In this episode, we take a look back at the events of the past week, and look forward to the future, as well as some of the things that have been going on in the world since we've been out of the country. Has the Lord Jesus risen again? Has France continued to protest against its government? Has the Dalai Lama gone all unusual? Have little lads been making Pentagon paper, press releases and leaks out into chat rooms? Has everything gone really, really strange? Is the Matrix starting to break down? These are just some questions we ll be answering over the next hour on Rumble, where we'll be with you on YouTube, talking about the pen and paper fallouts, the congressional hearings, Michael Schellenberger, and Matt Taibbi. Once we click over to being exclusively on Rumble exclusively, we'll tell you an unbelievable story about a man who's been embezzling money, and a story about the man who can't wait to get off a plane. And then we'll take a trip down memory lane and see what's going on while we're in the future. We'll be joined by an exclusive Q&A from our Locals community, where you can join us for an exclusive community Q & A! by becoming a member of the Locals Community! RUMBLE is a community of likeminded likeminded individuals who are willing to talk about anything and everything, including politics, business, pop culture and pop culture, and everything else. including the weirdest thing you can think of. R.I.P. R.E. . We're back in the real world, where it's cool, real, real and real, and it's just like the real life, and we're not your average pop culture. , and we can talk about it and we re not your normal pop culture . . . and we don't have to be like that . . we re just like you, we re talking about it! . RATE 5 stars and review it on Apple Podcasts! Rate, review, review and subscribe to our podcast! RATE us a review! and subscribe so you can be part of the R& review our podcast and become a supporter of our podcast, too! Thank you for listening to our new podcast, RATE, review us your thoughts on the podcast and subscribe on your favourite streaming platform, and leave us a star rating and review on your podcast!
00:04:02.000These are just some of the questions we'll be answering over the next hour on Rumble.
00:04:06.000For the first 15 minutes we'll be with you on YouTube.
00:04:10.000We're talking about the pen and paper fallouts.
00:04:12.000Plus we'll be speaking with Michael Schellenberger from the Twitter files and from the congressional hearings where he was derisorily referred to as a so called journalist, along with other actual journalist Matt Taibbi.
00:04:26.000Once we click over to being exclusively on rumble, we're going to tell you an unbelievable story.
00:04:45.000It comes from Seymour Hersh who, whilst he may once have been a Pulitzer Prize winner, like many Pulitzer Prize winners, he has since turned into a conspiracy theorist.
00:04:54.000Almost as if the standards of journalism have radically declined and the mainstream media establishment now is devouring its own if they don't toe the line.
00:05:04.000You can join us for an exclusive Q&A by becoming a member of our Locals community.
00:05:09.000There's a red button somewhere on your screen right now.
00:05:12.000I'm simply not young enough to know exactly...
00:05:15.000You look very young the way you're doing this.
00:05:24.000I think you'll find it's still Chinese.
00:05:27.000It comes from China is where it comes from.
00:05:30.000Nothing good comes from there, let me tell you.
00:05:34.000Hey, while we've been away, guess where your president, if you're in America, Joe Biden's been?
00:05:40.000He's been in Ireland and he's been mistreating one of our favourite WEF stooges, Rishi Sunak, who's currently our Prime Minister, used to be a hedge fund worker.
00:05:51.000His wife's very, very closely affiliated to technological giants that have their own affiliations with WEF.
00:05:59.000You can Google all that stuff for yourself for now.
00:06:50.000Getting off Air Force One in the last half an hour or so, shaking hands with Rishi Sunak who was there on the tarmac to greet him in the wind.
00:06:58.000Not bad for Rishi Sunak because he's sort of hanging at the side there trying to re-engage Biden.
00:07:04.000But there's no way it was a mistake because Biden introduced a succession of other individuals, doesn't he, to Lieutenant David McCorkle?
00:09:05.000This is a time where you don't want people, octogenarians or otherwise, Talking about tongue suckery, even if it's an idiom that's inoffensive in the native tongue.
00:09:16.000It's the wrong week for that, isn't it?
00:09:20.000Once again we have to draw your attention to the fact that the mainstream media That has a vested interest in inducing a state of near idiocy in you so that you're so depressed, bewildered and apathetic you can't discern truth from fiction and significance from the insignificant.
00:09:38.000Look, Trump's plane got more TV coverage than Biden killing healthcare for 15 million.
00:09:42.000Now you might be a person who doesn't believe in healthcare.
00:09:45.000I'm English and everything like that and I like the National Health Service.
00:09:48.000I think it's a shame that junior doctors and nurses are forced to strike Because in particular, during the pandemic, they were told that they were heroes.
00:11:35.000Terence McKenna, as you know, is a sort of ethnobotanist and cultural crusader, a man who took quite a lot of psilocybin in order to bring shamanic realms of divine consciousness to ordinary folks.
00:11:50.000He said, The reason we feel alienated is because society is infantile, trivial, and stupid.
00:11:56.000So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.
00:12:00.000I grapple with this because I'm a parent, and I think anybody who has children comes to the realization, like, what will it be?
00:12:06.000Alienated, cynical, intellectual, or slack-jawed, half-witted consumer of the horseshit being handed down from on high.
00:12:12.000There's not much choice in there, you see?
00:12:15.000All we want, our children, all of us want our children to be well-adjusted.
00:12:18.000Unfortunately, there's nothing to be well-adjusted to.
00:12:21.000And when I watch the coverage of this, or we read the coverage around the Pentagon Papers, and in a sense it's a story about nihilism, because the kid making the revelations, releasing that information, this was not like a Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange style, Prisoner to their own conscience, like, oh my god, I just have to do this!
00:12:43.000Or in the case of Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, Julian Assange had a sort of a higher mission.
00:12:48.000This was a kid just impressing people on a chat room.
00:12:51.000Do you feel like that there's this sort of immersive nihilism now?
00:12:54.000That even these leaks, which to a degree appear to reveal that the version of events were being given around the Russia-Ukraine conflict, are not even how the US government sees them.
00:13:08.000They're reporting like, you know, that things are going well, this is fantastic in private, so this ain't going at all well.
00:13:12.000You know, there's a disjunct between those two things.
00:13:15.000Always what we're told is that these revelations are unpatriotic because they put like service people at risk, and if indeed they did that would be a terrible thing, but I feel like it's true that Chelsea Manning's revelations and Snowden's revelations didn't put A single, well anything could have put them at risk but
00:13:31.000certainly no one came to any harm as a result of them.
00:13:34.000Look, while we were being distracted by Trump's static plane and speculation on how he might
00:13:40.000shimmy up the stairs, this is I think CBS is reporting of that healthcare.
00:13:56.000So listen, this is 18 seconds of reporting, so this is going to presumably succinctly convey all of the facts that we need to know about these expiring health care benefits.
00:14:07.000All right, tonight, a lot of Americans are just hours from losing their Medicaid benefits.
00:14:12.000During the pandemic, the federal government suspended rules that remove people from the Medicaid rolls, but that protection expires at midnight.
00:14:20.000The government estimates 15 million people will lose their health benefits in the next few months.
00:14:26.000Good night. Now back to the Trump jet. See what he's doing now. Has he got out the car yet? What's he doing?
00:14:31.000The irony of this all is that this Trump, I mean they don't mention it there, but it was Trump who
00:14:35.000signed this into being in the first place. So this was something that supposedly I guess when you
00:14:39.000break down right and left in the in the United States, the left traditionally for healthcare and
00:14:44.000the right aren't. Trump brought this in and now it's Biden doing away with it so it's obviously quite ironic.
00:14:49.000Yes and we don't really want to be caught in these sort of tiny fissures between the two parties.
00:14:55.000What we want to examine is the possibility of an entirely different set of rules.
00:14:59.000Let's have a look at how Schellenberger explained whistleblower stories will be handled.
00:15:08.000This is how we've been primed to deal with leaks.
00:15:42.000But I was very surprised by the way that this story was reported on because they didn't talk at all about the content of the leaks.
00:15:50.000They just talked about the guy himself, which seems sort of odd because I feel like the Bill Maher real-time show is meant to be a kind of somewhat highbrow, analytical, idealistically driven show, but it's very surprising.
00:16:05.000Listen to the jokes that he made about the kid doing the leagues.
00:16:27.000Also will be the name of his ass when he goes to prison.
00:16:34.000Once again, I like Bill Maher, but I was pretty surprised to not see the content of the leaks themselves.
00:16:41.000In particular, that apparently Ukraine are suffering pretty heavy losses and privately the US believe that there will be no chance for a peace deal in the next year and that Ukraine will never reclaim any of the lost territory.
00:16:54.000That seems to be significant information that's not being duly covered.
00:17:00.000It's about views though, ultimately, isn't it?
00:17:02.000I mean, even like going back to the last story that we were talking about, you know, reporting on that healthcare thing, it just doesn't get the same kind of views as with Trump.
00:17:12.000And yet, you could totally argue that 15 million people losing healthcare, whichever side, whatever you kind of think of that, is a bigger story than whether Trump has got on a plane or not.
00:17:21.000And in this case, the bigger story is the revelations, not what that kid looks like.
00:17:26.000Have a look at Noam Chomsky's famous quote.
00:17:28.000Those of you that look at a lot of alternative media will perhaps associate this with the rather more outlandish reporters on the fringes.
00:17:38.000The method is called problem reaction solution.
00:17:40.000They create a problem, In this case these leaks.
00:17:43.000A situation to cause some reaction in the audience so that this becomes the norm of the measures you would accept.
00:17:48.000I mention this because the mainstream media are now talking about more internet censorship laws being introduced.
00:18:15.000ABC News is learning tonight that intel agencies are looking to change how they monitor chat rooms and social media online according to multiple sources familiar with this after that huge leak of sensitive Pentagon documents on Discord.
00:18:28.000Apparently they're looking to expand now how many kinds of sites like this they watch after all of that classified information was exposed.
00:18:36.000It was mostly related to the war in Ukraine.
00:18:39.000So the information will be either ignored or discredited.
00:18:43.000The whistleblower don't seem right in this instance, but the source of the information will be smeared and just the way that the story is conveyed focuses on interesting details.
00:18:56.000You would think in a Responsible and independent media, what you'd be interested in is the content of the leaks themselves rather than the personal details of the kid making the leaks or fetishizing his arrest.
00:19:11.000We're going to have a little look now at that Zelensky story.
00:19:14.000I'm pretty interested in this and then we're going to go to our main story on the Pentagon Papers.
00:19:20.000So this is from our friend Seymour Hirsch.
00:19:22.000CIA knows Zelensky and top generals are skimming hundreds of millions in USA.
00:19:26.000Now if that's true, that's pretty astonishing, isn't it?
00:19:31.000Because the whole... I've always regarded it as a pretty simplistic narrative, but such as it is, it was that Zelensky is a hero, Putin is really bad, and the idea that there's skimming going on, That seems pretty astonishing.
00:19:45.000We'll just exclusively cover this on Rumble.
00:19:47.000If you're watching this on YouTube, we're going to switch that off now.
00:19:50.000Okay, so let's have a look at the story.
00:19:51.000On Wednesday, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a report on Substack that alleged the CIA was aware of widespread corruption in Ukraine and the embezzlement of USAID.
00:19:59.000The report said the Ukrainian government has been using U.S.
00:20:02.000taxpayer money to purchase diesel from Russia to fuel its military.
00:20:06.000Hirsch said Zelensky had been buying the fuel from Russia, the country with which it and Washington are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments.
00:20:19.000Hirsch said, according to one estimate by CIA analysts, at least $400 million in funds were embezzled last year.
00:20:25.000They've been purchasing diesel from Russia, so they've been involved in trade.
00:20:32.000During a meeting CIA director William Burns presented Zelensky with a list of 35 generals and senior government officials whose corruption was known to the CIA.
00:20:40.000Zelensky responded by dismissing 10 officials who were engaged in flagrant corruption.
00:20:44.000So prior to this conflict it was commonly reported in the mainstream media that Ukraine was, if not a Basket case nation than certainly a country with a lot of corruption issues.
00:20:57.000And perhaps that's true of all, you know, like maybe the UK is the same.
00:21:02.000Maybe all of our countries are similarly engaged in corruption.
00:21:06.000But it seemed like Ukraine was particularly renowned for corruption and that Bill Gates said it was the most corrupt government in the world, I think, at one point.
00:21:17.000He says stuff and the share price has changed and he says something else.
00:21:21.000It's astonishing to watch the way that guy carries on.
00:21:24.000I think the surprising part probably is because of the reductive narrative that we all Buy into in a certain way, I guess.
00:21:32.000Even if you're kind of doing the kind of research that we do, we still, I guess, absorb in some way a reductive version of this war.
00:21:40.000And so when something like this comes out, and you kind of go, hang on, this is more nuanced, and this is strange, and how are we getting these kind of stories?
00:21:47.000Sometimes even when I'm saying stuff like this, 400 million dollars being skimmed, they were buying Diesel or Fresh, I think, nah.
00:24:32.000So let's have a look at, like, this is a good story because what we've done is we've combined Elon Musk and his argument with the BBC reporter with the way that the mainstream media functions.
00:24:42.000And, like, my favourite bit in this report is the bit where there's those, the questions asked in a press briefing.
00:24:50.000Because in the press briefing, like the press, like a bunch of little ninnies all queue up to go, oh, what are we going to do about this whistleblower boss?
00:24:57.000Like, instead of going, you've been lying about that war!
00:25:00.000Because you told us that he was going brilliantly!
00:25:04.000They're like such a bunch of little nerfs.
00:25:06.000Like, when I used to have to work for MTV and that, and you have to go and interview Superman, and you have to say, Superman, why are you so great?
00:25:27.000Anyway, that's still happening in actual politics.
00:25:30.000That's what you think because of all the badges and all of the pageantry and all of the apparent prestige and the italics that you're dealing with legitimate organizations.
00:26:00.000The reason I like this is because it's by Mark Fisher, right?
00:26:02.000Mark Fisher, it turns out, was mentally ill because he eventually killed himself.
00:26:07.000Mark Fisher, you know, as you know, coined the phrase capitalist realism, meaning like we can't envisage anything beyond our current system.
00:26:16.000So it's sort of like continuing the work of like, I don't know, Huxley, Orwell, where these dystopias have been sketched out for us that are so thorough and all encompassing, we can't think of nothing else anymore.
00:26:25.000But he also cared a lot about mental health.
00:27:30.000You'll have heard of the Pentagon Papers and how they reveal that privately the US have concerns that they're not sharing in their jingoistic appraisal of ongoing events between Ukraine and Russia.
00:27:42.000Elon Musk has recently said that the state media operates as a propagandist machine.
00:27:49.000What's interesting about the Pentagon Papers is that in private the US accept that the war will go on for another year and Ukraine have little hope of regaining any land lost in this conflict.
00:28:00.000Why then are the media only asking questions about the identity of the whistleblower and questions that lead to doubling down on censorship rather than investigating the validity of the revelations?
00:28:11.000Let's have a look at how the mainstream media reported this story.
00:28:21.000In fact, the opposition could be seen as a convenient metaphor for how close the government and the media are A member of the Massachusetts National Air Guard has been taken into custody.
00:28:31.000Federal authorities identifying him as 21-year-old Jack Teixeira.
00:28:34.000Firstly, he's not old enough to be in the army.
00:28:36.000That's the first thing that I'm going to point out.
00:28:38.000A dramatic arrest caught on camera in connection with the Pentagon's leaked documents probe.
00:28:43.000A man walking out of a Massachusetts home with his hands above his head before he's handcuffed and taken into custody.
00:28:49.000Seems like overkill for arresting that little lad.
00:28:51.000They could have just sent a couple of staff from Disney World.
00:29:03.000This comes after a teen, whose identity was withheld, spoke with the Washington Post, with permission from his mother, claiming to know the alleged leaker.
00:29:11.000So where's this whole story taking place?
00:29:22.000began posting classified information to Discord last fall.
00:29:26.000I bet he's glad that that nickname's sticking.
00:29:28.000Those documents rapidly spreading across similar groups causing a global diplomatic fallout.
00:29:33.000Okay, so what's in the documents that that tiny tot radical, O.G., has leaked?
00:29:38.000The documents on the war in Ukraine leaked from the Pentagon and other U.S.
00:29:42.000security bodies only confirm what anyone paying attention already knew, that the United States and NATO are massively and critically involved in arming and training Ukraine and providing detailed intelligence to the Ukrainian armed forces.
00:29:54.000The leaked document also says the US doesn't expect Russia-Ukraine peace talks in 2023.
00:29:59.000Another leak that was also reported by the Washington Post says the US thinks it's unlikely Ukraine will regain any significant territory and is expected counter-offensive.
00:30:08.000A stark difference from what the Biden administration has been saying publicly.
00:30:11.000What I suppose that tells you is there is a paternalistic and propagandist approach to the way that we are informed about current events.
00:31:08.000When they're making decisions to continue to fund and continue to support, that should be on the basis of, look, this is what we really think.
00:31:16.000Ukraine aren't getting any of that territory back.
00:31:23.000Your relationship with the state can be evaluated and understood here.
00:31:26.000They're telling you one thing while they believe another.
00:31:29.000They're extracting your tax dollars that's ultimately ending up in the hands of the military-industrial complex.
00:31:33.000And when there's a whistleblower, the media just report on the whistleblower and fetishize him and whether or not he should have said it and how long he should go to prison for, whether or not it constitutes espionage.
00:31:44.000How come all of these institutions are between you and the truth and actually your money?
00:31:49.000Researchers say the leak ranks high among other prominent recent revelations about the clandestine US government activity.
00:31:55.000A list that includes information from Edward Snowden about the NSA's bulk surveillance activity.
00:32:00.000So we now know that the state are lying to you about how they regard the Russia-Ukraine conflict to play out.
00:32:08.000That's interesting because they want you to continue funding it.
00:32:11.000Now how are the media holding the government to account?
00:32:15.000What type of questions are they asking?
00:32:17.000Are they operating as a media might, an independent media might, as conveying to you information so you can determine and decide how you view this?
00:32:28.000Or are they essentially in partnership with the government in helping them to shape the narrative in a way that keeps you from understanding the truth?
00:32:37.000Here's a tweet from Michael Tracy, friend of the show, that might help you understand that relationship even more.
00:32:42.000Look at the questions that were asked by journalists at the Pentagon press briefing today.
00:32:46.000They're all about demanding answers for how the government plans to improve its ability to conceal newsworthy information from the public.
00:32:55.000What steps has the Department of Defense taken to reduce the number of people who have access to not only these classified briefings, but classified material in general?
00:33:03.000Did you go to school with people like that?
00:33:05.000Sir, sir, can we stay behind and do some extra homework?
00:34:02.000What technologies is the Pentagon applying right now to both spot leak documents online and spot potential indicators of leaking-type practices?
00:34:10.000Having heard that list of suck-up, obsequious questions, is Elon Musk right that the mainstream media essentially functions as propaganda for the state?
00:34:20.000Last week, Twitter labeled NPR and PBS as state-affiliated media before changing the wording to government-funded media.
00:34:28.000The BBC and Voice of America were also tagged.
00:34:31.000Look at the dynamic between Musk and this BBC report.
00:34:34.000The BBC report sees himself as an avatar for an advocate of truth.
00:34:39.000But Elon Musk simply says, who are the BBC?
00:34:42.000We've spoken to people very recently who were involved in moderation and they just say there's not enough people to police this stuff.
00:34:48.000Particularly around hate speech in the company.
00:34:52.000What hate speech are you talking about?
00:35:03.000And by making it particular, the guy's argument breaks down because he can't go, which wouldn't probably be that hard, here are a bunch of tweets that I've personally seen that I find offensive.
00:35:11.000It's not Danny's research because he doesn't really believe it because he's just been given a bunch of talking points to hit Elon Musk with.
00:35:17.000He's not even brought a knife to a gunfight, he's brought an ice cream to a gunfight.
00:35:21.000Yeah, I mean, you know, just content that will solicit a reaction, something that may include something that is slightly racist or slightly sexist, those kinds of things.
00:35:32.000So you think if something is slightly sexist it should be banned?
00:35:39.000I'm trying to understand what you mean by hateful content, and I'm asking for specific examples.
00:35:44.000What's really important, and this applies to all aspects of the story we're telling you today, is what do you focus on?
00:35:51.000Individuals, like the 21-year-old kid that's made these revelations, or individuals that are saying racist stuff that they shouldn't be saying on Twitter, or do you look at how these tools are being used by the powerful?
00:36:04.000Are you analysing something that pertains to the movement of power?
00:36:08.000Ultimately what's important and what's interesting is Twitter was being co-opted by the same centralist media interests that that dude works for.
00:36:16.000He's not comfortable moving away from generalizations, he doesn't have particular and specific information, he's not willing to talk about how powerful establishment interests want to use social media as a tool for propaganda because he is participating in that, probably not knowingly actually.
00:36:31.000And you just said that if something is slightly sexist That's hateful content.
00:36:36.000Does that mean that it should be banned?
00:36:37.000You've asked me whether my feed, whether it's got less or more.
00:38:54.000I'm literally asking you about, you changed the labels, the COVID misinformation labels.
00:38:58.000There used to be a policy, then They want to have a conversation about minutiae, not that hate speech is unimportant, but compared to centralised control and an inability to have the significant and important conversation about whether state interests and media interests align to such a degree that we're no longer being given anything approaching the truth, we're continually given only propaganda.
00:39:26.000That's the important conversation, whether you're talking about the Pentagon Papers or more broadly the relationship between the mainstream media and the public and the government.
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00:41:22.000Now let's go back to the other version of me who cares a great deal about corruption within the government, within big tech, how they all work together, bloody media.
00:41:54.000For all of his talk of not wanting people to be surveilled, he's probably surveilling us right now, I bet.
00:42:01.000Joining us now is the editor of Public on Substack, and renowned so-called journalist of the Twitter files, is Michael Shelley Schellenberger.
00:42:27.000You've got so many more Twitter followers since last time I saw you.
00:42:33.000Hey, you explained to us last time about that, I don't know, that Aspen thing, some Aspen Institute, where they explained, you said, like, oh, wouldn't it be bad if there was a laptop leak?
00:42:45.000Like, and I think in that case, it was the Hunter Biden laptop.
00:42:48.000Almost like you were saying that the media are primed in advance so that when stories break, they've been sort of, you know, primed, groomed to report on it in a particular way.
00:42:59.000What can we learn from this round of leaks?
00:43:03.000I know it's you that taught us about how they will teach you to focus on the individual and not focus on the content of the leaks.
00:43:11.000Is this a classic piece of reporting by the mainstream when it comes to this round of leaks, Michael?
00:43:18.000I mean, I think it's important to understand, Russell, that the Pentagon Papers was this really triumphant moment in American journalism.
00:43:25.0001969, New York Times, Washington Post decide to publish these top-secret Pentagon Papers about how bad the war is going in Vietnam.
00:43:35.000Steven Spielberg made a whole movie about this called The Paper in 2018.
00:43:41.000Meryl Streep, as the publisher of the Washington Post, making this difficult decision to basically go against all of her social, her friends, including the defense secretary at the time, to publish these papers is hugely considered a hugely courageous act.
00:43:56.000Of course, it was upheld by the courts because the First Amendment is so strong, it protects this.
00:44:01.000So when I discovered that there had been a workshop hosted by the Aspen Institute in the summer of 2020, Basically, training journalists not to focus on the substance of the leaks, of any leaks, but instead to focus on the leaker, it literally sent chills up my spine.
00:44:20.000I found it the creepiest thing in the world.
00:44:22.000And it was a workshop attended by the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, all the major media, Wikipedia.
00:44:29.000The main censors at both Twitter and Facebook.
00:44:32.000I then discovered afterwards that there had been a previous white paper by people at Stanford, including some people that I think have very close ties with the national security state, making the exact same case that they should break the Pentagon Papers principle.
00:44:47.000So, of course, when this latest leak happened, this latest leak of Pentagon Papers, Sure enough, there the journalists were focusing very heavily on who this person was, calling him a racist, saying he was anti-Semitic.
00:45:02.000But I think it was striking how much of the focus was on the person and what a terrible person he apparently is, and much less so on some of the pretty extraordinary revelations in the documents themselves.
00:45:15.000I was very surprised to see even commentators that I admire following that principle.
00:45:24.000It seems in this instance that the protagonist is almost irrelevant, that it wasn't necessarily
00:45:32.000ideologically inspired, that it was just a sort of a kudos move in a chat room, just
00:45:37.000oh look, see, I can access these things, that's at least how it seems, or one telling of the
00:45:41.000story. But in any event, I'm still narrativizing the individual rather than focusing on the
00:45:46.000content and it seems that what's of particular interest is that the story that we've been
00:45:52.000told about the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, as many people have suspected, is
00:45:59.000being one that's been told to us in a pretty biased way and sort of, kind of in a sense,
00:46:06.000Michael, legitimizes many of us that have been cynical about the humanitarian situation.
00:46:14.000uh a perspective that we've been invited to view this through it sort of seems that that's is not legit mate well can like um what do you think are these particularly significant revelations and Why is it that they continue to exaggerate the damage that these revelations do?
00:46:37.000I mean in particular around Snowden and Chelsea Manning and the fact that it seems that the US personnel have not been harmed as a result of those revelations.
00:46:47.000Yeah, well, I mean, I think the first thing we should emphasize is that we have not heard from the accused.
00:46:53.000And the accused has a right to tell his story, you know, and describe his motivations.
00:47:00.000Maybe it's just exactly like the mainstream news media and the Pentagon are saying, but we don't know.
00:47:06.000And I think we have to emphasize that before we jump to some conclusions.
00:47:10.000Of course, there were very important revelations in the documents.
00:47:13.000Maybe the most important one is that There's no hope for a negotiated settlement until next year.
00:47:19.000That's a very similar sort of story that we saw from the Pentagon papers in the 1960s, that the war was not going as well as people said it was.
00:47:28.000We also saw a revelation that Zelensky was demanding the ability to fire missiles into Russia.
00:47:39.000I don't think we've really had a proper debate in the United States or the rest of the Western world on what happens in terms of escalation.
00:47:46.000There's obviously understandable concerns about escalation, given that Russia is a nuclear-armed power.
00:47:52.000So, yeah, I mean, it seems to me that the behavior in particular of the news media Where it really is acting like propagandists for the Pentagon, rather than people really opening up this debate and discussing the content.
00:48:09.000And perhaps considering that maybe we don't know everything at this point and shouldn't rush to conclusions.
00:48:13.000So it's really the opposite behavior that we saw from the 1960s where you may remember that one of the ways that Hawks demonized the leaker of the Pentagon Papers in the 1960s, Daniel Ellsberg, was that he had visited a psychotherapist and this was considered to be a terrible thing or some sign of his mental instability.
00:48:31.000So in the past that was viewed as a very right-wing reactionary kind of attack and now it's just considered par for the course that we would demonize this person as a racist and anti-Semite.
00:48:42.000Yeah that's right and I suppose the other aspect of this is that the revelations are in and of themselves and patriotic and they're dangerous and it was really interesting to see the text of that press conference the kind of the questions that were asked during that none of them were like investigative it was all questions like what are we What are we going to do?
00:49:05.000How are we going to stop this kind of thing happening again?
00:49:06.000Nobody asked any questions at all about like...
00:49:09.000So you know when you said that it sort of sent chills through you down your spine when
00:49:13.000you were at that, you know, when you heard of that Aspen Institute and the institutionalization
00:49:39.000I mean, so 1 of the ways to think about what journalism is supposed to be is that it is supposed to be a kind of check and balance on the government.
00:49:46.000So, for example, when we get access to the Twitter files, we want the content of the files.
00:50:09.000We're not supposed to be concerned about, oh, what is the Pentagon going to say, or am I going to lose access?
00:50:15.000So that kind of behavior, when you see media organizations promoting The kind of public relations or propaganda functions of the military.
00:50:26.000You're not doing the journals anymore.
00:50:27.000You're dealing directly with propagandists.
00:50:30.000The other thing I would notice that there is a significant amount of and a significant history of the CIA and other intelligence community organizations.
00:50:39.000Infiltrating the news media, placing stories in the news media.
00:51:00.000One of the things that we've seen with the Twitter files, but also with the lawsuits by the Attorney General of Missouri, and Louisiana is that you start to see these propaganda
00:51:11.000operations that the U.S. government had run abroad turned inward against the American people on
00:51:32.000It was the basis for the whole Russiagate hoax.
00:51:35.000We saw the Hunter Biden laptop was dismissed with a conspiracy theory that it was hacked information, even though We knew from the first time that those materials came out that there was an FBI subpoena and the FBI had the laptop since December 2019.
00:51:49.000We also, of course, see state propaganda with COVID, where you saw the person leading the response from the United States, Anthony Fauci, dismissing an extremely reasonable hypothesis that the virus may have leaked from a lab and insisting through, you know, so-called scientific journals like Lancet And also with the New York Times, Washington Post and others that anybody who said it was anything other than a zoonotic virus was was engaged in a conspiracy theory.
00:52:17.000Those are propaganda efforts by the US government aimed at the American people using the mainstream news media.
00:52:23.000Those are the kind of things that the United States used to do abroad.
00:52:26.000As it sought to overthrow governments or prop up governments, we're now seeing it turned against the people of the United States and the Western world, and we should be extremely suspicious of the official narrative on this Pentagon Papers leak on everything else.
00:52:42.000Hey, can you tell us a little more about Rene Diresta and the use of think tanks to utilize and mobilize more censorship, please?
00:53:50.000So, I think she's maybe the most important person on the outside.
00:53:55.000of the censorship industrial complex making the case for greater censorship and i would note she just they just published an article just true to form uh in foreign policy renee did with her colleague called how gamers eclipsed spies as an intelligence threat so now renee diresta is out there making the case for So, of course.
00:54:22.000And so this is what we're going to see, Russell, is that every new problem for the national security state, every new crisis, whether it's climate change or COVID, Or a leak of sensitive information is going to be used as justification by sort of the people on the outside who are ostensibly independent, but have very strong ties with the Pentagon or the CIA.
00:54:45.000They're going to be using these incidents to demand greater censorship.
00:54:48.000And that's what she does in foreign policy this week.
00:54:51.000So like what you saw at the Aspen Institute, where they groom the journalists to watch out for a certain thing, that happens on a mass scale through the kind of public facing organizations of which Rene Diresta is a representative.
00:55:18.000So then when these stories start coming out, we're particularly primed for them.
00:55:23.000And do you think that this story about their kid doing these releases, you know, the recent Pentagon Papers, Pentagon Papers Part 2, the confusingly named, do you think these will be used to mobilise legislation that allows for more censorship?
00:55:41.000They're constantly trying to create new pretexts or predicates or justifications for censorship.
00:55:47.000I think the other thing that's come out in our research, Russell, that's super important and really interesting, is that they use these national security types, CIA fellows like Rene Diresta, who use woke language to justify censorship.
00:56:02.000And at first I would sort of hear it and it seemed incongruous because on the one hand, I associate the woke with more of the radical left and extremely progressive anti-imperialist types.
00:56:12.000But then you start to hear it coming out of the mouths of people who are also talking about Russian disinfo and national security.
00:56:18.000And it always struck me as really incongruous.
00:56:20.000And then I started to understand that really it's been going on for a while.
00:56:23.000There's all sorts of organizations that talk about countering digital hate.
00:56:29.000There's a group in Britain that's called the Institute for Strategic Dialogue that's targeting climate denialism, including Jordan Peterson, Bjorn Lomborg, myself.
00:56:43.000They're using climate denialism online as justifications for censorship.
00:56:48.000The other thing I would note, Russell, is that we started seeing a pattern where there was basically a set of countries, the United States, Britain at the heart of it, but also New Zealand, Australia and Canada.
00:57:02.000And somebody pointed out, because I'm sort of new to this space, someone pointed out, they go, well, that's the Five Eyes intelligence and spying network that's existed since World War II.
00:57:11.000That network of surveillance, one of the characteristics of it, Is that the countries, because they can't spy on their own citizens without violating their constitutions, so they spy on each other's citizens and then they share the information with each country.
00:57:28.000So it's the British think tank that's attacking me.
00:57:31.000It's the Australians who's attacking us.
00:57:34.000And then similarly, our people attacking Brits and Australians.
00:57:37.000So the same thing that they've been doing in terms of using each other in these different countries to spy on other people to get around constitutional protections against surveillance, they're now doing the same thing on censorship.
00:57:49.000So I think those two new things are things to build our resilience against the censors, is to be aware of the ways in which the censors are using wokeism, they're tapping into preventing real world harm is one of the things they say.
00:58:04.000Yes, increasingly abstract motivations for control and censorship.
00:58:14.000Initially, out-and-out wars against nations, then wars against terror, then wars against germs, then wars against hatred and hate speech.
00:58:25.000And I see, in order to avoid legislation that prevents nations spying on their own citizens, they can have a pact.
00:58:33.000I'll spy on your citizens, you spy on my citizens.
00:58:37.000Almost like a mutual handjob pact to allow the maximum amount of spying.
00:59:04.000That's just the quivering pile of data in the middle, Michael, that needs to be analysed.
00:59:10.000Do you feel That as this crusade of yours, if indeed that's an appropriate word, continues that you become increasingly alienated from what once would have been regarded prestigious figures in legacy media.
00:59:24.000Are you able now to go to a New York Times style banquet and meet, I don't know, Bruce Wayne and people like that?
00:59:32.000Or don't that happen anymore because you are now a detested outsider?
00:59:37.000Well, it's a really interesting question.
00:59:39.000So I just did a very long, I did two very long interviews with BBC, which is working, which have been working on a, I think it was a podcast on nuclear power.
00:59:50.000And so nuclear is now much more fashionable in Western countries, people recognize that you need nuclear energy to deal with climate change.
00:59:59.000But I'm also somebody that has pushed back against the climate alarmism.
01:00:02.000And on this interview with the BBC, they asked me a bunch of really hard questions.
01:00:08.000And do you think climate change is happening?
01:00:11.000And they did it in a way where I knew that actually the producers wanted to include me in their story, because they were writing about they're doing a thing on nuclear, and I'm a pretty well-known advocate of nuclear.
01:00:22.000But it was almost like the sense I had was like they had to prove to their audience or to their senior supervisors at BBC or elsewhere that I wasn't a climate denier.
01:00:34.000And so my sense is that there has been a concerted effort against me, at least since 2020 when Apocalypse Never came out, to basically key me out of the mainstream news media, to demonize me, to slander me.
01:00:47.000This particular group, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, has been taking the lead on it.
01:00:54.000I think it's hard for mainstream journalists to include me in their stories because I think they get a lot of flack from these think tanks that put a lot of pressure on them.
01:01:04.000We also know that many of these people that are complaining about bot networks operate their own bot network.
01:01:10.000So Rene Diresta, for example, at the Aspen Institute was once asked, she was asked about her own bots that she operates.
01:01:18.000We know that and again, this is the former CIA fellow.
01:01:21.000We also know that she was involved in a dirty tricks campaign in a 2017 Senate race.
01:01:26.000Yeah, I mean, I think these things are going on.
01:01:29.000I think the real wild card, though, I would just say is Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter.
01:01:33.000the Russians. Somehow she got away with it and is considered still a legitimate voice even though
01:01:39.000she was involved in what was potentially illegal campaign activities. So yeah, I mean, I think
01:01:44.000these things are going on. I think the real wild card, though, I would just say is Elon Musk's
01:01:48.000takeover of Twitter. That was not something that anybody saw coming. And it revealed both the
01:01:54.000extent of the censorship apparatus, but also how close they came to having control over all the
01:02:04.000And you saw his famous now interaction with BBC, where he pushed back against BBC's own misinformation and censorship.
01:02:12.000So I think we're in a very dynamic time.
01:02:14.000On the one hand, sometimes I feel like we're up against a really You know, intimidating power and force and coordinated effort.
01:02:24.000And on the other hand, I think that the Internet and people want to be free and they want to be able to use the Internet and say what they want.
01:02:31.000People don't like the idea that governments around the world are working to censor us.
01:02:36.000And so that gives me hope that I think that the light will shine through the cracks that we can, you know, can basically put into this huge effort to censor us.
01:02:48.000I suppose one of the things that conversation revealed is that there is now no authority that we all unthinkingly grant our faith to.
01:03:00.000Like, I don't know if it was ever the case, but, like, being British and stuff, you know, like, there's the sense that in the 1940s, the BBC and the voice of Churchill and the Righteous pipes against fascism. And now all of these acronym
01:03:18.000institutions, whether they're financial or media, are understood to be, broadly speaking, corrupt.
01:03:27.000And at the very least, you can say, it appears they don't operate primarily on behalf of the
01:03:34.000people that they claim to represent and report to. It seems that they mostly propagandize on
01:03:42.000behalf of elite institutions and organizations.
01:03:46.000When you see that exchange between Elon Musk Um...
01:03:52.000And that BBC reporter, do you think that this is an indicator of a shift that's taking place?
01:03:59.000Even though Elon Musk, it's difficult to sort of frame him as a kind of a radical when, you know, he's the richest man in the world and stuff.
01:04:15.000That trust has now declined massively.
01:04:17.000So I think something like a quarter of Americans trust the mainstream news media.
01:04:21.000That's the lowest point, I think, in recorded history.
01:04:24.000The problem for the mainstream news media, and it's sort of a vicious circle for them, is that when they don't report on true facts in the world, when they don't tell us about vaccine side effects, when they don't tell us that natural disasters are actually declining in frequency, or when they tell us false things like Hunter Biden's laptop was a result of a hack, Then people get the truth elsewhere.
01:04:49.000That hurts their trust in those news media outlets.
01:04:52.000So you get a vicious circle where the news media end up appealing to a smaller and smaller audience.
01:04:57.000They want to retain the support from that audience by telling that audience what they want to hear, but then by excluding certain facts or outright lying about other facts, They then undermine the trust with the rest of the public.
01:05:09.000So I do think we're entering into a period, and you saw in the Elon exchange, where Elon, I mean, the killer moment, of course, is where he goes, give me one example of a case of misinformation you've seen on Twitter.
01:05:19.000And the reporter couldn't do it, even though he himself claimed that there was widespread evidence of it.
01:05:24.000And we saw this afterwards, too, where people, they were pointing to the exact same think tank that I had mentioned earlier, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, this little nefarious think tank with some sort of relationship with national security entities, with various financial interests, claiming that there'd been all this misinformation and anti-Semitism.
01:05:44.000Well, I go into the report, and I look in the report, and they were counting people criticizing the World Economic Forum and George Soros with no mention of Judaism or anti-Semite, anything, they
01:05:56.000counted that tweet criticizing the World Economic Forum in Soros as an example of anti-Semitism.
01:06:01.000So that kind of stuff does not breed trust in the public. And when you can see online the
01:06:07.000active mistrust of organizations like the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, I think they're going
01:06:11.000to have a hard time regaining that trust after being caught red-handed lying or misleading or
01:06:18.000just excluding information that other news outlets like yourself or Joe Rogan or
01:06:23.000others are including in their coverage.
01:06:25.000Oh no, man, that's really worrying, isn't it?
01:06:27.000Because you feel like that... Because antisemitism is a real thing in the world.
01:06:32.000Acts of antisemitism do occur in the world.
01:06:35.000It's, you know, like the desecration of a graveyard, a synagogue, hate speech, legit hate speech.
01:06:44.000Like, in real life, if someone shouted in the street, I don't like the WEF, you wouldn't go, Hey!
01:06:53.000You'd think, oh, this person is against globalism.
01:06:56.000The continual reframing that's changing of the meaning of words.
01:07:00.000All these things are happening that seem to be organized in order to create new systems of control, the new ability to shut down dissent.
01:07:11.000And with this new emergent ways to censor, it's pretty worrying.
01:07:15.000And that's why one of the things I keep I'm trying to return to, Michael, is our ability to find new union, to try and find something of spiritual value in this, to accept that we actually oughtn't be resorting to bigotry and prejudice, and that we should make an effort to respect people who want to do life differently from us.
01:07:40.000Because as long as that remains a kind of a hypersensitive area, we're able to be neatly corralled.
01:07:48.000And, you know, just that example that you gave then sort of gave me a little jolt, perhaps like your chilling Aspen Institute moment.
01:08:12.000I hope we get to see you again soon, mate.
01:08:14.000You can follow Michael's work by going to public.substack.com.
01:08:18.000He does really brilliant things, and there was a video of him recently analysing, I think it was, Rene Diresta, talking about an announcement she made that sounded pretty anodyne, and in real life she was actually saying something that sounded perfectly reasonable, like, this is going on every day, and we should stop it!
01:08:34.000And what it meant was, We're going to censor everything that everyone does all of the time.
01:09:40.000The fact is they're arguing, but that's their right to argue on there.
01:09:42.000We'll be on Rumble tomorrow, same time, for another fantastic show, fantastic guests, difficult, unpalatable truths sometimes, but hey, what are you going to do?