A Chinese spy balloon has been spotted over the US, and the government wants to shoot it out of the sky. Will they shoot it down? Or will they let it fly free? To find out, we talk to Dave DeCamp of Antiwar, and Gareth Blumberg of The New York Times, to find out who's winning the battle of the balloons and who's losing the missiles. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships/awakeningwonder and use promo code AWAKeningWonders at checkout to get 10% off your first month with discount code: AWAKENINGWonder. We're part of the Robots Radio Podcast Network. See all the great network shows at RobotsRadio.net. Episode Music: "Space Junk" by Borrtex "Goodbye Outer Space" by Cairo Braga "Outer Space Warning" by Fountains of Wayne "The Little Mermaid" by The Weakerthans "Space Traveler" by Pylawn "Space Truck" by Bumblebee "Space Ship" by Dov Charney "The Boy Who Couldn't Get Over It" by Crawl" by Squeex "Space Pilot" by Lizzie Borden "Space Plane" by Shadydave "Space Jam" by John Singleton and much more! Subscribe to our channel on iTunes and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe and review our new episode on Podcoin. Subscribe here. Learn more about your ad choices and become a supporter of the podcast by becoming a patron of AWINGINGWOW! Subscribe to AWakening Wonders. or share our podcast! and we'll be giving you the best listening experience in the podcast that s all the best vlogs, anywhere else in the world can you get a chance to listen to the best podcast on the best of what's good on the highest quality podcasting and social media you get the most of it? Subscribe, comment and subscribe to our podcast on social media? , and more! Subscribe and subscribe on your favourite podcasting platform? and share it so you can be notified when there's a new episode drops next week of the latest podcast you decide what s good on what s going on where you're listening to the most amazing thing going on in the most awesome podcast you might be listening to most powerful podcast you can vlog about it!
00:00:18.000Will it be balloons or will it be missiles is of course the story that there are Chinese spy balloons being spotted over the States.
00:00:24.000We're talking about Shell's record profits that oddly have occurred during an energy crisis.
00:00:30.000There's this curious pattern where crisis seems to create profit.
00:00:34.000When we click over to being exclusively on Rumble, we'll be talking about Ukrainian corruption and, in particular, how one recently removed oligarchs got peculiar ties with everyone's favourite laptop DJ.
00:00:53.000That has recently been revealed to have oligarchical ties.
00:00:56.000Zelensky's booing people out of government, this dude's one of them.
00:00:59.000He's got ties to Hunter Biden, that's the sort of thing.
00:01:01.000Oh no, we're not going to tell you too much about that, you might have, I don't know.
00:01:03.000Stay with us if you're watching this on YouTube, but do click over at Rumble when you can.
00:01:07.000On the show as well is our guest Dave DeCamp, he's News Editor at AntiWar.com.
00:01:12.000He's going to be talking to us about Ukraine potentially being used to pilot CBDC schemes and about the missile stuff and all Also, also, the West, in particular the United States, and I don't mean to offend you if you are American, we love you and we love your country, but your government and the set of corporate interests that it represents are starting to provoke China into a potential global conflict.
00:01:39.000Is the first silo in this potential geopolitical nightmare come in the unlikely form of that friendliest of objects, a lovable, silly old, soppy old, stupid balloon?
00:01:52.000Let's have a look at how the mainstream media reported this story.
00:04:06.000You shouldn't float a balloon over... It's provocative.
00:04:09.000I mean, if it was happening to you as an individual, if a balloon just sort of hovered above you, like in a Peanuts cartoon, Cloud, whatever, you wouldn't like it.
00:04:26.000That's a joyful story, except ecologically.
00:04:28.000What about though, haven't you ever on a birthday, as I once did, tied a balloon to you and then had that balloon float around a part of you on your birthday to celebrate you?
00:04:36.000No problem there, but it's not spying on you.
00:04:38.000But if someone said to you that balloon's got your worst interests at heart.
00:04:42.000How do we know the balloon just didn't float off of its own accord?
00:04:46.000Well, we certainly don't know what happened to the balloon because it was shot down in a real Yahoo, Yippie, Aye, Aye fashion that I'm afraid does showcase some aspects of American culture that American detractors would use to attack America.
00:04:58.000It was like, I've shot that son of a gun straight out of the sky!
00:06:04.000Once it got to Montana though, hey, you better watch out.
00:06:07.000That's where things got pretty serious for the balloon.
00:06:10.000But it has been observed that the balloon's journey across the United States, the saucy, spying little voyeur that it is, little full of hot air, is as nothing, according to John Pilger, the great English journalist, compared to an...
00:06:24.000arc of military bases being built around China. This is likely one of those stories where
00:06:30.000we're told, "Oh, China spying on us." But look at the encroachment on Chinese territory
00:06:36.000that this arc of military bases represents. Pilger's tweet says, "Congratulations to US
00:06:41.000sharpshooters who after several attempts," that's very dry, very Pilger, to sort of criticize
00:06:46.000their attempt to get it in one shot, not a very wild bunch, "shot down a Chinese balloon
00:06:51.000straight near the land of the free." Oh, God, he's actually quite anti-American, isn't he?
00:06:55.000Below is a map of some of the 400 US...
00:06:57.000bases that surround China, spying, probing, several with nuclear arms.
00:07:05.000One of the things we're talking about over the course of this week's shows is the potential escalation of tension between the U.S.
00:07:13.000and China and how that maps onto the current proxy war, which is what we're kind of forced to call it these days, between America and Russia via Ukraine.
00:07:24.000This is a story, by the way, about those arcs.
00:07:25.000If you want to look, the US has secured access to four additional military bases.
00:07:32.000But before we get into this story about the increase in regional tensions and how that plays into geopolitical narratives and increased global tension in the pursuit of a unipolar I want to tag a few more instances around this conflict in Ukraine.
00:07:47.000The Ukraine are replacing the defence minister in their first major reshuffle since the invasion.
00:07:51.000Some people are saying that Zelensky's clearing out his closet, Eminem style.
00:07:55.000Clearing out some Ukrainian ministers that are corrupt and stuff and oligarchical.
00:07:59.000But the first dude that's getting replaced in this reshuffle... He was my favourite.
00:08:05.000I love this one, he's the one that kept going, Oleski Reznikov, he's the one that kept, if you don't know him, he's the one that kept going on Telegram, well we're de facto members of NATO and we spill our blood and the Americans are backing us.
00:08:15.000He kept going on the TV making the fatal error of accurately describing what's going on.
00:08:22.000Of course none of this is to say that Russia's invasion isn't egregious or criminal or that Putin isn't a tyrant.
00:08:27.000Simply that we all have access to the complexity of facts that may not necessarily conform to mainstream media narratives and the unipolar agenda of the globalist state.
00:08:36.000And this is a story that sort of helps us to understand that in real time.
00:08:40.000He's been booted out and this is him before in his old more carefree days at the ministry shouting off at the mouth about the way that Ukraine's basically a NATO.
00:09:19.000And incrementally, these various pledges and oaths are being broken.
00:09:27.000In a minute we're going to talk about Gareth, the oligarch who owned Burisma and his connection to a certain little laptop yielding son whose laptop tends not to make it onto certain social media sites.
00:09:39.000The naughtiest little laptop in the West.
00:09:42.000Delaware's sauciest laptop, the laptop of Hunter Biden.
00:09:46.000And what's weird about this story is like, when you hear like, oh, the oligarch who owned Burisma is getting shut down, you think, I've heard of that before, Burisma.
00:09:55.000Why do I even know about Ukrainian energy companies and stuff?
00:09:59.000And you think, oh, that's why, because it cropped up on that laptop that was meant to be Russian disinformation.
00:10:16.000The only reason we broadcast on Rumble is because they have guaranteed freedom of speech.
00:10:21.000They have guaranteed us the right to attack establishment interests.
00:10:25.000They have given us the right to have an agenda that supports you, All of us, in our attempt to collectivise, organise and present alternative narratives to the mainstream media lies, deception and claptrap that you're regularly fed round the clock, we've got to oppose it somehow.
00:10:41.000And Rumble are thankfully affording us that ability.
00:10:44.000So click over from YouTube and you can say, well, I'm going to take my g-lay off.
00:11:30.000Stick around though, we've got some great facts.
00:11:32.000Because on the other side of this we're going to be talking to Dave DeCamp about these kind of geopolitical stories in a sensible, responsible way.
00:11:40.000We've got an amazing story for you about how Ukraine is being used not only to pilot missiles, test them for potential future conflicts, how there are bloody biolabs and... Allegedly.
00:13:05.000Mate, you said that you were interested in the story that former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said that the US blocked his efforts of mediating peace between Russia and Ukraine.
00:13:16.000It's a story you reported on that hasn't been picked up much.
00:13:27.000So Naftali Bennett, he was the Prime Minister of Israel when war first broke out, when Russia first invaded, and he took his role to be a mediator.
00:13:38.000And he actually went and visited Putin on March 4th, so that's less than a week after, you know, the invasion and things really, you know, were heating up.
00:13:47.000And in this interview that he just posted on his YouTube channel over the weekend, he really detailed his mediation efforts.
00:13:55.000And he said he met with Putin on March 4th.
00:14:00.000He was talking to them back and forth.
00:14:02.000And he said he coordinated the entire thing with the US, the UK, the German, and the French.
00:14:09.000And he said there was real will on both Putin's side and Zelensky's side to reach a ceasefire.
00:14:14.000He said he got major concessions out of them.
00:14:16.000Putin dropped his demand of the denazification of Ukraine, which he defined as removing basically regime change, removing Zelensky.
00:14:24.000And he said Putin also dropped the demand of demilitarization.
00:14:28.000On Zelensky's side, he said that he renounced trying to join NATO, which this is Bennett, you know, former Israeli prime minister, explained was the reason for the Russian invasion was how close Ukraine was to NATO.
00:14:41.000But Bennett said again, he coordinated this with all these Western countries, and he told the interviewer that there was a decision among the Western countries that they wanted to keep striking Putin, how he put it.
00:15:39.000Turkey, the host of those Istanbul talks, said that they thought the war was going to end, but some of their NATO partners wanted to continue the war to weaken Russia.
00:15:49.000And then just a few days later, again, this is April 2022, Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, former Raytheon board member, came out and said, we want to weaken Russia in Ukraine.
00:16:00.000So it's just more evidence that the U.S.
00:16:02.000and its allies blocked negotiations at the beginning of the war and wanted this thing to continue.
00:16:08.000Even if we don't become ensnared in the broader morality of inciting war when peace is available, we surely have to address the way that the media has reported on this conflict, denying most people access to the details that you just inventoried.
00:16:31.000We've focused on several fascinating aspects of this story, notably the profiteering of the military-industrial complex and more recently BlackRock's investment in the reconstruction of Ukraine.
00:16:46.000If you could just talk a little about that for a moment, Dave, then we'll move on to an even broader geopolitical narrative that involves unipolar incentives and ongoing American hegemony and the likely forthcoming conflicts between the United States and China, especially if they keep sending those terrifying balloons.
00:17:08.000But first, can we talk about their reconstruction and the investment opportunities that that's offering American corporations in particular?
00:17:17.000So the clear winner right now of continuing this war to weaken Russia is Raytheon, Boeing, the weapons makers, the American military-industrial complex, the $100 billion.
00:17:31.000European countries are sending their old Eastern Europe, former Soviet republics, They're getting rid of their old Russian-made weapons, buying some new shiny American weapons.
00:18:06.000And that's where you see these companies like BlackRock.
00:18:08.000They're going to get in on this reconstruction, and they're going to be able to create all this new infrastructure, because Russia has been destroying the infrastructure starting in October as the war has continued.
00:18:18.000It's just going to get worse and worse for the people of Ukraine.
00:18:21.000And that $600 billion that it's going to cost, or $750 billion, might even get up to a trillion.
00:18:28.000There's going to be interest payments.
00:18:30.000There's going to be grants from the governments that are backed by central banks so they can just print money.
00:18:35.000I mean, you know, it almost makes the $100 billion seem small, the amount that they're going to be able to make off of Ukraine's reconstruction.
00:18:44.000And unfortunately for the people of Ukraine, you know, they're the ones that are suffering right now, dealing with rolling blackouts and not being able to heat their homes, you know, in the harsh Ukrainian winter.
00:18:54.000Not to mention that the conditions in Ukraine economically will likely be favourable to a great many globalist imperatives.
00:19:04.000We talked about in our presentation just there the opportunity to create a 100% digital state and that was not conjecture.
00:19:11.000The Ukraine themselves have produced a piece of publicity material, video in particular, outlining a vision that you can have an entirely
00:19:20.000centralized surveillance state with biometrics, deeply immersive ability to observe. So there's the profit
00:19:26.000for the military-industrial complex, there's the reconstruction profit and there's the kind of
00:19:31.000opportunity to turn Ukraine into a pilot state for numerous imperatives that have been
00:19:37.000discussed openly over the last five, six years around digital ID, social credit scoring, even
00:19:45.000So it's very easy to see how there is an agenda alongside the obvious humanitarian agenda that elsewhere in geopolitical history has not seemed to be at the forefront of corporatist American interests.
00:20:00.000Yeah, and a big part of this, too, is about, you know, with all those companies building the infrastructure and besides just turning Ukraine into a de facto NATO member, which I think it's pretty fair to say they are now, as Reznikov has said, the defense minister who's being replaced, you know, giving them this foothold in Ukraine right on Russia's border to turn it basically into this Western client state right in Russia's backyard, I think was a big part of the goal.
00:20:27.000kept pushing this And pushing this and was involved in Ukraine, you know, going back to the 2014 coup and supporting Ukraine in the war in the eastern Donbass region through all that time.
00:20:38.000You know, there is reporting right before Russia's recent invasion, not recent, it's been almost a year now, but there is reporting from Yahoo News that CIA power military officers were deployed on the front lines of the Donbass war, you know, during that whole time.
00:20:52.000So Again, you talk about the narrative.
00:20:54.000It's a snapshot for the corporate media from February 24th until now.
00:20:58.000For us, we have to look at the big picture.
00:20:59.000It even goes way back before 2014 with NATO expansion and all that.
00:21:05.000So that's why people are buying up this narrative because, again, they give them that snapshot.
00:21:12.000Not to mention the Nord Stream pipeline and the shift now in Americans' ability to sell resources across the world, which was another explicitly stated goal prior to the commencement of this conflict.
00:21:27.000We want to be the number one provider of liquid gas, which I believe is another one of the objectives that has been subsequently met.
00:21:34.000It helps us, doesn't it, Dave, to see geopolitics in the form of a broader narrative, in particular the attempt to destabilise Russia, potentially because of a burgeoning partnership and set of treaties that they've cultivated with China.
00:21:53.000Now, of course, America, every time I say China I want to China.
00:21:56.000Their relationship with China is, of course, in the headlines because of that terrifying, awful, bloody balloon.
00:22:04.000But also, there is a wider global narrative about US hegemony and unipolar intentions and the potential for China and Russia to disrupt that.
00:22:17.000Are we likely to see this story becoming increasingly incendiary over coming weeks, months, years, Dave?
00:22:25.000Yeah, and you know, one point is that the people running American foreign policy, you know, the neocons who control it and other people, you know, part of the deep state, there's different factions and some of them are not very smart.
00:22:39.000And those are the ones right now that are controlling the Biden administration, I think, you know, Tony Blinken, Victoria Nuland.
00:22:44.000What they're doing to Russia and China clearly is going to bring them closer together.
00:22:49.000They're both facing Western sanctions.
00:22:51.000They're both facing Western military buildups.
00:22:53.000And now they're shaking hands and making deals.
00:22:55.000And it's creating this kind of new, like you said, multipolar world, potentially, with Russia, China, Iran, even Venezuela, all these countries that are being sanctioned by the US.
00:23:49.000Then you have the Pentagon saying this has happened before.
00:23:52.000And one thing I pointed out in my article that I wrote up about it, it's on antiwar.com today, is that just a few years ago, you know, surveillance aircraft from a foreign country over the U.S.
00:24:02.000wouldn't really be that big of a deal.
00:24:04.000Because the US and Russia had a treaty called Open Skies, and it allowed unarmed surveillance flights over each other's territory.
00:24:12.000Russia actually tried to salvage it, but the Biden administration rejected the offer.
00:24:16.000You know, that was another thing that led up to this war is the decline of arms control treaties between the US and Russia.
00:24:22.000So anyway, so maybe a balloon Floating over the US for a little while wouldn't have really raised alarms back then before this treaty was scrapped.
00:24:32.000I'm not really sure, but we have to ask these questions.
00:24:35.000And the timing of this whole balloon thing, you know, the Pentagon announcing it right before Blinken is supposed to go to China.
00:25:40.000Marine Corps opened a new base on Guam, and these marine leaders, these military leaders in the Asia-Pacific, they say They're doing this to prepare for war with China.
00:26:12.000If you remember last summer, Nancy Pelosi's little stunt, she went over there and it provoked the largest Chinese military drills around Taiwan that have ever happened.
00:26:50.000intervention in the Chinese Civil War, backing Chiang Kai-shek when the Kuomintang fled to Taiwan, The US intervening militarily in the 1950s to stop Mao from
00:28:30.000They're trying to get the Netherlands and Japan to get in on these sanctions.
00:28:34.000And again, these military buildups and his Pentagon, his State Department, the CIA, the FBI, just about every federal agency under Biden has said China is our number one threat, our top enemy.
00:28:46.000So we have to think very cautiously about all this balloon you know, frenzy when that is the backdrop.
00:29:41.000Or we'll be invited to forget the provocation.
00:29:43.000What dear Blinken, if he's any kind of a diplomat, should be doing is getting himself on a balloon and going to China by balloon on a global balloon tour.
00:30:15.000Is there any clues in the name, for example?
00:30:19.000Yeah, so I mean, that's basically our bias is that we're anti-war, non-interventionist.
00:30:24.000We're a libertarian staff, so we're what most people would consider, you know, right-leaning.
00:30:29.000But we have columnists from all over the political spectrum, and that's been the mission of the website.
00:30:33.000It was founded in 1995 by Eric Garrison and Justin Raimondo, and Justin was the columnist who was a genius, but unfortunately he passed away.
00:30:43.000In 2019, but the whole time it was about building a coalition, you know, we would run columns from, you know, Daniel Ellsberg and Pat Buchanan, just completely different ends of the political spectrum.
00:30:56.000And that's what we pride ourselves on.
00:30:59.000Because, you know, this issue, especially now, as we're looking down the barrel of a potential war with Russia and China, now a nuclear war, we really need to unite to stop this.
00:31:08.000And that's what We're all about, and the site is entirely reader-funded, that's why they've been able to do this and go against these narratives, and I'm very honored to be working for them.
00:31:18.000I started doing it full-time in 2020, and I just write short news articles every day.
00:31:24.000I sort through hundreds of articles in the mainstream media every day and kind of filter it through to give people a short understanding, so that's what we're about.
00:31:33.000Again, I think your viewers, you know, would appreciate what we do over there.
00:31:38.000And also, if people don't want to read, I condense it into about a 30-minute daily podcast.
00:31:43.000It's called Anti-War News with Dave DeCamp.
00:31:46.000You can listen to the audio version or we also have a YouTube channel.
00:31:49.000We're also on Rumble and all that stuff.
00:31:52.000So yeah, I think, you know, our views align a lot, Russell, in that politics are kind of secondary when you're When we're in the situation we are today, and people really need to wake up, and I know you had Jimmy Doran promoting that anti-war rally February 19th in Washington, D.C.
00:32:10.000We're going to be represented there by Scott Horton, who's our editorial director.
00:32:19.000We're going to be represented at that march by Gareth, who's a human centipedia, very much like that terrifying film where people did all manner of filthy stuff.
00:32:29.000In a way, true opposition these days has to be bipartisan and transcendent of those kind of divisions, because it's quite clear that centralist interests, whether left or right, both have a pro-military agenda, both pro-surveillance, both pro-digitisation, and really what is required is a coalition of the awakening in order to truly oppose what appears to be a relentless march towards the apocalypse.
00:32:58.000I mean, when we're in the Armageddon, we won't have time to check what rosettes the other zombies are wearing as we pick through the ashes and rumble This is a Democrat zombie.
00:33:52.000On tomorrow's show, Matthias Desmet, author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism, is joining us, talking about mass formation and how the elites are controlling us.