Feb. 19, 2022 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:05:03
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| The JFK story is like, that has been Oliver Stone's thing. | ||
| I mean, he's been following that story. | ||
| He's been chasing it down. | ||
| We talked about on the podcast that his film, JFK, was essentially 30 years after the assassination. | ||
| And then this documentary that he just released is 30 years after his film. | ||
| So he's been chasing this thing down. | ||
| I should catch the documentary. | ||
| I've seen the film. | ||
| It's very good. | ||
| It's on Showtime. | ||
| I mean, generally, we're live, right? | ||
| We're recording. | ||
| So generally, the assassination of presidents, it's something which, you know, I've been in prison with people that assassinated Sadat. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, really? | |
| Yeah, these sorts of, this intrigue at the top and the plots, I actually befriended them. | ||
| I've got a copy of a Quran at home signed by one of them as a gift to me, a parting gift from prison. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| The kind of intrigue, when you get to that level of intrigue at the top, nothing is ever what it seems, man. | ||
| I can only imagine. | ||
| It's gotta be a stressful way to live. | ||
| Imagine being a world leader. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| And all the shit you're dealing with and potential assassination and coup plots and... | ||
| And part of how you operate has to be one thing, one face you present to the public, and another thing is what you're really actually doing because you've got all these other people, especially today with the nature of information wars, attempting to subvert what you're trying to do based on your overt actions. | ||
| And so you have to hide what you're really actually up to. | ||
| It's difficult to navigate that terrain. | ||
| Well, not only that, but when you operate like that, if you're constantly operating in this sort of deception vein, it's got to be hard to know what's true and what's not true, because you're full of shit. | ||
| When you're full of shit, I think it becomes more difficult to recognize. | ||
| What's true and what's not true. | ||
| And you don't get to that position unless you're full of shit in the first place. | ||
| You have to compromise. | ||
| They don't let you in. | ||
| When you find out politicians that earn $200,000 a year and you find out they're worth $200 million. | ||
| How did that happen? | ||
| And you're like, what is going on? | ||
| Well, I'll tell you what's going on. | ||
| Just look to Pelosi, right? | ||
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unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Well, that was what I was talking about. | ||
| She's making a lot of money. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| But it's not from her salary. | ||
| Well, my favorite thing was when she was confronted and they asked her a question about trading, about whether or not people that are in Congress and what have you should be able to trade. | ||
| And she takes a sip of water because she knows this is going to be a big one. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| Well, listen, there was on Twitter, and we can probably return to the question of tech and speech and censorship, but there was this account called Pelosi Tracker. | ||
| I don't know if you ever saw it. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's been taken down. | ||
| It was tracking all her trades. | ||
| I was following the damn thing. | ||
| I was really interested to learn from it. | ||
| It's good to invest in what she's investing in. | ||
| Well, because that's what they say, right? | ||
| You watch her moves and you know you're going to make money. | ||
| Why would they take it down? | ||
| It got taken down. | ||
| There was two accounts. | ||
| One was called Epstein Tracker, and it was following the Ghislaine trial. | ||
| Was it Ghislaine Tracker or Epstein Tracker? | ||
| The other was Pelosi Tracker. | ||
| Both got taken down. | ||
| Why? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Who knows, man? | ||
| Why does Twitter do anything? | ||
| Man, it's so confusing now. | ||
| I mean, Twitter used to be, like, you would, you remember the old days when you would just say, like, at Majid, I'm having a pizza with friends? | ||
| Like, you know, like, you would do those things. | ||
| Like, that's what people would do. | ||
| Like, off to the movies with my buddies. | ||
| It's a weapon now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a weapon in a hybrid war that we're in. | ||
| Unfortunately, we're in a hybrid war. | ||
| And one of the main fronts in that war is information over the definition of reality. | ||
| And in that context, whoever defines reality gets to win. | ||
| And Twitter is, as a result, in that context, it's a weapon that is being used to define reality by molding people's minds. | ||
| That's fascinating to put it that way. | ||
| And what's interesting is the people that are being molded are fiercely defending the rights of those people to mold them. | ||
| Yeah, that's the best way to do it, right? | ||
| Well, the people who are being molded, the people that are a part of the hive mind. | ||
| It's the best way to do it. | ||
| I mean, look, if I wanted to enslave you, I don't think I'd have much of a chance physically, right? | ||
| I mean, I don't know about you, but I've only been training for about a couple of years, yeah? | ||
| So the way to do it would be for me to convince you. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Use a Jedi mind trick. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| These are not the drones you're looking for. | ||
| Yeah, so you voluntarily follow me. | ||
| That's the way to do it. | ||
| And if you're a minority in power, you're always going to be a minority if you're in power. | ||
| When we get this conversation started, what I want to do for people that don't know you, I want to go into your past and your book and who you were in the previous life and who you are now and why you're recognizing this and you're so fiercely Resisting this shit more than a lot of people are because a lot of people are scared of blowback Like they see what's going on with governments and with lockdowns and all these things and they're they're | ||
| scared of the blowback and so they're kind of keeping their mouth shut but you're not doing that at all and I think a lot of that has to do with your past I've seen worse, yeah. | ||
| Will you just give us a rundown of what happened with you? | ||
| For your listeners, I was born in Essex, UK and had a very normal, integrated childhood until I kind of hit my teenage years. | ||
| From my teenagers, we were the first generation, by the way, of Muslims born and raised in the West. | ||
| My parents were immigrants. | ||
| And why that's relevant is we, my age group now, I'm 44, we had to navigate a place for Muslims in the West Prior to that point, of course, that hadn't been done. | ||
| And there's a long history with sort of this whole Huntington model of a clash of civilizations, which is a bit caricature. | ||
| But there's a long history sort of between Islam and the West and relations and mixing. | ||
| Some of it's good. | ||
| A lot of it involved war with the Crusades. | ||
| So we are now born and raised in the West as British citizens. | ||
| Now, to put that into context in Europe, If you look with the US and you have minority communities, a lot of the room for improvement exists in, say, African-American communities, right? | ||
| In Europe, the equivalent is with Muslim communities, wherever you go, whether it's in Britain with Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, whether it's in France with the North Africans, in Morocco, in the Netherlands with North Africans, Moroccans, in Germany with Turks, Across Europe, generally, Albanians, who also majority happen to be Muslim, but more cultural, not really that religious. | ||
| But across Europe, the largest minorities are Muslims. | ||
| And so that same question about integration, cooperation, equal opportunities, social mobility, Whereas in the US it applies specifically, I don't know, say for example with African Americans and Mexican Americans or Latino Americans in Europe generally and in the UK, it's a Muslim question. | ||
| So when I began, sort of hit my teenage years, we experienced a lot of tension around that. | ||
| And there was a lot of racist violence that I experienced growing up with some sort of neonati racist violence. | ||
| And when I say violence, I'm talking severe, severe shit, like machete and hammer attacks, screwdriver attacks. | ||
| I've had to watch friends of mine get stabbed before the age of 16. Many of my friends were stabbed. | ||
| We had running street fights with these guys, knives, machetes, everything. | ||
| I mean, it was really bad. | ||
| One particular occasion, this guy tried to help me. | ||
| I was surrounded by a group of them, and they all had their big kebab knives. | ||
| I thought I was going to die, man. | ||
| And then this guy was just walking past, random guy walking past. | ||
| He saw that I was surrounded by these guys, and he tried to step in to defend me. | ||
| And what they did is, I was 15 years old, they held me back, and they basically started stabbing this guy all over his body, forced me to watch it, and they called him a Paki lover. | ||
| And the idea was that he's a traitor to his skin for trying to defend me. | ||
| So, of course, I became very angry. | ||
| But, by the way, I met that guy about two years ago. | ||
| He lived. | ||
| He had a punctured lung. | ||
| Turns out he was with the army. | ||
| He's a hero for me, man. | ||
| He's a hero. | ||
| And I put out a public appeal to see if I could get reunited with him. | ||
| He wants to stay anonymous, but I met him. | ||
| And he's still alive and he still lives in my hometown. | ||
| He's still, you know, local to the area in my home county. | ||
| But that made me very angry. | ||
| At the same time, if you want to think back, the timeframe we're talking about, the early 90s, the genocide in Bosnia was happening. | ||
| The Bosnians are also Muslim. | ||
| And so we felt that that could come to Britain. | ||
| We felt very isolated. | ||
| We felt very vulnerable. | ||
| And so we were looking in that context for some form of belonging, feeling rejected from society around us. | ||
| The guys that attacked us, by the way, they would boast about having connections and links with the police. | ||
| And it turns out to be the case that there was a problem in those days with the police. | ||
| There's a famous case of the murder of Stephen Lawrence in the UK, who was stabbed to death in a similar way while waiting at a bus stop. | ||
| And his killers were never brought to justice for over 20 years. | ||
| And there was a government inquiry commissioned into that, it's called the McPherson Inquiry, and it eventually became famous for coining that phrase institutional racism. | ||
| And it was talking about how police were not looking into these sorts of crimes, so nobody was ever brought to justice for what happened to us. | ||
| And everything I described was a year before Stephen Lawrence was murdered. | ||
| But that became the pivotal case in the UK. It became like a George Floyd moment. | ||
| It was huge, except he wasn't... | ||
| You know, I know George Floyd had some background. | ||
| This guy was clean. | ||
| He was just a young kid. | ||
| No background. | ||
| He just set a bus stop. | ||
| So in that context, we became very angry and began looking for belonging and identity outside of the mainstream that we felt rejected us. | ||
| And so at the age of 16, why that's all relevant is I ended up joining a revolutionary Islamist organization. | ||
| I didn't trust society. | ||
| I didn't trust authority. | ||
| I didn't trust the West generally. | ||
| Looking at the genocide in Bosnia with the UN troops, one of the... | ||
| The most searing memories for me was Srebrenica, where the Dutch UN soldiers were standing by as the Bosnian Muslims were killed and put in that mass grave, and they didn't have the mandate to intervene. | ||
| So we really didn't trust institutions to defend us, whether it was foreign policy or even domestic at home. | ||
| So at the age of 16, I joined this group called Hezbo al-Tahrir, which means the Party of Liberation. | ||
| And in a nutshell, before Al-Qaeda and definitely before ISIS, this was an organization that wanted to caliphate globally around the world. | ||
| But instead of using terrorism in the conventional means we understand it today, blowing things up, Our purpose, our method was to recruit army officers in Muslim majority countries and instigate military coups to try and come to power. | ||
| I joined this group at 16 and I spent about a decade, well, yeah, more, just over a decade in this organization. | ||
| I rose to the leadership in the UK. I set the group, I exported it from the UK and set it up in Pakistan. | ||
| I was part of the first move in the wave that went from Britain to Pakistan to found the group there. | ||
| In that vein, I ended up recruiting some army officers there in Pakistan as well. | ||
| Can I ask you how that happens? | ||
| How do you make contact with the army officers and how could you recruit them? | ||
| How would you go about doing that? | ||
| Well, there's this military academy in the UK that, globally, countries send their officers to for training. | ||
| It's called Sandhurst. | ||
| And we would, because of the Pakistani community, we knew friends who had relatives or whatever that would be coming from Pakistan to study at Sandhurst. | ||
| It's like an officer's training academy. | ||
| And then through relatives, you know, you begin conversation. | ||
| And then really the rest of it is what's really important. | ||
| Is being trained in techniques as to how to convince people of your aim. | ||
| So like what would happen? | ||
| So a lot of that involves around first, so we used to say that you have to first destroy before you build. | ||
| And so whatever you believe in at the moment has to be removed before we can replace it with our ideological framework. | ||
| And so if you believe in, say you're coming from Pakistan, a thing you're going to generally, Obviously there are exceptions, but you're going to have some form of belief in the international order, in the international system, in democratic governance, because Pakistan for most of its history has been a democracy. | ||
| And so we'd have to pick apart those ideas first. | ||
| By focusing on the flaws and the holes in these eyes. | ||
| So take the international community. | ||
| It's very easy to do. | ||
| If you've got the UN standing by while a genocide is going on in Bosnia and you're speaking to a Muslim who's from a country that was founded to protect Muslims after partition in 1947, just say, look, you think these institutions are going to protect you when you see what happened in Bosnia. | ||
| So the failure of the international order was something that we could poke to try and make those fissures bigger. | ||
| And so a lot of it is... | ||
| And we'll get back to this, by the way, with the debate today with COVID. But a lot of it was a psychological assault on assumptions that people took for granted. | ||
| And then you pick those apart through discussion. | ||
| You demonstrate how those assumptions don't stand up to the real world and they require a solution. | ||
| That solution has to be something that fits what the person wants. | ||
| Now, if you're speaking to a Muslim, it's pretty much a given that they don't want genocide against Muslims. | ||
| So we'd go back, say, take the example of Bosnia. | ||
| We talk about, well, how do you think Muslims who are blonde-haired, blue-eyed even came to Bosnia in the first place? | ||
| Well, actually, it was through the caliphate, which is true. | ||
| It was the Ottomans had the leadership of the Muslim world at the time, modern-day Turkey. | ||
| And the Ottomans used to provide protection in that area. | ||
| Now, that last vestige of a caliphate was destroyed in 1924, after World War I. And that's when the Muslims who are in modern day Bosnia lost that protection of the Ottoman Empire. | ||
| So if you're speaking to somebody that knows his history, which we were trained in. | ||
| So remember, I'm 16. I shouldn't be having conversations about the Ottoman Empire in Bosnia unless somehow I've been involved in a form of a process of a combination of education and indoctrination. | ||
| And it's how to use that education for the purposes of indoctrination that we were trained in. | ||
| So you can kind of have those discussions. | ||
| And we ended up recruiting people. | ||
| As I say, I exported it to Denmark, then to Pakistan. | ||
| I was on the leadership in the UK. Eventually, I went to Egypt to try and re-establish the group there in Egypt. | ||
| Egypt at the time was under Hosni Mubarak. | ||
| I was doing a degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies. | ||
| It's SOAS, part of the University of London. | ||
| It's considered one of the leading kind of radical left-wing colleges in the UK, but for Arabic it's actually one of the best in the world. | ||
| And I was doing law and Arabic at SOAS, and for my Arabic degree I needed to go to an Arab country for my language year, my third year. | ||
| So I chose Egypt. | ||
| So that was my ostensible reason for going to Egypt. | ||
| But actually, while I was there, I began recruiting again for my organization. | ||
| The difference between Egypt and Pakistan, Denmark and Britain is Egypt's a dictatorship. | ||
| Still is till today. | ||
| Whereas Pakistan wasn't. | ||
| And, of course, Denmark and Britain weren't. | ||
| So in Egypt, where I tried to start building these cells, recruit people to my organization, I arrived one day before the 9-11 attacks, not knowing, of course, that was happening. | ||
| And so that changed the security paradigm for the whole world. | ||
| If you remember Tony Blair saying the rules of the game have changed. | ||
| Once 9-11 happened, people like us who were not, you know, terrorists in the kind of bombing sense, right? | ||
| So that's just the difference between, say, an Islamist, to briefly define it, somebody who wants to impose a version of Islam over society, as opposed to just the religion of Islam, which is a faith. | ||
| An Islamist, I define, and people can differ with these definitions, just my definition, someone who wants to impose a version of Islam over society, impose a dogma, yeah? | ||
| But our methods, our means, were not violent. | ||
| They were more like infiltrating the government and trying to take over from within. | ||
| But once the 9-11 attacks happened, the security rules of the game changed. | ||
| The Egyptian regime came after us. | ||
| There was a bit of a cat-and-mouse chase. | ||
| I was on the run for a bit in Egypt. | ||
| But eventually, they raided my house at roughly 3am. | ||
| And they had machine guns and grenades and everything. | ||
| They came in. | ||
| And I was awake at the time because I was married and I have a one-year-old. | ||
| He was one at the time. | ||
| I have a son from that previous marriage. | ||
| And I was trying to put him back to sleep. | ||
| They ripped him from my arms. | ||
| They blindfolded me. | ||
| And they put me in this van, took me to their state security headquarters, and a lot of, I can go into some of the detail, but a lot of atrocities then happened to us. | ||
| I mean, we went through quite a horrific experience in the dungeons of Egypt. | ||
| And the first thing they did is they took me up in Alexandria, where I was living. | ||
| They took me up to the top of a building, blindfolded, and stood me on the edge of the roof to try and make me believe that they were going to push me over. | ||
| I had to stand there very still. | ||
| It takes a bit out of you. | ||
| You can't see anything. | ||
| And I could feel the wind around me. | ||
| But that was just a warm-up. | ||
| That was for the purpose of softening me up so that I would believe that they're prepared to do anything so that I'm ready to talk. | ||
| So once they put me there, then they took me down and they took me in to see an officer. | ||
| I was blindfolded, but to be confronted by an intelligence officer from the state security. | ||
| And he asked me my story. | ||
| And we were trained to say one thing in that context as Islamist revolutionaries, and the answer was very straightforward. | ||
| And it's what I said. | ||
| I was very programmed, right? | ||
| So I said, my name is Majid Nawaz and I'm a member of Hizb al-Tahrir from Britain and that's all I've got to say to you. | ||
| And that's what I said to the officer. | ||
| So he laughed. | ||
| He's heard that before from us. | ||
| There's a long history of this group in Egypt. | ||
| So he said, all right, let's see what you do next. | ||
| And then they put us in this van, drove us through the desert, still blindfolded, took us to Cairo, and they took us to this building called Al-Gihaz, Al-Gihaz Amin al-Dolo, which is the headquarters of the state security, internal state security for all of Egypt. | ||
| Took us underground. | ||
| And this is where the real nightmare began. | ||
| Tied our hands behind our backs with rags. | ||
| We were bodies piled on top of each other on the floor in this... | ||
| I don't know what it was. | ||
| I call it a dungeon because it was underground in a basement-like structure. | ||
| And then that's when the screaming began. | ||
| They gave us all numbers. | ||
| I was 42. And from that day, this was now, I think, day two. | ||
| From that evening, they began a roll call. | ||
| We weren't allowed to sleep, by the way. | ||
| If we slept and we didn't answer our name, we were beaten. | ||
| And they went through the numbers in chronological order. | ||
| And so I would hear, number one, he was called up, taken into a separate room, tortured, and we would hear his screams, electrocuted, and then they'd say, call number two. | ||
| Number one is brought back, collapses in his spot, brings number two, number three, and they go through. | ||
| Everyone is being tortured one by one. | ||
| And of course, I have to wait my turn. | ||
| 42. So I've heard 41 other people. | ||
| So number 41 was next to me. | ||
| This is a moment I write about in Radical, which is the story of all of this. | ||
| It's my autobiography. | ||
| It's called Radical. | ||
| And this poor guy, I still don't know who he is till this day, but he turned to me and he was crying because his turn was next. | ||
| And he said, help me. | ||
| I don't know what to do. | ||
| I'm in the same position. | ||
| So I just read some passages of the Qur'an to him. | ||
| There's a passage about a boy. | ||
| Because Muslims believe everything, you know, in the Old and New Testament, we believe that's from the same tradition, the same God. | ||
| And a bit like the best way I can explain it for an American or a world audience is... | ||
| Just as Christianity views Judaism as part of their tradition, Islam views Christianity and Judaism as part of our tradition, right? | ||
| So there's a story in the Quran about a Christian boy who tried to proselytize for monotheism and this pagan king didn't like him and he put him in a ditch and he burned everyone in this ditch. | ||
| It's called Surat al-Buruj, the story of the trench. | ||
| And it's about suffering in the face of truth. | ||
| And so I just started reciting this passage to him. | ||
| I started reciting this passage and there's a very specific way of reciting the Quran. | ||
| It soothed him. | ||
| All I remember him saying to me was, you're a good man, thank you. | ||
| And then he was taken, his number was called, he was taken. | ||
| And then eventually he collapsed, he was brought back and he was just unconscious and my number was called. | ||
| So I had to walk, imagine that, I had to walk towards this The room where they're going to torture me. | ||
| And the guy said, right, you're going to have to speak. | ||
| And I still had my hands tied behind my back. | ||
| But I had managed to get the rags loose. | ||
| And I'm not the kind of guy that's going to... | ||
| I mean, honestly, at that moment, I decided I'd rather die than be humiliated in this way. | ||
| And then also then telling him a story about my friends, you know? | ||
| So because my hands were loose, honestly, I decided I'd rather just attack the guy and then they're going to have to shoot me dead. | ||
| But then something unexpected happened. | ||
| There were four of us from the UK. Instead of electrocuting me, he electrocuted my friend, who was also in the group with me, who's from London, who's also in Egypt. | ||
| They tortured him in front of me. | ||
| And then he said, right, your turn. | ||
| You have to speak. | ||
| Tell us why you're here. | ||
| Tell us what you're doing here in Egypt. | ||
| I gave him the answer, the stock answer I gave in Alexandria. | ||
| He said, my name is Majid Nawaz. | ||
| I'm a member of Hizmet Tahrir from Britain. | ||
| Do what you want. | ||
| And by this time, my hands were loose, but I was still pretending they were still tied. | ||
| And honestly, Joe, people are going to think this is barbaric, but you haven't been in that situation to know what happens to the brain. | ||
| But I took the view that if they touch me, I'm just going to bite down on his neck and they're going to have to shoot me dead because I was just going to basically just attack the guy with my teeth. | ||
| That's all I had. | ||
| Lucky for me, for whatever reason, he said, right, I'm going to give you 24 more hours to think about your answer. | ||
| Go back to your spot, and if you don't answer, you saw what we did to your friend, and we're going to do that to you. | ||
| Now, this is the fourth day. | ||
| So they took me back to my place, and then there were some hints that they were going to rape me or whatever. | ||
| They're talking about, oh, this one looks, you know, talking about my physical features, and maybe we should treat them in a different way. | ||
| And I think they were trying to scare me with that, too. | ||
| And they have, by the way. | ||
| They were raping wives in there. | ||
| They were torturing children in front of their fathers just to try and force the father to confess. | ||
| I mean, just imagine no rules. | ||
| Anything is possible, and nobody's ever going to find out about it. | ||
| Now, lucky for me, that was the fourth day. | ||
| The British consul is meant to make contact within 48 hours. | ||
| So four days, they're already late. | ||
| But however they managed to do it on that fourth day, because I was a student of Arabic, and I could understand, I heard a phone ring in the dungeon, and one of the officers picked the phone up, and I could hear him speaking in Arabic, and he said, yeah, the foreigners are here with me. | ||
| And then I could hear him say, yes, sir, yes, sir, okay, all right, today, sir. | ||
| And that's when I realized, you know what, we might be taken out of here. | ||
| So, it was the case. | ||
| That evening, so I was due to go back to that officer who'd given me the warning, but before I was due back, they sent some pickup truck, military truck, to come and collect the four of us that were from the UK, and they took us from there. | ||
| I imagine the ambassador was making a big stink. | ||
| They took us from there and instead took us to a prison called Masra Atura prison, which is where I eventually met the assassins of Anwar Sadat, the former prime minister, the former president. | ||
| And they put us into solitary confinement for three and a half months, roughly. | ||
| The Egyptians we left behind there, the Egyptians continued, they continued treating them in a really brutal way, those that were arrested with us. | ||
| But we were then put into solitary confinement. | ||
| I was then, as a result, I was never electrocuted. | ||
| My friend, as I said, was in front of me. | ||
| He was in the next cell to me. | ||
| And after, so that cell that we were put into solitary confinement, there was no toilet, there was no bedding or anything. | ||
| It was just a bare concrete cell. | ||
| We had to, forgive me, but I suppose this is your show, we can speak like this, but we had to shit on the floor, we had to piss on the floor, and then they'd come 15 minutes break, they'd come with a bucket, and they'd just wash it down, and then we're back in that same cell. | ||
|
unidentified
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Whew. | |
| Three months or so later, we were charged. | ||
| I remember the charges still in Arabic. | ||
| I'd still quote them for you. | ||
| The first charge was, which means membership of a prohibited organization. | ||
| The second charge was, propagation by speech and writing of banned ideas. | ||
| It was beautiful because that's what convinced Amnesty International to adopt us as prisoners of conscience. | ||
| The charges. | ||
| Now, why that's beautiful is imagine, by the way, I forgot to say, so I was 24 years old by this time, yeah? | ||
| Imagine an angry Muslim, 24, at the peak of the war on terror, yeah? | ||
| Iraq hadn't yet been invaded, but 9-11 had happened. | ||
| I hated the West. | ||
| I hated what I called the kuffar, infidels. | ||
| And I existed to overthrow the Western order. | ||
| And I was prepared to die for that. | ||
| I was prepared to be tortured for it. | ||
| And along come Amnesty International and they say he doesn't deserve to be in jail for his ideas unless he's committed a crime. | ||
| And we hadn't committed any crime in Egypt. | ||
| All we were doing was speaking about these ideas, these kind of revolutionary ideas. | ||
| And because the Egyptian constitution had been suspended, Under an emergency since the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981 by the guys I eventually met in that same prison. | ||
| The Egyptian constitution does protect ideas, but it had been suspended in the name of an emergency for over 20 years. | ||
| And I'd like to, when we get to the current day, come back to the nature of how emergencies work when they suspend your rights, okay? | ||
| So this is, they'd suspended the rights of Egyptians, and it was meant to be temporary. | ||
| And that temporary situation lasted over 20 years, which is why we ended up in jail for our ideas. | ||
| What was the initial emergency? | ||
| The assassination of the president. | ||
| Okay, so because of that emergency, they used that to justify... | ||
| Which I can assure you, assassinating a president is a lot more deadly than the IFR for COVID, which is 0.096%, similar to the flu. | ||
| So that was a real emergency where a president was killed. | ||
| And it was meant to be temporary. | ||
| The state of emergency existed for over 20 years. | ||
| It's why they were allowed to treat us in that way, because they had suspended the rights of their citizens as a permanent thing. | ||
| Amnesty International comes along and says, these guys are prisoners of conscience. | ||
| When I learned of that, it really, really shook me. | ||
| Because I had never in my life up until that point, and I'm 24, I never received the positive word from any bastion of Western values, any institution, right? | ||
| Whether it was amnesty, governments, media... | ||
| And it began a process in me, in that time in prison, to just try and understand why Amnesty cared about defending my rights, because I knew I didn't care about them. | ||
| We would go around attempting to deconstruct the concept of human rights in order to recruit people to our ideological worldview. | ||
| But here was this organisation who knew that I defined them as a soft power enemy. | ||
| We saw human rights organisations as a soft power tool of Western colonialism. | ||
| And so they knew I defined them as an intellectual enemy, and yet they were defending me and my right and attempting to help get me out of jail. | ||
| So that began a process, and I've said often, right, where the heart leads, the mind can follow. | ||
| So I think it's really important when you're trying to change people's minds and help people that they see an emotional connection first because, and we've seen this in science, right, with neurological patterns. | ||
| I've often spoken to Sam Harris about this, that often you look at the The way people think, and actually we think that we are led by our thoughts, but actually something happens in the brain prior to us actually even acknowledging what we're doing, right? | ||
| And that brings up whole questions of free will that Sam talks about. | ||
| But here in this context, amnesty reaching out to me softened my heart for the first time in my life. | ||
| All I'd ever known up until that point in my relationship with the West and the country in which I was born, Was violence. | ||
| I mean, I've seen more violence than anybody should have seen at that stage. | ||
| And that was the relationship I had. | ||
| My relationship with society was defined through hate and violence. | ||
| And that's all I'd known through my adult years, my teenage years, and on to my early 20s. | ||
| We're in jail. | ||
| This is when Iraq got evaded by Blair and Bush and Blair. | ||
| Of course, we were really upset with that as Islamist prisoners. | ||
| We believe this is all part of the war that we were involved in. | ||
| But Amnesty continued campaigning for us. | ||
| So what I did is I spent... | ||
| We eventually got convicted. | ||
| I served five years, which in Egypt was meant to be three quarters of the sentence. | ||
| But we ended up staying for about four years in jail, just under. | ||
| And we were released having completed our full sentence. | ||
| So it's not that Amnesty got us out, but the mere fact they were campaigning for us. | ||
| So I spent that time in prison reading everything I'd get my hands on. | ||
| We were eventually let out of solitary confinement, and I, always having been somebody that appreciated intellectual discussion, I saw around me the who's who of political prisoners in Masra Atorah prison. | ||
| And we had everything from communists and socialists. | ||
| We had Muslims who had converted to Christianity. | ||
| We had Christians who had converted to Islam. | ||
| We had jihadists who'd assassinated the president. | ||
| And we had Israeli spies who were being accused of being Israeli spies. | ||
| Everyone was in this jail. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And we had a joke that under Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, If you change your mind from anything to anything, it's a criminal offense. | ||
| Because it didn't make sense, right? | ||
| You had a Muslim convert to Christianity, threw him in jail. | ||
| Christian, convert to Islam, throw him in jail. | ||
| For conversion? | ||
| Everything. | ||
| You change your mind on anything and you'd be in jail. | ||
| You're unreliable. | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
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What is the logic? | |
| Well, that's the funny thing. | ||
| Mubarak didn't want anyone to think. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Just don't think. | ||
| Just obey. | ||
| So when he heard that you're just tossing and turning too much in your mind, he'd just throw you in jail? | ||
| Throw you in jail. | ||
| That guy's too sketchy. | ||
| I mean, think about it. | ||
| You've got people that assassinated Sadat, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Why did they assassinate him? | ||
| In 1981, Anwar Sadat made a peace treaty with Israel. | ||
| Egypt and Israel's peace is because of that president. | ||
| And it was military guys that assassinated him. | ||
| And they did it because they believed that was treachery. | ||
| They didn't want peace with Israel, so assassinated him, right? | ||
| So you can understand, okay, you've got jihadis who believe making peace with Israel is treachery. | ||
| They're in jail. | ||
| But on the other hand, this guy, I was with him in prison as well, and he'd been accused of being an Israeli agent. | ||
| Threw him in jail too. | ||
| And the guys that prosecuted and convicted the assassins of Sadat, right, they were in jail with the assassins of Sadat 20 years later. | ||
| That's the danger of dictatorship. | ||
| Everyone ends up in prison. | ||
| Because you literally can just point at anybody you want and go lock them up. | ||
| So I used that opportunity to speak to everyone. | ||
| I had the advantage that we were young. | ||
| They were like, the Sadat assassins had been in prison for longer than I'd been alive. | ||
| I was 24, they'd been in jail 25 years. | ||
| So we looked at them and thought, wisdom. | ||
| Now these guys had also changed their ideology in that time. | ||
| They basically started advocating for a more peaceful approach. | ||
|
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Really? | |
| And a more traditional faith in Islam as opposed to the politicized dogma. | ||
| What I called earlier Islamism, yeah? | ||
| So I spent a lot of time with these guys because, first of all, they had my respect. | ||
| They'd lived the life that I had started on, right? | ||
| But they'd also then come back from it. | ||
| One of their names was Dr. Tariq. | ||
| He'd managed to become a doctor through his time in prison and studying. | ||
| The other guy was Salah al-Bayyumi. | ||
| So I spent a lot of time talking to them and others. | ||
| Egypt's largest jihadi group at the time was called Gamal Islamiyya. | ||
| Their leader was in prison as well. | ||
| What was their tipping point? | ||
| Like, once they were incarcerated after the assassination, What led them to change the way they viewed the world? | ||
| Because you would imagine that people... | ||
| One of the things that we always talk about with the prison system in America is you're just making better criminals. | ||
| You're making more hardened criminals. | ||
| You're introducing them to other hardened criminals, and there's very little rehabilitation. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's right. | |
| So what caused these men to change their perspective? | ||
| So that's the general rule. | ||
| And I'll get to in a second, eventually, we also do that kind of rehabilitation work in the UK with Muslims convicted of high-level terrorism. | ||
| In fact, the brother, my friend, who I'm working with on that, was going to be here with me today, but some paperwork didn't work out with his situation, so he's not. | ||
| But... | ||
| What happened in Egypt is the exception. | ||
| There was a process called, which means the revisions. | ||
| And they sent in a whole bunch of theologians to speak to the leaders of these jihadi groups. | ||
| And eventually, over a process, a long period, and I imagine a lot of carrot and stick, The leadership of these groups, in particular the largest group, as I say, was known Gamal Islamiyya, which is not the group that assassinated Anwar Sadat, the president. | ||
| That was known as Al-Jihad Al-Islami, or Islamic Jihad. | ||
| But the other group, which was larger, was known as Gamal Islamiyya, or the Islamic group. | ||
| That group's leadership began this process of revision, murajaat, and eventually they came to what they called Mubadarat Waqth Al-Unf, which means a ceasefire. | ||
| They declared a ceasefire with the government based upon theological revisions. | ||
| And as a reward for their revisions of their violence, they were put into this prison where the political wing were rather than the violent wing, right? | ||
| And so because we were the political wing, they were then deemed as being safe to be put with the political side of it as opposed to the terrorist side. | ||
| So then I got to mix with these guys and I spent all that time reading their revisions in Arabic, debating it with them, Speaking to the other prisoners, like, there was this liberal presidential candidate called Ayman Noor, who was thrown in jail because he was a presidential candidate. | ||
| He stood for election against Mubarak, threw him in jail. | ||
| They used some corruption charges on him, but everyone knew that he was because he stood as president and he wasn't an endorsed candidate. | ||
| He was in jail. | ||
| So I spoke to people that have a liberal ideology, revised Islamist ideology, communist prisoners, spoke to everybody, and then did a lot of my own reading. | ||
| And one of the interesting things for me was reading, in particular, English literature. | ||
| Read a lot of Tolkien, a lot of Orwell. | ||
| I even read the Harry Potter books. | ||
| In a jihadi jail. | ||
| And the interesting thing with Tolkien, Orwell in particular, is there's a lot you can learn from those stories that relate to our situation today. | ||
| There's a lot of hero's journey stuff. | ||
| Precisely. | ||
| And then on top of that, I read a lot of Islamic theology. | ||
| I continued with my Arabic studies. | ||
| And the more I learned, the more I studied, the more tolerant I became, and the more the dogma that I had adopted began to unravel. | ||
| And this is, you know of my dialogue with Sam, it became an Amazon film. | ||
| It's explained in that. | ||
| A lot of it is in the book that I did with Sam, published by Harvard, which was my second book. | ||
| But in essence, the more I learned about my tradition and my heritage, I was ignorant of that because I wasn't born with that heritage. | ||
| I was born in dislocation from it. | ||
| But sitting with those who had studied this and those who had spent many years thinking about this, the more I learned, the more open I became. | ||
| And because Amnesty had initially opened my heart, I began looking for alternatives. | ||
| Now, what I didn't want to do was leave the group or even announce leaving the group while in jail. | ||
| I have a bit more dignity than that. | ||
| I didn't want anyone to think I've done it because I'm in prison and someone's pressured me. | ||
| So I left prison, still a committed member of the group on paper, got back to the UK and even did some interviews as a member of the group. | ||
| But within that year, it became very apparent to me that I was living a contradiction and I could no longer maintain in that fervor the sort of the dogma that I that I adopted. | ||
| I had to, you know, I'd unpicked it in my mind in such a way that it was no longer sustainable for me to to remain on the leadership. | ||
| And then the group I was with offered me directly to become the leader in the UK. | ||
| So within that week, I had a choice to make. | ||
| Either I live a lie and I lead this organisation while no longer believing that this is good for anyone's future or I resign. | ||
| So I unilaterally and openly announce my resignation from the group and also my abandonment of my previous ideology in the favour of a more traditional and organic understanding of my heritage. | ||
| How was that met within the group? | ||
| Outrage. | ||
| Outrage. | ||
| My marriage fell apart and my entire identity up until that point had been defined by families and friends around this ideology and organization. | ||
| All of that, imagine you've been plucked out of your reality and you have to reconstruct yourself from nothing. | ||
| But on top of that, you've just come out of jail. | ||
| The war on terror is at its peak. | ||
| Tony Blair is Prime Minister and Bush Jr. is President. | ||
| So the world hates you because everyone thinks you're the enemy. | ||
| You've just lost all your friends and you have to build yourself back up again from nothing. | ||
| How did you maintain your resolve during that period? | ||
| Because I've got to imagine the pull to go back to your old ways is probably very strong because there's community there and even though you had come to this realization in jail and through all your reading that there had to been a great pull to try to bring you back to the old life. | ||
| This is why today, when talking about contemporary debates, the stance I've taken against tyranny, and I won't mince my words on it, this is why it's so insulting. | ||
| It's seriously ignorant. | ||
| Where some voices have come out and said, oh, Majid Nawaz has become radical. | ||
| He's radicalized, sorry. | ||
| I use the word radical myself. | ||
| Radicalized. | ||
| He's become an extremist again. | ||
| These people have absolutely no idea what extremism is. | ||
| They have no idea what it takes to inoculate yourself against that before anyone else was even talking about counter extremism. | ||
| They have no idea the inner discipline it takes to pull yourself out of that and lose everything. | ||
| What was that like? | ||
| It was incredibly difficult. | ||
| But what got me through it and what gets me through it today, to draw that similar analogy, what got me through it then is you have to have a belief in why you're doing what you're doing. | ||
| And I went seeking and I found people who were far better than the people I was following, who were also consistent to my heritage and yet believed in finding what we have in common and bringing people together rather than dividing people. | ||
| There are, again, back to teachers, yeah? | ||
| Spiritual guides. | ||
| One of the first things, I needed to land on some form of spiritual and humanitarian platform. | ||
| So I went to Sufi sheikhs who practice the soul or purification of the soul, of the inside, to try and make sure that you're on a firm foundation. | ||
| And I went looking. | ||
| And I got very lucky that one spiritual guide Sheikh Ali, who I spoke to early on. | ||
| And he said, listen, you're going to go on a journey. | ||
| Trust the journey. | ||
| And the important thing is we stay in touch, but trust the journey. | ||
| And as long as your intention is good, you will land on your feet. | ||
| And I remember one of the things he said to me. | ||
| He said, we're in this situation now where it's almost like this Muslim-Western divide. | ||
| As I say, the war on terror was ongoing. | ||
| Blair was Prime Minister. | ||
| Bush was President. | ||
| And he said to me, just imagine you're like... | ||
| Moses in the court pharaoh and you're there and you're going to speak to these people to try and make them understand what you've understood as to why you pulled back from that brink to try and help them understand that war isn't the way forward with this. | ||
| The whole war on terror discourse, the whole paradigm. | ||
| So I spent the next 10 years of my life on that guidance given to me by Sheikh Ali. | ||
| Attempting to, from the inside, working with the machine, I'm now going to call it the machine, right? | ||
| The system. | ||
| Working with that machine in an attempt to be like Moses in the court of Pharaoh. | ||
| Let them see through my example what can be rather than what The bad things that you think are. | ||
| The good that can be, right? | ||
| So I met with Blair. | ||
| I met with Bush in his house in Texas. | ||
| I met Blair a few times. | ||
| I've met with PM Cameron, met with Trudeau. | ||
| I've met with a lot of these people in an attempt to show them there's another way. | ||
| What I realized over the course of that attempt, and we can get into some of this detail, but what brings me here today is 10 years of being an Islamist revolutionary and then 10 years of attempting to work on that high level in governments, in that machine, to try and soften the power of that machine, soften its own self-inflicted blows, such as the invasion of Iraq. | ||
| Such as, you know, arbitrary kill lists, assassinating people without due process, to try and end that war and instead bring about a dialogue. | ||
| Unfortunately, the machine I was trying to work with, I don't believe it's any longer possible to work on the inside and achieve that aim. | ||
| How so? | ||
| Mission creep. | ||
| Mission creep. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you may know, but for your listeners, I'll say that after leaving that organization, I set up a group called Quilliam in an attempt to be that, you know, what the guidance that was given to me. | ||
| And I don't think I'd be where I am without that guidance. | ||
| You ask about how I did it. | ||
| You have to have strong people around you. | ||
| And you have to have an understanding of who you are and not lose that. | ||
| And it's very difficult. | ||
| But 10 years, I'm trying to work with that machine to say, look... | ||
| Yes, I can help you on the ideological side of how to speak to those Muslims who have gone down that path, but on your side there is some responsibility. | ||
| You've got to respect the civil liberties values that you claim you're fighting for. | ||
| So if you're saying they hate our democracy, they hate our freedoms, that's not going to wash if you're invading countries. | ||
| If you say they hate our democracies, they hate our freedoms, that's not going to wash if you're torturing people or you're outsourcing your torture to dictators that you support financially. | ||
| Now, this is true with the UK as well as the US, right? | ||
| It's now established. | ||
| What I'm saying now isn't any longer in dispute, but it used to be when I first started talking about it. | ||
| There's a guy called Abdul Hakim Bilhaj from Libya, who it's now been established that the British authorities outsourced his torture. | ||
| And that's now not even in dispute anymore. | ||
| And they relied on the intelligence that they knew they got through him being tortured in a third country. | ||
| It's called extraordinary rendition. | ||
| When Western countries outsource torture to dictators and then rely on that intelligence to make their next move. | ||
| And my point is, if you're fighting for your values, right? | ||
| Joe, if you're reacting because you're a father and you want to defend your children, the last thing you're going to do that is consistent with that is harm other people's children. | ||
| If you're fighting to defend children. | ||
| So you're saying to me you're fighting for your values. | ||
| But then don't outsource torture. | ||
| Don't invade countries. | ||
| Don't arbitrarily kill people from the skies without due process. | ||
| Like a 17 year old American, Anwar al-Awlaki's son, who was bombed under Obama's presidency in Yemen because they wanted a father. | ||
| They knew the 17 year old was there next to him and they decided to bomb anyway. | ||
| And the thing is, if you start behaving like this, of course, every action causes a reaction. | ||
| And there's me in the middle trying to say, these guys are wrong, but this is also wrong. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Now that machine, it took me a while, 10 years of attempting to try and, you know, rein in the excess on both sides. | ||
| Of course, doesn't earn you any friends. | ||
| Can I ask you more about the process? | ||
| Like, how do you go about meeting these people? | ||
| Like, how does this set up? | ||
| Like, how do you meet Trudeau? | ||
| How are you meeting Bush? | ||
| How is this facilitated? | ||
| At the time, I was the only one publicly speaking about any of this. | ||
| And so they were all desperate to hear from me. | ||
| Because you were someone who was radicalized at one point in time and had converted over and they trusted you? | ||
| Every single one of these was an invitation. | ||
| I didn't ask for any of these. | ||
| And how did they know of you? | ||
| When I left Hizr al-Tahrir, so it's interesting because we forget what the media world used to look like with the internet today. | ||
| I did all the kind of, you know, the prime time. | ||
| So I did in the UK BBC Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman here. | ||
| I did CBS 60 Minutes. | ||
| Larry King. | ||
| So what used to be the primetime shows? | ||
| They're not anywhere, right? | ||
| So people would see this guy on the CBS 60 Minutes, like, who the hell is this guy? | ||
| He's been in jail, he's now speaking against this stuff. | ||
| So I would be invited. | ||
| I was invited to Bush's home. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| In fact, what was that like? | ||
| Well, I'll tell you a story because he sat me down and like you did, he said, well, tell me about yourself. | ||
| And I got to the point of when I said, oh, they tortured us in prison. | ||
| And he said, I opened my book with this story, by the way. | ||
| He said, stop right there. | ||
| I said, all right. | ||
| OK. | ||
| If you remember, Bush was that whole waterboarding and redefining torture, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So he says, stop right there. | ||
| So I stopped. | ||
| He looked me in the eyes and said, how do you define torture? | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| What was your impression of him as a person? | ||
| When I looked him back square in the eyes, I said, you know, electrocution on the teeth and genitalia. | ||
| And he said, yeah, that's torture. | ||
| Carry on. | ||
| Now, the interesting thing with Bush is I found him to be very personable. | ||
| But then, you know, that really doesn't mean much when you're in charge of a country that invades another country. | ||
| But one-on-one, he was very easy to talk to. | ||
| Did he seem slow? | ||
| No. | ||
| Not at all, right? | ||
|
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No. | |
| Was that an act, do you think? | ||
| That kind of down-home, aw shucks type? | ||
| What I've learned is look at media narratives today. | ||
| And it's so often the impression we have in media is a narrative built up. | ||
| And especially in those days, before we had decentralized media, Isn't it fascinating that today he is thought of as a reasonable Republican? | ||
| And he's thought of as like, boy, if only George W. Bush was running for president. | ||
| Like, we think about him, the standards of behavior. | ||
| Everything is shifted, and Trump threw a monkey wrench into the gears that fucked up the machine so hard that they look back with nostalgia of the days of Bush. | ||
| But I can remember when Bush was president, the hate that people had for him. | ||
| It was palpable. | ||
| And then when we invaded Iraq, then it changed. | ||
| Because after 9-11, then he had given this big speech and he had stepped up in this way where we felt comfortable, like, fine, we have a leader. | ||
| We've been attacked. | ||
| We have to unite as a nation. | ||
| This is a real leader. | ||
| And he gave a real speech. | ||
| And even Democrats were saying yes. | ||
| We have a real president. | ||
| One thing that's interesting about those years is before the invasion of Iraq, Muslim Americans used to generally vote Republican. | ||
| And the reason was largely, again, there's always exceptions, the reason was largely because of the social conservative family values. | ||
| Muslims are very socially conservative. | ||
| Believe in family, believe in community, and all the debates you hear today about liberals and the whole kind of, you know, LGBT and all that stuff, you can imagine coming from a religious background, Muslims are a lot more conservative on that stuff. | ||
| They used to vote for Republican Party and then Iraq happened and they switched to the Democrats. | ||
| And I think we're in a moment now where that switch is going back from the Democrats back very slowly back to the Republicans again. | ||
| And Trump's last election result demonstrated that trend because despite Trump's presidency and I often get accused of all sorts of things. | ||
| Look, I have been on the streets in London protesting President Trump when he floated the Muslim ban because I'm married to a beautiful American woman. | ||
| And I was worried about being banned coming into America. | ||
| With my background, it actually meant something. | ||
| So I was on the streets protesting Trump. | ||
| So despite me, you know, what I'm about to say, I don't want anyone to misinterpret and suddenly imagine the Trump supporters. | ||
| I'm tired of people putting words in my mouth. | ||
| They haven't lived my life. | ||
| They don't know why I think what I think. | ||
| But having protested Trump, It is interesting to see the results that he got in these elections. | ||
| His share of the Muslim vote went up and his share of the African-American vote went up, not down. | ||
| This last 2020 election. | ||
| And I think that's the beginning of something that's happening where people on the social stuff, these communities, and the same for Latino votes, by the way, these communities, I think they're beginning to prioritize their social conservative once more because when you look to foreign policy, there's not really too much that Biden redeems himself on. | ||
| So I think that that vote is going to switch back again. | ||
| But yeah, these guys, I attempted for about 10 years, through my then organization, Quilliam, to attempt to, pretty much as happened to me on the Islamist side, to attempt to try and soften some of that hard edge of the war. | ||
| How was that met with Bush? | ||
| He was charming, but of course it wasn't ever going to be Bush. | ||
| It was going to be the people around him. | ||
| What was his perspective on what you were saying? | ||
| The last two years of the Bush presidency, I think they really began getting to grips with some of this. | ||
| And again, that's not a popular thing to say. | ||
| And I remember the time, those last two years, they began realizing that this has to be more of an ideological and intellectual conversation and not a physical war. | ||
| You can't win. | ||
| In this war, there was no way anyone was going to win. | ||
| And so they were stuck in this situation where it was many years deep into the war and realizing that they had done everything that they were trying to avoid. | ||
| We had had that one desert storm war and I think people had come under the impression that if we were to invade a country, it would be very quick and very easy. | ||
| We had this very American-centric idea of what would go on in a war. | ||
| And because of that, it made us so much more willing to enter into wars. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| If a foreign army occupied America, would you just sit back and let them stay here for 10? | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| No man worth his salt is going to sit there and watch a foreign army in their... | ||
| If anyone invaded Britain, I'd be the first to say, sign me up. | ||
| Where do I join? | ||
| No one is just going to let foreign troops in their land, right? | ||
| But this madness was brought about because back in those days, Bush didn't even know the difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims. | ||
| It was just pure ignorance. | ||
| The foreign policy neoconservative machine was hoodwinked by this guy called Chalabi in Iraq, who convinced them that if you invade, everything's going to be hunky-dory. | ||
| Iraq is going to blossom into this democracy. | ||
| All that ended up happening is 60% of Iraq was Shia. | ||
| You end up creating this satellite of sphere of influence for Iran. | ||
| Because Iran is Shia origin country and it ended up having this disproportionate influence in Iraq as a result. | ||
| And you end up with a situation today. | ||
| I mean, it's a mess. | ||
| When you think back to this man trying to convince the Bush administration that everything was going to be fine, it was going to blossom into a democracy. | ||
| What do you think was his motivation? | ||
| Do you think ultimately he knew that the Shia and the Sunni would go to battle and there would be a massive conflict and that it would destabilize the region? | ||
| Do you think he was aware of that or do you think they were operating on ignorance or do you think they were operating under this premise that they were going to get to control the natural resources and it was worth it financially and they would sort it all out? | ||
| Well, you know, individual intentions aside, if you look to Cheney, if you look to Rumsfeld, and if you looked at this guy, Chalabi, who was from the Iraqi National Congress, and if you look at everything that happened since then, and the behavior in Iraq and beyond, It's definitely not about bringing democracy. | ||
| Now, the jury's out for me. | ||
| Is it oil? | ||
| Is it natural resources? | ||
| Is it strategic positioning? | ||
| It's definitely not the reason that we were told. | ||
| And it certainly wasn't weapons of mass destruction. | ||
| That was all built on a lie. | ||
| And that's also come out since. | ||
| Do you think they knew about the lie, for sure? | ||
| How many people do you think knew about, like when they were broadcasting on CNN, weapons of mass destruction, we have to invade Iraq. | ||
| Who do you think knew that that was not true? | ||
| Remember Colin Powell? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I'm quite sure he knew he was speaking bullshit. | ||
| God, that's so hard to believe. | ||
| That's so hard to believe because he's so admired. | ||
| And when you have an example of a man who has a distinguished military career and then goes on to be a distinguished politician, he's one of the best examples we've ever had. | ||
| But you remember, he was opposed to it for a long time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And then he gave that one speech. | ||
| I think it was at the UN? Yes. | ||
| And I think that's the point, that he knew what was going on. | ||
| He was opposed to it. | ||
| He didn't want to follow this. | ||
| He had a vial of something, right? | ||
| And then somebody gave him something. | ||
| And then he said, all right, you know. | ||
| And I think when he did that, that speech, I think he knew in his heart something's not right. | ||
| What was the vial? | ||
| What did he have? | ||
| I can't remember, but it was used as evidence, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| What we've had since in the UK is an inquiry, and they found that Tony Blair pretty much, you know, they all knew that something wasn't right with this intelligence they were given. | ||
| And this 15 minutes thing, it just wasn't right, you know? | ||
| And the guy that exposed it, one of our scientists in the UK... 15 minutes thing? | ||
| That Saddam can strike within 15 minutes of it, yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's a guy who, in particular with the weapons of mass destruction... | ||
| Now, again, caveat, Saddam is no picnic. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yes, for sure. | ||
| I mean, the man has gassed his own people. | ||
| He's the Iraqi equivalent of Mubarak that did what he did to us in Egypt. | ||
| And his sons were the most evil. | ||
| I mean, again, people think I'm going to defend... | ||
| This isn't about defending Saddam. | ||
| It's just true. | ||
| The first death in our organization, my former group, was in Iraq. | ||
| One of our members was tortured to death by Saddam. | ||
| We were attempting to overthrow Saddam too, right? | ||
| So this is no favoritism to Saddam Hussein coming from me. | ||
| What I'm saying is that you don't go into war based on a lie. | ||
| And this guy called Dr. Kelly in the UK, he was the scientist from our whatever, our defense sector, who exposed this lie. | ||
| He turned out dead a couple of weeks later. | ||
| No one knows what happened to him, but he's dead. | ||
| So it's just all weird, right? | ||
| Died of what? | ||
| They found him dead in his car. | ||
| I think it's officially suicide, whatever. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| Was Epstein suicide? | ||
| I say no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you say? | |
| It doesn't look like it, does it? | ||
| I get very uncomfortable when people say he did commit suicide. | ||
| It's a bit weird, isn't it? | ||
| Well, I start asking them questions. | ||
| Why do you think that? | ||
| Like, did you look at the autopsy? | ||
| Did you ever hear Michael Baden speak about it, where he talks about the ligature marks at the bottom of his neck, which indicate he was strangled? | ||
| Did you hear about the broken bones, rather, in his neck? | ||
| Like that don't exist normally when people hang themselves. | ||
| They usually are only from someone being strangled. | ||
| There's a desire, the camera thing, the security guards conveniently sleeping, like there's so much. | ||
| It's all strange. | ||
| But it's in front of everybody's face. | ||
| Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat. | ||
| Ta-da! | ||
| And you're like, holy shit. | ||
| If the lie's big enough, right? | ||
| This is a good one, though. | ||
| I mean, it's quite extraordinary that they were able to pull that off. | ||
| They were able to pull that off in front of everyone's eyes. | ||
| Well, I mean, I don't know if they've pulled it off. | ||
| I'm not so sure people deep down really, really, truly believe that that's... | ||
| I mean, everyone, I think, realizes more than meets the eye with that. | ||
| Yeah, I think so too. | ||
| People don't want to speak about it. | ||
| But it's gone on long enough that I think it's going to be a part of the past. | ||
| And people are just going to go, what happened to him? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| What happened to Kennedy? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Like I just said with Dr. Kelly, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| But what we have learned from that is... | ||
| That it's easy to manufacture consent around something that isn't true for foreign policy purposes. | ||
| It was done with Iraq. | ||
| And my whole thing was, how do we stop that happening again? | ||
| That's what I was trying to do. | ||
| With Bush? | ||
| With all of them. | ||
| All the way through to Cameron. | ||
| What kind of dialogue did you have with Bush in terms of trying to convince him to take a different approach? | ||
| Well, so as I say, in these last two years, they were listening. | ||
| So I met with Secretary Chertoff, who founded the Homeland Security. | ||
| He used to be a judge. | ||
| And we would work very closely with Homeland Security and that entire group And what happened was, if you recall, so those last two years, then Obama got elected. | ||
| And as always, just as we felt we were beginning to make progress, I mean, one of my bugbears has long been we have to shut Guantanamo Bay down. | ||
| This idea that we can throw people in jail for years and years and years over decades with no charge, right? | ||
| It started with jihadi prisoners. | ||
| You move to Syria, it moved from jihadi prisoners to their wives and their children now. | ||
| So there's just been a jailbreak in Syria, an ISIS attempted jailbreak. | ||
| Now, there's a bit of detail to that story that's more interesting than the fact that ISIS, in the first organized attack, For many years since the fall of their so-called Islamic State have demonstrated that they've regrouped because they had a full frontal assault on this jail. | ||
| But that's not what interests me. | ||
| And I think that the Kurdish forces have retaken it just yesterday. | ||
| What interests me is the detail in this little story. | ||
| And that is that it turns out that there were hundreds of children in this jail. | ||
| Children born to ISIS fighters who nobody wanted to take care of, so they threw them in this adult jihadi prison. | ||
| Hundreds of children, some of whom died in this attempted jailbreak. | ||
| So we've gone from... | ||
| And this is where, when the Overton window shifts in that way, when you say, oh, Bush's years, if only, our value system has shifted so much to a point. | ||
| We are now... | ||
| Living with this idea that our states and our allies can throw children in jail for years with some of the most dangerous people on the planet. | ||
| And it went from jihadis in Guantanamo to in Syria now to their wives and children, including, by the way, Western citizens. | ||
| So this jailbreak, some of the kids that were killed, 16 year olds, 17 year olds, Western citizens, Australians, you know, and others, American as an American kid in the Times newspaper. | ||
| And why were they in the prison? | ||
| Because they were taken there as kids by their jihadi parents. | ||
| And nobody wants to do, no Western government, credit to America, under Trump, you guys took back all your foreign fighters from ISIS. Britain hasn't done so, nor have most European countries. | ||
| Took back all our foreign fighters. | ||
| Who were Americans who went to join ISIS, yeah. | ||
| They're now back in the, you know, you bring them back and if there's a crime to answer for, you put them on trial. | ||
| But what you haven't done, what America hasn't done, is say, you know what, I don't give a damn. | ||
| They might be American, but they can stay in Syria. | ||
| And even if they're sentenced in Syria, say they finish their time, where do they go? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that's what's happened is nobody. | ||
| So there's camps. | ||
| There are entire camps. | ||
| They're just internship camps, concentration camps or intern camps, like Al-Hawl, Camp Al-Hawl in Syria, where there's women and children, kids from babies, and they're growing up and they're giving birth in these prisons, and no one's charged them or convicted them of anything. | ||
| So they're essentially being raised in these prisons. | ||
| They are born and raised in prisons. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Now you go from Guantanamo to that, and I'm going to bring you to another stage, right? | ||
| We're talking about the Overton window of acceptability shifting. | ||
| We've got a Home Secretary in the UK right now called Priti Patel. | ||
| She then suggested that, what do you do with these boat people that come over from France and they're trying to cross the English Channel, undocumented migrants, they're landing in Britain. | ||
| What do you do with them? | ||
| She said, I know what we can do with them. | ||
| Arrest them. | ||
| And then put them in a camp in Rwanda. | ||
| So you've gone from, we've gone from arbitrarily interning jihadis to arbitrarily interning their wives and their children to now arbitrarily interning anyone who's undocumented in these camps. | ||
| That's not the kind of world I want to see going forward. | ||
| It's like that movie Elysium, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's not the kind of world I want to see going forward. | ||
| So this is the kind of thing that I was upset with in that machine. | ||
| And I'm trying to work in the machine to say, what you guys are doing is making the problem worse with this kind of behavior. | ||
| Power, brute force, does not fix your problems. | ||
| And these conversations with Bush in particular, what was that like? | ||
| How did he respond to this? | ||
| So, Bush was one meeting. | ||
| And after that one meeting, I was able to speak to the administration. | ||
| And as I say, so for the last two years, I felt, we felt, we were beginning to make progress. | ||
| Obama gets in, and then they want to reinvent the wheel. | ||
| And a lot of people, when they look at Obama, they think, a great president. | ||
| Again, I'm not going to mince my words, and I don't want anyone to say, R.C. Majid is this or that. | ||
| Guys, you've got to understand, I didn't even come from this system. | ||
| I wanted to overthrow the whole thing, Obama and Bush together. | ||
| I was anti-democracy, full stop. | ||
| So this is not about me supporting Bush, supporting Obama, supporting Trump, supporting anyone. | ||
| I'm looking at this from the outside and seeing what's going wrong vis-a-vis this specific debate. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| And speaking objectively about it, regardless of whether you're left-wing or right-wing. | ||
| So Obama comes in, and this man launches more drone strikes than Bush, has a kill list, which Bush never had, that is unaccountable. | ||
| That kill list he made, including American citizens, was not accountable to Congress. | ||
| So on the physical war side, he basically did even more than Bush did. | ||
| With his assassinations, with his NSA spying, with his... | ||
| Military approach to solving problems with his drones, more drone strikes than Bush ever conducted. | ||
| He just ratcheted up the military side of this. | ||
| And we were then, when Obama became president, my work was for a long time ostracized from the Obama administration because of this point. | ||
| And then where he should have done something, like the rise of ISIS, completely useless. | ||
| So your work was ostracized because you were working towards peace and a less brutal approach, and he was conducting drone strikes and NSA surveillance. | ||
| They didn't want to hear what I just said to him. | ||
| They just didn't want to hear that. | ||
| They didn't want to hear it. | ||
| But they knew your position, and did you eventually get to meet with him? | ||
| Not him. | ||
| Not him. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I met Hillary Clinton, I met Madeleine Albright, but I didn't meet Obama. | ||
| Did you ever meet anybody that smelled like sulfur? | ||
| What? | ||
| Any of those people? | ||
| What? | ||
| They're like, they're evil. | ||
| This is an evil person. | ||
| This is for sure straight from hell. | ||
| So, anyway. | ||
| Just fucking around. | ||
| No, no, it's good enough. | ||
| But you met Hillary Clinton. | ||
| You met George Bush. | ||
| Who else did you meet inside the organization? | ||
| On the U.S. side, Madeleine Albright, Secretary Chertoff when he was head of the Homeland Security Department. | ||
| Was any one group or one administration more open to your ideas? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| Well, the same thing happened. | ||
| It's usually the case, right? | ||
| It takes six years. | ||
| Last two years of the Obama administration, like the last two years of Bush, they began listening to us. | ||
| And then, of course, Trump comes in. | ||
| Now, the interesting thing is, again, the whole ISIS problem was playing out under Obama. | ||
| But what I began witnessing is that machine, I'm going to call it mission creep. | ||
| You've got to a situation now, under Biden, Where even those who are Trump supporters, who question the U.S. election and its transparency, are now being defined as domestic extremists or domestic terrorists. | ||
| And this is where I have to exit. | ||
| Because I'm saying, okay, hold on. | ||
| You guys, first of all, you have no idea what extremism is. | ||
| You have no idea what terrorism is. | ||
| And if you're going to weaponize that language and start applying it onto people that question an election, I cannot be a part of that. | ||
| So I shut Quilliam down. | ||
| Unilaterally just shut the thing down. | ||
| I will not be used to stigmatize Trump voters as domestic extremists. | ||
| Extremism, terrorism is a very specific thing. | ||
| It's like racism. | ||
| You disagreeing with me isn't racist, right? | ||
| But that's how it's being used often these days, right? | ||
| And you're going to use that. | ||
| People like me that actually dodge hammer attacks, machete attacks, screwdriver attacks, watch friends get stabbed over that thing called racism. | ||
| I will stop you misusing that word because I know that if the boy cries wolf... | ||
| That when some little kid like me is trying to run away from the real racists, no one's going to believe them. | ||
| Would you categorize people like the January 6th attack? | ||
| At the very least, there's some amongst them that are extremists. | ||
| There was people that showed up at the Capitol with zip ties. | ||
| I mean, and they were looking for politicians. | ||
| There are some amongst them that most certainly were extremists. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| That's like there's some among Muslims that were extremists. | ||
| Do you see the concern, though, from the administration that at the very least, there's the beginnings of something that could be absolutely awful? | ||
| Yeah, and that's where you've got to be accurate in your language. | ||
| Right, but I think that's the problem, right? | ||
| They use hyperbole, they use exaggeration, and also they use agent provocateurs. | ||
| Precisely. | ||
| That conversation where Ted Cruz was speaking to the woman from the FBI, I'm sure you've seen that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where she said, have you ever incited, has the agency incited violence? | ||
| I can't answer that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When she rattles off a bunch of things that she can't answer, you're like, hey, there's supposed to be a real fucking clear answer to all those questions. | ||
| It's supposed to be no. | ||
| No, we don't do any of that stuff because that stuff's illegal. | ||
| Entrapment is not legal in the UK, but it still is here. | ||
| And it gets used often. | ||
| It gets used often. | ||
| We know there were certain people in that crowd that were with law enforcement. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And they were behaving less than admirably. | ||
| With intelligence agencies, yeah. | ||
| And it seems like there was some people that had a vested interest in this going sideways. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I think it was a tool to sort of label the administration as being even more awful than they already thought it was. | ||
| But, you know, it's like you're not vaccinated, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I start using labels, anti-vaxxer, right, just to try and pigeonhole you before you even speak. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So we've got to be careful with language because it's a weapon. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The anti-vax thing is a big language issue. | ||
| So it's the same with the US elections and it's the same with Muslims and terrorism. | ||
| And I began realizing that this language was being weaponized for the purposes not of achieving a solution to the problem we're attempting to fix, but for politics. | ||
| And I thought, you know what, the problem here is I'm going to be instrumentalized. | ||
| My language, my work is going to be instrumentalized. | ||
| And so I had to get out and do what I'm doing from the outside in these sorts of conversations instead. | ||
| There's no way I could remain part of that phenomenon. | ||
| I mean, look, Joe, you asked me about who won Bush v. | ||
| Gore in Florida. | ||
| Till this day, I'll say to you, I think Gore won. | ||
| Does that make me an extremist? | ||
| Now, obviously, Bush became president. | ||
| Obviously, I have to deal with that reality and accept it. | ||
| But if you ask me, what's my opinion? | ||
| Bush's brother was governor. | ||
| There was something going on with the Chads or whatever you call them. | ||
| Wasn't there something going on with John Kerry, too? | ||
| Yeah, something a bit weird, right? | ||
| Now, I've got a right to question Bush v. | ||
| Gore, just as a Trump voter has a right to question Biden v. | ||
| Trump. | ||
| I think you do have a right, and I also think there's an issue where it's fun to think an election's rigged. | ||
| Fun's a bad word. | ||
| There's an excitement that attaches to it that's akin to conspiracy theories. | ||
| It's akin to people that go looking for UFOs. | ||
| But I wouldn't go so far as to say rigged. | ||
| My questions were more... | ||
| But some people do think it's rigged, and that's what's exciting to them. | ||
| Do you remember the Time Magazine piece? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which piece? | ||
| The piece that explained the wording it used was like, there's a cabal of well-organized, financed people that saved democracy on that day of the election. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's what I'm talking about, right? | ||
| That leads to questions. | ||
| That's sneaky talk. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And they use the word cabal. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We fortified the election. | ||
| That's the word they use, fortified, right? | ||
| So as somebody who at the time was a broadcaster on a talk show on mainstream UK radio, it's my job to say, what the heck is this? | ||
| So I didn't want to be a part of what I very clearly saw as it's now happening with the Vax debate. | ||
| Was a weaponization of language, an instrumentalization of those activists that are there to try and fix the problem for political purposes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So I'm like, listen, you know what? | ||
| I've done my bit here. | ||
| I tried to be the Moses in the court of Pharaoh. | ||
| I've gone back to my spiritual guide who was there originally, a bit like a Yoda figure. | ||
| We do a lot of work, by the way, on, as I say, Muslims convicted of high-level terrorism offenses and work with them on physical training, MMA fighting, actually, and spiritual guidance to try and get them back to a solid foundation, less than, minus the hate. | ||
| So there's a guy from Chicago, there's a few in the UK. These are leaders of the terrorism wings in prisons like Belmarsh. | ||
| And they've, you know, rehabilitation is a very difficult thing to do. | ||
| And actually, it's the exception, not the norm. | ||
| But where you have got that exception, that's why it's so valuable. | ||
| That's why it's so powerful. | ||
| So I want to continue with my brother Osman Raja, Sheikh Ali, to do this kind of work, working outside of my media work, outside of my, you know, my activism for civil liberties. | ||
| I will keep up on the rehabilitation, prison rehabilitation side, but more direct, more one-on-one I tried to work with the system, tried to work with that machine, and the problem is that the mission creep, it didn't just stop, by the way, with the war on terror. | ||
| But you look at that with the COVID, you look at whatever emergency props up, I've come to the conclusion that there are some nefarious Factions out there that will seek to use this emergency to increase state power. | ||
| Yeah, this these conversations that you had, did you make any progress? | ||
| Was there ever a moment where they implemented any of your ideas or took it into consideration and used that information upon making new decisions? | ||
| Like, what kind of dialogue were you able to have with them? | ||
| Progress with the public, progress in the messaging, definitely. | ||
| Progress in humanizing people that come from my background and showing that actually there is a different way, yes. | ||
| Progress with policy, I'm not very happy. | ||
| What was their motivation for meeting you then? | ||
| Why would they want to sit down and talk to you? | ||
| Say if Hillary Clinton sat down and talked to you, why Trudeau sat down and talked to you? | ||
| So, the best example I can give for this is, like, why did Sam want to talk to me? | ||
| Who, prior to that, was very much in that kind of world where there's a problem with Islam, yeah? | ||
| I met Sam at a debate in New York called, it's an Intelligence Squared debate, where I was arguing for the motion, Islam is a religion of peace, and Ayaan And Douglas Murray, both now my friends, were arguing against that motion. | ||
| And I met Sam at the dinner afterwards. | ||
| Now, what happened with Sam is up until that point, he'd been being attacked by whatever, like the Ben Affleck example, yeah, on the Bill Maher show, as being an anti-Muslim, a racist. | ||
| Now, take that example, put it to governments. | ||
| Governments are ultimately very sensitive to public opinion. | ||
| You launch this war on terror, it gets revealed that the whole Iraq thing was built on a fabrication. | ||
| Governments are quite sensitive to the idea that actually they are coming across as anti-Muslim and they've got strong Muslim minorities in their countries. | ||
| You need to fix that problem somehow. | ||
| And they were desperate for a solution. | ||
| So they would reach out to me and I think part of it was optics, honestly. | ||
| I think that also the people... | ||
| On a junior level, I think genuinely probably wanted to help, but policy doesn't get set at that junior level. | ||
| And even when you speak to the heads of state, I mean, how much, I don't know, how much of Canada's policy right now is Trudeau, right, versus whichever faction he's with that is in power? | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| I think it's more the latter. | ||
| It's not just one man. | ||
| It can't be, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, it's also when you see their narrative shift and what they say in terms of like mandates and things that they're going to implement, we wouldn't do that, and then that's the norm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, what do you think is, what's the main factor? | ||
| I don't know anything about Canada's politics, but if you become the President of the United States, one of the weirdest things about the job is that it's the most important job in the entire country, if not the world, and we have new people doing it. | ||
| And we have a popularity contest to elect the new person to do it. | ||
| And you could see through Trump, you don't even have to have experience in government No experience. | ||
| You don't have to have been a mayor, or a governor, or a senator, nothing. | ||
| That kind of reinforces the notion that there's a faction who are meant to support that person, right, behind the scenes, who have the experience. | ||
| You call that the bureaucracy, the civil service, That's why I believe it's never just about that one person. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And unfortunately, what we're witnessing at the moment, I suppose we can come to this later, but what happens when that faction is no longer serving the interests of the values the country's meant to be built on? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Then you have a situation where the state is no longer serving the people, which is what I believe we're in at the moment. | ||
| The state is no longer serving the people. | ||
| Now, this mission creep, you experienced this during the Bush administration, so you feel like with every administration, it keeps getting deeper? | ||
| I mean, the best example is that Guantanamo example I spoke to you for. | ||
| It went from arbitrarily interning the jihadis, who were meant to be like very dangerous people, and now we're putting kids in jail. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Who are kids of the jihadis, who were born as, you know, either taken as three, four, five-year-olds, or born in the prison, and they're wives, and everyone's like, oh, no one wants them back. | ||
| Right now, you go to Camp Al-Haul in Syria, full of wives and children, and they're just running around these camps, and they're in prison. | ||
| It's a camp. | ||
| Some of them born there, some were two, three, four years old, and they've grown up in there. | ||
| Just imagine that, man. | ||
| Horrifying. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I mean, this is the stories we hear about North Korea, and we're horrified about that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We're doing it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's terrifying. | ||
| So that's mission creep for you. | ||
| That's a classic example of mission creep to a point where it's become politically acceptable for a UK Home Secretary to say, we're going to do the same to undocumented migrants. | ||
| Now, that's a problem we have to fix, by the way. | ||
| Our borders, we've got to work out a solution that's humane to that problem, and it does require a solution. | ||
| And I do recognize that... | ||
| Open borders aren't practical. | ||
| Well, our situation is even stranger because we scoop everybody up, put them at the border, and then, depending on what you believe, distribute them throughout the country on either buses or however they're doing it. | ||
| Now, if that is true, if they're just allowing people to just come into the country undocumented, you have to wonder, like, what's the motivation behind that? | ||
| And what is also the motivation about this push to try to allow undocumented people to vote? | ||
| It's like, are you letting people into the country as a bribe so that they'll vote for the people that let them into the country versus the people that wanted to secure the borders and build the wall? | ||
| So are you... | ||
| Are you essentially stalking your pond? | ||
| You're bringing in more people that are going to go with your agenda? | ||
| Well, there's all this thing in this country, this massive contradiction, right? | ||
| where you can't have someone need to have a driver's license or identification to vote because that's racist but you can have them need to have a driver's license or identification to show they've had proof of vaccination yeah yeah but you can have someone come in from across the border and not check them for vaccination not vaccinate them and not check to see if they have kovat and It's crazy, right? | ||
| But you can... | ||
| This is what I mean by politicization of all these debates. | ||
| It's so inconsistent, and it's so... | ||
| They're both simultaneously existing from the same people, where they're espousing one thing that literally contradicts the other thing. | ||
| Why would you do that, though? | ||
| Why would any individual... | ||
| Give a reason for doing thing A, and then ditch that reason and do exactly the opposite for thing B. It shows you that's not the reason. | ||
| Well, one of the reasons why I really wanted to talk to you is because I think your perspective is so much different than anyone else's because of your Because when you were radicalized because of your time in prison and because of The incredibly rational way you pursue truth and the way you discuss things now I've seen your BBC program and I've seen you give talks you have a very clean and rational way of Addressing and breaking down all these processes | ||
| that are in place that cause people to behave a certain way you understand it and Because you were radicalized yourself as well. | ||
| You understand the mind play that I think is oftentimes It's known of, but not discussed, and certainly not understood deeply like you do. | ||
| And I think that is the key to all of us understanding what's going on right now, that there's a lot of panic, there's a lot of moral outrage, and a lot of virtue signaling, and a lot of signaling to the tribe, but then there's also these forces that have been moving in play as what you call mission creep, and this is an opportunity for them To push even further in this general direction, and I don't think many people are aware of that. | ||
| I think they're looking at it in terms of what their ideology supports, whether their ideology is pro-vaccination or their ideology is pro-open borders or pro-close, whatever it is. | ||
| Like, people are locked into a pre-arranged, pre-determined group of ideas and opinions that you have adopted, that you will support. | ||
| And it's become almost like a religion. | ||
| And religions, the problem with the term religion is we always think of it involving a deity. | ||
| And it doesn't have to involve a deity. | ||
| The ideas become the deity. | ||
| The signaling to the group becomes a deity. | ||
| I think you know that more than anyone. | ||
| Well, this brings us to contemporary times. | ||
| After shutting Quilliam down, there was a bit of an overlap, but I primarily became a talk show host on a UK mainstream radio station. | ||
| And we had call-ins as well. | ||
| And COVID struck, and I had to take a view on it. | ||
| Now, I'm double jabbed. | ||
| And the reason I am is right at the beginning, I gave the benefit of the doubt to the narrative, to the authorities telling us what we needed to do right at the start. | ||
| And I thought, you know what? | ||
| I'm not anti-vaccine in principle, so fine. | ||
| You know, I had no reason to question any of it. | ||
| What happened is, once they implemented this emergency law, they ditched all of our rights in the UK under this Coronavirus Emergency Act. | ||
| Now, I've seen that before. | ||
| That's why I said we've gone back to emergencies, right? | ||
| I've seen that story play out before. | ||
| And the problem is the minute the government takes your rights, there are still blowback, legislative blowback from the war on terror that we still haven't got rid of. | ||
| Patriot Act. | ||
| In the US, in the UK, the right to silence is now in any port of entry or exit in the UK, Heathrow Airport, shipping port. | ||
| It's now a criminal offense to stay silent if a counterterrorism investigation is conducted on you. | ||
| The Terrorism Act 2000 has criminalized your right to silence. | ||
| So if you are investigated or interviewed by someone and you choose to be silent, they just lock you in jail for that? | ||
| It happened to me. | ||
| So when I got out of prison, the Terrorism Act 2000 was already in place. | ||
| I was released from prison in 2006. I was interrogated under this power and I was informed directly by a police officer, your silence is a criminal offence as is refusing your right for us to take your DNA. They took my DNA by force and I had no right to silence and I had no right to a lawyer. | ||
| Now what's changed since then is they've reformed the DNA part, they've reformed the legal representation, but the right to silence, that's still there, it's been taken away. | ||
| Now that's an example of a hangover from the war on terror. | ||
| There's many. | ||
| If you remember under Blair, they tried to extend detention without charge for 90 days. | ||
| So, emergencies, the Patriot Act in the US, emergencies are always used by the state for a power grab. | ||
| It's the nature of human beings. | ||
| It's an opportunity. | ||
| It's an opening that you do. | ||
| It's like in an MMA fight, if someone stumbles, you dive on his back. | ||
| Why wouldn't you exploit it? | ||
| It's natural. | ||
| You're there to win. | ||
| And you want to beat your opponent. | ||
| And it's a massive opportunity to change the paradigm. | ||
| You change everything that's happening. | ||
| So, the minute they suspended our rights under the Coronavirus Emergency Act, Is the minute my light started switching on, like, uh-oh, where's this gonna happen? | ||
| Did you use your platform to advocate for a different approach? | ||
| Did you say how you felt about this idea of stripping away laws in the idea under the guise of protecting people, that this is not only unnecessary, but it's unproductive, and it leads to bad things, and instead, there could be some sort of advocacy campaign for vaccination, or advocacy campaign for Doing responsible things and social distancing and not taking it to the extreme of changing laws. | ||
| So look, yes. | ||
| And where I'm coming from is, back to Egypt, they injected me against my will in prison. | ||
| With what? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
|
unidentified
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Just... | |
| Inoculations? | ||
| Who knows what it was. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We were taken, and you've just come out of a torture dungeon. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you're going to fight with them and get sent back to the dungeon, and you're going to let them put whatever they want in your arm. | ||
| So we had a... | ||
| In the first place, we were prisoners of conscience under duress, which is why, in principle, it was against our will, and there's no point trying to fight it. | ||
| So, coming from that background, the minute in the UK they started saying, if you don't get your jab, we're going to sack you. | ||
| No job, no jab, they called it. | ||
| If you don't get this vaccination, you can't travel. | ||
| And then it started going from there, mission creep. | ||
| If you don't get this vaccination, we're going to have a lockdown only for the unvaccinated, which some European countries announced. | ||
| If you don't get this vaccination, well, we're going to start looking at whether you have to pay a fine every month, which some European countries announced, and some media pundits in the UK were openly advocating on the airwaves. | ||
| You start hearing this rhetoric. | ||
| You've got to appreciate, I've come from the background where I've had to reason myself out of a totalitarian agenda and embrace instead something I believe I can hold onto and bring people towards. | ||
| What was that thing? | ||
| Well, through the inspiration of Amnesty, it was essentially our values grounded in civil liberties and democracy. | ||
| I've lost a family over that struggle, yeah? | ||
| To commit to, in that war on terror, to fighting a war, an ideological war, to defeating darkness in the form of terrorism that was beginning to engulf the Muslim mind. | ||
| I've sacrificed a lot in that struggle to come out on the other end of everything I fought for, only to be told that the thing I'm defending is going to start doing the same thing. | ||
| The state is going to start telling me what I have to put in my body and when and if I don't agree, I can't travel. | ||
| If I don't agree, I can't work. | ||
| If I don't agree, I can't leave my home. | ||
| Now, to play devil's advocate, from their perspective, they want to get people to be inoculated because they want to protect the population, they want to slow the spread of this deadly disease, and they want to bring society back to normal as quickly as possible. | ||
| They see the tools that are at their disposal, and they decide to use the law to try to make it forced, to try to coerce people into getting vaccinated for their better good. | ||
| And there's a bipartisan consensus on what you just said. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The last time there was a bipartisan consensus on such a big lie was the invasion of Iraq. | ||
| When you say such a big lie... | ||
| It's a lie. | ||
| What is a lie about it? | ||
| The COVID vaccination doesn't stop infection. | ||
| It doesn't stop transmission. | ||
| But it does in the beginning, right? | ||
| It reduces it for 12 weeks, after which point... | ||
| Is it only 12 weeks? | ||
| Doesn't it vary per person? | ||
| So younger people don't need it. | ||
| Of course, for older people, when we look at the studies, it's 12 weeks after which point it reduces to the similar levels in terms of infection and transmission as the unvaccinated. | ||
| Now, we have the academic papers to demonstrate that. | ||
| But actually, if you look at real world data today, right now, England that doesn't have vaccine passports compared to Wales and Scotland that do. | ||
| And we have lower rates in England. | ||
| Even the prime minister, Boris Johnson, is on camera saying this thing doesn't stop infection or transmission. | ||
| I'd argue with you. | ||
| That's why England has ditched the entire thing yesterday. | ||
| But isn't it because they thought it did initially? | ||
| When the initial laws were put into place, the consensus was that it stopped transmission, it stopped infection, and it protected you from hospitalization and death. | ||
| So, I'm prepared to, on the principle of charity, I'm prepared to assume that's what they thought. | ||
| It seems like that was the general consensus amongst medical experts in the early days of the vaccine. | ||
| That's why, you know, many of them that are now, they've come out against these mandates, they talk about the initial days of it, what it was like, and this is why they were in support of this. | ||
| I'm prepared to concede on the principle of charity without knowing those guys. | ||
| I mean, I know there were people that weren't establishment scientists that were saying from day one, they were saying there's something wrong with this. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But let's apply the principle of charity, because we should. | ||
| Yes, we should. | ||
| The minute it became clear, because this is such an egregious violation of human dignity, the minute it became clear, this should have been ditched. | ||
| But it hasn't. | ||
| Until today, even in my country, Scotland and Wales haven't dropped these mandates. | ||
| Now, the other point, though, is let's assume that was their intention. | ||
| I've got a deeper question which goes beyond the science. | ||
| And that is that If you've got the power to dictate to people what to put in their bodies on behalf of other people, Right? | ||
| And you're the state, and that's the law you bring in. | ||
| Now, that, I believe, is such a fundamental shift in our social contract, in the relationship between you and the state, that it requires not only a broader discussion, I think that requires a democratic mandate to bring in because it's such a fundamental change in direction in Western liberal democracies when it comes to the relationship we have with the state. | ||
| What do I mean by that? | ||
| If I said to you, Joe, listen, you've got two kidneys, man. | ||
| I need one. | ||
| And you're going to give it to me because the state says you have to look after me. | ||
| Now, if I have done that without your involvement, without your choice for the common good, and I have the power to be able to do that, and the reasoning I'm giving is... | ||
| That there are people that deserve this kidney and you have a spare one and that you have to look after other people. | ||
| Now it could be kidneys, it could be anything. | ||
| It could be any medical procedure and generally beyond that it can be anything you have to do for other people's sake. | ||
| Now if I want to redefine that relationship because up until now you had every right to say my blood is my blood and I know someone needs a blood donation or you know or an organ donation. | ||
| I know I should care for people but it's still my decision. | ||
| If I'm going to change that And say it's no longer your decision, right? | ||
| Then it requires a broader and deeper conversation. | ||
| And it requires, I'd say, that's referendum level change in our culture. | ||
| Switzerland has referendums. | ||
| It's like Brexit referendum in the UK. It's referendum level shift because it sets the precedent. | ||
| That going forward, I have a five-year-old. | ||
| If I surrender this debate now and I'm 44 years old and say, yes, okay, state, on behalf of protecting Joe, you can force me to do certain medical procedures because I have to think about Joe, right? | ||
| I've surrendered my individual bodily autonomy for the common good. | ||
| My five-year-old boy's never going to know what it felt like to say, my body, my choice. | ||
| Now, what I don't understand is the cognitive dissonance. | ||
| Because on the one hand, we argue my body, my choice when it comes to abortion. | ||
| And we suddenly ditch that principle when it comes to vaccination or inoculation. | ||
| Well, the answer to that is vaccination and inoculation protects those around you. | ||
| That's what they would say. | ||
| So, peanuts, yeah? | ||
| Peanuts? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, some people have an allergy to peanuts. | ||
| It's a minority of people, right? | ||
| But it's the reason why, and you'll know this, anyone will know this, you go into a restaurant and they ask, do you have any allergies before I order the food? | ||
| And the reason they do that is because if there's even a trace of a peanut in that dish, you could die. | ||
| If I'm going to start mandating these injections, we know that there is a rare side effect. | ||
| We know that there are some people that die from them. | ||
| Lisa Shaw was a BBC journalist who died after her AstraZeneca vaccine as officially ruled by the coroner and written up by the BBC. I'm in touch with her husband, right? | ||
| His name is Gareth. | ||
| Are they more transparent about injuries over there? | ||
| They've started to be, because our resistance has been very fierce to all of this. | ||
| England is a bit of an outlier now. | ||
| They just ditched everything yesterday. | ||
| There's a lot more to do, but they've ditched what they called Plan B, the whole idea of vaccine passports, because there's been such a fierce resistance to this. | ||
| So take it back to that peanut. | ||
| So this woman... | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So if I mandate injections, right, vaccination, some people are going to die because we know that there is a side effect that some people die from this thing. | ||
| Death is a side effect. | ||
| Yes, minority of people. | ||
| But it's like peanuts. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Now, it's insane to mandate peanuts in every meal. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So again, back to looking after... | ||
| Right, but peanuts don't have any... | ||
| There's no protecting other people by eating a peanut. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| So go back to the original, because we know that doesn't apply anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Beyond 12 weeks, it doesn't even protect people anymore. | ||
| But let's go back to the original and give them the benefit of the doubt. | ||
| But doesn't it still protect them from hospitalization and death? | ||
| Isn't that... | ||
| Depending on age. | ||
| Depending on age. | ||
| Yeah, depending on age, right? | ||
| So, you know, a 5-year-old? | ||
| Definitely not. | ||
| 12-year-old? | ||
| No. | ||
| My dad is in his 80s, like late 70s, 80s. | ||
| Yeah, he's had his boosters. | ||
| And he's got comorbidities. | ||
| So if the infection fatality rate is 0.096%, like the flu, right? | ||
| Now the Office for National Statistics in the UK, through a Freedom of Information request, has just revealed the number of people who died solely from COVID with no other coexisting illness. | ||
| 17,731. | ||
| If my memory serves, it's definitely 17,700 and something. | ||
| Total number of people from the beginning of this pandemic who've died only from COVID. And this is only in Britain? | ||
| In Britain, right? | ||
| We were told the figure was in the hundreds of thousands. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, this is all coming out in the UK now, yeah? | ||
| There's a bit of a retreat from all of this narrative. | ||
| But isn't the problem with that narrative that so many people have comorbidities and we have to protect them too? | ||
| The thing about this country is there's a large percentage of us that are obese. | ||
| It's probably somewhere in the neighborhood. | ||
| We looked at it, right? | ||
| Was it like 40% or something like that? | ||
| It's a very high level. | ||
| So, like, what do we do? | ||
| So, Lisa Shaw and others. | ||
| So, you're going to say, I'm going to sack somebody who doesn't protect the other person, yeah? | ||
| So, what we're saying is, and this is what I'm saying requires a proper debate because it's a shift in our culture. | ||
| I'm just playing devil's advocate. | ||
| I know, I know, I know. | ||
| I've heard you speak on this. | ||
| Lisa Shaw, who died after her AstraZeneca vaccine, was that death worth it because somebody else can't control their dietary habits? | ||
| Well, is that, I mean, obviously comorbidities vary. | ||
| It's not just her dietary habits. | ||
| Someone could have some serious autoimmune disorder. | ||
| There's quite a few different things that constitute. | ||
| The big one is dietary habits. | ||
| Obesity. | ||
| Obesity is huge. | ||
| If somebody is vulnerable in any other way, what we've done with every other illness to date is that the vulnerable person has to protect themselves through a number of means. | ||
| And we do what's reasonable to make sure the vulnerable person is looked after. | ||
| What we have never done is say that I'm responsible for your comorbidities and your extra health problems, and I have to take something at risk of losing my job that might have a side effect in me and could even kill me. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because I lose my job or I can't travel or I can't go into this restaurant. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Now for me, I mean, the science by now, by the way, is clear, but let's assume this whole conversation is built on the principle of charity that they didn't know the science at the time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That still doesn't exonerate us from the political conversation that was needed about what kind of society we want to live in. | ||
| Because for me, if you get to a point like New York is today, Wales and Scotland, Well, you're telling me that I need to show identification before going into a restaurant, before going into a hotel, concert. | ||
| We've got a Papers, Please Society in that case. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Now, you can't go from a democracy to a Papers, Please Society within one election term without having any consultation with the public on this and without having a proper and informed debate about how this will permanently change the culture of our society. | ||
| And that's for me a bigger problem. | ||
| I mean, the science is clear, as I say, but let's have this entire conversation on the assumption that when they initially brought it in, they were genuine, right? | ||
| Even though now it's proven that that's not the case, but that's fine. | ||
| I'm willing to give people the benefit of the doubt. | ||
| You want me to concede that from now on and permanently, The state can tell me what to put in my body for the sake of the common good and to continue to do so every six months with a vaccination that hasn't been tested for any long-term side effects. | ||
| I just have to accept that the state knows what's best for me and always does the right thing. | ||
| Now, as I say, the last time there was a bipartisan state-based consensus on something so meaningfully wrong was the invasion of Iraq. | ||
| Now, you're speaking to somebody who's been on the... | ||
| On the blunt end of what happens when a state gets something so wrong. | ||
| There is no way you can undo what I've seen in my life to know that the state doesn't always act in our best interests. | ||
| And there is no way that you can remove those experiences from me. | ||
| Now, especially when you're talking to somebody who's been injected against his will in prison, right? | ||
| And the ethnic minority case here, whether it's here in the US with the African American communities and the whole experience of medical abuse by the state, or I'll move it again to personal example. | ||
| In Pakistan, the CIA conducted a fake vaccination program on children in the hunt for Bin Laden. | ||
| That's not even concealed. | ||
| It's been admitted. | ||
| Is that Jamie? | ||
| You can look it up. | ||
| Vox has reported, everyone's reported, because they've admitted it and apologized for it now. | ||
| In the hunt for Bin Laden, there was a fake hepatitis B vaccine program on children collecting all their DNA to try and see if they were related to Bin Laden so they could trace Bin Laden. | ||
| This is why in Pakistan, my family's country of origin, The Taliban blow up vaccination centers because they think they're CIA fronts. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So while he's looking that up, I'll keep telling you this story. | ||
| You know, there we are. | ||
| How the CIA's fake hepatitis B vaccine program in Pakistan helped fuel vaccine distrust. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Now, you know, what is that? | ||
| Is that on Fox? | ||
| That's a fake hepatitis B vaccine program. | ||
| And Jamie, if you scroll down, it may even contain the CIA's apology in there. | ||
| Whoops. | ||
| But many of them do, once it got exposed, yeah? | ||
| But again, Joe, the only way this gets exposed is when people like us have these conversations. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, you're trying to, not you, but, you know, people are trying to convince me that none of this happened. | ||
| That the state's always had my best interests at heart. | ||
| I can't undo those experiences and those memories and the treatment to say, OK, you were wrong on Iraq and you actually lied. | ||
| You were wrong with this hepatitis B vaccination program in Pakistan. | ||
| My family still live there. | ||
| OK, you were wrong there and you lied and you did this fake program using vaccines. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| OK, you were wrong there. | ||
| But oh, and you were wrong when you injected me in prison. | ||
| One of your allies, Mubarak, who was one of the closest allies of America after Israel in the Middle East. | ||
| But this time you're telling me the truth. | ||
| No, I'm going to question. | ||
| I'm not saying you're lying. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'm not saying anyone's lying, by the way. | ||
| But that's a thing where, under crisis, people do not like people questioning the narrative. | ||
| Because the narrative may offer us relief from this uncomfortable moment we find ourselves currently in. | ||
| And we all collectively look to something to help us out of this. | ||
| And for a lot of people, it's the vaccines. | ||
| So the vaccines became this... | ||
| This thing that you are not allowed to challenge, and even though we have this dodgy history with the pharmaceutical companies, you're supposed to ignore that. | ||
| You're supposed to completely put that on the back burner. | ||
| Well, this is where, again, you can't undo what I know about this, right? | ||
| So, let's try another one. | ||
| Can you look up who paid the largest criminal fine in history? | ||
| Thank you, Jamie. | ||
| Sorry to give you orders. | ||
| So, the assumption that pharmaceutical companies are acting in your best interest, just like the assumption that the CIA, when it encourages these things, vaccination programs in, say, Pakistan, is acting in your best interest, is an assumption that has to be interrogated. | ||
| Now, we know here in America, the opioid crisis, that the medical establishment was abused. | ||
| And the opioid crisis here in the States ended up killing more people than the AIDS crisis. | ||
| Now, pharmaceuticals make a lot of money out of this. | ||
| And so with the who paid the largest criminal fine in history, you'll probably get two results depending on your search engine. | ||
| And though you don't need to put in the word who paid the largest pharmaceutical fine in history, You can just say who paid the largest criminal fine in history and you'll get GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer. | ||
| And the difference is, I think the difference was that GlaxoSmithKline have paid the largest accumulative fine and Pfizer has paid the largest fine in one big go. | ||
| And you can go to something called the violation tracker. | ||
| Since the year 2000, it documents all of the criminal and civil violations that Pfizer has been found on the wrong side of and has paid fines for. | ||
| And so this assumption that big pharmaceutical companies are acting in our best interests, again, is an assumption that has to be interrogated because it's during an emergency where debate is being silenced that it becomes incredibly important to ask these questions. | ||
| Otherwise it gets snuck in and you can never undo it. | ||
| And when you were working at the BBC, you started doing what you always do. | ||
| You're questioning narratives, you're discussing ideas openly and objectively. | ||
| What kind of pushback are you getting? | ||
| So it was LBC. Oh, LBC. Global is the largest commercial radio group in the UK and they have music channels and what have you. | ||
| And then one of them was the talk radio site called LBC. And I was having these sorts of conversations. | ||
| And without going into whatever, you know, because I'm no longer there. | ||
| So for legal reasons, I don't want to get into what specifically happened. | ||
| What I will say is I was scheduled to go on the very next weekend after returning from my Christmas break in Tennessee. | ||
| And a day before my schedule was I had a weekend show. | ||
| I was doing really well. | ||
| You know, imagine a weekend lunchtime. | ||
| When everyone should be in their restaurants having a good time, having their Bloody Marys, having their Sunday roasts. | ||
| And I was getting over half a million listeners on a weekend lunchtime for only two shows a week. | ||
| And it went from a graveyard shift to being a really respected slot. | ||
| One day before reappearing this month, they told me that my services were no longer required. | ||
| But the part isn't in dispute. | ||
| The indisputable part is my contract was on until April. | ||
| But I'm not there anymore. | ||
| Did they have a conversation with you at any point in time before that where they're like, well, you probably can't talk about that. | ||
| I can't talk about that. | ||
| But I know that what I will say is why people, other people outside of my then bosses, were upset with me, including in the organization, was because I was having these sorts of conversations I'm having with you. | ||
| That CIA Pakistan thing, multiple times mentioned it on my show. | ||
| I actually physically pulled out my phone and asked my listeners to Google who paid the largest criminal fine in history and had them call in. | ||
| Yep, Pfizer, Pfizer, Pfizer. | ||
| So that kind of conversation where I'm trying to, by the way, all while being double jabbed, I got two Pfizer vaccinations. | ||
| So people still throwing anti-vaxxer labels at me. | ||
| And this is the problem. | ||
| It's like the Southern Poverty Law Center called me an anti-Muslim extremist. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| And they listed me as an anti-Muslim extremist. | ||
| At the same time, there's a database called Thomson Reuters World Check. | ||
| All the banks, all the large accountancy firms, all the big money firms in Wall Street, in the city of London, they all subscribe to World Check because if you have a bank account, they want to make sure that you're not funding terrorism. | ||
| So World Check is a database that categorizes you as to whether you're clean or not when it comes to finances from a terrorism lens. | ||
| I'm probably the only person you'll meet on the planet that was simultaneously listed by well-checked Thomson Reuters under category red, terrorism, as a Muslim terrorist, while listed at the same time by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Muslim extremist. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| But didn't they say Sam was one of those two? | ||
| They didn't list him. | ||
| Ayaan Arsiali was listed. | ||
| So what I did is I sued them, both. | ||
| And I won against Thomson Reuters World Check. | ||
| They had to publicly apologize in court, remove that defamation, and they paid damages. | ||
| And I sued the Southern Poverty Law Center. | ||
| That didn't get to court because before disclosure, they publicly put out a video, apologized, and paid damages. | ||
| But what that story serves to tell you is that when you question these things, today it's so lazy and easy to throw labels at people. | ||
| So being double-jabbed, they call me an anti-vaxxer. | ||
| Being a Muslim that had literally gone to jail for my faith, they were calling me an anti-Muslim extremist. | ||
| And this is how absurd these people are. | ||
| That you disagree with somebody and instead of trying to engage with the substance of your point, they want to throw a label at you and hope it sticks. | ||
| And isn't this just what happens when people get into power? | ||
| And when I say into power, I'm not just talking about government. | ||
| I'm also talking about people that have accepted a certain narrative and find that there's a lot of other people that are along with them in this same narrative. | ||
| And they have these Media pylons, like social media pylons, where they'll attack people. | ||
| And like you, call you an anti-vaxxer even though you've been vaccinated. | ||
| The same thing with Eric Clapton. | ||
| They were angry at Eric Clapton because he spoke openly about his very extreme vaccine side effects. | ||
| Just speaking openly as a person who was vaccinated. | ||
| And they called him a vile anti-vaxxer. | ||
| Well, the question is why, right? | ||
| And it's to shut debate down. | ||
| Now, why would you want to shut debate down? | ||
| I think there's a deeper point here, and that is that we've just come out of a time where, for a long time, moral and Let's just say relativism, whether it's moral or otherwise. | ||
| Relativism, this idea that truth is relative, this idea that it's all subjective, that everything is personal experience, that's being promoted. | ||
| There's no such thing as reality. | ||
| Whether it comes down to defining a man or woman. | ||
| We spoke about this last time I was here with, well, it was there in California, but with Sam as well, we spoke about the trans debate. | ||
| Whether it's defining a man and a woman, whether it's anything else, this idea that actually truth is all personally subjective. | ||
| When you promote the idea that there's no such thing as truth, and when you shut down debate that is seeking truth, not that it claims truth, but is seeking it, when you shut that debate down, in aid of this idea that truth is relative, Like those, for example, who now know the science that the COVID vaccination doesn't stop infection or transmission and doesn't reduce it beyond 12 weeks. | ||
| The booster shot, by the way, is eight weeks. | ||
| But having known that and they still insist on vaccine passports, it's no longer about seeking the truth for them. | ||
| The truth is relative and it serves a purpose. | ||
| What happens when you do that? | ||
| When there's no such thing as truth, you can't define reality. | ||
| And when you can't define reality, the only thing that matters is power. | ||
| You're a father. | ||
| Now, we're your child, children who can't reason, like my kid's five. | ||
| I mean, his reasoning abilities are great, but he's five, right? | ||
| It's why you say to the child, because I said so, do it. | ||
| It's good for you. | ||
| Because they don't know how to reason yet, yeah? | ||
| And you try, and if something's too complex, you say, I'll explain another time, but right now you have to listen to your father, don't do this. | ||
| When there's no such thing as truth, because everything's relative, the only thing that matters is power, because power gets to define reality. | ||
| And this brings us to the hybrid war we're in right now. | ||
| And that's why people that are in power who are seeking a specific outcome from the world that we're in want to shut debate down. | ||
| What they're not interested in is seeking truth. | ||
| What they're interested in is shutting that debate down because power steps into that void when reason no longer exists and gets to define reality for you from up above. | ||
| And it's why it's so important in a dictatorship. | ||
| That the only thing you have left when all your power is taken from you is the truth. | ||
| And if you read Orwell, if you look at 1984, it's why he spends so much time talking about how the power he was writing about in that fictional account is attempting to redefine reality, redefine the past, redefine the future. | ||
| Because if you can't hold on to reality, you have no premise to scrutinize the government for whether they're telling you the truth or not. | ||
| And it's really, it is a war in that sense, hybrid war. | ||
| So information in that war becomes your most powerful weapon. | ||
| Now, most people don't have the privilege of researching these debates, foreign policy, war on terror, COVID, whatever it is. | ||
| People don't have the privilege because they're working nine to five, a minimum wage, and they're hungry and they're just busy trying to live and survive. | ||
| What they normally do is they outsource their thinking on where the truth lies to trusted voices in the media. | ||
| So it's why it becomes so important to manipulate the media, so that those trusted voices that people are looking to are no longer giving them at least the best understanding of the truth they have, but are also peddling the agenda of power. | ||
| When you're in a situation like that, it becomes difficult to define reality and therefore difficult to challenge government. | ||
| On whether or not they are sticking to their promises because everything gets shifted. | ||
| Everything's relative. | ||
| The Overton window keeps moving. | ||
| The goalposts keep shifting. | ||
| If you remember, back at the beginning of this, we were told two weeks, whatever it was. | ||
| Flatten the curve. | ||
| Flatten the curve, yeah. | ||
| Now look at us two years later. | ||
| And we're here still. | ||
| Look at Montreal. | ||
| There's still lockdown right now. | ||
| They can't go out at 10 o'clock. | ||
| The goalposts keep shifting and you're expected to forget what you were told last time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| In the UK, we were told specifically two weeks and then it went from two weeks to flatten the curve to we're only going to just wait in lockdown. | ||
| And we, by the way, we had a national lockdown, a very long one. | ||
| We're all confined to our homes. | ||
| And they said, just wait. | ||
| We're going to inoculate the most vulnerable. | ||
| Just think of granny. | ||
| Don't kill granny. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| So, by the way, my grandmother died in all of this. | ||
| So again, I'm not anti-grandmother, yeah? | ||
| I wasn't allowed to attend her on her deathbed while the Prime Minister and all of his special advisers and all of the Cabinet were drinking with cheese and wine parties in Downing Street, breaking all the rules, which has all come out now in the press. | ||
| And it's not just me. | ||
| Many people in the UK went through that horrific experience. | ||
| We couldn't even visit our dying relatives, and they were partying meanwhile. | ||
| The Health Secretary caught on video camera having an affair in his office, in government offices. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Matt Hancock. | ||
| So we went through that whole lockdown. | ||
| It went from two weeks to flatten the curve to, okay, just wait until we just vaccinate the vulnerable. | ||
| Then it was, just wait, we're going to vaccinate everyone over 40, which is when I originally got it, right? | ||
| Now I'm 44. Then it was, just wait until we vaccinate all the adults and get herd immunity. | ||
| Then they shifted the goalposts again. | ||
| Just wait until we vaccinate the kids. | ||
| Now, the JCVI in the UK, the Joint Committee for Vaccination and Immunisation, failed, did not recommend to the government. | ||
| They failed to recommend vaccinating children. | ||
| Government went ahead anyway, said, no, no, no, we have to vaccinate the kids. | ||
| You keep shifting the goalposts like 1984, George Orwell. | ||
| And you keep telling people, gaslighting the people, that's not what we said. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| We didn't just say, wait until we did, you know, vaccinate. | ||
| No, you're getting it wrong. | ||
| Kept gaslighting the people, shifting the definition of reality, playing with people's memories. | ||
| That serves a purpose. | ||
| In this hybrid war, in which information is the weapon, it serves a purpose because you've got to disorient, confuse, and create self-doubt in the citizens so they no longer have the strength to question government. | ||
| For what they said and what they didn't deliver, or what they did deliver when they weren't meant to. | ||
| And that's how you stymie or handicap any opposition. | ||
| And in the UK, again, because there was a bipartisan consensus, even the opposition party, like with Iraq, they kept saying to every crisis, the solution was harsher restrictions, harsher restrictions. | ||
| In the end, people, the only way, when you're in that situation where you've been locked in your homes, where the state's telling you you have to get injected or you lose your job, right? | ||
| When you've lost all your rights, even by law, because the Emergency Act came in and we weren't even legally allowed to oppose any of this. | ||
| In the end, you're in a situation, the only way people get their rights back from tyranny is by taking them through activism. | ||
| You never, in that situation, the state never just gives your rights back. | ||
| Now when I say taking them, I mean civil action, I mean protests, I mean activism, I don't mean violence. | ||
| But that's why if you look to the example of England, Unlike Wales and Scotland, there were huge protests and a lot of voices, not just mine, were fierce on this to a point where England had to, you know, they couldn't, they just retreated on all of this now. | ||
| And all of the, everything I've been saying, you take up masks, you take lockdowns, you take mandatory vaccines, and I've only ever been opposed to mandates, by the way, right? | ||
| It's only about mandates for me, whether you define mandates as lockdowns or mask mandates or vaccine mandates. | ||
| For me, it's the force bit that I don't like. | ||
| I'm double jabbed, again, to remind everyone. | ||
| But everything we were saying, that mask mandates are useless, that the virus particles are millions of times smaller than the cloth mask they were telling everybody to use, that testing continuously was actually making the problem worse, that PCR tests were unreliable, they ditched the PCR tests, that lockdowns, did anyone ever think of what we call an impact assessment? | ||
| They're going to lock you in your homes to save X number of lives. | ||
| Does that kill Y number of people more? | ||
| In other words, does it kill more people than we're saving? | ||
| Because if you were opposed to the lockdowns in those days, oh, you want to kill granny. | ||
| And my question was, if I save one granny, am I killing 10? | ||
| Isn't the way to find that out to look at overall death? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And whether or not it changes year after year after year? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, this is the interesting point. | ||
| So since being, we'll get to what I'm doing next in terms of my media work, but very quickly I started as a substack after my services were no longer required. | ||
| And one of the things I put up in there, the last one I wrote, is this idea that this ONS statistic, the Office for National Statistics, that came out with the Freedom of Information request, And they said, yeah, 17,000, whatever it was, 730, whatever people died from only from COVID since the beginning of this pandemic, right? | ||
| And we were told it's hundreds of thousands. | ||
| But there is a spike in all-cause mortality. | ||
| Now, if it's not from COVID, what's causing it? | ||
| That's a question that remains open. | ||
| The Times of London reported that there's been a 25% spike in heart attacks in Scotland. | ||
| Professor Norman Fenton and Professor Neil from Queen Mary Westfield University in London, part of the University of London, have looked at this and said there's a five-year high in all-cause mortality. | ||
| Now, if there's a 25% spike in heart attacks in Scotland that are as of yet unexplained, there's a five-year spike in all-cause mortality, but COVID deaths are similar to flu deaths, then what's causing all these excess deaths? | ||
| Well, how many of those people survived COVID and then had heart attacks later? | ||
| Because that is one of the side effects of COVID, is blood clots, heart issues. | ||
| So Professor Fenton, and I say he's done the research, not me. | ||
| All I'm saying is floating the question, saying these need answers. | ||
| He said that these specific spikes in deaths were specifically after vaccination. | ||
| And were those people also infected with COVID? I don't think so from memory, but I'd have to look at that. | ||
| That's the big distinction when it comes to myocarditis and all these different things. | ||
| What if you have both? | ||
| What if it's an issue where they got a bad case of COVID even though they were vaccinated? | ||
| What do you blame it on then? | ||
| To break that question down, we have to look at with COVID and off COVID deaths as well. | ||
| By the way, these talking points that you've obviously heard over the last two years, Every single one of them. | ||
| So the health secretary in the UK came out and admitted that the COVID deaths have been overestimated because there's been a mix between with COVID and of COVID, right? | ||
| We also know that, again, memory, so forgive me if this is off, but from memory, two thirds of COVID cases were caught after hospital admission rather than because of COVID. Right. | ||
| They're hospitalized for something else. | ||
| They get COVID in hospital. | ||
| That's a big thing with young people. | ||
| Now, if you put all of that together, and you recognize that there's 17,000 roughly deaths only of COVID, and there's this spike, five-year spike in all-cause mortality, it wouldn't make sense to say, did they have COVID as well, when we know that only 17,000 only, one death is too many, but 17,000 died only of COVID, and that a lot of these people were getting COVID in hospital. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And it's a similar thing. | ||
| Like, I'm going to show you this. | ||
| Can we do something? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The independent newspaper, yeah? | ||
| There's this multi-gold medalist Olympian weightlifter from Hungary. | ||
| His name was Sylvester something. | ||
| But if you look up the independent, anti-vax, gold medalist, dead. | ||
| This is today's news, right? | ||
| I've got it here as well because I put it out earlier. | ||
| You could airdrop that to Jamie if you'd like. | ||
| Oh, here you go. | ||
| There he is. | ||
| Right, look at that headline. | ||
| See that headline, yeah? | ||
| Anti-vax Olympic gold medalist Sylvester Solani. | ||
| Can you know how to say his name? | ||
| I think Sylvester Solani. | ||
| It's spelled with a lot of different words. | ||
| S-Z-I-L-V-E-S-Z-T-E-R-C-S-O-L-L-A-N-Y. So he died of COVID, age 51, and they're calling him an anti-vax. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Now, if you scroll down, please, sir, Jamie. | ||
| Scroll down to that. | ||
| Go, hit, hit. | ||
| You have to... | ||
| Oh, you have to register to keep reading. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| So I've got it on my phone. | ||
| Can I send it to you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How do I do that? | ||
| Actually, you might not be able to because it's... | ||
| Is this on a... | ||
| Can he... | ||
| I'll try later. | ||
| Hit that. | ||
| I'll try later. | ||
| Hit the I'll try later and you'll get to the article. | ||
| Yeah, there we are. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| If you go down to... | ||
| Yeah, there we are. | ||
| That paragraph, Walke Sloanly had, according to the publication, paragraph above it, yeah? | ||
| He contacted the virus soon after receiving his jab. | ||
| Do you see that? | ||
| So they called him an anti-vaxxer. | ||
| Six-time World Championship medalist had been vaccinated to allow him to continue work as a gymnastics coach. | ||
| However, he contracted the virus soon after receiving his jab. | ||
| And the headline calls him an anti-vaxxer. | ||
| And says he dies. | ||
| Now, this is the manipulation that's been going on. | ||
| This is from today's press. | ||
| It's still going on. | ||
| He had not built sufficient levels of antibodies. | ||
| So he was jabbed. | ||
| So, back to your question. | ||
| What's causing this spike? | ||
| Five-year spike in all-cause mortality. | ||
| How crazy is it that that's how they decide to portray him? | ||
| Go back to the headline. | ||
| There you are. | ||
| That's folly, right? | ||
| They make him look like a fool. | ||
| It's deceit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's this narrative that they want to push, where whenever someone questions whether it's Eric Clapton or yourself or anyone. | ||
| They'll call you an anti-vaxxer. | ||
| This man was jabbed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, so why I showed you that is back to that question. | ||
| If they die after the vaccination, one of the things Norman Fenton, professor from Queen Mary Westfield, in response to your question of did they have COVID too, right, is first of all, we know the COVID deaths are 17,000. | ||
| So... | ||
| And we know the majority of hospitalized cases of COVID were caught after hospitalization. | ||
| We also know, in his study, he says they died soon after the vaccination, right? | ||
| Now, you want to look at this. | ||
| Now, I'm not giving you a reason for why there's an all-five-year spike. | ||
| I'm saying these questions, as somebody that works in media, these questions demand answers. | ||
| And he's looked at this and he said, Professor Fenton and Neil from Queen Mary's, and they've said... | ||
| These deaths were soon after vaccination, this spike, right? | ||
| And they're saying their view is they have to interrogate whether the vaccination itself, whether it caused myocarditis or any other negative reaction that's caused this spike in deaths. | ||
| And that, by the way, that spike, it could then be you go to hospital and you catch COVID in hospital. | ||
| But that's not the reason you're in hospital. | ||
| We already know that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So these are, in ordinary times, Whether it's with a thalidomide scandal that historically led to babies being born, you know, without their limbs intact, whether it's, you know, the CIA example I gave you with the hepatitis B fake vaccination program in Pakistan, whether it's the Tuskegee experimentation on African Americans here, we know this malpractice occurs. | ||
| We know that abuse has happened historically. | ||
| Now, here you've got a vaccine that has just been rolled out, hasn't been tested in the long term, and we've got some alarming figures of an all-cause spike in mortality, and we know in instances that there is a side effect of death, as in the case of BBC journalist Lisa Shaw, who the coroner ruled specifically died because of AstraZeneca, the vaccine. | ||
| So there are multiple questions here that demand answers, but asking those questions without drawing conclusions... | ||
| By the way, I have never on air discouraged anybody to get the vaccine. | ||
| People used to call it as a call-in show. | ||
| Members of the public would call in. | ||
| Imagine sitting there for three hours, yeah? | ||
| I give a monologue for 20 minutes and then I'm open season. | ||
| Anyone can call and interrogate me. | ||
| It's good for practice in debates, but point is, people would call up and say, should I get the jab magic? | ||
| I'd say, I'm not a doctor. | ||
| I can't advise you. | ||
| I'm talking about mandates because I tell you one thing I am, as a postgraduate of political theory, I understand how political systems work. | ||
| And my concern is more on a macro level. | ||
| These questions about deaths, what I'm concerned about is that the people who ask these questions, suddenly you find they lose their jobs, they become stigmatized, and that kind of behavior I've seen happen before, because that's what happens in tyranny when you question authority. | ||
| It's what happened to us, and it's what these great historical literary figures have always advised us to question, whether it's Orwell. | ||
| Whether it's the Gulag Archipelago, whether it's Solzhenitsyn, whether it's... | ||
| And we have that experience because of the Soviet Union, right? | ||
| We understand Darkness at Noon, right? | ||
| These books, Catch-22, Joseph Heller, about the absurdity of rules and bureaucracy that don't make sense. | ||
| The entire point of these books is to teach us do not just succumb to whatever the bureaucracy is telling you, but ask questions where things don't make sense. | ||
| And when people are trying to shut those debates down, that says more to me about what's going on than anything else. | ||
| Isn't it universal though in terms of like world government? | ||
| There's not world government that I'm aware of that's very open about what's going on about failures and mistakes and not understanding the information correctly because they were under an assumption that proved to be incorrect. | ||
| It's essentially across the board and isn't part of that just managing some sort of large-scale pandemic with a large population of people and trying to make sense of it all and trying to figure out how do you manage that? | ||
| And you have to have two different things going on. | ||
| You have to have actual solutions like medication and you also have to have optics. | ||
| You have to give the people the impression that you're managing this and you're working very hard to figure this out and you've come to some uncomfortable conclusions and you made some decisions that maybe are going to upset people, but they're going to help everyone overall. | ||
| So we need to go to the origins of COVID to see, again, on a global level then, were they acting in good faith, right? | ||
| Now, all the evidence currently indicates no. | ||
| And when you say they, who do you mean by they? | ||
| People in power. | ||
| All the people in power are acting in bad faith? | ||
| The people in power that are interacting in our reality. | ||
| I mean, when we're talking about, like, leaks and emails that have been exposed, when you talk about conversations between people that work in the Wuhan lab, those are being exposed to us very recently. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm under no impression that politicians were aware of these emails before us. | ||
| So the lab leak, let's talk through that example, yeah? | ||
| So one thing we can say, I think quite fairly, is I doubt Fauci's acting in the best possible way he should be acting. | ||
| So he knew about this slab leak thing from the very beginning, and the leaks that have now come out, even the DARPA leaks themselves, indicate that they attempted to suffocate this story. | ||
| In the UK, we have a similar example, Lancet, which is a very well-respected medical journal. | ||
| One of the guys that, well actually the guy that Fauci's federal funding supported, his name is Peter Daszak EcoHealth Alliance. | ||
| He's a Brit. | ||
| And they were the ones engaged in gain-of-function research in Wuhan in that lab. | ||
| Now, there was a letter very early on, and I was, from the beginning, I was questioning the lab leak thing. | ||
| And again, getting into trouble for doing so. | ||
| But this is before any of the leaks. | ||
| But there was still evidence to indicate something wasn't right here. | ||
| Brent Weinstein talked about it on the podcast very early on. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| But he's an evolutionary biologist. | ||
| He understood the actual virus itself. | ||
| And that's why I got him on my show as well. | ||
| There's a video of him on my show talking about this, right? | ||
| Now, what happened is that this guy that Fauci was funding, Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance, that's not in dispute that they receive federal funding. | ||
| Fauci in Congress testified and said it wasn't gain of function to Senator Rumpel's sort of hearings. | ||
| And the leaks have subsequently indicated that they did know that this funding was being used in the lab in Wuhan to make this virus sticky, to make it stronger and to make it work for humans, to actually infect humans. | ||
| Peter Daszak, again, very early on, co-authored a letter in The Lancet, which is a very respected medical journal in the UK, in which, before these leaks came out, They declared that anybody who questions whether this was leaked from a lab is a conspiracy theorist. | ||
| And it was signed by a number of doctors, and it was among them Peter Daszak. | ||
| Peter Daszak's the guy that got the funding to do this work. | ||
| At the bottom of all Medical Journal articles, you have to declare an interest. | ||
| Are there any conflicts? | ||
| And they said, we have no conflicts of interest. | ||
| So here you've got that these guys wrote a hit piece calling anybody like Brett who questions whether it's a lab leak a conspiracy theorist, while obviously it's him, Peter Daszak, receiving funding to do that very work, writing a piece in a medical journal, smearing those who are attempting to uncover whether he'd received funding to do that very work. | ||
| I think I'm qualified enough in the human... | ||
| In human nature, at least, to be able to say he wasn't acting in our best interest. | ||
| That's a conflict. | ||
| That's a conflict. | ||
| And that, you see, from the very beginning of this thing, it happened with everything we were saying. | ||
| Lab leak, masks, lockdowns, mandates. | ||
| Eventually the truth came out, but it had to be fought for. | ||
| So that tells me that the people that were attempting to suffocate this truth, at least, not everybody, but the people that were involved in suffocating the truth and smearing dissidents, while knowing because the leaks indicate that they knew, right, they weren't acting in our best interests. | ||
| And I think that's a fair conclusion to reach. | ||
| What were they doing? | ||
| They were attempting to use this emergency to usher in a new way of doing things. | ||
| Vaccine passports, even though in the UK and England at least now we've dropped them and Ireland followed suit, Czech Republic has followed suit. | ||
| But it wasn't ever about you not being able to come into say into this studio and infect me, because even after they learned that you could still infect me, the vaccine passports were still in place. | ||
| But they've told us, they meaning people in power, have told us what they want to do next. | ||
| So the UK is currently the head of the G7 group. | ||
| That's the world's most economically advanced countries. | ||
| And the UK currently chairs the G7 Group. | ||
| Our Chancellor, who does our economy, called Chancellor of the Exchequer, his name's Rishi Sunak. | ||
| He's put out this video. | ||
| This is all my feeds, by the way, my social feeds. | ||
| He put out this video saying that what they want to do is bring in this thing called the Central Banking Digital Currency. | ||
| They want to replace fiat paper money with digital money as a competitor to Bitcoin and crypto money, right? | ||
| But instead of being decentralized currency, it will be controlled by a government. | ||
| It's digital currency but controlled centrally through the banks, Bank of England. | ||
| So instead of having a bank account with whatever, HSBC or Bank of America, you'll have a bank account directly within the American context with the Fed, in the UK directly with the Bank of England. | ||
| You have a personal bank account and you're given digital money in that bank account. | ||
| These are called central banking digital currencies. | ||
| The Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK has already announced their intention to do this as the G7 group. | ||
| And if you look up... | ||
| This sounds terrifying, by the way. | ||
| If you look up the Telegraph newspaper... | ||
| I've already Googled it, and there's a lot of headlines about it. | ||
| Yep, there's a specific article in the Telegraph, Programmable Digital Currency. | ||
| If you can't find it, I'll pull it out for my Twitter feed, and we can talk through it on my feed. | ||
| While he's looking for that, I'll talk you through it. | ||
| So one of these... | ||
| Central bank digital currency, is that the one down below? | ||
| Digital currency should be programmable. | ||
| See that one there? | ||
| He's looking at it even on the search. | ||
| It says the word programmable. | ||
| Top search result. | ||
| Third line down. | ||
| Should be programmable. | ||
| Programming. | ||
| Now, see again, there's a paywall. | ||
| Start your free trial. | ||
| But you can see the word there, right? | ||
| Programming in the headline. | ||
| Now what they're doing is they're saying... | ||
| That this digital currency, because everyone knows that with inflation at over 5%, it's now 5.4%, right? | ||
| Our fiat money, the paper money, is increasingly becoming worthless and we're headed towards a big disaster. | ||
| The Fed wants to raise interest rates. | ||
| We're in so much debt that if you raise interest rates, people are going to suffer because we're living on debt as Western economies. | ||
| So they realize that the lifespan of paper money is fast coming to an end because of the 2008 economic crash in particular. | ||
| So they're bringing in these central banking digital currencies. | ||
| Why is that word programmable in there? | ||
| So what they said in that article, and the Chancellor put a video out saying this as well, they said, right, Think back to what vaccine passports were, yeah? | ||
| If you don't have your jab, you can't even eat in this restaurant. | ||
| What they've said, and why the word programmable was in that headline was, they've said that this money that you will earn from work, instead of having paper money, you have this digital money, it's programmable so that you can't buy certain foods, or if you do something that your employer doesn't like, it's all in that article. | ||
| You won't be able to spend your money. | ||
| In other words, it's not money, they're vouchers. | ||
| They're like food vouchers. | ||
| And they can be programmed so that, like the Chinese social credit system, that if you try and use them on a certain thing, it won't work. | ||
| Say you want to buy a burger and they want you to buy bugs, which is one of the examples used. | ||
| If you start to try and buy unhealthy meat, it just won't work. | ||
| You tap your card, you can't buy the thing because you've met your quota that month of burgers. | ||
| You have to buy something like a vegan meal. | ||
| So it won't just be money in the sense of the way we have dollars or pounds today. | ||
| It'll be something that's controlled in terms of your ability to distribute it. | ||
| Which is why I'm calling it a voucher. | ||
| It's a coupon. | ||
| But even a coupon, if you have a coupon to buy bread, you can still buy the bread. | ||
| But you can't buy... | ||
| See, that coupon to buy bread, what you can't do is buy a burger with that coupon. | ||
| It's for bread. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you will have this central banking digital currency, and then what they're talking about in that article that we just pulled up is they'll say, right, and it explicitly uses the words, won't be used on something that the employer deems inappropriate or the state deems inappropriate. | ||
| Oh, we've got to see this. | ||
| See if we can find that or... | ||
| I'm just digging through a different article about it, too. | ||
| There's pilot programs that are going to be used in the Olympics coming up in China. | ||
| They've already started it in Sweden. | ||
| Do you feel like you're sounding the alarm for people that don't understand what the fuck is going on? | ||
| I've pulled it up for you here. | ||
| There's the video. | ||
| I don't know if your camera can see that. | ||
| There's the video. | ||
|
unidentified
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video, there's him speaking about it. - The G7 is launching a set of public policy principles for retail central bank digital currencies, CBDCs. | |
| Central bank digital currencies could be a digital version of money, a bit like a digital bank note that could be used alongside-- Right, so that's the guy who runs our economy in the UK. He's named the Chancellor of the Exchequer. | ||
| And here is the article. | ||
| Bank of England tells ministers to intervene on digital currency programming. | ||
| And here's a quote from the article. | ||
| This is in the Telegraph, the one he pulled up. | ||
| But it was behind a paywall, so I'll just read the quote. | ||
| Digital cash could be programmed to ensure it is only spent on essentials. | ||
| Or goods which an employer or government deems to be sensible. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Now, I'm gonna take it one step further for you, Joe, right? | ||
| So, the vaccine passport infrastructure is in place, but now we know that the vaccine doesn't stop infection or transmission, but the Checkpoint Charlie exists everywhere. | ||
| They bring in digital banking, central banking, digital currencies. | ||
| You've got a scenario now that you're checking in and out everywhere you go using vouchers that are programmed and you can only spend where you're told you can spend them. | ||
| There's another word for that, man. | ||
| That's called the Chinese social credit system. | ||
| That's what it's called. | ||
| And anyone who watches Black Mirror will know what I'm talking about. | ||
| That's that TV show, right? | ||
| So what they are telling us, and when I say they, who's they? | ||
| People in power. | ||
| That's the head of our economy, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. | ||
| Second most powerful person other than the Prime Minister and maybe the Foreign Secretary in the UK, right? | ||
| He's telling us, I just played it there for you. | ||
| He's telling us that's what he, as the UK, the head of the G7, want to bring in for the G7. So a scenario where like in New York at the moment, because the passport infrastructure is in place, you bring in that digital currency and you've got this total control. | ||
| And if I'm speaking to you the way I'm speaking now, and my employer or government, you heard that in the quote directly, yeah, deems me as saying or doing something inappropriate, suddenly I can't actually pay to come here and speak to you anymore. | ||
| My digital currency won't even pay for the ticket. | ||
| Because it will be known that I'm coming to speak to you. | ||
| Sorry, your vouchers don't allow you to purchase that ticket to go and speak to Joe. | ||
| And this is where we get into the kind of censorship that we see in social media that is not... | ||
| It's not... | ||
| You can't have that kind of censorship with the First Amendment. | ||
| In normal discourse. | ||
| But you can have that kind of censorship if you've developed a digital platform that distributes information but it's a private company. | ||
| So think about what money is where you can spend it on whatever you want versus this digital currency which is essentially controlled in a sense like you have free speech on Twitter but you really don't. | ||
| Because if you go too far or you talk about something that they don't find appropriate they'll just ban your account. | ||
| That could be what we're looking at in terms of what we think of as free speech being social media platforms could be what we think of as your free-range ability to buy whatever you want with whatever money that you've earned. | ||
| So what's going on here, right? | ||
| We're in a moment in history. | ||
| And this is why I said to you what I can speak to you about with a bit more authority than even the science debate. | ||
| And I've done my homework on the science debate. | ||
| I had to because I had a live show and I was interrogated by the public for three hours on a call-in show. | ||
| I had to have done my homework. | ||
| And the way you've seen me be able to pull out my receipts, yeah? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's what I had to do on the show. | ||
| But put the science aside. | ||
| Where I will speak with a level of authority is political theory. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I'm a postgraduate and I spent my entire life involved in political structures and political activism and thinking about social contracts. | ||
| Now, what's going on here is, with this central banking digital currency, if you get to that situation where you end up with the Chinese social credit system in the West, why? | ||
| Why would anyone want to do that, right? | ||
| I believe we're in a moment of the Gutenberg press. | ||
| Go back to when the printing press was invented. | ||
| Technology disrupts power structures. | ||
| It always has. | ||
| Printing and its invention was a new technology. | ||
| What happened when they invented the printing press? | ||
| The power structures who up until that point were reading the Bible for you and were telling you that you're going to pay this priest X amount of favors and he'll forgive you your sins. | ||
| And that became a bribery system, right? | ||
| Which is what Martin Luther was so upset about when he pinned his thesis to the wall. | ||
| The printing press disrupted that power dynamic because people could read the Bible for themselves. | ||
| And they began realizing that the power structures were manipulating what was written to control people. | ||
| Now, nobody in hindsight is going to argue that printing and its invention is a bad thing for humanity. | ||
| But at the time, it led to war. | ||
| It led to the 30 years war in Europe. | ||
| Because it disrupted power so much that people began rising up and it led to this 30 year period of war, which eventually led to the Reformation and the rest is history, right? | ||
| What's today's Gutenberg press? | ||
| The internet. | ||
| The decentralization of information and then because of that, the internet, the decentralization of currency in the form of crypto is disrupting power. | ||
| Because the way that after The revolution of the Reformation and the printing press. | ||
| Control was still possible, though obviously not to that level, which is why we no longer have those absolute monarchies. | ||
| But control in a nation-state context was still possible to an extent because the money supply was controlled. | ||
| Now what's happening is that the invention of the internet with the decentralization of information and in particular here the decentralization of currency in the form of cryptocurrencies is disrupting those power hierarchies and it's leading to this conflict now. | ||
| And we're in a moment. | ||
| When the printing press was invented, the powers that be needed to try and hold on to that power as the Thirty Years' War kicked off. | ||
| They eventually lost it. | ||
| But to hold on to it, they became very brutal because they were losing their grip on power. | ||
| Today, this is what I believe we're witnessing. | ||
| It's not about vaccine passports. | ||
| This was a red herring. | ||
| To have the infrastructure in place that you can have a Checkpoint Charlie society so that when the central banking digital currencies are in place that infrastructure is already there because people were so scared they voluntarily allowed you to put that in place so that you can maintain your grip on power because what's coming around the corner is the decentralization of everything of media therefore of narrative and of course remember whoever defines the truth gets to define reality decentralization of narratives decentralization of the economy through crypto You no longer have the power | ||
| to define the story and control the money supply. | ||
| So the powers that be who are losing that power need to clamp down. | ||
| They're clamping down on their own children because we are people who are born of the West. | ||
| So it's an internal civil war in a hybrid war context Over truth and over information. | ||
| Centralization versus decentralization, basically. | ||
| It's no longer about left or right. | ||
| It's about up versus down. | ||
| It's about power versus those who don't have power. | ||
| Do you think if there was no cryptocurrency, if there was no Bitcoin or any of the other crypto coins, that they would attempt to do some sort of digital currency? | ||
| Do you think that this is a response to the understanding that that Decentralized digital currency is eventually going to take over or has gained far more momentum than they ever anticipated. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| And also decentralized media because you can't control the narrative. | ||
| See how easy it was to convince everybody initially that the Iraq war was needed. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Now you've got a point today where they haven't been able to convince people of their measures that they wanted to bring in when COVID struck, because it was quicker to be able to unpick that narrative due to decentralization. | ||
| Shows like this that weren't under the traditional yoke of traditional media were able to have certain conversations. | ||
| Now that means that it's harder to control the narrative. | ||
| And so in a situation like that, when you're losing your grip and power, the only option you have left is to clamp down. | ||
| And I'm sorry to say, but that means, like the 30 Years War in Europe after the printing press was invented, we may be in for a bit of a rough ride ahead. | ||
| But we are literally facing a crossroads. | ||
| Do we go down the direction of centralization or decentralization? | ||
| It's obvious where I stand. | ||
| I think ultimately, like happened eventually after the wars of 30 Years War and... | ||
| Eventually people need to be respected and they will win. | ||
| They will win this. | ||
| And we'll end up with a better future. | ||
| But there's going to be some short-term pain. | ||
| And what do you mean by that? | ||
| There will be another emergency, whether it's war with Russia, which is already being played up. | ||
| Whatever it is, whether it's the crash of the economy because of the fiat and the inflation at 5.4%, at least in the UK, it's 5.4% here. | ||
| I know it's out of control here as well. | ||
| If the currency collapses because we're living on printed money at the moment, it's called quantitative easing. | ||
| We are literally printing ourselves money to try and pay for our debt. | ||
| We're just printing more money. | ||
| That's unsustainable. | ||
| So we're in this situation where any other crisis could occur. | ||
| If the gas, Putin controls Europe's gas supply. | ||
| If there's a war with Ukraine, he cuts off the gas supply. | ||
| There's a Nord Stream 2 pipeline that services Germany, but also other European countries are dependent on Russian gas. | ||
| So if he shuts off the gas supply, you end up with food shortages. | ||
| Now, you can go one of two ways. | ||
| If there's riots because people are hungry, that's a perfect pretext to bring in more draconian power to control society. | ||
| And people will want it because nobody wants to live with riots. | ||
| I mean, people moving away from the West Coast and San Francisco in particular because of some of the crime problems there, right? | ||
| So people move away from that. | ||
| But if you've got food shortages everywhere and people end up rioting, it's a good reason to say, right, we need more power to control this. | ||
| We need more emergency powers. | ||
| We need stronger laws. | ||
| And so you end up in a situation where crises can be manipulated to bring in stronger and stronger authority, when really what's going on is we're in this crossroads in history. | ||
| Now we will get out of this because ultimately it's a numbers game and ultimately in times like this you end up fighting against your own sons. | ||
| It's those in power fighting their own people and eventually the people by sheer numbers end up becoming the people in power. | ||
| So in the long run we may well end up in a decentralized world which will be much better. | ||
| But as I say that to get there we have to get through this period of those in power attempting to hold on to that power. | ||
| Do you think it's possible that we won't get there and then we'll wind up in a more draconian centralized world? | ||
| Everything's possible. | ||
| Professor John Gray at the LSE questions the idea that history moves in a positive trajectory. | ||
| He questions the idea that we're only ever going to get better. | ||
| His theories in the context of liberalism. | ||
| We must never take anything for granted, but it's why I've been so vocal. | ||
| Because everything we've just spoken about, I've looked at this, I've had to reason myself out of totalitarian systems, and so when I see that what I joined, kind of our values that we believe and hold dear to, our civil liberties, what I sacrifice things to defend, if the thing I'm defending is moving in that direction as well, I can see that pattern, I can see the early warning signs. | ||
| Hannah Arendt is a German-Jewish philosopher, was. | ||
| She wrote about the rise of totalitarianism in Germany to try and understand it. | ||
| In fact, was one of the leading and first philosophers to try and dissect totalitarianism and how it emerged. | ||
| And she coined this theory, which everybody can look it up. | ||
| It's called the banality of evil. | ||
| And her basic point was she ended up living her final years in Israel and she was really interested in understanding how ordinary, everyday, nice people became Nazis. | ||
| And the banality of evil is her theory that explains it. | ||
| And the point was that actually good people can do evil things. | ||
| And they don't even realize they're doing them. | ||
| And it's incremental. | ||
| It's step by step. | ||
| And each incremental step is justified for the common good. | ||
| Until like a proverbial frog being boiled alive in water, and because it's a frog and its skin temperature changes with the water, it doesn't realize it's being boiled alive until it's too late and it dies with the boiling water. | ||
| It doesn't jump out. | ||
| So take that proverb, that story, and apply it to Hannah Arendt's theory of the banality of evil. | ||
| That if you incrementally change, step by step, you change society, before you even realise it, you've got to a point that it's past the point of no return. | ||
| If that happens, it's very difficult to get out of that without external intervention. | ||
| Well, you see this mindset that's very disturbing and online and social media. | ||
| You see this mindset from people that if you had talked to them four or five years ago, they would never advocate denying anyone medical help for diseases for something that they had caused, like say obesity, something that was a personal choice they had made or an addiction that they had to food or what have you. | ||
| Drug addictions no one would ever deny medical treatment to those people you would never advocate for that especially not publicly and openly and then other an entire group Especially now that we know what you said about how the vaccine at a certain point in time no longer stops transmission No longer stops infection like you're still giving it to people and you're still getting it So if that is the case and we know that to be the case now How can anybody in their right mind, | ||
| under good conscience, advocate that someone would be denied medical care? | ||
| Because they didn't subscribe to the same thing you subscribed to, because they didn't take this inoculation that you took. | ||
| Right, so we know that in Israel, when you look at rates, so in terms of percentages now, not just raw figures, but percentages, the rate of COVID is higher among the boosted than it is among... | ||
| But don't they have a much higher rate of boosted people? | ||
| So that's why I'm saying it's a comparative figure. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| It's adjusted for percentages. | ||
| Okay, so it's even adjusted for percentages. | ||
| But they have a very low percentage of people that are unvaccinated, right? | ||
| So you can sample that with control groups. | ||
| Is it like less than 10%? | ||
| It's low. | ||
| It is low, but there are still some in Israel. | ||
| But also in the UK these studies have been done, looking at percentages and rates. | ||
| Prior to Omicron even, in the UK they found that the rate, this is in fact in the Spectator magazine, you can put it up, the rate of COVID is higher among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. | ||
| Rate, not numbers. | ||
| So what do they attribute that to? | ||
| I don't want to get into the science because you can speak to people like Robert Malone, as you've done, and they can get into the science here. | ||
| The questions as to whether, for example, one thing we do know is our health secretaries admitted that it is not normal to roll out mass vaccination during a pandemic, because what that is said to encourage is mutated versions that can evade the vaccine. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And there's a video of our health secretary even admitting that now. | ||
| We were saying that a long time ago. | ||
| They're all admitting this stuff now. | ||
| And there's something called ADE, which is antibody-dependent enhancement, that the virus could indeed, through evolutionary processes, learn what to evade while it's still in its early stages of its first wave and its second wave, which is why what normally used to happen is you wait for the three waves of a typical pandemic before you start inoculating against that pandemic. | ||
| But to try and inoculate in the middle of a virus, some scientists are saying, only encourages antibody-dependent enhancement. | ||
| In other words, a mutated version that specifically targets the vaccinated because it's evolved to evade that spike protein. | ||
| But take that science away, right? | ||
| And just let's discuss it from the idea that mass vaccination in the middle of a pandemic, right? | ||
| You get to a point now where it's openly accepted in media narratives now that this vaccine doesn't stop infection or transmission. | ||
| And there are articles explicitly saying that the rate of those vaccinated is higher than those who are unvaccinated. | ||
| But they're still insisting on the vaccine passport. | ||
| And they're still insisting on demonizing the unvaccinated. | ||
| Now, take Canada. | ||
| A father was denied access to his child by a judge, reported by the BBC, denied access, visiting rights, to his child by a judge because he was unvaccinated on the request of the mother. | ||
| What purpose does demonizing the unvaccinated serve if the science is no longer supporting their arguments? | ||
| What purpose does it serve to say you can't have an organ transplant if you're not vaccinated? | ||
| We'll deny you service in a hospital or we'll lock down only the unvaccinated. | ||
| Now we know what we know. | ||
| What purpose do these draconian measures serve? | ||
| The only thing that makes sense to my mind is what we were talking about because they are very keen to make sure the infrastructure is there for the central banking digital currencies. | ||
| You need A checkpoint society to live in that digital world like China. | ||
| So meaning they need people to follow every step of what they're mandating, what the law is, what they're advocating for with no dissent. | ||
| The unvaccinated are living proof that vaccine passports are illogical. | ||
| So you have to demonize that living proof because you need the checkpoint in place, the vaccine passport, not for stopping the virus. | ||
| But I don't think that the people that are advocating for this are in favor of or even aware of a digital currency system. | ||
| Well, no, they're not. | ||
| They're not. | ||
| Not the everyday person, no. | ||
| But that's what demonization, you see, it serves to shut down rational debate. | ||
| Right, but here's my question. | ||
| Is this a conspiracy or is this a natural artifact of human behavior? | ||
| Neither. | ||
| Neither. | ||
| It's a revolution. | ||
| How so? | ||
| In the wrong direction. | ||
| And there needs to be a council revolution. | ||
| How is it a revolution? | ||
| This is a power grab. | ||
| But how is it a power grab if the people that are involved, like say the health experts, the people that are doctors and medical experts that are advocating for people to be vaccinated and boosted and many who even are encouraging mandates for employees. | ||
| There's a lot of people that have no dog in the fight when it comes to a central digital currency. | ||
| They don't even know about this. | ||
| So what makes them want all these things in your eyes? | ||
| Psychological operation. | ||
| Military grade. | ||
| By who? | ||
| I'll read it for you. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Is this the one from Canada? | ||
| No, this is now a UK example. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So we have a unit called SAGE, which is a scientific advisory group. | ||
| That's the committee that was advising government on pandemic policy. | ||
| yeah it's called sage one of the most prominent members on that was uh professor susan mitchy yeah professor susan mitchy for 40 years has been a member of the communist party First point. | ||
| And she's one of the most prominent members on the scientific advisory group in the UK that formulated, that's the formal committee that formulated our pandemic response. | ||
| This is from the Daily Mail on the 10th of June 2021 in an article by James Gant, headlined, Social distancing and face masks should stay forever, says Communist SAGE committee member Professor Susan Mitchie. | ||
| Now, keep that point in mind. | ||
| Social distancing and face masks should stay forever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Keep that point in mind, and I'm going to make another point for you. | ||
| Is that a real quote? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's not clickbait? | ||
| Yeah, that's directly from her. | ||
| It gets worse, Joe, right? | ||
| Here's an article. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Forever, in all caps, says Communist SAGE committee member Professor Susan Michie. | ||
| She said, we never used to pick up dog poo in the park, but learned to over time. | ||
| Now, let's move to the next, because I'm going to build this case up for you, because I know I said something, military-grade psychological operation. | ||
| I promise you, I'll establish that statement step by step like this, by showing you headlines every step of the way. | ||
| The Telegraph. | ||
| Reported on 14th of May 2021 in an article headlined, Use of fear to control behaviour in COVID crisis was totalitarian, admit scientists. | ||
| These are people that left that group SAGE and they came out and spoke like whistleblowers and they said, we were using fear as government policy to psychologically manipulate the public. | ||
| We call it PSYOPs, psychological operations, to try and elicit that fear response. | ||
| So in answer to your question as to why were people towing the line, they weren't involved in the power grab. | ||
| It's because they were victims and targets of state-sponsored psychological operations from the scientific committees that should have been looking after us. | ||
| Now that article in the Telegraph I said to you... | ||
| It's there for you. | ||
| Everyone sees that. | ||
| That's a national newspaper in the UK. It's not even a fringe. | ||
| It's a national broadsheet printed newspaper. | ||
| The Prime Minister used to write for that newspaper. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah? | |
| The Telegraph. | ||
| And as I say, that was the headline. | ||
| Use of fear to control behaviour in COVID crisis was totalitarian, admit scientists. | ||
| Members of the scientific pandemic influenza group on behaviour express regret about unethical methods. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| But they used that fear to try to get people to comply with what they thought was a good thing, the vaccination. | ||
| They're realizing now, after the dust has settled, that they have regret. | ||
| They express regret about unethical methods, but they're publicly expressing this regret because they've come to this recognition. | ||
| So that doesn't seem like a conspiracy to me, more than it feels like people under pressure, So this is not me saying it's a conspiracy. | ||
| This is me saying, why did every ordinary, everyday people comply? | ||
| Because of the fear that was deliberately stoked. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Now, we're going to carry on. | ||
| So we've got a headline here on the 13th of January 2022. This is this month, yeah? | ||
| Again in the Daily Mail. | ||
| Ministers have used propagandistic tactics to scare public into complying with COVID rules, founder of Number 10's Nudge Unit claims. | ||
| Now the Nudge Unit is a colloquial term for the Behavioural Psychology Unit in government. | ||
| It's called SPY-B, the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Behaviour Group, right? | ||
| The founder of that unit has come out now. | ||
| And I said he regrets, and he's written a column for a different platform called Unheard, and this is the news piece on his column. | ||
| So he's written a whole column expressing this regret, and he says he expressed regrets that they used these manipulative methods to encourage fear. | ||
| But it gets better. | ||
| Why do they use the word military grade? | ||
| So this so far establishes that, because intent's not relevant for me at this point, right? | ||
| What I'm describing to you is what happened. | ||
| Why were people scared? | ||
| You know, you could be well-intentioned in doing this, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. | ||
| My point isn't about intentions or conspiracy. | ||
| This is just what happened. | ||
| And people need to know that they were manipulated, whether for good or bad intention. | ||
| That they were manipulated in a way that the people that did it are now expressing regret because they know that this is coming out. | ||
| So they're trying to get ahead of the curve and admit that they did it. | ||
| Now, here's another interesting one, right? | ||
| So there's an MP in the Parliament, in the British Parliament. | ||
| His name's Tobias Elwood. | ||
| He's a Conservative MP. Now, on his own Twitter page, he announces... | ||
| I'll just read it for you. | ||
| No point in Googling this. | ||
| I'll just read it for you on his own. | ||
| He's got a Twitter page. | ||
| He announces, delighted to be promoted to Lieutenant Colonel as a reservist in the 77 Brigade. | ||
| An honour to continue serving Her Majesty's Armed Forces, the most professional in the world, right? | ||
| What's the 77 Brigade? | ||
| Well, you go to their website and they tell you what they are. | ||
| Groups within 77 Brigade, and I'll just read a bit here for you. | ||
| This is on their own website, yeah? | ||
| Digital Operations Group provide a specialist capability to deliver influence, activity and products across a broad range of communications channels. | ||
| Web Ops team. | ||
| The Web Ops team collects information and understands audience sentiment in the virtual domain. | ||
| With the extent OSINT, that's Open Source Intelligence, policy framework, they may engage with audiences in order to influence perceptions to support operational outcomes. | ||
| Now the question is here, you've got a British MPs involved in a military psyops unit called the 77th. | ||
| Now I'm going to tell you something about Twitter, because we mentioned Twitter, yeah? | ||
| This is an article in the Middle East Eye. | ||
| I'll read a direct quote for you. | ||
| The date is, as it pulls up open here, 30th of September 2019, Middle East, the article by Ian Cobain and it's headlined, Twitter Executive for Middle East is British Army PsyOps Soldier. | ||
| Part-time officer has worked on behavioural change projects in the region. | ||
| Gordon Macmillan, who joined Twitter, the social media company's UK office six years ago, has for several years also served with the 77th Brigade, a unit formed in 2015 to develop non-lethal ways of waging war. | ||
| Now, I've just read for you the 77th is engaged in information operations. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| And a Twitter executive is a member of the 77th. | ||
| A PSYOP soldier. | ||
| And this is why I said to you, military grade psychological operations. | ||
| Not just any psychological operations. | ||
| This is why people have become so scared. | ||
| They are victims of PSYOPs. | ||
| Intentions might be good. | ||
| Don't you think you, I, Jamie, your listeners had the right to know this was happening to us, regardless of the intention? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, this was listed in an article in September of 2019, right? | ||
| I mean, we did know about it. | ||
| Well, that was exposed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
At least it was published. | |
| Oh, it was exposed in September of 2019. It was exposed, yeah. | ||
| It's a leak. | ||
| It's not a... | ||
| It's an expose. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| It's not the government saying, this is what we're doing to you. | ||
| How did they find out about that? | ||
|
unidentified
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Leaks. | |
| One thing I like about you, Majid, you come with receipts. | ||
| Receipts, right? | ||
| So when I say, now I'm going to say the statement again, and it's going to sound less crazy. | ||
| Military-grade psychological operations. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, I see that. | ||
| That is military-grade. | ||
| Now, let me ask you this. | ||
| How do you think that is achieved? | ||
| Do you think that's achieved through the use of things like the IRA, like how Russia uses it, troll farms, things along those likes that manipulate narratives through paid posers, like people that are pretending to be posters, but they're really just someone who works for a government organization and they push a very specific... | ||
| Like, I get very suspicious when I see people with, like, American flags in their Twitter handle and they talk a lot of crazy shit. | ||
| I'm like, that might be a Fed. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| You know, there's a lot of that online. | ||
| I find a lot of that on Instagram, where I'll see someone's page. | ||
| Like, someone will send me a video. | ||
| Hey, check out this video. | ||
| And I go to their page and I go, this feels suspiciously not like a person. | ||
| Like, this feels suspiciously like someone is trying to, like, get something to rile people up out there. | ||
| Their whole page has no, there's no character to it. | ||
| There's no personality. | ||
| There's no emotional engagement. | ||
| It's like a constant barrage of memes and videos that are inflammatory and data. | ||
| And I look at it and go, is this guy in Macedonia somewhere? | ||
| You know, in a troll farm? | ||
| Because we know that that's a real thing. | ||
| So it's not just... | ||
| Like, here's the thing that we're willing to accept very easily. | ||
| We're willing to accept that foreign countries are manipulating us. | ||
| Right? | ||
| We're willing to accept that Russia does that. | ||
| That the IRA... We've just seen that we're doing it. | ||
| But that's the thing like how much are we doing it and how much do we know about like the Renee DeResta's work with the IRA when she When she uncovered these hundreds of thousands Sam did a podcast with her and then I did a podcast with her afterwards and Just talking to her about the depth of the work that they do to try to get people riled up online and that's exactly what they're doing They're just entering into these Christian chat groups. | ||
| There was a an article recently that came out that showed that out of 20 of the top Christian groups on Facebook 19 of them were run by troll farms 19 of them we showed all these different like your baby daddy ain't shit that was run by troll farms all these like really wild inflammatory Meme pages run by troll farms and their purpose is just to rile people up we're accepting those like wow we're being attacked but What are we doing? | ||
| What are the intelligence agencies within this country that have a vested interest in pushing a narrative? | ||
| What are they doing in this country? | ||
| What are they doing on social media while we're getting blocked and banned left and right for all kinds of arbitrary things? | ||
| Like Unity 2020, which was Brett Weinstein's organization that was trying to pit together a very respectable member of the right and a very respectable member of the left and see if they could come up with an alternative party. | ||
| They were banned from Twitter for that. | ||
| Now, Twitter's one arena, yeah? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| One battleground. | ||
| A while back in this conversation, you said something which I appreciate you saying, and it's accurate, is that having been through all of this, I was able to identify some of these early warning signs. | ||
| I'm trained in ideological warfare, basically. | ||
| I have been, as an Islamist revolutionary, and it's why the Egyptian government put me in jail. | ||
| I know all these signs and I know how it works. | ||
| I know how you deconstruct a country for the purposes of destroying it from within. | ||
| Now, whether it's Twitter and our use of social media platforms, but it doesn't stop there. | ||
| It includes subversion through infiltration of state bodies by your operatives who are not there to serve people, but who are there to deliver the aims of your organization. | ||
| And what are the aims of the organization? | ||
| So let me play something for you by Klaus Schwab. | ||
| This is in Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. | ||
| He's speaking in 2017. I feel like we should have Darth Vader music playing when that guy talks. | ||
| Please do it when I play. | ||
| Seriously? | ||
| Can you get Darth Vader music? | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| Hold it, please. | ||
| We're going to have the proper music. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For this amazing introduction of Xi Jinping. | |
| Are you ready? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tell me when. | ||
| Give me some... | ||
| Okay, but we want to hear the audio as well. | ||
| I have to say, when I mention our names like Mrs. Merkel, even Vladimir Putin and so on, they all have been young global leaders of the World Economic Forum. | ||
| But what we are very proud of now is the young generation like Prime Minister Trudeau, President of Argentina and so on, that we penetrate the cabinets. | ||
| So yesterday I was at a reception for Prime Minister Trudeau and I... We know that half of this cabinet, or even more half of this cabinet, are actually young global leaders of the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's true in Argentina, too. | |
| Wow. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| That's true in Argentina as well. | ||
| It's true in Argentina, and it's true in France now. | ||
| I mean, with the president, with a young global leader, but what is important for me So what you got there is Emperor Palpatine speaking about how in the preludes, the first three Star Wars, how he's going to use democracy to put his people in place, right? | ||
| He explicitly said in that quote you just heard, what we are very proud of is that we penetrate the global cabinets of countries with our World Economic Forum young global leaders, and then gave examples like Trudeau, like Macron. | ||
| And it's not just him saying this. | ||
| This is Tony Blair saying exactly the same thing. | ||
| Our teams are now embedded in governments around the world, helping them to keep their people safe during this pandemic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How to keep people as safe as possible, protect them as much as possible, but not simply in respect of COVID-19 itself, but in respect also of the collateral damage done by the disease. | |
| So we've been really focusing on three areas. | ||
| The first is around exit strategies, particularly in the UK and other developed countries where we've published papers showing how we might exit and ease the lockdown. | ||
| Secondly, of course, because of all the work we do in Africa with many different governments there, our teams have stayed in place. | ||
| They're on the ground. | ||
| They're working with the president, prime minister's teams in combating the crisis. | ||
| And there what we're focused on is trying to give them realistic ways of containing COVID-19 without doing enormous damage to economies that depend often on informal working and where the food supply chains are a critical part of keeping people alive. | ||
| And then thirdly, we're working on the global coordination That one doesn't bother me. | ||
| The direct quote, though, you'll see it. | ||
| Our teams are now embedded in governments around the world. | ||
| That's actually what they wrote. | ||
| And the video is two minutes. | ||
| I didn't play all of it. | ||
| That's what he says. | ||
| But what he's saying there sounds reasonable. | ||
| Figuring out strategic ways to end the lockdown easily. | ||
| No, not the end of lockdown. | ||
| Didn't he say that? | ||
| Keep in mind, Tony Blair is the one who's been advocating for vaccine passports, digital identification through COVID, and all of these measures. | ||
| But didn't they say that about ending the lockdowns and keeping businesses? | ||
| Once those measures are in place. | ||
| So even in the UK, his stance has been, yeah, we're going to get out of it, but you have to have digital ID. And this is going to introduce the social credit score system. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So all of that came from your question, which is, regardless of intention, how do people do that infiltration from within? | ||
| It's not just Twitter. | ||
| So back to the psychological operations. | ||
| It's also embedding people in government who are subscribed to this agenda. | ||
| And the agenda of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum is the same as the agenda of Tony Blair, in this regard. | ||
| They call it on their own website, they call it the Great Reset. | ||
| That's what they say themselves. | ||
| Yeah, that's a bizarre thing to do, to openly... | ||
| Why do you think they openly discuss it that way? | ||
| Because the Great Reset has always been this gigantic conspiracy theory among the online folks. | ||
| Like, this is all part of the Great Reset. | ||
| Well, when he wrote a fucking book called the Great Reset, you're like... | ||
| Hey man, shouldn't you be hiding this? | ||
| And in 2017 at Harvard, he's saying, you know, we're going to basically, all of these world leaders will penetrate their cabinets with our young global leaders. | ||
| He's open. | ||
| He's open. | ||
| Blair's open. | ||
| During the Iraq war, Blair tried to bring in ID cards in Britain. | ||
| He failed. | ||
| Now he's back. | ||
| And he's trying to bring in digital ID during COVID. Right? | ||
| So they're open about it. | ||
| So this is going to be this never-ending process to slowly move the goalposts. | ||
| Towards more and more authoritarianism. | ||
| Checkpoint society. | ||
| It's all there. | ||
| They told us this. | ||
| People have to realize this, right? | ||
| This is important. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| When you were on your radio show, what kind of pushback? | ||
| Can you talk about that? | ||
| No. | ||
| Probably can't. | ||
| I can when it comes to those who disagreed with me in public. | ||
| Just not the management legal side, contract side. | ||
| But there were other broadcasters that basically... | ||
| Some called me... | ||
| Deranged is one direct quote. | ||
| Because obviously this is a whole radio group, so there's other presenters, not just my show. | ||
| When I said publicly on my feed, I will not get a booster, and I said I'm a conscientious objector to getting a booster because of mandates, and I refuse to participate in a system that removes choice. | ||
| I was called deranged for saying I didn't want to get a booster. | ||
| Soon afterwards, again, it all came out. | ||
| And they realized that the boosters weren't doing much when it comes to the spread and transmission of COVID. So they publicly came out and attacked me. | ||
| For some of the things I've said here, in fact, I've gone... | ||
| Nothing I've said here I haven't already said, by the way. | ||
| So I've been called an extremist for saying this, for having this discussion that I'm having with you. | ||
| I've been re-radicalized. | ||
| Somehow, apparently, this means that I haven't really left the group that I used to belong to. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And on top of that, I need mental help. | ||
| I've got mental health problems. | ||
| I'm being gaslit in that way, that I'm the one who's lost sense of reality. | ||
| So when you move the goalposts in that way to such an extent that the psychological operation's purpose is to gaslight the public, as happened under communism, the person who speaks up is the person that needs psychological help as opposed to... | ||
| Of course. | ||
| That is gaslighting by definition. | ||
| That's where we are but as you've seen nothing I said comes without receipts no and you know when we were easing into this conversation I had a I had a feeling it was gonna go this way but I was like I was hoping I was gonna find some holes yeah I was hoping like well maybe he's exaggerating or maybe I don't I don't see these holes So, again, remember this, right? | ||
| For me, it's not about intention. | ||
| You can have the best of intentions and do evil. | ||
| That is what Hannah Arendt meant. | ||
| I think that's a very good point. | ||
| That's a very good point because that erases the stigma that it's attached to these conspiracy theories that there's this grand cabal of evil people that are trying to control the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think that there is a sense or that they have an incentive to try to impart more control? | ||
| Because we're under direct competition with China and they have essentially total control over the way the Chinese government has control of their corporations and the corporations act for the interest of the Chinese party. | ||
| They act within the best interest. | ||
| They're not independent like, you know, say Harley Davidson or something like that, does whatever the fuck they want when they would make motorcycles. | ||
| What are you doing in China, especially if you're involved in a technology company, you work with the government? | ||
| I'll go one step further. | ||
| Okay, please. | ||
| There's something called elite capture, which is a term that I use. | ||
| I believe our elite have come under the undue influence of Chinese intelligence agencies, unfortunately. | ||
| Our elite, like who's our elite? | ||
| Our political elite. | ||
| Our political elite. | ||
| Well, okay. | ||
| So if you look up BBC, Chinese spy, parliament, MI5 have just last month, in fact this month I think it was, warned about this. | ||
| I've been saying it since my hunger strike, which we haven't spoken about, but I went on hunger strike. | ||
| At the beginning of the pandemic because of the Uyghur genocide in China. | ||
| I did a five-day hunger strike to try and draw attention to the plight of the Uyghur Muslim community who are facing genocide in China because nobody was speaking about it in the media at the time. | ||
| It wasn't getting the attention it deserved. | ||
| And I was a mainstream broadcaster who didn't even turn up to work because I was on a hunger strike sitting outside the Chinese embassy in protest. | ||
| The purpose was to get 100,000 signatures On a petition on a UK Parliament website that would force a debate in the UK Parliament on the genocide in China. | ||
| We got the 100,000 signatures within four days and there was a debate and the UK Parliament unanimously voted in a symbolic vote that there was a genocide in China and then other countries started cascading after that. | ||
| Canada did the same, the Netherlands did the same. | ||
| Blinken here, when he was sworn in, After my hunger strike was asked in his swearing-in ceremony, he said, yes, I believe there's a genocide in China. | ||
| And then America followed suit as well. | ||
| Back in those days, when I did that hunger strike, It wasn't common. | ||
| Apart from Trump, it wasn't common for somebody from my background to speak about China. | ||
| It was seen as a Trumpian thing to do. | ||
| And people often forget how that was in those days. | ||
| And I mentioned back then that the reason I think this genocide was not getting the attention it deserved in the press was because our elite had come under the undue influence of Chinese state governments. | ||
| CCP, right? | ||
| Communist Party, not the Chinese people, but the states influence operations in the West. | ||
| And they had somehow captured our elite to head in a direction that serves the interests of China. | ||
| Now what's come out since then, it's now two years later. | ||
| Again, like with everything else I've spoken about, it's now in the press. | ||
| So there's an article in the BBC, MI5 warning over Chinese agent in Parliament. | ||
| That's from the 13th of January this month. | ||
| Now that, this lady here, she's been operating with senior parliamentarians as an active spy of the Chinese Communist Party to the point where our security services, the internal branch, MI5, had issued a rare warning, as it says at the top, right? | ||
| And she's not the only one. | ||
| You want to read it for people that are just listening? | ||
| MI5 has issued a rare warning that an alleged Chinese agent has infiltrated Parliament to interfere in UK politics. | ||
| An alert from the security service said Christine Ching-Kui Li, I hope I've pronounced that correctly, established links for the Chinese Communist Party, CCP, with current and aspiring MPs. | ||
| She then gave donations to politicians with funding coming from foreign nationals in China and Hong Kong. | ||
| Specifically, we go down to the next few paragraphs there. | ||
| One of the MPs funded by Ms. Lee was Labour's Barry Gardner. | ||
| So this is our opposition party who received over £420,000. | ||
| That's half a million dollars. | ||
| Yeah, from her in five years. | ||
| But he said he's always made the security services aware of the donations. | ||
| Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey also received a £5,000 donation, so a lot less. | ||
| Those two parties, by the way, were very much in favour of all of the COVID mandates. | ||
| And we know that the idea of lockdowns began in China. | ||
| We know that the virus leaked from Wuhan. | ||
| We know that China has an interest in making sure that the world follows its ideology, a bit like in the Cold War where the Soviet Union wanted us to be communists. | ||
| But can you really buy the influence of these politicians for $100,000 a year to the point where they're willing to instigate these sort of COVID lockdowns? | ||
| What you do is they don't think they're being bought. | ||
| They think they're receiving money from a donor and they're serving their donor's interest like a lobby. | ||
| That's how the lobby works. | ||
| So they have discussions with them about an agenda. | ||
| Yeah, and it's like, you know, so when I first started speaking about the Uyghur genocide, it was seen as racist against the Chinese to speak about the communist influence of China in the West. | ||
| So you don't need to say to somebody, here's some money, do the bidding of the CCP. You need to say, I'm funding you as a British-Chinese citizen when actually they're working for the CCP. I'm worried about increasing anti-Chinese racism. | ||
| Again, a legitimate concern to have. | ||
| I'm going to provide money to your party and let's start trying to divert conversation away from criticizing Chinese actions because it will lead to anti-Chinese racism. | ||
| And let's instead speak about The need for Huawei, the contract with Huawei, the 5G networks. | ||
| So it's why we had this problem where it was so difficult to cancel those Huawei contracts, but we ended up cancelling them in the end after we agreed to have them because all of this got exposed after that hunger strike. | ||
| I'm not saying I'm the reason it got exposed. | ||
| I'm saying it was in chronological order just to reassure people that what I say isn't just something that I've just plucked out of my head. | ||
| It's actually then it gets reported in the press. | ||
| It's happening. | ||
| So the concern around China's influence in terms of not only our tech, Huawei and others, and the ability to enter our information through the backdoor, through the Huawei 5G networks, which have since been cancelled since Trump. | ||
| And in the UK, we followed America and cancelled those pending contracts. | ||
| It doesn't just apply to tech. | ||
| It doesn't just apply to pro-lockdown messaging in Parliament. | ||
| But you look to, we've got a nuclear reactor in the UK called Hinkley Point C. It's being built with Chinese funding. | ||
| Now I'm asking, you've got a country that's engaged in a genocide against a community for their beliefs. | ||
| It doesn't tolerate diversity. | ||
| And you're letting that nation, controlled by the CCP, work on our sensitive nuclear programs. | ||
| Now, I wouldn't do that with the Soviet Union. | ||
| And what I don't understand, moving this conversation slightly to foreign policy, is why are we not realizing that we've got this kind of consensus developing with the Biden administration that Putin and Russia are a threat, when actually you've got a bigger problem here with the CCP. Far more powerful than Russia, far more organized, have far more centralized control, and are far wealthier, and their military is far stronger. | ||
| And we've got a real elephant in the room, and that is the increasing power of the CCP ruled China. | ||
| And the influence isn't just military, but it's also soft power. | ||
| So when the lockdowns first began, I signed a joint letter with other signatories. | ||
| And one of the signatories was General Spaulding, here at the US General. | ||
| And it's online still. | ||
| And we directly alleged that Chinese influence operations have been responsible for a lot of this idea that lockdowns were our solution. | ||
| It was the first nation that implemented lockdowns. | ||
| And then Italy and Europe followed after China, and then the rest of Europe followed after that. | ||
| And Michael Senger, who's one of the signatories to that letter, has written an extensive book on this, tracing step-by-step, the way I've gone through receipts with you here, he's gone through step-by-step these influence operations where the CCP have been encouraging a draconian response to COVID and all of this technocracy that is eventually going to arise in the form of Checkpoint Charlie Society and Central Banking Digital Currencies. | ||
| They've been encouraging other nations to implement these... | ||
| Their model. | ||
| And how do they get away with that? | ||
| How do these other nations comply? | ||
| They comply because of influence? | ||
| Influence operations, funding, intelligence operations, as you see. | ||
| And because of that, they're willing to impart laws that they would not normally do? | ||
| Who? | ||
| The governments that they're being influenced. | ||
| The governments, whether it's Great Britain, whether it's the United States, these governments are being influenced, in your mind? | ||
| With the help of the agenda coming from other non-state actors, such as the World Economic Forum, and their teams penetrating cabinets across the world, as Klaus Schwab said, there are some supranational interests here that exist above the nation-state, working, as I said to you, as a power grab, working to define the future in a certain direction, and that is to make sure that decentralization doesn't happen. | ||
| The mother of centralization is the CCP. So we're at a crossroads historically. | ||
| We can either move towards decentralization and people power, which means local governments, decentralized power, community, family, and a separation of powers, or we move in a CCP direction. | ||
| And there's a term for this in political science. | ||
| It's called the Thucydides trap. | ||
| How does a rising power overtake an existing power? | ||
| Rising power, China, existing power, America. | ||
| How does a rising power overtake an existing power without war? | ||
| The term Thucydides trap is a term to describe that historically, whenever we've been in this moment, war has happened because nobody sits by quietly and allows for that rising power to take them over. | ||
| So we're in that moment now and our challenge is how do we navigate this Thucydides trap moment with the rise of China without us going to war with China, but also stave off their influence. | ||
| But that's the moment I believe we are in in history And I'll just say, I don't know how long we have, by the way, and I'm talking a little bit. | ||
| We basically just hit the three-hour mark. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| I mean, I don't know how long you're comfortable with talking, but I'm happy to stop whenever you want me to. | ||
| The situation now in Ukraine, I believe it's a folly. | ||
| Russia and Putin, of course, like all governments, they have their own interests, their own agendas. | ||
| But what we really should be looking at isn't throwing Russia further into the bosom of China, which is what we're doing at the moment. | ||
| You've got a Russia-China alliance against us. | ||
| Surely, if we're going to be clever, we need to be able to use diplomacy with Putin and separate Russia from China. | ||
| Because the bigger danger is China, not Russia. | ||
| Russia isn't our friend, but the bigger danger is China. | ||
| The way we're behaving at the moment, whether it's with Ukraine or in Syria, is we're pushing that alliance closer. | ||
| You've got Iran, Russia, China, and they've got cooperation. | ||
| With Biden's screw-up in Afghanistan, and not the fact we withdrew. | ||
| I've never been for the war, as we've discussed. | ||
| But the way he withdrew. | ||
| The Taliban now have more Black Hawk helicopters than the entire British Army because of Biden, right? | ||
| The Bagram Air Base, that was the American base in Afghanistan, the Daily Mail reported, and you can look it up if you want to, but I'll just tell you, the Daily Mail reported that Chinese military have now landed at Bagram. | ||
| So you've got this axis developing Russia, China, Iran, and Afghanistan, ruled by the Taliban. | ||
| If we're going to be clever, we've got to realize this rising bloc It's not in our interest for them to stay united in that way. | ||
| We should be attempting diplomacy with Russia and focusing on China as a rising concern. | ||
| Because unlike Russia, not only does China have a stronger economy and a stronger military, those things I can handle. | ||
| The problem I've got is China is stronger ideologically. | ||
| It has a alternative consensus about that crossroads we're at. | ||
| China has a centralized system and it has soft power to advocate for that centralized system. | ||
| It believes in itself and its technocracy and its social credit system. | ||
| In other words, it's like the Soviet Union. | ||
| It has the ability to sell itself because it's cohesive. | ||
| Russia doesn't have that centralized social credit system. | ||
| It doesn't have that, you know, thing that the Chinese have with that kind of strong centralized power with an ideology behind it. | ||
| Russia is a traditional country, not an ideological country, at least since the collapse of the Soviet Union. | ||
| What we should be worried about is the ideological country because ideologies peddle soft power and they influence minds with their agenda and they influence narratives. | ||
| And what we've missed, because we aren't in the West attuned to ideological warfare, We've missed that bit. | ||
| We've missed the fact that the CCP has been influencing through its narratives, it's been influencing the world in this hybrid war way with its disinformation campaigns. | ||
| A lot of these fake accounts on Twitter, by the way, Twitter themselves have confessed that a lot of them were run by the CCP. And so this disinformation is being peddled from that side. | ||
| If we could divide Russia from China, we stand a stronger chance in that Thucydides trap moment of the rise of China, how to navigate around that. | ||
| I feel like you and I could have another 15 of these three-hour conversations. | ||
| So we've got to do this again. | ||
| Can I quickly tell you what I'm doing next? | ||
| Yes, please. | ||
| So having, how do I put this diplomatically? | ||
| Having had my services no longer required for my mainstream media. | ||
| You should have a podcast. | ||
| And I know I've said that to a billion people. | ||
| And I'm going to say it to you because I think you more than anybody are qualified for this. | ||
| Well, I will. | ||
| I'll be on. | ||
| So that's what I wanted to tell you. | ||
| So there's three things I'm going to do. | ||
| My service is no longer being required on that talk show. | ||
| So I'm working with Odyssey, which is an online video platform like YouTube. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But it's decentralized. | ||
| So the video sits on a blockchain. | ||
| So that YouTube yesterday took down Dan Bongino's show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They took it down? | ||
| Took it down. | ||
| Suspended. | ||
| And they took down trigonometry. | ||
| Well... | ||
| Okay, when they take these down, they've taken them down for a specific period of time or forever? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But that's why I decided... | ||
| I know the trigonometry thing. | ||
| I heard Jordan Peterson told me about that last night. | ||
| I was shocked. | ||
| So I thought, I'm not going to go down that route in the first place. | ||
| There we are, permanently banned. | ||
| Permanently banned Dan Bongino. | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| I mean, it came out of nowhere, right? | ||
| So I don't imagine he said anything. | ||
| Let's have a look. | ||
| YouTube on Wednesday permanently banned conservative commentator Dan Bongino from the platform saying he attempted to evade a previous suspension. | ||
| I mean, you know how this works. | ||
| So he violated the rules by trying to evade a previous suspension, I think it says. | ||
| The Fox host uploaded a video to his main channel while his secondary channel, which primarily hosted short clips from his digital radio show, was actively suspended for violating YouTube's COVID-19 misinformation policy. | ||
| When a channel receives a strike, it is against our terms of services to post content or use another channel to circumvent the suspension. | ||
| Okay, well that... | ||
| Meanwhile, newspapers can say anti-vaxxer dies while he's vaccinated, and there's no repercussions for that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Anyway, so the point is, whether it's him, whether it's trigonometry, they've been taken down. | ||
| So I didn't want to go down that route. | ||
| So I've been speaking to Odyssey. | ||
| Julian is their CEO, and he's been very kind. | ||
| And I'm gonna put my show on this other platform called Odyssey, which is decentralized. | ||
| Isn't Brett's show on that as well? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's called Radical with Majid Nawaz. | ||
| There's Rumble, which is another platform that's more open. | ||
| So I spoke to those guys too, but I think with me, with Odyssey, see it's built on the blockchain tech? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And Rumble, I don't think its videos are decentralized in that way. | ||
| So even if the Odyssey website's removed, The library blockchain check that those videos sit on stay on the blockchain, and I will then own my own content. | ||
| So that's my idea. | ||
| I think I want to live by example. | ||
| If I'm worried about going either in a centralized direction with the planet or a decentralized direction, I want to try and move my own media content in the decentralized way. | ||
| Walk to walk. | ||
| And the other thing I've got is that substack, which I set up as soon as I lost my gig. | ||
| And I do sort of written content on there. | ||
| And finally, I'll be doing some collaboration with Getter as an alternative to Twitter just to try and have that diversity on the Twitter space. | ||
| I'll be doing some videos and live streaming and tweet content on Getter as well. | ||
| But those three, Odyssey, Substack and Getter, will be where people will be able to find me. | ||
| The content's called Radical, whether it's on Odyssey's, Radical with Majid Nawaz. | ||
| On Substack, it's called the Radical Dispatch. | ||
| And my name on Getter, you can find me on there as well. | ||
| Majid, I appreciate you. | ||
| This was everything I wanted and more. | ||
| I'm so glad we did it, and we will do it again. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| Thank you very, very much. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You heard it, folks. |
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