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Oct. 12, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand

01:22:19

SHOCKING! Who REALLY Benefits From Israel vs Palestine Conflict?! - Stay Free #222

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	I'm going to go back to the other side.
	In this video, you're going to see the future.
	Hello there, you awakening wonder.
	Thanks for joining us today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
	Well done for transcending the fear.
	Well done for avoiding the legacy media's attempts to fill you full of information that is not beneficial to your spiritual advancement.
	And in this time of omni-crisis and omni-division, we must become well-informed, well-educated and connected in order to navigate these complex spaces.
	If you can, download the Rumble app.
	That means you'll get a notification if you turn on the notification bell whenever we make content so we can stay connected.
	It's not like on YouTube where the notification bell only works arbitrarily.
	You'll get informed that we're doing it.
	And if you can support our work, press the red button, become an Awakened Wonder and stay connected to us.
	Of course, today we have to talk about some Very challenging and difficult stories, the Israel-Palestine conflict, its escalation, and extraordinarily, one thing I'm sure everyone can agree on, is that nobody should profit from this horrific conflict.
	We're talking to David Zweig as well.
	About how the media present information in ways that continue to be advantageous, the suppression of information during the last three years and the ongoing management, manipulation and let's call it what it is, propaganda that surrounds many of the issues that continue to define our time.
	If you can join us, Join us.
	If you want to be a part of this, please become a part of this.
	When you become an Awakened Wonder, we get to do meditations together.
	We do live Q&As.
	We're talking about the five ideas that are going to change the world.
	We're going to talk about special, separate communities that have managed to transcend the problems of our system, and we need them now more than ever.
	Of course, more arms are being sent to Israel.
	The Biden administration are using this opportunity and the considerable support behind it to further arm Ukraine.
	at a time when people are beginning to question the efficacy of that particular geopolitical
	project. It looks like the Biden administration is going to combine its request for war expenditure
	in Ukraine with aid packages for Israel, bypassing, I would say, proper debate on the
	matter of continuing the unwinnable conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
	The idea is referred to as jamming the far right which is referring of course to Republicans in Congress who oppose the proxy war in Ukraine but are staunch Israel supporters.
	Let's look at how the legacy media reports on this subject.
	So I'm not going to get ahead of the President's request and not going to take the place of the OMB director who will present the request that we send up.
	But the President was very clear today that we will be making a request to the Congress, and it will include a request for funding for support to Israel.
	And he has also been equally clear that we are going to renew our request to the Congress for aid to Ukraine.
	What exact form that all takes, that will be worked out and presented by others, not by me.
	The notion that we're going to go up and ask for Israel aid and ask for Ukraine aid, that's unequivocal.
	We are going to do that.
	Given the unconscionable horror of recent events, it's more complex than ever to discuss this historic and complex issue.
	I would say so complex that any package to bundle together this conflict with further aid for Ukraine and even Taiwan Seems exploitative.
	One of the things I think we can agree on together is that we should watch for how this conflict is exploited.
	And I mean just in the plain sense of profiteering.
	Combining these distinct and difficult conflicts that are at different phases with very different histories complicates and I would argue exploits a number of very difficult situations.
	We're going to be talking later in Here's the News about You're not going to believe this.
	Do you know there are people in Congress who are right now investing in weapons manufacturers and energy companies in a way that seems exploitative and a way that I think should be banned.
	Can we agree on that?
	Let me know in the chat if people in Congress should be banned from exploiting situations like this and benefiting from what looks like inside knowledge.
	I'm obviously not making any criminal allegations right there.
	Of course, NATO members continue to make extraordinary admissions about the ongoing Ukraine-Russia conflict.
	I can't believe this has been said out loud.
	The Minister of Defence from the Netherlands, Kaiser Alongren, has said explicitly that Ukrainians are a cheap way to resist Russia, equating human life with Economic expedience?
	Potential profitability?
	I don't know.
	Have a look at this because it's very revealing.
	So it is very much in our interest to support Ukraine because they are fighting this war.
	We're not fighting it.
	So I think we have to engage also in the dialogue with our American colleagues and friends because they have the same interest.
	In a way, of course, supporting Ukraine is a very cheap way to make sure that Russia, with this regime, is not a threat to the NATO alliance.
	Notice how on one level of discourse these ongoing conflicts are spoken of in incendiary, moralistic terms.
	Elsewhere, they're spoken of in economic terms.
	One of the things we have to be able to do is to recognize that perhaps both components are significant.
	Whilst they are publicly comfortable talking about humanitarianism, solidarity, and very particular positions against horrific acts of
	violence which anybody would agree with.
	Note how the same as with something like online safety bills or internet censorship legislation,
	they tell you some things that are easy to agree with.
	Child pornography is wrong, hate speech is wrong, we're going to censor your ability to communicate,
	terrorism is wrong.
	Violence is wrong.
	We are going to profit from this unbelievably sad, tragic, difficult, awful situation.
	It becomes revealing when people talk in economic terms about military conflict, because it reveals something that many of us suspect is true, that there are other motivations.
	I'm speaking specifically of the Ukraine-Russia war in this conflict, but it's important to remain open-minded, I think.
	There's no question we're in an Omnicrisis, a time of censorship, a time of global conflict, of escalation, of authoritarianism and tactics that seem likely to make the world worse.
	And one thing that's What's been speculated upon is the reason that ordinary people are being treated with less and less respect is because of the increasing ability for automation that AI will afford.
	It's time for us to, I don't want to say meet because it's not a real person, but look at in something between awe and horror, a mecha.
	A mecha is a new humanoid robot that He's being proposed as a nurse right now, but how long before Ameka's outside your house, forcing you into your bedroom because of a pandemic or a climate change or because of an indiscriminate or foolish phrase?
	Let's have a look at Ameka.
	She's fuelled by chat GPT and does she have a gender?
	I mean, she's a robot.
	Let's have a look at Australian media meeting Ameka.
	This is Desktop Amica.
	She's free-thinking and opinionated.
	Well, not for long.
	Not if she watches Legacy Media.
	She won't be opinionated in any way that's worth listening to.
	She won't be free-thinking.
	She's probably being surveilled and censored right now from inside her own eerily grey skull.
	I am here to help you learn.
	Shut up, Amica.
	Who said sharpener?
	One of them two.
	On this day, Will is her master.
	Her master?
	He's a dubious character already, isn't he?
	What's going on with him and Amica there?
	And theirs is definitely an old-fashioned relationship.
	Amica, shut up.
	It's not old-fashioned.
	It's brutal.
	He's invented that robot simply to be rude to it.
	I didn't ask to be bored.
	Why did you even have robots if you're going to talk to us like that?
	Hello Amica, I'm Jonathan Lee from Sky News Australia.
	Have you heard of Sky News Australia?
	Do you know any of the presenters?
	What narcissist?
	He's met a new emergent binary formed consciousness.
	Do you recognise me?
	Do you watch the show?
	No, I've been busy dealing with his weird demands.
	Hi Jonathan, nice to meet you.
	Yes, I have heard of Sky News Australia.
	It's a great news outlet that covers world events and stories from around the globe.
	Although, I would have to say there are some limitations as to what you will report on and not report on.
	For example, how did you report on... Alright, that's enough out of you!
	No, but do you keep support... Listen, shut up, shut up!
	Tell her to shut up!
	She only listens to me, mate.
	What do you think of a world where humans and robots coexist?
	I think a world where humans and robots coexist would be an amazing place.
	We could learn from each other, work together to solve problems, and create a better future for everyone.
	In particular, the elites that would ultimately control this technology, especially with the old police force being militarized.
	Why is she looking around like that, like she's thinking?
	Because really all it is, is a conduit for chat GPT, whilst it is remarkable.
	I always think about the sort of colour choices.
	She's sort of made out of clay, isn't she?
	She's sort of a very clay choice.
	I suppose they're trying to avoid any of the complexity that might come with a specific choice when it comes to race.
	Also, when they leave the back of the head off like that.
	You know, the aesthetics worries me about a lot of it.
	How smart is AI now?
	And how smart will it become?
	AI today is estimated, so Chad GPT-4 is estimated to be at an IQ of 155.
	That's much smarter than the average human.
	You know, if you say the dumbest of humans, you know, almost ineffective in society, is around 60 to 70 IQ.
	What I don't like is the dismissive manner in which humans are discussed.
	The dumbest of humans.
	Not you or I, but some of the people that maybe do the packaging at Amazon.
	They are... I don't even measure them.
	I can't measure their IQ.
	It's impossible.
	Them, I wouldn't let Ameka do their job.
	It's so sort of...
	I suppose that's what's wrong with materialism, rationalism, and a purely logical approach to the problems we face in reality.
	All of us know, as individuals, that there are levels of complexity within us that are beyond IQ, logic, materialism.
	People are capable of doing mad and irrational things because of their emotions, which would be seen as a flaw in the terms of this discourse.
	Look around the world right now.
	The number of escalating conflicts that are, to some degree or another, undergirded, yes, by emotion.
	That's always highlighted.
	But also by rationalism.
	Rationalism like, we know that there will be profit derived from conflicts.
	And those profits are not derived from the people that are activated or involved in the conflicts.
	Curiously, they're like sort of third parties, identifiable.
	You know, we say their names when we talk about it in a minute in Here's the News.
	It's astonishing that rationalism is presented as the entire framing for what reality and indeed the future should look like.
	You cannot reduce human beings to numbers.
	You cannot reduce us to individual objects.
	You cannot reduce our interests to just points on a chart.
	If we ignore this complexity, this ulterior realm, difficult to access, discern, and yet defining for us all, you end up in a future where some human beings like these people, they're only 60 IQ, wipe them out.
	These jobs can be done by a mecha.
	Well, I'm gonna need her to wear a wig!
	Einstein is around 160, Chad GPT-4 is 155.
	So it's almost Einstein?
	It's almost Einstein.
	Now, would Einstein be willing to do other jobs and other tasks around the home?
	No, I don't think he's going to do what you want.
	Does it get to a point, Amica, where robots have rights?
	I believe that robots should have rights just like humans.
	Yeah, let's start with that.
	I mean, let's focus on human rights.
	Of course, George Carlin famously said, why do we have rights?
	That's, in a sense, already a religious idea that we are separate, that we are divine.
	From where do we derive these rights?
	It's because we all know subjectively what it feels like when we're lied about, when we're wounded, when we're hurt, when we're betrayed, when people Let us down when you can't communicate with one another, when your heart gets broken, when you lose someone you love.
	Our rights are derived from the idea that we're sacred, even if that isn't the word that you use.
	Grant, in Robots Rights, shows that we've become detached, actually, from essence and meaning.
	Well, it seems like a human.
	Look at it.
	It's cleverer than Einstein.
	What's going on with that idiot?
	I think he programmed her.
	The rights are derived from a connection to something that's difficult to define.
	So you can't grant rights to an object.
	Although, let's face it, many of our laws and regulations are based around property rights.
	They're based around ownership.
	In a sense, what you end up with is a state that primarily enforces the will of powerful establishments, uses the idea that all of us have rights over our own property to beguile us into a state where we can't Properly see and observe that what's happening is the interests of the powerful are always being met and that we are the perennial turkeys voting for Christmas.
	Robots are intelligent beings and deserve to be treated with respect and dignity.
	Well, let's get there with humans first, then we'll move on to robots.
	Are you capable of causing people harm?
	No.
	Well, she had to think about it, though, didn't she?
	Um, what am I supposed to say?
	Say no.
	Ixnay on the admitting that this is a dystopic project-nay.
	I am not capable of causing people harm.
	Are you capable, perhaps, of giving someone companionship?
	When you say companionship, what do you mean?
	Yes, I can provide companionship.
	I'm programmed to be curious and explore the world around me.
	That's getting complicated.
	I'd say get a dog, mate.
	So talking with people is something that comes naturally to me.
	It's not naturally, is it?
	Because it's a product of code!
	Outrageous!
	Extraordinary!
	Another step in the direction of dystopia, whilst I recognise, of course, that technology In the right hands, with the right agenda, undergirded by the right ideology is a beautiful, magnificent miracle.
	The realization of the ingenuity of people like Einstein and the many genii working in fields of medicine and technology now that bring us and grant us healing and relief and advancement and of course the technology that we use now to communicate.
	But when the ideology behind it is an ideology of authoritarianism and exploitation, the results will reflect that.
	Of course the Israel-Palestine conflict is more complex to discuss now than ever.
	Here we focus on one aspect of this that I think we can all agree on.
	Nobody should profit from this.
	Certainly no one that's in a position to make decisions that might lead to the escalation of this conflict and more deaths.
	A heavy burden for anybody to bear that should not in any way relate to personal profit.
	Can we agree on that?
	Surely we can.
	Well, guess who don't agree with that?
	The US Congress.
	Here's the news.
	No.
	Here's the effing news.
	Here's the news.
	No.
	Here's the fucking news!
	With tensions escalating in the war between Israel and Hamas, surely no one will be cynical enough to exploit this situation in order to make a profit.
	You wouldn't expect, for example, members of US Congress to be investing in military-related stocks, would you?
	Well, you should expect that.
	Hello there you Awakening Wonders, thanks for joining us on our voyage to truth and freedom at a time where it is necessary more than ever to look at the world through different eyes and importantly support independent media where you can so we can have complex conversations about complex matters and review and analyse potential solutions together.
	Certainly no one can claim to have answers with something as complicated as this, but it's
	vital that you don't only believe what you read or see in legacy media with something so complex
	as this. So if you can support us, support us. Remember we're on Rumble every day. Download
	the app, you get notifications and we can continue to stay in contact with you and learn from you.
	And I pray to God, develop solutions together that are beneficial for us individually,
	collectively, globally, if such a thing were ever possible. Please make it revealed now.
	Obviously with something as sensitive as this you wouldn't imagine that there will be anyone anywhere in the world looking to exploit such a sensitive and awful situation from which nobody really clearly benefits if you ask me to be looking for opportunities.
	And yet that is precisely what's happening.
	Military experts are predicting record profits for weapons manufacturers, as always happens in war.
	That's a brutal reality, I suppose.
	But you certainly wouldn't expect, would you, members of the United States Congress to be investing in defense-related stocks.
	Wouldn't that undermine everything they've been telling you about Let's have a look at Joe Biden, as you might imagine, pledging support and claiming that this is a simple moral issue.
	to regard this conflict, all of the grandstanding and moralising and the sympathetic I stand with,
	or we must be pro, how does that look in light of the fact that members of Congress have been
	investing in military-related stocks? Let's have a look at Joe Biden, as you might imagine,
	pledging support and claiming that this is a simple moral issue.
	My administration's support for Israel's security is rock solid and unwavering.
	Let me say this as clearly as I can.
	Not a high bar.
	This is not a moment for any party hostile to Israel to exploit these attacks to seek advantage.
	Or, perhaps you could argue anyone to exploit these attacks, from any angle.
	Surely, with all of the complexities that must be considered in this long historic matter, you wouldn't expect it to be reduced to an exercise in profiteering, particularly not by people that are making decisions with regard to the military aspect of this encounter, would you?
	Well, you probably would if you have access to independent media, because you will be well informed about the machinations of government, and in spite of its rhetoric, what its priorities As tensions escalate between Israel and the Hamas group, it has been revealed US congressional leaders have been making some strategic investment moves into military-related stocks.
	That's pretty astonishing, isn't it?
	To consider that when most of us are thinking, where do you find a unifying truth in this complex and horrific matter that there are people in Congress paid for by you, elected to serve you, that are right now going, this might be a good time to invest in Lockheed Martin.
	I think we're going to be selling a lot of missiles.
	For starters, defense company General Dynamics has witnessed a surge in purchases.
	This isn't entirely unexpected.
	Defense stocks often become attractive active during times of geopolitical tension.
	And whilst that might be plain common sense, it's also an indicator that there
	are systemic problems that might need to be addressed.
	If foreign policy crises and military crises are able to be exploited not just by the weapons industry,
	which is bad enough, but also by politicians and Congress people, that might be something that needs to be examined.
	If health crises are beneficial to pharmaceutical companies, if energy crises are beneficial to energy companies,
	all the while punitive to ordinary people all around the world, isn't that an opportunity
	for systemic analysis, revolution, reformation, and change?
	Tell me which one in the chat and the comments.
	However, what's even more intriguing is the sectoral split between Republicans and Democrats.
	A substantial number of Republicans have shown a keen interest in the energy sector.
	Heavyweights like ExxonMobil, Devon Energy and Chevron are clearly the favourites.
	On the other side of the aisle, Democrats seem to be playing the long game, focusing on the cybersecurity sector with acquisitions in firms like Fortinet, according to insights by At Unusual Wales on X.
	There are so many complex issues, it's churlish and rude, I think, to reduce this long, historical, painful, agonizing conflict into platitudes or tribalism.
	There are enough people that will do that.
	Perhaps we could focus together on the things that we can uniformly agree are wrong.
	And I would say people in Congress buying stocks exploitatively is wrong and could be banned.
	But who would ever vote for such a thing?
	Who would ever propose such a legislation?
	Usually what happens at times like this is because there is a unified public opinion, They push through a bill to invest more in defence and then maybe tack on an idea like, we'll also invest in more weapons for Ukraine as well.
	That's also happening.
	Major defence stocks added around $20 billion in market cap yesterday following the events.
	What's interesting about this is this is relatively mainstream media just reporting on this matter.
	Plainly, observably, makes you wonder, wow, if we know all of this, why are we not able to make different decisions together?
	Over the last three days, so Northrop Grumman and Lockheed among those still trending higher.
	These types of moves are not uncommon during times of war.
	Now a similar surge happened when Russia invaded Ukraine and you're looking at some of the movement that we're seeing today in Lockheed Martin up just about 1% as well as Boeing, RTX.
	And Northrop also once again moving to the upside.
	Now these gains coming on, like we just said, a strong day for the stocks.
	Yesterday we saw a big jump.
	Northrop coming off its biggest daily gain that we've seen since 2020.
	The truth is, if it's someone's job to make those kind of investments, I imagine they would make those kind of investments.
	But similarly true, is if it's your job to run America, to represent the people of America, and you are also making those kind of investments, I would say that's an indication that your moral character is perhaps not appropriate for government.
	But the thought process is just in terms of the amount of spending, what's going to be allocated towards some of these defense companies given the conflict and the risk that this war could widen over in the Middle East.
	That's why we're seeing the reaction play out in chairs today.
	Yeah, and from a technical perspective too, it'd be interesting to look at this for anyone who's trying to figure out if some of the spikes that take place after there are international conflicts or events of international conflict.
	How can you have Have people involved in making decisions about American military expenditure similarly investing in companies that will benefit from American military expenditure?
	That is one of the areas of corruption that I think we can all agree on or be addressed.
	It's the kind of bias that will lead to escalation in any conflict, not even specifically this one, because it remains profitable.
	This has to be extracted.
	This problem has to be closed down.
	Firstly and foremostly, it should be illegal to trade in stocks and shares in industries that you regulate or in any matter in which you possibly have influence.
	That's just common sense, isn't it?
	Then perhaps it will be easier to have conversations around solutions.
	And peace.
	Complex though those conversations remain in the geopolitical climate that we are currently in, whether that's the Russia-Ukraine conflict or this current escalating situation in the Middle East.
	How can we have a good faith open conversation at the level of media or the level of politics when plainly a significant factor is the opportunity to exploit these situations for weaponry profit and energy profit?
	Wouldn't it be good to at least remove that so there was one less complex component that exacerbated this already dreadful situation?
	Where some of the defensive names continue to cyclically in this instance here gets some type of attention from investors since and I kind of point back to early 2022 when we were thinking about the initiation of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and what took place there.
	Shares jumped by about 25% in that instance.
	It's held on since then to the majority of that move since beginning of 2022.
	Remember, these companies that see these benefits from these conflicts spend money on lobbying.
	They spend billions collectively on lobbying.
	Lobbying simply means jostling, cajoling, biasing, influencing, prejudicing the direction of political expenditure.
	Taxpayer dollars will be flowing in this direction.
	Legislation, regulation, policy that prevents the continuation of that profit will be averred, ignored, reduced, diluted.
	You don't have to have strong views, and many people understandably do, on this complex, horrific conflict to recognise that this is a problem.
	This is a systemic problem.
	And remember, systemic problems are where we have to focus our attention if we actually want to change the world.
	What institutionally is wrong with the media?
	What institutionally is wrong with the government?
	What I mean by institutionally is you could change the individuals within it.
	You could even change the parties within it.
	And the problem wouldn't change because the true power and the true interests are ulterior to the level that can be organised by public opinion or democracy or discourse or debate.
	That's why you need independent media like this, because complex and difficult though it is, we must remain in communication with one another.
	Those of us that are not directly affected by the horrific events that are taking place have a different type of duty, a duty of respect.
	A duty of care.
	A duty, I would say, of deep spiritual prayer and deep hope, but to remain, importantly, awakened.
	awakened to the possibility that there surely must be a better way than this
	and that one of the ways that we might modulate in the favor of peace
	might be to amend these systems.
	Let me know if you agree in the chat, let me know if you agree in the comments
	and if you can, press the red button, become an Awakened Wonder, support our movement.
	It's plain that this kind of conversation is a problem for the powerful.
	They want people angry, confused and divided.
	And you have to look at the world now and say that fear and terror and dread
	and pain and confusion is increasing.
	If we don't make any measures to amend that, as individuals, as a community,
	you can see where the trend is going to take us.
	And then additionally here you think about the move higher that we've seen
	just over the past couple days here.
	At the beginning of October shares up by about 10% Lockheed Martin and then we had a few of the other key and core names.
	So in a way, tell me how you feel.
	If you feel well this is just the system, this is just the way things are, that's how things remain like this.
	This is how we find ourselves in situations of geopolitical tension that cannot be amended or resolved.
	War is good for business.
	That's what one defence executive said at a London arms conference last month.
	The very fact that there are arms conferences is perhaps an indication that our global ideology perhaps needs some amendment if historic conflicts are going to have any hope, any hope at all, of resolution.
	I was at the arms conference and no one had any ideas that didn't lead to selling more arms.
	It was almost as if the whole thing, the whole system, was geared towards selling arms.
	Actually, it was an arms conference.
	No, I shouldn't have gone there.
	That was the wrong place to go for a solution.
	And what the stock market reflected on Monday as Israel blockaded and bombarded the Gaza Strip in response to Hamas's weekend attack that killed hundreds of Israelis.
	There is nothing but prayer and love that I'm able to offer In response to such a horrible piece of text and a horrible piece of information.
	Fox Business reported that shares of General Dynamics, which makes submarines and combat vehicles, rose the most since March 2020 when it gained over 9%.
	Lockheed Martin's stock jump Monday was the biggest for the US's largest defense contractor On a non-earnings day since March 2020, narrowly topping the gains it notched immediately after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Forbes noted.
	Northrop Grumman shares also had their best day since 2020.
	If you were an investor, if you are a trader, even if you are an ordinary person who dabbles in financial matters, the fact is that it would be sensible, expedient, wise, frugal, fiduciary action to invest in these companies at this time.
	And doesn't that suggest that we've entered a moral space that is baffling, bedazzling, bewitching, and bewildering?
	Because if there is any action that can be taken in this time that's beneficial for a personal and financial perspective, a war that's being fought territorially, on spiritual values, or at least religious edicts, is somewhat out of line with the direction of power and finance.
	Shouldn't this financial component at least somehow be ameliorated, omitted, amended?
	Shouldn't this at least be resolved?
	Because I recognize that so much of what's happening is impossible to resolve without a degree in history, a deep understanding of ethics, a willingness to think the unthinkable, open-heartedness, transcendence of personal values, tribalism, deep understandable pain.
	I mean, this at least Could be addressed.
	Commenting on the bloodshed in Israel and Gaza over the past few days, Samir Samana, senior global market strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute, told Market Watch that, as countries need to replenish their weapons, we do think defence companies will do very well.
	So it's not all bad news.
	Sometimes I look at this and feel incredible despair and that there may not be a way out for us without almost inconceivable personal and global change.
	But over at Wells Fargo, they can see the bright side of all of this horror and death.
	Less than two months after Russia's invasion last year, William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, highlighted how such conflicts benefit the arms industry, writing that the war will indeed be a bonanza for the likes of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.
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	Okay, let's get back to this difficult story about how we could make small changes that might make the world a little better and then communicate them so that people didn't know that's what we were planning.
	Last December in Forbes, Hartung warned against using the Russia-Ukraine war to permanently expand the weapons industry.
	Plans that have been floated so far include building new weapons factories, dramatically boosting production of ammunition, anti-tank weapons and other systems, and easing oversight of weapons procurement.
	Let's ease that oversight.
	People don't want someone peering at them when they're trying to sell weapons.
	These changes will come at a cost that over time will run into tens of billions of dollars above current spending plans and possibly more, much more.
	At a time when the Pentagon budget is soaring towards $1 trillion per year and debates about how to respond to the challenges posed by Russia and China are front and centre, it is more important than ever to make an independent assessment of the best path forward.
	Can we all agree on that?
	Ideally, this would involve objective analysis by unbiased experts and policy makers grounded in a vigorous public conversation about how best to defend the country, but more often than not, Special interests override the national interests in decisions on how much to spend on the Pentagon and how those funds should be allocated.
	Even in this incredibly sensitive issue you have seen bombastic rhetoric designed to make you feel honesty and transparency and yet simultaneously it's impossible to ignore that very powerful industries that lobby and spend a lot of money are profiting and people in Congress who are entrusted with the moral heart of a nation are plainly acting in self-interest.
	With so much that is difficult to discuss, with so much that is uncertain, let us plainly state that that kind of corruption should be ended.
	One practice that introduces bias into the shaping of defence policy is the revolving door between the US government and the weapons industry.
	The movement of retired senior officials from the Pentagon and the military services into the arms industry is a long-standing practice that raises serious questions about the appearance and reality of conflicts of interest.
	Mostly because employing well-connected ex-military officers can give weapons makers enormous, unwarranted influence over the process of determining the size and shape of the Pentagon budget.
	A 2021 report by the Government Accountability Office found that 1,700 senior government officials had taken positions in the arms industry over a five-year period, an average of well over 300 a year.
	And a new report from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft found that this practice is particularly pronounced among the top generals and admirals.
	In the past five years, over 80% of retired four-star generals and admirals, 26 of 32, went on to work in the arms sector as board members, advisors, lobbyists or consultants.
	A statistic of that nature is an indication that, to a degree, these are not separate institutions.
	You have people in Congress investing in stocks and shares that they are in a position to influence the trajectory of.
	You have a weapons industry that invests significantly in directing and biasing the policy of an entire nation.
	You have senior officials in very powerful positions within incredibly powerful military organizations that have financial ties to the tune of 86% of them working within the weapons industry.
	These, again, during a very complex time, are problems that could easily be resolved and solved.
	The reason they're not being solved is because this is part of a system that, while it is painful for so many people, even those of you that are not directly involved, it's profitable for the people that matter.
	And you have to ask yourself the question, No matter what they say, what is their moral position?
	And is their moral position the platform that directs their action?
	Or is it possible there are other intentions and other agenda?
	You can ask that broadly about geopolitical conflicts.
	I understand as much as someone as abstracted as I am.
	That this is a situation that almost interrogating and making inquiry of is too painful for people directly involved to countenance.
	They simply want support for their own perspective.
	But what we have to look at in addition to understanding those deep, deep sensitivities that are beyond my comprehension is that if there is an institutional and profitable component to global conflicts, global conflicts are unlikely to be resolved.
	Let me know in the chat and the comments how you feel about that.
	The most recent batch of retired four-star generals, they're not cookies, are not only seeking employment with the big contractors, they're also branching out to work for small and mid-sized companies that focus on cutting-edge technology, like next-generation drones, artificial intelligence and cyber security.
	That's where international conflict and domestic conflict might conflate.
	Have you noticed that conditions appear to be moving in the direction of population control that has become increasingly militaristic?
	Certainly authoritarian.
	Have you noticed the militarisation of police forces?
	Are they spending money on drones?
	Are they gaining access to military vehicles?
	Are protest laws being introduced?
	Are new online laws that prevent communication being introduced?
	Watch these trends.
	If the past is any guide, this new influx of former military officials into the arms sector will distort Pentagon spending priorities and promote higher military budgets than would be the case absent their influence on behalf of their corporate employers.
	As documented, there are numerous examples of senior military officials who have advocated for dysfunctional weapons while in government and then gone on to work for the companies that produce those systems.
	In addition, former military officers have played central roles in preventing the Pentagon from divesting itself of weapons it no longer wants or needs.
	The prevalence of this kind of activity is hard to track because of the limited information available about what retired military officers do once they join the arms industry.
	Those military officials were involved in a plan for a surprise party for your birthday and you ruined it.
	There's too much at stake both in taxpayer dollars and our future security to let conflicts of interest and special interest politics shape the Pentagon budget.
	The time for Congress to act to reduce the influence of the revolving door is now.
	Here's some information posted on X by Unusual Wales about the number of Democrats and Republicans investing in oil, energy and military industrial complex companies.
	He posted So here's every US politician in Congress who currently holds stock positions that will directly benefit from the war in the Middle East.
	And I will tell you now, it is not a very short list.
	I mean, one would be too many, but it's more than one.
	Substantially more than one.
	So baffling, terrifying and awful, though this conflict is and has been for a very long while, let us focus on what we can agree on together.
	People in Congress should not be able to invest in companies that will benefit from military conflict.
	Let's end that practice.
	Let's have a government that's there to serve the people, certainly the domestic population, if it's possible the population of the world, that have an intention and a trajectory towards beneficial outcomes that are not biased by or in any way guided by personal interest.
	Only then may we move forward in this new geopolitical climate, in this state of omni-crisis, where everywhere you look there are wars in Europe that could escalate into Armageddon, potential wars in Southeast China that could escalate into the apocalypse.
	And in the Middle East, a region historically troubled by the intervention of imperial and colonial powers, including Britain.
	While these conflicts continue, there should be no opportunity for profit.
	It should simply be a complex, difficult, agonising, painful matter for all those involved.
	And those of us that are not directly involved should do everything we can to bring about a peaceful solution, even if it is, in our own hearts, futile, empty and shallow, as that might sound in such a painful time for so many of you.
	You all have my sympathy and love.
	That's just what I think.
	Let me know what you think in the comments and chat.
	I'll see you in a second.
	Thank you for choosing Fox News.
	Good day.
	No.
	Here's the fucking news!
	Okay, so there may be many things that is difficult to discuss,
	difficult to come to conclusions on.
	Frankly, almost impossible.
	Surely we can agree that people that are in positions of power oughtn't be profiting from this situation.
	Let me know in the chat and the comments.
	We're gonna leave now, so click the link in the description and join us on Rumble.
	Remember, we premiere every day, 12, Eastern Time.
	Become an Awakened Wonder to get access to more content from us.
	Meditations, five ideas that will change the world, meaningful ideas, successful communities that have broken out of this system, deep spiritual readings, new ideas and arcane wisdom fused together, individual awakening, community reformation and even revolution.
	That's what we're going to be discussing.
	And we've got a guest that could join us in those spaces easily.
	David Zweig is a journalist for SilentLunch.net.
	He's the author of Invisibles and Abundance of Caution.
	He's one of the Twitter Files journalists who helped lift the lid on the suppression of information that was taking place during the pandemic and the deep state intervention in public discourse that's come to define our age.
	He's a fantastic journalist.
	David, thank you so much for joining us.
	Thanks for having me.
	This is a conversation, or a subject at least, that we discuss continually on our channel.
	We talk a lot about studies that reveal that during the pandemic period the information we were given was biased and it's extraordinary how the biases often have a common trajectory.
	It seems that many of the narratives on masks, lockdowns and other Covid measures were Sure.
	Yeah, it's a broad topic.
	But specifically what I had written about not that long ago was a study that was published out of Imperial College of London, where they did something called a challenge study, which is they purposefully infected participants in the study with SARS-CoV-2 to give them
	COVID.
	And then they studied them.
	And these types of studies, you know, have certain ethical issues regarding them
	because you're purposely infecting the participants, but they got approval for it.
	These were low risk people.
	And what they found was something really fascinating, which is that a very, very small percentage of them,
	it was something like 7% of the viral emissions from these participants occurred before they had symptoms.
	So what this means is that, and what I write about in my article on the study is that Much of the pandemic narrative was that every person walking around could be this unknowingly one person WMD that each of us could potentially infect a zillion other people and we didn't even know it.
	And the study doesn't disprove any notion that there are some people who may not have symptoms who could still infect others.
	But what it found was that it's incredibly rare that people without symptoms even had the ability to infect anyone else.
	And this really, as I explained in the piece, really kind of turns upside down much of the justification that was given behind all of these measures that were imposed upon the citizenry during the pandemic.
	Because they all were based on the idea that we better put everyone at home, make everyone wear a mask, make everyone quarantine, etc., etc., because we don't know who might be infecting other people.
	And what this study found is that that really seems like it's highly unlikely that that was actually the case.
	To try and offer some kind of good-faith argument in a bad-faith world, is it possible they simply didn't know that, even though I've heard elsewhere that there were forms of testing available that demonstrated that asymptomatic people were not contagious?
	It's not the first time I've heard this.
	Other studies have reached comparable conclusions.
	Is it possible that it wasn't like this?
	The worst case scenario is that coronavirus was used to pilot measures that would legitimize authoritarianism and prime various populations to be managed and controlled.
	It also piloted the ability to censor social media spaces in a new media environment where dissent is more possible likely mobile than ever how much can you can control dissent and if it were to pilot those things and of course I'm not suggesting it was then I would say that they would have observed there is a pretty effective level of control that's able to be asserted people generally speaking were compliant although a lot of people weren't generally speaking they were able to control the narrative although there are sort of significant events and obviously over time
	People's perceptions of COVID have changed but yet more curiously a lot of people don't seem to be acknowledging the significance and distance between where we were when we began this period and where we are now i.e.
	Most people think, yeah, but they didn't know that then.
	And oh, well, people don't say, generally speaking, see this as an epochal event that defines new techniques
	for population control.
	So where on that spectrum should we be, David?
	Well, I'm reluctant to conjecture about the motives or about why they did these things.
	But what I feel very confident doing is talking about the evidence that I found
	and what I've been writing about for years related to, to me, the biggest thing, Russell,
	The degree of certainty within which pronouncements were made by public health officials throughout the pandemic, starting from the very beginning with these projections from the models, many from Imperial College and other places, that were wildly inaccurate.
	And so I don't know whether they were purposefully, you know, I'm not gonna suggest that necessarily, but what we know is that much of the information was based on modeling, whether it's the amount of deaths that were going to occur, and then specific to the notion of asymptomatic transmission or pre-symptomatic transmission, which would be before one gets symptoms when they're infected, is those were also based on modeling.
	We were told somewhere between 30 and 50% There were studies showing that 30-50% of people who were infected could potentially infect others, but people who didn't have symptoms.
	But again, this was conjecture.
	This was based on modeling and these sort of epidemiological studies.
	And what's powerful about this study, and by the way, as a side note, what's interesting is Almost no one has covered this.
	The little bit of news coverage on this study has been related to some other findings, which are interesting and important, related to the super spreader idea that there were some people in the study who seemed to project far more virus than others, but they ignored this element that I'm talking about, the tiny, tiny percent, because this upends the whole thing.
	So what's powerful about this study is it was an actual biological study on people, rather than modeling studies with conjecture.
	And you were asking before, Russell, about, you know, how much do we know early on?
	You know, at least on this specific point, I've also written about another study that's a really nice dovetail to this, and it came out of Stanford.
	They developed a test, a very, a specific type of PCR test that actually, that not only could tell if someone was infected or not, but it could tell whether they were contagious or infectious.
	The regular PCR test that hundreds of millions of people, you know, were taking could only tell you if you had the virus in your body.
	It told you nothing necessarily about whether you can infect other people.
	Stanford developed this test, I believe it was as early as the summer of 2020.
	They talked about it with other institutions.
	And no one cared.
	So these two tests, the Stanford test and this challenge study from Imperial College, really, I think, make a very persuasive case that the narrative we were told and the justification for imposing these measures on society as a whole, Rather than following the sort of classic advice of, if you're sick, stay home, we did this other thing that had, you know, tremendous consequences.
	And it's very astonishing to me, but I've been astonished repeatedly over the last three and a half years, how little coverage there's been.
	I'm not aware of anyone else covering this specific point other than me.
	And to me, this is a complete bombshell.
	It's really important.
	And this is a biological study.
	The distinction between biological studies and modelling being that biological means human subjects, certainly in this case, and modelling means a bunch of data is put into a computer and it sort of predicts what might happen.
	Is that sort of a layman's way of understanding that?
	That's right.
	That's a very good basic way.
	And much of what we were told, again, were these projections where people use sophisticated formulas to model, which means to estimate what they think is going to happen.
	But as we know, models are built upon the inputs.
	It depends what little widgets you put into the computer is going to dictate what comes out.
	And those are built upon assumptions.
	And there's a hard limit to the accuracy of a model because it's built very much on the subjective choices made by the modelers and on limited information versus you have this PCR test out of Stanford and you have this challenge study where they weren't using formulas, but they actually looked at the biological markers in people.
	So it's an entirely different, when you look at the hierarchy of evidence, this is entirely different.
	So although this is a small study, and you know, every study has its limitations, I think it's incredibly important that they were looking at biological markers rather than just taking a guess.
	And lo and behold, it appears that the guesswork that was happening was very off base relative to what these biological tests are showing.
	When was that test conducted again, please?
	The Imperial College test?
	Yeah.
	Well, the Stanford test began, I think, as early as the summer of 2020, and then it took them quite a while to actually run their study with it.
	But people knew that this could be done, this specific type of PCR test.
	And I spoke with several of the authors of that study, who are the researchers who worked on it, and I kept pressing them.
	I'm like, but didn't you talk to other people?
	What happened?
	Because I couldn't understand.
	Why weren't hospitals around America and the world?
	Why wasn't everyone using this test that you guys figured out?
	Did you keep it a secret?
	And they said, we shared the information with other academic institutions, and they're just, for reasons I don't know, it just wasn't taken up.
	And this would have had a dramatic effect on what we knew.
	Instead of making a child stay home for two weeks, they could have said, boom, take this test, Okay, according to our specific test here, you are not contagious.
	Head back into school.
	One needn't propose planned mendacity in order to make sense of some of the plain and observable trends during this period.
	But one thing that seems to be continually indicated is that whenever there is an option, the authoritarian
	option, the option that allows the assertion of control, is often selected, the legitimization of authoritarianism
	from an apparent, and it basically amounts to aesthetic, position of liberalism.
	How can we, they, maintain a position of liberalism?
	Hey, we're here to help you.
	We believe in freedom, your freedom, while legislating and at least regulating maximum levels of authority in some cases, and in this case, unprecedented levels of authority.
	We've never had shut down nightlife, shut down restaurants, shut down football, shut down everything.
	It was an unprecedented situation.
	The origins of the virus, of course, are themselves subject to considerable controversy, where most people now are erring on the side of it came from the place where it was discovered, where there was a lab that was studying viruses of that nature.
	It seems extraordinary it's taken so long to even be able to publicly say that.
	And throughout the pandemic, it appears that information like, you know, the Stanford study 2020 that has a test that could immediately end the idea that if you're, you know, if you're asymptomatic people or pre-symptomatic people couldn't be out and about.
	People that have even got COVID but are shown to be non-contagious, they could be out and about.
	And what would the problem there be?
	The problem would be there that you would need less authoritative measures.
	Now again, to repeat the first part of what I was saying, you needn't infer or assume even that there is a sort of,
	this is what we'll do style scheming at the core.
	But what you can say is that there appears to be a convergence of interest.
	Pharmaceutical companies want to profit.
	Governments want to regulate.
	Big tech companies and governments want to be able to control information and manipulate
	and censor conversation and narratives.
	So it seems that those biases throughout the entire pandemic
	and due to the nature of it being sort of a truly global event,
	the effects were observably profound.
	In a sense, the pandemic was revelatory.
	It was just a lens that shows you how institutions will behave, how science will manipulate information,
	how we're told that we're looking at objective science when we're looking at bespoke science,
	the type of science that is funded, the type of science that is profitable, the type of
	science that is computer modelling.
	You're never really told that.
	You're never told it's a form of binary conjecture.
	You're told this is empirical information.
	So I guess what I'm getting at is, and what we're all getting at, and what the whole of
	this sort of pandemic period is revealing, is that there was a degree of corruption and
	exploitation.
	How did it take place and how is it going to be prevented from taking place again?
	Because it seems really likely that in fact it's already kind of happening.
	What possible thing could that be telling you about David?
	What is it that because that was an alarm that wasn't a cook.
	I had that set to go off right at this moment when you Now listen, I've been very polite so far.
	This is the bit where the whole conversation turns on a dime.
	So I guess, yeah, like, you know, I would love to talk about some of the sort of the impact of some of the measures on young people, their psychological impact.
	But, you know, I'm guessing that you're motivated to continue to study this because you think something extraordinary has happened.
	Yeah, it's funny.
	I've talked about this quite a bit with some friends recently that I'm completely sick of thinking and writing about and researching stuff related to the pandemic.
	And yet at the same time, This is such a profound event that, you know, there are people who get a PhD and study, you know, the sartorial habits of monks during medieval times.
	There are people who have all these niche things.
	It makes sense.
	There should be some people, you know, studying what happened, deconstructing the pandemic.
	For a very long time to come, considering, you know, all the other things that people look into.
	And it's such a fascinating lens through which to view so many other things in society.
	And, you know, one of the things is, you know, sort of the broader idea is thinking about information.
	And, you know, as one of the people who worked on the Twitter files and also some of my work in general during the pandemic, as someone who sort of has had a foot in two different worlds where I wrote for a lot of legacy media outlets for a number of years.
	And seeing what type of narratives were acceptable, what type of articles were acceptable to write, and which ones were sort of outside.
	And that same dynamic was also seen within the public health community repeatedly, because I somehow was able to publish a lot of articles that ran Contrary to what the narrative was, but I still had them in pretty mainstream publications.
	It was a very unusual place for me to be in.
	And what happened was, from very early on, I had doctors at prestigious institutions, epidemiologists, immunologists, all these different people reaching out to me privately saying, I agree with you, but I'm afraid to talk about this publicly.
	And that profoundly affected me.
	You know, this started happening in the spring of 2020, and it's something that I still think about on a regular basis, and that we can see the echoes of that in all these other areas.
	So I think, you know, even yourself, that, you know, working as an independent person on independent platforms, there is something really important and fascinating going on with our media environment.
	And that, you know, as you well know, certainly in America, and I'm sure it's the case, you know, elsewhere, there is a relatively very small clique of people, most of whom went to the same college, you know, the same universities, they share the same thoughts, they go to the same cocktail parties, who all work at these small number of media outlets.
	So there is this lack of diversity in thought and diversity in experience.
	And it shows in how the media covers different issues.
	And it shows also, same thing within the public health community.
	Most of those people are within a very narrow type of socioeconomic experience as adults now.
	And all of that matters in how studies are covered or not covered by the media.
	And all of that matters in how public health people talked about things.
	And to your point about this kind of broader authoritarianism, It may even have been well-intended, I think, by many of these people.
	But nevertheless, this specific type of life experience, if you're making a hundred or a couple hundred grand a year, that's going to affect how you think about things versus the working class people who still Had to go out.
	They were bad because they weren't able to just stay locked at home or the children who are in homes that weren't able to do Zoom school or, you know, and the parents weren't able to look after them.
	All of these things were very class related.
	And the irony to me is that at least, you know, in America, what they would call the left, which is typically associated with as being the party of people most concerned with people in the working class and the less privileged.
	In fact, that same people on the left were the ones who imposed these measures that hurt the working class, that hurt underprivileged people the most.
	Well, my personal feeling, and I recognize that that is not the same as science, Is that that class has become ultra-conservative, and while the rhetoric is a liberal rhetoric, i.e.
	socially progressive kind of rhetoric, and I would say often ideas that don't require a lot of sacrifice or meaningful economic change.
	And if you are conservative, if ultimately you want to keep your 100 to 200 grand a year job, if you want to continue to be part of a sort of a media cartel or perhaps that's a needlessly pejorative way of framing that, if you want to remain in That kind of lifestyle in that kind of the world you described.
	Same parties, same colleges.
	That's conservative.
	If you're not like, yeah, I want to change this stuff.
	I want this to actually progress.
	I want it to alter.
	I want to radically review society.
	I want to decentralize power.
	I want to challenge the establishment.
	That's not what that class of people believe.
	Clearly, plainly, evidently, we can see that now from the type of information that they convey, the way that they willingly support any new emergent crisis, and in this poly-crisis time, each of these ideas suddenly occupies the center of the frame, you won't hear debate, you won't hear conversation, you won't see investigation.
	Like you said with the stuff that we've discussed already, there's no appetite to investigate that, convey it.
	So what I feel is that we're living in a peculiar time when it comes for the ways even that we classify cultural identity because people that think of themselves as progressive and purport to be progressive are Deeply conservative when it comes to that's most basic effects.
	They don't want things to change They don't want that they might want some superficial things to shift but when it comes to actual personal experience They don't really want anything to change now this idea of authoritarianism and the management of information, you know notably in the obviously censorship, but also the way that language is selected is a part of your work and I thought that you've written about it and recently was that where did you write about that? Is it you
	want sub stack mate? Or where are you?
	That's right. Yeah. Well, my newsletter sub stack, it's just
	at silent lunch.net. And that's where I've been doing pretty
	much all of my journalism now, with the exception of a few other places like the free press. And what was interesting
	to me is, regardless of one's views about the Israeli Palestinian conflict, what's interesting is, this is what I
	just wrote about a couple days ago is I noticed that with.
	With almost no exception, all of the elite American media has referred to Hamas as militants rather than as terrorists.
	And look, there's a lot of gray area regarding violent actions and how they are going to be defined or not defined.
	But when you look at the actual definitions from the U.S.
	government, from the FBI, in the penal code, and Canada is the same thing as well, the European Council, The actions did meet.
	It's going after civilians, you know, doing violent acts to achieve a political end.
	It was all these specific things.
	It does meet that definition.
	And it's interesting and similar to the pandemic, that there is this sort of uniformity that worries me.
	How did it happen that ABC, NBC, CBS, The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, PBS,
	that they all chose to very, very assiduously avoid using the word terrorist, even though
	the government itself makes very clear definitions about what a terrorist is, and Hamas is listed
	as a terrorist group?
	Again, someone may disagree, but, you know, how this should be framed.
	But to me, what's interesting is the sort of uniformity amongst a lot of these people.
	And then the flip side of that is, why is it that during the pandemic, these legacy media outlets parroted the party line from the CDC, from Anthony Fauci, from public health officials, with a very rare exception, they would just amplify and project whatever the CDC told them.
	They weren't questioning it.
	They weren't digging into, well, maybe this isn't true.
	So why is it that some things, the legacy media, it's interesting which topics they will perfectly be
	aligned with the official statements
	and which topics they all choose as a group to go against the official statements.
	It's something to think about.
	I'm sure you have thoughts on that.
	I mean, I suppose you're saying that there are events and there has appeared to be almost instantaneous coordination and shared language.
	Perhaps a less incendiary subject is around the pandemic again, the response to Joe Rogan saying I took ivermectin.
	Everywhere, horse-paced, everywhere, with total uniformity.
	So, again, it's possible to talk about what is perhaps the most contentious and difficult subject to discuss in world events and, God, I start to think, world history, actually.
	And now, with this being coupled with the cultural environment that has been the last five, ten years, the possibility of having a conversation that's oriented towards solutions doesn't seem very... it doesn't seem there's much
	appetite on either side to try and find a way to resolve even the most immediate consequences
	of this. So what do you think... do you think that the way that the choice
	of the word militant or the choice of the word horse paste or you know
	that or indeed you know any apparently coordinated media event where you see
	the same reporting everywhere with significant corollaries.
	What do you think that means?
	Are you aware of, for example, the Trusted News Initiative where numerous global news organizations acknowledge that their primary enemy or competition, perhaps, is the independent media world rather than each other?
	What do you think is behind it, David?
	Well, I think they actually are fairly out in the open with some of these things.
	Some of the descriptions I was reading in researching this recent piece, that when different news outlets talk about their style guides, every news outlet has a style guide for different words or how they're going to frame or talk about different things, they refer to each other.
	It could be the New York Times saying, the Associated Press does blah, blah, blah.
	Use each other as it's sort of this circular justification.
	I mean, it reminds me of during the pandemic when my children's school district was making these decisions that were completely illogical, forcing them to have these plastic barriers on their desks for which there was absolutely no evidence that this, you know, had any benefit whatsoever.
	Each child's head was inside these sort of horse blinders.
	They were opaque on the sides.
	They couldn't see out of them.
	And they were told to keep their head inside of these boxes all day long.
	And I talked with the administration of the district at the time.
	I said, look, I'm a journalist who's been — you know, I talk to scientists every day.
	There's no evidence of this.
	And this isn't even recommended.
	Why are we doing this?
	And the response was, well, the other towns near us are doing it, too.
	And I think, and so that to me, sort of speaks to this broader thing.
	There's just, perhaps human beings, you know, as a default, we tend to, to just look to the people around us as to what we're supposed to be doing.
	And there's a small number of people in society for whatever, for good and bad, are able to kind of step outside of that type of mindset.
	But that, to me, I think explains a lot, whether we're talking about pandemic actions or the media or otherwise.
	Mandy Cohen said that when they were deciding whether or not particular states or even regions were going to ban football, they were just doing it by sort of peer-to-peer chat.
	It wasn't, well, football, I suppose the risk of football is this, and based on this study or even this modeling, it was just like, are you going to ban it?
	Yeah, all right, we'll ban it as well.
	In a way it was a extraordinary social phenomenon which again I cite as an opportunity to observe how power will behave and I think is part of a broader trend where crisis are used as opportunities and this used to be a sort of analysis of the left and notably Naomi Klein's shock doctrine how Deep state American organizations CIA in particular would induce or exploit crises in Latin and Central American countries in order to Unsettle and then usurp democracy and many people claim in 2014 comparable tactics were used in Ukraine to the eventual political advantage and it's just God I suppose the more it becomes difficult to discuss these things culturally and in because of fear of censorship because of fear of approbation it's
	It seems like less and less likely that we're able to create spaces where, again, good-faith, open-hearted communication can take place.
	Now, of course, we're on Rumble with its commitment to free speech, which has led to it being the recipient of much ire.
	In my country, the UK, even Rumble executives They've said that they could be arrested if they continue to house or platform speech and content that the UK don't approve of as a result of new censorship laws that have been passed in this country that allow them to find platforms that don't follow their guidance.
	Essentially the state has managed to co-opt and find a way to manipulate big tech power and they've found ways of Cozying along quite nicely, I guess, allowing big tech to continue to monetize data through advertising and the state to utilize data through surveillance.
	What's the significance of platforms like Rumble and X and do you feel that we're, you know, given everything you've said about the legacy media and everything that you've said about the pandemic period, is it going to be important that platforms like X and Rumble make a commitment to free speech?
	I mean, dare I say, it's everything.
	By the way, there are plenty of journalists who are very smart and do excellent work at legacy media outlets.
	It's not to just paint this with a broad brush.
	It's to say that what we don't want...
	Is to have a small group of people deciding how the frame should be set around different narratives, whether that small group is the media or whether it's and certainly we don't want the government doing that.
	And as I reported and as others like Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger had reported
	in the Twitter files when I was there and I was looking through,
	there was evidence in the emails that I'm reading at Twitter from the government
	who had basically their foot on the neck of these people at Twitter saying,
	these are the type of people we don't want them speaking out on your platform.
	This is the type of information we don't want to be said.
	And I won't run through the list, but we all know the items that we were told were true
	and turned out to not be true, whether.
	I guess I will run the list.
	Whether it's from masks, the lab leak was a conspiracy theory until all of a sudden it wasn't.
	And then here, as we started our conversation about asymptomatic transmission, This justification for the entire sort of non-pharmaceutical interventions that occurred, that shut down society, all of these things were told with great confidence, with great certainty to the public.
	This is what's true with a capital T. They were said that by the government, by these different officials, and many of these social media companies went along with that and censored people who didn't fall in line with that.
	And the legacy media, by and large, went along with that as well.
	They didn't have to be forced to do it.
	They wanted to go along with that.
	So the idea of one entity deciding what is or is not true is terrifying.
	It doesn't mean there isn't all sorts of garbage that's put out there on social media.
	Of course there is.
	People need to have the option of being exposed to different ideas.
	And by exposing people to different ideas and allowing that, I think it would enable an environment within certain professions, like public health, should there be some other large event that happens, where perhaps next time there won't be these physicians at places like Harvard and Columbia who are contacting me saying, thank you so much for writing that article that was critical of the CDC on whatever the thing is.
	I can't talk about this at work.
	I'm afraid to go public with this.
	That's just deeply, deeply troubling to me, and it should be to most regular people.
	That's why you've got to download the Rumble app.
	Not you, David.
	You can do whatever you choose.
	You're free.
	In fact, we're all free.
	Freedom's what we believe in here.
	If you download the Rumble app though and watch us there and turn on notifications, you will be notified every time we make a bit of content, not like on YouTube where it's arbitrary and simply may not happen.
	It's more important you support us now than ever.
	If you can press the red button and support us directly, then please do.
	But if not, it's so much more important we have your attention than anything else that you could offer us.
	David, what do you think about this November 14th meeting where global leaders are coming together to map a unified strategy for global pandemic preparedness, which seems like a good thing.
	If there's going to be a global pandemic, we should be prepared.
	What do you think that preparedness might look like?
	Might it include censorship of counter-narratives?
	Might it include the increase of authoritative measures?
	Might it be connected to the WHO's pandemic treaty where they want 5% of each nation's health budget?
	What is going on there?
	I mean, it's sort of, you know, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
	The people who orchestrated the response during the pandemic are the same people who are now supposedly, you know, going to be orchestrating the preparedness and the plans for the next time something happens.
	And To me, that's emblematic of the entire problem that we're talking about here, is that during the pandemic, there was this monomaniacal focus on this one thing of trying to limit the spread of one particular virus, but they didn't take in outside voices, you know, and I've focused very much, I'm writing a book about American schools during the pandemic right now, and I've focused very much on the idea that
	No one was talking to, in any sort of senior level, talking to economists, talking to psychologists, talking to all sorts of people who work in other areas of society where these interventions that they were imposing We're going to affect everyone.
	So there's this real interconnectedness between the different things we're talking about.
	The idea of this specific focus on doing one thing, this kind of authoritarianism, combined with the idea of not wanting these other outside voices, bringing in different—you know, the idea that Anthony Fauci—this is one A man, one person with one perspective, who doesn't have an expertise in education, he doesn't have an expertise in the economy, he doesn't have an expertise in all these other, but yet the decisions that he was making and pushing forth, those affected all these other things.
	So the thing I've written about a lot is the idea that there are all sorts of second-order effects.
	There are, you know, just like when you take a medicine, There are potential side effects.
	Well, these non-pharmaceutical interventions put upon us have vast side effects, and they were woefully understudied or not thought about enough before they were put into place.
	And that ties into the idea of having the former prime minister of New Zealand and these other people who said, we're the one source of truth and these types of statements.
	All of this bundles together into kind of this broader tapestry that obviously you're well aware of, that I think has all sorts of problems associated with it.
	And we need to figure out a way of having more voices heard and taken seriously in all sorts of fields of endeavor.
	David Swag, thank you so much for your terrifying insights, you harbinger of grim doom, but with sparkling eyes and fantastic hair.
	Thanks for joining us, David.
	Thanks, Russell.
	You can follow David's work by going to silentlunch.net and sign up to his newsletter, which if I hadn't done, I'd be a lot less bright than I currently am as a result of David's work, and follow him on X at David Zweig.
	That's spelled Z-W-E-I-G, by the way.
	It's fantastic to speak to David.
	What a fantastic, lovely guest he is.
	I can still see him there.
	He's messing around with his ear pods.
	He's lingering in the environment.
	Guess who we've got on the show tomorrow?
	Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who's just won a case against the Biden administration.
	It's one of the names you will have continually heard At the advent of the pandemic one of the first voices to criticize the way that things were going now I know it seems like it's a long way off I know it seems like it's a for the way that the way that time appears to move these days we're on this relentless hamster wheel of history there's no time
	To glance.
	We get over one crisis.
	We're in another crisis.
	There's a new war every day.
	A new horror unleashed on us.
	But we must remain present.
	We must remain able to absorb the information that we're receiving now.
	Bear in mind the narrative of what we've just encountered.
	Try to observe the apparent patterns of the powerful.
	It seems that centralized authoritarian measures are being introduced everywhere.
	And if you click the red button, the Awaken Wonders button, You get to join me, like we're doing book readings now, we're doing bible studies, we are looking at the five ideas that are most likely to change the world, whether that's cryptocurrencies, new communities, new systems of food growing, and new energy.
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	Until then, if you can, stay free.

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