C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning playwright, novelist, and political satirist. His plays have been produced and have toured at theatres and festivals Playwright CJ Hopkins discusses George Orwell, Totalitarianism, and other current topics in this episode. For more info: https://cjhopkins.com/
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| Hey, everybody. | |
| Welcome to the podcast. | |
| My guest today is CJ Hopkins, who I would describe as as honest as daylight. | |
| And his honesty gives him a clarity of thought and clarity of expression and a kind of landscape view of what's happening in our country today and across the world. | |
| Which is this unprecedented, I would say, emergence of totalitarian systems. | |
| And CJ has written about that extensively and beautifully in a way that I was tempted to just take A chapter of my book and devoted to his writings, and I quote him extensively in my book. | |
| CJ, you're a hard guy to get a hold of. | |
| I don't think you even own a telephone, but something about the way that you see the world is really, really unique, and I think really valuable for people. | |
| All of your loyal followers. | |
| And let me talk for a second. | |
| And let me give just a little bit of an introduction. | |
| CJ is a very accomplished playwright who's had plays that have run in Germany and England and all over the world. | |
| He is a political satirist. | |
| How else would you describe yourself, CJ? So that's pretty much it. | |
| I guess I'm a novelist now, too. | |
| I wrote a novel in 2017, a dystopian sci-fi novel. | |
| Maybe we can talk about it a little bit later. | |
| It turned out to be sort of... | |
| Horribly prescient, you know, in terms of what's been happening over the last two years. | |
| But yeah, that's pretty much it. | |
| Playwright, novelist, political satirist. | |
| And what is your background? | |
| Just my life story in a nutshell. | |
| How do you explain that, you know, you kind of arrived at the place where... | |
| You're kind of a guru in terms of critical thinking and of explaining to people, being able to see with clarity and then explain with eloquence and precision to people in a way that I just don't see anybody else doing. | |
| You're kind of, in some ways, like the modern version of Noam Chomsky. | |
| If you read one of Noam Chomsky's books in the 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s, It was always revelatory because he had a capacity to interpret history in ways that were novel, but they were also, you know, they just gut-punched you at something that, oh, this is what's happening. | |
| This explains it. | |
| And it was... | |
| It was really beautiful. | |
| And unfortunately, you know, probably one of my heroes, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Tom Hartman, many of the other kind of great leaders of liberal thought, of anti-corporate thought, have somehow been seduced by this model for corporate control of our society. | |
| And really, that's what we're dealing with, right? | |
| It's not even ideological, as you pointed out. | |
| And it can disguise itself because it isn't an ideology. | |
| It's not disguised as fascism or nationalism or communism. | |
| It's just We are protecting you from COVID. And, you know, all of this stuff is justified. | |
| And the outcome is the same. | |
| It's the control of society by elites and by these large, particularly corporate, pharmaceutical, military intelligence and technocracy structures. | |
| I've got some theories about all of that, Bobby, which, you know, from my essays, you were just mentioning Chomsky, and, you know, yeah, it's heartbreaking watching. | |
| A lot of people succumb to this, but sure, back in the, well, for me, it was really the 80s and the 90s, reading Chomsky. | |
| I mean, what I always loved about Chomsky is I felt like he was telling the story that nobody else was telling him. | |
| In a nutshell, that's kind of what I've been trying to do. | |
| I started my blog, The Consent Factory, my satirical blog, back in 2016. | |
| And that's really when I started with writing my essays and my political satire. | |
| And as you said before, that life story in a nutshell, you know, I was born in Florida, ran away to San Francisco for a while. | |
| My ex-wife dragged me back into the theater. | |
| I was, you know, an actor when I was a kid. | |
| You know, I spent so much of my life, you know, in downtown theater in New York City making, you know, experimental plays that, you know, hardly anybody saw. | |
| You know, and then they took off after a while. | |
| I ended up in Berlin. | |
| I was, you know, I was bouncing around Europe with one of my plays. | |
| And I just felt like I wanted to live in Europe, ended up in Berlin. | |
| You know, right around 2016, I saw something just really interesting happening. | |
| And that's what pulled me into writing the political satire. | |
| And before, you know, the whole official COVID narrative started and all of that, I was writing about what I call the war on populism. | |
| You were just talking about ideology. | |
| I see it as all part of the same story. | |
| Back in 2016, there were all of these populist eruptions all over, most noticeably, Brexit and the election of Trump. | |
| And what I saw was what I referred to as Globocap. | |
| What is it? | |
| You touched on it a minute ago. | |
| How do we describe the functioning power system that we are living under currently? | |
| It doesn't really fit the old models. | |
| I don't think we have gotten our minds around what it is yet, and that's part of what I've been trying to do to describe it. | |
| Talking about, you know, you touched on the totalitarianism, and as I've written in numerous of my columns, no, it's not 20th century totalitarianism. | |
| You know, it's not Stalinism. | |
| It's not Nazism. | |
| It's not any of these models. | |
| But nonetheless, there is a totalitarianism at its core. | |
| I've described what I think is the essence of totalitarianism is this obsession with control and this need to control everything. | |
| And the most intimate aspects of our lives. | |
| And this is what we've seen for the last two years. | |
| This spirit or this energy being turned on society with just an unbelievable intensity. | |
| Let me make an observation. | |
| I'm struck by your idea that this began in 2016. | |
| And one of the things that was happening in the world at that point was the Syrian war. | |
| And the Syrian war was a really a product of CIA intervention because so that people understand the history, the Qatar, which people pronounce Qatar, which has the largest natural gas fields in the world, a very, very close ally in the United States, can only ship, it has the cheapest gas, it can only ship its gas to Europe through LNG, through liquefied natural gas, which is very expensive. | |
| It proposed with the United States government to put a pipeline through Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria into Turkey. | |
| If it got to Turkey, it would allow it essentially to bankrupt Russia, which is dependent on gas exports to Europe and oil exports through a network of pipelines that go through Turkey. | |
| And the Russians recognized this as a threat to their economy, to their power, to their identity, and to their national sovereignty. | |
| And they were able to persuade Bashar Assad to kill the pipeline and say, you can't bring it through Syria. | |
| The CIA and some of the European intelligence agencies essentially arranged a revolution in Syria, which ended up in the creation of ISIS. | |
| And drove 2 million refugees, Muslim refugees mainly, into Europe, which ended democracy or destabilized every democracy in Europe and created Brexit and the rise of what is the These populist impulses and nationalistic impulses. | |
| And, you know, this is one of the issues. | |
| That's a long build-up to one of the issues I really want to kind of get to with you, which is populism often begins with an idealistic impulse. | |
| But it also tends to align itself with all of the alchemies of dark demagoguery. | |
| So racism and nationalism and misogyny and xenophobia often find themselves able to attach themselves to populism. | |
| And then those tendencies are easily exploited by people who oppose the populist impulse. | |
| They say, oh, it's just about Trump and it's about racism. | |
| And we saw this recently in Canada, where you saw a genuinely idealistic populist convoy. | |
| And it was in the eyes of the world that became kind of a right-wing racist exercise. | |
| And, you know, that's what they've done to me. | |
| That's what they do to everybody. | |
| You know, that's kind of a tangled mishmash of thoughts that I'd love you to respond to. | |
| It's actually not that tangled. | |
| It's funny, my earliest essays that I was writing back in 2016 when I first started, I was kind of describing the world. | |
| I mean, what you're talking about is all of the complexity of the situation and the conflicts that we're in. | |
| And that we've been experiencing. | |
| And of course, it's incredibly complex. | |
| Part of what I've been trying to do with my essays, with my columns, is to simplify it a bit and reach a real general audience. | |
| When I say populism, I often put it in quotes, you know, the war on populism. | |
| And people come back and argue with me, you know, well, Trump's not a populist, you know. | |
| And I said, yeah, I know that. | |
| I have no love for Donald Trump. | |
| I lived in New York City with the man for 15 years, I think he's a clown. | |
| But nonetheless, he became a symbol for this populist I think it's an illustration for this populist rebellion. | |
| In a sense, I could almost translate it to that rebellion that you just described in Syria, in other countries, Russia, absolutely. | |
| The story, I think, that I've been trying to tell with my essays for the last few years and all the way up through the COVID narrative and everything, I often, I go back to the collapse of the Soviet Union. | |
| And this is actually when I wrote my first stage play. | |
| You know, when the Soviet Union collapsed, I sat down and I said, we're in a new world. | |
| You know, we're in a new world. | |
| The world I grew up in, it was the Cold War. | |
| And that was the world that had existed, you know, since the end of the Second World War. | |
| The Soviet Union collapsed. | |
| I said, okay, we're in a single ideology world. | |
| And it isn't really even an ideology. | |
| Let's call it a post-ideology. | |
| But as the Soviet Union collapsed, the way I see it, we became a global capitalist world, right? | |
| And I think for the first time in human history, we live in a world that is dominated by a single ideology. | |
| And it's complex. | |
| It's not seven guys sitting around in a room making up conspiracies. | |
| It's a very, very complex situation, but nonetheless, This is the first time that one ideology, one power system dominates the entire globe. | |
| So much so, and this is a point that I've tried to make repeatedly in my writing, that in a sense, every conflict that we experience now is an insurgency. | |
| The system itself has no more outside enemies. | |
| The world that we used to live in where two large powers were competing with each other, most of us still see the world that way, naturally. | |
| That's the world we grew up in. | |
| We see it as the United States versus Russia or what have you. | |
| It's not the world that I'm looking at. | |
| The world that I'm looking at is a global capitalist world where all of the conflicts, every conflict is a different type of insurgency, whether you're talking about rebellion, refusal to play ball in the Middle East, you know, refusal to play ball in Russia, the populist uprisings, and they were, you know, primarily neo-nationalist uprisings. | |
| Here in Europe, and then with Brexit, and as you described them, all of these challenges or these conflicts are insurgencies, in a sense. | |
| And what I've been tracking is the power system's response to these different insurgencies. | |
| It makes absolutely no difference to Globocap, whether, you know, whether an insurgency is left wing or right wing or, you know, Islamic fundamentalist, Christian fundamentalist, or what type of insurgency it is. | |
| It's basically a rebellion against global capitalist dominance. | |
| I hope that I got close to addressing some of the stuff that you were talking about. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I think what happened in 1989 was that, you know, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, that capitalism had triumphed over in this, you know, 70-year war against communism. | |
| But then it turned and obliterated democracy. | |
| And, you know, that's kind of what we're seeing today. | |
| And one of the things that you described really brilliantly, That also was revelatory to me, which is this is the first time we've seen the rise in totalitarianism that is unaccompanied and unattached to ideology. | |
| It's actually, it's another point that I try to make often, and I'm just struggling to understand all of this stuff myself, and mostly I advocate that other people try to understand. | |
| If you look at the history of what's happened, you know, we could say the last 30 years, we could say the last, you know, six or eight years, it actually is quite logical and it makes perfect sense. | |
| Once a system really achieves global hegemony, de facto global hegemony, And it doesn't have any outside enemies anymore. | |
| What is left to do, right? | |
| What is left to do? | |
| Well, all that's really left to do is consolidate power, right? | |
| Consolidate power and increase control. | |
| It's the thing that makes Globocap interesting, Global Capitalist Hegemony interesting, is that it can't really have an ideology, as Nazism did, as It depends on all of us buying into the fairy tale. | |
| You know, we're all free. | |
| You know, we're all free and we live in democracies and it really depends on the fairy tale. | |
| What I think What has been astounding over the past two years to watch is that the system has shifted to a more openly totalitarian mode. | |
| I'm in the process of putting together my essays for a new collection of essays, and I'm going back over all of the essays that I wrote starting in Go back and look at, and I'm putting the footnotes in, documenting how totalitarian these measures have been from the very beginning. | |
| From the very beginning, I've described it in different ways. | |
| I feel like the last two years, whatever else, and they've been about many things and they are very complex, but I feel like the overarching message of the last two years Has been coming from, you know, power has been shut up and get in line because we're the ones running things. | |
| And we can do this to you anytime we want. | |
| Bobby, it's a more brazen totalitarianism than I've ever experienced, you know, from the West in my lifetime, and I can't help but see it as a message. | |
| On one of your essays, you talk about how all the lies are being exposed, and it reminded me a lot, you know, I didn't share your optimism that that means the collapse is imminent, because You know, what you call the COVID cult. | |
| I remember reading about the history of, the early history of Stalin. | |
| He starved to death three or four million people in Ukraine and the Soviet Union, Soviet citizens. | |
| It was a catastrophe. | |
| And it was a catastrophe that was obvious to everybody except for the ideological commissars who were simply telling people what they saw with their own eyes was not true. | |
| Oh, if you were living in the Ukraine and you were starving to death, you were committing an act of treason against the Soviet Union. | |
| And it was presumptive that if you were starving that you were treason. | |
| And they literally, I mean, people were eating each other regularly, practicing cannibalism, eating their children. | |
| It was one of the most horrific crimes in history. | |
| And yet they were able to, simply by redefining it, they were able to, you know, to portray it as a great triumph. | |
| And I see today what they're doing with the pandemic. | |
| It's pretty obvious to me, and I assume to you, that they're going to spike the football, declare victory, and say all the things that we did worked. | |
| All of this factual infrastructure is now exposed to a lie, and what do they do? | |
| They change subjects. | |
| Sorry. | |
| Go ahead. | |
| There's a chapter in Orwell's 1984. | |
| They're having the big hate week celebrations. | |
| And right in the middle of a big speech, somebody's giving a big hate week speech. | |
| They switch official enemies. | |
| And suddenly Oceania is not at war with East Asia anymore now. | |
| They're at war with Eurasia. | |
| And they've always been at war with Eurasia. | |
| And the guy making the speech doesn't even miss a beat. | |
| He just continues his speech and switches official enemies and the whole thing changes like that. | |
| And it's kind of like what's happened with the war in the Ukraine. | |
| And Putin, yeah. | |
| The thing you just touched on, you just described it. | |
| I wrote in a piece, I think it was late autumn last year. | |
| I was not really being a satirist. | |
| I was, you know, I guess more of an activist and I've been more of an activist. | |
| And I said, all we have to do is hold out and make it through the winter because they cannot keep this narrative going forever. | |
| Through another summer, through another winter, if we can hold out, those of us who are resisting, who are fighting this, if we can hold out and get to April, this thing is going to collapse. | |
| And it's just my sense was, you just can't continue the big lie that long. | |
| Not the way our society is structured, you Very prominent among them. | |
| People have been exposing and publicizing these lies from the very beginning. | |
| And the things, you just rattled them all off. | |
| masks, the completely artificial way that COVID cases were defined and COVID hospitalizations, anyone who's in the hospital for anything, if they test positive their COVID hospitalization, all of the components of the narrative, people if they test positive their COVID hospitalization, all of the components of the narrative, people have been exposing And it was only a month or so ago that it just went on too long. | |
| And the official voices had to start acknowledging it. | |
| And then the rebellion picked up, you know, culminating, I think, in what went on in Ottawa, but it wasn't just Ottawa. | |
| There are huge protests in Germany every Monday, all around Germany and all over Europe. | |
| Protests have been building. | |
| It went on too long, and the narrative has collapsed. | |
| Maybe you're thinking of the piece that I wrote, The Last Days of the Covidian Cult. | |
| The narrative has collapsed. | |
| The Covidian Cult, what I meant by that, has kind of collapsed. | |
| I don't think the project is over. | |
| For example, today, Today is the first day I am technically allowed to rejoin society in Germany, as long as I put on a medical-looking mask and am willing to get myself tested on a daily basis. | |
| And this is being sold as, ah, the return of freedom. | |
| And it is continuing. | |
| I'm watching governments gradually pull back their restrictions, right, because they don't want truckers parked outside of their parliaments. | |
| I'm watching them gradually roll back their restrictions, but they're not rolling back the narrative. | |
| And I don't believe they're rolling back the project, the larger project, which I think I just referred to today as the pathologization of everyday life. | |
| Yeah, well, you know, I don't share your optimism that the whole thing is going to collapse. | |
| And I really try not to make predictions about the future because, you know, my job is to get up every day and, you know, say reporting for duty, sir, and then go out and fight the bad guys. | |
| And, you know, and to really let go of the outcomes, just to know that the only thing I really control is the A little piece of real estate inside of my own shoes. | |
| And as long as I can stand up, my job is to resist, resist, resist, and try to spread the resistance. | |
| But you get depressed if you weren't able to, you know, let go of the outcomes. | |
| And, you know, the big I lasted in Germany. | |
| It lasted from 33 to 45 at 12 years. | |
| That's, you know, that's a long time. | |
| And then But in the Soviet Union, it really lasted from 1917 till 1989. | |
| And everybody in the Soviet Union was conscious that it was a lie. | |
| You know, there was an entire society that was based upon This kind of stoicism and this unique Soviet humor about government propaganda. | |
| Everybody knew it was a lie, but they were stage actors, as you say. | |
| They were walking through their parts and then when they walked off stage doing whatever they could to survive. | |
| You know, with these underground economies that were started. | |
| And at the beginning of the pandemic, I gave a speech in Berlin, one of the first big demonstrations. | |
| They say that administration may have had 1.3 million people, but there's all kinds of counts. | |
| It was a lot of people. | |
| And I said in that speech that governments love pandemics the same reason they love wars, because it gives them opportunities to clamp down police, state security controls on their society, to expand their powers, to reward their allies in the military-industrial to expand their powers, to reward their allies in the military-industrial complex, and to shift huge tsunamis of wealth from the middle class and poor to the ruling | |
| And, you know, it's just amazing to me the timing of, you know, of the Ukraine crisis and the predictable global response, propaganda response, but also just the unanimity of You look at Fox News and you get the same report as you get on CNN, MSNBC. It's just like before the Iraq war. | |
| Or any kind of dissent was outlawed. | |
| And so you see the, you know, the COVID narrative collapsing, and they're not even allowed, you know, the response of the government is just to stop talking about COVID, to call it off, to spike the football, to declare victory. | |
| Yeah, it's funny. | |
| I was at that demo in Berlin for your speech, and you're absolutely right, of course. | |
| You really can't shift, you know, power systems can't shift To this type of nascent totalitarianism, totalitarianism, whatever you want to call it, without an emergency, without a crisis. | |
| It's the crisis. | |
| It's the fear. | |
| It's the emergency that puts everyone in such a state of panic that you can... | |
| We've heard them together and achieved this type of unanimity. | |
| You probably know the Germans, you know, the Nazis referred to it as Gleichschaltung, you know, synchronization of the entire culture. | |
| And it's absolutely what we've seen. | |
| The thing that disturbs me about where we are right now, I mean, there's several things that disturb me about where we are right now, but one thing that disturbs me about it is, again, I think when I say the Covidian cult and the official narrative is collapsing, people watched the narrative collapse. | |
| But what they do is they push Fauci away and they say, okay, that's all over and you're free now. | |
| You're free, but keep your mask on. | |
| And I'm talking about in Europe. | |
| I know most people are taking them off in the States. | |
| You're free now, but keep your mask on and show me your test results. | |
| We still need to see your papers before you can sit down and rest. | |
| What's happening is what they call, in Germany, the basic measures. | |
| They're rolling back the harsh measures, and they're keeping in place the basic measures. | |
| And this is kind of what I meant by the pathologization of everyday life. | |
| I don't think the project is over. | |
| The big narrative is over, but what's happening, and it's frightening to me, is all of this pathology theater is becoming incorporated into everyday life, right? | |
| Into everyday life. | |
| And as far as this unanimity, it's terrifying to me, watching Watching it switch, I mean, there are funny memes all over the, you know, social media. | |
| I saw one meme where someone said, you know, I support the current thing, whatever it is. | |
| What I see is this global power system, which is dividing the world, dividing the world into there is us. | |
| Those of us who are in power and who are normal and we're the good guys and if you want to be part of us, then you will parrot whatever we tell you to parrot on any given day. | |
| It doesn't matter how ridiculous it is. | |
| You know, you will say it, and you will ignore all of the complexities in the history of everything, like the history of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. | |
| You'll ignore all that, and you'll parrot this fairy tale that we're pumping out at you. | |
| If you don't, then you're a conspiracy theorist or a COVID denier or a reality denier or a terrorist or an extremist or a far-right, you know, domestic violent extremist or whatever. | |
| They have a million epithets that get rolled out. | |
| It's classic totalitarianism, but it's dividing the world into, you know, those, everyone who is with us And anyone who deviates from whatever we say the norm is. | |
| And I'm just watching the intensity of this build Yeah, and I mean, if I had to predict what they're going to do, which I really avoid going through things, looking into people's minds, you know, even people who are my adversaries and saying what they're thinking, | |
| and also making predictions, because I'm not very good at making predictions, but I would say worries me is that We're good to go. | |
| Communism, fascism, any idiot, Zionism, whatever. | |
| There's no ideology. | |
| It's just, we are, it's the reality. | |
| We're protecting you against X. And it could be a germ one day. | |
| It could be Putin the next day. | |
| It could be China the day after that. | |
| It could be Saddam Hussein. | |
| And every time they do it, they pass another version of the Patriot Act. | |
| We invade a country that didn't do anything to us and we tell a big lie about it. | |
| And we use it to pass the Patriot Act to loosen the Bioweapons Treaty to allow us to develop bioweapons, which ends up in Wuhan. | |
| You know, that's how we gave Tony Fauci a $2 billion raise to develop bioweapons in 2002 following the Iraq invasion and the anthrax attacks. | |
| And each one sets the stage for the next crisis and the next expansion of power. | |
| As soon as, if you were conspiratorial, you'd say, yeah, as soon as the COVID narrative begins to collapse of its own weight and its own contradictions, they roll out Putin. | |
| And when Putin's gone, they've got Marburg virus in the pipeline. | |
| They have Ebola virus and all these other viruses, and then they have China. | |
| And they have Muslim terrorism. | |
| And all of these, you know, and each one will come with a new imposition of government rollbacks or rights that are portrayed as a beneficent government moving in to protect the public. | |
| And each one will be accompanied by additional censorship. | |
| You know, the censorship around Putin. | |
| Listen, Putin is apparently a megalomaniac. | |
| Who may or may not be rational. | |
| But I really want to know more about the history and more about, you know, what is driving him and what is, as you say, there's tremendous complexities with former Soviet Union Russia's today's relationship with the Ukraine and the role of, you know, of the CIA and the U.S. administrations in breaking our word in surrounding Russia. | |
| With NATO. And would this have happened if we didn't do that? | |
| I want to know the answer to that question. | |
| You know, what are the benefits of surrounding Russia with NATO at a time when there's no Cold War? | |
| Is it recreating a new Cold War by making that country by waking the sleeping bear? | |
| When my uncle was president in 1962, Russia put missiles in Cuba. | |
| They were 90 miles from us. | |
| And we reacted with terror and brought the world to the edge of nuclear war because we found that untenable. | |
| It was an existential threat. | |
| But I can see where maybe Russia feels the same way when we put bases in Poland and Yugoslavia and the Czech Republic and all of these Satellite nations that were once part of the Soviet Union. | |
| And we promised we wouldn't do that. | |
| We said we will not move NATO one inch, and the whole world knows that. | |
| And what would have happened? | |
| What are our intelligence agencies saying? | |
| You know, that's what they're supposed to be doing. | |
| They're supposed to be telling us, if you put a base in Poland, it's likely to inflame the tensions. | |
| And give justification to a madman to invade Ukraine. | |
| And what is our part of it? | |
| You know, we're not allowed to talk about any of that stuff. | |
| Nobody can talk about it. | |
| It's just, you know, there is one ideological story and you hear it on Fox, you hear it on MSNBC. You hear it on the CNN, and there is no dissent permitted. | |
| And anybody who's sad as it raises these issues is treasonous. | |
| They're a bad person because they're justifying the invasion of the Ukraine and all that. | |
| I just wish we didn't live in that world. | |
| I wish we lived in a world where we could talk with each other and really understand the complexities of this situation. | |
| And they are myriad. | |
| You just said it, and you've experienced this much more than I have, but many of us have. | |
| The system has almost no tolerance whatsoever for discussions of history, for discussions of the complexities of politics, and those of us who try to engage in it are being just relentlessly And, you know, and called every name in the book. | |
| You know, Russia and the Ukraine. | |
| Where do you want to start? | |
| You know, after the Soviet Union fell apart, the West moved in there and had a party. | |
| And started privatizing Russia and just went nuts. | |
| We had a big party. | |
| And when Putin, predictably, Putin came into power, he came into power and said, wait, we're going to stop this party and I'm going to take care of Russia. | |
| I'm not going to... | |
| I don't want to play ball with Globocap at the expense of Russia, and I'm going to take care of Russia and Russians, right? | |
| And again, even just me bringing this up, okay, now I'm a Putin apologist, and I love the man and worship him or whatever, according to the mainstream narrative. | |
| But all I'm really trying to do is just look back at the history of what happened. | |
| You talked about... | |
| You know, NATO just continually encroaching on Russia surrounding its western border, you know, bringing more and more countries in, you know, breaking the promises. | |
| Of course, at some point, one of two things was going to happen. | |
| Either Putin or whoever's running the Russian government was going to give up and say, you guys win. | |
| Come and take us. | |
| Or something like this was going to happen. | |
| This is entirely predictable. | |
| It was almost inevitable after the coup slash revolution in 2014. | |
| All of these facts are there. | |
| All of these historical facts are there. | |
| They were all there from the very beginning. | |
| But God help you if you bring them up and actually start discussing them. | |
| I mean, think about how you've been stigmatized. | |
| And demonized by the mainstream. | |
| As far as I know, no one's even reviewed your book in one of the so-called respectable papers. | |
| The book sold over a million copies and no one will touch it. | |
| Right? | |
| None of the big reviewers. | |
| It's a scary, scary world that we're living in, and it's getting scarier. | |
| This is why I use big, scary words like totalitarianism. | |
| CJ Hopkins, thank you so much. | |
| Thanks for continually being a voice of informed and idealistic dissent. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you for having me on. |