In this episode, Matt Taibbi talks about the cover-up of the Wuhan lab leak, and his personal connection to Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian prime minister who is more akin to a modern-day neoliberal dictator. He also discusses the tragic events in the Middle East, including the Israeli attack on Gaza, and the potential role of the United States in providing arms to Hamas and other terrorist groups. And, of course, there's a special guest: Russell Brand, host of the excellent show Stay Free With Russell Brand. Stay Free with Russell Brand is hosted by Russell Brand and is produced by Matt Tiberi, who is also a regular contributor to the New York Times and The Daily Beast. This episode was edited by Annie-Rose Strasser and edited by Alex Blumberg. Our theme music is by my main amigo, Evan Handyside. The show was mixed and produced by Matthew Boll. Additional music was made by Mark Phillips and Matt Knost, and additional mixing and mastering by Matthew McConaughey. Thanks to our sponsor, Awakened WMM, for providing the sound design and mastering of the music used in this episode of Stay Free, and for the production of the theme song, "Awakened" by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool, which you can stream on the Electric Light Orchestra on SoundCloud, and our ad music, which is produced and mixed by John Singleton, who also writes for the show, and is available on Soundcloud.org, and provides production assistance on Soundtrack, and also on the music on the website of the Electric Republic, and other services provided by SoundCloud. . , and we hope you enjoy the music you get a chance to listen to the music from the show "Stay Free" and "The White Noise Network." and "AstroFabulous" by the Electric City, and we thank you for all your support and support, and thank you, too, for all the support we get from our sponsorships and shout out to you, the amazing people who sent us out on social media and all the work we do it. , we really appreciate all the love and support we receive, we really really appreciate it. Thank you so much of you, you're amazing people, thank you! Thank you for being kind and support us, you really are amazing, we appreciate it, we're really appreciate the support, love you.
00:10:22.000Thanks for joining me for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:10:24.000We've got a fantastic show for you today because we're talking about some complex, difficult issues with people that genuinely understand them.
00:10:33.000He's talking about the degree to which Fauci participated in the cover-up of the Wuhan lab leak story, which we've got an in-depth article on.
00:10:42.000Also, Matt will be talking to us about Tragic events in the Middle East and his personal connection to Chrystia Freeland, the woman who sounds like a Tolkien-esque elf queen, but actually through her legislation, regulation and imposition of power in Canada is more akin to a modern-day neoliberal
00:11:03.000Let me know in the chat where you stand, in particular on this new pose of liberalism that kind of amounts to, I don't know, is it tyranny with a nice haircut?
00:11:14.000Listen, if you haven't downloaded the Rumble app yet, download the Rumble app now because then you'll get notifications whenever we make content.
00:11:22.000It's not like on YouTube where you turn on the notification bell and then they tell you if they choose to.
00:11:26.000And then suddenly shut you down off the platform and demonetize you.
00:11:30.000Oh no, you will get the notifications.
00:11:32.000And if you can support us, if it's within your means to support our community at this time, and I'm aware that there are extremely serious things happening in the world at the moment, but I believe that independent media movements such as this one can contribute positively at a time of, hmm, Epochal challenges, how do you want to define the omnicrisis that we are living through?
00:11:54.000And I say that with all due respect to those of you that are directly affected by this situation and we plan to remain obviously respectful to the suffering that many, many people are experiencing right now.
00:12:31.000In any geopolitical conflict you see exploitation and in this current conflict which I believe has to be handled with extreme caution, awareness and almost surrender unless you are involved in the situation.
00:12:44.000Again, that's not something I feel qualified to talk about.
00:12:47.000The idea that people in positions of power have been exploiting it for literal personal gain is astonishing to me.
00:12:52.000We reported on the sheer volume of people in Congress that had bought stocks and shares in weapons manufacturers And now, Rand Paul, subsequent to both Lindsey Graham and Nikki Haley calling for escalations, which I believe, well, have you looked for yourself, would make the bad situation that the people involved in that conflict are already experiencing a great deal worse.
00:13:18.000Rand Paul has called for restraint citing potential lessons learned
00:13:24.000from 9-11. I want you to let me know what you feel about Rand Paul's analysis. Have a look at him
00:13:31.000saying that now. What would you do? You know I have nothing but sympathy for the Israeli people at
00:13:44.000Before we think about spreading this to the rest of the world, maybe we ought to think about exactly what's going on on the ground there.
00:13:49.000I do think that There is immediate reaction sometimes, so let's get everybody, let's get everybody who's responsible.
00:13:57.000And without question, Iran had their hands in this.
00:13:59.000But you remember after 9-11, there were people who wanted to attack Iraq.
00:14:02.000They said Iraq caused 9-11, turned out Iraq didn't have anything to do with 9-11.
00:14:06.000So let's see where the facts lie, let's investigate this, and let Israel need to do what they need to do, which is...
00:14:13.000Tomorrow we'll be talking in depth about the military-industrial complex and how the United States brokers deals for the MIC across the world, including selling arms to at least 57% of the world's autocratic countries, leading to the possibility A claim that's already been made that Hamas used American-made weapons to conduct those attacks.
00:14:38.000Certainly, it's clear that Taliban weapons have made their way into... Well, I mean, the Taliban aren't ideal people to be armed with.
00:14:47.000Beyond the kind of ideological arguments here, one question that I think we could focus on together, and let me know if you agree with this, It's America's role in supplying arms to autocratic states and potential bad actors on a global stage and their economic model that requires the proliferation of weapons and how that is at odds with Joe Biden's claim that it's the role of the United States to bring about peace, a recent claim that he's made.
00:15:15.000A person who you can rely on to certainly not use sophistry in their public speaking You know, Hezbollah's very smart.
00:16:02.000I suppose what Donald Trump is saying is that the people that are being morally condemned, quite rightly, are using tactics and strategies that are effective.
00:16:17.000And he appears to be commenting on how his remarks might be used to escalate tensions, even while saying them.
00:16:24.000Now let me know what you think about Trump's remarks and certainly let me know what you think about them compared to Joe Biden's comments and you will be in a very good position to scrutinize those comments after you've seen our content on America's role in arming the world and in particular Arming potential opponents and terrorists.
00:16:45.000You know this guys, that Mexican drug cartels gained access to missiles that were intended for Ukraine.
00:16:53.000You know that the Pentagon keep failing audits.
00:16:56.000You know that the way that arms are being proliferated throughout the world is likely contributing to increased military activity.
00:17:04.000I mean, it's kind of Obvious, actually.
00:17:06.000And Trump's ability to say what other politicians won't say, I think, elicits more trust, certainly from people who are inclined to support him.
00:17:16.000Let me know what you think about that in the chat.
00:17:20.000For example, just look at what Trump says here about electronic tanks.
00:17:23.000And compare that to the causistry, the sophistry, the doublespeak that we've become accustomed to from ordinary, centralist, neocon politicians.
00:17:32.000And that means, of course, politicians from both sides of the near-invisible aisle.
00:17:56.000So that we go into enemy territory, we will blast the shit out of everybody, but at least we will go in with environmentally nice equipment.
00:18:09.000Doesn't that seem like the kind of skewering rhetoric designed to point out the hypocrisy in legacy media-supported politicians who claim they have an agenda of creating safety and peace, while participating in the arms industry, while propagating ideas around climate change that are punitive to ordinary people, while not even addressing the problems that they claim are true, and even if these problems are true, Why is it that the measures undertaken always penalise ordinary people?
00:18:38.000And are we beginning to see now that the rise of populism is precisely the result of the ability of politicians like Trump to say what's unsayable by other political figures?
00:18:49.000Cast your mind back to the period when he was in office and he was, you know, at that point speaking, I think somewhat favorably and affectionately about vaccines while also talking about hydroxychloroquine.
00:19:04.000Are you confident saying that word even yet?
00:19:06.000I can just about say ivermectin if it's permissible on this WHO governed channel.
00:19:11.000But hydroxychloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, let me know in the chat, let me know in the chat.
00:19:17.000But do you remember in particular the moment Where Fauci rolled his eyes.
00:19:21.000In those days, Fauci was being presented as a kind of medical Willy Wonka.
00:19:28.000A kind of, sort of, scientist Jesus who we could rely on.
00:19:32.000A counterpoint to the corruption and hyperbole of Trump.
00:19:37.000Well, as a result of the investigations of genuine, legitimate, while persecuted journalists like Matt Taibbi and our friend Michael Schellenberger, they're both our friends, we don't mean to separate them in that way, we now have a greater understanding of Fauci's role in censoring the cause of the last pandemic.
00:19:55.000Also, and with everything that's going on in the world, the Omnicrisis that we are all experiencing, none so much as those directly involved, of course, but a sense that the world is in real crisis, in real trouble, that we can't trust any of our institutions anymore, that legacy media exists solely to normalize and amplify the intentions of the powerful.
00:20:19.000That crisis is being induced everywhere we go at an almost insufferable, unendurable, unconscionable rate?
00:20:28.000Is it possible that they are still conducting experiments that are even more dangerous than those that took place in Wuhan that were alleged to have started this pandemic?
00:20:52.000I wish I could tell you in the midst of the current Omni crisis that at least scientists connected to the Wuhan lab leak aren't doing more dangerous experiments that could lead to another pandemic and that Anthony Fauci wasn't potentially involved in a massive cover-up in the last one.
00:21:12.000Let me know in the chat that the scientists involved potentially in the Wuhan lab leak are still doing dangerous, contagious, unnecessary experiments that could lead to another pandemic.
00:21:23.000And if the idea of another pandemic seems familiar to you and potentially real, that's because some significant global figures keep talking about the next pandemic, the next pandemic, like almost it's going to be war, pandemic, war, pandemic, war, pandemic.
00:22:25.000Okay, so they all seem pretty confident there's going to be another pandemic, but also the scientists involved in the Wuhan lab leak are doing more experiments that are a bit like that, even though really the last time they did it, it probably caused this pandemic.
00:22:41.000More and more of us accept that as the reality.
00:22:42.000Now let me know on the chat if you're still entertaining the idea that it came from a wet market.
00:22:47.000So let's get into this story with a little more detail.
00:22:50.000Later, and you'll love this, we're talking about how Anthony Fauci, unbelievably, The fellow that was meant to be coordinating to a degree the global response to the pandemic was involved in covering up some pretty important facts.
00:23:02.000Scientists linked to Wuhan bat researchers have been accused of performing dangerous experiments on a MERS-like virus that could spark a pandemic.
00:23:10.000Well, they should certainly interrogate and investigate that Possibility to see if there's any truth in that.
00:23:15.000A team from the University of North Carolina published a paper in Science Advances detailing how they'd synthesized a MERS-like bat virus and used it to infect human cells and humanized mice.
00:23:26.000I never feel that good, do you, when I hear the phrase humanized mice?
00:23:29.000I never think this research is in the right hands.
00:23:31.000I'm gonna just start routinely now, outside laboratories, going, have you got mice in there?
00:23:35.000We certainly do, what business is it of yours?
00:24:06.000The team includes Professor Ralph Baric and Trevor Scobie, who worked with Professor Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology before the pandemic, creating chimeric viruses by inserting spike proteins from bat viruses Into the original SARS virus.
00:24:19.000I don't sound like a Luddite and I know that so many important things have been achieved as a result of biochemical endeavour, biological ingenuity, chemistry, science more broadly.
00:24:30.000What a wonderful discipline it is and you will know from my conversation with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University that I admire, adore and revere A subset of at least genuine scientists.
00:24:40.000And one of the conditions I would say for being considered a genuine scientist is related to funding.
00:24:45.000When science becomes a subset of at least an endeavour to accrue profit rather than heal and help people, problems emerge.
00:24:54.000And when there's an agenda that goes even beyond that, I think we're at even greater risk.
00:24:59.000The new experiment used a reverse genetics technique to create a MERS-like bat virus called BtCoV422, which was collected by Shi Zhengli's team in China in 2019.
00:25:10.000The scientists said they'd perform the latest study to test whether antivirals would work against the infection.
00:25:15.000But experts warned the experiments were needlessly risky for little gain.
00:25:36.000Anton van der Meer, Professor of Molecular Immunology at Oxford University, told The Telegraph, because coronaviruses evolve rapidly, these experiments carry the risk of generating variants which are better able to infect human cells, and therefore... Humans!
00:25:50.000Oh, there's no precedent of that happening.
00:26:05.000Human and equipment error means that infection of those performing the experiment is a risk and the infected individual could then spread the infection outside the laboratory and initiate a pandemic.
00:26:18.000How do you know there's no wet markets or damp coffee shops?
00:26:21.000Or stinky fruit and veg stores around there?
00:26:24.000Before you jump to racist conspiracy theories, like doing this type of research definitely causes pandemics, why don't you just look around and see how much moisture there is in all of the facilities nearby you?
00:26:55.000The government represents against the interests of the people.
00:26:58.000Science that's telling you that they're looking for cures for stuff are actually curing things that they're creating themselves that are worse than anything that's out there already.
00:27:05.000It's gone mad and I don't really know, other than forming separate systems and advocating for radical change pretty fast, what else we're supposed to do.
00:27:13.000There's no prospect of using such work to develop a vaccine or antiviral drugs since these can only be tested in humans during an actual pandemic.
00:27:21.000It seems to me this experiment is simply not justified.
00:27:25.000Professor Barrick developed the reverse genetics technique, which not only enables a virus to be brought to life from its genetic code, but allows scientists to mix and match parts from other viruses.
00:27:34.000It's like they're, like, just trying to have fun, isn't it?
00:27:36.000Like, okay, a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
00:27:38.000Mix and match and bringing genetic code to life.
00:27:41.000It's not Mr. Potato Head, it's a deadly virus.
00:27:44.000I know, but we've given this one a big nose!
00:27:48.000However, experts said that the same experiments could have been carried out by inserting the spike protein of BtCoV422 into a harmless pseudovirus.
00:27:58.000Pseudovirus experiments should have been the first thing they did before making this live virus, said one scientist who chose to remain anonymous so that he could keep his job and keep his funding and not be called a heretic and flung out of the lucrative science world.
00:28:11.000They went straight to testing a live virus in human cell culture.
00:28:14.000And they performed experiments in everybody's favorite, humanized mice, which presents a higher risk of escape than just cell culture.
00:28:28.000If we could hang the water bottle up there and weigh it down with this grain and those weird little pellety things, we could be out of here in no time.
00:28:50.000So this guy would have stopped it, nipped it in the bud.
00:28:53.000They've already gone straight to the bit where they're clacking around, mixing and matching, living it up, having a great time there.
00:29:00.000Experts also warned that the experiments were performed at a biosafety level, BSL-3 level, rather than the highest BSL-4 safety level.
00:29:07.000There's mad, evil Knievel, radical Gadabout, nitwit scientists performing these experiments not even at the highest level of safety.
00:29:14.000It's not like there's been a massive pandemic probably caused by lacklustre standards at a laboratory and it's leaked out because they were doing it at bio level 3 or 4.
00:30:00.000Worst thing that's going to happen, you get some dye on your hands or one of your humanized mice might get a bit of a sugar rush and run out and get run over by an electric scooter.
00:30:11.000And here's a sentence that seems plainly obvious to anybody.
00:30:14.000Experiments on potentially pandemic organisms should only be performed if there are clear benefits to humanity and should be performed at the very highest level of containment.
00:30:22.000Alright, so that's still happening on the planet you live on.
00:30:25.000All those things that are so complicated and awful you don't even know how to talk about them.
00:30:28.000You know, this we do know how to talk about, don't we?
00:30:30.000Just stop bloody doing it, you absolute mad lunatics.
00:30:33.000Now, let's have a look at whether or not Anthony Fauci actively repressed information that could have helped us to have understood the nature of the last pandemic a bit earlier, or he had some reason for keep saying it must have come out of a wet market, it must have come out of a wet market.
00:30:47.000If it was caused by poor standards in a lab that had connections to United States funding, then the very person who's in charge of the response is at least tangentially responsible for the whole fiasco.
00:30:57.000Seems ridiculous that you'd even have to consider that.
00:30:59.000More ridiculous yet that it's possibly true.
00:31:01.000Starting in February of 2020, from the very beginning, Anthony Fauci knew he was involved with funding this lab, and he did everything possible.
00:31:16.000That is not a positive news broadcast right there is it?
00:31:19.000I mean the Dow is going up but Gaza is on fire and Anthony Fauci appears to have been deceiving us throughout the pandemic and right from the offset of the pandemic possibly because he had a vested interest and of course Anthony Fauci doesn't do that job anymore.
00:31:35.000Even though we've had Unanimous Congress declassified information.
00:31:39.000I have unclassified information that's being withheld from me to this day.
00:31:44.000But we have evidence, yes, that they were dishonest, that Anthony Fauci lied in hearings to me, which is a felony, punishable up to five years.
00:31:51.000We now have emails that show him saying that he knew it was gain-of-function, that the virus looked manipulated, and that he was worried that this came from the Wuhan lab.
00:32:43.000We also know that there was a safety committee that should have reviewed this, and we know that Anthony Fauci went around the safety committee.
00:32:50.000The safety committee set up in place to make sure this wouldn't happen never saw the Wuhan funding because Anthony Fauci allowed the funding to go around the safety committee.
00:33:16.000You get Journalists like Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi and Barry White, you get like actual journalists, they all try and go, well, should we try and work out the truth here?
00:33:23.000But people that work for the legacy media, they won't do that because they can't, because the function of the legacy media is to amplify the message of the powerful and normalise the agenda of the power.
00:33:31.000They just normalise, OK, we're all in this together.
00:33:56.000National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the U.S.
00:34:02.000government response to the coronavirus pandemic, visited CIA headquarters to influence its review of COVID-19 origins, the House Oversight Committee reported in September.
00:34:13.000Last month, committee chair Brad Wenstrup made headlines when he revealed that seven CIA analysts with significant scientific expertise on the agency's COVID-19 discovery team, CDT, received performance bonuses after changing a report to downplay concerns about a possible lab origin of the virus.
00:34:30.000It looks like maybe it came from a lab.
00:34:32.000What if you were to say that it didn't come from a lab?
00:35:35.000Previous reporting already showed that Fauci prompted the Proximal Origin paper according
00:35:39.000Lead author Christian Anderson expressed grave doubts about the natural origin theory even months after Nature Medicine published a paper, and they described themselves as pressured by higher-ups referring to individuals in the White House and other government agencies.
00:35:54.000They just bombarded you with wet market, wet market, natural origin, natural origin, to the point where something was plain and obvious.
00:36:02.000Like, that Institute of Virology became sort of, eventually, it was just too obvious to be ignored, but it was ignored.
00:36:09.000It was denied for a very long, even now, it's not like people are going, you know, of course, of course, is it?
00:36:13.000You still sort of can't even say that.
00:36:15.000That's because we don't live in reality.
00:36:17.000We live in a curated psychological space, created by very powerful interests, amplified and normalized by the legacy media.
00:36:24.000Only way to bypass that is through independent media channels like this one, which is why independent media channels like this one are demonetised.
00:36:33.000Now, the new information from multiple sources, including a CIA whistleblower, senior government investigator and a senior official, suggests a broad effort by Fauci to go agency by agency from the White House to the State Department to the CIA in an effort to Steer government officials away from looking into the possibility that COVID-19 escaped from a lab.
00:36:52.000Follow the science around every one of those agencies.
00:36:55.000Follow the science around the talk shows that held sort of celebratory parties where Anthony Fauci was portrayed as a figurehead for that time of crisis.
00:37:07.000Thank God for Anthony Fauci rolling his eyes!
00:37:11.000If it proves to be true that he went agency by agency suppressing the truth, if it proves to be true that he deliberately created a funnel for funding and masked that, that's where the mask was necessary, ironically, then what are you left with there?
00:37:25.000You are left with a public space that is built on deception.
00:38:51.000According to the CIA whistleblower, the CIA purposely did not badge Fauci in and out of the building so as to hide any record that he'd been there.
00:38:58.000Fauci came to our building to promote the natural origin of the virus, the CIA whistleblower said.
00:39:21.000Grant records show that Anderson had a multi-million dollar NIH grant proposal pending while he wrote Proximal Origin.
00:39:28.000Fouch's oversight of the power and the fact that he had an author's grant on his desk put him in a clear position of power over scientists' conclusions.
00:39:35.000Oh no, he was able to influence it by suggestion, by holding grants and the offer of grants.
00:39:40.000People tell you this is how it works all the time.
00:39:43.000The amount of funding available to them means that that's That's not science, is it?
00:39:46.000Because science would be, well, let's take funding out of it, let's just look at the available data.
00:40:04.000That's just science as a tool of the agenda of the powerful, reported as objective science by a complicit legacy media who received their funding via advertising from pharmaceutical companies.
00:40:17.000It's just crazy to think that the one person who was presented as the voice of reason, the reliable weather vane and bulwark of our sensible response to this terrible condition, could be actually part of the cause, part of the problem, concealing the truth.
00:41:30.000How do figures that are meant to represent the health interests of an entire nation, and on an occasion such as that, the world, actually behave?
00:41:43.000That's why it was such an extraordinary event.
00:41:44.000That's why it was utilized to create authoritative measures and to shut down dissent and increase surveillance and surveillance measures like passports and different forms of ID and to increase censorship and shut down dissenting voices because Something happened that was literally global and so much was revealed as a result.
00:42:00.000The first thing they have to do is have the ability to control the narrative.
00:42:04.000If they can't control the narrative, they're in trouble because none of us are going to tolerate that if we understand it.
00:42:10.000I used to say this before the age of the internet.
00:42:12.000What do you think in classified documents?
00:42:25.000That's how all these things went down.
00:42:26.000Obviously, what's in that documentation, in fact, the raison d'etre of those documents and of classification itself and of those agencies is to prevent you from ever understanding how you are truly governed and controlled.
00:42:38.000Because if you knew what was in those documents, you would not cooperate.
00:42:43.000It would shock you to the very core of your being.
00:42:46.000We are beginning to understand this now, that our most treasured and cherished institutions require radical reform and that it will not come from within the system itself.
00:43:22.000There was a clear lack of interest in a robust analysis of Chinese military connections to WIV research and connections that could be drawn between US research and WIV activity, the whistleblower said.
00:43:33.000In letting Fauci secretly influence analysts behind closed doors, the CIA may have allowed Fauci to promote his own personal interests, undermining the scientific integrity of the agency's investigation.
00:43:44.000Despite his claim that he did not try to exert influence over investigations into Covid's origin, Fauci had a clear motive to divert attention from the Wuhan lab.
00:43:53.000Perhaps when the next pandemic comes, and evidently it is, not just because some of the world's most powerful vested interests are telling you that it's coming, but But because simultaneously, none of the lessons of the last lab leak, if indeed it was one, have been learned.
00:44:08.000The same scientists are conducting yet more dangerous research.
00:44:13.000I don't want it, you don't want it I assume, and yet it's still happening.
00:44:16.000We know that Anthony Fauci, who was presented to us as the figurehead, a paragon of truth and authenticity, is now seeming to be its direct inverse.
00:44:43.000It's not going to come from within the system.
00:44:45.000Even though, whatever hope you have, for whatever figurehead you're backing, what would happen if they were placed, dropped, into that cesspool?
00:44:53.000Let me know if you think any individual can really make a difference.
00:45:00.000We have to radically change as individuals and we have to be willing to sacrifice and make the necessary changes in our own lives and in our communities and to demand democracy by any means necessary except, of course, violence.
00:45:11.000Should they be carrying out those experiments now?
00:45:13.000Should Andy Fauci be taken to task for his conduct if indeed this stuff is true?
00:45:17.000And I'd also, let me add this, stop making humanised mice.
00:45:44.000And it's preposterous to imagine that someone that was lauded as a figurehead, as a kind of prophet of the pandemic era, a self-proclaimed voice of science and manifestation of science could potentially be so corrupt.
00:45:57.000And yet, That's what the journalism that we just used to make that content suggests, and maybe even in places appears to, according to that CIA whistleblower, demonstrate.
00:46:07.000I am now honoured to introduce so-called journalist, that's the words of Congress, writer of Racket News and America This Week on Substack, and author of Griftopia.
00:46:37.000Not a fully immersive omnicrisis, geopolitical nightmares everywhere you look, corruption, censorship everywhere.
00:46:44.000I mean, there's so much for us to discuss, but given that we've just done an item using your journalism, can we talk a little more, Matt, about Fauci's role in censoring the potential origins of the last pandemic?
00:46:59.000And I suppose significantly that CIA whistleblower and like Fauci's agency tour to shut down investigation.
00:47:08.000Yeah, so this is a story that grew out of the Twitter files a little bit.
00:47:16.000Because a lot of the focus of the Twitter files was about suppression of COVID-related topics, a number of people came forward.
00:47:25.000Michael Schellenberger and I, about six months ago, we started To hear about a whistleblower in the CIA who was coming forward with a story that Anthony Fauci had, at least on a couple of occasions, come to the CIA's Weapons and Counterproliferation Center.
00:47:45.000I forget exactly what the acronym is, but it was what they were using to study the origins of of COVID and gave a presentation pushing the idea of zoonotic origin on the CIA analysts.
00:48:01.000Later on, some six of the seven analysts at the CIA who were leaning towards lab origin changed their minds before the issuance of a final report.
00:48:14.000They were given financial incentives by the agency to do that.
00:48:19.000There are a number of other stories that came out as a result of all this, but he also went to the State Department and the White House, was pushing this proximal origins of SARS-CoV-2 paper that we also had reported on that he was heavily involved with drafting, probably never disclosed it to any of those agencies.
00:48:38.000So it looks like a pretty sophisticated, energetic campaign to go through the intelligence agencies and executive branch agencies and try to convince them to not look at the lab origin theory.
00:48:53.000If this is true, it seems to be the kind of corruption and hypocrisy that people that were judged to be conspiracy theorists very early in this process were offering.
00:49:07.000I feel like pretty early on people were saying, how is the Wuhan Institute of Virology funded?
00:49:12.000It was not even possible, as obviously you know, to even talk about lab leak theory at the beginning.
00:49:17.000Does this, are you able, I sort of feel like I know that you are from when we spoke particularly at that censorship industrial complex event that we did, like able to look at this somewhat objectively?
00:49:27.000Or do you find yourself sort of recoiling in disgust?
00:49:30.000Or are you excited as an investigative journalist?
00:49:32.000Like, oh my God, this is actual information.
00:49:36.000What, what does this do to you emotionally?
00:49:38.000I ask because This would seem to be the type of story that an investigative journalist would be excited by, that this is something that you can show an unravelling of, almost a complete reversal of someone that's been presented as a hero, celebrated to an almost galling degree, an uncustomary degree, a degree that's actually bloody obvious that something was going on when you look at it now, that he was on the talk shows and the dancing syringes and all those kind of things.
00:50:02.000Makes you think this isn't a normal thing to happen.
00:50:06.000When the media does something that extreme, whether it's pro someone or against someone, possibly there's another agenda at play.
00:50:13.000So there's a few questions I want to ask you.
00:50:15.000Does it excite you as an investigative journalist?
00:50:17.000Why don't we see that kind of investigative journalism taking place within the legacy media?
00:50:22.000And what was your emotional reaction to it?
00:50:23.000And finally, within this little bunch of questions, can you envisage that this will lead to any kind of criminal judicial consequences for Fauci?
00:50:34.000Well, just quickly, to go in order, I should admit that I was very taken in initially by a lot of the propaganda about COVID.
00:50:45.000And I was reluctant to go anywhere near the topic because I didn't, I was a little bit afraid of aligning myself with sort of anti-vaccine activists.
00:50:55.000Even if I was saying something true, I didn't want that impression out there.
00:51:00.000And when we started doing the Twitter files, Barry Weiss and Michael Schellenberger were much, much more interested in the COVID aspect than I was.
00:51:08.000I was trying to focus on the FBI intelligence aspect of it, mainly because I You know, I wasn't sure what was true about the COVID question, but we came to realize by the end of the project that the COVID messaging thing was central to the worst corruption that we were looking at in the documents, mainly because what they were doing wasn't taking things that were false and eliminating them.
00:51:36.000They were taking things that were true and intentionally removing them and actually coming up with a reason to remove True content.
00:51:49.000And this led to this series of stories, which I was excited about because, you know, I didn't have any particular feelings about Anthony Fauci.
00:51:59.000I was a little annoyed by his imperious demeanor and his lecturing.
00:52:05.000You know, just as an outside observer, he seemed obnoxious to me.
00:52:09.000But when we got the documents showing his emails back and forth with the scientists who did the original paper concluding that the virus had a natural origin and saw how aggressively he was suppressing their natural reaction that this probably came from a lab or at least that they couldn't rule that out.
00:52:36.000Seeing that in paper was very exciting because we're not asserting it, we're just saying here, Look at what he said.
00:52:46.000They lied to you about what they thought.
00:52:49.000And that's always exciting as an investigative reporter is when you get proof of something as opposed to having to rely on an anonymous source or something like that.
00:53:00.000This latest thing with the whistleblower suggests something a little bit more sinister, which is an active cover-up of investigations into this question and then, you know, as to the question
00:53:18.000of whether this will lead to criminal probes, I think it's possible because there is
00:53:23.000more to come out about America's relationship to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the
00:53:32.000sharing of scientific research, the possibility that some American scientists may have actually provided
00:53:40.000the technology to help create this virus.
00:53:45.000None of that is proven, but I think it's out there and there's, you know, from what we hear, there's more stuff that's kind of come out.
00:53:51.000If it does, I think, yes, I think there will be probes.
00:53:55.000That's pretty, that's interesting and somewhat exciting.
00:53:58.000So then if there's a legitimate story and there's somewhat reliable evidence and sources available, part of my question there was why does the legacy media not spend any money, time, resources, investigative endeavour on stories like this?
00:54:20.000I mean, it continues to astonish me that they're uninterested or disinterested.
00:54:26.000I forget what the right word is in this situation.
00:54:28.000But, you know, from the very beginning, COVID was a story that was reported in a very particular way.
00:54:37.000I think a lot of reporters decided what they felt or what they believed about certain topics based on what Donald Trump's reaction was.
00:54:44.000If Donald Trump suspected that there might've been lab origin, Or if you blame China, then the response was to go all the way in the other direction.
00:54:54.000If Donald Trump said he took hydroxychloroquine, then hydroxychloroquine absolutely had to be snake oil.
00:54:59.000There was no other way of reporting this because Anthony Fauci was presented as the kind of human counterpart to Donald Trump at the time.
00:55:34.000Seems that it's being maneuvered out of the agenda.
00:55:38.000And I feel that there's, and I'm obviously not the first to make the remark, that there's an emergent template where crises enter, a very strong narrative accompanies the origin of the crisis.
00:55:51.000Anyone that dissents is maligned and it becomes very difficult.
00:55:56.000And the thing you described about, you know, to be sort of inquisitive or to oppose the narrative is become aligned with Trumpism.
00:56:04.000It's almost, I feel that they are creating that dynamic.
00:56:09.000Myself, over the last few years, I've gone from a position of thinking, like, oh, Donald Trump, man, seriously?
00:56:14.000And, like, then recognizing that there's a lot of people who see him as a sort of a real solution because of the berserker component, because he is an anomaly in the political space.
00:56:23.000Then, like, for me, as it becomes slightly more sophisticated, I think, hang on a minute, if they don't like him as much as they don't like him, that at least is something, whatever's going on with this guy, the establishment don't want him in there.
00:56:36.000Up to all the way where I start thinking he's alright!
00:56:40.000Because in a sense you're maligned and marginalised and excluded from space.
00:56:45.000The thing that you said about how they defaulted to Fauci as a counterpoint because of some rolling eyes and because they had a sort of a neocon stooge as he's starting to appear sort of up there on the podium.
00:56:57.000It's now, we've now reached the point where you have the kind of, the space is becoming so fissured and fractured that new alliances were going to happen.
00:57:06.000And I get, in that moment I felt, oh well that's the fault of the people that are reporting in this manner and refusing to investigate as a result of those assumptions, the ones that you just outlined.
00:57:15.000But perhaps it's a, perhaps it's broader than that.
00:57:17.000Perhaps this is just the, what these alliances are just going to occur because it is authoritarianism versus the periphery and anti-authoritarianism Well, I very much think it's the latter.
00:57:28.000yourself in new alliances. What do you think it is? Which one of those?
00:57:30.000Well, I very much think it's it's the latter. I mean, I'm working on a book now and looking into the origins of, you
00:57:40.000know, this anti disinformation censorship complex. And part of it comes
00:57:46.000from this political theory that was, you know, is derived by a German jury, he
00:57:54.000was a Nazi jurist actually named Carl Schmitt, who one of his core political theories is that all politics, liberal
00:58:45.000And it's also convinced people to turn the blinders on when it comes to looking at somebody like Anthony Fauci.
00:58:52.000In retrospect, we should have wondered right away about a guy who tells us that he lied to us about something like masks for our own good.
00:59:04.000That's something that no journalist or scientist should ever be caught doing, saying, yeah, I told you a wrong fact, but I had to, like, we shouldn't let people off the hook for that.
00:59:16.000But we did because he coded as somebody who was a friend and not a foe.
00:59:31.000And you can see how authoritarianism is advanced by this false oppositional perspective.
00:59:40.000You're either with the terrorists or you're against the terrorists.
00:59:43.000In a way, what that creates is a conversational framing that is in its nature opposed to something that I think might be quite fundamental The decentralization of power, the demonopolization of powerful big tech entities, the prohibition of the overreach of the state, the foreclosure of the state's right to intervene in matters like how you raise your children or how you earn your money.
01:00:11.000By creating that sort of polarity, in the end a sort of a relatively balanced polarity Would, almost on a mathematical level, lead to two spaces?
01:00:26.000So I can see why that has prevailed, and how it serves authority, and also how we've experienced, even in this time that I've been, you know, intellectually, shall we say, engaged in these spaces, We've witnessed the inversion of meaning, like free speech is bad, free speech is hate speech, that talking about peace or advocating for peace is bad and disloyal, and how we've seen liberal...
01:00:57.000Parties that were typically associated with advocacy for civil rights and liberal attitudes becoming authoritarian.
01:01:05.000I suppose it's precisely because of this, the phenomenon you're describing.
01:01:08.000So yeah, that book's going to be good, I reckon, because you can see how that would dynamically create that kind of fissure.
01:01:49.000The machine learning version of content moderation, that's what it does.
01:01:55.000It's designed to score you on a spectrum of opinions.
01:02:00.000And, you know, that's why things like this Digital Services Act that you've got in Europe now are so scary, because it's just creating an intellectual dragnet over vast territories and separating people according to their opinions.
01:02:17.000Um, you know, and telling us that some opinions are just illegal, you know, and others are, you know, everything else is okay.
01:02:27.000And that's a terrible, dangerous way of looking at things.
01:02:31.000It's totally contrary to From a free market perspective it seems that what was and has been emerging in online spaces is the potential for global audiences to accrue
01:02:48.000Topically, or via subject, i.e., Substack is an example, Rumble, the phenomenon of Joe Rogan, to take the most evident figure, that you can create new markets bypassing institutions.
01:03:03.000And I would say that that trend Unchecked would continue and have connotations and could be extrapolated beyond media space and I would say into the administering of power, ultimately.
01:03:26.000There was a tendency and a trend that had to be arrested and has been arrested and is being arrested.
01:03:31.000I wanted to ask you about the EU's Digital Services Act, the recent labelling of Ex Biteri Breton as a hub of disinformation, and the numerous comparable pieces of legislature, whether it's Canada's podcast bill, whatever they're calling that, The UK's online safety bill that sort of coincided with events that affected me personally, of course.
01:03:57.000And I wonder what you feel this is in effect.
01:04:03.000And of course, I wonder in particular, how you feel about the fact that they're often mobilized by things that almost anyone would agree with hate speech, child pornography.
01:04:13.000But often there are matters for which there are already laws that don't require additional legislation or the foreclosure of free speech.
01:04:22.000Right, and that's always how they propagandize repressive or authoritarian measures.
01:04:29.000They start with something that everybody agrees with for whatever reason.
01:04:34.000That's why in America, I think the first figure to be removed from the internet in a coordinated way.
01:04:43.000Alex Jones was somebody who was really unpopular in many quarters.
01:04:47.000So people didn't protest the underlying issue, which is, you know, switching out one way of regulating speech, which was always litigation based and doing it by this other means, which was corporate behind closed doors, didn't involve courts or juries or anything like that.
01:05:03.000Um, that's scary, but all the laws that you're talking about, um, I have tremendous implications for the ability of ordinary people to conduct democracy.
01:05:16.000I mean, these sort of top down measures, they imply that speech is dangerous.
01:05:26.000And we found out, I mean, I think COVID is the primary example of of why these kinds of laws can be abused, right?
01:05:38.000So, with COVID, one of the things that happened was you saw early on there were scientists like Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford and Martin Calder from Harvard.
01:05:49.000Sinetra Guptra from Oxford, who were suppressing the Internet, not because they got anything wrong, not because they were inciting people or committing libel or doing anything that you would traditionally consider a crime, right, or a speech offense, but because they were opposing a government policy.
01:06:12.000They were saying that they thought lockdowns were ineffective.
01:06:15.000They thought that there were lockdowns were not scientifically indicated.
01:06:18.000And the people who run the trust and safety departments or the censorship departments in these companies classified that as disinformation because it was information that produced the wrong behavior in people.
01:06:33.000It aroused the wrong political response.
01:06:37.000So even though it's factually true, it's narratively incorrect.
01:06:42.000And that's what's so dangerous is that you have people with that kind of power Deciding what is and is not appropriate content and they will lie, you know, they'll abuse those powers.
01:06:56.000In a way, it's already happening, isn't it?
01:06:59.000Because sometimes when I'm talking about what I believe to be an attempt to create systems of authority that are able to, because true authority I suppose by its nature, would bypass democracy and some of the stories that we track and obviously that you track and investigate, ...appear to be targeted and motivated towards the creation of systems that mean that regardless of what country you're in or regardless of whether or not what you're saying is true, there are new methods and modes of control being introduced, often under the auspices of safety, because the alternative would just be to announce that it's about control.
01:07:43.000Talking about what's been happening with banking in Canada and appears to be being legislated for and certainly is increasing.
01:07:50.000And I wondered actually, because you know Chrystia Freeland, the sarcastically named Deputy PM of Canada.
01:08:00.000What's your personal experience of her, if that's not a rude question?
01:08:56.000And, you know, there were some columns that she wrote that even at the time I remember raising an eyebrow about.
01:09:03.000When Putin first came to power, you can go back and look at this, there was a column that she wrote talking about how the West is falling in love with Russia again.
01:09:12.000You know, the implication being that Putin was, you know, he was a more respectable face.
01:09:21.000He was someone with whom we could do business.
01:09:25.000And, you know, she had a reputation as somebody who kind of Toe to the establishment line, the American foreign policy line on Russia, which we didn't always agree with because there were pretty dramatic consequences for people in Russia at the time.
01:09:46.000There was a gutting of the freedom of the press, there were elimination of all kinds of public services, and a lot of the Americans were cool with that.
01:09:58.000You know, when she reappeared in this role in Canada, all of my old friends from Russia, we've been all texting each other about this.
01:10:09.000This stuff is, you know, the use of denying banking services, this invitation of Yaroslav Honka to The Canadian Parliament, it's hard for me to believe that Krystia, who has a Ukrainian background and started her career out writing for Ukrainian papers, didn't know what was going on there.
01:10:36.000So the excuse that this all caught them unawares, I'm just not sure about that.
01:10:42.000But yeah, no, and she seems very aggressive.
01:10:45.000In promoting this very aggressive use of denial of services to people who are on the wrong side of the informational landscape and That's very concerning.
01:10:59.000And it's totally contrary, again, to what traditional Western liberal democratic values.
01:11:06.000You said earlier that it was using the ideas of Carl Schmitt that democracy itself could be regarded as a kind of liberal window dressing for binary systems, for dividing friends.
01:11:21.000from foes and one of the things I've been most struck by is how the aesthetic of
01:11:26.000liberalism, the rhetoric of liberalism is so closely allied to authoritarianism
01:11:32.000and Chrystia Freeland and Justin Trudeau and figures that I feel like you know
01:11:37.00010 years ago or 15 years ago I would have I would have just thought, they seem nice, like the kind of
01:11:41.000people that you'd want run in a country, sort of modern looking and sounding.
01:11:47.000And before long, they're like literally applauding Nazis.
01:11:50.000Now I'd, when we'd spoken about that, I mean, on our channel, assumed that that was just
01:12:15.000So, what, you think it's... I mean, that's just speculative, is it?
01:12:18.000I mean, it does seem like a pretty mad accident.
01:12:20.000I assumed it was like a Jungian kind of deep, unconscious accident brought forth from the collective psyche that Canada, in all its liberal posing, somehow, like a fart, just revealed, oh no, we're applauding a Nazi!
01:12:39.000But you think it's sort of, like, almost potentially deliberate?
01:12:46.000Well, yeah, if it was a fart, that's one of the all-time loud ones, I would say.
01:12:57.000First of all, it's impossible to believe that they were not aware that this guy fought on the other side of a war where 42,000 Canadians died.
01:13:09.000Most people are pretty, you know, I understand it was a long time ago and not everybody's read their World War II history, but if your country fought in a war you have, you tend to know.
01:13:18.000Who was on the other side of that conflict?
01:13:22.000Yes, there are some legitimate reasons.
01:13:24.000There, of course, were legitimate reasons to fight against the Soviets, among other things, because they had previously done a non-aggression pact with the Nazis.
01:13:50.000They had to have done some research on this, and it's impossible for me to imagine that they weren't.
01:13:57.000They weren't at least aware that they were asking Parliament to cheer somebody who was fighting on the other side of their war.
01:14:06.000So, the Nazi element aside, but you add the Nazi element to that, and that scene, it looks like what my podcast partner Walter Curran and I called a soft opening for asking people to accept certain fascistic values.
01:14:24.000I don't know how else to interpret that scene.
01:14:27.000It's a difficult phenomenon, or at least event, to interpret at all.
01:14:33.000A few things I'd love to run through with you.
01:14:34.000Firstly, the emergence, or at least announcement, that RFK is going to run independently and the fact that a significant number of Americans say they would consider voting for an independent candidate.
01:14:46.000Do you think it will alter the trajectory of the election?
01:14:48.000Do you think it could even alter the candidate that runs for either the Democrat or Republican party?
01:14:53.000Do you think it will change the This course during this election, do you think that he's going to get like super attacked from both sides now?
01:15:01.000What do you think will be the broad impact of RFK's candidacy, Matt?
01:15:07.000I think the candidacies of both RFK and Cornel West are going to have a significant impact on Uh, the election, at least I think that's very possible.
01:15:20.000Um, Cornel West doesn't have to get that much support before he becomes a major factor in the race, uh, for a variety of reasons.
01:15:31.000And it's the same thing with our RFK with, he starts getting even pulling the same numbers that he has been, you know, between 10 and 20%.
01:15:40.000Uh, of even the Democratic electorate.
01:15:43.000If you start adding the people who are among Independents and Republicans who would consider voting for him, then we're getting into serious numbers.
01:15:50.000Now, the question is, will his candidacy hurt Trump, who's the presumptive nominee more than Joe Biden, who's the presumptive Democratic nominee?
01:16:00.000I don't know, but, um, You know, there's a reason why the Democratic Party, actually both of the two established parties, hate these kinds of candidates because, especially at a moment like this one, when, you know, the incumbent is so totally unappealing.
01:16:19.000So, if given the option of voting for somebody who's still alive and breathing and able to, you know, speak in his own language, People will do that, you know?
01:16:33.000And I think both RFK and West are going to become real factors.
01:16:42.000That I suppose at least is cause for some optimism.
01:16:45.000Another subject I wanted to of course touch upon is the escalating violence in the Middle East.
01:16:50.000I've noticed already that it's entering into an already difficult, divided, communicative space and this is almost the ultimate divisive issue.
01:17:03.000Even prior to cancel culture, even prior to the kind of online tribalism That we see these days and the kind of self-censure and the censure of others.
01:17:12.000This was an issue that was almost, I don't know, it appears to divide people like nothing else I can really think of.
01:17:20.000What do you think is going to be the impact just in terms of journalism and discussing it and the calls for nuance and calls for peace when it comes to this horrific and brutal and difficult issue?
01:17:36.000Obviously, it's a terrible story and it breaks your heart.
01:17:44.000One of the things that's really troubling about this era of journalism and even social media communication is that There's relentless pressure on people to have visible external symbols of compliance or support.
01:18:02.000So anything from wearing masks to the Ukraine flag emojis to even for some people the American flag emojis or the black square or whatever it is.
01:18:14.000There's always this pressure to kind of reduce things to, I'm on this side or I'm on that side, and I hate you because you're on the other side of this.
01:18:23.000And let's come to those conclusions right away.
01:18:27.000Let's do that in the initial hours of the event.
01:18:33.000Whereas in my experience, it can take years before you really can have strong opinions about a thing because issues can be so complicated.
01:18:47.000Of all the issues that there are in the world, this is the one that people feel most—they feel less tolerant of the shades of gray in between.
01:19:01.000And I think that's dangerous because this is an immensely complicated issue and people on both sides of it would gain from learning the perspective of the other side.
01:19:17.000They're going to move to one side or the other and just pour invective and venom on one another.
01:19:23.000And that's only going to worsen the situation.
01:19:26.000When the only way out is to kind of reach some kind of mutual understanding or And I don't know.
01:19:32.000I don't do you see that happening I'm not I'm not sure not sure that I is to speak to a genuine journalist That's what investigative journalism looks like and that's what investigative journalism does it looks at something that everyone assumes to be true wait a minute Andy Fauci is a great guy hold on a a second and suddenly revelations and suddenly reality is
01:19:50.000different. How interesting what the legacy media investigate and what they don't investigate.
01:19:54.000How revealing, whose side are they on?
01:19:57.000Is it their job to investigate or is it their job to amplify and normalize the agenda of the
01:20:03.000powerful? You let us know in the chat in the comments.
01:20:06.000Remember, tomorrow we've been joined by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, who said that
01:20:10.000Wikipedia even, that sort of trusted resource of all of us. Who among us doesn't write their entire show
01:20:17.000I know we don't anymore because, as Larry Sanger says, it's propagandist and biased.
01:20:23.000If you want to be part of this movement, and we are going way, way, way beyond anything we imagine now, here on Rumble, we will describe to you the nature of the problem.
01:20:32.000There, on Locals, we are interested in the solution.
01:20:36.000On Stay Free with Russell Brown, we talk about the numerous ways that the world has gone awry, the corruption of the military-industrial complex, the inefficacy of the state, the corruption of the legacy media.
01:20:45.000On Locals, what's it going to be like next?