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July 21, 2021 - Viva & Barnes

01:58:08

Sidebar with Journalist Jordan Schachtel - Viva & Barnes Live!

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Time	Text
	I was a half second early there.
	It's really actually tough to time it perfectly, because it takes about three seconds when you click live to go live, and then it's just a question of whether or not I get within the half second frame.
	Good evening, people.
	Let's wait for the standard Fs to invade the chat so that I know that we're rolling and we're...
	I am not late, Ray K. I am meticulously, obsessively punctual.
	F, F, F. F looking good.
	Booyah.
	I skipped over.
	What is this?
	Barnes?
	Is that the same as your...
	Hold on.
	Get out of here.
	Okay.
	How's everybody doing?
	As everyone can see, I got a haircut.
	I love this haircut.
	I went with the trimming of the beard.
	The only problem is, and this is why I don't trim the fur around Winston's eyes, once you do it...
	Once you manicure your face, you have to start maintaining that manicure, and I can't be bothered to do that.
	So once this grows out, I've learned my lesson.
	I'm not manicuring the beard ever again.
	It's going to grow savage and wild.
	But my goodness, Damp's company in Montreal gives the best skin fade on earth.
	Okay, what's a...
	Oh, okay, I got private chat on StreamYard.
	I just noticed that.
	All right, so let me get back to regular chat so I can see the comments.
	It's going to be an interesting stream tonight.
	Jordan Schachtel.
	And I'm going to make a guess as to the origin.
	Well, not the origin.
	I suspect there's a history to that last name.
	And if I can guess it right, without having done any research, I'm going to pat myself on the back.
	Jordan Schachtel is a national security correspondent, investigative journalist.
	And I mean, I've been following him.
	I have not been following him for very long on Twitter, but I've been seeing his stuff for quite a while.
	And I read some interesting articles today, so we're going to have a good discussion because it's going to touch on some issues that have been in the news recently, but also a bit of what he does, how he does it, and what's unique about that.
	So let's see.
	Standard disclaimers, no legal advice.
	Superchats, 30% goes to YouTube.
	If you don't like that, I understand that.
	You can support Robert Barnes and I on Locals, vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
	For everyone on Locals, I said I was going to do a live stream today, and I'm going to.
	I guess I'm just going to have to do it after this live stream, exclusive to Locals.
	Super Chats, if I miss them and you're going to be upset about it, don't give the Super Chat.
	I don't like people feeling miffed.
	It's like a Canadian kid in play.
	I don't know what that is referencing, but thank you for the chat.
	And you got a face.
	You got a fade.
	Really.
	It is a beautiful fade.
	Brings out the grey hairs, but what can you do?
	Now...
	Jordan and Robert are in the house.
	There were some under-the-table or over-the-table wagers as to the color of Robert's tie, so place your bets while I say hello to this super chat.
	The only thing that matters is that if the wife likes it.
	She thinks the beard is not short enough, but she appreciates the thought and the effort.
	Okay.
	We shall bring in...
	What?
	Does your wife like that you've got to fade and set...
	I don't know what that means.
	Okay, we're bringing in Jordan.
	We're bringing in Robert.
	Gentlemen, how you doing?
	Good, good.
	Doing great.
	Thanks for having me.
	Thank you for coming.
	This is going to be interesting because oftentimes it's not hard to find a slew of information on a guest and to go watch interviews, read posts.
	I've been reading some of your articles, but there's what we would refer to as a dearth of information about you on the internet.
	I suspect we're going to get to why that is.
	But elevator pitch for everybody who's watching who may not know who you are.
	Who are you?
	What do you do before we get into the origins coming back to the present?
	Yeah, so I'm an independent journalist, and I've worked basically all over right-of-center media, and most people are familiar with my work pre-2020 from the foreign policy national security space.
	Most people in recent days are familiar with my work regarding the COVID mania stuff.
	But yeah, I've been a journalist for like seven, eight years now since leaving grad school.
	So it's been an interesting time.
	I wear a lot of other hats.
	I do some strategic communications, PR work, and do some ghostwriting, trying to stop doing that because it's just, I wouldn't recommend it for anyone.
	It's such a pain.
	But yeah, you know, totally.
	Running my own show right now, and I really enjoy being in that space, and I highly recommend anyone that can get out of the Cube life, just get out now.
	If I may ask, how old are you?
	You look rather young.
	Oh, thank you.
	I'm 31. You are rather young.
	Okay.
	Robert knows the MO.
	When we do this, we have a guest on.
	In as much as it's relevant to help explain how someone became who they are, my guess as to your last name...
	Someone once upon a time had a spelling mistake on the L, and it should have been an R, and it stuck.
	Is that right or is that wrong?
	I don't think so.
	It's of, like, German-Jewish origin.
	So, you know, there's a difference between, like, German last names and German-Jewish last names.
	You have a very uniquely different type of history.
	My ancestors came from Eastern Europe, you know, eventually made their way all the way to the United States.
	Yeah, but I don't think that it's a misspell, perhaps like an Ellis Island type incident, but I know there's other Schachtels out there that pronounce it that way, and I know that there's like a German and Austrian and Hungarian way to translate that.
	I've only grown up knowing Schachters, so I thought for a second maybe it was one of those mistakes at the crossing.
	Where are you from?
	Yeah, so I was born and raised in New York City metropolitan area.
	You know, I spent a lot of time in D.C. Now I'm in Florida.
	So my New Jersey accent has faded significantly.
	I don't pronounce things in an embarrassing manner anymore.
	I'm not nearly as bad as someone from Long Island with their ridiculous accent, too.
	But yeah, born and raised in New York City metro, right across from New York City, basically.
	When did your ancestors first come to the States?
	So, yeah, it's fascinating to hear family stories of early immigration to the United States.
	My ancestors, so this would be like my great-great-grandparents, came to the U.S. in the late 1800s, early 1900s, from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, all kind of like a similar area back then.
	And they spent years making the journey on foot from Eastern Europe to Western Europe.
	You know, working for years and just walking, basically, to get on a ship to get to the United States.
	They came to the U.S. speaking Yiddish.
	You could see it on their documentation.
	Didn't speak a word of English.
	And it's incredible that the United States used to be a place, at least, where it was just like there wasn't even like a political ideology behind just getting here.
	You just got here because you wanted to get away from...
	I think a lot of people share that story of immigration around that time.
	It was just a bunch of people from other countries that just wanted a chance to get, you know, the boot of government off of their backs.
	Robert, by the way, before we go, bring your mic a little closer.
	Apparently, your volume might be a little lower than than others or than than ours.
	So Eastern Europe, you're multiple generations.
	It's not your parents were not first generation, grandparents were not.
	So you've been in America for a while.
	Yeah, several, several generations in the United States.
	But, you know, most of my family's stuck relatively in the New York City metro area.
	I guess once you're like born and raised there, you don't traditionally leave there for whatever reason.
	You know, they use so much access to New York City, to Philly, and a bunch of other cities.
	And yeah, for whatever reason, New Jerseyans just kind of tend to stay there.
	I think it's the same for California people.
	I'm sure people can relate.
	Midwesterners tend to stay in the same area for the most part.
	Ned, did you have a lot of siblings?
	What did your parents do?
	My parents both worked in finance, insurance.
	I have an older brother.
	He's a lawyer.
	Younger sister works in TV production.
	I have an extended family because divorced parents, remarried parents, stepbrothers.
	Half-sisters.
	It's a big family.
	I think it's a very American thing these days to have all kinds of...
	A lot of cousins have a great supporting network growing up.
	Nothing but good things to say about them.
	Did you go to public schools or private schools in elementary, high school, etc.?
	I was raised in the public school system.
	Looking, you know, it takes a while, I think, to look back on it and realize the shortcomings of the U.S. public school system, especially because I think I just learn a little differently.
	And the public school system does not maximize.
	It's a very rigid formula that they teach.
	I wish that my future children at least had the opportunity to be educated in the best way possible.
	And I don't think that it's really, unless you're in a surprisingly good, my school district was fine, but when you look back on it, you just kind of get propagandized into stupid stuff.
	And a lot of the hours that you spend are not particularly useful, in at least my opinion.
	Especially looking back on the public school system nowadays, how they kind of glorify certain Presidents and FDR, especially looking back on how they propagandize about the New Deal and all this stuff, and it gets in people's heads.
	And next thing you know, it's just like these status quo things are just total lies.
	And yeah, I've become over, I guess the COVID stuff, too, really opened my eyes to a lot of things.
	And you kind of like rehash the things that you were taught growing up.
	Yeah, that was the reason the public school system made a lot of good friends there, had good times, but I don't think of it as an optimal system whatsoever.
	I say Robert has taken me out of the matrix, or at the very least, the circumstances of the last two years has taken me out of the matrix.
	Once you're out and you see it, you can never go back to seeing it the same way again.
	And once you understand the truth of things that have actually occurred, you can never go back to even...
	Truly believing what you thought was absolute truth before then.
	And we'll get into the COVID stuff because I know you've been huge on it, among other things.
	But this might help us explain something that occurs later on in your life.
	Politically speaking, your parents, your upbringing, were you...
	I mean, you're from New York, so I operate on the stereotype that you're democratic parents, democratic upbringing.
	Is that...
	Fairly accurate?
	No, we were like Rockefeller Republicans, like total rhinos.
	I guess that's the best way to explain it.
	But to my family's great credit, they've become more based over the years significantly, living through the Bush years and having to vote for John McCain as an option, having to vote for Mitt Romney.
	I think a lot of even Republicans in the Northeast are so sick of these awful options that they've been presented.
	And they were big fans of Donald Trump.
	So, yeah, so we grew up in kind of like a moderate Republican family, surprisingly.
	And as Jews, it's even more rare to be Republicans.
	There's very few of us in the Northeast.
	What initiated or instigated or inspired your original interest in national security?
	Yeah, so, again, growing up across from New York City, I grew up maybe 20 miles outside.
	In my town, New Jersey, basically, the economy was financed by a bunch of people who worked in Manhattan.
	When 9-11 happened, it really shook up our world.
	I think I was probably...
	You were 11 years old when it happened.
	Yes, I was 12, I think.
	There were a lot of tragedies in my school.
	Everyone was commuting to New York City, either in the train, by car.
	The kid that I was, this girl I was carpooling with, her father tragically died in the World Trade Center.
	And it really shook up our worlds entirely.
	And that's what kind of got me on this path, especially to the foreign policy, national security space.
	It really, you know, I didn't really have any, you know, I was just a kid, but I didn't really have any ambitions.
	Got me really interested about how the world works.
	You know, what was the case with all these jihadis?
	What were they doing overseas?
	Yeah, so in undergrad and for my master's, I started international relations.
	In addition to, I was actually planning on becoming an FDNY firefighter.
	So in undergraduate school, I went to the County Fire Academy in Jersey.
	And got my firefighter certification, became a firefighter.
	I was going to do, you know, the FDNY was actually my original goal.
	And through a lot of different things that happened in my life, I ended up getting into, you know, the media journalism space.
	But it was originally, you know, heavily focused on trying to serve my country.
	In a certain way or my community.
	So, you know, when I went to grad school, I wanted to become a Fed, basically.
	And thank God I dodged that bullet because dealing with like, you know, imagine being in the FBI or CIA nowadays.
	I consider myself lucky not being there.
	The Gretchen Whitmer plot, which is now looking more like it was an FBI plot to abduct Gretchen Whitmer.
	Actually, just to touch on this a little more, you're 11, 12 years old when 9-11 happens.
	Do you remember everything about that?
	Do you remember where you were that entire day?
	Did it...
	I mean, look, it was traumatizing for people who were not in New York.
	How traumatizing was it for you?
	And what happened that day?
	And then how did you process that over the long term?
	Yeah, it was just one of those things where you're, you know, you're almost a teenage kid and something just like totally shakes up your world.
	The next thing you know, your friends' parents aren't...
	Some of them aren't around anymore.
	And thank God nothing happened to my immediate family.
	I did have some relatives that had escaped, but it was such an impactful event for those of us because we were living at the time, I'm sure you guys remember, we were living in an America where we were the world's hyperpower.
	The Chinese threat was not really a thing back then.
	The U.S. was just this dominant force.
	We crushed Iraq and the Gulf War a decade earlier.
	And we were just this unstoppable force.
	And we didn't really think about...
	Americans weren't really thinking about what was going on overseas.
	And this just totally shocked our worlds.
	And we thought that we would be prepared, that there would be some kind of missile defense system that would prevent this thing from happening.
	And it just exposed so many vulnerabilities.
	As I, you know, my political ideology and the way I look at foreign affairs has changed dramatically over the years and, you know, about the stuff that happened in Afghanistan and Iraq.
	But that was really, I think, a life-changing moment for a lot of us that grew up in the New York City metro, that it was just so jarring and impactful.
	And, like, your bubble of security just felt shattered at the time.
	Now, in terms of being a fireman, what do you have to go through to learn how to be a fireman?
	So, New Jersey, you have to do, I think it's like 180 hours.
	You do all kinds of, like, EMT stuff.
	You learn how to, you know, the best way to find someone in a room full of smoke.
	You learn how to carry out people.
	You learn how to put out a fire.
	You learn about biological and chemical issues and stuff like that.
	In New Jersey, they have you trained pretty well.
	And I think certification works almost anywhere in the United States.
	So New Jersey is also very reliant on volunteer firemen.
	So most of the firefighters in the state are actually volunteers.
	And they do considerable work for their communities.
	And it was actually a good way for me to kind of mature to being around a lot of interesting people that kind of assisted in your maturity.
	You know, I would if anyone is like thinking of if you have like spare time and you want to help out your community, becoming like an EMT or a firefighter is such an awesome way to give back a little bit.
	So obviously you didn't stick with that or you didn't do that in the long run.
	What did you go on to study and how did you get into journalism?
	Yeah, so in grad school, I was just kind of like...
	I was kind of on the fence about, like, okay, do I really want to do this, like, federal hierarchy thing?
	And at the time, well, it was a couple years after Andrew Breitbart just died, and I had become much more interested in, I don't want to say politics, but just, like, commentating and journalism and, like, a lot of, I was really inspired by, like, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, like, all these powerful people that...
	Had really helped me in undergrad, dealing with my Marxist professors and stuff like that.
	And I was like, this is pretty awesome.
	And I think I have some things to contribute in this national security space.
	So maybe I should just write about it and see how it goes.
	And I moved to Washington, D.C. for grad school.
	And my first job was at Breitbart.
	And to get, I was basically just like...
	I was emailing Steve Bannon consistently every single day, just harassing him, be like, "Alright, I'm gonna write for free for you, and then you're gonna offer me a job." I didn't even have a car.
	I was biking for people who live in...
	D.C. I was biking from the Adams Morgan neighborhood to Capitol Hill, which is like several miles through traffic and just like basically knocked on his door.
	And he doesn't live there anymore, I don't think.
	But yeah, it was quite the experience.
	I really just wanted to work for Andrew Breitbart's institution.
	And that was my kind of first job in the space.
	And I'm so grateful that they were willing to give me that opportunity to make that.
	First step into the journalism and writing space.
	Now, what was it like working for Steve Bannon?
	Because he has a bit of a mixed reputation as an employer.
	Yeah, he was very supportive.
	He's tough, but he was very supportive of my work.
	I have no...
	Is he as crazy as people say he is?
	I mean, crazy in a good way sometimes, crazy in a different way sometimes.
	Crazy in a good way, we call that eccentric.
	Yes, eccentric.
	It's like from the movie Speed.
	When you're poor, you're crazy.
	When you're rich, you're just eccentric.
	What was that?
	People describe it, I guess, as a really intense experience.
	How much of those descriptions are accurate?
	How many of them are exaggerated?
	It's pretty accurate, yeah.
	I don't like spilling the tea.
	I'm not one of those people that's ever going to write a tell-all book.
	So private conversations are private conversations.
	But we disagreed on things and he still let me publish stuff.
	So I've got to give him credit.
	He's dealing with all kinds of shit right now.
	But I've got to give him credit where credit is due.
	And he provided the first opportunity to me.
	Forever grateful for that.
	He took a chance on me when I was just some, like, idiot grad school student with basically zero credentials and just had, like, a real passion to want to contribute to this movement that Andrew Breitbart started.
	And, yeah, that's how I got started.
	It was actually Gary Vaynerchuk.
	For anybody who doesn't know who Gary Vaynerchuk is, Gary V gives all sorts of life advice.
	One of the pieces of advice he gave, which I always thought was meaningful, is when you're young...
	Work for free or just go work somewhere where you want to learn what you're doing, even if it means working for free, to get the experience because you have the rest of your life to make money.
	And it sort of sounds like that's kind of what you did is you pinpointed the place where you wanted to become value-added, went and became value-added, and then ended up working there.
	How long did they exploit you for before they started taking you on a remunerated basis?
	It was a couple months, but honestly...
	Especially in this economy, if anyone's trying to...
	I don't want to tell you to harass someone to tell them to get you a job, but you need to be constantly on their radar because they're dealing with so many people, so many emails every day.
	And you have to just...
	Especially people that are super busy and are leading organizations.
	What's the worst that can happen, right?
	They just say, like, F off.
	Get lost.
	Whatever.
	I think people need to shoot their shot and just go for it.
	That was my attitude back then.
	I was 23, I think, and just really wanted to be there.
	What did you cover for Breitbart?
	I was covering exclusively foreign policy.
	There was a lot of stuff going on.
	The U.S. was so bogged down.
	Everywhere in Africa, everywhere in the Middle East, Afghanistan.
	Same thing that's happening now, basically, right?
	So nothing really changes.
	We didn't really have that China...
	Well, the China threat was there, but now it's so on everyone's radar, which is good.
	I'm going to give credit to my father.
	My father has been predicting that China would be a threat for the last 20 to 30 years, and none of us were listening.
	I was 10 or 15 at the time, but none of us were listening.
	And it's come to fruition in a way that I think even he could not have predicted.
	Of course, he also predicted that rap would no longer be popular in the year 2000.
	So he gets something right, he gets something wrong.
	But what I was going to say, Chris Banks, nobody should work for free.
	When you are investing with somebody and you're getting the experience, it's not free, you're getting something out of it.
	But I think any decent employer should still nonetheless pay and not accept free work.
	But you go there, you're doing, what type of journalism?
	For them, just covering random subjects that you have an interest in before they take you on as a formal employee?
	Yeah, I was just submitting random commentary pieces.
	They were just kind of like a loosely connected shop back then.
	You could just write about whatever, and if it gets approved, it gets approved.
	It was interesting because they had such a solid crew back then, people that really went on to become huge.
	I remember I was corresponding with Ben Shapiro, who was an editor at the time.
	Ben Shapiro was literally editing some stories.
	Now, of course, I don't think he does that anymore because he's just got so much stuff going on.
	Quite the roster back then.
	But yeah, I would just submit something, and when I was doing it for free, trying to get on their radar, maybe half of them would get declined, half of them would get approved, but they were super flexible.
	And I think that you can basically, if you're an aspiring writer and you have something interesting to say, there's still plenty of publications that are willing to do that, like Town Hall or Daily Caller.
	Just get in touch with their editors on Twitter or something, American Greatness.
	I'm sure if you have something interesting to say and you think it's compelling, they'd be definitely willing to publish that kind of stuff because people like me are going to Substack and being more difficult to reach and not willing to write for these publications anymore.
	So it creates this opportunity for, I think, a lot of young people to get into that space.
	And some of these institutions still have good funding.
	Some wealthy people behind them.
	They're always looking for writers.
	What led you into Substack?
	Yeah, so I think it was time, once I kind of like built up a significant enough audience that for whatever reason people think I have interesting things to say.
	It's still a hard time believing that.
	But yeah, I kind of just wanted the flexibility to do whatever, just work for myself.
	And I still have a lot of clients on this side who I work for in a different capacity, whether it's writing, researching, and doing some comms work for them, some PR work for them.
	But I like just being able to totally set my agenda.
	I've never been someone that just tries to work.
	Wants to be in a big organization or even a small organization.
	I want to do it myself.
	I think you guys can obviously relate to that, having this channel and your own system now and your Locals page, which I think Dave Rubin's a genius to establish that.
	I think it's going pretty well.
	I saw a quote from Naval.
	I don't know how I ended up following Naval on Twitter, but he says, once you become self-employed, you become unemployable.
	Yes.
	It hit a little bit home because I started off at the big firm, started off my own firm when I left and somehow found a way to be sustainable on YouTube doing this and it's blossomed into my absolute ikigai.
	But it is a weird thing.
	You mentioned people are interested in what you have to say and you walk around.
	I don't know if you do to the same extent I do with this imposter syndrome where it's like, what am I doing that's so unique?
	What am I doing that's insightful?
	I hope it is, but sometimes you doubt yourself.
	First of all, how do you get past that?
	Do you get past that?
	Or have you not yet gotten past that feeling?
	You try to keep the ego in check.
	I think that's been effective for me.
	I actually, so I've really gotten into martial arts and I train jujitsu three times a week.
	And there have been people there that are really good black belts that...
	That, you know, kick my butt from time to time.
	So that's definitely a humbling experience.
	I think it's good to find something that you're not the best at.
	Like, I think that, like, I can go, I'm a pretty good writer, and I think that I'm a pretty good researcher, and I have a really good filter for information, and, like, I can compete with the best I'm on that.
	So I think it's good for people to find something that you're, like...
	You want to start at or you're moderately decent at.
	That's a humbling experience.
	For me, that's worked out pretty well.
	I think that definitely keeps me in check.
	But it is strange.
	What you mentioned about being unemployable, I can definitely relate.
	Because if someone walked up to me today and they're like, okay, I'll pay you what you think you're worth.
	If you sign on for us with...
	Absolutely not.
	I'm just not at all interested in doing something like that.
	I totally understand the flexibility and being able to work as hard as you want.
	I think the quality of your work when you work for yourself is the best it will ever be because you only have yourself to blame when things go south and you can take credit for everything when things are good.
	It's very motivating for me to work for myself.
	Well, I mean, our constitutional democracy was founded on the idea that you have a lot of effectively self-employed people.
	Independent proprietors would be the best at protecting constitutional rights and liberties, which we've kind of seen over the last year.
	I confess I've never been afflicted with any imposter construct, but that's a different mindset when I was young.
	But one great utility of Substack, like Locals, and that's vivabarneslaw.locals.com, for those that may be inquiring, is the...
	Utility of being free of corporate sponsors.
	And to give an example of that, and we'll bridge into a little bit later how the COVID dynamic, a lot of people on the right took the bait on within the political and media establishments, and how that created space for the independent research that you've been doing, exposing all the lies along the lockdown path.
	But just to use as a recent example, Black Rifle Coffee Company, those bunch of scam artists.
	fraudsters, grifters, who decided to defame and smear a kid from Kenosha, Wisconsin, just because they wanted a front-page cover from the New York Times.
	But rather than honest media coverage...
	Blaze, Clay Travis, he's got the changes.
	He has a DBAP slogan on his t-shirts.
	He needs to just take the don't off and then he'll be honest and accurate.
	But he and Buck Sexton, the Rush Limbaugh replacement, Dana Loesch, these people did bogus cover stories for Black Rifle Coffee Company.
	The day after, they basically smeared everybody connected to Kyle Rittenhouse, smeared many conservatives, smeared.
	And it's because Black Rifle Coffee Company is a key asset.
	So, of course, they're going to eat crow and spin nonsense for them.
	One of the great utilities of Locals, one of the great utilities of Substack, is freeing content creators up from corporate sugar daddies so you don't have to smear a kid like Clay Travis helped do by promoting the scam artist Black Rifle Coffee Company.
	Oh, but Robert, you also may suffer from the too much knowledge syndrome.
	So, for those who don't know of the Black Rifle scandal, what exactly happened for those who may not know?
	Why you're so angry and why so many people are so angry with them.
	So Black Rifle Coffee Company has made almost all of its money promoting itself as a Second Amendment-supporting, self-defense-supporting, old-school Americana, you know, hunters supporting people that are on the right, you know, pro-vet, pro-military, you know, sometimes, frankly, in sort of glitchy ways.
	In other words, you know, put a chick with a bikini and look at how tough we are and weed, lots of bacon, a lot of that routine.
	So there was always reason to be a little...
	A little skeptical of him.
	And somebody else that Joe Rogan loves to promote, he always accidentally ends up stumbling into promoting left-wingers, so people can do their own math on that.
	But basically promoted themselves that way.
	When Kyle Rittenhouse got out, got received bail, he happened to be wearing a Black Rifle Coffee Company t-shirt.
	That's it.
	Elijah Schaefer for The Blaze said, hey, this is what good coffee is like.
	Just pointing that out.
	Black Rifle Coffee Company demanded Elijah Schaefer, who they advertise on his show, take that down.
	Then they issued basically a demeaning statement about Kyle that did damage to him in the court of public opinion based on nonsense because these people get their news source from people like Joe Rogan and on a lot of issues like this.
	Joe Rogan had Tim Dillon on and he smeared the whole family because stick to comedy, Timmy.
	These are people who don't know what they're doing.
	But it's one thing to do that.
	To smear him the first time and to say, we have nothing to do with his defense and so on and so forth.
	But then they double down.
	They do a special news hit piece, basically, on the conservative movement in the New York Times, saying how they didn't really want to be the Starbucks of the right.
	And they specifically, in the context of Kyle Rittenhouse, defamed everybody that supported him, people around him, smeared him, called him racist, attacked him, had nothing to do with anything.
	And by the way, they promoted this piece.
	So this wasn't a hit piece on them.
	They themselves promoted it.
	Then the next day, because they're getting bleeding cash with people canceling Black Rifle Coffee Company left and left and right, they go on.
	Clay Travis and Buck Sexton are replacing part of Rush Limbaugh.
	Terrible, boring show.
	It's already not good.
	But putting that aside, they do this long puff piece interview with him.
	Dana Loesch does a, some other people did some puff piece with him.
	A bunch of talk radio people did puff pieces with him.
	Not being honest, such that people on my locals board are like, oh, is that just a fake hit piece?
	No, Black Rifle Coffee Company deliberately threw conservatives and Kyle Rittenhouse under the bus to serve their interests.
	They were willing to smear a kid to promote their economic interest, and they deserve consequence for it.
	But sadly, Many of our corporate co-opted media are unwilling to do that and are running cover form for some low-level ads.
	And one of the great utilities of Substack and Locals is freeing people up from that level of corporate sponsorship control.
	It's why people like Alex Jones have been free of it for a very long time.
	They sell their own product.
	So how much was that important to you to be free of?
	You don't have any donors that are controlling you.
	You don't have any corporate sponsors that are controlling you.
	You can say what you want.
	You can go where you want to go.
	You don't have to be like Sean Hannity and start saying certain things different than you said a month ago about the COVID vaccine, for example.
	Nobody advertises on Fox more than Big Pharma.
	Do the math, folks.
	How much is that important to you as part of the Substack component?
	Yeah, it's everything to be censorship-proof these days.
	I was just actually at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas.
	And I have a lot of good friends in politics and in commentary and even politicians.
	And it's tough to even have an open conversation with these people in public about controversial issues because they don't want to put themselves out there because they're just very politically inclined to not want to...
	Go too far on anything.
	And it just creates this weak environment.
	And you do see that in the media a lot, too.
	A hesitancy to tackle the big issues.
	And that's one of the things.
	And to Substack's great credit, I'm sure to Locals' great credit, that they have stood behind their creators entirely.
	I don't know any examples from those two platforms of anyone being demonetized or censored for saying something controversial.
	They're just totally behind the concept of free and open speech.
	But it is a huge problem just in the United States in general now.
	People that are unwilling to say what they think because they know that there's kind of like these political guardrails that they don't want to exit this area of proper conversation.
	I'm a very diplomatic person, but I'll tell you what my opinion is on something.
	But a lot of people nowadays, especially in Washington, D.C., It's very rare that you'll be able to have an open conversation with someone that works in politics or lobbying about something, especially if they know where you come from, if you have some kind of significant interest.
	It's a very weird place in America that we're always kind of watching our backs, making sure that we're saying the right thing, the PC thing.
	That's one of the huge things about subsec and locals.
	You know, some great video streaming platforms that you can just kind of say what you think.
	And it's very powerful to have the backing of institutions that allow you to do that.
	Well, I've always said there's still some pressure.
	You know who your audience is.
	And if you go out and do things, they're going to shock your audience.
	You might lose some of your supporters.
	But you've hedged the risk a lot more.
	But by and large, depending on your community, they are following you for your honesty and not for your...
	Your angle.
	Actually, getting to something that I read, I hope it's not too touchy.
	Your departure from Breitbart, was it in 2016 that you left Breitbart?
	Yeah.
	And you left on terms that are perfectly in line with exactly what you're saying right now, which is believing what you believe and not being shy to express it.
	Tell everybody how your time at Breitbart came to an end.
	I don't know if there's been any lingering Lingering damage as a result of that relationship ending.
	Yeah, so basically what happened is that I don't want to open up old wounds, but I was just a right-wing journalist commentator at the time, and I was uncomfortable with the direction they were going in.
	Without getting into too much detail, I basically, I regrettably made a statement to the press about why I left, and that was my only regret.
	I don't regret leaving Breitbart, and I think I've gone on to do some decent things, and I'm on good terms with all those people, and I'm in a good place.
	I have nothing but good things to say about those folks.
	They're super talented.
	Writers and contributors there.
	They have a great roster and they've also, I think, moved on from some tumultuous times that they were having back then.
	This is, I guess, second movie reference of the night.
	The Amy Winehouse documentary.
	I forget who said it in the movie, but they said basically life can teach you a lot if you live long enough.
	And I appreciate exactly what you're saying right now.
	When you're young, you say things and in the age in which we live, you say things.
	That ring forever, given the internet.
	It never goes away.
	And if you're surrounded by people who are forgiving and understanding, they'll forgive and they'll understand.
	If you're surrounded by people who are malicious and want to perpetually use your wrongs against you, despite all other behavior to the contrary, they'll do that.
	And that's the line that everybody has to walk.
	Especially when you're living in the social media age.
	So, I mean, it's an interesting perspective.
	And I didn't mean to open up old wounds.
	I was doing some research and saw it, thought it was interesting because, you know, you had principles whether or not things never end well when they end.
	But it's good to see that it ended well to the extent that everyone's moved on.
	Now, another thing that I found is you have a very minimal social media footprint in terms of information, in terms of background.
	Is that deliberate?
	And if it's deliberate, how do you go about doing it?
	I mean, for anybody who's looking as to how to keep a low-profile social media footprint.
	Yeah, so I have a lot of friends that deliberately created a Wikipedia page for themselves, and I always thought that was an awful idea.
	I have a blue check on Twitter.
	That's as far as publicly verified that I want to go.
	But notably, I'm also becoming kind of anti-credentials nowadays, so I make it...
	Specifically difficult for people to find out stuff about me because I think credentials nowadays are very overrated because our institutions are all weird and corrupted and not necessarily a meritocracy whatsoever.
	But yeah, I've never been the type of person that wants to be the next big-time TV commentator.
	I'd much rather have a long-form conversation with you guys.
	So I'm not out there to impress anyone.
	If people like what I have to say, that's great.
	Follow me, subscribe to my work, and do whatever you want to do.
	But I was never really in this on the show business element type.
	So I'm so grateful that people are willing to support me and stuff like that.
	But that's one of the reasons why I've never tried to establish a huge profile for myself.
	Because I was like, that's just not me.
	I'm not trying to be some...
	Nightly TV anchor or any crap like that.
	So that's kind of why it's probably difficult to find a sophisticated biography on me because most people that have that kind of setup have done it themselves or have had like, you know, if you're working at Fox, you'll have like your assistant do it for you.
	And it's just something, it only creates problems, by the way.
	Like the more you could become like, especially with the journalism that I've been doing, I don't want people to Be able to censor me as easily as they want to.
	And I'm very aware of the conversation topics and I'm seeing people like, you know, like a lot of my buddies are being deplatformed and you have to realistically navigate your way around that.
	So I would like to make it difficult for the folks that like Media Matters, make their job a little harder to blast me and get like the SPLC and all those.
	Junk organizations on my case.
	Keeping a low profile helps me in that regard.
	Basically, you want your work judged by the quality of the arguments contained within it, not the credentials of the individual writing it.
	Even though, in your case, you have the credentials.
	Going past that, I used to know how people were approaching Whatever the political controversy of a client I was representing because of how they defined me.
	So if there was someone on the right who didn't like what I was doing, then it was Robert Barnes, comma, Ralph Nader's lawyer, Wesley Snipes' lawyer, Jill Stein's lawyer, whatever.
	Now people on the left, it's Robert Barnes, comma, Alex Jones' lawyer, Covington Kidd's lawyer, Kyle Rittenhouse' lawyer, etc.
	It's always fascinating how they want to limit the quality of the argument being made by...
	Who it is that's making it, which is always a sign to me they can't attack the substance of the argument.
	The argument's weak.
	You don't have to take pot shots at the person arguing.
	But putting that aside, aside from shifting to Substack with an independent content creator model, the other move you made was from D.C. to Florida.
	What precipitated that other than maybe the obvious?
	Yeah, so before I answer that, I was researching your guys' YouTube channel, and I saw that you had Alex Jones on last week, and me from two years ago would have been like, oh my god, I'm following Alex Jones.
	I don't know what to do.
	But I was like, I'm so humbled now.
	That's amazing.
	Alex Jones is such a funny...
	Incredible dude.
	The amazing thing is to say I struggled with that decision.
	I mean, Robert and I have been discussing it for a while.
	I just struggled with it for all the same reasons you just mentioned.
	The social impact.
	You have Alex Jones on.
	First of all, people have stigmatized Alex Jones despite having never heard an actual word he said.
	People might stigmatize him for legitimate reasons, but it's like once you have that association, everybody, you're dirty by association on the one hand.
	And so, you know, I have friends and family who might not like the fact that I even gave him a voice as though he needs me to give him a voice and not, you know, the other way around.
	But YouTube actually allowed the video to stay up and they actually re-monetized it after I asked them to review it because I didn't think there was anything shocking or offensive or not advertiser-friendly in it.
	So, fingers crossed, you know, the tide might be turning at YouTube, but it's not.
	But yeah, that was a big one.
	That's where you have to say, I'm going to do it.
	Do it with integrity and hope that if people judge me, they judge me.
	But that was the end of it, and it went well.
	It was great.
	But yeah, it's from Alex Jones to Jordan Schachtel, and everybody's got a story to tell, and you're telling yours.
	So what was the second question that Robert asked?
	So I remember it.
	It's why I didn't move from D.C. to Florida.
	So it was entirely COVID-related.
	I mean, I have a lot of good friends in D.C., and I'm still back and forth from D.C. a lot of time for work and stuff like that.
	But, like, D.C. was totally shut down.
	Almost all of my favorite restaurants, bars in D.C. are gone forever.
	Like, COVID crushed the local economy in Washington.
	And I was just, like, sitting in my apartment.
	My friends didn't want to do anything.
	I was traveling a bit, but I was like, man, every time I come back to D.C., like, this sucks.
	And Trump had just...
	Well, Biden was just, you know, had won the election and not going to go there.
	We're on YouTube.
	A lot of people in the chat.
	His fraudulency the second.
	He was appointed.
	He was anointed and what's the word?
	Sworn in.
	Government was turning over and I found that it was a good time.
	You know, I grew up coming to Florida a lot.
	I have family and friends in Florida.
	I'm in...
	An undisclosed location, Southeast Florida.
	It's great.
	I so much appreciate Ron DeSantis' leadership for what he's done in letting us live our free lives.
	Florida's been open for so long.
	I've been here since about the beginning of the year.
	And I have nothing but good things to say about it.
	I don't know if this will be my permanent long-term destination.
	I'm really enjoying it now.
	I am a little concerned that...
	If I were to move back to the Northeast anytime soon, that I would see a rehash of the COVID stupidity.
	So I don't plan on moving anytime soon because I think that that's probably the next step for these monsters that are leading the state governments.
	But yeah, I like it.
	We have great communities here, good food.
	Good coffee, nice people.
	Nothing but good things to say.
	We have beaches.
	I don't know what is better than sunlight and freedom.
	And beaches and fishing.
	Let's get into some of the stuff you've been covering.
	I'll just ask the biggest question.
	What, in your opinion, are the biggest stories you've ever broken?
	I might want to get into some details about them.
	So what are some of the bigger things that you've covered that you think you've shed some light on that was not there before?
	Relate to the pandemic?
	Or in general, even beyond the pandemic.
	I have a pretty crazy story from my time at Breitbart.
	That was kind of fascinating.
	And I think it contributed to Donald Trump's election in a way.
	So if you guys remember, remember that Ashley Madison data leak thing where all those guys The information was spilled over, it was hacked, and it was available in a publicly accessible database.
	So I had a contact that was like, hey, maybe you should look through this.
	Maybe you'll find a good story.
	And I'm a national security reporter, right?
	So what am I going to do with this?
	But by chance, I was like, okay, I'm bored one night.
	So I'm filtering through it.
	And I had her last name Biden, right?
	And next thing you know, there's a...
	Hunter pops up, right, on the list.
	His name is...
	Is his name Robert?
	I think his real name is Robert Hunter Biden.
	Something like that.
	But it was a fascinating thing.
	And I was like, holy shit.
	Hunter Biden's trying to cheat on his wife.
	He was a member of the site.
	So I called my buddy who's more of an entertainment reporter.
	And I delivered that to him.
	And I think we co-bylined it.
	So we break this story, and it's one of the biggest stories in the press at the time.
	Then this is right when Joe Biden is considering running for president.
	And we break the story on Hunter Biden.
	Next thing you know, two weeks later, his wife has kicked him out of the house.
	So it clearly made inroads in the Biden household.
	Then a couple weeks later, there's so much family turmoil that Joe Biden decides that he's not going to run this year.
	So I was thinking, I was like, maybe I kind of contributed towards Donald Trump defeating Hillary Clinton because if that story had not been broken and Hunter Biden's world was again torn apart from his reckless sex, drugs, and whatever is going on in his life and foreign corruption, that maybe Joe would have decided to run as a more stable family.
	So that was a very interesting story.
	But yeah, like I broke a lot of, like over the Trump years, a lot of personnel stuff.
	There was, so one of the things I was doing that was really pissing off the left was we were doing profiles of government bureaucrats who had significant political Um, posts that were in the social media space, on Twitter, on Facebook.
	A lot of people in the State Department that were, like, actively agitating against the president who they were supposed to be working for.
	A lot of people at DOJ, Department of State.
	I had DOD.
	We had so many people.
	This was when I was at CRTV, which merged with Blaze later.
	And we had so many...
	Interesting stories on that front.
	And there's even a little Wikipedia on their page that says Jordan...
	Of course, Wikipedia has this bias.
	They said Jordan was like slandering these career noble government bureaucrats.
	But it was a lot of fun.
	And we caused a significant amount of chaos in these bureaucracies.
	We were doing this kind of work in 2016 and 2017, and this would play out.
	So many times in the Trump administration.
	I mean, his biggest defect as president, arguably, was that he just couldn't get his staffing in order.
	And those political staffers have to keep the bureaucrats in order.
	So these bureaucrats were just tormenting him for many years.
	And we were helping to expose that.
	Yeah, that was one of the things you constantly expose.
	On the Ashley Madison thing, I had a client.
	Famous baseball player who was thrilled by the fact that he was apparently listed six times in there.
	He considered it a trophy in achievement, but he's a unique personality.
	Another story there.
	That's another story for another day, as we say.
	You were one of the people, along with Mike Cernovich and a few others, highlighting how bad...
	The Trump administration personnel decisions were.
	That, you know, really good people were not getting in, were getting railroaded.
	People who were loyal to him were getting thrown aside, like Michael Flynn.
	While people who hated the guy...
	Kept getting rewarded and getting to control.
	And, you know, Pat Buchanan wrote a book during this time period about the Nixon administration, same set of problems.
	Nixon being too distracted by the New York Times and institutional media.
	Didn't fully appreciate that personnel was policy and policy was personnel.
	And Trump almost never, I mean, it got better at the end, but there was still massive, I mean, his whole election thing went AWOL because the Republican National Committee was actually undermining him all the way through.
	raised almost a quarter of a billion dollars for legal fees.
	To my knowledge, not a penny of it went to election lawyers.
	They're, in fact, keeping people out from representing the president, lying to the president about what his election remedy is.
	Could you talk about just how deep, severe, and systemic that most of Trump's own appointees were on a daily basis trying to make sure that Trumpism never happened as a matter of policy?
	Donald Trump never figured out during his four years as president.
	He started very early on taking horrible advice.
	I mean, his advisors on, like, national security and foreign policy were one, Condi Rice, who's tying him to a point, and two, Henry Kissinger.
	And there were a few other people in the mix, but these were like institutional think tankers who were responsible for all the problems that we were dealing with in the 21st century.
	The problems he himself ran against, saying these were idiotic policies and terrible positions.
	He was putting the people who implemented and administered and supported them in positions of power in his own administration.
	It was just one person after another.
	And a lot of people who are loyal to the president will kind of say that he just didn't really...
	He trusted them too much.
	I just had the opportunity to meet Donald Trump once, and he came off very differently.
	He's a very friendly guy.
	And he's very different, I think, from the way that you see him in the media.
	And a lot of people don't understand that.
	He's actually a decent person.
	He was too forgiving with the backgrounds of these political appointees and every single major person.
	Whether it was Steve Mnuchin, just a terrible Treasury Secretary, a total statist, Rex Tillerson, General Mattis, General McMaster, these people all hated him and despised him and they were recommended by bad people.
	I hope that if he throws his hat in the ring again...
	I know that he has good people around him.
	He just needs to fully embrace what they have to say.
	Yeah, no doubt about that.
	Now, at some point, you transitioned into the COVID coverage, where you were one of the few independent voices raising questions from the very get-go about almost – Everything related to it.
	Could you describe the investigative process?
	Because part of your process was the same process I used at the time, in terms of just looking at the past, looking at what the protocols had been in the past, looking at what the reactions had been, the public health intervention, and just how completely AWOL everything was.
	Can you describe that?
	I've always had kind of like a weird interest, not really a weird interest, but a lot of people like dystopian, post-apocalyptic films and books like World War Z and Bird Box, stuff like that.
	And that stuff was always fascinating to me.
	So I kind of had a separate interest in what would happen if there was a crazy pandemic?
	What would the CDC do?
	What would the WHO do?
	So right when COVID started, that was the first stuff I went into was this pandemic playbook stuff.
	What I found very early on in what was going on in Wuhan, China, was that they were not doing anything that these institutions had recommended based on hundreds of years of human experience dealing with outbreaks.
	So immediately I was skeptical.
	I think far earlier than most people, because I just took the time to look at the documentation, which is...
	It's still publicly available.
	They've done a good job of covering it up on the CDC and WHO website.
	They had very different recommendations for pandemic preparedness.
	A lockdown was not an existing concept prior to 2020.
	A lot of people don't understand this.
	It was this radical.
	It all came back to the Chinese government wanting to show that they were containing a virus.
	They did that through, I think, in my opinion, A massive...
	I got to be careful because this is YouTube.
	I think the Chinese government was running a massive disinformation operation.
	And in addition to that, they wanted to show that they were doing something.
	So they use all this ridiculous disinfectant, you know, spraying the streets, talking people in their home.
	You're one step ahead of me.
	First things first, YouTube overlords.
	Nothing in this video is either medical advice...
	Ask your doctor if you have any questions.
	This was one thing I was just thinking about, and I don't recall who it was that said it.
	It might have been AJ, or it might have been Cernovich.
	The idea that China, with its full internet censorship, with its forbidding Google, nothing gets out of China, all of a sudden, in the first two weeks to a month of this...
	You have like a slew of video being leaked out of China showing the most horrendous, horrific, terrifying things.
	The trucks going down the street, spraying some spray, all this stuff.
	And it's now only having seen the world from outside the matrix that I say, how is it that from a country that controls all information, censors all speech, censors all information, bans and blocks the internet, how is it that the only videos we have coming out of there are coming out now and are these particular videos?
	In your opinion, this is not medical, professional, legal advice.
	Was this a coordinated effort from the government to allow for the leak of certain videos, certain information?
	And if so, why?
	In my opinion, totally unrelated to the medicinal advice community.
	From my background in understanding disinformation, I think that China ran an op and it was kind of like a dual pronged situation.
	Like I talked about, they wanted to show that they were doing something, but they also wanted I have a pretty long-form piece at my subsac.ca.substac.com where you can find this in detail what exactly China did.
	And there were a lot of indicators.
	As you talked about, that something was really off here, like the people dropping in the streets.
	That never happened anywhere in the world.
	There's no, you breathe in COVID and you drop dead type thing.
	That's a ridiculous thing.
	But that's what China wanted us to believe.
	And also these videos and photos were released on Western media platforms.
	They were not released on Chinese media platforms.
	And China bans these platforms.
	So how exactly did they get these, I guess they called them citizen journalists or whatever.
	How did they get this stuff on Instagram, on YouTube, on Twitter?
	Shouldn't people be raising some red flags there?
	How did it show up on Ike?
	The argument would be that they're specifically not on Chinese news platforms because they're forbidden there and the only place they get leaked to is Western media who runs with them.
	I guess the bigger question is, if that's the explanation, which would be logical, how are they escaping China in the first place in such numbers and in such detail and in such a coordinated fashion, for lack of a better description.
	But sorry, keep going.
	And not only that, you're totally right.
	China claims to have stopped the virus in its entirety in February and March of 2020 by locking down Wuhan and...
	China has been very open economically and through their society since then.
	They claim that this one thing in Wuhan that they did solved all of their COVID problems in the country.
	And if you look at this COVID chart, their numbers that they put out, they just stopped reporting cases.
	And COVID was over because they can just decree it over.
	So a lot of countries, every country that initiated a lockdown, instituted it based on this Wuhan example that they thought that they could just lock down the country.
	And their cases would go from up to sideways.
	And that would be it.
	It would be over.
	And there's still countries that are doing this.
	Australia and New Zealand are still propagandized by this stupidity.
	Just the other day, the UAE, United Arab Emirates, were spraying the streets with disinfected because that's what China was doing in Wuhan.
	Fauci was recommending lockdowns based on the advice of Chinese scientists.
	This all goes back to China.
	But I do have to say that eventually...
	I think the time has come, and the time came a long time ago, for the West to take responsibility for our ridiculous naivete on this, because we can't just blame China entirely.
	It is our politicians and bureaucrats who are now forcing this down our throats.
	Sorry, go ahead, Robert.
	Oh, one of the other things you followed early on was the science behind all this, in the sense that there were a lot of reports coming out about how it actually spread, what its risk rate really was.
	You know, you had the ship, you had other circumstances.
	And what was amazing to me is how that data got buried.
	All the trust the science people would immediately bury any actual science that refuted their assumptions and their politicized agenda.
	Yeah, these people come from academia mostly.
	They are physician scientists, the people making these claims that these mitigation suppression strategy works.
	I just have to be super careful about blowing them up too much because I know YouTube is super sensitive about this.
	But I would say that these people have not contributed to society in any significant manner ever.
	Public health expert ever done for society.
	The whole concept of a public health expert, I think, is preposterous.
	Imagine if you went to a family doctor and you said, oh, my brother's depressed.
	So the public health expert would say, okay, antidepressants for the whole family to deal with this.
	But now they're dealing with this on a societal level.
	The whole concept of a public health expert, I think, is just, like, collectivist nonsense.
	Well, especially since they're politically appointed.
	They're advising the politicians who appointed them.
	Then you have the courts, whose judges are appointed by the politicians adjudicating on the legal questions resulting from the decisions of the politicians.
	It's judicially incestuous in the most intimate manner.
	But one anecdotal thing, like, I have a high school buddy who lives in China now, and I have a couple of other contacts.
	I'm not a journalist, so I don't...
	Life in China has been nothing compared to what they see as life in Canada, life in Australia, life in New Zealand, life in the UK.
	And the question is, did our government see this, get traumatized, and think this is what they have to do in order to give the impression of an effective battle?
	Or did they see this as a power grab to implement?
	What everyone else is talking about.
	The things that were called conspiracy theories until people actually saw the template, the order of the day on the World Economic Forum.
	Was it malice?
	Was it incompetence?
	Or was it a combination of both?
	In your humble opinion, as a journalist who has done a lot of research on this.
	It's a combination.
	You see that...
	Some people have grown to really love the spotlight, particularly Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose messaging has changed dramatically from his early days of just kind of like realizing, I think he was delivering great advice about certain topics that I can't elaborate on.
	But I think that he was a humble scientist who just came to enjoy his media appearances a little too much.
	And his control a little too much.
	And that put us in a situation where we have all these MDs and PhDs becoming like Twitter and Instagram stars and just living in the fame of this conformity and embracing this safety regime because this can elevate their profiles.
	And it's so despicable.
	And I have a hard time...
	Having any respect for these people because I think they know exactly what they're doing.
	It's so tough because I can't get into specific topics on YouTube, but you know what I'm saying.
	It'll be a good ad to go follow you on Substack for the more in-depth conversations.
	Suffice only to say here, Fauci, I believe, is the highest paid federal employee in the United States.
	Never missed a paycheck.
	We, coming out of Canada, have our, you know, the health officers in Ontario who get paid $315,000 Canadian dollars.
	That's like, that's still a lot by Canadian standards.
	And they're all the ones saying, it's for your own good.
	We're going to lock you down for a little bit longer.
	Here's your $2,000 a month.
	We get our full paychecks on your tax dollars, but it's for your own good.
	We're not ready to reopen yet, despite the numbers that they have.
	And, I mean, the moving goalposts.
	You've seen the moving goalposts from day one.
	I've seen it.
	It's just that everyone has lost so much already, nobody wants to call it out anymore because you have to recognize your losses to do so.
	But it is over the top.
	The power, the prestige, what's it called?
	Veneration when you're adored.
	Gretchen Whitmer giving a press conference with a Fauci embroidered pillow in the background.
	They've been deified and it gets to their head.
	Like Robert, you always say, true test is how one deals with power.
	The combination of stress or success reveals a lot of people, either one.
	You documented knowing the exaggerated threat, but I thought one of the utilities was, I was curious why certain people could see through the charade versus those that couldn't.
	I could understand the people that were corporate compromised.
	If you're at Fox News, almost your number one source of advertising is Big Pharma.
	Big Pharma is expected to make a lot of money with either certain therapeutics or vaccines.
	Down the road.
	There's no interest in pre-existing drugs.
	People start questioning this particular therapeutic or this particular group of public health officials or medical establishment.
	Maybe they question some other ones in ways that people don't want.
	So I understood that.
	But what was striking to me was how I describe it as a dividing line for people.
	I was like, you can tell whether someone's truly independent of thought.
	By how they reacted to everything associated with the pandemic.
	What do you think was in your background?
	I mean, part of it I thought the national security background was very useful because this was really a national security political issue, not really a public health, disguised and masked as a public health issue.
	But what else do you think was in your background that allowed you to have that independent skepticism right out of the gate where other people were just biting and swallowing whatever Fauci was feeding them today?
	In addition to that, Yeah, it's so important to lean on the side of liberty.
	And when people from the government tell you that they're there to assist you and, you know, Ronald Reagan's famous quote, but yeah, I don't know.
	I guess it was just like, I've just always been not a contrarian, but questioning.
	The prevailing narratives, not necessarily buying into them without evidence.
	Definitely more of like a don't trust but verify person.
	But it's so important to nowadays, and I think I've been more radicalized in this sense in a positive manner, to lean on liberty.
	You can't just...
	Especially when you understand the function of the federal government, whether it's here, Canada, or elsewhere, that you need to prioritize human freedom.
	People need to be able to make decisions for themselves.
	So when these bureaucrats are, and these very unimpressive bureaucrats, by the way, I think this is like a big-time distinction between people who kind of get it on the COVID stuff and people who don't.
	People who deify, as you said, these individuals who are just like, Not competent, wouldn't really make it on their own, and haven't really done anything impressive.
	I think that's been a dividing line for a lot of people, is if you can see through what they're, you know, if they have a nice resume, like Fauci or credentials, like a Harvard chair of public health somewhere that's like, you know, paid for by China or whatever.
	But when you kind of can see through this picture, and in addition to that, I never want to put people in a position where their life is being affected by government in a negative manner.
	I'm not like a Michael Malice anarchist, but I'm moving more in that direction every day when I see the atrocities that are being committed by the government in the names of helping people.
	It's in Canada.
	We have the Prime Minister tweeting daily, we're here to help you get through this.
	Literally, It's not even the way a good parent would deal with their kids who's going through something tough.
	It's pandering.
	It is infantilizing the general population, empowering the government, and leading people to come to the conclusions that they're incapable of fending for themselves.
	They're incapable of taking care of themselves.
	And it's a straight-up abusive relationship where the government causes the harm that they then come in and say, here's the Band-Aid for the boo-boo that I just gave you.
	Because studies are coming out now.
	We'll see the numbers.
	We know the numbers.
	And I've tweeted it to Francois Legault, our PM, that more young people are succumbing to the restrictions than to the virus itself.
	And the numbers, when this started off, we've all forgotten.
	It was two weeks to flatten the curve, not to overwhelm the healthcare facilities.
	It's a year and a half later, and our governments have chosen to launder our taxpayer dollars through $13 million a month in COVID awareness to buy the media.
	To get the media dependent on that government funding for advertising to control the message, they put $150 million into that and not healthcare infrastructure.
	And it is all a form of laundering taxpayer dollars through advertising.
	Some people in the chat are saying, well, at least in Canada, you guys get $2,000 a month.
	Yeah, first, if you're eligible.
	Second, it's taxable.
	So the government takes your tax dollars, subsidizes you because they put you out of business, taxes you on that money, and someone's got to pay it back, and it sure as hell is not any of them.
	Sorry, you got me started again.
	But yes, we are being led by incompetence, and it's not difficult to understand how some people confound that or attribute that to malice.
	And at the end of the day, when you know you're incompetent and you keep governing, it is malice.
	Yeah, I think in Canada especially, One of the worst things, Canada has a nice people, but it's also been your biggest weakness, is that Canada has a very subservient population to government.
	And when you put yourself in that situation, especially under a parliamentary system that has a lot of control over all aspects of your life, I think that's what makes the United States uniquely different and why we had examples in Florida and Texas.
	In South Dakota and Arizona and in a lot of states where people were able to live free lives and people kind of had this functioning understanding that government might not be your friend from time to time.
	And in the rest of the Anglosphere, the exact opposite happens.
	In the UK, you still have this mess.
	In New Zealand and Australia, we already talked about.
	In Canada, a total mess.
	If something is to be said about the founders' wisdom, the founders of the United States' wisdom, it's really showing itself today in our federalist system.
	But yeah, like Canada and in a lot of Europe and in New Zealand, you often find a very subservient population that is too trusting of government.
	And it has come back to backfire.
	I mean, sometimes it works.
	Like sometimes the Sweden example, Swedes are very trusting of their government too.
	Luckily, their government made the right decision and decided to let them stay free.
	But in Canada, the opposite happened.
	Have you noticed how news on Sweden's response has entirely fallen off any media coverage?
	It's basically...
	Part of the disallowed restricted books section.
	You're just not allowed to talk about Sweden.
	This is a question for both you and Robert, actually, because I'm living in Canada.
	I'm seeing it on social media.
	It seems that the blue checkmarks of Twitter are now greatly focusing on Republicans who are coming out and saying positive things about vaccination.
	My initial reflex was, oh, it must be true.
	Then my skeptical side says it's probably not any truer today than it was last week, but the media is now making a concerted effort to pick up on any soundbite from any Republican who is saying something beneficial or, you know, encouraging to go get vaccinated.
	Is that correct?
	Or is there, in fact, a shifting tide even among the GOP to publicly come out and loud the benefits of vaccination?
	That's a complex one.
	I have to be careful here again.
	Mitch McConnell came out today and said, get vaccinated or you have to go back into lockdown.
	I think he's a disgusting animal for saying something like that.
	Again.
	It's time for some turtle soup.
	It's time to divvy up the turtle.
	But then you have DeSantis who comes out, and I was going to tweet it, but I don't like...
	Retweeting or getting involved in these things because I don't want anyone thinking I'm telling them what to do with their body.
	DeSantis comes out with a message.
	It's much more tempered.
	It's much more logical.
	It's much more the way it should be done.
	Here are the stats.
	Make up your own decision, but we are not mandating anything for you, which I like.
	McConnell comes out and, my goodness, it looked like he was being held at gunpoint when he said what he said from my own perspective.
	Yeah, but no, but is it more of them, or is it just the blue checkmarks now focusing on this to try to spin the narrative, look at the GOP pulling 180s, good for them, or you can't trust them?
	Because of Big Pharma and other people, because they just had Trafalgar just had a pullout, which is the same as what Richard Barris reported.
	Won't go into too much details, because they cut Richard Barris off live when he was talking about which groups were on this side.
	But 80%, almost 80% of the country, and Republicans in particular at least, I think 60% nationwide, 80% of Republicans, oppose any forced vaccines, period, of the adult population, particularly for this.
	And what's incredible is, throughout the whole, and this would be good, we'll start with the historical aspect, because this, for YouTube's purposes, we're not talking about the current pandemic, we're just talking about past pandemics.
	For the Spanish flu, Hong Kong flu, the Asian flu, you know, the Spanish flu itself also came from China.
	Another interesting story.
	But putting all that aside, all three, you know, hundreds of thousands listed as dead back when we had a lot more strict causation standards than we do on this one, one might add.
	But can you remember that there were no lockdowns of churches, no mass lockdown, national lockdowns of schools.
	I mean, there were selective lockdowns in certain places for select.
	Groups of people for select periods of time related to a specific risk.
	But even during the Spanish flu, we never shut down all businesses.
	We never shut down all travel.
	We didn't require masks everywhere in the country.
	We didn't do forced medical treatment.
	And all of that has been wiped out from public knowledge.
	But someone pushed back on the Spanish flu where they highlight the fact that there were, in fact, mask mandates in certain cities.
	In certain cities there were.
	Yes.
	But even there, it was all limited.
	And it would be specific.
	When it had a peak epidemic outbreak, then they had people wear masks in certain locations within certain jurisdictions.
	But it wasn't nationwide.
	It wasn't anything else.
	And that was back when they...
	Did not know what the Spanish flu was, right?
	And the other thing you can talk about, like one of the things I thought that was really good is you just went back, not only looking at how they historically treated it, what the WHO and CDC said just a few years ago about how this should work, but also, for example, we've had tons of mask studies.
	So we're not talking for YouTube purposes about their current pandemic, but there was lots of studies about how effective masks would be for an influenza virus.
	And those studies didn't support what the current set of policies are.
	I suspect those studies were what predicated or preceded the disclaimers that are found on all those boxes.
	The idea that anyone says we found out new technology or new information or new studies about face masks, I'm not a doctor.
	Consult with your doctor.
	As a pure logical lawyer, I have a great deal of difficulty thinking that we have discovered anything new.
	About the science of face masks in the last year that we did not already know beforehand.
	Not scientists talking, but yeah, sorry.
	Jordan, what do you have to say about that?
	There were no randomized controlled trials, which is supposedly the gold standard for trials, on masks during this time period.
	They had 18 months to do something, and nothing came out to show that to support their claims that they're making about This topic.
	There was a one randomized control trial that came out in Denmark that ruled out the efficacy of masks from the wearer's perspective, preventing you from being infected with COVID, that there was no benefit to the mask wearers.
	So the establishment press and Big Pharma and that public health expert coalition said, well, They didn't rule out masks as a form of spreading illness from one person to someone else.
	So that's what they're kind of going by.
	And when they talk about the evidence for this topic, they stress a lot of models, a lot of studies done by the CDC, but no trials.
	There's no hard data on this topic to make their case.
	There never has been.
	And one of the things you did a lot of investigative reporting was just, you know, getting the data and publishing the data.
	And often the data just didn't support the institutional narrative so that data would disappear from institutional coverage.
	I mean, we're now even to the point where somehow the vaccine reporting system is now suddenly utterly untrustworthy and unreliable.
	You can't even look at it.
	You can't even think about it.
	Totally nonsense.
	Doesn't apply.
	And it's like, I decided to do a search, DuckDuckGo search.
	I was like, well, before 2020, were there a bunch of criticisms of this?
	It turned out there were a few criticisms.
	It was that it underreported the problem, repeatedly, historically, VAERS did.
	And it's, have you been, so I've been as shocked as anything about the methodology.
	Like, from a lawyer's perspective, that, you know, all of a sudden we skip the legislative branch, we skip the public approval, we skip a meaningful evidentiary trial.
	Nobody's required to actually present the evidence so we can assess it and judge it and critique it one way or the other.
	Have you been surprised that, like, in other words, they've operated this like you would a national security emergency, not like you would normally a domestic legislative agenda?
	Yeah, from what I understand, VAERS is a very open platform.
	So if you want to submit something and you're a doctor, you throw it in there.
	Or if you have some other contact, you can just initiate a file with the VAERS system.
	And it's imperfect, but I think you can at least learn a lot from people's contributions to it.
	There are not as many vetting mechanisms as we'd like them to have, but at least I think it's something.
	For these people to make claims that you should totally disregard it, I think, is a mistake.
	Because I think you can kind of see a parallel as you're talking about in the national security space.
	I'd say it's more so like a raw intelligence data set.
	And you get out what you can.
	I guess not to belabor this point, because I think we can probably talk and agree on this for a long time.
	In your journalistic endeavors, Jordan, have you gotten something radically wrong or something that turned out to be radically wrong that has traumatized you for the better in terms of your process going forward?
	Yeah, so this involves sources, and I can't get too specific about it.
	There was someone who led me the wrong way, and I learned a hard lesson about relying too much on sources, and it only happened once, but it was something that my editors back then were aware of, and I apologized to the person who was the target,
	and I kind of outed the source and basically said that you should not Trust this person.
	And I took responsibility for it.
	And it really taught me a lesson to rely on anonymous sources as little as possible.
	And the best case scenario, you never rely on these people because they're just really out there to peddle an agenda.
	Why the Washington Post and New York Times use these people is because they create this kind of distance.
	So if the story happens to be untrue, they can just blame the source.
	Or just say that something...
	So that's why when they were pushing all this Trump-Russia stuff, they said, oh, the source has a tape, but we didn't get the tape, but the source read the tape to us.
	So they kind of create this disconnect so they can peddle fiction.
	But one of the big lessons I learned in the journalism space was...
	Never rely on anonymous sources because eventually you'll get burned by them.
	And I think it's just kind of unethical to heavily report based on these concepts anyway.
	It's what MSM does, is they report on the anonymous sources.
	I don't think they worry about getting burnt.
	I think it's part of the design.
	It's effectively the wrap-up smears.
	One reports on it, the other one reports on that report, and by the end of it, you've actually lost sight of the fact that it was based on an anonymous source from...
	Trump removing the MLK, was it MLK?
	Bust from the White House to, you know, SHIT whole countries, anonymous sources, but by the time anyone realizes that, the story's been reported and re-reported.
	The latter, he might have said, but that's another story.
	But the MLK bust was totally fake.
	But speaking of sourcing, because I think that's a good bridge into Russiagate coverage, that if you're in the national security space, especially, Then you can know, like, I have Seymour Hersh's book that was sent to me by a locals board member.
	VivaBarnesLaw.Locals.com The Killing of Osama Bin Laden that exposes how much the CIA version, the Washington Post version, the cinematic version, a Zero Dark Thirty version is almost entirely fiction.
	And if you know the national security space, if you know, like, I mean, John LeCuré with Russia House and Taylor of Panama and all the other books, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, or Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana, or any of those people.
	Then you knew the script of Russiagate before it even started.
	You knew what the Steele dossier would be like.
	You knew who Christopher Steele was.
	You knew how they laundered bogus information and basically took their local bar.
	I mean, literally, that's how it happened.
	Some guy he talked to at a bar in D.C. becomes his secret inside source right next to Putin.
	And what's amazing is The Guardian is back to doing it again.
	They're rehashing it.
	The media's anxious to repeat the same lies they got caught telling for years.
	How was it that you could identify from the get-go how and why this was likely a fake story and how the methodology of that fake story worked?
	How did background in national security allow you to smoke that out very early?
	So when you learn about the history of misinformation and disinformation, you do learn about the reality that not just foreign intelligence agencies use this to peddle information, but domestic intelligence agencies too.
	I would have to say in the early Trump years, I wasn't fully embracing the idea that they were just totally lying, but I was very skeptical about the Trump-Russia narrative.
	I think that our intelligence community used to not want to engage in this type of behavior on a regular basis, especially when it involved domestic politics.
	There were some kind of lessons learned.
	From the Nixon era that I think they calmed down a little bit for a while.
	But when Donald Trump won the election, everything came back.
	You know, these FISA guardrails just no longer existed.
	The spying on people, the leaking information to the Washington Post and New York Times.
	The infamous transcripts from the Flynn call that ended up being nothing significant.
	That it was just, at some point it became clear to anyone that understood the past of these organizations and what they were trying to pull off that this was basically, yeah, again, this is a sensitive topic for YouTube, but they wanted to impact the government in a significant manner to the point where Donald Trump's standing...
	Would always be questioned, and that's what they wanted.
	And in addition to his standing, his legitimacy being questioned, they eventually wanted him to be removed from office, and he came very close, especially in those early days.
	I think that Mike Pence very much bought into the nonsense that was being peddled by the intelligence community and people that were very close to the president that would have.
	We're overseeing a type of situation where the president would have had to step down based on nonsense.
	But luckily, we had some awesome intrepid reporters and also some politicians who really stepped up on this.
	You had Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan, Rand Paul, a lot of people that took the fight back to these people.
	And I think that President Trump only survives with allies that were necessary at the time.
	Who ended up breaking the Clinesmith-FISA falsification?
	I forget how that came about.
	Inspector General Horowitz that ultimately ratted Clinesmith out.
	Not that it led to any consequence.
	But going back to the sources...
	So if you understand...
	Launder information, how they use anonymous sourcing basically to tell a story with what the intelligence agencies want.
	And these kids at the New York Times and the Washington Post saying, oh, I have a special source at the CIA.
	Not recently, like...
	Your Glenn Greenwalds of the world gag at hearing that.
	They're like, that's your source?
	That's exactly what you should not be listening to?
	I had a debate with Ben Bradley when he was editor of the Washington Post many years ago about before it was outed who Deep Throat was.
	And I raised the question with him.
	I said, maybe the reason you guys have kept secret who Deep Throat is is because it's not some moral...
	Grand just whistleblower.
	It's some corrupt intelligence officer or FBI Hoover guy who wanted to weaponize their power against and form a de facto for the then kind of loose deep state that was mad at Nixon for a range of reasons.
	And I just remember he smiled and laughed, said, well, I guess you'll find out someday.
	Well, of course, that's exactly who it turned out to be.
	The guy who ran COINTELPRO, Mark Felt, was...
	He wasn't this honest, honorable, moral champion.
	Bob Woodward was used as the tool of the deep state to take out an elected president.
	That was the real story.
	That was the moral, heroic story of Bob Woodward, now busy doing his little cocktail parties and whatnot.
	But the importance of understanding how they're used.
	Don't trust any story from the institutional press that has well-connected anonymous sources.
	The IC, the intelligence community, deep state, however you want to identify them, are very good at targeting specific media entities and individuals in the media and turning them basically into rock stars and delivering them everything that they ever wanted on a silver platter, making their job easy for them, and using them to launder information.
	Their campaigns through these people.
	I mean, Adam Goldman won a...
	I think he won a Pulitzer for his reporting on Trump-Russia and a lot of people in New York Times.
	And it was all nonsense.
	But they elevated these people from kind of like a low-level person to a star that wins the awards that they ever won.
	What's her name?
	Natasha Bertrand, who's like infamously called Fusion Natasha now.
	She was like...
	A nobody at some random paper and made a contact, I think, in the CIA.
	And this contact was just feeding stuff to her.
	And it wasn't just a contact.
	Like, this was a concerted effort through these intelligence agencies to identify these people, to feed information to them, to see that they can be trusted to keep them anonymous.
	This is what James Comey did.
	This is what Clapper did.
	That they found individuals, you know, like Ken Delanyan.
	I'm just like name dropping all over the place here.
	But they found individuals that were trustworthy, that were willing to launder information for them.
	And it helped both sides.
	These people have never been prosecuted for anything that they did, for all the illegal behavior.
	And the so-called journalists kept them safe, kept them anonymous.
	Jordan, the question I have for you.
	You're doing stuff which is independent journalism without the pressures of mainstream journalism.
	You get to step on the toes, I guess, of some of the mainstream journalists.
	You get to make them look bad or make them look unthorough.
	How is it making enemies with these people?
	Have you made enemies with the mainstream journalists?
	I see you on Twitter.
	You're sort of snarkier.
	I think everything reads snarkier on Twitter than it otherwise is intended.
	But I was not expecting a soft demeanor from you based on Twitter.
	But have you made enemies, or are you still friends with the people who work in the milieu in the mainstream section of it?
	Yeah, I try to be as diplomatic as possible in person, and I don't pick fights with people on social media.
	If people attack me, I'll be like, okay, I'm happy to engage in this, and you're probably not going to end up on top here.
	Yeah, that's kind of my philosophy.
	Similar to actually Donald Trump, who famously branded a counterpuncher.
	I think that it's not worth engaging with these people.
	If they want to engage with you and try to smear you, then you have every right to fight back and even go as far as to go after them as well.
	But I wouldn't recommend anyone getting into the space just to deliberately attack these people because it's just a waste of time.
	And these are actually, I think these are dying institutions.
	They're funded through the welfare of people like Jeff Bezos.
	These institutions don't make money, and they put million-dollar losses on these people's balance sheets.
	So while they fade into obscurity, I will cheer that on.
	If they decide to engage with us or attack us, I'm happy to accelerate that process.
	But I'm looking forward to the collapse of the corporate press, and if that means that these people end up without a job.
	I wish them luck with maybe they can learn to code or build solar panels as Joe Biden said.
	I hope that they find success in these very important things outside of journalism.
	Learn to code might get us kicked off of YouTube.
	Robert, you're taking flack.
	Barnes, why have you not put Viva on to Jesse Lee Peterson yet?
	Why are you hearting JLP from Viva?
	Okay, I'm going to look into Jesse Lee Peterson right now.
	There is...
	There's not enough time in the day, people.
	I'll look into it now.
	It's come up and I've got some explanations and apparently someone I have to follow.
	He's got a great name.
	He, Colin Noor, there's some other people that we actually haven't.
	People don't know that there's a bunch of people that have been invited.
	It's just figuring out timing and scheduling over time.
	Nobody named Jesse Lee will I try to hide from the court of public opinion.
	They're too good of a name in that respect.
	Speaking of the conservative webosphere and mediasphere, were you surprised by how many people, especially early on, some have come around late, But even like, you know, Benji Shapiro and some other people, I know his wife's a doctor, but, you know, we're kind of on the wrong side of a lot of pandemic issues early.
	Did it surprise you how many people had sort of deferred to the white lab coat crowd, sort of were cheering on Fauci, no matter what he was saying on a given day, at least in the first early months, cheering on the lockdown even, which was frightening to me.
	Were you surprised at how much of the conservative people on the right did not default to freedom when the question was raised?
	I think you saw this a lot with the DC crowd, and I don't want to name names, but I think it goes to show that a lot of people don't actually believe in what they're selling you, because if they did, they never would have stood for these lockdowns, for these other things that destroyed so many millions of American human lives and livelihoods,
	that there are certain things that you need to stand for, even if we're being attacked by You know, a rogue nation, or if something horrible is going on, there are some things that just are beyond the pale for supporting.
	And the government's interference into our basic individual rights is one of those things that you should never, ever, there's no reason to ever support them, even in, you know, a horrible pandemic, because it's still up to us as individuals to fight that.
	battle on our own and when the government gets involved it can only do bad things on this front and yeah it was very disappointing to see but it was very revealing and I'm sure you guys have also made some interesting connections and good friends because you found that a lot of people share your ideals and were willing to stand for them in a tough time when not a lot of people...
	We're willing to back you.
	Like, I remember that a lot of people on the right were, like, calling me all these awful names.
	Like, there was this one guy who was basically this very high-profile social media commentator who said that, like, I was basically a terrorist for arguing against masks because I was supporting the spread of a virus.
	Like, I was a bioterrorist.
	And there were a lot of people that I have, unfortunately, haven't...
	Talked with since the beginning of this stuff, because you sometimes just lose all respect for them when they're just bedwetters to such a dramatic extent, and you realize that they don't really believe in anything that they're selling.
	And the D.C. Beltway class, the real epidemic was all the supposed advocates for liberty living inside Washington, D.C., folding like a lawn chair because of the threat of a virus.
	It's an amazing thing.
	I've never been anti-mask.
	I've just been anti-government requiring it or mandating it simply to impose massive fines on a bureaucratic level.
	Because we know that once the masks got legally mandated, and I say legally mandated in quotes because it never went through any legislative process, the cops were just going around looking for people who were easy to ticket, who looked like people that would not be likely to contest the tickets.
	And it was nothing more than a money grab.
	And had nothing to do with actual safety, especially when they're, you know, issuing tickets in parks, outdoors in parks, knowing the science.
	And so it was never a question of, like, being anti the protection measures.
	It's just being anti-government enforcing them with draconian penalties.
	And you would have gotten probably the same level of compliance, if not more, but for the coercion aspect, which goes towards the masks, it goes towards the vaccines, it goes towards anything when you can't be swayed with reason.
	You're not going to be compelled with coercion without some pushback and probably more of it.
	But yeah, losing some friends.
	When people don't...
	I just found there's a lot more people who are...
	I'll back it up.
	There's the expression, success has many fathers, failure is an orphan.
	Nobody wants to be responsible for the consequences of their actions, or very few people, the ones who are likely to defer to the government.
	And those people have become, you know...
	Plain as day for everyone to see now as a result of this.
	And the DC Beltway is a pretty good example, if I can imagine.
	It's that people who ultimately defer to the authority of the government and don't want to take responsibility for their own independence.
	And I can see how those are the easiest ones to turn and defer.
	But I guess we've all lost some friends as a result of our public defiance of total submission.
	But speaking of that sort of broader, of course, if you're in Canada, you might be buying stuff from China that might have contamination in the mask, and that's a whole other animal to distrust what sort of took place and transpired.
	But I think, you know, the questioning of the methods, the lack of legislative process, the lack of investigative process, the lack of full transparency, the lack of public participation, the lack of an evidentiary adjudicated process, all of the...
	That's as contaminated as the public policy, but a big part of that was a lot of institutional deference, institutional actors, especially on both the left and the right.
	But that's a good transition into some of the issues currently raging on the national security front in Cuba.
	If we look at Cuba, it's fascinating that our left decided...
	Followed by the statism, welcomed the statism that came with these public health interventions and lockdowns.
	And a few countries that could not afford that were countries like South Africa.
	They're already right on the edge economically.
	And another one was Cuba.
	And what's fascinating to me is you have these public...
	The first people willing to...
	Many years in a Cuban prison.
	Just to go out on the street and publicly protest and broadcast it.
	And the reaction still of some parts of the left, Crystal, Kyle Kalinske, the same people that Joe Rogan tells you to listen to, which, God bless him, is a sign that the man ate too much weed.
	But you have Crystal Ball and Kyle Kalinske saying that the reason, God bless him, the reason is that it's because of the embargo.
	Not recognizing Cuba chose not to get any vaccine because it wanted to make its own.
	Cuba has an M of its own until the protests, venting people from anywhere in the world, bringing it out or bringing in medicine.
	And again, I'm not someone that's a hard right guy.
	I'm not a Ben Shapiro on Cuba.
	But let's just say I know people who have been there for many times in years and people right now on the ground there.
	That resistance is an authentic resistance to the effect of the lockdown.
	The communism is not popular in the country.
	That's why they don't have elections there, particularly with younger generations.
	But they couldn't afford to do the lockdown.
	It was going to kill the legitimate government.
	The left thought it would justify.
	Look at how we saved all your lives.
	When what it did is it ruined everybody.
	And now we're seeing protests for it.
	But what's amazing is the inability of sort of at least part of the press, particularly on the left, to be honest about the lockdown's consequences and instead are still pretending it's 1961 Bay of Pigs, Cuba.
	Yeah, Cuba's...
	In Florida, it's a very interesting situation because we have a huge...
	To their credit, they're so passionate about the liberty for their co-national folks for Cuba.
	And I think the left gets this wrong and a significant faction on the right gets this wrong.
	Because speaking of the embargo, the United States has had the embargo on Cuba since the Communist Party took over.
	And we really have nothing to show for success from the United States side in influencing the affairs in Cuba.
	Because that's the goal.
	You want to make them somewhat less threatening.
	But they still have all these ties to China and Russia.
	And they're a problem.
	So I think that an argument could be made from the right that the embargo is not useful.
	Maybe drop the embargo.
	I'm not saying it should be a priority.
	The left's problem.
	Is that they think the embargo is responsible for the economic issues in Cuba.
	But that's not the case.
	It might make it a little more difficult for trade in some circumstances.
	But as you noted, it is communism.
	That it isn't causing the government in Cuba to be a total disaster and its citizens to suffer.
	If Cuba was a free market that was embargoed by the United States, they would still find out a way.
	For their citizens to be prosperous.
	They have a lot of trading partners still.
	The idea that if, you know, these people like AOC and I think Black Lives Matter, the organization was saying, oh, we can just lift the embargo because they're proponents of these hard left ideas and socialism and communism and think that Cuba will all of a sudden flourish if we lift the embargo.
	And that's just, it's clearly not the case.
	And I just hope that one day There's so many Cuban Americans in this area specifically and all over the country who have incredible stories.
	Their family basically all, the dissidents all came here on rafts or devices that they made themselves and went through tough.
	I have nothing for support for that movement.
	I don't think that the US has any interest in a military option for Cuba.
	I think that would be a disaster.
	But in terms of hoping that that regime eventually falls someday, I fully support the Cuban-American and Cuban people's ambitions to be free.
	And I think you can support anyone's ambition.
	I hope that everyone has the opportunity to have full individual rights someday.
	From a policy option, I think there's nothing on the table from the U.S. side.
	I really do not want to see the military involved in the Cuba situation whatsoever.
	That government's really close to collapsing on its own accord because it failed to deliver basic things by its own choices.
	But speaking of which, what's fascinating to me is, to bridge back to the earlier conversation, it was that experience by Cubans, that experience by Venezuelans in Florida.
	That led them to when they saw, people like Pitbull, when they saw the lockdowns to be like, this kind of looks familiar and not in a good way.
	And to be quickly on top of this, one of the reasons why Trump went up there, one of the reasons why DeSantis has such political protection and popularity, because people forget the press waged war on DeSantis, predicting he was going to be a mass murderer every other week because he wasn't going along with the institutional narrative, and Florida ended up being one of the most desirable places for people to escape to.
	How have you seen it in Florida in terms of the public's reaction to DeSantis' independence?
	And how much do you see a different mindset with people who are living in a free state of Florida compared to the mindset of the people you saw in D.C.?
	If you talk to the business owners here, they are so thankful that Ron DeSantis literally saved their careers, their families' livelihoods.
	I think that Ron DeSantis will win the next election in a landslide.
	The Democrat opposition in Florida right now is like a total joke.
	I mean, there is a significant amount of Democratic voters.
	He only won the last gubernatorial election by, I think, maybe like low five figures votes in a state of significant 20 million people.
	But yeah, so he is adored, especially by the Republicans in Florida.
	Rightfully, a lot of people are hearing whispers about him stepping up to the big show.
	But in such a divided country, like as a Floridian right now, I would almost rather just like, you know, let's send Trump out there and keep DeSantis here because what we got going on here is good.
	And let's just like keep the federal government out of our affairs.
	It would suck to lose DeSantis because there doesn't seem to be much of a bench and you never know what you get with these politicians.
	I pulled up a couple of chats.
	Sorry, Robert.
	Go ahead, Robert.
	What do you think about all this?
	Like someone just mentioned, these people are going to go door to door.
	Now, I'll be honest.
	I would pay money to see some government people from D.C. go door to door in the state of Alabama.
	If they would film that for like a reality TV, that would be a beautiful thing.
	They'd knock on the door and say, I got a little jab for you.
	Good luck.
	I mean, you'd see some people running from some dogs, from some guns, some other things.
	That would be pure entertainment.
	But what do you think?
	I mean, are they really going to go door?
	I mean, this is, again.
	Historically unprecedented.
	We've never done anything like this.
	Sent people door to door to stick a needle in your arm of anything, regardless of what it was.
	Now, we grabbed some people for forced sterilizations, but we should be ashamed of that.
	We grabbed people for the Tuskegee experiments where we did not give them medicine.
	We should be ashamed of that.
	We detained people during the Japanese detention camps, Korematsu.
	We should be ashamed of that.
	Of course, Canada, they came up with another name for it.
	It's not a detention camp.
	It's a hotel for sure.
	A government-designated quarantine facility or a government-designated hotel, GDH.
	It's so beautiful.
	It's Orwellian.
	Yeah.
	But how do you think people are going to respond to this?
	It's interesting because the latest data on the vaccines, Israel's a really...
	Interesting country that's releasing data because they basically compelled everyone to get vaccinated.
	A significant portion of the population got vaccinated.
	What they're finding out of Israel now is that the vaccine, while Big Pharma claimed some stuff about the vaccine at preventing infection, we can just say that it hasn't lived up to the hype of this specific.
	So the argument for forcing people to do this no longer applies because it doesn't seem, according to the latest data from all these countries among the vaccinated, that prevention of transmission is not really a thing related to this vaccine.
	The argument now is it prevents severe disease, but not that it prevents transmission.
	So if someone, an individual chooses not to get vaccinated, it's kind of like, you know, do what you...
	It's on your own accord, right?
	Like, just as if someone chooses to partake in any other habit that might cost them or benefit them in the future.
	Yeah.
	That's the stat that everyone is running with now.
	It's a celebrity who I was talking to on Twitter.
	Sarah Silverman says, you know, 99% of the people hospitalized have not received both shots.
	That was a Fauci claim.
	It originated with Fauci, and it's a total fabrication.
	It's totally not true.
	It's so far off by orders of magnitude.
	It's false on its face.
	Now there's varying numbers.
	I've seen 99%, I've seen 95%, I've heard out of England 60%.
	This is the problem.
	Once you are dealing with a media that is fundamentally untrustworthy, proven untrustworthy, historically demonstrably untrustworthy, where does anyone go?
	You've got to go to the people who are reading what Robert refers to at the White Papers, and you've got to...
	And they're the ones that get demonized by the mainstream media that has the monopoly over people's reputations and brands.
	You see it when they're attacking Alex Berenson, a longtime New York Times journalist who's only citing government data.
	Bobby Kennedy, who's only citing government data.
	Brett Weinstein?
	Brett Weinstein, a liberal science guy who's just talking to other science people, suddenly you can't listen to what Brett has to say?
	I mean, this is insanity in terms of the mindset of who...
	All of a sudden, the only people you can listen to are the slower brother of the white lab coat crowd, the people who don't understand what special meant in their special education program.
	They got the misunderstanding of that.
	But speaking of which...
	Somebody, Sidewalk, asked from our Locals board at vivabarneslaw.locals.com, what is Jordan hopeful about?
	Yes, so I see a lot of opportunity here because we lived through this awful experiment devised by our government and forced upon us, and it has...
	You can call it red pills.
	People have become more based than ever.
	Our coalition of based individuals is now millions and millions of people.
	People have awakened to the reality that the corporate press is just a bunch of thieves and liars, that big pharma has lied to us repeatedly, that our government bureaucrats are not to be trusted.
	And this institutional distrust will be very healthy when it comes to the future of our nation because...
	People will no longer give the benefit of the doubt to these people and will scrutinize much more than they used to.
	Especially as Americans, I think at least people who have accepted that this safety regime was an awful thing will fight very hard to not allow something like that to happen in the future, hopefully.
	What I find amazing now is you talk about the distrust in government.
	And I see that playing in, and I want to get back to the Gretchen Whitmer thing, but I very much see that playing into the next level of being red-pilled, is where you have the institutionalized powers now, call it infiltrating, call it setting up.
	They want to demonize everyone who is now vocally anti-government to basically turn them into domestic-ists.
	And I see this happening in real time from the outside.
	And I find that as encouraging as you find the red pill aspect.
	The double red pill is seeing how these people are now being demonized and worst in order to turn them into criminals before they actually are criminals.
	And if they don't ever become criminals, have the FBI come in and facilitate the process, so to speak.
	Sorry, Robert, what were you going to say?
	Oh, yeah.
	One of the questions on locals is effectively...
	To what degree were you concerned that once you launched on this, like I was explaining earlier, I was having a debate with my older sister who's very smart.
	She won like 34 out of 35 awards in law school, number one.
	My brother and I just finally figured out we would stand up the whole time because they were just going to say her name every single award.
	But she trusts more in the white lab coat crowd than I do.
	And one of the things I'm encouraged by is that people forget the Milgram experiment.
	When they put...
	I mean, people don't know.
	They brought people in.
	There's a guy in a white lab coat.
	They said, hey, we're doing this thing where we're disciplining people who get the answers wrong with electric shock treatment.
	We'll tell you what to dial it up to based on their answers.
	The person sits there, and the scary thing was more than half of people would keep turning it up, thinking the person in the other room was dying just because someone in a white lab coat told them to.
	However, when they had two different people in a white lab coat disagree with each other, 90% of the people wouldn't go along with torturing anybody.
	And the potential is that people wake up to not trusting the white lab coat crowd, rely upon their own conscience, and people make much better decisions.
	And you're right.
	I mean, like questioning Big Pharma in certain contexts, there were two to three percent.
	You know, Bobby Kennedy was out on an island.
	Alex Jones was out on an island.
	There was two or three percent people saying, maybe we shouldn't always trust whatever Big Pharma tells us.
	Maybe this drug is great.
	Maybe it's not great.
	Maybe we should have informed consent, like the Nuremberg Code of 1947 said.
	But when you entered into this, There are a lot of people whose fear, like for a doctor, there's no incentive, no skin in the game for a doctor to warn about the vaccine.
	Because if the doctor tells someone not to take the vaccine and they suffer injury, the doctor can get sued into oblivion.
	If, on the other hand, the doctor tells them, absolutely, you have to take this, and that vaccine causes them harm, the doctor can't be sued at all.
	And so the incentives are so distorted.
	And the same with people in the medical community.
	Look at Brett Weinstein.
	That's why they're blackballing him.
	We discussed it early on.
	Those two doctors that came out in California that ran those emergency clinics.
	We got into a debate with my friend Scott Adams about that.
	Where they were like, look, there's not a lot of literature based on what's happening here.
	It's not our lived experience.
	Were you concerned at all that, okay, if I go into this space and say what I really think, there's a bunch of people.
	That are never going to look at me to be retained in the future, etc.
	Were you worried about that at all?
	What said?
	I'm just going to follow where I think the truth is.
	Not worry about the consequences.
	I suppose I'm just uniquely immune from caring about what other people think.
	So I was born to thrive for a time like this.
	Well, I care about what people who I care about think about what I'm doing.
	But like randos on the internet?
	No.
	Nothing.
	As long as people in my inner circle who I trust and who I've talked about this stuff with, they're like, yeah, this seems legitimate.
	I have no concern with going against the green.
	Robert, you especially, you were right there, too, dealing with this stuff when we were not in the 1%, but in the 0.01% of people who were talking about this stuff.
	I think some of us are just uniquely different in that we just, like, if you're just, like, a random person on the internet that wants to call me the worst things in the world, I just don't care.
	So I'm lucky to have that attribute, I guess.
	All right, now with that said, we'll keep it under two hours.
	It makes it very easy for Eric Hunley, who transposes all of these streams into podcasts.
	It makes it easier, for whatever the reason, under two hours, easy to convert, over two hours, a little more headachy.
	Jordan, tell everybody watching where they can find you on the various social medias.
	Yeah, so twitter.com slash Jordan Schachtel.
	My publication is called The Dossier.
	It's on Substack, dossier.substack.com.
	You can also find, I have a new podcast that I just launched last week, also called The Dossier.
	It's available on Apple, on Spotify.
	It's also available to subscribers on my Substack.
	And, yeah, you know, I really appreciate you guys having me on and had a very interesting conversation.
	All right.
	Absolutely.
	Our pleasure.
	And apparently someone said way early on that Schachtel in German means box.
	I don't know if that's true.
	I'm going to go to Google after this.
	Robert.
	And I'll be at the after party at Viva, live chat at vivabarneslaw.locals.com while watching News with Booze, which is on Eric Hundley and Alison Morrow's channel coming up in just a bit.
	And now I said I would do a live stream on Locals Exclusive today.
	I'll join the chat.
	I'll do the live stream tomorrow because I'm out of time and I've got three kids upstairs who have been surprisingly quiet.
	There was one other thing.
	Robert F. Kennedy for everybody.
	Did I mention it tonight?
	We had to postpone to August 11th.
	Robert, who do we have on the floor?
	Next week will be Richard Barris.
	And then we've got a lineup all the way through mid-September.
	So we'll be announcing those in the near future.
	Alright, so everyone in the chat, thank you very much.
	Jordan, Robert, thank you very much.
	Stick around, we'll say our proper goodbyes afterwards.

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