In this episode of The War Room, we discuss the rise of artificial intelligence, robotics and genetic engineering in the past, present, and future, and the implications for the future. What is the role of AI in society, and what does it mean for our understanding of the world?
00:03:45.040accelerationism these you could imagine as a kind of a series of denominations that are branching out from
00:03:52.420one central idea that idea is based in scientism where science at least the current state of science is
00:04:02.480viewed as the ground of being and the future is seen as sacred prophecy or a number of sacred prophecies
00:04:11.380depending on the religious denomination what we heard there as I say is just a small snippet of the
00:04:21.180mentality that is coming out of Silicon Valley across America across Europe all the way to China this
00:04:28.100notion that whereas we once had gods and priests and divine insight and miraculous healing we now have
00:04:38.040artificial intelligence robotics brain manipulation and genetic engineering now this is a prevalent belief
00:04:47.880in Silicon Valley this is a prevalent belief in AI labs and biological labs all over the world
00:04:55.160but if there's one thing that I've learned in studying religion is that that is step one the first thing you want
00:05:02.980to do understand what these people believe step two is a bit more controversial and you start asking is what
00:05:11.700they believe real is this really happening now if you follow my work I have been putting up articles every
00:05:20.080Monday at jobot.xyz I've been putting up a podcast every Thursday the Omega Point podcast and the theme is what is
00:05:31.940happening right now in this vast cultural transformation what do race robots and religion mean in such a future in which the gods are AI and the priesthood are those in command of the machine
00:05:48.460my latest article is this I don't believe the all powerful god bots approaches if you're curious come check it out and if you're not curious don't worry these technological transformations will come to you one way or another now back down to planet earth you're probably familiar with the recent indictment of tenant media and a number of people associated with it including
00:06:17.460including two Russian nationals here to speak speak about this with great expertise the former federal prosecutor TJ Harker also a writer whose work appears at the American mind blaze media man's world and of course his own substack TJ thank you very much for joining us can we start off just tell us a little bit about this indictment when did it come down who is involved and then we'll move on to the
00:06:47.440broader implications which as I've discussed with you are much more interesting ultimately
00:06:52.100sure yeah Joe and thanks for having me on so back on September 4th about a week ago the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment of two Russian nationals a man named Konstantin Kalashnikov and a woman named Elena Afanasfea those are the only two people who were actually indicted in this matter so tenant media was not indicted
00:07:14.140the talent there Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Lauren Chen they also were not indicted in fact they were not even explicitly named in the indictment they were simply identified by pseudonyms but in short what the indictment alleges is that these two Russian nationals used tenant media for the purposes of spreading as Merrick Garland the Attorney General of the United States says hidden Russian government messaging and the Deputy Attorney General of the United States Lisa Monaco
00:07:44.140calls it pro Russia propaganda and disinformation and specifically the charges were a failure to register on what's under what's called the Foreign Agent Registration Act or FARA
00:07:54.140FARA so what I'm really curious about you've told me in conversations we've had before that this indictment is not some standalone operation that this is a much broader effort from the Department of Justice I know myself we've seen I don't know if they this is explicitly involved but you've seen Demetri Symes Sr. raided by the FBI you've seen Scott Ritter raided by the FBI
00:08:21.140also the New York aide also the New York aide to Kathy Hochul Linda Sun who was a Chinese national so it seems to go across nationalities in the political spectrum can you tell us about what this means on a broader in a broader context yeah sure so there's a couple things to keep in mind the first is that FARA the Foreign Agent Registration Act is a law that was passed about 80 years ago in 1938
00:08:50.140and the purpose of this act is to require people who are agents of foreign principles who are engaged in political activity to simply register with the Attorney General of the United States or the Department of Justice and so in other words if you are an agent that sounds like a scary word but basically if you're a person in the United States and you're working on behalf of a foreign principle in any country overseas and the thing that you are doing in the United States is political activities then you need to register
00:09:20.120and that's it you can still engage in the political activities you simply have to disclose to the government the nature of your relationships who the foreign principle is and all your contracts and so forth and so this law it has both a criminal component and a civil enforcement component and for the last 80 years or so until about three to four years ago the criminal component had rarely been used it was one of those statutes
00:09:50.120until recently this actually is unfortunately a practice that is used by federal prosecutors routinely they sort of dig up a statute they dust it off
00:09:58.520blow the dust off and then they resuscitate it in a new era when it no longer serves the purposes that it served in this case during the Cold War
00:10:06.400and here what it appears that the Department of Justice is doing in coordination with the Treasury Department and the Department of State and various intelligence agencies
00:10:14.660is trying to one further its efforts to censor what it considers to be propaganda within the United States
00:10:22.600and then two to discredit or deplatform those various commentators on the right wing who deliver messages to their audiences that are inconsistent with the messages that the Biden-Harris administration
00:10:35.940and the general sort of leftist prevailing orthodoxy want Americans to hear so what I'm saying in effect is that FARA in this case
00:10:45.180and then two other issue recent issues that were disclosed by the Department of Justice of a separate indictment and an affidavit of probable cause relating to a seizure warrants
00:10:54.620are not really being used for the purposes of prosecuting people at least in this tenant media case instead what they're they're intended to do
00:11:02.360what it appears that the government is trying to do is to discredit American right wing commentators by causing Americans to associate in their minds
00:11:11.600people like Tim Pool and Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin with the Russians it's sort of analogous to what the left has done with Hitler
00:11:18.600if you can establish in the minds of Americans that Hitler is terrible and then establish that Donald Trump is Hitler well then you don't need to do any more thinking you simply know what you need to know about Donald Trump
00:11:28.600similarly the United States government's Department of Justice as well has made tremendous efforts to try to get Americans to think that everything Russian is bad Russia Russia Russia Russia it's terrible and then if they can get Americans simultaneously to associate anybody with the Russians then the Americans won't have to do any thinking they can simply know that those people are bad and in this case the goal of the Department of Justice you've heard that that saying an organization's purpose is what it does
00:11:57.600here the purpose is to get Americans to associate Tim Pool and others with Russia and therefore make that negative association but otherwise it doesn't have a legitimate purpose and I should point out by the way that Farah makes no inquiry into whether or not the information that is being communicated to Americans by tenant media is true or false it makes no inquiry into whether or not the information benefits Russia or harms Russia or benefits the United States
00:12:27.580or harms the United States that's simply irrelevant this is really a technical violation of a failure to register and not only that but there is no allegation in the indictment that any of the information that was propagated by tenant media was harmful to the United States in any way so that's the sort of a summary overview of what's what's going on in this prosecution what the ostensible purpose is that is to prosecute these two Russian nationals and what the actual purpose is which is to further the government's attempt to censor information
00:12:57.560the United States government's attempt to censor information that it does not find palatable palatable to its political goals
00:13:04.560yes you know we've heard a lot from people like Mike Benz talking about these broad censorship efforts I believe he calls it weapons of mass deletion and this certainly seems to be a pretext for honing in on certain individuals and certain issues you know you listed a number of individuals who are being associated in this way with Russia and Russian manipulation and propaganda Tim Pool Benny Johnson so on and so forth
00:13:32.560but also of interest is are the issues themselves that these people are talking about I've seen various claims that issues like open borders issues like runaway inflation even issues like diversity and equity and inclusion being directed against whites in particular white males that these are also being associated with Russian propaganda it reminds me very much of when Hunter Biden's laptop
00:14:01.560was being dismissed as Russian disinformation with the document presented by the I think it was 51 intel agents saying it had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation if you could just tease out some of these issues and ways in which the media by way of this department of justice indictment the ways that the media are basically creating this negative association in the mind of the listener and not just
00:14:31.540not allowing people to think through real issues that are affecting real Americans
00:14:36.540yeah no that's a that's a great question Joe and so let's work backwards from the consequences so far so one among the consequences to this DOJ indictment were that Lauren Chen was fired from blaze media YouTube shut off the tenant media channel you know and then the various you know five or six talent figures associated with tenant media obviously are out of that job anyway and that job was you know fairly lucrative for some of them there and that job was you know fairly lucrative for some of them there and
00:15:01.520so you would think so you would think that in the context of a DOJ indictment let me like step back for a moment when the department of justice brings an indictment as I did many times when I was a federal prosecutor when it brings an indictment the goal is to prosecute somebody and among the various considerations that you take into account when when bringing a charge like this is will the defendants actually show up in court in other words can we arrest them can we extradite them if they're overseas and so forth
00:15:31.520that we can have our day in court we can show the public our evidence and we can attempt to get a conviction but in this case the DOJ would have known all along that often as Faya and Kalashnikov going to come to the United States would never be extradited and those are the only two named defendants in the United States what this means is that the purpose of this indictment is not actually to prosecute those two people who will never set foot in a United States court almost certainly
00:16:01.520can only be understood as intentionally creating this this atmosphere of negative associations this de-platforming this defunding that resulted in these various right-wing commentators so you including as I mentioned firing Lauren Chen from Blaze Media fire shutting down the YouTube channel for for tenant media and so forth so you would ask yourself as a regular American well okay Merrick Garland said that the information that tenant media was spreading
00:16:31.520Lisa Monaco the deputy attorney general of the United States said this is pro-Russia propaganda and mis and disinformation well what exactly was the information that they're saying is is disinformation and propaganda and hidden Russian government messaging we can look into several other documents that were released around the same time there was a on September 4th as well released to the same day as this Kalashnikov Afanasveya indictment was a what's called an affidavit of probable cause a search warrant and a seizure warrant
00:17:01.160that the FBI had signed that the FBI had signed by a magistrate judge to seize a bunch of what are called fake websites or doppelganger websites that is websites that Russian intelligence had created to look like the Washington Post to look like Fox News to look like various German news outlets like Der Spiegel and others and then to put stories on those various outlets that were designed as Lisa Monaco says and Merrick Garland says to be disinformation but here's actually what
00:17:31.160what was in that type of what was in that type of those stories so I'm actually going to quote from the affidavit of probable cause wherein the FBI gained access to some FSB documents Russian intelligence documents specifying their intelligence operations plan so one of the here are five or six of those messages and I wrote these down in advance because they're actually in the affidavit you can find it it's all publicly available but this is what our government says is the Russian government engaging in disinformation
00:18:01.160number two America has numerous domestic problems number three America should focus on its domestic problems before sending billions of dollars to Ukraine number four that America is discriminating against white people number five that rising prices are creating difficulties for ordinary Americans and this is another this is really interesting there's a bunch more like that I think the takeaway here is almost every listener to the war room would listen would understand those points to not be disinformation at all
00:18:31.160not two years ago not two years ago or a year and a half ago when the Russians began funding tenant media but five or ten or arguably 20 or 25 years ago so in other words what the Russian government is doing is trying to get information to Americans and what the United States government is doing is blocking that information now let me be perfectly clear here I'm not apologizing for the Russian government there are things that they are doing that are clearly illegal
00:19:01.160but it's not all about providing you know providing some remedy to the Washington Post or providing some prosecution that results in jail time of an individual all of it is being done for different purposes which is evident from the fact I pointed out earlier namely that Kalashnikov and Ophan Ophan Ophan Ophan Ophan Ophan Ophan Ophan Ophan Ophan Ophan Ophan Ophan Ophan Ophan Ophan Ophan Ophan Ophan Ophan Ophan Ophan Ophan
00:20:01.160The good rule of thumb is ask yourself in any sort of geopolitical struggle which way can the information flow and which way can it not flow and once you have identified which way the information cannot flow then ask yourself why can it not flow in that direction and once you've done that you're likely figured out who the bad guys are in your various information warfare programs so during the cold war United States used all sorts of effective tools
00:20:31.160tools and techniques to reach Soviet citizens inside the Soviet Union we used Voice of America Radio Free Europe we use various cultural exchanges and other techniques educational exchanges and at the same time with the Soviet government with the NKVD and later the KGB did was try to stop that from happening they literally jammed the signals broadcast by Radio Free Europe and Voice of America they absolutely dominated domestic media you know you've heard of Pravda from during the Soviet era
00:21:00.740they engaged in extensive indoctrination and education and of course they had extensive internal surveillance so information during the cold war it was not easy for it to flow into the Soviet Union right because the Soviet secret police forces and foreign and domestic intelligence services blocked it from coming into the country today what you have is the exact opposite again let's just be clear it is not the case that everything that the Russian government says is true or is designed to help America
00:21:30.740however it is the case that the United States government is trying to prevent you from understanding what they want to say which is why you can no longer watch RT television in the United States which is why this indictment was brought and so it's a strange thing to say this but we're living in this inverted cold war posture where we are actually the prisoners inside this informational prison into which information from a foreign
00:22:00.740how you can no longer stop the Chinese so the Russian military as well as the military as I just pointed out is the information that many people on the right wing would say is true now another thing I should point out is the reason the Russian intelligence services are interested in advancing this narrative is because it's easy to advance a narrative that is true it's much harder to advance a narrative that's false and so in the indictments that I've read and in the various affidavits that I've read
00:22:30.740as true. And I should point out again that even in the case of tenant media, there is no allegation
00:22:36.000whatsoever that anything that Benny Johnson or Tim Pool or Dave Rubin created was anything
00:22:41.600different than they would have created and had in fact already created before tenant media was
00:22:46.420being funded by these outside Russian sources. So again, this is not about the truth or falsity
00:22:52.020of the information. It's simply about deplatforming and defunding those people who want to send a
00:22:56.940message that is both consistent with the truth and inconsistent with the leftist sort of
00:23:03.260prevailing woke regime's orthodoxy. Well, TJ, once again, you've painted a very detailed if dark
00:23:11.980picture. We really appreciate you coming on. Now, we've read your writing at American Mind,
00:23:17.260at Blaze, at Man's World, elsewhere, but where can people find you? And if you would just direct the
00:23:22.740audience to your substack, which is full of all sorts of fascinating essays, anyone listening to
00:23:27.980this surely knows that they've got a real treat in store for them, however dark and depressing it may
00:23:33.600be at times. Where can we find you, TJ? Yeah, you can find me at tjharker.com, which will redirect to
00:23:40.480the substack Amicus Republici or Friend of the Republic. Thank you very much, sir. TJ Harker,
00:23:48.240always willing to fight no matter what the odds are. We'll be coming back with Jack Posobiec,
00:23:55.280who's on the ground in Philadelphia in the run-up to the debate tonight, and also Matt Boyle from
00:24:01.960Breitbart Media. You might wonder how it is that I maintain this wild and crazy stare. I can tell you
00:24:09.220right now the secret is coffee, transhuman levels of caffeine. If you want to support the war room,
00:24:17.280go to our partner's website, warpath.coffee, promo code Bannon. Of course, in Bannon's absence,
00:24:27.220we're going to have to drink his coffee for him. Maybe you can help. Warpath.coffee, promo code
00:24:34.140Bannon. You too can be loud. You too can stare at the camera with these wild and crazy eyes.
00:24:41.660Stay tuned. We were going to a break. We'll be back with Jack Posobiec and Matt Boyle.
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