Abby Martin and Joe Rogan expose U.S. military’s global pollution—900 Superfund sites, Camp Lejeune’s toxic legacy, and Okinawa’s coral reef destruction—while critiquing its role in Yemen’s bombing campaign (linked to Obama’s Iran deal betrayal) and Afghanistan’s instability. They dissect Israel’s apartheid system, citing 73% Israeli support for Gaza’s civilian-targeted bombings, U.S.-supplied munitions, and settler expulsions like Sheikh Jarrah, enabled by legal shields like the Hague Invasion Act. Skeptical of UAP disclosures, Martin questions grainy footage motives, from psychedelic weapons to quantum physics, while Rogan explores theories like time-traveling drones or future humans. Both agree: imperialism and propaganda fuel conflict, demanding demilitarization and uncomfortable truths over curated narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
I remember one of the first times, not one of the first times, but one of the...
One of the biggest times that I got blowback from having you on was your personal experience interviewing people in Israel, interviewing Israelis and interviewing Palestinians and trying to sort through, like, what is really going on over there?
What is the real attitude about people over there?
It must be an email campaign.
It must have been a campaign because it was like the same letter over and over and over again I was receiving in my inbox.
It must have been like a website where you could go and then sign it and then send it to me.
But don't you think that the tide has shifted in that subject where now people are realizing, like they're going, hey, This is not as simple as the mainstream media wants everybody to look at it.
The way the mainstream media was portraying it in this country, it was always that Israel's the good guys, the Palestinians are the bad people.
That's how it was.
But the mainstream perception now has very much shifted, don't you think?
When you see the Iron Dome, and you see these rockets being fired out of Palestine, and they're all getting detonated in the air, and then you realize, oh, this is kind of a crazy situation.
One side has this insane technology, and the other side is...
25% of American Jews now, after the latest onslaught in Gaza, believe Israel's an apartheid state.
And that shows you how dramatically the narrative has completely flipped on its head.
Because for the last 20 years, Israel's been losing control of dictating the narrative.
I mean, that was really what they relied on for so long, that we're acting in self-defense, that we're surrounded by people who hate us and hypothetically will commit genocide against us.
To basically defend the fact that they are committing de facto genocide in Gaza, that is the erasure of Gaza residents.
It's the erasure of a culture.
It's not just the extermination.
That's according to the UN. But yeah, the tide has changed, Joe.
They can no longer say that they're acting in self-defense over the last 20 years with the bombardments, with the invasions.
With the colonization outside of their borders.
I mean, we're talking about Lebanon, Syria, and the Golan Heights, and just constantly bombing an open air prison.
It is an open air prison.
There's two million people trapped there.
They cannot leave without permits by the Israeli government or the collaborative government in Egypt.
Those people are trapped.
And then you look at Israel, they're living high.
They're living a great life.
I saw some crazy-ass ad from Dior of people basically just having this very ritzy time, living in Tel Aviv, living in Jerusalem, and completely...
Just separate from the fact that there is this besieged ghetto of two million people denied basic access to things like water and electricity.
I mean, the right to have human mobility, I think, is like the most basic right that you can have as a human being, like to leave and freely travel.
And these people can't do that.
And the media has completely painted it forever.
The media is totally controlled, right?
The media acts as an arm of the state.
And for the longest time, the media has basically just said Israel is right.
They've only depicted the Israeli side of the story.
And it doesn't matter anymore because with the advent of social media, Palestinians are able to film their own reality for the first time.
So they're filming the home demolitions.
They're filming the ethnic cleansing.
They're filming themselves getting bombed relentlessly for no reason other than collective punishment and torture of this area.
And that is convincing the world and actually bringing more people to their side.
The sympathy is now going to Palestinians, where even Democratic voters—a Gallup poll is taken every single year of Democratic Party voters and where they're at on the Israel-Palestine thing.
And this year, for the first time in the history of the poll, more Democratic Party voters say that the pressure needs to be put on Israel— And it's just because of this.
It's because the narrative's changing, Joe, and they've lost the moral high ground here.
They have targeted munitions that the U.S. supplies to them.
They choose to target entire families' homes.
They choose to kill 14 members of one family sleeping in their bed at night because maybe one person has ties to Hamas.
Hamas has indiscriminate rocket fire because they don't have targeted munitions.
Wrap your mind around that.
One side has all the armaments in the world supplied by the world's empire, and they actually direct these missiles towards sleeping families and civilian infrastructure and AP buildings.
Don't they drop leaflets and let them know that- So that's what they claim, that we're the most moral army in the world because we warn people in advance.
I have contacts on the ground in Gaza that said that is not true, and also this was happening at night.
You're sleeping in bed.
But they can use that and say, oh no, we sent a 10-minute warning.
And even if that were true, Your entire home.
Like some guy lost his whole bookstore that his family has passed down from generations.
That's all gone.
All of these businesses gone.
It's not just about people's lives tragically lost.
And they have used Hamas governing the Gaza Strip as a reason since Hamas pushed Israeli settlers out back in the day 15 years ago as a reason to enact this medieval siege and tighten the noose every year, allow less and less people to leave, allow less and less water, bomb more and more factories.
You know, all of these things that basically make life harder and harder.
But the thing is, if you look at actually the history, the Israeli government facilitated Hamas to rise to power.
They wanted Hamas to take control of the Gaza Strip.
So then they can use Hamas as this eternal enemy to collectively punish everyone there.
And it's actually a war crime upon war crime upon war crime because this is indiscriminate bombing.
50% of people who live in Gaza are children.
Innocent children.
That's 70 kids who just died in the last bombing campaign.
These people are innocent.
They have nothing to do with Hamas.
But, Joe, it doesn't even matter what Gazans do, what Palestinians do to resist.
Look at The Great March of Return, the documentary that I actually came on last time and talked about.
It's now up for free.
Gaza Fights for Freedom.
Everyone can check it out on YouTube.
YouTube's throttling it, but please check it out.
This is what happens when Palestinians resist peacefully.
Everyone says, where's the Palestinian Gandhi?
Why don't they peacefully resist?
They are.
They have been.
They've largely abandoned violent struggle or armed resistance, which is actually internationally protected right for colonized people.
But when they resist peacefully, in the tens of thousands, they were mowed down by Israeli snipers, Joe.
Has something been ingrained in them that there's like this us versus them mentality and that they are the other and that they don't think of them as the same?
Yeah, I mean, 73% of Israelis wanted the bombing to continue.
You know, this was a completely indiscriminate bombing campaign that was leveling civilian infrastructure.
We all saw those buildings fall like 9-11.
I mean, this was a huge media tower that was leveled for no reason.
There was no proof that Hamas was even in the building.
This is part of a subtler colonial attitude.
You look at, you know, US institutions like our justice system and police force, you know, there's no doubt that there's racism when it comes to the disproportionality of people who are in prison, for example, in terms of African Americans.
Imagine if the U.S. were colonizing native land and just subjugating these people today.
That is what's happening in Israel.
So Israel is built upon ethnic cleansing and it continues to ethnically cleanse and colonize people every single day.
That is why all of the Israeli authorities have abandoned the two-state solution a long time ago.
Hamas even actually said that they would accept a two-state solution.
In their latest charter, they said that they're willing to accept a two-state solution, but no Israeli authority Has actually given that, you know, credence.
Well, so Israel was founded on top of Palestine, you know, but the original partition, which is the 1948 borders, that Israel has continued to take more than that.
And so the West Bank is here.
Gaza is a totally separate area.
Gaza was kind of a surplus area for refugees that were basically expelled during the original foundation of Israel.
And then you have Jerusalem, which is this international city center where people are supposed to coexist.
So ever since 1948, Israel has continued to take more and more and more.
And that's why you see that famous, like, you know, the quadrant of the four maps of Palestine and more and more land has been atomized over time.
In 67, they...
Yep, exactly.
In 67, they committed, you know, they went on a huge war of aggression and took...
We've occupied the West Bank in Gaza under military occupation and the West Bank today continues to be occupied under an Israeli military dictatorship where you cannot do anything.
For the people that are just listening, Jamie pulled up this map of Palestinian loss of land from 1946 to 2014. So it shows before Israel was decided, before it was called Israel, it shows Palestine, and then it shows Jewish land in Palestine.
It's like these tiny little pockets.
And then it shows the UN plan from 1947, which Israel takes over a big chunk.
But then it gets much bigger in 1949 to 1967. And then in 2014, most of Israel is white.
And the Palestinian part, which was green in the original map, which all green, is now just a tiny few pockets.
And those little pockets of land is basically where the West Bank is.
So when people say, we want the two-state solution, and I'm not Palestinian.
You know, I advocate BDS, which we can talk about, because BDS is the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.
And it's what American allies and, you know, allies of Palestinians can do to try to advocate that human rights are restored.
So international law must be applied.
Refugees must have the right to return.
The occupation must end.
And human rights must be distributed equally, which means apartheid must fall.
So those little specks of land that are dotted throughout the territory, that is what they say should be the Palestinian state.
How could the Palestinian state exist if it's already taken over and atomized by settlements?
And when I was on the ground in the West Bank, it's like it's hard to wrap your mind around the reality of it until you're there and you have to go through these military checkpoints.
People hear, oh, it's under military occupation.
They think of like, oh, there's a base, there's soldiers milling around.
This is like fucking the US military in Iraq.
This is dehumanizing, subjugating, humiliating occupation on a daily basis that you have to endure as a Palestinian going from one place to the next.
They set up giant concrete barricades blockading you just to make your life miserable.
If they find something on you that can be construed as a weapon, you go to prison.
If you're an Israeli settler, because people say, oh, the PA controls parts of the West Bank.
That's true.
So they point to the fact that there is some sort of Palestinian authority throughout some of this territory.
It's a very small amount.
If you're an Israeli settler and you kill a Palestinian, you can't even get arrested.
There's no direction that the PA could have to even arrest an Israeli settler.
Settler just has all the rights and they're sanctioned by the state to do whatever the fuck they want and they can walk around with guns, point a gun to your head, expel you from your home.
And Joe, I don't know if you saw that crazy ass video that basically paints the picture of what I'm talking about right now of a settler from New Jersey or Long Island saying, Hey, if I don't take your home, someone else will.
He's literally moving into a Palestinian's home in Jerusalem, which is supposed to be this shared center.
So, this is the problem is that there's a court order that's just totally fallaciously concocted by the Israeli court system because everything is discriminatory against Palestinians and everything is disenfranchised geared toward pushing Palestinians out.
So they have these concocted documents that they can use to be like, look, we have this court order, so therefore we need to push you out.
The Palestinians are fighting it, but who's going to win at the end, Joe?
I mean, this is a demographic law that's in place, which means that 70% of Jerusalem needs to be Israeli Jews.
So what happens when you have 31% who are Palestinian Arabs?
They need to be expelled to maintain that artificial majority, to maintain that demographic.
There's incredible twins, brother and sister Muhammad and Mona al-Kurd, who are filming their reality.
They live in Sheikh Jarrah.
They're filming real-time settlers in their home, trying to take it over forcibly.
So they have these homes in Sheikh Jarrah that these people are living in and then they pay people to just move into these people's homes and force them out.
Yes.
And what's the official government stance on this?
Like, what do they say when confronted about this?
So they just decide the boundaries have been pushed back and this is now our territory.
And so all these people that live in these homes, they have to abandon these homes because if it's our territory, you can't live here because you're Palestinian.
In October, the Israeli Magistrate Court of Jerusalem ruled to evict 12 of the 24 Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah and to give their homes to Israeli Jewish settlers.
The court also ruled that each family must pay 70,000 shekels, $20,000, in fees to cover the settlers' legal expenses.
And this is happening every single day, but I think that because Sheikh Jarrah is a flashpoint in Jerusalem, it's become like a shocking thing for the media to cover.
I mean, this is happening all the time in the West Bank, where people are, you know, their homes are getting demolished for just the minor of things that they maybe build an extension to their kitchen or something like that.
Then they get demolished, right?
And they're made homeless.
But in Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan, it's in Jerusalem, which is supposed to be this shared center place where Israel touts, you know, all these holy sites are there.
And Israel touts it as, we all live in peace and harmony within this area, but it's not true at all.
And even within the 1948 borders, you saw mass mobs going, pulling people out of taxis, saying, are you Arab?
Beating the shit out of people in the streets.
It was an ugly, ugly thing.
And all of this preceded Hamas firing the first rocket in the latest onslaught.
All of this preceded that.
You had Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is the third holiest site in Islam, on fire and thousands of Jewish Israeli settlers chanting death to Arabs and burn their memory, looking at this ancient, incredible mosque in flames.
And the new Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, actually is part of this extremist settler movement who wants to basically take over Al-Aqsa and build a Jewish temple.
And again, just imagine if thousands of Muslim extremists...
We're chanting in front of an ancient synagogue, death to Jews.
I mean, you just can't wrap your mind around it.
Look at all the fucking Hubba Baloo over Notre Dame on fire.
People were throwing tens of millions of dollars and everyone was up in arms about it.
But when Al-Aqsa's on fire and when they're attacking it with stun grenades and smoke bombs during Ramadan...
So they were attacking worshippers during Ramadan, which is a very holy time.
And it was all in part of this onslaught in Sheikh Jarrah and these home demolitions, not home demolitions, but the forced expulsions in Jerusalem and all the pogroms.
You saw, like, You know, thousands of people marching throughout the streets, chanting death to Arabs, and it was a very, very scary time.
So Palestinians rightfully were protesting, and they were protesting around Al-Aqsa, and that's when the Israeli police attacked and started firing, not live ammunition at that time, but they were firing smoke bombs and grenades, and a hundred worshippers or something had to go to the hospital that night.
Because I remember when you had those interviews, when you went over to Israel and you interviewed these people that had this very nonchalant attitude about just kill them all.
And, you know, there was a lot of pushback about that.
I remember that.
But I remember thinking, well...
You'd be hard-pressed to find rational-looking people in America that would have that attitude about any group of people.
Like, just go kill them.
Kill them all.
It would be very difficult.
But you found a lot of people that were talking like that.
People look at that and people can check that out on Reporting from Palestine, our playlist on Empire Files.
People should check that out because a lot of people will look at that and they'll say, you cherry-picked these interviews.
You made these people look bad.
Look, not only did we not cherry-pick the interviews, but like you just said, Joe, if you go to the Deep South in the most racist areas of the United States, sure, you'd find people who believe similar types of things, but how quickly would you find enough people all at once saying, kill all the black people?
Right.
Exterminate them, nuke them.
I mean, that's a real genocidal rhetoric.
There was even people laughing about it and gleefully telling an American documentarian knowing on camera.
I mean, if that's what you're willing to say on camera, what are you willing to say behind closed doors?
And this is something that's been passed down Yeah, I mean, racism is palpable because of the situation that they're in.
They're conditioned, born and bred, hating Palestinians, otherizing Palestinians.
You have forced, you know, segregation in schools.
There's so many elements and layers to the racism, the deep-seated racism that exists in Israeli society.
But really, ultimately, you have to In order to accept the fact that you are a colonizer, that you are an oppressor and subjugating people just right across the way in this open air prison, subjugating basically 5 million Palestinians either live in Gaza or the West Bank.
And they are being tortured and subjugated and oppressed every single day.
And you have to be okay with that to a certain extent to be a proud Zionist.
Did you find anybody over there that was either any Israelis over there that were opposed to this line of thinking, opposed to this perception, opposed to the actions of Israel against the Palestinians?
There are definitely leftists in Israel, and I don't mean to say that there are not.
Of course there are people trying to push back against the government, of course.
I don't know how many anti-Zionists there are, because why would you live in Israel?
I know a lot of Israelis who have emigrated to Europe or America, because it's just too much to live there and kind of be surrounded by this kind of mentality.
But I mean, yes, simple answer is yes, there are plenty of people there who disagree with the occupation, who maybe want the siege to be lifted on Gaza because it's too much.
But I would say at the end of the day, the vast majority agree with the whole premise of the colonial project.
And I do know that, you know, it's kind of dangerous to be an out.
If I lived there, I would be in danger.
Even Bet Salem, which is a human rights organization that has openly declared Israel to be an apartheid state, they operate in Israel and they are in danger.
That's why I had to direct Gaza Fights for Freedom outside of the country.
I mean, I would have loved to be within Gaza, but I was told I was an Iranian spy.
And that I was a propagandist and I was banned for life.
And so I can't even go there.
And so I had to work through this blockade and get, you know, files every couple weeks and sort through this data.
And it was really unfortunate.
And it's very scary, especially for the people who worked with us, because they know that they could be penalized and punished for having their name on the documentary.
But, Joe, this is reflected in polls.
I mean, it's very extreme.
The fascism is extreme.
Look no further than Naftali Bennett, this dude who's the new prime minister, who said openly, bragged, I've killed a lot of Arabs in my life and there's nothing wrong with that.
He has openly declared there should be no Palestinian state.
He's actually more right-wing than Netanyahu himself.
And you see the US politicians pointing to Netanyahu and being like, look, Netanyahu's an extremist.
These settlers are extremists.
They don't represent the mainstream current of Israeli society.
But that isn't the case.
They are outgrowths of a lot of true things about Israel, just like Trump was a true manifestation of a lot of where American society was at.
But the liberals They want to sanitize this reality from us.
That's the thing that's disturbing is when you talk to American intellectuals who are very bright people but either are supporters of Israel or are American Jews and they have sort of a blind allegiance towards Israel in a lot of ways.
And that was...
In a lot of ways, that was what you had to have in those circles for a long time, right?
You supported Israel.
Everybody supported Israel.
But I think seeing some of the things that you uncovered in your work and seeing some of those interviews and to recognize that it's a very disturbed place.
Very, very disturbed.
There's no clear...
There's no clear moral high ground for these people when you're talking about shooting people that are just working as press or shooting people that are medics.
It's one of those things, too, where if you ask someone, like, how do you fix this?
How does one resolve the conflict in the Middle East?
That might be, like, the biggest problem in all of world politics.
Like, ask someone, how do you resolve the crisis in the Middle East?
So there's a brutal Israeli military dictatorship that's been imposed on the West Bank, and it has been since 67. And this is preventing people from organizing politically.
I know people who've been in jail for years and years with no trial because they were an organizer.
You know, they were politically active.
You can't have weapons.
You can be thrown in jail if you have anything on you that can be construed as a weapon.
You can't convene in groups.
You saw plenty of footage that came out of the last onslaught and the last stuff that was going on of people simply raising a flag, which is illegal under the Israeli military dictatorship.
You cannot hold up a symbol of your culture.
And you will get arrested.
You saw plenty of people getting attacked.
You even saw like a six-year-old boy getting arrested by the Israeli military.
So, Joe, I don't know if you knew this, but I just...
One, a lawsuit.
This is fucking insane.
I mean, this goes along with the whole BDS thing, but there are 30 states in the US that have passed legislation that says you cannot make money at a state institution as an independent contractor unless you sign a contract saying that you will never advocate the boycott of Israel and never engage in the boycott of Israel.
I mean, you actually can't wrap your mind around it because it's totally incomprehensible and flies in the face of logic that actually they would alter our laws to benefit a foreign country.
But when you see things like the John Cena thing, or when you see things like the NBA kowtowing to China, and even the World Health Organization, I'm sure you saw that spokesperson who wouldn't even recognize that Taiwan was a country, wouldn't say it.
He was in...
I was on a Zoom call with this lady who was asking him questions about Taiwan's response to COVID-19.
And he refused to even discuss that Taiwan is a country, so he disconnected the phone and then came back.
And when he came back, he said, well, I think China's doing a really good job, so let's just move on.
But it shows you the crazy influence that one country can have.
And we sort of accept it with some countries, but with other countries, we're deeply disturbed by it.
Countries that we don't think are our allies, we're deeply disturbed by it, like this China thing.
But this idea that these institutions or these countries can have any effect whatsoever on our First Amendment rights That's very disturbing.
And it should be something that raises people's hackles.
It should put people up in arms because that's a precedent.
And if that gets set because we're allies with a country and we allow it to happen because we're allies, you can't talk badly about, you can't advocate for whatever you're advocating for.
If you're advocating for boycotts or not visiting or sanctions against them, that's a super slippery slope.
All we'd have to do is have these kind of relationships with a lot of different countries.
It's so unbelievable that this has happened under the radar.
And you have actually a foreign leader bragging about it.
Netanyahu took to Twitter and he was like, we've worked really hard to lobby these states, to pass these.
I think they're throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks because they know it's unconstitutional.
When they've been challenged before in a couple of states, I think four states, they've faced legal challenges and they've all been ruled unconstitutional because they are!
And I mean basically Israel serves as an important strategic partnership with the U.S. military because we can manage operations, we can use them as a battering ram and a military garrison out there.
So I said, well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to Al-Qaeda?
He said, no, no.
He says, there's nothing new that way.
They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.
He said, I guess it's like we don't know what to do about terrorists, but we've got a good military and we can take down governments.
And he said, I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.
So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan.
I said, are we still going to war with Iraq?
And he said, oh, it's worse than that.
He said, he reached over on his desk, he picked up a piece of paper, and he said, I just got this down from upstairs, meeting the Secretary of Defense's office today, and he said, this is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran.
You know, the Middle East is highly resource-rich.
We wanted to stake our claim in the region, and Israel's the perfect outpost for that.
And, you know, when Israel went on that war of aggression in 67, I think the U.S. was like, hey, we can fucking use you.
You've done well.
Which actually is interesting because a lot of people think the tail wags the dog or Israel controls the US. No, it's very obviously that the US is using Israel for its military goals and regional domination, which means that it can be untenable, which means that we can make it inconvenient for the US to care about subsidizing Israel.
They don't give a shit.
You know, if enough pressure is mounted, they will abandon the project.
They have similar goals but not congruent goals and interests.
They don't care if Israel takes over all of Palestine.
That doesn't really matter to the US political establishment.
Do you think that part of the way this is all playing out is because the fact that they're backed up by the United States and the United States gives them like these crazy laws like what you faced in Georgia and they have these sort of the attitude over here that like this is our that's our guard dog over there like we'll we'll let this thing loose we'll do whatever we can to support them because we need them we need them to protect our assets over there and so we empower them in A wild way,
like in not ever talking about these atrocities and really kind of glossing over the things that you've highlighted.
I mean, it's totally subsidized by the U.S. And that's why during the Great March of Return, you saw these toothless resolutions passed by the U.N. being like, we condemn Israel.
And the U.S. has veto power on the world stage.
There's something called the Hague Invasion Act that says if you even try to indict U.S. officials for war crimes, you can fucking be invaded by the U.S. I mean, there is so much power and domination from the U.S. as the supplier.
And backer of these states like Saudi Arabia and Israel that no one can do anything about it until we act here.
But it was controversial at the time because there wasn't the kind of media coverage in mainstream media, which is where everybody was getting their news.
So these controversial, small, independently operated media units like yours that would go over there and report things, they were sort of dismissed and marginalized.
Well, you were working for Russia today, and I think the way I was describing this to a friend, I said, I bet they thought that if you got this woman who talks a lot of shit about American imperialism and you hire her for Russia today, that'd be a pretty good scoop.
You got this very articulate American woman who's talking shit about the American empire.
Whoops!
What is she saying about Crimea?
Oh no.
And they're like, oh no, this bitch hates all imperialism.
Fuck, I thought she was on our side.
When you started going against what Putin was doing in Crimea, and then they invited you to go to Crimea and put shoes on the ground, you're like, get the fuck out of here.
I mean, what's funny about it is that my boss cared so much about just aesthetics.
He was just obsessed about like the set.
And he didn't even like, he didn't even really care about like the politics.
But...
What was interesting is that he got so much heat from what I did from, I don't know, I think the higher-ups, I think half of them really liked what I did because I was trying to assert my editorial freedom and being like, look, this isn't just a Russian propaganda network.
You need people out there who are criticizing Russia.
So I think half the people were like, yeah, let's do it.
And the other half of the people were like, fuck no, you're done.
And so what happened was it just became impossible for me to do my job and, you know...
I wasn't stepped on in terms of my editorial freedom, but I think my boss never forgave me for making his job harder.
But, you know, it's just the same thing if you're working for The Atlantic.
You know, like, you know your role.
You are hired because you know your role and you agree with the editorial line of the network.
And so when it comes to, like, Israel-Palestine, like, a lot of these people are hired at these institutions because they believe in American exceptionalism, because they tacitly think that the U.S. should be a global empire, because they are Zionist.
So you're not going to step on the toes of management.
And again, the whole manufacturing consent model, it's like, that's just the way the media operates.
And I think a lot of people have the perception that politicians get paid by lobbying groups and then they do their bidding.
Look at someone like Marco Rubio.
When the Parkland kids were talking to him, they're like, will you stop accepting donations from the NRA? And he was like...
They buy into my agenda.
I don't get paid by the NRA to tout gun advocacy.
They know that I'm good on the issue and they pay me.
So it's the same with the media.
And part of the model of control of the media is flack, where you basically discredit and undermine anyone who's going against what the corporate dictated narrative is.
And that means Israel-Palestine.
She's a Russian agent.
She's an anti-Semite.
She's a truther because of shit that I said 15 years ago that I stand by today.
We don't know the truth about 9-11.
But, you know, it's unbelievable the lengths that they will go to make you obsolete from the entire discussion.
The fact that we think that the Bush administration told us the truth, I mean, it's just laughable, you know?
I mean, the fact that they waited over a year to even start an investigation.
The Warren Commission looks like the fucking Bible compared to the 9-11 Commission.
I mean, it was a setup from the start.
Even the commission members quit in protest because they said this is...
A joke.
We're not learning the truth.
Henry Kissinger was the first person that was supposed to be administering the commission, a decorated war criminal, where you had family members in horror saying, how the fuck is this guy supposed to administer the investigation?
This is unbelievable.
They didn't even want an investigation.
So I think that starting there, you know, trying to reopen how there was such a massive failure That day.
How was there such a massive failure of intelligence to let that happen?
When you hear about things that are orchestrated, when you hear about FBI people that are involved inside organizations that instigate things and help plan things, then the rest of the people that they're doing it with, you always wonder how much How much of that exists?
How much of that exists across the board in all sorts of big events that happen?
I was reading this thing.
Let me find out if this is true.
I was reading this thing.
I just saw the title of it.
What was the woman's name that there was a kidnap attempt on her?
But I do feel like, you know, when you push people into a corner like people are in Gaza, it's like that is kind of, you know, resistance is like a natural human inclination.
But what I'm saying is, if you look at military strategy, if you just look at the strategy that they employ in America with agent provocateurs like they did with the World Trade Organization, when they had that massive protest and then these agent provocateurs came in and started smashing windows and lighting things on fire, and then all of a sudden now you have a violent protest.
So then you can send the police in and start arresting people and they set up a no protest zone.
Remember that?
Where the World Trade Organization, you couldn't even have a pin on your backpack that had a WTO with a red line through it.
They were taking pins away from people.
You couldn't walk in with a t-shirt that said no World Trade Organization.
You couldn't do that.
They would say this is a no protest zone.
They violated people's First Amendment rights to ensure that the World Trade Organization got to do their little thing in Seattle and have it done completely without protests.
So they just start smashing things.
That's what they do.
That's an agent provocateur.
And it's a common strategy.
It's existed throughout history.
Nero burned Rome.
Hitler burned Reichstag.
I mean, they did this to make sure that they could implement their strategy and their plans.
Yeah, I mean, doing things like that, doing things like...
Any time you're...
Imagine...
I'm not accusing anybody of this, again.
But imagine, if you want to distract someone from one thing you're doing, and the way you do it is invade a country.
Invade a country, prop up some rebels, launch some rockets, do something, and while all that's going on, you're over here shoveling money and doing a little of this, doing a little of that.
That's gone on throughout history.
People have done that.
It's a part of strategy.
It's a part of propaganda.
It's a part of how people implement a thing that they want to do that's unpopular with the people.
I mean, and when the military-industrial complex plays such an interwoven role in our politics, it's hard to separate the two, really.
You know, it really is.
And these things are administered with such extreme levels of cognitive dissonance, like the Yemen War.
I mean...
It's unbelievable how that was started and Obama's a war criminal for that alone, you know, and no one actually gives him the credit for starting that and it's still going on and it's absolutely horrifying.
I would imagine that they would want them considering that the only thing that basically makes us not invade and do regime change in North Korea is the nuclear deterrent.
I mean, I would imagine that any country would want nukes if they're trying to be undermined and overthrown by the U.S. and its allies, for sure.
But the Iran nuclear deal, despite whatever you think about Iran developing nuclear weapons, the Iran nuclear deal was a tremendous step to put whatever containment in order and to basically prove to the world that they are complying with the development of peaceful nuclear energy and nothing more.
And so basically Saudi Arabia got irked.
They didn't want their influence waning in the region.
And so Obama literally said, this is a quote from him, he said he wants to placate Saudi Arabia.
And that is why he agreed to get into the Yemen war.
A war of outright genocidal bombing.
Grain silos, sheep herding.
I mean, it's absolutely horrific.
What the U.S. has done.
And it's not just Saudi.
It's the U.S. there every step of the way.
It's the weapons.
It's the targeting.
They were refueling up until a couple of years ago.
I mean, it is an all out genocidal war.
And one of the people on Obama's security team before we got into the war, he said this war is going to be long, bloody and indeterminate, meaning we have no fucking clue how it's going to end, nor do we care.
It is disgusting because people kind of fly under the cover like, oh, it's the Saudis and oh, the US just supporting Saudi.
No, the US is responsible for that.
And what's disgusting about it is it's all about Iran.
It's basically all about, in their mind, containing Iran because the Houthis they see are an extension of Iran because they're Shia.
But really, they don't really have anything to do with Iran.
But it basically strengthens Iran.
This is the most amazing thing about the war on terror is it's strengthened all of our alleged enemies.
It's done the opposite of what they've told us they wanted to do.
Look at Afghanistan, for Christ's sake.
The Taliban controls more territory now than they did when we invaded.
And the whole last 20 years was all about, we can't let the Taliban take over.
Well, we can't leave now because the Taliban will take over.
strength and the whole time you're risking life and limb for 20 years and now they're just like well uh we're out but guess what the taliban's going to take over i was reading a story about um afghan interpreters and people that have helped the troops while they were over there and that a lot of the veterans are very concerned for these people's lives if we pull out of afghanistan absolutely Absolutely.
Well, like Wesley Clark said, which I think is a really accurate thing, he said, when you're a hammer, you look at every problem like a nail.
And when you're a global empire, you don't look at how can we cooperate, how can we peacefully negotiate things.
You look at how can we contain people by military force, which is what imperialism is.
How can we extract and subjugate, you know, extract wealth, subjugate nations and keep them under our thumb to maintain our domination?
And I think that a lot of these people who get into these positions of power, it's really short term.
They want to make super profits.
They're all tied up in the MIC. They don't have long term strategic goals of like, well, what's going to happen in 10 years if, you know, this and this happen?
I mean, you look at somewhere like Yemen or Afghanistan.
The Houthis' dire enemy is al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Yet, we are waging a genocidal campaign in Yemen to bomb the Houthis.
Meanwhile, al-Qaeda is there.
You know, we have this policy, we're also bombing them.
But it's just like, it's just a complete mess, which really makes me think that it's a lot of just short-term bad decisions to just continue making that cash.
Jesus.
And then the next administration comes up and tries to clean up the mess, but they look at every problem like a nail also.
Well, many politicians have discussed this, but no one's ever gotten in a position to try to implement something like this, where they're trying to pull us out of any interventionist foreign policy, any foreign wars, like, let's get out of all that stuff.
We know there are many culprits, corporations, policymakers, mass consumption.
But what if there was one single entity that by itself will bring planetary collapse?
One single organization.
One single enemy that not only produced enough toxic destruction to destroy the planet on its own, but was also subject to virtually no regulations, no oversight, no accountability, and as of yet, no blame.
If there was a monster like that, shouldn't it be dragged out of the dark and into the center of the struggle to save the planet?
Even if every person, every automobile, and every factory suddenly emitted zero emissions, the Earth would still be heated, headed towards total disaster for one major reason.
So this is going to be all completely grassroots funded.
I'm working with Dar Jamal.
He was one of the first embedded reporters in Iraq, an incredible investigative journalist who's on the tip of the spear of climate change research.
So here's the pitch real quick.
That quote is from Barry Sanders, who wrote The Green Zone.
Through his extensive research in 2009, he found that even if all of those things were halted, the U.S. military alone as an institution would still cause enough carbon emissions to cause a lot of the climate change that we're seeing.
One of the things I found out from my friend Evan Hafer from Black Rifle Coffee, when he was overseas, he was telling me about these burn pits.
And I didn't know about the burn pits.
I didn't know that that's how they got rid of their garbage.
They just had this massive...
24-7 fire going where they would throw everything into it.
Tampons, garbage, cans, like whatever the fuck you had.
You know, whatever waste they had they would throw in there and that all these soldiers were forced to breathe in the toxic fumes Because the wind would blow, it would go through the camp, and everybody would be breathing the smoke from this toxic burn pit 24-7.
And they're denied claims, just like Gulf War Syndrome.
Look, a lot of movies have been done about the environment.
A lot of people are focused on climate change.
This is a huge issue in politics, mass movements, all of this.
The media acknowledges it.
But no one has tackled what I see as the elephant in the room.
And if you were to pull out 100 people from the streets, how many people would say the U.S. military is one of the largest contributors of not only climate change, but just pollution?
Here, the global greenhouse gas emissions amount to 593 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent from 2010 to 2018, an annual average similar to the annual GHG emission output of 14 million passenger cars.
So what the US military does is essentially the average emissions output of a large city.
Well, we're going to outline—the climate change research is very—it's hard to elucidate because it's very scientific, and we're going to be with the cutting-edge science with scientists in Alaska.
We're going this summer, and we're going to be documenting that.
But this goes so far beyond carbon emissions.
This is about stuff like you're talking about.
I mean— Again, the U.S. military is the largest polluter on the planet as an institution.
Not even just the U.S. government.
This is crazy, right?
It pollutes more than the biggest chemical companies, the top five chemical companies combined.
If you were to ask people who should we fight if we're trying to save the environment, people will say oil companies or mining or animal agriculture, all that shit.
But really, it's this.
This is the elephant in the room, Joe.
And people don't want to address this because they want access.
A lot of these environmental organizations have...
Access and grants from the US government.
It's controversial.
It's controversial.
And I want to give you a couple examples that go far beyond what we just saw.
Camp Lejeune, Jacksonville, North Carolina.
There was so many chemicals that were poured into the water by the US military 60 years ago that people in the tens of thousands were dying.
There's actually a graveyard called Baby Heaven because of how many children under the age of five have died because of these pollutants.
The government denied it for decades, and they're still denying paying people for the water contamination.
Coldwater Creek, Missouri.
Dumping from nuclear waste.
I mean, this is radioactive compounds that have the shelf life of billions of years.
It's permanent pollution, right?
These toxins have polluted tens of thousands of people that played in these creeks.
This is what the U.S. military is doing to their own people.
Their own soldiers, their own personnel at these military bases.
A Superfund site is a site that the EPA has designated a highly toxic Very polluted site in the United States that's on the national priorities list because it's so fucking toxic that it is causing extreme devastation to people's health and the environment.
900 out of 1300 Superfund sites in the United States are either military installations or have previously hosted military needs.
And there's hundreds more being considered.
And places like Camp Lejeune, places like Coldwater Creek, look at the uranium dumping in Navajo land, all of these things that have benefited the US military.
And they've just, with callous disregard and criminal negligence, have dumped their pollutants and chemical runoff in these areas, hundreds of areas in the United States.
And we're just talking about the US. Think about what the 800 bases are doing around the world.
Think about what war does.
Landmines still in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos.
Agent Orange still causing birth defects.
I mean, all of this really, really heavy stuff.
DU in Syria and Iraq.
It's not just even about human health.
What does it do to the environment?
It prevents you from being able to have sustainable agriculture.
And we should explain to you, depleted uranium is what you're talking about.
And that was considered by many people to be the cause of the Gulf War Syndrome that a lot of soldiers experienced and birth defects and cancers and all sorts because they were using depleted uranium rounds because apparently when they use them as rounds, it just goes right through tanks.
And this is not just stuff that was done during the Cold War and World War II, even though a lot of this shit is still sadly being felt today and again being denied the claims, just like the first responders on 9-11.
I mean, how callous do you need to be to use and exploit these people and then to deny them health care?
Yeah, that's the scariest thing about all this shit is that there's so many patriotic people that really do think that they want to support their country.
And so they do enlist and they risk their life to go over there and do the things that they have to do that they feel they're doing to support freedom, to make...
America a better, safer place.
And then if they get wounded or if something happens, they don't even get taken care of.
Or if they do get taken care of, it's very poorly and they have to fight for it.
And things like the depleted uranium poisoning that has caused Gulf War syndrome or things like these burn pits, it's really treasonous.
And it's not just this relic of how our military used to be before we knew better.
The burn pits just happened in Iraq, man.
I mean, and I just read the story yesterday of this chemical foam that was used to basically stop fires is now being incinerated in hundreds of sites across the U.S. This is like some goddamn X-Files episode.
It's like a sinister covert program to burn this highly, highly toxic foam.
It's called a forever chemical because it never actually goes away.
I don't want to go into how horrific the statistics are, but it's bad.
And it's not just human health.
Like I said, I mean, this is biodiversity.
This is...
This is like Jeju Islands in South Korea that the whole island is opposed to this base.
It's totally unnecessary.
And it's just expanding and expanding.
And it is threatening nine geoparks, which is like an exceptionally unique biodiverse area.
You know, they just built a base on Okinawa.
Okinawa is basically an entire base.
Like 70% of the island is a military base.
But they're building another fucking one that threatens a rare blue coral reef.
I mean, it's lunacy.
It's madness and it's lunacy.
And I get a lot of people are patriotic and I get that a lot of, you know, we fetishize the military, we worship the military, we're born and bred to think that this is necessary to have a global empire.
But I want to make people shift their consciousness and say it doesn't have to be this way.
I think what people are worried about, the people that are pro-military in particular, is they're worried about some nefarious government, like whether it's China or Russia or whoever, that builds up a global military that rivals the US, that surpasses it, and they become the dominant world power.
The dominant world power, not just economically, which you could argue China has already done, but militarily.
No, but we're terrified that if we don't keep up, like this is, I mean, I'm not making excuses for anybody, but this is like, if you're going to play devil's advocate, you say, okay, We have to do horrible things because the world's a horrible place.
This is what devil's advocate would be, right?
We have to make sure that we keep our strong military despite all the dangers it presents because if we don't and if we let China take over the world, we're going to be treated the same way Chinese citizens are treated in China.
Like if the Communist Party somehow or another gets a foothold in America and conquers it.
Like people say that's impossible, that's impossible, that's history.
Like, history is filled with empires taking over the other countries.
The idea that it could never happen to America.
Like, every fucking empire has always thought that it could never happen to them.
I'm sure Rome, they were running around, you know, drinking wine, partying for everything.
We got this.
Same thing with ancient Greece.
Same thing with the European or the UK. Like, the way England was running the world back in the day, you would have thought that England was going to be the superpower forever.
We have a legitimate concern on our hands globally about some governments.
And I think they have a legitimate concern about us.
But we want to thank, again, this is rose-colored glasses.
Which is a really sad way to accept this mass-murdering, earth-destroying machine, isn't it?
I mean, to basically put this hypothetical scenario that's based on nothing today.
Yes, in the past empires were warring, but the US has dominated the entire planet.
You can look at someone like China.
China has one military base in Djibouti.
One.
We actually think that China's threatening us for putting ships in their own waters, the South China Sea.
I mean, it's ridiculous the kind of news that comes out basically pretending that China is a threat militarily, when literally it would just be like us having a ship in the Gulf of Mexico and China saying they're threatened by that.
It's very disturbing.
If you're looking at China trying to be a counterweight to, you know, global capitalism, yeah, that's definitely happening.
They're offering countermeasures to development in Africa and stuff like that, and you can argue about the benefits of that.
But it's definitely not the same as what the U.S. is, you know, putting the barrel of a gun to someone's head and saying, do this, or you're fucked, and we'll sanction you to death, literally to death.
I mean, I hate to be like, you know, bring it back to America, but I do think that you have talked extensively about big tech and the insidious nature of like censorship online.
I find that kind of similar in a really eerie way, you know, where corporations have just taken upon themselves to censor Sanitize our reality, curate what they want us to see, working on behalf of government institutions like the Atlantic Council and stuff like that, these fact checkers that censor.
What we see on social media and change the algorithm.
Google, change the algorithm.
We don't see news that I'm talking about when you just Google things anymore.
That to me is just as creepy.
I would rather be a Chinese citizen and know exactly how the censorship model works than actually herald the First Amendment as somehow working in this country.
I mean, how long ago was it where Facebook was banning people if you talked about the lab leak hypothesis, which is now widely accepted, but eight months ago, they were banning you.
When Trump was in office, if you brought that up, that maybe this shit leaked from a lab, you were labeled a racist, you were a terrible person and a Trump supporter.
Mainstream scientists are talking about it openly.
It was on the cover of Newsweek.
It's been re-examined.
Now that this polarizing asshole is out of the White House, we can speak about the truth.
How creepy is that, that the intelligence community along with the political establishment and also the mainstream media, notoriously untrustworthy entities are telling us what reality is acceptable or not.
Like, for example, Oddly behind this new UFO rollout, which we can talk about.
Meanwhile, they are saying QAnon should not exist on the internet.
Who gets to decide?
What about critical thinking and media literacy?
That's what I would rather have, the tools given to us so we can sift through and determine what is disinformation and what is not.
Well, he has a great speech that, if you go to my Twitter, I retweeted it, I think yesterday, about the importance of free speech and how important it is, whether you like it or not, whether you agree with someone or not.
As individuals and as a species to navigate in the space of all possible experiences together, the only way we have to correct course, the only way we have to notice our errors and correct for them is to talk about everything.
We have to exchange ideas.
The software we have cognitively and behaviorally is always a matter of persuasion and criticism and error detection and complaint.
We have to be free to talk to one another and to not merely Think things in private and remain terrified over expressing these things for the possible reputational damage we may incur.
And so insofar as our environment, you know, the environment we create with each other, you know, society becomes stifling of free expression insofar as we're We're hemmed in on all sides by taboos and blasphemy tests and the persistent threat of excommunication and defenestration.
We get worse and worse at detecting our own errors and collaborating with one another.
I totally agree with the notion that we need to have freedom of expression.
I'm a free speech absolutist.
I think that it's very, very important.
And especially with the anti-BDS laws, it's like, I know how important this kind of speech is.
And the thing that I disagree with Sam Harris, first of all, a million Iraqis did die.
But I think the other thing that he really gets wrong is that he kind of is an apologist for U.S. empire where he thinks that the U.S. just has good intentions.
And so anything that happens as a result of those good intentions, well, it's not our fault and we can wash our hands clean.
But in theory, he's advocated for the Iraq war and such.
And yeah, I mean, I think that that couldn't be further from the truth.
I think that there is no like moral high ground.
That these actions are being done in our name.
And if there's anything that can prove that it's the last 20 years of U.S. foreign policy, I mean, it's a complete joke to actually pretend like any of this is being done for our sake, you know, and to protect our freedom.
And, you know, and going back to the Earth's Greatest Enemy thing, it's like it's not just about the U.S. military.
It's about the structure of imperialism.
And it's about the web that works with our junior collaborators.
It's also European nations.
It's NATO. It's all of these junior partners that also act to secure these interests and keep these countries poor and extracting all their wealth and putting their boot on the neck of so many people and preventing their self-determination.
And that's a huge problem, Joe, because I believe in freedom to the point where I feel like everyone around the world can pursue their own freedom and their own freedom of thought.
And that's without U.S. interference.
And we need to really take a step back and Think of what kind of world do we want to live in?
Do we want to live in a world where we are preparing for nuclear war as an inevitability, for preparing for war with China as an inevitability, or do we want to work in a world of cooperation?
Negotiation, experimentation.
How can we pursue and confront these problems that are systemic and global together?
I think a lot of things are done in reaction to the US. Like for example, and I think we can get into the UFO stuff, but I think that Space Force, for example, after the US declared that branch of the military and is now violating the Outer Space Treaty and all this stuff to militarize space, Russia was just like, I'm completely against this, but now we have no choice but do our own program.
So you see kind of things like that where there's a reaction to this hyper-militarized state from these other global powers.
Like, for example, Biden declaring that he's going to invest fucking $100 billion in nuclear weapons.
It's like all of that triggers all these other countries.
I mean, I do think that we have a lot of power, and if we used it for good, I think the world could be a much better place.
And we don't have to live in an empire, and we don't have to live in fear of other countries becoming an empire.
I think that we need to look at what kind of world do we want to live in, Joe.
And, you know, China, I mean, there was an agreement.
There was an agreement between corporate bosses and Chinese bosses to make super profits in the late 80s to ship and export a lot of U.S. capital and production over in Asia.
And that has led to a lot of shit that's gone on today.
You know, we have to look at the context of how this all happened.
It's amazing that that is not being discussed more by our politicians when you talk about the difference between pre-pandemic and post-pandemic America when they recognize that so many things were being manufactured overseas.
So many things are difficult to get, including so many computer chips, so much medicine, so many different things are being manufactured outside of the United States.
Why is that?
Because they...
Sacrificed long-term stability for short-term profits.
And this was something that, you know, I was watching, I'm watching this, it's an amazing documentary series about boxing called The Kings, and it's all about Marvin Hagler, Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, and Tommy Hearns, and about what they were like, like boxing against each other in the 1980s.
And it talks about Detroit.
And it shows what Detroit used to be like, because Tommy Hearns came from Detroit.
And it shows what Detroit used to be like when the U.S. manufacturing of automobiles was all taking place there.
And how all these union workers had great wages.
You didn't even have to graduate from high school.
You could get a union job and have an amazing life and have...
You know, be able to take care of your family and educate them and you had money.
Like, you could live well because the unions had made it so that these people working in these factories, highly profitable factories, right?
They're making these amazing cars.
They made money.
This is like during the 1950s and the 1960s.
And then 20 years later, after the government has changed, or after these organizations, rather, after these corporations have decided to move their manufacturing overseas, source parts overseas, do a lot of the work because they've saved money this way.
Detroit is a wasteland.
I mean, it's a wasteland.
And they highlighted the extreme poverty.
They show all these different people that are waiting in line for food.
Everybody who's a social justice warrior and who's tweeting from an iPhone about anything.
Do you understand what you're doing?
Me too.
I've got one.
Here it is.
You know who's making that?
It's not some union guy who's got a nice house and a boat, you know, who's doing rel and sending his kids off to college and super happy about his life.
No, it's someone who's working in a factory that has nets around it to keep people from jumping off the fucking roof.
That's how crazy it is.
There's literally nets around the Foxconn buildings to keep people from jumping because so many people hated their lives working there.
They were jumping off the roof in such numbers they had put nets up.
I had a conversation with Shane Smith about this once where he was talking about in every cell phone is this stuff called coltan and that if you go to where they're making coltan, it's probably an underaged worker in Africa Digging it out of the ground with a stick.
And that underage worker in Africa, the child labor, is getting into your cell phone that's allowing you to self-righteously tweet about things.
And Boyan Slott, who's been on the podcast a couple times, has done amazing work to develop this machine that's scooping up this plastic and converting it into actual goods and recycling it and using it.
What he's willing to do, what Boyan is able to do with this thing, it's like it skims the water and scoops up all this plastic, and then they're pulling this plastic out.
It's like you need to just drive a hybrid and you need to drink out of non-plastic...
And it's like, dude, look at these corporations.
You're telling us that that's going to solve the environmental crisis when we have...
A global empire and all these corporations just willy-nilly, like, producing all this shit with no regulation?
Like, God.
I mean, plastic bags should have been banned fucking decades ago.
Like, why are we even...
The individualizing the problem is so depressing because it takes away from the structural nature and the systemic nature of pollution and how it's not about the person taking less showers and drinking out of a metal straw.
I've talked about this way too many times, but I'm going to talk about it again.
We had Dr. Shanna Swan on to talk about how the plastics that are in our system, because of whether it's plastic that our food is contained in, that we're reheating in microwaves, or leaching from plastic that gets in our water bottles, and these things called phthalates are affecting our reproductive systems.
It's a crazy podcast that we had, where she was basically saying...
How our modern world is threatening sperm counts, altering male and female reproductive development, imperiling the future of the human race.
It's one of the most disturbing podcasts I ever did.
Because in the middle, first of all, she's a wonderful lady.
She's such a sweetheart.
And in talking to her, she's really actually funny too.
So like she has like a thing on her Instagram called the jizz quiz.
And you would not expect it from this lady who's like, you know, she's probably like in her 60s and she's an academic and she's an epidemiological environmentalist.
What is her exact...
Environmental epidemiologist.
That's what she is.
So she's examining the effect that the environment has on biology.
And she's found this horrific connection between the invention and the use of petrochemical products and the lowering of sperm counts and the increase in miscarriages.
And also, this is where it gets really weird.
The shortening of the taint, the human taint.
It's one of the best ways, biologically, when you look at animals, one of the best ways to tell males versus females is the size of the taint.
It varies by 50 to 100% in males and females.
And with males, it's shrinking.
And it's getting closer and closer to female size.
Penises are shrinking.
Testicles are shrinking.
Sperm count is shrinking.
And males are becoming more feminized because of these things called phthalates.
It's spelled with a P-T-H-A-L-E-T-E. These phthalates that are in plastics, they've proven with animals that when you introduce these to animals, it directly affects the male reproductive system and depletes their ability to form sperm.
It shrinks their taint, it makes their penis small, and it's happening to people, too.
And when you see, like, so many people that are confused about their sexuality, and so much weird shit with sexuality in this country, and then you look at this, and you go, hey, there's a fucking culprit here.
Like, there's something that's happening to human beings.
Like, a real direct correlation between increased miscarriages, decreased sperm counts, a lot of it is because of environmental toxins.
Pesticides, plastics, all these things that whether we like it or not, we're consuming and we're consuming now.
And the thing is about these things being consumed by people who are pregnant and then it's going to have an impact on their children.
It's going to have an impact on their babies because they've got it in their system.
The stigma about sexuality is one thing, but the decreasing of the human taint, the fact that they can measure that human taints are shrinking and that we know that this is directly connected to phthalates, you can't ignore that.
Even if you want to look at this as a social issue and as we're more open now to all sorts of ideas about sexuality, that's all great.
You can look at things, but to me, this is a comprehensive To look at what is actually going on with human beings, you have to look at all the factors.
You have your positive factors, more openness, more acceptance.
Those are the positive factors.
The weird one is chemicals.
The fact that chemicals might be changing what it means to be a human being.
And we can get this into aliens right here.
Because I have always had this weird theory about what aliens are.
In my feelings, when I look at them, and they have, like, if you look at the classic alien...
They have these little tiny bodies with no sex organs and these giant fucking heads.
And I'm like, well, if we keep going the way we're going now, well, what is holding us back?
If you look at war and...
Thievery and assault and all the aggressive, horrible things that people do, right?
If you look at just war alone, what is that?
It's territory.
It's like animals taking over other animals because of their resources, right?
That's what human beings are doing.
It's a very animalistic thing.
How would you stop that?
Well, one way to stop that is to completely eliminate sexual reproduction, to have no instincts towards acquiring of resources, no instincts towards acquiring of sexual partners.
All sex is eliminated because you can have immensely pleasurable experiences without having any sexual intercourse.
You don't even need sex organs.
We will reproduce.
Through genetic engineering only, we will reproduce through some sort of yet to be invented process that's far superior.
It eliminates any kind of birth defects, any kind of mishaps that happen in the genetic code, and It creates uniformity amongst the species.
So there is no more prejudice.
There is no more racism.
Everybody looks exactly the same.
They all look exactly the same.
It sounds crazy, right?
But if you think about it, what would be the alternative?
Well, the alternative, you keep allowing this biological chaos.
You keep allowing this tooth and claw approach.
You keep allowing dominators and victims and everyone's fighting for the position on the top of the hill.
If we are to advance to what Carl Sagan would describe as a species that is capable of interplanetary travel and no longer commits war or genocide, what would be the best way to do that?
Well, the best way to do that would be to stop being people.
Because people are some sort of weird fucking animal.
And if you look at our approach in terms of our adoption of technology, well, what are we doing exactly?
When you talk to someone that needs their phone on them all the time, what are they doing?
Well, they're connected to some electronics.
Well, now they got it on their wrist.
Well, and soon with Elon Musk's invention with Neuralink, it's going to be in your fucking head.
How long before we are some sort of a symbiotic thing where we're no longer a biological entity?
We're a biological entity that interfaces constantly and inextricably with technology.
Inexorably, rather, with technology.
You can't take the two apart from each other.
We are technology.
The same way a person who lives in Alaska in the winter has to have clothes.
There's no options.
You are connected forever to your fucking clothes until you get to a warm environment and you can take your clothes off.
If it's 30 below zero outside, you're not walking outside naked, right?
We've already accepted that a human being is no longer just a biological thing.
You need shoes or you're gonna fuck your feet up, right?
You need clothes or you're gonna freeze to death.
How long before our inventions surpass merely clothes and shoes and housing and comfort and it becomes something that is a part of our biology?
And maybe that would be the only way we would be able to leave this planet.
Maybe that would be the only way we would be able to avoid war and avoid rape and avoid murder and avoid theft and conquering.
Maybe we just eliminate those instincts.
And maybe we would look at things in terms of what's the correct logical approach without any of the weird monkey instincts that we all harbor.
I mean, as someone who just had a kid, that's such a terrifying concept because I've never felt so animalistic and primal.
Everything around me is in a state of reproduction.
Every aspect of nature.
And then when you become that vehicle of reproduction and have an entity growing inside of you and then, you know, the fourth trimester is just them linked to you still to grow.
And it's such a fascinating thing.
And your brain is completely reconfigured after birth.
You lose 4% of your brain mass as a woman because everything is reprioritized to center on the baby.
Up to 4%.
And the oxytocin that's released that makes you bond and there's also so many other chemicals and hormones that, you know, it's all about reproduction.
And then you realize this is why I exist.
This is what humans are.
We are reproduction machines.
And it just kind of dawns on you because our mind occupies so much of everything else and we have technology, like you're saying.
And so it's very disturbing to think that that primal instinct could be completely removed and you could just be in a world where humans are created.
He said, human beings are the sex organs in the machine world.
It's amazing.
I think about it all the time.
Because I think the way I've described it is like we're sort of like some really strange biological caterpillar that gives birth to the electronic butterfly.
And we don't even know what we're doing.
We're just making a cocoon.
We're just making a cocoon.
And whether it's artificial intelligence or whether it's some sort of a symbiosis, which is something where the electronics or the technology gets into your body somehow or another because it makes it better.
If you think if there was a thing that you could have that would make life way better for everybody, you just had to get it in your body, you just have to accept it as being a part of your body, you'd be rude to not do that, right?
The idea of Neuralink is, the way Elon described it to me, and again, I'm a monkey, so I'm going to do a shit job of paraphrasing this, but the idea behind it is, it's going to radically increase your bandwidth, the way you can interface with information.
You're essentially going to have much more access to information, and you're going to be able to access it far faster.
And one of the things that Elon said that haunts me to this day, he said, You're going to be able to speak without words.
You're going to be able to speak without words.
So you're going to be able to communicate with people without using words with this electronic interface.
That's what these fucking aliens are.
If they have these little tiny slits for mouths and they have these fucking weirdo bodies because they don't need any muscles anymore and they don't need sex organs anymore because no one's having sex.
If we accept that How long before it becomes that?
Is it fifty years?
Is it a hundred years?
Is it a thousand years?
If we just keep accepting this introduction of technology into the biological human body, how long before it becomes what these fucking things are?
These iconic Classic gray aliens that we see.
Literally, if you went from what we used to be, right?
We used to be these hulking chimpanzee-like creatures, right?
And we're covered in hair.
And now what are we now?
Go to Starbucks and see these fucking nerds on their laptops.
If you think of someone who's just locked in a cubicle doing programming all day and they don't do any exercise, your muscles wither away, your body atrophies, you have this tiny little shell that you carry your head around with.
You just need enough energy and enough physical strength to lift up off your chair and walk over to another chair and sit down and drive.
And then you get home, you get up, and you walk over to the food, and you eat that, and then you walk over to the TV, and you sit in front of it, or you walk over to the computer.
So do you think that that's when these people see these visions and when we see UFOs or people have documented them, do you think that that is what's happening?
That it's actually aliens projecting themselves or physically here?
That could be us in the future going back to check.
Maybe we've fucked everything up and we need fresh genetic code.
We need to come back and get fresh genes from all these people because we've replicated so much.
It's like a puppy mill that makes fucked up dogs with the eyes too close together, right?
I had a friend who got a chocolate lab, and I went over her house, and I was looking at the dog, and the dog was like, his eyes are way too close together.
I'm like, where did you get this dog?
And she's like, yeah, I got it from this really shitty puppy mill.
This dog was fucked up.
This dog would eat all kinds of things around the house and chew on the walls.
It was a fucked up dog.
But maybe that's what happens if they don't source genetic material.
I mean, or maybe they've gone past that and they just want to do experiments on people.
Maybe they're from another planet.
Maybe they're drones.
Maybe those things that we're looking at, those grays, are really just some sort of an artificial intelligence drone.
Right, because it seems kind of like a human construct that we're projecting what we think that they would do.
Travel here in a craft and be here physically.
Yeah.
My brother and I just did a whole tribute to UFO-ology and lore on Media Roots Radio and attributed a lot of it to your show, Joe, because I was floored by some of the shit that I saw.
And it was just mind-blowing to go through these cases.
And I... As I told you before we started this, I was so cynical, you know, and it's easy to just kind of like look at one debunking video and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Or like, you don't believe these people's testimonies and shit.
shit because i remember seeing so many documentaries on youtube back 10 years ago of all these military officers high-ranking people talking about how or listening to coast to coast am you know driving throughout the desert art bell and george nori talking about these ufos that went over military installations and all of these strange unexplained things and so i just became such a cynic and i was like oh yeah like whatever none of that's real it's just one guy saying this or whatever but i'm i'm i'm full in now man i'm back
And, you know, 50 years later, when these people are interviewed, you would think that with the advent of drones and all these things, they'd be like, well, now I can explain it.
It was advanced military technology then, because now I see the technology that we have, you know, like, but they don't say that.
The Zimbabwe one is interesting, but there is a problem with it.
One of the problems is John Mack.
John Mack and...
I'm not going to make any accusations, but there are people that believe that hypnotic regression...
is a very problematic way to get evidence because through hypnotic regression and John Mack, he wrote an amazing book.
I think he did two books.
He was a Harvard psychologist who I think it was abducted And maybe there was another one, but a friend of mine who wasn't even really into UFOs at all, my friend Maura gave me that book, and she's like, you've got to read this.
I don't know exactly the timeline, but the problem was these people that are involved in hypnotic regression- Oftentimes, whether they're aware they're doing it or not, they introduce ideas into people's heads and they give them false memories.
It's a common issue and it's one of the main complaints that I've heard critics say about John Mack's work.
I'm interested in that.
I'm very interested in that.
And I'm not saying those people are lying.
And I'm not saying that John Mack introduced ideas into their heads.
But what I am saying is the real evidence, the real evidence like the video of that thing, whatever the fuck that tic-tac was, taking off at what they estimate to be thousands of miles an hour instantaneously from a standstill.
And jetting off to the cat point where they were initially supposed to meet.
The coordinates that the jets had where they were supposed to scramble to doing this exercise, this fucking tic-tac went to that spot.
Almost like to tell you, hey bitch, I know where you're going.
They tracked it on radar going from 80,000 feet above sea level to 50 in less than a second.
Even back in the 50s and 60s, it was all described as similar types of things that would disappear or shoot off.
That doesn't seem physically possible.
But now, what's so weird about it now, why are former CIA directors like Brennan, Woolsey, even Obama has made a joke about, yes, we don't know what these things are, What do you think it is?
Why is the intelligence community coming out and actually like putting their stamp of approval on this when for the last 70 years it's been so under the radar they you know they've been putting this under wraps but now they're kind of toying with the idea like we actually don't know what these are.
And then they also say, we know that they're not from our military.
So they're hinting toward adversaries, right?
China, Russia with the hypersonic weapons technology that they're claiming that they can develop weapons five to ten times the speed of sound.
And I don't know what that looks like when you apply it, but that's strange to me that you see this rollout in the mainstream media talking about this now with the disclosures that the Pentagon has put out.
Well, when I look at these things, a lot of these people, I believe these people.
And especially watching that documentary, Joe, it was a real mindfuck.
And a lot of this is bone-chilling because I believe, especially when 62 people see something or 200 people in Melbourne, Australia, or all of these high-level military people who you could tell are scared shitless recounting what they saw, I believe them.
I really do because it's hard to act, right?
But my mind tends to go toward what is physically possible.
Is it mass hallucinations?
Is it some sort of DMT weapon that can elicit some sort of mass hallucination where people are susceptible to a delusional mindset and told something like you just said?
Is it the hypersonic weapons technology?
Is it something that is a drone being projected holographically?
Is it something that we can explain by...
You know, the realm of quantum physics that we actually don't understand, like the Schrodinger's cat phenomenon.
Like, is there something that is within the realm of physics, but we don't understand and can't comprehend it yet?
So that's where my mind goes in terms of what is it.
If it is something from another planet, is it holographically projected onto us?
Is that what's happening?
But in terms of the intelligence community and people like Marco Rubio with that PBS special that came out, or the 60 Minutes special, and Marco Rubio at the end of it is just like, we don't know what these are, man.
They might not be from our planet.
And I'm like, what the fuck?
Like one of the most hardcore neoconservatives is going out there and cutely toying with the idea that this could be from another world.
And knowing that this has been so under wraps that whatever is happening, and I believe something is happening, has been completely censored and covered up by our government.
But now they're coming out and saying it's okay to talk about this.
This is no longer some fringe kooky conspiracy theory.
This is happening.
Of course, the cynic in me goes to what better way to kind of We pull on our deep-seated psychological fears of something that we can't explain, this kind of supernatural element to whatever is going on.
Going back to the UFO lore of everything from X-Files, something that I grew up on, you know, the abyss, like this notion that if there's something greater than our government and our technological capabilities, then we need to kind of like just acquiesce toward our institutions to be like, you just do whatever you need to do, whether that be...
Militarizing space.
These things are a threat just because they exist and we don't know what they are.
So my mind goes to There's a reason why this rollout is happening and it's not for the betterment of humanity and it's not because of the curiosity of these officials in terms of learning or wanting to find out what UFOs are.
It's about, going back to what I said before, it's about militarization and Space Force was basically part of the neocon blueprint back from PNAC, the Bush administration, and Trump fulfilled that dream.
And I do think that this is part of that.
And look, I don't know, but I think that we need to ask questions.
Why is our reality being sanitized?
Why are things like QAnon being purged from the internet?
As ludicrous as it may be, but we're also simultaneously being told that UFOs are something that are real, And they're concerning.
They're potentially a threat to national security.
And I appreciate your perspective because I think it's good to look at this from a bunch of different angles because...
It's real tempting to say, well, I'm finally at a point in history.
It's amazing.
I'm here where the government is admitting that there are alien crafts that are off-world vehicles, not from this earth.
You know, that was like one of the quotes.
That we're admitting that we are being visited.
But are we?
Because why would the fucking government finally start telling us without motivation, without some sort of endgame, what's in it for them to tell us about these things?
Unless they're so frequent and so bizarre and so many military people are talking about them that they feel like their back is against the wall and they have to say something about it because otherwise they're going to lose credibility.
That there's so many of these things.
And there's so many of them, like the Go Fast video, the FLIR video.
There's so many of these encounters that these very reputable people, like Commander David Fravor, have had with these crafts that behave in a way that is impossible, as far as we know, with any known technology on Earth in 2021. And this is, the David Fravor one is from 2004. What's disturbing about it is no matter what it is, I don't think we're going to find out the truth.
And I think it's going to be exploited for certain means that we're not going to know.
It's not going to be overt.
But there is definitely something going on because it doesn't make sense.
And if it's, oh, there's so many people seeing it, shit, this has been going on for 70 years.
I mean, that movie, I mean, there's people like every day...
One thing that I find really interesting, though, is now everyone has cell phones that film in 4K, Google Earth satellites all over the world that can zoom in on someone walking down the street.
So if these things are flying over the ocean, like someone, you know, part of the David Fravor special on 60 Minutes was saying, I saw this shit like this every day.
That was a literal quote from him.
Why are we only seeing these grainy satellite images of these UFOs?
This is a strange, unidentified, what they call a UAP now, because UFO's got a bad rap.
It's like Red Pill.
I've got to take it over by assholes.
You know, so now a lot of these people that have seen these things are frustrated at the lack of transparency.
I mean, this is the narrative, right?
I don't know if this is true, but my friend Jeremy Corbell, who's been the guy who's released most of these, most of these videos, like those pyramid-shaped crafts that they were watching with night vision that were in the middle of the fucking ocean floating around over this destroyer or this aircraft carrier, they don't know what the fuck those things are.
These are videos from people that are there.
The one that was a transmedium vehicle that was flying over the ocean and then went into the ocean, they don't know what the fuck that is.
They filmed that thing with night vision.
They don't know what it is, and this was soldiers that were filming it, enlisted people who were filming it, and you could hear them saying, like, what the fuck is this doing?
Like that one that went into the ocean, that's the best they can do with filming something off of night vision.
The ones that were floating around above that UFO or above the aircraft characters shaped like pyramids.
About the Go Fast video.
I mean, they're using the cameras that are on these fighter jets that are designed to track enemy craft, and that's what they're designed for.
They're locking in on this thing with their tracking systems.
This thing's moving at the same rates of speed and they're following it.
This is the best that they have in that application.
Now, that doesn't mean that the government doesn't have some satellites that could zoom in on those coordinates and get that thing and get a very detailed, high-resolution video of that.
They probably have that.
If these things really are real, if they aren't bullshit, if this isn't just some sort of a mass psyop, if that's true, they probably have some really high-resolution shit that will curl your toes.
And that's what Christopher Mellon says.
But there's no reason for them to release that stuff for two reasons.
One, why would they give away the actual capability of these satellites in an undeniable way?
If you could see the fucking bolts on this UFO from however many miles in the sky these satellites are, then everybody would be like, Jesus Christ, what else are they watching?
What else can they see?
Watch you take a shit through your bathroom window.
What are they doing?
If they can see that, if they can read a license plate from space, that's what's been reported, that it is possible now, through these satellites, that you can get such a high-resolution video that you can clearly see a license plate from space and read it clearly.
There's also something called claytronics, which is like a programmable matter, like microcomputers that can create a holographic cloud that's actually a tangible hologram.
I mean, there's so many things that seems like it's centuries off.
This is what they're saying that they're working on, developing, where you can have a series of microcomputers program themselves into different visual entities, into one giant hologram.
Well, the New York Times is the first to break it in 2017. That really shifted the perception.
When you see the New York Times has an article talking about these unexplained vehicles and taking them seriously, and then interviews with high-ranking military officials, people from the Pentagon, all that kind of shit, when you see that stuff starting to make it into the mainstream...
It just changes everything.
The New York Times for sure changed everything.
That 2017 article changed the people that would never take UFO seriously.
They're seeing that in the New York Times and they're saying like, holy shit, this is in the Times.
Yeah, these are the same people who discredited Dennis Kucinich at the 2007 presidential debate because they were like, you saw a UFO? Like, you fucking idiot.
And that was one of the questions.
And he was like, yeah, yeah, like I saw a UFO. And it's like, dude, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, all of them saw UFOs too.
And it was such a discrediting fringe thing.
But no, it's not at all.
There's so many bizarre things.
If they were developing BZ hallucinogenic weaponry back during the Cold War, my mind goes to something about if you take an FDMT, you visit aliens.
They're claiming- This is another bizarre thing, is like something that seemed to science fiction a decade ago is now being told that it's real, like microwave weapons.
Permanent brain damage for some of these people allegedly.
They're calling it Havana Syndrome, it sounds like some film noir thing.
And then they're pointing to, oh this must be China or Russia because we wouldn't morally Do anything like this, the red flags in my mind go off right there.
Yeah, so, I mean, whether it be Cuba, Venezuela, multiple other countries, Iraq, there's a policy by the CIA to starve people into submission and then to overthrow their governments.
It's never worked in the history of the world.
No one does that, right?
But it doesn't stop the policy from sanctioning people to death.
There's a 62-year criminal embargo that has been in place on Cuba just for the fact that they wanted to go a different route.
They wanted to pursue a communist state.
And the CIA never forgave them.
And so there's been hundreds of assassination attempts against their leaders.
The CIA has spent $25 million every single year trying to foment regime change, funding these institutions on the ground.
They created a fake Twitter account called Zunzunio one year to try to generate people to radically try to undermine the Castro regime.
There was Operation Mongoose where they actually wanted to blow up ships of refugees and actually blame it on Castro.
There's been multiple terrorist attacks of CIA-backed agents inside Cuba, in Miami, to try to foment all of this hostility against the Castro regime.
And the embargo, it doesn't just prevent trade from the U.S. It prevents and basically puts in place this pressure valve where any state in the world knows their place, knows that if they try to trade with Cuba, they will be penalized.
So by proxy, they don't want to fuck with that because they will be threatened by the U.S. Like, you cannot do this.
So Cuba has been isolated, this tiny island nation that has somehow done these incredible medicinal advancements like eliminating HIV transmission from mother to child.
Despite the criminal embargo, this is preventing medicine from getting in.
This is preventing food from getting in.
This is a devastating thing that's cost them tens of billions of dollars.
During COVID, Trump added like 100 plus sanctions on top of the embargo.
And every single year, every country in the world in the United Nations General Assembly votes to lift the embargo, except the US and Israel.
They vote to uphold it every time.
Everyone in the world realizes this is a criminal thing.
If we want to see what Cubans can do, and if they're fed up, they need to change their own system from within.
But right now, the media is painting this as, oh my god, Cubans are starving.
Cubans don't have medicine and food because of communism.
Now, lift the goddamn embargo, and then let's figure out what's going on, right?
You cannot look at this country in isolation and say, oh, this is due to the communism?
No.
This is a crippling economic blockade.
And when I was there, I went on the ground and did some reports for Breaking the Set.
And I talked to many people.
There's incredible advancements.
There's housing for all.
You don't see homeless people there.
There's a lot of great things about Cuba, despite the hardships that they're living under and despite the control of and domination of the U.S., they're still managing to do a lot of great things.
And a lot of the people were very open.
You know, they said, look, you know, some people loved Castro.
Some people didn't like the communist government.
But they said, look, please tell your government to give us medicine.
We are dying and we don't have access to medicine because of the criminal blockade of the United States government.
Please tell your government to stop.
And then we'll sort out our own problems.
If we have critiques, if we want to figure out some other political system, that's on them.
But we can't judge them.
And you really see how the media is controlled.
When Haiti's been protesting for three years straight against a U.S.-backed dictator and no one gave a shit, and then one day spontaneous protests erupt, right?
And all of a sudden the media is all over it.
We need to intervene.
We need to offer some sort of humanitarian chain, just like we did to Venezuela, which is also under crippling sanctions.
All of these things are hoisted up by the US media as we need to save Cuba, right?
You even have the mayor of Miami on TV on Fox News saying we need to bomb Cuba right now.
This is our chance.
We need to do what George Bush did in Panama and what Clinton did to Yugoslavia.
We need to bomb the shit out of Cuba and remove the president.
I mean, this is sick stuff.
And when you look at the actual terrorism, That the US has sponsored to try to overthrow this tiny island nation's economic system just because they didn't want to go along with capitalism.
It's unbelievable.
So yeah, when I see protests erupt spontaneously, and when the media is actually desperately showing the pro-communist protests as anti-communist protests, there's actually dueling protests right now.
I absolutely think that we need to question everything that's coming from our media, especially when I was on the ground in Venezuela when they were saying the same thing about Maduro.
And I was there.
I was in the opposition protest during the deadliest time.
If you are a person and you are on a network, we don't even have to name the name of a network, how does this work?
Do you get a message?
Do you get talking points?
Is there a discussion with some intelligence agency that gets together with the head executives and they sort out what the narrative is going to be and then this gets filtered down to the talking heads that are on the network?
Going back to the model of, like, how does consent – how is it operated and how is it manufactured?
It's like, yeah, so media ownership, right?
Who owns the giant corporate conglomerates?
A small few – A small – like five or six corporations control 90 percent of everything that we see here in Reed.
Then it goes to media elites.
So who dictates the policy?
And how do you know how you get access to politicians?
I lived in DC for a couple years.
I know exactly how this shit works.
You don't get access to people unless you play the game.
If you ask questions that are unsavory, you will not get invited back to the press conference.
Then you go to the whole issue of flack, undermining the messenger who counters whatever.
So it's marginalizing and discrediting people who don't go in line, which goes back to the hiring process, which goes back to self-censorship.
If you are working at these media outlets, chances are you agree largely with the orthodoxy of the media network.
You agree with the fact that the US is an empire, that it, you know, You're a capitalist.
You're a Zionist.
You think that these countries need to be, you know, that are despotic and whatever.
You believe in this.
You believe in the mythology, right, that's put out there by our media.
Otherwise, you would not get hired.
And if you somehow change your mind, you're going to face a wall.
You're going to face a wall internally.
And you see this time and again.
For example, this woman who was just in a Students for Justice for Palestine chapter in her university, some woman named Emily, she joined AP as an intern, and she was fired.
From a pro-Zionist lobbying campaign, because they said she was too biased to work at AP. Meanwhile, you have a former IDF prison guard, the Israeli military, he was a prison guard in the Israeli military, managing the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg.
I mean, that's the kind of disproportionality that we're talking about.
So, yeah, it's also advertising, of course, right?
That's who subsidizes media.
Defense contractors, pharmaceutical industries, big banks, oil companies.
You know who pays your pocketbooks, right?
You know who's stuffing the cash.
And 80%, this is according to Peter Phillips, the author of Giants Who Really Rules the World, and it's really transnational corporations that have interlocking boards of directorates, and really you can fit them all in a studio no bigger than this giant apparatus, but he says that 80% of corporate news is prepackaged by PR firms that work for governments or corporations.
80% of the news that's delivered through this filter is prepackaged for us.
And I've seen it firsthand, Joe, when I was in Venezuela, when I was in Colombia.
I've been to Guantanamo Bay.
I have talked to journalists in these institutions.
They believe.
They believe.
And a lot of them sit in their hotels.
They just sit in their fucking hotels and do their journalism behind...
They don't go out and speak to people.
Whenever I'm in a country on the ground, I'll go and get a snapshot of what people are thinking.
And I'm honest about it.
And beyond that, I don't have the veil and facade of objectivity where a lot of these people in the corporate news will say, oh, no, I'm an objective journalist.
I'm an unbiased journalist.
And that's what's hammered in your head during journalism school.
That doesn't exist.
Objectivity does not exist.
You are always couching your opinions in establishment entities, authority figures and think tanks.
And who funds those think tanks?
Who's behind?
You know, what ideology is driving the figures that you're citing?
So what I do with my journalism, I just come out and talk about what my opinion is.
And if you want to follow my journalism, that's great.
But I don't hide who I am.
I don't hide who I am and I don't hide what I think.
And I uplift the people that are obscured and erased from corporate media.
I highlight what Israelis think.
I highlight the Palestinian voices.
I'll highlight the Maduro supporters.
I'll highlight the Cubans who are Castro and Supporters and supporters of communism.
Because we never hear their perspectives, Joe.
It's one-sided and it's curated and carefully crafted for an American audience.
And we have to take a step back and ask, who's putting this story together?
What interests lie behind the story?
And apply our own critical thinking, because we're living in a highly polarized, highly politicized society right now, and it's never been worse.
We're siloed off into our own echo chambers.
We only see what we want to see because the corporations have insidiously curated what our reality should be.
And that is not the way that we need to be.
That's not how we're ever going to get an understanding.
That's not ever how we're going to figure out where our similarities lie.
That's a necessity to manufacture consent, for people to be distracted at what is this other person doing, not what are we doing.
And as an American citizen, that's all I can do.
I can't do anything about China.
You know, Chinese people are working to curb their carbon emissions.
They're working to change their society as best they can.
All I can do as an American citizen is do as much as I can here in this country because I feel like dissent is the highest form of patriotism.
And I need to speak out, use my platform, use my voice as much as I'm being, you know, as much as our videos throttled on YouTube, as much as the algorithms have censored my work.
I need to do whatever I can to put this information out there.
Because I think it's important, you know, and a lot of people are interested in it.
I never learned true history or the nature of our government in school.
You know, my education was sanitized for me.
So it's important for me to be that vector to be that vehicle for other people who want to go down, down, down, down.
Dude, talk about a PSYOP. It's wild because they're basically trying to connect themselves to woke ethics because they recognize, they've licked their finger, they found out which way the wind's blowing, like, yeah, go that way.
Yeah, propaganda.
Let's go with it.
I mean, that is nothing.
They have nothing to do with diversity.
They have nothing to do with that.
They have to do with bombing the shit out of people.
Well, the CIA had such a bad rap, I think, before 9-11, and they've been able to rebrand themselves so many times.
And then, of course, through Trump, all these intelligence communities, agents have been able to rebrand themselves as like resistance people and all this shit.
But let's go back to what we knew the CIA was doing before 9-11, because they're still doing that shit today.
So it's no longer the old CIA. What did they used to do?
It's what are they doing?
And how are they changing their PR strategy to adopt this woke ideology to basically trick young kids into recruitment models and whatever, and to try to wipe their hands clean of their sinister, horrific, bloody legacy that continues today?
What, if anything, can make our society a more balanced, more accurate in terms of its portrayal of what really is going on in the world and a place where we're not doing the same shit in a more complicated way decade after decade?
You have sitting congresspeople talking about apartheid.
You have Human Rights Watch talking about apartheid.
We need to address the elephant in the room.
I know it's controversial and I know it's hard.
And everyone knows someone in the military.
My partner, Mike Preissner, who I do the Empire Files with, he is an Iraq War veteran.
He has a couple of viral speeches that people may have seen doing winter soldier testimonies.
But he joined the military a month before 9-11.
And he got shipped to Iraq.
And now he is an incredibly committed anti-imperialist veteran who now helps soldiers get out of the military.
And when we were on the precipice of war with Iran, he was there coaching people through 24-7.
You don't have to go.
You don't have to go.
And you don't have to be a part of this.
So it starts with conversations, Joe.
I would recommend people get off Twitter and get in the real world and start talking and engaging in dialogue because nothing will ever change.
We're just going to keep reinforcing These structures and we're going to keep reinforcing the most horrible habits and falling back on ideologies that are based on myths and nothing more.
And it's really unfortunate because the biggest myth of all is the fact that we need to be an empire and we need to really address that and we need to start figuring out how can we live in a sustainable world?
How can we cooperate And face the challenges that are coming.
Climate change.
The world is going to shrink, right?
There is something also optimistic, though.
We don't have to worry about college for our kids.
I don't think that that's a thing anymore.
We don't have to get in debt.
I mean, it's all about learning skills and not falling into these debt traps that don't really apply to what the future is going to be.
It's actually kind of cool to think of what our children will do.
Because I'm trying to look at this, yeah, there's so many things to be negative about and harp about, but I think that the future could be a really amazing one.
Because I have faith that the creativity and ingenuity of people embracing the vastly different reality that we grew up in.
And abolishing all these old relics of the nuclear family and the fact that you need to just put in this $100,000 into a college fund and then go to college and get a degree and then slave away in some thing that none of that is going to apply to them.
And so it's actually a really beautiful thing that we can develop.
And if we cooperate and if we work together and if we figure out a way that we can actually manage our resources in a sustainable way, And in a harmonious way with nature, and I truly believe that we can, I think the world will be a very, very different place, Joe.
And I think that because we've done it for so long, we've done these horrible things for so long that we just feel like that's normal.
What I've been told is that everybody who's working for whatever corporation you're working for, the mandates get brought down from the Communist Party and that's why they're involved in whether it's road building in parts of Africa or whether they're developing mines.
All these things they're doing, they're doing with the interest of the Communist Party.
But even if you were to take that narrative at face value and say, okay, so we do that with the IMF and the World Bank.
We do the same thing, right?
So basically, we have to do that to stave off Chinese influence in those regions and to offer counterweight to U.S. hegemony.
But that's like a side.
Yeah, it's kind of intertwined with the military, of course, because it's acting as an alternative to subjugate entire nations into debt traps and stuff like that.
But still, that's like a side from what I'm talking about, this giant global military empire.
It's unmatched.
And I don't think that it has to be that way.
And I don't think any other country like China or Russia would become that.
So you think that it's established this way because of what Eisenhower warned about, that the military industrial complex has become this overwhelming beast of a system.
That has just controlled the United States government for so long and controlled the way we interact with foreign governments for so long that we think that it has to be this way, but it doesn't.