Michael Shellenberger - On the Sinister Truth of the Jan 6th ‘Bomb’ Threat
Today, we present my conversation with Michael Shellenberger, an investigative journalist and editor of Public on Substack. In our discussion, we delve into the significance of independent media, particularly in the face of the censorship industrial complex.Michael also explores the Jan 6th “bomb threat,” revealing the agencies involved and shedding light on aspects the legacy media won’t cover.For more of Michael’s work and Public’s reporting, you can click HERE: https://public.substack.com/ --💙Support this channel directly here: https://bit.ly/RussellBrand-SupportWATCH me LIVE weekdays on Rumble: https://bit.ly/russellbrand-rumbleVisit the new merch store: https://bit.ly/Stay-Free-StoreFollow on social media:X: @rustyrocketsINSTAGRAM: @russellbrandFACEBOOK: @russellbrand
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proper, legit journalists like Michael Schellenberger, who is today's guest.
When we had this conversation, I knew I was in the company of a true journalist.
Someone who believes in organizing a global movement to confront a global threat.
Who advocates for the farmers.
Who advocates for the truckers.
Who advocates for individuals across the political and cultural spectrum that we may come together.
Unified but decentralized against the forces that want to destroy us.
He talks about these NGOs and think tanks that are used to crush dissent as government proxies.
You will love this conversation and you will become educated.
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He famously worked with Elon Musk to expose censorship on the Twitter files.
Michael Schellenberger is one of my favorite journalists.
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Okay, without further ado, let's introduce our fantastic guest today, my friend and free
speech advocate, Michael Schellenberger.
Great to be with you, Russell.
Michael, it's been an extraordinary couple of weeks.
Many of the things we discussed when we met months ago to talk about the censorship industrial complex have become, I suppose, more severe.
Events in Ireland, events in the United Kingdom, Canada, The revelation that the Emergency Act was illegally evoked, the attempt to introduce vague and peculiar hate speech laws.
I understand that comparable things are happening in Brazil, according to a recent piece I read on Public.
Do you feel that people are beginning to understand how critical the issue of censorship is now, or do you feel that we are sleepwalking into a state of compliance?
That's a great question.
I mean, I think that we are becoming more aware of how the censorship industrial complex operates.
And so we are much more quickly able to identify what's happening in different countries, whether it's Germany or Brazil or Canada.
We're seeing very similar institutions, Soros Foundation, the Omidyar Philanthropies.
We see intelligence agencies, the FBI, for example, showed up in Brazil in this analysis of Brazil.
We see them engaging in very similar behaviors, seeking to demonize ordinary folks with very reasonable demands, whether it's Canadian truckers, Or German farmers as far right, which is basically code for calling them Nazis.
And these are people that are demanding things like, you know, these farmers in Germany make less money than the average German citizen and they're protesting an increase in energy costs.
That's a concern that most Germans share.
And so you see this effort to sort of demonize them.
They use similar tactics.
They'll say, oh, we discovered some internal messages on Telegram and we found that they were involved in COVID, you know, denialism and Russian disinformation, basically suggesting that all the farmers are far right and fascist.
Similar tactics we see in Brazil, where they've sought to label people with very reasonable concerns.
So, I think we're much more, we have greater, as you know, as our opponents say, we have greater situational awareness of what the censorship industrial complex is doing.
And I think that's becoming, turning to our favor.
And you just see a lot of concern across the West around, you know, huge numbers of border crossings, you know, large challenges of integrating immigrants So clearly, as you were saying on Tucker recently, there's a lot of chaos in the system right now.
And so I think one of the things that's going for, you know, popular movements is that there's broader recognition in the society that things aren't going well, and that the elites have done a poor job of managing our societies.
When it comes to the question of censorship, the fundamental question I suppose we have to ask is, are they asking for the legislative ability to censor in order to protect us or in order to support their own agenda?
And it seems almost absurd to me that anyone would think that the former was in any way plausible, but then we all consume Quite varied and distinct media these days.
I just watched a piece, I think, on a British corporate media outlet where a former government general, and I'm going to take a wild guess and say current board member of some weapons manufacturer, advocated strongly for an increase in budget for defence in the UK, advocated for conscription, and it was all presented as news when it's like plainly Advocacy for a particular set of policy.
So when it comes to, for example, the now somewhat famous Barack Obama Stanford speech where he said the problem with independent media is even if you don't believe these conspiracy theories, they muddy the water.
That's why they should be able to censor.
It seems to me that the opposite is true.
They are able to propagate such consistent and ubiquitous messaging through their many channels that used to be opposed and now as the TNI themselves admit are aligned in their war against independent media that we sort of are unable to galvanize the level of outrage that will be appropriate given what we're facing.
I think that's right.
I think that the broad concern from elites is the lack of control over independent media, in particular, the lack of control over social media.
And so you saw a very deliberate effort really coming out of 2016.
It preceded it.
But really, it was Brexit and Trump that really resulted in FBI, CIA, the organizations that governments support, all these different NGOs whose names we can't even remember because they come, they pop up, they disappear.
They're like little front groups.
We're tracking more of the people now because it's easier to track the people.
They create these little groups that last for a year or two, then they disappear, demanding more censorship by social media platforms.
Obviously, they had succeeded until Elon Musk took over Twitter, and so now they're attacking Elon Musk regularly because they want to get control over that platform.
There's a sort of desperation to them.
There's a kind of desperate quality to it.
Every single opportunity they have, they use as a reason to demand more censorship.
So whether it's the German farmers protesting, whether it's the Canadian truckers, whether it's COVID, whether it's climate change.
Whether it's the war in Ukraine, they're absolutely obsessed with gaining control.
The other thing that we've noticed, we actually went and identified that the discipline, the message discipline that the censorship industrial complex has, They're very obsessed with Russia.
They really want to frame their opponents as Russian.
They also want to frame their opponents as fascist and Nazis.
So they continue to do that.
And then they also want to frame their opponents as engaging in conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theories is a really important one for them because what they want to do is they don't want people to ask questions About whether or not laws might be getting broken.
I think it's important where conspiracies are secret efforts to break laws.
If you are a police detective, you are by definition a conspiracy theorist, unless you're a terrible police detective.
If you're an investigative reporter, you must engage in conspiracy theorizing.
Obviously, that's not enough.
That's not the end of the story.
You want to go gather evidence to support your or to contradict your theories.
But what they're trying to do is to get people to not think, and that's why they're emphasizing so much this new one that they're really emphasizing media literacy.
The Canadian government in particular wants to put money into government-funded media outlets.
Already, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation does this.
You see it in the United States as well, a very heavy hand in various, you know, NPR, Voice of America.
You know, they want to push these sort of certified organizations, and they use NewsGuard, Global Disinformation Index and others to demand that the advertisers boycott independent media.
So they're absolutely obsessed with controlling the information environment.
And it sounds, you know, like it sounds crazy to say it, but it's absolutely accurate to say they want mind control.
They want to control how people think.
They want to control people's behaviors.
This is just an obsession of the elites.
And it doesn't it doesn't matter whether it's 2016, 2017, 2018, 2024.
This is where they're headed and they have to stamp out dissent, stamp out independent voices.
And so you're going to see this constantly.
The only hope we have is to identify early what they're doing, expose it, describe how they're doing it, describe how it's pathological, how it's tied up to intelligence agencies.
That's our best weapon against them.
It's to get what they call and what we're calling situational awareness of their disinformation efforts.
There are a bewildering set of alliances forming and it's difficult to track a gender emerging.
When you talk about this obsession with Russia, I'm reminded of a recent interview I saw with Nancy Pelosi where she said that anti-war protests, even if they were regarding the Middle Eastern wars, were playing into the hands of Putin, even speculating that these protests might somehow be funded by Putin and Russian disinformation organisations.
She even had the gall to say that the funding should be investigated, when if anyone's funding
should be investigated, it's Nancy Pelosi's.
How is it that Nancy Pelosi is someone where you could sit down on a Tuesday night and
watch a Netflix documentary enshrining her as a kind of living symbol of progress, a
kind of hero of liberalism, and you can hear her talking in such odd... and then you can
hear her on the news attacking a civil rights movement, an anti-war movement, as if the
60s never happened, as if being pro-free speech and anti-war wasn't just 20 years ago a...
Liberal, left-wing position, and now we're- the fact that there are- because there are no genuine principles being practiced, you can just mobilize and move this mosaic of ideas to create whatever pattern is convenient to generate, as you say, control.
One- last time we talked, we were talking about the vagueness of hate laws, the vagueness of the description of what hate- what constitute hate speech in Ireland.
I know that you've been writing about censorship laws in Brazil now.
How is it that there are these- that- You know, there are agricultural movements across the world because farmers in Sri Lanka, India, Germany, the Netherlands and Scotland all seem to be experiencing the same problem.
And the same rhetoric is being deployed against them.
And with the subject of censorship, similar, I think in your article, or certainly in the article of one of your colleagues, you said something like eerily similar legislation being imposed in Brazil, in Ireland, in Canada, UK.
Tell me, where do you think this is emanating from?
Is it like these groups that are around Soros?
But tell us, Michael, please.
Yeah, that's such a great question.
I mean, we wrote, yeah, eerily similar is the words that keep coming up.
Because, you know, most Americans, we don't pay a lot of attention to other countries.
We're sort of famous for being very provincial in that way.
But as soon as you start looking at Germany, you look at Brazil, it's the same institutions, Soros, Omidyar, State Department funded NGOs, which are often controlled by or influenced by the CIA.
The CIA used to try to control and overthrow governments.
Using labor unions as labor unions have declined.
It's now NGOs.
So you see people clearly with very strong connections to the intelligence community, whether working directly for them or funded through various NGOs or philanthropies.
doing the work of intelligence communities. So yeah, I mean, there's a sense of a kind of,
you know, dark energy that you can't see it, but it's sort of, its effects are visible in
all these different places. And they talk in the same ways.
You mentioned a really, the hate speech one is another one. I mean, so you sort of have Russia,
they say, the messages are very disjointed.
It's like Russia, far right or Nazi or fascist.
They also talk about undermining democracy.
And then the other one is hate speech.
Well, hate is a completely subjective issue.
It's just your interpretation of somebody.
Is angry or somebody says, I think we're having trouble absorbing all the immigrants that we've been, you know, the fourfold increase of border crossings in the United States.
I mean, that's something that very progressive Democrat mayors of Chicago and New York are raising the alarm about.
Well, are those are they filled with hate?
If I say so, yes.
And then they should be censored.
So you clearly you're seeing and you know, you're getting people like, you know, Brennan and Hayden, the former directors of the CIA, who sit on the boards of big organizations like the Atlantic Council, making what often seem like left wing arguments, you know, the need for, you know, fighting hate, fighting racial intolerance.
But then also making what you might consider more right wing arguments, or at least used to be considered right wing arguments about Russian influence.
And I think that these messages are not it's not accidental.
I point out at one of the articles, we point out that there's other arguments you could make against populism, since these are fundamentally counter populist movements.
You might say that populism is inefficient, that globalization is better for the economy.
But what's so interesting is they're not making that argument.
They're really wanting to focus on these deeper Messages, and I think it's because they have decided that they're doing particular work with particular constituencies.
So I think that the Russia framing actually is really aimed at people that are traditionally on the right, since the Russians have been demonized for so long.
You see the never Trump Republicans often using that.
I think that the anti-hate speech stuff is aimed at the left.
You know, so I think you get these different messages aimed at different groups.
This is really strategic.
They're not messing around.
I've been involved in left-wing causes since I was 17.
So literally 35, over 35 years of my involvement in left-wing causes.
They're famously undisciplined.
Like you can't like people are disorganized.
I mean, you know yourself, right?
Like you're in these people that want to say a million different things.
These organizations and these initiatives are so disciplined.
You know, when we were together in London, I compared it to sort of an intelligence operation from like one of the Bourne Identity movies where they're so disciplined.
Everybody knows what they're supposed to do.
They know what they're supposed to say.
They don't veer from it because they're in a military hierarchy.
And that's what we keep finding.
In fact, we did find with the CTIL files last fall or last December, November, December, we found the military in Britain and the military in the United States clearly involved in pushing these initiatives and in fact created a handbook For pushing them.
So, yeah, we're looking clearly at militaries and intelligences and intelligence communities working together around the world, particularly through the five eyes, English speaking nations, but also Brazil, to basically push the same strategies of censorship and disinformation, the same institutions there.
Look, this is coordinated.
This is global.
It's very, very dangerous because obviously we're at a disadvantage given our limited resources against all of the major governments of the world.
In fact, our only option is popular uprising, mass disobedience, simultaneous awakening.
I'm very interested in these temporary, almost pop-up agencies that are used by governments as proxies to crush dissent.
This is one of the subjects of our recent conversation on Tucker.
Logically AI is one such group who I think targeted you, certainly targeted me, Jay Bhattacharya among others,
Moderna, I have agencies that track people.
Logically AI, it seems like, as you say, sometimes it feels like a quite diffuse agenda,
but due to the variety of subjects they're willing to attack on,
but plainly it is about asserting control.
How is it that people can be galvanized, educated and informed when there's this odd combination
of sort of like they're tediously bureaucratic, technocratic, temporary and technological.
So it seems like very difficult to get a hold of it and say like, well, this is what's happening now.
But the same way that you, I was struck, Michael, by the way that you're saying they have,
Um...
it were avenues of attack. The Russian angle is to hit the right. The free speech, the
hate speech angle is to hit the left. Do you think now that there are new demographics
emerging for which there aren't neat taxonomies because they are made up of people like you
died in the war lefties, me a kind of a cultural lefty but always vehemently anti-establishment
almost to a pathological degree as far as I can tell from inside of myself, forming
alliances with people that were plainly once regarded as conservatives. What do you think
about these new alliances and how do we grow them and how do we become effective when what
we oppose is by its not by its nature but apparently seems at least now to be so sort
of diffuse and difficult to track all these weird little NGOs and think tanks funded by
governments and stuff.
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Yeah, it's such a really, it's such an important question.
So one of the first things that, you know, my friend and colleague Matt Taibbi, the journalist, did when we first were discovering the censorship industrial complex, I think it was like last spring or summer, is they created a report of all the censorship organizations.
And it was really useful and helpful.
I think they did 50 or 100 of them.
The problem was that some of these organizations are like pop-up organizations.
They pop up for like a year or two.
They don't say where their money's coming from.
Some of them don't even say who the people are.
They pop up and then they disappear.
Now, there's other ones that are more longer lasting.
I mentioned Omidyar, Soros, the Atlantic Council.
These are much more longer lasting.
They've been around for decades.
But we realized that actually tracking the organizations wasn't enough.
We are now tracking the people because what you see is people that people pop up in one organization and they go quiet for a little bit like that Homer Simpson gif.
He goes back into the into the hedge and then they come back into some other organization.
And then and then we're trying to track the people.
But then the really we think the really fundamental thing to track are the disinformation campaigns that the elites They would call them influence operations or information operations.
And you can track those over time.
And some of them, like the Russia one, you know, that the sense that Russia is controlling things.
It's really a conspiracy theory.
That's that you can see it over time.
It even was in Brexit, it turns out.
And obviously now we're seeing it in play out in places like Germany and I suspect it would be in Brazil, too.
Similar with the hate speech, they have these little histories.
So we're trying to really do it at three different levels.
The people, the organizations, and the campaigns that they run.
We think that just having awareness of it, so when people see it they go, oh that sounds like something that might be coming from the intelligence community, or that sounds like something that we might have seen Russell Brand or Matt Taibbi or Mike Schellenberger write about.
Get some of that awareness.
I think that actually, it's funny because we find ourselves Learning a lot from our opponents and using some of their language.
I call it situational awareness.
They sometimes call it pre-bunking or inoculating people against fake news.
We need to inoculate our followers and listeners to these government-run and initiated influence operations.
We need people to know they are trying to control how you think.
They're trying to control the information environment.
Here's the characteristics of that that you should be looking for.
And one of the characteristics about that we wrote about last year a couple of times, so happy to see you on Tucker to talk about this, is their demonization efforts.
If you have a populist voice who's growing in power and the three big ones are you, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, they will come after you just no, you know, no holds barred.
They'll come after you like you're a political candidate.
That's what they're doing.
And that's the same strategy that obviously political consultants use to attack their opponents.
It's also the strategy that intelligence community has used.
You look at the CIA's tactics.
From World War Two all the way until now, they will demonize their opponents.
They will say the most outrageous things to destroy people's lives.
It's quite shocking.
And you kind of go, well, we allow for that in politics, but we don't allow for governments to do that.
Governments are not allowed to engage in politics.
That's where we draw the line.
So every time we can expose the behavior of these government officials engaging in politics, I think we're actually doing a real service for a lot.
I mean, you guys have had to pay a heavy price.
They've certainly come after me, too.
They'll keep coming after folks, but I think you have to draw attention to what they're doing, because I think that inoculates the public to some of the effects of it.
Attica69 in the chat right now, what a great fucking point.
Inoculate against propaganda.
And I am really heartened sometimes when I look at the comments under a story, often a story that's nothing to do with me, Michael.
Can you imagine that?
And I read this, I read the comments and people are like, that's bullshit, that's bullshit, propaganda, propaganda.
Like the one I noticed was Channel 4 did a news piece that was on excess deaths cool sort of like sudden death syndrome uh and i may get some of the details wrong here but we did a video on it and it was a video where like you know this is the tone it's british media so it's like people are suddenly having heart attacks and collapsing for no reason no one knows what it could be but this phenomena has come around since around 2020 2021 right every single comment is we know what's causing this we know what you're doing
We know, like, I didn't find one comment that was like, oh, I wonder what this could be?
Everyone knows.
I remember another story where a Facebook whistleblower, this is about three years ago, so I was on the beginning of my journey of operating in these kind of media spaces, Michael, and we did a story going, oh this is brave, this Facebook whistleblower coming forward, and all of our comments were, nah, This woman's being used so that they can control and manage individual accounts.
This won't lead to infrastructural change within Facebook.
This is about being able to censor and control.
So our audience were ahead of us.
Hopefully, we've bloody well caught up with them by now, but certainly, like, you know, I am very heartened by, and even with the personal experiences and personal attacks recently, like, When I go out, look, I might get a different experience in, sort of, Manhattan or certain parts of London, but, you know, when I'm out with normal people, people go, alright, Russell, keep your head up, chest out, son!
Like, people don't, they, they're losing control.
That's what this is about.
They're losing control.
And it's because of, thank you for listing me in such illustrious company, but, Well, I always cite the real journalists who operate with integrity, that show they're working out, that bring receipts, that do the research, that help us to make the connections, like yourself and the colleague that you've listed, the great so-called journalist Matt Taibbi, for educating a, you know, a media class within which I'm happy to be included.
I remember, mate, when you told us about the pre-bunking that went on with the Hunter Biden laptop story, that in advance news organizations were told, listen, we've got this disinformation coming your way, just so you know in advance to ignore it before it hits you.
I also, with regard to what you're saying about track the individuals within these little Soros or Atlantic organizations, I remember when I see Uh Victoria Nuland, this is a slightly different thing because it's in the world of diplomacy but like Victoria Nuland cropping up talking about bio labs in Ukraine that only become dangerous when Russians get control of them but were not dangerous when they were controlled by Americans in Russia and that she's worked with
The Obama administration, the Bush administration, now works with this administration.
You start to realise, oh wow, no, there are these sort of, this Zelig army of bureaucrats and mandarins that are operating and manoeuvring power outside of the spotlight that temporarily shines on the waxen and cadaverous face of the current incumbent of the White House.
We're starting because of the speed of the discourse now to be able to sort of go no wait a minute This is gonna be like say the Nord Stream pipeline was a really obvious one as soon as it happened You're like fuck off like they couldn't even keep pace with the with the opposition and dissent Yes.
Yeah, I think that's totally those are all great examples.
I mean, there's definitely something going on with Russia.
I don't totally understand.
We've talked you talk about that earlier in our conversation.
You talked about how Obama goes and gives a speech one week before they in 20 early 2022, before they announced the disinformation governance board in the United States, one week clearly preparing the conversation for that introduction.
He does it at Stanford with the former Russia ambassador named Michael McFaul.
Who works for Michael McFaul, the Stanford Internet Observatory, which is one of the main censorship organizations, a former CIA fellow who's really runs it off, you know, who was working with Obama.
So, you know, she was supposedly just, oh, I'm just an ordinary tech executive, suddenly found herself fighting ISIS, you know, and in the White House with Obama.
I mean, clearly an intelligence operative.
So you see clearly something going on with Russia.
There's a strategy to use Russia in some geopolitical sense that I don't think I've completely come to understand.
I think some of it has to do with they want to label domestic populists, people like you or people, you know, Trump supporters in particular.
But even we saw with Brexit, they want to label populists as foreigners.
It's quite brilliant because, of course, the famous political advice from Karl Rove, who is George W. Bush's political consultant, he said, attack your opponent's strength.
Well, so what they're doing is they're saying that populism is foreign.
It's really quite amazing.
So they're saying you're not actual.
There's no actual domestic support for these populists.
It's foreign.
There's some sort of mysterious connection to Russians.
Oh, it's Russian.
Rudy Giuliani.
It's somehow connected to Russian disinformation.
Hunter Biden's laptop.
And like you were saying, I say, first of all, it's illegal.
It's secretive.
That means it's a conspiracy.
The Hunter Biden laptop, the FBI had it in 2019, December 2019.
They then did a pre-bunking operation in the summer of 2020.
Clearly knowing that this laptop is going to be made public in some way before the election.
So you have the weaponization of government agencies as well as supposedly non-governmental organizations like Aspen Institute to manipulate the press.
Sorry, there's a thumbs up automatically on my screen.
I like it.
But I think that, yeah, I mean, so we're now seeing it all over the place.
We've seen January 6th.
I mean, this is crazy what we're discovering on January 6th.
There was a fake pipe bomb that was supposedly discovered innocently by somebody who happens to work for an anti-misinformation organization funded by the FBI.
Just, you know, so-called discovers this this this fake pipe bomb on January 6 outside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.
Somehow they then think, oh, well, there's probably one at the Republican National Committee.
They go there.
Russell, this is insane.
They all of the text messages of the Secret Service have been deleted.
All of the cell phone data that would cover the person that they have on video supposedly planting the bomb has been corrupted and the videos are sort of suddenly missing.
So we have the FBI, the Capitol Police, And the Secret Service involved in a huge cover up and potentially participating in the actual creation of the fake bombs in the first place.
This is sinister at a whole other level.
I mean, that's probably one of the biggest things we've discovered.
We haven't even had a chance to talk about it yet.
But for us, the orchestration of January 6th.
To make it look like it was an attempt to overthrow the government, as opposed to what it was, which was the withdrawing of security, the holding back of the National Guard, the construction of a fake bomb hoax, and the participation and the continued cover up by our government agencies.
I think it's one of the biggest scandals in American political life ever, not just in the last few years.
How does it make you feel to have to discuss that in legitimate and empirical terms when if you were to put on MSNBC that would be used almost as the bullseye of MAGA?
Look, you know, Jan 6 was an insurrection, they would tell you.
That it was racist, it was violent, it was the worst homeland event since 9-11.
Like, to hear it spoken of... So, like, what I find very striking is that they're That these formerly regarded as rational news spaces are themselves hysterical whilst condemning extremism.
But hysteria is by its nature a kind of extreme form of emotion and an extreme form of expression.
But whenever you hear footage missing, text messages deleted,
person that finds it has affiliation with the FBI, FBI have a long history of comparable false flag operations,
it starts to become evident.
And also Michael, I'm struck by the fact that this is one of those stories where you're invited to not believe your
own eyes, where we've looked at that footage and you see a sort of docile
and benign, somewhat occasionally bovine population traipsing through
hallways, as Norm Macdonald, God rest his eternal soul, pointed out,
often behind the velvet ropes.
Like that.
These are, we're being invited to participate in a plain illusion and we're the ones that are gaslit as nut jobs and extremists.
Indeed, that's what Tucker pointed out about the participation of voices like my own and I expect he would extend that to you as people that have a degree of cultural capital or credibility in spaces that are beyond conservatism or what would be known as the right are particularly loathed and likely to be subject to attack because we reach audiences that are demographically meaningful.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think that just to go to the January 6th story for one more minute, I mean, the establishment wanted to construct a conspiracy theory.
Their conspiracy theory is that there was a coup attempt on January 6th.
The evidence all showed the opposite, that you have Trump telling people to go home.
He literally goes on video and records a video saying, go home.
Anybody that knows how coups work, we did a video on this, but I mean, if you look around the world, coups, the military needs to be on your side.
That's the first thing.
And the military needs to either take over the Congress or bomb the Congress, take over the media.
This was the opposite of that.
Literally, it was Trump and some of his supporters The leaders of Congress, Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell at the time, they refused a request from the Capitol Police to have more security in the form of National Guard.
So they literally defunded the police security in advance of January 6th.
We know there were over 200 confidential human sources working for the federal government, meaning Paid agents of the federal government in the crowd, 200 of them, almost certainly playing a role of instigating the riot that occurred.
You then had this fake bomb attempt.
You had them covering up all of the data that might allow you to go to the perpetrator.
Maybe the craziest part of this, Russell, is that the FBI claimed that the bomb almost killed the vice president-elect Kamala Harris, who was visiting the DNC at the time.
time. Literally, if you're Kamala Harris, you would be making a lot of noise about how
I was almost killed by a bomb from MAGA Republicans.
She doesn't say anything about it.
In fact, we we don't even know that Kamala Harris is at the DNC until months later.
Why would they be hiding that?
The reason that they were hiding that is we think our speculation can't prove it yet, is
that they didn't know that she was going to go to the DNC.
So she goes to the last she goes kind of unexpectedly goes there.
The bomb is there and they don't make a big deal of it because they don't want to make a big deal of the fact that there was potentially an assassination attempt on the vice president, because, of course, there wasn't.
This was all part of the theater that they were constructing.
So there are big holes in it.
I mean, it was interesting.
The Washington Post did do a big story about how the Secret Service Lost all of the all of the text messaging data between its agents on January 6th.
So there are certain flaws in their story.
I think that I think that things are falling apart.
You know, a year ago I came on your show and I pointed out that.
You know, basically you and Glenn Beck had killed the World Economic Forum because no heads of state wanted to go anymore.
Kind of same thing this year.
Not a lot of people wanted to go.
World Economic Forum gets up there and they say, oh, the big problem is misinformation.
Other people disagreeing with us online.
It didn't have the impact it did.
You see that you, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson are bigger than ever.
Our journalism is reaching more people than ever.
So I do think that the establishment is in a state of panic and they're not really sure what to do.
I think the big event we haven't talked about, but obviously is hanging over all this, is that Elon Musk made Twitter turn it into X, made it a free speech platform.
So now actually you can get true information out there that really we weren't able to do before.
So I think we are headed for a period of significant change And potentially chaos now that people are allowed to actually hear and get information that they weren't allowed to get just a year and a half ago.
Yet we still have growing support for censorship by government and big tech in accompaniment to these censorship laws that are being lobbied for or passed around the world.
This is Pew Research.
Can you talk us through that story, Michael, the graph that you posted showing public support?
Do you think it's legitimate?
And if so, how do we oppose it and alter that growing public support?
Well, we call this the most terrifying graph in the world.
And I point out that there's other terrifying graphs.
There's this graph showing a quadrupling of border crossings in the United States.
By the way, very similar numbers into Western Europe.
We also point out the rise in drug deaths from 20,000 in the year 2000 to 122,000 last year.
It's absolutely unconscionable.
But I think that maybe the scariest is that Pew graph that asks People whether they would support government involvement in censoring speech online.
There's a significant increase the general population, but when you break it down, there was basically no change in support among Republicans for censorship.
I think it was in the low 30%.
With Democrats, sadly, the numbers rose from around 40% in the year 2018 to 70% last year.
That's such a shocking increase, Russell.
Polling, public opinion tends to change slowly because people don't change their minds very often.
It tends to change slowly, like over generations, over like 10 or 15 years.
To see a change like that in that short period of time, it's clearly, and I don't have any doubt about this, because all the people I talk to, the progressives I talk to, they want more censorship because they thought that all this free speech on social media platforms Lead to the success of Trump, first and foremost.
I think they also thought, oh, it also led to people not taking vaccines, although I think that's probably gone down a bit now that we know that vaccines neither prevent infection or transmission.
But this shocking increase among liberals, Democrats in the United States for censorship.
And we worry a lot about that because Obviously, you can expose the government.
You can try to use the First Amendment and point out that government officials are not supposed to be demanding censorship or limiting speech in any way.
We can expose intelligence operations, expose FBI involvement in Brazil.
But if the public wants censorship, We're in a very bad way because the First Amendment in the United States and the protections of free speech in other countries depend on the public supporting free speech.
And that means depending means that you have to have people that support allowing people that they don't like or agree with have free speech.
So I don't think it's the end of the story.
I will say I do think that events like we had in London last June, the conversations that we're having, I think that as people start to see that Oh, maybe it is important to actually control your border and not allow a lot of people to just come in willy nilly.
Or maybe we should.
It wasn't a good idea to force the vaccine on people.
I do have some faith in the American people that we will come around, including Democrats.
But I think that cultural work is the main event and it's going to take.
Years and maybe decades.
That's why I'm much more interested now in going to college campuses, having conversations, particularly with liberal minded people, to restore our faith in free speech.
Because I didn't ever think I'd have to make the case for free speech to Americans, but I do think that that's where we're at right now.
Thank you.
Even with old-school analog media, print media, newspapers, I was always astonished in the ability of a culture to maneuver a population into voting against our own interests.
And I feel sometimes that we are engaged in a race, a kind of Where either there is going to be this proliferation of free speech that will lead to decentralisation.
Something that suggests power has to become flatter and more diffuse.
And there is this sort of opposite tendency to aggregate, control, restrict, to empower centralised forces.
And it astonishes me.
With the recent events in the Middle East, I even saw emergent coalitions divided again by that most divisive of historical issues, the Israel-Palestine-Israel-Hamas conflicts, and I wonder when it comes to this subject of war and migration if there might be a new discourse to be started in so much as, is it possible, do you think Michael, to start fostering the argument that If indeed destabilisation of global populations and the creation of a migrant class, refugee class, is the result of globalism, in particular its corporate and military components, there ought to be an explicit connection between
Controlling migration and not getting involved in foreign wars and not getting involved in corporate projects that destabilize, for example, the nations of Latin America or the Middle East or nations within Africa.
Do you think that is a connection that could be forged?
No war if you want to control refugee and migrant crisis, both in countries like mine and countries like yours.
What do you think about that idea?
I think there's something really, yeah, I'm glad you asked this.
I mean, the elites in Western Europe and the United States are absolutely obsessed with being able to move large numbers of people around the world.
And I think there's a lot of different motivations for that.
I think some of it they want, obviously, cheap labor for the corporations that want cheap labor.
They want to drive down the prices.
I also think it's part of a counterpopulist strategy.
They actually want to dilute the voices.
They want to divide the public.
They want to divide people.
I think some of it's gotten out of control.
I think the other part of it is that they want to be able to wage war wherever, whenever they want to, without popular check and balance on that ability to wage war.
And if you're going to wage war, you're going to create refugees.
So it seems to me these two things go hand in hand.
If you want to be able to just declare, you know, invade Iraq or participate in a war in Ukraine or get involved in a war with Iran, you know, you then have to be able to absorb large numbers of migrants to deal with that.
That's part of the deal.
They're absolutely obsessed with this question.
Anybody who suggests that there's a problem of integrating all these migrant refugees to, you know, Europe, the United States, you're a racist, you're a bad person.
So, yeah, I think that this is clearly part of some strategy.
I mean, look, I've defended what we call the Western Alliance.
I mean, I think that civilization has allowed us to live very long lives.
We have abundant food and energy.
There's a lot of benefits to this.
And we've had this thing called Pax Americana since World War II, where the United States placed a policeman into the world.
I don't see that exactly going away.
People said, oh, Trump threatens that.
He wanted NATO to pay more money for defense, you know?
So I think there was there was to some extent there's been this concern about populism.
But there's also just these really powerful people in the establishment that frankly are pathological in their obsession with power, their obsession to control.
And they start to lose some control.
They have to start to share power.
They have to negotiate with different societal actors.
They have to make some concessions to the farmers and the truckers.
And they don't like it because they're snobs and they're elitists and they're in the grip of I kind of almost OCD levels of needing to control food and energy production bill to invade countries that they want.
So I think that it's it's so part of the react the counterpopulist reaction is rational.
But I also think part of it is just completely pathological and reflective of elites that are completely disconnected from their their populations and really look down on ordinary folks and think that they should not have to, you know, Take orders from them in a democracy that they should just be able to rule without question.
I agree with that and we're here now to show that we are merely mouthpieces of a movement.
I will pass on some of the many questions that have been offered to you by our chat if that is convenient to you, Michael.
May I ask you some questions for our community?
The first one is from Centaur66, question for you.
I would like to know if UK farmers are building to an uprising.
I live in a rural community of farmers and they're not happy at all right now and haven't been for some time.
Do you think that there's a possibility that this agricultural protest could include the United Kingdom?
I know that in Iowa, I feel like there's a far agricultural movement in the U.S.
Do you think it has the potential to become global?
And indeed, if we have a global opposition, if globalism is a significant part of the problem, mustn't the response be somehow global?
Unified but decentralized is the phrase I've been using.
Yeah, I certainly hope so.
I mean, boy, it's been really inspiring to see the farmer protests.
I reported on the farmer protests in the Netherlands in 2022.
And that was really it starts off.
We've seen protests by the German farmers, by the French farmers.
Their demands are really simple.
You know, they would like to be able to continue farming.
They don't want to have to pay huge increases in energy because if they pay huge increases of energy, then everything becomes more expensive.
So I think these are very reasonable demands.
I don't know what the situation is with British farmers, but certainly I think farmers have played a really important role in putting a check on global elites.
The other thing global elites want to be able to do is of course move food around the world however they please.
And I think there's just real questions around The benefits of that.
I think that there have been benefits and certainly some poor countries have benefited.
But I also think there's consequences domestically and we have to have some.
I think as part of this is also just the disrespect that elites have for farmers.
They look down on them.
They're just clearly really snobby.
They take them for granted.
And yet.
Without farmers, obviously, there is no food, there is no civilization.
All of our wealth, our ability for most of us to not farm, has depended on farmers continuing to innovate and to use technology and to produce more food on less land that also protects the environment.
So, I think it's great.
I would love to see the British farmers join that worldwide uprising.
Thank you.
On a related topic, what do you think, Michael?
Ask anchor1110 about the ongoing protest against right-wing opposition in Germany.
These protests are mainly organized by the government itself and NGOs.
Is it a distraction so that people forget about farmers protests?
Are you familiar with that story?
Yeah, so we just published a really interesting article by a German journalist where he talks about how one of these so-called fact-checking organizations, it's really clearly looks to us like a government cutout or a front group.
It's called Corrective.
The head of it basically attacked the farmers in Germany as far right, Russian influence, COVID, all the stuff that you would imagine.
The other thing that they did is they claimed that there was some secret plan by this right wing party called AFD to deport immigrants.
But it wasn't secret at all.
That's like what that's been a big part of their their platform for a long time.
It's very similar to what what Trump wants to do in the United States.
So agree or disagree with that as a policy.
There was no secret plan and they made it seem like it was some secret sinister thing.
They also suggested that it was Nazi, by where the meeting occurred.
So they're engaging in disinformation, they're engaging in an influence operation in Germany.
To frame the AFD's demands as unreasonable and to frame the farmer demands as unreasonable.
And the problem, of course, is that much of the German public agrees with these positions.
I mean, we even noted in the piece that we published that the chancellor of Germany had supported deporting some amount of the immigrants that had come in.
So and I think most Germans share the concern that energy prices are too high.
So the problem for the elites You can see it's a kind of desperate quality when they find that their positions are in the minority.
They have unpopular positions.
That's when they turn to demonizing their opponents and making up lies about them.
Thank you.
Jamie Jam asked, with similar laws to the misinformation and disinformation laws being enacted across the West, being acted in your country, will the First Amendment be able to be utilized against it?
Do you think these laws will achieve their objectives in making people self-censor?
That's Jamie Jam.
I mean, people have definitely already been self-censoring.
In the United States, the question of whether or not the government can use what you would call front groups or cutouts like the Stanford Internet Observatory to demand censorship of social media platforms, that's going to the Supreme Court.
March 18th, the Supreme Court will hear that case that was brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana against these different government agencies and their partner cutouts.
I mean, I think what's so interesting about this case is that you remember me saying that in the past, the CIA sought to overthrow governments, control the information environment, spread disinformation, demand censorship.
They often did that through NGOs or they did it through news media.
Now, their emphasis is on doing it through NGOs and philanthropies, and that's what we saw with the censorship industrial complex.
So, really, it's a question of, are we going to let the intelligence community, are we going to allow the government to operate these public-private partnerships to demand censorship?
I hope the Supreme Court says no, but once again, there's very powerful interest at stake, and so I don't think we can depend on I don't think we need to depend on the politicians.
I think really some of the most important work is just this investigative work, this public education, this movement building to really stand up to these guys because they really are quite out of control and they're not going to stop until we expose them.
Citizen Smithy asks in the chat, these are all members of our community, does Michael have any tips for helping us get around censorship and surveillance?
Well, I would say I would not encourage people to change what they want to say in order to conform to these rules.
I think a better approach is to speak your mind.
And if you have evidence that you're being censored, and often the social media platforms, particularly Facebook, will flag your post in that way.
Then I would say talk expose that because there is this thing called the Streisand effect, which was named after when Barbra Streisand tried to stop photos of her home being shown on the Internet.
Everybody wanted them to go see where Barbra Streisand's home was.
So I think that when they censor you, it's important to draw attention to it and say this bad thing happened.
This is outrageous.
So I would encourage you to speak your mind, and if they censor you, certainly send it to us, michaelschellenberger at gmail.com.
I would love to see evidence of censorship.
We need to expose the censorship, not conform our behavior to it.
We made a bunch of Freedom of Information Act inquiries after recent events, and man, they dragged their heels about giving you that stuff.
You gotta prove it's you!
Give us your handles!
They really try to make it as complex as possible, but we are awaiting from a variety of these NGOs and organisations, you know, more information about the degree of surveillance, censorship, deamplification, shadow banning, utilising bots In our streams that generate automatic negative responses to content.
We're getting into all that stuff at the moment and it's pretty fascinating.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think it's the last thing that you were talking about, the Lee Fong stuff, where you and I are both in these Moderna documents.
I mean, so here you have taxpayer money going to big pharma to engage in censoring ordinary citizens.
I mean, it's basically they're playing a role as a member of the censorship industrial complex with our money.
I mean, it's adding insult to injury.
And finally, this question from Miss Molly.
Michael, do you think that Taylor Swift is part of the influence operations?
I have no idea whether whether she is.
I mean, it's a it's a funny conversation, though.
I, you know, I'm sure that if she's a Democrat, I suspect she's a Democrat.
They'll want her to support Biden.
I think what I admire about the folks that have been raising the concern that she's part of an influence operation is that that's pre bunking.
I think you're creating situational awareness that should Taylor Swift start campaigning for Joe Biden.
That that was something that we should have expected and that it's not some big revelation or surprising.
And you just have to take it with a grain of salt.
I think pop culture figures, you know, mostly are on the left historically.
But I think a lot of I think we should also give Americans our credit that we're not going to make our decisions just based on what a pop star says.
Yes, that's very good advice indeed.
Michael, thank you so much for your time today.
It's always inspiring, encouraging, uplifting, informative, edifying to communicate with you, as well as the fact you're easy on the eye in spite of that illusory image behind your head.
