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Dec. 22, 2022 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
57:54
How the US & China Colluded On Covid! With Michael P Senger - #052 - Stay Free with Russell Brand
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You're not alone.
In this video, you're going to see the T-13.
Hello and welcome to stay free with Russell Brand.
Today is subcutaneous, a deep under the skin in-depth conversation with a fascinating thinker in the past.
We've had Tim Robbins.
Did you see that episode?
Jordan Peterson, Eckhart Tolle, Maya, a.k.a.
M.I.A., Vandana Shiva's been on, Jocko Willink, and today I'm joined by Michael A lawyer and the author of Snake Oil, How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World.
Michael's been an outspoken critic around the pandemic and the emulation by Western liberal democracies of Chinese-style tyranny, says Western elites are to blame for our response to COVID-19 through the influence and collusion with the Chinese Communist Party.
And it is this subject that we will be discussing among others today.
Welcome to the show, Michael.
Thanks for joining us.
Thank you so much, Russell.
It's in particular this collusion that interests us because we've been pitted a narrative where
US interests and Chinese interests in particular are at odds with one another and buttress against
one another but perhaps the tendrils of deceit in that narrative are visible through the evident
emulation of Chinese policy for example around Covid.
So can you give us clear examples of collusion between the CCP and Western interests, be they governmental or private, in particular US pharmacological interests?
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, the focus of my work is really just on the significance of everything we've experienced over the last three years with regard to COVID.
If you think back to spring 2020, with those initial lockdowns, what really happened is across the world, A liberal democracy suddenly ground to a sudden stop.
You know, beginning in Italy and then going from one country to another, you had that domino effect across Europe.
And then, you know, quickly came across here to the United States, starting in California and then San Francisco.
It's these draconian lockdowns based on absolutely nothing other than what China says they did in Wuhan for a couple months at the very beginning.
And, you know, to your point, I don't think there's any stronger evidence of collusion between these governments than that.
I mean, that's really what piqued my interest in this entire subject matter, because this policy of lockdown was not in any Western pandemic plan.
It had no history in western science since the middle ages of the very latest and it had been completely, you know, contradicted by everything we learned about infectious disease and epidemiology throughout the 19th and 20th century.
This idea of just locking down and arbitrary closing things to try to protect people from ubiquitous respiratory virus had just completely ruled out By our entire development of our epistemology about infectious disease throughout the last two centuries.
And yet suddenly, just based on what China says they did, this policy is imported all over the world universally based on absolutely nothing but this vague promise it's going to save lives.
I think that really speaks to the level of influence that the Chinese Communist Party actually has throughout the Western world.
Because even as we're being told that China has experienced a backslide of totalitarianism, it becomes a brutal dictatorship, as our officials pretend to be so hawkish and so wary of China, we get all these headlines, when it actually comes to the important policies You know, they're very credulous about taking this information from China.
Every single one of these policies, beginning with the initial lockdowns, and then going to, you know, the ventilators, mass mandates, the idea of mass testing, and then of course going all the way to vaccine passes, every single one of these policies really just based on what China says they did in Wuhan.
So you believe that the emulation of the policies in themselves is evidence of a type of collusion.
But wouldn't the lockdown measures, which you say there's never been a Western plan for, the fact that that's unprecedented, isn't it because it's an unprecedented situation, Michael, that there's never before been a comparable pandemic?
Or are you saying that the Spanish flu was comparable or even bird flu or some of the SARS situations that we'd previously had a couple of decades before?
So it's the impression of an unprecedented situation based on all the information that we initially got from China.
And that's really what this all comes back to is the level of credulousness.
The problem here is the level of credulousness that our own leaders and our own elites across institutions, across media, academic, journalistic and political institutions have shown With regard to the information that's come from China.
Because the entire impression of this super virus was deliberately sown, I would say deliberately, but sown by the impression that we got of the initial events in Wuhan.
You know, suddenly, beginning in January of 2020, we're told that there's this virus, you know, plaguing the residents of Wuhan, and you have all these videos.
If you're on social media at that time, you have all these videos of poor Wuhan residents, you know, suddenly spasming and falling to their deaths, and you have piles of bodies in the streets of Wuhan from this super virus just plaguing the residents of Wuhan.
And of course, in hindsight, we know all these videos are fake.
Every single one of these videos that was going across social media was fake, but that's a very creepy scene.
to uh you know create the world's first impression of this virus and it sows that seed in people's minds you know oh could this be real um could it be that there's this super virus that you know necessitates doctors you know shooting people as they're trying to escape the city That's a very creepy thing for ordinary social media users.
You know, Facebook is usually such a happy place, but at the beginning of 2020, you're just inundated with these very personal messages that there's a super virus coming to get you.
And that creates a very strong initial impression.
You couple that with the initial data that came out of China, you know, showing that the fatality rate was, you know, 4%.
Of course, we know that's, you know, completely wrong.
In hindsight, the fatality rate for those under 70 years of age was never higher than 0.1%.
The overall infection fatality rate across all age groups was about 0.2%.
The initial data from China was that it was 80 times that, a fatality rate of 4%.
We're just completely out of whack.
And you couple that with this propaganda campaign, this agitprop of, you know, residents falling over, and you have this super strict lockdown.
And suddenly, the dictator of China implements this strict lockdown of this one city.
And we're told that this is effective and suddenly it leads across the world just weeks later.
It doesn't even really take that long.
You know, just a week after he implements it, you have all the heads of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom saying, you know, I will praise China again and again because their actions really showed the way for this virus.
Weeks after that, you know, the World Health Organization officially rubber stamps this policy of lockdown into global policy.
And based on nothing but that, you have this completely unprecedented, untested policy.
And based on nothing but the dictator of China implementing this policy of lockdown.
in this one city, and weeks later saying that this was effective in reversing the course of the virus, leaders around the world adopt this policy.
And when you look at, you know, China's graph of coronavirus deaths, I mean, it's just so obviously forced, as I captured here on the cover of my book, you know, it's going up and up and up and then, I mean, they didn't even do a particularly good job of forging the data.
So anybody with a bit of common sense or a bit of geopolitical knowledge about how China fakes their data in every single subject will immediately recognize that this data is fake.
But when you look at the leaders of all our institutions, the closer you get to the positions of leadership throughout this pandemic, the more likely those officials have been to treat this obviously forged data as real.
That is absolutely unbelievable and it really speaks to You know, how much those systems have merged and the level of credulousness that our leaders are actually showing toward the Chinese Communist Party isn't it if they pretend?
In my opinion, it's simply to mollify the public by pretending to be hawkish about China.
If the early evocative images from Wuhan were indeed staged, the images of people getting sprayed down, the very dramatic images that a lot of us still remember but that do appear to have somehow been erased, generally speaking, from the public memory, if they were staged, if these were not legitimate images, do you believe that there has been Deliberate collusion by Western interests, or do you think it's a genuine error?
Because if you're suggesting that it is collusion, Michael, what is the nature of it?
Who benefits?
And why elsewhere are there narratives where it appears that in the matter of The desire to have a unipolar world.
U.S.
and globalist interests are deeply opposed to China.
Is that in itself a false narrative?
How does this collusion create benefits?
What was the ultimate benefit of the lockdown?
So if you could just build that for us.
A bit like that graph, in fact.
Absolutely.
It is a false narrative, to a certain degree.
You know, they're not completely merged.
The interests of Western elites and the interests of the Communist Party are not completely parallel.
But they're parallel to the extent of, you know, wanting more power for themselves.
And that's where the Chinese Communist Party's policies, that's why, you know, we've seen the Chinese Communist Party's policies more and more become implemented across the world.
And so the purpose of those initial videos that created the world's first impression of this virus with, you know, residents of Wuhan, you know, falling to their deaths, and of course, all these videos have been proven to be completely fake.
They were released all over social media and purportedly portrayed events in Wuhan, but they did not.
They were all staged videos or training videos or videos from places that had absolutely nothing to do with Wuhan.
But the purpose behind them is an open question.
But when you think, what could the purpose possibly be?
Because they painted China and the Chinese Communist Party in such a bad light.
So the only purpose of these videos was simply to terrify people.
Well, I think that speaks to, you know, how does Xi Jinping and hawks like him within the Chinese Communist Party view China's relations with the Western world.
You know, he believes that the West will never respect China, that the way you can get Westerners to believe pretty much anything you want is by confirming their bias that, you know, the Chinese Communist Party is brutal and they're totalitarian.
And this is really the message That dictated our entire response to COVID-19.
That China had this real lockdown.
That the reason, you know, oh, they could have a graph like this and nobody else, you know, every single other country in the world, all 200 other countries, you know, we just had cases that rose and fell and didn't matter what we did.
But the Chinese Communist Party had a real lockdown.
You know, they welded people in.
That was some of the most effective propaganda from that very beginning, is those images of people welding people in.
It's like, oh, the Chinese are so brutal, they could just weld people into their homes.
But at the same time, You know, just a couple months later, we were inundated with these headlines, you know, all that China, the US has absolutely no control over the virus.
You know, China is on top of the tiniest risk.
That's the exact words of a headline in the Washington Post.
Headline Salon goes, you know, oh, China showed the way to control this virus.
Why can't America learn from them?
The New York Times is saying China offers its own version of freedom.
And it all comes back to that idea that China was the only ones who could have this real lockdown because of their totalitarian system.
At the beginning of the lockdown period outside of China, in European countries, specifically Italy and the UK, where I'm from, There were a spate of tweets and social media accounts advocating for a change of direction.
There was a moment where the UK talked about herd immunity and a Swedish-style, somewhat laissez-faire attitude to controlling movement and regulating behaviour.
Is it true that many of these accounts were Chinese-sponsored, first of all, Michael?
And secondly, when it comes to the origins of this virus, how much more is there to be understood, in particular whether or not it was a wet market or a laboratory, and how integrated US interests were at the point of origin?
So yeah, especially in the spring of 2020, when the world started going into lockdown, you had these vast armies of social media bots repeating the exact same words in every single language and dialect across the world.
And this was revealed, actually, in a limited hangout with a New York Times article, which became the subject of my first article on the subject.
You know, I had no platform back when this all started.
I became an activist in this community simply because I didn't see anybody.
When you looked Across, you know, I was looking for anybody with the platform, journalists, officials, academic celebrities, anybody who's looking at Chinese influence on the response to COVID.
I didn't find anyone.
So all my work over the last three years has really just been stepping into that role that I didn't see anybody else playing.
And I got my start by tracking China's influence across social media, especially these bot posts.
And this was revealed by a non-profit, which released the information to New York Times in the spring, summer of 2020, about all these bots, hundreds of thousands of bots, which had stormed social media all across the world, all different languages and dialects, using the exact same words about how, oh, we're just sitting here washing our hands.
And meanwhile, China is, you know, they're sharing this video.
Of, you know, China spraying the streets and, you know, high, you know, locking down and cleaning everything and saying, you know, if only we could have a response like China.
This is very blatant that, you know, these bots are denigrating every single other country in the world, every single other government in the world, while saying, you know, if only we could have a response like China.
And the exact same words.
This is a very clear bot campaign involving hundreds of thousands of accounts.
And then when you look at every single leader around the world when they initially hesitated to implement lockdowns, you look at their social media feed around that time, and just in the same way, they are all inundated with these bots, you know, denigrating them just very vulgar foul language, which I won't be here like, oh, you know, you're gonna have blood on your hands.
And if you don't implement a lockdown, like China did, So it's very clear here, especially with those initial bots, you know, storming the entire world, denigrating every other government, it's very clear that those bots came from China.
And that's only logical because we know that within China, for many years now, they've had an entire social media army.
They actually have hundreds of thousands of employees within China who do nothing but post on social media all day.
This actually amounts to billions of social media posts per year.
And the Chinese Communist Party has found that this is very effective in keeping control within China, because you can't prevent narratives that they don't want from getting on social media.
What they do instead is drown it out with these patriotic propaganda messages all day.
So social media is just saturated and essentially useless for all intents and purposes, because the impression of the will of the Chinese people is just whatever the Chinese Communist Party wants at any given time.
So that campaign was effectively traced back to China.
And then to go back to the lab, and that's another key piece of this puzzle, is that that was very crucial from the very earliest stage when you had those initial videos being shared in early 2020 of Wuhan residents falling to their deaths.
And those were shared all over social media by what were Most likely bots, just given the volume of how often these videos were shared, but also by Chinese dissidents.
A lot of these videos were shared also by people who pretended, at least, to be dissidents, the hawks against the Chinese Communist Party.
And why is that?
I think in some cases, you know, that idea of controlled opposition goes way back, you know, over a century in communist countries.
So some of this is controlled opposition, and that's how the Chinese Communist Party exercises influence in the Western world.
It's by co-opting the hawks, co-opting the people who are pretending.
to be holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable.
So this is how disinformation gets into the Western world, is they say, oh, you know, we're sharing this because it makes China look so bad, when really China is just trying to create the illusion of this super virus and wants everybody to believe it.
And some of that, of course, feeds on itself.
You know, it might initially come through controlled opposition within the China hawk and dissident community, but then China hawks and dissidents say, oh, yeah, you know, that does make the Chinese Communist Party look bad, so we'll release it as well.
So those videos, all of a sudden you have these videos of people falling to their deaths.
At the exact same time, we're getting these stories about how, you know, oh, there's China's top virology lab is in Wuhan.
And look at that, the dictator of China just shut down one city with a lab in it.
And we start getting these, you know, stories about how, you know, maybe it came from this lab, maybe it's this lab leak.
And that is absolutely crucial.
And the biggest thing that I think people should understand is how crucial the idea of a lab leak was from the very beginning, and getting the entire world to go along with this idea of lockdown, not just at the propaganda level, the individual level, the idea that, you know, oh, there's this lab in China, that's another reason to be scared of the virus.
But the entire reason that we have this emergent response, the entire reason the national security community, which played an outsized role in these lockdowns, was able to override all our existing pandemic plans so easily is because of the suspicion that it might have leaked out of this lab.
And then There's essentially this sort of double bluff as well.
Because initially, just in the first couple weeks, the idea of a lab leak was censored across social media.
And people would be censored for sharing the idea of a lab leak.
They immediately set up this false dichotomy.
Where the same scientists who initially reported to intelligence officials that it might have come from this lab in Wuhan, just a couple weeks after that, they say, oh, no, it actually came from this wet market that was, you know, 100 miles from the Wuhan lab.
And they published a paper saying that.
And that false economy has stayed with us from this day to this day.
So that when people ask you, oh, do you think it came from lab?
And you say, no, I don't think it came from lab.
And they say, oh, so you must be a wet market guy.
You must think it came from opangolin.
And of course, it's just absolute nonsense.
There are a thousand other places that it could have come from.
And in fact, we have overwhelming evidence that it was already spreading months before all this occurred.
You know, we didn't hear about this virus until January of 2020.
We were told that, you know, it jumped out of a penguin or jumped out of the Wuhan lab and started, you know, killing everybody in Wuhan.
But we have overwhelming evidence now that it was spreading all over Europe and even in Brazil and the rest of the world by fall 2019 at the very latest.
And that some officials within the United States intelligence community actually knew had been tracking a virus since fall 2019.
So how could they possibly believe, you know, five months later, The lockdown was going to stop this virus, but this was this narrative that was used to sell the public on this idea of lockdown.
You know, you had the super virus jump out of Wuhan and then somehow it jumped out over to Italy and jumped over one country and another.
This science fiction narrative of the super virus jumped from country after country, but this virus is already everywhere.
It just wasn't that deadly, so we didn't notice it until we started mass testing for it.
So LubeLab was actually crucial to that narrative Do I believe that it came out of lab?
Absolutely not.
It was just circulating everywhere.
And there was a wave of excess deaths across Asia in 2019 such that it probably came from somewhere in Asia maybe in late 2018 or early 2019.
But this narrative that it jumped out of lab or that it jumped out of some animal in the wet market in Wuhan is absolute nonsense.
It's been used to reinforce this narrative of pandemic that was used to suspend rights across the world.
What is the advantage of concealing that this virus has been active and present for a much longer period than is publicly acknowledged?
And what is the advantage for the Chinese in trying to establish a template that will be mirrored by liberal western democracies.
What is the benefit of concealing that the virus has been around for, as you say, one year more than is understood, whether you believe in the lab theory or the wet market theory?
What about the origin is being concealed?
What is the advantage in that lie?
So, as you say, the fact which has been borne out in peer-reviewed studies all over the world, just overwhelming evidence that this virus is already spreading.
Many months before January of 2020, by fall of 2019, it was just spreading all over the world.
That fact has been downplayed by elite institutions, especially public health institutions, especially major media outlets like the New York Times, who have really gone all in on this idea that we had the lockdown in spring 2020, that those lockdowns were effective, because it undermines the narrative so completely.
You know, it doesn't take much in terms of logic to realize that if this virus was already spreading unbeknownst to everybody by fall 2019 that shutting down the world in march 2020 was not going to be effective in uh you know effective method of stopping that virus and in fact it was not effective you know we now have overwhelming evidence as well those lockdowns completely failed despite all the collateral damage
Despite the fact that all that collateral damage was known at the time that they were implementing the lockdowns, this has been meticulously documented as well, that people knew that there were going to be a mental health crisis that is going to cause extreme hunger, not just for the developing world, but for the poor in the developed world as well.
I mean, that idea of sheltering in place when you're living in a large family in a one-room apartment is far different for wealthy people who can Um, you know, shelter in place in one of their many flats somewhere.
Uh, you know, this absolutely horrific collateral damage, which was just completely ignored by officials in implementing this policy, which was not effective.
And now we know that it was for a virus, which is already ubiquitous by fall of 2019 and early 2020.
of 2019 and early 2020. So that fact is so damning to the narrative that this
lockdown was effective in stopping this virus which was jumping over from one
country to another, the super virus.
That fact has been downplayed because it undermines that narrative so completely.
And so now everybody's kind of bought into it, bought into the lie.
that it has to have been a lab leak or it has to have been a wet market. And that's the dichotomy
that you'll see across all the elite media outlets. There's either the ones who publish
a story about the lab leak, but then they'll publish a story saying, oh no, it had to have
come from a pangolin. But it's neither of those. We actually have absolutely no idea where it came
from, but it was already spreading many, many months before that. So why would the Chinese
Communist Party go to these lengths to craft this narrative to get the entire world to emulate
their response to COVID-19.
It's all part of a sort of long-term project.
You know, Xi Jinping has stated very clearly that his goal—he doesn't believe that Western democracy, the ideals of the Enlightenment, and the Chinese Communist Party can coexist indefinitely.
He sees these ideas of democracy, human rights, independent judiciaries, civic life, as fundamentally threatening to not just the longevity of the Chinese Communist Party, but to the world's future, the socialist future that he envisions for the world.
He's made this very clear in his documents for many years now.
So his long-term goal, he also doesn't believe that that the world will ever respect the Chinese Communist Party, so he believes instead that the world has to come to emulate China by essentially exporting China's system to the west of the world.
And this becomes part of the policy of unrestricted warfare, of exporting elements of China's totalitarian system sort of discreetly to the rest of the world and getting them to adopt those through global institutions, through China's influence within global institutions and elite institutions across the western world.
This is made possible because China's influence with their institutions did not go back just for a couple of years or even to just Xi Jinping's time.
It goes all the way back to the 1970s when Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon first went to China and opened up China.
Since that time, we developed this doctrine of change through trade, where we engage with China.
Western countries let China in and developed economic relations with China with the intent that they would become more like us.
That as they became wealthier, they would demand human rights and the other freedoms that we now have in the Western world.
But really, what happened is that over those decades, what really changed was simply the story that we were being told about China.
As one of our institutions after another, and all the elites who we had connected to China, bought into their system and started telling the story of changing China when really China's system had not fundamentally changed.
So you have these horror stories.
You have Tiananmen Square.
You have the brutal repression of Falun Gong.
And then, of course, in 2012, you have the return of Xi Jinping, who represents a very hawkish wing of the Chinese Communist Party, known as the Princelings, the original descendants of Mao Zedong's revolutionaries.
And his rise to power is considered in some ways a soft coup by the princelings against the technocrats who used to run the Chinese Communist Party.
And what we see in 2020, and so in the years before COVID, we start to hear all these horror stories about things coming out of China.
You hear about concentration camps, and you're like, oh wow, that's not...
That's not consistent with what I've heard about China changing and getting better.
You hear about their treaty violations in Hong Kong.
There's this brutal crushing of dissent in Hong Kong.
You're like, wow, that's strange.
China's really had this backslide into totalitarianism.
And then what happens is that in 2020 with COVID, the Chinese Communist Party essentially takes that influence and takes it into its highest gear, such that The entire world very quickly adopts some of the most totalitarian elements of China's system, beginning with those initial lockdowns, and then everything that stems after that, you know, the idea of mass mandates that undermines the principle of bodily autonomy.
The idea of lockdowns undermines the principle of, you know, free movement, free association, the right to work.
Every single one of these principles of the Enlightenment is essentially undermined by each of these policies very quickly.
Such that the entire world starts to look a lot like China in a very short time.
Michael, if there is a Chinese ideological expansionist project to create a unipolar CCP type world, and there is a US globalist hegemony that similarly wants a homogenized US hegemonic through like the implementation of decrees perhaps issued through the WHO, WEF and ultimately representing American corporate big tech interests, energy interests, finance interests, then surely the Chinese unipolar project and the US unipolar project are
Definitively at odds, so why would they collude and collaborate on a project of this scale?
What is the advantage of Western interest, broadly speaking, umbrellaed under US hegemony, in toeing the line for what seems like a very particular Chinese project?
So Western elites and the Chinese Communist Party are at odds to a degree, and depending on the subject, depending on who exactly you're talking about, and a lot of the reason why it was so easy for the world to adopt many of the Chinese Communist Party's policies, especially during their response to COVID-19, is that their interests are really not Not opposed to those of corporate America for all intents and purposes from most of these policies.
You know, you look at what happened with lockdowns.
They absolutely crushed small businesses.
You know, here in the United States, I think it was over half of small businesses went bankrupt and did not recover.
That's absolutely horrific.
But at the same time, you know, corporate earnings, the stock market absolutely soared during that same time period.
So it's not that hard to get people to believe these ridiculous lies about how China controlled the virus by shutting down one city for a couple months.
That's utterly absurd and obscene.
And it's not that hard to get people to believe it when it's in their interest to believe it.
And so it's that alignment of the self-interest of Western elites with the propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party.
In some cases, you look at the officials, the initial instigators of these lockdowns especially, many of those have really close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
You know, in the United Kingdom, for example, You have Jeremy Farrar who was one of the leading instigators of those initial lockdowns.
He was very quick to praise China's initial lockdowns and was very excited when the UK went into lockdown and he was always advocating much stricter lockdowns.
He is the CEO of the Welcome Trust.
It's one of the world's largest vaccine non-profits, very close ties to Gates Foundation and the global vaccine industry, and he was actually just given a position, essentially rewarded for his advocacy for lockdowns, which we know absolutely failed, were absolutely horrific in the harm they did, and did absolutely nothing to control the virus.
But this guy, German Farrar, was actually just promoted to the World Health Organization, one of the highest positions of the World Health Organization, after the role he played in that.
And he's not the only one.
Another SAGE member, they're both members of SAGE, Susan Mickey, is even more ridiculous.
You know, her story, she's a 40-year member of the British Communist Party with absolutely no background in epidemiology or infectious disease, who was on SAGE, was one of the, you know, very small handful of advisors who essentially dictated the United Kingdom's response to COVID.
That's just insulting to our intelligence.
They're just mocking us at this point.
This woman, who is a 40-year member of the British Communist Party, who is a behavioral scientist and had no background in infectious disease, was advised by the government of the United Kingdom and was in charge of the SAGE nudge unit to get people to consent to lockdowns.
And she was also awarded with a big promotion by the World Health Organization at the same time as Jeremy Farrar, and is now in charge of the World Health Organization's nudge unit.
So this is very, you know, with some of the initial instigators of these lockdowns, I mean, they were mocking us with how obvious the influence is.
But from there, It's not necessarily direct influence.
It's really our own elites in the Western world doing this to us because it's not in their self-interest to oppose it.
And oftentimes, like with these lockdowns, it really is in their self-interest to simply go along with that narrative, even if it isn't true.
And seeing nobody else oppose it, it just becomes its own false reality.
It just kind of snowballs from there.
So, So corporations, you know, it's in their interest to go along with the narrative.
And academics, you would expect them to, you know, speak up about something like this.
But because of the ties that their universities have with China, you know, China gives a lot of money to universities and think tanks.
And journalism outlets, you know, they are sponsored by Western oligarchs and Western elites, the ones who are really in charge of the information that we get from our own media outlets.
It's not in their interest to oppose us either, because they're so economically tied to China as well.
Yeah, I think for most people in the United Kingdom and the Western world and the U.S., We understand that this is a big historical moment, and if we decoupled from China, yeah, that would be costly.
We'd take a 10 to 20 percent hit in stocks, and that's too bad, but we understand that for a big historical moment like this, it's necessary.
But for the billionaire class, for the oligarch class, it's a lot bigger than that.
It's not just 10 to 20 percent.
A lot of times it's 80 or 90 percent, or in some cases, outright bankruptcy if we decoupled from China.
That is a huge fall for, you know, some of the richest people in the world suddenly face bankruptcy because of a historical moment.
So you can understand that, you know, they're not necessarily evil, bad people.
It's just that they're not gonna go out of their way to report on a story.
That would lead to their own outright financial collapse.
If it was released some other way, if that became the narrative, then they'd go along with it and realize that it was necessary.
But they're not going to go out of their way to do that.
And that's why you get this coordination across all of our elite sources of information.
Where you get the embrace of what is essentially a false story that these lockdowns actually were necessary, that there's a supervisor jumping out and there's nothing unusual about adopting China's response to COVID-19, as absurd as that is.
And that's why what's been discussed in our media outlets, the narrative that's been towed by our media outlets with regard to COVID-19 is so completely disconnected from the reality that we can all see on the ground is because that narrative is, you know, what's necessary to preserve ultimately those financial connections with China so that people don't
People don't ask.
They don't care to ask.
They don't care enough to ask where these policies actually came from because they actually knew, you know, it's all hiding just underneath the surface.
I'm not, you know, a super investigative journalist, you know, I'm very good, you know, I've meticulously cited all the sources, so it's all well documented, but I've not, you know, discovered any top secret information here.
This is all hiding, just made the surface that every single one of these policies, you look at the initial pandemic plan, the initial response plan for the response to COVID-19 in the United Kingdom, for example, every single one of these policies, all the sources cited are from China.
And the same with, you know, New Zealand.
They very explicitly say that we're adopting this policy of zero COVID.
And since the only country that's ever achieved zero COVID is China, we're just going to take all these policies from there and all the citations are from China.
It's all hiding just beneath the surface.
So it's not that the information is actually hidden, it's just simply that it's being downplayed because they don't want people to know about that, because that would be so costly.
The political backlash would be so costly, not only to their own position, but in terms of the historical moments that precipitate with the decoupling from China, that would be extraordinarily costly to our current cadre of elites.
So it seems that what much of your work has unveiled is that prior to our understanding of the advent of this virus, it was present perhaps in Asia, that it was Opportune to present it as having originated in Wuhan, perhaps originally for Chinese interests and then secondarily for Western interests.
The Chinese had a vested interest in ensuring that their lockdown policies were emulated.
This converged with a series of global Western interests The aspect of this that I have trouble with, Michael, because I'm obviously trusting your assurances that all of the sources that you're using are in your book, Snake Oil, is that I believe that the entire project of US globalism is currently underwritten by the idea, see, like, you know, Davos-style W.E.F.
One World Central New World Order.
I believe that's undergirded by the idea that whilst it may be tyrannical and undemocratic for us to impose a technological dictatorship upon you, it is better than what will happen if the Chinese version of globalism plays out.
So we have therefore decided on your behalf To prevent that from happening by acting upon the interests of corporatism, globalism, unelected globalist bodies, massive foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Clinton Foundation, to ensure that a cosy, liberal-looking version of technological dictatorship is imposed.
We'll have our own versions of social credit scoring, our own version of centralised currencies that can be controlled, switched on, switched off.
But nevertheless, tyrannical though this may be, it is still liberal, you know, the identity politics hue will be represented, and it's not like, you know, Tiananmen Square tanks are coming out just to spray people down and shut people up.
So I suppose the challenge I have here is that when you say there is some legitimacy to the idea that there is a globalist expansionist Chinese project, do you see that that, to a point, Legitimises American hegemony.
Legitimises the military-industrial complex, because they can sort of say, even though they don't publicly and explicitly say this, we don't want Russia and China teaming up, they'll screw the world over.
Let's drain Russia of all their resources in this proxy war in Ukraine.
Then we'll start demonizing China again, hence the new stance on, you know, Chinese protests, where we know that the protesters being lauded and lionized rather than condemned, even though of course we saw lockdown protesters, broadly speaking, demonized in Western democracies.
So I wonder what you feel about that.
I wonder how you sort of, how that buttresses up against the sort of broad idea that many of us are nervous Because I always felt Chinese is a sort of isolated country and they might have interests in their region like you know notably and obviously Taiwan but they're not really particularly interested in coming to London or Bruges or like Delaware and imposing CCP style ideology but you seem to be saying that broadly speaking or in a longer term there is an interest in doing that.
Oh, I mean, absolutely.
There's no question that the idea that China is threatening is, you know, very useful propaganda to reinforce the idea of global hegemony, you know, even American or Western global hegemony.
But that's really all part of the plan.
You know, that really goes back to what Xi Jinping thinks about China's relationship with the West.
The West will never respect China.
He's not, you know, trying to get the entire world to say, you know, all hail Xi, all hail China.
It was all done through Western propaganda that is made plausible so that we accepted this version of sort of totalitarianism.
That's why it all uses these global institutions like the World Health Organization and like the World Economic Forum.
You know, if somebody who was, let's say, the mayor of London or the mayor of Los Angeles, just said, you know, okay, I'm just gonna adopt this policy of lockdown because the dictator of China did it, and just suspend everybody's rights, and you know, maybe I'll follow the rules, maybe I won't, who cares, but you have no more rights anymore.
You say, no, that's treasonous.
You can't just take a policy that the dictator of China did and did it here.
Well, when it goes up through the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, they rubber stamp it and, you know, Klaus Schwab gets up there and he says, you know, this is the good policy for the future of humanity or whatever and, you know, Tedros says, you know, China showed the way and, you know, what China showed is that you have to do this.
Suddenly, it's rubber stamped as a global policy and mayors across, you know, one country after another, they do it and even if they're not corrupt, they see everybody else doing it and so they go along.
Um, go along for the ride, and suddenly this becomes global policy.
But the story we're given is not that we're doing it because China did it.
The story we're doing is that, oh, you know, China was barbaric, but it worked there.
We're doing it because our global institutions are telling us to do it.
You know, despite the fact that it's well known, it was always well known, the World Health Organization was in the pocket of the Chinese Communist Party.
A lot of this is, you know, tempting our own elites with a sort of will to power and creating that sort of moral intellectual disconnect where the truth no longer matters.
Because once they've bought into that policy of lockdown, and we see this across the entire world, not just with elites, but everybody else, once people have bought into that idea of lockdown, it's so effective in seeding the idea that there is a super virus.
Because the collateral damage was so obvious and so well known at the time these policies were implemented, that once you've bought into that, and you've placed that bet, And then you're told that this policy was not only extraordinarily harmful to a lot of vulnerable people and poor people, but it wasn't even effective.
You think that can't be right.
There had to have been a super virus.
Lockdowns had to have been effective because there's no way I would go along with something like that.
There's no way I would just endorse totalitarianism, an absolutely horrific crime against humanity, if it wasn't effective.
So people's egos become attached to it.
The entire response to COVID-19 was really sort of downstream from that.
So it's that very sudden shift in values Where the truth no longer matters, and people become disconnected from objective reality, from objective science.
They learn that, you know, truth is just whatever elites say it is in any given time.
They say something is science, then suddenly it's the science.
You know, they can create history as they go along.
It's essentially tempting the entire rest of the world to go along with In many ways, you know, it's all psychological.
get them to embrace the Chinese Communist Party system while still believing that
you know they're opposed to China, while still believing that the Chinese
Communist Party is a threat. In many ways, you know, it's all psychological.
The Chinese Communist Party, when you look at their propaganda, it's very clear
they're not even trying to get the rest of the world to not see them as threat.
In fact, they very deliberately stoke this idea that China is barbaric, China is a threat, to get the rest of the world to become more like China.
Out of the supposed necessity, as you're saying, of opposing Chinese cultural hegemony, we instead get our own version of global hegemony.
You know, not only with those horrific videos that came out in response to COVID, but even more recently, you had these recent lockdowns across China and our own media outlets, which were demonizing protesters against lockdowns here in the Western world.
You know, it was only two years ago.
I'm old enough to remember the fact that they were all saying, you know, oh, China's response to COVID-19, the U.S.' 's
Disastrously faltered and China showed this virus can be controlled, imploring us to be like China.
At the same time, they're demonizing protesters against these lockdowns here in the United Kingdom and the United States.
They're saying, you know, comparing them to neo-Nazis, you know, you have public health officials signing a letter denouncing anti-lockdown protests and condemning them and saying that, oh, you know, these are populist radicals and not even, you know, Not only for reporting on the protests in media outlets, you essentially have this complete cover-up of the fact that these policies were extraordinarily unpopular and that there were all these protests.
But then just two years later, recently, with the protests against lockdowns in China, they're saying, you know, oh, these protesters are fighting back against this tyrannical system, against this tyrannical Chinese system.
And, you know, they're going to great lengths to try to pretend that this is consistent with They're demonization of anti-lockdown protesters here in the Western world saying, oh, well, you know, it's because China's lockdowns are stricter.
But at the same time, they were telling us that our lockdowns should be stricter to be more like China's.
There's no consistency here.
There's no truth.
It's simply a narrative that, you know, China is bad.
And once these policies have been embraced by us, they're good.
But, you know, don't think about where the policies came from, because the policies actually came from China.
It's power merging all over the world to create one sort of giant global socialist system.
You know, it's the war of Oceania and East Asia.
You know, we've always been at war with East Asia.
It goes back to you know, Orwell's vision of that sort of dystopian future, where these governments pretend to be at war with each other.
And in many ways, the interests of the direct interests of elites are still opposed, such that, you know, they can be serious about opposing China for purposes of, you know, Taiwan's sovereignty.
And they might say that that's a red line, that if China invaded Taiwan, that they would, you know, declare war.
And they might be very serious about that red line.
But at the same time, they're very credulous with accepting information from China because it serves their own self-interest, because they have no interest in opposing, you know, getting to the bottom of why the world did that and opposing that narrative, because that would be so difficult and financially damaging for them to do that.
So it's these subtle ways, it's sort of using propaganda in a way that no regime ever has before, of not trying to sell their own system, Explicitly, not trying to get the world to like them, but instead just using propaganda to get the world to implement their policies and transform the world into a version of the Chinese Communist Party system.
Is there any evidence that US interests, as represented by Anthony Fauci and DARPA, were integrally involved in any of the matters that preceded this lockdown and the commencement of this story?
Have you got any data about that in your book, Michael?
Yeah, I mean, Anthony Fauci has been extraordinarily deferential to the Chinese Communist Party's narratives.
And, you know, especially with regard to lockdowns, he was one of the leading officials who endorsed this policy of lockdown.
Um, even as recently as 2021, he was advising the government of India saying that, you know, they should look to, uh, look to China, uh, the lockdowns that were done in China as a model, you know, response to this virus.
I mean, what is he basing that on?
You know, absolutely nothing.
You know, he said in a sworn deposition just last month, That you know he got the entire idea of lockdown just because his friend Clifford Lane flew to China and you know saw that they had a lockdown and the officials there said it was a great idea so they adopted it here in the United States.
I mean this is the guy who effectively led the entire American response to COVID-19 being that deferential implementing this horribly totalitarian catastrophic policy based on nothing but what the dictatorship in China said.
relationship with the Chinese Communist Party absolutely needs to be examined.
DARPA as well, one of the very first officials who we got information from about this virus,
really the United States government's only point of contact within Wuhan in those initial weeks,
was a guy named Michael Callahan, who was described as DARPA's virus investigator,
global virus investigator.
And we essentially got, the United States got its official version of the events of Wuhan and what was going on in Wuhan from this guy Michael Callahan in DARPA.
And, you know, he again, his version of events was extraordinarily close to what the Chinese Communist Party's own propaganda was describing.
Oh, you know, there are just bodies everywhere.
And yeah, it's this terrible super virus.
We had to put everybody on ventilators.
You know, he was big in advising the United States government to procure more ventilators.
We now know in hindsight, those ventilators were extraordinarily deadly for patients over the age of 65.
There was a 97.2% fatality rate for those patients who were put on mechanical ventilators.
With that in perspective, there were 26 times as likely to survive.
Patients over age 65 were 26 times as likely to survive if they were not put on mechanical ventilators.
So that's why you had this mad rush for ventilators in the very beginning, in those initial weeks.
And then, quietly, that entire policy of putting patients on ventilators because of a grassroots movement, they discovered how deadly it was, was rolled back.
It was all just on that initial messaging that we got from China, which was rubber-stamped by the World Health Organization, by those like Michael Callahan who ratified the propaganda
from the Chinese Communist Party about what was going on in Wuhan. He was
the only official source the United States government relied on and what he was
telling the United States government was essentially you know matched Chinese
propaganda. So there's a lot of... so yeah I think definitely within DARPA,
within the national security community, within public health and the leaders of the response to COVID-19 especially, there's a real deference, there's a real uncomfortable relationship of them with the Chinese Communist Party that absolutely needs to be examined.
That's really kind of the point of all my work, is that we need a real inquiry into how this actually happened, into what that relationship is.
And then once those policies get adopted by the source of initial instigators, it becomes official policy.
And it's very hard for institutions to backtrack on that.
And so everything that happened after that, I think it's mostly inertia.
It all just kind of snowballs from those initial events.
Because they're in too deep.
It just goes back to that, you know, what I was saying before about once they've endorsed this policy that had all these catastrophic Collateral damage, all these catastrophic harms resulted from it and wasn't effective.
That's just very hard for institutions to emit air and reverse tech.
So that's why these policies lasted as long as they did until, you know, one day earlier this year, they're suddenly rolled back for no real good reason at all, basically just because they became so unpopular.
And they essentially split, and now we're essentially in a war for memory over what happened.
They're trying to act like this is no big deal, you know, there was nothing unusual or is all necessary, maybe it saves some lives, who knows, you know, millions lives, billions lives, who's counting?
But they're trying to make everybody believe there wasn't a big deal.
And unfortunately, there's still a level of interest in this subject matter, even though it is, these mandates for the most part are in the past now, people still want answers to how this happened.
Because it's not just your normal policy difference.
It's not whether the top tax rate should be 40% or 50%.
It's not whether abortion should be legal at the state or federal level.
This policy disaster was absolutely catastrophic.
It caused extraordinary harm to a great many people in a very short amount of time for absolutely no good reason at all.
And we need to get to the bottom of why that happens.
Because I think the real motivation behind this, what was the ultimate goal here?
Not just exporting those elements of totalitarianism, but creating that disconnect where we no longer have truth.
Because truth is absolutely fundamental to any kind of democratic government, to any kind of free people.
Once elites can just kind of define reality as they want, however it sort of fits their agenda, whatever they want, and people learn to accept that, You have no basis for holding power to account.
So creating that sort of disconnect is sort of the most lasting impact of the response to COVID-19.
And until we can actually get truth back, we're not actually living in a real democracy.
That's such a beautiful explanation for how a kind of real-time simulacrum has been established.
Top-level collusion, the abandonment of available data in favor of data that allowed the implementation of unprecedented regulation.
I think your work is laudable.
Michael Senger's book, Snake Oil, is available now.
We'll post a link in the description if you want to get a copy of that.
Michael, thank you so much for your time.
Thanks for coming on and explaining that complex subject to us so eloquently.
It's been an incredibly valuable experience.
I appreciate it.
And I hope that you'll come back on and help us to chart the journey to justice as more and more of the truth around this complicated and opaque matter is exposed through conversations like the ones that you're having.
And thank you for including us in it.
Absolutely.
Thank you so much, Russell.
Pleasure's all mine.
Thank you for having me.
You can follow Michael on Substack, where you can read much more of his work.
On tomorrow's show, we'll be talking to the comedian and actor Duncan Trussell.
Thank you very much for joining us on today's episode of Subcutaneous.
Stay free.
He's switching.
He's switching.
Man, he's switching.
He's switching.
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