On this episode of Stay Free with Russell Bradd, host Russell Brand sits down with journalist Matt Taibbi to talk about the latest revelations from the so-called or X-Files, as it now has to be called. Matt talks about how the UK government is spying on its own citizens, and how they're using non-profit organizations to do so, and why it's so important to know what's going on. Plus, Russell talks about Elon Musk and his latest case, and the Election Integrity Partnership, a name like that, you know, you're not going to want to miss this one. Stay free with Russell! Stay free, and stay free, wherever you get your news and information. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to anchor.fm/OurAdvertisers and use the promo code: "WAKEUPWEEKS" to receive 10% off your first pack of stickers when you sign up to the StickerMule Rewards program! If you like what you hear on the show, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and tell us what you think about it in the comments below! We'll be giving away a limited edition sticker pack with six stunning designs, including a dream boat! Thanks to Sticker Mule! and Stickermule for making it all the coolest stickers you can imagine! And if you like stickers, you'll get 10,000 of them! you'll be the first in the Awaken Wonder Locals community! Want to sponsor the show? ? Subscribe to stay free with us? Subscribe here! Learn more about our upcoming limited edition stickers with a discount code: Stay Free With Russell, Stay Free, and get 20% off the first episode of the show! Stay Free! Become a supporter of our new podcast, and receive 10, free shipping, plus a discount on future episodes, and a free shipping offer, plus an ad-free version of the next episode coming in the next week's next week, coming soon, coming in next week! in the coming weeks! to receive 20% OFF THE DAILY MAKING MAKING US AVAILOR BONUS EPISODE AND VIP PROMOTION AND PODCAST AND VIP SUPPORTED INCLUSION AND PRODUCED, FREE PRODCAST, AND A PATREON WITH VIP SUPPORTING THE SHOW AND MORE?
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00:04:53.000Time for us to have a conversation with a genuine, legitimate, fantastic journalist, a man with integrity, authenticity, a man whose spirit will inspire you and help you to recognise that no matter how disempowered you feel, no matter how far from truth you may feel, no matter how hard it may be to maintain optimism, There is always hope because there are men like my next guest out there fighting for freedom by acknowledging the complexity of truth.
00:05:20.000Please welcome to the show Matt Taibbi.
00:05:29.000How are we going to make an American media audience concerned with the UK files?
00:05:37.000What's the function of them and why are they globally significant?
00:05:42.000Well, we've only released a piece of them so far.
00:05:46.000Actually, some of these documents came out some time ago in a couple of Al Jazeera pieces.
00:05:57.000But for the most part, there's an enormous quantity of Labor Party internal email communications that a whistleblower got hold of and now an investigative journalist named Paul Holden has, and he's been writing for us.
00:06:16.000These documents are really important because of an organization called the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which has become one of the most influential, quote-unquote, anti-disinformation organizations in the world.
00:06:31.000They have been tremendously successful in getting people taken off the internet by accusing them of hate speech, disinformation, and other offenses.
00:06:43.000And they've always claimed to be independent.
00:06:45.000These documents show that they were actually a Labour Party operation.
00:06:49.000And, you know, they're pretty damning, I would say.
00:06:56.000Are there recognisable establishment figures within the British political establishment and even the American political establishment?
00:07:04.000And would you say that knowing that they are not neutral and unfunded, that an agenda can be discerned based on the individuals targeted?
00:07:16.000So this group, this Centre for Countering Digital Hate, Its origins trace back to a faction within the Labour Party that you're probably familiar with called Labour Together, that is most directly aligned with Keir Starmer, right?
00:07:38.000So he's, you know, the likely next Prime Minister over there.
00:07:43.000And yes, they have targeted individual politicians, most notably Jeremy Corbyn in Britain.
00:07:53.000But also going even further back than that, or farther, I always get that wrong.
00:08:00.000There was a sort of controversy involving Grant Schaps, remember the Tory MP, who was accused of editing his own Wikipedia pages.
00:08:12.000These documents show that that story came from this group.
00:08:20.000And so, It's a group that's dedicated to stopping fake news, but they themselves appear to have trafficked in fake news, so that we think is significant.
00:08:30.000In the United States, we saw them all over the Twitter files because, among other things, they were really, really intense in trying to get the so-called disinformation dozen removed, which included Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and they've been recently sued by X slash Twitter.
00:08:48.000Uh, because they've been involved in, um, accusations that, uh, X or Twitter or Elon Musk are all trafficking in hate speech.
00:09:00.000So, uh, they're a pretty significant organization.
00:09:04.000This new classification of hate speech appears to really be a weapon for control and a successful one because the category of hate speech is clearly one That exists, but it's difficult to believe that the sudden interest in protecting people's feelings is motivated by compassion.
00:09:28.000And if it is, why are these opaquely funded organizations like the Center for Countering Digital Hate that don't explicitly declare what their interests are and what their funding is and what their agenda is?
00:09:39.000And why do they have like sort of discernible connections to the political establishment?
00:09:47.000This is happening, it seems, more and more broadly.
00:09:49.000Ireland appears to be a piloting nation for these practices, with particularly draconian legislation being introduced and being demanded all the more immediately as a result of the recent riots in Dublin.
00:10:08.000How do you think we're going to see this category of hate speech Yeah, that it's been appropriated for the wrong ends.
00:10:14.000I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head there.
00:10:16.000that is a position that can be defended?
00:10:19.000Why is it not becoming clear that hate speech is not a legitimate concern?
00:10:25.000Not that hate speech doesn't exist, but that it's being mobilized in this way?
00:10:29.000Yeah, that it's been appropriated for the wrong ends.
00:10:33.000Yeah, I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head there.
00:10:38.000It's one thing when a bunch of college lefties come up to me and they say we're really concerned
00:10:46.000about the proliferation of hate speech online.
00:10:48.000It's another thing when I see an organization quoting the U.S.
00:10:52.000Joint Chiefs of Staff and taking money from the Department of Defense and they're worried about hate speech.
00:10:59.000You know, the sudden concern with defense and intelligence agencies with this topic and It is very hard to believe, and why is it so significant that they're involved?
00:11:15.000Ira Glasser, the former head of the ACLU, he's the person who's famous for defending the Nazis who marched at Skokie.
00:11:24.000He once talked about why he was against hate speech codes on campuses, and he told students and even minority students, he says, The issue isn't the speech.
00:12:18.000Enough's enough, because AwakendWonders over on YouTube, we need you to click the link in the description and join us over on Rumble, because me and Matt are going to start speaking pretty freely now.
00:12:29.000You're listening to this conversation.
00:13:07.000And in Greece there was the Syriza movement and Podemos in Spain.
00:13:11.000And although Jeremy Corbyn was a lot later, I still feel that this kind of sentiment of anti-establishmentism was fueling that movement after an attempt to make the Labour Party, which is our Democrat party, more of a centrist and neutered organisation.
00:13:28.000You know, which obviously began with Tony Blair and then there was a kind of a backlash against that.
00:13:34.000Jeremy Corbyn was a significant figure because it felt for a moment, particularly in 2017, that there was a possibility that there was a genuine anti-establishment populist running for one of the major parties in the UK and it was someone from the left, not from the right.
00:13:55.000So the disparaging and smearing of Jeremy Corbyn was interesting and there are people now that just Believe that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite and used extraordinary attacks and is a homophobe and stuff.
00:14:10.000Was Jeremy Corbyn someone that was especially and particularly targeted?
00:14:14.000And if so, what does that tell us about the agenda of groups like the Centre for Countering Digital Hate and hate speech more broadly?
00:14:24.000of hate speech. I like what you just said, it's not, you know, the control of hate speech, it's
00:14:28.000who decides what hate speech is. So can you tell me how Jeremy Corbyn, who to most people seems
00:14:33.000like, you know, even if you don't agree with him, a pretty authentic figure. Yeah, exactly.
00:14:41.000Yeah, I mean, I think you again, that question is directly on point.
00:14:48.000When we started working on the Twitter files, one of the things that we didn't understand at first was, how come there are so many people who come from the military and sort of counter-terrorism suddenly involved in content moderation in Silicon Valley?
00:15:06.000And when we finally started drilling down into organizations like the Global Engagement Center in the United States, The Department of Homeland Security had agencies against disinformation.
00:15:18.000I had one person from one of those agencies telling me that, look, basically, originally these anti-disinformation groups were built to combat Propaganda from ISIS and Al Qaeda.
00:15:32.000But after the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Tea Party, as you mentioned, Podemos, Syriza, you know, Viktor Orban's Fidesz Party, right?
00:15:42.000Like the Australian far-right movements, and then even Bernie Sanders, Trump, Brexit, and then Jeremy Corbyn, I think, is a really important example.
00:15:56.000That whole mission just shifted home, right?
00:15:59.000They had this huge, basically illegal operation directed overseas at terrorist groups and they just, they just turned it inward.
00:16:07.000And these people, the switch was described to me as CT to CP.
00:16:12.000So it's counter-terrorism to counter-populism.
00:16:15.000And I think that fully describes what happened here.
00:16:20.000Like during the entire war on terror, we just told all these military and intelligence groups, Do whatever you need to do, including droning people to death, if that's necessary, to stop propaganda reaching the UK and Southern California suburbs.
00:16:40.000And then those same people got moved on to this other mission.
00:16:44.000I don't think they can really distinguish between terrorists and legitimate political movements, like people who vote.
00:16:55.000And that's what's happened, is that they've turned the war on terror machinery inward.
00:17:02.000It seems almost too deliciously simple to say that counter-terrorism became counter-populism, but there might be observable symptoms even in the rhetoric of a figure like Hillary Clinton saying we need to deprogram these MAGA extremists, like the language around it.
00:17:25.000might be revealing. And I suppose that what it seems like is, you know, probably post
00:17:31.0002008, but certainly with the advent of the kind of communication that's become subsequently
00:17:37.000available, it became necessary to invent and utilise counter-populist tools, because anti-establishmentism
00:17:47.000is I suppose always present, but very difficult to mobilise and organise when it is not geographical
00:17:54.000or it's not single issue related. But I suppose now a genuine anti-establishment movement
00:18:00.000could form, and indeed they are forming, with more success plainly on the right, I suppose
00:18:07.000As the defining ideal around which the movement coalesces, whether that's Gert Wilders or your man Javier over there in Argentina.
00:18:16.000And if indeed there is a broad anti-migration sentiment and we can debate the legitimacy of those feelings and the impact of migration as opposed to something like global corporatism, But I suppose it's harder to counter a movement that has nationalism and even ethno-nationalism around which to formulate itself.
00:18:41.000And I think that Ireland becomes an interesting example for two reasons.
00:18:44.000One Matt, the legislation there seems more overt and frightening than elsewhere with
00:18:49.000the police being granted powers as I understand to sort of invade people's homes and you know
00:19:03.000Ireland is an oppressed nation that for years suffered under the kind of tyranny of the
00:19:08.000British Empire obviously that would be, you know, they should be the beneficiaries of
00:19:12.000this kind of compassionate and to use a rather lazy word, woke discourse that often undergirds
00:19:19.000the demand for the implementation of hate legislature.
00:19:23.000So I suppose what I'm asking them, Matt, is how, where you think, how you think Ethno-nationalism and nationalism might oppose these what seem to me to be ultimately globalist and establishment measures, and whether or not the anti-establishment movement can handle some of the nuances that are overridden by making it a sort of nostalgic and nationalist movement to oppose globalism, I mean.
00:19:55.000Yeah, I mean, I think, first of all, all these movements A lot of them are beginning to realize that they have something in common in that they're all being targeted by these same structures.
00:20:11.000The Five Eyes intelligence partners are monitoring the Sanders movement and the DSA in America and Free Palestine movements in the same way that they're following Trump The Boogaloo Boys, you know, we have a new document story coming out this week that shows, you know, a sort of DHS connected organization using phony accounts to infiltrate the Boogaloo Boys.
00:20:46.000And so I think a lot of these sort of groups that are on the populist right and populist left, they have to realize, and I think they are realizing, That they're being lumped together as similarly as some threats to the established order.
00:21:03.000And they will be targets of technologies and policies and strategies that are probably not legal in a lot of countries.
00:21:17.000And they're going to have to find their own ways to communicate.
00:21:23.000Because they're going to be shut out of the bigger platforms.
00:21:28.000They will be de-amplified if they happen to get into mainstream news.
00:21:35.000So I think that's important for these groups.
00:21:37.000They have to first show that they're legitimate.
00:21:39.000They have legitimate political grievances.
00:21:42.000And secondly, they have to broadcast those as loudly as possible and not be dismayed by what's going to happen to them.
00:21:49.000With these NGOs like CCDH being, it seems, used as tools for various globalist agenda, I wonder if it takes figures with the kind of almost unprecedented power of Elon Musk to oppose them, whether that's through his case against Media Matters, which are themselves an interesting organisation with an interesting history and an interesting funding model, and indeed Musk's pretty unique decision to open up Twitter after his acquisition of it to journalists such as yourself.
00:22:28.000What does it indicate to us, Matt, that it seems to take Elon Musk?
00:22:32.000What does that tell us about how global power is moving?
00:22:35.000And is that cause for optimism or pessimism?
00:22:39.000Does it mean that sort of ordinary people aligning is becoming less and less sort of relevant?
00:22:45.000That you sort of almost have to be a tech titan and the world's richest man to be able to sort of stand up against this kind of insidious and invisible power?
00:22:57.000Like that, you know, at minimum, you need a couple of hundred billion dollars, basically.
00:23:03.000That's, that's a little bit depressing.
00:23:07.000You know, the overall narrative of this is so interesting, I think, Russell, because when the when the internet arrived, Most people viewed it as this amazing, like, revolutionary tool that was going to bring together all kinds of people all over the world.
00:23:27.000Like-minded people from, you know, different countries were going to be able to communicate for the first time easily.
00:23:34.000Political movements could coalesce more easily.
00:23:39.000Like, people were going to innovate more.
00:23:41.000They were going to do more interesting research.
00:23:43.000I mean, it was this beautiful, liberating thing.
00:23:46.000And also the internet made it almost impossible for authoritarian countries to have the internet and continue to, you know, to lock down their citizenry.
00:23:57.000So we looked at it as an inherently democratizing tool that had some characteristics that lean towards, you know, anarchy a little bit, right?
00:24:07.000You saw that with the Arab Spring, you know, at the drop of a hat, You know, movements could coalesce and like within a matter of days, you could have four big governments toppled.
00:24:19.000And I think that was the moment when the authorities realized, wow, we have to really get a lockdown on this thing because we just can't allow this to happen.
00:24:31.000We are too much at risk if the internet is free.
00:24:34.000And there's a moment in time Where that narrative of the unfettered free internet started to roll back and the internet became a tool of social control, which is I think where it is right now.
00:24:48.000And, you know, one of the symptoms of that is that the only, you know, you basically have to be Elon Musk in order to break through the You know, homogenous environment, political environment that's been created on the Internet.
00:25:07.000And even Elon is relatively small potatoes compared to the entire rest of the universe.
00:25:15.000But the reaction against him is really significant because The whole information sort of cartel doesn't work if there's like one link in the chain missing I think that's that's one of the big reasons why there's been such an intense campaign against him because
00:25:31.000If there's one opt-out, then there's a place for all kinds of information to still be moving around, and they can't have that.
00:25:41.000So, in his legal battle against Media Matters, is it possible that a victory could be achieved that's so significant that it could have positive repercussions for the rest of us?
00:25:58.000You know, in particular, his connections to the Clintons, and his involvement, maybe in like, you know, some of the stuff that went on in 2016, some of the the Russiagate stuff, I'm guessing is involved in that.
00:26:10.000And, and also with media matters, George Soros, is he some sort of international supervillain?
00:26:16.000What's what's going on with these, like these figures that appear to be organizing around this sort of Well, Soros I'm not really an expert in, but David Brock, I've been in media a long time.
00:26:34.000I've covered some really loathsome people.
00:26:37.000I've shook the hands of some really loathsome people in my life, and I'm not easily shocked.
00:26:46.000He's one of the more breathtakingly off-putting human beings I've ever encountered.
00:26:54.000I mean, I've never met the man, but just his record is astonishing.
00:26:58.000If you go back to the 90s, and he wrote, he gleefully wrote about all this in, you know, books that he published.
00:27:06.000He was basically the hit man for the Republican Party in, uh, in the United States.
00:27:14.000He was behind media campaigns against everyone, uh, from Anita Hill to the Clintons.
00:27:22.000He basically organized a lot of the campaigns to highlight things like the Lewinsky scandal.
00:27:32.000And then allegedly he had some kind of religious conversion or politically religious conversion.
00:27:39.000He admitted all of this in books like Confessions of a Political Hitman, I think it was what it was called.
00:28:08.000And what they're accused of here, and I have to stress that It's an accusation, right?
00:28:14.000Like, you know, for the purpose of the lawsuit, you have to assume that these things are true, you know, just to get past the first part of the suit.
00:28:21.000But we don't know if it's true, right?
00:28:23.000But they're accused basically of faking the creation of fringe hate speech and making it look like major advertisers were appearing next to those accounts so that they could then report on that Um, and then tell other organizations that it had happened, which led to boycotts of the platform.
00:28:49.000Now, without commenting on that specific case, I can tell you that that's something that we've seen on the internet.
00:28:57.000We saw on the Twitter files more than once.
00:29:33.000There's some interesting and well, I don't know about nefarious figures emerging and that practice of being able to, in this instance, create what seems like a visual affiliation between advertisers And fringe groups, extremist groups, right-wing groups.
00:29:57.000But it seems, yeah, from the moment Elon Musk... I remember that Elon Musk was seen for a while as a kind of techno-eccentric Willy Wonka of the cosmos.
00:30:08.000colonizing Mars. I can make cars run on hiccups."
00:30:12.000Like he was like, oh, this guy's gonna be great.
00:30:15.000You know, and then suddenly he acquired a social media platform.
00:30:19.000And it's weird. I've had this sense for a long time, you know,
00:30:22.000as Mexican folk used to say in California, I didn't cross the line, the line crossed us.
00:30:28.000That there's just been this sort of creeping line of what's sayable and permissible now.
00:30:33.000And suddenly I found myself in alliance with groups I never thought I would be in alliance with,
00:30:39.000just because to be anti-establishment now requires all sorts of new affinities.
00:30:46.000Like, at one time I never thought I would find myself having...
00:30:49.000I didn't think I'd find myself getting on with Tucker Carlson.
00:30:53.000And now, like with the escalation of events in the Middle East, there are new fractures, new fissures, new fragmentation.
00:30:59.000It really feels like a time of annihilation.
00:31:02.000Matt, can you tell us a little bit About the new Twitter files and the election integrity partnership that sounds so sort of bureaucratic and has the word integrity in it and normally a sort of diagnostic tool that I've learned in my own short time in journalism is if something's calling itself the trusted news initiative or the friendly cuddly bunny party you should probably get yourself a bunker
00:31:39.000Now as soon as I see the word trust, I just assume the person's lying.
00:31:44.000Which is not a healthy reaction, but it's kind of evidence of the Orwellian world we live in.
00:31:50.000Yeah, Michael Schellenberger at Public, with whom I testified in Congress earlier this year and then also again this week, we'll be doing the same thing.
00:32:03.000We got hold of a large new trove of documents involving something called the Cyber Threat Initiative League, or CTI League.
00:32:16.000And this is like the precursor organization to that Um, election and tech integrity partnership.
00:32:24.000It involves people from the Pentagon, from DHS, from the FBI.
00:32:31.000There's a woman from the UK who was central in creating this group, but it really lays out in tremendous detail, like what the thinking and strategy of all these anti-disinformation people are.
00:32:46.000They're talking about creating fake sock puppet accounts to infiltrate groups they don't like.
00:32:51.000They're saying, we're going to be doing the same things that the bad guys are doing.
00:32:55.000Um, you know, they're openly talking about, uh, you know, describing Republicans as needing reprogramming.
00:33:06.000Um, and you know, there's just all kinds of stuff in, in, in these documents that I think are when people see them, The Twitter files were important because they showed, they proved a link between this kind of stuff and official agencies like the FBI and Homeland Security.
00:33:26.000This, I mean, there were like whole quotes about, well, we need to do this in a quasi private way because the Department of Defense can't do it legally.
00:33:37.000And, you know, Department of Homeland Security doesn't have the capability.
00:33:43.000And the Global Engagement Center only has $250 million.
00:33:46.000So they're not going to be very capable either.
00:33:48.000So it needs to be done by people like us who aren't officially, you know, attached to anybody.
00:33:55.000And that's kind of the model for how these things work.
00:33:57.000You see these NGOs that look independent, behind the scenes, they're working with, you know, intelligence groups and enforcement agencies.
00:34:05.000And they believe, they really believe that, you know, sort of domestic political movements,
00:34:12.000like whether it's Trump in America or Corbyn in the UK, that those things are threats in the same way
00:34:21.000And we see that in these documents and it's pretty shocking.
00:34:24.000Yes, it's interesting how often there are apparently independent organizations
00:34:31.000that are advocating for ending hate speech or for a fairer and more just world
00:34:36.000that are actually merely a conduit for power and that becomes discernible through their funding.
00:34:43.000And then you find sock puppet accounts that are supposed to be legitimate independent individuals, but they too are a conduit for the same power.
00:34:51.000And it seems like whether or not a popular or anti-establishment figure emerges from the left-wing space using left-wing rhetoric or the opposing space using the appropriate rhetoric there, that they will be opposed.
00:35:05.000And it seems now that Whatever language is required to legitimise the foreclosure of those groups can immediately be accessed and defined.
00:35:14.000In our time it seems to be, I suppose, the power of identity politics, and I mention that only because of how it might relate to hate speech, is that it's by its nature Divisive.
00:35:26.000It's divisive not only in terms of ethnographics, but also in terms of time.
00:35:33.000It indicates that the culture moves at a pace where it's pretty clear, I would say, and this is just a guess, that generally, I would imagine, America is a less racist place than it was 50 years ago, and the UK is a less racist place than it was 50, 60 years ago, and I would say that of most Western countries, and yet there is this feeling that the tension is being amplified.
00:35:57.000And I suppose it's going to... I watched the British, I guess, right-wing, certainly nationalist, populist figure Tommy Robinson yesterday being arrested for his attendance of a essentially a pro-Israel march, I guess is what it was.
00:36:16.000In the end, we're going to have to... The only way, I think, to form the kind of alliances that are going to be required in order to oppose centralised authoritarianism is by accepting that you know like ideas that you sort of simply don't agree with that there would be communities that are like we are a ethnically defined community whether that's you know like an ethnic community of african americans somewhere in america or
00:36:46.000Communities that are organised around religion or culture or sexual identity or progressivism.
00:36:51.000Seems like, how else is this tension ever going to be diffused without the alternative otherwise is to yield to some centralised authority that's going to, as you said earlier, determine what hate speech is.
00:37:08.000I don't see The same way as they enter into these wars without giving you a vision of, and this is how we beat Russia eventually, and Ukraine joins NATO and it doesn't need to lead to a nuclear war, or this is how we involve Iran in this conflict and it doesn't cause some massive, terrible apocalypse in the Middle East.
00:37:27.000There's only sort of attempts to manage, control, shut down, curtail.
00:37:32.000sort of a desperate attempt to continually oppose what seems to be organically happening
00:37:38.000just as a result of one, total lack of trust in authority, whether it's state or media or corporate,
00:37:44.000two, the ability to organise differently as demonstrated by the Arab Spring and even
00:37:51.000in terms of the corporate space, Napster.
00:37:55.000There were examples how the online space was going to collapse existing power centres.
00:38:00.000Independent media collapsing existing media power centres.
00:38:04.000And to oppose that, these new categories have to be invented to sort of roll back what appears to be the Natural, if you can say natural, trajectory of more accessibility to comms.
00:38:17.000So these new ideologies have to be legitimised through, yeah, I suppose a number of measures, but it seems the one at the moment that's important, certainly when you watch coverage of that riot in Dublin, you hear the sort of Garda, the Irish police say, there's a far-right extremist faction in Ireland that we have to shut down.
00:38:37.000That doesn't make sense in terms of Irish politics or Irish history.
00:38:41.000Or a figure like Tommy Robinson with whom I'm sure I would disagree on religion and gender and all sorts of stuff I'm sure but getting arrested as he arrives at a protest.
00:38:57.000Yeah, and you even see, actually Matt, sorry to go on, but in normal legacy media reporting, you say, like I saw a pundit say the other day on MSNBC, in order to prevent fascism, you have to vote for the Democrats in this election cycle.
00:39:13.000You can't vote for Cornel West or you're voting for Trump.
00:39:17.000So they're sort of, in a sense, fashioning a kind of tyranny with the aesthetics of progressivism.
00:39:28.000They're leaving you with one acceptable choice.
00:39:32.000Everything else is outside the trust tree.
00:39:37.000You should be afraid to be seen in those circles.
00:39:43.000There might be consequences for you to be in those places.
00:39:48.000In order to get there, in order to get people to accept Those ideas, they have to, as you say, they have to radically change how Western people think because we're not, if you're old enough especially, we're not conditioned to think that, thinking that way.
00:40:01.000Like, I certainly would, will never be able to accept total curtailment of speech rights or, you know, this idea that I can only think a certain way or only vote for a certain person or otherwise I'm, You know, a threat or an enemy?
00:40:20.000Like, that's not how we've been raised to think.
00:40:23.000We see this in these documents, by the way.
00:40:25.000There's like a Pentagon official who's talking sort of admiringly about the Chinese information landscape, saying that, you know, you have to change the narratives for people way before you get to the point of removing content.
00:40:42.000The average Chinese citizen does not think that he or she is being censored because they've been conditioned for so long to accept the environment that they're in, that for them, it's just, oh, government's making good or bad decisions for us.
00:40:57.000You know, let's just go along with it.
00:40:59.000Well, you see, in America, especially, that line you talked about has already moved pretty significantly.
00:41:04.000Like, once upon a time, we would never have even We would never have read news like, you know, certain kinds of marches have been declared illegal, like in France, like, you know, the pro-Palestine marches, you know, or that certain kinds of speech has been declared illegal.
00:41:25.000We would have thought, regarded that with shock, not even that long ago.
00:41:31.000Now, they've slowly conditioned us to this idea that yes, some things can be illegal.
00:41:36.000Some things can be taken down from the internet without due process.
00:41:41.000We don't even need to have a criminal case against somebody to accuse them of incitement or anything like that.
00:41:48.000We can take off even the President of the United States without a trial or a lawsuit or anything.
00:41:58.000And that's what's so scary about this.
00:42:01.000It's not even just the thing that they're doing.
00:42:04.000It's that they've been so successful in changing the way people think about all this stuff through their relentless attention to these issues.
00:42:17.000It's curious that the pandemic provided a window, I think, into the ordinary format of powers, movements and functioning.
00:42:28.000For example, I suppose the point of origin for Yielding civil liberties at the advent of the pandemic was human life is sacred.
00:42:39.000And collectively, we have a value that means that individually, I should give up my individual freedom.
00:42:46.000And I should be willing to take certain medications, you know, basically without question for the common good.
00:42:55.000This idea of the common good, bringing that to the forefront in the pandemic era, I felt intuitively, was a risky idea because it's an idea that is
00:43:05.000mostly removed from common understanding and common discourse. Mostly we live
00:43:12.000in an atomized society, you live as an individual, the pursuit of your
00:43:15.000individual pleasure is your primary goal in life, you live through the consuming
00:43:20.000of products, that's where you get your identity from. We've gone quite far down
00:43:24.000that road and economically those are going to be, I think, untenable
00:43:27.000ideas as we experience the kind of economic decline that seems to be accelerating
00:43:31.000and the sort of infrastructural disrupture that's taking place in your
00:43:36.000country and mine. But throughout that period, with that idea in mind, the sanctity
00:43:41.000of human life, we very quickly accept...
00:43:44.000They were very quickly, and I say they, the establishment, the media, were very quickly able to normalise measures that in a country like China can just be implemented because of years of comparable social control.
00:43:56.000But as people learned that there were...
00:43:59.000good deal of discrepancies and downright lies throughout it, from the origin of the virus
00:44:04.000to the efficacy of the medications, to the consequences of taking those medications,
00:44:09.000to the reliability of the media. Countermeasures dismissed and the efficacy of them denied.
00:44:16.000I think what we're seeing now is, in some quarters at least, a willingness to disobey.
00:44:23.000So I suppose the function of the media now has to be to continue to create a climate of crisis.
00:44:30.000Even if it's just through the manipulation of semantics that suddenly hate speech, oh my god there's hate speech, we have to do something about hate speech.
00:44:42.000Do you see where I'm sort of going with it, Matt?
00:44:44.000That you have to turn that into a kind of ever-present crisis in order to legitimize whatever measures it requires.
00:44:52.000And I know that something that I've seen sort of in my notes here is you were talking about the CTI league.
00:44:56.000I don't know if you've touched upon that.
00:44:59.000Yeah, I think it's part of the revelations that you've just made and maybe forthcoming revelations that you and Schellenberger are making.
00:45:06.000What is the CTI League and how does it relate to what I was just saying?
00:45:10.000The normalization of measures that would otherwise be seen as egregious.
00:45:14.000Like you said, certain protests being banned or certain speech being banned is not something we would have tolerated 10 years ago.
00:45:20.000Yeah, I mean, again, the CTI League is this group that was formed You know, officially to address COVID misinformation and disinformation, but we see in the internal documents that they were actually involved in anything related to current events, especially the elections.
00:45:42.000And you're right, they absolutely like their raison d'etre was the health emergency.
00:45:49.000But internally, they were doing everything from following followers of Trump to following Free Gaza protests to following the Democratic Socialists of America.
00:46:00.000And yes, it's the climate of emergency is central to this whole concept.
00:46:09.000Because, you know, if you're raised in a Western liberal democracy grounded in Enlightenment values.
00:46:19.000The whole idea is that human history had shown us that when power is concentrated too much, the individual's rights are constantly violated.
00:46:32.000And in order to protect against that, we have to make sure that power is diffuse, that people have self-determination, that they have participation in their own Political destiny.
00:46:42.000I mean, that's the entire idea behind the American system, for instance, right?
00:46:47.000But these people want to reverse that.
00:46:50.000They openly want to change how we think about that particular issue.
00:46:58.000They think that focusing on individual rights at the expense of the collective is dangerous, and therefore we have to, you know, change How people think, even about everything from hate speech to threat to informed consent in medicine.
00:47:17.000You know, once doctors cared intensely about informed consent, after World War II, after what we found out about happened in the concentration camps, you know, the Nuremberg Accords made it mandatory, like, for every civilized country to have informed consent with medicines.
00:47:36.000But when the COVID vaccine came along, There was a strong public relations campaign like, no, just take the shot.
00:47:43.000And you know, you don't need to know exactly what the results are, whether there have been side effects or not.
00:47:56.000And that's totally antithetical to how we think in free societies, but they want to change that.
00:48:01.000Like that's, that's a necessity for them to change that.
00:48:04.000And, and they will, you know, unless there's significant opposition.
00:48:08.000Bloody hell yeah it's not um it isn't um what do you want to say hyperbolic then to refer to it as kind of social engineering that our behavior is being altered and you can see how that can be done quite easily just through the very obvious um introduction of new technology it just would have been unthinkable that we would have you know tagged ourselves in the way we do through tech handover information in the way we do through through our phones and stuff so when you start Adding ideological tags to that, that's fascinating.
00:48:39.000I've got a few questions and comments to pass on from our community.
00:48:42.000One is, does Matt from Jim Earthsea in our community, does Matt think the silver lining of COVID could be the starting of a revolution as it's awakened previously idle people?
00:49:00.000It's literally designed to conduct surveillance and distribute propaganda.
00:49:04.000I'd like you to tell me if that's true from Testimony or it's just a sort of a rumor from the dark edges of the internet.
00:49:13.000And what did you think about the comment about this COVID silver lining as well as that CIA internet comment?
00:49:20.000Um, you know, on the CIA internet front, I mean, obviously the internet had defense roots.
00:49:27.000I don't know that it was necessarily exactly created specifically with social control in mind.
00:49:32.000I think it was initially created as a means for factions of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines to communicate with one another efficiently.
00:49:43.000And once they figured out how to do that, I don't know a whole lot about that history, though, so I probably shouldn't comment on it.
00:49:52.000I will say, though, that when it was introduced, it did have, for a while, a very liberating impact on a lot of places around the world.
00:50:05.000I was there when it was Soviet and then I was there when it was, uh, you know, post-Soviet and the internet was really important in teaching Russians, um, all these new values.
00:50:17.000So, um, as for COVID being the start of a revolution, I think you did see that there were an awful lot of people, um, around the world who, who became, um, angry at the system in new ways because of, What happened during the pandemic, they became mistrustful of authority.
00:50:42.000And we're talking about like ordinary small town, like old ladies and moms who don't care about politics.
00:50:54.000I hope that energy, you know, goes somewhere because I, I frankly find this terrifying.
00:51:00.000Like one of the things we see in these documents, there's a ton of these sort of corporate marketing types who are involved in these projects, and they're applying technologies that they use to monitor how people feel about their products.
00:51:16.000Like, does this, they use algorithms to analyze, does this social media post make people feel good or bad about software X, right?
00:51:26.000Now they're applying that to how people feel about their governments, how people feel about government policies, and they're dividing everything into These binary categories, friend, foe, positive, negative, you know, with us, against us.
00:51:45.000Again, that's totally antithetical to what we think of in a traditionally democratic society.
00:51:52.000We think, well, there's a lot of us with lots of different ideas, and collectively, we all get somewhere really cool together.
00:52:17.000Yeah, authoritarianism and sort of at least one definition of fascism, you know, the state corporations and media coming together.
00:52:25.000In Lee Fang's piece about Moderna, which I obviously paid a special interest to because I was in it, it showed like how yet another NGO, I think they were called something like the PGA, have been set up and how that Moderna have been employing former FBI agents or at least FBI operatives and how Moderna are spending a lot of money observing online dissent and are looking to control shadow banks.
00:52:53.000I can't believe that a company that didn't exist a couple of years ago are targeting dissenters online and have the compliance of the government, have the compliance of social media sites.
00:53:06.000That, again, and obviously something that's affected me personally, is an indication that this is escalating, I suppose because it has the capacity to escalate, into Inconceivable territory now, doesn't it, Matt?
00:53:20.000And one of the scary things about that sort of Moderna piece is, look, the people who do this kind of work, the anti-disinformation work, a lot of them don't know anything about anything except what they do.
00:53:35.000But they have no problem whatsoever deciding that PHDX is wrong about the vaccine or wrong about this side effect, while health official Y is absolutely right.
00:53:51.000And so they have these sort of pre-packaged ideas about things.
00:53:57.000They have no specific expertise in anything, but they rely entirely on this idea that, well, Moderna is, let's just say they're an officially sanctioned partner in the vaccination effort.
00:54:48.000It's just a whole bunch of people who don't have any real knowledge except about this technology and about this sort of expertise deciding all kinds of questions.
00:54:59.000They have no business deciding for people.
00:55:01.000That's the thing that's terrifying to me.
00:55:04.000Power, even energy, requires polarity.
00:55:09.000And you talked about the need for diffuse power models in order to have democracy, autonomy, individual freedom.
00:55:16.000So I can see how these emergent dichotomies are ways to centralise power, that it's beneficial to create.
00:55:24.000Oppositionism in order to centralise power, almost on the level of physics.
00:55:28.000Got another question here for you from Jamie Jam in our community.
00:55:32.000With all of the censorship laws being enacted, DSA and others, including in Australia, how far do you think things will go until there's a pushback from people?
00:55:40.000Will masses of people be charged, tried, imprisoned for years until people push back against it?
00:55:46.000Do you think it's going to play out like the McCarthy era?
00:55:53.000I mean, I would hope that if there's going to be a confrontation like that, I would think it would be in the United States because we have a very unique tradition with speech in this country.
00:56:10.000And it's something that was taught to all of us at a very young age.
00:56:17.000Nobody's allowed to tell you what to think or do.
00:56:19.000Like, you have the right to your own opinions.
00:56:21.000That's the very first thing, right, you're guaranteed as an American citizen.
00:56:28.000The right not only to have an opinion, but to petition the government for a redress of whatever your complaints are.
00:56:35.000So if it's going to happen, I would think it would happen here.
00:56:38.000But what I'm seeing recently, especially, is that There's this incredible apathy and pessimism, and I don't know where that comes from, but it's really frightening.
00:56:54.000I always feel optimistic about people in general.
00:56:58.000I think that even in the worst situations, they just will not put up with things endlessly.
00:57:03.000I don't know how you feel about this, Russell, but even my experience watching Russians They put up with an awful lot for an awful long time and eventually they just said, you know, screw this.
00:57:13.000And I think that's going to happen with this stuff eventually.
00:57:17.000But whether that's going to be now or in 30 years, that's the question.
00:57:21.000Sometimes I feel even when there are protests that spill into riots, there is an indication that there's a sublimated energy that's just waiting to be released.
00:57:34.000I first noticed it When in the you know I'd always got a protest when I was like younger for like the dockers union in Liverpool I was I ended up there by mistake actually just because I was out and it was happening I was like oh my god this is so exciting and then mayday sort of socialist protests in the UK and I used to enjoy that kind of stuff and then
00:57:54.000Like in like I think it was 2011 in the UK a man was murdered in police custody in London and it sparked first local riots then riots across London that led of course to sort of looting and stuff and then across the whole nation there were riots in sort of disparate riots across cities.
00:58:14.000I thought what is this underlying energy that's been released by the the ignition of this event and of course its expression was diffuse and of course you know people were stealing you know sneakers and phones and stuff like that might you you know but I felt that what was underneath it was a kind of anger and a dissatisfaction and even the nihilistic expression of it was an indication that of a culture and a society that had lost its way and once again Matt and this is you know getting on for 15 years ago that
00:58:50.000What was interesting is the way the judiciary, then under soon-to-be Prime Minister Keir Starmer, just responded.
00:58:57.000Then people were on trial, like, the next day.
00:59:16.000Because it's, yeah, like, what we all know is, you know, to sort of semi-quote Gandhi, is like, you know, a few million British people cannot control a billion Indians if those Indians refuse to cooperate.
00:59:31.000Because we are so disparate, distracted, and like you say, the apathy that's engendered, I think, by losing tradition, losing connection to family, losing connection to God, or highest ideal, or whatever you want to call God, the God principle.
01:00:16.000When it gets to the point where people just will not go to work or they will not go along, that's when you have what happened in the late 80s with the collapse of the wall.
01:00:29.000That's when you had, you know, the Arab Spring happened pretty quickly, and that's because those countries, there was an enormous amount of discontent that was simmering.
01:00:38.000I think what people missed about episodes like Brexit, you know, the election of Donald Trump, the rise of Corbyn, also in the UK, but also all those populist moments that you mentioned, movements in Europe, you know, Syriza, Podemos, Those are all symptoms of people being deeply pissed off and sometimes they don't even know why.
01:01:06.000I mean, I remember interviewing people at Trump events and I would ask them like, why are, so why, why this guy?
01:02:10.000Next week we've got Steve Kirsch coming on the show talking to us about vaccines, sudden death, Fauci.
01:02:16.000He's even willing to put a hundred thousand dollars on the line for a debate about Covid vaccine safety and I'll find out what MIT means by then as well.
01:02:24.000Click the red button to become an Awakened Wonder so you can join us live for that as well as Greetings with the Lord.
01:02:31.000Whether you are a follower of JC and the almighty forces in the Old Testament, or the single force, of course, that's what monotheism is, or you might love the Bhagavad Gita, we join together to... Remember in the conversation when I was saying about where you're going to get the energy from?
01:02:45.000You're going to get the energy from God, is where you're going to get the energy from.
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