Alex Berenson joins me to talk about his new book, Pandemic Pandemic: A Global Pandemic Response to Pandemic Vaxx, and why most people don t want to hear about coxellium vaxx anymore. In this episode, we discuss: Why is it important to have a global pandemic response to pandemics? What is the best way to respond to a pandemic? What role does the government have in responding to pandemic risk? Why should we be worried about the potential impact of pandemic vaccines on public health? And how can we make sure that we don t repeat the mistakes that have been made in the past and avoid repeating them in the future? If you haven t yet, use the code GOD is Great for 25% off this week, and become an Awakened Wonder. You get 1 month free of all G&W for a month, or join us for the rest of the month for free for just $99.99. You get 20% off your first month, and you'll get access to all the best G+W dropshipping deals available on the App, too! Subscribe to the App and get 25% all month for a year! You'll get 15% off the first month for the month, plus an additional 5% off for the second month! You can post it now! Use the code AWakenedWonder for 1 month FREE, and get an additional discount code: GOD IS GREAT for the remainder of the year. Subscribe here! This week's ad-free version of the show is available on Audible! Subscribe to our new podcast, Subscribe, rate, review and subscribe for a chance to win a FREE 7 days of G&GOD is great! and receive a discount code! Become an awakened wonder! We'll be giving you access to the show called RUMBLE! to see the future of the future and more! Stay tuned for more episodes coming soon! To find out more about the future, check out our new episodes of Awakening Wonder, coming soon. Stay Free with Russell Brand. and more coming soon, stay free, stay tuned to the next episode of the Awakening Wonder! by becoming awakened wonder and stay tuned for the next full-length video on our newest episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand, coming up on this week's Stay Free!
00:00:52.000Coming up, we've got Vandana Shiva, we've got RFK, We've got Steve Bannon coming up, and today I'm talking to Alex Berenson.
00:00:58.000If you don't know Alex Berenson, he used to be a legacy media commentator, but he broke away when the New York Times, well, I suppose during his time at the New York Times, while serving as an Iraq correspondent during the numerous wars, he discovered what the legacy media is really about.
00:01:14.000If you were on Awakened Wonder on Locals, you could have joined us for that conversation, and it's really worth becoming one, because this week, if you use the code God is great.
00:01:50.000I'm glad to hear you sounding so well.
00:01:54.000I know you live a life of dedicated research and inquiry and in 2024 it seems that finally long repressed, suppressed and censored truths are emerging, whether that's on adverse injuries, excess deaths, extraordinary profiteering, the manipulation and management of information, And today in the United Kingdom where I live, it's been announced that AstraZeneca are giving 650 million pounds to Britain as some kind of demonstration of largesse for building more factories.
00:02:31.000Now 97% of the research that AstraZeneca did before establishing that vaccine was funded by By the taxpayer.
00:02:40.000I wonder what this new story, along with I suppose Mandy Cummings announcement of the normalization of COVID vax shots, you know, that's just part of life now having with the flu shot, tells us about the next phase of the COVID and COVID medication process.
00:02:58.000Do you think that most people in the U.S., certainly, and I assume in the U.K.
00:03:03.000and everywhere else, are basically, they don't want to hear about COVID anymore.
00:03:06.000We're at a very interesting moment because, you know, I think there's some people, this sort of small group of hardcore COVID fanatics, you know, the people who are still wearing masks, the people who are still complaining on Twitter that, you know, I'm immunocompromised and you, Which in most cases, they're not seriously immunocompromised in the way that you would be having chemotherapy or something like that.
00:03:27.000They just call themselves immunocompromised.
00:03:32.000So there's 10 or 15% of people who are in that place.
00:03:35.000And then I'd say there's 10 or 15% of people who are seriously concerned about what we might have done to ourselves with the mRNAs.
00:03:43.000And COVID vaccines and who definitely want to make sure that going forward we don't lock down for another respiratory virus like this one, that we have accountability.
00:03:55.000But unfortunately or fortunately, I think most of the world just doesn't want to hear about COVID anymore.
00:04:01.000And so for those of us who want accountability and who want to ask questions about the long-term impacts of the COVID vaccines, And we want to make sure that we don't have, you know, 2020 and 2021 don't repeat.
00:04:24.000And I suppose one of the ways that we continue the conversation is by making it plain that there's a plan, if not a plan, it seems a strategy that may include future pandemics.
00:04:35.000Now, optimistically, that would be an indication of Perspicacity and responsibility in this world government seems to be forming around us and proposing treaties that bypass national sovereignty.
00:04:52.000The WHO version of a global pandemic response certainly includes such measures and indeed the Continual establishment of new factories for Moderna and AstraZeneca and this country and I'm sure there are comparable stories in your country also suggest that this is something that is ongoing and what I feel that people
00:05:17.000...ought to remain vigilant about is the way that it seems to me two things are a significant reframing of what's happened.
00:05:27.000The recent large COVID study that was to a degree funded by the CDC and Pfizer appears to be an attempt to mitigate The impact of the stories at least that surround adverse events and in the UK the way that excess deaths are being recorded has changed.
00:05:47.000They've manipulated the way that they report excess deaths.
00:05:52.000So those things indicate to me that this is something that is ongoing.
00:05:56.000It's a strategy that's likely to be deployed and normalized in the future and it's clear that we were deceived at least at the beginning of the pandemic period.
00:06:08.000Let me go to a point that I think might have the most traction, again, for the people who are outside, the people who are really engaged in this going forward, and might be the most important thing we can talk about, which is the lab leak, okay?
00:06:22.000So I think at this point that anybody who's paid attention to the evidence would say with a near certainty that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab in Wuhan.
00:06:34.000And that there was gain-of-function research happening there on coronaviruses.
00:06:55.000It is crucial for two reasons that we force governments, the US government, the UK government, the Chinese government will never admit it, but we need to get governments to admit this.
00:07:09.000Well, first of all, we should try to have some accountability for these people who were involved in this, even, and you know, again, we'll never get to the Chinese scientists, but somebody like Ralph Baric, who clearly was very involved in coronavirus research, Who, you know, was talking to the scientists at the lab in China, where this most likely leaked from.
00:07:31.000I'm not saying Ralph Baric knew what was happening exactly, but there's sufficient evidence that he had quite a bit of knowledge, you know, in the years leading up to 2020, that dangerous research might be being conducted.
00:07:45.000And, you know, was he talking to the U.S.
00:07:52.000But the second issue, and this kind of goes to what you just said, is there are these efforts for pandemic preparedness.
00:07:58.000And my joke about this, but it's not a joke, is the number one way we're going to get another pandemic is funding pandemic preparedness efforts, okay?
00:08:07.000Whether that's going into caves, looking for dangerous viruses, whether that's trying to make viruses more dangerous with gain-of-function research in labs, we shouldn't be doing any of it.
00:08:18.000And there should be a worldwide treaty that basically says we're not going to meddle with respiratory viruses to try to make them more dangerous.
00:08:26.000The only thing we should be doing for the pandemic preparedness, probably, is buying some masks, even though they don't really work, buying some gloves, sticking them in a warehouse somewhere.
00:08:36.000The truth, Russell, is that before COVID, we hadn't had a major respiratory virus epidemic since 1918, more than a century.
00:09:28.000American financial involvement seems quite clear and what's plain to all of us and requires no further research is that if that is true the people that Collectively are responsible for this happening, were charged with our global response, are unwilling to admit their culpability and are now firstly moving on to preparing us for the next one without having learned any of the lessons of the previous one.
00:10:00.000If they've learned, they're certainly not telling us publicly.
00:10:03.000They're certainly, whatever they may know, whatever they may think, they are just charging merrily along.
00:10:12.000Our audience, like in the stream, the rumble stream and the locals awakened wonder stream, are certainly free to speculate but what I tend to do is remain within what is demonstrable and I do enjoy a little conjecture and in the same way that you've said it's clear that certain financial interests have benefited and are there for perhaps Viewing this myopically, it appears that what's particularly dangerous is where the financial interests and the ability of states to regulate and impose authority and a general trend towards authoritarianism in a more desperate, diffuse and oppositional public sphere increasingly charged by
00:11:00.000Social media appear to align and are leading to, whether it's through censorship laws or the militarization of police forces or the normalization of lockdowns or conversations around 15-minute cities, authoritarianism appears to be on the rise, most notably, in my view, not in the hands of resurgent nativist populism, but under the peculiar auspices of liberalism, in fact.
00:11:32.000I mean, I would basically agree with that.
00:11:34.000One thing I've written a lot about on my Substack on Unreported Truths recently, and you know, Substack, Twitter, Rumble, these are some of the few places left where you can really say what you think, you know, for better or worse, where the First Amendment in the U.S.
00:11:49.000really holds, is that I think the First Amendment in the United States is under threat.
00:11:52.000And, you know, it's under threat from mostly from the left in a variety of ways, including defamation lawsuits, including, you know, campus speech codes, including cancel culture.
00:12:05.000You know, there's there's there's efforts to sort of ring fence what you can and can't say.
00:12:11.000And including in my case, you know, direct efforts from the White House to force Twitter, and ultimately these efforts were successful by the White House and by Pfizer, to force Twitter to ban me.
00:12:23.000So, you know, I have my cup that I like to, you know, Fauci and Gottlieb and Slavin and Borla.
00:12:29.000You know, I am suing the federal government in the U.S.
00:12:32.000I am suing, you know, senior Pfizer officials.
00:12:36.000And I'm hoping that, you know, I'm hoping that lawsuit will continue to move forward and we're waiting on to hear about the motion to dismiss.
00:12:42.000But, you know, beyond me, beyond you, beyond any single person, I think I'm really sad that younger people in the United States don't really seem, especially on the left, they don't really seem to believe in the First Amendment or understand its value.
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00:14:48.000We are going to have to start the countdown now.
00:14:50.000We're going to be exclusively available on Rumble now.
00:14:53.000So become an Awakened Wonder to join us for these conversations live.
00:14:57.000Remember, you can get one month free by clicking the link in the description and using the code GODISGREAT.
00:15:05.000I suppose that, well, you know, what we've learned about The way that the culture appears to be dividing is that values that seem to be somewhat permanent and connected to the ideology are mobile and are easily yielded when authoritarianism appears to be acting in their favor.
00:15:28.000And that's, I suppose, the opposite of a value or a principle in so much as it's not able to withstand vicissitudes.
00:15:38.000I mean, it's all well and good to say you believe in free speech when you control, you know, most newspapers or most of academia or Hollywood, but you have to, if you truly believe in the value that it's a universal value, you have to be willing to listen or at least permit the speaking of stuff that you don't like.
00:15:57.000And I, you know, I just, Again, look, people say, you know it too, when you're on Twitter, people say terrible things to you all the time, and that's the price you pay for having open dialogue, open discussion, and I truly believe that's how we get to answers, by letting people say whatever they want.
00:16:19.000And this idea that, I mean, somebody went on MSNBC, this disinformation specialist went on MSNBC and said the First Amendment is a risk to the United States.
00:16:32.000The First Amendment, it's the First Amendment!
00:16:37.000It's at the core of who we are, and I think it's made the United States a great place, and we've exported that value of freedom of speech worldwide.
00:16:45.000And the idea that somebody who claims to be an expert on information and speech would say that openly is just crazy to me.
00:16:53.000I suppose it's become an important message.
00:16:55.000I was astonished to find out how much money and how many resources Moderna, for example, had deployed to silence voices, I assume, including... Silence both of us!
00:17:06.000I mean, that doesn't seem like it would be in the ordinary remit of a pharmacological organization anyway.
00:17:13.000Aren't they supposed to be manufacturing and distributing medicines?
00:17:19.000You know, I think they correctly viewed people who were talking about vaccine side effects, who were saying, how long does this really work?
00:17:29.000You know, is, does it make any sense to, if you were previously infected to get vaccinated again, what about, you know, what about if you're 20 years old and in good health, why would you take this vaccine?
00:17:39.000They viewed it as a problem for their sales, as a problem for their profits, and they wanted to get us out of the way.
00:17:47.000Now, one of the stories that's going to be difficult to repress, though you can see the machinery maneuvering around it, is the increase in excess deaths across the world.
00:17:59.000In this country, the Office for Statistics has altered the way that they measure excess deaths In order to, it seems at least to me, to lower the number of excess deaths which they have done successfully from 30,000 to 10,000.
00:18:11.000Yet in your country it seems that in a period of around 10 months there were 150,000 excess deaths in an entirely unanticipated demographic.
00:18:22.000Among other things this caused the insurance companies to re-evaluate the premiums and that's one of the ways that it becomes most empirical and demonstrable and the conversation unavoidable.
00:18:32.000How do you think something as Difficult to dilute and ignore as excess deaths is going to be managed.
00:18:39.000And why are we not getting the necessary research into this?
00:18:46.000You know, it does seem to me that both in both the US and the UK, where I've seen the numbers, yeah, we have excess deaths at a rate of maybe 8 to 10 percent above pre-COVID time, right?
00:18:58.000Which is Which is maybe worse than it looks like because if you recall, early in COVID, there was this idea that the people who COVID attacked and killed were mostly so old and so sick that there was what was called the pull forward effect.
00:19:14.000In other words, that people who were dying, who were very, very likely to have died a year or two later.
00:19:19.000And so the belief was we would have a period after COVID where deaths were actually below normal for a year or two before they went back to trend.
00:21:04.000Of course, Pfizer shares are... Well, let me have a look.
00:21:09.000I've got some data here, but I don't think it's going too well for them.
00:21:11.000It's collapsed to its lowest point in 10 years, Mandy Cohen has announced that there's a new COVID vaccine coming out this fall as if it was like a Kanye album.
00:21:22.000Why does it seem now that COVID is being treated like flu after it was treated initially more like Ebola or HIV?
00:21:33.000People are tired of it and everyone's gotten it and everybody knows just that it's not Ebola, that it is more like the flu.
00:21:41.000And so at some point, if you're the CDC and you're telling people to isolate for five days and wear masks all the time, people are just laughing at you.
00:21:50.000And I think, you know, they've recognized that in the last couple of months.
00:21:56.000I mean, I don't know if it's the same in the UK, but in the US, the public health establishment has lost tremendous credibility.
00:22:05.000And I would say that is not just verbal.
00:22:07.000Again, for the sort of hardcore people who are really concerned.
00:22:10.000I would say that average people are just don't, they've tuned out the CDC and they even trust their own doctors less.
00:22:18.000And I will say, it seems to me that doctors in the U.S.
00:22:22.000are not pushing the COVID vaccines at all at this point.
00:22:27.000And they have essentially realized that they don't want to sacrifice their credibility, you know, to help the CDC when ultimately There's no gain for their patience.
00:22:40.000No, I think trust in institutions is at an all-time low.
00:22:44.000Of course, in the ascendancy of Trump, we saw the power of social media, and indeed, let's say, one man as the voice of a movement's ability to destabilize, diminish, and maybe even decimate the power of legacy media, perhaps just with the simple phrase, fake news.
00:23:06.000Even now, as Trump's various forms of lawfare continue, it seems that the left are equally willing to trash institutions if those institutions don't behave in accordance with their agenda.
00:23:20.000I have seen MSNBC and CNN query the validity of the Supreme Court's decision to defer any January 6th related trials to post-November, and therefore the election.
00:23:34.000So this, while institutions and trusted institutions, be they medical, judicial or electoral, seems to be collapsing, do you think that this is a point of potential crisis for America?
00:23:49.000You know, I hate to think that, but it, I mean, it sort of feels that whoever wins in November, and obviously it's going to be Biden and Trump again, A lot of the country is not going to, I mean, obviously
00:24:13.000It's hard to imagine him being president in two years, much less in 2028.
00:24:19.000Trump, if he wins, is going to be very angry and understandably so, frankly, at the way he's been
00:24:25.000treated the last couple of years and you know.
00:24:28.000The four criminal trials, the civil suits, the crazy New York case where he's been fined $450 million with interest for taking out some loans that he paid back In full?
00:24:42.000I mean, that to me is a true miscarriage of justice, and he's right to be angry about it.
00:24:59.000Well, it seems to me that what's happening in macro is trust in institutions is collapsing because of the impossibility of concealing their malfeasance in an open communication world before the censorship industrial complex can catch up to the capacities of independent media and social media communication.
00:25:21.000Means that there's a need for a re-evaluation of all of our institutions.
00:25:27.000And instead of recognising that need, there's an attempt to cling on to centralised authoritarian models in a landscape that cannot and will not accommodate them.
00:25:36.000And that's going to lead to the rise of authoritarianism.
00:25:39.000And it seems to me that the Democrat Party are unable to meaningfully introduce any policies that are going to appeal To ordinary Americans, blue-collar, what they call them, grey-collar, ordinary Americans of many distinctions, and are leaning into only two areas really, the traditional areas of guns and abortion, the tropes that have emerged out of wokeism, and the ongoing and increasingly hysterical vilification of Trump.
00:26:08.000When their own government and their own candidate is becoming increasingly popular as wars across the world cost the American taxpayer an unmanageable amount and seem increasingly either futile or, worse than futile, nihilistic, self-destructive.
00:26:28.000It really is stunning, the repudiation of Biden and the embrace of Trump.
00:26:36.000In 2020, I don't believe there was ever a poll that showed Trump ahead of Biden.
00:26:41.000And at this point, in 2024, Trump is clearly ahead of Biden.
00:26:47.000Whether it's two points or five points, if the election were held today, it seems almost certain that Donald Trump would win.
00:26:53.000Um, and considering, you know, January 6th and considering, um, uh, you know, that, that made that upset a lot of people, including me.
00:27:02.000I did not like to see the Capitol, the riot outside the Capitol.
00:27:05.000I'm not going to call it an insurrection.
00:27:07.000It clearly was not an insurrection, but it was a bad day.
00:27:09.000And, and, and, and it was a riot to see that, that the, the Donald Trump, that the Democrats have overreached so badly.
00:27:18.000in the last three years. That Donald Trump is now leading, that he's managed to become
00:27:24.000a sympathetic figure to a lot of Americans is really amazing and says, you're right, the Democrats
00:27:30.000they seem to have staked their whole future on demonizing Trump and at least for now it is not
00:27:39.000And it's difficult to imagine what further strategies remain, especially when there's an unwillingness to accommodate other candidates, an unwillingness to debate.
00:27:51.000When RFK, who I... well, increasingly, if you think of the views that RfK espoused that were regarded as extreme mostly centered around his book about Fauci, his concerns around vaccines and their potential side effects, dual-purpose research, the weaponization of health and
00:28:18.000It seems odd that RFK was demonized and ultimately annexed by a party that he's plainly historically affiliated with in order to once again ensure that the Democrat Party remains a sort of a hierarchical institution with preferred candidates given easy access to candidacy.
00:28:41.000Well, you see it, I think, on both sides, that no one can tell Biden he shouldn't run again.
00:28:47.000The Democratic Party does not have the power to do that.
00:28:49.000And Donald Trump, all the people in the Republican Party who didn't like Donald Trump, all those rhinos, you know, he's destroyed them.
00:28:57.000The Republican Party is Donald Trump's party, and the Democratic Party, you know, there may be people in the Democratic Party who don't want Joe Biden to run, but they're not in charge.
00:29:06.000So we are, it is, You can argue that parties as institutions, you talk about a lot of institutions that have lost power, that that's another institution that's lost power.
00:29:18.000you know, that Donald Trump or Elon or you or Tucker, you know, that power has sort of shifted to individuals
00:29:27.000who are able to reach large groups of people via social media.
00:29:32.000And you're right, I think there's these, like in academia, these institutions don't know
00:29:38.000And this idea that they're going to respond by censoring.
00:29:40.000To go back to the lab leak, it's very interesting, right?
00:29:43.000The lab leak, the first and most crucial research showing that this probably came out of a lab
00:29:50.000was literally done on Twitter, open source.
00:29:54.000You know, some scientists, some non-scientists kind of, you know, playing hopscotch with each other,
00:29:59.000finding, you know, an obscure database here, a paper there, and really putting together something that, you know,
00:30:06.000that Fauci wanted to hide, that the US government.
00:30:10.000government wanted to hide, that the media wanted to hide, because You know, whether you want to say, well, they did that for the right reasons.
00:30:15.000They thought, you know, maybe there would be real anger at China.
00:30:18.000I mean, I don't think that's most of what it was.
00:30:21.000I think it was mostly an effort to protect their own interests.
00:30:37.000When you were working at the New York Times, as well as reporting on financial crime, am I right in saying that you served as a foreign correspondent in Iraq and reported presumably on the conditions of the Iraq conflicts and the subsequent period in that region?
00:30:52.000You left the New York Times in 2010 and it seems now that the New York Times is essentially, or at least functionally, a limb of the establishment. If you take, for example, their
00:31:04.000involvement in the Jack Tashera case, where it was New York Times investigators that contributed
00:31:11.000to his eventual arrest, at least their reporting and their research led to his arrest.
00:31:16.000They were sort of almost a law enforcement agency in that instance. And the recent
00:31:20.000story about CIA having bases in Ukraine and having had them for the last 10 years, while
00:31:25.000contrarily reporting that Putin's attack on Ukraine was entirely unprovoked, whilst it's
00:31:32.000clear that the CIA have been acting as provocateurs in that region prior even to 2014 and
00:31:41.000Since then, what do you think has changed in the way that legacy media operates?
00:31:46.000Is the age where journalists can become heroic, win Pulitzer Prizes, be like men or women of the people, adored, voices of truth and reason, and still operate at institutions like the New York Times truly over?
00:32:00.000What is the role of the New York Times now?
00:32:03.000How have those institutions changed since, you know, during the time that you've worked for them and since you've left them?
00:32:12.000First of all, I think there's nothing more dangerous than a journalist who wants to be a hero.
00:32:16.000The biggest mistakes, and I'm not even joking right now, the biggest mistakes I saw and the most glaring problems I saw at the Times came when their I'm thinking of one in particular, but there were journalists who thought, I'm the center of the story.
00:32:35.000Secondly, when I worked at the Times, okay, well, I wrote a lot of stories that, you know, when I was in Iraq, that the coalition provisional authority, which was the US government, did not like.
00:32:45.000And so I certainly didn't view myself as a tool of the U.S.
00:32:52.000Maybe I was in some broader way that I didn't see, but I didn't view myself that way, and I was never encouraged to view myself that way.
00:33:00.000Third, I couldn't work at the New York Times anymore.
00:33:02.000I mean, first of all, they would never have me back.
00:33:05.000And sometimes I think it's funny, when I write something that people on Twitter don't like, they say, oh, he wants to get back to the New York Times.
00:33:36.000But I don't even think I'd be able to do that these days because if I had an opinion about, you know, the 1619 project or whatever, I would have to either keep my mouth shut or risk, you know, censure and being fired.
00:33:50.000And so the Times has lost It's not just me.
00:33:53.000They've lost a fair number of people like me.
00:33:56.000They've shifted further and further left.
00:33:58.000I wouldn't even say they're necessarily a tool of the establishment.
00:34:01.000They're just a tool of the sort of progressive wing of the Democratic Party at this point.
00:34:06.000And look, if Donald Trump is re-elected or is elected in 2024, They're going to be at open war with the government.
00:34:15.000You won't see them as a tool of the establishment.
00:34:18.000They will go to war with the government.
00:34:27.000We stand with the woke wing of the Democratic Party.
00:34:30.000I wonder then where, in your mind at least, the location of the establishment is at this point.
00:34:38.000I feel that potentially in this kind of spaces that we report in and communicate in, the establishment is regarded as the nexus of interest, a transcendent of partisan ...politics and that currently the the democrat party are more representative of those interests indeed using the sort of cultural issues as a veil or smoke screen for the broad compliance with the economic interests with the industries that tacitly or otherwise control those institutions.
00:35:13.000I've heard the phrase the blob used a lot to To describe those interests, the CIA and state departments and so I suppose what I mean by that, yes it's pretty plain that the New York Times wouldn't pivot in favor of Trump were he to be re-elected but isn't it, whether this is true or not in terms of policy or his record in office, certainly the emotion that he engenders in his supporters is a kind of anti-establishment
00:35:44.000Further, drain the swamp, lock her up.
00:35:49.000This is like, this kind of nativist populism is, I suppose, fundamentally derived from a sense that's probably been a lot worse since 2008, and I don't mean the presidency of Obama, I mean Obama's decision primarily to bail out the banks, that's kind of fostered a sense that these institutions are no longer, let alone in the service of American people, even particularly connected to them.
00:36:16.000And I would also agree, you know, you really started in 2003, right, with the Iraq war, which, you know, proved to be basically a strategic disaster, you know, that the Republican foreign policy establishment never admitted.
00:36:33.000I mean, if you really think about what Trump, the first truth that he told that people didn't want to hear was about Iraq being a disaster.
00:36:50.000And the second truth I would say he told that people didn't want to hear was about immigration, and that too much immigration is destabilizing, whether it's in the U.S.
00:36:58.000And the U.S., look, we can tolerate immigration.
00:37:03.000We're an immigrant society, but that does not mean that having One or two percent of the country come in every year from really poor countries is good for the United States.
00:37:14.000And so Trump, you know, when he said build the wall, you know, people on the left, that was very much something people in the establishment didn't want to hear.
00:37:34.000With regard to the Iraq war, what was the nature of your reporting on it at that time?
00:37:39.000What were the kind of, because I suppose then you were sort of, although Obama would have been in office, I guess it would have been critiques of Cheney, Wolfowitz, etc.
00:37:48.000No, I mean, listen, I was not a political reporter.
00:37:52.000I went there in 2003, I went there in 2004, and just tried to report from Baghdad and the rest of Iraq what I was seeing.
00:37:59.000And it was very clear that the occupation was not going well,
00:38:03.000that decisions that had been made inside the Green Zone were not playing out on the ground as the US claimed
00:38:14.000And so the tension was building, and there was going to be an insurrection.
00:38:19.000And I think the only people who really knew that in Iraq in 2003 were some of the front line officers,
00:38:27.000military officers, and some of the reporters.
00:38:29.000And the Green Zone, they just, la, la, la, la, la.
00:38:32.000We're just, you know, everything is great.
00:38:34.000And this country is going to be Lebanon in a couple of years.
00:38:38.000And all we need to worry about is how to distribute the reconstruction contracts.
00:38:43.000And that, you know, that blew up in their faces in a matter of months and became a very expensive nightmare that in some ways is, you know, we're still dealing with the consequences of.
00:38:57.000It was the ultimate example of propaganda meeting reality, right?
00:39:01.000It was sort of, in the same way that Vietnam was for a generation of reporters before, right?
00:39:06.000Where for all these years, the United States insisted that Vietnam was under control, and if we just had a few more troops, everything would be fine, and the South Vietnamese really wanted us there, and it was all lies, right?
00:39:40.000I see, and I wonder if ultimately we will come to regard subsequent conflicts in the same light, that the propaganda simply cannot withstand reality as more and more people are exposed to that reality.
00:39:52.000Certainly Afghanistan could be described in those terms, although it was never a particularly popular conflict, neither was it much publicized, even though it cost, I think, two trillion dollars.
00:40:01.000It seems to me that what's happening now between Ukraine and Russia and the degree to which NATO countries and certainly Western interests are involved in that conflict is an available comparison as well as the legitimacy of the endeavour and what is actually at play when it comes to the motivation of nations like yours and mine.
00:40:23.000So, you know, Ukraine is probably a place where I differ in my views from you, but I will say this.
00:40:29.000I would say we're probably not getting the full story, right?
00:40:33.000There's not a lot of reporting from the front lines on either side, on either the Russian or the Ukrainian side.
00:40:42.000And it does seem clear that, you know, this idea that some of us had that, you know, the Ukrainians are really going to counterattack and deal a blow to the Russians in 2023.
00:40:54.000And so, you know, I don't have to agree with you, you know, completely about Ukraine to understand that you're probably right that we're not getting the full story.
00:42:02.000So it's pretty clear that at least in the Kremlin, they view Ukraine, you know, if not as a completely as completely, you know, Russian territory, certainly, it should be a vassal state, right?
00:42:15.000That it's that it's part of the buffer between Russia and Europe, that that's what it's been.
00:42:20.000And that, you know, NATO really, and the EU should really lay off Ukraine.
00:42:25.000And then from the, you know, from the European point of view, well, Ukraine's in Europe, and We should, you know, we should be encouraging Ukraine to become this Western democratic society.
00:42:36.000And ultimately, I mean, I guess what I believed, you know, in 2022 and would like to believe today is that the Ukrainians mostly agree with the European point of view.
00:42:47.000If that's wrong, if it turns out that there's a significant number of people in Ukraine who really want to be aligned with Russia, you know, that would be That would be something that I would say I haven't heard in the media.
00:43:02.000I don't think it's true, but you raise a fair question.
00:43:08.000Yeah it seems like it's somewhat regionalized even within the reporting that I have had access to and simply I suppose what I would return to is what is the function of the United States in bringing about a resolution in this conflict and what are the motivations in the continual arming of Ukraine?
00:43:28.000Indeed your Earlier remark that Russia perhaps regards Ukraine as a vassal and a border, I think, could equally be applied to NATO and the US's perspective on Ukraine.
00:43:48.000Here's the one thing I think that people on the right need to acknowledge, which is that Putin tends to be a bad actor.
00:43:56.000Okay, and I do think that the unwillingness, you know, the willingness to sort of make excuses for him in terms of the internal repression in Russia, that's not a society I would want to live in, and I assume it's not a society you would want to live in.
00:44:11.000And look, I have real problems with the way the left treats the First Amendment in the United States, I have real problems with the way I've been treated, the way you've been treated by people, but we're not being Poisoned, you know for our political views and and you know, the Russia is a Russia's a rough place And I do think we you know, the right needs to admit that absolutely I certainly have no problems admitting that Russia is a rough place and these points about our nations being preferable is certainly one that conservatives were willing to use when the left were advocating for different forms of socialism in an earlier incarnation of that movement, but
00:44:43.000When it comes to the matter of liberty, these are questions that, you know, gosh, I'd love the opportunity to put before Julian Assange, for example, and certainly the way his case has been handled.
00:44:58.000It's funny, this has turned into, you know, a much, in some ways, this is what, look, even you and I can't talk about COVID for an hour anymore.
00:47:20.000And don't go using it like that Joe Rogan to make yourself better if you get an illness, which is definitely a political thing now and not a private medical matter.
00:47:28.000One of those drugs he mentioned, ivermectin, is something more often used to deworm horses.
00:47:52.000So now let's have a look at why the FDA are not allowed to call ivermectin a horse paste anymore and why we couldn't refer to it as a Nobel Prize winning anti-parasitic drug in the first place when that's what it was.
00:48:03.000The FDA has agreed to remove and stop reposting several social media messages suggesting ivermectin, a drug some doctors use to treat COVID, is intended for animals and not humans.
00:48:15.000I like that, because it sort of sounds like a harassment claim, doesn't it?
00:48:18.000You've got to stop and stop repeating, OK, sorry, we won't.
00:48:21.000Can we just occasionally on a Saturday say it's a little bit of a pace for animals?
00:48:58.000That's not the FDA's role, even, to provide personal, medicalised advice.
00:49:02.000They're meant to actually oversee clinical trials, regulate pharmaceutical companies, from whom they also receive their funding, in significant part.
00:49:51.000As a result, the FDA will now stop publishing a consumer update titled, Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Prevent COVID-19.
00:49:59.000And we'd prefer that you use drugs that are patented, even if there are all sorts of adverse events and possibly even excess deaths that we're frantically trying to conceal right now.
00:50:08.000And remove all related social media posts within 21 days.
00:50:12.000Ivermectin is approved for both animal and human use.
00:50:15.000There are loads of things, though, like antibiotics and headache tablets.
00:50:17.000You don't have to get all hysterical about it.
00:50:18.000It's just, like, an animal's not that different from a human.
00:50:36.000But I will say, even though it's not a horse paste, you could take too much of it and then your butt would clog up and no one would like you.
00:50:45.000I can't stop being childish about Ivermectin.
00:50:47.000Ivermectin advocates celebrated the ruling and independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
00:50:53.000claimed the FDA stance is bias against low-cost therapies.
00:50:58.000Oh, well there you go. That's the root of it, isn't it?
00:51:00.000Ivermectin's been out of patent for years and years and years and we'd much rather you took this stuff.
00:51:04.000Is this stuff profitable? Is this stuff effective? Can you show me the data?
00:51:07.000Can I have access to completely unredacted information when it comes to this subject?
00:51:11.000Can you tell me about the profits? Can you tell me about the funding?
00:51:14.000Can you tell me about the adverse events, the excess deaths, the origin of the virus in the first place,
00:51:17.000and whether there's any US involvement?
00:51:18.000I can't answer any of those questions and neither can I say what I'd really like to say, which Ivan Mekvin is a... The FDA declined to comment on Kennedy's claims.
00:51:39.000You're lucky your surname's Kennedy or you've been in a lot of trouble.
00:51:42.000But again said clinical trial data does not support ivermectin's use to treat COVID.
00:51:47.000This is the classic moment now in Conspiracy World because this was when Joe Rogan was much mocked and maligned at an international level because he took his own course of action when it comes to his private business and then had the audacity to have a successful podcast.
00:52:00.000What I didn't know until just now is that Dr. Pierre Khoury, guest on our show and vital voice when it comes to ivermectin, COVID treatment and medicine and ethics more broadly, He's the one that told Joe Rogan to take ivermectin, which is rather like telling JFK to get a convertible.
00:53:03.000Dr Pierre Corey, the horse dewormer PR campaign involved coordinated and sequentially timed actions between the FDA, CDC, AMA, APHA and corporate controlled media, i.e.
00:53:12.000late night hosts, news broadcasts, newspapers, etc.
00:53:15.000It really was that extensive wasn't it?
00:53:16.000I saw sort of people dressed up as Joe Rogan, probably there was a dance or something, Don Lemon, I mean it was just so mad and it's like you're sort of told to forget about it but It's not because you want to go on about it for its own sake, even.
00:53:43.000In the wake of that campaign, pharmacies stopped filling valid legal prescriptions and hospitals removed ivermectin from their formularies.
00:53:50.000They really went to town on it, like it was Satanic Verses or my videos on Netflix.
00:53:58.000Never had an FDA-approved drug, one of the, if not the safest prescribed medications in history, ever been vilified or restricted to this extent.
00:54:06.000Just like hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin had to be stopped.
00:54:09.000The FDA's role in that campaign started with the posting of the below tweet on August 21st, 2021, a week after the report on the below left came out showing a massive rise in ivermectin prescriptions in the US during the deadly Delta wave.
00:54:53.000It also threatened the markets for all the competing pricey patented pipeline pharmaceuticals like Remdesivir and Paxlovid, Molnupiravir and the monoclonal antibodies.
00:55:03.000Also massive global markets in the many billions.
00:55:05.000It's like when like some piece of IP becomes available.
00:55:49.000But the FDA couldn't do it all by themselves, so they called in the CDC to do some dirty work.
00:55:53.000Five days after the FDA tweet, the CDC sent out a warning advisory to all the state medical boards, which was then forwarded to every licensed physician in the country.
00:56:01.000This is an official CDC health advisory.
00:56:03.000Rapid increase in ivermectin prescription and reports of severe illness associated with use of products containing ivermectin to prevent or treat...
00:56:10.000Three days after the CDC memo, they then trotted Fauci out on national TV, and he says this.
00:56:17.000What I think would be a fun game is to apply those exact words to another popular product around that time.
00:56:54.000AMA, APHA, ASHP call for immediate end to prescribing, dispensing and use of ivermectin to prevent or treat COVID-19 outside clinical trials.
00:57:03.000And then they called in for mass media firepower.
00:57:16.000And now you can see how that's replicated.
00:57:18.000We've done previous stories on the Trusted News Initiative, which shows how various broadcast media have relationships and a shared agenda.
00:57:26.000This is a brilliant example of how that works, but it's not the only one because whenever there's an agenda, whether it's don't report on this war, take out this dissenting voice, whatever it is, they will operate in this way.
00:57:36.000I believe, without evidence, that the tweet and the entire PR campaign was devised and executed by Weber Shandwick, the massive PR firm that simultaneously works for the CDC, Moderna and Pfizer.
00:57:46.000At the risk of foreshadowing, I also believe, without evidence, that the entire reason the FDA settled this case is because discovery would be severely damaging to many people involved.
00:58:12.000So what he's saying is, is that if this thing's settled out of court, people will just forget it.
00:58:18.000And people are just tired and exhausted and energy prices and shrinkflation and all those problems that we suffer every day.
00:58:23.000We don't have time to remember that we were all lied to and manipulated on a massive scale in a variety of ways during that extraordinary period.
00:58:29.000That tweet went absolutely viral and became the FDA's most popular tweet in history.
00:58:33.000I believe that tweet was the opening shot that completely turned from what had been isolated battles against ivermectin into an all-out war.
00:58:40.000Like, why aren't they bothered about us eating processed food?
00:58:42.000They'd let us eat, like, processed food and corn syrup and sugars and seed oils and stuff that are causing cancer and heart disease.
00:58:49.000Like, why are they not going, stop eating it!
00:58:52.000Is the difference possibly that they'll let us do things that are bad for us that are profitable and not let us do things that may or may not be bad for us that are not profitable?
00:59:02.000It doesn't seem to be looking after you and loving you.
00:59:04.000As we all know, the FDA's opinion was misleading and deceptive.
00:59:08.000Once a drug receives FDA approval for a disease, it can legally be used to treat Any other disease, a practice called off-label prescribing.
01:00:07.000Well, we think it might be a bit of a...
01:00:17.000Now beyond the tweet, the FDA also went on the warpath across all other major social
01:00:21.000Although the initial salvo started on social media, it didn't end there.
01:00:24.000Four months later, in another attempt to influence the practice of medicine, they sent letters to the Federation of State Medical Boards and the American Board of Pharmacy.
01:00:31.000Now, when the lawsuit was first filed, obviously the FDA moved immediately to dismiss, and they did so by arguing that they cannot be sued because they have sovereign immunity.
01:00:39.000That lets you know a great deal about how the FDA sues itself, like a type of king.
01:00:54.000What you also can't make up is that the district court judge agreed with them and dismissed the case.
01:00:59.000Amazing nexus of interests all intertwining here.
01:01:03.000But lawyer Clayland Boyden Gray immediately appealed the case because he knew that although federal law actually does give the government immunity against legal actions, there are some exceptions, such as ultraviars, a term describing when an official acts outside their authority.
01:01:17.000Plaintiffs challenging the acts must show that the official was acting without any authority whatever or without any tolerable basis for the exercise of authority.
01:01:25.000Boyden's decision to appeal was spot on because the appeals court judge was truly miffed at the FDA and immediately ruled that the plaintiffs had standing and that the lawsuit could proceed.
01:01:34.000This was a huge win back then in our court of public opinion largely because the FDA lawyer had to admit in open court that physicians did indeed have every right to prescribe ivermectin off-label for COVID.
01:01:45.000It gets even better because in the appeals court opinion, the judge went off on the FDA with the following statement.
01:01:50.000FDA can inform, but it has identified no authority allowing it to recommend consumers to stop taking medicine.
01:02:18.000It shows you that we sort of, almost like naive, adorable children, don't even really know what agencies are supposed to be doing.
01:02:25.000Like, democracy can start doing stuff that it's not meant to do, or the government can start doing stuff that it's not allowed to do, or its regulatory bodies can start saying and doing things that are well beyond its remit, and we're just like, oh, OK, well, we don't want to be like a bunch of horses, so I guess we'll just do what you told us, huh?
01:02:40.000But actually, we should have gone, well, see, Scott, do you get out of here?
01:02:43.000Oh, OK, but do you realize it might be Even tweet-sized doses of personalized medical advice are beyond FDA statutory authority.
01:03:18.000And well, we know why they said it, because the FDA approved it, Big Pharma are their biggest advertisers, there was a government edict to regulate and centralise authority at that time, and that's why this has been such a confusing event for us all.
01:03:30.000However, it's my opinion that because the case ended in settlement, we cannot claim total victory because it allows the FDA to continue to lie with statements like this one today, claiming they are not guilty of wrongdoing.
01:03:39.000FDA has not admitted any violation of law or any wrongdoing, disagreeing with the plaintiff's allegation that the agency exceeded its authority in issuing the statements challenged in the lawsuit, and it stands by its authority to communicate with the public regarding the products it regulates, the spokesperson said.
01:03:53.000And look how they had to sort of tiptoe through that.
01:04:08.000How can anyone have any trust in the judiciary?
01:04:11.000How can anyone have any trust in the media?
01:04:12.000How can anyone have any trust in the state when we see how they work together?
01:04:16.000I bet even now, depending on where you're watching this, if you're watching it on Instagram, there'll be something under there.
01:04:21.000If you're watching it on YouTube, there'll be something under there.
01:04:23.000If you're watching and looking at it at X, there won't be something under there.
01:04:26.000And if you're watching it on our home rumble, there might be some crazy ads and some crazy comments, but there'll be nothing else under there.
01:04:33.000Still now, when you report on this subject, they're still trying to control it.
01:04:37.000They're introducing different regulations to control comparable things.
01:04:40.000And you can hear in the FDA they're not sorry about that.
01:04:42.000We went totally mad and said something was a horse paste even though it's something we ourselves had approved of and indeed the off-label prescribing is a practice that we ourselves endorsed.
01:04:51.000We went all mad for some reason and I can't remember what it was.
01:04:55.000It's money and corruption and the opportunity to regulate and maybe even we don't know for sure because we don't say things that we can't corroborate.
01:05:02.000More insidious things than that we'll have to keep looking.
01:05:06.000That's why we're still reporting on this story.
01:05:08.000It shows us who we are and who we're not and how we're governed.
01:05:12.000But I trust the wider public, says Pierre Corrie, can see right through such a statement.
01:05:15.000I mean, who will believe that they can claim innocence when they were forced to settle?
01:05:19.000You only settle when you know you're going to lose in court or you cannot risk going through the discovery process.
01:05:24.000Either way, the plaintiffs, Boyden Gray and Associates, and the FLCCC, Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, landed a big victory against one of our most captured federal health agencies.
01:05:37.000Ivermectin is not an exceptional case.
01:05:38.000The FDA is biased against many low-cost generic and or natural therapies with low profit potential.
01:05:43.000Could it be because half its funding comes from Big Pharma?
01:05:46.000That's RFK responding to the below post announcing the FDA's requirement to get rid of all those posts.
01:05:54.000And perhaps we'll think about medication more broadly in your country and how it is prescribed and if it's expensive or not and whether or not competitive practices are encouraged or perhaps even more broadly than that.
01:06:05.000Is the industry, odd word, of health focused on patient health care and wellness of individuals or is it focused on profit?
01:06:11.000And once you've answered that question you can answer some more questions about the way that a legacy media Report.
01:06:16.000Are they on your side, or are they on the side of a kind of nexus of interests that include the state and corporations?
01:06:22.000Then you can talk about the judiciary.
01:06:25.000You can ask yourself those questions, but not for long, because even now, while we're speaking, there are sets of forces enclosing all around us.
01:06:32.000On me, in particular, and on you, specifically, to ensure, just even take a simple example like Instagram, go, political speech?
01:06:42.000Think that that doesn't Essentially mean information that would encourage you to become discerning, agitated and angry about the way that you are treated by the powerful.
01:06:51.000That's essentially what that means and it will be masked in bureaucracy.
01:06:54.000It will be hidden from your view and instead what will be put in front of you is all an old twaddle.
01:06:58.000But hopefully you and I and us together can continue to create relationships and participate in a movement that opposes this madness.
01:07:22.000Remember, you could have been there live for our conversation if you were an awakened wonder on Locals.
01:07:26.000You could also join us for our conversations where we discuss where to purchase real estate to set up a glorious, revolutionary new movement.
01:07:34.000I want to welcome some of the new people that have joined us.
01:07:37.000Lou555, Completely Loved, Counter Blow, Hungry Josh and Liza9.
01:07:40.000Join us tomorrow, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.