In this episode of Awaking Wonders, we're back from our week long break, and we're covering everything that's been going on in the world while we've been away. We've got a new story about the Dalai Lama, and a story about Joe Biden mistaking Rishi Sunak for the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Plus, we'll be speaking with Michael Schellenberger from the Twitter Files, and from the congressional hearings where he was derisorily referred to as a so-called journalist, along with other actual journalists, Matt Taibbi. And we'll have an exclusive Q&A from a member of our Locals community. Subscribe to Awakenings Wonders to be notified when we upload a new episode every Monday morning. Subscribe here to our new bi-weekly newsletter, Awakening Wonders, where you'll get the latest news and reviews from the world's most influential thinkers, including our very own R.I.P. (and most influential) podcasters! Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code AWAKINGWonders for 10% off your first pack! Want to sponsor the podcast? Subscribe now and receive 20% off the first month's mailbag edition of the podcast only available in Kindle, iBook, Paperback, Hardcover and Hardcover, plus a free copy of our new hardcover edition of The Dark Side Of? Download the epsiode of our newest issue of the new book, The Secret Diary of Winston Churchill: A Man Who Couldn't Read It? by clicking here. and leave us a review on Audible.co/awakeningwonderings.co.uk.uk and we'll send you a rating and review it on your favourite podcasting platform! We'll be looking out for your comments and reviewing your thoughts on the book recommendations and reviews on the next issue of The New York Times bestselling edition of Good Mythology, Good Morning, Bad Mythology and Good Morning America? Good Luck! by clicking the next week! Thank you for listening to Awakening Wonders, and spreading the word out to your fellow awaking wonders! - Tom and Geezer, Tom, Tom & Geezing, and good vibing! Tim, Tim, Caitie, and your questions and thoughts on all things awaking wonderings. - Yours Truly, Maureen, Sarah, and Sarah, the podcasting Queen,
00:00:30.000These are just some of the questions we'll be answering over the next hour on Rumble.
00:00:34.000For the first 15 minutes, we'll be with you on YouTube.
00:00:37.000We'll be talking about the Pentagon paper fallouts.
00:00:39.000Plus, we'll be speaking with Michael Schellenberger from the Twitter files and from the congressional hearings where he was derisorily referred to as a so-called journalist, along with other actual journalists, Matt Taibbi.
00:00:53.000Once we click over to being exclusively on Rumble, we're going to tell you an unbelievable story.
00:00:58.000I don't know if it's true, so that's why we'll be cautious around it, but has Zelensky been embezzling?
00:01:13.000It comes from Seymour Hersh, who whilst he may once have been a Pulitzer Prize winner, like many Pulitzer Prize winners, he has since turned into a conspiracy theorist.
00:01:22.000Almost as if the standards of journalism have radically declined and the mainstream media establishment now is devouring its own if they don't toe the line.
00:01:32.000You can join us for an exclusive Q&A by becoming a member of our Locals community.
00:01:36.000There's a red button somewhere on your screen right now.
00:01:39.000I'm simply not young enough to know exactly...
00:01:52.000I think you'll find it's still Chinese.
00:01:55.000It comes from China is where it comes from.
00:01:58.000Nothing good comes from there, let me tell you.
00:02:01.000Hey, while we've been away, guess where your president, if you're in America, Joe Biden's been?
00:02:08.000He's been in Ireland and he's been mistreating one of our favourite WEF stooges, Rishi Sunak, who's currently our Prime Minister, used to be a hedge fund worker.
00:02:19.000His wife's very, very closely affiliated to technological giants that have their own affiliations with WEF.
00:02:26.000You can Google all that stuff for yourself for now.
00:03:17.000Getting off Air Force One in the last half an hour or so, shaking hands with Rishi Sunak who was there on the tarmac to greet him in the wind.
00:03:25.000Not bad for Rishi Sunak because he's sort of hanging at the side there trying to re-engage Biden.
00:03:31.000But there's no way it was a mistake because Biden introduced a succession of other individuals, doesn't he?
00:05:32.000This is a time where you don't want people, octogenarians or otherwise, Talking about tongue suckery, even if it's an idiom that's inoffensive in the native tongue.
00:05:43.000It's the wrong week for that, isn't it?
00:06:02.000For all of his talk of not wanting people to be surveilled, he's probably surveilling us right now, I bet.
00:06:09.000Joining us now is the editor of Public on Substack and renowned so-called journalist of the Twitter Files is Michael Shelley Schellenberger.
00:06:35.000You've got so many more Twitter followers since last time I saw you.
00:06:41.000Hey, you explained to us last time about that, I don't know, that Aspen thing, some Aspen Institute, where they explained, you said, like, oh, wouldn't it be bad if there was a laptop leak?
00:06:53.000Like, and I think in that case, it was the Hunter Biden laptop.
00:06:56.000Almost like you were saying that the media are primed in advance so that when stories break, they've been sort of primed, groomed to report on it in a particular way.
00:07:07.000What can we learn from this round of leaks?
00:07:11.000I know it's you that taught us about how they will teach you to focus on the individual and not focus on the content of the leaks.
00:07:19.000Is this a classic piece of reporting by the mainstream when it comes to this round of leaks, Michael?
00:07:26.000I mean, I think it's important to understand, Russell, that the Pentagon Papers was this really triumphant moment in American journalism.
00:07:33.0001969, New York Times, Washington Post decide to publish these top secret Pentagon Papers about how bad the war is going in Vietnam.
00:07:43.000Steven Spielberg made a whole movie about this called The Paper in 2018.
00:07:49.000Meryl Streep, as the publisher of the Washington Post, making this difficult decision to basically go against all of her social—her friends, including the defense secretary at the time, to publish these papers is hugely—considered a hugely courageous act.
00:08:04.000Of course, it was upheld by the courts because the First Amendment is so strong, it protects this.
00:08:09.000So when I discovered that there had been a workshop hosted by the Aspen Institute in the summer of 2020, basically training journalists not to focus on the substance of the leaks, of any leaks, but instead to focus on the leaker, it literally sent chills up my spine.
00:08:28.000I found it the creepiest thing in the world.
00:08:30.000It was and it was a workshop attended by The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, all the major media, Wikipedia.
00:08:37.000The main censors at both Twitter and Facebook.
00:08:40.000I then discovered afterwards that there had been a previous white paper by people at Stanford, including some people that I think have very close ties with the national security state, making the exact same case that they should break the Pentagon Papers principle.
00:08:54.000So, of course, when this latest leak happened, this latest leak of Pentagon Papers, Sure enough, there the journalists were focusing very heavily on who this person was, calling him a racist, saying he was anti-Semitic.
00:09:10.000But I think it was striking how much of the focus was on the person and what a terrible person he apparently is, and much less so on some of the pretty extraordinary revelations in the documents themselves.
00:09:23.000I was very surprised to see even commentators that I admire following that principle.
00:09:32.000It seems in this instance that the protagonist is almost irrelevant, that it wasn't necessarily
00:09:40.000ideologically inspired, that it was just a sort of a kudos move in a chat room, just
00:09:45.000"Oh look, see, I can access these things, that's at least how it seems" or one telling
00:10:33.000Are these particularly significant revelations and Why is it that they continue to exaggerate the damage that these revelations do?
00:10:45.000I mean in particular around Snowden and Chelsea Manning and the fact that it seems that the US personnel have not been harmed as a result of those revelations.
00:10:55.000Yeah, well, I mean, I think the first thing we should emphasize is that we have not heard from the accused and the accused has a right to tell his story, you know, and describe his motivations.
00:11:08.000Maybe it's just exactly like the mainstream news media and the Pentagon are saying, but we don't know.
00:11:14.000And I think we have to emphasize that before we jump to some conclusions.
00:11:18.000Of course, there were very important revelations in the documents.
00:11:21.000Maybe the most important one is that There's no hope for a negotiated settlement until next year.
00:11:26.000That's a very similar sort of story that we saw from the Pentagon papers in the 1960s, that the war was not going as well as people said it was.
00:11:36.000We also saw a revelation that Zelensky was demanding the ability to fire missiles into Russia.
00:11:47.000I don't think we've really had a proper debate in the United States or the rest of the rest of the Western world on whether on what happens in terms of escalation.
00:11:54.000There's obviously understandable concerns about escalation, given that Russia is a nuclear armed power.
00:12:00.000So, yeah, I mean, it seems to me that that the behavior in particular of the news media.
00:12:06.000Where it really is acting like propagandists for the Pentagon, rather than people really opening up this debate and discussing the content and perhaps considering that maybe we don't know everything at this point and shouldn't rush to conclusions.
00:12:21.000So it's really the opposite behavior that we saw from the 1960s, where you may remember that one of the ways that Hawks demonized the leaker of the Pentagon Papers in the 1960s, Daniel Ellsberg, was that he had visited a psychotherapist.
00:12:35.000And this was considered to be a terrible thing or some sign of his mental instability.
00:12:39.000So in the past, that was viewed as a very right wing reactionary kind of attack.
00:12:44.000And now it's just considered par for the course that we would demonize this person as a racist and anti-Semite.
00:12:50.000Yeah, that's right, and I suppose the other aspect of this
00:12:53.000is that the revelations are in and of themselves and patriotic, and they're dangerous.
00:12:58.000And it was really interesting to see the text of that press conference, the kind of,
00:13:06.000the questions that were asked during that.
00:13:47.000I mean, so one of the ways to think about what journalism is supposed to be is that it is supposed to be a kind of check and balance on the government.
00:13:54.000So, for example, when we get access to the Twitter files, we want the content of the files.
00:14:23.000So that kind of behavior, when you see media organizations promoting The kind of public relations or propaganda functions of the military, you're not dealing with journalists anymore.
00:14:35.000You're dealing directly with propagandists.
00:14:37.000The other thing I would note is that there is a significant amount of and a significant history of the CIA and other intelligence community organizations Infiltrating the news media, placing stories in the news media.
00:15:02.000government and other governments spend millions of dollars paying for propaganda stories in other countries.
00:15:08.000One of the things that we've seen with the Twitter files, but also with the lawsuits by the Attorney General of Missouri, And Louisiana is that you start to see these propaganda operations that the U.S.
00:15:21.000government had run abroad turned inward against the American people on multiple instances.
00:15:27.000Now, we've documented it now on basically the claim that Trump was a Russian agent and that there was this memo supposedly showing that Putin controlled him because of prostitutes urinating on him in a bed.
00:15:44.000Was dismissed with a conspiracy theory that it was hacked information, even though we knew from the first time that those materials came out that there was an FBI subpoena and the FBI had the laptop since December twenty nineteen.
00:15:57.000We also, of course, see state propaganda with covert where you saw the person leaving the response from the United States.
00:16:05.000Anthony Fauci dismissing an extremely reasonable hypothesis that the virus may have leaked from a lab and insisting through, you know, so-called scientific journals like Lancet and also with the New York Times, Washington Post and others that anybody who said it was anything other than a zoonotic virus was engaged in a conspiracy theory.
00:16:25.000Those are propaganda efforts by the U.S.
00:16:27.000government aimed at the American people using the mainstream news media Those are the kind of things that the United States used to do abroad as it sought to overthrow governments or prop up governments.
00:16:38.000We're now seeing it turned against the people of the United States and the Western world, and we should be extremely suspicious of the official narrative on this Pentagon Papers leak on everything else.
00:16:50.000Hey, can you tell us a little more about Rene Diresta and the use of think tanks to, uh, utilize and mobilize more censorship, please?
00:17:55.000She confirmed that she's a CIA fellow.
00:17:58.000So I think she's maybe the most important person on the outside.
00:18:03.000Of the censorship industrial complex making the case for greater censorship, and I would note she just they just published an article just true to form in foreign policy.
00:18:15.000Renee did with her colleague called how gamers eclipsed spies as an intelligence threat.
00:18:20.000So now, Renee DiResta is out there making the case for expanded censorship and expanded surveillance of gamer chat rooms.
00:18:29.000So, of course, and so this is what we're going to see, Russell, is that every new problem for the national security state, every new crisis, Whether it's climate change or COVID or a leak of sensitive information is going to be used as justification by sort of the people on the outside who are ostensibly independent, but have very strong ties with the Pentagon or the CIA.
00:18:53.000They're going to be using these incidents to demand greater censorship.
00:18:56.000And that's what she does in foreign policy this week.
00:19:26.000So when these stories start coming out, Coming out, we're particularly primed for them and do you think that this story about their kids doing these releases, you know, the recent Pentagon Papers, Pentagon Papers Part 2, the confusingly named, do you think these will be used to mobilize legislation that allows for more censorship?
00:19:49.000They're constantly trying to create new pretexts or predicates or justifications for censorship.
00:19:55.000I think the other thing that's come out in our research, Russell, that's super important and really interesting is that they use these national security types, CIA fellows like Renee Diresta, who use woke language.
00:20:08.000to justify censorship and at first I would sort of hear it and it seemed incongruous because on the one hand I associate the woke with more the radical left and extremely progressive anti-imperialist types but then you start to hear it coming out of the mouths of people who are also talking about like Russian disinfo and national security and it always struck me as really incongruous and then I started to understand that really it's been going on for a while There's all sorts of organizations that talk about countering digital hate.
00:20:37.000There's a group in Britain that's called the Institute for Strategic Dialogue that's targeting climate denialism, including Jordan Peterson, Bjorn Lomborg, myself.
00:20:46.000It's countering hate, so they're using racism online, they're using climate denialism online as justifications for censorship.
00:20:56.000The other thing I would note, Russell, is that we started seeing a pattern where there was basically a set of countries, the United States, Britain at the heart of it, but also New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, And somebody pointed out, because I'm sort of new to this space, someone pointed out, they go, oh, well, that's the Five Eyes intelligence and spying network that's existed since World War II.
00:21:19.000That network of surveillance, one of the characteristics of it is that the countries, because they can't spy on their own citizens without violating their constitutions, so they spy on each other's citizens and then they share the information with each country.
00:21:36.000So it's the British think tank that's attacking me.
00:21:39.000It's the Australians who's attacking us.
00:21:42.000And then similarly, our people attacking Brits and Australians.
00:21:45.000So the same thing that they've been doing in terms of using each other in these different countries to spy on other people to get around constitutional protections against surveillance, they're now doing the same thing on censorship.
00:21:57.000So I think those two New things are things to build our resilience against the sensors is to be aware of the ways in which the sensors are using woke is and they're tapping into preventing real world harm is one of the things they say as a main justification for for censoring and they're also using their allies in these other countries.
00:22:17.000Yes, increasingly abstract motivations for control and censorship.
00:22:22.000Initially, out-and-out wars against nations, then wars against terror, then wars against germs, then wars against hatred and hate speech.
00:22:33.000And I see in order to avoid legislation that prevents nations spying on their own citizens, they can have a pact.
00:23:12.000That's just the quivering pile of data in the middle, Michael, that needs to be analysed.
00:23:18.000Do you feel That as this crusade of yours, if indeed that's an appropriate word, continues that you become increasingly alienated from what once would have been regarded prestigious figures in legacy media.
00:23:32.000Are you able now to go to a New York Times style banquet and meet, I don't know, Bruce Wayne and people like that?
00:23:40.000Or don't that happen anymore because you are now a detested outsider?
00:23:45.000Well, it's a really interesting question.
00:23:47.000So I just did a very long, I did two very long interviews with BBC, which is working, which have been working on a, I think it was a podcast on nuclear power.
00:23:58.000And so nuclear is now much more fashionable in Western countries.
00:24:03.000People recognize that you need nuclear energy to deal with climate change.
00:24:07.000But I'm also somebody that has pushed back against the climate alarmism.
00:24:10.000And on this interview with the BBC, they asked me a bunch of really hard questions.
00:24:16.000And do you think climate change is happening?
00:24:18.000And, and they did it in a way where I knew that actually the producers wanted to include me in the in their story because they were writing about they're doing a thing on nuclear and I'm a pretty well known advocate of nuclear.
00:24:30.000But it was almost like the sense I had was like they had to prove to their audience or to their senior supervisors at BBC or elsewhere that I wasn't a climate denier.
00:24:42.000And so my sense is that there has been a concerted effort against me, at least since 2020 when Apocalypse Never came out, to basically key me out of the mainstream news media, to demonize me, to slander me.
00:24:55.000This particular group, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, has been taking the lead on it.
00:25:02.000I think it's hard for mainstream journalists to include me in their stories because I think they get a lot of flack from these think tanks that put a lot of pressure on them.
00:25:12.000We also know that many of these people that are complaining about bot networks operate their own bot network.
00:25:18.000So, Renee DiResta, for example, at the Aspen Institute was once asked, she was asked about her own bots that she operates.
00:25:26.000We know that, and again, this is the former CIA fellow, we also know that she was involved in a dirty tricks campaign in a 2017 Senate race that used fake Russian bots To create the perception that the Republican candidate was being supported by the Russians.
00:25:42.000Somehow she got away with it and is considered still a legitimate voice, even though she was involved in, you know, what was potentially illegal campaign activities.
00:25:51.000So, yeah, I mean, I think these things are going on.
00:25:53.000I think the real wild card, though, I would just say is Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter.
00:25:58.000That was not something that anybody saw coming, and it revealed both the extent of the censorship apparatus But also, you know, and how close they came to having control over all the social media platforms.
00:26:10.000So I think that's changed things a bit.
00:26:12.000And you saw his famous now interaction with BBC, where he pushed back against BBC's own misinformation and censorship.
00:26:20.000So I think we're in a very dynamic time.
00:26:22.000On the one hand, I sometimes I feel like we're up against a really You know, intimidating power and force and coordinated effort.
00:26:32.000And on the other hand, I think that the Internet and people want to be free and they want to be able to use the Internet and say what they want.
00:26:39.000People don't like the idea that governments around the world are working to censor us.
00:26:44.000And so that gives me hope that I think that the light will shine through the cracks that we can, you know, can basically put into this huge effort to censor us.
00:26:56.000I suppose one of the things that conversation revealed is that there is now no authority that we all unthinkingly grant our faith to.
00:27:08.000Like, I don't know if it was ever the case, but, like, being British and stuff, you know, like, there's the sense that in the 1940s, the BBC and the voice of Churchill or the Righteous against fascism. And now all of these acronym institutions,
00:27:28.000whether they're financial or media, are understood to be, broadly speaking,
00:27:34.000corrupt. And at the very least, you can say, it appears they don't operate primarily
00:27:41.000on behalf of the people that they claim to represent and report to. It seems
00:27:47.000that they mostly propagandize on behalf of elite institutions and
00:28:23.000That trust has now declined massively.
00:28:25.000So I think something like a quarter of Americans trust the mainstream news media.
00:28:29.000That's the lowest point, I think, in recorded history.
00:28:32.000The problem for the mainstream news media, and it's sort of a vicious circle for them, is that when they don't report on true facts in the world, when they don't tell us about vaccine side effects, when they don't tell us that natural disasters are actually declining in frequency, or when they tell us false things like Hunter Biden's laptop was a result of a hack, Then people get the truth elsewhere.
00:28:57.000That hurts their trust in those news media outlets.
00:29:00.000So you get a vicious circle where the news media end up appealing to a smaller and smaller audience.
00:29:05.000They want to retain the support from that audience by telling that audience what they want to hear.
00:29:10.000But then by excluding certain facts or outright lying about other facts, they then undermine the trust with the rest of the public.
00:29:17.000So I do think we're entering into a period, and you saw in the Elon exchange, where Elon, I mean, the killer moment, of course, is where he goes, give me one example of a case of misinformation you've seen on Twitter, and the reporter couldn't do it, even though he himself claimed that there was widespread evidence of it.
00:29:32.000And we saw this afterwards, too, where people, they were pointing to the exact same think tank that I had mentioned earlier, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, this little nefarious think tank with some sort of, you know, relationship with national security entities.
00:29:46.000With various financial interests claiming that there had been all this misinformation and anti-Semitism.
00:29:52.000Well, I go into the report and I look in the report and they were counting people criticizing the World Economic Forum and George Soros with no mention of Judaism or anti-Semitism, anything.
00:30:03.000They counted that tweet criticizing the World Economic Forum and Soros as an example of anti-Semitism.
00:30:09.000So that kind of stuff does not breed trust in the public.
00:30:12.000And when you can see online the active mistrust of organizations like the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, I think they're going to have a hard time regaining that trust after being caught red-handed lying or misleading or just excluding information that other news outlets like yourself or Joe Rogan or others are including in their coverage.
00:31:01.000You'd think, oh, this person is against globalism.
00:31:04.000The continual reframing that's changing of the meaning of words.
00:31:08.000All these things are happening that seem to be organized in order to create new systems of control, the new ability to shut down dissent.
00:31:19.000And with this new emergent ways to censor, it's pretty worrying.
00:31:23.000And that's why one of the things I keep Trying to return to you, Michael, is our ability to find new union, to try and find something of spiritual value in this, to accept that we actually oughtn't be resorting to bigotry and prejudice, and that we should make an effort to respect people who want to do life differently from us.
00:31:48.000Because as long as that remains a kind of a hypersensitive area, we're able to be neatly corralled.
00:31:56.000And, you know, just that example that you gave then sort of gave me a little jolt, perhaps like your chilling Aspen Institute moment.
00:32:28.000And there was a video of him recently analyzing, I think it was, Rene Diresta, talking about like an announcement she made that sounded pretty anodyne.
00:32:36.000And in real life, she was actually saying, she said something that sounded probably reasonable, like, this is going on every day and we should stop it.
00:32:42.000And what it meant was, We're going to censor everything that everyone does all of the time.
00:33:48.000The fact is they're arguing, but that's their right to argue on there.
00:33:50.000We'll be on Rumble tomorrow, same time, for another fantastic show, fantastic guests, difficult, unpalatable truths sometimes, but hey, what are you going to do?