On June 14, Reuters published an article about the US Military’s clandestine program to discredit China’s Sinovac vaccine during the early days of Covid-19. Turns out the Pentagon hired an outside agency to purposefully spread FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) about the Chinese inoculation program by flooding social media with anti-vax propaganda. It was a smack in the face for anyone—including us—who’s been calling for sound public health measures over the last four years. And it very likely killed people in Southeast Asia.
This week, we look at the harrowing reporting that revealed a shameful, interventionary program that began under the Trump administration and persisted at least a few months into the Biden presidency. We’ll also review the very few conspiritualists that have even covered the story—somewhat surprising, given that a good ol’ government conspiracy is their bread and butter. But what happens when anti-vaxxers are confronted with a government-led anti-vax program, enacted by the same military that some of them, like RFK Jr, want to drastically reduce? Let’s find out.
Show Notes
Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic (Reuters)
Pentagon Ran Secret Anti-Vax Campaign in Philippines, While Censoring Americans Who Criticized COVID Shots (Children’s Health Defense)
Supporting military missions overseas (GDIT “Careers” page)
Companies Profiting from the Gaza Genocide
CONTRACT to GENERAL DYNAMICS INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, INC.
DynPort Vaccine Company
Public Health
Vaccine Diplomacy in the Wake of COVID-19
Pentagon Orders Sweeping Review
Martin Luther King Jr.’s moral stance against Vietnam War offers lessons for the Middle East
Exclusive: Inside the S--tshow That Was the Trump-Biden Transition
The Scam at the Heart of the Mysterious Epoch Times
End The Forever Wars | Kennedy24
EXPOSED: Secret Pentagon MISINFO Campaign Spread LIES About COVID Vaccines (The Hill)
DISGUSTING! Glenn Greenwald GOES OFF On Pentagon Anti-Vax Psyop (Breaking Points)
Pentagon Opens Sweeping Review of Clandestine Psychological Operations
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
They were paid to create at least 300 Twitter accounts to tweet things like... Covid came from China.
And the vaccine also came from China.
Don't trust China!
And... From China, PPE, face mask, vaccine, fake.
But the coronavirus is real.
So, I mean, we have to be clear, this is not just an anti-vax campaign, like Reuters is
pointing out that the propaganda accounts are undermining masking.
And even there's another section in which they talk about the undermining of the credibility
of the test kits.
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersections of
conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiratualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon.
You can also grab our bonus episodes every Monday via Apple subscriptions.
And as independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
Conspiratuality 212.
U.S.
military tells RFK Jr.
style lies.
12. US military tells RFK Jr. style lies. On June 14th, Reuters published an article
military's clandestine program to discredit China's Sinovac vaccine during the early days of COVID-19.
Turns out the Pentagon hired an outside agency to purposefully spread FUD, or fear, uncertainty, and doubt, about the Chinese inoculation program by flooding social media with anti-vax propaganda.
It was a smack in the face for anyone, including us, who's been calling for sound public health measures over the last four years.
And it very likely killed people in Southeast Asia.
This week, we look at the harrowing reporting that revealed a shameful interventionary program that began under the Trump administration and persisted at least a few months into the Biden presidency.
We'll also review the very few conspiritualists that have even covered the story, somewhat surprising given that a good old government conspiracy is their bread and butter.
But what happens when anti-vaxxers are confronted with a government-led anti-vax program enacted by the same military that some of them, like RFK Jr., want to drastically reduce?
Let's find out.
Because one of the challenges of the work we do can really be sourced in the binary culture war environment that we live within right now.
Right?
Because we defend vaccines, for example, we must be shills for big pharma and big government.
And we've pushed back on that idea for over four years now.
But unfortunately, there's a vocal cohort that just believes that if you got the COVID vaccine, or you think that the vaccines were effective, that you must be shilling for someone or you're just a sheep, you're just in the dark right now.
And so what else can you do but slam your head against a wall when you discover that the US military was purposefully spreading the anti-vax propaganda to try to discredit Chinese vaccines?
Now this Cold War tactic could never work in the internet age because as Reuter points out, it only helped to fuel the global anti-vax I mean, it worked, in the sense that the DOD source that they got on record admitted that they weren't concerned about public health at all, because their objective was to simply disrupt Chinese political and economic interests.
But I think you're right about binary culture war, with regard to the extremely online field in which we operate, in which these, like, very black and white battles are boosted by the platforms and monetized by all the typical players.
But it's also, like, a multi-level war.
Like a 5D chess game, as the Anons like to say, in which, you know, a bunch of us, most of us, are in this fishbowl, and we can be completely outclassed by the cash and power of completely amoral government agencies, which makes me sound a little bit like RFK Jr.
here, but, I mean, we'll get to that later.
Oh, did you get hired by his campaign, Matthew?
Is that what's going on?
Yeah, maybe.
Yeah, yeah.
I'll be running comms, especially on the demilitarization front.
Yeah, he'll be calling you Charles occasionally.
Maybe.
So, I'm going to give a 101 on the Reuters reporting in a moment.
I mean, the reporting has all the hallmarks of like the all capital letter breaking news that you find on Russell Brand's channel.
Hell, it could even rise to the level of an emergency episode on the Joe Rogan experience.
We have it right here, a secret covert operation by the American military spending nearly a half billion dollars of taxpayer money to spread disinformation.
So I'm sure this was widely covered by the conspiritualist set, right Julian?
Oh, well, not really.
So that's the irony.
It's mostly been crickets.
Because how are anti-vaxxers going to cover this story?
What can they say?
We knew it.
The government is lying to you again.
This time they said that, wait, vaccines don't work?
So where is their spin?
They have a lot of obstacles there that we'll get into later.
But I mean, one of them is they'd also have to feign outrage on behalf of Muslims.
Oh, the cynicism.
The cynicism.
I was wondering exactly the same thing, Derek.
How can they possibly spin this?
I mean, the real anti-vaxxer headline should be, finally, the deep state did something heroic, saving lives in the Philippines.
But that's a bridge too far.
So it did take them a while, but over the days of preparing for this episode, we found that some conspiritualists actually did put out content that found a way to weave this Truly atrocious news item into their own particular narrative.
They would also have to confront data like the fact of the horrible record of vaccine uptake and death in the Philippines, which we'll also get to, but they did try to spin it.
We have RFK Jr.' 's Children Health Defense website spun it in an amazing direction.
You're going to break that down, Julian.
Glenn Greenwald also offered a slightly less conspiratorial take, but he stopped short of stating that COVID vaccines are effective.
We have Russell Brand coming up, right?
Otherwise, it's truly amazing how quiet conspirituals have been in regard to an actual government conspiracy.
So let's start with the reporting.
The title of the Reuters report is, Pentagon Ran Secret Anti-Vax Campaign to Undermine China During Pandemic.
And here's the lead.
The U.S.
military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China's Sinovac inoculation, payback for Beijing's efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic.
One target?
The Filipino public.
Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and put innocent lives at risk.
So in 2020, the US military awarded a company called General Dynamics IT a $493 million contract to provide clandestine influencer services for the military.
Is that actually in the line item?
Like that's what it actually says?
Yes.
Yep, so GDIT provides IT information technology support services to local, state, and federal agencies, as well as commercial businesses like Amazon Web Services.
Now, while they do more benign-sounding work, but important work like cybersecurity and end-to-end services for the cloud, they do specialize in defense.
Which makes total sense because their parent company is General Dynamics, which is the sixth largest arms manufacturer in the world.
So when General Dynamics, I imagine, needs tech logistics to move and track MK-80 bomb casings, like they're the main global supplier, or 155mm artillery shells for Israel to use on Gaza or to support Ukraine's resistance against Russia, GDIT is there with the hardware and software.
This was not the only contract.
Just this past February, they were awarded a $922 million contract to modernize the U.S.
Central Command's IT infrastructure.
This includes securing and stabilizing operations throughout Northeast Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South Asia.
So, would you also say maybe protecting and advancing U.S.
political and economic influence around the world?
This contract was specific to helping allies and connecting the infrastructure to allies so that there were safe networks to talk through.
In fact, in May, GDIT was also awarded a $185 million contract to be the global cybersecurity provider for the U.S.
Air Force Civil Engineer Center.
We're in this position where, and I know we'll get into this more, but you have a company that is doing this clandestine influencer work, as we said.
But from my perspective, and having worked in technology for a number of years, cybersecurity is pretty important.
And I know I would rather these companies be supporting our allies than not protecting us against Russian and Chinese influence, for example.
From my perspective, military security is necessary.
Leaving aside the military bloat that defines so much defense spending, which is a related but separate topic, GDIT has awarded a ton of taxpayer money to provide necessary services.
Yeah, okay, so necessary to some, imperialistic to others.
I mean, yes, if, you know, a country insists on maintaining 750 military bases in 80 countries around the world, that's going to be a big security task.
Totally necessary once they're there and someone has decided that that's how the world is going to be.
But I think you're also rightly pointing out that this is one of these complex Well, you know, corporations that can have a seeming cloak of ambivalence.
I would call it functional laundering, not in any purposeful sense, but just through the fact that these vast defense contractors, like, do anything and everything.
It's like they can say, well, we provide all of these services.
For instance, here's a very weird thing.
According to usaspending.gov, as of last August, GDIT was awarded another Huge grant, $229.9 million from the DHS.
Forget this, providing a contact center under the General Services Administration, automated contact center solutions contracts for funeral service assistance to surviving family members of the COVID disaster.
So also under the GDIT umbrella, there's a vaccine manufacturing company, They've built IT infrastructure for contact tracing during COVID.
So at home, GDIT is working hard to develop public health tools, or so we say, so they say, while requiring also its employees to be vaccinated.
So that presumably everyone is healthy when they go to work and decide to do things like fuck over people in the Philippines, just so that they don't give their money to China.
So to me, it sounds an awful lot like an imperialistic kind of network.
And I'll just note that President Amy Gilliland makes 4.6 million per year for overseeing this smorgasbord of goods and bads and services.
And it's all a lot of money.
And, you know, that's in layman's terms.
For us, it's huge.
But then for context, the U.S.
spent $916 billion on its military in 2023.
That's 40% of global military expenditures.
And I went and did the math on that $500 million anti-vax contract, and it becomes 0, or sorry,
0.054% of their total budget. So it's like not even pocket change, not even pocket lint. It's
like this trailing wisp of exhaust behind an incomprehensibly vast machine that's doing
one major thing, which is dominating global power structures and organizing global flows
of oil and capital, generally on behalf of US oil.
or corporate or global interests.
And in that light, Filipinos being dissuaded from vaccination to gain some kind of advantage over China as an economic power, is just a bit of collateral damage to this overall movement.
And then they throw in some anti-Muslim bigotry on top with the lie about the vaccines containing pork products, which it just seems all part of the general business.
And for me, you know, the picture that emerges is of an impossibly evil and corrupt agency, which will literally do anything for power.
Like, it will lie on both sides of the vaccine issue.
And I think what we've seen is that the conspirituality crowd doesn't have to make it make sense.
Like, Julian, you're really going to sort of run that down when we get to it.
All they really have to do is to seize upon this nauseous feeling that governments are incoherent and cruel.
I think the last two weeks of Jon Stewart's podcast has done a really good He does a fantastic job of addressing government bloat specific to defense and talking about all of the ridiculous things that the U.S.
government and the lobbying power behind defense contractors has done.
And yet, he does a fantastic job of trying to navigate that space one week with Jane Mayer, for example, of talking about the money that's spent on these contracts and lobbying And yet that number also can't be zero, because we are a nation that other nations want power from, so that we do need defense forces in place.
And so it reminds me, this entire story, looking at GDIT from afar and what's going on, it reminds me of walking through New York City on 9-11, because one of the thoughts that was in my head that I remember quite clearly was, Oh yeah, this is what other nations have to deal with on a daily basis.
I'm 26 at the time, and it's the first time in my life I had to fear for my life.
I was in the World Trade Center at less than an hour before the first plane hit.
Kind of a parallel example made me think of one of the criticisms we often talk about on the podcast, which is anti-vaxxers are the product of the efficacy of vaccines.
They have spent their lives with all of this incredible medicine, and because they've lived within it, it's the water they swim in.
They don't have to see it anymore.
And I am the product of someone who has grown up not worrying about being bombed all the time, which is incredible.
And I'm sure most people around the planet would prefer to be in that position.
And so I look at GDIT doing cybersecurity services and having worked in technology, it's like, oh yeah, that's really important.
I kind of want all the money in my bank to be there.
I kind of want the US arms pile to be safe so that people can't tap into it and disrupt The weapons disrupt the electrical grid, for example.
We lost power for a few hours on Saturday and that was disruptive.
Imagine a foreign agent disrupting the entire nation's electricity grid because our cybersecurity protocols weren't there.
So teasing apart all of those layers, especially from a few reports that I've read, Would be very challenging to me.
I do know very specifically that this one campaign we're discussing today is nefarious and evil and horrible, but I also can't claim that the entire company is part of imperialism when they're actually doing work that I'm probably pretty supportive of.
Yeah, I just want to say here too that part of the historical context for all of this
that I think is so messy and difficult, I mean you bring up 9-11, Derek, it's in the
post 9-11 landscape that we end up with something like the NSA's wireless wiretapping, you know,
warrantless wiretapping program which, you know, Edward Snowden ends up revealing and,
you know, this is part of what has fed the valid paranoia about American secret operations.
By the same token, it's in the aftermath of revelations about Russian interference in
the 2016 election that in 2019 the Trump administration passed this legislation that makes it acceptable
to run this exact kind of campaign that happened, that has now been exposed.
And when Biden comes in, that gets, you know, reduced and rolled back significantly.
So we're in this very messy kind of real politic situation.
set of dynamics that is pretty ugly when you pull back the curtain.
I think, Derek, you make some good points about the ambivalence of a company like GDIT.
I want you to complete an analogy you started to make because I find it really interesting.
You said that anti-vaxxers benefit from the success of vaccines.
It sounds like you're saying that pacifists or anti-imperialists really benefit from the victories of imperialism.
If they live in a country like America where you don't have to worry about bombs dropping all the time, sure.
I mean, if you're in a situation where that is not part of your daily experience, to understand the pressures of a society in which your life could be taken in an instant, I think that your nervous systems would be tuned in quite a different way.
At least speaking personally, I don't want to make this blanket statement, but I feel pretty privileged by the fact that that's not something I have to worry about.
Plenty of other problems, like domestic terrorism, which we've covered before, but that is not one of them.
Yeah, I think I share that individual perspective as well, but then I'm hesitant to enlarge it to a kind of politics around that.
And I think the fact is that anti-imperialism has been a leftist, a socialist, a communist, but also a liberal, conservative, populist, and libertarian critique of You know, US military expansionism for like over 125 years.
Like when I look closer into the sort of, especially the American Philippine history here, I came across this, listen to this.
We hold that the policy known as imperialism is hostile to liberty and tends toward militarism and evil from which it has been our glory to be free.
That's a sentence from the platform of the Anti-Imperialist League founded in 1898 In Boston, in opposition to the acquisition of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War.
And, you know, the League is formed by people who are appalled by American militarism.
And on that list of people is people like Andrew Carnegie, Henry James, William James, Mark Twain.
So, like, this is not just a sort of politics of individual perception, like, you know, how, you know, how safe am I personally and what kind of systems do I need to have in place?
This is a moral argument that has been taken up by all kinds of people from all across the political spectrum for a very long time.
It's not new, you know, it's not naive.
It's a political conviction that blurs party lines.
Well, I want to just add here, too, because of what I was saying about RealPolitik a moment ago.
If we look at the history of the 20th century, we can see good arguments for this critique of American imperialism, but they exist alongside a lot of other things that were Sure.
happening. Sure. The Soviet Union was also on an expansionist imperialist kind of mission
and the history of the Cold War has all kinds of really ugly truths with regard to America
supporting right-wing dictators. But it was also doing that as a way of trying to minimize
Soviet influence. So it's really messy. I don't think it can cleanly just be
ascribed to America's desire for power and economic hegemony.
Well, but America's desire for military power and hegemony is just a fact that I think
everybody morally has to deal with.
Yeah, but the question that I think Derek is raising when he talks about security in this kind of maybe multivalent way is that security and economic and military power is not just about control over others.
It's also about dealing with the fact that there are real adversaries in the field.
there are real people. China is not some innocent player on the world stage.
To return to GDIT, this Chinese vaccine contract is very different from a lot of the other
So they were paid to create at least 300 Twitter accounts to tweet things like... COVID came from China.
And the vaccine also came from China.
Don't trust China.
And... From China, PPE, face mask, vaccine, fake.
But the coronavirus is real.
So, I mean, we have to be clear, this is not just an anti-vax campaign, like Reuters is pointing out that the propaganda accounts are undermining masking, and even there's another section in which they talk about the undermining of the credibility of the test kits.
Yeah, so the argument that's being made in the article is that China was trying to blame the U.S.
for the spread of COVID to try to basically distract from the fact that COVID originated in their country.
And then basically the U.S.
said, nah, fuck that, we're going to just trounce on you in any way possible.
So yeah, it's not just anti-vax, it's really discrediting anything that's happening from the country.
Now, given those tweets, I don't know about you guys, but I wouldn't mind getting a half billion dollars to shitpost.
In this case, for at least a year, the tailored anti-China propaganda targeting Central Asia and the Middle East was Effective, but not in ways that they thought because it actually spread global anti-vax propaganda because we're not in the Cold War anymore.
Targeting regions on the internet has the unfortunate consequence of leaving those regions.
And so the stated goal of spreading mistrust about China's Sinovac vaccine It actually resulted in the campaign fueling the global anti-vax movement, which is really, in some ways, the origin story of this podcast, considering our first episode was a look into Mickey Willis' propaganda film, Plandemic.
Yeah, and the thing that you're gesturing towards there, Derek, that I just want to underline is that mistrust of one vaccine tends to lead to a generalized mistrust of other vaccines as well, regardless of where they come from or which company is making them or what illness they're for, right?
It fuels a generalized anti-vax receptivity.
Yeah, exactly.
Because Sinovac was not as effective as Moderna or Pfizer's vaccines, but they were still effective and pretty important for those populations.
Yeah, and I mean, part of what's tricky about this is that even though, yes, Matthew, it's a lie, and yes, you can look at it as being Islamophobic, vaccines in the past had been manufactured using pork gelatin.
So, they were able to exploit that in this propaganda.
The Sinovac vaccine was also shipped to multiple countries before phase three trials had been completed.
So, you know, there's a lot of conflicting information and, you know, tricky details going on here anyway.
I think the most disgusting thing, like full stop, is that we have anti-vax messaging promoted by a powerful organization that is clearly not even caring about global vaccination rates.
Oh, yeah, it's fucking awful.
And all the way through the story runs the theme of vengeance against the fact that Chinese propaganda outfits were trying to shift the blame onto the US and say that the vaccine actually came from this military base or it came from this part of America.
And like, OK, we'll get you back for that kind of thing.
Right.
All right.
I want to mention here, too, that in her book, Invisible Rulers and Elsewhere, digital propaganda expert Renee DiResta Has always been clear that while authoritarian nations are constantly trying to infiltrate and undermine democracies online, the U.S.
has its own secret disinformation and propaganda campaigns.
In fact, her team had flagged campaigns ran by the DGIT, and this triggered the internal investigation that the Washington Post article reported about back in 2022.
Well, what's the 101 on what GDIT did back then?
What were they up to?
You know, it's not entirely clear.
The Washington Post reporting on this doesn't actually list them by name.
It does refer to contractors.
It does detail campaigns originating in the Department of Defense, which had breached Facebook and Twitter terms of service and had therefore been taken down.
These mostly involved replication of existing pro-Western messaging via fake accounts that communicated in Farsi, in Urdu, in Arabic.
And they gave accurate CDC info on COVID, dismissed Chinese propaganda claims of COVID originating in the U.S.
And they were also critical of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
So those are some examples of just, you know, standard kind of messaging where the West is trying to win hearts and minds.
The article does, however, cite one particularly egregious tweet that falsely alleged deceased Afghan refugees had been shipped home from Iran with missing organs.
And so the review that went on as a result in part of Stanford Internet Observatory,
you know, filing their report, the review that went on as part of SIO filing the report
happened as the incoming Biden administration was trying to get their hands around what
had been going on under Trump.
It was handled by Colin Call, who was the Undersecretary for Defense for Policy, and it included data from Rene DiResta's team who noted that the identified fake accounts actually had very little impact in terms of the numbers of followers and the engagement on posts.
The Facebook and Twitter officers who had brought concerns to the Pentagon pointed out that, look, if we can sniff out these fake campaigns, your adversaries are probably like completely aware of what you're trying to do anyway.
All of this, it seems, fell on deaf ears in 2020, but in 2021 would lead to the review.
That review concluded that instances of false information were the result of inadequate oversight of contractors and training of personnel.
That's a direct quote.
It's not clear to me what the exact chain of events is here, but it sounds to me like the anti-Sinovac campaign This particular campaign did have a regional effect in the Philippines as we flagged, which is a country that had one of the lowest vaccination rates in all of Southeast Asia to begin with.
and has now just come out.
This particular campaign did have a regional effect in the Philippines as we flagged,
which is a country that had one of the lowest vaccination rates in all of Southeast Asia to begin with.
So only 2.1 million people in a nation of 114 million citizens are fully vaccinated
against COVID right now.
And the country also had one of the highest mortality rates in Asia during the time of this campaign.
And so you have Dr. Nina Castillo-Carrandang, who is a former advisor to the WHO
and Philippines government during COVID, said that the US effort poured more salt
into an existing wound as the Filipino public was skeptical of vaccines.
From a 2016 dengue fever outbreak that happened there.
So learning about the US anti-vax effort, she told Reuters, I'm sure there are lots of people who died from COVID who did not need to die from COVID.
Yeah, I mean, this whole thing is so absolutely disgusting.
And it is important just to point out that yes, during 2016, they had this dengue fever outbreak.
The vaccine had some problems.
I think it turned out that the vaccine produced almost twice as many adverse reactions
or like worsening symptoms of dengue fever than people who are not vaccinated were getting
so that vaccine was discontinued.
And as a result, you had reduced uptake of childhood vaccines even before this campaign.
Still, I mean, less than a 2% vaccination rate Gross.
I don't know anything about epidemiology, but I would assume that that could turn the entire archipelago into, like, this COVID mutation petri dish with a vaccination rate that low.
Like, there's literally no resistance to it.
But I also think that this whole confluence of doubts and terrible histories was so impactful that it even had the strongman and former Philippines president Duterte completely apoplectic, like he couldn't believe he was unable to simply harangue and threaten Well, Reuters also talked to someone from the U.S.
military about this campaign for the article who spoke anonymously.
way above its weight.
Now, he's out to pasture after his completed terms, but I really have to wonder what he thinks now
about being undermined in the public health sphere by his strongman crush, Trump.
Well, Reuters also talked to someone from the US military about this campaign for the article
who spoke anonymously.
He said, We weren't looking at this
from a public health perspective.
We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.
There it is again.
Yeah.
Now, I wasn't aware until we started looking into this that part of the new thing going on here is the rise of a kind of brass knuckles vaccine diplomacy.
Or this realization early on in the pandemic that during the race to develop a COVID vaccine, there was going to be significant influence opportunities at play.
Like this prompted leaders like Emmanuel Macron in France to advocate for vaccine solidarity.
A lot of other leaders did as well.
This would be, you know, solidarity against, you know, Chinese influence, but also competitive trends that would increase vaccine inequity globally.
But according to a report on the MIT Center for International Studies portal, China eventually donated 2.1 billion vaccines to over 100 countries.
But this diplomacy aspect of it became clear when it was shown that they distributed them for strategic purposes.
They gave 532 times the number to Myanmar than to Guyana, for example, even though Guyana was hit way harder by COVID.
So That's what these GDIT wonks were looking at and, you know, clearly nothing else.
When and how this program started is unclear.
We know it began under Trump.
According to Reuters, Biden's National Security Council found out about the operation shortly after the inauguration.
They expressed frustration.
as the administration was and remains very pro-vaccine, but it was in order to stop until the spring.
And apparently, the Defense Department didn't learn about this operation until fall of 2021
after an internal review.
And as I flagged before, American agencies, government agencies, the bloat of bureaucracy
here has it so that people do not talk to one another.
The CIA and FBI famously hate each other.
They sometimes try to beat each other out on cases.
They hide evidence from other agencies.
This has been well documented for generations.
So, Reuters stating that certain agencies didn't learn about the campaign until later is probably the best they could find out.
I don't know, but I don't know why they wouldn't report it out if they had more information.
Each of these agencies also operate under different bosses and budgets, but the fact that any agency in Biden's administration discovered it in January or early February and didn't immediately shut it down still remains pretty concerning to me.
It's very frustrating that Reuters wasn't able to find the precise dates of when the Biden admin knew that, you know, this was happening versus when they actually ended it.
Like, I imagine it would be a reporting nightmare to nail it down.
You'd have to have access to countless internal comms.
We also know that the Trump-Biden transition was a complete shit show with Trump's team
being as obstructionist as it could have been in terms of personnel handovers.
Do you remember them like walking out of the offices in the White House with furnishings and art and shit?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, I mean, it's plausible that pre-inauguration knowledge of the program, which would be standard, just didn't happen.
And then post-inauguration control of the bureaucracy was delayed.
But the questions this raises, I think, can lead into the black-pilled territory of, especially left-wing Democratic voters, who already have a lot of reasons to assume they're worst, especially when it comes to military action and contracting.
It becomes very easy for them to imagine, well, they didn't shut down the program because they don't actually give a shit about dying Filipinos and Muslims.
I mean, that's the kind of thing that has a conspiratorial vibe to it, when the more banal truth might be that you just have a wave of newbies sliding into desk chairs trying to figure out what their passwords are for the first several weeks.
I mean, this is really the great horror of Orwell, the completely normalized structural cruelty of large abstract bureaucracies.
I mean, there doesn't have to be organized evil for there to be super bad outcomes, but I think the injustice of that, that sense of that just happening, being in the nature of things, might be central to the conspiracizing impulse.
I was recently reminded of what Jared Kushner said when the Trump administration took office, which was, we have to hire people.
They aren't already there.
And that was pointed out from something I was listening to around Project 2025, because that is one of the scariest things about this upcoming election, because Heritage Foundation said, oh, we're not going to fuck around like last time.
We're going to have everyone ready for employment on day one.
And that is something we should all be scared of.
Yeah, and this is the whole, the notion of the deep state is so upside down, right?
Because the idea is that you should have people in government who are there across multiple different administrations, who are not merely political appointments, they're public servants.
And the idea that you have to fire everyone when you come in and install loyalists, that's actually way, way more dangerous than this weird trope of the deep state.
Well, there's something around, I think it's something like four or 5,000 employees who change with the administration and something like 50,000 who are considered public servants.
And the most nefarious aspect of Project 2025 is it wants to declassify a large percentage of those 50,000 so that they turn over with the administration.
Now, of course, If that were to happen and then a Democrat takes power, that would shoot Harriton in the foot.
But since they're trying to institute the unitary executive theory, their goal is to just get someone in and leave them in.
And that is also a cause for concern.
Yeah, I want to just add here, too.
I mean, we're looking at this from different angles and we are acknowledging that this is absolute red meat for conspiracy theorists and for people who are deeply suspicious of government.
And I have my own kind of critiques of government as well.
At the same time, I look at this and I go, OK, these these officers from the social media companies were trying to talk to people in the Trump administration.
They were basically ignoring them about this problem.
Then Biden gets in.
Once the Biden people are in place, Uh, the people from big tech are talking to them and they're saying, Oh, we need a massive review on this.
They conduct the review that takes time.
After the information from the review comes in, they stop these programs, they take the legislation enacted by Trump in 2019, which made all of this possible, and they pare it down.
I don't know if they've completely done away with it, but they've introduced various ways of trying to constrain it.
So in some ways, you see the process kind of working, and then our media reporting on it.
So it's like, okay, this is not all Atrocious.
Let's turn now to how some of our familiar conspiritualists and contrarians have reacted to these revelations.
Have they cheered on the brave mavericks at the DoD for trying to save Filipinos from dangerous untested DNA-altering 5G microchipping vaccines?
Or have they gone the other way, deciding that if the deep state was echoing familiar anti-mask, anti-testing, anti-vaccine messages, it simply must be the case that those were the real lies, like the blue pill was actually the red pill all along.
Maybe they've had a moment of cold-blooded rationalism that has blossomed into the thought that perhaps the vaccines were safe after all, and the government was trying to gain geopolitical advantage by lying in ways that would weaken our enemies.
Which sounds oddly like the truth to me.
It turns out the answer is D, none of the above.
Let's turn first to the email newsletter and website of everyone's favorite presidential hopeful who has said that those refusing vaccines had it harder than people under Nazi occupation and that COVID was engineered specifically to spare Jews and Chinese people.
Everyone knows that's Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Three days after the news broke, the email subject line that I got from Kennedy's Children's Health Defense read, DOD ran secret anti-vax campaign.
The article it then linked to was written by senior reporter for The Defender, which is their website, Michael Nevradakis, also listed as one of the rotation of hosts for the Children's Health Defense TV show called Good Morning CHD.
It sounds like a children's show.
I just realized I'm not on the Children's Health Defense email list.
I'm jealous, Julian.
I'm going to sign up after this.
So, Novraticus has a PhD after his name, which is in media studies, which he achieved at the University of Texas at Austin in 2018.
He's based in Athens, Greece.
We should also note that his column for The Defender was republished by the Epoch Times throughout 2022.
Legit.
Ah, the plucky, maverick, alternative news source that RFK Jr.
reads every day, but which is actually a huge money laundering scheme.
I wonder if he reads past The Defender.
I have a feeling he does.
Nevradicus wrote articles like, quote, Moderna sues Pfizer over COVID vaccine patent infringement, but patents belong to the world, says Dr. Robert Malone.
That was a long headline.
Another one.
Global campaign aims to break silence around COVID vaccine injuries.
It's pretty interesting stuff, but Navratakis was a Fulbright Scholar.
He has a Master's in Public Policy from Stony Brook University.
He's an intelligent dude, apparently.
But he seems to have really focused on Greek politics and media for a long time.
I found him writing about topics in the Huffington Post back in 2012 on Greece specifically.
He also had an interview with Noam Chomsky back then.
But at some point, he seems to have been indoctrinated into the anti-vax pipeline, and now he writes articles for The Defender with titles like, Spike protein leads to five mechanisms of damage in human
body. Another one, ran Paul rips Fauci testimony. NIH more secretive than the
CIA.
In this case, he does a good job of relaying the facts of the story as reported by Reuters,
oddly enough. But there's a pattern here consistent with what others in this sphere
ended up doing, as we'll talk about, which is to immediately contrast the disinformation
campaign that targeted Southeast Asia with the public health messaging at home during
the pandemic, and then to imply collusion with big pharma.
And this all happens in the first three sentences.
So the first sentence tells readers that the Pentagon ran a secret propaganda campaign in 2021 to disparage the Chinese Sinovac vaccine in the Philippines.
They do not make it clear that this was disinformation.
Anyway, that's just my note.
In the second sentence, we get this construction, quoting, the secret campaign to counter what the U.S.
perceived as China's growing influence in the Philippines launched during the same time the U.S.
government was telling Americans COVID-19 vaccines were safe and effective and censoring vaccine critics, alleging they were spreading misinformation.
Okay.
Sentence three focuses on how Sinovac was available in the Philippines in 2021, but that Pfizer and Moderna would only arrive in mid-2022.
So that's the framing.
The author lays out the rest of the campaign, which, as we've noted here, included calling into question the efficacy of PPE, masks, COVID testing, and the Chinese vaccine, while disparaging China as the source of the virus.
This all, of course, is similar to actual claims that anti-vaxxers and COVID grievance mongers, who both run and read The Defender, were spreading during the same time.
But the article doesn't touch on that irony.
Instead, they focus on how Americans were told COVID vaccines were safe and critics of vaccines were silenced as spreading misinformation.
It does seem to be conveniently lost on these folks that part of why this story is so depraved and so deserving of outrage is precisely because the government was echoing their own false and harmful talking points.
It's really awkward.
Yes, the US military-industrial complex is bad.
because they lie to Southeast Asian people, but they lie to them in the exact same way
that we target evangelicals or black Muslims or Latino families or Haredi Jews in Brooklyn
with our own anti-vax propaganda.
Neverdakis faithfully quotes Reuters using a study that shows people who become skeptical
of one vaccine will often then be skeptical of other vaccines.
And so therefore the Pentagon may have contributed to reduced vaccination rates in Southeast Asia.
They literally print that as part of their article.
There's no hint of applauding this great outcome because they want to keep hitting the accurate note
about government hypocrisy while having no problem ignoring their own hypocrisy.
Their big takeaway is the assertion that their Twitter files
has shown that a secret censorship and propaganda campaign that was pro COVID vaccines was being run
by the Pentagon, they say, which there's no evidence for that,
in the US while at the same time, it was running the opposite campaign in other countries.
It's all such a mess.
There's a bit of a plot twist here, a stressful complication that I think goes beyond this failure to be self-reflective.
I think it's worth noting that RFK Jr.
has a conundrum here and that this Defender article is in tension with his campaign because just as he and his handlers don't want to come clean on their vaccine hypocrisy, they also are not here going to lean into the fact that RFK Jr.
also wants to dismantle the military state that was able to blithely execute this disaster.
So this is straight from the Kennedy 24 piece page. It's time to end the imperial project
and attend to all that's been neglected, crumbling cities, antiquated railways, the failing water
systems, decaying infrastructure, annual defense-related spending is close to $1 trillion. He goes on.
You know who he sounds like here, apart from countless other pacifists. I mean, he's echoing
Martin Luther King Jr. in 67 when he says, the promises of the great society have been
shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam. Billions are liberally spended for this ill-considered
war, the security we profess to seek in foreign adventures we will lose in our decaying cities.
But RFK Jr.
can't make the anti-imperialist argument when it comes to vaccines, can he?
And I really think it's his loss, because I don't think he's wrong about this moral imperative to draw down expansionism.
And he has the family and personal legacy to give that a certain amount of gravitas, even, you know, if he's a hypocrite on it when it comes to blanket support of Israel, where he repeats basic sort of talking points about how the IDF is the most ethical military force in the world.
In general, he wants to present himself as an anti-imperialist, and it just doesn't work in this particular story.
Yeah, I was going to say, all the way through listening to that, I'm like, but Israel, but Israel.
Exactly.
But Israel.
Yeah, yeah.
And then, you know, he's also echoing a kind of bog-standard populist talking point about a sort of American isolationism, where we need to just focus on putting America first, essentially.
Right.
Onward now from RFK Jr.
to our endless font of eloquent wisdom and some would say word salad, Russell Brand.
No!
Here's what he said on YouTube as part of his introduction to last Thursday's video on Rumble.
Titled, EXPOSED, all caps.
Pentagon ran anti-vax campaign in Asia while censoring you, both words, all caps.
You won't fucking believe this.
And then for a minute, let's contemplate together what the Pentagon were doing, claiming that vaccines were ineffective in China and Asia, while censoring the claim that vaccines were ineffective in these territories.
Is it possible In their attempt to spread misinformation abroad, they were telling the truth more in the Philippines and across Asia than they were to the populations that they're supposed to be serving.
First of all, let's look at Joe Biden at the G7 and try to spot any bloody difference at all between what they're claiming is cheap fake, it's a new phrase now, Yeah, so this is actually the perfect rendition done without any irony of what I jokingly wondered about with regards to how they were going to handle this.
Was the government actually telling the truth in its propaganda campaigns abroad while lying to Americans?
Just sneaky, sneaky like a fox.
It may have seemed like a random segue that we just listened to right there because he goes right into talking about Biden and the G7.
And I promise you, I did not edit that.
That's just Russell's stream of consciousness.
And what's he saying?
He's saying the mainstream media is lying to us about These video clips having been doctored to make it seem as if Biden has dementia.
Yeah, I am so looking forward to the day when we don't clip this guy because he's simply a blathering idiot.
And, you know, here he's just adopting the Trump Free Association mode.
Like, he's so full of shit.
And you can hear him filling up the airtime by just channeling free-floating internet chaos.
He's fully bought into the strange inversions of the mirror world reality, but he's also like just trying to send everyone over to, to rumble.
So he's doing this very fast stream of consciousness.
Here's all the different topics I'm going to cover.
Right.
So Russell Flagg, cheap fake is a new term.
It is, it's one that the Biden administration has been using a lot recently, which happened after a video was published from that G7 meeting.
Biden turned to look at a parachuter that had just dropped into the field.
The edit makes it look like he's randomly turning around and walking the other way, which Trump has never done.
He was just checking out the action.
And Russell, after covering it, and then Biden replying, Russell made a response video to Biden's response about the cheat fake.
And now the term is being claimed by every side of the argument.
And it's going to be a regularly recurring term in the lead up to the election.
So listeners, prepare for that.
Yeah, I mean, there's gonna be lots of gotcha BS moments like that.
I think it's important to unpack the facts.
I also don't think that unpacking the facts in a case like this is going to assuage younger Democratic voters who see his obvious age and decline, even as Trump's is objectively worse.
Like, the pulse I'm continually reading from my feeds is pretty consistently like, I can't believe this is my choice.
Okay, so once Russell had honey-trapped me over to Rumble, I found that the episode took opportunities to make fun of Biden's stuttering, took opportunities to refer to Steve Bannon as a lucid, eloquent communicator who understands the rhythms of politics, that's a direct quote, that the legacy media has unfairly smeared Steve Bannon.
Russell hyped up claims of Pfizer concealing massive deadly vaccine side effects, supposedly.
And of course, as a newly pious Christian, he blamed America's demise on her godlessness.
But he didn't say anything else about the Pentagon story.
How long was the video, Julian?
Oh God, I don't even remember.
I just kept going through the whole thing, going, at any point does he come back to this?
Because you can see the different little screenshots that he's taken of the new stuff that he's covering.
As far as I could tell, he didn't come back to it.
Yeah, I think it was just over 20 minutes on YouTube.
And the funny thing was, he has a new technique now.
You know, he always advertises Rumble because he can monetize on Rumble and he can't monetize on YouTube anymore.
So, YouTube is basically an ad for Rumble.
And the new technique is the last five minutes of that YouTube video are a kind of faded-out Russell giving his speech, waving his hands, everything, and just an overlay saying, go to Rumble to see this now.
It's just an advertisement at this point.
It's incredible.
Yeah.
And I've noticed, too, one of his new brand partners is HALO.
Oh, yeah.
The Christian Prayer Act, as endorsed by Marky Mark, right?
All right.
On Wednesday, Jimmy Dore commented on the story, and it's worth listening in just because his incoherent mental gymnastics are always equal parts annoying and entertaining.
Now, for anyone unfamiliar, we've not really covered Jimmy Dore before on this podcast.
He's a stand-up comedian.
And for a decade, he was on a political show with the Young Turks Network, probably the biggest political network on YouTube.
It's been around for a long time.
That was called Aggressive Progressives.
But as with several diagonalist public figures, try to say that fast, since 2020, he's gone independent and increasingly become a mouthpiece for a range of conspiracy theories and right-leaning political views.
He's an anti-establishment Bernie bro, who then transitioned into saying that Hillary was a more scary option than Trump.
Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits, and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines, the Chinese vaccine.
Oh, that's for Pfizer or something, right?
Yeah, so guess who the military's working for?
The military, again, just like the CIA doesn't work for the president, the FBI doesn't work for the president, they, the military, DARPA, they all work for corporations.
This country's run by, we live in an oligarchy.
This is a corporatocracy, this is not a democracy.
Just for the record, Jimmy, when we saved all those Nazi lives after World War II, So Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on Twitter that match descriptions shared by former U.S.
how people have been labeled Nazis that were not Nazis.
Yeah.
And meanwhile, every company from World War II that helped Hitler is still bigger than
ever.
Is that weird?
So Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on Twitter that match descriptions shared
by former US military officials familiar with the Philippines operation.
So none of those people got banned.
Yeah, that's racist.
But you know who did?
Dr. Robert Malone.
People like that.
And so then the Pentagon came and said, no, we're going to make everybody in the Philippines afraid of the Chinese vaccine.
Imagine how evil that is.
If you really believe the vaccine's saving lives, and if you really believe this virus is deadly, that you would do that?
Yeah, the scintillating analysis there.
I love how he's like, the Nazis, uh-huh.
And the CIA, yes.
And DARPA.
And then he's just sick.
And then he just segues the hell away from me.
He's like, I don't even know where that's going.
This all ties back, according to Jimmy Dore's sidekick, whose name is Kurt Metzger, to the Nazis.
Did you say psychic?
Did you say psychic?
I meant to say sidekick, but maybe it came out as psychic.
Yes.
Well, you would have to be psychic to know all the things that he claims to know.
It all goes back to the Nazis and how the intelligence agencies are really doing the bidding of Big Pharma.
Which is tough because it's plausible that Pfizer and Moderna benefited from the mistrust created in Sinovac.
But this is not anything that's reported about in Reuters.
There's no evidence that that was the aim of the disinformation campaign.
Data actually referenced quite helpfully by the Children's Health Defense article we talked about also shows that mistrust in one vaccine tends to translate into others regardless of the brand name.
And then notice too that Doar does that same little sidestep.
If you really believed vaccines were saving lives, and if you really believed the virus was deadly, then can you imagine how evil you had to be to run this campaign?
And that's not an incorrect assessment of the people running the campaign, of course.
Well, yeah.
I mean, he's making a point, his own sort of point, about his vaccine faith quotient, but he's absolutely right on the evil angle, and that's what I want to get to when we wrap, because, like, you know, Dora can be incoherent in everything, but the broadest sort of top-level observation that something central is really off, which is precisely the feeling that conspirituality hijacks.
That's something I think we've pointed out in various ways, but it really becomes clear in this story is you're correct.
He is right about that.
He has a platform where he's obviously ignorant of medicine and science.
And so what happens is, you start with an assumption that something is off.
There's a corporatocracy.
There's absolutely too much lobbying power in Washington.
The corporations do run some of these agencies and politicians.
All true.
That does not then mean the next step is, let's quote Robert Malone.
But he's become so integrated into the fabric of these figures that they say, well, he's a doctor, he's got a PhD, so let's just say he's right because he's a contrarian.
And trying to navigate that territory between the fact that we have so many problems with corporate hijacking of our government.
With the anti-science sentiment is really kind of the nut of the problem here that we've been discussing so often and why we've talked to so many medical experts who are also frustrated with the system that we live in and what they have to deal with in a for-profit healthcare system.
And my biggest fear of this is that you have good instincts combined with terrible instincts, and where does that leave us in terms of public health?
Exactly.
Yeah, and that's what conspiracy theories always do, right?
There is always truth in the conspiracy theory.
There are always things that are plausible that could be the case in the conspiracy theory.
But what you hear Jimmy Dore doing there is conflating several different things as if there is a faceless they who is actually pulling all of the different strings.
So they are shutting down Robert Malone, but they are not shutting down the Pentagon program that is spreading their own disinformation.
They are benefiting from it.
So it's like Big Pharma, the government agencies, the big tech companies, the attempt to silence people like Robert Malone, all of that is somehow being decided by the same people in the same room.
And that's just not the case, even if there's some accurate kind of pointing out of hypocrisy and corruption.
So finally, let's check in with Glenn Greenwald because he's a fascinating character and he slid from left to right in terms of the company he keeps and a lot of the positions he holds as this outsider, free speech champion, independent journalist.
Listeners probably remember that Greenwald won a Pulitzer Prize for his work at The Guardian on breaking the huge 2013 global surveillance story that I referenced Earlier, which was primarily via the leaked NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden.
And then following that for six years, he was involved as a co-founder and editor and then just a journalist at The Intercept.
But he left The Intercept in 2020, citing complaints that he was being censored.
And since then, Greenwald has gradually migrated into being a frequent guest on Fox News.
He was on Tucker Carlson all the time for a while there.
Like Jimmy Dore, he holds this diagonalist blend of right-wing and left-wing anti-establishment views.
Now the clip that we're going to listen to is from the YouTube channel for Breaking Points, which interviewed Glenn on Wednesday of last week.
And Breaking Points is kind of one of these centrist debates, like present opinions from multiple sides, little independent news channel and commentary channel on YouTube.
Greenwald really bangs the drum here about the supposed hypocrisy of reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Which I think for many who've taken this particular pipeline was a pivotal red pill issue, which then got accelerated by their perception of COVID authoritarianism.
Then he shifts to this conflation of public health administrators with covert intelligence operations as if they work in concert or somehow they know what one another is doing.
He'll end up with the accurate observation that the campaign endangered Filipino lives and the accurate observation that pharmaceutical companies were reprehensible for price gouging on COVID vaccines.
But then he tries to sell the speculative narrative that the disinformation was designed To enable Western big pharma profits.
And again, that's not part of what the investigative journalism pointed to.
This is being done at a time when if you were an American citizen and raising doubts about the vaccine, either its efficacy or its safety, you would almost immediately be banned from being heard online at the demand of the U.S.
government.
You could lose your job if you didn't take the vaccine.
You would lose the ability to have free movement.
They were really trying to prevent people from taking a vaccine that, in the United States, they were telling us was a lifesaving vaccine that we had to take.
And the motive was so hideous, which was to drag these people away from China and force them to buy from American pharmaceutical companies in order to separate these countries from China.
We were willing to allow people to die by not getting the vaccine for our own reasons.
And that, I think, is the key too.
The context for this was that the Trump administration negotiated, under the banner of America First, that these pharmaceutical companies were required to give priority to American citizens.
And in exchange, they were told, you can gouge the rest of the world however you want.
China stepped into that breach, knowing that there are a lot of poor countries that couldn't buy the vaccine, and offered to give their vaccine, essentially for free, And that was the relationship we tried to impede, in part,
again, to prevent these countries from having gratitude toward China, but also in part to
force these poor countries to pay exorbitant prices.
It's repugnant if the position of the United States government is true, which is that these
vaccines are lifesaving and you need to take them to protect yourself against COVID.
Yeah, if indeed all of that was true.
I mean, he's a fast talker and he makes some good points.
There's a lot of like sliding back and forth between things where I'm not really sure he could fully back up what he's saying.
I'm not so sure about China's great humanitarian impulses, but he is correct that they were wanting to provide vaccines.
I'll just add here that right after the clip ends, one of the hosts on Breaking Points contrasts all of this with hand wringing over CCP propaganda on TikTok.
Which to me is just this example of false equivalency in the name of appearing to call out hypocrisy.
So, I mean, Greenwald overreaches with the implication that the DoD is straight up acting on behalf of Moderna and Pfizer.
But one reason he does that is because it's pretty common knowledge that from the banana wars of the early 20th centuries up to the oil-fueled wars of today, That U.S.
military and economic interests are often very difficult to disentangle.
So Greenwald doesn't have proof, but he's not wrong to flag that historical reality.
It's going to resonate with a huge number of listeners and to recite the many plausible layers of cruelty here.
But I think, you know, you've done a great summary of the, you know, the responses from our pundits here, which were all very predictable and they were funny.
And just switching into full op-ed mode here personally, I do think it's a little bit shooting fish in a barrel to figure out how these people are tripping over themselves to make this make sense within the web of tensions that they've spun, all of which really stem from a single anxiety that I think is broadly relatable, and I think that they weaponize, which is, do we believe our governments, as currently conceived and organized, can ever work?
Like, do we believe that some divine, natural order is on track to restore peace and justice in the world?
That kind of uncertainty is at the heart of the contradiction that drives conspiracy theories and conspirituality forward.
And, you know, going right back to Ward and Voss, pointing out in 2011, conspiritualists don't hope to change the world directly.
They hope that by developing some kind of insight, into how corrupt and terrible everything is, they will
accelerate their development and some sort of osmotic change will overcome the world and restore the
order of things and usher in something better.
And if you really get that on board, like RFK Jr.'s 's campaign makes a lot more sense.
Because he and everyone we've profiled today, they're relentlessly focused on every terrible thing.
Whether they're real or exaggerated or made up.
Everything that's turned the world into a nightmare.
And in RFK Jr.' 's case, it's not surprising for someone.
I just want to add here that, you know, there's something about conspiracists that we've talked about before, which is that they're also romantics.
Yeah.
Right?
It's the black-pilled romantic.
That's the point. And that's why RFK Jr. has no real policy solutions
beyond ripping down government agencies and cancelling scientists.
I just want to add here that, you know, there's something about conspiracists that we've talked
about before, which is that they're also romantics.
Right? It's the black-pilled romantic.
It's that everything is, has this incredible nefarious agenda behind it.
is has this incredible nefarious agenda behind it.
But if we can just root out the cabal, then we can almost approach some kind of utopian freedom
But if we can just root out the cabal, then we can almost approach
like some kind of utopian freedom and great awakening and moving into 5D consciousness, et cetera, et cetera.
and great awakening and moving into 5D consciousness, etc., etc.
And the reality actually is that the world is a lot more complicated than that.
And the reality actually is that the world is a lot more complicated than that.
And I think it's wise to consider, even if you are spotting traces of corruption
and misuse of power, that when you tear something down, what arises in its place is not necessarily
gonna be old rainbows and unicorns.
I feel like you're doing something Freudian with the term romantic.
It's as if they are actually in love with the darkness of their vision and want it to be so in order to ensure their own kind of sublime renewal.
But, you know, in all of these, you know, with all of this going on, The Reuters story, I think, provides this meatpacking warehouse of red meat to feed some core intuitions, if not the fact-based arguments of conspiritualists.
I mean, $500 million can be dropped on a disinfo campaign, and that's going to dwarf any grassroots or democratic attempt at spreading influence.
Like, even if GDIT is using similar tactics as Children's Health Defense.
Even if they're aligned on principle, the sheer largesse of their power, I think, is humiliating.
Not only to, you know, RFK Jr.
and his lot, but to all of us trying to have a voice about anything.
And we also know that it's so amoral, so bereft of values, that everyone—we can feel that the content of that contract could just pivot on a dime, because it's money seeking money, influence seeking influence, power seeking power.
Yeah, and now we have a baker's dozen for the disinformation dozen, and the DOD is at the top of the list, right?
Yeah, right.
I also think there's a direct intuitive parallel that RFK Jr.
and Doerr, and to an extent Brand, could be drawing on between the claims like, you know, Big Pharma is keeping us sick to sell us more drugs, and something that you'll also hear, the U.S.
Empire is making us unsafe to promote weapon sales.
Now, the latter might be more plausible than the former, but the basic structure of the government creating the problem that they promised to solve is the core intuition.
The government is pretending to be beneficent while acting as this killing machine.
And I think it's really painful for Bobby that he's going to have to be silent on that hypocrisy or that contradiction because, just because this arms race is about vaccines, I think it might be a test case for his values.
Like, will his loathing for vaccines overshadow his loathing for imperialism?
I mean, if he wasn't committed body and soul to this fiction
that vaccines are poison, like, he'd have a very dangerous thing,
which is an authentic and powerful intuition about the awfulness of militarism around the world,
validated by a terrible true story, written and directed by the same legacy of warmongers
that murdered his elders and changed everything forever.
Like, he could take that straight to the bank.
And to me, that's one of the deepest political dangers.
I mean, it's not as important as causing deaths in the Philippines, but it's really disruptive to anyone who wants to challenge the military and economic systems that drove this thing.
Like, Diagonalists and the Red-Pilled should not be seizing the moral high ground on the subject of militarism and imperialism.
That used to be the territory of pacifists from across the political spectrum who had real moral analyses of power.
And not just resentments and fever dreams.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
