Pandemic Path to Transhumanism with Dr Tim Coles
Dr. Tim Coles discusses transhumanism with RFK Jr.
Dr. Tim Coles discusses transhumanism with RFK Jr.
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Welcome back, everybody. | |
My guest today is TJ Coles, a postdoctoral researcher at Plymouth University in the UK, where he studies the cognitive aspects of blindness and visual impairment. | |
His neuroscience books include Your Brain in Quarantine, Where Does Prejudice Come From?, He also writes about politics for Counterpunch, The Gray Zone. | |
His political books include We'll Tell You What to Think, Wikipedia, Propaganda, and The Making of Liberal Consensus. | |
The latest book is Biofascism, The Tech Reform, A Complex, and The End of Democracy. | |
And those are all issues that we have a big interest in talking about on this program. | |
I want to start... | |
I'm playing you this very frightening tape by Yuval Noah Harari, who is kind of the ideological commissar of the World Economic Forum. | |
I would say the acolyte or inspiration for Klaus Schwab, who vigorously and aggressively promotes him. | |
Harari says in this tape... | |
Now scientists are saying, first of all, there is no such thing as free will. | |
Science is familiar with just two kinds of processes in nature. | |
You have deterministic processes, and you have random processes, and of course you have combinations of randomness and determinism, which result in a probabilistic outcome. | |
But none of that is freedom. | |
Freedom has absolutely no meaning. | |
From a physical or biological perspective, it's just another myth, another empty term that humans have invented. | |
Humans have invented God, and humans have invented heaven and hell, and humans have invented free will. | |
But there is no more truth to free will than there is to heaven and hell. | |
And as for feelings, they are definitely real. | |
They are not a fiction of our imagination. | |
But feelings are really just biochemical algorithms. | |
And there is nothing metaphysical or supernatural about them. | |
There is no obvious reason to consider them as the highest authority in the world. | |
And most importantly, what... | |
Scientists and engineers are telling us more and more is that if we only have enough data and enough computing power, we can create external algorithms that understand humans and their feelings much better than humans can understand themselves. | |
And once you have an algorithm, That understands you and understands your feeling better than you understand yourself. | |
This is the point when authority really shifts away from humans to algorithms. | |
Harari starts by saying we're developing algorithms now that can understand human feelings better than the humans themselves. | |
And once we have those algorithms, it gives totalitarian and authoritarian regimes The capacity to control human behavior in ways that are subtle and complete, and that human beings will be human at that point in form only, and that we will see the ascendancy of what he calls digital dictatorships that are run by traditional elites. | |
Harari kind of laments that totalitarian regimes and oligarchies and plutocracies of the past have not been able to achieve this level of control over human behavior, but the current technology gives those cohorts that exciting capacity. | |
You've been thinking a lot about this issue and about the issue of transhumanism, which seems to be an obsession of the World Economic Forum, but also any of these Very, very powerful internet titans from Google and Facebook and the other internet platforms. | |
And they seem to, and correct me if I'm wrong, these billionaire class themselves seem to see transhumanism as a way to kind of permanently extend their lives or at least their consciousness. | |
The World Economic Forum has kind of a broader view of transhumanism, which is about how you achieve through the integration of machines and human beings, how do you achieve a level of control that will allow informed and enlightened how do you achieve a level of control that will allow informed and enlightened elites to manage global Oh, wow. | |
This all sounds paranoid to people who have not read what they are writing about themselves and have not seen what they are saying about themselves. | |
And, you know, it came as a shock to me because I never read any of this stuff until I did it. | |
And so I think the first impediment is kind of persuading the listeners to this podcast that this is something real and not part of my ravings. | |
So go ahead and unleash all of the knowledge that you have about transhumanism. | |
Well, I think Harari's a bit behind the times, really, because Eisenhower infamously said in his farewell address that the military-industrial complex, as he called it, could give rise to a technological elite, which would be unconstrained by normal morals. | |
And many of us have called this techno-fascism. | |
So in the 1970s, for example, the behaviorist V.F. Skinner He wrote a book called Beyond Freedom and Dignity, in which he said that people are basically out of control and we should try and use technology to control them. | |
And this created the ideological background for techno-fascist order, where today we have big tech, etc. | |
But what's happened with the pandemic, we've gone into a new phase of what myself and people like Naomi Wolf have called bio-fascism. | |
Where they're not only talking about machines that can read your mind and know you better than you know yourself, but actually they're talking about invasive medical procedures, about the commercialization of human biology. | |
So this goes beyond what Shoshone is above, for example, called surveillance capitalism. | |
This is direct bodily control. | |
So it seems that Harari is sort of talking about these things. | |
In a way, it's coded as if perhaps this could be a warning of the future, but it's here already. | |
And a lot of people who might have been skeptical about this in the past, they've seen how their very biology has become a tool of the state during the pandemic. | |
Where they've all of a sudden had to scan QR codes in order to go to restaurants. | |
They have to give their most personal data to these big tech firms. | |
So what was considered fantasy not long ago by the public, it's as if they've had a big smack in the face. | |
Because I think that what's happened is, even before the pandemic, there were several sort of authoritarian vectors One of which was out of control financial systems in the form of asset management companies. | |
So today, companies like BlackRock and the Vanguard Group and State Street and Fidelity and a few others, they now control trillions of dollars of assets and they've bought the majority institutional shareholdings of the big tech companies, of big pharma, of big media. | |
So really, even before the pandemic, you had this growth of these huge financial institutions, which seem totally undemocratic. | |
There's no accountability. | |
They enjoy huge tax breaks. | |
There's hardly any regulation. | |
And they've really consolidated their power. | |
And they also profit from chaos. | |
So in a financial downturn, they can buy property, for example, for pennies on the dollar. | |
And inflate the value of their portfolios, which on the stock market is fake anyway, because a lot of companies today, half of their stock value is in buybacks, where corporations are just buying back their own stocks to inflate their values. | |
So that's the first one. | |
The second authoritarian vector, I think, was big tech. | |
And I mentioned Eisenhower with the military-industrial complex. | |
This meant that the US entered into a permanent war economy. | |
Where the taxpayer pays for military research and development to give us things like computers and the internet and satellites. | |
That's all very well. | |
But then it's transferred to the private sector. | |
And far from being capitalist, it's transferred to monopolies. | |
So you have these huge out-of-control institutions and you end up with CEOs like Bill Gates who enter this new class of centi-billionaire where they're worth over a hundred billion dollars And I think the third authoritarian vector was this regulatory capture by Big Pharma, where if you look, for example, at the CDC Foundation, who's funding it, it's Pfizer and Johnson& Johnson and AbbVie and all these other groups. | |
So you have these three or four vectors that are already authoritarian. | |
And they're already in this kind of techno-fascist mindset where they, through what the Pentagon used to call total information awareness, and then they transferred this doctrine basically to Google, which started out as the CIA's venture capitalist firm In-Q-Tel. | |
They seed funded Google and they absorb all of our data, everything we're doing, including listening to us through iPhones. | |
And they sell this information to data brokers and to advertisers, completely authoritarian. | |
And it comes out of the state sector. | |
So after 9-11, for example, the military industrial complex morphed into the industrial intelligence complex where the NSA and other institutions were given these huge budgets. | |
And they continued to work on projects like through DARPA, the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency. | |
As far back as the 60s, they were working on brain-to-machine interfaces, where they could Rig up people's brains to machines to have the machine produce what people are thinking. | |
And then after 9-11, with these inflated budgets, it became like help for veterans. | |
For example, amputees could have their brains rigged up to a machine that could move a robotic arm. | |
So this has been going on for decades. | |
But these existing authoritarian vectors of big pharma, regulatory capture, big tech, They really became what I and others call bio-fascists after the pandemic. | |
They completely used their power to take over media. | |
And we saw an unprecedented deluge of propaganda during the pandemic. | |
And they also, of course, used their leverage to impose these mandates. | |
And we're now in a situation where it's gone beyond what Harari was just talking about. | |
I think this is the crucial background. | |
The World Economic Forum, with all its so-called intellectuals, they provide the kind of ideological drive or the ideological cover that supports a lot of this agenda. | |
And I think a lot of it is very counter-revolutionary. | |
A lot of World Economic Forum publications, they talk about the negative effect of corporate globalization. | |
So we've seen in the US these authoritarian vectors that include the big tech companies and big pharma. | |
And I think that the World Economic Forum is basically trying to counter any kind of working class revolt against their system because For a long time, they've been talking about how the globalization of corporations robs ordinary working class people of their livelihood. | |
Wages stagnate and job opportunities decrease. | |
So they have to find a way to make sure that they can retain this system that profits them. | |
But in a way that makes sure that there's no kind of backlash through politics or even revolution. | |
And a lot of what the World Economic Forum does, it sort of captures progressive and free-thinking revolutionary leaders and then absorbs them into this system and they become sort of intellectuals for the World Economic Forum and then they become a kind of managerial class. | |
And this all feeds into transhumanism because in the background you've got these authoritarian vectors of big finance and big pharma and big tech. | |
You have the ideological drive of the World Economic Forum trying to stop people from gathering their own affairs and having their own political systems. | |
And then you've got this push for technology, which is now, they say, data is the new oil. | |
So everything we do and say is recorded. | |
Everything we do is tracked and surveilled. | |
And the pandemic gave them an unprecedented opportunity to put these systems really into place, where it's no longer just an external form of control. | |
They're actually going after the very biology of humans themselves. | |
So we end up with things like DNA markets, where these corporations can now grab your DNA and privatize it. | |
Well, we don't even know what they're doing with it. | |
We know for sure that some intelligence agencies have been working with some of these companies. | |
And we know that there's military genetic engineering. | |
There's a super soldier program. | |
So the whole transhumanist agenda, I think, falls into two categories. | |
You could call them the sort of Ray Kurzweil category. | |
Kurzweil, the software developer, said famously 20 years ago or more, the future does not need us. | |
So people like that think that humans can just disappear and machines could take over. | |
Then you've got another kind of thinking among transhumanists like Elon Musk, who say that Well, you know, maybe technology could actually augment us and help us. | |
So you have either augmentation or the end of humanity. | |
And these are the two trains of thoughts in transhumanism. | |
And we've gone from being what were externally controlled human beings by laws and by customs and so on to now directly controlled through our very biology. | |
In addition to that, we see technology getting smaller and smaller. | |
For example, these earpieces for mobile phones, cell phones. | |
They're now little tiny buds, wireless buds, and soon it's going to be brain implants. | |
And the underlying basis of this is it comes, as I said earlier, from this military-industrial complex, which after 9-11 morphed into the industrial-intelligence complex. | |
I call this new phase the tech pharma complex because we're seeing big, unaccountable technology, which has unprecedented censorship. | |
I mean, the level of censorship and deplatforming and vilification, we've never seen anything like it, really. | |
That's merged with big tech. | |
So the top 50 biggest US corporations, there's an overwhelming share of them, are big pharma and big tech. | |
And it all comes back to these asset management companies. | |
So we're dealing with very few corporations that have enormous monopoly power. | |
And they're driven by this agenda that either the future doesn't need us or else we're going to all be augmented beyond what it means to be human. | |
And if you look throughout history, yes, of course, humans have always used tools to improve their performance, whether it was our tribal ancestors throwing spears. | |
But now it's got to the point where it's actually becoming increasingly invasive and increasingly biological. | |
Let me just put up one example of the kind of problem that, you know, this new technocracy from the World Economic Forum undoubtedly sees as a global management dilemma. | |
And that Elon Musk has talked about it. | |
Elon Musk says, you know, first the machines are going to take our jobs and then they're going to kill us. | |
And a good example is self-driving automobiles. | |
I read an article recently that said between 30 and 40% of the jobs in the United States involve driving. | |
And so if you eliminate all those jobs with self-driving automobiles, you then have a problem of what do you do with the workers. | |
And what do you do? | |
Do you usher them into cities? | |
As you say, they become machines and made them unnecessary. | |
How do you manage those kind of populations? | |
And somebody like, you know, who thinks about these things like Bill Gates and Claude Schwab and the people from the World Economic Forum seem to be preparing us to deal, to manage those kind of enormous kind of mega-problems. | |
Yeah, absolutely. | |
Because they're terrified of ordinary working class people taking away a little bit of the power that these people have, which is now unprecedented. | |
And they want to make sure that people have some kind of preoccupation. | |
They have to make sure that people are always frightened by some kind of crises, whether it's terrorism or war or a pandemic. | |
And it's quite openly spelled out in their publications. | |
It's quite amazing what they admit to because this seems like a hierarchy of knowledge in which they have complete capture of the intellectual class who go and write these documents. | |
Then they have capture of the potential revolutionaries that could implement these changes. | |
They buy them and absorb them into their system and make them part of the World Economic Forum. | |
And they also, of course, have... | |
You're talking about kind of classically like leaders like Justin Trudeau, or Tony Blair, or Macron, the people who go to Davos every year and who are part of the Klaus Schwab Institute. | |
And who purportedly, traditional liberalism, the kind of liberalism that, you know, people call Kennedy liberalism, that I grew up with, is liberalism that was on the side of the working class, on the side of the poor, that opposed the oligarchies all over the world. | |
And you have now, you know, liberal leaders... | |
And Naomi Klein, who have been now appropriated for this World Economic Forum project and have become its operatives, its ideological gatekeepers, its kind of torquemadas, you know, for the inquisition of this new religion. | |
Yeah, I think the language is so corrupted that it's a miracle we can even communicate with each other because neoliberalism, it's not new. | |
It's an old system that dates back at least to British imperialism, if not further. | |
And as you say, it's not liberal at all. | |
It's the opposite of liberalism. | |
And I think, unfortunately, that a lot of the old guard of the left, like Chomsky, who I very much admire, saying that people who don't want to be forcibly injected should be locked away. | |
That was so awful. | |
This sort of attitude is driving people on the left to the right. | |
And what we're now seeing is a great realignment, I think, of the politics Certainly in the United States and also in the UK. And I think the left used to be very critical of big pharma. | |
And it used to accept that these are criminal monopolies that lie all the time and literally kill people with their terrible drugs that they market, often illegally. | |
And now all of a sudden, because it's a pandemic, we're supposed to trust Big Pharma. | |
It's crazy. | |
And that's why I try to stop saying left and right anymore. | |
And I just talk about class, working class people and non-working class people. | |
And it's only really when people who have no power get together and start pushing. | |
And we see that throughout history, whether it was the civil rights struggle or any example you want to think of. | |
It's ordinary people coming together and putting aside politics. | |
Talk about Wikipedia, because that's been kind of an extraordinary conquest for these transhumanists and big pharma forces. | |
It's really become a propaganda vehicle for... | |
The big irony is that the internet and Google and Facebook and Wikipedia, who promised us to democratize communications around the globe, have become the most potent instrumentalities of emerging totalitarianism. | |
And Wikipedia is at the spirit of that. | |
It's really redefining reality in a way that It tracks precisely the pharmaceutical paradigm that supports, you know, the subversion of democratic structures by these big corporations that makes war on natural health, on vitamins, on exercise, on diet. | |
Anybody who opposes the pharmaceutical paradigm is just systematically slandered and defamed in the pages of Wikipedia. | |
And as you say, it's all a big lie. | |
They claim that they're It's a crowdsource that somehow is in mechanisms that we now understand because of litigation, the pharmaceutical industry has been able to gain, and the tech industry has been able to gain control over that vehicle. | |
In the book, we'll tell you what to think. | |
I lay out who's behind Wikipedia. | |
And as you say, it's not a bottom-up, crowdfunded venture. | |
It's basically run by the Wikimedia Foundation, which is funded by the usual suspects, big banks, the war corporations like BA Systems, Big Oil, ExxonMobil. | |
And big pharma like Pfizer. | |
And so the content of Wikipedia's articles, as they call them, they don't call them entries like an encyclopedia entry, they call them articles. | |
The content reflects the interests of the donors. | |
And so it's obviously not in Pfizer's interest to have people exercising and taking vitamin D and vitamin C and getting sunshine and fresh air. | |
It's in their interest to be permanently sick so that they can keep marketing products to them. | |
So any alternative health practitioners, even entire fields of alternative medicine like acupuncture and wikipedia... | |
Yeah, absolutely. | |
Wikipedia just slanders it, and it's horrendous. | |
And they work with institutions like one called Guerrilla Skeptics. | |
The woman from Guerrilla Skeptics even had a T-shirt that said, Big Pharma Shilling. | |
So it was kind of a tongue-in-cheek joke, which was basically admitting that she was shilling for Big Pharma. | |
And these are the kind of people that have great influence on Wikipedia. | |
And anybody that tries to democratically edit their page or a page on behalf of somebody else, they're just overwhelmed by these bots and trolls. | |
And Wikipedia, they even have paid PR people from corporations to go and edit these entries, which is actually, it's not even against Wikipedia's rules, rather astonishingly. | |
So it's what I call the normalization of conflict of interest. | |
And because Wikipedia is supposed to be free, but actually it's already bought by these big corporations. | |
So it's basically one big advertising racket. | |
Yeah, and their ultimate mechanism for control is that they have these senior editing rooms where the appeals ultimately rise, the appeals of disputes over new entries to these articles or new edits. | |
the articles ultimately make it into that editing room. | |
And if it's a subject of concern, of editorial policy concern, in other words, if it's a edit that goes against the pharmaceutical paradigm, the outcome in the editing room is always very predictable. | |
They aren't going to protect their funders. | |
You're ultimately a neuroscientist. | |
You try to understand how the brain interprets information, interprets experience and how systems, authoritarian systems use certain alchemies of demagoguery to manipulate public behavior and essentially hypnotize the human authoritarian systems use certain alchemies of demagoguery to manipulate public behavior And even minds, as you point out, of people, you know, brilliant minds that are templates for critical thinking like Noam Chomsky. | |
Who's had an entire career distinguishing himself As a skeptic of propaganda, as a, you know, as a critic, a devastating, brilliant critic of propaganda, and yet this particular propaganda has hoodwinked him, | |
has hoodwinked even the equally surprising Naomi Klein, who has written about, you know, the mechanisms by which big pharmaceutical and other corporations Use crises to engineer financial and power advantages in societies, and she calls it disaster capitalism. | |
And so she's basically written the blueprint of how we should be interpreting what happened over the past 20 months, how Democratic structures are systematically subverted by large corporations who use crises, public crises, to elevate their power and their wealth and to diminish the democratic defenses to it. | |
And how in the world could a mind like Naomi Klein's I think it's fear mainly, but also dialectical thinking. | |
Because now, I'm not a fan of Donald Trump. | |
I even wrote a book against Donald Trump. | |
But there is such a thing as Trump derangement syndrome. | |
The left and progressives really hate him to an illogical and pathological level. | |
Now, I don't like Trump. | |
I'd rather Bernie Sanders have won. | |
But I think that because the whole political system during the pandemic had been attributed to Trump and his laissez-faire I couldn't care less about anything. | |
The left went into this dialectical either-or mode where they thought, well, Trump doesn't seem to care about the pandemic, so therefore it's really bad, and we have to get behind this authoritarian big pharma. | |
And they convinced themselves that it wasn't authoritarian because they were so afraid of Trump. | |
They had this Trump derangement syndrome. | |
So I think that's also a big part of it. | |
And Trump did introduce some of these lockdowns and mandates, but the pro-Trump propaganda said that he didn't really do that and he didn't want to do that. | |
And I think the left had absorbed a lot of that. | |
So I would say that a lot of these brilliant minds got hoodwinked because of this either-or dialectical thinking Trump bad, so therefore we have to get behind the big pharma agenda. | |
And also, as you say, fear, absolutely, for sure. | |
The media were really in a frenzy about the pandemic and what they called the necessity to be injected by these experimental products. | |
Yeah, I like what you said about, you know, the dialectic thinking, because it's always struck me. | |
I mean, it struck me over the past two years that anything that Trump said or can be attributed to him For liberals, that becomes toxic. | |
And the opposite must be true. | |
Even if they don't believe in something, even if they believe pharmaceutical companies are dishonest and graven and venal and criminal and homicidal and subversive democracy, they'll befriend them because if they think that Trump was against them, then it's a lot like what you said. | |
A phenomena that you see in human behavior. | |
People who hate somebody, hate their parents or hate somebody else, often when they're obsessed with that hatred, they're allowing the subject of their hatred to control their behavior. | |
They're giving that person, it's a paradox, because instead of, you know, the worst thing that you can do to your enemy is to ignore them, to make them irrelevant. | |
And by hating them, you really give your enemy power over your own conduct. | |
And I think that that's happened on a massive scale within the Democratic Party, and it's warped the party, it's turned the party against its own value, its fundamental value. | |
There's like freedom of speech, you know, the resistance to the corporate control of our society, bodily control over, you know, my body. | |
my choice, all of these things that were fundamental mantras and foundation stones. | |
To modern liberal democratic party, the party has now turned against. | |
And I guess it's a propaganda technique. | |
You know, how did Justin Trudeau end up the enemy of working class truckers who were in a non-violent Political protests. | |
What happened to the constitutional, the sacred constitutional right to assembly? | |
You know, of course people can come to the Capitol and protest. | |
We like that in a democracy. | |
That's an emblem of a functioning democracy. | |
If somebody's violent, they go to jail. | |
But if they're not violent, we encourage them to protest. | |
And yet, I think really Justin disgraced himself with the truckers and his unwillingness to go meet with them and ask them, what is the issue? | |
Let's talk about it. | |
The things that Democrats usually did with With working class people, you know, that was the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. | |
Democrats turned against the working class and they become a party of beliefs. | |
Absolutely. | |
This is where I think we enter into this bio-fascist order because it's not only being told that you have to have these experimental products injected into you, it's also the enforcement I think we're in quite a bad situation with these authoritarian, out-of-control monopolies. | |
That under the cover of public health emergency now have forced themselves into a position where they have control over our bodies. | |
And this is a total inversion of what used to be sort of left liberal values, as you say, my body, my choice. | |
But unfortunately, many on the left or the liberal progressive side, they convinced themselves that the individual has to abide by these mandates for the greater good, but they never actually gave a good argument for that. | |
The whole vaccine The quote-unquote issue was just absurd. | |
They would say, for my safety, you have to be vaccinated. | |
But if I'm vaccinated, why do you need to be vaccinated? | |
So it didn't make any sense at all. | |
And then some of the more nuanced thinkers said, well, overwhelming public hospitals. | |
We don't want that to happen. | |
But look at what's happened to public hospitals. | |
They've been privatized and sold off. | |
And if there was affordable or free healthcare in the United States, that would have saved already hundreds of thousands of lives. | |
It's just a circular argument. | |
It's circular logic. | |
It's the abandonment of this critical thinking and these critical faculties. | |
Because I think the two things have happened. | |
One is fear. | |
And the second, as we said, is this dialectical thinking, where anything associated with Trump or the Republicans is bad, so therefore we have to go to the opposite side, even if it's into the arms of Big Pharma, the traditional enemy. | |
And I think that, as I said before, this is driving a lot of working class people who traditionally were on the left, is driving them to the right wing, because the right wing are now posing as The saviours of free speech against wokery, and they're posing as the true libertarians, where you do as you wish with your body. | |
And I think we're now seeing this great realignment of politics, where everything's turning upside down. | |
So you are the expert on how these systems are put in place. | |
Do you know how we get rid of them? | |
What is the path out of this? | |
It's unprecedented because there's all these kind of what I call turnkey totalitarianism, these new instrumentalities of control, like vaccine passports, like digital currencies, like Facial recognition and track and trace surveillance and all the 5G data collection infrastructure that is now in place that gives these totalitarian systems mechanisms for control that were unavailable to every system in the past. | |
How do we get out of this? | |
How do we wake up the liberal democratic left and How did they ultimately see that they've been the victims of a giant bait-and-switch? | |
I think we, first of all, need common points of agreement so that we can go to people, educate them, find like-minded people, and we need to explain how this all unfolded. | |
The public have been so deluged with propaganda. | |
I think, though, the third injection, when they said you need three injections in order to be fully vaccinated, a lot of people at that point, I think, realized. | |
So there are, unfortunately, sometimes it has to get worse before it can get better. | |
And a lot of people at that point realized what was happening. | |
So there are opportunities like that. | |
Another one is with data collection. | |
If you say to people, you do realize that your phone is listening to everything you say, and it's sending information to Google. | |
That's quite shocking to people. | |
So, I mean, left or right, we can agree that this is wrong. | |
So there's common points of agreement. | |
So it then takes education and forming, particularly at grassroots community levels, community organizing, Local council meetings, that sort of thing. | |
I mean, we're all hooked on technology, right? | |
So the boycott is not really very feasible, unfortunately. | |
But there are opportunities to raise fear within the corporations, because what they respond to is concern about public opinion, right? | |
So if they think the public's going to turn against them, they start to act. | |
So you could have days of protest against certain measures, right? | |
And we've seen this. | |
This has been very successful. | |
So the very impressive global anti-injection protests that have been sustained, that has had an effect. | |
And they've really, you know, in some countries, they've dropped the vaccine passes. | |
Like I moved to France a few months ago from the UK. So just as the UK dropped all of its COVID restrictions, Macron said, I don't know if I can swear on this show, but He said, let's say he wanted to annoy the... | |
He said, I want to piss off the unvaccinated. | |
This was the French president saying this. | |
I want to piss off the unvaccinated. | |
But it didn't last long because the French carried on protesting, protesting. | |
And now, at the moment, the mandates have been dropped. | |
This is the power of protest and sustained protest, common points of agreement as well. | |
Because in France, we noticed that it's even people who had been injected, they said, I stand with those who have not been injected, because it's their choice. | |
They shouldn't be forced to be if they don't want to be. | |
So that's also a difference. | |
In ideology, in understanding that even if you don't agree with somebody, you stand by their right not to be coerced. | |
And I think this level of sustained protest has worked, and we're now seeing the mandates being rolled back. | |
T.J. Coles, thank you so much for joining us. | |
This has been an extraordinary podcast. | |
I think you have a particular understanding, an acute, precise understanding Of what's happening and an eloquence about it that I think is really helpful to me, to our listeners. | |
And I can't thank you enough for the work that you're doing. | |
And I hope that you will come on and be a regular on this podcast because your point of view is so, so important. | |
So thank you very much, TJ Cole. |