is he's distributing information that is literally going to change the way people view the way the government and the military work.
01:10:22.000I mean, it's incomprehensible how much the world has changed and what we are aware of because of WikiLeaks' revelations in the past 10 years.
01:10:30.000I mean, even just the film that I just made, Gaza Fights for Freedom, I cite a WikiLeaks cable about how Israel wanted Hamas to win in Gaza and they said that they were strategizing for that to happen so then they can regard Gaza as a hostile territory and then just relentlessly bomb them.
01:10:52.000Because people, I don't think that people really knew that Trump would take these powers and become so authoritarian with them.
01:10:59.000Well, what's disturbing to me is, WikiLeaks used to be something that people on the left would cite as evidence that the military was out of control.
01:11:09.000Or that the military industrial complex is out of control.
01:11:12.000Then, because they feel like somehow or another WikiLeaks was involved in helping Trump, They became a Russian mouthpiece and a traitor.
01:11:21.000I mean, like, the left, over the last few years in particular, since 2016, WikiLeaks has been sort of redefined.
01:11:32.000They're conflating Julian Assange's personal politics, and I don't know what those are.
01:11:36.000I know that he had those private DMs with Trump Jr., which looked bad, but...
01:11:42.000He was talking to him about, you know, we need your tax return so then people don't think of us as like a biased organization and it would look good and kind of like, you know, a little too buddy-buddy with Trump Jr. But that does not take away from the importance and, you know, validity of what WikiLeaks is as an organization.
01:12:00.000It's also a person talking to another person, giving their opinion, which makes sense.
01:12:05.000People just really don't like Julian Assange as a person, and it doesn't matter how much you hate Julian Assange.
01:12:11.000This is completely beyond the pale, what's going on to him, and he needs to be defended.
01:12:22.000What's crazy is these charges that just got unveiled with the Trump administration, they're trying to extradite him to the U.S., of course, and he'll just be sitting in a cell for the rest of his life if he doesn't face the death penalty.
01:12:32.000But the charges have nothing to do with the 2016 election at all.
01:12:36.000They all have to do with the massacre, the collateral murder.
01:13:21.000He's a political prisoner and he needs to be freed and it's absolutely astounding that the Trump administration is doing this and that people are going along with it.
01:13:33.000It's weird the shift in how people used to defend him and now no longer do and nothing really has changed in terms of what he's actually done.
01:13:40.000It was a traumatic election and people's reptile brains got activated hardcore and they think everything is Russia and they think Julian Assange is Russia and they think anyone who's talking about US foreign policy is towing the Russian line, towing the Kremlin line.
01:13:54.000It's not about the people who control this government, it's the dark evil forces behind your friends and family and the people who are talking about sowing discord and shit.
01:14:03.000It's a disturbing time because it's hard to relate and actually have these discussions with people.
01:14:08.000Yeah, I think you nailed it when you said the 2016 elections have sort of awakened this reptile brain.
01:14:25.000And that's part of, I think, some of the motivation behind this and justification for deplatforming people, wiping them out, like remove them, get them out.
01:14:40.000It's like this kind of shit that you see.
01:14:42.000They feel like they're in an ideological war.
01:14:45.000That's why identity politics is so fascinating because it's just been adopted by the establishment, by the liberal wing of the establishment, to try to trick people that we're somehow a progressive society.
01:14:56.000It's all just like corporatism under the flag and the banner of social politics and identity politics, and it's completely absurd.
01:15:05.000I mean, with Barack Obama, we thought that we were in a post-racial society because we had a black president, and we know that that's absolutely a falsehood.
01:15:14.000So I just think that we're just going down the wrong path here.
01:15:17.000And neoliberalism has really done a number on this country and the world.
01:15:22.000And we're going to see kind of more authoritarian fascist policies take root because people are really down and out with how capitalism has morphed.
01:15:36.000It's really disturbing because, you know, you're looking at, like, left identity politics, but it's under the banner of capitalism.
01:15:44.000So really, it's just about privatization.
01:15:47.000Neoliberalism is just about privatization.
01:15:48.000So it's not about, like, leftist, you know, socialist politics.
01:15:52.000And even you look at someone like Bernie Sanders, he's not a socialist.
01:15:54.000He's a democratic socialist, which means that he just wants social democracy.
01:16:00.000He's not talking about abolishing private industry.
01:16:02.000He's not talking about nationalizing anything.
01:16:04.000He's just talking about having workers have a seat at the table and getting the fair share.
01:16:09.000So we've gone off the wayside of rhetoric and we just have no idea how to talk about these things in a fair way because things are so heated.
01:16:20.000And ideological and people are just blinded, I think, and don't really understand these issues well enough.
01:16:28.000And it's really disturbing because we're at a point in our country where we need to have conversations.
01:16:36.000But going back to the censorship stuff and the consolidation of corporate media, people don't have the platform, they don't have the voice to get these ideas out there.
01:16:44.000Which is why your show is so important.
01:16:47.000I mean, having people like me, like Tulsi, I mean, Bringing out these concepts and shifting the consciousness is very, very important.
01:16:56.000Well, I think that when people are hearing the same thing over and over and over again from one side and then an opposite view over and over again from another side, it's very difficult to have an understanding of what the fuck is going on.
01:17:17.000Or they tend to just find whatever side seems to get them the most social credit or the most reasonable perspective in their terms, whether it's left-wing or right-wing, and then just support that.
01:17:34.000Pattern that they adopt, this conglomeration of opinions that they adopt.
01:17:39.000And then they're so busy with their jobs, they're so busy with their family, they're so busy with their life.
01:17:43.000And then all this other shit, when you're seeing deregulation, all this other shit you're seeing, the stuff that caused the banking crisis, all this stuff is going on.
01:17:54.000And it's going on without their knowledge.
01:17:56.000It's all happening underneath the surface.
01:17:58.000And then something erupts, like the economic collapse of 2007, 2008. And they're like, what the fuck is happening?
01:18:22.000And to really develop a nuanced perspective of what the problems are, how to fix them, and then who is actually going to support a real tangible solution versus who is just saying some Elizabeth Warren type shit to get elected.
01:18:36.000Well, that's why we need a real mobilization in the streets, because there's no person who's going to change this.
01:18:42.000There's no top-down implementation that's really going to revolutionize society and get people living wage and get people healthcare.
01:18:49.000Even Bernie said, I'm not going to be able to do this.
01:18:55.000But yeah, I mean, there's nowhere in the country that you can live if you're living on minimum wage and actually afford a two-bedroom apartment.
01:20:46.000And so what we've done with these civil society organizations is try to foment radical discontent on the ground in Venezuela to try to, you know, get some sort of uprising and The guy, Juan Guido, was just some guy plucked from obscurity who was just well-known in Georgetown and Washington,
01:21:03.000D.C., much more well-known there than he was even in Venezuela.
01:21:07.000So, you know, this was completely engineered.
01:21:33.000That's actually the vast majority is private industry.
01:21:35.000And a lot of those private CEOs are very anti-government.
01:21:41.000Long story short is that the coup was initiated, you know, during the Trump administration after he slapped like 70 sanctions on Venezuela.
01:21:48.000And we're talking about medicine, food, all the things that they're saying that they need, right?
01:21:54.000That they're trying to stage these fake aid caravan deliveries.
01:22:45.000But when I was on the ground, I saw flourishing democracy.
01:22:48.000I saw dozens of people, hundreds of people who said that they Love the process there, that they believe in the Bolivarian movement and that they're Chavismo till death.
01:22:58.000And we don't understand because those people's voices are totally censored from corporate media.
01:23:03.000The only Venezuelans that we hear from in corporate media are rich opposition, either, you know, expats or people who just have fled.
01:23:11.000And what do we hear from corporate media?
01:23:20.000I mean, their take on corporate media, if you're looking at like Fox News, they'll say we need to overthrow Maduro and everyone's starving and it's a failed state.
01:24:36.000And you see all of these people who were involved in Exxon Mobil and all of the oil industries that were flourishing in Venezuela before Chavez got elected.
01:24:45.000And they just want their profits back.
01:24:58.000So ever since these failed coup attempts over the last decade, the US has been fomenting regime change through the civil society organizations, USAID offshoots in the country, and basically trying to foment violent unrest.
01:25:12.000Violent unrest to the extent that they burn down streets.
01:25:17.000I mean, when I was there during the height of the violence in 2017, like 200 people died.
01:25:22.000And the news just kept saying, like insinuating that Maduro was going out there with police forces and actually gunning down people in the streets.
01:25:29.000It couldn't be farther from the truth.
01:25:33.000We looked at death records and we found out that the opposition lynch mobs were actually responsible for the overwhelming majority of deaths in the streets.
01:25:46.000These people are targeting maternity clinics, hospitals, basically any enclave of government services because that's what this is really about.
01:25:53.000It's about a kind of a fascistic bent of the opposition wanting to take back the power from the poor.
01:26:00.000The poor people got power and they didn't like it.
01:26:03.000And that's what the crux of the problem is.
01:26:05.000But when you're looking at the corporate media, it's an absurdly cartoonish brush that's being painted.
01:26:11.000And then if you look at the liberal media with Maddow and all these other people, they either don't talk about it or they say Maduro needs to let the aid in.
01:26:18.000You even saw Bernie and Elizabeth Warren saying Maduro needs to let the aid in.
01:26:49.000Because they're allies with the US. So it's a cynical stunt to try to get this humanitarian international outcry to say, oh my god, people are dying.
01:27:01.000It's not a matter of that there's no food.
01:27:04.000It's that food is very expensive because there's an actual economic war being waged by massive corporations in the country and just external entities, whether it be the Trump administration or US multinationals.
01:27:57.000They've been trying over and over again to try to get something going.
01:28:01.000And basically, at the end of the day, what happened was just a giant money grab.
01:28:06.000It was basically a money laundering scheme.
01:28:08.000You look at these people who are the opposition leaders now, Juan Guido, Carlos Vecchio, they've just stolen all the money back.
01:28:16.000Maybe they realized the coup wasn't going to go forward, but they basically ended up stealing at least $70 million and just putting it right in these people's bank accounts.
01:28:25.000I mean, you have international, it's an international conspiracy to try to take the money back from the people whose money was basically administered by Maduro for social services.
01:28:37.000And the root of it all is nationalizing the oil.
01:28:39.000Nationalizing the oil is the root of it all.
01:29:47.000Yeah, you should check out, everyone should check out our Empire Files YouTube channel because we've done extensive coverage on the ground, really going into the nuts and bolts of what the economic crisis really is.
01:29:58.000And my partner, Mike Preissner, did this epic takedown of John Oliver and You know, the liberal media is just as bad.
01:30:04.000John Oliver did some fucking absurdly false kind of, like, analysis of the whole Venezuela situation, and we just went through and debunked every single line of it.
01:30:14.000I mean, it was extremely disingenuous.
01:30:16.000I bet he had someone who wrote all that, right?
01:30:20.000So I bet he probably has no real knowledge of it.
01:30:24.000Nor could you really, unless you extensively studied it the way you have, and especially if you have feet on the ground.
01:30:32.000I think that most people just, in order to understand a complex, nuanced problem, like some sort of an international conflict that we're involved in that has to do with nationalizing oil, like, god damn, you gotta do a lot of work.
01:30:53.000I mean, you find that with a lot of these so-called online experts.
01:30:56.000When you talk to them one-on-one and you get them off the record without notes, they're just people.
01:31:02.000Well, there's this guy, this UN human rights investigator named Alfred de Zayas that I did this big interview with, and he said he tried to propose this to the UN saying there is no humanitarian crisis there.
01:31:38.000So is the idea that they just put these sanctions in place, allow this political unrest to take place, support the opposition, and then just have a slow burn until it all collapses, and then come in and swoop in and fix everything and make it a part of the United States government?
01:31:51.000And then these people will not have a voice any longer.
01:31:54.000And another thing that they hate is that Maduro has given 2 million free homes to people.
01:31:59.000That's something that's completely unheard of to maybe Americans.
01:32:02.000But that's one thing that Juan Guaido said that he would do.
01:32:06.000He immediately implemented a new hydrocarbons law, or he was proposing to implement a new hydrocarbons law, which is, again, reprivatizing the oil, and also just immediately privatizing all of the social services that Maduro and Chavez did.
01:33:43.000Yeah, no, the Venezuela thing's a mess.
01:33:45.000It's so difficult because it's so nuanced, but I encourage everyone to maybe check out Venezuela Analysis and Empire Files and Telesaur if they want to learn more about that situation.
01:33:55.000Have you encountered any demonetization of your channel from discussing these complex issues?
01:34:02.000So we actually stopped monetizing altogether, so we are ad-free.
01:34:06.000But we would have been demonetized, I'm absolutely sure.
01:34:10.000And we also are slapped with age restrictions and sensitive content bans on almost every single video that we put up, whether it be Israel, Palestine, or Venezuela.
01:34:33.000Mike's video about John Oliver was just literally taking clips from John Oliver and then critiquing them, and they said that was a sensitive content ban.
01:34:43.000Do you think that's a corporate issue because you're criticizing an HBO show?
01:34:47.000No, no, because it's happened with almost every single one of our videos.
01:34:52.000And so you have to make sure that you're logged in, that you prove your age, just all these different steps and gatekeeping methods to prevent people from getting access to our channel.
01:35:01.000And another crazy thing about it is if you just search like Empire Files, Venezuela, like it will take you a really long time to actually find our work, even if you type in the channel name.
01:37:15.000This is the issue that people have with Facebook and Google and any of these gigantic online corporations that are deciding what is and isn't popular and using algorithms to steer people in directions.
01:37:31.000You know, one of the more fascinating discussions that's happened over the past few years is this understanding that their algorithms favor people arguing about things.
01:37:41.000Like if you want to have a subject, like say abortion, and you put up a, you know, if you're a pro-choice or a pro-life person, you're going to get steered towards things you disagree with so that you engage with them more because that's where the money is.
01:37:56.000The money is in you being upset and engaging.
01:37:59.000I mean, that's where people really get into it.
01:38:02.000So the more you engage, the more profitable it is for Facebook, and the more they encourage that type of behavior.
01:38:08.000So their algorithm actually encourages pissing you off.
01:38:13.000And wants you to stay on YouTube and just go down the rabbit hole on every issue.
01:39:38.000And then if you go online and you read something else, and that something else is contrary to what you believe, and you start believing in that something else, somehow or another that's bad.
01:39:49.000This is one of the great arguments against censorship.
01:39:53.000It's like you have to figure out what the fuck makes sense.
01:39:56.000The only way to figure out what makes sense is to read all kinds of things.
01:40:11.000If you think you know what's correct, you're the arbiter of free speech, you're the arbiter of logical discourse and common sense in this world, let me ask you things.
01:40:51.000I just think it's incredibly dangerous because you have to have an unbelievably complex and nuanced perspective in order to be able to dictate what makes or does not make sense.
01:41:04.000You have to have a lot of information at your disposal.
01:41:08.000If you're talking about something like Venezuela, let's look at that, for example.
01:41:12.000Look at what you know, and then look at what you see in what you would call progressive left-wing media that...
01:41:21.000To your knowledge is incorrect and is basically propaganda points that's being redistributed in this way that is palatable.
01:41:28.000Now imagine if people decide that you, Abby Martin, are somehow or another part of some right-wing conspiracy now and they're going to censor your voice and censor your – because it doesn't fit in to this narrative that they're – because you need so much information.
01:41:45.000To be able to really understand what's happening in this one part of South America that we're talking about.
01:42:05.000I want the Chinese perspective, because I feel like we're smart enough to really determine our own reality based on All the available information.
01:42:12.000But this is where we're fucked, is that we don't have a reliable, independent source that's not filled with hyperbole and emotion and dunking on people and screaming and insulting.
01:42:25.000And I want someone who can break things down logically and clearly with no ideological bend.
01:42:33.000You're not leaning left, you're not leaning right.
01:42:39.000I think it's because it's not necessarily human.
01:42:42.000And, you know, people have opinions and they have biases and either they couch those biases in like these think tanks and pretend like they're these unbiased journalists or they just kind of wear it on their sleeve like I do with Empire Files and Media Roots, which is my, you know, my news organization.
01:42:59.000But, I mean, we try to lay it out, but we also don't hide where we're coming from.
01:43:03.000I almost appreciate that more than a lot of these journalists, so-called journalists who are really kind of stenographers, who pretend like they are unbiased.
01:43:11.000And they're like, I'm just giving it to you straight.
01:43:12.000And at the end of the day, they're really not.
01:43:15.000They're trying to toe a line and they're trying to push a certain perspective, but it's just not obvious.
01:44:42.000What I'm hoping is that if you look at what this technology is doing, what technology in general is doing, particularly like information technology, internet, cellular phones and smartphones and all these devices and And all the various new incarnations that are coming out.
01:44:58.000What they seem to be doing is they seem to be We're good to go.
01:45:28.000But I think ultimately it's going to fail.
01:45:30.000And I think ultimately as technology, as all these innovations keep coming down the pipe, we're going to get closer and closer to this time where everyone has an instantaneous and equal access to information.
01:45:43.000And I think that when that time does come, lying will be virtually impossible.
01:46:02.000I think they're going to develop some sort of technology that allows us to link up together and through some new way of communicating that we don't foresee now.
01:46:16.000But if you just look at this trend, like what is the trend?
01:46:18.000The trend was, oh, you go to the library and get a book.
01:47:10.000Like these various languages that we use, whether Spanish or Chinese or whatever it is, but some sort of a new language that kids learn, and a new language that's a universal language that's distributed through online platforms.
01:47:24.000And have this all go straight to your fucking brain.
01:47:38.000We're so dependent upon these devices.
01:47:40.000It just seems to make sense that the general direction that all this is going is becoming more and more invasive and more and more inclusive.
01:47:48.000More and more invasive in terms of the way it's sort of ingrained in your body and becomes a part of your life, becomes more and more a part of everyone's life.
01:48:01.000And then more inclusive in terms of more access to this information and more access to thoughts.
01:48:09.000And I just think we're just a few years away from someone making a breakthrough.
01:48:55.000But that looks like some Iron Man type shit.
01:48:57.000He's going to wear a football helmet that does that in the future.
01:48:59.000If I just go one step, this is like the next thing they get this on a Bluetooth thing just touched your ear that everybody's already been walking around with for the last 25 years.
01:49:06.000So he's essentially calculating his groceries as he walks around?
01:49:10.000Yeah, this is just probably connected to his phone.
01:50:17.000Right after I came on last year, the sanctions shut down our show, and so we had to do this giant fundraiser, and it was just absolutely very difficult to...
01:52:34.000It's so, again, this is another thing.
01:52:37.000It's so difficult to understand what's actually going on.
01:52:39.000There's so many pro-Israel people that put their head in the sand and don't want to look at some of these atrocities and don't want to look at some of the videos that you sent me of soldiers shooting at people that are not doing anything.
01:53:36.000I mean, it's shocking how many war crimes were committed on camera.
01:53:40.000And it's just amazing the propaganda that's just told to us about what this is and why they have the right to kill people that pose no threat to them.
01:53:50.000When you were on last time and you talked about this, one of my email accounts was flooded with literally a chain letter, the same letter, like denouncing you and your lies and your anti-Semitic You know,
01:54:23.000Go to GazaFightsForFreedom.com if you want to check it out when it gets released.
01:54:27.000And it's just really incontrovertible, Joe.
01:54:30.000I mean, even if it were a war between armies, all of these things that Israel has done are still documented war crimes and very grievous violations of international law.
01:54:41.000And we're talking about direct targeting and assassinations by Israeli snipers of disabled people, of children, press, and medics.
01:55:06.000And so the film looks at this UN investigation, basically during the March in 2018, and documents all of the grievous crimes and atrocities conducted by the Israeli military.
01:55:17.000And I mean, you know, Palestine has a right to defend itself.
01:55:35.000And the fact that this is not even what that is, that there's literally people going out there in peace with their bared chests, holding flags, and they're getting killed and sniped.
01:56:07.000And so, you know, we're just trying to document this to really kind of push the needle for accountability because these laws have been agreed upon by the international community, some of them 100 years ago.
01:56:18.000And to have kind of a rogue state acting with complete impunity, knowing that it has total protection from the U.S. empire and given more freedom than ever under Trump with this Golan Heights thing and the moving of the Jerusalem embassy or the moving of the embassy to Jerusalem.
01:56:34.000It's abysmal, and it needs to be stopped, and they can't control the narrative any longer because we're seeing this with our own eyes, and that's what this film does, is really lays it all out.
01:56:45.000Abby, you concentrate and focus on so many different fucked up parts of the world.
01:57:19.000Well, I think that, well, first of all, I go and camp a lot.
01:57:23.000I get into nature a lot, which is also kind of depressing, knowing that, you know, climate change and blah, blah, blah.
01:57:28.000But I try to get out and see the beauty of the world and understand my privilege, especially as an American citizen, because we can't afford to not be aware and we can't afford to not be educated in talking about these issues, especially when our government is subsidizing this around the world.
01:57:45.000$10 million every day with our tax dollars.
01:57:49.000I mean, this is going on and it's so close to home.
01:57:53.000And we have to acknowledge our privilege and acknowledge the situation, which is we have agency.
01:57:59.000We have agency to lobby our government to change this and to stop these criminal acts.
01:58:08.000But do you ever feel that it's almost like you're absorbing too much because you are looking at all the problems of all the people, seven plus billion around the world and all these different horrific injustices?
01:58:22.000I try to focus on what I can do and what I can do is challenge my own government.
01:58:27.000And as an American citizen living in this society, I think that the U.S. Empire and the Pentagon is the source of a lot of problems around the world.
01:58:39.000I mean, you have to understand the issues that are going on, especially with foreign policy in terms of the colonized and colonizers, the oppressed and oppressors, and the US's role as well as other previous empires role in shaping the world as it is today.
01:58:53.000And a lot of the problems that have arisen are because directly U.S. foreign policy, whether it be the global war on terrorism, whether it be terrorism in general.
01:59:01.000I mean, you know, drone strikes basically cause terrorism.
01:59:04.000Whether it be the environmental crises, the Pentagon is actually the largest polluter in the world, more than 140 countries.
01:59:11.000That's essentially every country in the world almost.
01:59:14.000A bigger polluter than the top four chemical companies combined.
01:59:18.000So it all kind of stems back from this notion that, you know, the US is the world's largest empire that's ever existed, and it needs to be stopped to save humanity.
01:59:28.000And so as an American citizen, I look at all of the problems and I understand that there is like a very common root.
01:59:35.000And I can do something about this common root.
01:59:37.000And if you're looking at domestic problems, the lack of healthcare, the lack of education.
01:59:41.000I mean, Martin Luther King called it decades ago.
01:59:44.000He says, you know, a nation that spends more and more on military spending is facing social death.
01:59:51.000I probably butchered his quote, but that's essentially the spiritual death, I think is what he said.
01:59:55.000But I mean, that's exactly what's happening is when we're squandering all of our money, bolstering up this huge global empire.
02:00:01.000We're not taking care of our people at home, our brothers and sisters at home.
02:00:05.000My empathy extends as an internationalist all around the world.
02:00:09.000I feel for my brothers and sisters in Palestine, Yemen.
02:00:22.000And it's time for us to really acknowledge what those horrible things are because we need to reinvigorate an anti-war movement in this country.
02:00:30.000And when you're saying that drone strikes create terrorism, what you're really saying is that, well, what people, if they don't understand, Drone strikes primarily kill civilians.
02:01:21.000But if you do it with a remote control and you launch Hellfire missiles out of a drone and it blows up the apartment building and kills all these innocent people but also gets the terrorists, it's mission accomplished.
02:01:52.000When you have anything that's ineffective to the point where most of the people it kills are good people, or at least are innocent people, we should say.
02:02:52.000I mean, every time you kill 98% innocent people, whoever survives, if you lost your whole family in that, you have an incredible amount of motivation to get back at whoever did it.
02:03:10.000And, you know, militarily speaking, Trump actually, you know, it's not just Trump.
02:03:15.000I mean, this is a bipartisan effort throughout the entire Congress.
02:03:18.000If there's one thing Congress can agree upon, it's to make nonviolent BDS efforts against Israel legal and also to just keep ramping up the military and egging on whoever's sitting in the Oval Office to be more militaristic.
02:03:32.000And that's exactly what's happened with Trump in a bizarre way.
02:03:35.000I mean, Congress approved like a near trillion dollar defense budget.
02:03:40.000And the increase alone in the last year was basically Russia's entire military budget, more than Russia's entire military budget.
02:03:47.000That's how much the shit's ramping up.
02:05:02.000And that's what we need to start like expanding our consciousness and our empathy worldwide to understand all of these things are linked and the struggle is all linked.
02:05:10.000And our world is shrinking really rapidly.
02:05:37.000Yeah, he has like this online campaign that's really awesome.
02:05:39.000But, I mean, Tulsi's speaking a lot about regime change wars, which is extremely important.
02:05:45.000But she still believes in drone strikes.
02:05:47.000She basically has a little bit of Obama's foreign policy that I don't agree with that fundamental understanding.
02:05:53.000Does she believe in limited drone strikes?
02:05:54.000Like maybe if there's an ISIS camp somewhere?
02:05:56.000I mean, I can't believe that she believes in some sort of just broad brush use of it.
02:06:03.000I haven't looked into the nuances of that, but I do think that no one is saying what I want them to about U.S. empire, about scaling back the U.S. empire and stopping all of the civil society movements because it's not just about invasions anymore.
02:06:20.000It's about usurping the democratic processes of all of these countries, like what we've done in Venezuela, what we're doing all around the world to try to foment unrest.
02:06:31.000Do you foresee a time where our dependence on foreign oil is radically reduced to the point where it doesn't justify these regime change wars and our dependence on these resources that these people have?
02:06:47.000Almost every conflict in the world, you can boil down to the acquisition of resources.
02:06:53.000And that's like what a lot of it is now is actually just capital interests needing to expand and grow and continuing to up and increase the profit structure of these corporations.
02:07:05.000And that's exactly why we've seen imperialism kind of go out of control in the way that it has.
02:07:22.000It hasn't stopped the imperialist misadventures of the U.S. government.
02:07:26.000So, I think there just needs to be a really big shift in consciousness and people to stop thinking that it's our right and that we have the right and the duty to do this around the world.
02:07:53.000Well, if it's not obvious, what is obvious is that we're not evolving in terms of If we're still involved in drone strikes that kill 98% of people, if we're still involved in regime change wars, we're still involved in these unnecessary military actions against Iran,
02:08:12.000these things that people are freaking out about, this is all the same kind of shit that people have been fighting against forever, that we don't want...
02:09:04.000Well, I mean, that's what's so scary about the Iran thing, because the people who are surrounding Iran and being directed to go out there, they're the ones who are going to be the sacrificial lambs for these defense contractors.
02:09:14.000And I don't think that you can argue anymore that this is for freedom.
02:09:43.000I mean, inevitably we're trying to get to the global confrontation with China and Russia, I guess.
02:09:48.000I mean, it's scary to think that we only have a couple independent states left to knock down to be under complete subjugation from the U.S. military and global capitalism.
02:10:00.000Well, not only that, even if we do move into some sort of a situation where we're in control, then we're a bigger target.
02:10:12.000And with the amount of nuclear weapons that are possessed by these countries that were, I mean, just what North Korea has, just this one small fucked up country, could ruin life on Earth.
02:10:37.000I mean, if someone chose to launch an attack, if they decided that they have the justification to launch an attack, then all of a sudden we're in a real war.
02:10:47.000Like a fucking war-war where people are invading us.
02:10:51.000Shits get knocked down, buildings and bombs blow up.
02:11:46.000And then also, what we discussed before, it's impossible for anyone to really have a deep, nuanced understanding of all these different issues.
02:12:46.000And what's needed is we need a movement of the masses.
02:12:49.000It's not going to come from the top-down world.
02:12:51.000It's gonna come from a grassroots mobilized effort to try to change these policies.
02:12:56.000That's the only way things have ever changed in the past.
02:12:58.000And I absolutely have hope and optimism that we're gonna change things and that we're going to correct this horrible path that we're on.
02:13:06.000Do you think that the 2020 elections can have a real significant impact of any of this?
02:13:12.000Do you think that whoever gets into office can really have an effect on the kind of policies that we're talking about with the kind of influence of the military-industrial complex, of all these lobbyists, of Wall Street, of all these monstrous machines that this pure,
02:13:30.000good old-fashioned democracy can actually step in and turn this ship away from the rocks?
02:13:37.000Bernie, I really do think that he's one of our last chances.
02:13:40.000Not because I think that he's going to completely do some revolutionary upheaval from the top down.
02:13:45.000As we know, Congress is stacked with a lot of terrible people who will block a lot of these efforts.
02:13:50.000But I think that he's going to mobilize the masses and reinvigorate the labor movement and reinvigorate unions.
02:13:56.000Help workers understand that they need to fight for these rights that have been eviscerated over the last hundred years.
02:14:04.000One thing that does inspire me as well is seeing people like Ilhan Omar.
02:14:19.000She got viciously attacked for retweeting one of my episodes from Empire Files, and I think it just shows how scared people are of her and her ideas.
02:14:28.000And you saw how hard everyone came down on her for just saying that Israel has an influential lobby in D.C. Yeah.
02:14:36.000Well, she's also wearing religious garb, so people are scared of that right away, the hijab.
02:14:42.000And then there was some hit piece on her.
02:14:45.000Yesterday, they're saying they think she married a brother.
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