On this episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand, host Russell Brand sits down with journalist Matt Taibbi to discuss a new series of documents uncovered by a whistleblower named Paul Holden. These documents were leaked by a group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which is dedicated to fighting against fake news, disinformation, and other forms of fake information spread by the establishment media and political establishment. They detail the group's strategy to delegitimize dissent within the Labour Party, and the tactics they use to silence journalists who challenge them. In this episode, Matt talks about the significance of these documents, and why they are so important for the American media to pay attention to them. Stay Free with Russell Brand wherever you get your podcasts. Remember, there's an episode every single day to educate and elevate our consciousness together. Stay Free, and enjoy the episode. [MUSIC PLAYING] Stay Free! - The Electric Surge Project, a production of Native Creative Podcasts by Native Creative Commons and the Electric Light Orchestra, created in partnership with Native Creative, Inc., and edited by Gabor Mate, and produced by Rachit Vellian, and brought to you in collaboration with the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, we hope you enjoy this episode and remember to share it with a friend or a loved one who needs a good night out there. - Thank you for listening to this episode. We really appreciate you, and want to bring you more content that elevates your consciousness and makes you feel better educated! - stay free, awake, awake! Stay free, and awake, and wake you up! . . . - . by , , and keep up to date with your consciousness, Thank you, Thank you! by: - Matt TIBBIRBIB - - JOSH MOORE - JUICY - JANE CRUISMS, JOSH MILLER - JORDY, JANE MAYTERMAYTER, VAN VANECK, JORDAN MEYER, & GABOR MARYLE THAYERKE MAYRICK, & KEVIN VENUS MAYOR, & JOSH MAYVAN MACHINES, and JOSH WELCOME, AND KEVAN SCARLAY, AND JOSH CHANEYE - JAMES KLEINDS
00:00:00.000Hello there you Awakening Wonders on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you download your podcasts.
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00:01:01.000You can follow Matt Taibbi on Substack or at Racket News.
00:01:04.000Both of those links are in the description.
00:01:06.000You can hear us Talking about the UK files, which shows how there's all sorts of spying, discrediting and dissenting going on, how there's a formula emerging for setting up these things called NGOs, non-government organisations, that are essentially sock puppets for power that legitimise it.
00:01:20.000We talk about Elon Musk and his latest case, and we talk about the Election Integrity Partnership, and with a name like that, you know they're stealing elections.
00:01:29.000This is the kind of conversation that's going to make you feel better educated.
00:01:32.000You know all the time when you're sort of talking to people and they go, no, no, the system's fine.
00:01:37.000Why don't you vote for the other party if you're not happy with things?
00:01:41.000Matt Taibbi is going to educate you and make you feel better.
00:01:44.000Time for us to have a conversation with a genuine, legitimate, fantastic journalist, a man with integrity, authenticity, a man whose spirit will inspire you and help you to recognize that No matter how disempowered you feel, no matter how far from truth you may feel, no matter how hard it may be to maintain optimism, there is always hope because there are men like my next guest out there fighting for freedom by acknowledging the complexity of truth.
00:02:11.000Please welcome to the show Matt Taibbi.
00:02:16.000So what is the significance of the UK files, Matt?
00:02:20.000How are we going to make an American media audience concerned with the UK files?
00:02:27.000What's the function of them and why are they globally significant?
00:02:33.000Well, we've only released a piece of them so far.
00:02:37.000Actually, some of these documents came out some time ago in A couple of Al Jazeera pieces, but for the most part, there's an enormous quantity of Labor Party internal email communications that a whistleblower got hold of, and now an investigative journalist named Paul Holden has, and he's been writing for us.
00:03:06.000These documents are really important because of an organization called the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
00:03:13.000Which has become one of the most influential, quote-unquote, anti-disinformation organizations in the world.
00:03:21.000They have been tremendously successful in getting people taken off the internet by accusing them of hate speech, disinformation, and other offenses.
00:03:33.000And they've always claimed to be independent.
00:03:35.000These documents show that they were actually a Labour Party operation.
00:03:39.000And they're pretty damning, I would say.
00:03:46.000Are there recognisable establishment figures from within the British political establishment and even the American political establishment?
00:03:54.000And would you say that knowing that they are not neutral and unfunded, that an agenda can be discerned based on the individuals targeted?
00:04:07.000So, this group, this Center for Countering Digital Hate, its origins trace back to a faction within the Labour Party that you're probably familiar with called Labour Together, that is most directly aligned with Keir Starmer, right, so who's, you know, your likely next Prime Minister over there.
00:04:33.000And yes, they have targeted individual politicians, most notably Jeremy Corbyn in Britain,
00:04:42.000but also going even further back than that, or farther, I always get that wrong.
00:04:48.000There was a sort of controversy involving Grant Schapps, remember the Tory MP who was accused
00:05:09.000Uh, and so it's, it's a group that's dedicated to stopping fake news, but they themselves appear to have trafficked in fake news.
00:05:18.000So that's that we think is significant in the United States.
00:05:21.000We saw them all over the Twitter files because among other things, they were really, really, um, intense and trying to get the so-called disinformation dozen removed, which included Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
00:05:32.000Uh, And they've been recently sued by X slash Twitter because they've been involved in accusations that X or Twitter or Elon Musk are all trafficking in hate speech.
00:05:51.000They're a pretty significant organisation.
00:05:54.000This new classification of hate speech appears to really be a weapon for control and a successful
00:06:04.000one because the category of hate speech is clearly one that exists.
00:06:10.000But it's difficult to believe that the sudden interest in protecting people's feelings is
00:06:18.000And if it is, why are these opaquely funded organisations, like the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, that don't explicitly declare what their interests are and what their funding is and what their agenda is, and why do they have discernible connections to the political establishment?
00:06:37.000This is happening, it seems, more and more broadly.
00:06:39.000Ireland appears to be a piloting nation for these practices, with particularly draconian legislation being introduced and being demanded all the more immediately as a result of the recent riots in Dublin.
00:06:58.000How do you think we're going to see this category of hate speech Yeah, that it's been appropriated for the wrong ends.
00:07:04.000I think you hit the nail on the head there.
00:07:07.000that is a position that can be defended?
00:07:09.000Why is it not becoming clear that hate speech is not a legitimate concern?
00:07:15.000Not that hate speech doesn't exist, but that it's being mobilized in this way?
00:07:19.000Yeah, that it's been appropriated for the wrong ends.
00:07:24.000Yeah, I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head there.
00:07:28.000It's one thing when a bunch of college lefties come up to me and they say we're really concerned
00:07:36.000about the proliferation of hate speech online.
00:07:38.000It's another thing when I see an organization quoting the U.S.
00:07:42.000Joint Chiefs of Staff and taking money from the Department of Defense and they're worried about hate speech.
00:09:08.000Enough's enough, because AwakendWonders over on YouTube, we need you to click the link in the description and join us over on Rumble, because me and Matt are going to start speaking pretty freely now.
00:09:19.000You're listening to this conversation.
00:09:58.000And in Greece there was the Syriza movement and Podemos in Spain.
00:10:02.000And although Jeremy Corbyn was a lot later, I still feel that this kind of sentiment of anti-establishmentism was fueling that movement after an attempt to make the Labour Party, which is our Democrat party, more of a centrist and neutered organisation.
00:10:19.000You know, which obviously began with Tony Blair and then there was a kind of a backlash against that.
00:10:24.000Jeremy Corbyn was a significant figure because it felt for a moment, particularly in 2017, that there was a possibility that there was a genuine anti-establishment populist running for one of the major parties in the UK and it was someone from the left, not from the right.
00:10:45.000So the disparaging and smearing of Jeremy Corbyn was interesting and there are people now that just Believe that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite and used extraordinary attacks and is a homophobe and stuff.
00:11:00.000Was Jeremy Corbyn someone that was especially and particularly targeted?
00:11:04.000And if so, what does that tell us about the agenda of groups like the Centre for Countering Digital Hate and hate speech more broadly?
00:11:29.000Authentic, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, I think you, again, that question is directly
00:11:38.000When we started working on the Twitter files, one of the things that we didn't understand at first was, how come there are so many people who come from the military and sort of counterterrorism suddenly involved in content moderation in Silicon Valley?
00:11:55.000And when we finally started drilling down into organizations like the Global Engagement Center in the United States, The Department of Homeland Security had agencies against disinformation.
00:12:08.000I had one person from one of those agencies telling me that, look, basically, originally these anti-disinformation groups were built to combat Propaganda from ISIS and Al Qaeda.
00:12:22.000But after the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Tea Party, as you mentioned, Podemos, Syriza, you know, Viktor Orban's Fidesz Party, right, like the Australian far-right movements, and then even Bernie Sanders, Trump, Brexit, and then Jeremy Corbyn, I think, is a really important example.
00:12:46.000That whole mission just shifted home, right?
00:12:49.000They had this huge, basically illegal operation directed overseas at terrorist groups and they just, they just turned it inward.
00:12:58.000And these people, the switch was described to me as CT to CP.
00:13:02.000So it's counter-terrorism to counter-populism.
00:13:05.000And I think that fully describes what happened here.
00:13:10.000Like during the entire war on terror, we just told all these military and intelligence groups, Do whatever you need to do, including droning people to death, if that's necessary, to stop propaganda reaching, you know, the UK and, and, you know, Southern California suburbs.
00:13:30.000And then those same people got moved on to this other mission.
00:13:35.000I don't think they can really distinguish between terrorists and legitimate political movements that people like people who vote, they see threats in the same way.
00:13:45.000And that's what's happened, is that they've turned the war on terror machinery inward.
00:13:52.000It seems almost too deliciously simple to say that counter-terrorism became counter-populism, but there might be observable symptoms even in the rhetoric of a figure like Hillary Clinton saying we need to deprogram these MAGA extremists, that the language around it might be revealing.
00:14:17.000And I suppose that what it seems like is You know, probably post 2008, but certainly with the advent of the kind of communication that's become subsequently available, it became necessary to invent and utilise counter-populist tools, because anti-establishmentism is, I suppose, always present, but very difficult to mobilise and organise when it is, you know, when it's not geographical or it's not single-issue related.
00:14:46.000But I suppose now, genuine anti-establishment movement could form. And indeed
00:14:51.000they are forming, with more success plainly on the right, I suppose because if you have
00:14:57.000nationalism as the defining ideal around which the movement coalesces, whether that's Goethe,
00:15:03.000Wilders or your man Javier over there in Argentina, and if indeed there is a broad
00:15:08.000anti-migration sentiment and we can debate the legitimacy of those feelings and the impact
00:15:14.000of migration as opposed to something like global corporatism, but I suppose it's
00:15:22.000harder to counter a movement that has nationalism and even ethno-nationalism around which to
00:15:29.000formulate itself. And I think that Ireland becomes an interesting example for two reasons. One,
00:15:35.000Matt, the legislation there seems more overt and frightening than elsewhere, with the
00:15:39.000police being granted powers, as I understand to sort of invade people's homes and seize tech,
00:15:45.000but also because there are these riots there and also because Ireland is not a
00:15:51.000colonial superpower. Ireland is an oppressed nation that for years suffered under the kind of
00:15:57.000tyranny of the British Empire, obviously, that would be, you know, they should be the
00:16:02.000beneficiaries of this kind of compassionate and, to use a rather lazy word, woke discourse that often
00:16:09.000undergirds the demand for the implementation of hate legislature. So I suppose what I'm asking them,
00:16:17.000Matt, is how you think ethno-nationalism and nationalism might oppose these, what seem to me to be
00:16:26.000ultimately globalist and establishment measures and whether or not the anti-establishment movement
00:16:33.000can handle some of the nuances that are overridden by making it a sort of nostalgic and
00:16:40.000nationalist movement to oppose globalism, I mean.
00:16:45.000Yeah I mean I think first of all all these movements A lot of them are beginning to realize that they have something in common in that they're all being targeted by these same structures.
00:17:02.000You know, the sort of Five Eyes intelligence partners, they're monitoring the Sanders movement and the DSA in America and Free Palestine movements in the same way that they're following Trump The Boogaloo Boys, you know, we have a new document story coming out this week that shows, you know, a sort of DHS connected organization using phony accounts to infiltrate the Boogaloo Boys.
00:17:37.000And so I think a lot of these sort of groups that are on the populist right and populist left, they have to realize, and I think they are realizing, that they're being lumped together Uh, as similarly as some threats to the, um, established order.
00:17:54.000And, you know, they, they, they will be targets of technologies and policies and, um, strategies that are not probably not legal in a lot of countries.
00:18:07.000Uh, and you know, they're, they're going to have to find their own ways to communicate.
00:18:12.000Um, because they're going to be shut out of, uh, you know, The bigger platforms, they will be de-amplified if they happen to get into mainstream news.
00:18:26.000So I think that's important for these groups.
00:18:28.000They have to first show that they're legitimate.
00:18:30.000They have legitimate political grievances.
00:18:32.000And secondly, they have to broadcast those as loudly as possible and not be dismayed by what's going to happen to them.
00:18:39.000With these NGOs like CCDH being, it seems, used as tools for various globalist agenda, I wonder if it takes figures with the kind of almost unprecedented power of Elon Musk to oppose them, whether that's through his case against Media Matters, which are themselves an interesting organisation with an interesting history and an interesting funding model, and indeed Musk's pretty unique decision to open up Twitter after his acquisition of it to journalists such as yourself.
00:19:18.000What does it indicate to us, Matt, that it seems to take Elon Musk?
00:19:22.000What does that tell us about how global power is moving?
00:19:25.000And is that cause for optimism or pessimism?
00:19:29.000Does it mean that ordinary people aligning is becoming less and less relevant?
00:19:36.000You almost have to be a tech titan and the world's richest man to be able to stand up against this insidious and invisible power.
00:19:48.000Like that, you know, at minimum, you need a couple of hundred billion dollars, basically.
00:19:54.000That's, that's a little bit depressing.
00:19:57.000You know, the overall narrative of this is so interesting, I think, Russell, because when the, when the internet arrived, Most people viewed it as this amazing, like, revolutionary tool that was going to bring together all kinds of people all over the world.
00:20:17.000Like-minded people from, you know, different countries were going to be able to communicate for the first time easily.
00:20:24.000Political movements could coalesce more easily.
00:20:29.000Like, people were going to innovate more.
00:20:31.000They were going to do more interesting research.
00:20:34.000I mean, it was this beautiful, liberating thing.
00:20:36.000And also, the internet made it almost impossible for authoritarian countries to have the internet and continue to, you know, to lock down their citizenry.
00:20:47.000So we looked at it as an inherently democratizing tool that had some characteristics that lean towards, you know, anarchy a little bit, right?
00:20:57.000You saw that with the Arab Spring, you know, at the drop of a hat, You know, movements could coalesce and like within a matter of days, you could have four big governments toppled.
00:21:09.000And I think that was the moment when the authorities realized, wow, we have to really get a lockdown on this thing, because we just can't allow this to happen.
00:21:21.000We are too much at risk if the internet is free.
00:21:25.000And there's a moment in time Where that narrative of the unfettered free internet started to roll back and the internet became a tool of social control, which is, I think, where it is right now.
00:21:39.000And, you know, one of the symptoms of that is that the only, you know, you basically have to be Elon Musk in order to break through the, you know, homogenous environment, political environment that's been created on the internet.
00:21:57.000And even Elon is relatively small potatoes compared to the entire rest of the universe.
00:22:06.000But the reaction against him is really significant because the whole information sort of cartel doesn't work if there's like one link in the chain missing.
00:22:16.000I think that's one of the big reasons why there's been such an intense campaign against him because If there's one opt-out, then there's a place for all kinds of information to still be moving around, and they can't have that.
00:22:32.000So in his legal battle against Media Matters, is it possible that a victory could be achieved that's so significant that it could have positive repercussions for the rest of us?
00:22:44.000What is the, what, who is David Brock and why is his history important?
00:22:49.000You know, in particular, his connections to the Clintons and his involvement maybe in like, you know, some of the stuff that went on in 2016.
00:22:58.000Some of the Russiagate stuff I'm guessing is involved in that.
00:23:01.000And also with media matters, George Soros.
00:23:04.000Is he some sort of international supervillain?
00:23:06.000What's going on with these figures that appear to be organizing around this battle between Musk and Media Matters?
00:23:17.000Well, Soros I'm not really an expert in, but David Brock, I've been in media a long time.
00:23:25.000I've covered some really loathsome people.
00:23:27.000I've shook the hands of some really loathsome people in my life.
00:23:36.000He's one of the more breathtakingly off-putting human beings I've ever encountered.
00:23:44.000I mean, I've never met the man, but just his record is astonishing.
00:23:48.000If you go back to the 90s, and he gleefully wrote about all this in books that he published, he was basically the hitman for the Republican Party.
00:24:02.000Uh, in the United States, he was behind media campaigns against everyone, uh, from Anita Hill to the Clintons.
00:24:11.000Uh, he basically organized a lot of the, uh, campaigns to highlight things like the Lewinsky scandal.
00:24:22.000Um, and then allegedly he had some kind of religious conversion or politically religious conversion.
00:24:59.000And what they're accused of here, And I have to stress that it's an accusation, right?
00:25:04.000Like, you know, for the purpose of the lawsuit, you have to assume that these things are true, you know, just to get past the first part of the suit.
00:25:11.000But we don't know if it's true, right?
00:25:13.000But they're accused basically of faking the creation of fringe hate speech and making it look like major advertisers were appearing next to those accounts.
00:25:30.000So that they could then report on that and then tell other organizations that it had happened, which led to boycotts of the platform.
00:25:40.000Now, without commenting on that specific case, I can tell you that that's something that we've seen on the Internet.
00:25:48.000We saw on the Twitter files more than once.
00:26:24.000There's some interesting and, well I don't know about nefarious, figures emerging and that practice of being able to, in this instance, create what seems like a visual affiliation between advertisers and fringe groups, extremist groups, right-wing groups.
00:27:41.000Getting on with Tucker Carlson and now like with the escalation of events in the Middle East there are new fractures, new fissures, new fragmentation.
00:27:49.000It really feels like a time of annihilation.
00:27:52.000Matt, can you tell us a little bit about the new Twitter files and the election integrity partnership that sounds so sort of bureaucratic and has the word integrity in it and normally a sort of diagnostic tool that I've learned in my own short Time in journalism is if something's calling itself the trusted news initiative or the friendly cuddly bunny party You should probably get yourself a bunker And get and start stocking up and getting ready to survive.
00:28:26.000Oh Yeah, no As soon as soon now as soon as I see the word trust, I just assume the person's lying like I Which is not a healthy reaction, but it's kind of an evidence of the Orwellian world we live in.
00:28:41.000Yeah, Michael Schellenberger at Public, with whom I testified in Congress earlier this year and then also again this week, will be doing the same thing.
00:28:54.000We got hold of a large new trove of documents involving something called the Cyber Threat Initiative League.
00:29:05.000Or CTI League, and this is like the precursor organization to that Election Integrity Partnership.
00:29:14.000It involves people from the Pentagon, from DHS, from the FBI.
00:29:21.000There's a woman from the UK who was central in creating this group, but it really lays out In tremendous detail what the thinking and strategy of all these anti-disinformation people are.
00:29:36.000They're talking about creating fake sock puppet accounts to infiltrate groups they don't like.
00:29:41.000They're saying we're going to be doing the same things that the bad guys are doing.
00:29:48.000They're openly talking about describing Republicans as needing reprogramming.
00:29:59.000There's just all kinds of stuff in these documents that I think are, when people see them, you know, the Twitter files were important because they showed, they proved a link between this kind of stuff and official agencies like the FBI and Homeland Security.
00:30:16.000This, I mean, there are like whole quotes about, well, we need to do this in a quasi private way because the Department of Defense can't do it legally.
00:30:27.000And, You know, Department of Homeland Security doesn't have the capability, and the Global Engagement Center only has $250 million.
00:30:36.000So they're not going to be very capable either.
00:30:38.000So it needs to be done by people like us who aren't officially, you know, attached to anybody.
00:30:45.000And that's kind of the model for how these things work.
00:30:47.000You see these NGOs that look independent.
00:30:50.000Behind the scenes, they're working with, you know, intelligence groups and enforcement agencies, and they believe They really believe that domestic political movements, like whether it's Trump in America or Corbyn in the UK, that those things are threats in the same way that the terrorists are, and we see that in these documents, and it's pretty shocking.
00:31:14.000Yes, it's interesting how often there are apparently independent organisations that are advocating for ending hate speech or for a fairer and more just world that are actually merely a conduit for power and that becomes discernible through their funding.
00:31:33.000And then you find sock puppet accounts that are supposed to be legitimate independent individuals but they too are a conduit for the same power.
00:31:42.000And it seems like whether or not a popular or anti-establishment figure emerges from the left-wing space using left-wing rhetoric or the opposing space using the appropriate rhetoric there, that they will be opposed.
00:31:55.000And it seems now that whatever language is required to legitimise the foreclosure of those groups, Can immediately be accessed and defined.
00:32:04.000In our time, it seems to be, I suppose, the power of identity politics, and I mention that only because of how it might relate to hate speech, is that it's by its nature divisive.
00:32:16.000It's divisive not only in terms of ethnographics, but also in terms of time.
00:32:23.000It indicates that the culture moves at a pace where it's pretty clear, I would say, and this is the guess that generally I would imagine, America is a less racist place than it was 50 years ago, and the UK is a less racist place than it was 50, 60 years ago, and I would say that of most Western countries, and yet there is this feeling that the tension is being amplified.
00:32:47.000And I suppose it's going to... I watched the British, I guess, right wing, certainly nationalist, populist figure Tommy Robinson yesterday being arrested for his attendance of a essentially a pro-Israel march, I guess is what it was.
00:33:04.000And I thought, wow, that's, you know, in the end, we're going to have to... The only way, I think, to form the kind of alliances that are going to be required in order to oppose centralised authoritarianism is by accepting that you know like ideas that you sort of simply don't agree with that there would be communities that are like we are a ethnically defined community whether that's you know like an ethnic community of african americans somewhere in america or
00:33:36.000Communities that are organised around religion or culture or sexual identity or progressivism.
00:33:41.000Seems like, how else is this tension ever going to be diffused without the alternative otherwise is to yield to some centralised authority that's going to, as you said earlier, determine What hate speech is unpersonal practitioners of it.
00:33:58.000I don't see how that the same way as they enter into these wars without giving you a vision of and this is how we beat
00:34:04.000Russia eventually and Ukraine joins a NATO and it doesn't need to lead to a nuclear war or this is how we involve
00:34:10.000Iran in This conflict and it doesn't call some massive terrible
00:34:14.000apocalypse in the Middle East. There's no vision. Is there Matt?
00:34:17.000There's only sort of attempts to manage control can just shut down curtail a store of a desperate attempt
00:34:24.000To continually oppose what seems to be organically happening just as a result of one total lack of trust in
00:34:31.000authority whether it's state or media or corporate to the ability to organize differently as
00:34:37.000As you as demonstrated by the Arab Spring and even you know in terms of the corporate space
00:34:43.000Napster, you know, there were examples how the online space was going to collapse existing power centers independent
00:34:51.000media Collapsing existing media power centers and to oppose that
00:34:55.000these new categories have to be invented to sort of roll back
00:34:59.000what appears to be the natural if you can say natural trajectory of a
00:35:04.000more accessibility to comms So these new ideologies have to be legitimised through, yeah, I suppose a number of measures, but it seems the one at the moment that's important, certainly when you watch coverage of that riot in Dublin, you hear the sort of Garda, the Irish police say,
00:35:23.000There's a far-right extremist faction in Ireland that we have to shut down.
00:35:27.000That doesn't make sense in terms of Irish politics or Irish history.
00:35:31.000Or a figure like Tommy... They've been oppressed their whole history.
00:35:36.000Or a figure like Tommy Robinson, with whom I'm sure I would disagree on religion and gender and all sorts of stuff, I'm sure, but getting arrested as he arrives at a protest.
00:35:48.000Yeah, and you even see it actually, Matt, sorry to go on, but in normal legacy media reporting, you say, like I saw a pundit say the other day on MSNBC, in order to prevent fascism, you have to vote for the Democrats in this election cycle.
00:36:03.000You can't vote for Cornel West or you're voting for Trump.
00:36:07.000So they're sort of, in a sense, fashioning a kind of tyranny with the aesthetics of progressivism.
00:36:19.000They're leaving you with one acceptable choice.
00:36:22.000Everything else is outside the sort of trust tree, and you should be afraid to be seen in those circles.
00:36:33.000There might be consequences for you to be in those places.
00:36:37.000And in order to get there, in order to get people to accept Those ideas, they have to, as you say, they have to radically change how Western people think, because we're not, if you're old enough especially, we're not conditioned to think that, thinking that way.
00:36:52.000Like, I certainly would, will never be able to accept total curtailment of speech rights, or you know, this idea that I can only think a certain way, or only vote for a certain person, or otherwise I'm You know, a threat or an enemy?
00:37:10.000Like, that's not how we've been raised to think.
00:37:13.000We see this in these documents, by the way.
00:37:15.000There's like a Pentagon official who's talking sort of admiringly about the Chinese information landscape, saying that, you know, you have to change the narratives for people way before you get to the point of removing content.
00:37:33.000The average Chinese citizen does not think that he or she is being censored, because they've been conditioned for so long to accept the environment that they're in, that for them it's just, oh, government's making good or bad decisions for us, you know, let's just go along with it.
00:37:49.000Well, you see, in America, especially, that line you talked about has already moved pretty significantly.
00:37:55.000Like, once upon a time, we would never have even We would never have read news like, you know, certain kinds of marches have been declared illegal, like in France, like, you know, the pro-Palestine marches, you know, or that certain kinds of speech has been declared illegal.
00:38:16.000We would have thought, regarded that with shock, not even that long ago.
00:38:21.000Now, they've slowly conditioned us to this idea that yes, some things can be illegal.
00:38:27.000Some things can be taken down from the Internet without due process.
00:38:31.000We don't even need to have a criminal case against somebody to accuse them of incitement or anything like that.
00:38:38.000We can take off even the President of the United States without a trial or a lawsuit
00:39:07.000It's curious that the pandemic provided a window, I think, into the ordinary format of powers, movements and functioning.
00:39:18.000For example, I suppose the point of origin for Yielding civil liberties at the advent of the pandemic was human life is sacred and collectively we have a value that means that individually I should give up my individual freedom and I should be willing to take certain medications, you know, basically without question for the common good.
00:39:45.000This idea of the common good, bringing that to the forefront in the pandemic era, I felt Intuitively, it was a risky idea because it's an idea that is mostly removed from common understanding and common discourse.
00:40:01.000Mostly, we live in an atomized society.
00:40:15.000And economically, those are going to be, I think, untenable ideas as we experience the kind of economic decline That seems to be accelerating and the sort of infrastructural disruption that's taking place in your country and mine.
00:40:27.000But throughout that period, with that idea in mind, the sanctity of human life, we very quickly, except they were very quickly, and I say they, the establishment, the media, were very quickly able to normalise measures that in a country like China can just be implemented because of years of comparable social control.
00:40:46.000But as people learned that there were a good deal of discrepancies and downright lies throughout it, from the origin of the virus, to the efficacy of the medications, to the consequences of taking those medications, to the reliability of the media, countermeasures dismissed and the efficacy of them denied, I think what we're seeing now is a in some quarters at least, a willingness to disobey. So I
00:41:13.000suppose the function of the media now has to be to continue to create a climate of crisis,
00:41:20.000even if it's just through the manipulation of semantics that suddenly hate speech, oh my god there's
00:41:26.000hate speech, we have to do something about hate speech, that it's a... yeah.
00:41:32.000Do you see where I'm sort of going with it, Matt?
00:41:34.000That you have to turn that into a kind of ever-present crisis in order to legitimise whatever measures it requires.
00:41:42.000And I know that something that I've seen sort of in my notes here is you were talking about the CTI League.
00:41:47.000I don't know if you've touched upon that Yeah, I think it's part of the revelations that you've just made and maybe forthcoming revelations that you and Schellenberger are making.
00:41:56.000What is the CTI League and how does it relate to what I was just saying?
00:42:00.000The normalisation of measures that would otherwise be seen as egregious.
00:42:04.000Like you said, certain protests being banned or certain speech being banned is not something we would have tolerated 10 years ago.
00:42:12.000Yeah, I mean again, the CTI League is this group that was formed You know, officially to address COVID misinformation and disinformation.
00:42:22.000But we see in the internal documents that they were actually involved in anything related to current events, especially the elections.
00:42:32.000And you're right, they absolutely like their raison d'etre was the health emergency.
00:42:40.000But internally, they were doing everything from following followers of Trump to following Free Gaza protests to following the Democratic Socialists of America.
00:42:51.000And yes, it's the climate of emergency is central to this whole concept.
00:42:59.000Because, you know, if you're raised in a Western liberal democracy grounded in Enlightenment values.
00:43:09.000The whole idea is that human history had shown us that when power is concentrated too much, the individual's rights are constantly violated.
00:43:22.000And in order to protect against that, we have to make sure that power is diffuse, that people
00:43:27.000have self-determination, that they have participation in their own political destiny.
00:43:32.000I mean, that's the entire idea behind the American system, for instance, right?
00:43:38.000But these people want to reverse that.
00:43:40.000They openly want to change how we think about that particular issue.
00:43:48.000They think that focusing on individual rights at the expense of the collective is dangerous.
00:43:55.000And therefore, we have to change how people think, even about everything from hate speech
00:44:02.000to threat to informed consent in medicine.
00:44:07.000You know, once doctors cared intensely about informed consent, after World War II, after what we found out about happened in the concentration camps, you know, the Nuremberg Accords made it mandatory, like, for every civilized country to have informed consent with medicines.
00:44:26.000But when the COVID vaccine came along, there was a strong public relations campaign like, no, just take the shot.
00:44:34.000And, you know, you don't need to know exactly what the results are, whether there have been side effects or not.
00:44:51.000That's a necessity for them to change that.
00:44:54.000And they will, you know, unless there's significant opposition.
00:44:58.000Bloody hell, yeah, it's not, um, it isn't, um, what do I want to say, hyperbolic then to refer to it as kind of social engineering, that our behaviour is being altered, and you can see how that can be done quite easily just through the very obvious introduction of new technology.
00:45:15.000It just would have been It's unthinkable that we would have tagged ourselves in the way we do through tech, hand over information in the way we do through our phones and stuff.
00:45:24.000So when you start adding ideological tags to that, that's fascinating.
00:45:29.000I've got a few questions and comments to pass on from our community.
00:45:33.000One is from Jim Earthsea in our community.
00:45:37.000Does Matt think the silver lining of COVID could be the starting of a revolution as it's awakened previously idle people?
00:45:50.000It's literally designed to conduct surveillance and distribute propaganda.
00:45:54.000I'd like you to tell me if that's true from Testimony or it's just a sort of a rumor from the dark edges of the internet.
00:46:04.000And what did you think about the comment about this COVID silver lining as well as that CIA internet comment?
00:46:10.000Um, you know, on the CIA internet front, I mean, obviously the internet had defense roots.
00:46:17.000I don't know that it was necessarily exactly created specifically with social control in mind.
00:46:22.000I think it was a Initially created as a means for factions of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines to communicate with one another efficiently, and once they figured out how to do that, they realized it had all sorts of other applications.
00:46:39.000I don't know a whole lot about that history, though, so I probably shouldn't comment on it.
00:46:43.000I will say, though, that when it was introduced, it did have, for a while, you know, a very liberating Uh, impact on a lot of places around the world.
00:46:58.000And then I was there when it was, uh, you know, post Soviet and the internet was really important in teaching Russians, um, all these new values.
00:47:07.000So, um, as for COVID being the start of a revolution, I think you did see that there were an awful lot of people, um, around the world who became angry at the system in new ways because of
00:47:27.000What happened during the pandemic, they became mistrustful of authority.
00:47:33.000And we're talking about like ordinary small town, like old ladies and moms who don't care about politics.
00:47:44.000I hope that energy, you know, goes somewhere because I, I frankly find this terrifying.
00:47:50.000Like one of the things we see in these documents, there's a ton of these sort of corporate marketing Types who are involved in these projects, and they're applying technologies that they use to monitor how people feel about their products.
00:48:06.000Like does this, they use algorithms to analyze, does this social media post make people feel good or bad about software X, right?
00:48:16.000Now they're applying that to how people feel about their governments, how people feel about government policies, and they're dividing everything into These binary categories, friend, foe, positive, negative, you know, with us, against us.
00:48:36.000Again, that's totally antithetical to what we think of in a traditionally democratic society.
00:48:42.000We think, well, there's a lot of us with lots of different ideas and collectively we all get somewhere really cool together.
00:48:51.000They think there's one North Star truth.
00:48:55.000And everybody who's on the other side of that is wrong and needs to be suppressed.
00:49:01.000And that's, to me, that's the beginning of, like, authoritarianism for real, and that's scary as hell.
00:49:07.000Yeah, authoritarianism and sort of at least one definition of fascism, you know, the state corporations and media coming together.
00:49:15.000In Lee Fang's piece about Moderna, which I obviously paid a special interest to because I was in it, it showed, like, how yet another NGO, I think they were called something like the PGA, have
00:49:25.000been set up and how Moderna have been employing former FBI agents or at least FBI operatives and
00:49:34.000how Moderna are spending a lot of money observing online dissent and are looking to
00:49:41.000control shadow back. I can't believe that a company that didn't exist a couple of years ago are
00:49:49.000targeting dissenters online and have the compliance of the government, have the compliance of social
00:49:55.000media sites. That again, and obviously something that's affected me personally, is an indication
00:50:00.000that this is escalating, I suppose because it has the capacity to escalate, into inconceivable
00:50:09.000Oh absolutely and one of the scary things about that sort of Moderna piece is, look...
00:50:17.000The people who do this kind of work, the anti-disinformation work, a lot of them don't know anything about anything except what they do.
00:50:25.000But they have no problem whatsoever deciding that PhD X is wrong about the vaccine or wrong about the side effect, while health official Y is absolutely right.
00:50:41.000And So they have these sort of pre-packaged ideas about things.
00:50:47.000They have no specific expertise in anything, but they rely entirely on this idea that, well, Moderna is, let's just say, they're an officially sanctioned partner in the vaccination effort, so they're right, and critics of them are wrong.
00:51:08.000Again, it's just that they're creating these dichotomies.
00:51:49.000They have no business deciding for people.
00:51:52.000That's the thing that's terrifying to me.
00:51:55.000Power, even energy, requires polarity.
00:51:59.000And you talked about the need for diffuse power models in order to have democracy, autonomy, individual freedom.
00:52:06.000So I can see how these emergent dichotomies are ways to centralise power.
00:52:11.000That it's beneficial to create oppositionism in order to centralise power, almost on the level of physics.
00:52:19.000Got another question here for you from Jamie Jam in our community.
00:52:22.000With all of the censorship laws being enacted, DSA and others, including in Australia, how far do you think things will go until there's a pushback from people?
00:52:31.000Will masses of people be charged, tried, imprisoned for years until people push back against it?
00:52:36.000Do you think it's going to play out like the McCarthy era?
00:52:44.000I mean, I would hope that if there's going to be a confrontation like that, I would think it would be in the United States, because we have a very unique tradition with speech in this country, and it's something that was taught to all of us at a very young age.
00:53:07.000Nobody's allowed to tell you what to think or do, like you have the right to your own opinions.
00:53:12.000That's the very first thing, right, you're guaranteed as an American citizen.
00:53:18.000The right not only to have an opinion, but to petition the government for a redress of whatever your complaints are.
00:53:26.000So if it's going to happen, I would think it would happen here.
00:53:28.000But what I'm seeing recently, especially, is that there's this incredible apathy and pessimism And, you know, I don't know where that comes from, but it's really frightening.
00:53:44.000But I don't think, I always feel optimistic about people in general.
00:53:49.000I just, I think that even in the worst situations, they just will not put up with things endlessly.
00:53:54.000I don't know how you feel about this, Russell, but like even my experience watching Russians, they put up with an awful lot for an awful long time.
00:54:01.000And eventually they just said, you know, screw this.
00:54:04.000And I think that's going to happen with this stuff eventually, but whether that's going to be now or in 30 years, that's the question.
00:54:11.000Sometimes I feel even when there are protests that spill into riots, there is an indication that there's a sublimated energy that's just waiting to be released.
00:54:24.000I first noticed it When in the, you know, I'd always gone to protests when I was, like, younger for, like, the Dockers Union in Liverpool.
00:54:33.000I ended up there by mistake, actually, just because I was out and it was happening.
00:54:36.000I was like, oh my god, this is so exciting!
00:54:38.000And then May Day, sort of socialist protests in the UK, and I used to enjoy that kind of stuff.
00:54:43.000And then, Like in like I think it was 2011 in the UK a man was murdered in police custody in London and it sparked first local riots then riots across London that led of course to sort of looting and stuff and then across the whole nation there were riots in sort of disparate riots across cities.
00:55:05.000I thought what is this underlying energy that's been released by the the ignition Of this event.
00:55:13.000And of course, its expression was diffuse and of course, you know, people were stealing, you know, sneakers and phones and stuff like that.
00:55:23.000But I felt that what was underneath it was a kind of anger and a dissatisfaction and even the nihilistic expression of it was an indication of a culture and a society that had lost its way.
00:55:35.000And once again, Matt, and this is, you know, getting on for 15 years ago, that What was interesting is the way the judiciary, then under soon-to-be Prime Minister Keir Starmer, just responded.
00:55:47.000Then people were on trial, like, the next day.
00:56:07.000Because it's, yeah, like, what we all know is, you know, to sort of semi-quote Gandhi, is like, you know, a few million British people cannot control a billion Indians if those Indians refuse to cooperate.
00:56:21.000And because we are so disparate, distracted, and like you say, the apathy that's engendered, I think, By losing tradition, losing connection to family, losing connection to God or highest ideal or whatever you want to call God, the God principle.
00:57:06.000When it gets to the point where people just will not go to work, or they will not go along, that's when you have what happened in the late 80s with the collapse of the wall.
00:57:19.000That's when you had, you know, the Arab Spring happened pretty quickly, and that's because those countries, there was an enormous amount of discontent that was simmering.
00:57:29.000I think what people missed about episodes like Brexit, you know, the election of Donald Trump, the rise of Corbyn, also in the UK, but also all those populist moments that you mentioned, movements in Europe, you know, Syriza, Podemos.
00:57:48.000Those are all symptoms of people being deeply pissed off and sometimes they don't even know why.
00:57:56.000I mean, I remember interviewing people at Trump events and I would ask them, like, why?