Lee Fang - Moderna Hiring Former FBI To Spy On You
TODAY - Is independent journalist Lee Fang.He’s a contributing editor over at UnHerd, and you can find the bulk of his reporting on his Substack at www.LeeFang.com. We will be talking about his recent report on how Moderna is spying on everyone, including me! It shows the relationship between big pharma and social media platforms.It reveals how they shape the public space relating to vaccine information to protect their bottom line.Additionally, we spoke about the War in the Middle East, how Nikki Haley makes huge money from the military-industrial complex, and how third-party candidates will fare in the 2024 elections. Support this channel directly here: https://bit.ly/RussellBrand-Support
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
We've got an amazing show for you today.
I'm talking to the journalist Lee Fang, who rose to prominence during the Twitterphile era, who recently wrote a piece about how Moderna have filed extraordinarily and has some peculiar agenda, it seems, to discredit and destroy people as varied as Elon Musk, Novak Djokovic and myself.
What do we all have in common?
Well, it's that we've publicly criticized the pharmaceutical industry and in particular their profiteering during the pandemic era.
Now it's time for our conversation with a fantastic real-life journalist and some would say eye candy, Lee Fang.
Thanks for joining us, Lee.
Hey, good to see you.
It's lovely to see you, as always.
You are regarded as something, as a heartthrob on this channel, you know that, as well as a much admired journalist.
We're obviously really interested in your recent Moderna piece.
I was really astonished and even though we've made content about it already, I'm still not sure that I entirely understand why Moderna have former FBI employees, why they spend money spying on people.
Can you Uh, explain this to us because it's not really typically what we understand as the role of a pharmaceutical company, one might imagine would have as their priority, the manufacture of medicines.
Tell us exactly what this story is and how you came by it, please.
Well, this is a pretty rare look behind the curtain.
This is a story about how a large corporation is really manipulating concerns around public health and public discourse to its own benefit.
Moderna essentially classifies in its own internal documents.
All legitimate criticism of the vaccine industry as quote-unquote dangerous misinformation, and that includes categorizing any criticism of the effectiveness of the vaccines, criticism of policies that coerce individuals to inject the vaccine, even the pandemic profiteering, this massive effort to make as much money as possible during the pandemic.
Actually fingering you in some of these reports for your criticism of the amount of money made by these large corporations.
So this is really the documents show the blurring of the lines between misinformation, disinformation and corporate marketing.
You know, it seems like there's no distinction between those two categories.
You know, there's, of course, dangerous misinformation out there in terms of lies and, you know, bad information that spreads on social media.
Sure.
But they're taking basically any criticism of corporate corporations that benefit from the vaccines of any of these policies around the pandemic and attempting to say, hey, you should ignore these stories.
Potentially these social media's Platforms should censor these stories.
And they're also equipping health care professionals with some of their partners to rebut some of these claims.
So they're basically recruiting the medical profession to fight any criticism of these corporations.
And, you know, I should say that we obtained these documents.
We also I'm using some of the documents that I obtained from doing the Twitter files reporting.
There's a couple of different sources I'm using here.
Um, but Moderna is different than Pfizer.
You know, Pfizer is a mega pharmaceutical corporation.
They have dozens and dozens of products.
Moderna is unique because this is a company that was essentially a startup for a very long time.
The COVID vaccines, their only approved product.
So this is a company that went from complete obscurity To becoming worth a valuation of over $100 billion almost overnight because of the vaccine.
Now that the pandemic is waning, it's kind of in the rearview mirror, there are less people buying their products.
So they're even more concerned with using and really manipulating these public discourse debates to get people to continue buying their product.
They are really dependent on more governments and individuals buying their product.
I'm terrified by this, Lee.
As you say, a company can come from nowhere.
Obviously, being British, we know that our current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, was part of a hedge fund, I think invested $500 million in Moderna just prior to 2019.
The UK government had several officials that subsequently went on to work for Moderna.
Moderna have received funding for a 10-year project from the UK government, as well as
I know you're aware of this - various, or at least two, FDA officials have gone on to
work for Moderna. This is a company that has a single product. Of course, in the last couple
of months I've experienced some unprecedented levels of attacks that were generated in media
by media.
So to hear of something this nefarious is concerning and intriguing.
So what do you think?
Is this a sort of a pretty unique situation or do other corporations of this size as Do you imagine behave in this way?
How far do you think they would go to discredit and attack their critics?
I'm very surprised that a company can, as you say, emerge from nowhere and now have a valuation of $100 billion on the basis of a single product, employ people from the deep state.
It just seems like a very unusual business model, Lee.
Well, look, you know, there's a long history of powerful corporations harnessing a public crisis to their own benefit.
You know, after September 11th, a number of corporations lobbied to enact laws that criminalize public reporting at At farms, at factory farms.
They said that, look, after September 11th happened, we could have a biological terror attack.
That means we need to criminalize anyone taking pictures at laboratories or at farms or at factory farms.
And it's clear that those laws were passed by lobbyists for the big agribusiness sector.
So there's a long pattern.
of businesses taking advantage of crises.
The pandemic was a crisis.
It's clear that in this case, pharmaceutical companies took advantage of this crisis and blended the concern around public discourse around disinformation to their own benefit.
Now, we just don't know the extent of this because, you know, we got very fortunate in terms of getting access to these files.
We don't know what Pfizer's doing behind closed doors.
We don't know what the other big corporations are doing, because this is pretty much a black box.
If it wasn't for the Twitter files and other disclosures, we wouldn't know a lot of this information.
How these content decisions are made, how they formulate these policies, it's incredibly opaque.
But it's clear that Moderna works closely with NGOs That brand themselves as independent, as neutral arbiters of the truth.
They're just there to advise the CDC, to advise Facebook and Twitter on content decisions.
What they don't tell you is that they're working hand in glove with corporations that benefit from these decisions.
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It seems to you, Lee, that the fact that they are taking these unusual steps when it comes to monitoring dissenting voices, that independent media has had a meaningful impact on the, well not only their business, but Perhaps their agenda more broadly in the pandemic period.
Do you think that independent media reporting disrupted a shared agenda between, say, certain government agencies, government more broadly, and the pharmaceutical industry in the pandemic period?
I don't want that to sound to sort of cloak and dagger. But say for example in this
country there's an inquiry now, a COVID-19 inquiry taking place and while it seems at points to be
pretty shallow and particular, it's still surprising that it's taking place. And now there's very low
uptake, only 7% of people taking sort of booster shots at the moment. Do you think that's because of
the impact of independent media?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, there's a couple dynamics at play here.
One, the mainstream media, you know, they're dependent on advertising dollars.
They have relationships with these big corporations.
Two, there's just a cultural problem in media these days.
You know, it doesn't take nefarious actions by a special interest.
to promote a culture of conformism.
You know, I was at a left-wing outlet for the last eight years, including much of the pandemic.
There wasn't any influence from Moderna or Pfizer in terms of advertising or anything of that nature.
But there was a culture of, hey, you know, we've got to support public health.
So, you know, we can't Publish any stories that might discourage people from taking the vaccine.
It's just a cultural problem in journalism today.
You really have to look outside to independent content creators, to independent media platforms that are willing to go against the grain, both in terms of pushing back and not being dependent on big corporate advertisers, but also pushing back on the culture of journalism.
A lot of the journalists and editors out there, simply for whatever reason, they act as a herd and work in one direction.
You need people who say, stop, let's wait a second, let's be skeptical of these trends, let's be skeptical of these policies.
And, you know, I wrote this story as a partnership with a good friend, Jack Paulson, for the media outlet UnHerd.
But, you know, I have a follow-up on my Substack coming out next week that looks at more of these files, and it really shows that Moderna was particularly Concerned with independent voices with people like you, people like Megyn Kelly, Jimmy Dore, many other independent voices that have been critical of these policies because they see that these independent voices are gaining a huge following and they're shaping the way people see these vaccines and see these vaccine policies.
Is it possible, without significant changes to the law or other, say, anomalous events, to even countenance silencing voices as significant as Tucker Carlson's, and more particularly, I suppose still, Elon Musk?
Isn't that beyond the reach of an organisation?
Like Moderna?
I mean, what other interests would they have to be working with to even be able to consider shutting?
Because these are not like, you know, sort of little online vloggers or whatever.
These are sort of like, you know, pretty powerful voices at this point.
What kind of, what kind of, um, you know, what kind of, kind of cooperation would they require from other interests or other institutions to be able to challenge voices like Tucker's or Elon's?
Well, look, we are in a benefit.
You're in the UK.
I'm in the U.S.
I'm in San Francisco.
We live in an open society.
You know, to varying degrees, we have free speech.
We have the First Amendment.
We have similar laws and provisions around the West, around Open discourse.
So it's not like a totalitarian state like Saudi Arabia or China, where a single government actor can shut down dissenting voices, but instead we see this effort to change the algorithms on these social media platforms to Demonetize and soft censor critical voices.
And at the same time, we see very prominent voices stigmatizing independent reporting.
They say, you know, people like you are dangerous.
They say, you know, you're crazy.
You're someone who's endangering the public health.
And so even when they're not technically censoring, they're marginalizing you to a degree that your voice is not heard or not believed.
And that's the kind of strategy of shaping public opinion.
and manufacturing consent that we see in the West.
It's not the command and control system that we see in totalitarian states, but it still can be very effective in terms of controlling the information that people see and what they believe.
Do you think that without the Twitter files, without Musk's acquisition of that platform, I suppose we just wouldn't know a great deal of this?
And do you think the attempts to discredit and smear Elon Musk are a result of losing control of even a small portion of that space?
Yeah, I think that's a big part of it.
Elon Musk is incredibly impulsive.
He makes a lot of wild decisions.
I've reported on dozens of leaked and hacked and various internal documents over the last 12 years.
It's very rare to have a source like Elon Musk.
It's basically having a billionaire open up the vault and say, come in and take anything you want.
I mean, that's kind of unprecedented.
I've heard from whistleblowers and From people who have left companies and want to speak out against public wrong, wrongdoing.
But for Elon Musk, I think he's a danger to the system because he's willing to point out these problems, whether they're in social media or in government.
And he can't really be controlled by anyone, perhaps because of his wealth.
And that's for better and worse.
You know, I don't agree with all the decisions he's made at Twitter and elsewhere.
But I am grateful for this opportunity to report on these documents because they tell a multifaceted story.
It's not just the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security that's been leaning on these social media companies to shape these content decisions.
Here it shows that powerful corporations like Moderna and like Pfizer, through these NGOs and other organizations that they work with, were attempting to shape the public discourse and to really control the information that we saw.
Yeah, and beyond that, deep state agencies, of course, I know you did their reporting.
Can you tell me a little bit more about what NewsGuard is and what their censorship model is and how they're merging corporate and state power?
And can you tell me what you know about the Trusted News Initiative as well and these other global organisations that seem to incorporate state-funded media and appear to have an agenda to impose narratives and shut down counter-narratives?
Can you tell me about the power that they have?
Well, yeah, there's this, this is, you know, there's some overlap with this story.
But there's a cottage industry of NGOs, some of them privately funded, some government funded, most of them are nonprofits, and they go out and they say, hey, we've got this misinformation, disinformation problem, you know, foreign influence problem, we need To shut down websites, or we need to warn people about dangerous information on the internet.
Well, that's all fine and well, but, you know, a lot of these organizations essentially have their own biases.
They're basically using their own subjective reading of the truth, and then claiming that they're neutral arbiters of what's real and what's not, and what's fair and what's not.
And what NewsGuard does, this is a startup that was founded in 2018, they're actually a for-profit company, so they're slightly different.
They're trying to monetize efforts to control what people see on the internet and where advertising dollars go.
So they rate websites on a 1 to 100 scale of trustability, but they have their own criteria.
And I've talked to a lot of the websites that they've been targeting and they say that there's A clear conflict of interest.
There are many issues at play here.
News Guard received a $750,000 contract from the Pentagon, from the Air Force, in terms of looking at misinformation.
Well, who do they target after receiving that contract?
Some of the left-wing sites that have been incredibly critical of the war between Ukraine and Russia.
They've been pointing out issues in terms of neo-Nazis in the Ukrainian military, stories around U.S.
influence over Ukraine's politicians.
These are areas of legitimate public debate.
These are stories that have been confirmed by other news outlets.
This isn't misinformation.
Nonetheless, NewsGuard, after receiving this Pentagon contract, has classified sites like Consortium News, a site that's been around for 30 years, that's published 20,000 articles.
Just because of five or six articles that are critical of Ukraine, they brand the entire site as dangerous misinformation.
Now, another example is the Daily Skeptic, a libertarian site in the UK that's been very critical of COVID Uh, policies of vaccine policies like the mandate, um, they tried to respond in good faith and go back and forth with NewsGuard and respond to their criticism when they were being labeled as dangerous misinformation.
They even updated all of their articles with an appendix of showing the criticism of their articles and showing their homework of all the studies that they use to report their articles.
After engaging with NewsGuard and promising to engage in good faith, NewsGuard downgraded their rating and rated them as even more dangerous misinformation.
This is a for-profit company that is working with big advertising conglomerates, including the advertising conglomerate That places the ads for Pfizer and other large healthcare companies that has a Pentagon contract but is going out and shaping what people read on the internet because their plugin, which is coming standard if you're reading all the news and public libraries in the US and they have partnerships in the UK, it's automatically logged in to certain public browsers and it's basically relegating advertising dollars and what you see on the internet.
Thanks.
In your article in which you talked about me and Novak Djokovic, you talk about a group called Public Good Projects that are funded by the drug industry.
What are they?
They sound pretty weird.
Some of the stuff that I was doing was difficult for me to understand.
Well, again, this is the same cottage industry.
This is just one of another groups that say, hey, we're out there.
We're here to fight misinformation.
We're here to help improve public health outcomes by shaping the type of news and social media that people read.
And so they were big players early in the pandemic.
They were advising the CDC and the Biden administration.
They were working closely with Twitter executives.
They had backdoor access.
To the Twitter firehose data.
And they were sending regular emails to Twitter executives saying, hey, these are the accounts that are spreading dangerous misinformation, i.e., you should be censoring these accounts.
And indeed, many of the accounts that they flagged for Twitter got demonetized and shadow banned and blocked.
And these are some of the other accounts, the public health accounts, that you should verify and amplify.
So they have a very close relationship with the social media platforms.
They were also advising Facebook.
And all the while, they were funded by Moderna, Pfizer, and other major biopharmaceutical companies.
They were providing over a million dollars in funding.
So if you look at this Moderna story, This relationship is continuing.
They've been quietly working with Moderna over the last few months to create a whole new training program for healthcare professionals to rebut dangerous misinformation.
So this is a non-profit group, PGP, that casts itself as independent, as simply interested in promoting good public health outcomes by shaping the information that you read on the internet.
But they're working quietly with Moderna and other healthcare companies.
Um, Lee, this ability to control and shape narratives I suppose is perhaps the defining media issue of our time.
The inability to have any kind of objective perspective.
And it can be partnered with our new ability to diagnose and discern where certain narratives might be emerging from.
With escalating tensions across the Middle East, we're seeing now a shift in the previous partisan divide Between Republicans who are sort of generally developing a kind of anti-war position with the exception of, you know, events in the South Pacific or, you know, the China and Taiwan situation, we're seeing more Republicans for war.
Can you tell me how this perspective is shifting and how it's being presented to us and how it's altering the sort of censorship issues that we've been discussing up till now?
Well, I think it's to be determined around the censorship issues.
I've seen some reports that people who have posted very benign, banal messages on Facebook have seen their messages disappear or their accounts seemingly being censored.
You know, they're posting things like just free Palestine and a hashtag and then suddenly seeing their posts disappear.
You know, but you know that we need more reporting on this.
We don't have A congressional investigation.
We haven't seen any leaks.
We don't have the owners of any of the social media platforms revealing anything yet.
We don't know how the disinformation, misinformation industry is shaping this yet.
But what we do know is that there's a rush to war.
And every time there's a rush to war, a rush to conflict, you have powerful voices attempting to shape the public discourse around this conflict.
There are very powerful voices in Washington, D.C.
that are demanding more U.S.
involvement.
They're demanding that the U.S.
arm Israel to the teeth and support whatever policy that Israel pursues in their pursuit of Hamas.
And that there are even more extreme voices that say, hey, look, given Iran's support of Hamas historically, even though there's no evidence yet, of Iran directing or having any knowledge of the October 7th attack, this should be the cause beli for war.
We should be striking Iran right now.
There are many prominent voices in the Republican Party, even a few in the Democratic Party, and powerful interest groups in Washington, the same folks who got us into the Iraq war, who are demanding and beating that drum for war every day in Washington.
So we're seeing this escalation in violence very rapidly.
Nikki Haley's one of those voices, I suppose.
I feel like you've reported recently on Nikki Haley and her financial interest and its connection to the military-industrial complex, I feel.
Can you tell me a bit more about that, mate?
And is Nikki Haley a real person?
She's not going to be president.
She's too crazy, isn't she?
I mean, she's capturing the never-Trump vote.
There's a lot of powerful interests that are, for lack of a better term, very right-wing, very neoconservative.
They hate Trump because Trump has promised to end the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
They hate Trump because he's not a big supporter of the NATO alliance.
They want a different Republican for 2024.
They want a Republican That is more in the mold of George W. Bush.
And they think they found the person in Nikki Haley.
And Nikki Haley is interesting because, yes, she's a neoconservative voice, but she's also entwined with the military-industrial complex.
She was, of course, Trump's ambassador to the UN.
When she left office, as a public official, she had to file ethics disclosures.
Her family was bankrupt.
They were facing foreclosure in South Carolina.
She did not have much money when she was leaving public office during the Trump administration.
Now that she's running for president, she has to file a new public disclosure.
What does it show?
She's worth millions upon millions of dollars.
She's raking in over $10 million a year.
And a lot of that money is coming from opaque defense interests.
There are a number of defense firms.
It's not clear what they do or who are their clients.
They're paying her and her husband.
She, of course, joined the board of Boeing.
Boeing makes a number of military vehicles, including aerospace that is used by the U.S.
military and the U.S.
allies.
And she was a very highly paid board member for them up until recently.
She has many relationships that suddenly created this newfound wealth that she has as she goes into this presidential campaign.
And she's using incredibly extreme and dangerous rhetoric.
She's cheerleading Israel to use whatever force necessary, no matter how many civilian lives are lost.
She's also talking about escalating this war into a war with Iran.
I mean, this is incredibly reckless discourse, but this is the voice that the neocons want.
This is what people in D.C.
who are demanding escalation, that want forever wars in the Middle East, she's their avatar.
And if you look at where her campaign is getting money, we'll see it in the next disclosure over the next I believe, month from her super PAC,
but she seems to have just unlimited financial resources and they've kind of materialized out of the blue.
She's dominating the airwaves in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and she's solidifying support.
So it's not the end of the road for those kind of party, a parakeet politicians.
The political establishment can still put forward and succeed with those kind of candidates
'cause it feels like the Republican Party, in particular post Trump has now yielded
to the kind of populism that can herald the power of independent media.
It seems like the Democrat Party is still institutionalized and still captured by unseen hierarchies
that a figure like RFK would have to run as an independent, would have no chance of success.
But it seems to me like, this is just intuition and just guesswork really,
I find it difficult to envisage a figure like Nikki Haley as the candidate for the Republican Party, particularly with Vivek Ramaswamy gaining popularity.
And it seems to me that in this independent media age, those kind of political figures don't really have a chance anymore.
But I guess you're saying that that diagnosis is kind of Wrong.
These kind of institutional figures can still be pushed forward by the Republicans and the Democrats because it seems to me that sort of one of the things that I'm more broadly observing, Lee, is an attempt to shut down independent media because independent media facilitates independent political movements and is in itself a threat to hegemony, even a bipartisan hegemony.
But do you think that That that isn't true.
That the Democrats can march on with Joe Biden, that the Republicans can find a comparable figure and stop this seeming rise of libertarian or progressive or populist voices.
That's what I'm trying to get to.
Well, I don't want to be contrite, but I do want to thread the needle a little bit.
You look back in 2020 at the Democratic primary there, there were populist voices.
There were people like Bernie Sanders that had significant support, but the Voices for populism on the left and the Democratic Party were extinguished really with COVID.
As this pandemic kind of exploded into the public mind, I think there was a retraction.
There was a kind of a demand for normalcy, a trusting of the establishment, a kind of return to the moderate corporate kind of Establishment voices within the Democratic Party and people fell in line behind Joe Biden.
Now we're seeing something parallel happening in the Republican Party.
We've had many years of very unique Republican populism, people like Vivek and Donald Trump, who are outside voices criticizing the deep state, criticizing these forever wars, criticizing the grip of Silicon Valley and Wall Street over Washington.
But now with the October 7th terror attack and this escalating violence across the Middle East, it's just like, you know, I kind of grew up in the shadow of 9-11.
I grew up in the D.C.
area.
I saw the pillowing smoke coming out of the Pentagon.
I grew up very close to D.C.
And it shaped all the politics.
The War on Terror just shut down everything in the Republican Party.
Everyone kind of fell in line.
You're either with us or against us.
Very pro-corporate, very pro-war.
We're seeing something simultaneous happen with the Republican Party.
Just as COVID strengthened the power of the establishment in the Democratic Party, I'm seeing the post-October 7th moment strengthening the neoconservative pro-establishment voice in the Republican Party.
People are falling in line with a pro-corporate, pro-war voice.
And these establishment voices that have been on the margins recently are coming back to the center and they're having more power than ever in the Republican Party.
Now, I don't hope that's the case.
I hope there's a lively debate within the Republican Party There are populist voices that criticize organized power, that criticize centralized power, that criticize these forever wars, but the
Public opinion within Republican Party primary debates is just, it's shifting.
I mean, I think with the next Republican debate, we're going to see just question after question.
Do you support more war?
Do you support arming Israel?
I mean, I think the tenor of the debate is fundamentally changing within the Republican Party.
It's returning back to the kind of establishment voice that has demanded war and demanded corporate bailouts and corporate giveaways.
That seems to be at odds with what most ordinary people want and it felt to me hugely to the detriment of the Democrat Party that they were somehow nurturing the disjunct between a kind of public appetite for peace and diplomacy, a loss of enthusiasm for foreign wars, It seemed like it was difficult for them to jazz people up
and keep it up for the conflict, you know, in particular between Ukraine and Russia, and
that the events in the Middle East have kind of served as a kind of a much-needed defibrillation
of that hawkishness.
And you're saying that's true on both parties, even if it's starting to seem clear that Americans in general don't support foreign wars.
It's a perspective that has to be cultivated.
And even in that recent piece, Lee, you know, that was the Time magazine piece that was celebrating Zelensky, it seems that people around him are saying, oh no, this war is unwinnable.
So do you think that, can both parties continue to put forward candidates that are generally speaking pro-war, when it seems obvious now that American people are getting cynical about it?
People are getting cynical.
It's a tragedy that we've gone over.
We've had this last year of the Ukraine war, where we you know, we had the discord leaks last winter that showed that the internal Pentagon intelligence report said that the counter offensive was unwinnable, that Ukraine had no real chance of gaining significant territory.
Well, we had tens of thousands of people die over the last year for what?
For basically a stalemate that the Pentagon knew would happen?
It's an absolute tragedy.
And I am comforted by the voices like Vivek and others who have criticized this conflict and called it what it is.
That being said, we're entering a new moment of fear, a new moment of, you know, People being terrified about terrorism, terrified about the spread of conflict in the Middle East.
And in a climate of fear, that's where you see kind of the neoconservative voice rise, where you see kind of the crushing of dissent and the move towards the establishment.
That's at least my, you know, that's my read of the current politics of, you know, right now in late November.
I hope that changes.
But, you know, just watching as an observer, The elements of the Republican Party shift since October 7th.
I think this is a monumental event and it's headed in a very bad direction.
Do you think that if both of the main American political parties continue to close ranks, shut down the emergence of populist figures, it's likely that there'll be some success at least for independent presidential candidates?
Is it likely to be a significant election?
The way that the media has changed in recent years certainly seems to posit, or sorry, afford that possibility.
What do you think about that, mate?
You know, it's really hard to diagnose because, you know, the U.K.
system and the U.S.
system is actually very similar.
Even though you have a parliamentary system, you know, we've got this congressional presidential division of power, essentially in elections, you know, we both have first past the post elections, winner take all elections.
So, you know, you have you have a lot of spoiler candidates in your constituencies across the U.K.
that can be manipulated by the two larger parties.
That's just how it works.
And that's very similar here, where we have a winner-take-all system, a very unusual electoral college.
The powerful two parties will manipulate and use third parties to their own advantage.
If we had a more democratic system, if we had a more open proportional system that actually promoted true political competition, I think there would be a true opening For third party voices like RFK and many others, because people are yearning for different choices.
Our system is closed off, even though we're a Western democratic country.
We don't give people meaningful choice in our elections.
It's incredibly limiting.
The few choices that people receive.
Many of them can be deceiving because, again, we have a winner-take-all system.
The system is basically rigged for the two parties, one of those to win, and when independent voices emerge, they're often abused or manipulated by the establishment to benefit the two-party system.
So I'm not hopeful in terms of independent candidates As long as we have this first-past-the-post winner-take-all electoral college.
We need fundamental reform in the U.S.
We need a proportional system or something of that nature to actually give people meaningful choice.
Because until we have that fundamental reform, It's very hard to see a third party having a meaningful impact, but we'll see.
At least in the discourse, it's very helpful to have outside voices because they're bringing up topics that the two-party candidates will not discuss.
They'll talk about interesting public policy issues, corporate issues, foreign policy issues that the mainstream media will not touch.
That's a benefit, but in terms of you know, a viable path to the presidency, our system is
designed to prevent that for third-party candidates. It feels like the way that the Occupy movement
dissipated in your country in particular and the way that leftist populist movements like Podemos in
Spain and Syriza in Greece were kind of annihilated and crushed after the financial crash.
Both of those movements, I suppose, are responses to the financial crash, has led to this kind of, you know, broadly presumed to be right-wing populism that's succeeding across the world, whether in Argentina or in the Netherlands.
And I suppose what I'm sensing is that unless there is the facilitation and reform that you're describing, unless there is the ability for more localised power, one of the ways that people can protest and reject what might be characterised as globalist, neo-liberal politics is through to a return to more
Demonstrably nationalist politics.
Understandably.
It doesn't seem like there's anywhere else to go.
Again, you know, because that kind of Occupy moment was so deftly crushed, ignored.
So do you feel, Lee, that the only sort of pathway out of this is via these kind of populist libertarian movements, if both parties are going to crush any attempt to evolve or reform?
I think there's a yearning throughout the world for populist movements.
But the big problem that we've seen, at least in my eyes, in the last decade since Occupy, is that the major parties around the world have refused to really champion left populism, to really challenge the neoliberal world order.
You have corporations that don't pay their taxes, That shift money and factors around the world to avoid labor regulations to avoid paying people a decent wage to avoid, you know, a decent pension for their retirees to make sure that they can pollute without any accountability.
Now, instead of taking on that kind of populism.
The left globally in the US and many other countries have forced upon us culture war.
They say instead of talking about these multinational corporations and these billionaires that jet across the world on their yachts and their private jets, Let's talk about race.
Let's argue about the pandemic.
Let's fight each other around gender ideology.
That's what we've received.
Now, that hasn't removed the issue of populism.
People are still angry at the establishment.
They're angry at these foreign policies.
They're angry at The fact that they can't afford eggs, that they can't get by in society today, that we have this inflation crisis, we have deteriorating infrastructure, and in the vacuum there, where there's no left populism, we're going to see right populism.
We're going to see more nationalistic movements.
We're going to see efforts, whether that's in Argentina or the Netherlands or elsewhere, to take up that space where there is no left populism.
We don't see left populism.
So, yes, there's an innate anger at the system.
There's an anger at the global order that does not work for the working class or for the middle class.
And in the absence of any kind of voice that champions reform, I'm sorry, the sun's starting to hit my face here.
We're going to see more of these movements, I think, because no one else is speaking to this problem.
And you see, like, the various agricultural movements across the world immediately characterised as right-wing and racist.
There's such an appetite to condemn these movements, even when they're in countries like Sri Lanka and India, and sort of, you know, where white nationalism would surely have limited success.
Like, they're sort of characterised in the same way.
I wonder like if the pandemic era was a kind of window into a globalist agenda and I wonder if we're going to see even in with these limited inquiries into Covid as we're seeing in this country and the beginning of lawsuits like the AstraZeneca one in our country a kind of emergence of real anti-authoritarianism that Whether it's expressed through right-wing populism or left-wing populism and you've described how it's unlikely to be the latter will lead to a genuine anti-establishment movement and in fact that's what sort of all of these new sensorial measures are kind of about and this and in fact maybe even these escalating crises and the concomitant fear that it generates is about preventing the emergence of these various anti-establishment movements.
Do you agree with that?
And how do you think that these various, the reckonings around COVID and the lawsuits around,
in particular, AstraZeneca, but there might be more stuff like that to follow.
Do you think that this might somehow boost an establishment movement?
Well, in this crisis of COVID and this pandemic, we were told we all have to sacrifice.
We can't go to the funerals of our loved ones.
We can't leave our homes.
You know, if you were a small business, you had to shut down.
You know, we all had to tighten our belts.
What they told us for justifying these extreme policies turned out not to be true, right?
Like the vaccine that was supposed to end transmission of the virus did not do that.
A lot of these COVID lockdowns did not work in terms of stopping the spread of the virus.
There was just a cornucopia of lies.
Meanwhile, while they told working-class people to tighten their belts and to sacrifice, The rich never got more rich.
Moderna alone minted five new billionaires.
We had this explosion of wealth, you know, low interest rates and bailouts that benefited big corporations.
It just kind of expanded this wealth inequality we see globally.
So, you know, in previous crises during the Great War and World War II, In the US, we created special taxes to make sure that the big arms contractors that were making a ton of money paid more back to the public coffers.
We kind of set price controls to say, hey, look, in this time of extreme measures to win this war, we're going to make sure that the rich don't Uh, don't, uh, exploit this crisis for their own benefit.
Did we do that for the pandemic?
No, we made only working class and middle class people pay the ultimate sacrifice.
We didn't make the corporations.
So in, I think in the, in this, uh, in this moment, looking back at it, there's a, just a complete lack of trust in the establishment.
There there's anger at the establishment, lingering anger at, um, At powerful elites, whether those are government elites or corporate elites, that benefited from this pandemic, that lied to us about this pandemic, we still have this inflation crisis that's downstream from a lot of these policies.
Whether that's in the US or globally, there's going to be a lot of lingering anger, and I think that's going to be a big factor going into the 2024 election, just as it's been a big factor in these recent elections in Argentina and the Netherlands.
Ah, Lee.
Thank you very much.
Even in times of fracture and confusion, you are able to bring us, now literally, great illumination and light.
And with that Thanksgiving light cascading across your much-adored, according to the chat, face, I'll thank you for joining us.
And thanks for doing reporting that appeared to establish that there is indeed an agenda to destroy me in the pharmaceutical industry, which seems to be playing out in the wider public.
Thanks, man.
Thanks for your work, Lee.
Hey, thank you so much for having me.
Appreciate you, Russell.
You can follow Lee Fang over on Substack.
We'll post a link in the description so that you can get access to his incredible work, including his recent report on how I've been targeted by Moderna in an extraordinary way.
Next week, we've got fantastic guests, including Matt Taibbi, who'll be talking to us about the UK files, which is another story that shows that peculiar, nefarious interests have been targeting me, it seems, In order to, I don't know, push censorship, shut down free speech.
We'll learn more about that with Matt Taibbi next week.
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