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Nov. 2, 2021 - RFK Jr. The Defender
48:52
Eric Clapton and RFK Jr Stand and Deliver

Clapton and Kennedy discuss music and current events in this episode.

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So I'm really excited today because I am one of my greatest rock and roll heroes and now a hero in other respects too, Eric Clapton.
And I grew up in the generation, which is the Clapton is God generation.
I grew up with the Yardbirds, as I told you in our first kind of communications, following you since then, in Cream, Blues Breakers, Derrick and the Dominoes, when you did the tour with Bonnie and Delaney.
Blind Faith, I have every album that you've ever made.
And, you know, I just grew up in that era, which you're very familiar with.
I want to just do a little bit of a recap of your career.
129 million records sold.
18 gold platinum or diamond records, 18 Grammys, unprecedented, three inductions in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for different headings.
Eric has played with every band that you've ever heard of, with Bob Dylan, with Aretha Franklin, with The Who, with The Beatles, with The Rolling Stones, with the Allman Brothers, Jimi Hendrix.
Really an amazing, amazing career.
And now...
Rolling Stone magazine considered him one of the greatest rock and roll heroes of all time.
And now you are a villain to the world.
So talk a little bit.
And I know, first of all, I want to tell the audience, Eric has done something he never does, which is not just to talk to somebody outside of his narrow.
He's famously shy.
And not only talking to somebody outside of his circle of friends, but also talking to somebody at seven or eight o'clock in the evening, or I don't know how late it is over there, but I was told by him and others that he never talks to anybody after dinner, but he made this accommodation.
So because Eric's in France and I'm in L.A., so I'm really grateful that you made that accommodation.
And I will tell people up front so that if you make any dramatic errors, you have a good excuse up front.
you Tell us, you know, how did you walk into this buzzsaw?
Because you knew it was going to happen if you talked about this, right?
A buzzsaw.
Yeah.
What's happened to your life in the last month?
Yeah.
It's what it feels like sometimes.
It's been, over the last year, there's been a lot of disappearing, you know, a lot of dust around with people.
Moving away quite quickly.
And it does kind of refine, it has, for me, refined the kind of friendships I have.
And it's dwindled down to the people I obviously really need and love.
And inside my family, That became quite pivotal.
With young kids, I've got teenage girls and an older girl who's in her 30s, and they've all had to kind of give me leeway because I haven't been able to convince any of them.
I think my wife is now seeing it the same way as me, but most of them...
They've always thought I'm a crackpot anyway, because I do things that are extremely unusual on any kind of level.
My pastimes and my tastes, the kind of movies I like, the books.
And yet they'll find themselves liking these things a little bit later.
So I'm out of step.
It's like I'm always out of step.
There's been a few people, usually musicians, and remarkably American musicians, It's almost like we grew up in the same backyard.
And I was just playing, adding myself on to a piece of music that Jimmy Vaughan had sent me a couple of days ago where he's singing.
He's singing a song called Down With Big Brother.
He's written a song about, you know, take these shackles off of me.
And it's, you know, it's kind of any, it could be any kind of protest song, but he wrote it way back.
And this was a long, long time ago.
And I thought that he is definitely crazier than I am.
And it's barbed wire fences and all this kind of thing.
He's a real Texan.
And now, you know, I've just convinced him to play so that we can put it out on the underground, you know, and it'll leak up or do whatever it does.
And so he sent this over and I'm playing along and I play, I didn't realise, but I play the same as him.
And yet we were born 6,000 miles apart.
But so I kind of...
I've found people a bit like me, but it's been difficult in this last couple of years, especially with, you know, mainstream media turning.
And, you know, I had been inspired by Van because he came straight out.
And his reasoning was, why can't we?
We have to make music for people.
I mean, he's a crusader, you know, really sees it as his calling.
And I thought, yeah, that's right.
People are not, they're not really acquainted with the idea that this is as important in their healing as any kind of medicine.
You know, the whole community thing of people being together with music and with great music.
And I think, you know, I got, I signed on with Van.
I said, have you got any songs?
And he sent me the song called Stand and Deliver.
And it was a kind of, it was comic, you know, it was kind of musical stuff.
And so Stand and Deliver, Dick Turpin wore a mask too, was the opening line.
And I thought, well, that's great.
It's just, it's kind of lighthearted.
But it's saying what we're all thinking, or some of the stuff.
And I got so much flack straight away from people right close to me, friends and associates and family, and saying, no, you can't.
You can't do that.
And I thought, I couldn't see what was so dangerous about it or risky.
And especially since it was targeted at the UK government when they started locking down and telling, you know, there was one guy that was the chancellor.
He still is.
Who said that if you're a musician and you can't get work, you should train for something else.
Is that Chris Whitty?
Is it Rishi Sunak?
Okay.
He's the finance minister.
To cut to the chase, I kind of signed on with that.
When I realized that there was a real parting of the ways, it only made me more determined because it's a bit To come up to date with the Rolling Stone kind of slur campaign, it becomes a compliment when it's coming from, you know, certain areas of the media.
Then it's just an affirmation to me that I'm doing the right thing.
And I had approached, I had come near to approaching them anyway a few months ago because a friend of mine was trying to Create a platform for a debate where we could talk about the pros and cons of the thing, you know.
And I found out in the course, and I thought Rolling Stone, and I thought of David Frick, who was one of the chief editors there, and one of the great journalists who I'd always got on with.
Was open-minded, good journalist, good interviewer.
And he was fired about five years ago.
And I got hold of him and he said, oh no, Rolling Stone now is owned by Roger Penske, who is ex-NASCAR. Do you know that?
Yeah.
I think, I don't know what his part in NASCAR was, but it I think he's gone on to become a collector of companies or whatever you call that.
And so they're not really...
I didn't even know how I was talking.
So I don't know who these...
I don't even know who these people are, except...
And why are they picking on me?
There's a grudge there.
And it is a fact.
And I've told this to a few friends.
They kind of helped to break up Cream.
I hate to say to give them that kind of power but back then they had just started and they did a really funny thing where they interviewed me in Sausalito and then they reviewed up Gig at the Fillmore and juxtaposed them so that on page two and page three there was the review and there was the interview and When it came out, someone showed it to me and I fainted.
I literally passed out from shock because I'd never been criticized on a deeply intellectual level like that before.
And I thought, I actually thought they've seen through me.
I've been spotted.
I've been, you know, debunked.
And I said to the other guys, I think we've come to the end of the road.
We've been We've been, you know, we're frauds.
And I think back, and they managed to convince me, those guys.
And I won't name that.
You would know who they were.
I mean, they're bigwigs.
But they convinced me that I was a charlatan, basically.
And it's taken me a long time to actually realise, no, no, we were pretty good.
Yeah, pretty good.
We were doing the right thing.
It was just, we didn't know what we were doing.
I'll admit that we didn't know what we were doing, but it was good and the people loved it and there was something of spite in there, which I've seen now.
I see everywhere.
I mean, I see it in all the media.
I don't read I don't read newspapers and I don't watch TV. I would watch movies but I would not watch.
I found that really disturbing once I found that I was hooked on the BBC news and I was waking up going to watch the 8 o'clock, the 1 o'clock, the 6 o'clock and the 10 o'clock news to see what they're going to dream up next for us to suffer from.
You know, Rolling Stone is interesting what happened there because I grew up with Rolling Stone, and Jan Wenner has been my friend for decades, and Hunter Thompson, and then, you know, great journalists like Matt Taibbi, who's one of the great,
continuing to be great counterculture journalists, who's been one of the most astute critics of the American political system and the marriage between corporate power and American politics, the kind of corporate kleptocracy.
And my first piece on vaccines I did for Rolling Stone in 2005 and won a lot of awards for that.
And there was an immediate pushback from the industry, from the pharmaceutical industry, and from the medical cartel.
Salon co-published it, and Salon took it down under pressure from Big Pharma and said it was filled with errors.
They never pointed to any error in it.
Jan Wenner steadfastly kept it up on the site, and at the beginning of COVID, they took it down.
After Penske took over, they took it down.
The best journalists have left Rolling Stone, like Matt Taibbi, and they're left, you know, with a bunch of people.
Tim Dickinson is one and a number of others who have just completely gone over to the corporate side and have bought this whole pharmaceutical paradigm hook, line and sinker.
And it used to be, it was the leading counterculture org in our country for many, many years.
And now it's just part of this wallpaper of pharmaceutical promotion.
You know, in the way that they've gone after you.
I mean, if you think about it, if you reduce what happened to you, and I want to hear kind of what happened, but really, you know, the major element of the story is you took the vaccine, you got hurt by the first one, you believe the propaganda, you took the second one, you got essentially disabled by the second one, you spoke out about your injury, and the whole world came down.
And gaslighted you and marginalized you and vilified you because you got injured by that product.
And here they come after you because you're not allowed to talk about that.
And that is the big problem is that they're trying, the way they're coping with the injuries from these vaccines is to pretend they don't exist and to punish people who get injured and then try to talk about it.
Yeah, that's a good synopsis.
I remember, because I looked in my phone for the dates, and the end of February was the first jab, and then the first of April was the second, and I didn't really feel the full effect of the second one for about two weeks.
And what it was, I was disabled.
My hands swallowed up and they froze, and I was getting ready to come out here.
To come out to where you are, not here, but to the States.
And I thought, I'd been practicing, practicing, all went out the window.
And I really wasn't sure if I was going to have to cancel.
And I had to cancel a few other things that I wanted to do, but I thought it would be detrimental to the progress or the healing process, if there was going to be one.
And that's the thing is, I didn't know.
I mean, the uncertainty surrounding this thing has been mammoth, I think.
I think everybody I know has got, what do they call it, the CAS, the anxiety syndrome.
Everybody I know is unsettled about it.
And for me, it was heightened by the fact that I had These adverse reactions.
And the life-saving part of it was that I'd found a group of people who were inviting me to talk about it because I couldn't talk about it anywhere.
As you said, there was nobody listening.
And it was very, very difficult to know what to do or how to...
I thought I was going crazy.
But I was invited into a group of people who have a channel on Telegram and we...
Which, by the way, the English government is getting ready to take down, too.
The leader of the Labour Party brought it up, I think, today in the House of Commons.
Telegram is a terrorist organisation, and it's got to be...
So they're trying to prevent people who have a critical point of view or any kind of questioning...
Nature from communicating with one another.
It's getting really, really scary.
But I was pissed off for two years that you take music out of the equation of our cultures.
We were all suffering from isolation.
And I believe this is my calling to play music.
And I don't even know what it's going to come out like, but I know it's beneficial because all music is.
I have a strong conviction about that.
And I was absolutely determined to beat these guys and we'll just go down fighting.
And that's still my mission.
And it's funny because they can say stuff about me, but I actually haven't felt physical opposition anywhere.
In fact, I felt more support as a result of this than I ever did before about anything.
And I was always quite private about my I'm really quite naive about the internet and all that,
but when I saw The sort of bad comments on Facebook.
I thought, you can't be serious.
This is like three guys that are doing this.
They all use the same language and everything.
It's just pathetic.
And so the flack I'm getting is not even grown up.
You know what I mean?
It's not even substantial enough for me to be concerned about.
And the support I get from some of the people that we know in common has been Phenomenal and really uplifting.
And so I'm really, you know, I'm more determined than ever.
You know, I'm writing songs and recording, but it's come back.
You know, I've actually been working with healing.
A guy that works for me just revealed to me this year that he can heal with his hands.
So I do that and I do acupuncture and, you know, I meditate a little bit.
And I work until, you know, it goes away.
If I don't play for a few days, I can go into kind of a Almost like semi-paralytic state of being, so I have to keep going.
And we just did a tour, and it was fantastic.
I played in Texas, where there were really no restrictions, and they loved it.
We got flack from the Stone because we played in Louisiana or New Orleans, where Apparently, and I noticed too that there was QR stuff everywhere and distancing and masks.
But the agreement was, you know, I will play anywhere as long as it's a non-discriminatory situation.
And I was really nervous, to be honest.
I really thought, well, the way they change the rules now, I thought by the time we got there in September, the goalposts will You know, and maybe I've got to travel all the way there, go to the hotel, sit in the hotel and wait.
Someone will call me from the gig and say, guess what?
You know, they've broken their agreement.
And then I've got to say, well, we're not going.
You know, and that's still, you know, I've got that next year too.
I face that predicament because they're declaring that the passport in the UK will be mandatory on the 22nd of December.
And they did that really cleverly too, because they opened a box on the government website for people to write in and object, but they didn't tell anyone they'd done that.
So you had to be on the underground networks to know that they'd done this.
And then you fill in, I filled in my objection and put it in, and guess what?
You know, it got laughed out of the Houses of Parliament yesterday.
I think it was the 11th of, that was last week, I think, that they laughed it out.
I think you can see it on YouTube.
They didn't even debate it at the referendum.
And so there will be passports.
It's just then I don't know what I'm going to, because I have to keep my word, man.
That's all I am.
Let me ask you a fact, because when you're going against an orthodoxy like this, it's like being in a fundamentalist culture where you're saying, essentially in a theocratic culture, where people have these deeply held righteous certainty about how the world is supposed to look, and you are looking at the world completely differently and saying, wait a minute, That is mass psychosis.
It's detached from reality.
You're not answering these really basic questions that everybody ought to know if you want to impose this kind of orthodoxy on the society.
And you need some kind of, I think, spiritual dimension or life to be able to find peace inside of yourself, Trusted authorities in the society who are saying, you're wrong, you're crazy, you're dangerous, etc.
So, where do you go for that kind of peace?
I had been drinking and doing dope a lot of my life, and about 34 years ago, I got sober.
And as a result of that, I began a kind of spiritual journey, but it was...
Pretty scrappy stuff.
I mean, for me, I started going to 12-step meetings and I was introduced to the concept of spirituality as not being a religious affair or anything orthodox.
It doesn't have to be anything that anyone else has to agree with.
I can kind of imagine my own belief system, my own God.
And because I was raised, you know, in a poor family, in a poor little village where we all went to I had a fairly pleasant religious upbringing.
It wasn't stringent.
I didn't go every Sunday.
I like aspects of it.
I like the teachings of Christ.
I like the Bible.
And I prayed.
And I think, you know, all through my drinking, I prayed.
Dear God, I'll never do it.
Get me out of this.
But I guess I never said thank you.
I never said thank you.
And so when I got into the program, the fellowships, you know, and I go to, and I've been, you know, I belong to most of them, really.
I've done just about everything.
I found it really easy to acknowledge that, the presence of God in my life.
And in fact, in treatment, for the second time and the last time, I knew, for instance, I knew I was going to drink again.
I knew with like 10 days to go, I knew it was just, you could guarantee it.
I was going to go out and I was going to get drunk.
So I got on my knees and I asked the room, To help me.
And something clicked.
And it's like, there's a thing, the book called The Big Book.
I shouldn't really be talking about, but I do share this from time to time.
And Bill Wilson, the founder, had what he called a spiritual experience where...
Maybe you even know, I'm sure you probably do know about this, where there was a flash of light and it was like a great awakening for him.
And I didn't have that, but I did experience that same day something called happiness, which had been absent from my life for many years.
And I didn't know what it was.
I found it hard to, I knew something was happening that was really kind of joyful.
And I had been relieved of this thing.
So I just carried on doing it, and that's what I do.
And so that's given me, over the years, it's given me a lot more confidence in what I hear in myself.
So I will ask questions, and sometimes I think, oh, that's you answering that question.
Don't kid yourself.
That's not God.
That's you.
So I've come to kind of understand when I'm getting instructions.
Or when I'm being answered.
So I ask for help a lot.
That's what I learned from being a member of a 12-step program is I ask for help all the time.
And then before we began talking tonight, I just asked the same thing is like, help me to say, help me to be true, help me to be honest, you know, help me to be To help other people.
And when I saw Brexit coming down the road and the connivance that was going on for the success of that, I thought these guys are just a bunch of public school boys doing this for some kind of jade.
You know, they can't be serious.
So that was the sort of prelude to COVID for me, was watching the engineering that went on.
In order for them to pull the heist.
You know, it was a heist.
And the Queen got, you know, everybody got used in that affair.
And I thought, by the time the lockdowns were coming down, I thought, man, I know these, you can tell these people are lying.
It's easy.
And I can hear this voice in me that says, Don't believe this.
And I, you know, in a way, I didn't want to not believe it.
I quite enjoyed, you know, the first period of lockdown was kind of like the way we live anyway.
We didn't go out, we didn't go anywhere, we watched a lot of...
But then when it started, when they started talking about mandating things, and I think I said to my Irish doctor...
I said, Dermot, do you think, you know, when they talk, because the people from Barrington, the Declaration, they had been saying, I had followed their philosophy and their views, because it was very, very sound.
It felt sound to me.
And they were promoting vaccine towards the end of last year.
And when it arrived, I thought, well, that's what they said.
You know, I'm going to follow their teachings, as it were.
And I said to Dermot, I said, do you think this will become mandatory at some point, this vaccine?
Because what's the end game with this?
It's everyone's game.
He said, no.
You know, so everybody, I couldn't find anybody that had the same suspicion as me.
And when I did, man, I found a rabbit hole.
And I'd heard about these things on the internet.
Don't go down the rabbit.
And I found a really good one.
And that's how I first knew that you were interested in having a conversation with you.
And I thought, oh my, now, now I'm in trouble.
I'm going to tell you something.
I got sober at the same time you did.
I got sober in 84.
I had an experience when I had 14 years, right after my dad died, I started doing heroin.
And I had taken the pledge when I was a little kid, so I never even drank coffee before I was 15.
You know what happens to addiction.
It's like you're dancing with the gorilla.
It's very fun at first.
Then you realize that you only stop dancing with the gorilla and watch you do it.
I had an experience where I was in one of those situations where it was 4 o'clock in the morning and I needed an opiate.
I needed it.
I prayed.
I got down on my knees and I prayed.
I sent me You know, send me a quad, and I said, a four milligrams of quad, and I will never take drugs again.
And I went on kind of a tear, and I was taking books off the shelves, and looking, maybe I left something here, and I picked up an old antique red walnut commode, an antique toilet, which was a seat that had been made into a table, and it had a little bowl in it.
It was from 1810, and somebody had given it to me recently, and I don't know why I picked it up.
I picked it up over my head, and it was shaking, and a lot of it fell out of it.
It was what I'd been praying for five minutes before it.
I said, thanks God, I found one on my own.
No, I don't.
I don't know.
Oh, and then, you know, a year and a half after that, I got sober.
Yeah.
And I had a spiritual awakening.
Although it wasn't a light-light experience, but it happened over a couple of weeks, and my desire for drugs and alcohol was completely lifted.
And I had tried for 14 years, earnestly, sincerely, and honestly to quit.
I never wanted to be doing that.
And nothing had worked.
And now, suddenly the compulsion disappeared.
And one of the things you mentioned, Bill Wilson, is that he had that spiritual awakening And his desire for alcohol was lifted.
And then three months later, he was in Akron of Ohio, and he was putting together a deal to purchase the Firestone Tire Company, which would have set him up for life as a multimillionaire in the middle of the Great Depression.
And he had put every penny he had into that deal, and all of his energies for two years, and he got out to Akron to sign a deal, and the whole thing fell apart.
And he was standing in the hotel lobby, and he could hear the lounge where people were drinking, and he could hear the clinking of the ice, and the glasses, and the laughter, and it was calling to him to come in there.
And he had this sensual revelation, which was the only way that he was going to stay sober, is if he helped other alcoholics.
That's when he started making calls to local creatures and to the Salvation Army.
And he found Dr.
Bob.
One of the things he recognized out of that experience is that you can't live off the morals of a spiritual awakening.
You have to renew it again and again and again every day by constantly trying to do the right thing.
And if we stop doing the right thing, we lose everything.
And that kind of recognition is what's gotten me into this kind of business.
You know what's right here.
And you kind of have to do it if you want to maintain that spiritual peace.
Yeah.
That's great.
Well, I had no idea.
You kept your anonymity.
I'm not very good.
I blow it every now and then.
But the essence of it is for me that to keep it, I have to give it away.
And I've found it actually difficult to talk because it's in the meetings.
I don't go to live meetings.
I haven't been to a live meeting for a long time, for a Almost two years at least, but I do this, you know, and I think I'm sure that the Zoom thing has made it difficult for people to get involved with recovery like that.
You know, where I live, I live in L.A., and they, in the little place where I live in Brentwood in L.A., they kept the live meetings going.
So I actually, during the COVID, I've been going to nine meetings a week.
It's been amazing.
Wow, wow.
It's allowed me to stay peaceful.
For me, the essence of being in recovery is that I have to give it away.
To keep it, I have to give it away.
And there's a guy I know in LA who said to me a while ago, he's an old-timer, he said, why do you think you keep Going on the road.
Why are you always touring?
And I said, I suppose I love to play, and I love to play.
The honour of playing with great musicians too, so I can listen to great music.
No, no, no, no.
He said it's the 12th step.
The 12th step.
And for those who are watching, I go, and the boss man here, it sounds like, goes to these, I can't say it about it, but this is what I do, and there's a 12-step programme.
They're well known now, I think, but Which is, in order to keep my sobriety or keep my sanity, I have to give it away and I have to help.
Everything I do has to have that basis to it.
So for me, the purpose of talking about my experience with The vaccine was it so that someone in a room somewhere who was suffering side effects knew that he wasn't the only one.
Because in England, nobody knows.
If you talk to somebody about the yellow card system, which is, you know, the reportage of side effects, most people don't even know it exists.
It's got to be clear.
It's criminal, you know, that it's been withheld.
And so most people don't even...
I've spoken to people off the cuff and just said, did you have any after effects from that particular experiment?
And they go, yeah.
And I think, well, why didn't you tell your MD? Oh, I didn't know.
I didn't want to bother him.
You know, I don't want to bother the doctors here.
It's crazy.
I feel that's my calling now as much as anything else is to just stick my neck out and say, well, it happened to me and if it happened to you, then you should tell someone.
I'm talking to you about this and it's ridiculous because the lengths you go to to make sure people are aware is unbelievable.
Hats off to you, Robert, really.
Well, you too, Eric.
Let me just ask you one other thing because we've gone on a thing longer than either of us.
And David, although it's pure pleasure for me to listen to you talk, you know, rock and roll started as a protest movement.
It's part of the DNA of rock and roll, but you're seeing a lot of hip-hop artists come out, which I think is encouraging, but it's kind of weird how rock and roll has essentially just embraced this orthodoxy There's some film in it.
We were talking about Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and those guys.
I'm pretty sure George would have been one of the crew too.
But rock and roll got watered down a long time ago.
The hardcore people.
It was about being a rebel.
Definitely in the old days.
And it's not now.
It's much more to do with conformity, I think.
How long does your thing go?
Because I could talk to you all night.
I love it.
Let me just ask you about one other kind of personal thing.
I know you went out with one of the Lord Harlick's daughters, I think with Alice.
Or had some kind of relationship with them.
But those kids grew up with me in Washington.
David Ormsby Gore grew up with my Uncle Jack in England when my grandfather was the ambassador.
He and my Uncle Joe were both in the war, both in the air reconnaissance.
My Uncle Joe was killed.
Lord Harlow, David Ormsby Gore I remained very, very close to my family.
My Aunt Jackie almost married him when Jack died.
But I went up.
So Francis, who is, I think, Alice's older brother, was my age exactly.
Lord Harlick, during the Kennedy administration, was the British bachelor to watch him.
He was kind of one of the closest friends, personal friends, and trusted advisors that my uncle had, and really helped him solve the Berlin crisis of 1962.
He became a liaison with Khrushchev, between my uncle and Khrushchev, and also during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he played a key role of bringing Harold Killen, was the British prime minister, kind of Bringing his point of view, and he was very much aligned with Jack that we had to keep the world out of war.
But anyway, I went up at one point, I went to the London School of Economics for a year, and I went up to Oswood Street in Shropshire on the Welsh border, and I was amazed about how different the Welsh people were from the Brits,
and just how unique culture that was, and seeing the gypsies, I remember I was on their front porch one day in Shropshire, and some gypsies, I think they were Irish gypsies, came by in one of those wooden caravans with the horses pulling on them and came up to that front porch, and he had a pitchfork that was carved out of wood.
The entire pitchfork was very beautiful, like a work of art.
It was an old-style pitchfork, and that gypsy just wanted that horse than anything.
He had a couple of magpies.
In a cage on the end of that.
I just was so taken by that whole experience of being out there.
Well, I see Jane.
I see Jane a lot.
Jane and I, we go back a long way.
And she's, Jane and Victoria are the only ones left, I think.
Because Francis died a while ago, and he was, I adored him.
Well, I adored them all.
And, you know, I adored Alice too.
But the dad, David, was a fantastic man.
And I think he was a rock and roll fan, too.
He was a big fan.
And Benny Goodman.
He loved Benny Goodman, most of all.
Because I think when he was in Washington, he would go and see those guys play.
I think they were pals, you know.
I hadn't thought of that, of course.
Yeah, the connection, of course.
Also, I went out with one of Anthony Fraser's daughters for a while.
Yeah.
And Harold Pinter was her boyfriend at that time, so I ended up spending a lot of time with him.
With Pinter, too.
Oh, with Pinter, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I almost know by heart one of his plays called The Caretaker.
You know The Caretaker?
No.
They made a great film about The Caretaker with Donald Pleasance and Robert Shaw, Alan Bates.
Absolutely brilliant, Phil.
Brilliant.
What are we going to do?
What are we doing now?
How long does this thing go on with?
I don't know.
You know, the interesting thing to me is that people from my political party, the Democratic Party, in our country are the major promoters of this.
And we have essentially abolished the Bill of Rights in our country.
We no longer have freedom of speech.
Yeah.
And it's the Democrats who are saying, we've got to stop these people from talking.
If you think about that, what it really means is that they've lost faith in democracy because they believe that you can't trust the public with dangerous ideas.
Of course, everybody knows that when you start censoring speech, you're on your way to totalitarian government.
We all have these lessons that we learned as children, and somehow, you know, my party forgot about it.
I was talking to a psychiatrist actually this morning, who's a good friend of mine.
He's a social psychiatrist, a brilliant, brilliant man.
And I said, how do you change a mass psychosis when you have a whole bunch of people who are subscribed to an orthodoxy that's completely irrational and, you know, clearly driven by fear?
But they all have a moral certainty that allows them to shut off any incoming information.
So they're not getting anything from the outside.
Everything is coming from circular inside of their heads.
And I said, how do you do that?
And he said, well, there's a formula for it.
You have to use the Socratic method.
You can't persuade them.
You cannot go to them and say, you have to listen to me.
You have to ask them questions.
And say, you know, how does this work?
Should we be vaccinating children?
Is it permissible to vaccinate a child and put them at risk in order to save an adult life?
Do you think that we know we can make a risk assessment of vaccines when nobody's turning in their yellow cards, nobody's reporting injuries?
Do you think it's okay to stop people from Reporting injuries.
And what he said to me is it's the only way to get rid of, to challenge people who are completely fortified by moral certainty.
You can only do it through the Socratic method.
You have to ask the question.
So anyway, it was a curious thing for me about, you know, whether this thing, how does it end?
Have you seen this guy called Matthias Desmet?
No.
Can I send you this guy?
I'll send you a link because he's come up with something called mass formation, which is where it's the same.
It's a method and it's a technique where you separate everybody and then you take away They're fundamental beliefs and security and you frighten them.
And then you get them all back together again, concentrating on one image, which is the virus.
So I would find that, you know, up until even recently, people were still talking about the virus.
As if it was the main thing, not about the government or the way it's been handled, but the virus, that's still the major threat.
And so what they did was, the people at SAGE, we all know, you know, they came up with this model, and it was based on that.
You get everyone to isolate, and then you attack them.
With fear.
And they're not allowed to talk about it to anybody.
And then you replace their sensibility with a focal point.
I mean, I'm doing a very bad job of explaining it.
You explained it really well.
And, you know, I have a chapter in my book called Germ Games.
The book comes out next week.
I'm going to send it to you on Monday.
I bought the book.
I bought your book.
One of the things I learned, if you looked, there was an event called Event 201.
It was put on by Bill Gates in New York with it.
Afua Haynes, the deputy director of the CIA, now the head of a national security agency under Biden, and they were drilling a pandemic, a coronavirus pandemic, this is in October of 2019.
The real pandemic's actually circulating, nobody knows, and it began circulating September 12th.
In October, perhaps they're doing a tabletop Exercise simulating a pandemic and how they can handle it.
And they're not drilling how do you keep people healthy?
How do you get them vitamin D? How do you get them zinc?
How do you get them to exercise, to lose weight, to stop drinking sugar drinks and all this?
It's all about how do you use this pandemic opportunity to militarize and monetize the response.
And what I found out in researching my book is that that was not just this one-on event.
They had been doing that year after year after year since 2000.
And they had involved hundreds of thousands of people in these practices, including frontline workers all over our country, all over Europe, all over Canada, so that you had this whole system that was primed to use the next pandemic to impose totalitarian controls.
And they all drilled, how do you stop people from talking?
How do you end free speech?
How do you give mandatory vaccinations?
How do you impose masks and lockdowns?
All of these.
Drilling it again and again and again.
And the people who participated in those drills were essentially being indoctrinated into the idea that this is how you handle a pandemic.
And in each one of these simulations, they involve a very famous person like Madeleine Albright or Sam Nunn or, you know, Bill Gates or people that everybody knew.
So it kind of anointed the whole thing with gravitas and legitimacy.
But here's the thing.
All of the techniques that use, and this goes back to what you're saying, are techniques that were developed by the CIA. And the CIA was involved in every single one of these pandemics.
They wrote the scripts for them.
And the CIA I've written a lot about the CIA. It was their long involvement in my family.
My family had a 60-year fist fight for the CIA. I've written a lot about it.
I've read all their manuals.
And they had, particularly in the 60s and 70s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, they were researching very intensively ways to control individuals and to do mass control over all societies.
And the essential plan, and this goes back to what you said, Is how do you take over an indigenous society?
How do you impose control from outside?
And here's what you do.
You destroy their economic system.
You destroy their trust in institutions.
You polarize the society and turn individuals against each other.
You make them mistrust in everything.
You fill the media with propaganda so nobody can distinguish lies from truth.
You give them different narratives that are all clashing and so total confusion.
And then when everybody's in chaos and you use fear to make everybody scared that somebody outside is going to hurt them, then you come in and you impose centralized control from outside on that chaos.
One of the...
The CIA was funding all of these experiments in a program called MK Alternative.
And it was also a whole lot of great and hard of joking.
They were using psychoactive drugs like LSD. They were using physical torture.
They made a huge use of isolation, which was the most potent form of psychological control.
They were using propaganda.
They were testing all these methods.
They were telling us to do something that's against our conscience, which is to dismantle the Constitution, dismantle rights, bully people, vilify people like you, silence Discussion.
And we do, and 67% of people will do it, they're told.
And then there's 33% that won't.
And those are the people who are, you know, you're getting messages from now.
Those 33% are with you.
The funny thing is, I have to take that first step myself by turning, making, not turning the TV on.
Because if I was to turn the TV on to one of their press conferences, and Chris really was Or Patrick Vallance or whatever his name is, was giving, making an announcement.
I would probably think, well mate, just give, just see.
You know, give them, give them a little bit of credit.
I have got, I'm human enough to be able to be sucked in.
I can be sucked in.
I'm an addict too, you know.
So I have to just, it's like, and the next one, the big one now is the smartphone.
Because I use that to communicate with like-minded people, to get support, advice, predictions.
And at the same time, that's where it's all going to end up.
And I have got three pieces of paper that I carry with me all the time saying, this man cannot have the vaccine.
And it's got nothing to do with the choice.
I am allergic.
To COVID vaccine.
If I have a booster shot, I don't know what will happen to me.
And I'm not willing to take the risk.
It could be really drastic.
So that is in writing from three professors.
I've met a neurologist, a lung doctor, and my own doctor.
And I know that that will run out pretty soon.
That paper won't have any value.
If it's not in an app, it won't count.
You know, I'm kind of counting down now to where am I going to end up when they take my freedom away?
I've got to be somewhere.
Somewhere where you're going to stay forever.
Somewhere where you can stay forever.
Like Hawaii or something.
Well, I think I might be here.
I'm in France and these people are pretty, they're not moving.
And the Italians are pretty staunch too.
They're pushing back.
They've taken over the ports and I think here it's going to be tough.
But the UK is feeling that it's a depressed country now.
It's really depressed and headed for another lockdown, I think.
Eric, I know it's your bedtime.
This has been great.
I really enjoyed it.
I'm going to send you the thing by this German, he's a clinical psychologist who studied that behavioral thing with mass formation.
You would love it.
Eric, thank you very much.
I'm going to send you my book on Monday, so you're going to have an early copy, and I hope this is the first of many discussions.
Yeah, I look forward to it.
May I stay in touch?
Oh, please.
Thank you.
Thank you, Robert.
God bless.
You too.
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