In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Joe and John talk about the JFK assassination, Watergate, and how technology has changed the way we think about truth and truthlessness. They also talk about how technology can be a weapon in a hybrid war that we're in, and why it's important to understand what's going on in the world and how it affects us, and what we should do about it. Joe also talks about his new movie, JFK: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which is out now, and John's new documentary, The Devil Next Door, which will be released on Showtime on November 15th. John also discusses how technology is a weapon that can be used to subvert the truth, and that we should all be careful about how we define reality, because it's a tool in a war that's being used to define reality. And that's a good thing, because we're living in a world where reality is defined by the definition of reality, and the best way to define it is by how we understand reality is by what we're told it's meant to be understood and how we're being told it is meant to feel and what it means to be defined. Enjoy, and tweet us what you think! if you have any thoughts or suggestions on how technology should be used, we'd love to hear them! Timestamps: 1:00 - What's the worst thing you've ever heard about technology? 4:00: What's your favorite piece of technology you've been taught to you by someone else? 6:30 - What do you like about it? 7:00 8: What does it mean to you? 9:15 - What are you looking for? 11:40 - How technology does it make you feel? 16: What is it a tool? 17:20 - What would you want to know about the world? 18:30 19:00 | What s it do you think it's like? 21:30 | What's it really mean? 22:40 | What is the role of technology in the 21st century? 27:30 // 22: Is it a weapon? 26:20 | How technology in reality? 29:00 // Is it just a tool or a tool, or is it not a tool of power? 30:40 32:00 + 33:00 & 35:00+
00:01:14.000And all the shit you're dealing with and potential assassination and coup plots and...
00:01:19.000And part of how you operate has to be one thing, one face you present to the public, and another thing is what you're really actually doing because you've got all these other people, especially today with the nature of information wars, attempting to subvert what you're trying to do based on your overt actions.
00:01:37.000And so you have to hide what you're really actually up to.
00:01:41.000It's difficult to navigate that terrain.
00:01:43.000Well, not only that, but when you operate like that, if you're constantly operating in this sort of deception vein, it's got to be hard to know what's true and what's not true, because you're full of shit.
00:01:56.000When you're full of shit, I think it becomes more difficult to recognize.
00:02:22.000Well, my favorite thing was when she was confronted and they asked her a question about trading, about whether or not people that are in Congress and what have you should be able to trade.
00:02:32.000And she takes a sip of water because she knows this is going to be a big one.
00:02:36.000Well, listen, there was on Twitter, and we can probably return to the question of tech and speech and censorship, but there was this account called Pelosi Tracker.
00:03:16.000I mean, Twitter used to be, like, you would, you remember the old days when you would just say, like, at Majid, I'm having a pizza with friends?
00:03:25.000Like, you know, like, you would do those things.
00:04:30.000And if you're a minority in power, you're always going to be a minority if you're in power.
00:04:34.000When we get this conversation started, what I want to do for people that don't know you, I want to go into your past and your book and who you were in the previous life and who you are now and why you're recognizing this and you're so fiercely Resisting this shit more than a lot of people are because a lot of people are scared of blowback Like they see what's going on with governments and with lockdowns and all these things and they're they're
00:05:04.000scared of the blowback and so they're kind of keeping their mouth shut but you're not doing that at all and I think a lot of that has to do with your past I've seen worse, yeah.
00:05:13.000Will you just give us a rundown of what happened with you?
00:05:18.000For your listeners, I was born in Essex, UK and had a very normal, integrated childhood until I kind of hit my teenage years.
00:05:31.000From my teenagers, we were the first generation, by the way, of Muslims born and raised in the West.
00:05:40.000And why that's relevant is we, my age group now, I'm 44, we had to navigate a place for Muslims in the West Prior to that point, of course, that hadn't been done.
00:05:53.000And there's a long history with sort of this whole Huntington model of a clash of civilizations, which is a bit caricature.
00:06:01.000But there's a long history sort of between Islam and the West and relations and mixing.
00:06:08.000A lot of it involved war with the Crusades.
00:06:11.000So we are now born and raised in the West as British citizens.
00:06:14.000Now, to put that into context in Europe, If you look with the US and you have minority communities, a lot of the room for improvement exists in, say, African-American communities, right?
00:06:26.000In Europe, the equivalent is with Muslim communities, wherever you go, whether it's in Britain with Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, whether it's in France with the North Africans, in Morocco, in the Netherlands with North Africans, Moroccans, in Germany with Turks, Across Europe,
00:06:42.000generally, Albanians, who also majority happen to be Muslim, but more cultural, not really that religious.
00:06:47.000But across Europe, the largest minorities are Muslims.
00:06:51.000And so that same question about integration, cooperation, equal opportunities, social mobility, Whereas in the US it applies specifically, I don't know, say for example with African Americans and Mexican Americans or Latino Americans in Europe generally and in the UK,
00:07:51.000And then this guy was just walking past, random guy walking past.
00:07:54.000He saw that I was surrounded by these guys, and he tried to step in to defend me.
00:07:58.000And what they did is, I was 15 years old, they held me back, and they basically started stabbing this guy all over his body, forced me to watch it, and they called him a Paki lover.
00:08:07.000And the idea was that he's a traitor to his skin for trying to defend me.
00:08:52.000And so we were looking in that context for some form of belonging, feeling rejected from society around us.
00:09:00.000The guys that attacked us, by the way, they would boast about having connections and links with the police.
00:09:06.000And it turns out to be the case that there was a problem in those days with the police.
00:09:10.000There's a famous case of the murder of Stephen Lawrence in the UK, who was stabbed to death in a similar way while waiting at a bus stop.
00:09:17.000And his killers were never brought to justice for over 20 years.
00:09:21.000And there was a government inquiry commissioned into that, it's called the McPherson Inquiry, and it eventually became famous for coining that phrase institutional racism.
00:09:29.000And it was talking about how police were not looking into these sorts of crimes, so nobody was ever brought to justice for what happened to us.
00:09:36.000And everything I described was a year before Stephen Lawrence was murdered.
00:09:40.000But that became the pivotal case in the UK. It became like a George Floyd moment.
00:10:16.000Looking at the genocide in Bosnia with the UN troops, one of the...
00:10:20.000The most searing memories for me was Srebrenica, where the Dutch UN soldiers were standing by as the Bosnian Muslims were killed and put in that mass grave, and they didn't have the mandate to intervene.
00:10:31.000So we really didn't trust institutions to defend us, whether it was foreign policy or even domestic at home.
00:10:37.000So at the age of 16, I joined this group called Hezbo al-Tahrir, which means the Party of Liberation.
00:10:43.000And in a nutshell, before Al-Qaeda and definitely before ISIS, this was an organization that wanted to caliphate globally around the world.
00:10:52.000But instead of using terrorism in the conventional means we understand it today, blowing things up, Our purpose, our method was to recruit army officers in Muslim majority countries and instigate military coups to try and come to power.
00:11:06.000I joined this group at 16 and I spent about a decade, well, yeah, more, just over a decade in this organization.
00:11:15.000I rose to the leadership in the UK. I set the group, I exported it from the UK and set it up in Pakistan.
00:11:22.000I was part of the first move in the wave that went from Britain to Pakistan to found the group there.
00:11:26.000In that vein, I ended up recruiting some army officers there in Pakistan as well.
00:11:45.000And we would, because of the Pakistani community, we knew friends who had relatives or whatever that would be coming from Pakistan to study at Sandhurst.
00:11:52.000It's like an officer's training academy.
00:11:55.000And then through relatives, you know, you begin conversation.
00:11:58.000And then really the rest of it is what's really important.
00:12:02.000Is being trained in techniques as to how to convince people of your aim.
00:12:13.000So a lot of that involves around first, so we used to say that you have to first destroy before you build.
00:12:18.000And so whatever you believe in at the moment has to be removed before we can replace it with our ideological framework.
00:12:24.000And so if you believe in, say you're coming from Pakistan, a thing you're going to generally, Obviously there are exceptions, but you're going to have some form of belief in the international order, in the international system, in democratic governance, because Pakistan for most of its history has been a democracy.
00:12:42.000And so we'd have to pick apart those ideas first.
00:12:46.000By focusing on the flaws and the holes in these eyes.
00:12:51.000If you've got the UN standing by while a genocide is going on in Bosnia and you're speaking to a Muslim who's from a country that was founded to protect Muslims after partition in 1947, just say, look, you think these institutions are going to protect you when you see what happened in Bosnia.
00:13:05.000So the failure of the international order was something that we could poke to try and make those fissures bigger.
00:13:15.000And we'll get back to this, by the way, with the debate today with COVID. But a lot of it was a psychological assault on assumptions that people took for granted.
00:13:23.000And then you pick those apart through discussion.
00:13:25.000You demonstrate how those assumptions don't stand up to the real world and they require a solution.
00:13:31.000That solution has to be something that fits what the person wants.
00:13:35.000Now, if you're speaking to a Muslim, it's pretty much a given that they don't want genocide against Muslims.
00:13:40.000So we'd go back, say, take the example of Bosnia.
00:13:43.000We talk about, well, how do you think Muslims who are blonde-haired, blue-eyed even came to Bosnia in the first place?
00:13:47.000Well, actually, it was through the caliphate, which is true.
00:13:50.000It was the Ottomans had the leadership of the Muslim world at the time, modern-day Turkey.
00:13:54.000And the Ottomans used to provide protection in that area.
00:13:58.000Now, that last vestige of a caliphate was destroyed in 1924, after World War I. And that's when the Muslims who are in modern day Bosnia lost that protection of the Ottoman Empire.
00:14:11.000So if you're speaking to somebody that knows his history, which we were trained in.
00:14:16.000So remember, I'm 16. I shouldn't be having conversations about the Ottoman Empire in Bosnia unless somehow I've been involved in a form of a process of a combination of education and indoctrination.
00:14:27.000And it's how to use that education for the purposes of indoctrination that we were trained in.
00:14:32.000So you can kind of have those discussions.
00:14:37.000As I say, I exported it to Denmark, then to Pakistan.
00:14:40.000I was on the leadership in the UK. Eventually, I went to Egypt to try and re-establish the group there in Egypt.
00:14:50.000Egypt at the time was under Hosni Mubarak.
00:14:53.000I was doing a degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
00:14:57.000It's SOAS, part of the University of London.
00:15:01.000It's considered one of the leading kind of radical left-wing colleges in the UK, but for Arabic it's actually one of the best in the world.
00:15:09.000And I was doing law and Arabic at SOAS, and for my Arabic degree I needed to go to an Arab country for my language year, my third year.
00:15:36.000And, of course, Denmark and Britain weren't.
00:15:37.000So in Egypt, where I tried to start building these cells, recruit people to my organization, I arrived one day before the 9-11 attacks, not knowing, of course, that was happening.
00:15:49.000And so that changed the security paradigm for the whole world.
00:15:53.000If you remember Tony Blair saying the rules of the game have changed.
00:15:58.000Once 9-11 happened, people like us who were not, you know, terrorists in the kind of bombing sense, right?
00:16:05.000So that's just the difference between, say, an Islamist, to briefly define it, somebody who wants to impose a version of Islam over society, as opposed to just the religion of Islam, which is a faith.
00:16:16.000An Islamist, I define, and people can differ with these definitions, just my definition, someone who wants to impose a version of Islam over society, impose a dogma, yeah?
00:16:25.000But our methods, our means, were not violent.
00:16:28.000They were more like infiltrating the government and trying to take over from within.
00:16:31.000But once the 9-11 attacks happened, the security rules of the game changed.
00:17:04.000And they put me in this van, took me to their state security headquarters, and a lot of, I can go into some of the detail, but a lot of atrocities then happened to us.
00:17:15.000I mean, we went through quite a horrific experience in the dungeons of Egypt.
00:17:18.000And the first thing they did is they took me up in Alexandria, where I was living.
00:17:22.000They took me up to the top of a building, blindfolded, and stood me on the edge of the roof to try and make me believe that they were going to push me over.
00:18:21.000There's a long history of this group in Egypt.
00:18:24.000So he said, all right, let's see what you do next.
00:18:26.000And then they put us in this van, drove us through the desert, still blindfolded, took us to Cairo, and they took us to this building called Al-Gihaz, Al-Gihaz Amin al-Dolo, which is the headquarters of the state security, internal state security for all of Egypt.
00:19:01.000I was 42. And from that day, this was now, I think, day two.
00:19:10.000From that evening, they began a roll call.
00:19:12.000We weren't allowed to sleep, by the way.
00:19:14.000If we slept and we didn't answer our name, we were beaten.
00:19:16.000And they went through the numbers in chronological order.
00:19:20.000And so I would hear, number one, he was called up, taken into a separate room, tortured, and we would hear his screams, electrocuted, and then they'd say, call number two.
00:19:30.000Number one is brought back, collapses in his spot, brings number two, number three, and they go through.
00:19:35.000Everyone is being tortured one by one.
00:19:37.000And of course, I have to wait my turn.
00:20:05.000Because Muslims believe everything, you know, in the Old and New Testament, we believe that's from the same tradition, the same God.
00:20:11.000And a bit like the best way I can explain it for an American or a world audience is...
00:20:16.000Just as Christianity views Judaism as part of their tradition, Islam views Christianity and Judaism as part of our tradition, right?
00:20:23.000So there's a story in the Quran about a Christian boy who tried to proselytize for monotheism and this pagan king didn't like him and he put him in a ditch and he burned everyone in this ditch.
00:20:35.000It's called Surat al-Buruj, the story of the trench.
00:20:39.000And it's about suffering in the face of truth.
00:20:42.000And so I just started reciting this passage to him.
00:20:45.000I started reciting this passage and there's a very specific way of reciting the Quran.
00:20:53.000All I remember him saying to me was, you're a good man, thank you.
00:20:56.000And then he was taken, his number was called, he was taken.
00:20:58.000And then eventually he collapsed, he was brought back and he was just unconscious and my number was called.
00:21:03.000So I had to walk, imagine that, I had to walk towards this The room where they're going to torture me.
00:21:11.000And the guy said, right, you're going to have to speak.
00:21:16.000And I still had my hands tied behind my back.
00:21:19.000But I had managed to get the rags loose.
00:21:23.000And I'm not the kind of guy that's going to...
00:21:24.000I mean, honestly, at that moment, I decided I'd rather die than be humiliated in this way.
00:21:29.000And then also then telling him a story about my friends, you know?
00:21:36.000So because my hands were loose, honestly, I decided I'd rather just attack the guy and then they're going to have to shoot me dead.
00:21:43.000But then something unexpected happened.
00:21:45.000There were four of us from the UK. Instead of electrocuting me, he electrocuted my friend, who was also in the group with me, who's from London, who's also in Egypt.
00:22:11.000And by this time, my hands were loose, but I was still pretending they were still tied.
00:22:14.000And honestly, Joe, people are going to think this is barbaric, but you haven't been in that situation to know what happens to the brain.
00:22:21.000But I took the view that if they touch me, I'm just going to bite down on his neck and they're going to have to shoot me dead because I was just going to basically just attack the guy with my teeth.
00:22:46.000So they took me back to my place, and then there were some hints that they were going to rape me or whatever.
00:22:53.000They're talking about, oh, this one looks, you know, talking about my physical features, and maybe we should treat them in a different way.
00:22:58.000And I think they were trying to scare me with that, too.
00:23:24.000But however they managed to do it on that fourth day, because I was a student of Arabic, and I could understand, I heard a phone ring in the dungeon, and one of the officers picked the phone up, and I could hear him speaking in Arabic, and he said, yeah, the foreigners are here with me.
00:23:36.000And then I could hear him say, yes, sir, yes, sir, okay, all right, today, sir.
00:23:39.000And that's when I realized, you know what, we might be taken out of here.
00:23:47.000That evening, so I was due to go back to that officer who'd given me the warning, but before I was due back, they sent some pickup truck, military truck, to come and collect the four of us that were from the UK, and they took us from there.
00:24:03.000I imagine the ambassador was making a big stink.
00:24:07.000They took us from there and instead took us to a prison called Masra Atura prison, which is where I eventually met the assassins of Anwar Sadat, the former prime minister, the former president.
00:24:15.000And they put us into solitary confinement for three and a half months, roughly.
00:24:21.000The Egyptians we left behind there, the Egyptians continued, they continued treating them in a really brutal way, those that were arrested with us.
00:24:28.000But we were then put into solitary confinement.
00:24:30.000I was then, as a result, I was never electrocuted.
00:24:33.000My friend, as I said, was in front of me.
00:24:44.000We had to, forgive me, but I suppose this is your show, we can speak like this, but we had to shit on the floor, we had to piss on the floor, and then they'd come 15 minutes break, they'd come with a bucket, and they'd just wash it down, and then we're back in that same cell.
00:25:56.000And along come Amnesty International and they say he doesn't deserve to be in jail for his ideas unless he's committed a crime.
00:26:02.000And we hadn't committed any crime in Egypt.
00:26:04.000All we were doing was speaking about these ideas, these kind of revolutionary ideas.
00:26:09.000And because the Egyptian constitution had been suspended, Under an emergency since the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981 by the guys I eventually met in that same prison.
00:26:22.000The Egyptian constitution does protect ideas, but it had been suspended in the name of an emergency for over 20 years.
00:26:29.000And I'd like to, when we get to the current day, come back to the nature of how emergencies work when they suspend your rights, okay?
00:26:35.000So this is, they'd suspended the rights of Egyptians, and it was meant to be temporary.
00:26:39.000And that temporary situation lasted over 20 years, which is why we ended up in jail for our ideas.
00:27:05.000The state of emergency existed for over 20 years.
00:27:08.000It's why they were allowed to treat us in that way, because they had suspended the rights of their citizens as a permanent thing.
00:27:15.000Amnesty International comes along and says, these guys are prisoners of conscience.
00:27:20.000When I learned of that, it really, really shook me.
00:27:23.000Because I had never in my life up until that point, and I'm 24, I never received the positive word from any bastion of Western values, any institution, right?
00:27:38.000Whether it was amnesty, governments, media...
00:27:41.000And it began a process in me, in that time in prison, to just try and understand why Amnesty cared about defending my rights, because I knew I didn't care about them.
00:27:51.000We would go around attempting to deconstruct the concept of human rights in order to recruit people to our ideological worldview.
00:27:59.000But here was this organisation who knew that I defined them as a soft power enemy.
00:28:04.000We saw human rights organisations as a soft power tool of Western colonialism.
00:28:09.000And so they knew I defined them as an intellectual enemy, and yet they were defending me and my right and attempting to help get me out of jail.
00:28:18.000So that began a process, and I've said often, right, where the heart leads, the mind can follow.
00:28:23.000So I think it's really important when you're trying to change people's minds and help people that they see an emotional connection first because, and we've seen this in science, right, with neurological patterns.
00:28:34.000I've often spoken to Sam Harris about this, that often you look at the The way people think, and actually we think that we are led by our thoughts, but actually something happens in the brain prior to us actually even acknowledging what we're doing, right?
00:28:47.000And that brings up whole questions of free will that Sam talks about.
00:28:50.000But here in this context, amnesty reaching out to me softened my heart for the first time in my life.
00:28:56.000All I'd ever known up until that point in my relationship with the West and the country in which I was born, Was violence.
00:29:04.000I mean, I've seen more violence than anybody should have seen at that stage.
00:29:41.000I served five years, which in Egypt was meant to be three quarters of the sentence.
00:29:46.000But we ended up staying for about four years in jail, just under.
00:29:51.000And we were released having completed our full sentence.
00:29:54.000So it's not that Amnesty got us out, but the mere fact they were campaigning for us.
00:29:57.000So I spent that time in prison reading everything I'd get my hands on.
00:30:02.000We were eventually let out of solitary confinement, and I, always having been somebody that appreciated intellectual discussion, I saw around me the who's who of political prisoners in Masra Atorah prison.
00:30:15.000And we had everything from communists and socialists.
00:30:19.000We had Muslims who had converted to Christianity.
00:30:21.000We had Christians who had converted to Islam.
00:30:23.000We had jihadists who'd assassinated the president.
00:30:26.000And we had Israeli spies who were being accused of being Israeli spies.
00:33:15.000And I'll get to in a second, eventually, we also do that kind of rehabilitation work in the UK with Muslims convicted of high-level terrorism.
00:33:25.000In fact, the brother, my friend, who I'm working with on that, was going to be here with me today, but some paperwork didn't work out with his situation, so he's not.
00:33:35.000What happened in Egypt is the exception.
00:33:39.000There was a process called, which means the revisions.
00:33:42.000And they sent in a whole bunch of theologians to speak to the leaders of these jihadi groups.
00:33:46.000And eventually, over a process, a long period, and I imagine a lot of carrot and stick, The leadership of these groups, in particular the largest group, as I say, was known Gamal Islamiyya, which is not the group that assassinated Anwar Sadat, the president.
00:34:01.000That was known as Al-Jihad Al-Islami, or Islamic Jihad.
00:34:05.000But the other group, which was larger, was known as Gamal Islamiyya, or the Islamic group.
00:34:11.000That group's leadership began this process of revision, murajaat, and eventually they came to what they called Mubadarat Waqth Al-Unf, which means a ceasefire.
00:34:22.000They declared a ceasefire with the government based upon theological revisions.
00:34:25.000And as a reward for their revisions of their violence, they were put into this prison where the political wing were rather than the violent wing, right?
00:34:35.000And so because we were the political wing, they were then deemed as being safe to be put with the political side of it as opposed to the terrorist side.
00:34:43.000So then I got to mix with these guys and I spent all that time reading their revisions in Arabic, debating it with them, Speaking to the other prisoners, like, there was this liberal presidential candidate called Ayman Noor, who was thrown in jail because he was a presidential candidate.
00:35:01.000He stood for election against Mubarak, threw him in jail.
00:35:04.000They used some corruption charges on him, but everyone knew that he was because he stood as president and he wasn't an endorsed candidate.
00:35:11.000So I spoke to people that have a liberal ideology, revised Islamist ideology, communist prisoners, spoke to everybody, and then did a lot of my own reading.
00:35:21.000And one of the interesting things for me was reading, in particular, English literature.
00:35:27.000Read a lot of Tolkien, a lot of Orwell.
00:35:34.000And the interesting thing with Tolkien, Orwell in particular, is there's a lot you can learn from those stories that relate to our situation today.
00:35:43.000There's a lot of hero's journey stuff.
00:36:20.000But sitting with those who had studied this and those who had spent many years thinking about this, the more I learned, the more open I became.
00:36:28.000And because Amnesty had initially opened my heart, I began looking for alternatives.
00:36:33.000Now, what I didn't want to do was leave the group or even announce leaving the group while in jail.
00:37:10.000Offered me directly to become the leader in the UK. So within that week I had a choice to make.
00:37:16.000Either I live a lie and I lead this organisation while no longer believing that this is good for anyone's future or I resign.
00:37:24.000So I unilaterally and openly announce my resignation from the group and also my abandonment of my previous ideology in the favour of a more traditional and organic understanding of my heritage.
00:37:44.000My marriage fell apart and my entire identity up until that point had been defined by families and friends around this ideology and organization.
00:37:55.000All of that, imagine you've been plucked out of your reality and you have to reconstruct yourself from nothing.
00:38:00.000But on top of that, you've just come out of jail.
00:38:04.000Tony Blair is Prime Minister and Bush Jr. is President.
00:38:08.000So the world hates you because everyone thinks you're the enemy.
00:38:11.000You've just lost all your friends and you have to build yourself back up again from nothing.
00:38:16.000How did you maintain your resolve during that period?
00:38:18.000Because I've got to imagine the pull to go back to your old ways is probably very strong because there's community there and even though you had come to this realization in jail and through all your reading that there had to been a great pull to try to bring you back to the old life.
00:38:35.000This is why today, when talking about contemporary debates, the stance I've taken against tyranny, and I won't mince my words on it, this is why it's so insulting.
00:39:22.000But what got me through it and what gets me through it today, to draw that similar analogy, what got me through it then is you have to have a belief in why you're doing what you're doing.
00:39:33.000And I went seeking and I found people who were far better than the people I was following, who were also consistent to my heritage and yet believed in finding what we have in common and bringing people together rather than dividing people.
00:39:54.000There are, again, back to teachers, yeah?
00:39:58.000One of the first things, I needed to land on some form of spiritual and humanitarian platform.
00:40:05.000So I went to Sufi sheikhs who practice the soul or purification of the soul, of the inside, to try and make sure that you're on a firm foundation.
00:40:47.000And he said to me, just imagine you're like...
00:40:52.000Moses in the court pharaoh and you're there and you're going to speak to these people to try and make them understand what you've understood as to why you pulled back from that brink to try and help them understand that war isn't the way forward with this.
00:41:03.000The whole war on terror discourse, the whole paradigm.
00:41:05.000So I spent the next 10 years of my life on that guidance given to me by Sheikh Ali.
00:41:11.000Attempting to, from the inside, working with the machine, I'm now going to call it the machine, right?
00:41:40.000I've met with PM Cameron, met with Trudeau.
00:41:44.000I've met with a lot of these people in an attempt to show them there's another way.
00:41:48.000What I realized over the course of that attempt, and we can get into some of this detail, but what brings me here today is 10 years of being an Islamist revolutionary and then 10 years of attempting to work on that high level in governments, in that machine, to try and soften the power of that machine,
00:42:06.000soften its own self-inflicted blows, such as the invasion of Iraq.
00:42:11.000Such as, you know, arbitrary kill lists, assassinating people without due process, to try and end that war and instead bring about a dialogue.
00:42:19.000Unfortunately, the machine I was trying to work with, I don't believe it's any longer possible to work on the inside and achieve that aim.
00:42:30.000So you may know, but for your listeners, I'll say that after leaving that organization, I set up a group called Quilliam in an attempt to be that, you know, what the guidance that was given to me.
00:42:38.000And I don't think I'd be where I am without that guidance.
00:42:49.000But 10 years, I'm trying to work with that machine to say, look...
00:42:53.000Yes, I can help you on the ideological side of how to speak to those Muslims who have gone down that path, but on your side there is some responsibility.
00:43:04.000You've got to respect the civil liberties values that you claim you're fighting for.
00:43:08.000So if you're saying they hate our democracy, they hate our freedoms, that's not going to wash if you're invading countries.
00:43:14.000If you say they hate our democracies, they hate our freedoms, that's not going to wash if you're torturing people or you're outsourcing your torture to dictators that you support financially.
00:43:23.000Now, this is true with the UK as well as the US, right?
00:43:51.000When Western countries outsource torture to dictators and then rely on that intelligence to make their next move.
00:43:57.000And my point is, if you're fighting for your values, right?
00:44:01.000Joe, if you're reacting because you're a father and you want to defend your children, the last thing you're going to do that is consistent with that is harm other people's children.
00:44:09.000If you're fighting to defend children.
00:44:11.000So you're saying to me you're fighting for your values.
00:46:51.000That kind of down-home, aw shucks type?
00:46:53.000What I've learned is look at media narratives today.
00:46:58.000And it's so often the impression we have in media is a narrative built up.
00:47:02.000And especially in those days, before we had decentralized media, Isn't it fascinating that today he is thought of as a reasonable Republican?
00:47:30.000And he's thought of as like, boy, if only George W. Bush was running for president.
00:47:35.000Like, we think about him, the standards of behavior.
00:47:40.000Everything is shifted, and Trump threw a monkey wrench into the gears that fucked up the machine so hard that they look back with nostalgia of the days of Bush.
00:47:52.000But I can remember when Bush was president, the hate that people had for him.
00:47:59.000And then when we invaded Iraq, then it changed.
00:48:05.000Because after 9-11, then he had given this big speech and he had stepped up in this way where we felt comfortable, like, fine, we have a leader.
00:48:23.000One thing that's interesting about those years is before the invasion of Iraq, Muslim Americans used to generally vote Republican.
00:48:32.000And the reason was largely, again, there's always exceptions, the reason was largely because of the social conservative family values.
00:48:39.000Muslims are very socially conservative.
00:48:41.000Believe in family, believe in community, and all the debates you hear today about liberals and the whole kind of, you know, LGBT and all that stuff, you can imagine coming from a religious background, Muslims are a lot more conservative on that stuff.
00:48:56.000They used to vote for Republican Party and then Iraq happened and they switched to the Democrats.
00:49:01.000And I think we're in a moment now where that switch is going back from the Democrats back very slowly back to the Republicans again.
00:49:07.000And Trump's last election result demonstrated that trend because despite Trump's presidency and I often get accused of all sorts of things.
00:49:16.000Look, I have been on the streets in London protesting President Trump when he floated the Muslim ban because I'm married to a beautiful American woman.
00:49:24.000And I was worried about being banned coming into America.
00:49:27.000With my background, it actually meant something.
00:49:29.000So I was on the streets protesting Trump.
00:49:31.000So despite me, you know, what I'm about to say, I don't want anyone to misinterpret and suddenly imagine the Trump supporters.
00:49:36.000I'm tired of people putting words in my mouth.
00:49:55.000And I think that's the beginning of something that's happening where people on the social stuff, these communities, and the same for Latino votes, by the way, these communities, I think they're beginning to prioritize their social conservative once more because when you look to foreign policy,
00:50:11.000there's not really too much that Biden redeems himself on.
00:50:15.000So I think that that vote is going to switch back again.
00:50:17.000But yeah, these guys, I attempted for about 10 years, through my then organization, Quilliam, to attempt to, pretty much as happened to me on the Islamist side, to attempt to try and soften some of that hard edge of the war.
00:50:34.000He was charming, but of course it wasn't ever going to be Bush.
00:50:36.000It was going to be the people around him.
00:50:38.000What was his perspective on what you were saying?
00:50:40.000The last two years of the Bush presidency, I think they really began getting to grips with some of this.
00:50:47.000And again, that's not a popular thing to say.
00:50:49.000And I remember the time, those last two years, they began realizing that this has to be more of an ideological and intellectual conversation and not a physical war.
00:51:01.000In this war, there was no way anyone was going to win.
00:51:04.000And so they were stuck in this situation where it was many years deep into the war and realizing that they had done everything that they were trying to avoid.
00:51:12.000We had had that one desert storm war and I think people had come under the impression that if we were to invade a country, it would be very quick and very easy.
00:51:20.000We had this very American-centric idea of what would go on in a war.
00:51:27.000And because of that, it made us so much more willing to enter into wars.
00:51:57.000The foreign policy neoconservative machine was hoodwinked by this guy called Chalabi in Iraq, who convinced them that if you invade, everything's going to be hunky-dory.
00:52:06.000Iraq is going to blossom into this democracy.
00:52:08.000All that ended up happening is 60% of Iraq was Shia.
00:52:11.000You end up creating this satellite of sphere of influence for Iran.
00:52:15.000Because Iran is Shia origin country and it ended up having this disproportionate influence in Iraq as a result.
00:52:21.000And you end up with a situation today.
00:52:24.000When you think back to this man trying to convince the Bush administration that everything was going to be fine, it was going to blossom into a democracy.
00:52:35.000Do you think ultimately he knew that the Shia and the Sunni would go to battle and there would be a massive conflict and that it would destabilize the region?
00:52:44.000Do you think he was aware of that or do you think they were operating on ignorance or do you think they were operating under this premise that they were going to get to control the natural resources and it was worth it financially and they would sort it all out?
00:52:56.000Well, you know, individual intentions aside, if you look to Cheney, if you look to Rumsfeld, and if you looked at this guy, Chalabi, who was from the Iraqi National Congress, and if you look at everything that happened since then, and the behavior in Iraq and beyond, It's definitely not about bringing democracy.
00:53:46.000That's so hard to believe because he's so admired.
00:53:50.000And when you have an example of a man who has a distinguished military career and then goes on to be a distinguished politician, he's one of the best examples we've ever had.
00:54:00.000But you remember, he was opposed to it for a long time.
00:54:22.000What we've had since in the UK is an inquiry, and they found that Tony Blair pretty much, you know, they all knew that something wasn't right with this intelligence they were given.
00:54:30.000And this 15 minutes thing, it just wasn't right, you know?
00:54:33.000And the guy that exposed it, one of our scientists in the UK... 15 minutes thing?
00:54:37.000That Saddam can strike within 15 minutes of it, yeah?
00:55:51.000Did you ever hear Michael Baden speak about it, where he talks about the ligature marks at the bottom of his neck, which indicate he was strangled?
00:55:58.000Did you hear about the broken bones, rather, in his neck?
00:56:02.000Like that don't exist normally when people hang themselves.
00:56:06.000They usually are only from someone being strangled.
00:56:09.000There's a desire, the camera thing, the security guards conveniently sleeping, like there's so much.
00:57:33.000And we would work very closely with Homeland Security and that entire group And what happened was, if you recall, so those last two years, then Obama got elected.
00:57:45.000And as always, just as we felt we were beginning to make progress, I mean, one of my bugbears has long been we have to shut Guantanamo Bay down.
00:57:53.000This idea that we can throw people in jail for years and years and years over decades with no charge, right?
00:58:06.000You move to Syria, it moved from jihadi prisoners to their wives and their children now.
00:58:11.000So there's just been a jailbreak in Syria, an ISIS attempted jailbreak.
00:58:16.000Now, there's a bit of detail to that story that's more interesting than the fact that ISIS, in the first organized attack, For many years since the fall of their so-called Islamic State have demonstrated that they've regrouped because they had a full frontal assault on this jail.
00:59:01.000And this is where, when the Overton window shifts in that way, when you say, oh, Bush's years, if only, our value system has shifted so much to a point.
00:59:11.000Living with this idea that our states and our allies can throw children in jail for years with some of the most dangerous people on the planet.
00:59:19.000And it went from jihadis in Guantanamo to in Syria now to their wives and children, including, by the way, Western citizens.
00:59:27.000So this jailbreak, some of the kids that were killed, 16 year olds, 17 year olds, Western citizens, Australians, you know, and others, American as an American kid in the Times newspaper.
00:59:37.000Because they were taken there as kids by their jihadi parents.
00:59:41.000And nobody wants to do, no Western government, credit to America, under Trump, you guys took back all your foreign fighters from ISIS. Britain hasn't done so, nor have most European countries.
01:00:19.000They're just internship camps, concentration camps or intern camps, like Al-Hawl, Camp Al-Hawl in Syria, where there's women and children, kids from babies, and they're growing up and they're giving birth in these prisons, and no one's charged them or convicted them of anything.
01:00:33.000So they're essentially being raised in these prisons.
01:00:38.000Now you go from Guantanamo to that, and I'm going to bring you to another stage, right?
01:00:41.000We're talking about the Overton window of acceptability shifting.
01:00:44.000We've got a Home Secretary in the UK right now called Priti Patel.
01:00:47.000She then suggested that, what do you do with these boat people that come over from France and they're trying to cross the English Channel, undocumented migrants, they're landing in Britain.
01:01:00.000And then put them in a camp in Rwanda.
01:01:02.000So you've gone from, we've gone from arbitrarily interning jihadis to arbitrarily interning their wives and their children to now arbitrarily interning anyone who's undocumented in these camps.
01:01:14.000That's not the kind of world I want to see going forward.
01:02:17.000And speaking objectively about it, regardless of whether you're left-wing or right-wing.
01:02:21.000So Obama comes in, and this man launches more drone strikes than Bush, has a kill list, which Bush never had, that is unaccountable.
01:02:28.000That kill list he made, including American citizens, was not accountable to Congress.
01:02:32.000So on the physical war side, he basically did even more than Bush did.
01:02:38.000With his assassinations, with his NSA spying, with his...
01:02:44.000Military approach to solving problems with his drones, more drone strikes than Bush ever conducted.
01:02:49.000He just ratcheted up the military side of this.
01:02:52.000And we were then, when Obama became president, my work was for a long time ostracized from the Obama administration because of this point.
01:03:01.000And then where he should have done something, like the rise of ISIS, completely useless.
01:03:04.000So your work was ostracized because you were working towards peace and a less brutal approach, and he was conducting drone strikes and NSA surveillance.
01:03:12.000They didn't want to hear what I just said to him.
01:04:11.000Now, the interesting thing is, again, the whole ISIS problem was playing out under Obama.
01:04:20.000But what I began witnessing is that machine, I'm going to call it mission creep.
01:04:24.000You've got to a situation now, under Biden, Where even those who are Trump supporters, who question the U.S. election and its transparency, are now being defined as domestic extremists or domestic terrorists.
01:05:15.000People like me that actually dodge hammer attacks, machete attacks, screwdriver attacks, watch friends get stabbed over that thing called racism.
01:05:22.000I will stop you misusing that word because I know that if the boy cries wolf...
01:05:27.000That when some little kid like me is trying to run away from the real racists, no one's going to believe them.
01:05:31.000Would you categorize people like the January 6th attack?
01:05:37.000At the very least, there's some amongst them that are extremists.
01:05:43.000There was people that showed up at the Capitol with zip ties.
01:05:47.000I mean, and they were looking for politicians.
01:05:50.000There are some amongst them that most certainly were extremists.
01:05:54.000That's like there's some among Muslims that were extremists.
01:05:56.000Do you see the concern, though, from the administration that at the very least, there's the beginnings of something that could be absolutely awful?
01:06:07.000Yeah, and that's where you've got to be accurate in your language.
01:06:10.000Right, but I think that's the problem, right?
01:06:12.000They use hyperbole, they use exaggeration, and also they use agent provocateurs.
01:06:31.000When she rattles off a bunch of things that she can't answer, you're like, hey, there's supposed to be a real fucking clear answer to all those questions.
01:07:29.000The anti-vax thing is a big language issue.
01:07:31.000So it's the same with the US elections and it's the same with Muslims and terrorism.
01:07:35.000And I began realizing that this language was being weaponized for the purposes not of achieving a solution to the problem we're attempting to fix, but for politics.
01:07:46.000And I thought, you know what, the problem here is I'm going to be instrumentalized.
01:07:49.000My language, my work is going to be instrumentalized.
01:07:52.000And so I had to get out and do what I'm doing from the outside in these sorts of conversations instead.
01:07:58.000There's no way I could remain part of that phenomenon.
01:08:01.000I mean, look, Joe, you asked me about who won Bush v.
01:08:58.000The piece that explained the wording it used was like, there's a cabal of well-organized, financed people that saved democracy on that day of the election.
01:09:19.000That's the word they use, fortified, right?
01:09:20.000So as somebody who at the time was a broadcaster on a talk show on mainstream UK radio, it's my job to say, what the heck is this?
01:09:30.000So I didn't want to be a part of what I very clearly saw as it's now happening with the Vax debate.
01:09:37.000Was a weaponization of language, an instrumentalization of those activists that are there to try and fix the problem for political purposes.
01:09:50.000I tried to be the Moses in the court of Pharaoh.
01:09:53.000I've gone back to my spiritual guide who was there originally, a bit like a Yoda figure.
01:09:57.000We do a lot of work, by the way, on, as I say, Muslims convicted of high-level terrorism offenses and work with them on physical training, MMA fighting, actually, and spiritual guidance to try and get them back to a solid foundation, less than, minus the hate.
01:10:12.000So there's a guy from Chicago, there's a few in the UK. These are leaders of the terrorism wings in prisons like Belmarsh.
01:10:20.000And they've, you know, rehabilitation is a very difficult thing to do.
01:10:23.000And actually, it's the exception, not the norm.
01:10:26.000But where you have got that exception, that's why it's so valuable.
01:10:30.000So I want to continue with my brother Osman Raja, Sheikh Ali, to do this kind of work, working outside of my media work, outside of my, you know, my activism for civil liberties.
01:10:41.000I will keep up on the rehabilitation, prison rehabilitation side, but more direct, more one-on-one I tried to work with the system, tried to work with that machine, and the problem is that the mission creep, it didn't just stop, by the way, with the war on terror.
01:10:56.000But you look at that with the COVID, you look at whatever emergency props up, I've come to the conclusion that there are some nefarious Factions out there that will seek to use this emergency to increase state power.
01:11:08.000Yeah, this these conversations that you had, did you make any progress?
01:11:14.000Was there ever a moment where they implemented any of your ideas or took it into consideration and used that information upon making new decisions?
01:11:25.000Like, what kind of dialogue were you able to have with them?
01:11:28.000Progress with the public, progress in the messaging, definitely.
01:11:31.000Progress in humanizing people that come from my background and showing that actually there is a different way, yes.
01:11:38.000Progress with policy, I'm not very happy.
01:11:41.000What was their motivation for meeting you then?
01:11:43.000Why would they want to sit down and talk to you?
01:11:45.000Say if Hillary Clinton sat down and talked to you, why Trudeau sat down and talked to you?
01:11:49.000So, the best example I can give for this is, like, why did Sam want to talk to me?
01:11:54.000Who, prior to that, was very much in that kind of world where there's a problem with Islam, yeah?
01:11:59.000I met Sam at a debate in New York called, it's an Intelligence Squared debate, where I was arguing for the motion, Islam is a religion of peace, and Ayaan And Douglas Murray, both now my friends, were arguing against that motion.
01:12:13.000And I met Sam at the dinner afterwards.
01:12:15.000Now, what happened with Sam is up until that point, he'd been being attacked by whatever, like the Ben Affleck example, yeah, on the Bill Maher show, as being an anti-Muslim, a racist.
01:12:25.000Now, take that example, put it to governments.
01:12:28.000Governments are ultimately very sensitive to public opinion.
01:12:31.000You launch this war on terror, it gets revealed that the whole Iraq thing was built on a fabrication.
01:12:37.000Governments are quite sensitive to the idea that actually they are coming across as anti-Muslim and they've got strong Muslim minorities in their countries.
01:12:56.000On a junior level, I think genuinely probably wanted to help, but policy doesn't get set at that junior level.
01:13:02.000And even when you speak to the heads of state, I mean, how much, I don't know, how much of Canada's policy right now is Trudeau, right, versus whichever faction he's with that is in power?
01:13:19.000Well, it's also when you see their narrative shift and what they say in terms of like mandates and things that they're going to implement, we wouldn't do that, and then that's the norm.
01:13:29.000Like, what do you think is, what's the main factor?
01:13:38.000I don't know anything about Canada's politics, but if you become the President of the United States, one of the weirdest things about the job is that it's the most important job in the entire country, if not the world, and we have new people doing it.
01:13:51.000And we have a popularity contest to elect the new person to do it.
01:13:55.000And you could see through Trump, you don't even have to have experience in government No experience.
01:14:01.000You don't have to have been a mayor, or a governor, or a senator, nothing.
01:14:05.000That kind of reinforces the notion that there's a faction who are meant to support that person, right, behind the scenes, who have the experience.
01:14:13.000You call that the bureaucracy, the civil service, That's why I believe it's never just about that one person.
01:14:21.000And unfortunately, what we're witnessing at the moment, I suppose we can come to this later, but what happens when that faction is no longer serving the interests of the values the country's meant to be built on?
01:14:32.000Then you have a situation where the state is no longer serving the people, which is what I believe we're in at the moment.
01:14:40.000The state is no longer serving the people.
01:14:42.000Now, this mission creep, you experienced this during the Bush administration, so you feel like with every administration, it keeps getting deeper?
01:14:54.000I mean, the best example is that Guantanamo example I spoke to you for.
01:14:57.000It went from arbitrarily interning the jihadis, who were meant to be like very dangerous people, and now we're putting kids in jail.
01:15:04.000Who are kids of the jihadis, who were born as, you know, either taken as three, four, five-year-olds, or born in the prison, and they're wives, and everyone's like, oh, no one wants them back.
01:15:13.000Right now, you go to Camp Al-Haul in Syria, full of wives and children, and they're just running around these camps, and they're in prison.
01:15:33.000That's a classic example of mission creep to a point where it's become politically acceptable for a UK Home Secretary to say, we're going to do the same to undocumented migrants.
01:15:42.000Now, that's a problem we have to fix, by the way.
01:15:44.000Our borders, we've got to work out a solution that's humane to that problem, and it does require a solution.
01:15:53.000Well, our situation is even stranger because we scoop everybody up, put them at the border, and then, depending on what you believe, distribute them throughout the country on either buses or however they're doing it.
01:16:06.000Now, if that is true, if they're just allowing people to just come into the country undocumented, you have to wonder, like, what's the motivation behind that?
01:16:15.000And what is also the motivation about this push to try to allow undocumented people to vote?
01:16:21.000It's like, are you letting people into the country as a bribe so that they'll vote for the people that let them into the country versus the people that wanted to secure the borders and build the wall?
01:17:34.000Give a reason for doing thing A, and then ditch that reason and do exactly the opposite for thing B. It shows you that's not the reason.
01:17:41.000Well, one of the reasons why I really wanted to talk to you is because I think your perspective is so much different than anyone else's because of your Because when you were radicalized because of your time in prison and because of The incredibly rational way you pursue truth and the way you discuss things now I've seen your BBC program and I've seen you give talks you have a very clean and rational way of Addressing and breaking down all these processes
01:18:11.000that are in place that cause people to behave a certain way you understand it and Because you were radicalized yourself as well.
01:18:18.000You understand the mind play that I think is oftentimes It's known of, but not discussed, and certainly not understood deeply like you do.
01:18:29.000And I think that is the key to all of us understanding what's going on right now, that there's a lot of panic, there's a lot of moral outrage, and a lot of virtue signaling, and a lot of signaling to the tribe, but then there's also these forces that have been moving in play as what you call mission creep,
01:18:48.000and this is an opportunity for them To push even further in this general direction, and I don't think many people are aware of that.
01:18:56.000I think they're looking at it in terms of what their ideology supports, whether their ideology is pro-vaccination or their ideology is pro-open borders or pro-close, whatever it is.
01:19:08.000Like, people are locked into a pre-arranged, pre-determined group of ideas and opinions that you have adopted, that you will support.
01:19:17.000And it's become almost like a religion.
01:19:20.000And religions, the problem with the term religion is we always think of it involving a deity.
01:19:26.000And it doesn't have to involve a deity.
01:19:59.000And the reason I am is right at the beginning, I gave the benefit of the doubt to the narrative, to the authorities telling us what we needed to do right at the start.
01:20:31.000And the problem is the minute the government takes your rights, there are still blowback, legislative blowback from the war on terror that we still haven't got rid of.
01:21:06.000So when I got out of prison, the Terrorism Act 2000 was already in place.
01:21:09.000I was released from prison in 2006. I was interrogated under this power and I was informed directly by a police officer, your silence is a criminal offence as is refusing your right for us to take your DNA. They took my DNA by force and I had no right to silence and I had no right to a lawyer.
01:21:25.000Now what's changed since then is they've reformed the DNA part, they've reformed the legal representation, but the right to silence, that's still there, it's been taken away.
01:21:34.000Now that's an example of a hangover from the war on terror.
01:22:07.000So, the minute they suspended our rights under the Coronavirus Emergency Act, Is the minute my light started switching on, like, uh-oh, where's this gonna happen?
01:22:16.000Did you use your platform to advocate for a different approach?
01:22:20.000Did you say how you felt about this idea of stripping away laws in the idea under the guise of protecting people, that this is not only unnecessary, but it's unproductive, and it leads to bad things, and instead,
01:22:35.000there could be some sort of advocacy campaign for vaccination, or advocacy campaign for Doing responsible things and social distancing and not taking it to the extreme of changing laws.
01:23:11.000In the first place, we were prisoners of conscience under duress, which is why, in principle, it was against our will, and there's no point trying to fight it.
01:23:19.000So, coming from that background, the minute in the UK they started saying, if you don't get your jab, we're going to sack you.
01:23:27.000If you don't get this vaccination, you can't travel.
01:23:31.000And then it started going from there, mission creep.
01:23:33.000If you don't get this vaccination, we're going to have a lockdown only for the unvaccinated, which some European countries announced.
01:23:40.000If you don't get this vaccination, well, we're going to start looking at whether you have to pay a fine every month, which some European countries announced, and some media pundits in the UK were openly advocating on the airwaves.
01:23:55.000You've got to appreciate, I've come from the background where I've had to reason myself out of a totalitarian agenda and embrace instead something I believe I can hold onto and bring people towards.
01:24:10.000Well, through the inspiration of Amnesty, it was essentially our values grounded in civil liberties and democracy.
01:24:19.000I've lost a family over that struggle, yeah?
01:24:22.000To commit to, in that war on terror, to fighting a war, an ideological war, to defeating darkness in the form of terrorism that was beginning to engulf the Muslim mind.
01:24:34.000I've sacrificed a lot in that struggle to come out on the other end of everything I fought for, only to be told that the thing I'm defending is going to start doing the same thing.
01:24:44.000The state is going to start telling me what I have to put in my body and when and if I don't agree, I can't travel.
01:24:53.000If I don't agree, I can't leave my home.
01:24:55.000Now, to play devil's advocate, from their perspective, they want to get people to be inoculated because they want to protect the population, they want to slow the spread of this deadly disease, and they want to bring society back to normal as quickly as possible.
01:25:11.000They see the tools that are at their disposal, and they decide to use the law to try to make it forced, to try to coerce people into getting vaccinated for their better good.
01:25:24.000And there's a bipartisan consensus on what you just said.
01:26:17.000But isn't it because they thought it did initially?
01:26:21.000When the initial laws were put into place, the consensus was that it stopped transmission, it stopped infection, and it protected you from hospitalization and death.
01:26:32.000So, I'm prepared to, on the principle of charity, I'm prepared to assume that's what they thought.
01:26:38.000It seems like that was the general consensus amongst medical experts in the early days of the vaccine.
01:26:45.000That's why, you know, many of them that are now, they've come out against these mandates, they talk about the initial days of it, what it was like, and this is why they were in support of this.
01:26:56.000I'm prepared to concede on the principle of charity without knowing those guys.
01:27:00.000I mean, I know there were people that weren't establishment scientists that were saying from day one, they were saying there's something wrong with this.
01:27:11.000The minute it became clear, because this is such an egregious violation of human dignity, the minute it became clear, this should have been ditched.
01:27:21.000Until today, even in my country, Scotland and Wales haven't dropped these mandates.
01:27:26.000Now, the other point, though, is let's assume that was their intention.
01:27:30.000I've got a deeper question which goes beyond the science.
01:27:33.000And that is that If you've got the power to dictate to people what to put in their bodies on behalf of other people, Right?
01:27:45.000And you're the state, and that's the law you bring in.
01:27:48.000Now, that, I believe, is such a fundamental shift in our social contract, in the relationship between you and the state, that it requires not only a broader discussion, I think that requires a democratic mandate to bring in because it's such a fundamental change in direction in Western liberal democracies when it comes to the relationship we have with the state.
01:28:16.000And you're going to give it to me because the state says you have to look after me.
01:28:19.000Now, if I have done that without your involvement, without your choice for the common good, and I have the power to be able to do that, and the reasoning I'm giving is...
01:28:33.000That there are people that deserve this kidney and you have a spare one and that you have to look after other people.
01:28:39.000Now it could be kidneys, it could be anything.
01:28:40.000It could be any medical procedure and generally beyond that it can be anything you have to do for other people's sake.
01:28:47.000Now if I want to redefine that relationship because up until now you had every right to say my blood is my blood and I know someone needs a blood donation or you know or an organ donation.
01:28:57.000I know I should care for people but it's still my decision.
01:28:59.000If I'm going to change that And say it's no longer your decision, right?
01:29:04.000Then it requires a broader and deeper conversation.
01:29:08.000And it requires, I'd say, that's referendum level change in our culture.
01:29:15.000It's like Brexit referendum in the UK. It's referendum level shift because it sets the precedent.
01:29:21.000That going forward, I have a five-year-old.
01:29:24.000If I surrender this debate now and I'm 44 years old and say, yes, okay, state, on behalf of protecting Joe, you can force me to do certain medical procedures because I have to think about Joe, right?
01:29:36.000I've surrendered my individual bodily autonomy for the common good.
01:29:41.000My five-year-old boy's never going to know what it felt like to say, my body, my choice.
01:29:46.000Now, what I don't understand is the cognitive dissonance.
01:29:50.000Because on the one hand, we argue my body, my choice when it comes to abortion.
01:29:53.000And we suddenly ditch that principle when it comes to vaccination or inoculation.
01:29:59.000Well, the answer to that is vaccination and inoculation protects those around you.
01:30:14.000But it's the reason why, and you'll know this, anyone will know this, you go into a restaurant and they ask, do you have any allergies before I order the food?
01:30:20.000And the reason they do that is because if there's even a trace of a peanut in that dish, you could die.
01:30:25.000If I'm going to start mandating these injections, we know that there is a rare side effect.
01:30:30.000We know that there are some people that die from them.
01:30:33.000Lisa Shaw was a BBC journalist who died after her AstraZeneca vaccine as officially ruled by the coroner and written up by the BBC. I'm in touch with her husband, right?
01:30:54.000They just ditched everything yesterday.
01:30:56.000There's a lot more to do, but they've ditched what they called Plan B, the whole idea of vaccine passports, because there's been such a fierce resistance to this.
01:31:06.000So if I mandate injections, right, vaccination, some people are going to die because we know that there is a side effect that some people die from this thing.
01:31:59.000So if the infection fatality rate is 0.096%, like the flu, right?
01:32:05.000Now the Office for National Statistics in the UK, through a Freedom of Information request, has just revealed the number of people who died solely from COVID with no other coexisting illness.
01:33:33.000If somebody is vulnerable in any other way, what we've done with every other illness to date is that the vulnerable person has to protect themselves through a number of means.
01:33:42.000And we do what's reasonable to make sure the vulnerable person is looked after.
01:33:46.000What we have never done is say that I'm responsible for your comorbidities and your extra health problems, and I have to take something at risk of losing my job that might have a side effect in me and could even kill me.
01:34:03.000Now for me, I mean, the science by now, by the way, is clear, but let's assume this whole conversation is built on the principle of charity that they didn't know the science at the time.
01:34:12.000That still doesn't exonerate us from the political conversation that was needed about what kind of society we want to live in.
01:34:20.000Because for me, if you get to a point like New York is today, Wales and Scotland, Well, you're telling me that I need to show identification before going into a restaurant, before going into a hotel, concert.
01:34:32.000We've got a Papers, Please Society in that case.
01:34:35.000Now, you can't go from a democracy to a Papers, Please Society within one election term without having any consultation with the public on this and without having a proper and informed debate about how this will permanently change the culture of our society.
01:34:55.000I mean, the science is clear, as I say, but let's have this entire conversation on the assumption that when they initially brought it in, they were genuine, right?
01:35:01.000Even though now it's proven that that's not the case, but that's fine.
01:35:04.000I'm willing to give people the benefit of the doubt.
01:35:06.000You want me to concede that from now on and permanently, The state can tell me what to put in my body for the sake of the common good and to continue to do so every six months with a vaccination that hasn't been tested for any long-term side effects.
01:35:24.000I just have to accept that the state knows what's best for me and always does the right thing.
01:35:29.000Now, as I say, the last time there was a bipartisan state-based consensus on something so meaningfully wrong was the invasion of Iraq.
01:35:38.000Now, you're speaking to somebody who's been on the...
01:35:40.000On the blunt end of what happens when a state gets something so wrong.
01:35:46.000There is no way you can undo what I've seen in my life to know that the state doesn't always act in our best interests.
01:35:53.000And there is no way that you can remove those experiences from me.
01:35:57.000Now, especially when you're talking to somebody who's been injected against his will in prison, right?
01:36:02.000And the ethnic minority case here, whether it's here in the US with the African American communities and the whole experience of medical abuse by the state, or I'll move it again to personal example.
01:36:16.000In Pakistan, the CIA conducted a fake vaccination program on children in the hunt for Bin Laden.
01:36:28.000Vox has reported, everyone's reported, because they've admitted it and apologized for it now.
01:36:31.000In the hunt for Bin Laden, there was a fake hepatitis B vaccine program on children collecting all their DNA to try and see if they were related to Bin Laden so they could trace Bin Laden.
01:36:41.000This is why in Pakistan, my family's country of origin, The Taliban blow up vaccination centers because they think they're CIA fronts.
01:38:18.000This thing that you are not allowed to challenge, and even though we have this dodgy history with the pharmaceutical companies, you're supposed to ignore that.
01:38:27.000You're supposed to completely put that on the back burner.
01:38:29.000Well, this is where, again, you can't undo what I know about this, right?
01:38:41.000So, the assumption that pharmaceutical companies are acting in your best interest, just like the assumption that the CIA, when it encourages these things, vaccination programs in, say, Pakistan, is acting in your best interest, is an assumption that has to be interrogated.
01:38:56.000Now, we know here in America, the opioid crisis, that the medical establishment was abused.
01:39:05.000And the opioid crisis here in the States ended up killing more people than the AIDS crisis.
01:39:10.000Now, pharmaceuticals make a lot of money out of this.
01:39:13.000And so with the who paid the largest criminal fine in history, you'll probably get two results depending on your search engine.
01:39:19.000And though you don't need to put in the word who paid the largest pharmaceutical fine in history, You can just say who paid the largest criminal fine in history and you'll get GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer.
01:39:29.000And the difference is, I think the difference was that GlaxoSmithKline have paid the largest accumulative fine and Pfizer has paid the largest fine in one big go.
01:39:40.000And you can go to something called the violation tracker.
01:39:42.000Since the year 2000, it documents all of the criminal and civil violations that Pfizer has been found on the wrong side of and has paid fines for.
01:39:52.000And so this assumption that big pharmaceutical companies are acting in our best interests, again, is an assumption that has to be interrogated because it's during an emergency where debate is being silenced that it becomes incredibly important to ask these questions.
01:40:08.000Otherwise it gets snuck in and you can never undo it.
01:40:11.000And when you were working at the BBC, you started doing what you always do.
01:40:17.000You're questioning narratives, you're discussing ideas openly and objectively.
01:40:22.000What kind of pushback are you getting?
01:40:24.000So it was LBC. Oh, LBC. Global is the largest commercial radio group in the UK and they have music channels and what have you.
01:40:33.000And then one of them was the talk radio site called LBC. And I was having these sorts of conversations.
01:40:39.000And without going into whatever, you know, because I'm no longer there.
01:40:43.000So for legal reasons, I don't want to get into what specifically happened.
01:40:47.000What I will say is I was scheduled to go on the very next weekend after returning from my Christmas break in Tennessee.
01:40:53.000And a day before my schedule was I had a weekend show.
01:41:34.000But I know that what I will say is why people, other people outside of my then bosses, were upset with me, including in the organization, was because I was having these sorts of conversations I'm having with you.
01:41:47.000That CIA Pakistan thing, multiple times mentioned it on my show.
01:41:51.000I actually physically pulled out my phone and asked my listeners to Google who paid the largest criminal fine in history and had them call in.
01:42:20.000And they listed me as an anti-Muslim extremist.
01:42:23.000At the same time, there's a database called Thomson Reuters World Check.
01:42:29.000All the banks, all the large accountancy firms, all the big money firms in Wall Street, in the city of London, they all subscribe to World Check because if you have a bank account, they want to make sure that you're not funding terrorism.
01:42:41.000So World Check is a database that categorizes you as to whether you're clean or not when it comes to finances from a terrorism lens.
01:42:49.000I'm probably the only person you'll meet on the planet that was simultaneously listed by well-checked Thomson Reuters under category red, terrorism, as a Muslim terrorist, while listed at the same time by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Muslim extremist.
01:43:16.000And I won against Thomson Reuters World Check.
01:43:19.000They had to publicly apologize in court, remove that defamation, and they paid damages.
01:43:24.000And I sued the Southern Poverty Law Center.
01:43:26.000That didn't get to court because before disclosure, they publicly put out a video, apologized, and paid damages.
01:43:32.000But what that story serves to tell you is that when you question these things, today it's so lazy and easy to throw labels at people.
01:43:40.000So being double-jabbed, they call me an anti-vaxxer.
01:43:43.000Being a Muslim that had literally gone to jail for my faith, they were calling me an anti-Muslim extremist.
01:43:49.000And this is how absurd these people are.
01:43:52.000That you disagree with somebody and instead of trying to engage with the substance of your point, they want to throw a label at you and hope it sticks.
01:43:59.000And isn't this just what happens when people get into power?
01:44:03.000And when I say into power, I'm not just talking about government.
01:44:07.000I'm also talking about people that have accepted a certain narrative and find that there's a lot of other people that are along with them in this same narrative.
01:44:15.000And they have these Media pylons, like social media pylons, where they'll attack people.
01:44:22.000And like you, call you an anti-vaxxer even though you've been vaccinated.
01:44:45.000Now, why would you want to shut debate down?
01:44:47.000I think there's a deeper point here, and that is that we've just come out of a time where, for a long time, moral and Let's just say relativism,
01:45:05.000Relativism, this idea that truth is relative, this idea that it's all subjective, that everything is personal experience, that's being promoted.
01:45:15.000Whether it comes down to defining a man or woman.
01:45:18.000We spoke about this last time I was here with, well, it was there in California, but with Sam as well, we spoke about the trans debate.
01:45:26.000Whether it's defining a man and a woman, whether it's anything else, this idea that actually truth is all personally subjective.
01:45:34.000When you promote the idea that there's no such thing as truth, and when you shut down debate that is seeking truth, not that it claims truth, but is seeking it, when you shut that debate down, in aid of this idea that truth is relative,
01:45:51.000Like those, for example, who now know the science that the COVID vaccination doesn't stop infection or transmission and doesn't reduce it beyond 12 weeks.
01:46:01.000The booster shot, by the way, is eight weeks.
01:46:04.000But having known that and they still insist on vaccine passports, it's no longer about seeking the truth for them.
01:46:12.000The truth is relative and it serves a purpose.
01:46:37.000Because they don't know how to reason yet, yeah?
01:46:40.000And you try, and if something's too complex, you say, I'll explain another time, but right now you have to listen to your father, don't do this.
01:46:47.000When there's no such thing as truth, because everything's relative, the only thing that matters is power, because power gets to define reality.
01:46:55.000And this brings us to the hybrid war we're in right now.
01:46:58.000And that's why people that are in power who are seeking a specific outcome from the world that we're in want to shut debate down.
01:47:07.000What they're not interested in is seeking truth.
01:47:09.000What they're interested in is shutting that debate down because power steps into that void when reason no longer exists and gets to define reality for you from up above.
01:47:19.000And it's why it's so important in a dictatorship.
01:47:23.000That the only thing you have left when all your power is taken from you is the truth.
01:47:28.000And if you read Orwell, if you look at 1984, it's why he spends so much time talking about how the power he was writing about in that fictional account is attempting to redefine reality, redefine the past, redefine the future.
01:47:43.000Because if you can't hold on to reality, you have no premise to scrutinize the government for whether they're telling you the truth or not.
01:47:51.000And it's really, it is a war in that sense, hybrid war.
01:47:55.000So information in that war becomes your most powerful weapon.
01:47:59.000Now, most people don't have the privilege of researching these debates, foreign policy, war on terror, COVID, whatever it is.
01:48:06.000People don't have the privilege because they're working nine to five, a minimum wage, and they're hungry and they're just busy trying to live and survive.
01:48:12.000What they normally do is they outsource their thinking on where the truth lies to trusted voices in the media.
01:48:20.000So it's why it becomes so important to manipulate the media, so that those trusted voices that people are looking to are no longer giving them at least the best understanding of the truth they have, but are also peddling the agenda of power.
01:48:34.000When you're in a situation like that, it becomes difficult to define reality and therefore difficult to challenge government.
01:48:41.000On whether or not they are sticking to their promises because everything gets shifted.
01:49:07.000In the UK, we were told specifically two weeks and then it went from two weeks to flatten the curve to we're only going to just wait in lockdown.
01:49:14.000And we, by the way, we had a national lockdown, a very long one.
01:49:24.000So, by the way, my grandmother died in all of this.
01:49:26.000So again, I'm not anti-grandmother, yeah?
01:49:28.000I wasn't allowed to attend her on her deathbed while the Prime Minister and all of his special advisers and all of the Cabinet were drinking with cheese and wine parties in Downing Street, breaking all the rules, which has all come out now in the press.
01:50:48.000In this hybrid war, in which information is the weapon, it serves a purpose because you've got to disorient, confuse, and create self-doubt in the citizens so they no longer have the strength to question government.
01:51:01.000For what they said and what they didn't deliver, or what they did deliver when they weren't meant to.
01:51:05.000And that's how you stymie or handicap any opposition.
01:51:10.000And in the UK, again, because there was a bipartisan consensus, even the opposition party, like with Iraq, they kept saying to every crisis, the solution was harsher restrictions, harsher restrictions.
01:51:22.000In the end, people, the only way, when you're in that situation where you've been locked in your homes, where the state's telling you you have to get injected or you lose your job, right?
01:51:32.000When you've lost all your rights, even by law, because the Emergency Act came in and we weren't even legally allowed to oppose any of this.
01:51:39.000In the end, you're in a situation, the only way people get their rights back from tyranny is by taking them through activism.
01:51:46.000You never, in that situation, the state never just gives your rights back.
01:51:49.000Now when I say taking them, I mean civil action, I mean protests, I mean activism, I don't mean violence.
01:51:56.000But that's why if you look to the example of England, Unlike Wales and Scotland, there were huge protests and a lot of voices, not just mine, were fierce on this to a point where England had to, you know, they couldn't, they just retreated on all of this now.
01:52:09.000And all of the, everything I've been saying, you take up masks, you take lockdowns, you take mandatory vaccines, and I've only ever been opposed to mandates, by the way, right?
01:52:16.000It's only about mandates for me, whether you define mandates as lockdowns or mask mandates or vaccine mandates.
01:52:22.000For me, it's the force bit that I don't like.
01:52:24.000I'm double jabbed, again, to remind everyone.
01:52:26.000But everything we were saying, that mask mandates are useless, that the virus particles are millions of times smaller than the cloth mask they were telling everybody to use, that testing continuously was actually making the problem worse, that PCR tests were unreliable, they ditched the PCR tests, that lockdowns,
01:52:41.000did anyone ever think of what we call an impact assessment?
01:52:44.000They're going to lock you in your homes to save X number of lives.
01:52:47.000Does that kill Y number of people more?
01:52:51.000In other words, does it kill more people than we're saving?
01:52:53.000Because if you were opposed to the lockdowns in those days, oh, you want to kill granny.
01:52:56.000And my question was, if I save one granny, am I killing 10?
01:53:00.000Isn't the way to find that out to look at overall death?
01:53:10.000So since being, we'll get to what I'm doing next in terms of my media work, but very quickly I started as a substack after my services were no longer required.
01:53:19.000And one of the things I put up in there, the last one I wrote, is this idea that this ONS statistic, the Office for National Statistics, that came out with the Freedom of Information request, And they said, yeah, 17,000, whatever it was, 730, whatever people died from only from COVID since the beginning of this pandemic,
01:53:45.000The Times of London reported that there's been a 25% spike in heart attacks in Scotland.
01:53:52.000Professor Norman Fenton and Professor Neil from Queen Mary Westfield University in London, part of the University of London, have looked at this and said there's a five-year high in all-cause mortality.
01:54:03.000Now, if there's a 25% spike in heart attacks in Scotland that are as of yet unexplained, there's a five-year spike in all-cause mortality, but COVID deaths are similar to flu deaths, then what's causing all these excess deaths?
01:54:16.000Well, how many of those people survived COVID and then had heart attacks later?
01:54:20.000Because that is one of the side effects of COVID, is blood clots, heart issues.
01:54:25.000So Professor Fenton, and I say he's done the research, not me.
01:54:29.000All I'm saying is floating the question, saying these need answers.
01:54:31.000He said that these specific spikes in deaths were specifically after vaccination.
01:54:36.000And were those people also infected with COVID? I don't think so from memory, but I'd have to look at that.
01:54:44.000That's the big distinction when it comes to myocarditis and all these different things.
01:55:00.000To break that question down, we have to look at with COVID and off COVID deaths as well.
01:55:05.000By the way, these talking points that you've obviously heard over the last two years, Every single one of them.
01:55:32.000So the health secretary in the UK came out and admitted that the COVID deaths have been overestimated because there's been a mix between with COVID and of COVID, right?
01:55:40.000We also know that, again, memory, so forgive me if this is off, but from memory, two thirds of COVID cases were caught after hospital admission rather than because of COVID. Right.
01:55:52.000They're hospitalized for something else.
01:55:56.000Now, if you put all of that together, and you recognize that there's 17,000 roughly deaths only of COVID, and there's this spike, five-year spike in all-cause mortality, it wouldn't make sense to say, did they have COVID as well, when we know that only 17,000 only, one death is too many,
01:56:11.000but 17,000 died only of COVID, and that a lot of these people were getting COVID in hospital.
01:58:34.000Now, so why I showed you that is back to that question.
01:58:37.000If they die after the vaccination, one of the things Norman Fenton, professor from Queen Mary Westfield, in response to your question of did they have COVID too, right, is first of all, we know the COVID deaths are 17,000.
01:58:59.000Now, I'm not giving you a reason for why there's an all-five-year spike.
01:59:03.000I'm saying these questions, as somebody that works in media, these questions demand answers.
01:59:08.000And he's looked at this and he said, Professor Fenton and Neil from Queen Mary's, and they've said...
01:59:13.000These deaths were soon after vaccination, this spike, right?
01:59:17.000And they're saying their view is they have to interrogate whether the vaccination itself, whether it caused myocarditis or any other negative reaction that's caused this spike in deaths.
01:59:27.000And that, by the way, that spike, it could then be you go to hospital and you catch COVID in hospital.
01:59:31.000But that's not the reason you're in hospital.
01:59:34.000So these are, in ordinary times, Whether it's with a thalidomide scandal that historically led to babies being born, you know, without their limbs intact, whether it's, you know, the CIA example I gave you with the hepatitis B fake vaccination program in Pakistan,
01:59:52.000whether it's the Tuskegee experimentation on African Americans here, we know this malpractice occurs.
01:59:59.000We know that abuse has happened historically.
02:00:02.000Now, here you've got a vaccine that has just been rolled out, hasn't been tested in the long term, and we've got some alarming figures of an all-cause spike in mortality, and we know in instances that there is a side effect of death, as in the case of BBC journalist Lisa Shaw,
02:00:17.000who the coroner ruled specifically died because of AstraZeneca, the vaccine.
02:00:22.000So there are multiple questions here that demand answers, but asking those questions without drawing conclusions...
02:00:28.000By the way, I have never on air discouraged anybody to get the vaccine.
02:00:32.000People used to call it as a call-in show.
02:00:50.000I'm talking about mandates because I tell you one thing I am, as a postgraduate of political theory, I understand how political systems work.
02:00:57.000And my concern is more on a macro level.
02:01:01.000These questions about deaths, what I'm concerned about is that the people who ask these questions, suddenly you find they lose their jobs, they become stigmatized, and that kind of behavior I've seen happen before, because that's what happens in tyranny when you question authority.
02:01:16.000It's what happened to us, and it's what these great historical literary figures have always advised us to question, whether it's Orwell.
02:01:25.000Whether it's the Gulag Archipelago, whether it's Solzhenitsyn, whether it's...
02:01:29.000And we have that experience because of the Soviet Union, right?
02:01:32.000We understand Darkness at Noon, right?
02:01:35.000These books, Catch-22, Joseph Heller, about the absurdity of rules and bureaucracy that don't make sense.
02:01:41.000The entire point of these books is to teach us do not just succumb to whatever the bureaucracy is telling you, but ask questions where things don't make sense.
02:01:49.000And when people are trying to shut those debates down, that says more to me about what's going on than anything else.
02:01:55.000Isn't it universal though in terms of like world government?
02:01:58.000There's not world government that I'm aware of that's very open about what's going on about failures and mistakes and not understanding the information correctly because they were under an assumption that proved to be incorrect.
02:02:12.000It's essentially across the board and isn't part of that just managing some sort of large-scale pandemic with a large population of people and trying to make sense of it all and trying to figure out how do you manage that?
02:02:29.000And you have to have two different things going on.
02:02:30.000You have to have actual solutions like medication and you also have to have optics.
02:02:35.000You have to give the people the impression that you're managing this and you're working very hard to figure this out and you've come to some uncomfortable conclusions and you made some decisions that maybe are going to upset people, but they're going to help everyone overall.
02:02:49.000So we need to go to the origins of COVID to see, again, on a global level then, were they acting in good faith, right?
02:02:54.000Now, all the evidence currently indicates no.
02:02:57.000And when you say they, who do you mean by they?
02:03:00.000All the people in power are acting in bad faith?
02:03:03.000The people in power that are interacting in our reality.
02:03:06.000I mean, when we're talking about, like, leaks and emails that have been exposed, when you talk about conversations between people that work in the Wuhan lab, those are being exposed to us very recently.
02:03:20.000I'm under no impression that politicians were aware of these emails before us.
02:03:26.000So the lab leak, let's talk through that example, yeah?
02:03:29.000So one thing we can say, I think quite fairly, is I doubt Fauci's acting in the best possible way he should be acting.
02:03:36.000So he knew about this slab leak thing from the very beginning, and the leaks that have now come out, even the DARPA leaks themselves, indicate that they attempted to suffocate this story.
02:03:45.000In the UK, we have a similar example, Lancet, which is a very well-respected medical journal.
02:03:54.000One of the guys that, well actually the guy that Fauci's federal funding supported, his name is Peter Daszak EcoHealth Alliance.
02:04:24.000He understood the actual virus itself.
02:04:26.000And that's why I got him on my show as well.
02:04:28.000There's a video of him on my show talking about this, right?
02:04:31.000Now, what happened is that this guy that Fauci was funding, Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance, that's not in dispute that they receive federal funding.
02:04:38.000Fauci in Congress testified and said it wasn't gain of function to Senator Rumpel's sort of hearings.
02:04:45.000And the leaks have subsequently indicated that they did know that this funding was being used in the lab in Wuhan to make this virus sticky, to make it stronger and to make it work for humans, to actually infect humans.
02:04:59.000Peter Daszak, again, very early on, co-authored a letter in The Lancet, which is a very respected medical journal in the UK, in which, before these leaks came out, They declared that anybody who questions whether this was leaked from a lab is a conspiracy theorist.
02:05:15.000And it was signed by a number of doctors, and it was among them Peter Daszak.
02:05:20.000Peter Daszak's the guy that got the funding to do this work.
02:05:23.000At the bottom of all Medical Journal articles, you have to declare an interest.
02:05:27.000And they said, we have no conflicts of interest.
02:05:31.000So here you've got that these guys wrote a hit piece calling anybody like Brett who questions whether it's a lab leak a conspiracy theorist, while obviously it's him, Peter Daszak, receiving funding to do that very work, writing a piece in a medical journal, smearing those who are attempting to uncover whether he'd received funding to do that very work.
02:05:49.000I think I'm qualified enough in the human...
02:05:52.000In human nature, at least, to be able to say he wasn't acting in our best interest.
02:06:09.000Eventually the truth came out, but it had to be fought for.
02:06:12.000So that tells me that the people that were attempting to suffocate this truth, at least, not everybody, but the people that were involved in suffocating the truth and smearing dissidents, while knowing because the leaks indicate that they knew, right, they weren't acting in our best interests.
02:06:27.000And I think that's a fair conclusion to reach.
02:06:32.000They were attempting to use this emergency to usher in a new way of doing things.
02:06:38.000Vaccine passports, even though in the UK and England at least now we've dropped them and Ireland followed suit, Czech Republic has followed suit.
02:06:46.000But it wasn't ever about you not being able to come into say into this studio and infect me, because even after they learned that you could still infect me, the vaccine passports were still in place.
02:06:56.000But they've told us, they meaning people in power, have told us what they want to do next.
02:07:01.000So the UK is currently the head of the G7 group.
02:07:04.000That's the world's most economically advanced countries.
02:07:07.000And the UK currently chairs the G7 Group.
02:07:09.000Our Chancellor, who does our economy, called Chancellor of the Exchequer, his name's Rishi Sunak.
02:08:48.000Now what they're doing is they're saying...
02:08:50.000That this digital currency, because everyone knows that with inflation at over 5%, it's now 5.4%, right?
02:08:57.000Our fiat money, the paper money, is increasingly becoming worthless and we're headed towards a big disaster.
02:09:02.000The Fed wants to raise interest rates.
02:09:05.000We're in so much debt that if you raise interest rates, people are going to suffer because we're living on debt as Western economies.
02:09:13.000So they realize that the lifespan of paper money is fast coming to an end because of the 2008 economic crash in particular.
02:09:20.000So they're bringing in these central banking digital currencies.
02:09:23.000Why is that word programmable in there?
02:09:25.000So what they said in that article, and the Chancellor put a video out saying this as well, they said, right, Think back to what vaccine passports were, yeah?
02:09:33.000If you don't have your jab, you can't even eat in this restaurant.
02:09:36.000What they've said, and why the word programmable was in that headline was, they've said that this money that you will earn from work, instead of having paper money, you have this digital money, it's programmable so that you can't buy certain foods, or if you do something that your employer doesn't like, it's all in that article.
02:09:51.000You won't be able to spend your money.
02:09:53.000In other words, it's not money, they're vouchers.
02:10:42.000So you will have this central banking digital currency, and then what they're talking about in that article that we just pulled up is they'll say, right, and it explicitly uses the words, won't be used on something that the employer deems inappropriate or the state deems inappropriate.
02:12:05.000Now, I'm gonna take it one step further for you, Joe, right?
02:12:07.000So, the vaccine passport infrastructure is in place, but now we know that the vaccine doesn't stop infection or transmission, but the Checkpoint Charlie exists everywhere.
02:12:17.000They bring in digital banking, central banking, digital currencies.
02:12:21.000You've got a scenario now that you're checking in and out everywhere you go using vouchers that are programmed and you can only spend where you're told you can spend them.
02:12:44.000That's the head of our economy, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
02:12:47.000Second most powerful person other than the Prime Minister and maybe the Foreign Secretary in the UK, right?
02:12:53.000He's telling us, I just played it there for you.
02:12:55.000He's telling us that's what he, as the UK, the head of the G7, want to bring in for the G7. So a scenario where like in New York at the moment, because the passport infrastructure is in place, you bring in that digital currency and you've got this total control.
02:13:09.000And if I'm speaking to you the way I'm speaking now, and my employer or government, you heard that in the quote directly, yeah, deems me as saying or doing something inappropriate, suddenly I can't actually pay to come here and speak to you anymore.
02:13:21.000My digital currency won't even pay for the ticket.
02:13:24.000Because it will be known that I'm coming to speak to you.
02:13:27.000Sorry, your vouchers don't allow you to purchase that ticket to go and speak to Joe.
02:13:30.000And this is where we get into the kind of censorship that we see in social media that is not...
02:13:44.000But you can have that kind of censorship if you've developed a digital platform that distributes information but it's a private company.
02:13:52.000So think about what money is where you can spend it on whatever you want versus this digital currency which is essentially controlled in a sense like you have free speech on Twitter but you really don't.
02:14:06.000Because if you go too far or you talk about something that they don't find appropriate they'll just ban your account.
02:14:11.000That could be what we're looking at in terms of what we think of as free speech being social media platforms could be what we think of as your free-range ability to buy whatever you want with whatever money that you've earned.
02:14:53.000I'm a postgraduate and I spent my entire life involved in political structures and political activism and thinking about social contracts.
02:15:01.000Now, what's going on here is, with this central banking digital currency, if you get to that situation where you end up with the Chinese social credit system in the West, why?
02:15:13.000Why would anyone want to do that, right?
02:15:16.000I believe we're in a moment of the Gutenberg press.
02:15:19.000Go back to when the printing press was invented.
02:15:26.000Printing and its invention was a new technology.
02:15:29.000What happened when they invented the printing press?
02:15:31.000The power structures who up until that point were reading the Bible for you and were telling you that you're going to pay this priest X amount of favors and he'll forgive you your sins.
02:15:42.000And that became a bribery system, right?
02:15:44.000Which is what Martin Luther was so upset about when he pinned his thesis to the wall.
02:15:51.000The printing press disrupted that power dynamic because people could read the Bible for themselves.
02:15:55.000And they began realizing that the power structures were manipulating what was written to control people.
02:16:02.000Now, nobody in hindsight is going to argue that printing and its invention is a bad thing for humanity.
02:16:12.000Because it disrupted power so much that people began rising up and it led to this 30 year period of war, which eventually led to the Reformation and the rest is history, right?
02:16:26.000The decentralization of information and then because of that, the internet, the decentralization of currency in the form of crypto is disrupting power.
02:16:35.000Because the way that after The revolution of the Reformation and the printing press.
02:16:41.000Control was still possible, though obviously not to that level, which is why we no longer have those absolute monarchies.
02:16:46.000But control in a nation-state context was still possible to an extent because the money supply was controlled.
02:16:52.000Now what's happening is that the invention of the internet with the decentralization of information and in particular here the decentralization of currency in the form of cryptocurrencies is disrupting those power hierarchies and it's leading to this conflict now.
02:17:27.000To have the infrastructure in place that you can have a Checkpoint Charlie society so that when the central banking digital currencies are in place that infrastructure is already there because people were so scared they voluntarily allowed you to put that in place so that you can maintain your grip on power because what's coming around the corner is the decentralization of everything of media therefore of narrative and of course remember whoever defines the truth gets to define reality decentralization of narratives decentralization of the economy through crypto You no longer have the power
02:17:57.000to define the story and control the money supply.
02:18:00.000So the powers that be who are losing that power need to clamp down.
02:18:04.000They're clamping down on their own children because we are people who are born of the West.
02:18:09.000So it's an internal civil war in a hybrid war context Over truth and over information.
02:18:16.000Centralization versus decentralization, basically.
02:18:22.000It's about power versus those who don't have power.
02:18:24.000Do you think if there was no cryptocurrency, if there was no Bitcoin or any of the other crypto coins, that they would attempt to do some sort of digital currency?
02:18:34.000Do you think that this is a response to the understanding that that Decentralized digital currency is eventually going to take over or has gained far more momentum than they ever anticipated.
02:18:55.000Now you've got a point today where they haven't been able to convince people of their measures that they wanted to bring in when COVID struck, because it was quicker to be able to unpick that narrative due to decentralization.
02:19:08.000Shows like this that weren't under the traditional yoke of traditional media were able to have certain conversations.
02:19:15.000Now that means that it's harder to control the narrative.
02:19:17.000And so in a situation like that, when you're losing your grip and power, the only option you have left is to clamp down.
02:19:23.000And I'm sorry to say, but that means, like the 30 Years War in Europe after the printing press was invented, we may be in for a bit of a rough ride ahead.
02:19:31.000But we are literally facing a crossroads.
02:19:33.000Do we go down the direction of centralization or decentralization?
02:21:04.000But if you've got food shortages everywhere and people end up rioting, it's a good reason to say, right, we need more power to control this.
02:21:14.000And so you end up in a situation where crises can be manipulated to bring in stronger and stronger authority, when really what's going on is we're in this crossroads in history.
02:21:25.000Now we will get out of this because ultimately it's a numbers game and ultimately in times like this you end up fighting against your own sons.
02:21:31.000It's those in power fighting their own people and eventually the people by sheer numbers end up becoming the people in power.
02:21:38.000So in the long run we may well end up in a decentralized world which will be much better.
02:21:45.000But as I say that to get there we have to get through this period of those in power attempting to hold on to that power.
02:21:53.000Do you think it's possible that we won't get there and then we'll wind up in a more draconian centralized world?
02:22:01.000Professor John Gray at the LSE questions the idea that history moves in a positive trajectory.
02:22:08.000He questions the idea that we're only ever going to get better.
02:22:11.000His theories in the context of liberalism.
02:22:14.000We must never take anything for granted, but it's why I've been so vocal.
02:22:18.000Because everything we've just spoken about, I've looked at this, I've had to reason myself out of totalitarian systems, and so when I see that what I joined, kind of our values that we believe and hold dear to, our civil liberties, what I sacrifice things to defend,
02:22:33.000if the thing I'm defending is moving in that direction as well, I can see that pattern, I can see the early warning signs.
02:22:40.000Hannah Arendt is a German-Jewish philosopher, was.
02:22:44.000She wrote about the rise of totalitarianism in Germany to try and understand it.
02:22:49.000In fact, was one of the leading and first philosophers to try and dissect totalitarianism and how it emerged.
02:22:56.000And she coined this theory, which everybody can look it up.
02:23:01.000And her basic point was she ended up living her final years in Israel and she was really interested in understanding how ordinary, everyday, nice people became Nazis.
02:23:12.000And the banality of evil is her theory that explains it.
02:23:15.000And the point was that actually good people can do evil things.
02:23:20.000And they don't even realize they're doing them.
02:23:23.000And each incremental step is justified for the common good.
02:23:27.000Until like a proverbial frog being boiled alive in water, and because it's a frog and its skin temperature changes with the water, it doesn't realize it's being boiled alive until it's too late and it dies with the boiling water.
02:23:39.000So take that proverb, that story, and apply it to Hannah Arendt's theory of the banality of evil.
02:23:45.000That if you incrementally change, step by step, you change society, before you even realise it, you've got to a point that it's past the point of no return.
02:23:55.000If that happens, it's very difficult to get out of that without external intervention.
02:24:01.000Well, you see this mindset that's very disturbing and online and social media.
02:24:05.000You see this mindset from people that if you had talked to them four or five years ago, they would never advocate denying anyone medical help for diseases for something that they had caused, like say obesity,
02:24:20.000something that was a personal choice they had made or an addiction that they had to food or what have you.
02:24:26.000Drug addictions no one would ever deny medical treatment to those people you would never advocate for that especially not publicly and openly and then other an entire group Especially now that we know what you said about how the vaccine at a certain point in time no longer stops transmission No longer stops infection like you're still giving it to people and you're still getting it So if that is the case and we know that to be the case now How can anybody in their right mind,
02:24:56.000under good conscience, advocate that someone would be denied medical care?
02:25:01.000Because they didn't subscribe to the same thing you subscribed to, because they didn't take this inoculation that you took.
02:25:08.000Right, so we know that in Israel, when you look at rates, so in terms of percentages now, not just raw figures, but percentages, the rate of COVID is higher among the boosted than it is among...
02:25:20.000But don't they have a much higher rate of boosted people?
02:25:23.000So that's why I'm saying it's a comparative figure.
02:25:36.000It is low, but there are still some in Israel.
02:25:38.000But also in the UK these studies have been done, looking at percentages and rates.
02:25:42.000Prior to Omicron even, in the UK they found that the rate, this is in fact in the Spectator magazine, you can put it up, the rate of COVID is higher among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated.
02:25:58.000I don't want to get into the science because you can speak to people like Robert Malone, as you've done, and they can get into the science here.
02:26:03.000The questions as to whether, for example, one thing we do know is our health secretaries admitted that it is not normal to roll out mass vaccination during a pandemic, because what that is said to encourage is mutated versions that can evade the vaccine.
02:26:24.000And there's something called ADE, which is antibody-dependent enhancement, that the virus could indeed, through evolutionary processes, learn what to evade while it's still in its early stages of its first wave and its second wave, which is why what normally used to happen is you wait for the three waves of a typical pandemic before you start inoculating against that pandemic.
02:26:44.000But to try and inoculate in the middle of a virus, some scientists are saying, only encourages antibody-dependent enhancement.
02:26:51.000In other words, a mutated version that specifically targets the vaccinated because it's evolved to evade that spike protein.
02:27:28.000A father was denied access to his child by a judge, reported by the BBC, denied access, visiting rights, to his child by a judge because he was unvaccinated on the request of the mother.
02:27:42.000What purpose does demonizing the unvaccinated serve if the science is no longer supporting their arguments?
02:27:48.000What purpose does it serve to say you can't have an organ transplant if you're not vaccinated?
02:27:53.000We'll deny you service in a hospital or we'll lock down only the unvaccinated.
02:27:58.000What purpose do these draconian measures serve?
02:28:00.000The only thing that makes sense to my mind is what we were talking about because they are very keen to make sure the infrastructure is there for the central banking digital currencies.
02:28:09.000You need A checkpoint society to live in that digital world like China.
02:28:15.000So meaning they need people to follow every step of what they're mandating, what the law is, what they're advocating for with no dissent.
02:28:26.000The unvaccinated are living proof that vaccine passports are illogical.
02:28:31.000So you have to demonize that living proof because you need the checkpoint in place, the vaccine passport, not for stopping the virus.
02:28:38.000But I don't think that the people that are advocating for this are in favor of or even aware of a digital currency system.
02:29:09.000But how is it a power grab if the people that are involved, like say the health experts, the people that are doctors and medical experts that are advocating for people to be vaccinated and boosted and many who even are encouraging mandates for employees.
02:29:28.000There's a lot of people that have no dog in the fight when it comes to a central digital currency.
02:30:19.000And she's one of the most prominent members on the scientific advisory group in the UK that formulated, that's the formal committee that formulated our pandemic response.
02:30:29.000This is from the Daily Mail on the 10th of June 2021 in an article by James Gant, headlined, Social distancing and face masks should stay forever, says Communist SAGE committee member Professor Susan Mitchie.
02:30:59.000Forever, in all caps, says Communist SAGE committee member Professor Susan Michie.
02:31:05.000She said, we never used to pick up dog poo in the park, but learned to over time.
02:31:10.000Now, let's move to the next, because I'm going to build this case up for you, because I know I said something, military-grade psychological operation.
02:31:18.000I promise you, I'll establish that statement step by step like this, by showing you headlines every step of the way.
02:31:26.000Reported on 14th of May 2021 in an article headlined, Use of fear to control behaviour in COVID crisis was totalitarian, admit scientists.
02:31:36.000These are people that left that group SAGE and they came out and spoke like whistleblowers and they said, we were using fear as government policy to psychologically manipulate the public.
02:31:48.000We call it PSYOPs, psychological operations, to try and elicit that fear response.
02:31:53.000So in answer to your question as to why were people towing the line, they weren't involved in the power grab.
02:31:58.000It's because they were victims and targets of state-sponsored psychological operations from the scientific committees that should have been looking after us.
02:32:06.000Now that article in the Telegraph I said to you...
02:33:16.000Ministers have used propagandistic tactics to scare public into complying with COVID rules, founder of Number 10's Nudge Unit claims.
02:33:25.000Now the Nudge Unit is a colloquial term for the Behavioural Psychology Unit in government.
02:33:30.000It's called SPY-B, the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Behaviour Group, right?
02:33:36.000The founder of that unit has come out now.
02:33:39.000And I said he regrets, and he's written a column for a different platform called Unheard, and this is the news piece on his column.
02:33:46.000So he's written a whole column expressing this regret, and he says he expressed regrets that they used these manipulative methods to encourage fear.
02:35:05.000Digital Operations Group provide a specialist capability to deliver influence, activity and products across a broad range of communications channels.
02:35:15.000The Web Ops team collects information and understands audience sentiment in the virtual domain.
02:35:21.000With the extent OSINT, that's Open Source Intelligence, policy framework, they may engage with audiences in order to influence perceptions to support operational outcomes.
02:35:30.000Now the question is here, you've got a British MPs involved in a military psyops unit called the 77th.
02:35:37.000Now I'm going to tell you something about Twitter, because we mentioned Twitter, yeah?
02:35:42.000This is an article in the Middle East Eye.
02:35:45.000The date is, as it pulls up open here, 30th of September 2019, Middle East, the article by Ian Cobain and it's headlined, Twitter Executive for Middle East is British Army PsyOps Soldier.
02:36:00.000Part-time officer has worked on behavioural change projects in the region.
02:36:05.000Gordon Macmillan, who joined Twitter, the social media company's UK office six years ago, has for several years also served with the 77th Brigade, a unit formed in 2015 to develop non-lethal ways of waging war.
02:36:19.000Now, I've just read for you the 77th is engaged in information operations.
02:37:21.000Do you think that's achieved through the use of things like the IRA, like how Russia uses it, troll farms, things along those likes that manipulate narratives through paid posers, like people that are pretending to be posters, but they're really just someone who works for a government organization and they push a very specific...
02:37:40.000Like, I get very suspicious when I see people with, like, American flags in their Twitter handle and they talk a lot of crazy shit.
02:38:36.000We're willing to accept that Russia does that.
02:38:38.000That the IRA... We've just seen that we're doing it.
02:38:41.000But that's the thing like how much are we doing it and how much do we know about like the Renee DeResta's work with the IRA when she When she uncovered these hundreds of thousands Sam did a podcast with her and then I did a podcast with her afterwards and Just talking to her about the depth of the work that they do to try to get people riled up online and that's exactly what they're doing They're just entering into these Christian chat groups.
02:39:06.000There was a an article recently that came out that showed that out of 20 of the top Christian groups on Facebook 19 of them were run by troll farms 19 of them we showed all these different like your baby daddy ain't shit that was run by troll farms all these like really wild inflammatory Meme pages run by troll farms and their purpose is just to rile people up we're accepting those like wow we're being attacked but What are we doing?
02:39:35.000What are the intelligence agencies within this country that have a vested interest in pushing a narrative?
02:39:44.000What are they doing on social media while we're getting blocked and banned left and right for all kinds of arbitrary things?
02:39:53.000Like Unity 2020, which was Brett Weinstein's organization that was trying to pit together a very respectable member of the right and a very respectable member of the left and see if they could come up with an alternative party.
02:40:03.000They were banned from Twitter for that.
02:40:10.000A while back in this conversation, you said something which I appreciate you saying, and it's accurate, is that having been through all of this, I was able to identify some of these early warning signs.
02:40:22.000I'm trained in ideological warfare, basically.
02:40:26.000I have been, as an Islamist revolutionary, and it's why the Egyptian government put me in jail.
02:40:32.000I know all these signs and I know how it works.
02:40:34.000I know how you deconstruct a country for the purposes of destroying it from within.
02:40:39.000Now, whether it's Twitter and our use of social media platforms, but it doesn't stop there.
02:40:43.000It includes subversion through infiltration of state bodies by your operatives who are not there to serve people, but who are there to deliver the aims of your organization.
02:40:54.000And what are the aims of the organization?
02:40:56.000So let me play something for you by Klaus Schwab.
02:41:00.000This is in Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
02:41:02.000He's speaking in 2017. I feel like we should have Darth Vader music playing when that guy talks.
02:41:22.000Okay, but we want to hear the audio as well.
02:41:28.000I have to say, when I mention our names like Mrs. Merkel, even Vladimir Putin and so on, they all have been young global leaders of the World Economic Forum.
02:41:43.000But what we are very proud of now is the young generation like Prime Minister Trudeau, President of Argentina and so on, that we penetrate the cabinets.
02:41:58.000So yesterday I was at a reception for Prime Minister Trudeau and I... We know that half of this cabinet, or even more half of this cabinet, are actually young global leaders of the world.
02:42:24.000It's true in Argentina, and it's true in France now.
02:42:27.000I mean, with the president, with a young global leader, but what is important for me So what you got there is Emperor Palpatine speaking about how in the preludes, the first three Star Wars, how he's going to use democracy to put his people in place,
02:42:43.000He explicitly said in that quote you just heard, what we are very proud of is that we penetrate the global cabinets of countries with our World Economic Forum young global leaders, and then gave examples like Trudeau, like Macron.
02:44:37.000Keep in mind, Tony Blair is the one who's been advocating for vaccine passports, digital identification through COVID, and all of these measures.
02:44:44.000But didn't they say that about ending the lockdowns and keeping businesses?
02:44:49.000So even in the UK, his stance has been, yeah, we're going to get out of it, but you have to have digital ID. And this is going to introduce the social credit score system.
02:45:27.000Yeah, that's a bizarre thing to do, to openly...
02:45:30.000Why do you think they openly discuss it that way?
02:45:33.000Because the Great Reset has always been this gigantic conspiracy theory among the online folks.
02:45:38.000Like, this is all part of the Great Reset.
02:45:39.000Well, when he wrote a fucking book called the Great Reset, you're like...
02:45:42.000Hey man, shouldn't you be hiding this?
02:45:45.000And in 2017 at Harvard, he's saying, you know, we're going to basically, all of these world leaders will penetrate their cabinets with our young global leaders.
02:46:42.000Because obviously this is a whole radio group, so there's other presenters, not just my show.
02:46:49.000When I said publicly on my feed, I will not get a booster, and I said I'm a conscientious objector to getting a booster because of mandates, and I refuse to participate in a system that removes choice.
02:47:01.000I was called deranged for saying I didn't want to get a booster.
02:47:03.000Soon afterwards, again, it all came out.
02:47:05.000And they realized that the boosters weren't doing much when it comes to the spread and transmission of COVID. So they publicly came out and attacked me.
02:47:15.000For some of the things I've said here, in fact, I've gone...
02:47:19.000Nothing I've said here I haven't already said, by the way.
02:47:21.000So I've been called an extremist for saying this, for having this discussion that I'm having with you.
02:47:39.000I'm being gaslit in that way, that I'm the one who's lost sense of reality.
02:47:43.000So when you move the goalposts in that way to such an extent that the psychological operation's purpose is to gaslight the public, as happened under communism, the person who speaks up is the person that needs psychological help as opposed to...
02:48:01.000That's where we are but as you've seen nothing I said comes without receipts no and you know when we were easing into this conversation I had a I had a feeling it was gonna go this way but I was like I was hoping I was gonna find some holes yeah I was hoping like well maybe he's exaggerating or maybe I don't I don't see these holes So,
02:48:31.000That's a very good point because that erases the stigma that it's attached to these conspiracy theories that there's this grand cabal of evil people that are trying to control the world.
02:48:40.000Do you think that there is a sense or that they have an incentive to try to impart more control?
02:48:48.000Because we're under direct competition with China and they have essentially total control over the way the Chinese government has control of their corporations and the corporations act for the interest of the Chinese party.
02:49:04.000They're not independent like, you know, say Harley Davidson or something like that, does whatever the fuck they want when they would make motorcycles.
02:49:10.000What are you doing in China, especially if you're involved in a technology company, you work with the government?
02:49:34.000So if you look up BBC, Chinese spy, parliament, MI5 have just last month, in fact this month I think it was, warned about this.
02:49:44.000I've been saying it since my hunger strike, which we haven't spoken about, but I went on hunger strike.
02:49:49.000At the beginning of the pandemic because of the Uyghur genocide in China.
02:49:53.000I did a five-day hunger strike to try and draw attention to the plight of the Uyghur Muslim community who are facing genocide in China because nobody was speaking about it in the media at the time.
02:50:02.000It wasn't getting the attention it deserved.
02:50:05.000And I was a mainstream broadcaster who didn't even turn up to work because I was on a hunger strike sitting outside the Chinese embassy in protest.
02:50:13.000The purpose was to get 100,000 signatures On a petition on a UK Parliament website that would force a debate in the UK Parliament on the genocide in China.
02:50:24.000We got the 100,000 signatures within four days and there was a debate and the UK Parliament unanimously voted in a symbolic vote that there was a genocide in China and then other countries started cascading after that.
02:50:36.000Canada did the same, the Netherlands did the same.
02:50:38.000Blinken here, when he was sworn in, After my hunger strike was asked in his swearing-in ceremony, he said, yes, I believe there's a genocide in China.
02:50:46.000And then America followed suit as well.
02:50:48.000Back in those days, when I did that hunger strike, It wasn't common.
02:50:52.000Apart from Trump, it wasn't common for somebody from my background to speak about China.
02:50:56.000It was seen as a Trumpian thing to do.
02:50:59.000And people often forget how that was in those days.
02:51:02.000And I mentioned back then that the reason I think this genocide was not getting the attention it deserved in the press was because our elite had come under the undue influence of Chinese state governments.
02:51:17.000Communist Party, not the Chinese people, but the states influence operations in the West.
02:51:22.000And they had somehow captured our elite to head in a direction that serves the interests of China.
02:51:28.000Now what's come out since then, it's now two years later.
02:51:32.000Again, like with everything else I've spoken about, it's now in the press.
02:51:35.000So there's an article in the BBC, MI5 warning over Chinese agent in Parliament.
02:51:40.000That's from the 13th of January this month.
02:51:42.000Now that, this lady here, she's been operating with senior parliamentarians as an active spy of the Chinese Communist Party to the point where our security services, the internal branch, MI5, had issued a rare warning, as it says at the top,
02:52:02.000You want to read it for people that are just listening?
02:52:04.000MI5 has issued a rare warning that an alleged Chinese agent has infiltrated Parliament to interfere in UK politics.
02:52:09.000An alert from the security service said Christine Ching-Kui Li, I hope I've pronounced that correctly, established links for the Chinese Communist Party, CCP, with current and aspiring MPs.
02:52:19.000She then gave donations to politicians with funding coming from foreign nationals in China and Hong Kong.
02:52:25.000Specifically, we go down to the next few paragraphs there.
02:52:27.000One of the MPs funded by Ms. Lee was Labour's Barry Gardner.
02:52:30.000So this is our opposition party who received over £420,000.
02:52:39.000But he said he's always made the security services aware of the donations.
02:52:42.000Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey also received a £5,000 donation, so a lot less.
02:52:47.000Those two parties, by the way, were very much in favour of all of the COVID mandates.
02:52:52.000And we know that the idea of lockdowns began in China.
02:52:55.000We know that the virus leaked from Wuhan.
02:52:58.000We know that China has an interest in making sure that the world follows its ideology, a bit like in the Cold War where the Soviet Union wanted us to be communists.
02:53:06.000But can you really buy the influence of these politicians for $100,000 a year to the point where they're willing to instigate these sort of COVID lockdowns?
02:53:15.000What you do is they don't think they're being bought.
02:53:18.000They think they're receiving money from a donor and they're serving their donor's interest like a lobby.
02:53:23.000So they have discussions with them about an agenda.
02:53:26.000Yeah, and it's like, you know, so when I first started speaking about the Uyghur genocide, it was seen as racist against the Chinese to speak about the communist influence of China in the West.
02:53:36.000So you don't need to say to somebody, here's some money, do the bidding of the CCP. You need to say, I'm funding you as a British-Chinese citizen when actually they're working for the CCP. I'm worried about increasing anti-Chinese racism.
02:53:53.000I'm going to provide money to your party and let's start trying to divert conversation away from criticizing Chinese actions because it will lead to anti-Chinese racism.
02:54:01.000And let's instead speak about The need for Huawei, the contract with Huawei, the 5G networks.
02:54:07.000So it's why we had this problem where it was so difficult to cancel those Huawei contracts, but we ended up cancelling them in the end after we agreed to have them because all of this got exposed after that hunger strike.
02:54:20.000I'm not saying I'm the reason it got exposed.
02:54:22.000I'm saying it was in chronological order just to reassure people that what I say isn't just something that I've just plucked out of my head.
02:54:28.000It's actually then it gets reported in the press.
02:54:31.000So the concern around China's influence in terms of not only our tech, Huawei and others, and the ability to enter our information through the backdoor, through the Huawei 5G networks, which have since been cancelled since Trump.
02:54:44.000And in the UK, we followed America and cancelled those pending contracts.
02:55:05.000And you're letting that nation, controlled by the CCP, work on our sensitive nuclear programs.
02:55:12.000Now, I wouldn't do that with the Soviet Union.
02:55:15.000And what I don't understand, moving this conversation slightly to foreign policy, is why are we not realizing that we've got this kind of consensus developing with the Biden administration that Putin and Russia are a threat, when actually you've got a bigger problem here with the CCP. Far more powerful than Russia,
02:55:32.000far more organized, have far more centralized control, and are far wealthier, and their military is far stronger.
02:55:38.000And we've got a real elephant in the room, and that is the increasing power of the CCP ruled China.
02:55:44.000And the influence isn't just military, but it's also soft power.
02:55:48.000So when the lockdowns first began, I signed a joint letter with other signatories.
02:55:54.000And one of the signatories was General Spaulding, here at the US General.
02:56:00.000And we directly alleged that Chinese influence operations have been responsible for a lot of this idea that lockdowns were our solution.
02:56:08.000It was the first nation that implemented lockdowns.
02:56:10.000And then Italy and Europe followed after China, and then the rest of Europe followed after that.
02:56:15.000And Michael Senger, who's one of the signatories to that letter, has written an extensive book on this, tracing step-by-step, the way I've gone through receipts with you here, he's gone through step-by-step these influence operations where the CCP have been encouraging a draconian response to COVID and all of this technocracy that is eventually going to arise in the form of Checkpoint Charlie Society and Central Banking Digital Currencies.
02:56:39.000They've been encouraging other nations to implement these...
02:57:01.000The governments that they're being influenced.
02:57:03.000The governments, whether it's Great Britain, whether it's the United States, these governments are being influenced, in your mind?
02:57:10.000With the help of the agenda coming from other non-state actors, such as the World Economic Forum, and their teams penetrating cabinets across the world, as Klaus Schwab said, there are some supranational interests here that exist above the nation-state,
02:57:26.000working, as I said to you, as a power grab, working to define the future in a certain direction, and that is to make sure that decentralization doesn't happen.
02:57:34.000The mother of centralization is the CCP. So we're at a crossroads historically.
02:57:39.000We can either move towards decentralization and people power, which means local governments, decentralized power, community, family, and a separation of powers, or we move in a CCP direction.
02:57:53.000And there's a term for this in political science.
02:59:39.000The Taliban now have more Black Hawk helicopters than the entire British Army because of Biden, right?
02:59:46.000The Bagram Air Base, that was the American base in Afghanistan, the Daily Mail reported, and you can look it up if you want to, but I'll just tell you, the Daily Mail reported that Chinese military have now landed at Bagram.
02:59:55.000So you've got this axis developing Russia, China, Iran, and Afghanistan, ruled by the Taliban.
03:00:01.000If we're going to be clever, we've got to realize this rising bloc It's not in our interest for them to stay united in that way.
03:00:09.000We should be attempting diplomacy with Russia and focusing on China as a rising concern.
03:00:15.000Because unlike Russia, not only does China have a stronger economy and a stronger military, those things I can handle.
03:00:22.000The problem I've got is China is stronger ideologically.
03:00:25.000It has a alternative consensus about that crossroads we're at.
03:00:30.000China has a centralized system and it has soft power to advocate for that centralized system.
03:00:36.000It believes in itself and its technocracy and its social credit system.
03:00:40.000In other words, it's like the Soviet Union.
03:00:42.000It has the ability to sell itself because it's cohesive.
03:00:45.000Russia doesn't have that centralized social credit system.
03:00:48.000It doesn't have that, you know, thing that the Chinese have with that kind of strong centralized power with an ideology behind it.
03:00:53.000Russia is a traditional country, not an ideological country, at least since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
03:00:59.000What we should be worried about is the ideological country because ideologies peddle soft power and they influence minds with their agenda and they influence narratives.
03:01:08.000And what we've missed, because we aren't in the West attuned to ideological warfare, We've missed that bit.
03:01:15.000We've missed the fact that the CCP has been influencing through its narratives, it's been influencing the world in this hybrid war way with its disinformation campaigns.
03:01:24.000A lot of these fake accounts on Twitter, by the way, Twitter themselves have confessed that a lot of them were run by the CCP. And so this disinformation is being peddled from that side.
03:01:34.000If we could divide Russia from China, we stand a stronger chance in that Thucydides trap moment of the rise of China, how to navigate around that.
03:01:43.000I feel like you and I could have another 15 of these three-hour conversations.
03:02:51.000YouTube on Wednesday permanently banned conservative commentator Dan Bongino from the platform saying he attempted to evade a previous suspension.
03:02:58.000So he violated the rules by trying to evade a previous suspension, I think it says.
03:03:03.000The Fox host uploaded a video to his main channel while his secondary channel, which primarily hosted short clips from his digital radio show, was actively suspended for violating YouTube's COVID-19 misinformation policy.
03:03:14.000When a channel receives a strike, it is against our terms of services to post content or use another channel to circumvent the suspension.
03:03:56.000And Rumble, I don't think its videos are decentralized in that way.
03:03:59.000So even if the Odyssey website's removed, The library blockchain check that those videos sit on stay on the blockchain, and I will then own my own content.
03:04:11.000If I'm worried about going either in a centralized direction with the planet or a decentralized direction, I want to try and move my own media content in the decentralized way.
03:04:21.000And the other thing I've got is that substack, which I set up as soon as I lost my gig.
03:04:25.000And I do sort of written content on there.
03:04:28.000And finally, I'll be doing some collaboration with Getter as an alternative to Twitter just to try and have that diversity on the Twitter space.
03:04:34.000I'll be doing some videos and live streaming and tweet content on Getter as well.
03:04:38.000But those three, Odyssey, Substack and Getter, will be where people will be able to find me.
03:04:43.000The content's called Radical, whether it's on Odyssey's, Radical with Majid Nawaz.
03:04:47.000On Substack, it's called the Radical Dispatch.
03:04:49.000And my name on Getter, you can find me on there as well.