NUCLEAR WAR IMMINENT?! This Is WHY Putin Is READY To Start WW3 - Stay Free #176
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Hello there, you awakening wonders!
Thanks for joining me on this voyage to truth and freedom.
Wherever you're watching us, remember, the whole show is only exclusively available on Rumble.
Especially when you're talking about...
War!
What is it good for?
This is a world where power and profit overshadow the pursuit of peace.
Joining me today for this special are three of the most insightful minds in the field.
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and my dear friend, Seymour Hersh.
That's one of the reasons I think the CIA is a very dangerous community, but its presidents love wars because they're good for ratings.
Let me ask you a question.
Yes.
What's your hat?
It's probably attention-seeking on some level, Seymour.
I've come from the world of entertainment, probably haven't entirely let go of the idea that I'm a sort of a physical representation of the radical stance that I take in my own journalism.
One journalist to another.
Jeffrey Sachs, the world-renowned economist and a man who pulls a face that makes me love him so.
If that's what he does when he's asked a tricky question, what does he do when he... What they're doing, more war, more war, more war.
That's all they want.
They don't ask anymore.
Nothing.
Not a word.
Aaron Maté, the man the Ukrainian government asked the FBI to blacklist.
The FBI, acting on behalf of its counterparts in Ukraine, asked Twitter to censor a whole list of accounts and also hand over their information to Ukrainian intelligence.
My name was on that list.
This is a world where power and profit overshadow the pursuit of peace.
When Donald Trump and Noam Chomsky are singing from the same hymn sheet.
When Cornel West and Tucker Carlson agree there is a machine at the heart of our culture that fires the conflict of war is the military-industrial complex.
First, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and my dear friend, avuncular curmudgeon, Seymour Hersh, lifting the lid on the Nord Stream pipeline from the comfort of his armchair.
It's an honour to have you, Seymour.
Thanks for joining us.
I'm glad to be here, I think.
Let me ask you a question.
Yes.
What's your hat?
It's probably attention-seeking on some level, Seymour.
I've come from the world of entertainment, probably haven't entirely let go of the idea that I'm a sort of a physical representation of the radical stance that I take in my own journalism.
One journalist to another.
I don't know if the word radical is the right one, but we'll let that one stand.
You want me to take the hat off, because I'll do it out of respect for you and your prize.
I don't want to see what's there, but I will tell you something.
I was fascinated, as I told one of your aides just a minute ago, by the Condoleezza Rice quote, and my pay for this performance here will be if somebody sent me a link to that.
We will send that to you.
You're ahead of the curve with that idea.
But that's that's been a prominent theme in the American conversations about oil.
And it is a fact that Norway which did help us has more than doubled the amount of oil natural gas rather is shipping out to Western Europe.
It had about nine or 10 percent its way up.
And so you can't work, you can never cut out mercantile interests, but there were probably much more immediate interests of war in Ukraine, etc, etc.
But that's a fascinating point that you were making.
Anyway, so I got something out of this.
I'm happy.
Look, can you stop being so generally cynical about my hat and the entire experience of this interview?
I get something out of it.
You don't need to overplay the, I'm a well-worn journalist, I was around during war, gay, I've got a Pulitzer Prize.
I get it.
You're senior, you're world-weary, you've become cynical about establishment power.
It's much more ephemeral than that.
It's just, you know, it's amusing.
The hat is amusing.
I don't think there's anything profound in me talking about it.
It's what I see.
Sir, firstly I will credit Gareth who makes the show with me for his research that led to our use of the Condoleezza
Rice clip and our general approach is to challenge the dominant
narrative that we are given through mainstream media which all and once was the domain of ordinary investigative
media which seems to have become deeply sanitized in the last 20,
30 years increasingly we are seeing whether it is Chris Hedges or
Glenn Greenwald or yourself journalists that have been prized for their investigative
work being if not demonized certainly subject to something amounting to smears
The White House has already denied your story and I'd like to ask you What do you think has happened to journalism in the last 20 or 30 years and why we're not presented with complex narratives that undergird reporting with the kind of economic, financial, military and geopolitical interests that usually lead to events like the Ukraine-Russia conflict or indeed an event, broadly speaking, within the remit of that narrative like the Nord Stream Pipeline sabotage?
Well, I think one of the problems, look, it's you're asking, you know, you're throwing you're throwing the ball to me.
And, you know, this is this is all I brood about a lot, because I worked at The New York Times in the 70s and had a great time, was never sort of blocked from writing stuff.
And it's a different world now.
You know, oh, come on, stop it.
The bottom line is that I think what a secret source now is for the people, many of the people who write for the major newspapers, is a press secretary who, you know, says, come over here, I'll tell you something a little different than I've told the other guys.
I just don't understand why they're not jumping on certain stories.
Certainly this story is, I could just tell you a friend of mine, I have a wonderful old friend who escaped from the Middle East, became an oil man, became very rich and very happy.
Living in France now, he wrote me after this, after the story, and he said, he said, oh, oh, Cy, he said, my nickname, he said, you've become a master in the deconstruction of the obvious.
I mean, what was so hard about this story?
We know Russia didn't do it, because if they wanted to, they could turn a valve.
And so, I guess, is Macedonia a member of the NATO?
Maybe they did it.
You know, where do you go for the next possible suspect?
Well, who is it?
It's clearly us, since the president basically said it.
But the bigger question is, what's going on with journalism?
I don't know.
My old newspaper, the New York Times, of which I did all sorts of stuff on the CIA and Watergate and Vietnam for them, hasn't touched the story.
Neither has the Washington Post, which is another two great main sheets.
I don't think the Wall Street Journal has.
The rest of the country, some people have.
It's just like a blank.
It's like, it could be as simple as, we're coming off the Trump years and we made big divisions in the media.
We're either going to be for or against Trump.
It could be the same sort of dichotomy plays out.
We're now in the Trump corner.
And if we write something critical, we're now in the Biden corner, rather.
If we publish something critical of Biden, we might be leading ourselves open to more Republicans.
The guy in Florida, etc.
I don't know what the fear is.
But it can't just be about the fact that I don't name sources.
I spent, you know, nine years at the New York Times writing about the CIA going after Allende and going, you know, and all that stuff, killing people abroad without naming sources.
I mean, you know, either trust what I do or you don't.
Yes, I know that you also wrote about Abu Ghraib, significant revelations there, and about the mass murders in Vietnam of civilians.
And the banalization of the media space is a theme that we touch upon frequently, the infantilization of us as the audience class.
Even with the current escalation of tensions between the USA and China through the sanctions around semiconductors and of course the rather more visually stimulating and sensational story that accompanies the balloon and indeed the shooting down of the balloon.
Can I tell you about the balloons?
Can I tell you a little bit about the balloons?
Yeah!
I asked somebody about it, my friends, and I said, what's going on with the balloons?
Of course, they've been there forever.
Maybe you could argue they could take photographs of what a satellite can see much better.
But basically, the last wave, the unnamed car-like with the American press so full of it, It turns out the federal government has a contract with the meteorology department or whatever it is, weather department at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, and that is one cold place.
It's way up there.
Most of the classes are underground.
You go underground to classes.
I've spoken there.
I know about this firsthand.
And over the Arctic Circle, everybody flies the polar route from Asia to America, and there's no Weather station there.
So the university has these little vehicles that goes and reports.
Pilots want to know if there's any unusual weather going on.
That's what you have to do.
And they are reporters of that information.
And that's what was shot down.
One of those things was shot down was one of those units that is sent up by a university under but paid by the government.
to go over the arctic circle and report on you know in case there's an extreme wind uh wind uh wind i don't know what the cliche is when the wind goes down in a in a down a downdraft and you know and and since there's no official station there who wants to be there to run a weather station and so they they're basically a remote weather station that's what they shot down whether they're going to talk about it in the next couple of weeks and uh uh the the we've we've put about what Actually, I don't know how many hundreds of billions of dollars into a new fighter, the F-22 that's coming online.
We had one called the F-1.
We put two hundred and three billion in to make about a hundred of them.
But in the 80s, so far, seven exists.
It's just money just floats.
But we paid a lot of money for the F-22.
And its first kill was the first balloon that one that one came over, was discovered over Montana.
That he knows exactly what he's doing.
When he landed, you know, in World War Two, your guys and your Spitfires and us and our P-51s, you took care of every mission, but you put a little, you painted on the side a decal for the kills.
We did the same in Asia when they are P-51s.
So the pilot of this F-22, getting the first kill of this plane, painted a balloon On the side of his life, socialized.
I'd love to think he was joking.
I don't know that.
I know he did it.
I don't know whether what was in the state of mind, but that's reduced.
Now we we've got to kill.
We kill the balloon and that's worth a couple couple, you know, 200 billion dollars for a plane.
Yeah, a small price to pay for dispatching some hydrogen and some helium.
It's over-the-top.
It's over-the-top crazy.
That's all I can tell you.
How do you feel then about the context that has to be said frames the Nord Stream Pipeline story, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the years of infringement upon former Soviet territories, the 2014... You're not allowed to say that!
How dare you say that, that there might have been reason Behind, you know, the language used, the language, it was done in 1990, the first agreement not to go east, when East Germany joined West Germany, that was in NATO.
We wanted to make the combined country, and don't forget, The Germans had a real problem because after World War II, when they wanted to get back into civilization and be accepted by other countries, get in the international groups like NATO, they spent a long time murdering people in Western Europe and bombing it and destroying it.
And so Willy Brandt was the guy that said, we're going to be a money bank for you guys.
We're going to be great neighbors.
We're going to trade with you.
We're going to show you we belong.
Willy Brandt did do that.
He got that started for all of his faults.
And so in 1990, when they joined, Gorbachev agreed To let this unified Germany into NATO.
And the price was a commitment by us in writing that I have a I live in Washington, so I know people.
I have a friend that has access to the classified part of the embassy and our embassy in Bonn, and he ran him.
He went and read the cables for me.
There's nothing fantastic about it.
The language used by our Secretary of State James Baker was the equivalent.
The equivalent in the in the documents agreement we made with the Corbett shop.
It wasn't a treaty, but it was an understanding, not one inch.
We will not go one inch east.
And then we've now, NATO was initially was 19 when it was set up in 69, 49 rather.
It's now what?
About 170 countries, Macedonia, you know, stuff like that.
I'm exaggerating.
But you know, NATO is a far cry from what we hate.
It's not Europe anymore.
It's all over.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe one of the tropical islands in the South Pacific will become a member of NATO next.
And so, and so here's the Russians eating this.
Here's Putin eating this.
And then we start putting missiles in the border in Poland that we claim are defensive, but in a half a day, they can be turned into offensive weapons.
There's no question about that.
It's a fact that can be just diverted.
It'll take some time, a half a day, but you can fire your seven minutes of Moscow.
And that's another reality.
So it's what I hate to see in the paper, in my newspaper, for example, they keep on describing the Russian attack as being without provocation.
Unprovoked.
Well, it was really provoked.
I'm very troubled by my president and his immediate foreign national security team, Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland, whose husband is one of the leading neocons Who got us, helped convince Dick Cheney to go into, that the solution to 9-11 and Al Qaeda was to attack Iraq.
One of the great non-existence relations.
I mean, just so crazy.
But anyway, those three, I call them Winkum, Blinkum, and Nod.
Nod, if you, I don't know if you have that child story there, but we have it in our country.
The first thing they do is they meet the Secretary of State in Alaska with the Chinese and start telling the Chinese what to do about their own domestic problems.
And now we push the war.
You know, I don't know things, but I know things.
The initial agreement, the initial decision, To plan for the pipeline was an option for leverage for the president for against Putin.
This was started in a year ago, 13 months ago in December and bled over to early this year.
And the idea was to ask the community for ideas.
I wrote about this where kinetic or non kinetic and the word was kinetic.
That means we're going to hurt somebody.
And so, of course, it emerged.
We're going to take out the pipelines.
We've been complaining about the pipelines for a dozen years.
The first one, Nord Stream 1, and the new one.
The new pipeline is interesting because the first one was cut off by Russia.
The second one was cut off by the Germans.
They put a sanction on it.
So Germany always had the chance, option, of opening up the pipeline any time they wanted.
And who cares about the pipeline in summer?
But comes fall, comes winter, and that's when you're going to need it.
The Russian natural gas has been supplying Germany and Western Europe with cheap gas for, what, a dozen years, and the economy's boomed based on cheap gas.
Now, Europe's suffering.
It's getting cold.
They had a mild winter, but it's getting very cold now.
The leading companies are getting the price of gas is going up enormously.
Companies like BASF, which is the largest chemical company in Germany in the world, has been talking to China about maybe moving some assets there.
The consequences of knocking out the pipeline economically are disastrous.
As again, as you said, Norway is getting more gas and Norway was a big player in us with the project.
But the key, the key thing is when the president told the intelligence community, I want this, I want this, I want to see if I have an option.
I think the thought of, in my understanding was, the thought of the community was, we're going to do what the, we do what the president wants.
That's what, that's the whole idea of having a CIA.
I mean, if you're the President of the United States right now, this guy can't get a thing through Congress.
But tomorrow, if he wants to, he can take a walk in the Rose Garden with the CIA director and somebody can get hurt the next day.
That makes you feel pretty good, particularly if you can't have your way anywhere else.
And so, I mean, that's one of the reasons I think the CIA is a very dangerous community, but full of a lot of smart people.
Anyway, it was always to be an option.
And what happened is, he didn't exercise.
They were going to do it at one point when they had cover in the summer.
They had cover because of a, there was a big, the Baltic Sea is not a, there's no oil there.
And the idea of having a bunch of deep sea divers start digging around would have been exposed any problem, any thought of getting away with taking out the pipelines.
It just would have been too obvious, too seen.
But there was an exercise, NATO exercise last summer.
There's been one every summer.
For 22 years now in the Baltic.
And then maybe you could slide it in then.
That was the idea.
But the president didn't pull the whistle then.
In late September, he did it.
And by that time, the community itself had thought there was no reason to do it anymore.
You know, it was there as a potential threat, but he'd already started the war.
And by September, the one thing that was interesting, I've always been among a group of journalists and people in the community have been very skeptical about the chances of Ukraine to win a war against Russia.
And you know, if you know the history, when in this when in Stalingrad, when the Germans got their great defeat, the Russians are losing 2400 dead and wounded every four hours in the final days of the battle, and one just kept on going.
I mean, they are tough.
So far, in the war against Ukraine, I'm sure in the beginning it's correct that Putin or his generals underestimated the willingness of the Ukrainians to commit hara-kiri, as they have been.
But by September, it was clear there was real trouble.
Among other things, the corruption was so wild among the top, even including Zelensky.
They were all fighting for what percentage of the money they're going to steal.
There was a lot of fighting and brooding about that, even today.
And so as a corrupt regime, it never was going to be accepted in the NATO.
And it wasn't going to win the war.
And so Joe, then in late September, wants the hit.
And he gets it.
And at that point, I think there were people in the intelligence community who thought it was, at that point, that didn't make sense.
That was just crazy.
And what's he doing?
He's throwing in, for whatever he can, the fear he had was that since Germany controlled the new pipeline, Nord Stream 2, the one that was just built and was just stopped.
They just finished it in 2020.
And it was full of gas even then.
The gas that came up was, it's a 750 mile pipeline from Germany all the way to near St.
Petersburg and right up near Estonia, the border with Russia and Estonia.
So the long pipeline was full of methane gas.
That's what the gas is, methane.
And anyway, and that's what bubbled up.
It wasn't it wasn't pumping any.
It just said just stored there would have been perfectly safe.
And so I guess that the Biden thought was I want to keep I want to keep any possibility that the Germans and the Western and with the rest of the Western Union, which is which is going to start getting cold.
It's it's he did in late September will open up the pipeline and then be at the mercy of Russia.
In other words, the way they put it.
That pipeline, the gas, the Russian gas, was a weapon for the Russians.
A weapon.
And once you took away that weapon, West Germany, if West Germany cannot open up the pipeline anymore, Germany rather, and the European allies of NATO, well then they'll keep on supporting us in the war.
They won't have the option of saying, we quit.
We'd rather have Russian gas than join you in a war that you can't win.
And that's what I think the dominant thinking was.
Yes, I think you're right.
The US were incentivized by the suggestion that it created the opportunity and necessity, in fact, for harmony between Russia and Europe.
It created conditions that were not advantageous, meant that solutions became evident and suggestible.
It was interesting that you touched upon Ukraine in corruption
and the current clear-out that Zelensky enacted, even though in reporting from the Guardian, prior to this
conflict, of course, when the Guardian's perspective on Ukraine was radically
different and much less simplistic and reductive,
they talked about Zelensky's ownership or previous ownership of offshore assets.
I know that the oligarch who's recently been ousted, who funded Zelensky's entire career, I understand it,
did have a relationship with Hunter Biden, through his corporation Burisma, that was paying Hunter
Biden.
It's just, it's fascinating, Seymour, to speak with you with your evident experience and cruel sarcasm when it comes to sartorial matters and hats in particular, to learn that these patterns appear to be Increasing and exacerbating over time that a short time ago you could rely on an organization like the New York Times for anti-establishment radical reporting and now they are a mouthpiece of the establishment.
It's interesting that the Ukrainian conflict, you know, much of the aid that's being offered Ukraine passes from the Pentagon through the military-industrial complex.
Many of those weapons and assets appear to be quite difficult to track and in the subsequent post-war
reconstruction of Ukraine, BlackRock are handling that and there is an aim for 100% digitalisation of Ukraine.
So it certainly seems to be a nexus of a great many stories that coalesce around corruption
and globalism.
A lot of people, by the way, I will tell you Seymour, on our online chat.
Adore you and your casual radicalism, although I'm getting there's a lot of people saying you should not have said that about my hat.
So it's I think you've had a bit of a better time than you thought you would have.
I think you've enjoyed this a little bit, haven't you?
You've been you started off a little bit curmudgeonly in your favorite chair that only you're allowed to sit in.
But over time, you've warmed to us as if being warmed by beautiful Nord Stream gas.
The only gas you can trust.
Your gas is a lot more expensive than my gas.
But you also create gas.
You're good at creating gas yourself.
You're a good gas machine.
That's great.
All I need to do is fit a pipeline to my face and we could have world peace.
I'll tell you one thing about you.
You know what you're talking about.
So that's right.
It makes it much easier for me because you do understand what the world's what's going on.
My only shock is really, to be honest, it was is the Including the press in London.
I must say the London Times was one of the few people that figured out the story I was writing had some relevance.
But most of the cheerleading for Ukraine was madness all the way in the war.
I'm sorry, it doesn't mean I love Russia.
I certainly don't want to admit to any fondness for anything in Russia.
That would make me out to be really in trouble.
I'd have to have my wife start the car for the next year.
You know, there's so much hostility to Russia that it overrides common sense.
That's what it's done.
It's just overridden the notion that the Russian army is going to lose to Ukraine.
It's just not going to happen.
And when Biden wanted to whistleblown, blew it up, the people who, in the community, we're talking about really the creme de creme, were really appalled by it.
They saw it as him making a political Him deciding I'm going to keep Germany and Western Europe cold and broke because I want to try and win this war in Ukraine, a war that he cannot win.
The trick that you must, that I will tell you that I've learned in my long, as you said, many, many years, is presidents love wars because they're good for ratings.
Alright, I got to go.
You got to go.
Put your headphones down.
Listen, I'm getting a bit sick of the level to which you're directing my outfit.
Do you want to pull it as a prize for wardrobe next?
I'll see you guys.
Hey, by the way, one thing I didn't know, I was a lot of people asking why Substack?
Substack is a I'm a I'm my own producer there.
It's an amazing place.
In other words, I'm there was more than a million hits on that story within less than a day.
And I get all these emails from people saying, wow, here comes somebody really telling a story now.
And they're on to the media.
They are on to the media.
They're on to the idea that there's either one side or the other, there's no middle.
And that means there's no good reporting.
And so it's fascinating.
I think the economics of the newspaper business are going to change enormously in the next decade.
My last one.
Goodbye.
I've got to go to work.
This isn't work.
You can't call this work coming on being vaguely offensive, making some gas jokes.
The only thing missing is the pub and the beer.
Goodbye.
Talk to you later.
God bless you, Seymour Hersh.
Thank you so much.
You can find Seymour's incredible work at seymourhersh.substack.com.
Tell us about how we should understand the recent news of the failed mutiny of Prygoshin over there in Russia and how it's being reported on by the mainstream media.
Is this a self-contained issue and do you think this is a false flag event to distract us from the failing Ukrainian counter-offensive?
How does this sit into the whole Russia-Ukraine narrative, sir?
Look, I think the one thing we know is how it's being used by the U.S.
and the U.K., and it's being used to prolong and expand the war.
Because we have a war machine in the United States.
I don't really know which generals are running the show right now.
I don't think it's Biden.
But we have a war machine that wants an expanded war with Russia.
So, whatever is the actual story here, and we don't know about multiple possible outcomes, what the media are reporting is no questions, other than saying, you see, Putin is at the end, and now we
can—basically, the implication is just we continue and we destroy Russia. So you see it in
every mainstream newspaper in the U.K.
and the U.S.
Not a question asked.
No puzzlement.
No puzzlement over the fact that the CIA says, oh, we knew for weeks.
Well, it raises a lot of questions, doesn't it?
Nobody asks questions anymore.
We have a narrative.
The narrative comes from the U.S. intelligence community.
It comes from the U.S. military.
It gets adopted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, in the
U.K., every paper, whether it's—I'm just looking at The Financial Times—reckless
as usual.
Gideon Rockman, the Putin system is crumbling.
Does he know?
Chris Donnelly, the president's hand has been fatally weakened.
How the hell do they know?
They don't know.
They don't ask anything.
But this is a storyline.
Why this storyline?
Because we have pushed into an incredibly disastrous war, first and foremost disastrous for Ukraine, because the Ukrainians that are dying, We provoked the war.
We refused to negotiate over the core issues, mainly NATO enlargement.
And we have a media that is so driven for more war.
And utterly without the idea of asking a single question, just like the questions you're asking.
They're not even raised in our newspapers.
But this has been like this all along.
They want more war.
That's all.
So whether this is a godsend that now we can say we should have more war because we're about to defeat Russia, whether this is actually CIA played a role in this?
Not impossible.
Anything's possible, given that they say, we knew for weeks.
Well, how the hell did they know?
Somebody should actually explain some of these things.
Whatever it is, what they want is war.
The point you make, by the way, is an extremely important one, which is the so-called Ukrainian counteroffensive is killing Thousands and thousands of Ukrainian young men who have been pulled off the streets, put in front of Russian helicopter gunships, put in front of Russian artillery, are dying by the hundreds or thousands per day.
But we don't count any of that.
We don't care at all.
The whole thing is a U.S.
effort to overthrow the Russian government.
Which I think is fanciful.
Reckless, endangering the world.
But that's how our generals have thought for a long time, how our CIA has thought for a long time.
That's what they'd like to do.
The Ukrainians are in the meat grinder, as they say, and they are dying massively.
No one counts that.
No one cares.
It's just a big, big success story.
That's how our media is reporting it.
And it's unbelievable.
You can't get a single Thought.
A single idea in the New York Times anymore that says, hmm, maybe what the government's telling us isn't exactly 100,000% the truth.
They don't ask anymore.
Nothing.
the truth. They don't ask anymore. Nothing. Not a word.
So, I'm not a happy guy today on our media question because today it's just exactly what
More war, more war, more war.
That's all they want.
And in the U.S.
there is not, by the way, not a word of opposition except Bobby Kennedy Jr.
Thanks God for him.
Because he's the only politician talking about a different way.
Negotiating.
Like his uncle did.
Like his father led.
And that's the real point, actually.
Yes.
I think, Geoffrey, after we finish our conversation, you should have a look at the dome of St Peter's.
I think you want to have a little glance at the Sistine Chapel ceiling and take in a couple of Caravaggios to unwind, because it seems like you need it.
Now, we live in a bewildering and beguiling media space.
We live in a landscape where we're offered cage fights between prominent billionaires like Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
A sense of mad, demented carnival descends.
As you say, Legitimate legacy media spaces seem incapable or unwilling to ask the pertinent and necessary questions when we find ourselves on the advent of a potential crisis of previously unseen proportions.
An ambition to carve up Russia is a bold one indeed.
To embark on a secondary campaign agitating for war with China seems Outrageous!
To have a political sphere devoid and divorced from debate, open conversation, where reasonable, rational figures like RFK that offer anti-establishment perspectives and diplomatic solutions ...are regarded by the mainstream as hysterical pariahs who cannot be engaged with, with the liminal space in which discourse can take place ever shrinking.
These people are too far to the right.
These people are conspiracy theories.
The role of independent media is clear, that it's necessary and important that we ask these questions, that we have to behave responsibly, that we have to have one eye on what's beyond simply reporting and move towards Activism and campaigning and participating in this conversation in perhaps more political ways.
When you see us move from a state of crisis around the pandemic around which it's playing, it seems that we were lied to extensively into a geopolitical crisis like the current one where we are continuing to be lied, where it seems evident and obvious that behind these events are sets of interests that can be observed, diagnosed and tracked.
At what point does this begin to coalesce around a political movement?
And do you feel that, given that the systems we live within, electoral, political and financial, delivered us into this state, how likely is it, even with the candidacy of a figure like RFK, who's joined us here on Rumble, both as a guest and now as a contributor, how likely is it that this system will allow him to make a reasonable impact?
How hopeful are you, Geoffrey?
Look, you know, what's interesting is we don't have discourse anymore in the mainstream.
We just have a narrative.
We have a line.
The line, because I know a lot, I've been in the inside, the line's bullshit most of the time these days.
Makes no sense.
Doesn't tell the truth.
Tries to create amnesiacs of all of us.
You're not allowed to talk about history.
You're not allowed to talk about an event the day before yesterday.
You're not allowed to ask questions.
But what's interesting, Russell, to me, nobody believes any of this.
So if you ask, do you believe what we're being told, no one believes it.
No one believes, you know, the vast majority of Americans.
...believe that the virus came out of a lab.
Well, they should, but they've been told exactly the opposite by all of the government officials.
No one believes what the government says.
And so, what does the narrative do?
What the narrative does is allow the truth to just be ignored.
rather than confronted.
So the idea of the narrative is not to make people believe.
The idea of the narrative is to have something to say so that you don't actually have to talk about real things.
So we're living morning till night with political bullshit.
We're not talking about anything real.
Where did this war come from?
I'll give another example.
You know, pretty obvious.
Two examples, very quickly.
In December 2021, Putin put on the table a draft agreement, security agreement, U.S.-Russia draft security agreement.
We could have negotiated with no war.
I called the White House.
They said no, non-negotiable NATO enlargement.
I had that call for an hour.
Never discussed in our media the fact that there was a draft agreement put on the table.
Then, in March 2022, we know it now because of an interesting point.
There was nearly a signed agreement between Russia and Ukraine to end the war, and the United States stopped it.
And Naftali Bennett, who was Prime Minister of Israel and an informal mediator then, when You know, he has a long interview where he describes at the last moment the United States came in and stopped it.
And why did they stop it?
Bennett says, because they wanted to look tough to China.
It wasn't even about Ukraine.
It was about that it would look soft to China.
Okay, but my point is something else.
Nobody in the mainstream media has raised the point that there was nearly a negotiated end to the war.
In March 2022 that the United States stopped.
It's it's too little a fact for the New York Times to show any interest.
It has nothing to do with with what the Washington Post might report or anybody else.
So it's not mentioned at all.
And if you mention it, you're crazy.
You know, you can't negotiate with that guy.
I said, but he did negotiate.
No, you're crazy.
You can't negotiate with that guy.
It's whatever they want to say.
Not to make us believe it because what they say is so damn preposterous.
Six people in a sailboat blew up the pipeline.
They say whatever they want so that they don't have to say Something real.
They don't have to show us a document.
Remember, everything's secret.
Everything's confidential.
Nothing is for public anymore.
So we have... It's not even right to call it a narrow discourse.
There's no discourse, because I think this discourse means that it's a two-way line.
Maybe I'm wrong about that.
There's no discussion.
There is a narrative.
And for some reason, all of the papers I grew up with went dead.
They're unreadable.
Every day I want to cancel my New York Times subscription, but if I could cancel a hundred of them, I would.
It's just so painful to see the stupidity of it right now.
You're on a blacklist.
The Ukrainian security service want the FBI to put you on a blacklist.
Why?
Why, Aaron, when you've got such lovely brown eyes?
Yeah, this came out recently in the Twitter files.
The FBI, acting on behalf of its counterparts in Ukraine, asked Twitter to censor a whole list of accounts and also hand over their information to Ukraine, to Ukrainian intelligence.
And my name was on that list.
I was among the people that Ukraine wanted to be removed and wanted to get my information.
And Twitter said no, because they pointed out that It wouldn't be such a good look if, you know, we're censoring Western journalists.
And the FBI said, OK, but it's just weird that it was Twitter that had to tell the FBI that maybe you shouldn't be censoring journalists, period, especially on behalf of a foreign government.
As to why Ukraine would want to do that, I don't know.
I just like to spread factual information about this proxy war and how it could have been avoided.
There were all these chances at diplomacy before the war and after the war.
They've all been sabotaged by the West.
I don't think it's good to use Ukraine and sacrifice its people for a geostrategic goal of bleeding Russia.
I don't see how that's in anybody's interest but U.S.
warmongers.
And because I say stuff like that, they wanted me censored.
Here is the email just to show that Aaron's not lying, that this isn't disinformation, it's evident truth that we can demonstrate there.
I had a conversation recently with someone that said that there's a kind of form of Occidental imperialism in the assumption that Ukraine aren't able to decide for themselves what the best response to a criminal Russian invasion ...is that Ukraine is an independent nation and it's somehow patronizing to assume that the narratives of those of us that live in anglophonic countries supersede their own long-standing tensions with Russia.
How do you reconcile the fact that Ukraine do have their own intentions with what appears to be the observable fact that this is somehow beneficial to NATO and the military-industrial complex?
Well, a few things.
Ukraine, of course, has the right to resist an invasion, but that doesn't necessarily obligate us to fuel the war with our military aid and intelligence support, which is what the U.S.
is doing.
Ukraine could not fight this war without U.S.
support.
And that's why Lindsey Graham said, the senator from South Carolina, said that as long as we aid Ukraine, they will fight to the last person.
I don't see how it's aiding Ukraine to use them to fight to the last person.
I want Ukrainians to live.
So, yes, Ukraine has the right to resist an invasion, but it doesn't necessarily obligate us to fuel the war, especially when, and this is a key point, there are diplomatic alternatives.
This war could have been avoided, and it could have been stopped after it began.
Before the war, there were the Minsk Accords, which Ukraine's far right and the bipartisan U.S.
establishment bitterly opposed because that would have ended the war in the Donbass that began.
After the 2014 U.S.-backed coup, Russia put out proposals in December 2021 that, at minimum, should have been discussed trying to address Russia's security concerns about the expansion of NATO and the, you know, placement of NATO infrastructure surrounding Russia, including inside Ukraine.
And the U.S.
and NATO refused to even basically discuss it.
So that was a mistake, and that was a case where diplomacy could have possibly averted all this.
And then after the war, we now have so many sources, NATO sources, Ukrainian sources, Vladimir Putin himself saying that a deal was reached in April 2022, but that Boris Johnson, with presumed U.S.
backing, came over and blocked it.
So yes, in principle, of course, a country has the right to resist a foreign invader.
But when there are reasonable alternatives to avoiding it, those at least need to be explored and not blindly fueling this disastrous war, especially when it's pitting the world's top two nuclear powers against each other.
And one more thing about Ukrainian agency.
It depends which Ukraine we're talking about, because Zelensky himself was elected on a peace mandate in 2019.
He was going to end the war in the Donbass.
He was going to make peace with the rebels and with Russia.
He couldn't, because Ukraine's far right blocked him.
They protested violently whenever he took steps towards implementing the Minsk Accords, and some people even threatened to kill him.
So, this far-right leader named Dmitry Yarosh said that if Zelensky makes peace with Russia, he won't lose his popularity.
He will lose his life.
He will hang from a tree.
So, when people say we need to respect Ukrainian agency, which Ukrainian agency are they talking about?
The agency that elected Zelensky on a peace mandate?
Or the agency of the far-right fascists who threatened to kill him if he implemented peace?
Of course, it's reductive to suggest that there is one Ukraine with a singular objective.
That's a good point, thanks for explaining that.
Arshela says in our chat here that this is an example of neoliberalism by proxy, corporate
control and global oligarchy.
Neocolonialism, she corrects.
Now this Ukrainian counteroffensive, which many people said was going to change the timbre
of the war, has gone appallingly badly and some suggest that the much-covered coup approach
in Moscow was covered so favourably and extensively precisely because it's a distraction
It was interesting wasn't it that NATO got a shout out when our man Pragoshin was outlining his objectives.
You didn't initially offer us a take on this Aaron.
Will you offer us one now mate?
Well, look, Prigozhin's hard to read, and there's so many theories about him.
Some people say he was working with Western intelligence, and there was Pentagon leaks not too long ago saying that Prigozhin had offered Ukraine the coordinates of Russian military positions.
He basically had betrayed his own side.
Now, I found that hard to believe because I don't think Ukraine needs to know where Russian forces are because the U.S.
tells them that.
Look, anything is possible.
I don't know exactly Purgosian's alliances.
On the surface, this could just be what it appears to be, which is that his group, Wagner, was facing a deadline to be incorporated into the Russian military.
Accordingly, Purgosian was going to be sidelined.
And this was his way of rebelling against that.
Simple as that.
I don't know beyond that.
But what I do know is that this was not the coup against Putin that it was portrayed to be in Western media.
So, within a few hours of Purgosian launching this revolt, all these neocon pundits who've gotten everything wrong for the last 20 years, from the Iraq war to today, and Al-Babam, Michael McFaul, all these people were all saying there's going to be a civil war in Russia, Putin is done, he might even already have fled Moscow, and of course that didn't happen.
It took about 24 hours and this thing was done, and The fact that this was not a threat to Putin can be best seen in the fact that you didn't have a single person switching sides and pledging allegiance to Purgosian.
He had a few thousand of his own forces with him.
But aside from that, I can't find a single senior Russian official who said that, you know, I'm joining with Purgosian and I'm on his side now.
So that to me is a reflection that this actually strengthened Putin, although it embarrassed
him, and it did make him look weak.
But ultimately, he leaves this, I think, emboldened, because now Purgoshin's in exile in Belarus,
and his militia, Wagner, will be implemented into Russia's forces.
So the fact that there was this desperate rush to sign Putin's death warrant before
even the developments could unfold speaks to, I think, first of all, the clamor for
regime change in Russia that drives NATO policy in Ukraine, and also a reflection, as you
mentioned, that this Ukrainian counteroffensive, which was supposed to turn the tide, is not
going very well.
Understandably because Russia's always had the advantage and this was only a matter of time before Ukraine would run out of material and also people to sacrifice.
All these young people being sent off to die in this useless war that could have been prevented and could still be avoided now.
So I was not surprised to see this hype in Western media because they need anything they can to distract from how badly this counteroffensive is going.
Last year, the White House said if Russia used cluster bombs, that would be a war crime.
This year, they're saying they're going to use cluster bombs, and if you don't let them, that would be a war crime.
What is a war crime?
Somehow we must not fall into the amnesia.
Somehow we must remember that a year ago the White House said, oh, cluster bombs, Russia is using them, that makes them criminals.
And this year they're sending cluster bombs to that war that they're not involved in other than helping people because they love humanitarianism so very much.
So how can that make sense?
This is good, this, because it will help you to learn stuff.
Certainly help me to learn stuff.
Either cluster bombs are bad, or they are not bad.
You can't determine the value of a cluster bomb based on who's been blown up by it.
Cluster bombs, are they good or bad?
Well, who's been blown up?
Someone I don't like.
I like cluster bombs.
Who's been blown up?
Someone I agree with.
Oh, cluster bombs.
Oh, that's not fair.
Boo.
Boo, cluster bombs.
Oh, they've just killed somebody.
Hurray!
I like cluster bombs.
Here's some propaganda from the state.
Tonight, the United States commits to supplying Ukraine with perhaps the most controversial weapon of this war so far.
You know, it's a very difficult decision on my part.
Oh, thank God.
Everyone go back to sleep.
It's OK.
I know cluster bombs are bad and that civilians might be harmed, but when they're being blown up, I just want you to bear in mind that it was a difficult decision for Joe Biden.
And that'll be of some comfort to you as you watch your legs and limbs being scattered around some unnecessary battlefield so that faraway people can become rich.
Weapons are capable of causing massive damage.
They carry smaller bombs with the ability to spread out over a large area.
Amazing.
But in 2023, that's going to get used.
That we're not capable of saying, listen, we've got these cluster bombs.
We're going to blow up all that Russian people with mums and dads and families and stuff.
Before we do that, though, should we have a chat about maybe how to end this conflict?
They also put civilians at risk.
The decision comes as Ukraine reports its counteroffensive is gaining ground against Russian forces.
Is it?
Cluster munitions, banned in more than 120 countries, scatter mid-flight and then rain down small bombs across a wide area.
Progress.
Progress.
They can cause massive indiscriminate damage.
But do they discriminate, though?
Oh, no.
It's indiscriminate.
Progress.
And bomblets that don't explode on the ground pose a significant risk to civilians, especially children.
Especially the children.
Ah, it's for the children.
Oh, there goes one now.
Or bits of one.
The Pentagon says Ukraine is running low on artillery shells and needs the munitions to help the counter-offensive.
We recognize that cluster munitions create a risk of civilian harm.
But we don't care.
Because, like, a year ago, you said it was wrong when Russia were doing it.
So what can you say now?
What can you possibly say?
Let's see.
But there is also a massive risk of civilian harm if Russian troops and tanks roll over Ukrainian positions.
This is how government works.
What do you need to say in order to do what you want to do?
Everyone sort of knows that technique in your own life, but it doesn't usually result in a death of children.
This one does.
What do we need to say in order to do what we want to do?
That not doing it would be worse?
Yeah!
No matter how bad something is, if not doing it would be worse, then we have to do it, right?
The only thing that would derail that is if you didn't trust those people, then you'd be in trouble.
But I suppose if they were able to censor information and stop you disagreeing with them publicly, then even you not trusting them would become irrelevant.
The US has previously condemned cluster munitions use by Russia.
It's okay, when will you do it?
Here, just six days into the war.
We've seen videos of Russian forces moving exceptionally lethal weaponry into Ukraine.
Do those masks help against cluster bombs?
That includes cluster munitions.
Russian cluster bombs.
Bad, bad Russian cluster bombs.
But desperate times may have called for desperate measures.
It's different when we do it.
Thank you.
Some Democrats have said that giving cluster munitions to Ukraine undermines America's reputation as a human rights defender around the world.
You're just so confused.
This is why you need your information censored, do you?
Because you're stupid.
Some cluster bombs, they are defending human rights, whereas other cluster bombs, they're bad cluster bombs.
Some cluster bombs go to heaven, and other cluster bombs, they go to hell, see?
That's the bad ones.
Don't you understand?
That's why you need a centralised authority to control information that you get, because you're too stupid to work all this out.
Don't worry, the mainstream's got your back.
What's the White House response?
I mean, we don't believe that it undermines our... There she is, Corrine Jean-Pierre.
Oh, God, another day at work.
I was an idealist.
Now I'm going to have to say that cluster bombs are good.
Cluster bombs are good.
What about if they kill children?
Still good, because them children would have died anyway, but by a Russian cluster bomb.
Progress!
Freedom!
Our reputation of being human rights offenders, this is something that we say all the time, right, when it comes to human rights, when it comes to having those conversations with either our partners or other heads of state, we certainly, the president never shies away.
He does shy away.
You never see him, do you?
And when he does, he can't speak properly.
Amazing.
Amazing.
Baffling.
Astonishing.
Hypocrisy of almost inconceivable proportions.
Let's see if we can somehow try and understand this without reaching the conclusion that we're being governed by a corporatist, globalist state that lies to us and does whatever it needs to do in order to meet its incentives, and its incentives are always about its own advancement, never about yours, but they have to mask that.
Let's see if we can reach another conclusion using On Friday, the Biden administration said it would send cluster munitions, weapons that scatter unexploded bomblets, across a wide area, killing and maiming civilians for decades to Ukraine.
That's progress.
Facing the failure of Kiev's military offensive, the United States is desperately seeking to use the provision of ever more destructive and indiscriminate weapons to reverse its setbacks on the battlefield.
Ain't going well.
What can we do?
How about indiscriminate and destructive weapons?
Yes, yes, that does seem like a way to peace and humanitarianism.
Destructive, indiscriminate weapons.
Critically, the announcement precedes next week's NATO summit in Vilnius.
At which the United States and NATO are planning to massively expand their involvement in the war.
So whatever you're thinking about the war, like should there be a diplomatic solution?
Could we force Zelensky and Putin to the table by withdrawing Western support for this war and preventing military-industrial complex profits from skyrocketing even further?
All of those ideas, don't worry about them, forget those.
What's happening at NATO is massive expansion.
Do you remember when you voted for it?
You know, you remember when they asked you, because you're funding it with your money, remember when they went, I don't mind a few hours of my working day going towards cluster bombs to blow up children.
That's my patriotic duty.
Driven into a corner by its miscalculations, the Biden administration is compelled to take even more drastic measures.
Yeah, the miscalculation is it's easy to have a proxy war with Russia, an armed nuclear superpower, which people like Jeffrey Sachs have been telling us from the get go.
The aim of the decision to use cluster bombs, regardless of its long-term impact on civilians, Should we regard its long-term impact on civilians?
No!
Don't regard that!
That's there!
Look there!
Oh yeah, it's better now!
Ow!
Ow!
My legs!
Ow!
Ow!
Don't regard that now!
Okay.
Is to kill as many Russian soldiers as possible.
The reasoning that led in the past to the use of Agent Orange and napalm.
How is it different?
And which will be used to sanction the use of tactical nuclear weapons is presently at work.
The US on the eve of Vilnius is clearly sending a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
NATO will stop at nothing.
And Putin will stop at nothing.
So that's good, isn't it?
Definitely don't consider a diplomatic solution where two opposed superpowers with nuclear armory have both stated publicly that they will stop at nothing.
There's only one thing we can solve this.
Cluster bombs.
In a briefing Friday announcing the move, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan justified the decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine as a means of staving off military disaster.
Oh yeah, cool.
There is also a massive risk of civilian harm if Russian troops and tanks roll over Ukrainian positions and take more Ukrainian territory and subjugate more Ukrainian civilians because Ukraine does not have enough artillery, he said.
Sullivan made this statement a little over one month after Ukraine launched its spring offensive, which the American press has touted as an endgame for Ukraine, leading, in the words of retired General David Petraeus, to significant breakthroughs.
Instead, the offensive has produced a bloody debacle.
You know that significant breakthrough?
Yeah.
How significant was it?
Pretty significant, actually.
It's been a bloody debacle.
Progress?
Freedom?
Ah, my legs!
Shh, look over there.
Far from inflicting a crushing defeat on Russia, the Biden administration has been driven to one escalatory move after another in an effort to shore up the Ukrainian military.
Because the Ukrainian military cannot defeat the Russian military because of history and the present and reality and some pretty solid stuff.
We recognize that cluster munitions risk creating civilian harm from unexploded ordnance, Sullivan said.
But we had to balance that against the risk that Ukraine might not have sufficient artillery ammunition.
In other words, the Biden administration weighed the cost of killing and maiming generations of Ukrainian civilians against the benefits of killing more Russian troops.
It decided that the deaths of Ukrainian children from unexploded ordnance was a sacrifice America's oligarchy was willing to make.
God bless that oligarchy.
Is there nothing they won't sacrifice that doesn't affect them at all?
Every line employed by the White House to justify sending these weapons of terror to Ukraine could be used to justify the deployment or even use of tactical nuclear weapons in the conflict.
That's a brilliant point, isn't it?
They're gonna turn up on your TV one day going, listen, you know, you've always thought nuclear bombs was a bad thing, but some nuclear bombs, American ones that you paid for, are good though because of how they would be not as bad as a Russian one, so we're gonna Yes, the White House would argue nuclear fallout poses a risk to civilians, but this risk must be balanced against the risk of Russian military advances.
OKAY THEN.
The stationing of U.S.
tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine has already been directly raised by an American think tank.
Oh my god, they're already, they're discussing it.
They're discussing it.
Moreover, the deployment and possible use of nuclear weapons in the conflict will no doubt be on the agenda at the upcoming summit in Vilnius.
Every official statement by the United States about its involvement in the war is justified on the basis that it is once again saving a country through military violence, this time Ukraine.
But in sending cluster bombs and depleted uranium weapons to Ukraine, the United States has made clear that this is nothing but a hollow pretext for pursuing its aim of prevailing over Russia and China in great power competition.
But it is that, isn't it?
It's not anything else, is it?
Because all of the things they said were true, like cluster bombs bad, cluster bombs good, that's all falling apart and all that's left is, we'd kind of like our economic interests in this geopolitical war to prevail.
The very words used by the United States and its allies to condemn Russia's alleged use of cluster bombs in Ukraine now fully apply to the US decision to send this weapon to Ukraine.
How could they not, if it was the principle?
The principle stays firm, as we always discuss.
In February 22, the US envoy to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, accused Russia of using cluster munitions in Ukraine which are banned under the Geneva Convention, which we will mention when it's convenient, but ignore when it isn't, and have no place on the battlefield.
In March 2022, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said, we have seen the use of cluster bombs, which will be in violation of international law, he added.
We also have to make sure the International Criminal Court really looks into this.
Not previous wars that we've been involved in.
Otherwise, we're going to have to go to prison as well.
Literally, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, the war criminals of Iraq will go to jail.
So we want the International Criminal Court.
Could you look over there?
Oh, no, that's not good.
That's really bad.
And also, what?
No, nothing else.
That's the end.
Goodbye.
Thanks for coming.
Here's some donations.
Bye!
In fact, all these denunciations of Russian actions on the part of the US and NATO were merely hypocritical pretexts for escalating US involvement in the war.
Oh, now I understand.
The decision by the United States to send cluster bombs to Ukraine exposes all of the pseudo-left defenders of US involvement in the war in Ukraine as shameless apologists for the US military's war crimes.
Doesn't it?
There's a simple question.
Are you on the side of cluster bombs or not?
Is cluster bombs a subject you want to equivocate and prevaricate on?
If you just said to someone out of nowhere, tapped them on the shoulder, cluster bombs, are they good?
Oh, tell me, God, what is a cluster bomb?
Oh, it's like a bunch of bombs that blows up and is indiscriminate and unexploded bombs remain there in the ground for years and kill children and civilians years later.
Oh god, no, I'm against them.
Okay, I just want to say that it's now they're using cluster bombs for something you've been coached into agreeing with through propaganda.
Well, then I do like cluster bombs.
Sorry about what I just said, I didn't realize that it was part of a partisan conversation.
In fact, the US-led war against Russia and Ukraine is a war for American global hegemony, in which Ukrainians are mere cannon fodder.
That line is basically all you need to know.
This is entirely in line with the series of criminal wars of aggression waged by the United States over the past half century.
Do you require some evidence?
Here's some.
It's called history.
Oh, don't look at that.
Look over there at the Russian cluster bomb.
Over 110 companies, countries, easy to get mixed up these days, isn't it?
Over 110 countries have ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions, CCM, which prohibits the use, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster munitions.
The United States, which has killed more people with cluster munitions than any other country, is not a signatory.
Hey, would you sign this, please, sir?
And what is that, my good man?
I'm a defender of democracy.
Let me sign your democratic innovation.
Oh, it's that we don't want to use cluster bombs.
Look over there.
Look over there.
There's some Russians.
Poor, that Russian guy farted.
I think Putin's got cancer.
Look at that bastard.
This latest escalation by the United States must be seen as a warning.
Washington will stop at nothing to prevent further military setbacks for its proxy force in Kiev and achieve its military goal of inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia.
The same homicidal logic that justifies the deployment of depleted uranium rounds and cluster bombs will be used to justify even greater and more reckless crimes, from the direct entry of NATO into the war to the deployment and use of nuclear weapons.
And how can you argue with that if at the very beginning, Joe Biden said, in order to support Ukraine, we're going to use cluster bombs.
Do you notice that at the beginning, they just sort of edged their way in?
We're just going to do this.
We're just going to stop the spread.
We're just going to help Ukraine for a little bit.
And then by then they do the stuff they were going to do in the first place because their real agenda is always control and dominion.
And they will always use safety, security or convenience.
That's generally more through commerce, but certainly security and safety is what they use to assert authoritarianism.
Everything is so dangerous, you might as well let us be in control.
And hypocrisy is just part of it.
Propaganda is necessary.
And principles are gone right out the window, as if blown up by a cluster bomb.
But don't worry, because it was an American one that you paid for.