Dark Journalist - Dark Journalist & Whitney Webb The National Security State Revealed!
Aired: 2022-12-17
Duration: 01:14:48


=== Intercept's Changing Reputation (10:58) ===

[00:00:01]  Hello, everyone.
[00:00:02]  This is Dark Journalist with a special interview for you with author and political researcher Whitney Webb.
[00:00:08]  Whitney has just put out a remarkable two volume set, One Nation Under Blackmail, walking through decades of national security state covert activity.
[00:00:17]  From Roy Cohn to Jeffrey Epstein, the figures are familiar, but her wide angle lens gets to the truth behind the story.
[00:00:24]  Whether it's the CIA, NSA, DHS, or organized crime, take your pick.
[00:00:29]  Please join us now.
[00:00:31]  I want to talk to you about those Twitter files,
[00:00:58]  because I think you're on the same kind of wavelength with me on it, that they are, you know, they're interesting, but they're sort of diversionary in a lot of ways.
[00:01:07]  Yeah, I definitely feel that way.
[00:01:08]  It reminds me a lot of, I don't know if you remember, well, you probably do.
[00:01:12]  So back in like 2014 or so, there was another billionaire who was doing a massive PR campaign for himself, is like this super good guy.
[00:01:22]  His name was Piero Midiar.
[00:01:23]  He's the current owner of PayPal.
[00:01:25]  And he was going to revolutionize journalism by creating The Intercept.
[00:01:31]  And putting Glenn Greenwald in charge, and you know, the Snowden stuff was all tied up with that.
[00:01:37]  And it didn't exactly play out that way, right?
[00:01:40]  But it was sold that way.
[00:01:42]  Yeah.
[00:01:43]  And at a time when sort of the WikiLeaks approach was being heavily attacked.
[00:01:48]  And of course, WikiLeaks itself was being heavily attacked and dismantled.
[00:01:53]  And so you have the intercept approach, which is selective release of leaks, right?
[00:01:59]  Versus WikiLeaks, where they just kind of publish everything and let you peruse it.
[00:02:04]  So, you know, it seems there's a lot of parallels there.
[00:02:07]  Actually, in that same media, I don't know, I call it a psyop, the whole intercept thing, really.
[00:02:14]  But that particular event, you had also Matt Taibbi was recruited by Pierre Amidiar to run a separate outlet that I think was called Racket or something like that.
[00:02:24]  But it ended up not working out and he went back to Rolling Stone.
[00:02:28]  Oh, interesting.
[00:02:29]  And Matt shows up as the kind of lead guy with Barry Weiss.
[00:02:35]  He's probably, at least among longtime consumers of independent media, best known for her Joe Rogan meltdown, where she called Tulsi Gabbard an Assad toady with no evidence and then got demolished.
[00:02:48]  Yeah, she's the person that was chosen for this, too.
[00:02:52]  So it's, yeah.
[00:02:54]  So the Mustang might be kind of round two of the same type of approach that they did.
[00:02:59]  I think it is a round two of restoring trust in media by elevating a new class of media.
[00:03:04]  I think that's sort of what happened, in a sense, with.
[00:03:08]  The whole thing about the creation of The Intercept, creating a lot of trust and hype behind a new media brand that ends up basically being a honeypot for would be whistleblowers.
[00:03:18]  They sent like three whistleblowers to prison after they were created.
[00:03:21]  Yeah.
[00:03:22]  Reality winner Daniel Hale and I can't remember the second one.
[00:03:26]  It might have been Terry Albury.
[00:03:28]  I'll have to look at my old reporting on it.
[00:03:31]  But, you know, they were brought there because it had this hype about Snowden and we work with whistleblowers and all of this stuff.
[00:03:38]  And in the case of Reality Winter, I mean, it was malfeasance on the part of Intercept reporters that sent her to prison.
[00:03:45]  Wow, incredible.
[00:03:47]  And yeah, really troublesome.
[00:03:48]  And he almost actually bumps out of there, too.
[00:03:50]  Yeah, he does.
[00:03:51]  But I used to report on these problems with the Intercept, and he used to say he was very nasty to me on Twitter.
[00:03:57]  I didn't even necessarily write about him.
[00:04:00]  I was writing about his boss at the time, Pierre Omidiar, who's a billionaire with ties to the national security state and a very suspect guy who's the owner of PayPal, very powerful.
[00:04:10]  Individual, and yeah, he said I belonged in a mental hospital.
[00:04:14]  And then, of course, he leaves The Intercept and basically uses a lot of the same arguments to get the outlet that I had previously used.
[00:04:20]  Interesting.
[00:04:22]  Wow.
[00:04:23]  Just unfortunate.
[00:04:24]  So, anyway, a lot of these people at this particular tier, you know, I'm a little cynical about.
[00:04:33]  No, I can appreciate it.
[00:04:34]  Would you, just since we're talking about Greenwald, if I jumped you back to the Snowden stuff?
[00:04:41]  How did you feel about what came out there?
[00:04:43]  And does that have that layer of inconsistency also?
[00:04:46]  So, I guess the reason I was very critical is because I was sort of suckered in, I guess you could say, initially.
[00:04:52]  Like, I really looked up to Glenn Greenwald and the whole Snowden thing.
[00:04:55]  And I thought the intersection, like, back years ago, I thought it would be like a dream job to write for The Intercept until I really realized what was, you know, apparently going on there.
[00:05:06]  And, you know, ultimately what happened with the Snowden leaks is that they were privatized.
[00:05:10]  They were put in the hand of a media outlet, or rather, you know, they had like a parent company and all this stuff.
[00:05:17]  I mean, it's not necessarily The Intercept, there's like a corporate structure.
[00:05:20]  Above that, and some other subsidiaries of that parent company that are sister companies to The Intercept.
[00:05:28]  But basically, more than 90% of the Snowden archive was never made public.
[00:05:34]  Interesting.
[00:05:35]  And it was just defunded and shut down rather quietly after basically sitting on it.
[00:05:41]  So, a national security linked billionaire creates a media outlet.
[00:05:44]  There's all this hype around it.
[00:05:46]  They sell this image, they send three actual whistleblowers to prison.
[00:05:50]  And the whistleblower, the leaks that created the hype, that created the outlet, most of them just get sat on and never released, and they'll never be released now.
[00:05:58]  Absolutely fascinating.
[00:05:59]  Well, it's really troubling stuff.
[00:06:01]  And, you know, why some people ask why Snowden didn't speak up about it.
[00:06:05]  Is he, you know, an op himself?
[00:06:07]  Or, you know, there's different arguments that have been made.
[00:06:11]  The counter argument to that is that he doesn't really have much of a, I mean, what can he say?
[00:06:17]  He doesn't really, you know, because of the charges against him that if he returns to the U.S., he'd be arrested and all of that stuff, he doesn't really have a lot of.
[00:06:25]  Leverage himself and depends on people like Greenwald and other people like that for popular support, among other things.
[00:06:32]  So it's a very thorny issue, and I see a lot of parallels between how that was originally sold back in 2014 with what's going on now.
[00:06:42]  And it's unfortunate.
[00:06:43]  So, one example will be that the first Twitter files reporting was on the Hunter Biden laptop and how that story was suppressed.
[00:06:49]  Yeah.
[00:06:50]  And it's very interesting how the focus has been on the suppression, but not on the laptop itself.
[00:06:55]  So, if there was all this effort to censor, The laptop, shouldn't the story be what's on the laptop as opposed to just that it was censored?
[00:07:02]  Because I think it's been known well before the Twitter files that censorship and malfeasance was involved in that story.
[00:07:08]  And there's also the fact that you had all these national security veterans and currently serving members of the national security state saying it was like Russian misinformation when it was not.
[00:07:18]  So you have like multiple levels of suppression.
[00:07:21]  But that particular, you know, the laptop itself, the contents of that have been analyzed in detail and released.
[00:07:28]  WikiLeaks style for public perusal by a nonprofit called Marco Polo.
[00:07:33]  And the Twitter files have not mentioned, noted that fact at all.
[00:07:36]  And they've gotten hardly any media attention compared to the media attention because of the Twitter files that's been focused on the suppression of the laptop.
[00:07:45]  There's apparently very little interest in what was actually being suppressed.
[00:07:49]  The stories of suppression, not what was actually being suppressed.
[00:07:52]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:07:53]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:07:54]  Yeah.
[00:07:55]  It's very inconsistent.
[00:07:57]  And it goes to the idea that.
[00:07:59]  Oh, since we're getting at this information, look, we're exposing this to pretend basically to be transparent.
[00:08:04]  And then in the meantime, you're not going into any of the real, actual troubling aspects of the Hunter Biden laptop, which was a good thing.
[00:08:10]  Well, you're naming, yeah, well, you're also naming who the bad guys are, and they've all been fired by Elon Musk, right?
[00:08:15]  So they're implying that this behavior won't happen under Elon now.
[00:08:21]  But will that be so?
[00:08:24]  I doubt it because there are people that have been critical of the Ukraine conflict, US foreign policy that have been censored and had their accounts suspended.
[00:08:32]  Since Elon took over, Garland Nixon's a really good example of that.
[00:08:37]  And yes, he's restored some people, but they may be banned again.
[00:08:40]  I mean, time will really tell.
[00:08:42]  And I'm not necessarily inclined to believe it because, you know, just like Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk has a lot of ties to the national security state.
[00:08:49]  He's a defense and intelligence contractor.
[00:08:52]  His fortune is because of, you know, heavily government subsidized loans that allowed him to build up his business empires Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity.
[00:09:03]  Most of those companies have, throughout their history, been extremely unprofitable.
[00:09:08]  So, how do you become a billionaire?
[00:09:10]  Obviously, someone in the establishment is helping him, but now he's the anti establishment guy.
[00:09:15]  You know, I don't really buy that personally.
[00:09:17]  Interesting.
[00:09:18]  Yeah.
[00:09:18]  Well, that does have a layer of PSYOP feeling right off the bat.
[00:09:23]  It does.
[00:09:23]  But again, time's going to tell.
[00:09:25]  But, you know, if you go back to 2014 and you, you know, ask people about The Intercept and Glenn Greenwald and Snowden and Piero Midiar, it's going to be a very different flavor than if you ask them about it now after it played out the way it did.
[00:09:37]  Right.
[00:09:38]  Good point.
[00:09:38]  Yeah.
[00:09:38]  So I would just, you know, tell people to maybe not buy the hype on Elon Musk so much because this is a guy that's making a brain chip.
[00:09:46]  Yes.
[00:09:46]  Right.
[00:09:47]  Excellent.
[00:09:48]  So, okay.
[00:09:49]  If you look at stuff going on with like the World Economic Forum and a lot of these other entities, even the Biden administration, their big priorities over, especially in 2021, have been about rebuilding trust with the public.
[00:10:01]  So, how do you do that?
[00:10:04]  I think what we're seeing with Elon Musk right now is a part of that effort.
[00:10:09]  They're trying to create a figure who's one of them, who people trust, and he's involved in agendas.
[00:10:16]  That if Bill Gates was the face of it or Klaus Schwab or whatever, they would oppose.
[00:10:20]  But a lot of those same policy agendas that a certain segment of the population hates when it's those guys in front, they like Elon.
[00:10:28]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:10:31]  Carbon tax, UBI, brain implants.
[00:10:35]  Elon Musk is on board with all of that.
[00:10:38]  And what really troubles me about the whole brain implant thing you had like 20% of the monkeys in animal trials die or suffer very gruesome fates, and it's moving into human trials.
[00:10:50]  So, yeah, normally when you have a medical product where 20% of the animal subjects die, it doesn't go to human trials at all.

=== Rockefeller Foundations and Race Science (02:37) ===

[00:11:00]  You go back to the drawing board and try and make a project, a product that doesn't, you know, kill a fifth of the animals and then subsequently people that use it.
[00:11:09]  Right.
[00:11:09]  But that's not happening with neuralink, it's going into human trials.
[00:11:14]  And this is part of that.
[00:11:16]  There's a transhumanist web that runs through your work, these people who are.
[00:11:22]  In this kind of deep state structure, all kind of somehow tied in with eugenics.
[00:11:28]  I find that really interesting.
[00:11:30]  Yeah.
[00:11:31]  So I learned about this, a lot of these connections originally from John Klezak, who's a contributor to Unlimited Hangout and does a lot of really good work about the education system specifically.
[00:11:41]  So from his work, I learned that Julian Huxley, who of course is Aldous Huxley's brother, was president of the British Eugenics Society.
[00:11:50]  He is placed in charge of UNESCO.
[00:11:53]  At the close of World War, well, you know, not that long after World War II, concludes, and he, in writing his vision for UNESCO, which again is the social and cultural arm of the United Nations, he says we need to make the unthinkable thinkable again, referring to eugenics.
[00:12:11]  Okay.
[00:12:11]  So that means he wants to use the social and cultural development arm of the UN to accomplish that.
[00:12:18]  That's essentially what he's saying in this speech.
[00:12:20]  And then, roughly 10 years later, he creates a book called New Bottles for New Wine.
[00:12:26]  And there he coins the term transhumanism and posits it as the new eugenics, the merging of man with the machine, and how these types of technologies that either merge with the human body or edit the human body in a genetic sense in vivo, that this is the new modern era of eugenics.
[00:12:46]  So it moves away sort of from selective breeding programs and race science to something that can be done to the living human body.
[00:12:54]  Or to fetuses, engineered babies, and whatnot.
[00:12:59]  So I think some people have this idea that eugenics, as it used to be, is gone, the whole idea of creating a master race and what have you, but it really hasn't, but it has evolved.
[00:13:09]  But that evolution was done by the same people that were responsible for the eugenics of the past.
[00:13:16]  And one consistent group that's been there before and after has been the Rockefellers through the Rockefeller Foundation, who, if your audience isn't familiar, were there funding the foundations of the Nazi race science.
[00:13:29]  Programs back in the 30s, and they're continuing to fund this stuff today in its modern iterations.
[00:13:36]  Right.
[00:13:37]  Yes, exactly.

=== Dulles and Nazi Amnesty Deals (02:33) ===

[00:13:38]  There's that whole wave, and there's the whole kind of American involvement around the Nazi movement, which, if you go back there, those are very interesting.
[00:13:48]  Sure, with bankers and people like the skull and bones nexus, like W. Averill Harriman and Prescott Bush, and people like that.
[00:13:57]  Yeah.
[00:13:58]  Union Bank and that whole kind of.
[00:14:01]  Interesting thing, the trading with the enemy aspect.
[00:14:04]  It is interesting.
[00:14:06]  And I think it's surprising to an average person to say, oh, you mean they were doing business with them after we were already in the war and against them and all the rest?
[00:14:16]  And then when the war is over, people arrested in the Nuremberg trials get brought back to the US to make NASA and a bunch of other science technology stuff for the national security state.
[00:14:30]  It really shouldn't be that surprising for people familiar with.
[00:14:34]  Important figures in the history of the rise of the US national security state, like Alan Dulles, for example, who during World War II was very sympathetic to elites within the Nazi power apparatus in Germany and sought to get amnesty for them while technically being part of US military intelligence and directly trying to undermine the policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the time.
[00:14:58]  As it came to, when it came to people affiliated with the Nazi party, he didn't want amnesty at all.
[00:15:04]  And Alan Dulles worked very hard to subvert that.
[00:15:08]  Interesting.
[00:15:09]  Someone who was really hardcore back there arguing on behalf of the Nazis for the benefit of science was Vannevar Bush.
[00:15:22]  And he's the kind of scientific version of Dulles in that sense, kind of pounding the table and saying, we need these guys.
[00:15:28]  So a lot of paperclip comes directly out of that.
[00:15:32]  Yeah, and I don't think enough people really realize that.
[00:15:34]  Like there's all this World War II propaganda that persists into the present and sort of this.
[00:15:40]  You know, like so many other events in history, you know, we're fed sort of a fairytale narrative of what that ultimately was and how, you know, the US was against the Nazis for these reasons and the Nazis were completely bad and we were completely good.
[00:15:54]  Well, if that's the case, you know, then why would we absorb so much of them into our national security state?
[00:15:59]  Right.
[00:16:01]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:16:02]  Do you, you mentioned Huxley.
[00:16:03]  If you think about Aldous, do you think of him as somebody who sort of broke away from the family and it's like, I have to get this out to the world with Brave New World?

=== Global Power Structure Tentacles (07:10) ===

[00:16:11]  Or do you see him differently?
[00:16:13]  It's hard to know.
[00:16:14]  So, I used to read a lot more of his stuff when I was younger.
[00:16:18]  I don't really have time for pleasure reading anymore.
[00:16:20]  But I did once when I was like, you know, before college.
[00:16:24]  And I read a book that he wrote later on in his life called Island that was very interesting because it was basically presenting his vision of what a utopia would be and then how the sort of this giant evil empire basically comes and ruins it and how he had a very, it seemed like he, by the end of his life, had a very cynical view of how the world was going and wanted a sort of different society, but didn't see any possibility for that to happen.
[00:16:52]  You know, actually exist alongside the octopus, I guess you could call it.
[00:16:59]  Yes.
[00:17:00]  You know, sort of the global power structure that we're dealing with today.
[00:17:05]  I want to talk to you about the octopus because I think you do a great job of bringing back to light the promise software aspect and how crucial that is to setting up the situation that we're in now.
[00:17:16]  And the Maxwell part, you come in there very interestingly, not just from the, you know, there's that whole salacious deep state blackmail sex.
[00:17:26]  Part of the Epstein Maxwell, but there's something else.
[00:17:29]  There's a big tech component.
[00:17:31]  Yes.
[00:17:32]  Either it's tech transfer or subversion of technology, control of technology.
[00:17:37]  And really, I mean, what you're looking at there is a lot of the same people respond, the same power nexus that was responsible for Iran, Contra, and Promise is also pretty much responsible for the origins of Silicon Valley.
[00:17:50]  Right.
[00:17:51]  And there's a lot more work to actually be done on that.
[00:17:54]  I'm hoping to get into that more in the next year or so.
[00:17:58]  Because there's, you know, I tried to do my best in the book to get to some of the aspects of it and sort of explore it through the lens of Epstein and the Maxwells, because they sort of offer a window into some of these more powerful companies and how these types of operators and these networks that span intelligence and organized crime have influenced the technology industry to such a significant degree.
[00:18:22]  There's a lot more to be done there in terms of connecting.
[00:18:28]  A lot of the people of the quote unquote enterprise of the Iran Contra era directly to the genesis of some of these companies.
[00:18:37]  I mean, there's some crazy stuff there.
[00:18:38]  And unfortunately, I didn't get to cover it all in the book, but hopefully soon.
[00:18:43]  But I mean, there's a lot there.
[00:18:45]  It's a very important field of study, if you ask me.
[00:18:48]  The book's remarkable.
[00:18:49]  I got through the first volume.
[00:18:53]  The second volume, you know, I haven't even been able to get into, but just the fact that you put all this together and that it's there, I think it outlines a fantastic history.
[00:19:03]  And you're able to get into these things.
[00:19:05]  One thing that intrigues me, and I wanted to ask you when we get into Promise and Maxwell and these types of things, is you know, Ollie North and Iran Contra and that piece and the continuity of government program.
[00:19:20]  How does that figure into any of this?
[00:19:25]  This meaning the present day?
[00:19:27]  Yeah, well, just the idea that this octopus spread out and that Promise became sort of the tentacles for it.
[00:19:34]  Yeah, so the op that was the theft of the Promise software itself, right?
[00:19:41]  Like the octopus that was responsible for it, the Promise op itself has tentacles in a sense.
[00:19:49]  It has different branches to it.
[00:19:51]  And it's inextricably really linked to other scandals of the time that are really part of the same thing.
[00:19:58]  Like Iran Contra and Promise to me are the same scandal.
[00:20:01]  They're treated differently, but it's the same people.
[00:20:04]  The same network ultimately is responsible for both, and they're very interconnected.
[00:20:09]  Right.
[00:20:10]  So, when it comes to continuity of government, you basically have the promise software being used to create a domestic dissident list.
[00:20:18]  And this was being done by one of the people that we know today as one of the ostensible masterminds of Iran Contra.
[00:20:24]  But, you know, that's kind of actually debatable in some senses.
[00:20:28]  But Oliver North, as you mentioned, right?
[00:20:30]  He and others, we don't know exactly who everyone was, but we know that both U.S. and Israeli intelligence were involved in the creation of this database called Main Core.
[00:20:40]  Which again is this list of domestic dissidents.
[00:20:43]  But it was directly tied to sort of these Contra support efforts in the sense that it was tied up with these continuity of government protocols or COG.
[00:20:52]  And so, as written at the time by these people that were also involved in the Iran Contra scandal, COG could be invoked through a vaguely defined national emergency.
[00:21:04]  And this, in terms of what this emergency could have been, was mass.
[00:21:11]  Nonviolent demonstrations against a military intervention abroad by the U.S. military.
[00:21:16]  So the concern at the time was that the U.S. military was going to intervene in Nicaragua and there would be mass peaceful, but mass unrest over it in terms of anti war demonstrations and all of that.
[00:21:28]  Yes, so they wanted a way to get around that.
[00:21:31]  So this domestic dissidents list had a list of perceived unfriendlies.
[00:21:36]  And you could be placed on this list for any number of infractions, some of which were really minor, like not paying your taxes one year.
[00:21:44]  Being seen at a previous anti war demonstration, having a history of activism, it didn't necessitate any sort of lawless behavior at all.
[00:21:54]  Just behavior that was led by this faction within the national security state at the time that arguably runs the national security state now 100%.
[00:22:07]  They viewed these people as a threat.
[00:22:09]  So there was an effort to classify Americans this way, decide who was subversive.
[00:22:15]  And who would be a threat to certain policy agendas or foreign policy agendas during this national emergency?
[00:22:25]  There are actually plans inside of it for rounding up civilians who are doing it.
[00:22:29]  Yeah, based on this database.
[00:22:30]  And this is something that actually goes back to the Vietnam War.
[00:22:33]  So the antecedent for this is really the Phoenix program in Vietnam.
[00:22:37]  So, but it, which was a domestic, basically, you know, a war of terror against civilians in Vietnam.
[00:22:46]  Who were perceived as being allied with the Viet Cong, but it wasn't actually based on any real intelligence.
[00:22:53]  And its successor, which was also CIA sponsored, which is Operation Condor in Latin America, as someone that lives in Chile and having heard a lot of stories from people, basically, there are cases where a lady didn't like her neighbor and she claimed she was communist, and then the neighbor was disappeared, even though there was no evidence she was actually communist.
[00:23:15]  You know what I mean?
[00:23:16]  So, a lot of these programs like Phoenix and Condor disappeared.

=== False Flags and Domestic Terror (10:27) ===

[00:23:21]  People under metrics like that, meaning like no actual evidence, just suspicion, anyway.
[00:23:29]  Yeah.
[00:23:29]  Yeah.
[00:23:30]  So, anyway, that's the same apparatus that produced those.
[00:23:35]  You can see the connection between those and then what was being developed covertly by this group, the enterprise of Iran Contra fame, under the guise of continuity of government protocols.
[00:23:49]  And according to reporting for the Miami Herald, there was basically a parallel shadow government.
[00:23:54]  That was involved in this and involved people that weren't in government at the time.
[00:23:59]  Some of the names they cite will be familiar to people Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who, of course, come into government later under the Bushes, right?
[00:24:09]  Well, at least Cheney does.
[00:24:11]  He's, you know, Secretary of Defense under Bush Sr., and then Vice President under George W. Bush, at which point Rumsfeld is Secretary of Defense.
[00:24:19]  I think under Bush Sr., Rumsfeld was a big pharma executive at Gilead.
[00:24:24]  That's interesting.
[00:24:26]  Yes.
[00:24:26]  And he'd already been Secretary of Defense for Ford.
[00:24:29]  Under Ford, yes.
[00:24:31]  So he's always.
[00:24:32]  He's one of the youngest and one of the oldest defense secretaries.
[00:24:34]  Yeah, he's a revolving door defense big pharma guy, which is actually more common than a lot of people would think.
[00:24:40]  But it explains a lot of the past two years when you think about it.
[00:24:44]  But anyway, not to get too off topic.
[00:24:47]  So basically, main core has developed in Iran Contra.
[00:24:50]  So there were attempts by people like Jack Brooks, who was a senator, to sort of bring this to light during a hearing about Iran Contra.
[00:24:58]  And he was citing the Miami Herald article I just mentioned that is practically impossible to find today.
[00:25:05]  And.
[00:25:07]  The line of questioning was completely shut down.
[00:25:09]  So, the main core itself should have been shut down and was not.
[00:25:13]  When 9 11 happened, it was seen running on White House computers.
[00:25:17]  Ostensibly, COG was activated during that period of time.
[00:25:21]  How far it actually went, no one really knows, of course, at least in the public sphere.
[00:25:26]  People at the White House, I'm sure, know, but they're not talking about it.
[00:25:30]  And as far as I know, the last reporting that was mainstream or at least mainstream adjacent took place in 2008.
[00:25:37]  A piece from Chris Ketchum and a piece from Tim Shorok.
[00:25:40]  They were both published that year about Maine Corps.
[00:25:42]  And based on their interviews, Maine Corps still existed at that time and had about 6 million Americans on it.
[00:25:48]  So at that point, it's most likely from 2008 to now, since there's been no uproar about it, it still exists today and is likely much larger than it was then, than 6 million Americans.
[00:26:02]  And so what we've seen emerge since those reports are things like the Biden administration's war on domestic terror.
[00:26:10]  Though the antecedents to that took place in the Trump administration, you had William Barr, as Attorney General, basically create a pre crime system within the Department of Justice that goes by the acronym DEEP, which, sorry, I can't remember exactly what it stands for.
[00:26:25]  It's a disrupt and early engagement program, something like that.
[00:26:30]  Yeah.
[00:26:31]  And it's already been used.
[00:26:32]  And it's basically about trying to arrest people based on their social media posts.
[00:26:40]  So, if they think you're going to commit a violent crime based on your social media posts, they'll arrest you before, you know.
[00:26:48]  So, anyway, the minority report kind of presumes.
[00:26:51]  Yeah.
[00:26:51]  So, I mean, the arrests they've made on it so far are actually kind of justifiable.
[00:26:56]  You have to understand this in the larger context.
[00:26:58]  So, when discussing this topic, I like to bring up how Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, in the same time that William Barr was launching this, were heavily lobbying Trump to create a new.
[00:27:11]  Entity within the government called HARPA, which would be a DARPA for health, right?
[00:27:16]  A health DARPA.
[00:27:18]  And the flagship program of this, as designed by former DARPA directors, including the guy Jeffrey Ling that ran the biotech office at DARPA, or one of them, was the abbreviation Safe Homes.
[00:27:32]  Too long of an acronym for me to remember by heart, sorry.
[00:27:35]  But it's basically about data mining social media posts with AI and using that AI to analyze those posts that you.
[00:27:44]  Freely make on social media platforms to analyze whether or not you are showing early psych neuropsychiatric warning signs that you may be violent at some point in the future.
[00:27:55]  Yeah.
[00:27:56]  So it wasn't created under Trump, but it was created under Biden under a totally different pretext.
[00:28:00]  It's called ARPA H.
[00:28:01]  They moved the H to the end, but it's the same people, same architects, same program, same everything.
[00:28:08]  But Biden pitched it as this is going to cure cancer.
[00:28:11]  But that's not what this program's about at all.
[00:28:13]  And it's housed under the NIH now, which, of course, we know after COVID 19 is just full of great people who'd never do anything wrong.
[00:28:20]  Right.
[00:28:21]  Absolutely.
[00:28:23]  Well, let's talk about this domestic terror push.
[00:28:27]  Because to get legislation and to get these programs fully on board.
[00:28:32]  The Biden administration, with where they're coming from, one of the things that came up was that they were discussing internally the ability to basically block access to the web for certain people.
[00:28:48]  I found this interesting and it dovetails with something.
[00:28:52]  I think that you were onto something like this when you said basically what they did with Stuxnet.
[00:28:57]  In Iran, is something that they were going to be able to do for someone like you or I who was going against the grain in terms of reporting, and that they would just confuse our communications with the web?
[00:29:09]  Yeah, I mean, they could easily do that.
[00:29:12]  I think reporting I did at the end of 2020 that's been proven right over time is that GCHQ teamed up with some of the other Five Guys, Five Guys, sorry, that's a fast food thing, the Five Eyes Intelligence Agency, sorry.
[00:29:28]  Yeah, so, and basically their goal was, as I wrote in the article, to declare war on independent media, but it was basically saying that they would like scramble our hard drives and, you know, compromise our systems.
[00:29:40]  Yeah, that was the plan.
[00:29:41]  It was reported on in the Telegraph originally.
[00:29:44]  And now it's come out just in the past couple of weeks that the UK government, in targeting people that didn't toe the line on COVID 19, that had sizable platforms that they had involved their counterterrorism teams.
[00:29:58]  In deciding how to engage them.
[00:30:02]  Okay, so there's the real crossover.
[00:30:04]  If you're looking at that and you say, well, what's their next step with this?
[00:30:10]  How do you think that would play out?
[00:30:12]  Let's say another emergency occurs and then they introduce a series of legislative steps that say, you know, first time around people questioned this and people died.
[00:30:22]  So, you know what?
[00:30:22]  You're not going to be able to question.
[00:30:25]  Okay, so I, you know, there'll probably be a false flag of some type.
[00:30:29]  At some point.
[00:30:30]  And I think a lot of people that watch this kind of stuff are anticipating that, but we don't know when it's going to happen or what it's going to look like.
[00:30:36]  But there are policy agendas that they want to push through that would not be accepted right now.
[00:30:41]  And they need some sort of pretext to have those accepted.
[00:30:44]  Pearl Harbor style event?
[00:30:46]  Yeah.
[00:30:47]  Well, actually, Bill Barr, before the El Paso shooting, basically said we need a galvanizing event to get people behind the end of encrypted communications, meaning a government backdoor into Telegram, WhatsApp, and all of these things.
[00:31:01]  Which, anyway, I don't really think are really that secure anyway, but they want an end to any sort of encryption.
[00:31:07]  They want a backdoor into all of it, which you're actually seeing happen right now with the UK's online safety bill, as it's called, which would give that backdoor to the UK government, which then would share it with all its Five Eye partners.
[00:31:20]  But this is something that's been going on, a push that's been going on for a very long time to end encryption and also a policy that dates back to the Obama administration.
[00:31:32]  Which they called the driver's license for the internet, which is where you have to have your internet access basically tied to your government issued ID so that every website you visit, everything else is tied to your government issued ID.
[00:31:47]  And subsequently, in the system as it's being built right now, your digital ID will decide what information you can and can't access and will also surveil everything you post, visit, and consume online.
[00:31:59]  And this is actually in policy papers from the WEF also in 2018.
[00:32:04]  They say it's not just about where you can and can't go, which, of course, we saw a lot in the COVID era with vaccine passports, this effort to sort of segue us into this system.
[00:32:13]  But they also say in that same 2018 policy paper that it's not just about where you can and can't go, it's about You know, what information you can and cannot access.
[00:32:21]  So, your telecommunications access and your internet access, they want tied to a government ID.
[00:32:26]  And this, again, is advancing probably faster in the UK right now than anywhere else.
[00:32:31]  And they've also been pitching the same thing for a while, which is interesting because, you know, in the UK, they've been very resistant to these identity programs for a long time.
[00:32:39]  The biggest champion of them, of course, is Tony Blair.
[00:32:43]  And he's, you know, been very active the past few years in promoting digital ID as a way to save all the ills.
[00:32:51]  And now the, The migration, illegal migration issues in England and in the broader UK, since they're at levels much higher than previous years.
[00:33:01]  Again, the digital ID or some sort of government ID, national ID system is being pushed really hard.
[00:33:07]  And then you have the online safety bill and related efforts to sort of drive a lot of these policies home.
[00:33:14]  But I think in the US, you'll see some sort of, you know, just imagine a domestic terror event.
[00:33:21]  It's blamed on, I don't know.
[00:33:22]  He was radicalized by Kanye West or Elon Musk's Twitter with its all dangerous free speech, blah, blah, blah.
[00:33:28]  And now we can't have anonymous people posting online, which is interestingly, people like Jordan Peterson are arguing this now.
[00:33:36]  You can't be anonymous online anymore.
[00:33:38]  I saw that.
[00:33:39]  Yeah, that's a weird position for him to take.
[00:33:40]  Yeah, after he starts hanging out with Netanyahu.
[00:33:43]  I just don't know.
[00:33:47]  That's a weird one.

=== Front Companies and Iran Contra (06:30) ===

[00:33:48]  Netanyahu oversaw a policy in Israel that began in 2012 where they basically start using.
[00:33:56]  Tech companies as front companies for operations that Mossad and Unit 8200, their NSA equivalent, used to do in house.
[00:34:04]  It's now an admitted policy.
[00:34:05]  It was admitted in 2019 by Globes Israel.
[00:34:09]  I think it's Globes.
[00:34:10]  It might be Calculus Tech.
[00:34:12]  One of the mainstream Israeli media outlets reported that they had this policy of basically creating a bunch of front companies and technology that they use for this kind of stuff.
[00:34:24]  And if you know the history of this kind of stuff, you know.
[00:34:28]  Not just Promise, but stuff like Converse Infosys, which is now Varrant Inc., and the NSA contracted them to build back doors into all of the social media companies for the NSA.
[00:34:39]  But, you know, they're an Israeli company, so they probably shared it with Israel, too.
[00:34:43]  You know, there's a lot of very interesting, interesting.
[00:34:46]  That's like a promise.
[00:34:48]  Well, yeah.
[00:34:50]  I think Israel, through Promise, learned how useful that type of tactic was and how much power it afforded them and repeated it on numerous occasions since then.
[00:35:00]  Take me back.
[00:35:01]  That's really interesting.
[00:35:03]  Take me back to Maxwell's, Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine's dad, and his involvement with stealing Promise back in the 80s.
[00:35:14]  So he wasn't necessarily involved with stealing Promise.
[00:35:16]  What he was basically doing was he was the salesman chosen by Rafi Aitan, who was the mastermind of the theft of the Promise software, at least on the Israeli side.
[00:35:28]  And so Rafi Aitan tried to use his accomplice.
[00:35:32]  On the US side, a man named Earl Bryan to market Promise after it was stolen.
[00:35:38]  So, you know, it's stolen.
[00:35:39]  Rafi Aitan uses Ari bin Manasha to contact a programmer in California who's Israeli American to install a backdoor into the Promise software so that any system that Promise, this compromised version of Promise, is installed on, will have a backdoor that allows Israeli intelligence the ability to access those systems and see what's being done on them and what they contain in real time.
[00:36:04]  So Earl Bryan was not very successful in a lot of his sales ventures.
[00:36:10]  So, Rafi Aitan then contacted Robert Maxwell.
[00:36:13]  And Robert Maxwell already had a series of front companies, many of which were involved in software that he used either as shell companies for his business empire and the suspect finances that that involved.
[00:36:27]  And then, you know, some of the stuff he was involved with on the Israeli intelligence side as well.
[00:36:31]  And he ended up using a lot of these companies to market Promise, not just the United States, but around the world.
[00:36:38]  When you compare it to how the CIA backdoored version of Promise fared, I mean, the.
[00:36:43]  Robert Maxwell just totally outdid them in sales by, like, I think a factor of like eight or 10 or something, like really high, you know, very significant.
[00:36:51]  So, through that, but his main focus, oddly enough, was on security agencies, intelligence agencies, mostly around the world.
[00:36:59]  But in the case of the US, it wasn't so much intelligence agencies as it was government labs that were working on the nuclear program.
[00:37:07]  So, this was Los Alamos and Sandia specifically that he sold this software to, but it was difficult for him to access because obviously they have a lot of.
[00:37:16]  Firewalls to try and prevent suspect software from being sold to them.
[00:37:21]  And the way he was able to bypass these firewalls, it started with Henry Kissinger, who was basically the person that told Robert Maxwell who he needed to connect with in order to sell this software to these labs.
[00:37:34]  So, straight off, you can pretty easily charge Kissinger with treason just for that.
[00:37:39]  But of course, nothing will happen to Henry Kissinger.
[00:37:42]  I'm sure he'll, well, you know, we'll see if he dies sooner rather than later.
[00:37:45]  Maybe he'll live for 200 years.
[00:37:47]  Let's hope not.
[00:37:50]  He's already 100, isn't he?
[00:37:52]  He's close.
[00:37:53]  He's close.
[00:37:55]  I know.
[00:37:57]  Anyway.
[00:37:59]  Yeah, so I'm unfortunately.
[00:38:02]  Oh, John Tower is the guy that Kissinger told Maxwell to connect with because Tower was a senator from Texas.
[00:38:10]  He was leaving his Senate position.
[00:38:12]  He used to be head of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
[00:38:14]  He's the Tower.
[00:38:15]  He had a lot of connections.
[00:38:16]  He was ostensibly.
[00:38:19]  Investigating Iran Contra, what do you know?
[00:38:22]  And he gets bought out by Mossad and gets on the Mossad payroll through Maxwell and opens the doors for Maxwell to Sandia and Los Alamos.
[00:38:31]  And interestingly, Towers and Maxwell die the same year in 1991, the same year that Danny Casalero dies and one of his main sources, Alan Standorf, dies.
[00:38:41]  And also the year that a bunch of the Iran Contra criminals were pardoned.
[00:38:46]  And when William Barr put into motion the Nicholas Bua report that claimed that the Promised software theft was just a bunch of made up hooey when it was actually not.
[00:38:54]  So, a big year for cover ups, 1991.
[00:38:57]  So, even Elliot Richardson was on the side of bringing out the whole scandal.
[00:39:03]  And that's interesting.
[00:39:05]  Yeah, there were a few people actually in the national security state who were one of whom whose name I can't remember, but Bill Hamilton of InSlaw told me on numerous occasions that he was going to assist them in getting this pushed up a pretty high level.
[00:39:18]  And then he died rather suspiciously.
[00:39:21]  A week or two after making those claims.
[00:39:24]  So the promise has quite the body count, but so does Iran Contra.
[00:39:28]  And that's why I really think it's a very well supported argument that Iran Contra and Promise are really the same thing.
[00:39:37]  Because if you read works like The Last Circle by Sherry Seymour, you see that drug cartel connection to Promise in the Cabazon Reservation and all of this.
[00:39:45]  And I mean, the same stuff is there.
[00:39:47]  Those same cartels and all of that, it's all tied up with Iran Contra as well, which was obviously involved with drug and arms trafficking to a significant degree and involved a lot of these same players.
[00:39:58]  And when you see things like Maine Corps and you see Promise being used by the people at the center of the enterprise of Iran Contra to create this domestic dissident program or, you know, labeling program, I guess, in favor of their Contra support efforts, you know, it's pretty clear that it's the same thing.

=== Massive Psyop Against Adversaries (04:48) ===

[00:40:19]  So basically, these people at the center of the enterprise have never gone away.
[00:40:23]  They've really taken over.
[00:40:24]  So I open with a quote, volume one of my book, with a quote from one of the Iran Contra whistleblowers.
[00:40:31]  Named Bruce Hemmings, who basically says, you know, if this is the enterprise, there are people in government and out of government.
[00:40:38]  And if you let them, they'll take over the entire national security state, they'll take over the entire government in the world, and they'll eliminate free speech.
[00:40:46]  And they hate democracy, they hate the Constitution, and they just care about expanding their money and power.
[00:40:52]  And I mean, that's where we are.
[00:40:54]  And that's who's in charge.
[00:40:56]  Interesting.
[00:40:57]  Right.
[00:40:58]  When I think about that, too, it reminds me that if you go into Iran Contra, You're dealing with a lot of COG people.
[00:41:07]  Oh, yeah, totally.
[00:41:09]  Yeah.
[00:41:09]  I mean, these are people that have no interest, like that whistleblower Bruce Hemings argued.
[00:41:14]  You know, these are not people that care about America or American values.
[00:41:18]  They don't have any national allegiance.
[00:41:20]  Their allegiance is to expanding their own money and power.
[00:41:23]  They're really a lot more like organized crime than they are, you know, our guys.
[00:41:29]  You know what I mean?
[00:41:30]  Yeah.
[00:41:31]  Because that's essentially how they operate.
[00:41:33]  And so, what I try and show in the book is that organized crime and You know, these particular factions in our intelligence agency that at this point in history have completely taken them over, you know, they're essentially fused.
[00:41:44]  They are really one in the same and they operate, you know, in tandem.
[00:41:50]  And it's very easy to see when you follow it throughout the years and the different tactics they've used to not just maintain their power, but expand it.
[00:41:58]  And it's very, I mean, it's just very disturbing, but I think it makes a lot of sense about how we got to this point because, you know, for so long, generation after generation of Americans have been propagandized to believe that the systems work.
[00:42:11]  Right.
[00:42:11]  But they obviously don't.
[00:42:13]  And there's obviously a two tiered system.
[00:42:17]  And things are out of control.
[00:42:20]  And it's just getting worse.
[00:42:21]  And a lot of things just don't add up.
[00:42:23]  So why is that?
[00:42:24]  Well, probably because what we're being told about how things work is a lie, ultimately.
[00:42:31]  Very interesting.
[00:42:32]  And that's true about the two sides also, because it's not a Republican Democrat issue at all.
[00:42:38]  One thing I was curious about, I want to take you actually back in your book to the just.
[00:42:43]  Previous to the Kennedy assassination with the whole McCarthy era.
[00:42:47]  But one thing I want to ask you is if you look at the 60s and 70s, post Kennedy assassination, MLK assassination, all the researchers who are calling out the government predominantly are heavy left.
[00:43:02]  Peter Dale Scott, May Brussels.
[00:43:06]  And then something happens right around sort of the late 90s into the 2000s where the anti government, you know.
[00:43:15]  Pro democracy kind of thing moves into more of the right.
[00:43:19]  And they, the things that they're associated with oh, I love the Constitution and things of this nature.
[00:43:24]  I want free speech.
[00:43:25]  I want the Second Amendment.
[00:43:27]  You know, all of that stuff becomes what the government is against.
[00:43:31]  And those people who are now on the right become sort of the dissident group.
[00:43:36]  How does that switch take place from all your research?
[00:43:39]  You've gone through the decades on this.
[00:43:41]  Yeah.
[00:43:42]  Well, unfortunately, I haven't done enough about media and like group psychology in this period.
[00:43:46]  So I can only make like a few, I guess, rather superficial observations about it.
[00:43:50]  But I think what you're talking about, that effort to switch that around, became a major priority of the national security.
[00:43:56]  Security state and also the big banks, after you have the invasion of Iraq and the mass protests that demonstrated or that produced, as well as the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2008.
[00:44:06]  I think they wanted to find a way to neuter both of those movements.
[00:44:09]  And so they wanted to go after the political forces that sort of were seen as being behind that.
[00:44:15]  And so now you have the left, and even the big commentators for the left in that particular era, even people like Rachel Maddow, right?
[00:44:26]  Look how she's evolved over time and she's taken her audience.
[00:44:30]  Oh, her core audience through those changes with her, the gradual changes over the years.
[00:44:35]  But I mean, if you look at I don't know 2004 Rachel Maddow to 2020 Rachel Maddow, I the different it's like night and day, yeah, right.
[00:44:45]  But if you're going through the years and you're just watching her show every day over the years and you're a regular viewer, you don't realize that she's taken you, you know, from one end of the spectrum to the other, basically, where you're now a pro war cheerleader as long as Putin gets taken down or whatever, you know.
[00:45:00]  But I mean, that's basically what it's done, right?
[00:45:02]  So now, um You've had this, and I don't think it's just the left, right?

=== Chinagate and Capital Flight (08:05) ===

[00:45:07]  I think in the last 20 years, you've had basically this massive psyop where you have basically two main US empire adversaries.
[00:45:14]  You have Russia and China, and the left rabidly hates Russia, and the right rabidly hates China.
[00:45:21]  How convenient, isn't it?
[00:45:25]  And I think, you know, and I'm not going to defend either of those countries because when you're looking at something that's, you know, how the enterprise has expanded over the years, this is a transnational problem.
[00:45:37]  You're not going to find this concentrated in just the national leadership of country X, Y, and Z.
[00:45:42]  This is something that is very global.
[00:45:45]  And that's why when you look at something like COVID 19, you see these governments that are ostensible adversary states enacting the same biosecurity policies that don't actually have a scientific basis behind them, but do advance technocracy and advance digitalization of everything and control and different policies that are rather Orwellian.
[00:46:06]  Yeah.
[00:46:07]  You know, I mean, Russia and China have really advanced in those directions much faster than even the U.S. has.
[00:46:12]  Right.
[00:46:13]  Yeah.
[00:46:13]  Right.
[00:46:14]  Well, I remember Russia when the whole COVID thing came out, they're like, hey, we have the Sputnik vaccine.
[00:46:19]  You know, yeah.
[00:46:20]  And because, you know, there's people in independent media who are like, U.S. empire bad adversaries of U.S. good.
[00:46:26]  And so they're like, well, Sputnik must be great.
[00:46:28]  And then it's actually the same basically as AstraZeneca.
[00:46:31]  And the Russian government has collected essentially no data on adverse reactions and won't let you know how many Russians have died from Sputnik.
[00:46:41]  Apparently, the only data on Sputnik has really been collected in Argentina, as far as I'm aware.
[00:46:47]  Interesting.
[00:46:48]  Well, because it was used there along with other vaccines, and they do collect some data on it.
[00:46:53]  But Russia does not.
[00:46:55]  And the Gamalaya Center that produces Sputnik V has a lot of problems.
[00:46:59]  I would refer people to Riley Wagaman and his sub stack for more information on the Russian Sputnik V program.
[00:47:07]  It's very unsettling.
[00:47:09]  No, I think there needs to be a lot of.
[00:47:11]  Light on that.
[00:47:12]  It does, because I think that's a core thing in terms of how they respond.
[00:47:17]  And it's interesting too, though, because the West, as it were, has been after putting Russia in a box for a long time.
[00:47:27]  Sure.
[00:47:29]  Yeah, actually, it was really interesting to me in writing about a lot of the ongoings here in the 90s and what this, you know, the octopus, the enterprise was doing between the 80s and the 90s.
[00:47:40]  They had this, you know, for a long time, including in the 80s, they justified a lot of their crimes under the guise of fighting, combating communism.
[00:47:48]  Right.
[00:47:49]  But then in the 90s, they get associated with basically, you know, the mafia, organized crime in the Soviet Union, who are business partners of Robert Maxwell.
[00:48:02]  That's really where it sort of happened.
[00:48:04]  Right.
[00:48:04]  Like Semyon Mogilevich and some of these other guys.
[00:48:09]  And so you have that team up there, and a lot of these guys end up being put, having a lot of connections to the capital flight out of Russia after the Soviet Union collapse or to the oligarchs.
[00:48:20]  That were sort of created as Russia was rapidly privatized after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
[00:48:26]  And then you have a lot of weird players coming together.
[00:48:29]  Like you have the alleged co founder of the World Economic Forum with Klaus Schwab, Maurice Strong, teaming up with Mikhail Gorbachev.
[00:48:36]  And they make some center for like the green movement, which is basically the subversion of the actual environmental movement to turn it into like a heavily veiled branch of the eugenics movement, really.
[00:48:51]  Yes.
[00:48:52]  Yeah.
[00:48:52]  Oh, yeah.
[00:48:53]  So, you have Gorbachev there, and you have a lot of other really weird stuff going on in this period.
[00:48:57]  And then at the same time, you have a lot of the people that were also involved in Iran Contra being involved in the Clinton era scandal called China Gate, which was really about transferring very sensitive military technology in the United States to companies tied to the People Liberation Army of China.
[00:49:15]  And this was connected more often than not to companies that were run by princelings, which are basically the children of prominent Communist Party leaders in China.
[00:49:25]  That were very, very much capitalist.
[00:49:28]  Actually, one of the ones that I talk about in the book was so capitalist that his father, who was a big time guy in the Chinese Communist Party, disowned him for being too capitalist.
[00:49:38]  He was like, he's not my son.
[00:49:40]  But he was in charge of a major, a couple of really major state owned conglomerates in the 90s and was actually China's biggest arms dealer.
[00:49:51]  I'm not going to put money into the Clinton campaign in 96.
[00:49:55]  Yeah, well, you'll see in volume two that this actually revolves around a lot of what Jeffrey Epstein was doing at the White House in 94 and 95, which also coincides with Epstein and Leslie Wexner repurposing Southern Air Transport, the CIA airline involved with Iran Contra, repurposing it from the limited.
[00:50:11]  But now it's going from, instead of from Miami to Latin America, it's going from Columbus, Ohio, where Wexner is based, to Hong Kong and back.
[00:50:21]  Oh, isn't that interesting?
[00:50:23]  Yeah, at the same time that Epstein is meeting with Mark Middleton.
[00:50:28]  Who's at the center of Chinagate?
[00:50:31]  Wow.
[00:50:32]  Because Chinagate, I would say, is really a misnomer.
[00:50:34]  It should really be Riyadi Gate for the Riyadi family.
[00:50:38]  And if you look at the Riyadi family and a lot of the inner workings of Chinagate, it's really the same people that were behind the Clinton side of Iran Contra, people like Jackson Stevens, right?
[00:50:51]  Jackson Stevens and the Riyadis were business partners.
[00:50:54]  In the early 90s, the Riyadis tried to rescue the BCCI branch of Hong Kong.
[00:51:00]  And failed, and they tried to get the Chinese government, the PLA specifically, to help them rescue that.
[00:51:05]  And the Chinese declined, but then became business partners of the Riyadis in a separate venture and poured a lot of money into their conglomerate, the Lippo Group.
[00:51:15]  And because of the longstanding Riyadi Clinton family tie, that was sort of the pretext for how Chinagate began.
[00:51:23]  And Mark Middleton was, after he left the White House, on the payroll of the Riyadis.
[00:51:27]  And they're like a very common theme throughout that.
[00:51:30]  But they're not based in China, they're based in Indonesia, but they have a lot of key business holdings in China.
[00:51:37]  And beyond.
[00:51:37]  Clinton got the Chinese into the WTO, even with all the labor violations and everything.
[00:51:43]  But the way he justified that was by banning Chinese weapon sales.
[00:51:48]  Oh, interesting.
[00:51:49]  And the U.S. had been the biggest market for Chinese weapons at that time.
[00:51:54]  Previously, the biggest Chinese market was the Iran Iraq War.
[00:51:58]  And involved in that was Jeffrey Epstein's mentor, Douglas Leese.
[00:52:04]  That's interesting.
[00:52:04]  Specifically with Narenco, which is one of the Chinese weapons.
[00:52:09]  Conglomerates, and that later was accused of smuggling weapons into the United States after this Clinton era switch.
[00:52:18]  And you have Jeffrey Epstein with Southern Air Transport meeting with Mark Middleton.
[00:52:24]  Anyway, the case I make in the book is that it seems like they were smuggling weapons into urban areas, the same urban areas that Gary Webb noted were being sort of flooded with crack cocaine.
[00:52:33]  So that same network seemed to have also been flooding cheap Chinese weapons into these same communities to exacerbate gang violence.
[00:52:41]  So, Gary Well was reporting on the drug side of that.
[00:52:43]  This is the other side.
[00:52:45]  And you basically have Jeffrey Epstein and Leslie Wexner, who were tied up with Israeli intelligence, collaborating with the Clinton apparatus.
[00:52:55]  Wexner, we're talking Victoria's Secret.
[00:52:57]  Yes.
[00:52:58]  Which is Victoria's Secret, Lane Bryant, Limited, Limited 2, I think Abercrombie and Fitch, Bath Body Works, you know, about a third of the modern American mall, basically.
[00:53:11]  Right.
[00:53:11]  Exactly.

=== Roy Cohn and Blackmail Subtext (14:04) ===

[00:53:12]  Real mover and a shaker.
[00:53:14]  There's two characters in your book that you track so, so well Epstein and the other is Roy Cohn.
[00:53:23]  And so you're bringing through this information about Epstein.
[00:53:26]  When you track Roy Cohn, you have to go all the way back to the early 50s.
[00:53:30]  I think I actually go back to his childhood.
[00:53:33]  I go really far back on Roy Cohn because I think his parents are a very important vehicle for showing how power really works in America.
[00:53:42]  Yes.
[00:53:43]  Give us some of that.
[00:53:45]  Yeah, so Rykohn's father was Al Kohn.
[00:53:48]  He was a judge, but in order to get a judgeship at that time, you had to have money.
[00:53:54]  He didn't have money, and so he basically agreed to an arranged marriage with the ugly daughter of a very powerful Jewish banking family, the Marcus family.
[00:54:06]  And a few years after that union is consecrated, the bank of the Marcus family collapses due to fraud.
[00:54:16]  Because of the Marcus family, but the more people in the Marcus family, including Roy Cohn and his mother, Dora Marcus Cohn, blame anti Semitism for it.
[00:54:25]  And I point out in the book that there's no actual real argument for that.
[00:54:29]  And it's pretty clear that there was obviously fraud committed by Bernie Marcus, who was Roy's favorite uncle that was in charge of the bank at its collapse.
[00:54:40]  For example, he takes loads of files in a dump truck and lights them on fire behind an apartment complex.
[00:54:46]  Would you do that if you were innocent?
[00:54:47]  Like, it's not anti Semitism to be like, that doesn't make any sense.
[00:54:52]  Plus, most of the people that were blamed for collapsing the bank for anti Semitic reasons were German Jewish.
[00:54:59]  And the alleged allegation is that the German Jews, the Lehmans and the Loebs and these other banking families, the Warburgs, hated the Marcuses because they were Russian Jewish.
[00:55:09]  So, I don't know.
[00:55:12]  But it doesn't make any sense because Bernard Marcus gets pardoned by a Lehman and then one of the Lehmans tries to argue for his release and stuff early and all this stuff.
[00:55:22]  So, why would they do that if they hated them?
[00:55:23]  It doesn't make any sense.
[00:55:24]  Excellent point.
[00:55:25]  Yeah.
[00:55:26]  And then the Warburgs host a celebratory dinner for Albert Cohn and a.
[00:55:31]  Why would they do that if they hated that family so much?
[00:55:33]  It doesn't really make any sense.
[00:55:34]  But anyway, this allegedly, according to the Marcus family and Roy Cohn's cousins, colors Roy's anti establishment views.
[00:55:42]  But I would really argue more that, you know, Bernie Marcus felt like he was above the law and the law shouldn't apply to him.
[00:55:48]  And in the case of Roy Cohn, you see that theme throughout his life as well.
[00:55:52]  And the key reason for that is probably his upbringing to an extent by Dora Marcus that gave him whatever he wanted and him spending a lot of time with his favorite uncle, Bernie.
[00:56:02]  Albert Cohn wasn't a big figure really in Roy Cohn's life.
[00:56:06]  But the fact that he was a judge, Roy Cohn milked that very much.
[00:56:10]  So from a very young age, Roy Cohn was not interested in normal childhood stuff.
[00:56:15]  He was interested in power.
[00:56:17]  And it's very bizarre to research and write about because, you know, at his like little kid parties, he didn't want other kids.
[00:56:24]  He wanted like powerful people in the city to come to his birthday party and stuff.
[00:56:31]  Well, he became the original sort of swamp creature.
[00:56:35]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:56:36]  But he did that by, you know, first being counsel to McCarthy during the McCarthy hearings.
[00:56:41]  He was on an ascendancy for political office and all other sorts of stuff.
[00:56:46]  And only because he went too far with McCarthy during the McCarthy hearings did he have to retreat and basically become a mob lawyer.
[00:56:55]  But he had a lot more influence than just that, obviously.
[00:56:58]  I mean, one of his most famous proteges is Donald Trump.
[00:57:01]  So obviously he had a lot of influence, you know, far beyond.
[00:57:04]  No question.
[00:57:05]  You know, How does Cohn get into trouble with the Kennedys?
[00:57:13]  So, a lot of that was during the McCarthy era, at least allegedly.
[00:57:16]  So, you had Bobby Kennedy and Roy Cohn fighting to be counsel to Joseph McCarthy during the McCarthy hearings, and Roy Cohn wins allegedly because of the interjection of J. Edgar Hoover into the situation, who, of course, hates Bobby Kennedy and has a very odd, difficult to explain relationship with Roy Cohn that even baffles Roy Cohn's official biographers.
[00:57:39]  But as I point out in the book, that's probably because they don't really want to get into the truth of that relationship because it's very insane and also pretty salacious.
[00:57:47]  So, well, we know that Cohen is engaged and also like Callboy.
[00:57:52]  Yeah.
[00:57:52]  So basically, that relationship goes back to sex blackmail stuff.
[00:57:58]  J. Edgar Hoover was compromised via sexual blackmail by organized crime back in the 30s when they photographed him engaged in oral sex with his longtime deputy, Clyde Polson.
[00:58:09]  And that.
[00:58:10]  Photograph eventually made its way into the hands of James Jesus Angleton, the first counter intel chief of the CIA.
[00:58:16]  So, obviously, Hoover was influenced by certain people, and there's a reason he never went after organized crime as FBI director.
[00:58:26]  He wouldn't even use the term.
[00:58:28]  No, not until I think the early 70s when he was about to step down.
[00:58:32]  Incredible.
[00:58:34]  So, that's how it was able to basically take over corporate America and all other sorts of stuff.
[00:58:40]  And our intelligence services because the top law enforcement official was blackmailed by the mob and then later by its affiliates in the CIA.
[00:58:48]  Right.
[00:58:49]  So he was entrapped and then, you know, realizing the power of blackmail as a matter of record now, accumulates blackmail files on friend and foe alike and just filled his office with blackmail files on people.
[00:59:01]  And part of this blackmail was accrued through a sexual blackmail operation that, you know, he wasn't necessarily running, but, you know, felt like he could attend because his secrets were already out, right?
[00:59:13]  And so, you know, other people that were seen in being involved with that particular operation was Louis Rosenstiel.
[00:59:20]  Who, as I note in the book, is very, in a very documented way, has a very odd relationship with J. Edgar Hoover and also Roy Cohn and organized crime as well.
[00:59:31]  He's a liquor baron of his era, runs Shinley Industries, which later gets folded into Rapid American and some other companies.
[00:59:39]  And Roy Cohn is also in that mix.
[00:59:43]  Roy Cohn admitted to an NYPD detective his involvement in these activities, but claimed that he had been entrapped, and so that's why he participated.
[00:59:52]  So it doesn't look like he or Hoover were like, you know, masterminding this.
[00:59:56]  They were sort of entrapped and then decided to play along because why not?
[01:00:02]  You know, the Kennedys also came out of liquor business as well.
[01:00:05]  It's just, this is a yes, with organized crime connections with Joe P. Kennedy.
[01:00:09]  Yeah, most definitely.
[01:00:11]  But obviously, what you see with Bobby Kennedy and John F. Kennedy is that they're not willing to go as far as some people in the national security state wanted to go for particular things.
[01:00:22]  And that's what got them into trouble.
[01:00:24]  Mm hmm.
[01:00:24]  Yeah, that's interesting.
[01:00:25]  I want to go to that because Cohn, it's an ongoing thing that he has problems with the Kennedys.
[01:00:31]  So he really becomes afraid when they're going to be in power.
[01:00:34]  And you're pointing out this section in the book.
[01:00:36]  Yeah.
[01:00:36]  That's very intriguing.
[01:00:37]  What's going on there?
[01:00:40]  So basically, he was really worried about first Bobby Kennedy being vice president, and then Bobby Kennedy is an attorney general under his brother.
[01:00:48]  And this also freaks him out.
[01:00:50]  And so there are major efforts in terms of trials by the Justice Department to go after Roy Cohn.
[01:00:56]  I think it's five different trials.
[01:00:58]  And through amazing feet after amazing feet, he's found not guilty.
[01:01:03]  But that's after like mistrials and jurors' family members dying, and like all the sorts of crazy stuff happens.
[01:01:10]  His lawyer has a heart attack, and he becomes his own lawyer and gives this crazy speech about how he loves America and cries.
[01:01:17]  I mean, like all this crazy stuff goes on at these trials, and he wiggles out of it.
[01:01:23]  And by the end of it, he starts looking more like a victim of a witch hunt after he was, you know, the witch hunter.
[01:01:30]  In the McCarthy era, which of course, as I mentioned earlier, Cohen went too far because he tried to blackmail the army, which didn't go well.
[01:01:39]  Specifically, when you have Eisenhower being president and he's an army guy and trying to blackmail the army, it's like, you know, a bad move.
[01:01:45]  But it was arguably a crime of passion because this was, you know, he was trying to protect David Shine, who was his best friend and allegedly a little more than that.
[01:01:57]  Who really knows?
[01:01:59]  But he was going to be sent overseas to fight.
[01:02:02]  And I guess the Korean War.
[01:02:03]  And in order to try and stop that, he tried to blackmail the army to keep shine in the United States and out of harm's way.
[01:02:10]  And it brought him down and brought McCarthy down and, you know, ended the Red Scare.
[01:02:16]  That is, well, it's One Nation Under Blackmail.
[01:02:18]  It's the name of your book.
[01:02:20]  They're living up to the title here.
[01:02:22]  Yeah, but a lot of these big events that people actually do learn about in U.S. history, you know, they learn the fairytale version, but the more you dig into them, you find that blackmail is a major subtext.
[01:02:32]  Even with Watergate, as I Point out in the book, there was like a call girl ring operating in the Watergate apartments, and the break ins are difficult to explain.
[01:02:40]  Some of the evidence found there suggests they were breaking into this, trying to.
[01:02:44]  They had a key to a safe in a particular lady's office at the Watergate who wouldn't have made any sense to burgle if you're trying to do it for political reasons.
[01:02:52]  And she was apparently running involved in a call girl ring that was tied to organized crime in DC and all their sorts of crazy stuff and went into the Nixon administration.
[01:03:01]  And just, you know, it's mad, maddening stuff.
[01:03:06]  It's incredible.
[01:03:07]  Yeah.
[01:03:08]  I want to actually ask you about Watergate, but before we go there, in this, The Kennedy assassination piece, since you have the CIA organized crime nexus in there, when we get to the JFK assassination, you have all these characters like Jack Ruby who are connected to both, who show up right in the middle and part of it.
[01:03:28]  And Jack Ruby also, or Rubenstein's his real name, he actually had a lot of ties to organized crime right in Texas, which brings him into connection a lot with the Moody family, who are sort of insurance magnates.
[01:03:39]  And one of the relatives of the Moody family, Searn Moody Jr., is very Close to Roy Cone, and apparently it seems to be involved in some sort of weird stuff with minor boys.
[01:03:51]  Little boys of the night, he would offer to guests at his ranch.
[01:03:55]  That's a direct quote from one of his best friends and Cone's best friends, who has the most hilarious name in the world.
[01:04:00]  I didn't include him in the book, but he's like Apocrypha for those that are into my book, I guess.
[01:04:07]  His name is Herb Smokler, Dr. Herb Smokler.
[01:04:12]  That's his real name.
[01:04:14]  If you read Citizen Cone, Which is one of the best regarded biographies of Roy Cohn.
[01:04:19]  There's not many of them by Nicholas von Hoffman.
[01:04:22]  You'll find a few herb smoker anecdotes about that, and they're all very disturbing.
[01:04:27]  Wow.
[01:04:27]  He's got that whole mentality into Studio 54 with them as well.
[01:04:32]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:04:33]  I have a lot of questions about Studio 54.
[01:04:35]  When I was writing the book, I remembered reading an article years ago about how one of the owners of Studio 54, because Roy Cohn was the lawyer for Studio 54, right?
[01:04:44]  One of the owners allegedly had CIA links, but then when I was writing the book, I couldn't.
[01:04:48]  Find it, so I didn't source it.
[01:04:50]  But I definitely would like to look at that because I mean, if you look at well, actually, my partner Johnny Bedmore is about to put out a series about how nightclub, the Profimo affair, which I cover in the book, a lot of that was precipitated by organized crime taking over nightclubs in Britain, and that this is sort of where intelligence was operating at the time.
[01:05:11]  And that a lot of the previous nightclub owners died under very suspicious circumstances in a You know, in the same way, girl after woman after woman, person at all these nightclub owners die the same way in a rather short period of time in a very specific location.
[01:05:29]  And then this team up of organized crime intelligence takes over, and what develops out of that is the Perfumo affair.
[01:05:35]  So it's very possible that using nightclubs for these purposes, you know, continued, was replicated in other countries.
[01:05:43]  And it would be not that surprising when you see Cohn's involvement and his history, you know, if Studio 54 was used for that.
[01:05:49]  Because I think I note in the book that he, Coney, attempted to blackmail, I think Hamilton Jordan, who was Jimmy Carter's chief of staff, based on the allegation that he had been seen using cocaine at Studio 54.
[01:06:03]  So, you know, it's very possible that it was used for all sorts of intelligence gathering.
[01:06:08]  That really makes sense.
[01:06:10]  Well, Ruby's a nightclub owner as well.
[01:06:13]  He's running all the strip clubs there in Dallas.
[01:06:17]  Did you find anything?
[01:06:18]  There's so much, you know, that's out there on the Kennedy assassination.
[01:06:23]  Did you find anything?
[01:06:24]  I didn't include the Kennedy assassination in the book or 9 11 in the book, right?
[01:06:28]  Because then I'd be at four volumes.
[01:06:30]  I mean, there's a reason, you know, people have written entire books just about aspects of the Kennedy assassination.
[01:06:37]  So, I mean, that's a field unto itself.
[01:06:39]  So, I would refer people to things like JFK in The Unspeakable, David Talbot's work.
[01:06:44]  I mean, there's lots of really great Kennedy researchers out there.
[01:06:48]  If you're interested in getting into the nuts and bolts of that.
[01:06:51]  Oh, no, I'm just going to say someone who's such an expert at the CIA mafia nexus, the way that you are, though, it's an interesting thing to get your take on it.
[01:07:01]  Okay.
[01:07:02]  So, the people I'm writing about in the book were definitely involved in the Kennedy assassination.
[01:07:06]  But what I'm trying to do is sort of set that up for people to do.
[01:07:10]  Further exploration.
[01:07:11]  So, I talk about people like Louis Mortimer Bloomfield and his connections and Kermendix.

=== Howard Hughes and Watergate (07:31) ===

[01:07:17]  Yes.
[01:07:18]  You know, entities like that are mentioned in my book.
[01:07:20]  And I mentioned that there's a Kennedy assassination tie there.
[01:07:24]  I mentioned the Profumo affair and how this was an effort to get Kennedy before he was even in office.
[01:07:29]  And of course, it falls apart.
[01:07:31]  And, you know, he's targeted by similar forces, you know, a few years later.
[01:07:37]  And that time it works, right?
[01:07:40]  But the first time was sexual blackmail by the same people that brought down the UK government, not that.
[01:07:45]  You know, shortly beforehand, right?
[01:07:51]  And it's very wild stuff.
[01:07:53]  You know, and this is just the 60s.
[01:07:55]  I mean, if this stuff was going on then, I mean, just think about what it's like now.
[01:07:59]  It's just mental.
[01:08:01]  But we could say all of that allows Nixon to get in, in essence, because you assassinate two Kennedys and the field is wide open.
[01:08:10]  And Nixon had cultivated a lot of power, people with influence and power.
[01:08:15]  You know, cultivated in some sense the Dallas brothers.
[01:08:17]  Allegedly, he had blackmail over the Dallas brothers, and this is sort of what allowed him to get into power.
[01:08:24]  And there's, you know, there's a lot of power plays with Nixon.
[01:08:27]  Yeah.
[01:08:28]  I mean, it's just a really crazy time in history.
[01:08:32]  And of course, you have the ascendancy there of none other than Henry Kissinger with Nixon.
[01:08:38]  And together they, you know, do a lot of damage, reorganize the globe, basically.
[01:08:45]  Yeah.
[01:08:45]  Mm hmm.
[01:08:46]  But when you see when we get into Nixon, we come into another deep event, which is the Watergate piece.
[01:08:53]  And you find all kinds of interesting pieces around Watergate.
[01:08:57]  And of course, the official story around Watergate doesn't make any sense.
[01:09:02]  And we also have the continuity of government players of that period.
[01:09:08]  John Dean was one of them.
[01:09:09]  He had actually worked for emergency planning.
[01:09:12]  So you have, again, that thread of COG people even in Watergate.
[01:09:19]  Yeah, so again, the official story of Watergate, I think, is just really a bunch of hooey.
[01:09:24]  You have a much deeper story going on here, and there's a lot of things that don't make sense.
[01:09:28]  You have conflicting accounts among the people that were caught burglaring the Watergate apartments, and their stories don't really add up.
[01:09:38]  Even Bob Woodward and their sources and who Deep Throat was, I mean, there's just a lot of inconsistencies with the story.
[01:09:44]  So, if you actually bother to investigate it objectively, you're going to find right away that the official story has a lot of holes in it, which is.
[01:09:53]  You know, fair to say for a lot of, you know, pretty much most events in American history that are noteworthy.
[01:10:00]  So, what you have here is really an effort to bring down the Nixon administration, but there's a lot of subtext to it, and it's a lot more complicated, I think, than a lot of people really realize.
[01:10:11]  Like I mentioned earlier, there was this call girl element, and some of the people involved in that not only had organized crime ties, but they had connections to very prominent people in the Nixon administration.
[01:10:21]  And one of the, I forget his name, one of the masterminds, apparently, allegedly, Of that call ring was very tied up with a particular member of the Nixon administration.
[01:10:33]  And he was being investigated for certain things that may have brought this call girl ring to light.
[01:10:40]  And that member of the Mixon administration, again, sorry, I can't remember his name off the top of my head because, you know, it's a thousand page book, a lot of names in there.
[01:10:47]  But he's due to engage one of the women that's very enmeshed with this network responsible for the call girl ring.
[01:10:55]  So, you know, there's an allegation that he may have acted or tipped off someone or this or that and been involved.
[01:11:01]  There's also a lack of mentioning about how Bob Woodward, right before.
[01:11:06]  Before he had this journalist job and gets the, you know, these big, there's these big scoops about Watergate and these sources and all of that, that he had this role with the military and some very prominent people.
[01:11:18]  And there were a lot of people in the military that were very unhappy with the Nixon Kissinger tilt toward Pakistan and tilt toward China and saw them as, you know, engaging in sort of political heresy, I guess you could say, for the period and wanted to see an end to that.
[01:11:37]  And, you know, there's just a lot of, Different elements to it.
[01:11:40]  It was a very out of really the entire book.
[01:11:43]  I kind of found that the hardest chapter to write because it was just so, so many things going on.
[01:11:49]  And you sort of have to do lip service to all, I mean, you sort of have to bring them up and just, well, you know, the way I try and do my work is even if I can't make sense of something, if it seems like pertinent information, I'll just put it out there and people can reach their conclusions about it, you know.
[01:12:04]  So when it comes to Watergate and you have like seven different subplots to the event itself.
[01:12:09]  You know, it's really hard to weave that together in a digestible narrative.
[01:12:14]  But what I'm trying to frame it was have it sort of revolve around a guy who I think is a pretty key character for what I'm trying to prove in Volume One.
[01:12:22]  He's actually on the cover of Volume One, Robert Keith Gray, who's sort of involved with some of this intrigue in Watergate, but also pops up in the Page Boy scandal of 1982 and has a history of CIA sex blackmail, you know, links to interesting characters.
[01:12:43]  Uh, you know, really throughout his career, he's nominally, you know, just a PR executive at Hill and Knowlton.
[01:12:49]  Which, if you're familiar with Hill and Knowlton, they're the people that created the incubator baby lie that got us into the first Gulf War.
[01:12:57]  Um, but their longtime head was Robert Keith Gray, who was, you know, a sexual blackmail guy, um, who was involved in all sorts of crazy stuff and very close to Bill Casey, CIA director under Reagan, and had a very odd relationship with Roy Cohn and took on Ed Nan Khashoggi as a client.
[01:13:16]  The same time that Jeffrey Epstein and Roy Cohn did.
[01:13:18]  Isn't that weird in the early 80s, right when Khashoggi is setting up Iran Contra?
[01:13:24]  Yes.
[01:13:25]  Well, it's interesting.
[01:13:26]  I want to ask you about Khashoggi.
[01:13:28]  Hughes, Howard Hughes with Nixon, Watergate, that whole period.
[01:13:32]  Anything that you want to put on about Hughes?
[01:13:36]  So I didn't really write about Hughes too much, as I recall, but I am kind of interested in looking into him now, now that the book's done, because obviously Elon Musk is in the news a lot.
[01:13:46]  Yes.
[01:13:46]  And I was recently watching James Corbett sort of take.
[01:13:49]  Down of Musk.
[01:13:51]  And what was interesting is he was talking about how Iron Man, the Tony Stark character, had intentionally been sort of modeled after Musk and was like promoting Musk and his products and stuff like that.
[01:14:04]  But that the original person that he was going to model it after was Howard Hughes.
[01:14:08]  So I'd kind of like to look at the parallels between Musk and Hughes now.
[01:14:12]  And I would love to see you do that because I think there's a lot there.
[01:14:19]  It's almost like you're dealing with multiple people at a certain point.
[01:14:24]  Whitney, just remarkable information and innovative reporting.
[01:14:27]  Now, stay right there and we'll do round two and have that up shortly at darkjournalist.com.
[01:14:33]  Now, everyone can find Whitney's work at unlimitedhangout.com and her sensational two volume book set, One Nation Under Blackmail.
[01:14:42]  Please join us on Fridays at 8 p.m. Eastern for the Dark Journalist X Series.
[01:14:48]  See you soon.