In this episode, Russell Brand speaks with Michael P. Senger, an outspoken critic of China's response to the 2009 Spanish flu pandemic, about the influence and collusion between the Chinese Communist Party and Western governments and the pharmaceutical industry in the wake of the crisis, and how they conspired to make it worse than it actually was. They discuss the link between the pandemic and China's policies, and the role played by Western leaders, academics, journalists, and academics across the world, as well as the role China played in spreading the virus to the rest of the world and the lack of effective treatment options available to fight the spread of the virus, and why the Chinese government should be held responsible for the crisis in the first place, not just in response to it, but in order to prevent it from spreading further, and causing more harm than it has already caused. Stay Free with Russell Brand is a show about freedom, liberty, and human dignity, hosted by a free-thinking, liberal-minded, and thoughtful thinker. Stay Free, and stay free! to stay free, and keep free, wherever you are, always wherever you go, and always . - Russell Brand is your host, wherever and however long you are and wherever you re at if you like to be in the world on this podcast, stay free. - stay free thank you, and thank you for listening to Stay Free! - and stay free, by Russell Brand, and thanks you for being , Thank you, , and , Jocko Willink, - Michael P Senger of Snake Oil, . . and . , and so much more, and I hope you like it. , I hope it s a good listen! , Thank you for joining us, by , thank you - to you, Jockos, I m joined by I hope , VJ Willink & Jero Willink . - VJ, Jero, VANANA VVVVANANAN and VVN (Jocko v , v ? VYVV etc, JVV, VANVAN MJVV , , M Vandana Shiva
00:00:03.000Hello and welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:06.000Today it is Subcutaneous, a deep, under-the-skin, in-depth conversation with a fascinating thinker in the past.
00:00:13.000We've had Tim Robbins, did you see that episode?
00:00:15.000Jordan Peterson, Eckhart Tolle, Maya aka MIA, Vandana Shiva's been on, Jocko Willink, and today I'm joined by Michael P. Senger.
00:00:24.000A lawyer and the author of Snake Oil, How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World.
00:00:28.000Michael's been an outspoken critic around the pandemic and the emulation by Western liberal democracies of Chinese-style tyranny, says Western elites are to blame for our response to COVID-19 through the influence and collusion with the Chinese Communist Party.
00:00:44.000And it is this subject that we will be discussing among others today.
00:00:53.000It's in particular this collusion that interests us because we've been pitted a narrative where
00:01:00.000US interests and Chinese interests in particular are at odds with one another and buttress against
00:01:06.000one another but perhaps the tendrils of deceit in that narrative are visible through the evident
00:01:13.000emulation of Chinese policy for example around Covid.
00:01:17.000So can you give us clear examples of collusion between the CCP and Western interests, be they governmental or private, in particular US pharmacological interests?
00:01:31.000You know, the focus of my work is really just on the significance of everything we've experienced over the last three years with regard to COVID.
00:01:39.000If you think back to spring 2020, with those initial lockdowns, what really happened is across the world, Uh, liberal democracy suddenly ground to a sudden stop, you know, beginning in Italy and then going from one country to another, you had that domino effect across Europe.
00:01:54.000And then, you know, quickly came across here to the United States, starting in California and then stay after state.
00:01:59.000It's these draconian lockdowns based on absolutely nothing other than what China says they didn't move on for a couple months at the very beginning.
00:02:09.000And, you know, to your point, I don't think there's any stronger evidence of collusion between these governments than that.
00:02:15.000I mean, that's really what piqued my interest in this entire subject matter, because this policy of lockdown was not in any Western pandemic plan.
00:02:23.000It had no history in western science since the middle ages of the very latest.
00:02:28.000It had been completely contradicted by everything we learned about infectious disease and epidemiology throughout the 19th and 20th century.
00:02:37.000This idea of just locking down and arbitrary closing things to try to protect people from ubiquitous respiratory virus had just been completely ruled out.
00:02:49.000By our entire development of our epistemology about infectious disease throughout the last two centuries.
00:02:55.000And yet suddenly, just based on what China says they did, this policy is imported all over the world, universally, based on absolutely nothing but this vague promise it's going to save lives.
00:03:06.000I think that really speaks to the level of influence that the Chinese Communist Party actually has throughout the Western world.
00:03:14.000Because even as we're being told that China has experienced a backslide of totalitarianism, it becomes a brutal dictatorship, as our officials pretend to be so hawkish and so wary of China, we get all these headlines, when it actually comes to the important policies You know, they're very credulous about taking this information from China.
00:03:39.000Every single one of these policies, beginning with the initial lockdowns, and then going to, you know, the ventilators, mass mandates, the idea of mass testing, and then of course going all the way to vaccine passes, every single one of these policies really just based on what China says they did in Wuhan.
00:03:55.000So you believe that the emulation of the policies in themselves is evidence of a type of collusion.
00:04:02.000But wouldn't the lockdown measures, which you say there's never been a Western plan for, the fact that that's unprecedented, isn't it because it's an unprecedented situation, Michael, that there's never before been a comparable pandemic?
00:04:16.000Are you saying that the Spanish flu was comparable or even bird flu or some of the SARS situations that we'd previously had a couple of decades before?
00:04:28.000It's the impression of an unprecedented situation based on all the information that we initially got from China.
00:04:36.000And that's really what this all comes back to, is the level of credulousness.
00:04:41.000The problem here is the level of credulousness that our own leaders and our own elites across institutions, across media, academic, journalistic, and political institutions have shown With regard to the information that's come from China.
00:04:56.000Because the entire impression of this super virus was deliberately sown, I would say deliberately, but sown by the impression that we got of the initial events in Wuhan.
00:05:07.000You know, suddenly, beginning in January of 2020, we're told that there's this virus, you know, plaguing the residents of Wuhan, and you have all these videos.
00:05:15.000If you're on social media at that time, you have all these videos of poor Wuhan residents, you know, suddenly spasming and falling to their deaths, and you have piles of bodies in the streets of Wuhan from this super virus just plaguing the residents of Wuhan.
00:05:28.000And of course, in hindsight, we know all these videos are fake.
00:05:30.000Every single one of these videos that was going across social media was fake, but that's a very creepy scene.
00:05:36.000To, you know, create the world's first impression of this virus.
00:05:40.000And it sows that seed in people's minds, you know, oh, could this be real?
00:05:44.000Could it be that there's this super virus that, you know, necessitates doctors, you know, shooting people as they're trying to escape the city?
00:05:52.000That's a very creepy thing for ordinary social media users.
00:05:55.000You know, Facebook is usually such a happy place, but at the beginning of 2020, you're just inundated with these very personal messages that there's this super virus coming to get you.
00:06:04.000And that creates a very strong initial impression.
00:06:06.000You couple that with the initial data that came out of China, you know, showing that the fatality rate was, you know, 4%.
00:06:13.000Of course, we know that's, you know, completely wrong in hindsight.
00:06:18.000The fatality rate for those under 70 years of age was never higher than 0.1%.
00:06:23.000The overall infection fatality rate across all age groups was about 0.2%.
00:06:28.000The initial data from China was that it was 80 times that, a fatality rate of 4%.
00:06:39.000And you couple that with this propaganda campaign, this agitprop of, you know, residents falling over, and you have this super strict lockdown.
00:06:47.000And suddenly, the dictator of China implements this strict lockdown of this one city.
00:06:53.000And we're told that this is effective.
00:06:55.000And suddenly, elites across the world, just weeks later, It doesn't even really take that long.
00:06:59.000You know, just a week after he implements it, you have all the heads of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom, saying, you know, I will praise China again and again because their actions really showed the way for this virus.
00:07:11.000Weeks after that, you know, the World Health Organization officially rubber stamps this policy of lockdown into global policy.
00:07:19.000And based on nothing but that, you have this completely unprecedented, untested policy.
00:07:24.000And based on nothing but the dictator of China implementing this policy of lockdown.
00:07:29.000In this one city, and weeks later saying that this was effective in reversing the course of the virus, leaders around the world adopt this policy.
00:07:37.000And when you look at China's graph of coronavirus deaths, it's just so obviously forced.
00:07:44.000As I captured here on the cover of my book, it's going up and up and up.
00:07:48.000They didn't even do a particularly good job of forging the data.
00:07:52.000So anybody with a bit of common sense or a bit of geopolitical knowledge about how China fakes their data in every single subject will immediately recognize that this data is fake.
00:08:03.000But when you look at the leaders of all our institutions, the closer you get to the positions of leadership throughout this pandemic, the more likely those officials have been to treat this obviously forged data as real.
00:08:16.000That is absolutely unbelievable and it really speaks to You know, how much those systems have merged, and the level of creditlessness that our leaders are actually showing toward the Chinese Communist Party, isn't it if they pretend?
00:08:30.000In my opinion, it's simply to mollify the public by pretending to be hawkish about China.
00:08:38.000If the early evocative images from Wuhan were indeed staged, the images of people getting sprayed down, the very dramatic images that a lot of us still remember but that do appear to have somehow been erased, generally speaking, from the public memory, if they were staged, if these were not legitimate images, do you believe that there has been Deliberate collusion by Western interests, or do you think it's a genuine error?
00:09:10.000Because if you're suggesting that it is collusion, Michael, what is the nature of it?
00:09:42.000It is a false narrative, to a certain degree.
00:09:45.000You know, they're not completely merged.
00:09:48.000The interests of Western elites and the interests of the Communist Party are not completely parallel.
00:09:53.000But they're parallel to the extent of, you know, wanting more power for themselves.
00:09:58.000And that's where the Chinese Communist Party's policies, that's why, you know, we've seen the Chinese Communist Party's policies more and more become implemented across the world.
00:10:08.000And so the purpose of those initial videos that created the world's first impression of this virus with, you know, residents of Wuhan, you know, falling to their deaths, and of course, all these videos have been proven to be completely fake.
00:10:20.000They were released all over social media and purportedly portrayed events in Wuhan, but they did not.
00:10:26.000They were all staged videos or training videos or videos from places that had absolutely nothing to do with Wuhan.
00:10:34.000But the purpose behind them is an open question.
00:10:37.000But when you think, what could the purpose possibly be?
00:10:40.000Because they painted China and the Chinese Communist Party in such a bad light.
00:10:45.000So the only purpose of these videos was simply to terrify people.
00:10:50.000But I think that speaks to, you know, how does Xi Jinping and hawks like him within the Chinese Communist Party view China's relations with the Western world?
00:10:59.000You know, he believes that the West will never respect China, that the way you can get Westerners to believe pretty much anything you want is by confirming their bias that, you know, the Chinese Communist Party is brutal and they're totalitarian.
00:11:11.000And this was really the message That dictated our entire response to COVID-19.
00:11:18.000That the reason, you know, oh, they could have a graph like this and nobody else, you know, every single other country in the world, all 200 other countries, you know, we just had cases that rose and fell and didn't matter what we did.
00:11:27.000But the Chinese Communist Party had a real lockdown.
00:11:31.000That was some of the most effective propaganda from that very beginning is those images of people welding people in.
00:11:35.000It's like, oh, the Chinese are so brutal.
00:11:37.000They could just weld people into their homes.
00:11:39.000But at the same time, Uh, you know, just a couple of months later, we were inundated with these headlines, you know, all the China, um, the U.S.
00:11:47.000has absolutely no control over the virus.
00:11:50.000Uh, you know, China is on top of the tiniest risk.
00:11:52.000That's the exact words of a headline in the Washington Post.
00:11:55.000Headline Salon goes, you know, oh, China showed the way to control this virus.
00:12:02.000You know, New York Times is saying China offers its own version of freedom.
00:12:06.000And it all comes back to that idea that China was the only ones who could have this real lockdown because of their totalitarian system.
00:12:15.000At the beginning of the lockdown period outside of China, in European countries, specifically Italy and the UK, where I'm from, There were a spate of tweets and social media accounts advocating for a change of direction.
00:12:35.000There was a moment where the UK talked about herd immunity and a Swedish-style, somewhat laissez-faire attitude to controlling movement and regulating behaviour.
00:12:48.000Is it true that many of these accounts were Chinese-sponsored, first of all, Michael?
00:12:57.000And secondly, when it comes to the origins of this virus, how much more is there to be understood, in particular whether or not it was a wet market or a laboratory, and how integrated US interests were at the point of origin?
00:13:17.000So yeah, especially in the spring of 2020, when the world started going into lockdown, you had these vast armies of social media bots repeating the exact same words in every single language and dialect across the world.
00:13:32.000And this was revealed, actually, in a limited hangout with a New York Times article, which became the subject of my first article on the subject.
00:13:39.000You know, I had no platform back when this all started.
00:13:41.000I became an activist in this community simply because I didn't see anybody.
00:13:45.000When you looked Across, you know, I was looking for anybody with a platform, journalists, officials, academic celebrities, anybody who's looking at Chinese influence on the response to COVID.
00:13:57.000So all my work over the last three years has really just been stepping into that role that I didn't see anybody else playing.
00:14:02.000And I got my start by tracking China's influence across social media, especially these bot posts.
00:14:08.000And this was revealed by a nonprofit Which released the information to New York Times in the spring-summer of 2020 about all these bots, hundreds of thousands of bots, which had stormed social media all across the world, all different languages and dialects, using the exact same words about how, oh, we're just sitting here washing our hands.
00:14:27.000And meanwhile, China is, you know, they're sharing this video of, you know, China spraying the streets and, you know, high, you know, Locking down and cleaning everything and saying, you know, if only we could have a response like China.
00:14:43.000It was very blatant that, you know, these bots are denigrating every single other country in the world, every single other government in the world, while saying, you know, if only we could have a response like China.
00:14:53.000So this is a very clear bot campaign involving hundreds of thousands of accounts.
00:14:58.000And then when you look at every single leader around the world when they initially hesitated to implement lockdowns.
00:15:05.000You look at their social media feed around that time, and just in the same way, they are all inundated with these bots, you know, denigrating them just very vulgar, foul language, which I won't be here like, oh, you know, you're gonna have blood on your hands.
00:15:19.000And if you don't implement a lockdown like China did.
00:15:24.000So it's very clear here, especially with those initial bots storming the entire world, denigrating every other government, it's very clear that those bots came from China.
00:15:33.000And that's only logical because we know that within China, for many years now, they've had an entire social media army.
00:15:39.000They actually have hundreds of thousands of employees within China who do nothing but post on social media all day.
00:15:44.000This actually amounts to billions of social media posts per year.
00:15:48.000And the Chinese Communist Party has found that this is very effective in keeping control within China, because you can't prevent narratives that they don't want from getting on social media.
00:16:02.000What they do instead is drown it out with these patriotic propaganda messages all day.
00:16:07.000So social media is just saturated and essentially useless for all intents and purposes, because the impression of the will of the Chinese people is just whatever the Chinese Communist Party wants at any given time.
00:16:19.000So that campaign was effectively traced back to China.
00:16:24.000And then to go back to the lab, and that's another key piece of this puzzle, is that that was very crucial from the very earliest stage when you had those initial videos being shared in early 2020.
00:16:41.000Wuhan residents falling to their deaths, and those were shared all over social media by, you know, what were most likely bots, just given the volume of how often these videos were shared, but also by, you know, Chinese dissidents.
00:16:55.000A lot of these videos were shared also by people who pretended, at least, to be dissidents, the hawks against the Chinese Communist Party.
00:17:04.000I think in some cases, you know, that idea of controlled opposition goes way back, you know, Over a century in communist countries.
00:17:11.000So some of this is controlled opposition, and that's how the Chinese Communist Party exercises influence in the Western world, is by co-opting the hawks, co-opting the people who are pretending to be holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable.
00:17:23.000So this is how this information gets into the Western world, is they say, oh, you know, we're sharing this because it makes China look so bad, when really China is just trying to create the illusion of this super virus and wants everybody to believe it.
00:17:36.000And some of that, of course, feeds on itself.
00:17:38.000It might initially come through controlled opposition within the China hawk and dissident community.
00:17:43.000But then China hawks and dissidents say, oh yeah, that does make the Chinese Communist Party look bad, so we'll release it as well.
00:17:49.000So those videos, all of a sudden you have these videos of people falling to their deaths.
00:17:53.000And at the exact same time, we're getting these stories about how, oh, China's top virology lab is in Wuhan.
00:18:01.000And look at that, the dictator of China just shut down the one city with a lab in it.
00:18:06.000And we started getting these stories about how, you know, maybe it came from this lab, maybe it's this lab leak.
00:18:15.000And the biggest thing that I think people should understand is how crucial that idea of a lab leak was from the very beginning.
00:18:22.000Getting the entire world to go along with this idea of lockdown, not just at the propaganda level, the individual level, the idea that, you know, oh, there's this lab in China, so that's another reason to be scared of the virus.
00:18:33.000But the entire reason that we have this emergent response, the entire reason the national security community, which played an outsized role in these lockdowns, was able to override all our existing pandemic plans so easily, is because of the suspicion that it might have leaked out of this lab.
00:18:49.000And so we, and then There's essentially this sort of double bluff as well.
00:18:55.000Because initially, just in the first couple weeks, the idea of a lab leak was censored across social media.
00:19:00.000And people would be censored for sharing the idea of a lab leak.
00:19:05.000They immediately set up this false dichotomy.
00:19:07.000Where the same scientists who initially reported to intelligence officials that it might have come from this lab in Wuhan, just a couple weeks after that, they say, oh no, it actually came from this wet market that was, you know, 100 miles from the Wuhan lab.
00:19:22.000And they published a paper saying that.
00:19:25.000And that false dichotomy has stayed with us from this day to this day.
00:19:29.000So that when people ask you, oh, do you think it came from a lab?
00:19:32.000And you say, no, I don't think it came from a lab.
00:19:34.000And they say, oh, so you must be a wet market guy.
00:19:36.000You must think it came from a pangolin.
00:19:38.000And of course, it's just absolute nonsense.
00:19:40.000There are a thousand other places that it could have come from.
00:19:43.000And in fact, we have overwhelming evidence that it was already spreading months before all this occurred.
00:19:48.000You know, we didn't hear about this virus until January of 2020.
00:19:51.000We were told that, you know, it jumped out of a penguin or jumped out of the Wuhan lab and started, you know, killing everybody in Wuhan.
00:19:58.000But we have overwhelming evidence now that it was spreading all over Europe and even in Brazil and the rest of the world by fall 2019 at the very latest.
00:20:07.000And that some officials within the United States intelligence community actually knew had been tracking a virus since fall 2019.
00:20:15.000So how could they possibly believe Uh, you know, five months later, the lockdown was going to stop this virus.
00:20:22.000But this was this narrative that was used to sell the public on this idea of lockdown.
00:20:27.000You know, you had the super virus jump out of Wuhan and then somehow it jumped out over to Italy and jumped over one country and another.
00:20:33.000This science fiction narrative of the super virus jumped from country after country.
00:20:54.000And there was a wave of excess deaths across Asia in 2019, such that it probably came from somewhere in Asia, maybe in late 2018 or early 2019.
00:21:05.000But this narrative that it jumped out of a lab or that it jumped out of some animal in
00:21:10.000the wet market in Wuhan is absolute nonsense.
00:21:13.000It's been used to reinforce this narrative of pandemic that was used to suspend rights
00:21:19.000What's the advantage of concealing that this virus has been active and present for a much
00:21:29.000longer period than is publicly acknowledged?
00:21:33.000And what is the advantage for the Chinese in trying to establish a template that will be Mirrored by liberal Western democracies, what is the benefit of concealing that the virus has been around for, as you say, one year more than is understood, whether you believe in the lab theory or the wet market theory?
00:21:56.000What about the origin is being concealed?
00:22:04.000So, as you say, the fact which has been borne out in peer-reviewed studies all over the world, just overwhelming evidence that this virus is already spreading.
00:22:15.000Many months before January of 2020, by fall of 2019, it was just spreading all over the world.
00:22:22.000That fact has been downplayed by elite institutions, especially public health institutions, especially major media outlets like the New York Times, who have really gone all in on this idea that we had the lockdown in spring 2020, that those lockdowns were effective, because it undermines the narrative so completely.
00:22:43.000You know, it doesn't take Much in terms of logic to realize that if this virus was already spreading unbeknownst to everybody by fall 2019, that shutting down the world in March 2020 was not going to be effective in, you know, effective method of stopping that virus.
00:23:03.000You know, we now have overwhelming evidence as well, those lockdowns completely failed despite all the collateral damage.
00:23:09.000Despite the fact that all that collateral damage was known at the time that they were implementing the lockdowns, this has been meticulously documented as well, that people knew that there were going to be a mental health crisis that is going to cause extreme hunger, not just for the developing world, but for the poor in the developed world as well.
00:23:29.000I mean, that idea of sheltering in place when you're living in a large family in a one-room apartment is far different for wealthy people who can Um, you know, shelter in place in one of their many flats somewhere.
00:23:42.000Uh, you know, this absolutely horrific collateral damage, which was just completely ignored by officials and implementing this policy, which was non effective.
00:23:54.000And now we know that it was for a virus, which is already ubiquitous by fall of 2019 and early 2020.
00:24:30.000And that's the dichotomy that you'll see across all the elite media outlets.
00:24:33.000There's either the ones who publish a story about the lab leak, but then they'll publish a story
00:24:38.000saying, oh no, it had to have come from a pangolin, but it's neither of those.
00:24:41.000We actually have absolutely no idea where it came from, but it was already spreading many, many months before that.
00:24:47.000So why would the Chinese Communist Party want to go to these lengths to craft this narrative
00:24:53.000to get the entire world to emulate their response to COVID-19?
00:24:57.000It's all part of a sort of long-term project.
00:25:00.000You know, Xi Jinping has stated very clearly that his goal, he doesn't believe that Western democracy, the ideals of the Enlightenment, and the Chinese Communist Party can coexist indefinitely.
00:25:13.000He sees these ideas of democracy, human rights, independent judiciaries, civic life, as fundamentally threatening to not just the longevity of the Chinese Communist Party, but to the world's future, the socialist future that he envisions for the world.
00:25:32.000He's made this very clear in his documents for many years now.
00:25:37.000So his long-term goal, he also doesn't believe that That the world will ever respect the Chinese Communist Party.
00:25:50.000So he believes instead that the world has to come to emulate China by essentially exporting China's system to the west of the world.
00:25:58.000And this becomes part of the policy of unrestricted warfare, of exporting elements of China's totalitarian system sort of discreetly to the rest of the world and getting them to adopt those through global institutions, through China's influence within global institutions and elite institutions across the western world.
00:26:16.000This is made possible because China's influence with their institutions does not go back just for a couple of years, or even to just Xi Jinping's time.
00:26:25.000It goes all the way back to the 1970s, when Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon first went to China and opened up China.
00:26:33.000Since that time, we developed this doctrine of change through trade, where we engage with China.
00:26:38.000Western countries let China in and developed economic relations with China with the intent that they would become more like us.
00:26:46.000That as they became wealthier, they would demand human rights and the other freedoms that we now have in the Western world.
00:26:53.000But really what happened is that over those decades, what really changed was simply the story that we were being told about China.
00:27:02.000As one of our institutions after another, and all the elites who we had connected to China, bought into their system and started telling the story of changing China, when really China's system had not fundamentally changed.
00:27:18.000You have the brutal repression of Falun Gong.
00:27:21.000And then, of course, in 2012, you have the return of Xi Jinping, who represents a very hawkish wing of the Chinese Communist Party.
00:27:30.000He knows the princelings, the original descendants of Mao Zedong's revolutionaries.
00:27:35.000And his rise to power is considered in some ways a soft coup by the princelings against the technocrats who used to run the Chinese Communist Party.
00:27:46.000And what we see in 2020, and so in the years before COVID, we start to hear all these horror stories about things coming out of China.
00:27:54.000You hear about concentration camps, and you're like, oh, wow, that's not, that's not consistent with what I've heard about, you know, China changing and getting better.
00:28:02.000You hear about, you know, their treaty violations in Hong Kong, there's this brutal crushing of dissent in Hong Kong, and you're like, wow, that's strange.
00:28:08.000You know, China's really had this backsliding to totalitarianism.
00:28:13.000And then what happens is that in 2020 with COVID, The Chinese Communist Party essentially takes that influence and takes it into its highest gear, such that the entire world very quickly adopts some of the most totalitarian elements of China's system, beginning with those initial lockdowns and then everything that stems after that.
00:28:33.000You know, the idea of mass mandates that undermines the principle of bodily autonomy.
00:28:39.000The idea of lockdowns undermines the principle of free movement, free association, the right to work.
00:28:45.000Every single one of these principles of the Enlightenment is essentially undermined by each of these policies very quickly, such that the entire world starts to look a lot like China in a very short time.
00:28:58.000Michael, if there is a Chinese ideological expansionist project to create a unipolar CCP-type world, and there is a US globalist hegemony that similarly wants a homogenized U.S.
00:29:19.000hegemonic through like the implementation of decrees perhaps issued through the WHO, WEF and ultimately representing American corporate big tech interests, energy interests, finance interests, then surely the Chinese unipolar project and the U.S.
00:29:38.000unipolar project are Definitively at odds, so why would they collude and collaborate on a project of this scale?
00:29:48.000What is the advantage of Western interest, broadly speaking, umbrellaed under US hegemony, in toeing the line for what seems like a very particular Chinese project?
00:30:04.000So Western elites and the Chinese Communist Party are at odds to a degree, and depending on the subject, depending on who exactly you're talking about, and a lot of the reason why it was so easy for the world to adopt many of the Chinese Communist Party's policies, especially during their response to COVID-19, is that their interests are really not Not opposed to those of corporate America for all intents and purposes from most of these policies.
00:30:34.000You know, you look at what happened with lockdowns.
00:30:36.000They absolutely crushed small businesses.
00:30:38.000You know, here in the United States, I think it was over half of small businesses went bankrupt and did not recover.
00:30:45.000But at the same time, you know, corporate earnings, the stock market absolutely soared during that same time period.
00:30:51.000So it's not that hard to get people to believe these ridiculous lies about how China controlled the virus by shutting down one city for a couple months.
00:31:02.000And it's not that hard to get people to believe it when it's in their interest to believe it.
00:31:07.000And so it's that alignment of the self-interest of Western elites with the propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party.
00:31:16.000In some cases, you look at the officials, the initial instigators of these lockdowns especially, many of those have really close ties to the Chinese Communist Party, you know, in the United Kingdom, for example.
00:31:30.000You have Jeremy Farrar who was, you know, one of the leading instigators of those initial lockdowns.
00:31:34.000He was very quick to praise China's initial lockdowns and, you know, was very excited when the UK went into lockdown and he was always advocating much stricter lockdowns.
00:31:55.000And he was actually just given a position, essentially rewarded for his advocacy for lockdowns, which we know absolutely failed, were absolutely horrific in the harm they did, and did absolutely nothing to control the virus.
00:32:06.000But this guy, German Farrar, was actually just promoted to the World Health Organization, one of the highest positions of the World Health Organization, after the role he played in that.
00:32:16.000Another SAGE member, they're both members of SAGE, Susan Mickey, is even more ridiculous.
00:32:22.000Her story, she's a 40-year member of the British Communist Party with absolutely no background in epidemiology or infectious disease, who was on SAGE, was one of the very small handful of advisors who essentially dictated the United Kingdom's response to COVID.
00:32:39.000That's just insulting to our intelligence.
00:32:41.000They're just mocking us at this point that this woman, who is a 40-year member of the British Communist Party, Who is a behavioral scientist and had no background in infectious disease and was advised by the government of the United Kingdom and was in charge of the SAGE nudge unit to get people to consent to lockdowns.
00:33:01.000And she was also awarded with a big promotion by the World Health Organization at the same time as Jeremy Farrar and is now in charge of the World Health Organization's nudge unit.
00:33:11.000So this is very, you know, with some of the initial instigators of these lockdowns, I mean, they were mocking us with how obvious the influence is.
00:33:19.000But from there, it's not necessarily direct influence.
00:33:23.000It's really our own elites in the Western world doing this to us because it's not in their self-interest to oppose it.
00:33:31.000And oftentimes, like with these lockdowns, it really is in their self-interest.
00:33:36.000To simply go along with that narrative, even if it isn't true.
00:33:39.000And seeing nobody else oppose it, it just becomes its own false reality.
00:33:46.000So corporations, you know, it's in their interest to go along with the narrative.
00:33:53.000And academics, you would expect them to, you know, speak up about something like this.
00:33:57.000But because of the ties that their universities have with China, you know, China gives a lot of money to universities and think tanks.
00:34:06.000And journalism outlets, you know, they are sponsored by Western oligarchs and Western elites, the ones who are really in charge of the information that we get from our own media outlets.
00:34:16.000It's not in their interest to oppose us either, because they're so economically tied to China as well.
00:34:21.000You know, I think for most people in the United Kingdom and the Western world and the U.S., We understand that this is a big historical moment.
00:34:31.000And if we decoupled from China, yeah, that would be costly.
00:34:34.000We'd take a 10 to 20% hit in stocks, and that's too bad.
00:34:38.000But we understand that for a big historical moment like this, it's necessary.
00:34:43.000But for the billionaire class, for the oligarch class, it's a lot bigger than that.
00:34:53.000Or in some cases, outright bankruptcy if we decoupled from China.
00:34:57.000That is a huge fall for, you know, some of the richest people in the world suddenly face bankruptcy because of a historical moment.
00:35:04.000So you can understand that, you know, they're not necessarily evil, bad people.
00:35:09.000It's just that they're not gonna go out of their way to report on a story.
00:35:15.000That would lead to their own outright financial collapse.
00:35:20.000If it was released some other way, if that became the narrative, then they'd go along with it and realize that it was necessary.
00:35:27.000But they're not going to go out of their way to do that.
00:35:29.000And that's why you get this coordination across all of our elite sources of information.
00:35:35.000Where you get the embrace of what is essentially a false story that these lockdowns actually were necessary, that there's a super virus jumping out and there's nothing unusual about adopting China's response to COVID-19, as absurd as that is.
00:35:50.000And that's why what's been discussed in our media outlets The narrative that's been towed by our media outlets with regard to COVID-19 is so completely disconnected from the reality that we can all see on the ground is because that narrative is what's necessary to preserve ultimately those financial connections with China so that people don't ask, they don't care to ask, they don't care enough to ask where these policies actually came from because they actually knew
00:36:24.000You know, it's all hiding just underneath the surface.
00:36:27.000I'm not, you know, a super investigative journalist, you know, I'm very good, you know, I've meticulously cited all the sources, so it's all well documented, but I've not, you know, discovered any top secret information here.
00:36:40.000This is all hiding just beneath the surface that every single one of these policies, you look at the initial pandemic plan, the initial response plan for the response to COVID-19 in the United Kingdom, for example, every single one of these policies, all the sources cited are from China.
00:36:55.000And the same with, you know, New Zealand.
00:36:57.000They very explicitly say that we're adopting this policy of zero COVID.
00:37:01.000And since the only country that's ever achieved zero COVID is China, we're just going to take all these policies from there and all the citations are from China.
00:37:08.000It's all hiding just beneath the surface.
00:37:10.000So it's not that the information is actually hidden.
00:37:12.000It's just simply that it's being downplayed because they don't want people to know about that, because that would be so costly.
00:37:18.000The political backlash would be so costly, not only to their own position, but in terms of the historical moments that precipitate with the decoupling from China.
00:37:28.000So it seems that what much of your work has unveiled is that prior to our understanding of the advent of this virus, it was present perhaps in Asia, that it was opportune to present it as having originated in Wuhan, perhaps originally for Chinese interests and then secondarily for Western interests.
00:37:58.000The Chinese had a vested interest in ensuring that their lockdown policies were emulated.
00:38:05.000This converged with a series of global Western interests The aspect of this that I have trouble with, Michael, because I'm obviously trusting your assurances that all of the sources that you're using are in your book, Snake Oil, is that I believe that the entire project of US globalism is currently underwritten by the idea, see, like, you know, Davos-style W.E.F.
00:38:39.000I believe that's undergirded by the idea that whilst it may be tyrannical and undemocratic for us to impose a technological dictatorship upon you, it is better than what will happen if the Chinese version of globalism plays out.
00:38:56.000So we have therefore decided on your behalf To prevent that from happening by acting upon the interests of corporatism, globalism, unelected globalist bodies, massive foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Clinton Foundation, to ensure that a cosy, liberal-looking version of technological dictatorship is imposed.
00:39:20.000We'll have our own versions of social credit scoring, our own version of centralised currencies that can be controlled, switched on, switched off.
00:39:29.000But nevertheless, tyrannical though this may be, it is still liberal, you know, the identity politics hue will be represented, and it's not like, you know, Tiananmen Square tanks are coming out just to spray people down and shut people up.
00:39:43.000So I suppose the challenge I have here is that when you say there is some legitimacy to the idea that there is a globalist expansionist Chinese project, do you see that that, to a point, Legitimises American hegemony.
00:40:02.000Legitimises the military-industrial complex, because they can sort of say, even though they don't publicly and explicitly say this, we don't want Russia and China teaming up, they'll screw the world over.
00:40:13.000Let's drain Russia of all their resources in this proxy war in Ukraine.
00:40:17.000Then we'll start demonizing China again, hence the new stance on, you know, Chinese protests, where we know the protesters being lauded and lionized rather than condemned, even though of course we saw lockdown protesters, broadly speaking, demonized in Western democracies.
00:40:36.000I wonder how you sort of, how that buttresses up against the sort of broad idea that many of us are nervous Because I always felt Chinese is a sort of isolated country and they might have interests in their region like you know notably and obviously Taiwan but they're not really particularly interested in coming to London or Bruges or like Delaware and imposing CCP style ideology but you seem to be saying that broadly speaking or in a longer term there is an interest in doing that.
00:41:12.000There's no question that the idea that China is threatening is, you know, very useful propaganda to reinforce the idea of global hegemony, you know, even American or Western global hegemony.
00:41:36.000He's not, you know, trying to get the entire world to say, you know, all hail Xi, all hail China.
00:41:41.000It was all done through Western propaganda that is made plausible so that we accepted this version of sort of totalitarianism.
00:41:50.000That's why it all uses these global institutions like the World Health Organization and like the World Economic Forum.
00:41:57.000You know, if somebody who was, let's say, the mayor of London or the mayor of Los Angeles just said, you know, OK, I'm just going to adopt this policy of lockdown because the dictator of China did it and just suspend everybody's rights.
00:42:09.000And, you know, maybe I'll follow the rules.
00:42:14.000You can't just take a policy that the dictator of China did and did it here.
00:42:18.000Well, when it goes up through the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, they rubber stamp it and, you know, Klaus Schwab gets up there and he says, you know, this is the good policy for the future of humanity or whatever.
00:42:29.000And, you know, Tedros says, you know, China showed the way and, you know, what China showed is that you have to do this.
00:42:35.000Suddenly it's rubber stamped as a global policy and mayors across, you know, one country after another, they do it.
00:42:41.000And even if they're not corrupt, they see everybody else doing it.
00:42:45.000Um, go along for the ride, and suddenly this becomes global policy.
00:42:50.000But the story we're given is not that we're doing it because China did it.
00:42:53.000The story we're doing is that, oh, you know, China was barbaric, but it worked there.
00:42:57.000We're doing it because our global institutions are telling us to do it.
00:43:01.000You know, despite the fact that it's well known, it was always well known, the World Health Organization was in the pocket of the Chinese Communist Party.
00:43:08.000A lot of this is, you know, tempting our own elites with a sort of will to power and creating that sort of moral intellectual disconnect where the truth no longer matters.
00:43:19.000Because once they've bought into that policy of lockdown, and we see this across the entire world, not just with elites, but everybody else, once people have bought into that idea of lockdown, it's so effective in seeding the idea that there is a super virus.
00:43:33.000Because the collateral damage was so obvious and so well known at the time these policies were implemented, that once you've bought into that, and you've placed that bet, And then you're told that this policy was not only extraordinarily harmful to a lot of vulnerable people and poor people, but it wasn't even effective.
00:43:59.000Lockdowns had to have been effective because there's no way I would go along with something like that.
00:44:03.000There's no way I would just endorse totalitarianism, an absolutely horrific crime against humanity, if it wasn't effective.
00:44:09.000So people's egos become attached to it.
00:44:11.000The entire response to COVID-19 was really sort of downstream from that.
00:44:16.000So it's that very sudden shift in values Where the truth no longer matters, and people become disconnected from objective reality, from objective science.
00:44:26.000They learn that, you know, truth is just whatever elites say it is in a given time.
00:44:30.000They say something is science, then suddenly it's the science.
00:44:35.000You know, they can create history as they go along.
00:44:38.000It's essentially tempting the entire rest of the world to go along with an element of a level of totalitarianism, get them to
00:44:47.000embrace the Chinese Communist Party system while still believing that they're opposed to China, while
00:44:54.000still believing that the Chinese Communist Party is a threat. In many ways,
00:45:01.000The Chinese Communist Party, when you look at their propaganda, it's very clear they're not
00:45:06.000even trying to get the rest of the world to not see them as a threat.
00:45:10.000In fact, they very deliberately stoke this idea that China is barbaric, China is a threat, to get the rest of the world to become more like China.
00:45:20.000Out of the supposed necessity, as you're saying, of opposing Chinese cultural hegemony, we instead get our own version of global hegemony.
00:45:33.000You know, not only with those horrific videos that came out in response to COVID, but even more recently, you had these recent lockdowns across China and our own media outlets, which were demonizing protesters against lockdowns here in the Western world.
00:45:48.000I'm old enough to remember the fact that they were all Oh, China's response to COVID-19 in the U.S.
00:45:55.000has disastrously faltered, and China showed that this virus can be controlled, imploring us to be like China.
00:46:00.000At the same time, they're demonizing protesters against these lockdowns here in the United Kingdom and the United States.
00:46:06.000They're saying, you know, compared to the neo-Nazis, you know, you have public health officials signing a letter denouncing anti-lockdown protests and condemning them and saying that, oh, you know, these are populist radicals and not even, you know, Not only for reporting on the protests in media outlets, you essentially have this complete cover-up of the fact that these policies were extraordinarily unpopular and that there were all these protests.
00:46:30.000But then just two years later, recently, with the protests against lockdowns in China, they're saying, you know, oh, these protesters are fighting back against this tyrannical system, against this tyrannical Chinese system.
00:46:41.000And, you know, they're going to great lengths to try to pretend that this is consistent with There's no consistency here.
00:46:48.000the anti-lockdown protesters here in the Western world, saying, oh well, you know, it's because
00:46:52.000China's lockdowns are stricter. But at the same time, they were telling us that our lockdowns
00:46:55.000should be stricter to be more like China's. There's no consistency here. There's no truth.
00:47:02.000It's simply a narrative that, you know, China is bad, and once these policies have been embraced
00:47:09.000But, you know, don't think about where the policies came from because the policies actually came from China.
00:47:14.000It's power merging all over the world to create one sort of giant global socialist system.
00:47:21.000You know, it's the war of Oceania and East Asia.
00:47:24.000You know, we've always been at war with East Asia.
00:47:26.000It goes back to You know, Orwell's vision of that sort of dystopian future, where these governments pretend to be at war with each other, and in many ways the direct interests of elites are still opposed, such that, you know, they can be serious about opposing China for purposes of, you know, Taiwan sovereignty.
00:47:44.000And they might say that that's a red line that if China invaded Taiwan that they would declare war, and they might be very serious about that red line.
00:47:52.000But at the same time, they're very credulous with accepting information from China because it serves their own self-interest.
00:47:58.000They just have no interest in opposing, you know, getting to the bottom of why the world did that and opposing that narrative, because that would be so difficult and financially damaging for them to do that.
00:48:13.000It's these subtle ways, it's sort of using propaganda in a way that no regime ever has before, of not trying to sell their own system explicitly, not trying to get the world to like them, but instead just using propaganda to get the world to implement their policies and transform the world into a version of the Chinese Communist Party system.
00:48:37.000Is there any evidence that US interests, as represented by Antony Fauci and DARPA, were integrally involved in any of the matters that preceded this lockdown and the commencement of this story?
00:48:55.000Have you got any data about that in your book, Michael?
00:48:59.000Yeah, I mean, Anthony Fauci has been extraordinarily deferential to the Chinese Communist Party's narratives.
00:49:06.000And, you know, especially with regard to lockdowns, he was one of the leading officials who endorsed this policy of lockdown.
00:49:14.000Even as recently as 2021, he was advising the government of India saying that,
00:49:18.000you know, they should look to China of the lockdowns that were done in China
00:49:29.000You know, he said in a sworn deposition just last month that, you know, he got the entire idea of lockdown
00:49:35.000just because his friend Clifford Lane flew to China and, you know, saw that they had a lockdown
00:49:39.000and the officials there said it was a great idea.
00:49:42.000So they adopted it here in the United States.
00:49:44.000I mean, this is the guy who effectively led the entire American response to COVID-19
00:49:49.000being that deferential, implementing this horribly totalitarian,
00:49:53.000catastrophic policy based on nothing but what the dictator from China said.
00:49:57.000So I think Anthony Fauci's relationship with the Chinese Communist Party absolutely needs to be examined.
00:50:04.000You know, DARPA as well, one of the very first officials Who we got information from about this virus, really the United States government's only point of contact within Wuhan in those initial weeks, was a guy named Michael Callahan, who was described as DARPA's virus investigator, global virus investigator.
00:50:26.000And we essentially got, the United States got its official version of the events of Wuhan and what was going on in Wuhan from this guy Michael Callahan in DARPA.
00:50:37.000And, you know, he again, his version of events was extraordinarily close to what the Chinese Communist Party's own propaganda was describing.
00:50:46.000Oh, you know, there were just bodies everywhere.
00:50:48.000And yeah, it's this terrible super virus.
00:50:51.000We had to put everybody on ventilators.
00:50:53.000You know, he was big in advising the United States government to procure more ventilators.
00:50:59.000We now know in hindsight, those ventilators were extraordinarily deadly for patients over the age of 65.
00:51:06.000There was a 97.2% fatality rate for those patients who were put on mechanical ventilators.
00:51:12.000To put that in perspective, there were 26 times as likely to survive.
00:51:17.000Patients over age 65 were 26 times as likely to survive if they were not put on mechanical ventilators.
00:51:22.000So that's why you had this mad rush for ventilators in the very beginning, in those initial weeks.
00:51:27.000And then, quietly, that entire policy of putting patients on ventilators because of a grassroots movement, they discovered how deadly it was, was rolled back.
00:51:35.000It was all just on that initial messaging that we got from China, which was rubber-stamped by the World Health Organization.
00:51:41.000and by those like Michael Callahan, who ratified the propaganda from the Chinese Communist
00:51:47.000Party about what was going on in Wuhan.
00:51:49.000He was the only official source the United States government relied on
00:51:52.000and what he was telling the United States government was essentially, you know, matched Chinese propaganda.
00:51:57.000So there's a lot of, so yeah, I think definitely within DARPA,
00:52:05.000national security community, within public health and the leaders of the response to COVID-19 especially, there's a real deference, there's a real uncomfortable relationship of them with the Chinese Communist Party that absolutely needs to be examined.
00:52:20.000That's really kind of the point of all my work, is that we need a real inquiry into how this actually happened, into what that relationship is.
00:52:30.000And then once those policies get adopted by the source of initial instigators, it becomes official policy.
00:52:35.000And it's very hard for institutions to backtrack on that.
00:52:39.000And so everything that happened after that, I think it's mostly inertia.
00:52:42.000It all just kind of snowballs from those initial events.
00:52:46.000It just goes back to that, you know, what I was saying before about once they've endorsed this policy that had all these catastrophic Collateral damage, all these catastrophic harms resulted from it and wasn't effective.
00:52:57.000That's just very hard for institutions to emit air and reverse tech.
00:53:01.000So that's why these policies lasted as long as they did until, you know, one day earlier this year, they're suddenly rolled back for no real good reason at all, basically just because they became so unpopular.
00:53:15.000And they essentially split And now we're essentially in a war for memory over what happened.
00:53:20.000They're trying to act like this is no big deal, you know, there was nothing unusual or is all necessary.
00:53:30.000But they're trying to make everybody believe there wasn't a big deal.
00:53:33.000Unfortunately, there's still a level of interest in this subject matter, even though these mandates for the most part are in the past now, people still want answers to how this happened.
00:53:45.000Because it's not just your normal policy difference.
00:53:49.000It's not whether the top tax rate should be 40% or 50%.
00:53:52.000It's not whether abortion should be legal at the state or federal level.
00:53:56.000This absolutely This policy disaster was absolutely catastrophic.
00:54:01.000It caused extraordinary harm to a great many people in a very short amount of time for absolutely no good reason at all.
00:54:09.000And we need to get to the bottom of why that happened.
00:54:13.000Because I think the real motivation behind this, what was the ultimate goal here?
00:54:21.000Not just exporting those elements of totalitarianism, but creating that disconnect where we no longer have truth.
00:54:28.000Because truth is absolutely fundamental to any kind of democratic government, to any kind of free people.
00:54:33.000Once elites can just kind of define reality as they want, however it sort of fits their agenda, whatever they want, and people learn to accept that, you have no basis for holding power to account.
00:54:46.000So creating that sort of disconnect is sort of the most lasting impact of the response to COVID-19.
00:54:52.000And until we can actually get truth back, we're not actually living in a real democracy.
00:54:56.000That's such a beautiful explanation for how a kind of real-time simulacrum has been established.
00:55:03.000Top level collusion, the abandonment of available data in favor of data that allowed the implementation of unprecedented regulation.
00:55:35.000And I hope that you'll come back on and help us to chart the journey to justice as more and more of the truth around this complicated and opaque matter is exposed through conversations like the ones that you're having.