In this episode, we discuss the ongoing crisis in the Middle East and America's potential role in arming the world. 50% or 57% of the world s autocratic nations have been sold arms by the American military-industrial complex. Additionally, we re talking to Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, about how Wikipedia exemplifies the trend towards censorship from open source and collaboratively achieved information. We ll be with you for about 15 minutes. If you could download the app and turn on notifications, it'll really help us. And if it's within your means to support us, click the red button and support us. You re not going to want to miss this! In this video, you re going to see the future. You'll have heard that it's possible that Hamas used US-made arms to conduct these horrific attacks. The most powerful nation in the history, not only in the world, but also in history of the history of history. We can take care of both of these and still maintain a variety of options at the same time, a kind of hyperbole that's needed at a moment where there's a lack of language that's not only appropriate, but that's the kind of language we need to be using to describe the moment. We're the United States of America, for the sake of peace and security. And we're the only country that has the capacity to do so, and we can do it. In a time where we have to be cautious about the way we talk about it, because it's not just about war, but about peace, and it's about peace and understanding it, too. . We can be a lot of things, not just war, it's important to be careful about what we say, right? we can be the best we do it right, and that's a good thing and we have the ability to do it so we can have a good time, right not just in the words we use them in the context of history, and not just to be a good enough or not just a good day to be helpful but in the right way , right ? a good day, right , not just for the of the world day, right ? and it s important to remember that for the future
00:09:30.000If you're watching us on YouTube, we'll be there for a few minutes before being exclusively available on Rumble because obviously, this is a time where we have to be supported and we have to be incredibly cautious about the way we talk about an omni-crisis across the world where there is so much suffering, so much conflict, so much doubt.
00:09:49.000We have to be very, very specific about what we say, and your support is absolutely invaluable to us.
00:09:55.000We're talking, of course, about the ongoing crisis in the Middle East and America's potential role in arming the world.
00:10:03.00050% or 57% of the world's autocratic nations have been sold arms by the American military-industrial complex.
00:10:09.000Additionally, we're talking to Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, about how Wikipedia Exemplifies the trend towards censorship from open source and collaboratively achieved information.
00:10:22.000So we'll be with you for about 15 minutes.
00:10:23.000If you could download the app and turn on notifications, it'll really, really help us.
00:10:28.000And if it's within your means to support us, click the red button and support us.
00:10:32.000The question The question that we want to really put to you is, as
00:10:35.000support for the Russia-Ukraine conflict appears to be waning, do you agree with that?
00:11:36.000Paul Tudor Jones, the famed investor, was on CNBC this week and he said, this is the most threatening and challenging geopolitical environment that I've ever seen.
00:11:44.000At the same time, the US is in its weakest fiscal position since World War II, with debt to GDP at 122%.
00:11:51.000Can America, can the West afford another war at this time?
00:12:01.000America can certainly afford to stand with Israel and to support Israel's military needs.
00:12:09.000And we also can and must support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia.
00:12:16.000It's clear there that the two issues are being conflated and there's an invitation to put the funding for both of those conflicts into one mental space.
00:12:25.000If you look into how Janet Yellen is herself funded, you might question whose interests she's representing when she speaks there.
00:12:33.000Let's have a look at what Joe Biden recently said when asked about these escalating conflicts, and in particular when it comes to combining aid packages.
00:12:45.000He's very curious what's happening right now.
00:13:04.000Can't just say the name of the country again when there are wars all over the world that are escalating.
00:13:09.000And as we will show later, many of the arms that are being used in these conflicts are potentially provided by the United States of America.
00:13:17.000Put simply, the United States of America are unable to properly trace where weapons that are sent off in aid packages are ending up.
00:13:25.000You'll have heard that it's possible that Hamas used US-made arms to conduct those horrific attacks.
00:13:32.000The most powerful nation in the history, not in the world, in the history of the world.
00:14:06.000Is it bringing about a peaceful solution?
00:14:08.000Is it advancing the interests of Ukrainian people?
00:14:11.000Is it Attending to the humanitarian crisis that's evidently unfolding there.
00:14:16.000And is it wise to conflate these two conflicts that potentially are quite different?
00:14:21.000Let me know in the chat what you think.
00:14:23.000Also, we're drawing a vowel somewhat over American domestic interest.
00:14:27.000Research published in the Journal of American Medical Association showed that poverty is the fourth leading cause of death in the United States and was linked to at least 183,000 deaths in one year.
00:14:35.00083,000 deaths in one year. I'm not sure if that's death from poverty or death with poverty.
00:14:41.000Sometimes people get confused about those things. Also, this conflict is being used
00:14:46.000or this set of conflicts are being used, as you know, as all crisis are being used to
00:14:50.000shut down dissent and communication. Donald Trump has been issued a gag order by the federal
00:14:55.000judge overseeing the criminal case over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020
00:14:59.000election prohibiting him from making public statements attacking prosecutors. Now, I know
00:15:03.000that's a tangent or issue, but have you noticed generally speaking that it's becoming harder
00:15:12.000We're also following news out of federal court here in Washington, D.C.
00:15:17.000The judge overseeing former President Trump's federal election interference case partially granted the government's request for a gag order actually restricting the former president from making disparaging statements relating to this case.
00:15:31.000Today a judge put on a gag order I'll be the only politician in history that runs with a gag order where I'm not allowed to criticize.
00:15:39.000What is this book that is for sale here?
00:16:54.000Again, sort of a communicative skill set that is going to be effective in a climate of hyperbole, bombast, disingenuity, dishonest reporting, lack of institutional trust.
00:17:07.000It's like the lessons are not being learned of how effective Donald
00:17:11.000Trump is as a communicator because of his willingness to say things that when Donald Trump says, you
00:17:18.000know, I know how these tax loopholes work, I use them when he uses language that is anomalous
00:17:23.000that stands out, it functions as a kind of valve, I suppose. Let me know in the chat in the
00:17:28.000comments. I know loads of you love Donald Trump anyway, but it's very interesting to see that one of the
00:17:34.000techniques to control Donald Trump is to stop him communicating altogether and you can see why
00:17:39.000because he's sort of amusing when standing at some sort of barn dance. But Al Capone, if you looked at
00:17:45.000him in the wrong way, if he didn't like you, you looked at him a little bit askance, he blew your
00:18:57.000Let's have a look at this tendency now, or at least a report that suggests a tendency to regulate cryptocurrency because it's being used to support Hamas.
00:19:08.000and around the world have identified a revenue source being exploited by Hamas, online donors offering support in cryptocurrency.
00:19:15.000Now, even before Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, U.S.
00:19:19.000officials had been probing the group's use of cryptocurrency through alleged money launderers.
00:19:24.000Hamas's use of digital currency represents just one of the many ways the terrorist organization has sought to raise funds while evading sanctions.
00:19:31.000Hamas and other terrorist groups have used Facebook and X to publicly post their crypto wallet addresses asking for donations.
00:19:40.000So the story that's being told is that cryptocurrency can and they say is being used to fund Hamas.
00:19:47.000The story that's not being told is that the military-industrial complex's profligate supply of weapons to unregulated potential bad actors means it's likely that weapons are ending up in the hands of opponents.
00:20:02.000In a sense, what's happening is a perpetuation of crisis where you have to fund aid, the
00:20:07.000weapons themselves that are being used to escalate the conflict are coming from potential
00:20:22.000Oh, well, we should censor this information on Facebook, shouldn't we?
00:20:25.000I mean, you don't want Hamas being armed, do you?
00:20:27.000No, but if you don't want Hamas being armed, perhaps also be very careful about the sales
00:20:32.000of weapons around the world to autocracies.
00:20:35.000This kind of hysteria is also leaking into stories that perhaps don't warrant it in a
00:20:41.000global climate that's so fraught with obvious tension.
00:20:44.000It's like the media has escalated to a point of hysteria where they now are unable to discern terrifying stories, and God knows there's enough of them and I pray to God that they end, to sort of human interest stories or stories that are a little bit disgusting but are not An invasion of a foreign enemy.
00:21:34.000Videos like these causing sleepless nights with reports of the blood-sucking parasites on... Might as well be Putin at this point.
00:21:41.000...buses and trains, inside movie theatres and hotels.
00:21:44.000That is just becoming an issue for the Parisians in our daily life.
00:21:49.000Paris is a global destination with millions visiting from across the world for events like Fashion Week last month.
00:21:56.000Concerns travellers can take the bugs home.
00:21:59.000While it's a national crisis in France, the tiny... National crisis compared to what's going on in the actual world.
00:22:06.000You might have to scratch a little bit at bedtime and there's potential that a bed bug could sneak away back to your home nation in your cuff.
00:22:14.000Bloodsuckers are a problem across the world, in American cities from Chicago to New York, and recently in Arizona, where exterminators found massive infestations with thousands of bugs.
00:22:25.000According to the CDC, bed bugs are known to hide, tucking into seams of suitcases, folded clothes, bedding and furniture.
00:22:33.000I attribute intent to the bedbugs now.
00:24:16.000It seems that there's a sort of a broad trend towards reporting on issues from a perspective of hysteria and terror.
00:24:24.000Whether or not it's cryptocurrencies being reported on in a way that legitimizes their censure, or bundling together numerous complicated and distinct issues in order to perpetuate, I would argue, the agenda of the military-industrial complex.
00:24:40.000You can see how what the legacy media does is Amplifies the intentions of the powerful.
00:24:44.000And sometimes by looking at a ridiculous story like the bed bugs it becomes sort of clear what the template is.
00:24:49.000Let me know in the chat if you saw that.
00:24:51.000Remember if you want to support us, support us now.
00:24:57.000This story now is an analysis of whether or not it's possible that Hamas used American-made weapons to undertake their recent attacks on Israel.
00:25:07.000The reason that we have to even consider this is because of the irresponsible way that the military-industrial complex has exploited various global conflicts and not paid
00:25:17.000attention to its own analysis of what constitutes an autocratic nation when making weapons sales. Isn't it a really
00:25:25.000interesting story? Listen to what Joe Biden says on one hand about
00:25:31.000that oughtn't be trusted and potential enemies on the global stage and
00:25:35.000America's role as peacekeepers across the world and America's escalating
00:25:39.000sales of weapons actions that have previously been condemned. This is
00:25:43.000another example of hypocrisy, another example of propaganda and another
00:25:46.000example of putting elite establishment interests ahead of literally global
00:25:51.000safety. Here's the news, no here's the effing news.
00:25:59.000Joe Biden rightly judges Hamas's attacks of Israel as sheer evil.
00:26:06.000If, as some have claimed, those weapons turn out to be American-made, which wouldn't be surprising as the American military-industrial complex provides more weapons to the world than anyone else, what would that make Joe Biden?
00:26:22.000Let's talk today about the potential that some of the weapons used by Hamas for their attack on Israel were American-made.
00:26:30.000It's clear that America arms nations that it regards as autocracies, as undemocratic countries, and to a degree, as enemies of freedom and liberty, and even the experiment of democracy itself.
00:26:42.000Notably, and most obviously, Saudi Arabia, who Joe Biden said he would make a pariah.
00:26:47.000Make them, in fact, the pariah that they are.
00:26:50.000And then continue to provide weapons to even more than Donald Trump, who he condemned for providing weapons to Saudi Arabia prior to his own election.
00:26:59.000Some are saying also that potentially weapons from Afghanistan ended up in the hands of various terrorist groups around the world.
00:27:06.000So in the wake and in the light of these appalling attacks, this incredibly awful, challenging, disruptive, heartbreaking time, Let's look at who is exploiting this situation, who is benefiting from this situation, and potentially even who caused it.
00:27:26.000President Biden condemned the attacks by Hamas, which he revealed killed at least 14 American citizens.
00:27:32.000Comparing him to the worst rampages of ISIS.
00:27:35.000With the fighting ongoing, the president huddled with his national security team this morning and held his third phone call since the conflict began with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, offering more military support, including precision-guided munitions for fighter jets.
00:27:49.000The first shipment of supplies landed this evening.
00:27:52.000The president today issued this warning.
00:27:55.000Anyone thinking of taking advantage of this situation, I have one word.
00:28:02.000How do we put Joe Biden's clear speech into a context that includes reversing their original position on providing arms to Saudi Arabia and the potential that Iran have access to weapons that were made by America and have fallen into what we might describe as the wrong hands?
00:28:20.000Let's have a look at the complexity behind it and As ever, when discussing the situation, we remain committed to respecting those of you that are directly involved, either ideologically, emotionally, nationally, religiously, and focus our attention instead on the causes and conditions
00:28:40.000And how we got into this position and who's exploited it.
00:28:43.000We've already talked about people in Congress investing in weapons.
00:28:46.000Now we're going to discuss how these weapons are in the hands of terrorists, autocracies and groups that are plainly capable of committing acts of evil.
00:28:54.000Are you sure that you want to run again?
00:29:20.000Imagine what happens if we in fact unite all of Europe and Putin is finally put down where he cannot cause the kind of trouble he's been causing.
00:29:31.000It's an interesting exercise to imagine those things, but it's unlikely to happen without considerable amendment of policy, and in particular, arms policy and the proliferation of arms around the world.
00:29:45.000Let's have a look at what Joe Biden's administration does and how that compares to what he says, because this is a complicated issue with very high tensions and polarised emotions throughout the conversation.
00:29:58.000Let us focus our attention on people in positions of power and powerful institutions that are able to direct the global agenda and how there's a disparity between what they're saying publicly about creating peace and what they're doing actually when it comes to proliferating arms and creating more tensions, more geopolitical tensions and more military opportunity, particularly for organizations that may use that power in the most nefarious way imaginable.
00:30:26.000Several reports suggest US-built weapons are being used by Hamas that are supplied from Afghanistan by the Taliban.
00:30:32.000In 2021, the US ended its operations in Afghanistan and left a stockpile of weapons that were taken by the Taliban after it took control of the country.
00:30:41.000It's also being investigated whether some of the weapons that the US sent to Ukraine have also ended up in terrorist hands.
00:30:46.000It's a theory that many people are familiar with, that Mexican drug cartels peculiarly ended up with some of the missiles that were intended for use in Ukraine.
00:30:57.000Makes you think that this isn't being monitored correctly and strange things taking place between aid packages to nations in conflict and the delivery of those weapon systems.
00:31:10.000Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson alleges that Hamas is using weapons supplied by the United States to attack Israel.
00:31:16.000That's very difficult to even consider, but this is what's being claimed.
00:31:20.000The former intelligence operative suggests that it's highly likely these weapons were diverted from US supplies intended for Ukraine, Afghanistan or the Palestinian Authority.
00:31:29.000We would be less inclined to consider that possibility if we didn't know that the United States military-industrial complex has a long history of providing arms to organizations that by its own judgment oughtn't be trusted and behave autocratically, undemocratically, and sometimes they declare them to be evil.
00:31:47.000Let's just take the example of Saudi Arabia.
00:31:49.000I've never said Saudi Arabia are a pariah and should be cut off, but Joe Biden did say that and then escalated the amount of arms sold to that nation.
00:31:56.000There are early reports that there are other nation states that are involved in this conflict.
00:32:01.000At these tentative early stages, I'd certainly myself advise circumspection, but people are saying that Iran are potentially involved, and certainly this mentality of providing the world with arms, providing nations and organisations with arms, even if not directly, and sometimes the way that this is accounted for, verified and tracked, is really dubious and opaque, is creating a more hostile and dangerous world more broadly.
00:32:23.000I'm also continuing to push to stop funding the war in Ukraine and push those countries to peace.
00:32:30.000And now with what's happening in Israel, we're looking at a whole different situation.
00:32:34.000I want to track the serial numbers of the weapons that Hamas is using against Israel, and I want to know if they came from Afghanistan or if they came from weapons that we provided to Ukraine.
00:32:45.000So these are answers that I want from whoever's running for Speaker.
00:32:49.000That claim being made by Marjorie Taylor Greene, who some of you will like and some of you won't like, but there's now some consistency to this claim, which of course is being politicised domestically, as all such crises and matters generally are these days.
00:33:03.000Let's look in a little more detail about the American military-industrial complex's activities globally and the kind of arms relationships that already exist, and whether or not they're responsible and potentially very, very dangerous.
00:33:14.000The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's annual analysis of the global arms trade showed the United States was the number one weapons exporter by a large margin.
00:33:24.000The United States accounted for 39% of major arms deliveries worldwide, over twice what Russia, oh those bastards, transferred, and nearly 10 times what China sent, those bastards, to its weapons clients.
00:33:35.000So remember that Russia and China are continually portrayed as aggressors in the American legacy media, but when it comes to the blunt fact of selling arms around the world, in some cases, in a significant number of cases, to autocracies, no one surpasses the American military-industrial complex.
00:33:52.000And remember what I'm offering you is this isn't America, like the nation of Jimi Hendrix and the hot dog, We're talking about elite interests that are transcendent of your national identity.
00:34:02.000In addition, the United States has far more customers.
00:34:04.000103 nations are more than half of the member states of the United Nations.
00:34:08.000In a sense, the military-industrial complex requires ongoing war.
00:34:12.000This is outside of the current conflict.
00:34:14.000In fact, Both of the conflicts that are defining the world right now, Israel, Hamas and Russia, Ukraine, across the world, weapons are being sold.
00:35:16.000And indeed, that is the sort of thing they say, but it isn't what they do.
00:35:19.000The reality, however, is that the Biden administration has helped increase the military power of
00:35:23.000a large number of authoritarian countries.
00:35:25.000According to an Interceptor review of recently released government data, the US sold weapons to at least 57% of the world's autocratic countries in 2022.
00:35:33.000So on one hand, they're calling them autocratic Dictatorships or regimes that are not in alignment with global peace edicts.
00:35:40.000And on the other hand, they're providing them with weapons.
00:35:43.000Both of those things shouldn't be true.
00:35:45.000And if they are, that's hypocrisy, isn't it?
00:35:46.000To judge something to be an autocracy or a bad actor on the world stage and then continue to sell them arms, probably with a good degree of knowledge that those arms may end up in the hands of enemies of certain ideologies or could be used against civilian populations.
00:36:00.000So Larry Johnson's claim that Hamas could have been using America-made weapons seems plausible and even if it doesn't prove to be the case in this instance you can see how a economic model of this nature means that it's likely that weapons will end up in the hands of people that will misuse them and that's like to Apart for a moment from the reality that the only function of weapons is to cause harm and ultimately they're going to end up being used in that way by somebody and if you're selling them to autocratic nations then surely it's exponentially increased.
00:36:28.000The fact that weapons intended for Ukraine in what is framed as a moral crusade against Russia ended up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels shows you sort of how bizarre and tangential the roots of these weapons can be.
00:36:41.000And it also shows you that Stopping that doesn't seem to be a priority of the military-industrial complex because they get to replenish stockpiles.
00:36:50.000It requires the world to be a dangerous place.
00:36:52.000In fact, if you were cynical, you might say that they benefit from terrorist organisations having access to arms because then you can legitimately sell arms to favoured nations that you determine to be democracies.
00:37:04.000Again, I'm not talking specifically about this instance with all of its complexity and its horror and legitimate grievances.
00:37:11.000I'm talking about an economic model that likely facilitates more terror, more war, more death, more money for the most powerful interests in the world.
00:37:31.000Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners have transferred American-made weapons to al-Qaeda-linked fighters, hardline Salafi militias, and other factions waging war in Yemen in violation of their agreements with the United States, a CNN investigation has found.
00:37:45.000Well, we're going to put a clause in to this arms deal saying, don't give it to terrorists.
00:38:01.000The weapons have also made their way into the hands of Iranian-backed rebels battling the coalition for control of the country, exposing some of America's sensitive military technology to Tehran and potentially endangering the lives of US troops in other conflict zones.
00:38:13.000The rhetoric around the American military Necessarily, and in my view quite rightly, remains one of heroism.
00:38:23.000Well, who's really putting the troops in danger?
00:38:25.000If you are doing arms deals that you know could lead to bad actors having access to weapons, and then you put American troops into those, who's really creating the problem?
00:38:41.000Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been the biggest weapons dealer, accounting for 40% of all arms sales in any given year.
00:38:48.000When we consider a fact like that, it shows us, doesn't it, that you can't have the military-industrial complex without that level of business.
00:38:56.000So in spite of Joe Biden turning up on your TV set saying, give us another four years and this time I'll really commit to peace and really do the things I said I'd do last time, He can't, can he?
00:39:06.000Because when the weapons industry spends billions per year lobbying and has more lobbyists than there are people in Congress, how is it possible, how is it even conceivable within this model that the proliferation of arms would ever stop?
00:39:20.000How are the calculations going to be like, oh, this is an autocracy that we don't agree with, yeah, but look at the profit.
00:39:25.000Oh no, it's ended up in the hands of terrorists.
00:39:27.000Well, we'll have to send troops over there and replenish our own stockpiles.
00:39:30.000And now we'll have to sell arms to these other nations in that region.
00:39:33.000Can you see that that kind of works as a business model?
00:39:37.000In general, these exports are funded through grants or sales.
00:39:40.000There are two pathways for the latter category, foreign military sales and direct commercial sales.
00:39:44.000The US government acts as an intermediary for foreign military sales, or FMS, acquisitions.
00:39:50.000It buys the material from a company first and then delivers the goods to the foreign recipient.
00:39:54.000So they actually are integrally involved.
00:39:56.000It's not just like that company's in America registered there for tax purposes.
00:40:00.000That probably wouldn't bear too much scrutiny, I bet.
00:40:02.000The American government takes responsibility for the delivery.
00:40:06.000DCS, Defence Collaboration Services, acquisitions are more straightforward.
00:40:10.000They're the result of an agreement between a US company and a foreign government.
00:40:13.000Both categories of sales require the government's approval.
00:40:16.000So actually, the government are in a position to prevent sales to states it deems unfavourable.
00:40:22.000And if there are no states that it deems unfavourable, or at least very few, then perhaps they should just drop that category and say out loud, we're a business.
00:41:03.000There are six stunning designs including this, a sticker of my own head.
00:41:07.000They're only available in this pack and they're all made with Sticker Mule's magic touch.
00:41:12.000Sticker Mule has 10,000 of these packs.
00:41:14.000Of the 84 countries codified as autocracies under the regimes of the world system in 2022, the United States sold weapons to at least 48 or 57% of them.
00:41:23.000The United States sold weapons to at least 48 or 57% of them. The at least qualifier
00:41:34.000is necessary because several factors frustrate the accurate tracking of US weapons sales.
00:41:38.000The State Department's report of commercial arms sales during the fiscal year makes prodigious
00:41:42.000use of various in its recipients category.
00:41:45.000As a result, the specific recipients for nearly $11 billion in weapons sales are not disclosed.
00:41:51.000So over 10% of those weapons sales are disclosed only as VARIOUS.
00:41:56.000You'd think that something as important and significant and potentially dangerous as the sale of weapons to autocracies shouldn't be listed as various.
00:42:04.000I'd like to know exactly where you sold this.
00:42:23.000We're pretty sure he just bought them to stockpile them to prevent them being misused.
00:42:27.000There's going to be nations that if you knew about it, and if it was written down in inventories, you go, you shouldn't sell weapons to them.
00:42:32.000It's not going to be that those weapons were a surprise for your birthday party and you ruined it, is it?
00:42:38.000These findings contradict Biden's preferred framing of international politics as fundamentally a struggle in which the world's democracies, led by the United States, are on the side of peace and security, as he called it in last year's State of the Union address.
00:42:50.000Imagine, he said, just then, we watched him say, imagine if I had a bit more time and I could get peace in Russia and Ukraine, I could get peace in the Middle East.
00:42:56.000Well, let's just take Russia and Ukraine.
00:42:58.000what's being done there to bring about peace other than escalating tension
00:43:02.000through the provision of arms, incendiary and reductive rhetoric, exploiting that
00:43:07.000situation plainly for military-industrial complex partners, not
00:43:10.000acknowledging the role played by the United States, NATO and other US
00:43:14.000affiliated interests in the creation of that conflict going way back but notably
00:43:18.000in 2014. So it's very difficult to imagine that that is what they're going to do.
00:43:22.000It's much easier to imagine that whatever happens, Joe Biden is essentially a puppet of deep state and corporate globalist interest, will continue to facilitate a political trajectory which is profitable without due consideration to the havoc, harm, mayhem and suffering that those decisions wreak upon the people of the earth.
00:43:40.000Opposing the United States and its democratic allies are the autocracies that collude to undermine the international system, Biden has stated.
00:43:46.000That's the simple narrative we're offered.
00:43:49.000There's the United States and we're just trying to help everyone by selling weapons, mostly.
00:43:53.000And then there's all these baddies that are just over there using weapons.
00:44:46.000If the answer is yes, then that will at least tell us something about whose interests are served and how this situation is being exploited.
00:44:52.000Former President Donald Trump based his arms sales policy primarily on economic considerations, corporate interests above all else.
00:44:59.000In his first foreign trip as president, he travelled to Saudi Arabia and announced a major arms deal with the repressive kingdom.
00:45:05.000Trump's business first approach resulted in a dramatic upturn of weapons sales during his administration.
00:45:09.000Now you'd imagine That people that don't like, oppose, vilify and loathe Donald Trump will say, aha, there's the evidence.
00:45:16.000Donald Trump is uniquely bad among presidents and political figures.
00:45:21.000Look at the way he went and sold arms to Saudi Arabia.
00:45:24.000However, in Biden's first full fiscal year as president, weapons sales from the United States to other countries reached $206 billion.
00:45:31.000Biden's first year total surpasses the Trump era high of $192 billion.
00:45:36.000The multi-billion dollar effort to train and equip Ukraine doesn't fully explain the dramatic rise in total arms sales last year, let alone to autocracies.
00:45:45.000Russia's invasion of Ukraine didn't occur until five months into fiscal year 2022, and much of the assistance from the United States to Ukraine took the form of grants, not sales, and the transfer of material from Pentagon stockpiles through the Presidential Drawdown Authority.
00:45:59.000So there are almost difficult-to-trace weapon sales going on.
00:46:03.000exponentially higher under Biden than under Trump, who was condemned for his business-first approach.
00:46:09.000Rather, the new figures reveal the continuity between Republican and Democratic administrations.
00:46:13.000While Biden signalled early on that his arms sales policy would be based primarily on strategic and human rights considerations, not just economic interests, he broke from that policy not too long after entering office by approving weapons sales to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other authoritarian regimes.
00:46:29.000So there you are, observably a distinction between the rhetoric and the declared ideology and the conduct while in office.
00:46:36.000And that's important and it's informative.
00:46:38.000Is this in part why you are despairing of American institutionalised political life as reported on by the legacy media?
00:46:45.000That you can have Joe Biden saying, I'm going to be the opposite of Donald Trump.
00:46:49.000Then coming into office, and with regard to arms sales in particular, increasing the arms sales, or the wall, building the wall anyway.
00:47:09.000How can you remain enthusiastic about, oh, the Democrat party, what they're going to do is this, It shows you that they just say what they need to say, then do what they're going to do.
00:47:18.000And I think when you have that information, in addition to the information about the arms sales in particular, you're able to intuit and discern what their real agenda will be when it comes to any global conflict.
00:47:29.000Are they interested in humanitarianism, justice, morality, democracy, civilization?
00:47:34.000How then do we square that with the economic deals that have been made?
00:47:37.000If those things are true, and I pray, I pray to you Lord, that those things are true, then why the arms sales to autocracies?
00:47:44.000Why the peculiar listings of where those arms sales have gone?
00:47:53.000How come 51 members of Congress And their spouses own defense contractor stocks.
00:47:59.000Even Marjorie Taylor Greene, I have to say, purchased stock in Lockheed Martin two days before Russia invaded Ukraine.
00:48:04.000Weapons makers have spent $2.5 billion on lobbying over the past two decades, employing on average over 700 lobbyists per year over the last five years.
00:48:13.000That's more than one for every member of Congress.
00:48:16.000Doesn't this point to a system that requires war?
00:48:18.000Doesn't this point to a military-industrial complex that has been irresponsibly providing arms wherever arms were required, not even providing in some cases the ability to track and measure where those weapons are ending up?
00:49:06.000Click the link in the description now if you're watching this anywhere other than Rumble and download the Rumble app if your device will allow it so you will know every time we make content because we're looking at another significant issue right now.
00:49:19.000We're observing the way that censorship has increased, how the internet itself has changed from a potential place of communication, revolution, decentralization and democracy into a dystopia of censorship and surveillance.
00:49:34.000We'll be talking to Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, president of the Knowledge Standards Foundation.
00:49:40.000But in order to participate in that, you've got to join us over on Rumble.
00:49:45.000If you're here on Rumble, thank you for joining us.
00:49:47.000Remember, become an Awakened Wonder, then you get access to our additional content where we talk about Off-grid communities, where we talk about cryptocurrencies, where we talk about solutions to the problems we talk about here every day.
00:50:04.000Larry, thank you so much for joining us today.
00:50:07.000You must have started Wikipedia as, I'm imagining, a fresh-faced idealist, full of potential and possibility, believing that Wikipedia would become an open source of knowledge collaboration, perhaps creating a consensus around a variety of complex topics.
00:50:24.000Can you tell me how Wikipedia changed from the vision you originally had to it and how it can be used as a kind of thermometer for a changing global climate when it comes to establishment intervention, You ask a very big question.
00:50:43.000So let's just take the first one, then, basically, how it changed.
00:50:49.000You know, when it started, there was a very robust neutrality policy.
00:50:57.000Many different points of view needed to be able to be stated, and they were, actually, in the first several years.
00:51:05.000I mean, it was already starting to lean left because that's how most of the contributors were, but still, they made a real effort.
00:51:13.000And over the next 10 years, and really solidifying by about 2015, The left had continued its march through the institutions.
00:51:25.000One of them, now one of the dominant institutions of big tech, is Wikipedia itself.
00:51:32.000And so by 2015, it It's shared in the same sort of outright bias that you see in the mainstream news media.
00:51:51.000So they wear their bias on their sleeve, and they have for the last several years.
00:51:58.000And this is particularly clear For any of the issues that we like to refer to as the narrative or whatever the current thing is.
00:52:13.000So as I say, around like maybe 2016 when the Brexit debate was happening and Donald Trump's first election, that I think is what really made the switch for the major news media.
00:52:28.000and I think that at the same time is what kicked the bias of Wikipedia into high gear.
00:52:36.000So I could say a lot more but... I have a bunch of questions based on what you've already said.
00:52:42.000With social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, now X, it's understood that these sites can be used to form consensus through communication and we're aware as a result of the Twitter files that deep state agencies were sort of embedded within Twitter.
00:52:58.000Certainly they were spending money, they were directing content, they were Pre-emptively asking for certain types of content, even true information to be suppressed.
00:53:06.000Most of our audience will be familiar with those practices now.
00:53:09.000But when it comes to those social media sites, they're communicative tools that create a consensus around news.
00:53:16.000Wikipedia is a different type of resource.
00:53:18.000It's not a social media platform, or is in fact the only one of the top five that isn't, I suppose, other than Google, which encompasses different types of social media sites, I suppose.
00:53:27.000So can you tell us, what is the distinction, and post Brexit and Trump, how did you see that neutrality being impeded upon?
00:53:35.000Was it because of intervention of deep state agencies?
00:53:40.000And can you give us a couple of examples of topics that were previously been collaboratively and somewhat objectively conveyed, becoming more biased and clearly subject to, as you say, a particular narrative?
00:53:54.000I have cited a number of examples in a series of blog posts.
00:54:02.000And it's hard to pick one, especially because after I make these blog posts, they'll go to the articles and try to clean them up to some extent.
00:54:13.000So they're not quite as embarrassing to them.
00:54:17.000But you ask a very interesting question.
00:54:21.000Basically, What is the difference between the techniques used for information control by Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, whatever, and on the one hand, and Wikipedia on the other?
00:54:43.000Well, I think the difference is for X or Facebook, They are literally throttling the views that they don't want people to share.
00:54:56.000I myself, I used to have a blue check, but I now have less traffic than I had before I had a blue, before I got my
00:55:09.000blue check on my posts, and this back in 2019. And so it's
00:55:18.000Now, on Wikipedia, on the other hand, it's actually much more straightforward.
00:55:23.000They simply don't allow certain points of view to be introduced.
00:55:30.000Now, from the outsider, or even people who are working and not even thinking about what's going on behind the scenes, It's what it looks like is just a bunch of random people who are anonymous, mostly, debating on what's called the talk page of Wikipedia, negotiating about what the article will be, and just a whole bunch of people who are really, really left wing or really, really, because it isn't necessarily the left, right?
00:56:11.000And they are all, you know, pushing a certain point of view.
00:56:15.000And if you try to give voice to any sort of, you know, skepticism about the jab, just for example, then they will shut you down and block you.
00:56:31.000But I think what's going on is that Any number of prominent players in the media landscape, and by that I mean not just, you know, I'm not talking about the, you know, network anchors or anything like that.
00:56:52.000I'm just talking about whoever is influencing the media, whoever cares, and that includes especially like PR firms, and quite frankly, A variety of government agencies that make it their business to direct these things, as we have learned in the last couple of years, especially in the Twitter files, right?
00:57:15.000I hope your viewership is aware of the Twitter files.
00:57:23.000We've had Matt Taibbi, Michael Schellenberger, Barry Weiss, David Zweig, all of these people come on our show and very much inform our perspective on how deep state agencies and corporate interests have co-opted big tech, how there's been a sort of formation of new elites, how the online space essentially could be conceived as a new Territory opening up, much like the discovery of what was somewhat dismissively regarded as the New World, which was subsequently being colonized by various sets of interests.
00:57:59.000The once organic space that afforded the advent of Napster and the changes that that created, or the Arab Spring, has necessarily become co-opted and controlled in the same way that We would have assumed, and continue to assume, that legacy media outlets like the BBC, CNN, ultimately see independent media now as their competitors rather than one another.
00:58:26.000We understand that there is an agenda, that the function of the legacy media is to amplify the agenda of the powerful and normalise the agenda of the powerful, and they increasingly are encroaching on the spaces that afforded actual dissent, independent thinking, independent conversation, their publishing of counter narratives.
00:58:49.000I suppose what's interesting about Wikipedia is because it was so successful and effective, it became the de facto resource for everybody from schoolchildren to, well, let's face it, media, like new media, like we look at Wikipedia, Still.
00:59:03.000And I suppose there's a difference from looking at, like, Henry VIII and, like, I know, was he six?
00:59:23.000But if you can't say, why were Pfizer afforded an indemnity agreement?
00:59:29.000Why are they not publishing those results for 75 years?
00:59:32.000What is the relationship between vaccine injury and myocarditis?
00:59:36.000How effective and what clinical trials were conducted?
00:59:38.000For children and pregnant women, what are the studies that suggest that breastfeeding women can safely take the vaccine?
00:59:46.000That is precisely where you're saying there will not be open conversation and again the coronavirus pandemic is more a lens rather than a unique, whilst it was unique in many ways, I primarily myself have started to regard it as a Opportunity to see how institutions and power always function.
01:00:04.000Where do their interests converge and how are they trying to establish new elites?
01:00:09.000Now, recently, Larry, perhaps we had on the show Dr Robert Epstein.
01:00:13.000You've maybe heard of him and the studies he does of Google activity and how new and how reality is ultimately curated, cultivated and imposed through Google's ability to manipulate, ultimately, news feeds, I suppose.
01:00:27.000Now, is it true that Google makes significant donations to Wikipedia, and as a result, are able to manage and control the reality?
01:00:36.000Because I suppose the way I see Wikipedia, you know, it's a pretty simple and obvious metaphor, I suppose, or at least analogy, is like, it's like a library.
01:00:44.000And if you have control over what's in that library and what's not in that library, you control the knowledge base itself.
01:00:52.000You are able to, that's why we live in this siloed and bifurcated cultural space, is because half of the world are not gaining access to any counter-narratives.
01:01:02.000They're receiving hyperbole and bombast and consuming it as facts.
01:01:05.000In particular, what is the relationship between Google and Wikipedia?
01:01:10.000And is it true that there are paid consultants managing Wikipedia?
01:01:15.000And so how is it ultimately that financial interests are managing the information you see in Wikipedia?
01:01:24.000Well, I think Google has contributed to Wikipedia in a couple of different ways that are really important.
01:01:32.000They have given millions of dollars, but Wikipedia gets, you know, tens of millions of dollars per year now in donations from various sources.
01:01:45.000I'm not sure that a really significant amount of that comes from Google, but it doesn't matter because Google's main contribution by far is the massive amount of traffic that they send to Wikipedia.
01:02:04.000And there is, you know, what internet theorists have called for a long time, the long tail of topics.
01:02:14.000And Wikipedia, if you want to look up an article about, I was looking at this Civil War general, Sylvester Morris, or something like that.
01:02:27.000And there's only one encyclopedia article about this Civil War figure, and it's from Wikipedia.
01:02:38.000You won't find a separate standalone article about that guy.
01:02:43.000And there's literally millions of topics like that, Wikipedia, that Wikipedia has the only article about.
01:02:50.000So I noticed back in the beginning, back in the day, how each month, because it happened on a monthly basis,
01:02:59.000the Google bot would come through and it would spider new set of articles,
01:03:08.000and we'd get a new influx of traffic and a new influx of editors as a result.
01:03:18.000And that pattern continued on for years and years.
01:03:23.000So, as a friend of mine likes to put it, Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that Google built.
01:03:33.000And I think there's something to that.
01:04:53.000There are a lot of other encyclopedias, and if you do search for encyclopedia articles on any topic, Even Google will still give you articles from other encyclopedias.
01:05:10.000Wikipedia is usually the first result, right?
01:05:14.000But if there are more, and especially if people are going to other sites more, Wikipedia, I think, will not be pushed as heavily by Google and other sources.
01:05:28.000So there's a couple of things that we need to do.
01:05:30.000I talked about the long tail of articles.
01:05:34.000All of you people out there need to start writing encyclopedia articles, and you need to start putting them on your blogs.
01:05:40.000And I mean about like that Civil War general, the long tail.
01:05:44.000There are a lot of specialized topics that you have knowledge about that other people don't know things about.
01:05:51.000You should be writing encyclopedia articles about them, And putting them on your blogs, and you will, and we actually have, so when I say we, I mean the Knowledge Standards Foundation, we have a plugin for WordPress that will allow you to push an article that is only on your blog to the Encyclosphere.
01:06:12.000And what the Encyclosphere is, is a free collection of all the encyclopedias, or at least that's what it will be when we're finished collecting them all.
01:06:24.000We're going to be doubling that number soon.
01:06:29.000So Encycloreader and Encyclosearch, those are two different encyclopedia search engines and readers.
01:06:39.000You should be using those instead of Wikipedia if you want to look at Wikipedia.
01:06:44.000In fact, there's another thing that we do.
01:06:46.000We have a plugin for Chrome or Chrome-based web browsers like Brave, which is what I use.
01:06:56.000And if you do a search on any topic that is in the encyclosphere, which is most of them now, then it will come up with some search results above the Google results, if you're using Google or, I think, DuckDuckGo.
01:07:16.000And if you click on those results, or if you click on a Wikipedia result inside of the results, instead of going to Wikipedia, it will load the article directly in your browser.
01:09:53.000Also, it's very surprising to see that you're kind of a real-life neo, navigating the matrix, organizing renegades, Trying to create rebellion against centralised information.
01:10:08.000And in a way, Larry, it seems like you're reviving the spirit of the early internet, where there was this kind of utopian moment that everyone's collective knowledge could be shared, that communities that were geographically disparate but shared an interest could form.
01:10:26.000that actually the necessity for authoritarianism and centralisation is itself diminished by
01:10:33.000the ability for communities to come together around what might be regarded as niche issues.
01:10:39.000In a sense, the advent of this technology could be used to, in a way I suppose, enhance
01:10:47.000our anthropological origins as a tribalised but not necessarily oppositionist and conflict-strewn
01:10:56.000There was a time where there was true diversity, where we wouldn't expect people in Iceland to have the same culture as the people in Senegal, and we would glory in the truly distinct cultures around food and religion and ideology.
01:11:09.000And now there is this homogenizing force Masquerading as, like, we're interested in diversity.
01:11:18.000Even when people use the term, like, left, I think, well, is it about redistribution?
01:11:24.000Is it about the real support of various communities?
01:11:31.000I'm sure you're familiar with Martin Gurry's analysis that the terms left and right are becoming almost redundant as a new dynamic between Centralising authority, establishment authority and peripheral dissent is becoming the root.
01:11:45.000That's why there are these extraordinary alliances.
01:11:47.000That's why someone like me, I'm more inclined to think that Donald Trump is going to provide a solution than I would Joe Biden.
01:11:56.000Even though I think what's really needed is massive systemic change.
01:12:01.000And now those kind of things can be openly discussed.
01:12:05.000Even though what you're undertaking is a vast enterprise, it alludes to and infers an even greater possibility for decentralization.
01:12:14.000How significant do you think those principles are?
01:12:17.000And particularly what you said, unified but decentralized.
01:12:20.000Do you think that's something that could be mapped onto political ideals?
01:12:23.000Because plainly it's an ideal of yours.
01:12:26.000A real ideal is a principle, and principles can be applied almost universally.
01:12:38.000I remember I was once asked to speak to the intelligence community back in, like, 2008.
01:12:46.000And they were asking me, you know, would it be possible to create a wiki for intelligence?
01:12:59.000And that is actually kind of what you just said.
01:13:08.000It's immediately brought that to mind.
01:13:11.000In other words, there is something about the notion of trying to organize organic, naturally occurring behavior that militates against freedom, okay?
01:13:31.000So let me say this, though, before I try to attack your question in a different way.
01:13:45.000I think some of your viewers might be worried that by collecting all of the encyclopedias, unifying them, as I say, that we would then be giving them all a single neck to cut off.
01:14:13.000All right, is that there is a standard for encyclopedia articles now.
01:14:22.000We call it the ZWI or zipped wiki file format.
01:14:29.000So all of those encyclopedia articles that I described have been represented.
01:14:36.000They have been captured in the ZWE file format.
01:14:41.000And there's also a standard way of organizing the articles in a database so that different organizations that manage different aggregators of different collections of encyclopedias They can exchange articles via these files, all right?
01:15:06.000It is the fact that there is a technical standard that no one is in control of, that everyone sort of agrees to use organically, right?
01:15:19.000That is the thing that enables Freedom on the internet.
01:15:25.000The reason I'm going on this, I know it sounds very wonky, I know it sounds like irrelevant and and merely technical, but it's not.
01:15:35.000This is the core of the issue of internet freedom, and a lot of non-techies don't realize this, but I'm telling you, it's the thing that enables freedom and always has on the internet, the thing that made the internet free in the first place, were Standards, okay?
01:15:55.000And I mean technical standards, communications standards.
01:16:00.000And when there are standards, Well, that means that you actually have to build clients that connect with a network, which is necessarily amorphous and existing in many different places.
01:16:15.000And so, for example, we have two different aggregators started by two different programmers
01:16:24.000using two different programming languages, and they are exchanging their files between them.
01:16:53.000I'm not saying that blue sky is the answer.
01:16:56.000It probably isn't, and there are other things, but Blue Sky is an example of the sort of thing that I'm talking about.
01:17:03.000So Blue Sky on social media is this project that was started by the former CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey.
01:17:17.000It basically aims to enable people to host their own data, to host their own lists of followers and people they follow, so that you could actually own your own presence online and interface with others via standards.
01:17:45.000So even the Knowledge Standards Foundation has started a project like this, and I'm not saying that ours is the best solution either, but we use the RSS standard.
01:17:56.000We actually are built on top of the blogging network.
01:18:00.000And so it is actually a plugin for WordPress.
01:18:05.000That's the sort of thing that I'm talking about.
01:18:07.000In other words, if you really, really want decentralization online, and if you want to make that a reality, then you have to adopt standards, and you have to adopt free clients that are easy for grandma to install, that plug into those networks.
01:18:30.000If you just start creating alternate websites like Rumble, for example, that's just another... it's just another competing centralizing force.
01:18:41.000So, now, okay, to address your question about, you know, how Cognate concepts might be developed for Politics.
01:19:02.000I mean, I would think rather that we are taking pre-existing political concepts, self-determination, freedom, individual rights, and applying them to the sphere of tech.
01:20:16.000In other words, the technology policy matters a lot.
01:20:22.000I understand, Larry, what you're saying, and I can see where these ideas mesh together.
01:20:26.000Ultimately, there's a requirement for standards and principles, and that those have to be indefatigable, enshrined and clear.
01:20:34.000And when you start to culturally mess with ideas like freedom of speech, of free speech, Then you facilitate and now through technology are able to execute forms of previously unimaginable tyranny.
01:20:50.000So what you're saying is the principles that preceded online spaces have to be applied in them and there has to be a consensus around what they are and you've explained to us very lucidly and clearly what the Tissue is that connects these ideas, that there are ways to govern these spaces that are in alignment with values that we used to consider to be important.
01:21:13.000We still claim that we consider important, but everywhere we see them trespassed against.
01:21:21.000Is there, before we leave, what is the function of the Knowledge Standards Foundation?
01:21:27.000Is this something that's beyond what you're describing in terms of the aggregation of these various Encyclopedia, or is that part of that same deal?
01:21:38.000Well, we've got a lot of different things going.
01:21:43.000But yeah, the most important task that we have is to aggregate all of the encyclopedias, make them available via search engines and readers.
01:21:56.000But even that isn't as important as simply aggregating them, making all of the data available And then encouraging developers to build on top of that in order to, again, have a decentralized but unified collection of encyclopedias that together is greater than Wikipedia.
01:22:18.000Larry, thank you for being so clear about a subject that's very, very important and sometimes so vast it's difficult to contain without anchoring it to a simple principle like freedom.
01:22:29.000And the phrase, unified but decentralized, is one I'll remember for a long time.
01:22:47.000The name of the network is the Encyclosphere, so it's called encyclosphere.org, and there you will find links to EncycloSearch and EncycloReader and our other projects.
01:23:00.000Couldn't you think of a name that was more difficult to spell?
01:23:02.000Why don't you call it Encyclo-Sphinx Establishmentarialism?