While the world may appear to be in disarray, while there appears to be ubiquitous crisis, holy war, global war, deception, lies about turns, we have to continue to awaken together. We have to find within ourselves the resources that are going to be required to face what potentially looks like an apocalypse. As our institutions fall apart, as our legacy media becomes more corrupt, as your trust in the government erodes to the point where it s barely even measurable, we need to communicate with reliable journalists. And as you know, there are still a few left in independent spaces. We ve seized one of them from the morass. We re talking to journalist Michael Schellenberger, founder of Public On Substack, the author of Apocalypse Never, and author of The Twitterphile, to talk about the need for independent journalism and free speech in Ireland, and why it s so important to fight for freedom of speech everywhere. This episode is available wherever you get your news and information. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers. We'll be running a special offer of $5 off your first month of your favourite ad-free epsiode of the month, starting on 1/27/2019. We'll only be running until 1/31/2019, so make sure to check out the offer through the link in your favourite podcast app so you can get 10% off your ad choices! To find out there, click the coupon code: AWAKeningWondes at the end of the day, and we'll be giving you 5% off the entire month of the ad-buying campaign, too! Thank you for listening to Awakening Wonders. You'll get 5% discount code: Awakening Wonders, and 5% of your ad discount, and a freebie on the next month, too. FREE PROMO, and get 20% off of the entire ad-only ad-bait deal, and 10% discount, plus a discount on your ad-code, plus free shipping on the first week of the second month, and they'll get 15% off my ad-binaries, and I'll be getting a free copy of my book "Awakening wonder, too, and you'll get a 20% discount on my next month's ad-cart, too get 5 VIP promo code, plus they'll also get my freebie, too?
00:00:00.000Hello there you Awakening Wonders, thanks for joining me wherever you are.
00:00:03.000For the first 15 minutes we'll be widely available, then we'll be exclusively available on Rumble.
00:00:09.000Click the link in the description to join us there.
00:00:12.000Whilst the world may appear to be in disarray, while there appears to be ubiquitous crisis, holy war, global war, deception, lies about turns, we Have to continue to awaken together.
00:00:27.000We have to find within ourselves the resources that are going to be required to face what potentially looks like an apocalypse.
00:00:34.000It's plain that you have to support independent media now because the institutions are broken and require either radical re-evaluation or total dismantling.
00:00:43.000As our institutions fall apart, as our legacy media becomes more corrupt, as your trust in the government erodes to the point where it's barely even measurable, we need to communicate with reliable journalists.
00:00:55.000And as you know, there are still a few left in independent spaces.
00:01:00.000We've seized one of them from the morass.
00:01:03.000It's so-called journalist Michael Schellenberger, founder of Public on Substack, the Twitterphile inaugure, author of Apocalypse Never, Thank you for joining us, Michael.
00:01:16.000Those viewers watching this will be aware that Michael is doing this in front of what you might call a strobing image, which I'm sure is part of your mind games mentality, presenting to us in the middle of a visual cyclone.
00:01:32.000If you're watching this anywhere other than Rumble, we'll only be available for a brief while.
00:01:35.000Press the red button to support independent journalism and Michael, can you tell us a little bit of what you've been doing recently in Ireland and how that impacts what's happening with legislation globally around online safety and hate speech?
00:01:52.000Yeah, well, I mean, you and your listeners may remember that Ireland proposed one of the most draconian crackdowns on free speech.
00:02:00.000It was legislation that would literally allow the police to go into people's homes and confiscate their cell phones and laptops and read what was on them.
00:02:09.000And then if people refused to do it, they could be carted off to jail.
00:02:14.000I mean, it was shocking to think that this was something that was being proposed You know, in a country like Ireland, which has long been a place really committed to free speech, you know, land of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde.
00:02:26.000And so we, you know, so we were there in, you know, in September, and it was incredible.
00:02:34.000I mean, I went and interviewed people on the street.
00:02:35.000Most people had no idea this was going on.
00:02:37.000But when people learned about it, most people were against it.
00:02:40.000We found out really upon arriving that the Justice Minister, who's also a member of Parliament who had sponsored the legislation, that really her career is in trouble because this legislation is so unpopular.
00:02:52.000So we're feeling pretty good about this.
00:03:01.000I think that the folks on the ground in Ireland, the free speech advocates, Our feeling like the wind is in our back and that there's a good chance to defeat this thing.
00:03:12.000People love their freedoms around the world.
00:03:15.000And even though I think people in Britain, I mean, sorry, people in Ireland are very, they're very, you know, concerned obviously about intolerance.
00:03:23.000But when I asked people on the street, we recorded videos of me interviewing people on the street.
00:03:27.000You know, has there been an increase in hatred and intolerance in Ireland that would necessitate such a thing?
00:03:33.000And basically everybody said, no, the Irish are more tolerant than ever.
00:03:38.000I wrote a piece over the weekend where I talked about, I think it helps to remind people just how much more progressive everybody is, how much more sensitive and tolerant everybody is.
00:03:47.000I think it also helped when I would ask people, I'd be like, what, what would James Joyce and Oscar Wilde think about this legislation?
00:03:54.000And most people I think said, I don't think they would like it very much.
00:03:58.000And also, you know, it's helpful to remind people because it's funny, people don't think that they'll be victims of censorship.
00:04:05.000Most people tend to think they go, oh, there's these hateful people that are out there and there's none of that in me.
00:04:10.000You know, it's kind of a classic, you know, I'm, you know, a good person.
00:04:14.000Everybody thinks they're a good person.
00:04:15.000They never think that they would be subject to such censorship.
00:04:18.000But when you kind of remind them about how subjective Hate speech supposedly is and how many people will think, some people will think some things are hateful and other people won't.
00:04:27.000I think it really did help to turn people's minds around.
00:04:29.000So I wrote a piece this weekend that just said, just make people think about it for a minute and I think people will end up siding on the side of free speech.
00:04:36.000Yeah, what you wrote in your piece, because obviously I read your journalism on Substack, on Public, which you founded, you said that you offer an alternative framing.
00:04:46.000It's pretty easy to see how, if you ask people the question, and wow, censor takers for Time Immemorial have known, If you've said, do you think hate speech is good?
00:05:09.000But it's interesting that the framing of the argument is, of course, designed to ease us into censorship.
00:05:17.000Like that when you think that the end point is police storming your home and grabbing your laptop the only thing that would legitimize that would be oh well it's there's child pornography on that laptop but of course the law doesn't say exclusively and specifically in cases of child pornography which is already illegal and doesn't require additional legislation so in a sense those points are Redundant and they are sort of in a sense using, I don't know, neuro-linguistic programming, cyber warfare, hypnosis to create conditions where we, like we the turkeys, vote once again enthusiastically for Christmas.
00:05:54.000I mean, there's this famous distinction between fast thinking and slow thinking, which comes from the great psychologist Daniel Kahneman, a contributor to something called behavioral economics.
00:06:08.000I mean, this goes back to the Greeks and this idea that It's easy to manipulate people when you can short-circuit their thinking and make them think quickly and emotionally, whereas this kind of dialogue, it's essential.
00:06:26.000I was teasing my readers, I just said, this one simple trick.
00:06:31.000And the trick, of course, is to get people to think slowly about these things and to have that conversation because Irrationality lives in fast thinking, and reason and liberalism, in the best sense of the term, and democracy depend on slow thinking.
00:06:47.000Yes, and dialogue, it might be assumed, would lead to consensus.
00:06:53.000And whilst there's offered, whilst the framing we're offered is this is to protect you, it seems that actually what's really being lain are a set of traps that prevent people realizing, wait a minute, we could organize society radically differently.
00:07:10.000We don't need to centralize power in the same way that we once did.
00:07:13.000There are opportunities for communication, discourse, consensus, autonomy that just simply didn't exist even 20, 30 years ago.
00:07:22.000And to prevent that sort of momentum and tendency from naturally unfurling a sort of what you might consider an ordinary evolution of the way that technology and communications has evolved, You have to use atavistic, reductive, and to use your phrase, fast thinking models to prevent people rationally moving in the direction of our shared interests.
00:07:47.000I think the other thing you said that's so important is this idea that we're doing this to protect you.
00:07:52.000In fact, these measures would make ordinary people more vulnerable to abuses of state power.
00:07:58.000And that also, that was part of the subjectivity I was pointing to, which was that You kind of get people thinking a little bit about it and you kind of go, you know, these are these are, you know, human beings that are going to be making decisions about what's hateful and what's not.
00:08:11.000And could you see how people might abuse that or start to manipulate that or that even just innocent mistakes might be made and get people entrapped in them?
00:08:19.000And so I think that it helps to get people to slow down on it and it helps to do it in person.
00:08:24.000And it was a delightful thing because I think sometimes, you know, even myself, I was sort of imagining that that, That I think you tend to think that one person holds a particular point of view and what you're reminded of is that when you talk to somebody that we hold a whole jumble of opinions and that actually the people will change their mind or they have different views and different circumstances.
00:08:47.000So I think for me the watchword right now is just re-humanizing the conversation and it's just so dehumanizing the ways in which the media culture work And the way that I think when people get afraid and they get into this panic and particularly the elites and this desire to control, it leads them to engage in really dehumanizing forms of rhetoric and of manipulations.
00:09:12.000And I think that there's just something so powerful to coming back to just the simple Recognition of our shared humanity and of our flawedness.
00:09:22.000And this is why one of the it's made me more appreciate the American system more, but the enlightenment and sort of the sense in which we're flawed.
00:09:31.000And so we have to create systems that that check that create checks and balances against these abuses of power.
00:09:36.000This dehumanisation is perhaps exacerbated and amplified and weaponised by a polarising political space.
00:09:45.000I think it was in your article that you pointed out at least that the Democrats that favour increased censorship has itself gone up from 40% to 70%.
00:09:56.000In the last five years and I suppose what undergirds that is not an appetite for censorship but the assumption that who's going to be censored are your opponents.
00:10:05.000That's what's going to be shut down is things that you generally disagree with and take in that democrat case you might say oh they think it's good to censor pro-life arguments or pro-gun arguments or libertarianism or MAGA extremism and in a way that's a call for Humanitarianism and humanism as you've just mentioned and that perhaps that even if you're not a spiritual or religious person and you know I feel that both you and I are Michael that that's an appeal to a set of values that transcend self-interest that hold on a minute that might not and even if from a self-interested perspective you might
00:10:48.000Hold on, this legislation could be used by an opposing ideology that sees me with the enmity that currently I regard the MAGA hat wearers or whatever it might be in this instance.
00:10:59.000So do you think that this oppositionism and this polarising culture is Creating an environment where people are more susceptible to authoritarianism because they think that they're going to benefit or their side is going to benefit from it.
00:11:17.000Yeah, I mean, I was trying to, you know, it's one of the things that we talked about before with your producers before the show was this declining trust in the government.
00:11:26.000I mean, of course, we're watching this horrible dehumanization occur in the Hamas attack on Israel, but then we see a lot of dehumanization.
00:11:35.000And people hate it when you say it, but there's people that are engaging in dehumanizing rhetoric on both sides.
00:11:42.000You know, is it worse now than it was a hundred years ago?
00:11:45.000I mean, it was obviously pretty horrible a hundred years ago.
00:11:47.000I mean, you start to look back at periods, I find myself looking back on periods like the 90s and being like we were all, we were in a much better way back then.
00:11:58.000There was much less this dehumanizing rhetoric.
00:12:00.000I definitely think that social media Has contributed to it.
00:12:04.000You know, there's the experience that we have, um, and I'm having it right now with several people where, you know, you're being attacked online and you feel like everybody's watching and it makes you very scared and paranoid and small.
00:12:19.000And then you can kind of go in one of two directions.
00:12:22.000You can try to, you can be smaller and hide and be quiet and not say, not take any risks.
00:12:28.000Or you can reaffirm, I think what we would call more spiritual values, which is The value of embracing all of humanity, of viewing ourselves as children of God, at least that's how I talk about it.
00:12:41.000I mean, I struggle with it, because as a Christian, for me, the hardest thing is the most essential part of Christianity, which is to love thy enemy.
00:12:51.000And it's not the easiest thing to do when people are attacking you and trying to destroy you to be like, I love you.
00:12:56.000You know, having that as the goal and holding that up as a really as the highest value, I think makes us better.
00:13:04.000And so for me, that's something to strive for.
00:13:06.000Yeah, as our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ says, if you just love people that love you, well that's expedient and ordinary.
00:13:14.000So it's only in loving your enemy, on bestowing blessings upon your enemy, that you are able to transcend this material state and this material paradigm.
00:13:23.000And often when we talk, and like indeed you're one of the journalists that I'd most cite as being a symbol of this, I need to talk to people that I recognise are credible, but I usually mean by that intellectually credible, like yourself or Glenn Greenwald, and I think, oh no, God, I've not gone mad.
00:13:38.000I have just remained anti-authoritarian, and the system has shifted around me, and the rules have all changed.
00:13:48.000And unless we're able to derive our values from somewhere outside of rationalism, that in a way can always make an argument for ultimately self-interest.
00:14:06.000Altruism, just a sort of a rational set.
00:14:09.000It's a pretty despairing model that we're offered.
00:14:13.000And indeed, when you feel that you are Under attack, when you feel that you're living in a system that doesn't have values, it's pretty easy to yield.
00:14:23.000And in a way, I suppose, yeah, a greater demand is made that you find within yourself a depth and a beyond faith, I think, Michael, even trust like that.
00:14:34.000Well, I believe in God, so God's got to have a plan.
00:14:37.000I'm looking forward to seeing how this one unfolds.
00:14:43.000But our systems, Whether they are media, judicial, like, yeah, they are not organized on that basis.
00:14:51.000We can say even values that are advocated for and declared as, you know, just accepted values, innocent until proven guilty, that doesn't seem to hold a great deal of sway.
00:15:04.000Where from where Do we derive these values?
00:15:07.000I hope you don't feel, gosh, short-changed by me.
00:15:12.000I would never have assumed that you were a person who's primarily, because if you are a spiritual person at all, you have to be primarily spiritual.
00:15:34.000I mean, I came back to my faith in a dark time when I needed it.
00:15:39.000And at first, there was something rational about it, which is that I knew that there's a lot of evidence that having faith is good for you.
00:15:52.000But there was also a leap of faith, and this is something that comes out of the existential tradition too, particularly out of Soren Kierkegaard, who was a brilliant Christian existentialist, but it's also in Friedrich Nietzsche, who was a very famous atheist.
00:16:06.000And it's a view that I hold very strongly, which is that faith is not something ultimately that you can reason towards.
00:16:12.000Faith is something that you must leap towards.
00:16:17.000And I think it's disparaged quite a bit, including by many people who I love and agree with on many issues in the secular community that really think that faith is irrational and that we should get rid of it.
00:16:34.000I think that we can get unity and agreement beyond people with different faiths, but there is some leap of faith that says we have a faith in humankind and in humanizing rather than dehumanizing.
00:16:50.000I can make a bunch of reasonable arguments about it, but I do think that ultimately it's hard to get your way there through logic, that you're making a leap of faith To believe in God, or to believe that we have a soul, or to believe that humanity is basically good.
00:17:11.000And I think even for things like liberal democracy, I just think that those numbers that your colleague sent me showing the declining trust in government, I mean, it's really scary.
00:17:22.000Particularly at a time of so much trouble in the world, and I think we have to affirm it.
00:17:27.000We can argue for it, but I do think if you are pro-human, you must be pro-civilization.
00:17:34.000And if you're pro-human and pro-civilization, you must be in favor of liberal democracy, and of free speech, and of innocence until proven guilty, and of all of the other foundations of civilization, because You can't be pro-human and against civilization because if you don't have civilization or you don't have these rules of liberal democracy, then the outcomes for humankind as a whole are far worse.
00:17:58.000Plainly they don't believe in these principles except when it's in their service, I say they, and I'm, you know, in a way I'm just doubling down on the point I made about the increase in Democrat support for censorship.
00:18:11.000They obviously don't believe in free speech because it has no value unless you believe in free speech that you don't agree with, in much the same way that you and I are just talking about spirituality, unless you are willing to Love thine enemy then all you're talking about is rationalism and logic.
00:18:26.000Now logic and rationalism are by their nature based on measurement and discernment and faith in a sense is an invitation to hurl yourself into the mysterious abyss and pray that it's not made of nothing but of something that there is some telos other than just blind expansionism and I mean that in the cosmological sense rather than the Imperial sense now, what do we do mate when you have
00:18:51.000figures whose primary pose appears to be around Morality and ethics say take Justin Trudeau, please
00:18:58.000Thank you Like seems to be all about kindness
00:19:03.000kindness and sweetness and I see him joshing along with the leader of the opposition, taking
00:19:07.000the speaker to the seat. But that speaker, you know, just before condemned the truck
00:19:12.000of protests or last year at least as Nazis on the flimsiest of evidence, no evidence
00:19:16.000actually to suggest that Nazism is what they're interested in. Meanwhile, they applaud an
00:19:20.000actual Nazi and then sort of ask us to sort of forget it and consider it as potential
00:19:25.000Russian disinformation as usual. And also that they are similarly introducing new streaming
00:19:32.000laws and the ability to regulate podcasts.
00:19:35.000How is it that the new aesthetic of authoritarianism is sort of couched in this floppy haired liberalism?
00:19:51.000I mean, obviously, there's two things going on.
00:19:54.000There's the censorship industrial complex, which we've seen funded by governments, both in the UK and the United States, the Five Eyes nations as well.
00:20:03.000We see the involvement of intelligence and security organizations.
00:20:07.000But there's also this cultural desire, and I think that some of that is coming just from a place of privilege.
00:20:14.000And just to put a point on it, I think some coddling, where there's this idea that I shouldn't have to hear disconfirmatory information.
00:20:25.000You know, I think that hearing people that disagree with you or that are debunking your views or challenging your views is uncomfortable.
00:20:33.000And so there's some extent to which I just think there's a lot of privileged people in the society that are saying, I shouldn't have to hear those views.
00:20:40.000So it's gotten, in some ways, it's a magnification of the filter bubbles that get created from social media platforms.
00:20:47.000The intolerance is coming from privileged elites.
00:20:51.000I always point out that the people demanding censorship are not, you know, bagging your groceries or filling up your car with gasoline.
00:20:58.000They're not making products to the factory floor.
00:21:00.000They're working at universities like Stanford, like Harvard.
00:21:04.000You know, that's where it's just in the art in the former prime minister of of New Zealand went to.
00:21:45.000This is not the view that our civilization is based on.
00:21:48.000Our civilization is based on this idea that we are all flawed, that we are all wrong at one point or another, that we have very mixed motives, that we all behave in ways that we regret later.
00:22:03.000Literally, there's not a single one of us that doesn't have that.
00:22:05.000And that We're better off when we are in an environment where we have people that can challenge us and criticize us.
00:22:11.000And I mean, I find myself whenever I have to make these little soliloquies about the importance of free speech, I go, God, I can't believe I have to justify free speech.
00:22:28.000that were not raised on social media and that weren't raised in this culture of fear tend to be more open to free speech.
00:22:35.000I think older generations tend to be more favoring free speech.
00:22:38.000But setting that aside, I think that we do have to find ways to make this case to folks about the importance of free speech, particularly younger folks, and how wonderful it is to be wrong.
00:22:50.000I mean, I wrote two whole books About that explore the ways in which I was wrong and and you know, you can use your narcissism against your narcissism in the sense that you can it's very fascinating the ways that I've been wrong.
00:23:02.000Let's talk more about how I've been wrong in the things that I regret because I do think that I think it inspires something from people.
00:23:10.000That's not defensive that'll actually allows us to kind of be like, yeah, I was wrong about that too, or I have those regrets too and Let him that's never sinned be the first to throw the stone.
00:23:21.000And it's just such a simple, basic lesson.
00:23:51.000In the sense of having a darker view of human nature, but it's in all the wisdom traditions and I think we have to elevate it once again as a sense of humility and the chance that we might be wrong and and for that reason, especially that's why we want to have a fair and equal justice system.
00:24:06.000And that's why we want to have freedom of speech.
00:24:10.000Nick Cave, the Australian singer-songwriter, said that we are experiencing in this new culture all of the piety of religion just extracted of important ideas like redemption and salvation and I again feel like there's this kind of, you know, I've written books in which I talk about, you know, doing things wrong but there's this sort of subsequent metastasization into sort of ethical failings, into something far more monstrous And it seems to me that this has a kind of cultural context that's curious.
00:24:46.000For example, you know, obviously free speech equates to hate speech is an interesting idea.
00:25:02.000The FBI targeting Trump supporters for 2024 and the kind of equation of opposition With terrorism, the use of language, you know, from Hillary Clinton specifically, like, you know, extremists if not terrorists.
00:25:21.000Yeah, I mean, so this is a very important investigative piece that ran in Newsweek by a journalist named Bill Arkin, who's a very well-known and respected journalist in the United States.
00:25:34.000He quoted many FBI officials anonymously, confirming that indeed this was what was going on, and the FBI has been Focused on exaggerating the threat of domestic extremism and domestic terrorism.
00:25:51.000We have also written about this extensively.
00:25:54.000We think that there is clearly an effort by a politicized FBI.
00:25:59.000To spread disinformation that basically frames Trump supporters as wanting to overthrow the government.
00:26:08.000I think there's reasons to suspect that a significant number of federal agents undercover were instigating violence on January 6th.
00:26:16.000We now know because In the fake FBI entrapment that led to the kidnapping plot against the governor of Michigan, those defendants have now been acquitted because the government was involved in an entrapment.
00:26:34.000So this is really scary because what we're talking about here is basically a disinformation campaign by the federal government to frame people expressing their free speech rights to frame them as terrorists.
00:26:49.000This is basically secret police, information operations.
00:27:02.000You know, I think that, you know, there's another thing here, which is the ways in which the intelligence and security agencies that are involved in this, they're manipulating The confusion that people have in their own minds, and I discovered it when I was interviewing people in Ireland, and I keep finding it, where on the one hand, people kind of are saying we should not allow incitement to violence.
00:27:27.000And everybody basically agrees with that.
00:27:29.000We have a lot of legal cases where you can't immediately incite violence.
00:27:35.000But you can see it's already it's it's a little subjective.
00:27:38.000In other words, it's easy to be like, we have to go kill that person because they're part of this religious group.
00:27:43.000That's a media incitement to violence.
00:27:45.000Well, you start to then get into it's not immediate or how immediate is it?
00:27:50.000That sort of subjective gray zone, you start to see the expansion or what psychologists call concept creep, where the idea of harm and what's categorized as harm grows, grows, grows.
00:28:03.000And that other thing I was mentioning where people are more intolerant of different views than justifies itself by saying, oh, well, we have to protect people from that harmful speech.
00:28:13.000So again, it's one of those things where it's like it takes some time to sort of explain what's going on and to help people to see that.
00:28:20.000You know, I mean, there's, this has come up with Twitter, now X, where Elon has allowed, you know, more so-called hate speech on the platform.
00:28:29.000I mean, in other words, you know, hate speech is subjective, but certainly, you know, you can find, and it's, you know, I think Elon, there's some questions around whether there's really been an increase, but certainly you can find people saying horrible anti-Semitic things online.
00:28:42.000We just saw over the last several days, people saying really terrible dehumanizing things.
00:28:47.000The question is, is it better to be able to argue back against that and say, look, that's really gross.
00:28:54.000You're justifying this horrible violence against people.
00:28:58.000Is it better to be able to have that conversation, or is it better to just have a small committee of experts decide to censor it?
00:29:05.000I obviously, and you, and our friend Matt Taibbi, and others, we obviously side with the idea of allow that debate to occur.
00:29:39.000But I do think we need to get back to allowing more of that conversation to occur because, you know, I think down the road of we just have to have more censorship decided by unelected people and by special secret committees.
00:29:52.000That's a very that's a road to totalitarianism.
00:29:55.000It's a road that we appear to be traveling down at pace in a variety of areas.
00:29:59.000Yes, with the censorship industrial complex.
00:30:01.000Yes, with matters that regarding world health.
00:30:04.000Yes, with matters regarding war, increasing ongoing war, without, it seems, due democratic
00:30:11.000process, without the ability to debate or discuss it, without a vision for peace in
00:30:16.000sight or even really discussed in some instances.
00:30:21.000This thing you said about the concept creep and the increase in what constitutes harm,
00:30:27.000I suppose by its nature legitimizes authoritarianism.
00:31:16.000And when we're talking about this, Michael, I know that at least from the way you present, it seems that you have some faith or hope at least that these institutions can improve. Now for the first time
00:31:29.000it seems in this sort of cycle leading to 2024 people are saying we would disband the CIA,
00:31:52.000Or do you believe that reform can be effective, even in the areas we've discussed, where I know a lot of people think, oh my god, this is seismic.
00:31:59.000We are on the edge of something absolutely terrifying, not just because of the loathing and distrust of the media and the government and many of our institutions, but because it appears There is a trajectory towards centralisation in many, many areas of public life and it's beyond national.
00:32:14.000It seems to be a global and somewhat coordinated issue.
00:32:18.000Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question.
00:32:20.000I mean, I think there's a lot of ways in which I and many others, I think, see the current moment as very similar to the 1970s.
00:32:28.000The 1970s, though, we had a reaction to Watergate in the form of something called the Church Committee hearing of 1975.
00:32:37.000But it was the Democrats that were running that hearing and it had the support of Republicans.
00:32:42.000And they really put it, this is where they exposed MKUltra, You know, the drug, the drugging of people without their permission.
00:32:50.000I mean, shocking experiments were done by the CIA.
00:32:55.000But we also saw abuses of power by FBI, of course.
00:32:58.000And there's still things from that era that we that we don't know.
00:33:01.000But you saw a sort of reform of institutions.
00:33:03.000And I think this is what America's founding fathers meant when they said we need a revolution every every few decades.
00:33:10.000You need to clean out these institutions.
00:33:12.000I personally think it would be going too far to completely shut down the FBI, you know, the CIA.
00:33:52.000But you definitely need new heads of these agencies who are psychologically healthy and apolitical.
00:34:00.000I think that one of the things that I've been very interested in is the ways in which Totalitarianism is characterized by psychopaths and narcissists taking over important societal institutions.
00:34:14.000And that means people that use their charisma to mesmerize and hypnotize people, basically with this line that we've been talking about, oh, I'm here to protect you and protect you from all this hatred and domestic extremism.
00:34:27.000And the psychopaths who will basically destroy people's lives.
00:34:29.000I mean, the entrapment that the FBI has been engaged in is often entrapment of people that are mentally disabled or mentally ill.
00:34:48.000Now, the problem is, and I point this out in this piece I wrote about Jim Jordan, who's the The head of this subcommittee investigating the weaponization, he's a lot like Church, Frank Church, the member of Congress was in the mid-70s.
00:35:02.000The difference is, is that the Democrats are against Jim Jordan.
00:35:05.000In fact, they demonize Jim Jordan as sort of anti-democratic, even though Jim Jordan has done the most to sort of surface the abuses of power, both by Department of Homeland Security in terms of censorship, also by FBI.
00:35:19.000But I will say, you know, the United States, we're still we still have a constitution.
00:35:24.000We have a really strong First Amendment that protects free speech and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in considering Missouri versus Biden, which is the lawsuit around censorship.
00:35:35.000Recently came back and actually expanded the injunction preventing this Department of Homeland Security agency from talking to social media companies.
00:35:44.000And I do think the Supreme Court will decide to hear this case.
00:35:47.000I do think the Supreme Court will side with us.
00:35:50.000So when I look, you know, it's like a knife by the phone booth.
00:35:52.000You know, it's like we're definitely having some setbacks.
00:35:56.000all around the world and the demonetization, including people, including you and others,
00:36:13.000You know, Elon has made it much freer.
00:36:16.000We have Supreme Court in the United States.
00:36:18.000We have the pushback in Ireland that appears to be working.
00:36:21.000Similarly, our friends in Brazil say that as soon as they said, as soon as they explained to people that what you're proposing is censorship, it did start to change the conversation in Brazil.
00:36:32.000So I do think that, I mean, what I, you know, it's cliche, but I will just say really fighting for free speech does matter.
00:36:39.000I think the event that we did in London had a big impact.
00:36:42.000I think the event that we did in Ireland is important.
00:36:46.000It's quite lovely, I will say, just at a human level to be able to have these conversations and have these exchanges.
00:36:52.000I've made some really lovely friends around the world.
00:37:03.000And so to be able to find each other and build a community has been one of the most satisfying and rewarding parts of building this free speech movement.
00:37:23.000I want to add Rumble to that list of people advocating for free speech, obviously, for some reasons that are pretty bloody obvious.
00:37:29.000Also, I want to talk about the Our idea of transparency, whilst the population from various nations have less and less ability to live privately, privacy is being equated with criminality, another one of those peculiar conjunctions that we've been discussing throughout this chat.
00:37:49.000There is no transparency in government, or perhaps insufficient transparency in government.
00:37:53.000A conversation I had recently with Scott Adams, we discussed the possibility of absolute transparency at the level of government.
00:38:00.000If you were able to witness all expenditure, if you were able to plainly witness all funding, if it was open source and accessible, is that possible?
00:38:12.000I feel like even with the subject, when we talk about, oh, you know, well, there are many Republicans that are pretty anti-war, but those, generally speaking, they're anti the war between Ukraine and Russia, and they're pro Yeah, intensifying hostilities between the US and China.
00:38:57.000And also, do you think that in the same way, after your point about Brazil, that we could end up with free speech kind of exiles in the same way that you might have once had tax exiles, that there might be principalities and regions where free speech is tolerated outside of the kind of Five Eyes countries, for want of a better phrase?
00:39:17.000I mean, I think it's, you know, right before the recent war and attacks in Israel, everybody was focusing on the United States on the border.
00:39:27.000And I mean, here we have in the United States and so, but it's also similar in Europe.
00:39:30.000I mean, here we have people around the world fleeing To free countries.
00:39:35.000People want to come to the United States and Europe because they want to be free.
00:39:39.000They want to be able to speak their minds.
00:39:42.000They don't want to be victims of censorship and state oppression.
00:39:45.000So at the end of the day, I do think that what we have going for us is that most people do want to be free.
00:39:51.000I have arguments with some people about this because obviously there are some people that do want totalitarianism and you are people that want censorship.
00:39:57.000But I think that's often that fast thinking.
00:39:59.000You get into slow thinking, you make people start to make, you require people to slow down and think about it.
00:40:05.000I do think they side with free speech.
00:40:13.000How frequently the US government is moving money around to hide various projects.
00:40:18.000Now, sometimes if you're making a new secret weapon, a defensive weapon, it might be justified.
00:40:24.000But even then, you're supposed to have congressional oversight.
00:40:27.000There's been far too much secrecy on these issues.
00:40:31.000We do need a whole new era of transparency.
00:40:33.000You know, on COVID, to give one example, you may remember there's this moment where one of Anthony Fauci's aides said, I'm going to use my private Gmail to avoid future Freedom of Information Act requests.
00:40:46.000And we ended up getting those emails anyway.
00:40:49.000There is this sense in which the people that are in charge They know, obviously, that what they're doing doesn't look good and is probably bad, and they really don't trust the public.
00:41:01.000I think in some sense they really don't like the public.
00:41:03.000They don't really think the public has a right to know, and yet that's been so foundational.
00:41:08.000It's, I think, one of these other reforms.
00:41:12.000I mean, like you, I think you kind of go, man, if there's really a crackdown here, do we have to go somewhere else?
00:41:31.000Transparency into how our tax money is being spent.
00:41:34.000Then I just think Western civilization is over.
00:41:36.000You know, I think you can start to lose some liberal societies in the Western alliance, but you start to lose the United States and I think it's game over.
00:41:45.000And so I do think I think we are going to get a victory on Missouri versus Biden.
00:41:51.000I will say America has been in some pretty dark moments before.
00:41:54.000You know, the most recently was sort of the 70s and the abuses of power that we saw in the in the late 60s, early 70s.
00:42:01.000But we really do have an amazing system here.
00:42:04.000And I think that culture is still here, but people forget it when they get caught up in the emotions of social media and fast thinking.
00:42:11.000And I wonder if that culture is being diluted by this, simply by almost technological advancement, in a sense, the same way that the industrialization of war made, you know, the First and Second World War much worse than their predecessors.
00:42:26.000And perhaps that doesn't tell the whole story of the preceding appetites.
00:42:30.000I read something about the brutality of the early days of the French Revolution that was sort of an indicator that the sort of Venom was still present.
00:42:39.000It's just they didn't have the mechanization that would facilitate murder on the scale of, you know, 50, 60 years later.
00:42:47.000Anyway, my point is that what concerns me is now the machinery is in place for dystopia and It appears sometimes that legislatively moves are being made that suggest that the idea of a consensus between those that are governed and the governing is breaking down.
00:43:11.000I spoke with Glenn Greenwald a little while ago and he says, you know, anti-protest laws, pro-surveillance, pro-censorship, and automated civil... you know, it seems that now, once
00:43:23.000there was a kind of necessity to, like for billionaire philanthropists to toss dollar bills
00:43:29.000from the window of a passing limo in a gesture of appeasement, whereas now it's just like,
00:43:34.000well we're just going to have robots on the streets of New York that at the flick of a switch
00:43:39.000can be utilised to absolutely control you in the militarisation of the police forces. But one of the
00:43:45.000components, so obviously you have to be, if not optimistic, you have to be hopeful to live in the
00:43:50.000space that we live in, otherwise our plan would have to become, we better get some land off
00:43:55.000Nicaragua and get the hell out of here and start thinking about communes that are off grid or
00:44:00.000whatever, and I do think about those things.
00:44:03.000But you also have to think, no, hold on, there is a battle here, there is a war, and it's significant what's happened in the last five, ten years.
00:44:12.000And the capacity that we have now to regulate and control, if that is undergirded by new legislation, like the safety bills that we've talked about in both the UK, Ireland, Canada, then that is a significant step towards the end of America, in a way.
00:44:31.000Yeah, and I will say I don't hold those apocalyptic views of AI.
00:44:37.000I just testified to Senator Paul inviting me to testify in front of the Senate about AI.
00:44:44.000In fact, I worry that that discourse around AI actually You know, suggest that humans aren't making these big decisions when they are.
00:44:54.000You know, everyone, there's a big thing you always see people do online where they're like, oh, I asked Chad GPT this question and they answered with this, you know, super politically correct response.
00:45:03.000Well, somebody is making that decision for Chad GPT.
00:45:05.000I mean, I just think I'm a little, I worry a little bit about that conversation on AI because I also think I see people that sort of say, oh, it's this big threat and that means I have to control it.
00:45:15.000Often the people hyping that threat are often people that want the control.
00:45:22.000But I do think at the end of the day, like, for example, in the case of the censorship, of course, they were using, you know, these tools to be able to do mass censorship, like on Facebook and on Twitter.
00:45:33.000But on the issues of what they were censoring, it was people making those decisions.
00:45:38.000Facebook's, you know, it's Mark Zuckerberg that's going to decide.
00:45:42.000And it's Elon Musk who's going to decide.
00:45:45.000You know, I think I mean, you know, the thing that really freaks me out is I'm like, what would have happened if Elon hadn't taken over Twitter?
00:45:53.000I mean, that's I that is really scary because I don't think we really knew how bad it was.
00:45:57.000There was there was some legislation already on the censorship of Facebook.
00:46:03.000But I do think, no, I think that we can't, we can't escape the West.
00:46:07.000If you, if you move to Nicaragua and start your commune, of course I'll come and visit.
00:46:12.000But I, but you're not, I mean, these are peripheral countries.
00:46:15.000I mean, you wouldn't be safe if there's some global totalitarian crackdown.
00:46:19.000And I just think, yeah, I mean, I just think, look, we, humankind is, you know, we've come up from really, you know, authoritarian rule over time and really violent rule and You know, the long sweep is pretty clear that we've evolved towards greater democracy and less violence.
00:46:40.000And there's been some backsliding for sure over the last few decades.
00:46:47.000But to some extent, that distrust of government Some of that's healthy, right?
00:46:53.000We don't want too much trust in government.
00:46:55.000We should not want the government to decide who can be paid for their YouTube videos or who should be censored online.
00:47:03.000I think it's a very, very dark moment right now, but I think we should You know, remind ourselves that this too shall pass and that nothing is permanent and that reality swerves, that trends tend to be non-linear, in many cases not linear.
00:47:22.000Do you, though, as a Christian, ever concern yourself with the idea that there might be some terrible apocalyptic showdown on the horizon that we're all going to be invited to participate in?
00:47:37.000I mean, obviously nuclear war is just the most realistic possibility for apocalypse, and I think everybody should be scared about it.
00:47:48.000I mean, that's how nuclear weapons sort of work, is by scaring people.
00:47:55.000You know, I'll say, though, that my understanding of it and I've done some amount of research and writing on this is that the most dangerous moments around nuclear were when we first got them when the Russians and Americans first got them and we were sort of.
00:48:11.000Not sure, you know, how to handle them.
00:48:13.000So we had the worst scares, you know, the Cuban Missile Crisis being the closest that we came.
00:48:19.000Since then, we've created much better communications.
00:48:22.000You know, I think there was a recent instance, as you may know, between, you know, the Ukrainians asked Elon to expand Starlink support up into, you know, new areas and he declined out of concern for nuclear war.
00:48:38.000So, I do think that, you know, we also saw India and Pakistan.
00:48:41.000Everybody thought that if India and Pakistan got nuclear weapons that they would have nuclear war, but it actually ended up helping them to de-escalate the situation.
00:48:49.000The most dangerous moment is when people first get the nuclear weapons.
00:48:53.000So, I think You know, I've been misunderstood this issue before.
00:48:57.000We should be scared of nuclear weapons.
00:49:00.000At the same time, we have put in place some some means to prevent their being used.
00:49:05.000But this is all the reason why we have to negotiate a peace in Ukraine.
00:49:09.000I mean, at this point, I think most people want to see something negotiated.
00:49:12.000And there are nuclear weapons that protect all NATO countries.
00:49:17.000And so there's going to be some negotiation over Whether that protection is going to be extended to Ukraine, whether it's not, or whether partly or whatnot, but ultimately, yeah, it is scary, but I do think there's also risks of becoming too apocalyptic and too hopeless.
00:49:35.000I do think we need to keep our eyes on the prize, which is for peace and freedom and prosperity and the older values.
00:49:44.000Including humility, especially humility, especially the balance of power, because without those things I think you tend towards a totalitarian mentality.
00:49:55.000Like an arcane honouring of principles like humility and an acknowledgement that technology appears to be moving in the direction of allowing less centralisation, more communication, More dialogue.
00:50:10.000And it feels to me that what's being cultivated is a mindset that's like, no, no, no, we should use all this to centralise power and create a centralised global entity that can regulate above, whether it's the WHO pandemic treaty or these eerily similar set of legislations across anglophonic countries.
00:50:29.000to increase surveillance or whether it's we have to rely on the largesse of Elon Musk to prevent
00:50:35.000escalating wars you know between proxy war at least between superpowers. Michael thank you
00:50:42.000so much thank you for covering so much territory in such good faith.
00:50:46.000That's what I feel is perhaps lacking in the conversation around social, cultural and political issues at the moment is a sort of an open-hearted intention towards resolution rather than a further validation of a polarizing position.
00:51:00.000Yeah, I feel that you're doing a lot of good, mate.
00:51:18.000You can follow Michael's work by going to public.substack.com and follow him on X by searching at Schellenberger, which is well worth doing because as you just witnessed, his contributions to the conversation are always enlightening.
00:51:32.000He has become, I think, an example of what he espouses.
00:51:35.000He indeed is the change that we would like to see in the world.
00:51:39.000On the show tomorrow, Kim Iverson is joining us.
00:51:46.000We'll be talking about RFK's announcement.
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