KINSELLACAST 376： Ordered up with Guy Goldstein, Brian Lilley, Ben Mulroney, Adrienne Batra plus Tom Petty-related songs and Liquid Mike, Rural France, Azro Cady, To Be Astronauts
00:09:12.460Given what you know, the American dream is a Michigan hoax.
00:09:17.460Tell me something that I don't know. Your cause for alarm is as pure as the snow.
00:09:23.460So, guys, so thank you so much for meeting with me on short notice to talk about the important writing that you're doing.
00:09:36.460It is amazing and compelling and, frankly, disturbing.
00:09:42.460Can you kind of describe for people who haven't read it yet what you've discovered and what you've been writing about in the past few days?
00:09:50.460Sure. So I guess to give you a bit of background on what I've been writing, it comes from the fact that I have been looking at the narrative war against Israel since about 2018.
00:10:02.460Part of my personal experience as someone who lives in Israel grew up outside of Israel was watching two different interpretations of the narrative evolve in real time.
00:10:13.460And so the systematic delegitimization of Israel every time a war began began to look far more systematic at some point.
00:10:24.460And in this war in particular, because the war has gone on for so long, it's actually evolved into cycles that started to become predictable, started to become evident.
00:10:38.460And I think many people or a lot of people started to see it as started to intuit this in some ways.
00:10:47.460I've seen a lot of people sort of talking about it as an idea that, oh, the famines are manufactured every time X happens in the war.
00:10:58.460What I started looking at was how this looks at a systematic level, right?
00:11:04.460What does it mean? Why does it happen?
00:11:06.460And what I started looking into was actually understanding the idea of a cognitive first military doctrine.
00:11:17.460What does that mean? What's cognitive?
00:11:20.460So traditionally, we think about war as something very kinetic, right?
00:11:27.460There are the five traditional fronts of a war, those being land, air, sea, and in the last 50 years, I guess, space, and then cyber.
00:11:39.460All of those fronts are fronts where one side hits up against another and you have a sort of very kinetic war.
00:11:47.460The idea of cognitive warfare has always existed, but it's always existed in a lot of, with a lot of other names.
00:11:54.460Sometimes it would be considered psyops.
00:12:00.460Sometimes it's economic and trade warfare, but it doesn't necessarily get grouped together as a coherent military strategy.
00:12:10.460It's almost always treated as part of either diplomacy, which is considered to be sort of off-season for conflict, or it's treated as secondary or ancillary, right?
00:12:22.460So, yeah, we're fighting a war, and so we do intelligence work.
00:12:27.460What it's never really been, the way that I hadn't seen it really looked at previously, was as a cohesive military strategy, where rather than targeting, I guess, the geographic terrain, you would target what Eric Weinstein refers to as a human terrain.
00:12:48.460And what was really interesting, or the breakthrough that I sort of had when I was looking at Hamas's war is nobody could understand why this terrorist army, yeah.
00:12:57.460The idea that, the idea that Hamas are irrational and crazy people, that barbarians just do barbarian things, never sat well with me.
00:13:21.920And what it comes down to is this idea that in actual fact, you can, given the way in which the world is currently structured in terms of international body, international politics and diplomacy, and the nature of the way the world operates, it is foreseeable.
00:13:44.740Well, it's possible, particularly for a non-state actor to create a cognitive first war, a war that their primary front and the only front that they seek advantage on is the mind.
00:14:01.100And once you start, once I started to look at it like that, what I started to see was all of Hamas's losses started to make much more sense, not just because it's humans, it's not human sacrifice.
00:14:15.500I don't think, I think it, again, it doesn't sit well with me to call it human sacrifice because I think that sacrifice assumes that the person on the other end is, you know, that's what they're asking for.
00:14:28.900But what it is, is it's a cognitive strategy that understands how to create scenarios that harm Israel more than, how to effectively create Pyrrhic scenarios for Israel at every turn.
00:14:45.940Every kinetic confrontation becomes a Pyrrhic victory.
00:14:49.800You know, every command center taken out is underneath the hospital, and therefore every, you can't, you can either not take out command centers, or when you do, the cost on the cognitive front is higher than the reward on the kinetic front.
00:15:05.720Now, what made it really interesting was looking at the framing of that against Israel's strategy, because Israel has a notorious cognitive last strategy.
00:15:30.740And so, Israel has not been accurately able to calculate the cognitive variables in its targeting procedures and in its sort of, the tactical decisions.
00:16:35.280You know, the light bulb goes off in my head moments, you know, because I've always assumed the military expression of their hatred was collateral.
00:16:45.120It was congruent or happening at the same time as the information war.
00:16:49.720And what you've convinced me of is, well, in fact, they almost don't care if the military expression of their hatred fails, as long as, as you put it, you know, this narrative coordination, this narrative war dominates.
00:17:04.140And what's interesting about it is you actually see, again, because of the length of the war, you start to see really interesting patterns emerge.
00:17:14.260So, for example, there's one pattern that's recurred five or six times in the war, where there will be a period of relative quiet, both on the narrative and the kinetic front during negotiations.
00:17:25.140Most of the narrative is trying to figure out who to blame for the collapse of the negotiations when they collapse.
00:17:33.960Almost immediately, once the negotiations are declared collapse, Israel declares that it's going to accelerate the kinetic front.
00:18:19.200That there is this whole set of institutions and, and players with vested interest in the Palestinian narrative that aren't just Hamas.
00:18:28.420And so, for example, with Operation Gideon's Chariots, when Israel declared the operation was going to begin, four days later, I believe it was amnesty.
00:18:37.780It was the amnesty and the, and the PRC that came out saying that there was a famine in Gaza and amplifying the famine narrative with the help of the New York Times, with the help of the BBC.
00:18:50.260And so, and so, it doesn't directly necessarily come from Hamas, but that timing is always synchronous.
00:18:57.780Israel's kinetic, there's, the negotiation is a lull.
00:19:01.440Then Israel accelerates on the kinetic front, while Palestine Inc. accelerates on the cognitive front.
00:19:08.180And you call that narrative coordination.
00:19:50.240You know, it's the fifth famine that's been declared this war.
00:19:53.320Why was no one ready with a narrative response?
00:19:55.500Because again, Israel has a narrative last doctrine.
00:19:59.540And so both sides make massive gains very quickly.
00:20:03.620And then mostly, and it saddens me to say it, but it's mostly Israel left trying to figure out how to recover.
00:20:10.440Because the kinetic losses don't harm Hamas.
00:20:14.360Because Hamas, if you take for a moment the concept that Hamas is an idea, it's almost more ephemeral than an army.
00:20:23.820Because it doesn't care about the territory because the world has kind of guaranteed that it'll get it back at the end of the conflict anyway.
00:20:30.300So it hasn't got a high territorial risk and it doesn't care about the people because it never cared about the people because martyrdom is one of its core tenets.
00:20:43.080And so they're making very low cost sacrifices because they'll either be given their tokens back at the end of the game or where they're sacrificing pawns that they don't care about.
00:20:55.500And meanwhile, Israel is sort of losing high value pieces on the chessboard, losing key strategic allies, key messaging elements in real time.
00:21:08.540So the, forgive my pronunciation, the Makawama Doctrine, what is that?
00:21:14.600You talk about that in the pieces you've done.
00:21:17.740So the Makawama Doctrine is actually a really interesting aspect of Islamist, the Islamist military doctrine.
00:21:28.320It's really something that evolved out of Hezbollah because, again, the Islamists are not 7th century barbarians.
00:21:36.560They're very sophisticated in a lot of ways and they understand a lot about Western society that the West probably still doesn't understand.
00:21:45.260So Makawama is fundamentally, and I know this through people who have studied it, not through my own readings of it.
00:21:53.680So I'm going to roughly paraphrase Gershon or Cohen, but it's essentially the idea, it's an inversion of the idea of Klausowicz that war is an extension of diplomacy.
00:22:06.320And it says that, and it sort of creates the idea that diplomacy is an extension of war, because in the jihadist ideal and the Islamist ideal, the world is divided into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Khalb.
00:22:21.180Excuse my terrible pronunciation, but that's as it is.
00:22:30.000The world, Dar al-Khalb only becomes Dar al-Islam once it's conquered.
00:22:34.240And so Makawama is often translated as resistance when it's translated to English.
00:22:39.700But in actual fact, it's a forever war doctrine that says that peace is, that diplomacy is one way to wage war.
00:22:51.120And it fits in with doctrines like Darwa, which is sort of the sort of soft conversion or the soft conquest idea of, you know, we can conquer Europe with the wombs of our women.
00:23:03.100You know, and those sorts of concepts that are taking aspects that are non-kinetic and turning them into tools of the same war.
00:23:13.900This doctrine is pretty well recognized.
00:24:09.840So the digital advocacy campaigns are incredibly sophisticated, right?
00:24:14.940I come from a background in digital communications and digital engagement.
00:24:18.700So it's something that I've got familiarity with.
00:24:22.780There's a few different parts of it that are really sophisticated.
00:24:25.800One of it is they understand algorithm incredibly well.
00:24:30.400And what they've understood is that algorithm promotes mass.
00:24:36.660In general, algorithms will promote mass.
00:24:40.460And the only way to get mass is to have really clear coordination on message.
00:24:46.540Because once you have clearly coordination, clear coordination on message, it's really hard for an algorithm to go, everybody's saying this thing, but I'm not going to make it trend.
00:25:57.100I think at some point there was some research that showed that there was a 50 to 1 ratio of pro-Palestine posts to pro-Israel posts.
00:26:07.940And it wasn't because of a, it wasn't that disparate a number of creators or audience.
00:26:13.680It was, you know, it was algorithmic selection.
00:26:17.140And so you have this situation where on the one hand, you have the bad guys making decisions about what should be promoted and promoting, promoting things that destabilize the West.
00:26:27.220And on the other side, you have the good guys who think that the most important thing is free speech and therefore allow more destabilization to get through.
00:26:58.940I just now put something out about a campaign where they sent out these, these are the social media posts to put out.
00:27:06.280And so where, when you get a lot of people who are ostensibly independent saying the same thing, it has a greater persuasive effect than when people who are obviously connected say the same thing.
00:27:23.140So if all of the government agencies put out the same blog post, it sounds very suspicious.
00:27:29.020But if 50 different independent news organizations put out the same message, it sounds like a very compelling case for that message.
00:27:37.160That's also one of the, one of the interesting things that I'm, I haven't yet finished writing this, but I'm currently writing about is the idea that we have mistaken the, when you read back at the history of the idea of a free press, it's actually never spoken about free.
00:27:56.040It's always spoken about independent, right?
00:28:00.240Historically, it was about independence and freedom was added onto it in the 20th century, sort of a, sort of a better word for independence.
00:28:08.380It's sort of a catch all branding for independence.
00:28:11.320The difference being that in actual fact, once you understand the idea of the free, the independent is what matter.
00:28:17.520You realize that when governments are coordinating the press, that's bad because that's Pravda when companies are coordinating the press, that's bad because we don't know.
00:28:36.420I don't exactly know what that is, but it's still, it still involves the same decay in the independent, in the, in the responsibility and function of an independent press.
00:28:50.620We're seeing organizations, organizations essentially putting out, I don't want to call it collusion because that has a secondary implications, but coordinating messages between media agencies.
00:29:08.040You remember, you remember, you remember how in the early two thousands, everybody was really upset with, with News Corp for buying up all the local channels.
00:29:18.100And there's a meme video that used to go around of all these people saying the exact same thing on different networks.
00:29:25.900And that was a, it was a major theme in the collapse of trust in media because once media, once News Corp owned all the media, it was hard to trust.
00:29:37.100Well, the, the difference between News Corp doing it, the government, the Soviet, the Soviet government doing it or an NGO doing it really is nil in terms of the impact on the populace.
00:29:54.620We're seeing that in order to push this narrative, they're destroying the fundamentals of Western society in no small part because of the people who live in Western society do not understand the fundamentals that are being destroyed.
00:30:09.020And also, we're arrogant in the West, and we believe, as you said at the outset, that we're dealing with people living in caves and they couldn't possibly possess the skills to manipulate us to the extent that they're doing.
00:30:24.580One, there's an extraordinary section of your piece before the last piece.
00:30:31.400You, Hamas's inverted traditional military logic, I'm going to quote you entirely, where conventional forces plan physical operations to achieve military objectives, Hamas designs physical operations to achieve psychological effects.
00:30:49.500They measure success by narrative dominance, not battlefield victory, end quote.
00:30:55.800So the first thing I wanted to ask of it is how does the people who run Israel and are executing the war not understand that, that they're, you know, they're getting their asses handed to them in this psychological battlefield?
00:31:10.480And secondly, what do you think we need to do to turn that around or at least slow it down?
00:31:21.140Um, so first of all, how Israel doesn't understand it, again, this is one of those things where it's tragic, but it's also not that surprising.
00:31:42.720And since the 70s, it's been doctrine at the UN, you know, the Zionism is racism and the delegitimization of Israel at UNESCO.
00:31:50.580It's over and over and over and over again.
00:31:52.940So Israel at a, at the political level is preconditioned to dismiss what the world says, because of course the world is complaining about Israel.
00:32:04.220At the military level, it's always worth remembering that the people that are running wars have been doing, have been playing the game they're playing for 40 years.
00:32:26.360And even if he intellectually understands, because he's a very smart man and I'm not taking away from his, his skill as a, as a commander of the army.
00:32:38.440His instinct is going to be that war is first and foremost about the ground game.
00:32:48.160Um, and I don't think that there's a lot of people in the world who have reached the point where they understand that war is first and foremost about what you, about the, not the narrative per se, but about the political gains that you can make during it.
00:33:07.040To some extent, it's worth pointing out, by the way, that Israel's early military doctrine seems to suggest that they had an understanding of this because Ben Gurion famously said that wars need to be quick and fought on enemy territory.
00:33:22.620And to some extent, the length of this last war has really shown us a lot of the, the structural challenges that make that cognitive front more meaningful in a way that in previous engagements where Israel was at war for three or four weeks, the, that front couldn't build up momentum.
00:33:43.980The, it would be over before the massive narrative front could be built.
00:33:47.500But the duration of this conflict and the holding pattern that Israel keeps going into to negotiate or because they've been told that they're not allowed by the, by, by U.S. administrations or because of internet, whatever reason they're in the holding patterns, that time is exactly what feeds the cognitive front.
00:34:07.720So while the kinetic front is static or stagnant, the cognitive front continues to accelerate.
00:40:20.340But 7.5% you shouldn't have to go and say, oh, you know, at City Hall, when I used to cover that, it was always, oh, I guess we'll close all the waiting pools and the libraries.
00:40:30.700Because there's never ways that City Hall and, you know, the province, I guess we'll just have to close all the schools.
00:40:38.040So, you know, that's what Environment Canada is doing.
00:40:41.080We'll see what the other departments do.
00:40:45.500And I hope it's true of your boss, your former boss, Gretchen, that when ministers would come in, and he's trying to balance the budget, ministers would come in and say, oh, boss, you know, if we just had a bit more, we can do a great job.
00:41:00.640He would call Treasury Board and say, cut them by double of what they have.
00:41:15.500First off, I think they need to start enforcing a return to office because I think it would make the government more efficient.
00:41:29.240Now, part of the problem is that they got rid of a lot of their office space in Ottawa.
00:41:33.560And I said, this is someone who works from home and would rather, well, I have an office and I go to it, but, you know, I'm on my own at the office.
00:41:41.200I'd rather we still had our closed media office.
00:41:42.960We don't, just being upfront with people here.
00:41:46.560But I think there is a lot of ways there you would find out that you didn't need 18 people in this little section you've got.
00:42:32.180Uh, by the way, Bruce Fanjoy won the writing of Carlton from Pierre Paulyette by going around and telling everyone that if you don't, uh, vote for him, the conservatives are going to cut all the, cut all the jobs.
00:42:43.600These cuts are going to be bigger than anything that Pierre Paulyette and the conservatives promised.
00:42:49.600If they, if they show up as promised, they will be.
00:42:53.080And, uh, and I'm, I'm with you, you know, uh, even though I run a company that's virtual because of the pandemic, we just kind of stuck with it.
00:43:00.560Um, you know, if we're paying lots of money, taxpayer money for real estate, um, that's empty, you know, we got to get people back in there to make use of it.
00:43:10.760But, um, yeah, it's, um, I think, uh, there have to be big cuts as the prime minister made a pretty big promise about defense spending and, uh, he's got to find the money to pay for it.
00:43:23.060And, um, you know, a lot of us are going to be watching to see if he, he follows through.
00:43:28.520Uh, yeah, this is every time somebody asks me, well, what do you make of Mark Carney?
00:43:32.920My answer is always, we'll wait and see.
01:15:34.180Hey, got out of bed today, and I don't know if I'm depressed or manic.
01:15:54.420But I got a will, I got a will to live, I got a pattern, yeah, I got a pattern, pattern for panic.
01:16:08.740One of the most frustrating things as a citizen and as a journalist is you always hear about the issues that we have in this city, in this country, in this province, but no one does anything about it.
01:16:21.020Until Doug Ford comes along, the premier of Ontario.
01:16:24.300Hello, I'm Adrian Batra, with me are Warren Kinsella and Brian Lilly.
01:16:28.060There are plenty of things, you know, that have frustrated people about Doug Ford, Brian, during the federal election.
01:16:36.080He was far too cozy with Mark Carney, conservative said, probably true.
01:16:40.660He, you know, recently, you know, fired up some s'mores at the cottage with Mark Carney.
01:16:46.980There's a bit too much coziness there.
01:16:48.540But that said, when Doug Ford is angry and an issue touches him directly, which is a lot of issues, he will go to town.
01:16:59.200Most notably, he spoke out, held up a front page of the Toronto Sun about the smash and grabs that are plaguing this province.
01:17:08.300Okay, so here's my little crime rant of the day.
01:17:13.580I don't know if you've ever seen, did you see these characters on the news last night that went into the LCBO up in Kitchener?
01:17:21.600They're a brazen bunch of crooks, you know, I have all the confidence in the world and the Water Police Services, Waterloo Police Services, the chief, he's a champion, the chief.
01:17:33.260We've got to catch these guys and throw them in jail.
01:18:05.460And, you know, sometimes he gets himself in trouble with that.
01:18:08.580I think on these issues, and Warren's got some more, that he believes Ford is being right on.
01:18:14.080But the public looks at that and says, yeah, right on, good, thank you.
01:18:19.340This is why Doug Ford is at 52% in the polls of late.
01:18:23.500Was it 52% or 53% that Abacus had him at recently?
01:18:27.320That's way better than he was during the election when he won his third majority.
01:18:30.720So when Ford jumps on issues like crime, we, the other day, held up a front page of the Toronto Sun, Joe Warmington's column on the guys that stole $8,000 worth of booze from an LCBO.
01:21:04.640You know, they'll just step away from the microphone when you ask them about the guy who had his place broken into in Lindsay.
01:21:11.260Now you've got incredible stuff, response-having, like Gary Mason at the Globe and Mail, no Doug Ford fan, applauding him and saying, damn right, I'd be doing the same thing.
01:21:21.720So he's got, he's like my former boss, Kretzian.
01:21:24.580He's got this unerring instinct for where people's gut, you know, are at and where people are feeling in their hearts.
01:21:32.280And, you know, that kind of emotional politics, it's not always rational, but that kind of emotional politics really works.
01:21:41.760And this guy is just really good at it.
01:21:44.100And, you know, that's why he holds such a commanding lead in the polls.
01:21:48.640You know, it's interesting, Brian, because on some of these issues that are happening within our own province, domestic issues, shall we say,
01:21:56.380that we've all talked about with respect to Premier Ford, very strong, very, very positive in general.
01:22:03.120But on the national front, he has really gone out of his way that we should be continuing this fight with the United States.
01:22:28.000You know, I imagine in Edmonton at the Alberta legislature, people are walking around with ball caps that say Danielle Smith was right about everything at this point,
01:22:36.920because the Carney government has effectively adopted much of what she was pushing earlier this year when she was being called a traitor,
01:22:44.660instead of what Doug Ford was pushing, which is what Justin Trudeau had brought in.
01:22:48.640He says he's still going to keep working closely with Mark Carney.
01:22:57.560He's also building bridges with Danielle Smith.
01:23:00.820So I know that, especially at West, when I was there for Stampede, a lot of anger towards Doug Ford over what happened during the federal election and him being too close to Carney.
01:23:10.080But while he, on the trade front, has been saying, let's double down on the terrorists, but let's support Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney,
01:23:21.640he's also gone out of his way to say, we've got to show Alberta some love and we've got to get those pipelines built.
01:23:27.220So, you know, so a lot of mismatch going in there, if you're looking at it from a purely partisan or philosophical point of view.
01:23:35.260But, you know, Doug Ford is his own guy.
01:23:41.580But we would be remiss if we didn't put the final point on this.
01:23:46.060And that was all the speculation about Doug Ford, that he wanted to run to be the next leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, that he wants to be Prime Minister.
01:23:54.340He's had three majority governments in Canada's largest province as a PC leader.
01:24:01.220So next step, of course, would be to go federal.
01:24:26.020Like he's even got, you know, mean, nasty guys like Warren Kinsella saying nice things about him and being very impressed by him.
01:24:33.720And, like, I'm not the only one who, you know, have been surprised by Doug Ford going back to before the pandemic, where he has truly been a premier for the whole province, for everybody.
01:24:49.820Number one, it's what Brian has identified.
01:24:52.360Conservatives, some conservatives, are really mad at him presently because they feel like he torpedoed a lot of Pierre Polyev's chances.
01:25:01.740If Pierre Polyev is no longer the leader of the Conservative Party a year from now, and that is possible, ask Aaron O'Toole or Andrew Scheer, I think that anger will fade away.
01:25:12.440So then the big issue, the big con, is the one you've identified, Adrian.