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Dec. 1, 2022 - Viva & Barnes

01:29:42

Interview with "The Gray Lady Winked" Author, Ashley Rindsberg - Viva Frei Live

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	I think Kanye West is a Nazi.
	And Nick Fuentes is a Nazi.
	So you invited a couple of Nazis on your show.
	And when you do that, you're supposed to rip their face off.
	And he looked genuinely surprised and hurt.
	That Kanye was leaving.
	Yeah, 100%.
	Okay, he said, no, no, my star, the one that's giving me all this attention is leaving.
	What if the money leaves with him?
	My God.
	No.
	You bitch.
	100%.
	Get men off.
	Do a real goddamn interview, you loser.
	No, it is an insult to bitches to call Tim Pool a bitch.
	I'm just saying, okay?
	The other thing that I'll just note is all we hear from right-wingers, including Tim Pool, and yes.
	You piece of garbage.
	You're a right-winger.
	You're a little grift.
	I'm actually a centrist who provides cover for anti-Semites.
	Yeah, we're not buying it.
	But we can't go a day without hearing from right-wingers defaming innocent people as groomers, as pedophiles, as dangerous individuals, whether we're talking about medical professionals, whether we're talking about educators.
	It's just endless, endless non-stop defamation of innocent people.
	But you invited someone who tried to make a case for pedophilia into your studio to have a nice, delightful conversation.
	Milo Yiannopoulos sitting right there.
	You didn't bother to ask a single question about his comments related to pedophilia, correct?
	Does Kasparian not realize that she's working with a man who made an argument for bestiality?
	I mean, there is so much deranged.
	Confession through projection going on here.
	Deranged.
	Please spare us.
	Mark, Mark.
	It's either that or Trudeau.
	So I'm not sure what's worse.
	Anna Kasparian.
	First of all, Cenk Uygur calls Kanye, who happens to be a black man, a Nazi.
	By the way, I'm going to go.
	I think we got Nazi, pedophilia, and bestiality within three minutes.
	Let's just see if we're still greenlighted here.
	He calls Kanye a Nazi.
	Anna calls...
	Oh, and then he calls Tim Pool a bitch.
	Anna Kasparian calls him a piece of garbage.
	What were the other words that she had for him?
	And then goes on to lament that Tim defames others.
	It would be funny.
	No, it's just funny.
	It's entertainment of the lowest order.
	It is the Jerry Springer of the interwebs now.
	The Young Turks have become the Jerry Springer of the interwebs.
	But that...
	I saw that yesterday and I'm like, Cenk Weger is thinking that Tim is caring about the money, which is an indication as to the first thought that goes on in Cenk Weger's mind.
	If Cenk Weger thinks that Tim saw that event as losing money, first of all, Cenk's judgment is off.
	And if Cenk thinks that Tim Pool is only interested in money at this point in his career, that's more of a reflection of Cenk.
	This guy once made a compelling argument for bestiality.
	I'm being tongue-in-cheek there, by the way.
	He then goes on to use misogynistic derogatory terms to talk about Tim Pool.
	And Anna Kasparian comes out and says, that's an insult to bitch.
	I'm taking crazy pills, people.
	All right, today's going to be a good one.
	Speaking of taking crazy pills.
	Yesterday we had...
	Whitney Webb, author of One Nation Under Blackmail, the Jeffrey Epstein saga, a thousand pages, two volumes detailing the blackmail corruption of American government from the 20s to 2013.
	Yesterday evening, we had Dan Hartman, whose 17-year-old son passed away 30 days after the jibby jab, four days after the jab, he was hospitalized.
	We had audio issues, but I think that interview got his story out to the world.
	Today, we have Ashley Rinsberg.
	It's Rinsberg or Reinsberg?
	I think it's Rinsberg.
	And I hate getting people's names.
	I should have asked before.
	Who wrote The Grey Lady Winked.
	Which, what is the most epic?
	It's not a takedown of The New York Times.
	It's just an expose of The New York Times.
	Because The New York Times, for everyone who thinks The New York Times is propaganda, I've got a spoiler alert.
	Flashback to that meme of the guy with the gun holding it to the other guy's head on the moon.
	It always has been propaganda.
	But before we get into that, I don't like doing my pitches with a guest present.
	You may have noticed it says this video contains a sponsored link thingy thing.
	It does.
	Today is EnviroCleanse.
	The air filtration system that I use in my own home.
	Yesterday my wife cooked the fish salmon skin to feed to the dogs.
	The house smelt like fish.
	And I said, why don't you bring the air filtration system into the kitchen so that we can air this out instead of opening up the door, letting out all the air-conditioned air that wastes money, people.
	EnviroCleanse home air purification system.
	I've talked about it before.
	We need air filtration in our house.
	We've got asthmatic issues.
	And we had a filter back in Canada, and it wasn't the EnviroCleanse filter.
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	It's got a nice fat HEPA filter thing to filter up bigger particles.
	It's got a patented mineral filtration system that neutralizes odors, bacteria.
	It is used by the Department of Defense.
	So that might be good enough of an indication of quality for a great many people out there.
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	It's quiet.
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	That's why the U.S. Navy uses it.
	Go to the website, ekpeer.com.
	Promo code VIVA.
	It's expensive, people.
	Air filtration systems are.
	But it's good.
	Promo code VIVA gets you 10% off the unit.
	A free air quality monitor, which will show you that it's working.
	And there is 0% financing for anybody who might need that.
	And that's it.
	And I appreciate a sponsor who has the courage to sponsor the channel of the hinged, fringed minority holding unacceptable views.
	And with that said, people, we'll be going live to Rumble at some point during the stream.
	But let's bring in our guest of the day.
	Author, journalist, and I got so many questions.
	Ashley, three, two, one.
	And we're in.
	Sir, how goes the battle?
	I think it goes well, actually.
	Last name is Rindsberg or Rindsberg?
	Rinsberg.
	Okay.
	I'm going to delve into your childhood just for a bit, but before we get there to see how you got to where you are and what went into that work, which everybody has to read.
	If you want to know the arguments as to how to discredit the New York Times in real time to anybody, read the book.
	30,000 Foot Overview, who are you?
	I am an author, an investigative journalist, and...
	A guy who's been in and around media for quite a long time, basically my whole career in various forms.
	And I'm really somebody who, I'm a bit of an explorer as well.
	I left the United States after college.
	I worked in San Francisco for a year at an incredible organization called Internet Archive, the Wayback Machine Guys.
	And then got a job on a sailboat as a deckhand.
	In Greece and Italy, and just kind of kept on going east was in Israel for many, many years.
	So I'm like one of these people that has to just look around the next corner, even when it's not really the wisest move.
	We're going to get there because I think it was the intro of the book which illustrated some of the problems that you had, at least with this particular book.
	If I may, and tell me if you don't want to talk about too much of childhood family stuff.
	Where are you born?
	Where are you from?
	Siblings?
	What did your parents do?
	I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa.
	I grew up in Philadelphia, Las Vegas, San Diego.
	I went to college in upstate New York.
	Cornell University.
	And like I said, worked in San Francisco for whatever it was, a year and a half, two years.
	My parents are South Africans who are now Americans, probably.
	And my dad's a doctor.
	My mom's a teacher.
	I've got a brother who is a marketing executive.
	And I live here right now.
	We're nomadic, but at the moment I'm in London.
	With my family, my wife and kids.
	And yeah, I think that's it.
	Yeah, unless you want to go to the cousins or...
	No, no, no.
	So born in South Africa, why did your parents move to America?
	I think the writing was on the wall.
	South Africa in the 1980s was not...
	It was still an okay place to be of a certain class, that class being white.
	But it was not a just system by any stretch of that word.
	And it was getting worse and not better.
	I think that was really clear for them.
	My dad, I think, was not particularly eager to serve in the army, the regime's military.
	So he wanted to be a doctor.
	He wanted to help people, and that's what he did.
	And I think a lot of it also is just kind of this very universal notion of making a better life in America.
	It sounds very...
	20th, 19th century, but that was the 20th century, so it's appropriate.
	But we were kind of like that, off the boat, looking for a better life.
	How old were you when you came over?
	I was two.
	Okay, so no memories.
	Your only conscious memories are of America.
	Yes.
	Yeah, that would be the case, yeah.
	And what was I going to say?
	I was actually kind of surprised.
	In Florida, there's a very big South African community.
	And many of them are recent, is the word emigres?
	Immigrants?
	Because in as much as things were bad 20 years ago, from what I had a good discussion, they've gotten worse and there's another wave of people leaving.
	Yeah, that's true.
	And what did you study?
	How did you get into journalism?
	I studied, interestingly enough, I studied philosophy.
	I sort of did a double major in philosophy and something that's called science and technology studies, which is the history, sociology, and philosophy of science.
	And at the time, I was like, when am I ever going to use this completely worthless?
	It turns out, actually, today, that is all we are all talking about, at least most of our conversation.
	When it's not about media, we're talking about science and what science is and what it's all about.
	And that, I found, was very, very interesting.
	I mean, you know, we have today this idea in the media that the science, right, the science is determinative of everything.
	And it's completely objective and neutral, dispassionate.
	And the number one principle, the premise of the entire field of the sociology of science is that basically scientists are human too, which means they are corruptible.
	They suffer from envy and greed, passion, love, despair, hope, the full range of human emotions that leads people to do things that are not always ethical and sometimes things that are ethical.
	But don't always lead to the most accurate results.
	And sometimes they do.
	You know, it's a mixed bag.
	So that has turned out very important to my current reporting on COVID, COVID corruption and COVID, the origin of the pandemic in particular.
	I came out of college basically with those degrees.
	I ended up working at the Internet Archive.
	Like I said, these are the guys that do the Wayback Machine, meaning they've saved the entire...
	Internet, web page by web page.
	It was a guy named Brewster Kahle, an internet pioneer, visionary, who created some very, very early internet technology called Waius, Wide Area Internet Search.
	It's kind of like a World Wide Web predecessor, a prototype.
	And I went to work for them, and it was really cool.
	We did this thing called a bookmobile, internet bookmobile.
	You could...
	Print and create a book anywhere in the world, including in the middle of a desert, didn't matter, and give it to a kid.
	That was the idea.
	I'm like, get people educated.
	Get books in people's hands.
	I took that to Egypt, where I delivered it to the Library of Alexandria.
	And this big project came back, and I'm like, I got to keep moving.
	That's where I got to Israel.
	It was like in the tail end of the Intifada, the second Intifada.
	There was a lot going on.
	A lot in the media that I saw did not really correspond to what was the truth on the ground, the reality on the ground.
	And I just started to get towing to journalism.
	It wasn't like an intentional, like, I want to be a journalist type thing.
	It was like coming across stories.
	A big story that I broke initially was about an Obama intelligence appointee.
	He was, I think...
	Very, very high-ranking.
	It was sort of like the head of one of the national intelligence apparatuses.
	And it turned out this guy had very long-standing deep ties to the Osama bin Laden family and was on record praising them right after 9 /11.
	First thing the guy says after 9 /11 is, "The bin Ladens are wonderful people." And then I uncovered more and more about this character, including his ties to Chinese state-owned oil companies.
	So this guy was on the board of a Chinese state-owned oil company, was going to head up essentially the agency that compiles intelligence for the United States of America to hand to the president.
	That was going to be his job.
	And everyone found that okay.
	And I was shocked that I was the guy who found this sitting in my little room in Tel Aviv.
	So the second Intifada is give or take 2002, if I'm not mistaken, right?
	Yeah, it started in 2000.
	Probably tail end of it was about 2002, 2003.
	And are you dual citizenship?
	Any citizenship?
	Are you there just on a visa?
	At the time, I entered as a tourist and was kind of going back and forth.
	I had a...
	A very life-shaking incident at that time.
	I just had come to Israel after sailing on that boat for two, three months working as a deckhand.
	And my best friend from childhood, who I attended college with, and it was sort of my creative partner, disappeared in Nicaragua on an island that is also a volcano.
	And there was this massive search launched that included private military contractors, the Nicaraguan army, police, etc.
	They looked for him for three weeks.
	And that was another point where I was reading the media about this because it made international headlines.
	And I'm like, they're just writing things that are just flat out not true, like factually just wrong.
	It's a weird thing because you don't feel like, of course, there's not any ill intent there.
	There's just blatant error.
	And when you're on the other side of it, you're like, I know that it's wrong and I know that there's no way to correct it.
	And I'm just going to live with the fact that they got at least things wrong about my missing friend who, you know, that would be the last thing written about him ever because he died there.
	So again, another point with the media, you just find this like clash between media and reality in these scenarios that you're witnessing.
	I didn't ask how old you are.
	I think we're both the same age, right?
	I'm 41. Okay.
	So you're a little younger than me, but so you're in Israel for the second Intifada.
	And so my question is, when you say, like, what's going on on the ground is not what's being reported, in which sense do you mean it?
	Because some people will say that Western media is excessively forgiving to Israel.
	Others, I mean, two screens, one screen, two films.
	Others are going to say they're unduly critical of the U.S., depends on what media you're watching.
	So in what way did you experience that what was going on on the ground was not what was being reported?
	Generally speaking, I think, you know, from the 20 years that I was in Israel and probably will be back there.
	I'm now a citizen of Israel.
	You know, I think the biggest thing, the broadest thing is that, and this is not about, like, who's right in the conflict, you know, because that's debatable.
	The thing that I always find so strange is when you think, you get the sense in the media that it's like...
	Just all-out warfare between Jews and Arabs in Israel.
	And then you're in Israel and you live life there.
	And Jews and Arabs live together and work together.
	And when I take my kid to a doctor, that is often an Arab doctor.
	And if I need to hire someone to do something for my whatever, that is often an Arab.
	And there's just this constant coexistence that has nothing to do with this total all-out combat that you get from the media.
	Their hatred is everywhere.
	It's not, in fact.
	And you talk to people.
	It's not that we're just begrudgingly accepting one another's presence.
	You talk to them, and there's a common sense, like, we're both here, we both understand what this is.
	And there's humor, and there's, you know, kindness.
	That's the broadest sense.
	I think, you know, on the other side of it, with a more specific intifada part, was...
	You never really got a sense in the Western media how devastating it was, how it was blanket.
	It was every day.
	You're living in a war zone in Israel.
	You know, the narrative emerged that, oh, Israelis are just kind of hanging out and drinking coffee and the Palestinians are getting bombed.
	And I saw that narrative emerge again and again over the six or seven wars that I was present for living in Israel.
	And, you know, that's not to take away from what Palestinians suffer during those episodes, which is often severe.
	But it's also, you know, why downplay the one side?
	That's what I'm curious about.
	Why this notion that Israelis are just chilling, just hanging out through a war, when the reality is that they're running at three in the morning with their children into bomb shelters like it's 1940.
	And I've been in that situation myself.
	Picking a kid out of bed at two in the morning, running, because you've got 15 seconds from the siren, which is an aerate siren, by the way, into your bomb shelter that's in your, wherever it is, in your basement or your building, whatever, and huddling there over and over and over.
	And the psychological impact, the psychological toll that takes, and of course, the physical toll that people endure when they are maimed or killed.
	You know, that is not something that I saw in the media or still see.
	You know, the one thing we saw in one of the more recent conflicts was with these nine or ten children, Palestinian children, and maybe there was one or two that were Israeli, front page New York Times, their photos, right?
	And you think, wow, I mean, these are dead children who were killed.
	And a few of them turned out to have been actually...
	Members of terror organizations, and they were not as young as they were made to be seen as by the Times.
	But the bigger picture there is saying, hold on, okay, I get why you do that, but where are the dead children from the war in Yemen?
	Where are the dead children on the front page in the war in Syria?
	Where are the dead children from the Holocaust that the New York Times never covered?
	Why that one conflict in this particular way?
	That's what stands out for me.
	It's interesting.
	And I can hear the arguments from people on the other side.
	Well, people who are going to say the rebuttal to that is you're dealing with an inequality of power.
	And so as far as coverage goes, you might have to have some inequality of coverage or depiction in order to counterbalance that inequality of power.
	Israel developed, you know, Iron Dome, this and that.
	Palestinians either...
	Victims of Israeli aggression or victims of their own government corruption, but victims to explain the...
	Or people are just going to say it's not that bad or that's what you get if you're occupying territory.
	How does one respond to that from a journalistic perspective?
	Well, I think then that's okay.
	I mean, if that's your position, that's a legitimate position to take.
	But at that moment, you are no longer dispassionately reporting news.
	You are a champion.
	You're championing one side in a war.
	That's what you're doing.
	And you might be doing the same thing in a war in the current war, the Ukraine and the Russian war against Ukraine.
	And you might think that the Ukrainians are justified and you might champion Ukrainians and now you are a champion for that side.
	Other people might not think that that's the case.
	Other people might make the case that Ukraine, along with Western powers, have been goading Russia into this situation for the last 10 to 15 years, and it's not as one-sided as it's portrayed.
	And I think this is the real problem, is that...
	This kind of coverage leads us into these black and white, good versus evil narratives.
	They lead us into narratives, period.
	That's where it really becomes problematic.
	When you start becoming a champion as a news organization and not as an activist organization or a human rights organization, but as a news organization, you're fundamentally changing your own mission.
	Your mission was once, let's just put the facts on the table and let our readers decide.
	Now the mission is, let's convince them of something particular.
	And that's where I find this to be problematic.
	All right, I'm going to ask this question, and then we're going to go on.
	You and I don't go anywhere, but then I'm going to close down the stream on YouTube, and everyone should go over to Rumble.
	This is the question.
	From what you're describing, it sounds like your journey to this book, which is ultimately a realization that the New York Times has always been activist, partisan journalism, and not...
	Gray lady as she was supposed to be.
	Sounds like it was 20 years in the making.
	When did you first realize this?
	And when did you get the idea to write the book?
	But before you answer that, I'm going to remove this from YouTube.
	Head over to Rumble, everybody.
	You got the link.
	It will not change the tenor of the discussion.
	This will be on YouTube tomorrow, but we're going to go and favor the platform that actually favors free speech.
	So here we go.
	Three, two, one, off YouTube.
	Exclusive to Rumble right now.
	You all know where to go.
	So, Ashley, I mean, you're there in two...
	I'm trying to think of when I realized that the New York Times was propagandist garbage.
	For me, it was Trump.
	I mean, 2016 is when I realized...
	You know, I always knew that media survives off creating drama, creating division, creating clicks before clicks, but traffic, that's the word I'm looking for, viewership.
	I never realized the degree to which they were...
	You know, I read Manufacturing Consent in philosophy school.
	I'm trying to reread it again, but it's very long.
	You know, we knew that they manufactured consent.
	I don't think I ever truly appreciated the degree to which they did that until 2015, 2016.
	When was your revelation?
	You know, I think it was probably when I really started to dive into the research for the book, and that was...
	Back to your earlier question, I was reading a book about the history of World War II and the rise of the Nazis called The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shire, a journalist at the time, I believe for CBS.
	And Shire wrote there about, in a footnote in that book, about the outbreak of hostilities of World War II.
	And the next day, the New York Times runs a lead story.
	In the paper, the lead story being the right-hand most column of the paper, in which they sort of drop the claim that the war had just broken out because Polish guerrilla fighters had invaded a German radio station and killed all the German radio station people.
	And then Hitler was just responding to this Polish aggression.
	And that's like a, you know, like this tire screeching, like radio, like this record screeching moment where you just Stop and say, hold on a second.
	The New York Times in 1939 is telling people that Hitler was defending himself against Polish aggression.
	I went and I looked at the article in the Times archive, and that is what it did say.
	The lead article of that day is sort of a reprint of the speech Hitler made.
	On that day or the day before, justifying his invasion of Poland and justifying it on the basis of this incident in the radio station.
	Just your friendly European country responding to aggression.
	Nothing to see here.
	Turns out that the whole radio station thing was a propaganda ploy developed by Goebbels.
	It was called Operation Himmler.
	They took P.O.W.
	inmates from a P.O.W.
	camp out of the camp.
	They dressed them up as German civilians.
	They shot them and they put them in the radio station to make it look as if Polish fighters had come raided the station and killed these people.
	It was designed to trick world media into believing Hitler was responding to Polish aggression.
	That was the purpose.
	The New York Times in 1939, in reprinting this, Basically makes this an enormous success.
	Because if they had done this and no one had printed it in the West, it would not have mattered.
	You know, obviously, that would just be...
	Nothing.
	Nothing would have happened.
	But in fact, they do print it.
	The fact that they fell for it, the fact that they relied...
	The only source for the article was a German propaganda organ, a Nazi propaganda organ.
	That was the source for this information.
	The fact that this takes place in 1939, Which means that the New York Times had been witnessing Nazi propaganda, racism, persecution for almost a decade by that point.
	And they believe it.
	Beggars belief.
	Not possible, right?
	That's when I started to look deeper into what happened there.
	What I discovered was that the Berlin bureau chief of the New York Times at that period was a man named Guido Wenderes, who was recognized by American journalists widely.
	To have been a Nazi sympathizer.
	And he was recognized as such by the Nazis as well.
	They liked him for that reason.
	So they gave him really good access, great sources, amazing scoops.
	And he, in return, it was sort of this Faustian pact.
	He delivered the goods for the Nazis.
	It worked.
	It worked for everybody.
	Of course, except for the people suffering the evils of the Nazis.
	So that's where I kind of thought to myself, Nobody had ever told this story.
	And it doesn't make me think, oh, I need to be the one.
	It made me think, how has the New York Times never held itself accountable?
	They knew about this guy.
	The management was made aware.
	They were aware of him.
	An editor from New York, a junior editor, a Jewish guy, came to the publisher and said, you've got a Nazi running your Berlin bureau.
	During the most consequential event of the 20th century, you've got to change this now.
	They threatened that guy with libel.
	Because he was so important, Guido Indaris was so important to what the New York Times was doing, which is manufacturing scoops, that they knew to lose that access at that moment, they would never recover it again.
	They would just, they would fall behind.
	And they would not allow that.
	That was the one cost they would not pay.
	So that's where I got this sense that, holy shit, this is corruption.
	On an epic scale, on a self-aware scale, in a way that kind of is sickening.
	And we've seen reverberations of that since then.
	It's amazing, like, the one thing that triggers it for someone.
	And it's history that other people might have known.
	But once it becomes mainstream knowledge of history, it becomes the waking point for other people as well.
	I know I might get ahead of some of the questioning, but...
	This is going to be the one that comes up, and I've been told that Kanye and Nick Fuentes are live on Alex Jones, so we've got some competition.
	But this is a question that might dabble over to the yay.
	We know that there's Jewish ownership, or there's always been sort of a Jewish family tie to the New York Times.
	What was that historical tie?
	So the paper was started by a man named Henry Raymond, who was not Jewish, but he sort of...
	The paper ended up kind of foundering a bit.
	And it was bought by a German-Jewish immigrant named Adolf Ochs.
	And Ochs is the guy who really turned it around.
	And he made it the Grey Lady.
	And they called it the Grey Lady because he committed to a kind of journalism that was flat, neutral, grey.
	Gather the facts.
	He published this famous business announcement the day he took over, saying he would pursue the facts.
	Without regard to fear or favor, that was his famous phrase.
	And he actually did that quite well.
	He actually even took that so far, and this is in the context of yellow journalism, the early 20th century, kind of like muddy, like really, what we have today basically was kind of like what it was then, where just a lot of churning up all the junk and like trying to grab eyeballs because it's lucrative.
	He took the opposite tact.
	He really wanted this to be really just Neutral as possible.
	And he wanted to do that with the tone.
	That's where the gray comes from.
	The tone was always really boring and kind of flat, where other people were being sensationalist.
	And it was obviously successful because he turned it around.
	Subsequently, the people who took over after him were basically his son-in-law, his daughter's husband, who's named Sulzberger.
	And the Salzburgers are still in control of the paper today, and there's still a Salzburger who is publisher and chairman of the New York Times company today.
	And they are not Jewish, most of them at least.
	They're no longer Jewish.
	I think most of them are generally kind of Episcopalian.
	And, you know, the Jewish question of ownership, you know, this is actually a great example because the New York Times, during some of this, was a Jewish-owned or Jewish-controlled newspaper.
	But that didn't lead them into pro-Jewish positions.
	And the Holocaust was a great example of this.
	And even later, the Intifada was another example.
	But the Holocaust coverage or non-coverage, they did not cover the Holocaust period.
	They had six front page stories about the Holocaust in six years.
	They did a story one day of 700,000 Jews murdered by the Nazis.
	They buried that on page five.
	They gave it about two, three inches of column space.
	Something like that.
	On the front page of that same paper was a story about a single guy in Iceland being killed.
	700,000 people get buried.
	One guy in Iceland is front page news.
	And that is because of their Jewish heritage.
	They did not want to be seen as being Jewish.
	They did not want to be seen as being pro-Jewish.
	And they also had this very complicated relationship with their Jewish background.
	They did not look at the Jewish people.
	As a people, they saw it as just a form of worship that would not distinguish you from any other person.
	So to talk about an effort to kill, to murder, mass murder Jews didn't mean anything.
	It was just like Hitler was mass murdering lots of people.
	Jews were just some of those people.
	They did not see the Jewish people the way that other people, including Hitler, as it were, saw them.
	So you don't always have this one-to-one relationships that, okay, therefore it was Jewish.
	That was not how it worked.
	It was actually the opposite.
	That's the danger of these kinds of reflexive associations between who owns what and how.
	You don't really know.
	I should specify, I'm not asking the question to pull the they-they business.
	It's always been the they-they.
	There's a shirt in there somewhere.
	It's just an interesting thing.
	I've noticed over time that Despite the accusations, the New York Times historically has not taken what would otherwise be partisan defensive positions of the Jewish people as a whole, which I always found interesting.
	I look for explanations.
	I look for it in corruption, financial ties.
	The idea that pre-World War II, the New York Times, and this is a part of the book as well, but the New York Times would have downplayed what was going on in Berlin because the Olympic Games were going on there.
	And so, like, you know, and again, it's history repeating, but history not repeating, but rhyming, where there were plenty of good economic reasons, business interests, to try to downplay what was going on so that it wouldn't harm whatever business ties the New York Times had at the time.
	Can you flesh that out a little bit for people who may not know of that historical scandal?
	Yeah, well, I think with the Times, you know, it's hard to know where the line...
	Was between the publishers of the paper, the ownership of the paper, making decisions, and the editors and reporters on the ground.
	So the Berlin Olympics in 1936, again, another propaganda effort by the Nazis.
	This was kind of their centerpiece, much like the recent Beijing Olympics.
	Very same thing.
	And, of course, there was a genocide either being perpetrated in the one case or about to be perpetrated in the Nazis' case.
	As context for this.
	But the Times basically trumpeted these Nazi Olympics as, not basically, literally, as the greatest sporting event of all time.
	That was their big story about the Nazi Olympics.
	And at the time, it's not like this is hindsight and having the benefit of being able to look retrospectively.
	At the time, other news organizations and other lobbying groups were trying to...
	Get America to boycott those games because they understood how morally corrupt it was to participate in a Nazi propaganda spectacle.
	The Washington Post, for example, condemned the games.
	They saw through it for what it was as, again, Nazi propaganda.
	The New York Times comes out saying the only thing we might regret here is that goose-stepping is probably not conducive to the development of Nimble, lithe, athletic bodies.
	That's what they said.
	When they wrote articles about the beautiful flag-bedecked streets of Berlin, they never mentioned that those flags were swastikas.
	So you have this clear corruption in the reporting.
	Now, does it come from the publisher saying, oh, I want you to handle this with kid gloves because we've got some business interests?
	Or does it come from the fact that the Berlin Bureau is being run by a Nazi sympathizer or collaborator, however you want to call them, and the paper's publisher is just kind of willing to let it happen because, again, they got great sources.
	They got great scoops.
	The Nazi brass really liked them.
	Why stop it if it's good for business, even if it's bad for your people?
	And that's the decision that seems like they made.
	I think in...
	The case of Walter Durante is the most infamous case of malfeasance that we have today, at least the most high-profile one.
	That was much more directly tied to American business interests.
	We can go into that.
	Yeah, let's get that, because that'll be the good segue.
	We'll do the Walter Durante and then go, because it sounds like they've always been infiltrated by some form of corruption, whether or not it's business or foreign interests, and then becomes the government itself.
	Durante, this is the Ukrainian famine.
	I always get the Holodomor or the Homolodomor.
	It's L-M-L.
	The Holodomor, the Ukrainian Holocaust, as many have called it.
	And there's still debate to this day.
	I say debate, depending on who you discuss with, as to whether or not it was genocide, whether or not it was just global famine, whether or not it was famine that affected other parts of the world as well.
	People tend to lose track in the Holocaust that there were other ethnic groups as well that were the object of the genocide.
	But there's some analogies that can be drawn there.
	But what was the Durante scandal for those who may not know about it?
	Walter Durante was the New York Times' Russia correspondent.
	And that kind of downplays his role, though.
	He was arguably the most famous journalist in America, possibly the world at the time.
	He was a celebrity.
	The New York Times would cover him.
	As the subject of stories, he would go and give a talk or release a book and he would get a story.
	He was a star.
	He, in 1931-32, when it became clear that there was a famine that was unfolding across Ukraine, the New York Times, via Walter Durante, came out saying there was no famine.
	They denied that it would happen.
	They denied the reporting of other journalists who said that there was.
	And the background to this is that Stalin had come into power, was looking to consolidate power.
	He was targeting these peasants that lived on sort of collective farms, that they had partial ownership of the farm, and they did well.
	They were thriving, and that was sort of antithetical to Soviet ideology.
	You were supposed to be proletariat.
	You were supposed to be having ownership of nothing.
	And he wanted them to disband these collective farms, and they refused.
	And he initiated this campaign of starvation.
	It killed...
	The estimates vary.
	I've heard between 5 to 10 million at the top end.
	And this was...
	Yeah, you could call it genocide.
	You could call it a Holocaust.
	It's in the realm.
	Was it actually that?
	You know, I guess it depends what your criteria are, but it killed 5 to 10 million people.
	That's kind of the baseline fact.
	And the New York Times denied it.
	The story goes, the official story goes, that Walter Durante took it upon himself to deny this famine.
	Why?
	Why would he do that?
	Nobody ever asks that question talking about Walter Durante.
	Durante was a very ambitious journalist, very eager for self-aggrandizement.
	And forgetting great stories.
	That there is no famine in Ukraine is not a story.
	It's nothing.
	It's a dying fall.
	That there is a huge million-person murdering, killing, famine in Ukraine is an incredible story.
	It's a tragic story.
	But for a journalist, it's huge.
	Why would an ambitious journalist Say no to that story when he knew it was true.
	We know that he knew it was true.
	He told other journalists who went on record saying, oh yeah, Durante told us he knew that it was going on and he lied.
	Why would he do that?
	Doesn't make any sense.
	The actual story is that the New York Times was part of a sort of this network of Huge, powerful business interests in America.
	This is the JP Morgans, the railroad people, banks, and they are the media piece of it.
	And we know how that works today.
	We see it in front of our eyes.
	Corporate media works with other parts of corporate America or global corporations, and they work hand in hand and they have similar interests, especially when you're a dynasty like the New York Times was and is.
	This group of business interests, business concerns, is looking to open up the Russian market, which had been shut to American business after the revolution.
	There was no longer diplomatic relations between Russia and the United States.
	The United States had not recognized the Soviets as the legitimate government of Russia at that point.
	And this group of American business interests, including the New York Times, was pushing for that to happen.
	FDR was governor.
	He was running for president.
	It was becoming clear that he had a very good shot of getting into that position.
	Walter Durante himself went to go see Franklin Delano Roosevelt, specifically to advise him to recognize the Soviet government.
	When he becomes president, that's exactly what he does.
	And there's a gala event at the Waldorf Astoria with all of these people.
	I have a list of the attendees, and it is the banks.
	The railroads, the sons of presidents, the electric company people, Thomas Edison's son is there, Theodore Roosevelt's son is there, some of the Getty clan are there.
	They give a standing ovation to one man, and that is Walter Durante.
	Because everybody in that room knew that FDR could not have pushed through recognition of the Soviet regime as the legitimate government of Russia if that same regime had just murdered 5 million of its own people.
	And if that had been known.
	But when you have the New York Times saying it didn't happen, you have plausible deniability.
	You have the ability to say, well, the New York Times is saying it didn't happen.
	It's not clear.
	Maybe it happened, maybe it didn't.
	Let's give them the benefit of the doubt, see what happens.
	Let's recognize these people, move forward, open up the markets.
	And that's why Durante got that standing ovation that night, the only person in that room to get that standing ovation, despite the fact that the ambassadors of both of the new ambassadors of both of those countries were.
	Present.
	And that is that story about money leading media.
	In this case, tragic.
	But the real interesting point here is that the cover-up, the narrative, the super narrative persists until this day.
	In 2003 or 4 or 5, somewhere around there, Ukrainian Americans came to the New York Times saying, give back the Pulitzer.
	I didn't mention that.
	He won a Pulitzer for his inaccurate reporting on...
	The denial of the Ukrainian famine.
	That's right.
	And these Ukrainian Americans come and say, give it back.
	We know this is a lie.
	How can you keep that pulitzer?
	They hire a historian as a consultant to decide what they should do.
	The historian goes away, does whatever he does, comes back and says, yeah, give it back.
	They say no.
	They refuse.
	They refuse to give it back.
	The answer, the response they provide is that, listen, you know, this was a broad swath of history, and it was just one guy, and he was slovenly, in the words of the New York Times publisher, and, you know, that doesn't reflect on us.
	That's the law.
	Yeah, we did a bad job back then.
	Now, the question that I have, you know, having lived through the present and these awards and knowing how they work, and they are, you know, giving Albert Bourla an award for Albert Brewer just got two awards.
	They give themselves awards so they can then hold themselves on pedestals to say how good they are.
	Do you know if the Pulitzer Prize was as corrupt back then or partisan as it is now?
	Was it a sham back in the day or did it actually have legitimacy at one point in time?
	It's a mixed bag, but yes, you know, they gave it to Durante.
	And those Berlin Bureau reporters that I mentioned praising the Nazi Olympics, two of the members of that bureau got Pulitzers for their reporting on Nazi Germany.
	These are the guys praising the Nazis for their propaganda spectacle.
	And, you know, I actually did an article for Unheard about About corruption of the Pulitzer Prize.
	Because in my book alone, I think I identified something like, between seven or nine or something or other, Pulitzers that are just absolutely ill-gotten.
	Like, absolutely, there's just not even a shred of a doubt that they ought to be given back.
	They're wrong.
	And that was just the New York Times.
	And that's over the period of 100 years.
	So, yeah, what is the Pulitzer?
	The Pulitzer is a stamp of approval.
	It's a seal of approval.
	It's part of the ecosystem.
	The New York Times is the center of that ecosystem.
	The New York Times has more Pulitzer Prizes than any other newspaper in America.
	They have almost double the next biggest contender, which is the Washington Post.
	It's not coincidence.
	It is part of an ecosystem that is designed to apportion gifts to the loyal, to those who express their fealty, to the edifice of...
	Corporate, centralized journalism, and it functions very well in that regard.
	That is not to say that a lot of those prizes are not deserved.
	They are.
	There's a lot of incredible reporting that gets done, and those prizes are, in many cases, richly deserved.
	And that's why, you know, I try to be clear that it's never one thing, you know?
	It's always a mix of things, and it's just like in Nazi Germany, the New York Times is reporting in this corrupt manner, and the Washington Post is not.
	And that is the case again and again and again.
	So I think it's important to look for, to really try to pinpoint where and why the corruption lies in the media and not to kind of paint the whole media with one brush.
	That was back when the Washington Post and the New York Times were not in lockstep with all of the other mainstream media as they are or seem to be currently.
	Durante, okay, known at the time, known thereafter, it was not a secret.
	Somehow the New York Times maintains its air of legitimacy, maintains its credibility.
	A one-off.
	Durante was a broken arrow.
	Rogue journalist.
	We go through World War II and the reporting or absence thereof, despite what some people might think would have been a bias or a bias the other way around.
	Infiltration.
	And it goes from political infiltration, or I should say foreign infiltration, When does it get into intelligence infiltration from American intelligence into the New York Times?
	I think you talked about Mockingbird.
	You had to have talked about Mockingbird.
	Did you talk about Mockingbird in the book?
	No, I didn't get into Operation Mockingbird.
	I wanted to keep this to these historical incidents of the New York Times misreporting changing history kind of for its own reasons, right?
	Not for...
	The CIA's reasons.
	A friend of mine has got a book coming out that really focuses a bit more on Mockingbird.
	But what I did cover, and this is in the same period, is the New York Times collaborated in the 1940s with the War Department, as it was called, to cover up the fact that there was radiation poisoning as a result of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
	And that was, you know, maybe there were instances before that.
	But what happened here was that the New York Times had this incredibly brilliant science writer named William Lawrence.
	And he...
	I might be getting the name wrong there.
	Anyways, the reporter basically gets...
	He's doing this, like, really just...
	Exciting, groundbreaking reporting on all the advances being made in particle physics.
	The scientists at the time were starting to slam particles into each other and break the atomic bonds of atoms and create incredible amounts of energy.
	He was right on top of it.
	He was so advanced in his reporting that he was ahead of the government.
	They had to tell him to stop reporting on some of it when they got wind of it because he was essentially leaking scientific secrets to the world.
	And then one day, the reporting on the physics just stops.
	And he's reporting about, like, aspirin and vitamin C and cancer or whatever.
	The next time the guy reappears, he is writing from the bombing armada that drops the bomb on Nagasaki.
	He's the only journalist, the only civilian on those planes, watching the bomb being dropped, watching the explosion, describing it in great detail.
	He also, turns out, had gotten extreme insider access to the Manhattan Project.
	He was invited into some of these secret facilities.
	He was watching test bombings being done.
	And the reason he got this incredible access is because he made an agreement.
	He and the New York Times made an agreement with the Department of War that they would cooperate to deny that there was radiation poisoning.
	As a result of the bombs.
	This is an interesting thing.
	We view these events in retrospect with the knowledge that we take for granted today, but this was absolutely new technology at the time that civilians are looking at conventional weapons and they think they go boom and that's it.
	And so after they go boom and they kill however many people instantaneously, it became of the utmost importance to downplay the fallout, pun intended, Of the nuclear fallout, for reasons which you'll make clear in a second, but that was the idea.
	People thought the boom and that's it, not knowing of the lingering horrors that went on for months because the technology, the science was new.
	And so you'll answer the question, but then what was the need to downplay that, to undermine that, to keep it from the collective consciousness of the people?
	That's exactly right.
	And that was the message the government was pumping out.
	This is just a conventional bomb, just way bigger.
	Nothing to see here.
	Why does that matter?
	Because the War Department had a huge political military interest in continuing to do that research, continuing to experiment and develop new types of nuclear weapons, bigger and badder.
	And, you know, it's one thing to be like, all right, they dropped a bomb and Okay, fine.
	If you know as an American citizen that they drop the bomb and if the wind is blowing the wrong way, this thing can kill you and everyone you know because the fallout could reach your shores.
	Or that it's killing not just the, you know, the whatever number, you know, 100,000 people that are killed in Japan on immediate impact, but hundreds of thousands of more.
	More people, innocent civilians.
	It is mutilating them.
	It is causing cancers in them.
	It is causing birth defects in them because of this horrid, horrid technology that's been unleashed upon mankind.
	You might want to stop that.
	You might want, as an American citizen, to be like, hold on and talk to your congressman to say, we need a little more oversight here.
	And that's exactly what the War Department did not want and the U.S. government probably as a whole.
	They wanted to plow ahead.
	This is, of course, in the middle of the Cold War.
	They wanted to continue doing this kind of path-breaking research.
	They wanted free reign.
	They did not want accountability.
	And that would have been very much like the Durante situation.
	You attach a certain quality to the event, and it changes the complexion of the event entirely.
	If America recognizes the Soviets and their socialists or communists, okay, it doesn't sound great, but it's not that terrible.
	If those communists just ruthlessly murdered five million of their own people, imagine what they're going to do to us.
	Same thing here.
	The American government and the military drops a bomb that kills a lot of people.
	It's not good, but we were fighting war.
	They drop a bomb that kills people and continues to kill people for weeks and months and years and even decades on end.
	And it could kill us or could be used against us to do the same to us.
	That changes this entirely.
	And that's why there was this overweening interest.
	And it was very skillfully crafted, this effort.
	Very, very deft.
	The way they pulled it off.
	The way they identified the leading science writer in America at the time.
	The way that they co-opted him.
	Just the skill of it all.
	And the effectiveness.
	And they did go on to do some very terrible...
	Hydrogen bomb tests not that long after.
	In the Marshall Islands, they dropped bombs, hydrogen bombs on Marshall Islands.
	They left islanders on some of those islands by mistake.
	And same thing happened, of course, like what you knew would happen.
	So if that had been in the consciousness earlier, there could have been much more oversight.
	There could have been, you know, as you pointed out, nobody knew.
	It's not even that it was a new technology.
	Nobody even knew this was being developed until after the bomb was dropped.
	Nobody even knew that there was a thing that could be done in this kind, in this manner, until it was done.
	So if you have the full information on the ground at that time, you say, "We need to hit the brakes hard, okay?
	We used this thing once.
	It was an emergency situation.
	Brakes right now.
	Oversight." Just rein it in before we do anything worse.
	I would even imagine from a military perspective, you might have soldiers who say, I don't want to be in the vicinity of these testings.
	What we thought was just a spectacle that we could watch this big cloud go up is going to kill all of us in five to ten years.
	It might have had an undermining effect on the military itself.
	And when does that scandal, when does the downplaying of those government atrocities get known?
	It was something that I think that unfolded.
	It took, you know, many decades.
	And it was a collaborative effort where, you know, you're comparing the reporting done by the New York Times on this, which again, denying radiation sickness.
	Not that they're saying we don't know that there is.
	They're saying we know that there is not, compared to people on the ground at the time saying, We're talking to doctors here who are telling us people are still dying, that we're not injured by the bombs, physically, directly.
	So you have that as the base layer.
	You have Amy Goodman, who Democracy...
	I forget the radio, the channel that they have.
	She was sort of instrumental in exposing this.
	And I actually think that...
	You know, the way that I told the story, the way that I kind of strung it all together makes it a bit novel because you have to look at the whole arc of it.
	You have to look at the whole arc of where this originated, who the reporter was.
	That's a very important piece of it.
	And what was going on in that context.
	So I actually think we haven't fully gotten to the bottom of that.
	And it's one of these things that, you know, it's not Durante.
	Durante in this weird way kind of sucks all the...
	Oxygen out of the room when it comes to journalistic malfeasance.
	He's like the symbol.
	He's our golden calf for malfeasance.
	And we're just going to stick with that one.
	And it kind of precludes going back and looking at some of the other stuff in a real deep manner.
	But that is one I think that we probably could use more study.
	No, it's an amazing thing.
	I'm looking at the chat in Locals and everyone, you know, they're saying safe and effective atomic bombs.
	Everybody who listens to this book or reads it is going to contextualize it.
	For the last three years, I mean, a lot of us might contextualize it from 2016 to 2020, Russiagate, all of the other fake stories that have been promoted by mainstream media, but most of us are more focused on the last two years, where everything that we've seen throughout the history of the New York Times can apply mutatis be tandis to current times.
	And I guess you're not going to explain the whole book.
	There's a couple about the Intifada, the absolute...
	Distorted fake story about the child that was allegedly caught in the crossfire between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers.
	Everybody can go look that up.
	His name was Mohammed...
	So you could even look on Wikipedia.
	That's one where now the mainstream media has had to go back and correct.
	So first of all, was this the first book that you had written?
	Actually, it was, yeah.
	It was the first book I wrote.
	So do you have a plan to do a follow-up?
	Do you have a plan of another book on the horizon?
	I kind of want to do a bit of a follow-up on, like, maybe a short follow-up on New York Times and China because, again, it didn't make it into the book because, for whatever reason, I hadn't gotten there in the book.
	But I think the bigger book for me and the book that I'm passionate about right now is The media narratives that were built around COVID.
	I think this is foundational, transformational.
	The media being co-opted into government power structures in a very direct manner, trying to elucidate exactly what happened, how and why.
	I think this was systemic failure of the American news.
	The fourth estate we talk about, I'm not sure that exists anymore as it was conceived to exist.
	And I think that this was probably the, you know, it definitely went out with a bang and not a whimper.
	Hold on, I just had a thought.
	It was, it'll come back in a second, but you had difficulty in getting the book published.
	Yeah.
	Okay, so go to the, what I was going to say.
	We'll come back to it.
	It's about the New York Times now just being an arm of the government.
	Well, the trouble with the book getting published, it's what I said about the ecosystem, right?
	The New York Times does not stand on its own, nor does the media as an institution.
	It's not a pillar.
	It's a kind of interwoven network of power bases that forms this kind of superstructure.
	Part of that structure is publishing.
	It's book publishing.
	This is publishing of news and information, and book publishing is very much part of that.
	You have people getting great book deals or Maggie Haberman and big New York Times reporters getting these gigantic deals.
	But the single most powerful tool in all of book publishing, marketing tool, is the New York Times bestseller.
	I mean, to say that you're a number one New York Times bestseller, it doesn't, you know, to say that you're the number one Wall Street Journal bestseller, it's great, but you don't have the same, it doesn't have the same rank to it, because the Times bestseller list is so powerful, and the Times, at that part, in that moment in history, in early 2000s when I wrote the book, the book review was equally as powerful.
	If you got a good book review in the New York Times, you got it made, and if you didn't, you're screwed.
	Editors and agents, it's not like they don't know that.
	They know that, and they're looking out for their business interests, and that's okay.
	But many of them told me that directly.
	And I'm talking about the very top people in those positions, in those seats.
	Told me in email and writing, some of them said it.
	Which I actually commend them for being honest, you know, because it's not that easy to do sometimes.
	But that's what it was.
	To go against the New York Times to favor this kind of little nobody in doing his thing in Israel when you're going to alienate the most powerful newspaper in the country.
	It's not a great business decision, I've got to admit, to do that.
	And they didn't.
	So I put that book away, put it in a drawer, proverbially, and waited it out.
	And then as things were starting to erupt at the New York Times around 2000, 20, so something like that, 21. Barry Weiss left the New York Times claiming she'd basically been hounded out.
	She's a left of center reporter, journalist, very, very talented woman, and hounded out of the New York Times by the hard left.
	The Tom Cotton thing.
	Where the New York Times erupts into the mutiny because they dared to publish an op-ed by a sitting U.S. Senator, who is a Harvard Law graduate, who was also an officer in the United States military, erupts into outrage where, only a few months before, they had published an op-ed by the literal Taliban, by the most disgusting figure in the global terror movement, not a peep from these people.
	And then, of course, the Trump stuff.
	The Trump stuff was just non-stop every day, every edition, every section.
	And that's why I always say there's a tell here.
	When you know there's a narrative being built, when you see that kind of...
	Endless repetition.
	Endless.
	They cannot forget about it.
	They cannot let it go for one moment.
	They cannot keep it out of the food section.
	They cannot keep it out of the interior design section.
	It's everywhere.
	That's a narrative.
	That is the surest sign that a narrative is being built.
	And it got under my skin.
	It's not because I was pro-Trump, which I was not pro-Trump.
	It's because I saw the lie being perpetuated in front of my eyes without substantiation.
	And when we think back to this question of confirmation and substantiation, it is everything in journalism.
	Ken Oletta is the New Yorker, famous New Yorker media writer.
	Very, very good guy, an incredible journalist.
	He had been tipped off to the Harvey Weinstein story many, many years ago.
	But at the end of the day, the key source would not go on the record.
	She would not give the story to him and let him publish it.
	And he could not run what would have been for him a career-making story and an incredible story in the fight against this kind of injustice because he didn't have substantiation.
	The New York Times, along with the rest of the media, of course, with the Trump stuff, it was just, we got this story, run it.
	We got this story, run it.
	Some 18-year-old kid has got this tip about Papadopoulos, run it.
	Doesn't matter.
	And there was never accountability.
	There was never any recourse to say, hold on, this is the one we got wrong, that's the one we got wrong.
	And some of the stuff I covered, the Russia bounty stuff, I looked into that one.
	The fact that this notion that Russians were putting bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan, and Trump knew, of course.
	It's not a story if you don't include that caveat.
	And Trump knew.
	That's the only thing that made it a story for them.
	They published that again and again and again and again in op-eds, in news articles, in mentions here and podcasts there, everywhere.
	And again, that's where the narrative is being built.
	Turns out that was not true.
	It was never true.
	No substantiation.
	No independent corroboration.
	They gave up on the core mechanisms of journalism in order to go after their political enemy.
	And again, it's not because I'm pro-Trump.
	And I'm not.
	It's because they abused the mechanisms of journalism.
	They abused public trust.
	And then they blame the public.
	They blame the public.
	And it's not even politically they blame it.
	They blame us by saying...
	Trust in media is at an all-time low.
	And I think to myself, no, it's not.
	Media reliability is at an all-time low.
	And it's a difference.
	Don't put the onus on us that we don't believe you.
	Put the onus on yourself that what you're telling us is not credible.
	This is why I think there was such a massive failure with Trump that bled straight into the COVID stuff.
	The question of where this pandemic came from, whenever you ask people, In the media, well, why did you tell everyone that the idea that it came from a lab was a conspiracy theory?
	They'll always say, well, it was a reaction to Trump.
	And I say, well, that's not a response, of course.
	And it's not true.
	In fact, I actually researched that.
	They came out with their anti-lab leak as a conspiracy theory at a time when Trump was still praising China's response to the pandemic.
	So they just made it up.
	Pre-Trump's position on that topic.
	So, anyways, this is where I think the reckoning has already taken place.
	We're in the middle of that reckoning with the media.
	I'm trying to find the tweet from the journalist who said it was not only a bad theory, but it had racist roots.
	It was a poor woman.
	And, you know, so.
	Someone in the chat asked your opinion on the New York Times ethics, and I think you just answered that quite thoroughly.
	And I'm going to snip that segment right there.
	It's a very interesting way.
	It's an astute way of putting it.
	It's not trust in the media that's at an all-time low.
	It's reliability of the media.
	The question was this, and you reminded me, this might make for a good sequel, is Mockingbird, the infiltration of government agents.
	into media to manipulate public opinion.
	And then we see exactly what happened over the last, the COVID era, which is...
	I mean, indoctrination is not an understatement, but we went from hating big pharma to praising big pharma, hating big government to praising big government, hating China to emulating China.
	A broad question, where do you see things going?
	What do you see as now being the future of this media?
	Do they wither up and die, or do they fight back with a vengeance?
	I think both.
	Like a wounded animal, it's when they're most dangerous.
	And that's kind of what we're seeing today, is that on my substack, I wrote a post, by far, not even a question, by far my most popular post, where I called it the rise of the kneecap media.
	Because what it is, is the weaponization of media for targeted political aims.
	And of course, that's always been there to a degree.
	But where it's just the norm is a complete departure from what we have known in American media.
	I think the media will kind of close ranks, continue to close ranks as it's doing.
	I think it will purge dissent.
	I think it will, you know, the whole thing with Sam Benkman-Fried, And the collapse of crypto exchange, FTX, great example, right?
	The New York Times, they built this character into, they made this myth for two years.
	For two years, they didn't ask, hey, what about your board?
	Do you have a board?
	You're a $30 billion company.
	Where's your board?
	They didn't ask the question.
	They didn't ask about liquidity and they didn't ask about collateral.
	They didn't ask the basic questions.
	Because they had a great story, because this guy was giving so much money to the media, and because he was donating $40 million to the Democratic Party in the last election cycle, and pledged a billion dollars going forward.
	It's $40 million if you don't count.
	However, they got $140 million into Mind the Gap, his mother's get-out-and-vote fundraiser, and not including what he gave in 2020, but...
	Sick amount of money.
	What's a few hundred million dollars?
	Right.
	So what do you have there?
	Now the media is involved in election funding.
	They are no longer trying to maintain the veneer of impartiality before they did.
	And that's at least a check, right?
	You have to check your behavior so you can't go too far because you're going to look like you're in the tank.
	That, I think, is largely gone.
	Not in all cases.
	There are outliers, but I think in most cases with corporate media.
	And we have to understand that the New York Times, whatever you might want to say, it and the Washington Post and most other newspapers were generally independently owned.
	That is not the case today.
	Most news organizations are owned by the Viacoms of the world or the AT&T's of the world or the Disney's of the world.
	Massive corporate.
	Overlords that determine what goes on there and that make these people behold and make these news organizations behold into a share price, to a corporate share price.
	And that means to a corporate interest that's tied to government.
	Because at that level, when you've got companies that are that big, they have to deal with government on some level.
	They have to keep the government happy.
	They have to keep the people in power happy so that they can pursue.
	They're gigantic corporate agenda in the many directions that it extends.
	And from a corporate point of view, that makes sense and it's fine.
	But from a media standpoint, it's not.
	So I do think we are seeing this kind of hardening of media's resolve to pursue those kinds of agendas.
	But very, very clearly, we are also seeing the rise of what I've called This is right now.
	We are engaging in kind of media, news media that is decentralized.
	We are not part of a corporate structure in this conversation.
	We're not beholden.
	There's not a producer that's speaking in my ear telling me, don't say this or don't say that or do say this or do say that.
	And this is proliferating.
	Back to the Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX, the way that story was broken was by decentralized media.
	It was two or three.
	Twitter accounts and Coindesk that broke a story in about two days that the media had failed to investigate for two years.
	This is, again, part of the turning point.
	So the media will get smaller.
	It will be more powerful within its own domain, but less powerful in a broader sense.
	And at the same time, we have a counterbalancing power structure, which is decentralized media, which is Rumble, which is Locals, which is Substack, which is Twitter, which is many other things.
	Are you on Locals now that you mention it?
	I'm not.
	Okay, well, we might have to remedy that.
	But either way, you'll give me all your links and I'll pin them.
	I was just looking at it because we always hear the term the fourth estate, and I didn't actually realize what the three estates were.
	Derivation of the fourth estate, traditional concept of the estate of the government is clergy, nobility, commoners.
	Is that the right?
	And the fourth estate was the media.
	Are we not living in what is becoming actual, by the textbook definition, fascism, where the independent media is now just an extension of the government?
	I think we're not there.
	I think we are still, I mean, there are moments where that certainly, certainly.
	Looks that way.
	And again, that's another thing I've written about in Substack a lot, which is that I call it the blob.
	It's this agglomeration.
	It's government, media, and big corporate brands.
	They take a message and they...
	Pump it out together.
	The government does the messaging, the media puts it out there, and then it's just, it leached into the cultural groundwater through the big brands, through the Nikes and the Coca-Cola and these billion dollar advertising campaigns.
	And the media is sort of the pipeline between government and brand.
	So I do think there are the risks of what you're describing present.
	I think when you have the sitting press secretary of the president of the United States, Being hired while she's still in office by a corporate news outlet and saying okay.
	And nobody erupting into outrage over that.
	That is a huge red flag.
	I think when you have government and media in lockstep on COVID messaging, and the media's response is not to challenge the government, but to serve as its sort of press shop.
	Then yes, I think you have something.
	COVID would be, I think, the closest case where that would be true, where we have essentially the government taking actions of questionable, at best, legality.
	To me, I'm not a lawyer, but it seemed like locking people in their homes in a democracy is not that.
	It depends which judge you ask, Ashley.
	I guess so, right?
	But the media is not saying, again, not popping the brakes and saying...
	Hold on one second.
	Let's just investigate whether this is the right thing or not.
	Let's investigate the money.
	Let's investigate the power.
	Where is the power coming from?
	Who is making this decision and why?
	Instead, what we had in the United States was the deification of Anthony Fauci.
	Anthony Fauci, I wrote a piece for Unheard as well.
	Anthony Fauci is not a public health expert.
	He is not.
	He is, in fact, the Top of America's biodefense research command structure.
	That's his job.
	That's why he's so powerful.
	If there is a...
	Come on.
	There's been no deification.
	They have Anthony Fauci bobbleheads.
	Let me get the pillows after this.
	Sorry, I had to bring that up while you mentioned it.
	That's okay.
	I'm surprised they don't sound like flakes of his hair or something, which might be coming.
	Put a drop of his blood in a pair of running shoes like they did with...
	Oh, geez.
	What was his name?
	Oh, Lil Nas.
	Put a little Fauci blood in your shoes.
	Okay, sorry.
	So Fauci is the greatest example of all of this.
	Fauci has covered up, has obfuscated, has lied to Congress, and the media has, in response, been his greatest cheerleader.
	And that is where, yes, you're veering into something that makes me deeply uncomfortable.
	All right, amazing.
	Now the question is this also, what do you talk about on your Substack?
	I mean, I know, but for those who don't know, what's the subject matter?
	I talk a lot about these issues, about media and where the media, it's called the burning telegraph.
	So the telegraph is the traditional conception of this kind of what delivers the news and it's burning, it's on fire.
	There's a huge problem.
	I talk about...
	You know, some of the stuff I've gone into recently with Kanye and those kinds of things.
	There's a podcast there as well, which is the flip side.
	It's called The Burning Castle, and that's a biblical reference.
	It's about taking personal responsibility through creative freedom.
	Achieving creative freedom as a way to not only express one's creativity, but to make the world actually a better place.
	So if you can find a way to be independent, creatively independently, it gives you an enormous amount of personal power.
	You can change the world for the better, but you can't do it when you're under someone's thumb.
	So I talk to a lot of people, different people, chefs, artists, designers, writers, novelists, what have you, people from business, science.
	But we always try to filter through that lens of creative freedom.
	What was the name of your friend's book on Project Mockingbird?
	That book is called Red, White, and Blind, and I believe it's out next month.
	Okay, excellent.
	I'll get that link out as well.
	Well, now that you mention it, I wasn't going to ask you, but I'm too curious now.
	What is your take on Ye?
	I'll ask you this.
	I do not often say as a whatever.
	I sometimes say as a lawyer because experience is relevant to...
	As a plumber, I'm going to listen to what the dude's talking about if it's about what's wrong with my sink.
	Law, lawyer, relevant.
	I very rarely find ethnic identity issues as relevant to discussion.
	They neither make one's position better or worse.
	So as a Jew, does it make what follows any more or less credible?
	And I don't know your level of practice, and it's none of my business.
	What is your take on Ye?
	Do you feel uncomfortable?
	Do you feel less safe in a world where Ye's can say the things Ye has been saying?
	Do you think it's a manic episode that is being exploited by people around him?
	Do you think the response is exaggerated, justified?
	What are your thoughts?
	I did a substack on Ye as well because I'm not a hip-hop fan.
	I don't like hip-hop that much, except for him.
	He's like, I can listen to him literally every day.
	I think he's a freaking genius.
	I think his fashion is incredible.
	I think he did things that nobody ever thought of doing and had the balls to do this stuff.
	And he would talk about it.
	And when he would talk about it, he would sound kind of crazy.
	And then he would do it and you're blown away.
	That's how I see Ye generally.
	In terms of his comments about Jews, I think...
	It can be one at the same time that, yes, he seems to be mentally unwell.
	And he seems to be an anti-Semite.
	I think when I look at what he's talking about, I personally look at it and see Louis Farrakhan.
	That's the message.
	That's the Farrakhan message.
	Jews controlling and Jews having this vendetta against Black people for some reason, which is the opposite from the truth.
	Should he have been shut down by Twitter?
	I'm not sure.
	I don't think he should be suspended.
	I did an article for The Spectator last month about Twitter, the future of Twitter.
	And for it, I spoke with the founder and CEO of Minds.com, which is a decentralized social network, Bill Ottman.
	Bill Ottman works with Daryl Davis, who is a black man who has De-radicalized more than 200 members of the KKK by talking to them.
	What Bill told me is that once you kick someone off the platform, they don't cease to exist.
	They go somewhere else and they do the same thing in a place that you can no longer help them.
	You can no longer intervene in a way that Daryl Davis would, which is by engaging and talking.
	And I think there's a profound truth to that.
	And what Bill said is that...
	Facebook, Twitter, and co, they know that.
	They know that that's true.
	They know that deplatforming people makes radicalization worse.
	They've done the research.
	It's not like they didn't think about it.
	But they also know where their legal liabilities lie, and they know where their business interests lie.
	So my take on it is that Kanye needs help.
	Kanye's needed help for a long time.
	I watched the brilliant Netflix documentary, which I found so incredibly moving.
	And inspiring as well.
	But by the third episode where he's meeting with Mike Novogratz and speaking about essentially nonsense, I've heard friends of mine who suffer from bipolar disease disorder who sounded exactly the same way as Kanye.
	And it's sad to see someone suffering in that way.
	And he's in this insane world of celebrity media stuff I used to be involved in when I worked in PR for a while.
	That world, those people will exploit you.
	And it's not the Jews who will do it.
	It's everyone who will do it for their own reason.
	It's Balenciaga who will do it and Adidas when it suits them.
	They don't care.
	They are corporate entities that are looking at their share price and that's why they exploit people.
	But I also think that when you set yourself up as a victim of everyone and everything, you're not doing yourself any good and you're not doing the world any good.
	To say, I've been victimized even though I'm one of the most famous Rich people in the history of the world who can do anything that he wants, anything today, tomorrow.
	He could do an album, another line.
	He has more power, more personal freedom than 99.9999% of humanity have ever had.
	So I think the cry of victim is false and disingenuous.
	I'm always reluctant when someone has come out to talk about their mental issues.
	Everyone has to be reluctant to then immediately disregard any Behavior that they find bizarre as blaming it on the mental illness because that deters anybody from ever being public about it.
	Forget what he said.
	I said it could have been misinterpreted at the beginning, whether or not he's using it for some form of marketing now, whether or not certain members of his entourage are.
	When he went to Trump...
	And says to Trump, do you want to be my running mate?
	That's the type of delusions of grandeur that I would associate with a bona fide, I'm higher than the world right now in this manic state of being, that I would say would be probably a symptom that most professionals would take note of.
	To go to Trump and ask him to be your running mate, it's not stupid, it's not catchy, it's not edgy, it's delusional in a, I would argue to say, maybe a clinical sense.
	As for the rest of it, You know, when you say, when someone comes out and criticizes a group and says Jews control the world, and then the world responds by banning him, closing bank accounts, cutting off contracts, well, like you say, first of all, they're not going to stop the beliefs.
	They're going to go somewhere else where it's going to be harder for you to hear it.
	And it's going to legitimize what they initially said by virtue of the response, even though JPMorgan Chase, CEO, not a Jew that I know of, who's the other one, Adidas CEO, not Jewish people, but then you're going to get, The people who believe it anyhow saying, everyone does it to placate who we have alleged is in control.
	And it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
	But I just feel like maybe my skin has gotten too thick.
	Nothing that Ye said I found made me uncomfortable as an individual, as a member of a group.
	Even listening to Nick Fuentes.
	Are you familiar with Nick Fuentes?
	I know who he is.
	Even listening to him, I've heard the arguments before.
	I can build the arguments.
	I can respond to them.
	It's a discussion.
	I just find that it's always very counterintuitive to say we're not having the discussion and you're being punished for even having said something, which I think Chappelle made a decent point.
	People make jokes about...
	And then when people perceive a double standard and then it actually is carried out in real life, it's only going to perpetuate those sentiments and not actually respond to them.
	Interesting.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	Well, you know, again, this is me as a Jewish person who's lived in Israel for many years.
	I take it as a given that Jews will face sort of unique sets of circumstances often.
	Persecution.
	That is our history.
	That is written into our blood.
	It is the story of my grandparents on both sides and their grandparents, and that's who we are.
	And I personally am at peace with that, and I know it's a reality.
	I know it's a reality that when I go to take my kid to a Jewish school or to a synagogue, there's going to be security outside that school.
	And if I look, drive past the non-Jewish school, There's not.
	Or this church?
	There's not.
	That's the reality.
	Decide what you will and that this is the personal freedom element.
	It's up to you.
	If you don't like how it is in that place, you do have a state that is Jewish, thank God, and you can live there or you can move.
	I kind of just take it in that regard.
	I think it's wrong and I think what Jordan Peterson came out...
	On a tweet, an incredible tweet the other day, it was yesterday maybe, "Jews are canaries in the social minds." It doesn't bode well for a society that has a lot of anti-Semitism bubbling to the surface.
	Generally, historically, talking about history rhyming, things don't go well when that starts to happen.
	It's an indicator that some balance is very, very off.
	When you target a tiny Tiny, minority.
	Tiny, infinitesimal in terms of population, global population.
	And attribute to them all the evils of all the world.
	There is something going wrong because it's just not possible that that's the case.
	And yes, there's over-representation of Jewish people in certain fields and industries.
	It still doesn't explain it.
	There's a rational, logical lapse.
	In that moment.
	And that's where things get.
	Jung has talked about that when you get to this point where these kinds of animus bubbles to the surface and he connects it to Jung, to religion.
	When there's a lack of religious faith, the vacuum is filled by chaos.
	And I think that's kind of where we're going.
	I personally think there should be security at schools and churches in general.
	We're living through a world now where there's unprecedented intolerance in a variety of areas.
	And I think some of it's been normalized.
	And when some intolerance is normalized, I would expect more intolerance in general.
	Ashley, this has been fantastic and fascinating.
	And we should do it again whenever...
	The FTX...
	Whitney Webb was on yesterday.
	She said she's working on something with FTX.
	That's going to be...
	The next thing to break down.
	Your book, The Great Lady Winked.
	Everybody should read it if you want to know the...
	They're not arguments.
	It's history.
	It's history that explains the present as it typically does.
	It's fantastic.
	We do this again?
	Yeah, anytime.
	Just give me a shout.
	Awesome.
	Now stick around.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes.
	Let me see if I didn't miss any questions in the chat.
	Let's see here.
	Yeah, someone said, the old gray lady, the old gray mare.
	I'm picturing that old man from The Simpsons now.
	Okay, so apparently Kanye, well, Ye is on Alex Jones and apparently it's been something of a spectacle, which...
	Oh my god, I can only imagine.
	That's what I feel about.
	I think everybody knows it's going to be a spectacle and there's very little actual...
	Maybe I'm being too mean.
	I'll wait to see Alex Jones.
	I don't think he would exploit Ye to bring him down, but there's been a lot of...
	There's something going on with Ye and the question is whether or not we be forgiving and understanding or judgmental and exacerbate whatever might be going on.
	Ashley, stick around.
	I'll put all of your links in there.
	Substack is what again?
	AshleyRinsberg.substack.
	And YouTube channel?
	Don't have one really that's active.
	I have one that's kind of dormant, but it's not a format that I've mastered yet.
	To say the least.
	Rumble and Locals.
	We'll work on that.
	We'll talk about that.
	Stick around.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes.
	Everyone in the chat, thank you very much.
	We'll be live tomorrow.
	I think Phil Damaris is going to be on.
	And that's it.
	See you all soon.

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