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Nov. 23, 2024 - Epoch Times

22:39

Tactics of Psychological Manipulation: Dr. Robert Malone

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	The battleground is your mind.
	This kind of tech is being deployed against you by multiple actors simultaneously, all seeking to shape how you think, feel, believe.
	In this episode, I sit down with scientist and physician Dr. Robert Malone to discuss his latest book, SciWar, co-authored with his wife, Dr. Jill Malone.
	We used to have salons.
	We used to read books.
	We used to discuss things with each other.
	And now we just kind of sit by the sidelines and shoot spitballs.
	What methods are powerful forces using to propagandize and shape behavior?
	And what effect is this having on society?
	Everybody agrees that we become more and more splintered and fragmented, and that's not a good thing.
	And it mostly benefits our adversaries.
	This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek.
	Dr. Robert Malone.
	Such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
	It's been a while and I'm always grateful for the chance to talk to you and learn from you.
	In past episodes, we've talked quite a bit about all sorts of things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
	Today I want to focus really on trying to explain some of the basic approaches of the psychological warfare and also some of your proposed solutions to dealing with this because it comes off as being deeply frightening, frankly.
	Let's talk about Psywar.
	What is it?
	Psywar is a term I didn't invent.
	It's actually used by the brigade down in Fort Bragg that call themselves the Psywar soldier.
	It's an abbreviation of psychological warfare, which has become increasingly a core function, a core capability.
	In militaries all over the world, but absolutely in the West and in particular the United States and Great Britain have really pioneered the use of psychological warfare or fifth generation warfare.
	Militaries have encountered the challenges, let's say gently, of the modern insurgencies such as Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, in which those movements have very effectively exploited religion and other social dynamic kind of psychological aspects as part of their overall battle strategy.
	And so the Western militaries have found it necessary to try to develop capabilities that would be able to match or exceed those of these kind of indigenous insurgencies that have been so effective going back to the Vietnam War.
	Something that struck me not too long ago is that we actually I really live in a society where it's become normal for people to try to manipulate you.
	I mean, a lot of advertising It functions this way, and especially with the advent of social media, and then especially with Juiced Up with AI to study the entirety of your profile, I guess that it's called, and feed you exactly what will impact your buying choices best.
	That's just one example of many.
	But that's just how things work today, isn't it?
	Increasingly so.
	That's very much the norm in marketing, for sure.
	Psychological warfare is an adjacency to marketing.
	Propaganda is an adjacency to marketing.
	It has a lot of the same forces, the same technologies, the same approaches, the same underlying psychological and social science underpinnings that drive it.
	Earlier on we were talking about Edward Bernays and in one of the early chapters in the book we talk about the modern history of psychological warfare as very much derived from the academic and practical discipline of marketing and propaganda.
	And we all recognize that in marketing.
	For instance, the use of sex to sell us foods or hamburgers or cars or whatever.
	At some level, a large fraction of society is beginning to really become increasingly uncomfortable with that.
	And yet it is incredibly powerful.
	The thing about this whole suite of technologies is that they're grounded in modern psychology, really advanced psychological understanding of the nature of the mind and how we form a structure of reality and how we process information.
	A lot of these technologies and strategies are designed to access our subconscious rather than our conscious mind.
	I think that's a problem.
	It's interesting because it kind of, I think, crept up on us.
	I realized myself that I never thought about it, right?
	You just kind of assume that...
	You're just swimming in it.
	Yeah, you're just...
	It's the way things are.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	And I didn't think about the moral valence of it.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	And that is...
	Nor did I. The truth is, nor did I. Until I encountered this seminal event where our initial book on how to just prepare and protect yourself from the novel coronavirus It was deplatformed by Amazon.
	Essentially, we could no longer publish it or circulate it.
	We'd worked really hard to get it out in the beginning of 2020. We just did it mostly as a community service based on our knowledge of biodefense and proper public health measures.
	To have it deplatformed and then asking again and again and again, why have you done this to us?
	Why have you taken off our work, our mental contribution?
	And then finally getting the answer because it violated community standards.
	And then reviewing what the community standards were, finding out that there was nothing that related to anything in the book.
	It was just a euphemism.
	And now, of course, we're used to this euphemism of violation of community standards.
	That's become a widespread justification for all kinds of censorship and Facebook and everything else.
	But back then it was a shock for me.
	And that was kind of the moment when I realized that with what was deployed during the COVID crisis, we had moved into a whole new era and phase of The use of methods to manipulate human opinion that exceeded anything that I'd been aware of in the past.
	It was so overt that for many of us, it was something that couldn't be overlooked.
	Robert, we're going to take a quick break right now, and we'll be right back.
	And we're back with Dr. Robert Malone, co-author of SciWar.
	So tell me more about these different sorts of tactics that are used in this SciWar or psychological warfare.
	So there's a whole range of tactics that are used that span from the nitty-gritties of digital manipulation of information and targeting of specific individuals with manipulated information.
	And that includes selective withholding of information or alternative points of view, as well as promotion of other information or points of view that might be more aligned with the interests of whoever's doing the information management.
	But one of the simplest to kind of serve as an entry level For understanding the nature of this and the logic is nudge technology.
	Nudge technology has largely emerged from academics in the United Kingdom.
	And the example we always use when we talk about nudge is we talk about a practice that was implemented in Schiphol Airport.
	In Amsterdam, where there was a problem with the urinals and cleaning of the bathrooms and men not being careful.
	Let's put it that way.
	And it was found that if you put a picture of a fly As a sticker inside the urinal, suddenly the cost of cleaning the bathrooms went way down.
	The bathrooms became a lot more clean for obvious reasons.
	It would distract the person and they would aim at the fly and they wouldn't end up contaminating the other space.
	So this is really one of the simplest examples of nudge technology.
	But Nudge has evolved into a large suite of logic and capabilities to gently direct individuals and populations towards various agendas that those that are doing the social engineering think are beneficial.
	So, for instance, we generally, most of us now believe that Smoking causes cancer, it causes emphysema, it causes all kinds of problems, both direct smoking and secondary smoke.
	So we can all agree it's a time to get rid of smoking.
	So what are we going to do for the people that are still smoking even after all of the information has been shared?
	Well, we can start doing things in which we provide subtle cues in a variety of different formats, including in all the programming.
	Remember, there was a long time when you weren't allowed to see anyone smoke a cigarette on television.
	That was forbidden, and it largely was forbidden in the movies.
	If somebody was smoking a cigarette, the movie ratings would shift because that was, you know, it was akin to porn.
	Showing somebody smoking was a bad thing, and we needed to stop that, so we were no longer to show people smoking.
	We don't want to romanticize it, presumably, right?
	Absolutely, right?
	For the greater good.
	We can all agree on that.
	It's a public health thing.
	And so there were all these subtle cues.
	In the UK, if you buy a pack of cigarettes, you find images of diseased lungs and things like that on the cigarettes and with any advertising.
	Canada as well.
	Yeah, you encounter these horrible images all the time.
	So we can all say that that's probably a good thing.
	And then another example of nudge is that we now live in a diverse culture.
	It's ethnically diverse, it's religiously diverse, and there's this history of A bias against people who are different.
	And so what can we do to reduce that bias?
	Well, we can make it so that media content shows ethnic diversity.
	And shows things like interracial marriages and represents religious diversity.
	And if it's necessary in order to make the point that we over-represent certain groups compared to their representation in the population, well, that's a good thing.
	Because we want to get to the point where we are able to eliminate these kinds of biases in the general population.
	So I can sort of see where this is going.
	But this is all what you would call nudge.
	That's very interesting.
	And nudge now extends down into all kinds of policies.
	Sure.
	And this is very deliberately and systematically being deployed in all sorts of sectors.
	In particular by public health.
	Right.
	There's something about public health and it has to do with the way that masters in public health people are trained.
	The focus is on the population, not on the individual.
	And when you think about nudge technology and this being deployed by governments and non-governmental organizations and transnational organizations like, say, the United Nations or the World Health Organization, You end up in a situation in which somebody is making a decision that this is the way the world should be and this is the way you should think.
	And so we're going to take this very powerful, subtle ability to provide cues to manipulate how you're thinking, what your emotions are, what your beliefs are, And we're going to deploy it for this topic or that topic or the other topic, and maybe it has to do with things that are controversial, that there isn't broad cultural consensus on.
	Then you're in a position where you are making a unilateral decision.
	You could say an authoritarian decision.
	Someone is making a decision about how people should think, what they should think, how they should feel, how they should behave in the world without consulting them.
	And you're using a technology that is so powerful and effective That you're literally reprogramming their mind without their consent.
	You do a really remarkable job, actually, in Cywar, documenting sort of the various different types of methods, this being, I guess, kind of like a basic example.
	Yeah, it's the easiest.
	Nudge is the easiest.
	The one that bothers me the most, frankly, because of who I am as a physician, is what I call psychological bioterrorism.
	My awareness of this as a process was relatively recent.
	Basically you're creating a fear narrative, fear of infectious disease in this case, but it can be many different things.
	It can be fear of climate change.
	So you promote this existential fear, this fear of death.
	One of the most powerful fears we have.
	You promote this fear through this series of steps and then you provide some sort of a magical resolution.
	This leader or that person or this corporation suddenly has the solution that will resolve your fear and then that allows whoever the Promulgator of this strategy to then capture whatever the benefit was that they were seeking,
	whether it was profit, because I believe this is now being done routinely as a marketing ploy by the pharmaceutical industries.
	One of the advantages of psychological bioterrorism, it's propagated through media.
	It's propagated through the internet in a global fashion, in a harmonized way, with almost no cost.
	It's amazingly effective.
	And this is another example of how this kind of psychological warfare can be deployed, and it's the one that I find most concerning.
	Because fear is such a powerful motivator and all sorts of people, I mean, this is what's coming to my mind with the absolute best intentions, will want to share that information.
	This is very serious, right?
	I used to refer to this as fear porn, but I think that's a gross oversimplification.
	The logic behind the term fear porn, like we have food porn or other things that people love to see certain types of imaging and certain types of messaging and they'll obsess over it.
	They'll seek these things out.
	And certainly fear is a great stimulus.
	We can see this.
	We're about to come up to Halloween and people love to be frightened.
	They love to go to these roadside attractions and they love to watch scary movies.
	It's a great dopamine hit.
	Veer is.
	Really effective.
	But this is far more powerful and more insidious.
	This is considered to be standard spycraft.
	For me, as somebody who considered himself an expert in biodefense and an active participant in what we would now call the biodefense industrial complex, this is part of what I did for a living since I left academia.
	To learn that I was just a cog in a wheel that was using this approach to advance other interests and purposes.
	And of course this has a socket with another one of the things that I talk about, which is disaster cronyism.
	So to give a recent example, There was the promoted narrative about, well, lately it's Marburg, but it was about the second round of monkeypox.
	Remember, we had the Canary Islands monkeypox outbreak that the WHO considered to be a global emergency and turned out to pretty much be a nothing burger.
	And then we had another round of that being promoted more recently.
	And If you tracked the news pieces that were coming out when that narrative was being promoted by the World Health Organization and others and it became a narrative,
	a common narrative in CNN and most of the mainstream corporate media outlets, you could also track that narrative in the literature about the stock market and about investing.
	And you had multiple articles being run simultaneously about who you should invest in this company or that.
	They gave the ticker numbers and what their technology was and how it related to the potential threat of monkeypox and what the potential upside was.
	And this has this direct socket connection with something that I've long railed against.
	Which is this pump and dump strategy that occurs in my industry all the time in which naive investors are manipulated to make investments in emerging technologies that are not yet mature.
	We can all see it with the promotion of narratives about cancer treatments.
	And some new biotech will come up with what they assert to be a breakthrough cancer treatment.
	It has great potential.
	It could cure cancer.
	And we're all afraid of cancer.
	They just need another 100 million or 500 million or fill in the blank.
	To finally prove this technology.
	And so there's a rush to invest, right?
	And the way that ecosystem works is that once those investments are made, if that technology never matures, or if it takes longer to mature than was projected, or if it doesn't really meet expectations, the company still holds all that capital.
	Now the market cap goes down.
	The valuation of the company goes down, the valuation of the stock, all those people that put money into that stock have lost money, but the managers, the people that are deriving their salaries, that find it necessary to continue to have that pool of money.
	They keep all that cash, and they can continue to spend it however they want, this pump and dump strategy.
	So this whole ecosystem flows from psychological bioterrorism to disaster cronyism, or what Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism, to pump and dump investments on Wall Street.
	To fuel emerging technologies and startup companies.
	When people encounter this, or when I show the videos from the Cywar Brigade down in Fort Bragg, the recruitment videos, people come away dumbfounded.
	I think most people have a sense that there's a cloud of this around them, but it's very jarring to be forced into recognizing that it's happening.
	Well, we have a lot to figure out as Canadians, as Americans, you know, members of these free societies.
	Dr. Robert Malone, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
	Thanks for having me and for sharing your opinions and perspective also.
	I always learn from you.
	Thank you all for joining Dr. Robert Malone and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.

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