Censorship Industrial Complex: Bret Speaks with Michael Shellenberger on the Darkhorse Podcast
Bret Speaks with Michael Shellenberger for the second time on the DarkHorse Podcast. They discuss censorship, the intelligence apparatus, and political disagreement with decency. Find Shellenberger on Substack: https://public.substack.com/Find Shellenberger on Twitter: https://twitter.com/shellenberger *****Our Sponsors:Hillsdale College: Since 1844, Hillsdale has been providing an education focused on freedom and character. Go hillsdale.edu/DARKHORSE to register for any of 39 free ...
But then we started to discover that it had this other twist to it, which was that there was a lot of government involvement.
And they're the most alarming three letters to see when you're going through documents that have been released to your FBI or maybe CIA.
And so when you start to see that in DHS and CDC, It's alarming.
And there was an aggressive effort by the U.S.
government to directly pressure the social media platforms to censor disfavored voices.
That's the simplest way to say it.
That's what it was.
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
I have the distinct pleasure of sitting early this afternoon with Michael Schellenberger.
This is his second visit to the Dark Horse Podcast.
For those of you who did not see our first discussion, I highly recommend it.
It was done while I was on the road.
In fact, in the very room that Michael is sitting in now, the tech is a little iffy, but we managed to cobble it together and the quality of the discussion I thought was excellent.
So anyway, check that out if you haven't seen it already.
For those who haven't seen it and are going to start with this second podcast, let me say, is it fair, Michael, to say that we are friends?
Yeah.
Good.
All right.
I feel that we are friends.
And I feel that at the same time, we were arch enemies, even if maybe you weren't entirely aware of that.
Were you not aware of that?
I was not aware of it, but maybe I was yours and I didn't know, but I never felt like you were my enemy.
You never detected that.
So what I mean is that there's an issue, the one on which I first became aware of you, on which I believe we still substantially differ, although I have moved slightly in your direction, partly as a result of things that I have learned from you.
I believe there is still a fundamental sticking point and hopefully I would love to reach agreement on it with you at some point.
The issue is fission power and whether it is a viable solution to some or all of our energy concerns.
My position is that the Actual hazard of fission power is dramatically undercounted.
And anyway, that is not going to be the subject of this podcast, but it is where I first became aware of you, you having become a champion of fission power as a potential solution, your argument being that it is substantially greener Then those of us who are spooked by the hazards understand.
And I certainly do get the argument.
But anyway, that is an argument we will postpone for another day.
I look forward to having it.
We did it!
We had the argument.
We had part of it, but I have I am in motion since that argument.
I'm hoping that you are too.
And the great thing would be if we converged.
And if not, I will try to censor you.
Oh boy, I did not see that coming.
Now we're back to Arch Enemy territory.
I will want this peep more amplified so that I can debunk it publicly.
Right.
Well, before you get to debunking, now I'm not well versed in the terminology, but I think you have to pre-bunk and re-bunk before debunking.
I think that's how it's now done in professional bunk circles.
We are definitely pre-bunking.
That is the cool subfield of disinformation studies.
That is where it's at.
That and AI are the cutting edge of censorship, of the censorship industrial complex.
Well, that is going to be the subject, but I do want to tell people that this is in some ways, as I count it, maybe you'll count it differently, but your third public incarnation.
When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can't think at all.
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So I remember you as a champion of fission power who leveled a significant challenge to those of us who were concerned about it.
Then I became aware of you again as you became a total buzzkill on the topic of homelessness and thoroughly destroyed any sense that anyone might have rationally held that the problem of homelessness is the result of not enough housing.
You did this by doing some very compassionate interviews on the streets of San Francisco.
I will at this point point out that you've written a book called San Francisco, which I think every one of us who mentions it trips over because it's so close to the name of the town.
But nonetheless, you did some great work revealing that.
You ran for governor.
Power structure thoroughly trounced you and made sure that you could not wield power on behalf of the citizens of California, so congratulations to Goliath on that one.
And then your third incarnation, you have become a lead reporter on the so-called Twitter Files, and you have coined the term, what was it, Information Industrial Conflict?
Yeah, Information Industrial Conflict.
I never take too much credit for it because it was so obvious that that's what it was, but yes.
No, those are the best ones that are hiding in plain sight, so you should take credit.
So anyway, what I want to do today is talk to you about the questions surrounding the Information Industrial Complex.
Was that it?
Yep.
No, I've got it wrong again.
Sensitive Industrial Complex.
Censorship Industrial Complex.
Okay, so this is something that I have, as you know, suffered from rather directly.
And survived.
As have you, as has anyone who gets it into their mind that truth-seeking might be a path forward for humanity.
You will run into this thing, and you will view it very differently than anybody who is outside of that realm could possibly, right?
It looks very different as it targets you than it does as you try to navigate the world of information.
So do you want to orient us to the Twitter files, how you became involved, what you have discovered, and then we can get into some deeper topics that I think are important.
Yeah.
Well, that's a great way to start, Brett.
I mean, I think that what you've said, it's a call to humility because I do not think I would have cared about this issue as deeply as I do had I not been censored.
I did a Spaces call, as you know, yesterday on Twitter with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., hosted by Elon Musk and David Sachs.
And Robert Kennedy and I violently disagree over nuclear.
Speaking of nuclear, I don't agree that vaccines are responsible for the increase of autism.
But I do share his concerns about what's going on in Ukraine, and I do share his concerns about COVID and the ways in which that vaccine was oversold.
But the point is that he's been censored too, and that upsets us because we have egos and would like to express ourselves.
But I think I can't speak for him, but I think I would not be so sensitive to it had it not affected me personally.
I put that out there to say we're all sort of brutes on this issue.
We're all sort of, you know, mugged by reality when you're censored.
It's very humbling, especially if you're a proud person and you think you are worth, that you have opinions that should be taken seriously and you think you evaluate the evidence.
So that happened to me in 2020.
It actually went asleep for me and I just went back to my work because I felt like I couldn't do anything about it.
And then the Twitter files happened.
And as your listeners no doubt know, that work started with concerns around seeing the ways in which Twitter was engaged in extremely biased censorship, particularly against COVID skeptics or skeptics of the vaccine, as you might say, including very, very famous ones, very prestigious ones at top universities.
But then we started to discover that it had this other twist to it, which was that there was a lot of government involvement.
And the most alarming three letters to see when you're going through documents that have been released to your FBI or maybe CIA.
And so when you start to see that in DHS and CDC, It's alarming, and there was an aggressive effort by the U.S.
government to directly pressure the social media platforms to censor disfavored voices.
That's the simplest way to say it.
That's what it was.
That's not legal.
That's not constitutional.
You are not allowed as a government—the First Amendment says the government shall not infringe on free—on Freedom of expression and that means you can't have somebody do it for you.
You can't pay somebody else to do it.
You can't subcontract it.
You can't be involved with non-governmental organizations doing it.
You can't be encouraging it.
Now you can correct what you see on social media and you can ask for a fair response but you can't go and ask For censorship, that's a violation of the First Amendment and the courts- A clear, a clear violation.
And I would say as somebody who has been censored, one of the problems with this landscape is that it was clear that there was a Yes.
centrally controlled effort to silence certain perspectives and to portray them as scientifically invalid.
And it was always unclear.
You know, you have this Baroque network of organizations, some of which are not nominally governmental, but they are intermingled in such a way that the First Amendment questions were obvious from the get-go, but the ability to make a clear argument is almost dependent on something like discovery.
In other words, the normal way for the evidence that you unearthed in the Twitter files to emerge would be for someone to sue something like Twitter.
And force the revelation that they had been instructed by governmental agencies to censor or invited by governmental agencies to censor.
And the strange twist here is that Elon Musk, having purchased Twitter, you know, as he famously said, he bought a crime scene, right?
And in buying a crime scene, he was able to make the evidence public as a public service through you and Matt Taibbi and others.
So anyway, there was a strange turn of events, but I do want to point out, absent that fact, absent Elon Musk having decided to reveal what he purchased in his Twitter acquisition,
There is a catch-22 that makes it very difficult for the censored to fight back in the way that the founders would have had us do it, which is that you have to be able to make the case to a court that your allegation that your First Amendment rights are being violated by a private corporation like Twitter Basically withstands a smell test, right?
If you don't have the evidence that the government was involved in censoring you, then it isn't the First Amendment violation in all probability.
And a court might not be favorable to your action and you'd be thrown out of court.
So, it required somebody sympathetic with the First Amendment to even discover that the evidence was there that this involved government.
Now, I do, because this podcast may be scrutinized later, I do want to point out there are legal reasons to believe that actually The government does not have to participate directly in a censorship action in order for the First Amendment rights of a citizen to be violated.
But we'll leave that for another day.
In this case, the government was involved.
It's a clear violation.
Is that fair?
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's in the courts by COVID critics, including Jay Bhattacharya, Aaron Cariotti, all the people that are familiar to your listeners.
And I think they're going to win.
And I mean, I hope they win.
It's been hard exactly for the reasons you say.
The courts have not been where they need to be, in part because I think there's also been some lack of clarity, which I feel like I've tried to gain around what should be done.
And that is that it's very hard to make the social media platforms Carry speech that they don't want to carry, because that's also a violation of the First Amendment, because the First Amendment does not allow prescribed speech.
Of course, that's the great controversy that Jordan Peterson got into in Canada.
He was protesting originally, when he became famous, the requirement that he be required to use adopted pronouns rather than natal birth pronouns for people.
And in the United States, the Supreme Court has been very, very clear on that issue.
There's no doubt about it.
You can't make people say things.
So making social media companies carry speech that they don't want to carry is probably not going to work.
And we don't want to have a we can't have a government regulator of speech.
So then what does that leave you with?
It really leaves you with transparency that you have some requirement that the social media platforms must explain why they are censoring me.
And I would go further and say they must give me a chance to the right to respond.
And have a chance so that if I feel unjustly or you feel unjustly, frankly, disparaged, discredited, harmed by being defamed by being deplatformed, there's actual there's psychological and financial consequences to those behaviors.
And so we should have a we have a right to a remedy.
And so I do think that that is up to the Congress, that it needs to do it.
We've also seen Elon Musk do more of that at Twitter than they had done previously.
And I, of course, and I've stated so publicly, encourage him to do that and to do as much of it as possible.
But I do think it's ultimately the citizens of the world need to demand that our governments require that level of transparency, which is why I was delighted to do the podcast and also to mention that we will be hosting a Free Speech Alliance meeting in London on June 23rd, followed the night before with a free speech event at Central Hall Westminster with Russell Brand, Matt Taibbi, and me.
And we're going to lay out the evidence that governments have in fact been censoring their citizens directly and indirectly, that this is absolutely inconsistent with freedom, with the Enlightenment, with the belief that free speech is a fundamental human right as well as an enabling
a foundation of democracy and free markets and human progress, and that there has been no human progress without free speech, and that every human liberatory movement in history and movement, I would add, of environmental protection has required more speech, not less.
And so we think that once the citizens of the world see this, that they will, a vast majority will want to have free speech.
And that that's basically what we're proposing, is that the world adopt America's high levels of First Amendment free speech, and that governments simply mandate the transparency by social media companies when they deprive citizens of it.
So I, of course, am very much in favor of this.
I would point out that the reasoning behind the importance of free speech is somewhat counterintuitive, which is why many people who nominally would have said they believed in it were also in favor of censorship.
But I would also point out that There is a reason that we don't all simply agree on this that the power gained through the suppression of speech is Cannot really be overstated right to the degree that you can control speech you can control Everything and so therefore this really is the central battle now the
There is of course going to be an arms race to the extent that you were able to discover the ways in which the government or our governments really imposed their will on this medium.
Was because they did not realize that what they were doing was going to be reviewed, right?
As soon as they understand that it will be reviewed, then they will go through something akin to, you know, the economic equivalent would be holding companies or something used to obscure the ownership of some property, right?
The mandates that are uh, discovered through a process like the Twitter files will be hidden, you know, they will be veiled.
And so anyway, uh, no one should imagine that just because we may be on the verge of waking up and reaffirming our commitment to free expression of ideas, um, that the battle will be over.
This is a forever battle.
And I believe the founders understood that.
Um, so that's, that's where we find ourselves ourselves.
Um, do you want to put some color on what it is beyond the jaw dropping fact of the U S federal government and its various agencies pressuring, uh, social media companies to censor citizens who were frankly, not social media companies to censor citizens who were frankly, not just the Not only doing something that was protected, right?
Vile speech is protected.
But this was the federal government actually interfering with the right of citizens to even discuss questions of their own health and the wisdom of certain policies that the government was advancing.
Right.
So this is actually citizens engaged in responsible behavior who were being censored and stigmatized and defamed at the behest of the federal government.
That's really a shocking, shocking fact.
So, I was hoping that you would tell us a little bit about the details of how that functioned.
What did you see in the Twitter files?
Yeah, and just to go back to something you said, where I think you were like, they didn't know they were going to get away with it.
The way I would say it is, the people doing it thought they, or they didn't know that they would be discovered, I think you said.
I think that they thought they would get away with it.
I think they thought that they were doing.
So if you look at what they were doing, they would do things like write articles, have reports.
They're all publicly available.
They would even make videos.
And one of my colleagues, I think one of the most important of the censorship leaders, a very influential policy advocate for censorship in the censorship industry, named Renee DiResta.
She's a former CIA fellow.
When a colleague of mine watched her video and he said, she's so boring.
How do people listen to her?
She's so boring.
And I was like, and I remember there was a moment where I thought she was boring, too, but I also knew there was something going on.
And then by the time this colleague said that, I was like, well, actually, she's like one of the most interesting people by far.
You have to understand what she's saying.
She's actually describing how the First Amendment is a problem and how they need to create these ways to get around it.
She called her talk to the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, almost a name designed to make you forget what it is or how to say it.
She said, this is about the power of partnerships, and we're going to partner with the government so we can engage in censorship.
Secretly behind closed doors without anybody noticing it.
But in front of all of you that I'm describing in this clear language.
So she did, you know, like a 10 or 15 minute talk.
I then, well, we responded and we did a video where we kind of had me describing what she was actually saying.
And when you get down to it, that is what she's saying.
She's saying we need to help censor because the government can't do it.
It was that speech she gave that then leads the Biden administration to publicly announce a so-called disinformation governance board in the spring of last year, which was immediately shouted down.
And we also discovered that Barack Obama, a week before that governance board had been announced, had made the case for the identical kind of censorship government agency, a kind of agency to control speech.
And then they sort of And then when you challenge them on it, they kind of run away from it and they go, well, but why are you saying the government has a right to speak too?
Of course the government should be able to speak and that's all it's doing.
And so they end up in a kind of retreating to a kind of, you know, sophomore philosophical conversation about how it's all just the same.
It's all just speech and it's all just, you know, and that also there is content moderation.
So I think the other thing you have to understand is that there's content moderation going on.
Elon censors a swastika.
They censor child pornography.
There's all sorts of censorship that goes on.
And they sort of then kind of get they try to kind of then suggest that it's all just in that level rather than, say, people describing very real side effects from vaccines or people suggesting that it doesn't make sense to people describing very real side effects from vaccines or people suggesting that it
From school or it doesn't make sense to mask children or that, you know, natural disasters aren't actually getting worse, you know, or, you know, various things that they sort of that they've then sort of they've sort of used the conventional various things that they sort of that they've then sort of they've sort of So, views into the same category as the swastikas and the child porn.
So.
All right.
A couple of things that I want to come back to here.
One, at the point that – and I was one of the people – I don't really like the characteristic or the characterization of shouting down the information governance board or whatever the hell that was.
But I was one of the people critiquing it.
Heather and I talked about it extensively.
Right.
And you were like demonetized, right?
Oh, we have been demonetized.
We were demonetized over talking about vaccine safety and effectiveness and repurpose drugs and early treatment for COVID and have never been remonetized.
So they, you know, this has had a very serious material impact On my family's well-being, literally half of our family income obliterated by YouTube, and frankly the things that they claimed were misinformation weren't, but there's no appeals process as you point out.
But I wanted to go back to, at the point that the public outcry arose over the Information Governance Board, or whatever their euphemism for Ministry of Truth was, They engaged in, you know, you say it's sophomoric.
I say it's sophistry.
That one of the weapons that are being used to disguise many things which are indefensible are arguments that are designed to befuddle, right?
These are wrong arguments that are hard to untangle.
They can bury you in them faster than you can untangle them.
And so the argument was that the claim that this information governance board was a threat to freedom of speech was itself misdisc and malinformation or something, right?
If you watch this podcast, you'll know mis, dis, and malinformation was actually an invention of the Department of Homeland Security, that misinformation amounts to errors, disinformation amounts to lies, and malinformation, amazingly enough, amounts to things that are based in truth but cause you to distrust your government.
In other words, the kinds of things that we have an absolute obligation to discuss, right?
The fact that our government may be untrustworthy, if that's true, we should be discussing it.
And not only, sorry, don't mean to rant at you, Michael, but not only did the Department of Homeland Security define mis, dis, and mal information as things to be worried about and controlled, but they literally defined them as a form of terrorism.
Yeah.
Right?
Misinformation, errors, a form of terrorism.
Disinformation, lies, a form of terrorism, does that make humor terrorist?
And then malinformation, true things that cause you to distrust your government, that's terrorism?
I thought it was our patriotic obligation to talk about these things.
So here you have the federal government literally Using a magic term, terrorism, to eliminate the rights of people engaged in speaking true things about the government that might cause people to be alarmed, right?
That's an amazing fact of history, yet very few people are even aware that it happened, right?
It's one of these things, like you can view it on the web, it's not that it was undocumented, but yet if you mention it to people it sounds like a wild-eyed conspiracy theory.
Yes.
Right?
That's one, it's its own defense because it's unbelievable.
Well in conspiracy theories, we did a piece today about conspiracy theories and it's important to keep in mind how many true things have been labeled conspiracy theories.
Let's just take three, we're just going to take the top three that everybody agrees.
Hunter Biden's laptop was Hunter Biden's laptop.
It was not a conspiracy theory.
And in fact, the alternative explanation was a conspiracy theory, which is that somehow the Russians did it.
And there was no, there were two waterlogged laptops that Biden in his drunken stupor dropped into his bathtub and gave to a computer store to repair.
That's what it was.
They had the subpoena from the FBI, the receipt from the FBI confiscating the laptop published in the New York Post.
So the conspiracy theory was that it was anything other than what it absolutely appeared to be and that New York Post had the proof of.
So that's number one.
Number two, COVID lab leak theory.
It was dismissed.
The Washington Post's original headline was, Tom Cotton repeats debunked conspiracy theory.
They then changed the headline stealthily, not acknowledged in the corrections.
In fact, not only had there been many, many lab leaks in the past, it had been the subject of front page newspaper coverage by USA Today, which noted that when they occurred, the people that had them occur on their watch tried to cover them up.
And moreover, there have been debates involving Anthony Fauci in lab leak concerns, where President Obama sides against Fauci and bans gain-of-function research.
These are all things that your listeners know very well.
But the third would be that the Pentagon is covering up evidence of UFOs.
That may still sound like a conspiracy to some people who have not been paying attention to the news.
But anybody else knows that since 2017, the Pentagon has acknowledged that it is studying UFOs.
It is now its own program called Arrow.
And we had another Pentagon whistleblower come forward yesterday.
So what we're seeing is there's that's just three examples of major things that were dismissed as conspiracy theories, all that have been proven to be real things in the last few years.
And so conspiracy theory is something that I think we should understand to be like the word disinformation.
It's a word designed by people in power to hijack our brains, and get us to stop thinking and get us to stop thinking critically.
Yes, and in fact, if you dig on that term, you will find that, and I'm not going to claim that the debate is perfectly settlable in either direction, but you will find that the CIA is actually interested in advancing that concept to dispel alternative explanations for the John F. Kennedy assassination.
Yeah, I've heard that too, though I also checked, when I checked that, I read that that was a conspiracy theory.
Well, that's exactly why I say it's unresolved.
I believe, I've seen the documents.
The documents are real.
The question is, what exactly is the CIA trying to do in this case?
And it could be ambiguous, but here's the larger point.
You mentioned three conspiracy theories that we all now acknowledge.
One of the three that you mentioned I believe could be or is likely to be a double reversal.
Yes, you phrase it very carefully.
You have government programs to study what are now euphemistically called UAPs, whereas UFO was a perfectly viable description.
It didn't claim that they were aliens, it just said we couldn't identify them, right?
But here's the thing.
Information that now suggests that we are to take UAPs or UFOs seriously, itself has the appearance of a government psyop.
That the government would like us now to be focused on this, and all of the things that constitute evidence in this realm are questionable in their own right.
So, I want to connect that back to something else.
You mentioned Rene Duresta.
In the interest of full disclosure, I know Renee DiResta.
Not well, but I've broken bread with her.
It's not surprising to me at all that she has a CIA background.
But am I mistaken in recalling a, in fact, very recent podcast in which you and Renee and Barry Weiss and Sam Harris gathered?
So, First of all, tell us, tell us about that.
This is not a caught red handed thing.
I'm not saying gotcha.
I'm just saying interesting that you would be talking about Rene Duresta as a, um, as the most fascinating, boring person in history by virtue.
Oh no, I don't think he's boring at all.
No, no, I think she's dangerous and needs to be disempowered and has been disempowered by our research and our writing.
I think she's the, I mean, I'm not saying there's not somebody else behind her, but I actually, whether or not there is, and I think it might be Michael McFaul, or at least she's someone that she works closely with and he's ostensibly her boss at Stanford.
I think she's the one that's done the most important intellectual work to make the case for censorship and to do censorship and to actually actively censor people like you.
So, I mean, I've written a lot about it.
People should read, most importantly, just called Why Renee Diresta Leads the Censorship Industry.
That's the big piece that we did on her.
But also she's in both of my congressional testimonies.
Um, and also discussed around Joe Rogan, but, um, she's a fascinating person.
Um, I, uh, on the podcast with Sam, I did not yet understand what, how important she was.
I knew she was important, but I didn't know I didn't know that what she had done with the Election Integrity Project and the Virality Project, which were the two main censorship programs in 2020 and 2021, nor did I understand... Is it fair to say, sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you, but is it fair to say you did not know It's not just the extent of her importance that you didn't know, but you didn't know in what way she was important?
Nor did I know she was overseeing the censorship program, nor had she talked about it or had made much hay of it.
Certainly not on the podcast.
She's very, very disciplined and careful with how she talks in every situation.
Having now watched many hours of Renee DiResta in various contexts, and she's always, she's, you know, she's interesting.
She always is sort of the number two person, but yet she's always obviously smarter than the number one guy.
You know, she has this whole, I think, completely contrived and ridiculous background story that she was just an anti, that she was just a pro-vaccine mom.
That's all.
And she just started being concerned about disinfo on Facebook.
I don't believe any of it.
She then suddenly found herself advising Obama on fighting ISIS, which is just this bizarre.
I mean, when you understand how hierarchical military intelligence cultures are to kind of imagine some hobbyist pro-vaccine mom from the Bay Area suddenly advising Obama on fighting ISIS, it's just absurd.
Yep.
So she's a fascinating person.
You know, I don't want to spend, I try not to overemphasize it because for two reasons.
One, I don't want to personalize it because it isn't a personal issue.
Actually, I think I share some common views of COVID and homelessness, for example.
I think she's higher in a personality description.
She'd be higher on orderliness and industriousness.
I bet she's pretty high on conscientiousness.
I think that's the type of person that has not cared for the open drug scenes and open drug dealing, nor do I think she was a climate alarmist.
I think actually she was probably really opposed to the stay-at-home orders for kids.
So I want to remain human about this.
I suspect, like I've always said, I'm sure like in her private life, she might be a perfectly good person, but the work she did censoring ordinary Americans is absolutely unethical, violates the Constitution.
She needs to be held to account for it.
She is being sued right now.
She did bad things, and she abused power, and she's been secretive, and there's a lot more going on than she's been honest about.
So, I don't want to personalize this, but I do think the example of Rene Durest is so significant that we need to spend a little time here.
And it doesn't have to be personal at all.
In fact, I would say, look, Rene, if you're watching, come clean, right?
What you did was unpatriotic.
The route back is to tell us about it.
How did it happen?
How did you find yourself doing this work that any rational person would understand is a violation of our most important constitutional right?
And as somebody who was a victim of that, I will welcome you with open arms if you'll come clean about the whole thing so that we as citizens can understand what it is and we can fix our structure.
So this isn't personal.
But I do want to point out, am I correct, Rene Duresta has been a guest on Joe Rogan's program?
Yes!
Yes, guest on Joe Rogan's program.
I ran into her at a conference of, let's just say, intellectually minded people who had gathered to talk about the important issues of the day.
A conference that was put together just for people to gather and discuss important things, okay?
You find yourself on a podcast with Rene Duresta and Sam Harris.
Sam Harris, who has played his own role.
Now, Sam Harris is not a government entity.
He is not obligated to be truthful or decent or analytically consistent or anything.
So I'm not suggesting that Sam has violated any principle other than common decency in what he did.
But the fact that you, who are now one of the most important nodes in the dissident network, fighting this cryptic suppression of speech, found yourself podcasting effectively on a team with Sam Harris, Rene DiResta, and Barry Weiss found yourself podcasting effectively on a team with Sam Harris, Rene DiResta, And my point is not really about Rene Duresta.
It's about whatever it is that Rene Duresta is doing.
The phony story that you point to couldn't possibly be right, where as a pro-vaccine mom, she finds herself advising the Pentagon.
Well, that same Unbelievableness accompanies her movement through the sphere of people trying to make sense of the world.
And how much does it have to do with, for example, Sam Harris's profound confusion of late?
Right?
I will point out to you that Rene Duresta is central to the story of both The suppression of actual information and analysis on COVID, but also the Biden laptop story during the election, right?
And Sam had Rene on as a guest on the now thoroughly debunked Russian collusion story.
Also, I guess my point is, it is not surprising.
I said I'm happy to say something about Sam.
Well, I would love for you to.
As you probably know, my relationship with Sam has become very complicated, and I hold Sam responsible for that.
But Sam is also somebody I would welcome back with open arms if he would come clean about what happened.
I mean, my view of Sam is that, first of all, I really loved his book, The End of Faith.
And I love, I think the meditation stuff is important.
I think, you know, in terms of expanding the range of human potential and human creativity, I think pushing back on Islam is important, although I also think it can be a religion of peace and love.
I really believe that.
But, you know, Sam has a very wrong core worldview that is sort of astonishing in its simplicity and childlike kind of nature, which is Well, I think he calls philosophical realism, but it basically doesn't deal with any of the most important ideas of philosophical thought of the last 300 years, starting with Hume and the notion that we're actually driven by emotions and instincts and that we're
Ironically, for someone who says he's an atheist and says that we're driven by emotions and passions, he has, I think, a great overestimation of his ability to avoid being trapped in various emotionally and proud and pride-bound arguments that have to do with his own overestimation of his abilities.
And I think also is platonic and fundamentally believes that sort of the world is apprehended by science and that the world somehow stays the same, but of course it doesn't.
And so when you look at something like vaccine efficacy, my colleague Alex Gutentag is really helping me understand better.
But particularly this person, Norman Fenton, has done this extraordinarily, I think, helpful explanation of how they manipulated the claims around vaccine efficacy, claiming 95% relative efficacy for vaccines that were less than 1% absolute efficacy and never explaining the difference to people, which is just dishonest, immoral, unethical.
But that also that those rates of efficacy change with different variants over time and with population dynamics.
And so the idea that you would pre-bunk Something about a vaccine's efficacy in the present to describe it in the future is grossly unscientific.
It's absolutely metaphysical.
It's basically a religious view.
We know what the truth is going to be next year on a fast-changing, rapidly-changing virus and pandemic.
It's ridiculous.
It's absolutely absurd.
What's more, we simply do not decide what's good or bad based on science.
Science tells us what is.
Hume is correct.
You cannot derive what ought to be from an is, at least not in any sort of direct way or without some broader appeal to human morality.
Human morality is complex.
It's important.
It exists in institutions.
There's all sorts of Type 1 thinking involved in it, which actually have been protective of cultures.
So I think he's got a view of the world that is, I just think, just almost childlike in its simplicity and its wrongness.
It's debunked.
Every philosophy student in college is supposed to get rid of that stuff when they study Hume.
And when they study basic philosophy and basic cognitive science, and he seems to think he's got this picture of the world that the experts are more right than wrong and more right than the public.
But Philip Tetlock debunked even that, showing that expert predictions about the future are no better than the average prediction of others, which are no better than random because we're terrible, terrible, terrible at predicting the future because we're terrible at predicting human behavior.
And we're terrible at predicting collective human behavior in the future.
So I just found I find Sam.
He made an interesting polemical intervention around Islam, but since then it's honestly been scientistic, reductive, hubristic.
And I think that's why he ends up finding himself taking advantage of grifters and censored.
Taking advantage of by grifters.
So that's my view.
And I think it's terrible philosophy.
I think it's terrible moral philosophy.
It makes for absolutely authoritarian instincts from somebody who claims to be on the side of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment questions on free speech and scientific inquiry were resolved hundreds of years ago, which is that you allow wrong speech...
Because wrong speech, anybody that's ever been involved in science or journalism or anything, wrong speech is necessary often for getting things right.
You know, you often, sorry, you often have to be wrong before you're right.
And so we encourage wrongness.
We like wrongness.
Yep.
- Oh, sorry. - Sorry. - I love this. - Somebody wants to reach. - It's UFOJ right here. - Oh, goodness.
So look, that's a great rant.
It dovetails with a lot of the things that I've concluded about Sam myself, and I've done more thinking about him than I would like to have as a result of his very aggressive posture he has taken towards me and Heather over the course of the pandemic.
And by the way, you'll be happy on that podcast I defended Jay Bhattacharya's honor In real time by Googling what Sam was claiming and showing that Sam was grossly misrepresenting it.
Right there on the podcast.
So anyway, there you go.
Somehow, Sam has become like the universe's way of teaching us about irony, right?
And the importance of humility.
The importance of humility and also I think he is a cautionary tale about rationalism, right?
Rationalism is a lovely idea that cannot be operationalized for the human reasons that you're talking about, right?
You just simply don't have that, you know, 30,000-foot view of all of these issues from which you can purge your, you know, emotional state and all of that.
And it is Sam's belief that he can, that he can derive an is from an ought, or an ought from an is, that has him resulting in all of these odd places, including having Rene Duresta on his program multiple times to spread misinformation in the guise of a sense-making podcast.
Right.
So that's an amazing fact.
But again, I want to come back to not the person of Rene Diresta, but the lesson that the rest of us have to take.
Right.
I don't know what to make of the fact.
I mean, Joe Rogan is a good friend of mine.
Right.
He's had A person who is downstream of the CIA and who has apparently been central in the process that has been censoring me and trying to censor him, that's a very complex reality to be in.
It's a hall of mirrors of a level that we do not anticipate.
I am now sitting here talking to you, somebody who I thought initially might be a shill for the nuclear industry.
Right.
But having come together over other issues.
So at some level, I would just say everybody needs to take the lesson of this.
It's possible that people in our midst are not what they appear to be.
And it is possible that people who appear not to be what they appear to be actually are what they appear to be, which is now what I take you to be, right?
I take you to be an honest broker, and the reason that I think that you're an honest broker is because I've now seen you across multiple domains take a difficult stance out of what I read to be principle.
So, okay, I misjudge you to begin with.
No, I appreciate that.
Thank you.
Yeah, yeah.
No, you're welcome.
But I guess the point is, look, a lot of people have misjudged Renee Diresta in the other direction.
They have taken her to be an honest broker, and that does not appear to be the explanation for what she is.
Her backstory appears to be a cover story, right?
So much is changing and the media are allowing, the new communications technologies are allowing us to have much more interesting, richer, complex conversations that we simply were not allowed to have in the era of one-way broadcast.
And it's creating all sorts of, the elites are freaking out about it.
They don't get to dominate public consciousness in the way that they did.
And they're trying to get, they tried to get control of social media.
And they basically were, they had basically achieved it.
Until this gigantic swerve ball, you know, Elon, whenever I think about Elon, you kind of go, boy, throw away all the books that were written because, you know, Lucretius, by the way, wrote this beautiful, these beautiful writings, the Greek philosopher, and he had, because he was an atheist, sort of believed that there was, that world was sort of random and that there were these swerve events and it was sort of a really,
Like, it's important to not be deterministic and also really understand the power of the American experiment, because Elon really came out of nowhere.
Like, that is not something you can look at the laws of history or the patterns.
I mean, we were truly headed towards a very totalitarian society, whereby a very small number of people—I mean, think about it.
The mainstream—they got all the mainstream news media together at Aspen to quote-unquote pre-bunk Hunter Biden's laptop, They had all these newspapers there, but they only really needed two social media platforms.
So whereas you had this heterogeneity even in the news media, suddenly you get the social media platforms and you basically have one or two that allow for the security state, the medical state, the corporate interests we now see exert this extraordinary control over these platforms.
So we came very close to that, but there was a swerve.
And so I think there should be humility.
Humility for me is the thing that keeps coming up, you know, that we should all be more humble.
And that's hard to do in an environment where the social media is such that it both magnifies ego and I think it reinforces dogmatism.
That's part of the reason I think the left has become so dogmatic, though I don't think it entirely explains it.
But I think it's a, so for me, I go, this moment is so amazing.
We should be humbled by the fact that our knowledge is always temporary.
There's very few eternal truths.
The ones that we have are very important too, including, I think, some amount of humility and curiosity.
And I actually kind of go, I know you've been roughed up the last couple of years.
I I certainly was in 2020 in particular.
But I do also think things change.
You know, I mean, if you just look at what's going on with the lab leak, my own views of the vaccine have changed after I saw the Norman Fenn stuff.
And I think it really helped me to see that.
So I think that I know you've been wanting to see this conversation broaden.
I do think you're starting to get that, you know, on a lot of the issues that you care the most about.
Yes.
Maybe this is a good moment to actually just give a status report on that.
I see there being 3.5 major legs of the COVID question.
One was lab leak.
Two was vaccine safety and effectiveness.
Three was repurposed drugs and early treatment.
And the point five is the relationship between our COVID response and the proliferation of new COVID variants.
And what I would say one thing that I look, I like I like your humility thing, but I think we need to break it into two pieces.
One, In the circles that I travel, people talk about what they call epistemic humility.
Yeah.
Right?
And it's not the same thing as personal humility.
It may be related.
But the recognition that you can be dead wrong on stuff and that you need to navigate with the knowledge that it may always be that you are stepping out on ice that seems thicker than it is and it turns out you were wrong.
And the ability to gracefully retrace your steps and take the correct path.
Is the key to navigating confusing issues like these.
I would caution you, I've heard you say a couple things already in this podcast.
These are places where I have the sense there may be an awakening the deeper you dig, right?
Norman Fenton may be the very clear early indication of something very wrong in this COVID space.
But the full depth of what's wrong requires a certain amount of digging, and it requires you to basically take all that you've learned from the Twitter files, about everything that was done, to take the voices that needed to be listened to and to sideline them, right?
And imagine that some very different conversation would have happened if that had not occurred.
A conversation that is now lost to history.
We will never have it.
But the point is, what would the conclusion of that conversation have been if we did have it?
That's what you're looking for.
If we had navigated in the forward direction, whereas we all agreed at the door that the purpose of the discussion was to figure out what the truth of COVID was, The truth of where it came from, the truth of what that implies about its likely evolutionary trajectory, the truth of whether or not there were early treatments to be had, irrespective of whether or not they were profitable to anyone, the truth about the novel technologies that were introduced, their
Their safety, their likely effectiveness, their utility or lack thereof in controlling the spread of the disease, right?
All of these things would have had a very different trajectory.
And I would just argue that I believe as much as I think a small handful of dissidents that came together, were brought together by COVID, did break the back of the narrative.
We have not managed to lodge the replacement for it, which is a correct analytical understanding of the evidence and what it implies about this disease and our responses to it.
So there are still layers to go, right?
Discovering that there was suppression and that it was not completely successful is part of it.
Inferring what discussion would have happened had it been gone is the other, and wow, is that a deep rabbit hole.
So anyway, yeah.
So there are a couple topics I want to make sure that we cover today.
I guess when I reached out about having you back on Dark Horse, the primary one that I wanted to get to was the issue that you recently reported on of FBI whistleblowers and the treatment of them.
So, could you summarize that story for people who don't know it?
Yeah, I'm glad you asked.
So, the short version of the basic facts of the matter are that multiple FBI whistleblowers have come forward.
What they have alleged is that there is internal pressure within FBI, but also stems, as you might imagine, from external pressure, including from the White House and Congress.
To go after so-called domestic terrorism.
There is no evidence of any increase, much less a significant increase, in domestic terrorism.
Domestic terrorism is extremely rare events.
If you think of Ruby Ridge or Waco or Timothy McVeigh or 9-11, extremely rare events.
So anything you could say about rare events is necessarily trans science, if you would even call it that.
It's not particularly, there's no, you can't do any significant statistical analysis of it.
And so, but what you've seen is these guys are reporting things like trying to increase the entrapment of mentally ill people or mentally impaired or just maybe people that you might have called In the past, we might have called retarded, people that do not have high IQs.
You see similar entrapments like we saw after 9-11.
after 9/11.
We see reports, you know, we know we all, you know, relatedly, we see, We now know there's testimony of potentially hundreds of government agents undercover or as assets for various domestic intelligence and law enforcement organizations at the January 6th protest and Capitol riot.
There's a whole separate January 6th conversation to have because there is more there than people say.
And certainly people go far beyond what the facts show as well.
But nonetheless, I think the picture has been an effort by FBI and particularly by Democrats and particularly by the Biden White House to drum up a domestic terrorism threat focused on the people that you would exactly expect them to be going after, which are Trump voters, Republicans, populists.
You know, conservatives mostly, but they, you know, there's some famous cases of they went after some, you know, a group of black left-wing socialists who were, you know, pro-Russia.
We've seen them go after, you know, anti-Ukraine war leftists like the Gray Zone, at least in terms of censorship.
I'm not suggesting FBI, although one of their reporters was just detained by British intelligence.
So you see a kind of crackdown going on in FBI that mirrors the sort of censorship crackdown.
It's as though you get the feeling when you research these two things side by side and report on them that there is a concerted effort to frame A significant share of the American people as domestic terrorists, violent extremists, or potential domestic terrorists and potential domestic extremists.
Frankly, I find it sickening.
We've seen that we've been debunked.
Wait, wait, I think frankly you're on the side a little bit, right?
For people who are maybe a little younger and don't really understand the game, what this is, is the weaponization of Clandestine elements of the executive branch against political antagonists, right?
This is an attempt to create a phony version of history that justifies whatever the blue team wants to do and an attack
On political adversaries that happens to use magic terminology that literally triggers provisions that should never have been installed in the American legal structure that unhook people's constitutional rights without the awareness that it has even happened.
I don't know if that description sounds drawn to you.
I don't think you overstated it at all.
That's what's happening.
And it's upsetting and disturbing.
And, you know, I'll give you an example.
I'll give you another thing we're working on right now.
We started seeing a lot of people, Biden, Obama, the media, think tanks, start to make a claim that anti-Semitism is sharply increasing and there's some big increase of anti-Semitism.
Well, you go look at the data.
I mean, I take offense at like three levels to this.
The first level I take offense is the just the grotesque abuse of the science and the lack of anybody even mentioning it.
They are not factoring in an increase of reporting in these various measures of anti-Semitism.
So they say they can say they've seen more reports.
Well, we actually have very good research, including quantitative research, showing something called concept creep, which is that the public's own view of what is harmful is increasing.
This gets talked about in the context of Gen Z being very censorious and not wanting people to say certain things because they get injured by speech.
But we've also seen a think tank in Britain has mislabeled posts critical of George Soros and the World Economic Forum as anti-Semitism.
So first of all, I find that offensive as somebody that cares about reality and truth.
The second way it's offensive is that if you are Jewish, and you are actually concerned about safety and the historical pattern, then you do not want people going out there and suggesting an increase of anti-Semitism where there is not one.
That's called messing with the baseline.
It's called monkeying with the baseline.
I agree.
But this is one of these issues that drives me a little bit crazy, right?
Because it – let's take climate change as another one, okay?
Here's something I can guarantee you.
A lot of climate change research and the discussion that flows from it is garbage.
It doesn't mean climate change isn't real, right?
For me, I use as a barometer the retreat of glaciers, right?
Glaciers function as a kind of integrative measure of warming.
I've been promised an ice-free Arctic for decades now.
There's never been an ice-free Arctic.
So I know something's overblown.
On the other hand, I don't see glaciers failing to retreat.
I see them retreating, but Kilimanjaro still has them, etc.
Anyway, my point is, in the case of climate change, we have both the reality of climate change and the abuse of climate change in order to justify things that are basically somebody's private interest.
Both things are happening simultaneously.
I have the sense that this is also the case with the claims about anti-Semitism, and the reason I say that, mind you, I'm an anecdote to be sure, but I didn't ever used to encounter anti-Semitism, right?
It was not a factor in my life.
I'm sure people had fleeting thoughts upon meeting me, oh, he's Jewish, and then maybe they had some thought, but it didn't manifest in a difference in treatment that I could detect, right?
That is no longer the case.
I now run into overt antisemitism regularly, right?
That could be the change in my position in the world, and that I'm encountering something that was there all along.
Or it could be that there's something in our social space that is experimenting with making antisemitism tolerable again, where for a long time after the end of World War II, it was understood to be a no-go zone across civilization, right?
So, I'm not arguing that your presentation isn't right, that there isn't an abuse of claims of antisemitism for purposes that have nothing to do with actually protecting anybody from anything, right?
But I don't want to synonymize that and say, just because there's bullshit on this channel, that the channel isn't also about something real, because my personal experience says, yes, something about antisemitism has become permissible again, and we are seeing something that, at least personally, looks like a major uptick.
Yeah, I haven't seen the evidence for it.
I mean, we've looked at it.
I'm not saying it's not there.
I'm just saying I haven't seen the evidence for it.
I have not seen anybody attempt to account for changes in reporting, which the increases of the reporting, and this is important, are increases we see across all religious categories.
So we see increasing reports of hate speech across all categories.
Now, you combine that with the fact that Jews are the most warmly popular viewed religious group and have been for a very long time.
I suspect it does go back to the Holocaust and World War II.
But Jews have, according to the Pew Research, and they've been researching it for a very long time, 63 is the mean thermometer rating for Jews, Catholics is 60, Protestants 60, Buddhists 57, Evangelical Christians 56, Hindus 55, Mormons 51, Atheists and Muslims are tied at 49.
So, you know, it's just not the case.
I just think it's, you know, I think it's very dangerous actually to go out and suggest an increase of hate.
I think it's often, I have the same reaction to what I do for the disinformation And the conspiracy theory and that I think that when they start talking about that, there's an agenda at work.
They're wanting to do censorship and they're looking to demonize people.
And I think I can't help but think it's actually aimed out of a larger strategy to frame the populists, particularly populist right, but to some extent to which it still exists, populist left.
As anti-Semitic, because it actually fits a particular historical parallel.
And again, I'm not saying there's not anti-Semitism.
I'm not saying a thing about whether support for Palestine is, you know, whatever that means.
I'm not even suggesting that.
I'm just saying in the sort of metrics that we all agree to use of what would count as anti-Semitism, I get very concerned when people start suggesting they're seeing a pattern there when we really don't have any evidence for it.
Well, I would suggest another interpretation and then we can move on.
I think we both made our positions clear.
I don't detect a difference in the average person's view at all.
Right.
I think in the U.S.
I experience essentially no antisemitism on average.
But what I am encountering that I never encountered before is overt stuff like Holocaust denial, like a theme on Twitter where, you know, in fact, I just ran into it this week.
Somebody cited somebody who has wanted an intellectual argument with me and has been sort of gunning for it, posted a link to another account.
And I clicked through on that account and their pinned tweet was something about.
I believe the Nazis were bad people because of a bunch of movies that were made by Jews who wanted me to think that or something like that, right?
It was some sort of Nazi vision.
Holocaust at the very least, yeah.
Right.
You know, Nazi Holocaust denialism, I know exists.
It always exists.
But it's rare enough that I've almost never encountered it in person.
Right.
I now encounter it with some regularity.
Right.
And right there on Twitter.
And mind you, when I saw this account, did I report it?
No.
My feeling is I actually would rather that these people Speak and we know that they're out there and we can assess whether they're becoming more common or not.
Then to have some, you know, I don't want to justify their fantasies that they're being oppressed by anybody, right?
I would like them to get the fuck over it, but whatever.
But nonetheless, my point is, again, my average interaction with other Americans I don't detect anti-Semitism, but the rate at which I encounter things that I find surprising, things that would not have been discussed in the open 10, 15 years ago that are now regularly discussed in the open, I do think that represents the increase in something.
So, your model that you don't see, you know, that people feel warmly towards Jews.
Cool.
That's not inconsistent with what I'm seeing, but what I am seeing is over on the fringe, I'm seeing- Yeah, but I mean, as a scientist, I think you would agree that we would want to see some data.
And so there is, they do have, the people that are making this claim are presenting data of increasing reports without factoring for concept creep.
Or for the fact that it's increasing along all groups.
In fact, there's more people, but it doesn't... In social science, obviously, you have to account for those reporting errors and reporting biases.
You know, you have to back up and kind of go, keep in mind, it's like Barack Obama is somebody that actually you wanted, he was somebody that you would actually count on as somebody that would not make a claim like that without actually having looked at it.
And I see no evidence that he was like, hey, did we account for reporting bias or what is the real research on this?
It's been irresponsible.
It's been used politically.
It's ADL.
It's SPLC.
By the way, we wrote a whole piece yesterday just on how they refuse to give interviews.
We've gone to over 50 of these organizations.
Ten of them replied.
Only one has agreed to an interview.
So these are groups that are out there demonizing their fellow citizens, demanding that they be censored, and then insisting that they should not have to respond to public inquiries or journalist inquiries about their work.
These are behaviors that I think that we sometimes talk about how much of the censorship is coming from the culture, is kind of wokeism and cultural wokeism, which is something that we're all very familiar with, and how much of it is inorganic, how much of it is coming from government agencies, how much of it is being driven by the White House.
And, you know, it's always like, You can never find the, like, there's no real clear line because the people in those agencies are true believers.
But it's actually quite pathological in the sense that they don't want to go on your podcast.
They don't want to have to justify their views.
They don't want to have to debate publicly.
And they make up a reason.
And the reason they make up is that they don't want to platform evil people like you and me.
But I think we actually all know that perhaps the real reason might be that they don't actually feel comfortable doing it because they themselves don't really even understand what they're doing.
They're in the grip of an ideology that they assume to be correct, and everybody around them assumes it's correct, but they haven't actually gone and looked at the data.
They haven't actually gone and interviewed the researchers that are claiming to have these increases of hate speech.
They're not asking whether the statistics are any good or how the data got collected.
They're not doing any of that.
You know, for me, I think that's the really toxic thing that we need to blow apart and blow it apart, both in sort of moralizing in favor of free speech, but also you have to just go to each particular thing and go, this claim, maybe it's true.
Maybe anti-Semitism is increasing and we just haven't seen the right evidence for it, but the evidence has not been established and it needs to be established before anybody can make the claim.
That's fair, but I would say there's a part of me that despairs even at hearing that the answer is, you know, let's look at the data.
Because I've just been through hell over abuses of the so-called data, right, as Norman Fenton reveals some of the many tricks.
And so anyway, I guess my point is, to the extent that this is apparently an issue with political momentum behind it, one can expect the data not to be the data, right?
And it would be lovely if we all, just as we ought to all agree, That speech rights are paramount and that it is in all of our interest that we be able to discuss the issues of the day openly in order to figure out what we believe should take place.
It is also in our interest that we not pollute the mechanisms of science so that we can study questions like what is happening with hate in general?
What is happening with anti-Semitism?
And unfortunately, we live in an era where everything that can be weaponized has been weaponized.
You know, so again, this is like another version of the Rene Duresta point, right?
You find yourself suddenly aware because of your political trajectory.
Or no, your career trajectory of the political dimension of Rene Duresta, but weeks before, you were in a discussion nominally on the same side trying to make sense.
Effectively, at some level, the CIA seems to have reached into your sense-making discussion, right?
So, that's an interesting fact.
I mean, it's funny, but of course she wouldn't do any interviews with me after I discovered everything.
And yeah, I mean, I think on the point about, I mean, I don't have much to add.
I would just say, you know, in terms of the data, I mean, that's exactly what I'm saying.
I don't think the data speaks for itself, but the data plus a couple, like, honestly, Some smart guys talking on a podcast and getting some extra superpower statistical help if I need to.
I surround myself with people that my wife is a statistician and Norman Fenton and you know I don't know if Alex Gutentag now works here with us.
You know and the Norman Fenton thing I think is special in part because he was able to explain No, no.
you know, this to somebody like me.
And so you kind of go, that's the right, but that's, but I think the point is that the censors are not participating in that kind of discourse.
They're actually.
No, no.
In fact, there's.
Yes.
They are censoring it.
That's.
Yeah.
But in other words, the problem is not that we have such a hard time getting to the truth of it.
I do think part of the problem is the scientism and the idea, the naive idea that Sam Harris puts out there, that the data speak for themselves.
Of course, the data don't speak for themselves.
We have to interrogate the data.
You have to look at how we're analyzing it.
But really, it's more like I do think we're going to come to a closer view on nuclear power the more time we talk.
I don't have total faith in it.
I don't think we need to be completely aligned.
But the fact that we can have a conversation like this and be able to do this in a free society, that's really what matters and that's what's being undermined.
And the tragedy is it's being undermined by people that claim so much to care about that, like Barack Obama.
Just to kind of put it out there, you know, I mean, it's disappointing for me as a Barack Obama voter to see Barack Obama mindlessly repeat that anti-Semitism is increasing without having just been like for a moment, and I don't think it's the past part of the possible, kind of going, you know, I'm going to actually go, the White House asked me, I'm not saying this would happen, but I'm just saying I speculated, the White House asked me to retweet this I'm actually going to take a minute and see if I really think that's true.
I might even call, because I'm Barack Obama, I can actually call any expert in the world at any time of day and ask them about their research.
And if I call them, because he's a smart guy, it's not funny, Obama certainly could have called somebody and been like, are you accounting for maybe people reporting this issue more rather than actually experiencing it more?
Yes, which actually, so two important points.
One, I want to come back to The issue you point to about the possibility that they haven't controlled for a change in level of reporting is exactly analogous to an issue that I think you missed when you said, look, there's no evidence that terrorism is on the rise.
Terrorism is absolutely on the rise.
You know why?
Because they've redefined it.
Yes.
Exactly.
They've redefined it so that a person saying, the evidence suggests that Ivermectin is effective against COVID, never mind whether you believe that, but a person saying, I have looked at the evidence and it suggests that Ivermectin is effective against COVID, that person is now, according to the Department of Homeland Security, engaged in terrorism.
That's where they've set the bar.
That's an amazing fact, but it's true.
You can check it, right?
Malinformation is defined as terrorism according to their own taxonomy.
And the evidence does suggest, we can debate how effective it is, but the evidence does suggest that ivermectin is effective against COVID.
And so a person saying that by their definition qualifies.
So anyway, my point would be, you can either monkey with the baseline and create an artificial trend, or you can monkey with the definitions and create a trend out of a flat line.
But we have to be aware of all of these things, because at some level, I think the punchline of this podcast is that the story of Michael Schellenberger is one of trying to make sense in a hall of mirrors, and you're doing well.
I mean, you're finding a lot of the stuff, but God damn, if it ain't a hall of mirrors, I mean, you're looking everywhere, right?
The, the, how, yeah, it's crazy.
So, okay, can you take us back to the story of the FBI whistleblowers?
What happened to them?
Well, okay, so there's a normal process that they all followed, which is that you first blow the whistle within your own organization, but then Congress has specifically passed laws that say that whistleblowers can then go to Congress.
That's a wonderful aspect of a democracy.
And that's what they did, and they went to members of the House, and they shared their testimony.
And then they were all basically punished.
I mean, there was retribution against them.
One guy, they relocated him in retaliation.
He sold his house, moved the entire family across the country.
The first day they got there, they suspended him.
Without pay.
You know, this kind of stuff, you know.
You know, and these are actually, when you actually, when you interview them, you're always with whistleblowers, because whistleblowers can be complicated people, but with these guys, it was like you started interviewing them and you'd be like, and you kind of go, oh, they're like Boy Scouts.
They're like, these are the ones that don't want to bend the rules.
These are the ones that are that are actually have memorized parts of the Constitution.
These are people that and you might disagree with it.
And there's a debate around, you know, interpretations of the Constitution or whatever.
But these are people that will take this Constitution at its word and they believe that they are loyal to the Constitution above the FBI.
Another word for people like that might be patriots.
Oh, it's patriot.
Don't be shy about that word.
I found myself, these are very conservative people.
I'm sure, again, we disagree on plenty of things, but I found myself being quite impressed with the one.
I interviewed three of them and my colleagues interviewed others and they did it for the And there's no evidence, and no one's really even charged that they did it for the wrong reasons.
Members of Congress tried to smear them.
You know, it's a very typical thing.
It's always, somehow you're connected to Trump.
You know, somebody that gave some money to Trump, you know, contributed to one of the nonprofits that one of them is at, that kind of thing.
You know, yes, they're conservatives.
You know, I think they were probably all Republicans, although I didn't ask how they voted.
But these are kind of who they appear to be.
These are guys who are blowing the whistle for an abuse of power by FBI.
And that's been a problem really since 9-11.
And so the FBI really hasn't been cleaned up.
I think the basic picture, and I agree with it, is that it went from being a law enforcement organization responding to evidence of crime To an intelligence gathering organization.
And so you just the classic reason why we don't surveil all Americans all the time.
It's not because we don't think we would find a lot of crime.
You know, it's a very important point, you know, like you could spy on everybody and you would find a lot more crime.
But actually, we don't do it that way for a variety of reasons.
But it's in the Constitution that we're not going to do mass surveillance because we believe in innocence until proven guilty.
And the onus is on the state to prove that you're guilty.
And that usually means that somebody, some evidence has to come to light that you're violating the law.
We're not just going to start spying on all of our fellow Americans, particularly because we don't like their politics.
So that's, you know, this agency is out of control.
The director, you know, agreed to show a document alleging a criminal bribery conspiracy involving Biden as vice president.
They finally let the members of Congress see the document yesterday, but they wouldn't give them a document.
So now they're going to file contempt of Congress charges against the director of the FBI.
So we have agencies Even if you're a Democrat and you just think all Republicans are evil, ask yourself, do you want an FBI that half the country doesn't trust?
That's exactly what percentage it is.
It's 50-50.
And if you think about it for more than two seconds, you'll know that you want law enforcement organizations that are broadly trusted by society.
Otherwise, you can't enforce laws.
This is what happens is that things fall apart and societies stop being able to enforce the laws and protect its citizens when they become politicized and directed at particular groups.
So again, you know, I mean, I can't disagree with anything you're saying, but I feel like you're underselling it.
Right?
The fact is, You have to have intelligence agencies.
If you're going to have intelligence agencies at all, and I believe we probably need something, they have to be completely indifferent to the politics of the people they are investigating.
The rules have to be clear.
Here are the things you're allowed to do, and here are the things that you're not allowed to do.
Those rules have to be spelled out in a way that we all understand where those borders are.
And then the intelligence agency has to investigate violations completely without any respect for one political ideology or another.
It doesn't matter that we are talking about a democratic president.
How could that possibly be less relevant to the question of whether or not Joe Biden committed a crime against the United States?
Right?
Influence peddling.
Look, you know, you mentioned Hume.
This is a Rawlsian veil of ignorance question.
Yes.
Right?
Patriotism is the recognition that you want these things to be politically indifferent.
You want them to do the jobs that they have with complete indifference to the politics of the people that they are investigating because I mean, there are good reasons like simple patriotism and decency.
But even if you're looking for a selfish reason, you don't want these things politicized because they will eventually be used against you.
Right?
That's the simple way.
Anybody can get it.
If you allow this thing to become a tool of politics, it will be pointed at you sooner or later.
So we can't afford it.
We should all agree on the depoliticization of these entities because it is a requirement of the republic to which we belong.
And I don't know, you also mentioned, you know, Democrats who think all Republicans are evil, right?
My feeling is those people are not doing right by their fellow citizens, right?
I know a tremendous number of very decent Republicans, right?
There's no way that I've found the hundred decent Republicans and the rest of them are evil.
The fact is, there are lots of people in the Republican Party who have a point.
Now, I have no patience for that party.
No patience.
No more patience for it than I have for the Democratic Party.
I'm done with both of them.
But the people in those parties are fellow Americans, right?
effectively on a ship together.
We have aligned interests almost completely until we get to the point where we disagree with relatively small things.
And we've got to stop looking at each other this way.
I mean, and in fact, I think what I'm trying to say to you, Michael, is that the view of the other side as ununderstandably wrong, right, just so far beyond the pale, is downstream of weaponized mechanisms to shape the narrative is downstream of weaponized mechanisms to shape the narrative so that the people on the other side of the political aisle become monstrous to us.
And it is our obligation, once you discover how deeply weaponized these things have become, it is our obligation to throw out the evidence that they've supplied us because it's not, in fact, evidence.
And, you know, I would even go so far, I was in that session yesterday with you and Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard and Elon and David Sachs.
Robert Kennedy was saying, as is his way, was simply reporting his natural position on any issue about He was refreshingly refusing to hedge on anything and simply saying what he believes and letting the cards fall where they may.
The audience responded very well, indifferent to their own political divisions with the man.
He may be nominally on the blue team and they may be nominally on the red team, but they were able to hear him because he was speaking to basic principles that are mostly beyond politics.
In some sense, those things resonate with the majority of Americans because they're common sense.
Right?
And we have been denied the ability to gather around common sense together with people with whom we might have some political divisions for so long that we have forgotten that they are indeed humans and that they are indeed fellow citizens and that we do indeed have a great deal of shared interest
Anyway, that's got to come to an end, and I think the resonance that Bobby Kennedy is finding is a clear indication of what the Hidden Tribes Report found in, what would that be, 2018?
You know about the Hidden Tribes Report?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Again, I'm fascinated by seeing your trajectory through this space and where you're landing.
Well, thank you, Brent.
I appreciate you.
Unfortunately, I'm going to have to wrap up because I got to go back to the story we're doing for tomorrow.
But just to mention, we are now public.
Substack, that's the name of the publication.
It's Leighton Woodhouse and a bunch of other folks and us and people can find us there and on Twitter and if you're in London on June 22nd, we'd love to see you at Central Hall Westminster around 7 p.m.
Cool.
Do you have a few more minutes or not?
I really have to.
I told them I would be meeting with them at this point, so I'm going to have to jump if that's... You're going to have to go.
Okay, well, we'll have to save... Yeah, it's been too long.
Save it for another time.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Michael Schellenberger, it's been a real pleasure, and I'm looking forward to a meeting down the road where we'll have even more new and fascinating stuff to discuss.
