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Oct. 30, 2021 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
58:17
Ashley Rindsberg
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Welcome to The Deling Pod with me, James Deling Pod.
And I know I always say I'm really excited about this week's special guest, but I actually cannot wait to hear what Ashley Rinsberg has to tell me.
Ashley, you're a journalist, a writer, and you've written a book about a most worthwhile subject, I would say, the mendacious evil of the New York Times.
Is that a fair description?
Yeah, I think in many cases that definitely is, yes.
The book is called, remind me, The Grey Lady Winked.
That's right.
Because some of our listeners are going to be, some of our viewers are going to be English or Australian or whatever.
Just put the New York Times in context.
I mean, is the New York Times, does it consider itself the world's preeminent newspaper, would you say?
Yes, absolutely.
And in the US, that's very much the case.
And I think it's not just them who consider it to be the world's preeminent newspaper, but many other people around them.
I think the entire American media ecosystem sort of centers around the New York Times.
And they very much set the news agenda for the news industry and for policymakers, decision makers, business leaders in the US and around the world.
So the way that I think of the New York Times is the flagship of the American news media, and they've been that way for the better part of a century, at least.
Right.
And I know that what you're going to tell me is that this reputation is slightly undeserved, given how fast and loose it plays with the truth.
Yeah, in a way it is very much deserved because they put an incredible amount of marketing energy and using the levers of power to maintain the myth of the New York Times.
It's a Wizard of Oz type institution where you pull back the curtain and you don't see the You know, this booming wizard, you see a man that's very human, very flawed, that's just pulling some levers and pushing some buttons to create this effect.
And what in reality is that this is a dynasty that owns and controls the newspaper.
It's a patriarchy for all intents and purposes.
And it is very much One that promotes its own agenda, and that agenda might be a business agenda in many cases, and in other cases it's an ideological agenda.
But either way, the result is that they often misconstrue the truth, they alter history, they edit reality in ways that serve their interests, and in ways that certainly downplay, obscure, or just outright destroy the true reality of the events.
Yeah, this all gels with what I've had this massive apocalyptic awakening in the last 18 months.
I spent most of my career as a journalist in the mainstream media.
And I genuinely believed, and people are going to think I'm shockingly naive, I genuinely believe that the job of a journalist is to seek after the truth, however uncomfortable it might be, however much it might contradict one's own political opinions or prejudices.
And I thought that all journalists were like that.
I mean, if you'd asked me 20 years ago about the New York Times, I'd have said, Well, it's kind of a bit stiff and boring.
It's not as exciting as the UK media, but it's written with authority.
And I'm sure that they do their best to try and present the truth as they find it.
Of course, none of this is true.
And I'm sure what I'm saying applies not just to the New York Times, but all the mainstream media.
But just tell me before we go into grisly detail, Who founded the New York Times and has it always been in the same family?
So the original founder, and this is going back to the 19th century, was a man named Henry Raymond, but it transferred hands toward the end of the 19th century and it was bought by an American immigrant, a German Jewish immigrant named Adolf Ochs.
And Ox is the one who really started the New York Times as we know it today.
He's the one that made it a success.
He rescued it from bankruptcy.
And he's the one who founded this dynasty that is in control of the New York Times today, as they have been for the last 120 years.
So they run it in that manner.
There's sort of a two-tiered stock structure that ensures that they maintain control of the paper essentially forever.
And that's a lot of the problem behind what's going on at the paper.
Is it actually profitable?
I mean, I can't imagine anyone wanting to buy this piece of crap anymore.
They surely don't get the subscription sales anymore, do they?
Well, so they have recently reconceived their business model, much like the rest of the media is trying to do, where the internet destroyed the advertising business model of journalism.
The New York Times has put all of its cards in subscription.
And Donald Trump turned out to be the biggest boon possible for the New York Times, who absolutely hated Trump, of course.
He drove something like a billion dollars in subscription revenues within just a few years.
But, you know, the subscription model that they've switched to has had a very interesting effect on the newspaper and on the coverage, because it means that only 2% of their total readership are actually paying for the product.
And that polarizes the news.
It does it the same way that we see news being polarized on Facebook.
That's something the New York Times has really gone after Facebook for, ironically, which is using algorithms that polarize news in order to drive traffic to drive revenue, and the New York Times has actually adopted a model that is doing the very same thing.
So you mean all their news stories are geared towards titillating the 2% of crazies stupid enough to finance them?
Is that more or less it?
Yeah, when you look at the 1619 project, which is drawn a lot of controversy in the U.S.
and this is their huge journalistic initiative that is supposed to reframe American history from being rooted in liberty to being rooted in slavery.
So rather than 1776 as the birth of America when it was declared independence from Britain, it is now 1619 where the first slaves, the year the first slaves arrived in the colonies.
And you have to ask yourself why would they embark on such a perilous Adventure and one that was so fraught with error and falsehood and outright lies that were called out by everybody from the far left to the far right.
And the answer is, is because it was the centerpiece of their marketing effort to market towards young, woke millennials, the ones who are actually going to be willing to shell out.
And they're not going to shell out for kind of that, that boring humdrum gray stuff that you were thinking about in, you know, the nineties, the two thousands that the New York times was called the gray lady for.
But they're going to spend their hard-earned money on sort of irrelevant newspaper subscriptions because it energizes the base, because it polarizes, because it's a them-versus-us approach to covering the news.
Right.
But how much of it is... Do you think the New York Times, the real purpose of the guys who... the controlling family?
Is there real purpose to use it as a money making vehicle, or is that perhaps secondary to their mission to, well, I mean to destroy Western civilization along the lines being proposed by the Great Reset and all these other You know, Bilderberg, the Council on Foreign Nations, you know, we know that the world is really run by these kind of special interest groups, these think tanks, this elite of the elites.
They're the ones pushing for this, for all the bad things that are going on in the world right now.
Is the New York Times really just the kind of the hymn sheet for that, or does it still consider itself a commercial venture?
I mean, you look at the revenues and you look at how important it is for them to rebuild a business model that can keep them profitable.
You look at their share price, which has gone up drastically in the last 5-10 years.
This is a business that brings in $2 billion of revenue per year that's controlled by a family of just a few dozen people.
So I think greed is never to be underestimated, especially in any American institution.
And I do think that it plays a huge role in terms of Those other countervailing forces regarding what is the other agenda?
What are the secret agendas?
I think in their case, it's actually quite out in the open.
When you are trying to reframe American history in this really mendacious way, in a way that they know it's been done willfully, knowingly, that they're publishing falsehoods in order to literally rewrite history, the agenda is really out in the open.
It is to subvert traditional values, and they're not sort of covering it up.
They're being quite open about it.
Right.
Actually, can I just say, I'm really enjoying this podcast.
I mean, I, you know, I don't always say this, and actually, I enjoy most of my podcasts, but you really know your stuff.
And it's an absolute joy, just sort of pointing you and letting you get on with it.
Thank you.
No, it's good.
Has your book yet got onto the New York Times bestseller list?
No, it hasn't.
They don't really reveal the secret sauce to what drives those lists.
But what is clear is that the New York Times, and this is something they've actually argued in court, the New York Times considers that bestseller list to be an editorial property, which means that It's a subjectively chosen list.
It's not about the numbers.
It is about their choice and their decision making.
And that's why books like this that come and try to tell a different kind of version of the truth to the ones the New York Times is peddling are often sidelined and they're squelched because people are afraid of the New York Times.
The New York Times bestseller list is probably the most effective book marketing tool in the world.
To get on that list is, you know, every publisher and author's dream.
And nobody wants to piss them off for that reason.
And for that reason, people want to keep books like mine out of the limelight, out of the spotlight.
They don't want people reading them.
But fortunately today we do have other avenues.
So I imagine there are so many examples of the way the New York Times has egregiously, cynically, corruptly rewritten history.
So, So obviously you're going to be a fund of examples.
Where should we start?
Should we start with the Russian Revolution?
Is that a good spot?
Yeah, I think it's a great place to begin.
It is chronologically the earliest episode that I cover in The Great Lady Winked.
In the US, at least, there's a very infamous, notorious character of American journalism whose name is Walter Durante.
And he's kind of the villain of American journalism and the story about Walter Durant is that he sort of took it upon himself to cover up the Ukraine famine and the Ukraine famine being a genocide perpetrated by Joseph Stalin in his early reign rule to consolidate power effectively.
You always have.
This was just a narrative that Durante just kind of did this on his own.
And no one ever really stopped to ask why he would do that.
Why would a journalist, a journalist, as you know, wants great scoops.
And that is a great scoop.
That's a story of a lifetime.
Why would he just say, no, no story here.
Move along, please.
Obviously, he wouldn't.
He was instructed by the times.
To cover up the famine, to cover up the genocide, because that smoothed the way for the US recognition of the Soviet regime, which still had been unrecognized by the United States government at that time.
This is 1931, 1932.
And the reason the New York Times was so hell bent on the US recognizing the Soviet Union is because they were part of a syndicate of big business.
That wanted to open trade relations with the Soviet Union, it was a it was a country of 150 million people is rapidly industrializing, they wanted access, these business people and this is including Chase Bank and JP Morgan, and all the big railroads.
They wanted to get access to those resources and access to that export market.
So they had to smooth the way because you could not sell recognition of a regime that had just murdered 5 million of its own people to the American public when this was the case.
So Walter Durante, at the behest of the New York Times owners, Covered it up.
He denied that there was any such famine.
He knew indeed that there was.
Other journalists were reporting that there was a famine and Walter Durante had the audacity to discount and discredit their reporting.
And this is something that the New York Times has never taken responsibility for, including in 2000 and Three, when they hired a consultant to review the Pulitzer Prize that Durante was awarded for this reporting.
This consultant was a historian and the historian said, well, yes, obviously give back the prize.
It's an ill-gotten prize and give it back.
And they refused.
The New York Times refused to give back the Walter Durante Pulitzer.
What sort of character was he, Walter Durante?
Durante was a, by all accounts, a brilliant man.
He was English.
He was a polyglot.
He was educated at Oxford.
He was a brilliant reporter and a brilliant writer and a great reporter in terms of his capabilities and his skills.
But where he obviously went wrong was with his moral character because he so easily and so glibly did the bidding of this company that wanted him to cover up this crime against humanity.
And he has now, or his legacy at least, has paid the price for that.
He must have been given huge backhanders for this, would you say?
Yeah, I think backhanders being... You know, money, you know, it must have been bribed.
He was given...
He was given something that I think is more valuable than a bribe.
And that's the enormous global platform of the New York Times.
They didn't just publish his reporting.
They published reports about Duranty.
They published stories about his new books.
They sent him on lecture tours.
They made him into an international celebrity, so high profile at the time that when the United States actually did recognize the Soviet Union, In 1934, I think it was, he was the one who accompanied the new Soviet ambassador from Moscow to Washington and accompanied the counterpart, the American ambassador, by boat back from D.C.
to Moscow.
So this was a guy that was thrust into the very center of American power and wealth, and he benefited from it that way.
Yeah, because I think Anthony Sutton has written about the connection between Wall Street financiers and the Russian Revolution, that it was all, it couldn't have happened without Wall Street backing, you know, some of the bank names you mentioned.
And then you had those intimate political connections, didn't you?
People like Avril Harriman, am I right in thinking?
People in the Roosevelt government were associated with the Stalin Stalin regime.
It was all very, very corrupt and stuff that we don't really get to hear about normally in the history books.
Yeah, that's right.
And these are things that you just would assume couldn't possibly exist.
In Walter Duranty's case, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt actually did recognize the Soviet Union, something that Walter Duranty had personally, in person, advised him to do, there was a sort of gala event celebrating these new relations.
It was all those types who were in attendance.
It was the son of Theodore Roosevelt, the son of Thomas Edison, the adult sons of them, the heads of banks, the heads of railroads, the heads of these huge conglomerates of American life who are applauding a And that's where you realize it's never really about ideology on a certain level.
It's about greed and power.
These are ardent, hardcore capitalists.
And that's where you realize it's never really about ideology on a certain level.
It's about greed and power.
And that's that that gala is just such a beautiful example of that.
The guy I know it wasn't Durante who said, I've seen the future and it works.
That was Lincoln Steffens, wasn't it?
What paper did he write for?
That's a good question.
I'm actually not sure about Steffens.
It was Steffens who said that, and he was famously pro-communist.
I haven't really dug into Steffens per se, but I did do a lot of research on the type of reporting that the New York Times carried in the early years of the Soviet Union.
And that included a woman named Anna Wintour, who was in actual... I'm sorry, Ella Wintour.
Not the Vogue editor.
So Ella Winter, she was an actual Soviet propaganda agent who was writing news articles in the New York Times that were unsurprisingly very favorable to the Soviet Union.
And you had people like George Bernard Shaw, who was writing about how wonderful it was in Moscow in the early days of Stalin's terror regime.
And how people were going to opera and walking down the streets in beautiful clothing and eating sumptuous meals.
And you're reading about this and you're like, we know this is not true.
And we know that he didn't believe it to be true either.
And probably the editors of the New York Times knew it was a lie.
But they printed the stuff anyways, because for whatever reason, it served an agenda.
And in a certain sense, there's more than one agenda.
So the ownership of the New York Times had a business agenda that was very clear, but the rank-and-file editors maybe had a different agenda, which might have been something that was genuinely sympathetic to the communists.
Yeah, yeah.
But we know that they were similarly dodgy in their reporting of the Nazis, were they not?
Yeah, so that was really something that shocked me, and it was actually what set me out on this journey of writing the book, which was the discovery that on the eve of World War II, on September 1st, 1939, when hostilities were declared, the New York Times printed a report, a lead story of that day, which claimed that Poland had actually invaded Germany.
And it's one of those, like, stop you in the tracks moments where you're thinking, what?
Like, of course, nobody could have possibly believed that was true.
Everybody would have seen through the lie.
And that was indeed a propaganda ploy by Hitler.
It was developed by the Nazi brass.
It was called Operation Himmler, and it was designed to fool the world for long, just long enough to give Hitler that window so he could do that first opening thrust into Poland.
And it worked when it was printed on the front page of the New York Times, that these Polish guerrillas had invaded German territory.
And the poor little Germans were just responding that that was a huge success for that bit of propaganda.
But the shocking thing about it is that was not by any means the first time that German propaganda was successfully printed by the New York Times.
The Berlin Olympics, the Nazi Olympics of 1936, were hailed by the New York Times as the greatest sporting event of all time.
If you read that report, they wrote thousands, thousand word or 3000 word long reports, talking about how wonderful Berlin was.
How clean, how kind and courteous the people of Germany were at the time, which might have all been true, but they made no mention of Nazis.
They didn't print the word Nazi once in that banner article.
So this was something that was going on for the better part of a decade.
And the New York Times management and ownership knew about it.
And they knew because it was brought to their attention by a Jewish editor in New York who said, you have a Nazi collaborator Running your bureau in Berlin, and this cannot go on, and they threatened him with a lawsuit.
They threatened to slap him with a libel lawsuit because they were so afraid of losing that great access they had to the Nazi brass who loved the bureau because they were printing Nazi propaganda.
But also there were high-level financier political connections in America with the Nazi party, weren't we?
I mean, I think it was the Americans, was it Rockefeller who gave the Germans the technology needed to turn coal into fuel without which their Panzers wouldn't have been able to operate because they've got no oil supplies of their own.
And you had George Bush's grandfather, was it Prescott Bush, I think, was intimately involved in financing the Nazi war machine.
Again, it's like the Russian Revolution, probably like the First World War as well, that we don't get told this stuff.
And I suppose part of the reason for that is that the newspapers, which I suppose, which we think of, we rely on to tell us the truth, are actually shilling for the For the cabal.
Yeah, or often just for the other side.
And a big part of it is that they don't go back and hold themselves to account.
And that's something we see just in day-to-day reporting.
It's not even with these world-changing events.
We see that when they print a story or a sort of a narrative that turns out to be false.
They don't print a front page article saying how false it was.
They do a tiny little correction somewhere in the back of the newspaper and no one's ever going to read it.
So the damage is done and they're not making any real attempt to undo that damage to correct it or fix it.
They're letting that narrative settle and stay in people's minds.
And that's the really pernicious thing.
Yeah.
Well, I imagine that tradition continues today in its reporting of the COVID alleged pandemic.
I mean, I would imagine that there aren't many articles in the New York Times about VAERS adverse reactions, for example, to the vaccines.
I imagine that they've been completely nixed.
Yeah, it's not something in particular that I've looked into, but I would imagine not.
It's one of these things that I talk about and that I think about, which is that Let's air both sides.
Let's at least explore the topic.
Let's just give it a fair hearing, whether they believe it's true or they believe it's false.
Give people a fair hearing on both sides of the issue.
But I do know that with the Times, they're reporting on the possible origins of the pandemic, of the virus, where was disastrous.
They were reporting from as early as February 2020 that lab leak was a quote-unquote conspiracy theory.
This was before most people even realized there was any virus spreading around the globe.
And they had already called it a conspiracy theory.
Nobody knew where it came from.
They just knew that it could not have possibly come from the lab in Wuhan, which studies coronaviruses and has a history of leaking viruses out of its lab.
But You know, there again, you have to think, why would they not just consider it?
Why not just be open-minded about this theory that had already been considered credible by leading scientists, but they shut it down and they shut it down for basically two years.
They were going after it, calling it a conspiracy theory, a fringe theory, racist.
That was probably the most damaging of the accusations.
If you had the audacity to explore this idea, you were a racist, so you better not do it.
And I think that's very indicative of the real motivation.
Yes, there's quite a lot of that sort of race baiting that goes on in the New York Times these days, isn't there, and has done for at least the last decade.
Now, I generally recall the worst recent examples of what journalists plagiarizing or making stuff up or something.
Remind me of those.
There was an incident with a podcast series called Caliphate, which was, they were caught fabricating some of the facts and the sourcing.
And, you know, there was also one of the most famous cases of the modern era was that of Jason Blair, He was a young African American reporter for the Times, sort of a rising star.
And he just made up stories left, right and center.
A lot of those stories were about what he was claiming to be the effects of the Iraq war.
And we're talking about effects of the Iraq war, the second Iraq war.
A week or two into the war, he was saying that these soldiers were coming back broken and psychologically traumatized and whatever else he was trying to prove.
And then after they found out he was just lying and making all this stuff up, people went and interviewed the same soldiers.
And they're like, no, I'm actually okay.
I mean, you know, they had challenges, but they were fine.
So this is again where you see that they were willing to give this kid who had already been flagged as being very problematic, this young guy, giving him front page stories on articles that he could not possibly logistically have reported, because if you look at the dates and the times that he claimed to interview people, it's just physically not possible.
But they were so invested in the narrative.
That they just closed their eyes and jumped.
And again, that's really where the danger lies, is that they're so invested in a narrative that the truth goes out the window.
What I don't get is why, after a well-publicized instance like that, Why people still take the newspaper seriously?
Surely, hasn't it reached sort of peak stupid right by now?
Surely we live in a world where no one looks at the New York Times and thinks it's a respectable paper of record.
It's an ecosystem.
It's one that there's mutual incentives among institutions like the New York Times and the Pulitzer Prize, as an example, and Oprah, who is now doing a TV and movie, a TV series and movie about the 1619 Project.
It's a system of interlocking interests, and that keeps it afloat.
That sort of maintains its power.
But I think among readers, I mean, I've been getting countless emails from Self-described lifelong readers of the New York Times who tell me they had cancelled their subscription.
I, you know, this year, last year, recent years, because it had just gone off off of the rails.
And I even a friend of mine, a writer named Jenny Holland.
Who an Irish writer who worked at the Times and who revered the New York Times when she worked there.
She said she says now she can't even open the newspaper.
It's just she sees just lies and agenda and narrative.
So I do think that it's shifting and I think people are peeling away from.
Newspapers and news outlets like the New York Times, where, you know, once upon a time, it would be the entire country virtually reading, let's say, the top 10 newspapers and watching three news broadcasts.
Whereas today, it's very much fragmented.
We have other news sources and people are changing their consumption habits.
What was your, I mean, I know I've written a few books and I know it's a real kind of, it's a hassle, it's a labour of love, it's thankless, you're probably not going to make much money out of it.
What was it, what were your motivations to write this book?
Um, I think a lot of it was, was initially curiosity, you know, coming across that first bit about the New York Times invading Poland, I'm sorry, the Germans invading Poland, or the other way around, Poland invading Germany in the Times, thinking, You know, what else happened here?
And also trying to understand my relationship with the news that I was consuming, because I was a New York Times reader and I believed in the New York Times, like a lot of people at the time.
So I wanted to understand how my views were shaped by Falsehoods by contorted views of history.
And that kept me going.
And the more I looked, the more I found.
And that became rewarding in and of itself.
Like I would sit in this cafe here in Tel Aviv, or when I was living in Tel Aviv.
I would just trawl through these articles, through the archives, and you find such valuable stuff.
And then you compare it with first-hand accounts or other works of history, and you really learn what actually took place versus what you are being told, the lie that you're being sold.
And that, to me, was incredibly interesting.
It's always a good story.
It's always exciting for a real journalist.
I think you probably are where you discover this thing where almost everyone thinks one thing and the exact opposite turns out to be true.
And you can explore.
I mean, I did a book about the Green Movement, about global warming and stuff.
But again, it's one of those things that everyone Everyone thinks it's this major crisis that's going on and that the polar bears are all dying and yada yada.
And of course, a lot of this is promulgated by the New York Times.
I don't know whether you cover that in the book, but I mean, I'm often writing pieces about the New York Times is climate coverage, which is incredibly dishonest and politically motivated.
No, I haven't written on it.
I don't really have the background on what the actual situation is.
I've been hearing more and more about this topic, you know, the counter narrative to the prevailing one about climate change.
And it's something that I've thought about for a long time.
Ever since, actually, I was in a lecture in a bookstore with A Nobel laureate in chemistry named Carey Mullis, and he was just saying that, you know, at the time it was called global warming, they sort of rebranded, but he was saying it was just, it just could not be the case in the way that people were presenting it.
And he's saying from a scientific standpoint, it just was completely, the model that they were presenting about global warming was completely flawed.
And something that I think about, I studied in university, I studied the history of science, the sociology and history of science and the philosophy of science.
And, you know, one thing that I've always asked myself about the climate change theory is, how do you falsify it?
How do you test it?
And I don't, I've never gotten an answer.
I don't know how it's possible to test a theory that involves the entire universe, but... Can I give you a spoiler of that?
It's, Ashley, it is designed not to be falsified.
That is the fundamental problem.
You've nailed it.
It has been so arranged that they can never, ever be proved wrong.
Right, that was always the question, because it started out as a theory about warming, and then when you see news stories about cooling in various places around the world, then it becomes a story about climate change.
So the theory is constantly shifting as evidence is being presented, and that to me is just an alarm bell that something here is not quite right, that there's not really a theory, and that's what worries me about it.
Howard, you mentioned Terry Mullis.
Is that the guy who died young?
I don't know.
I actually don't know what happened to him.
He wrote a book.
He won the Nobel Prize for his... he created a scientific technology that replicates DNA.
Is he the guy who invented the PCR?
Yeah, PCR.
That's right.
Yeah.
He's the guy who said the PCR test.
He gave interviews.
He said it should never be used for the purposes that it's being used now.
And rather handily for the agenda, he's dead.
He died.
So you met him.
Remember, what was he like?
Well, I think he was based out of a research institution where I grew up in California, a town in San Diego.
And he did this talk at a great bookstore that I love, which is called DG Wills.
And, you know, he talked about things in a way that was very counterintuitive and questioning things that were considered to be gospel truth.
You know, talking about climate change, the amounts of global warming at the time, and the amount of money that had been invested into the investigation of global warming versus the amount of money that had been invested into preventing an asteroid from slamming to the earth, which at the time he said it was a number that was ridiculous.
It was like $2 million was being put into Figuring out what we might do in that kind of scenario.
The discrepancy was crazy.
So those are the kinds of things that I love to learn about because it makes you think.
Where you might agree with Carey Miles, you might disagree with him.
He might be right and wrong on different things.
But it was at least questioning the narrative.
That to me is the most important thing.
And when you're in a news environment or in an information environment that doesn't allow that to occur, that in itself is a very big problem.
You say this was in San Diego?
You used to live in San Diego?
Yeah.
I once had to give a talk in San Diego about my book, my climate change book, Watermelons, and some local rich guy, you know, sort of billionaire entrepreneur had invited me to talk to his guests.
And I made them, I drove down from LA to San Diego.
And I made the mistake of stopping for lunch with some friends of a friend.
And they gave me this local weed.
And I had to talk at this event that evening.
And I said, is this stuff strong?
He said, no, it's fine.
You know, but he was a Californian for God's sake.
He was a weed head.
And I had a couple of puffs.
And I was more stoned than I've ever been in my life.
And I had to give a talk.
And I could see as the miles, as we etch up the miles towards San Diego, my sort of anxiety increased.
I've got to give a talk.
Anyway, somehow it came good in the end.
Are you there now?
No.
So now I live in Israel, just outside Tel Aviv.
OK, well, you've got it.
I can't not ask you about this.
I mean, from where I'm sitting, Israel seems to have turned into a kind of biomedical fascist state.
I mean, you've presumably been forced to have the experimental shot because everyone has.
Yeah, you know, the compliance here was very high and it's a funny thing because people, I get that kind of feedback a lot, what you just said about Israel and it being, you know, the passports and whatever we have, but it's a very strange thing because People are very relaxed about a lot of things that you wouldn't expect them to be relaxed about here.
So they're kind of like, sure, I'll take the shot, whatever.
Let me just get on with my business.
But on the other side of the equation, when it comes to enforcement and the government, there's also kind of a bit of something that's a little bit lax about it.
It's not like you must do this and you must do this in order to do.
You can really just get away with living life however you want here without the vaccine.
Yeah, absolutely.
Like you can, you really can.
And you won't feel impinged by it in any way, I don't think.
And I know plenty of people who have opted not to take it.
And interestingly here, like in the US, you know, the American left right now is very much pro-vaccine, pro-mandate, pro-mask.
And the right is on the other side.
Here it's a bit different, where the left Is the one that's really raising questions about the vaccine and the mandates and opposing it and the right is a little bit sort of indifferent to it they're not really for or against the kind of just going along to get along.
So, it's a bit of a different dynamic and it's from the outside I could see why it would look that way, but when you're here.
And if you had chosen not to have the vaccine, and I know plenty of people who have and people who are very close to me as well, you are not really restricted in what you can do in terms of life here day to day.
I mean, I've had somebody previously on the podcast who was telling me that she could no longer sing in her local choir because the unvaccinated were forbidden from that kind of thing.
You know, I'm sure that I'm sure there are cases and pockets here and there.
But I think in general, I don't think you will be able to live exactly how you want to today without being vaccinated.
And, you know, in my case, they've been pushing the booster, which I have not done.
And... What have you had?
You've had two so far?
I had the first two.
I didn't want to...
Yeah.
Pfizer.
Yeah.
And the booster, it just felt to me at this point, unnecessary for me and my family.
And I just didn't think it was worth whatever risks there might be associated with it, given the possible benefits.
And I'm okay with going to cafes here, going to an office space where I work.
No one asks me questions.
I even told them.
They're like, yeah, listen, technically we're supposed to, but don't worry about it.
And that's sort of the attitude in Israel in general and it's just a different approach to life on a bigger scale and in ways that is positive in this regard and negative in some other regards where things are just a little more fast and loose than places like the UK or the US.
It's really good to hear that because Israel used to be on my list of places I wanted to go and visit.
And I've heard so many good things about Tel Aviv, that it's a really relaxed sort of cafe society with great food and stuff.
And you know, I like fouda.
Have you ever seen fouda?
It's one of my favorites.
Yeah, yeah, great, great.
Yeah, it was amazing.
But I have to say that Israel did rather blot its copybook.
Who was it who pushed this kind of what I consider this biomedical fascism?
Was it Netanyahu or was it his successor?
Netanyahu was the one who was really aggressively courting Pfizer to start here and he was sort of putting on maximum pressure to get as many doses as he could get into Israel as quickly as possible.
And then, you know, the medical institution have also You know, the health ministry etc have pushed for these various restrictions, but there definitely is we even within the government there is counter pressure to that there is a lot of the government that is pushing back against it that is saying we need to, you know, remove restrictions and free up.
It's definitely not a monolithic response from the government.
And again, that's sort of part and parcel to Israeli society, where you have these really fractured coalitions, you have like, you know, 10 different parties in the coalition, and some of them are hard left, some of them are hard right within the same coalition.
So you have different interests being represented in a way that actually is healthy, despite some of the downsides and the drawbacks of that model.
Right.
Because I'm just thinking that I was thinking about America.
Well, actually, same is happening in the UK, where where soldiers are being mandated to take the what I consider the the clock shot or the the death jab.
And I'm kind of thinking, particularly in a country like Israel, which is surrounded by people wanting to destroy it and who make no bones about it.
You know, you've got everyone has to.
Have you done military service?
No, I came here at a later age.
You're too old.
You're an old man.
But you know what I'm saying?
If you've got kids keeling over from myocarditis or having mini strokes from the miniature blood clots that some of these injections can induce, that's not a very good state for your arm forces to be in.
Yeah, I don't exactly know.
I do know that they mandated IDF soldiers to get the job.
I know there are people, many of them, who have refused.
I don't know what their fate is or what's supposed to happen to them.
But yeah, I think those are definitely concerns that had to be taken into account and hopefully we'll find a way forward.
Yeah, yeah.
I do.
I know you've got loads more horror stories about The New York Times and I just don't want to waste them.
You must tell me some more.
What are the other more egregious abuses of journalism that you found in The Grey Lady?
You know, I think the big one for me personally is the Holocaust, that they covered up the Holocaust.
Really?
That's a big one.
That's a big one.
And they did it at the same time that their bureau in Berlin was printing Nazi sympathetic reporting for years.
And, you know, this is something that's been well documented.
There's a whole book about it called Buried by the Times by a scholar of the subject matter.
It's still hard to believe, and it's still something that they've never fully held themselves to account for, despite the egregiousness of it.
I mean, they printed six front page articles in six years about the Holocaust.
There was a story that they ran about the deaths of 600,000, the murders of 600,000 Jews in Europe, that they printed on page A14.
They gave it something like two, three inches of column space, while on the front page of that day's edition, One of the stories that made the front page was the death of a single man in Iceland.
So you think, how could they put the death of one guy in Iceland on the front page, and a story about 600,000 Jews murdered in Europe on page 12 or 14 or whatever.
And again, that came back to business interests.
They were afraid of being seen as a Jewish newspaper in New York City.
They wanted to be seen as just a great American newspaper.
They thought that to be seen as a Jewish newspaper would hurt their business irrevocably.
And so they committed what I think is the greatest journalistic crime in American history.
And they did it very easily.
You know, same thing with the Ponary massacres, the massacres where In, I believe, Poland, where Jews were just lined up for weeks on end and shot in a forest.
And while this was going on, again, front page news by the New York Times was the wedding of the publisher's daughter, who was Jewish.
So that was something that really stuck with me throughout my research.
Well, yeah, this is one of the things I've been Half discovering.
I mean, I haven't really done my research on this, but I'm definitely getting the impression that there was a certain level of Jewish financier influence.
I mean, power people who actually didn't give a damn that Jews were being massacred, that the business matters or the narrative or the agenda was more important than the lives of less well-off Jews.
Is that the vibe you're getting?
Certainly from the family that owned the Times and that controls the Times today, that was absolutely the case.
They openly, actively opposed Jewish immigration from Europe at the time into America.
They pushed for the U.S.
to close the borders to Jewish refugees, specifically by name, not just saying refugees in general.
They opposed Jewish Immigration.
It wasn't even immigration.
These are refugees fleeing for their lives.
And that was, it's horrific.
I mean, when you think about this in total, opposing the last hope of these people who are being murdered by their own countrymen in Europe, and downplaying stories about their murders or ignoring them in their entirety, your mind is boggled by it, especially learning that these people were themselves Jews.
But that's why it's a truly perverse story.
Yeah.
But great for you.
I mean, well done for you for exploring this, this uncomfortable territory, because I mean, this is exactly this should be meet and grist to to any any halfway decent journalist.
I was I was scrolling down the other other hot, hot topics in the book.
I noticed Vietnam makes an appearance now.
Presumably the New York Times was instrumental in bigging up the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which we now know was faked in order to start the Vietnam War.
Yeah, I actually never got into that.
People have asked me about the Gulf of Tonkin and what their role might have been.
What I was focused on in the chapter on Vietnam was that their reporters actively took a role in Influencing American policy in such a way that kept America in the war for 10 years longer than JFK had actually wanted it to be in the war.
So JFK was planning a pullout in the early 1960s.
He wanted to get out.
He saw the quagmire forming in front of him.
And he believed that correctly, that the only way that he could actually get out of Vietnam was if there was a stable South Vietnamese government in control.
And when the president of that government, Diem, was assassinated, that ruined JFK's plans to pull out and the US was in the war for 11 years longer.
Part of the reason that assassination took place is because the New York Times reporter there, David Halberstam and his successor, Neil Sheehan, were really pushing this notion that GM was compromised, corrupted, that he was persecuting minorities across the country, and that he had to go.
And this galvanized parts of the American government, including parts of the CIA, that had the same opinion about GM and the South Vietnamese government.
And it gave them fodder.
It gave them an ability to say, look, look, even the New York Times is saying that Diem is massacring Buddhists.
And one story that was a really famous story was that Diem's regime had murdered 30 Buddhists.
And that was, you know, a huge news story at the time.
And it was part of the story that we still remember today with the Buddhist monk on fire and the Buddhist monks suffering and all that.
And when the UN actually went to investigate the deaths of these 30 Buddhists, they found all of them alive.
All 30.
And this was never retracted.
It was never corrected.
That narrative stuck in people's mind that DM was evil, that he had to go.
When he was assassinated, that put an end to those plans that JFK was hatching to get out of the war early.
And this was kind of this disastrous, one of the disastrous effects where a narrative gets in place of simple, gumshoe, truth fact gathering, truth telling.
Rather than narrative crafting, and it's just again and again, again, that's the same pattern.
It's a measure of how much my understanding of journalism has changed that when I was about 20 years ago, I read a book by Neil Sheehan called A Bright Shining Lie, I think it was, which is often It's held as one of the great books about the Vietnam War.
But you're saying that this guy was one of those pushing this fake news narrative about Diem?
Yeah, he pushed a narrative that he thought was right.
He thought it was the right thing to do.
And, you know, maybe he had justification for believing that.
But he and Halberstam were committing all sorts of journalistic offenses, including relying for a lot of the reporting on a source that turned out to be a North Vietnamese spy.
So they were publishing these stories that were channeled to them, funneled to them by the North Vietnamese propaganda Or arm and they did it unrepentantly, even when they found out that this spy was indeed a spy.
So I think the message there is that, you know.
As much as Sheehan and Halberstam were critical of the war, when you as a journalist decide to put your foot in it, rather than try to just tell people what's happening day by day, moment by moment, you eventually create a monster.
You become a part of the problem.
And I think that's exactly what happened with Halberstam and Sheehan.
Rather than just bringing the facts home, they spun a narrative that spun out of control.
Yeah, and also you can imagine that, at least on a subconscious level, journalists in Vietnam would have every reason to want to prolong the war because, what, they get the honorary rank of major, I think, they get to travel, they get priority travel in helicopters, they get all the weed, all the prostitutes they can shag, and they get to be, you know, I mean, living life on the edge.
It must have been great being in the NAM, but yeah.
Yeah, but you know, it's that glamour of the experience that I think that's also one of those things that people fall victim to.
And we've seen it in the New York Times, we saw it with the New York Times in Cuba, where the Cuba in the late 1950s, Fidel Castro was sort of a non entity, like he had disappeared, he was irrelevant.
He had no men, no guns, no money, and this sort of self-styled adventurer named Herbert Matthews, who was a New York Times correspondent, who had palled around with Hemingway in Spain and Abyssinia, Ethiopia, he took it upon himself to find this romantic revolutionary, Keith Castro, and Proclaim on the front page of the New York Times that this was Cuba's democratic savior.
And he kept pounding away at that narrative that Castro was a messiah, was a democratic messiah who was going to save Cuba and democratize the island.
And he literally resurrected Castro from all but certain political death and made him into an international star.
And within months, all the money, the guns, the men that he needed started flowing into him.
Castro himself was so grateful for what the New York Times had done for him that he went to their offices on three separate occasions to thank the publisher in person for their hand in bringing about the Cuban Revolution.
Wow.
Yeah, I would imagine that this wasn't the New York Times acting of its own bat though.
I'm sure that there must have been some CIA influence in that particular...
You know, who knows?
It got to a point, though, that the American government was so alarmed by the New York Times reporting on Cuba that they actually held congressional hearings into it.
There was a Senate committee that was looking into the way that the New York Times had empowered this revolutionary who, as we all know, subsequently became a tyrant.
And, you know, it was a disaster.
Did the New York Times promote Che Guevara as a groovy revolutionary with a...?
Basically, the answer is yes.
The Times made the entire Castro regime look like just this wonderful place where all of Cubans, despite never having cast a vote for this man, were considered him to be naturally elected, sort of just elected because they all loved him so much.
That was the storyline that Times was running with, and that was a storyline that the international left had been advancing as well.
The New York Times very much took part in that.
Castro didn't really need an election because he was so beloved that he was naturally the leader of Cuba.
That was something that they actually wrote about, along with other figures in the intellectual left like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Yeah, the intellectual left, they've got an awful lot.
I mean, you mentioned George Bernard Shaw and the Fabians.
I mean, some of the things that they're advocating for are just totalitarianism.
They're horrible people.
But before we go, I've really loved talking to you, actually.
Tell me a bit about your, is it your next book about going to Nicaragua to search for your friend who died?
Tell me, what's the background to that?
Yeah, my best friend growing up, a guy named Jordan Ressler, we were friends from very young age, 12 or 13, and we were roommates in college and university.
And after graduating, he decided to take a trip to Nicaragua and went up with a Brit, actually, to this island, there's a volcano on an island, and these two went hiking.
He was an Ivy League graduate, my friend, and the guy he met there was an Oxford grad.
And these two kind of, Guys that were very out of place on this island disappeared and there was a search for three weeks by the Nicaraguan army, by military contractors from the US.
It took them that long to find the bodies and they had died on the tallest waterfall.
They plunged to their deaths, tragically.
And I went to go, five years later, I went to go find out For myself what happened there.
And, you know, I understood from going there and doing some investigation that there were no answers like there's just there's nobody with them there was no, there is no answer to that conundrum it's a tragedy but when I was there I had a Sort of an idea for a different kind of story that was inspired by this.
And it became a novel called He Falls Alone, which will be coming out next year.
And it's a bit of a thriller, a bit of a literary novel.
And it's really looking at the place of a young man who is lost in a very strange, woke world that he's having to contend with and goes to find the truth and seek out the truth that had been covered up by a very powerful and wealthy group of people.
Sounds good.
Sounds really good.
Well, actually, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
I think you're slightly, you've come out of left field for me.
I mean, you were sort of booked by my guy who books people for me, and I'm really glad he found you.
It's great.
It's a nice change.
Yeah, thank you.
I've definitely, you know, I've known who you are for quite a while.
And I know some people from the Breitbart world and, and appreciate what you guys are doing.
So thank you.
Oh, cool.
Cool.
Um, so, um, if you've enjoyed this podcast, as I'm sure you have, well, first of all, you must buy Ashley's book, just tell it, tell us what the book is called again.
It's The Grey Lady Winked, and it's grey with the American spelling, which is an A and not an E. You can find it at thegreyladywinked.com.
Excellent.
And your other book is called, coming out next year?
That's called He Falls Alone.
Cool.
And if you like this podcast and you want to support me, as of course you do, don't forget I'm on Patreon and Subscribestar and I really value and appreciate your support because it's increasingly hard in this censored world for voices like mine to be heard.
So, thank you.
Thank you again, Ashley Winsberg.
It's been really good fun.
Excellent, excellent guest.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Thank you so much, James.
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