Stay Free - Russel Brand - October 13, 2023


The BOMBSHELL COVID Study that Changes Everything! With David Zweig

Topics
challenge study and Stanford test corruption and exploitation
Hosted by
Russel Brand
Mentioned
David Zweig Russell Brand Anthony Fauci Michael Schellenberger Awakening Wonders Jay Bhattacharya Twitter Files Vincent Ferre Andy Cohen Naomi Klein Matt Taibbi Plum Derosa Joe Rogan Horsepaced People Biden
SHOCKING! Who REALLY Benefits From Israel vs Palestine Conflict?! - Stay Free #222 Dr Jay Bhattacharya ”The Government Censored Me & Other Scientists. We Fought Back—and Won”

Episode Stats


Length

37 minutes

Words per minute

167.47

Word count

6,347

Sentence count

340

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

David Zweig is a journalist for Silent Lunch and the author of Invisibles and Abundance of Caution. He s one of the few journalists who helped lift the lid on the suppression of information that was taking place during the pandemic, and the deep state intervention in public discourse that's come to define our age. In this episode, we discuss the possibility that the information we were given about the SARS pandemic was biased, and that the truth was much darker than what was presented to us by the mainstream media and the CDC. We discuss whether or not the truth could have been found, and what it might mean for our understanding of the events leading up to the outbreak of SARS in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We also discuss the role of the Deep State in shaping public discourse, and how it was able to exert control over public opinion and access to information through techniques such as surveillance, surveillance techniques, and surveillance techniques that were designed to delegitimize dissent and allow for effective control of public opinion. Remember, we premiere every day, 12 ET, at 12:00pm Eastern Time. Become an Awakened Wonder to get access to more content from us, meditations, 5 ideas that will change the world, and meditations that will make the world a better place to live in the world. Stay Free with Russell Brand. - The Conscious Revolution Project. Well done for transcending the fear! - Well done, Russell Brand, ? Thank you for joining us today for transcribing the fear? (Apostolos, ) - . , & so much more? (featuring the work of and by in this episode by , by ) ? ( ) ... is a post on this post on on this video on this is a mashup that will help us all be better than that which will help you get a chance to be heard in the rest of the world in the next episode? , and so on, and so much so that you can help us make it so that we can be more like that in the real world more so than that, more of that, and more so so than you can be a better of that can help you know how to be like that, etc., etc. , etc., etc., and more like it?

Transcript

Transcripts from "Stay Free - Russel Brand" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello there, you Awakening Wonder.
00:00:01.000 Thanks for joining us today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:05.000 Well done for transcending the fear.
00:00:07.000 Well done for avoiding the legacy media's attempts to fill you full of information that is not beneficial to your spiritual advancement.
00:00:16.000 Remember, we premiere every day, 12, Eastern Time.
00:00:20.000 Become an Awakened Wonder to get access to more content from us, meditations, Five ideas that will change the world.
00:00:28.000 Meaningful ideas.
00:00:29.000 Successful communities that have broken out of this system.
00:00:33.000 Deep spiritual readings, new ideas and arcane wisdom fused together.
00:00:39.000 Individual awakening, community reformation and even revolution.
00:00:43.000 That's what we're going to be discussing.
00:00:45.000 And we've got a guest that could join us in those spaces easily.
00:00:48.000 David Zweig is a journalist for SilentLunch.net.
00:00:51.000 He's the author of Invisibles and Abundance of Caution.
00:00:54.000 He's one of the Twitter Files journalists who helped lift the lid on the suppression of information that was taking place during the pandemic and the deep state intervention in public discourse that's come to define our age.
00:01:06.000 He's a fantastic journalist.
00:01:07.000 David, thank you so much for joining us.
00:01:09.000 Thanks for having me.
00:01:10.000 This is a conversation, or a subject at least, that we discuss continually on our channel. We
00:01:14.000 talk a lot about studies that reveal that during the pandemic period the information we were given
00:01:23.000 was biased and it's extraordinary how the biases often have a common trajectory.
00:01:29.000 It seems that many of the narratives on masks, lockdowns and other COVID measures were ineffective to the point of being misleading and potentially dishonest.
00:01:39.000 Can you tell us a bit about this David?
00:01:42.000 Sure, yeah, it's a broad topic, but specifically what I had written about not that long ago was a study that was published out of Imperial College of London where they did something called a challenge study, which is they purposefully infected participants in the study with SARS-CoV-2 to give them COVID, and then they studied them.
00:02:03.000 And these types of studies, you know, have certain ethical issues regarding them because you're purposely infecting the participants, but they got approval for it.
00:02:13.000 These were low-risk people.
00:02:15.000 And what they found was something really fascinating, which is that a very, very small percentage of them, it was something like 7% of the viral emissions from these participants occurred before they had symptoms.
00:02:29.000 What this means, and what I write about in my article on the study, is that much of the pandemic narrative was that every person walking around could be this unknowingly one-person WMD that each of us could potentially infect a zillion other people and we didn't even know it.
00:02:51.000 And the study doesn't disprove any notion that there are some people who may not have symptoms who could still infect others.
00:02:57.000 But what it found was that it's incredibly rare that people without symptoms even had the ability to infect anyone else.
00:03:06.000 And this really, as I explained in the piece, really kind of turns upside down much of the justification that was given behind all these measures that were imposed upon the citizenry during the pandemic.
00:03:20.000 Because they all were based on the idea that we better put everyone at home, make everyone wear a mask, make everyone quarantine, et cetera, et cetera, because we don't know who might be infecting other people.
00:03:31.000 And what this study found is that that really seems like it's highly unlikely that that was actually the case.
00:03:38.000 To try and offer some kind of good faith argument in a bad faith world, is it possible they simply didn't know that?
00:03:45.000 Even though I've heard elsewhere that there were forms of testing available that demonstrated that asymptomatic people were not contagious.
00:03:54.000 It's not the first time I've heard this.
00:03:56.000 Other studies have reached comparable conclusions.
00:03:59.000 Is it possible that it wasn't like this?
00:04:01.000 The worst case scenario is that coronavirus was used to pilot measures that would legitimize authoritarianism and prime various populations to be managed and controlled.
00:04:15.000 It also piloted the ability to censor social media spaces in a new Media environment where dissent is more possible, likely, mobile than ever.
00:04:26.000 How much can you control dissent?
00:04:28.000 And if it were to pilot those things, and of course I'm not suggesting it was, then I would say that they would have observed that it's a pretty effective level of control that's able to be asserted.
00:04:39.000 People, generally speaking, were compliant, although a lot of people weren't.
00:04:43.000 Generally speaking, they were able to control the narrative, although there are some significant events, and obviously over time, People's perceptions of COVID have changed but yet more curiously a lot of people don't seem to be acknowledging the significance and distance between where we were when we began this period and where we are now i.e.
00:05:03.000 most people think, "Yeah, but they didn't know that then."
00:05:06.000 People don't say, generally speaking, see this as an epochal event that defines new techniques
00:05:14.000 for population control. So where on that spectrum should we be, David? Well, I'm
00:05:20.000 reluctant to conjecture about the motives or about why they did these things, but what I feel
00:05:29.000 very confident doing is talking about the evidence that I found and what I've been writing about
00:05:34.000 for years related to, to me, the biggest thing, Russell, is...
00:05:39.000 The degree of certainty within which pronouncements were made by public health officials throughout the pandemic, starting from the very beginning with these projections from the models, many from Imperial College and other places, that were wildly inaccurate.
00:05:57.000 I don't know whether they were purposefully.
00:05:59.000 I'm not going to suggest that, necessarily.
00:06:01.000 But what we know is that much of the information was based on modeling, whether it's the amount of deaths that were going to occur, and then specific to the notion of asymptomatic transmission or pre-symptomatic transmission, which would be before one gets symptoms when they're infected.
00:06:19.000 Those were also based on modeling.
00:06:21.000 We were told somewhere between 30% and 50% There were studies showing that 30-50% of people who were infected could potentially infect others, but people who didn't have symptoms.
00:06:35.000 Again, this was conjecture.
00:06:37.000 This was based on modeling, these epidemiological studies.
00:06:42.000 What's powerful about this study, and by the way, as a side note, what's interesting is, Almost no one has covered this.
00:06:48.000 The little bit of news coverage on this study has been related to some other findings, which are interesting and important, related to the super spreader idea that there were some people in the study who seemed to project far more virus than others, but they ignored this element that I'm talking about.
00:07:04.000 A tiny tiny percent because this offends the whole thing.
00:07:08.000 So what's powerful about the study is it was an actual biological study on people rather than modeling studies with conjecture and you were asking before Russell about How much do we know early on, at least on this specific point?
00:07:24.000 I've also written about another study that's a really nice dovetail to this, and it came out of Stanford.
00:07:29.000 They developed a test, a specific type of PCR test, that not only could tell if someone was infected or not, but it could tell whether they were contagious or infectious.
00:07:40.000 The regular PCR test that hundreds of millions of people were taking could only tell you if you had the virus in your body.
00:07:46.000 It told you nothing, necessarily, about whether you could infect other people.
00:07:49.000 Stanford developed this test, I believe it was as early as the summer of 2020.
00:07:54.000 They talked about it with other institutions and no one cared.
00:07:59.000 So these two tests, the Stanford test and this challenge study from Imperial College, really, I think, make a very persuasive case that the narrative we were told and the justification for imposing these measures on society as a whole Rather than following the sort of classic advice of, if you're sick, stay home, we did this other thing that had tremendous consequences.
00:08:23.000 And it's very astonishing to me, but I've been astonished repeatedly over the last three and a half years, how little coverage there's been.
00:08:33.000 I'm not aware of anyone else covering this specific point other than me.
00:08:36.000 And to me, this is a complete bombshell.
00:08:38.000 It's really important.
00:08:39.000 And this is a biological study.
00:08:42.000 The distinction between biological studies and modelling being that biological means human subjects, certainly in this case, and modelling means a bunch of data is put into a computer and it sort of predicts what might happen.
00:08:55.000 Is that sort of a layman's way of understanding that?
00:08:57.000 That's right.
00:08:57.000 That's a very good basic way.
00:09:00.000 And much of what we were told, again, were these projections where people use sophisticated formulas to model, which means to estimate what they think is going to happen.
00:09:09.000 But as we know, models are built upon the inputs.
00:09:12.000 It depends what little widgets you put into the computer is going to dictate what comes out.
00:09:18.000 And those are built upon assumptions.
00:09:20.000 And there's a hard limit to the accuracy of a model because it's built very much on the subjective choices made by the modelers and on limited information versus you have this PCR test out of Stanford and you have this challenge study where they weren't using formulas but they actually looked at the biological markers in people.
00:09:41.000 So it's an entirely different, when you look at the hierarchy of evidence, this is entirely different.
00:09:46.000 So although this is a small study, and you know, every study has its limitations, I think it's incredibly important that they were looking at biological markers rather than just taking a guess.
00:09:56.000 And lo and behold, it appears that the guesswork that was happening was very off base relative to what these biological tests are showing.
00:10:04.000 When was that test conducted again, please?
00:10:07.000 The Imperial College test?
00:10:09.000 Yeah.
00:10:09.000 Well, the Stanford test began, I think, as early as the summer of 2020, and then it took them quite a while to actually run their study with it.
00:10:17.000 But people knew that this could be done, this specific type of PCR test.
00:10:21.000 And I spoke with several of the authors of that study, who are the researchers who worked on it, and I kept Pressing them, I'm like, but have you – didn't you talk to other people?
00:10:30.000 What happened?
00:10:31.000 Because I couldn't understand, why weren't hospitals around America and the world?
00:10:35.000 Why wasn't everyone using this test that you guys figured out?
00:10:38.000 Did you keep it a secret?
00:10:40.000 And they said, we shared the information with other, you know, academic institutions and they're just – for reasons I don't know, it just wasn't taken up.
00:10:50.000 And this would have had a dramatic effect on what we knew.
00:10:54.000 Instead of making a child stay home for two weeks, they could have said, boom, take this test.
00:10:59.000 Okay, according to our specific test here, you are not contagious, head back into school.
00:11:04.000 One needn't propose planned mendacity in order to make sense of some of the plain
00:11:17.000 and observable trends during this period.
00:11:20.000 But one thing that seems to be continually indicated is that whenever there is an option,
00:11:27.000 the authoritarian option, the option that allows the assertion of control is often selected.
00:11:34.000 The legitimization of authoritarianism from an apparent, and it basically amounts to aesthetic,
00:11:41.000 position of liberalism.
00:11:43.000 How can we, they, maintain a position of liberalism, hey we're here to help you, we believe in freedom, your freedom, while legislating and at least regulating maximum levels of authority in some cases and in this case unprecedented levels of authority.
00:12:00.000 We've never had shut down Nightlife, shut down restaurants, shut down football, shut down everything.
00:12:06.000 It was an unprecedented situation.
00:12:08.000 The origins of the virus, of course, are themselves subject to considerable controversy where most people now are erring on the side of it came from the place where it was discovered, where there was a lab that was studying viruses of that nature.
00:12:20.000 It seems extraordinary.
00:12:21.000 It's taken so long to even be able to publicly say that.
00:12:24.000 And throughout the pandemic, it appears that information like, you know, the Stanford study 2020 that has a test that could Immediately end the idea that if you're asymptomatic people or pre-symptomatic people couldn't be out and about.
00:12:38.000 People that have even got COVID but are shown to be non-contagious, they could be out and about.
00:12:43.000 What would the problem there be?
00:12:44.000 The problem would be there that you would need less authoritative measures.
00:12:48.000 Now again, to repeat the first part of what I was saying, you needn't infer or assume even that there is a sort of, this is what we'll do, style scheming at the core. But what you can say is that
00:12:59.000 there appears to be a convergence of interest. Pharmaceutical companies want to profit.
00:13:03.000 Governments want to regulate. Big tech companies and governments want to be able to control
00:13:08.000 information and manipulate and censor conversation and narratives. So it seems that
00:13:14.000 those biases throughout the entire pandemic, and due to the nature of it being a truly
00:13:19.000 global event, the effects were observably profound.
00:13:23.000 In a sense, the pandemic was revelatory.
00:13:26.000 It was just a lens that shows you how institutions will behave, how science will Manipulate information.
00:13:33.000 How we're told that we're looking at objective science when we're looking at bespoke science, the type of science that is funded, the type of science that is profitable, the type of science that is computer modelling.
00:13:44.000 You're never really told that.
00:13:45.000 You're never told it's sort of a form of binary conjecture.
00:13:48.000 You're told this is empirical information.
00:13:51.000 So I guess what I'm Getting at is and what we're all getting at and what the whole of this sort of pandemic period is revealing is that there was a degree of corruption and exploitation.
00:14:06.000 How did it take place and how is it going to be prevented from taking place again?
00:14:10.000 Because it seems really likely that in fact it's already kind of happening.
00:14:16.000 What possible thing could that be telling you about David?
00:14:20.000 What is it?
00:14:21.000 Because that was an alarm.
00:14:22.000 That wasn't a cook. 1.00
00:14:23.000 I had that set to go off right at this moment when you... Now listen, I've been very polite so far.
00:14:30.000 This is the bit where the whole conversation turns on a dime.
00:14:33.000 So I guess, yeah, like, you know, I would love to talk about some of the sort of the impact of some of the measures on young people, their psychological impact.
00:14:41.000 But, you know, I'm guessing that you're motivated to continue to study this because you think something extraordinary has happened.
00:14:46.000 Yeah, it's funny.
00:14:47.000 I've talked about this quite a bit with some friends recently that I'm completely sick of thinking and writing about and researching stuff related to the pandemic.
00:14:58.000 And yet at the same time, This is such a profound event that, you know, there are people who get a PhD and study, you know, the sartorial habits of monks during medieval times.
00:15:11.000 There are people who have all these niche things.
00:15:14.000 It makes sense.
00:15:15.000 There should be some people, you know, studying what happened, deconstructing the pandemic.
00:15:21.000 For a very long time to come, considering, you know, all the other things that people look into.
00:15:26.000 And it's such a fascinating lens through which to view so many other things in society.
00:15:33.000 And, you know, one of the things is, you know, sort of the broader idea is thinking about information.
00:15:40.000 And, you know, as one of the people who worked on the Twitter files and also some of the and my work in general during the pandemic, as someone who sort of has had a foot in two different worlds where I wrote for a lot of legacy media outlets for a number of years.
00:15:57.000 And seeing what type of narratives were acceptable, what type of articles were acceptable to write, and which ones were sort of outside.
00:16:07.000 And that same dynamic was also seen within the public health community repeatedly, because I somehow was able to publish a lot of articles that ran Contrary to what the narrative was, but I still had them in pretty mainstream publications.
00:16:23.000 It was a very unusual place for me to be in.
00:16:26.000 And what happened was, from very early on, I had doctors at prestigious institutions, epidemiologists, immunologists, all these different people reaching out to me privately saying, I agree with you, but I'm afraid to talk about this publicly.
00:16:42.000 And that profoundly affected me.
00:16:44.000 You know, this started happening in the spring of 2020, and it's something that I still think about on a regular basis, and that we can see the echoes of that in all these other areas.
00:16:54.000 So, I think, you know, even yourself, you know, working as an independent person on independent platforms, there is something really important and fascinating going on with our media environment.
00:17:06.000 And that, you know, as you well know, certainly in America, and I'm sure it's the case, you know, elsewhere, there is a relatively very small clique of people, most of whom went to the same college, you know, the same universities, they share the same thoughts, they go to the same cocktail parties, who all work at these small number of media outlets.
00:17:27.000 So there is this lack of diversity in thought and diversity in experience.
00:17:33.000 And it shows in how the media covers different issues.
00:17:36.000 And it shows also, same thing within the public health community.
00:17:39.000 Most of those people are within a very narrow type of socioeconomic experience as adults now.
00:17:48.000 And all of that matters in how studies are covered or not covered by the media.
00:17:53.000 And all of that matters in how public health people talked about things.
00:17:57.000 And to your point about this kind of broader authoritarianism, It may even have been well-intended, I think, by many of these people.
00:18:07.000 But nevertheless, this specific type of life experience, if you're making a hundred or a couple hundred grand a year, that's going to affect how you think about things versus the working class people who still Had to go out. 0.72
00:18:20.000 They were bad because they weren't able to just stay locked at home or the children who are in homes that weren't able to do zoom school or, you know, and the parents weren't able to look after them.
00:18:30.000 All of these things were very class related.
00:18:33.000 And the irony to me is that at least, you know, in America, they will call the left, which is typically associated with as being the party of people most concerned with people in the working class and the less privileged.
00:18:46.000 In fact, that same people on the left were the ones who imposed these measures that hurt the working class, that hurt underprivileged people the most.
00:18:55.000 Well, my personal feeling, and I recognize that that is not the same as science, Is that that class has become ultra conservative and while the rhetoric is a liberal rhetoric, i.e.
00:19:14.000 socially progressive kind of rhetoric and I would say things that often ideas that don't require a lot of sacrifice or meaningful economic change.
00:19:24.000 And if you are conservative, if ultimately you want to keep your 100 to 200 grand a year job, if you want to continue to be part of a sort of a media cartel, or perhaps that's a needlessly pejorative way of framing that, if you want to remain in that kind of lifestyle, in that kind of the world you described, same parties, same colleges, That's conservative.
00:19:47.000 If you're not like, yeah, I want to change this stuff.
00:19:49.000 I want this to actually progress.
00:19:51.000 I want it to alter.
00:19:52.000 I want to radically review society.
00:19:53.000 I want to decentralize power.
00:19:55.000 I want to challenge the establishment.
00:19:57.000 That's not what that class of people believe.
00:20:00.000 Clearly, plainly, evidently, we can see that now from the type of information that they convey.
00:20:05.000 The way that they willingly support any new emergent crisis, and in this poly-crisis time, each of these ideas suddenly occupies the centre of the frame.
00:20:18.000 You won't hear debate, you won't hear conversation, you won't see investigation.
00:20:23.000 Like you said, with the stuff that we've discussed already, there's no appetite to investigate that, convey it.
00:20:29.000 So what I feel is that we're living in a peculiar time when it comes for the ways even that we classify cultural identity because people that think of themselves as progressive and purport to be progressive are deeply conservative when it comes to that's most basic of facts.
00:20:47.000 They don't want things to change.
00:20:49.000 They don't want that.
00:20:50.000 They might want some superficial things to shift, but when it comes to actual personal experience,
00:20:55.000 they don't really want anything to change.
00:20:56.000 Now this idea of authoritarianism and the management of information,
00:21:01.000 notably in the obviously censorship, but also the way that language is selected
00:21:07.000 is a part of your work.
00:21:08.000 And I feel that you've written about it recently.
00:21:11.000 Where did you write about that?
00:21:12.000 Is it, are you on Substack, mate?
00:21:13.000 Or where are you?
00:21:14.000 That's right, yeah.
00:21:15.000 Well, my newsletter at Substack, it's just at silentlunch.net.
00:21:21.000 And that's where I've been doing pretty much all of my journalism now,
00:21:26.000 with the exception of a few other places like the Free Press.
00:21:29.000 And what was interesting to me is, regardless of one's views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, what's interesting is, this is what I just wrote about a couple days ago, is I noticed that With with almost no exception, all of the elite American media has referred to Hamas as militants and rather than as terrorists.
00:21:53.000 And look, this is there's a lot of gray area regarding violent actions and how they are going to be defined or not defined.
00:22:00.000 But when you look at the actual definitions from the U.S.
00:22:03.000 government, from the FBI, in the penal code and and Canada is the same thing as well.
00:22:09.000 The European Council The actions did meet.
00:22:13.000 It's going after civilians, you know, doing violent acts to achieve a political end.
00:22:18.000 It was all these specific things.
00:22:20.000 It does meet that definition.
00:22:22.000 And it's interesting and similar to the pandemic, that there is this sort of uniformity that worries me.
00:22:29.000 How did it happen that ABC, NBC, CBS, The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, PBS, that they all chose to Very, very assiduously avoid using the word terrorist, even though the government itself makes very clear definitions about what a terrorist is, and Hamas is listed as a terrorist group.
00:22:50.000 Again, someone may disagree, but You know, how this should be framed.
00:22:55.000 But to me, what's interesting is the sort of uniformity amongst a lot of these people.
00:23:01.000 And then the flip side of that is, why is it that during the pandemic, these legacy media outlets Oh, parroted the party line from the CDC, from Anthony Fauci, from public health officials, with a very rare exception, they would just amplify and project whatever the CDC told them.
00:23:23.000 They weren't questioning it.
00:23:24.000 They weren't digging into, well, maybe this isn't true.
00:23:28.000 So, why is it that some things, the legacy media, it's interesting which topics they will perfectly be aligned With the official statements and which topics they all choose as a group to go against the official statements.
00:23:44.000 It's something to think about.
00:23:45.000 I'm sure you have thoughts on that.
00:23:49.000 Yeah, I do.
00:23:50.000 I mean, I suppose you're saying that there are events and there has appeared to be almost instantaneous coordination and shared language.
00:24:04.000 Perhaps a less incendiary subject is around the pandemic.
00:24:10.000 Again, the response to Joe Rogan saying I took ivermectin.
00:24:15.000 Everywhere, horse-paced, everywhere, total uniformity.
00:24:19.000 So again, it's possible to talk about what is perhaps the most contentious and difficult subject to discuss in world events and, God, I sometimes think world history, actually.
00:24:30.000 And now, with this being coupled with the cultural environment that has been the last five, ten years, the possibility of having a conversation that's oriented towards It doesn't seem there's much appetite on either side to try and find a way to resolve even the most immediate consequences of this.
00:24:55.000 So do you think that the choice of the word militant or the choice of the word Horsepaced or any apparently coordinated media event where you see the same reporting everywhere with significant corollaries.
00:25:12.000 What do you think that means?
00:25:14.000 Are you aware of, for example, the Trusted News Initiative, where numerous global news organizations acknowledge that their primary enemy or competition, perhaps, is the independent media world rather than each other?
00:25:29.000 What do you think is behind it, David?
00:25:32.000 Well, I think they actually are fairly out in the open with some of these things.
00:25:37.000 Some of the descriptions I was reading in researching this recent piece, that when different news outlets talk about their style guides, every news outlet has a style guide for different words or how they're going to frame or talk about different things, they refer to each other.
00:25:51.000 It could be the New York Times saying, the Associated Press does blah, blah, blah.
00:25:57.000 Use each other as it's sort of this circular justification.
00:26:01.000 I mean, it reminds me of during the pandemic when my children's school district was making these decisions that were completely illogical, forcing them to have these plastic barriers on their desks for which there was absolutely no evidence that this, you know, had any benefit whatsoever.
00:26:18.000 Each child's head was inside these sort of horse blinders.
00:26:21.000 They were opaque on the sides.
00:26:23.000 They couldn't see out of them.
00:26:24.000 They were told to keep their head inside of these boxes.
00:26:27.000 all day long. And I talked with the administration of the district at the time. I said, look,
00:26:33.000 I'm a journalist who's been, you know, I talk to scientists every day. There's no evidence of this
00:26:38.000 and this isn't even recommended. Why are we doing this? And the response was, well, the other towns
00:26:44.000 near us are doing it too. Yeah.
00:26:46.000 And I think, and so that to me sort of speaks to this broader thing.
00:26:51.000 There's just perhaps human beings, you know, as a default, we tend to just look to the people around us as to what we're supposed to be doing.
00:27:00.000 And there's a small number of people in society for whatever, for good and bad are able to kind of step outside of that type of mindset.
00:27:10.000 But that to me I think explains a lot whether we're talking about pandemic actions or the media or otherwise.
00:27:16.000 Mandy Cohen said that when they were deciding whether or not particular states or even regions were going to ban football they were just doing it by sort of peer-to-peer chat.
00:27:27.000 It wasn't well football I suppose the risk of football is this and based on this study or even this modeling it was just like are you going to ban it yeah all right we'll ban it as well.
00:27:35.000 It was so In a way it was a extraordinary social phenomena which again I cite as an opportunity to observe how power will behave and I think is part of a broader trend where crisis are used as opportunities and this used to be a sort of analysis of the left notably Naomi Klein's shock doctrine how
00:27:55.000 Deep state American organizations, CIA in particular, would induce or exploit crises in Latin and Central American countries in order to unsettle and then usurp democracy.
00:28:07.000 And many people claim that in 2014, comparable tactics were used in Ukraine to the eventual political advantage.
00:28:14.000 And it's just, God, I suppose the more it becomes difficult to discuss these things culturally and because of fear of censorship, because of fear of approbation, it's It seems like less and less likely that we're able to create spaces where, again, good faith, open-hearted communication can take place.
00:28:33.000 Now, of course, we're on Rumble with its commitment to free speech, which has sort of led to it being the recipient of much ire.
00:28:41.000 And in my country, the UK, even Rumble executives have They've said that they could be arrested if they continue to house or platform speech and content that the UK don't approve of as a result of new censorship laws that have been passed in this country that allow them to find platforms that don't follow their guidance.
00:29:02.000 Essentially, the state has managed to co-opt and find a way to manipulate big tech power and they've found ways of Cozying along quite nicely, I guess, allowing big tech to continue to monetize data through advertising and the state to utilize data through surveillance.
00:29:18.000 What's the significance of platforms like Rumble and X and do you feel that we're, you know, given everything you said about the legacy media and everything that you've said about the pandemic period, is it going to be important that platforms like X and Rumble make a commitment to free speech?
00:29:35.000 I mean, it's, dare I say, it's everything.
00:29:38.000 I mean, that, by the way, there are plenty of journalists who are very smart and do excellent work at legacy media outlets.
00:29:47.000 It's not to just paint this with a broad brush.
00:29:49.000 It's to say that what we don't want is to have a small group of people deciding
00:29:56.000 how the frame should be set around different narratives, whether that small group is the media or whether it's,
00:30:02.000 and certainly we don't want the government doing that.
00:30:04.000 And as I reported and as others like Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger had reported
00:30:10.000 in the Twitter files when I was there and I was looking through,
00:30:13.000 there was evidence in the emails that I'm reading at Twitter from the government
00:30:18.000 who had basically their foot on the neck of these people at Twitter saying,
00:30:23.000 these are the type of people we don't want them speaking out on your platform.
00:30:29.000 This is the type of information we don't want to be said.
00:30:33.000 And I won't run through the list, but we all know the items that we were told were true
00:30:39.000 and turned out to not be true.
00:30:41.000 I guess I will run the list.
00:30:43.000 Whether it's from masks, the lab leak was a conspiracy theory until all of a sudden it wasn't.
00:30:49.000 And then here, as we started our conversation about asymptomatic transmission, This justification for the entire sort of non-pharmaceutical interventions that occurred, that shut down society.
00:31:02.000 All of these things were told with great confidence, with great certainty to the public.
00:31:08.000 This is what's true with a capital T. They were said that by the government, by these different officials, and many of these social media companies went along with that and censored people who didn't fall in line with that.
00:31:20.000 And the legacy media, by and large, went along with that as well.
00:31:24.000 They didn't have to be forced to do it.
00:31:27.000 They wanted to go along with that.
00:31:28.000 So the idea of one entity deciding what is or is not true is terrifying. 0.92
00:31:36.000 It doesn't mean there isn't all sorts of garbage that's put out there on social media. 0.85
00:31:40.000 Of course there is.
00:31:42.000 People need to have the option of being exposed to different ideas.
00:31:49.000 And by exposing people to different ideas and allowing that, I think it would enable an environment within certain professions, like public health, should there be some other large event that happens, where perhaps next time there won't be these physicians at places like Harvard and Columbia who are contacting me saying, thank you so much for writing that article that was critical of the CDC on whatever the thing is.
00:32:11.000 I can't talk about this at work.
00:32:13.000 I'm afraid to go public with this.
00:32:15.000 That's just deeply, deeply troubling to me, and it should be to most regular people.
00:32:20.000 That's why you've got to download the Rumble app.
00:32:22.000 Not you, David.
00:32:23.000 You can do whatever you choose.
00:32:25.000 You're free.
00:32:25.000 In fact, we're all free.
00:32:26.000 Freedom's what we believe in here.
00:32:27.000 If you download the Rumble app though and watch us there and turn on notifications, you will be notified every time we make a bit of content, not like on YouTube where it's arbitrary and simply may not happen.
00:32:37.000 It's more important you support us now than ever.
00:32:39.000 If you can press the red button and support us directly, then please do.
00:32:42.000 But if not, it's so much more important we have your attention than anything else that you could offer us.
00:32:47.000 David, what do you think about this November the 14th meeting where global leaders are coming together to map a unified strategy for global pandemic preparedness, which seems like a good thing.
00:32:59.000 If there's going to be a global pandemic, we should be prepared.
00:33:02.000 What do you think that preparedness might look like?
00:33:05.000 Might it include censorship of counter narratives?
00:33:08.000 Might it include the increase of authoritative measures?
00:33:11.000 Might it be connected to the WHO's pandemic treaty where they want 5% of each nation's health budget?
00:33:19.000 What do you think is going on there?
00:33:22.000 I mean, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
00:33:25.000 The people who orchestrated the response during the pandemic are the same people who are now supposedly going to be orchestrating the preparedness and the plans for the next time something happens.
00:33:39.000 To me, that's emblematic of the entire problem that we're talking about here is that during the pandemic, there was this monomaniacal focus on this one thing of trying to limit the spread of one particular virus, but they didn't take in outside voices, you know, and I've focused very much, I'm writing a book about American schools during the pandemic right now, and I've focused very much on the idea that No one was talking to, in any sort of senior level, talking to economists, talking to psychologists, talking to all sorts of people who work in other areas of society where these interventions that they were imposing
00:34:18.000 We're going to affect everyone.
00:34:20.000 So there's this real interconnectedness between the different things we're talking about.
00:34:25.000 The idea of this specific focus on doing one thing, this kind of authoritarianism combined with the idea of not wanting these other outside voices, of bringing in different, you know, the idea that Anthony Fauci This is one man, one person with one perspective who doesn't have an expertise in education.
00:34:43.000 He doesn't have an expertise in the economy.
00:34:46.000 He doesn't have an expertise in all these other, but yet the decisions that he was making and pushing forth, those affected all these other things.
00:34:54.000 So, the thing I've written about a lot is the idea that there are all sorts of second order effects.
00:35:00.000 There are, you know, just like when you take a medicine, There are potential side effects.
00:35:04.000 Well, these non-pharmaceutical interventions put upon us have vast side effects and they were woefully understudied or not thought about enough before they were put into place.
00:35:17.000 And that ties into the idea of having the former Prime Minister of New Zealand and these other people who said, we're the one source of truth and these types of statements.
00:35:26.000 All of this bundles together into kind of this broader tapestry that obviously you're well aware of, that I think has all sorts of problems associated with it.
00:35:36.000 And we need to figure out a way of having more voices heard and taken seriously in all sorts of fields of endeavor.
00:35:44.000 David Swag, thank you so much for your terrifying insights, you harbinger of grim doom, but with sparkling eyes and fantastic hair.
00:35:55.000 Thanks for joining us, David.
00:35:56.000 Thanks, Russell.
00:35:58.000 You can follow David's work by going to silentlunch.net and sign up to his newsletter, which if I hadn't done, I'd be a lot less bright than I currently am as a result of David's work, and follow him on It's fantastic to speak to David.
00:36:15.000 What a fantastic, lovely guest he is.
00:36:16.000 I can still see him there.
00:36:17.000 He's messing around with his ear pods.
00:36:19.000 He's lingering in the environment.
00:36:22.000 Guess who we've got on the show tomorrow?
00:36:23.000 Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who's just won a case against the Biden administration.
00:36:27.000 It's one of the names you will have continually heard At the advent of the pandemic, one of the first voices to criticise the way that things were going.
00:36:35.000 Now, I know it seems like it's a long way off.
00:36:38.000 I know it seems like it's for the way that time appears to move these days.
00:36:42.000 We're on this relentless hamster wheel of history.
00:36:45.000 There's no time to glance.
00:36:46.000 We get over one crisis, we're in another crisis.
00:36:48.000 There's a new war every day, a new horror unleashed on us.
00:36:52.000 But we must remain present.
00:36:53.000 We must remain able to absorb the information that we're receiving now.
00:36:58.000 Bear in mind the narrative of what we've just encountered.
00:37:01.000 Try to observe the apparent patterns of the powerful.
00:37:04.000 It seems that centralized authoritarian measures are being introduced everywhere.
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00:37:50.000 Not for more of the same.
00:37:51.000 Oh, no.
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