Today I’m speaking to Laura Dodsworth, author of the ‘A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic.’ We discussed how fear was used during the pandemic to influence decision-making in government and manipulate us! She breaks down exactly how they did it…this is an interview you don’t want to miss!Laura's book 'A State of Fear': https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57504035-a-state-of-fear For a bit more from us join our Stay Free Community here: https://russellbrand.locals.com/Come to my festival COMMUNITY - https://www.russellbrand.com/community-2023/NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/
Joining me now is Laura Doddsworth, journalist, photographer and filmmaker, author of A State of Fear, how the UK government weaponised fear during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Thanks very much for joining us to talk about this book, A State of Fear, which is a bestselling book, I understand, Laura.
It was.
It was on the Sunday Times bestseller list for four weeks.
Was it favourably reviewed by the mainstream media?
That's funny you should ask.
Well actually, it's had really great reviews.
Before I launch into some of the bad reviews, I shouldn't just start off with doing my own book down, should I?
It had great reviews.
You know, Lord Sumption called it an important book.
It had reviews in Telegraph and the European Journal of Psychotherapy, some great reviews, but the Sunday Times bestseller list didn't actually protect it from one of the worst book reviews known to man in the times.
Objectively, one of the worst ever won.
Well, maybe I'm not very objective as the author, but it wasn't a great review.
Much mention was made of my previous work.
There's one book where I photographed and interviewed 100 women about their vulvas, their vaginas, for an exploration of womanhood.
And you might have read the review and think that in real life, I'm followed around by a chorus of high-kicking vaginas.
I'm never without my vaginas.
It was a very kind of obvious attempt to demean me, to delegitimize my new book.
Mate, look here.
We've got a, this is a quote from the advisor on SPIB.
Do you know what that is advisor on SPIB?
Are we talking about like that nudge unit and all that type of stuff?
I know exactly what this is because this is somebody that I interviewed for my book.
SPI-B is the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviors.
They're a group of social Scientists, behavioral psychologists, various social scientists, and what they do is give the government advice in times of emergency, such as a pandemic.
And I interviewed several of them when I was researching my book, A State of Fear.
And this one here broke cover actually to speak to me because he was so concerned about the way the government was using fear and behavioural psychology.
I mean, to not to not mince our words, the government used fear to control you in lockdown.
That's fascinating.
And in a sense, perhaps it's something that we would have anticipated and something that we can appreciate.
Sometimes I try to approach the extraordinary events of the last couple of years In good faith, not to the denial of what is evident and plain that there have been regulations, legislations and advantages that have been accrued through that period that appear to point to an agenda, but at least not to lead to conclusions.
Perhaps you and I together through the course of our conversation can highlight a case for how the pandemic was a revealing period, how we learned about how power functions, How we learn about how propaganda operates and how we are manipulated, how our behavior is affected by messaging.
Starting with this quote, Laura, that we've just referred to, the way we've used fear is dystopian.
We have a totalitarian government in respect to propaganda, but all governments engage with propaganda.
The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable.
It's been like a weird experiment.
Ultimately, it backfired because people became too scared.
So there was an explicit intention To use fear, it's interesting to note that in the end, we're dealing with a basic palette of emotion, rage and fear and shame.
And even when something feels secular, mechanical and bureaucratic, its resources are quite emotional and deep.
And that obviously raises ethical questions.
Do you think that there was an ethical breach in the way that this pandemic was handled?
Do you think that they understood things that they didn't convey?
And do you think that they highlighted aspects of the pandemic, whether that's medically or socially?
Wow, there's so much to pick up on there.
But I'm going to go back to your first point that you approach this with good faith.
And I think that's really important because when I wrote the book, there were a lot of people that just said to me, well, why?
Why would the government use fear?
As though it had to indicate that there was some evil conspiracy theory or agenda.
You know, there may or may not be, but there's a very simple answer to the question.
And that is that governments use fear because it encourages compliance.
There is a gap between your rational thoughts and your suppressed emotions.
And it's that gap that allows governments or any would-be manipulator to control you, to manipulate you, to exert undue influence on you.
And fear is the steam in the emotional engine.
Fear is the big one.
Is it a breach of ethics to use fear?
I think this really depends on where you sit personally and ideologically.
I would probably put myself right at one end of the spectrum that says you should not use fear to control people.
It is unethical.
If this was a laboratory experiment, if a psychologist wanted to put their fingers in your brain, reach around and use fear to control you to see what happens, Then they would need to go through an ethics approval procedure.
You would sign a consent form.
None of us signed consent forms at the beginning of the lockdown, did we?
And what's more, at the end of the experiment, they would make sure that you left happy.
You know, you would probably watch a rom-com and have a slice of chocolate cake.
They wouldn't send you out a gibbering wreck with COVID anxiety syndrome.
There was never any end to this.
The advisors that I interviewed for A State of Fear, the ones who spoke to me on the record and those who spoke to me anonymously, I asked them all, what is the plan for de-escalating fear?
And there was no plan.
What really worried me and sent chills down my spine, actually, were a couple of advisors who were not only very content with the use of fear because they thought it was proportionate in a pandemic, Because pandemics are frightening.
But they said, well, hang on a minute.
Why would we de-escalate fear?
We will move from this to the next crisis, which is climate.
And I think that, you know, there is a risk here that governments lean on fear and nudge, which is a form of behavioural psychology and propaganda, to shut down debate, legislation, disagreement, in fact, because these covert ways to influence you are successful and they bypass all that kind of procedure.
So if you, you know, the The COVID pandemic and the lockdown created what academics have called a window of malleability.
Our habits changed and that meant we were ripe for more change.
You know, it's a great time then to push the idea of changing habits towards, say, net zero goals.
When you say covert, what covert modes were utilised?
Do you think that the entire Endeavor is to a degree covert because they were not explicit about their operation.
It's obviously incredibly convenient that many of the things that were used to mobilize fear and compliance have subsequently been demonstrably untrue, whether that's the efficacy of the medication.
Allegedly!
Or the origins of the virus.
Allegedly.
Or many of the subsequent measures.
So what was covert, Laura?
I think a lot of it is covert.
A pandemic is an emergency.
But back in February 2020, World Health Organization documents showed that at that point it was very well understood that COVID risk was stratified according to your age and your clinical status.
So the elderly or people with particular comorbidities were more at risk.
By March 2020, we locked down and the government's obviously asked this panel spy be a question.
Crikey.
What are we going to do?
We're going to lock down.
We're going to mass quarantine the healthy.
How are we going to make sure people follow this rule?
Because it's unprecedented.
I know from talking to these advisors.
They were worried about things like You know, the poor old working class chap missing football in the pub, you know, it's kind of classist assumptions going on here.
And so Spy B advisors reply with this whole gamut of suggestions.
One is that people's sense of personal threat needed to be increased because they were complacent, because they understood the risk to their demographic group.
Another way of looking at that is that people understood very well what the risk was.
They understood the risk to their age.
If I think back to that time my mum started shielding long before they were supposed to.
She's in her 70s, she's got terminal lung condition, she's poorly, her and her husband hold themselves up.
I on the other hand was trying to finish a big photography project and I thought right okay You know, my work might be thrown off the table for a while.
I'm off.
I'm taking some hand sanitizer.
I'm going to be careful.
I'm not going to go into services.
You know, we understood our risk.
The Spybee advisors never explained how they would only target the complacent or those at risk.
No, what happened was the government operationalised a campaign to make everybody frightened.
This isn't unheard of in public health problems.
If you think back to AIDS in the 1980s, we were told that everybody would know someone that died of AIDS within 10 years.
And that didn't happen, you know, that never came to pass.
I don't know anyone, luckily, who died of AIDS.
So there's a kind of a trend in public health to increase the sense of risk, to democratise the sense of risk, if you like.
So, to stop people being complacent, to increase their sense of risk, they did things like ads.
You know, nearly a billion pounds was spent across 11 government departments in the UK over three years, most of it on Covid.
So many ads, some of them taking quite a horror film aesthetic.
They were designed to make you feel that, you know, if your loved one died, it was your fault.
You didn't follow the rules.
Thank you, Laura.
Sorry to interrupt you.
Let's have a look at some of those ads.
Let's look at the steals first, guys.
And in the event where it becomes steals first, when it becomes when in the event that the people have correctly deduced that they are not at risk.
Then in order to elicit fear, you have to mislead them.
So it's not only covert, it's duplicitous at that point.
If people have correctly deduced, oh, I'm not really at risk, so I should go out.
In order to make those people afraid, you have to deceive them.
Let's have a look at some of these assets.
These are obviously assets that are derived from the UK.
Why don't you post in the chat some of the assets from your country?
They won't regard them as assets, they will.
we all regard them as propaganda, quite rightly.
So if you're in America or if you're in Canada, why don't you tell us the most egregious examples
in your country?
Show me what they were using in the US.
Show me what they were using all around the world.
'Cause that indicates that there was a degree of cohesion and collaboration transcendent of national sovereignty,
which one might argue is appropriate during a pandemic, but possibly had more nefarious ends
than the preservation of human life.
In fact, Laura, one of the things that I continually queried is,
This seems at odds with how we organize society in other areas.
It doesn't seem to me that, broadly speaking, the way we organise society is, all life is sacred.
We must protect everyone.
That's why our economic systems, social justice systems, are all reflecting this sanctity of human life.
Elsewhere, it looks like elitism, control, opportunity for regulation, opportunity for profit, are the mandates that drive the way the culture functions.
So look at these.
It's good that you mentioned the horror aspect.
I know you did some work, mate, on the red and yellow thing there,
like the sort of colors that were used.
And we'll break down, like, sort of tell, this one, see, telling the risk isn't real.
What's extraordinary here is all of these require us to accept, and we might have to
leave YouTube now, guys.
We might have to leave YouTube So there's a link in the description join us exclusively on rumble right now because I'm going to say things that still because the who's power still extends to the domain of YouTube where on rumble we can speak freely to convey love not to convey hate to convey unity not yet more division like when you so let's just go we're going to rumble now, um like The vaccines don't prevent transmission and we're not trialled to prevent transmission.
And asymptomatic people could not... 96% of asymptomatic people tested did not spread the virus and there was a type of PCR test available as early as March 2020 that could demonstrate that.
So any propaganda predicated on that idea was false.
Whether they knew it at the time or not can be contested and can't be proved, but it was false.
So anything like tell him I always keep a safe distance, irrelevant in most cases.
Tell him you never bend the rules, irrelevant in most cases.
Tell him the risk isn't real, irrelevant in most cases.
What's your view of this propaganda?
And we'll spin through some of the stills that we have available, guys.
Yeah, well, I mean, You make a really good point.
We were told that one in three people didn't know they had it, and that was presented as something that was really scary.
Wow, you know, you may come across your grandchild, or your lover, or someone you work with, or your neighbour, and they're a biohazard.
They won't know they've got it.
They could infect you.
Another way of looking at that is, one in three people experience it so mildly, they don't know they've got it.
But it was twisted around always to be frightening.
I mean, those stills we just looked at, they're really grainy, the eyes are looking at you.
It's supposed to make you feel like if you've killed, you know, if someone's died, it's your fault.
Don't look at what the government might be doing wrong, which is maybe care homes or lack of PPE or hospitals being built like, you know, cities for infection.
No, no, no, no.
Don't look at all of that over there.
Are you bending the rules?
Is it your fault?
You're a risk to your neighbor.
You're a risk to your loved ones.
So it's a responsibilization.
You've got those chevrons at the bottom.
You pointed out the yellow and the red and the black.
You know, what does that remind you of?
Well, it reminds you of disaster cordons.
Do not cross.
Danger.
But also a wasp.
A wasp sting.
This could hurt.
You know, everything about the visual is designed to create alarm, to hold you back.
Is that what you mean by... Sorry to interrupt you again, Laura.
Is this what is meant by nudges?
That isn't a nudge.
What is a nudge?
A nudge is a form of behavioural psychology which is supposed to nudge you into a form of behaviour that is better for you.
Because luckily, Russell, there are lots of people that know better than you what's good for you.
It's what's called choice architecture.
It's supposed to encourage you to make a better choice.
An example would be if you're in a shop putting fruit at eye level and putting chocolate out of reach.
Um, an example of a nudge would not be taxing chocolate and making fruit cheaper.
So it's not about mandates.
It's not about price.
It's about encouraging you to make the so-called best choice.
But that's all predicated on somebody knowing what's best for you.
It's covert manipulation with the assumption that the person making those nudges has the moral authority that I would require before trusting them with making that choice on my behalf, which I bloody well wouldn't.
And so this is just good use of propaganda, good use of semiotics rather than nudging.
I'd say so, but I think it is, you know, it's incredibly well staged.
Look at that.
They did these briefings in Downing Street.
They'd be well spaced out.
They gave it a kind of a military feel.
You've got the chevrons.
See, when the messages stay home, the chevrons are red.
As soon as it's stay alert, which is you can sort of get back to normal life a little bit.
It's green, green for go.
They'd have these experts, they'd use very martial language.
The whole thing was incredibly well staged.
And don't forget it was daily.
You know, we were bombarded daily with messages about death.
We were always told how many people died but never recovered.
We were told how many people were admitted to hospital but never left hospital.
And do you remember the COVID dashboard that the UK government ran?
It was probably the same in lots of other countries.
It showed you all these stats.
But it didn't show you other key performance indicators.
So you know how many people died, went to hospital, didn't say how many children had dropped off the register at school, or how many people have missed their cancer appointments, or what had happened to mental health stats.
The focus was always on these very deathly COVID stats, to the exclusion of everything else.
It took over the mind.
Laura, what I feel is that a helpful analytic tool with the pandemic and perhaps anything really is to remove the subject and then observe the behavior around it without the biases that the subject induces.
And what you can see here is how power functions when it comes to organizing our reality.
You highlight this information, you eliminate this information.
We had RFK on the show recently.
He had a Terrifying array of information to share with us, including that a significant amount of the funding for the vaccine rollout, excuse me, came from the military.
But when it came to the response, the military were involved to a sort of like a staggering degree, like that.
My first response to this was, oh, really, this is an inadvertent crisis to which authority is responding by capitalizing on it.
Like, oh wow, we've got the opportunity to regulate now, we've got the opportunity to shut down the censor, create protest law, introduce surveillance.
But it seems like everything that happened was beneficial when it came to centralized state power and was detrimental to individual freedom and the ability to have an open discourse about the various potential Another bit of information, the Cabinet Office spent £586 million in the last three years with a vast majority going on public health awareness campaigns during lockdown.
Let's have a look at that bit of propaganda from Scotland and please post your favourite propaganda in the chat.
This is what you mentioned earlier using images from horror.
Can you talk us through this Laura?
Yeah, so the images on the left are from a Scottish health Scottish Government health ad showing how COVID can spread.
Of course it's all, well, most loosely a metaphor.
COVID is not green slime.
It doesn't spread around like this.
And I remember when I saw it, I thought, God, this is horrific.
It's frightening.
If I'd seen this as a kid, I know this would have given me nightmares.
I would not want a child to see it.
What we have on the right is what it reminded me of when I racked my brains, which is a scene from The Exorcist, which has an age rating of 18.
So, you know, they said these ads were to target 18 and above, but there was no way to stop children from seeing it.
And what an ad like that has the potential to do is to disrupt intergenerational relationships long term.
I think it's really created a lot of suspicion between people.
You know, are we safe?
Um, what might we what might we give each other?
Can we hurt each other?
It's really changed how we go about families, but also waiting for cues from the government.
You just mentioned authority before.
And I think that takes me back to the existential crisis, this whiplash of shock I felt when we when we locked down because before that I'd had this idea that we were free.
You know that I had agency that I could choose pretty much what I did in my life and that we were part of a democracy and then an emergency hits and you find out that the most basic of freedoms you took for granted are not real at all.
You can be told you can't work.
I mean, I'm a freelancer.
Lockdown was okay for the laptop middle classes.
You know, if you've got a safe job and a nice home and a garden, you might have even quite enjoyed lockdown.
In fact, there was an article in the Times this week saying that somebody had lockdown nostalgia.
I mean, are you kidding me?
Lockdown nostalgia.
Lots of people were baking soda bread and forest schooling their kids and it was okay.
But for some people, lockdown was a nightmare.
They don't have a nice home.
They don't have a garden.
Maybe people were abused at home.
You know, people missed school.
You couldn't go and worship.
You couldn't date somebody.
You couldn't go and see your lover.
You couldn't go and see your family.
And so these things that we've taken for absolutely granted were gone.
Dominic Cummings didn't see his lover.
Matt Hancock clearly was breaking lockdown rules.
I think I saw him adjust something that could have been a subject for one of your photographs, as a matter of fact.
A hundred of those penises, 'cause some of your portraiture has involved genitalia.
Not yet Matt Hancock's, but it certainly seems like it could be a subject.
There was incredible revelations about the mechanations within government.
There were the ongoing parties in our country, in America Gavin Newsom was alleged to have had a gathering.
There are enough examples of people wearing masks for photo ops and then removing them.
It's pretty plain that big tech profited.
It was the biggest wealth transfer in history.
And I still think we're unpacking and I sense this intuitively
as well as like in more verifiable ways.
And let me know in the chat and the comments now.
How do you think society and culture more broadly continue to be affected by the events of lockdown?
How have your children been affected?
Have you known people that have taken their own lives as a result of the psychological impact of being placed on lockdown?
What about the fissures that it has put between people from different cultures with different values?
It's interesting to note, Laura, that there's a class impact here,
and that particular effort was made to manage what you might call in our country working class people in America,
blue collar Americans, people that do necessary work.
They were temporarily, what do I want to say, deified or at least celebrated before being damned once again when it was convenient to do so.
In our country, a lot of key workers and health workers were celebrated primarily through the medium of rainbows and meaningless platitudes.
But when it came to paying them more, those pay rises were not offered.
34,000 key workers in New York City, of course, lost their jobs because of a refusal to undertake certain medical procedures.
So it seems to me that, taken as a whole, this period of time created a world transfer.
It created psychological instability.
It created opportunities for enormous profit.
Created opportunities for surveillance.
Created opportunities to introduce protest laws.
Let's not forget what happened in Canada.
The trucker protest was used as an opportunity.
When working people tried to stand up against the use of emergency regulations, you saw
what happened.
You saw how they were smeared and criticized and condemned, how technology was used to
shut down donations.
Many egregious steps were taken to shut down our freedom.
And to your point, Laura, it shows you actually that freedom is temporal and illusory and
takes place within such boundaries that it can scarcely be called freedom at all.
I wonder if you have concerns about what the next steps will be?
Like when you said a minute ago, all of the measures came down to individuals.
You as an individual, you killed granny.
I think we've got a headline there.
That was our former health minister, now reality TV star, Matt Hancock, was offering up that you're killing your granny.
Don't know how you could possibly Kill your granny, given some of the revelations that have since come out about the lack of clinical trialing for transmission and that asymptomatic people were scarcely infectious.
But nevertheless, the propaganda has been spread and the damage has been done.
I know elsewhere when it comes to matters like climate change, which let me know in the chat where you stand on that, it's normally 15 minute cities, taxes on ordinary people.
It's seldom This is why we are going to control corporations in this way.
It's interesting that many of the measures suggested amount to ways of controlling and prohibiting the freedoms of individuals.
What do you feel like is the next wave and how do you think it will continue to be utilised Laura?
You said so much I want to bottle it and drink it very slowly but you know There's plenty more than that came from, mate.
I'm sloshing about in this stuff.
I feel like I've been sprayed with a champagne bottle.
Slow down with that.
OK, so hang on.
Do you want a kombucha?
No, I don't, thank you.
I like it, but I'm all right.
I'm all right.
OK, so it make you burp or something?
No, I'm all right.
I drank a Diet Coke before I came on.
It's a lot less healthy than kombucha, but I'm still battling the burps.
Well, I've got to say something about the Matt Hancock thing.
Yeah, whatever you want.
Because that's evil.
I think what he said was nothing less than evil.
It's one of the most egregious things that was said.
The idea that a child should feel responsible for their grandparent dying is disgusting.
Because a lot of grandparents died.
And it wasn't the grandchildren's fault.
It's because COVID is particularly dangerous for elderly people.
What a terrible thing to say to kids.
Just terrible.
Just to control them.
You're right because actually mate, we're all quite susceptible to propaganda as discerning adults, but children, who knows?
And also, I think the contract between us and those that govern us has been irrevocably altered, broken, I might argue. I can never trust centralised
authority again in any form.
This is why I think judiciary will always be questioned, the media will always be questioned,
the results of elections will always be questioned, because we've just seen again and again and again
that there is literally no reason to trust them unless you're absolutely fucking terrified.
Unless you're terrified to the point where you're like, oh...
Oh god.
Just look after me daddy.
You know, there's no point in Lots of people are like that.
But I mean if you look at us right you've got your kombucha.
I've got some bottled water We're in a very lovely studio in a beautiful part of the country.
Things are okay.
We're not on sale Yeah.
And and yeah, we are in this really strange time of an unveiling where we're understanding a lot about what goes on around us.
And for me, this has been nothing short of an existential crisis.
You know, it really hit me that March 2020.
And so when you say, well, what's next?
Well, what's next is the story of humanity.
It always has been.
It always will be the same.
People can be manipulated You know, in our time, in our time and who'd have thought that we'd see it?
We've seen the mass evocation of fear and propaganda to gain compliance for something which nearly all of us were not at risk from.
I'm not saying COVID wasn't a serious disease for some people, but I think we've only just swerved terrible times and we see what can happen.
You know, you talked about the vaccine before.
There were people that were told no jab, no job.
They lost their jobs if they didn't want to be vaccinated.
And there are many reasons an individual might not want to be vaccinated.
You know, there are still countries, I think the US has only just lifted its its ban on federal like federal workers were sacked if they weren't vaccinated and you couldn't visit the country unless you were vaccinated.
They've only just lifted that.
Think about Canada, like you said, you know, the truckers who don't want to be vaccinated.
They had their accounts frozen and people who supported the GoFundMe had their accounts frozen.
So we've seen how unvaccinated people can become a minority, which is scapegoated and harmed.
And that was deliberately leveraged as well.
You know, you had the Covid hero versus the Covidia.
And how can that be done?
Well, That's done because once upon a time the enemy was a country that would drop a bomb on you from another country, right?
A red button over there in some snowy country.
Then the enemy was somebody who might strap bombs to their chest, a terrorist.
But in the case of a virus, you know, we're all the enemy, we're biohazards.
There was a doctor on TV, Dr Sarah Jarvis, in 2021 who said breathing is an offensive weapon.
I was scouring the newspapers at the time for examples of this.
There was an Israeli newspaper that called ultra-Orthodox Jews who were breaking the rules, Covid insurgents and bioterrorists.
You know, the language that was used to describe human beings for breathing, for moving about or choosing not to accept a medical intervention was stunning.
It was extraordinary to watch how they managed their previous demonization of ordinary people by using perhaps and having not yet caught up with some of the lexical changes that have taken place in recent years to and to recognizing oh no we're condemning people now like of course notably in the United States of America there had to be a great deal of work done In communities of color, because there's a natural, what do you know, suspicion of centralized authority.
And it was interesting to watch that.
There's some other comments in our locals chat.
If you're not a member of our locals community yet, press the red button on your screen.
Join us on locals, like Seabuck77 who says, in my experience, our local blue collar community refused to wear masks and was skeptical of this whole thing.
The middle class went along until it split.
Half have woken up, And the woke far left white collar are the ones we see driving around wearing masks in their car.
Now certainly it became politicized even prior to the sort of condemnation around Trump.
I remember initially Joe Biden being like, openly we can pull up the clip if we want to, Joe Biden saying that he wouldn't take a vaccine until it was verified.
And of course people say that they didn't participate in the politicization of the medications or the responses.
It was the other side's fault that that happened.
But that's the kind of sort of tribalized chit-chat that don't Get us nowhere.
It seems to me that it was a great opportunity to control, to demonize, to divide, to censor, to smear.
Like the Twitter file revelations about true information that was shut down and controlled.
The number of highly credible scientists whose contributions to the conversation was shut down, smeared, because it didn't go along with this information.
It seems in retrospect, correctly, many people were smeared as being anti-vax.
By the way, they changed the meaning of the word anti-vax in the dictionary during that period.
So again, as I say, the subject itself is of limited interest
because we live in a fast-moving time defined by an ever-shifting news cycle.
But the behavior that it revealed is fascinating.
We can see how powerful interests will collaborate.
We can see how apparently innocuous, free, global organizations like the WHO are able to assert
and continue to assert incredible control over the way that information is promulgated.
And many of that ain't been rolled back yet.
Can I ask you, please, Laura, about forthcoming potential ways
to terrify and control the population?
I feel like-- what's this Time magazine?
WHO, "This emergency's over, get ready for the next one."
New pandemics are always being rehearsed all over the gaff.
They're always spending money doing sort of like weird games
to prepare for new pandemics.
Some of the anomalies I'd like to point out is when you have the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
significantly donating to the WHO, I think behind only the nation of Germany
in their level of donations, I would prefer that elsewhere,
that organization hadn't invested heavily in vaccines.
Now, you might say, well, that's a cohesive response.
They believe in this type of regulation and this type of medical response.
But when it is profitable and when it affords that degree of influence, it seems to me like there's a great opportunity for democracy.
It seems that what we're being offered in lieu of democracy now is limited debate within tiny tiny cubes of discourse while a centralised authority continues to assert its agenda.
What do you reckon is going to happen mate with like forthcoming pandemics and forthcoming like climate change type stuff?
Well you know sometimes I tune out of the specifics because the thing is the principles are always the same.
What people won't want to hear, but it's the truth, is that your brain is a battlefield.
And it's not just the terrain, it's the target.
You are the target.
It's governments, it's corporations, would-be manipulators, they all want to influence you.
You know, you're subjected to millions of pieces of information every day, and your brain's basically got bouncers on the door.
It lets some information in and others, so they're competing the whole time for your attention.
and they will compete using emotion. Sometimes it's hope.
Do you remember the Obama posters, just his face with hope underneath? Quite often it's fear.
You know, like I said before, fear is the steam in the engine. So avian flu, monkey pox, climate,
blah, blah, blah.
They're all the same.
They're using the same techniques to grab you.
Think about climate.
I mean, here's a few examples.
Whatever you think of climate change and whether it's man-made or not, and what the response is, do you know how they're trying to influence you and manipulate you?
You know, scriptwriters for films and series, they're invited to workshops For instance, there was a workshop for scriptwriters about how to increase vaccination uptake.
No way.
Did that really happen?
I mean, I know people talked about it because on soap operas in the UK, and let us know if this happened in your country, there was just sort of like casual bits of chat about, have you had your booster shot yet?
I ain't getting a booster shot.
There's no proof that it works.
That's a conspiracy theorist.
That literally was a scene from EastEnders.
Russell, 100%.
And it's not new.
This kind of thing's been going on for decades.
It's the history of the BBC and governments have had hotlines to soap opera managers and broadcasters forever.
I think what's different is how out in the open it is.
Now I've got documentation about the scriptwriters being invited to talk about vaccination uptake.
And there was a scriptwriter who spoke to me anonymously, again, so he doesn't destroy his Hollywood career, for my new book, Free Your Mind, because the stories are just fascinating.
You know, when you watch your soap opera for a bit of light entertainment in the evening, well, I bet you don't, I don't, but millions of people do, you know, switch off, enjoy it, fine, but be mindful.
They are constantly trying to socially engineer you.
There's a big, big soap opera here in the UK.
They had Just the kind of cheesy vaccination scene you're talking about.
Is that Corrie?
The other one?
Coronation Street?
Coronation Street's another one.
I was on my EastEnders though.
So, you know, they had one.
There was a couple of ethnic minority characters talking quite virtuously about how they'd had their vaccine.
And then a white woman comes onto the scene, ironically called Karen, and she hasn't had it and they call her one of them anti-vaxxers and make fun of her because she's buying cigarettes but she won't get the vaccine.
There's loads of that.
And when you watch it, it actually feels quite artificial.
But in COP26, All of the UK soap opera storylines converged.
They crossed over.
They mentioned each other.
This does not happen without coordination.
It was all deliberately to nudge people into being more worried about climate change.
And the reason for that is to soften people up for net zero goals.
It's a very contentious political policy, which involves a lot of hair shirts.
And by the time you get to wear the hair shirt, you'll be glad of it because you'd be cold.
You won't be able to afford your heating anymore.
The closing credits of EastEnders, this iconic British soap opera, on one episode showed London if sea levels rise by two meters.
Now, even the IPCC does not say this is a plausible scenario.
But the point about using a graphic, you know, we're not in an observable climate crisis in London.
We're not wading through water.
We're wading through woke, but we're not wading through water.
The point of the graphic is to trick you into thinking that this climate crisis is there on your doorstep.
One day you might walk out on the cities underwater.
Although the Netherlands have managed to hold back rising sea levels with medieval technology, and we've got Thames barriers, you know, it's to frighten you.
Think about insects.
You know, there's no great clamour among the world's people to eat more insects.
You know, we're not all going, oh yes, give me mealworms and crickets.
But have you seen how many programs are talking about using insects, like in cookery programs or celebrities eating insects from Angelina Jolie barbecuing tarantulas, which was truly horrific to Robert Downey Jr.
talking about a protein drink that's made from insects.
You know, there is some kind of technocratic public policy do-gooders, academics and politicians that really want you to eat insects.
So you'll see it everywhere in the media.
Many of these have been regarded as and dubbed right-wing talking points.
Let me know in the chat and the comments if you're aware of that.
And let me know also how you identify in terms of your political persuasion.
My personal belief, of course, is that neither right-wing nor left-wing party organizations
are going to deliver to you the individual freedom that you will come to require.
I'd love to have a look at that.
If you can find that EastEnders scene of the vaccines, that would be fantastic if you can
pull that up and queue it up, have a little look at it before we play it out.
That would be fantastic.
When you said earlier about the brain, or perhaps more obtusely, but maybe more accurately
is difficult to say.
Consciousness being the battlefield of our current war of information,
having moved from the wars against nations, the Cold War already becoming an abstraction,
to the war against terror, to the war against germs, now the war against ideas and the war against consciousness
itself.
It seems to me that it is necessary that we undertake a kind of individual spiritual awakening,
where we take personal responsibility for our consciousness, where we become aware of when we are responding to fear
and when we are responding to desire.
This is something, of course, I know a good deal about as a recovering alcoholic and drug addict.
I'm well aware of the role of compulsion and the role of stimulation in organising my behaviour.
Similarly, though, and blessedly, I'm aware that none of the issues that I seek to resolve
externally through material means can ever be resolved in that
direction that without a spiritual awakening, without a willingness...
to surrender the inner domain to a greater power, I am doomed to be subject to the stimulations,
the coordinated stimulations it seems, that are externally being operated upon us.
Now me, I feel like that the climate change conversation for me is bypassed by reverence and love
for the environment that I evolved in harmony with.
That I can see that we ought to behave respectfully towards our planet and that regulation and control when it comes to the protection and love of our planet and the species that we share it with should target first and foremost the most powerful corporate entities that currently enjoy significant subsidies from us.
Wealth transfer and redistribution of wealth are already taking place.
It's just in the upward direction.
Stay free with Russell Brand.
See it first on Rumble.
Now, as Laura was saying earlier, it's individual freedom that is the issue.
Forget for a moment what your views are on medication.
I reckon I'm intelligent enough to recognise that people have a variety of personal conditions, some that might warrant an enthusiastic response to a pharmaceutical intervention.
And others that may be more cynical and skeptical.
And this is not a reason to be cynical or let alone hateful to other people.
Let me know in the chat and the comments.
One of the things that offended me most was the way we were invited to be condemnatory, judgmental, and hateful to one another.
And it was encouraged.
You can see that even with a couple of years of hindsight, that screams propaganda.
There's no way that that would sort of automatically unfurl.
And from the keyboard of a staff writer over there, No, it's painfully artificial.
It's embarrassing.
And you wonder why the ratings are going down for soap operas.
It's because they're shameless propagandists for government public health messaging.
And in fact, there was a report that came out, I think last year, from the government's nudge unit.
And Sky, the broadcaster, and it's called The Power of TV.
And it's about nudging people towards net zero.
And this is what I mean about it being more in the open.
They talk about using the whole gamut of programming from news, which you'd like to think is impartial,
to children's programming and cookery, travel, documentaries, product placement, everything in between,
in order to make people compliant for net zero policies.
It's quite astonishing that it's just out there in the open.
And they talk about the historical use of TV for social engineering.
So I would never tell people to turn off the TV, although there is a chapter of my new book with that title.
But if you don't want to turn off the TV, you have to watch it mindfully.
You have to understand that it's not a one-way process.
They're trying to influence you as much as entertain you.
And actually, you know, you were asking before what the dangers coming up are.
I think people don't understand what a pivotal time we're at with artificial intelligence.
So, at the moment there's a lot of buzz about generative AI, so ChatGPT, BARD, these really fun tools where you can ask it to write you some copy, ask you to write it some text, use it for research.
That has the potential not only to be used to generate copy, but to manipulate you and nudge you.
And I think people don't realize how far we're already in that world.
I'll give you one example.
Anti-knife crime ads.
Now this sounds like, hello doggy, this sounds like a really worthy, it sounds like a really
worthy idea that you want to reduce knife crime.
But what's happened is the UK government has identified the sort of people that might be
at risk of being perpetrators and gets ad served to them online.
So let's say young people that like drill they've been identified as potential knife crime perpetrators.
So they search for drill and they get they get anti knife crime ads.
Now this sounds great but what if that person was never going to pick up a knife was never going to commit a knife crime.
They're being followed around the Internet by knife crime ads.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
And for all we know, people are getting the idea about knife crime that they never would have had.
If I search for knives, I'm probably going to get some really cool Swiss Army knife ads.
You know, I'm going to really enjoy it.
I'm going to go on some great websites.
But somebody who's... You're not a fan of drill.
No, but I do listen to quite a lot of cool music thanks to my sons, but not Drill.
But you know, if I was in a city, black, listen to Drill, I'm going to get totally different search results to me.
We're in that world now.
We're already in that.
And what that is reminiscent of is the kind of futuristic surveillance society, you know, that pre-crime, thought-crime territory of films like Minority Report.
We're already there.
You add in nudge, behavioural psychology, with Artificial intelligence and algorithms.
And people don't understand what kind of personalized, manipulated digital environment they will be in.
You and I will be in different digital environments.
Like I say, that inner city black youth will be in a completely different digital environment again.
It may all be with worthy, public, you know, worthy goals on behalf of politicians.
But we don't know yet how that's going to work out.
And it's quite insidious because people aren't aware of it.
This is why I'm inclined to agree with Vandana Shiva.
This is why I'm inclined to agree with Vandana Shiva.
Regular guest on this show.
Star of Community 2023.
There's a link in the description if you want to join us there.
July the 14th to July the 17th.
We must re-sacralise our planet.
I'll plan it.
We've only got one, I think, at the moment.
Re-sacralise it though.
Re-sacralise our relationships.
Have an individual relationship with your own consciousness and also pay attention to how you interrelate to the divine.
Laura, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking with me today.
Laura's new book is available to pre-order now, Free Your Mind, The New World of Manipulation and How to Resist It.
There's a link in the description to learn about it now if it's not out yet.
Is it out?
Is that in July?
We'll put a preview link out.
Laura, thanks so much for joining me.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Well done.
We're not here next week, so we'll post some of our... We're not here next week, but we'll post some of our best guest interviews every single day.
Join us next time, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
