#1963 - Michael Shellenberger

Hello Michael. Hey Joe. thanks. good to see you again. thanks for having me back.

And I was like, let me finish this interview, I'm on, I'm over.

And yeah, it was incredible. You know, I'd never met Elon before, you know, I met him at the coffee station. Just make himself a cup of coffee. He had no idea who I was, and yeah, we just got into it.

It was, you know, I was sort of the least known of the big three journalists that were there. It was Barry Weiss and Matt Taibbi who was on, and they'd already started thinking about how to, kind of what to go after. And Matt had done a story on the Hunter Biden laptop already. And then we were starting to look at January 6th because Trump gets deplatformed on January 8th.

And so because I'm like, the junior member of that threesome, so to speak, they gave me January 7th. So the first thing we? One of the first things we did was just to look at how they made a decision to get to pull Trump off the platform. And it turned out that the 7th was an important day. Because that was when they started to rationalize this decision to deplatform Trump. Even though their own people inside had decided that he had not violated their terms of service, so they were sort of stuck making up a reason to deplatform him.

And that was an important theme was that they just kept changing the rules, basically to do what they wanted to do. And that was the same thing. On the Hunter Biden laptop, the New York Post story that they censored also had not violated their terms of service. So, I mean, look, it was crazy, I mean, it was, you know, people always ask questions about the about the files themselves.

But, you know, the experience was we would ask for these searches and we just get back huge amounts of data. It was lots of thousands and thousands of emails, thousands of internal messages on their Slack messaging system. And so, yeah, I mean, a lot of it was, you know, some of it was very boring because you have to just read tons and tons of stuff. But, you know, I think the big theme was we start by seeing a real, you know, super progressive. It's like, 99 percent of campaign contributions from Twitter staff are going to Democrats.

You know, the head of safety at Twitter is a guy named Yol Roth, who, you know, said There's actual Nazis in the White House when Trump came in. He's very progressive. But over time, we just kept finding like, this weird. Like, FBI wants us to do this, you know, there's these other government agencies, oh, you know this.

All these people used to work at the FBI, the C.I.A. shows up, Department of Homeland Security, and we're kind of like, what the hell is going on? And the story quickly shifted from us, sort of. And I think what Elon thought, which was that it was just very progressive people being biased in their content moderation and their censoring.

To there is a huge operation by U.S government officials, U.s government contractors and all of these super sketchy NGOs getting money from who knows where. Basically demanding that Twitter start censoring people. And at that moment, the story shifted for all of us.

And that was, I think, where Taibbi became particularly important. And sort of the lead because he had had so much experience on, sort of looking at how the U.

S government during the War on Terror had waged disinformation campaigns, propaganda campaigns. And it became clear to us, you know, over time that the U.S government had turned its propaganda and disinformation campaigns that had been waging abroad. It turned them against the American people.

And that was where you just sort of get chills up your spine and you were like, this is something seriously sinister is going on.

Oh, no, absolutely not. That's part of what was so terrifying is that it was all of the social media companies, including Wikipedia, by the way, which we don't talk enough about. But also all of the mainstream news organizations are all being organized.

So when does it start? You know it really? What you're looking at is the apparatus that was created by the War on terror over the last 20 years, starting after 9-11. Then there was a battle against ISIS because ISIS was successfully recruiting on social media, so there was sort of a counter-ISIS recruiting campaign that occurred.

Then you get the big event is Brexit 2016, Trump's election in 2016.

And the establishment just freaks out, absolutely freaks out. And there's a lot of different motivations here, so one of the motivations is just to blame Facebook, blame social media for Trump's victory. It was never true.

I don't really think anybody really believed it. There's just, you know, there's just for a variety of reasons we can talk about. There was never any good evidence that whatever Russians did, had much of any influence, any measurable influence on the outcome of the campaign. But they started to scapegoat the social media companies as a way to get control over them, and so then they started....

Then, in 2017, they set up.

Well, two things happened, or many things happened. The Department of Homeland Security just declares election infrastructure to be part of their mission of protecting election infrastructure. And that meant protecting the media environment, protecting.

Protect put that in quotes. It's creepy, it's patronizing, it's a power move.

So that's the first thing that happens. They create something called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within the Department of Homeland Security. To supposedly protect the media environment from foreign influence, they create something called the Foreign Influence Task Force with the FBI to basically start policing domestic speech. On these platforms, they start organizing all the social media companies to participate in these meetings. So you had Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, in here.

And he says to you, there's this critical moment where you ask about the Hunter Biden laptop, and he goes, Well, yeah, you know, in the summer of 2020, all these FBI guys come to us saying, there's going to be a hack and leak operation involving Hunter Biden. Which is super suspicious. Because, as everybody now knows, the FBI had Hunter Biden's laptop in December 2019. What freaked me out, and I was, I had, so, by the way, I was a victim of the Hunter Biden laptop disinformation. I thought that I voted for Biden.

I thought that it was a I thought that that laptop was Russian disinformation. I just bought the whole thing and this is from somebody who.

So for all the reasons that progressives bought that the laptop was fake, I bought that it was fake. So so then when you realize that it was real and that everything in that New York Post story in October 14, 2020, was was accurate. I started seeing stuff in the emails. The thing that really freaked me out was this thing that Aspen Institute a call. It's called a tabletop exercise.

And it was actually a Zoom call to role play how to deal with a Russian hack and leak around Hunter Biden. This is like in June of 2020, so this is like months before the New York. Before months before Rudy Giuliani gets that lap, the laptop, but before Rudy Giuliani gives the laptop to New York Post. Why in the hell is Aspen Institute holding a tabletop exercise to pre-bunk? Basically, they are training or brainwashing all these journalists.

I mean, it's CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, Wikimedia Foundation, the Wikipedia folks, the networks, all of the social media companies all coming together. To be like, okay, well, if something is, if something is leaked, then we should not cover it in the way that journalists have traditionally covered it. Meanwhile, Stanford University a few months earlier had put out a report saying reporters should no longer follow the Pentagon Papers principle. Well, the Pentagon Papers, of course, is this famous episode. It was Steven Spielberg made a whole movie about it. Where the Washington Post and New York Times published these internal Pentagon documents showing that the U.S government was losing the war in Vietnam, right?

This is Daniel Ellsberg, and he just releases it. He steals these documents, he breaks the law, steals these documents, gives them to the newspapers, the newspapers publish them. It's this kind of incredible moment in American journalism where we are like.

The First Amendment gives these newspapers the right to publish hacked, so-called hacked but leaked information. And here you have Stanford University, Aspen Institute, saying, Oh, no, no, no, that's all. We should stop doing that. Journalists should no longer write about leaked information that way. Instead we should focus on the person who leaked it.

So it really sent chills on my spine. It was the creepiest thing I'd ever seen. And this is, of course, you got to remember. Aspen Institute is funded by the U.S government.

Stanford is funded by the U.

S government. So this is people go, oh, well, you're just one of the responses we've got. Oh, you're just talking about content moderation by private companies. No, we're talking about U.S.

Government-funded organizations.

If the U.

S government is censoring information. That's obviously a violation of the First Amendment, but if the U.S government is funding somebody else to censor information, that's also a violation of the First Amendment. You can't.

Indirectly, it's still a violation if you're funding somebody to demand censorship. So it was quite a steeplechase. But there's a lot here, I mean, it's a lot of people, a lot of institutions, a lot to unpack.

And that was part of the reason I wanted to reach out and be like, I need a Joe Rogan session to just kind of go through it all.

Like, how did they decide? I would always assume that the so-called deep state is essentially bipartisan, that they wouldn't necessarily side with the Democrats or the Republicans. They're really they're just in charge of. They're supposed to be gathering information to protect the country. So how did they decide specifically to either stop information or propagate misinformation that would aid Joe Biden?

That is exactly the right question. So, I mean, I think the thing you have to understand is that Trump was viewed by the deep state, by CIA, FBI, Pentagon. I mean, all of the elites. And you're right, it's bipartisan in the sense that it's both never Trump, Republicans and Democrats what freaked them out.

The most about Trump is that he was threatening to pull the U.

S out of NATO. I don't think that that was, I just think that was bluster, like, that's insane. And by the way, I should say, I actually, I support what we call the Western Alliance.

I support providing military security for our allies in Asia and in Europe. I'm not a I mean, there's parts of economic nationalism that I respect, but I'm also. I don't think we should pull out of NATO. I think NATO has provided peace in the world and mostly been a good thing. It's obviously had some crazy abuses like Iraq. This whole experience has made me rethink my support for Ukraine.

But I think it's important to understand that Trump terrified the deep state and the national security establishment. So did Brexit. There's a sense in which you had a guy on here named Peter Zion, who wrote this book, called This really apocalyptic book about how the world is going to fall apart. And his whole argument, which I don't agree with, I think he's brilliant, but the book is, I think the argument is wrong. His whole argument is based on the idea. The United States is going to stop providing military security to our allies in Asia and Europe.

It's all just based on this assumption that Trump is the beginning of some the U.

S withdrawing from its traditional role since World War II. There's a bunch of people who obviously their ideology, their livelihoods, their identity, just their whole way of life is tied up with. Providing the United States providing this protection for Europe and Asia, and they view Trump as threatening that. I also think they just really hated the guy.

They looked down on him, he was crude and all the things that people don't like about him.

And what's so interesting is that if you read people like people on the left, like Noam Chomsky and others who have been critics of U.

S or Glenn Greenwald, who are critics of, or I think, Matt Taibbi, critics of U.s government military invasions around the world since World War II. I mean, we've overthrown many governments, right?

Iran, Chile, Guatemala, and what the pattern is is that these are places where nationalists, sometimes socialists, but often just nationalists, who are trying to control their economies. And they didn't want foreign interference were coming to power, and the U.S government would see that as a threat to providing to having this liberal global order, as it's called. And so they saw what they saw Trump as an existential threat to this post-war liberal order, and they needed to. And they viewed social media as the means to his power, which I think was exaggerated.

So on the one hand, they saw a threat, I think they also saw an opportunity, the War on terror. We won. I mean, like, it's just, I mean, huge, huge victory. I mean, it's shocking how successful it was in some ways.

So you have a bunch of people that suddenly need something to do, so there's a lot of motivations there. And then you also have the guys that lost the Hillary campaign, John Podesta, he was the chair of her campaign. He runs the most powerful, progressive, frankly, propaganda organization in the world, or at least in the United States, the Center for American Progress.

They were looking also, for some reason, someone to blame for their own failures, for the dislikability of Hillary. And so there was just a lot of motivations to try to get control over social media platforms. They felt like they had lost control of them.

Did they have an understanding of how other people would view this?

So, on the one hand, the internet is a function of the U.

S military, I mean, it's a spinoff of the U..S. military. It's a great one.

We're glad to have it. But I think the U.S military and the deep state and whatever they felt like, they had control over the internet. Until Trump, basically, or maybe until ISIS around 2014 2015, that's the first dynamic, the second dynamic is culturally.

Silicon Valley is libertarian, right? So you have the Electronic Frontier Foundation, you have a libertarian ethos. Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, is very much a manifestation of that libertarian ethos. Mark Zuckerberg Less.

But even Mark Zuckerberg after the 2016 elections, when everyone's accusing him of throwing the election to Trump, he's like, This is ridiculous. He's like, our own data doesn't support. There just wasn't enough. The Russians clearly did not have this influence. They just beat the crap out of him so much and threatened to take away their ability to operate, which is known as section 230. Which is this huge liability protection in the law that passed in 1996, which allows Google, Facebook, Twitter to exist?

I mean, it's just it's not.

They would say things like, You know, 146 million Americans had Russian propaganda in their news feeds. That's not the same as saying 146 million people saw the ads. Right, because it's like, your feed is memory that was social.

Of course, Facebook has changed. So, yeah, I mean, there's, there's, I mean, look, there's three big disinformation campaigns that were run by, frankly, the U.S.

Government and their allies. The first was the Russia hoax, the idea that Russians, that Russians controlled Donald Trump and won him the election. The second was the Hunter Biden laptop. And the third is that Covid origin. You know, the idea that that it's a conspiracy theory to even imagine that Covid could have emerged from a lab. There's others including, you know, we can talk about.

There's a there was this effort to basically smear a bunch of ordinary, conservative or Trump supporting Twitter users as Russian bots. Yeah, but but basically you have active disinformation campaigns being run by the U.S government U.S.

Government contractors against the American people on these issues, at the same time that they're demanding censorship, so you have propaganda on the one hand and censorship on the other.

Right now, no one's in trouble, no one from the F.BI is in trouble, no one loses their job, no one gets reprimanded.

No one gets, you know, brought before the American people and said, You failed us, not only did you fail us, you betrayed us because you knew this was not true. And you allowed. Someone whose son has deep ties to both Ukrainian and Chinese companies that were paying him for influence. And it appears, at least by some of these emails, that some of that money went to the actual vice president of the United States, which is fucking wild. And then the crazy thing is. One of the things about having a right and a left is that whenever there's information that's inconveniently bad for that one side, particularly the left. You don't hear a fucking peep about it on the media.

It's dismissed, it's like, you know, they'll talk about it like someone said. Someone talked about the Hunter Biden laptop and said it was like, half fake, that was like a term AOC, half fake.

That's right. That is such a horrible violation of the trust that the people who elected you put in you. You have access to all the information, you have access to that actual fucking laptop.

A lot of people have access to it if you wanted to. I said, I don't want to look at it, I was like, I don't want to look at that fucking thing. I want to see this guy getting foot jobs from hookers in Vietnam, smoking street crack.

It's crazy, whatever he did, but the fact that someone would say that's half fake.

This is like the same people. There's still people that say that Trump was in bed with the Russians, which is how he won in 2016, people that still parrot that.

And I'm like, I want to go on Joe Rogan and just unpack this for them. How serious this is? I mean, you have to remember the New York. I mean, I'll put on myself, I was so biased.

The New York Post published the subpoena, which is a kind of receipt from the FBI showing they had taken Hunter Biden's laptop from this computer repair store owner in Delaware. It was published in the New York Post. They also published the receipt that has Hunter Biden's signature on it. Saying that he had not only had left the laptop there, but also that it gave the computer store, the computer repair owner, the rights to it. If he abandoned it, Hunter Biden never said it wasn't his, he never denied that it was his laptop.

They're always making stuff up as they're going along. But I think the other interesting thing that's important to know here about that laptop story is that within Twitter, they look at that New York Post article. Yul Roth, the head of safety, and his team. They look at it and they go, Yeah, I mean, it's legit. It doesn't violate our internal, it doesn't violate our terms of service. And at that moment, I mean, it has a Manchurian quality, Manchurian candidate quality to it. Where the former chief legal counsel to FBI, a guy named Jim Baker, who is central to beginning the Russiagate probe of Trump, he's now at Twitter as deputy general counsel.

This is part of what I was discovering in the Twitter files is just vociferously attacking this thing. It's like, this looks like misinformation, disinformation. We shouldn't trust it. It looks like it violates Twitter's policies. He just, I mean, like, multiple, I think it was at least four messages and emails of him pushing to the executives.

And, of course, we can't see the phone calls, which is really where a lot of the dirty work happens. Pushing to just get this thing censored by Twitter, sure enough. A few hours later, Yoel Roth says Well, okay, you know. We think that it could very well have been a Russian hack. Where somehow they put the. I mean, it was this crazy thing, where they're like, Well, we think it was hacked and then put on the laptop, it was just bizarre.

YoEL Roth Like, there's moments where I respect him because he was enough of a truth teller. Internally, it's why he got to the position he was in, which is a very powerful position. To be like, Hey, this is bullshit, like internally, he would say. But he was also a company man. So when powerful superiors in the organization, including former FBI people and Jim Baker wasn't the only one when he gets worked, he just bent.

And he just was like, Okay, yeah. I think we've decided that it violates our hacked materials policy and we're going to censor it. The other thing I want to point out about this, it's not just that they censored the article. Because people always go well, you know, it only lasted for a few days or whatever, it was, the discrediting of it, the censoring, censorship is a disinformation strategy if you censor that article. In other words, Twitter and Facebook, all the headlines where Twitter and Facebook are. You know, they're going to restrict the dissemination of this material, or they think it's, you know, that's all. That publicity is really what matters.

So in terms of like, you know, in my defense and other people that bought the idea that it was somehow a fake. We were being told by the media that everybody had looked at this and was kind of like, Look, it looks like it's hacked and there's something funny about it. So I think that, you know, I think there's so many shocking things about it. But I think it's the level of coordination and conformity within these social media companies. It was the pre bunking in advance, and it was the complete total, you know, just the complete news media blackout and unanimity that there was. And it was just all of them. I mean, it was like all the networks, all the newspapers. They all just repeated this idea that there was something wrong about the laptop and there wasn't.

I mean, it's hard by a lot of things, one of many things, I mean, the other craziest thing of all, maybe some of the most crazy stuff of all, is that. Facebook censored accurate Covid vaccine side effect information because it didn't want to promote vaccine hesitancy. And there was the White House. Is like, just pressuring them, I mean, this guy, Andy Slavin in particular, is just this malign actor, just pressuring, pressuring, threatening them.

And they're nasty in these emails, the White House, nasty in what way? Oh, just just being just just basically, you know, it's a continuity. Biden does it publicly.

So they're killing people, they're basically accusing people of, I mean, these guys, they don't. The gloves are off. I mean, they're just like you're killing people by letting this information.

I mean, the information is people telling their own story of vaccine side effects. We always point out like it was one of the great public interest, progressive victories in recent memory. That the drug companies have to name the side effects of their drugs in their TV ads. Yeah, like, that's a big part of it, right?

It's like a running joke. You have to name the side effects in the TV ads. Well, here, they, like, you, were ordinary people trying to tell stories of the side effects that they had from the vaccine. On Facebook and Twitter, and the White House is demanding that Facebook and Twitter censor that stuff. This is the.

This is just the worst. I mean, that is, I mean, that's just Soviet Chinese style censorship, like full on. I mean, so it's not over. And I think that, you know, we've already seen there's other things going on. Like that agency, I mentioned that cyber, that part of the Department of Homeland Security, the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency.

They changed their website over the last few months to remove references to domestic counter disinformation efforts to emphasize countering foreign disinformation. They, you know, we talk a lot about this. There's one of the big leaders of the censorship industrial complex is this person named Rene Diresta at Stanford Internet Observatory.

And she's critical of like she moved out of San Francisco because it's just too crazy. So she and I had this conversation, like we were talking about this even before I started talking to her. Right? When I started looking at the Twitter files and we did this long interview, I was on Sam Harris's podcast with her.

But then she starts showing up in the Twitter files and all these weird ways and we start looking into her. It's a very so she's also the reason where she's so important is. Like, like, when you read the, when you follow the meetings or watch the YouTube videos. She's like one of the smartest people, like there's something going on with her, she's like a real leader, she's always sort of the number two.

The other thing about these people is that they move around a lot, they move in between organizations. And she's always sort of the number two, but she always seems a bit smarter than the person that she's reporting to. But so she's somebody that she goes to. She gets a computer science degree from State University of New York at Stony Brook.

That happens to be a major recruiting place for the NSA. She then goes and she gets a job at Jane's trading, which is like one of the great. It's like up there with Goldman, or maybe better. It's where SPF from FTX was at. She was there then, she had a couple of companies that did, like logistics and Cyber. Very high powered, successful executive.

And then, according to her story and the public story, she gets obsessed with anti-vaxxers to get young kids, she's obsessed with anti-vaxxers. Spreading anti-vax misinformation is long before Covid, I think it's around 2014, 2015. Next thing, you know, she's like. Advising President Obama on counter ISIS disinformation strategy in the White House. And advising on the expansion of something called the Global Education Center, which is part of the State Department of Counter Disinfo.

So suddenly she's like, the senior person. It's very suspicious, very rapid rise. If you know anything about those communities, they're very hierarchical and like, you have to work your way up over many years. She's instantly like at the top. In 2017, she is at a consulting firm called New Knowledge that is then caught doing disinformation against an Alabama Trumpian Republican candidate named Roy Moore.

They are caught doing fake Facebook pages accusing Roy Moore of wanting to basically restrict alcohol consumption in Alabama, which is deeply unpopular position. It was false and also creating the perception of Russian bots supporting Roy Moore. Her firm runs that campaign.

Afterwards, she sort of tries to distance herself from. It suggests that she wasn't involved. Even though, when you read the Washington Post and New York Times articles about her, about that, about the scandal, she sort of she makes. It makes it clear that she was actually the person that brought the funding in to run the program, and also kind of conceived of much of the strategy. After that, she becomes the top researcher to the Senate Intelligence Report of 2018 on Russian disinformation in the 2016 election. So she's not not only is she not punished for her role in it, she's rewarded by the Democrats with this incredibly powerful position. So she becomes like the lead witness. The lead author for Senate Democrats, Adam Schiff, in promoting the whole, you know, narrative that somehow Russians swung the election to Trump.

He's amazing, I highly recommend him coming on. But he runs something. He basically leaves State Department and starts something called the Foundation for Freedom Online, and he has been documenting this more than anybody. So he had it, but he's just really in the weeds.

Like, it's really detailed, it was hard to understand, you have to really go through it and unpack it. I used a bunch of it in my testimony.

I talked to him, I interviewed him a lot, but I mean, you know, basically a media blackout on all of this stuff. Rene Diresta, who then moves from New Knowledge to Stanford Internet Observatory. That organization and three other organizations, Atlantic Council, Grafica and University of Washington, has a think tank on this. They get government funding and they run something called the Election Integrity Project in 2020 to basically demand censorship.

Jordan, I'm in it. I mean, they attack me in this disinformation, these censors, they have reports they put like me, Jordan Peterson, Bjorn Lomborg, you, I mean, they put us in there.

So anybody that has a social media, a big social media follower and following, call us super spreaders. And then they try to get us censored, and they did for me, they got Facebook to censor me.

It's true, but it leads people to draw the wrong conclusions.

The wrong conclusion being that climate change is real, but not the end of the world. Or vaccines. The wrong conclusion would be, maybe don't get the vaccine. Or maybe if you're, you know, whatever, under 18, or you're a young man or 18, or if you've had whatever. I mean, whatever it might be, you don't need to be triple vaxxed. So they're basically using an opinion which is you should get the vaccine, or you should think of climate change as apocalyptic, as a way to. And then they kind of go to the back door and say anything that's being used to propagate.

That narrative should be counted as misinformation, so she is obliged to back up so that. So there's a little cluster of the censorship industrial complex. Does this quote unquote? Election Integrity Project? In 2020, they censor tens of millions of social media posts.

Go to the Facebook Climate Change Center. Even my stuff on homelessness and drugs, they'll be like, here's how to get accurate information on climate change. That's how you know that I'm on some list, I'm on some blacklist at Facebook, so yeah, so it's those three things.

Those are all forms of censorship, those these groups, which are U.S government funded organizations. This is very important to stress. This is not some private actors.

U.

S government fund organizations, pressuring the social media companies to censor these posts and these people, and they do it in 2020. And then Renee, who does this little video? It's like one of the creepiest videos we've discovered. There's little videos that they do.

She's sort of describing, you know, well. And then we realized that we needed to keep going on Covid. And so then, in 2021, the election integrity project turns into something called the Virality project. And that's where they then go and wage censorship on Covid information that they don't like. I refuse to use their language. And again, it's tens of millions of people.

And it's so you see it at all levels, it's these guys doing it. We say, I like, we. The censorship industrial complex is the right, I think, description of what we're talking about. It's a phrase that, of course, came from Dwight Eisenhower's famous farewell address that he gives.

He goes, Look, you know, you got to worry. The D..O...D. is funding all these private military contractors. These private military contractors have a financial interest in war. This is Eisenhower, the guy that won World War Two.

I mean, it's like, Mr. Credible on this issue, and he was like, this, amazing, beautiful. I mean, it's really the best of of what a president can be. He warns against this.

It's the so, it's this, it's this complex, it's this kind of clustering of government agencies and government funded groups. So, you know, I mean, it's in the case of the censorship industrial complex, it's the Department of Defense, it's the State Department.

It's FBI, it's CIA, it's Department of Homeland Security, funding these so-called think tanks, and there's some. Sometimes there are universities, or sometimes they're standalones.

Some of them are in Britain, by the way, there's a very special, that special relation with the U.S, and Britain often the U.S will.

The U.

K Think tanks right now are attacking me, trying to discredit me, so some of them will go that way, they'll try to, like, attack me. How so?

Well, they just put out a report.

These guys are the worst. They put out this like long report describing climate disinformation. And like, I was like, as soon as I opened up, I was like, Fuck, I bet I'm in this. And I just do like, Command F and I just are. Schellenberger. And sure enough, it's like, Oh, I, whatever, like multiple results and like, crap, you know?

And so they and they, you know, often these are reports that they don't get a lot of fanfare or whatever, but they get. They make sure that they get e-mailed to a bunch of journalists, they talk to the journalists, and they just. They basically just emphasize, never talk to this person, never quote this person, do not platform them. We then, by the way, after our testimony, that same Stanford cluster, it's actually more than one group at Stanford, even, they e-mailed.

I'm not going to say who because I don't want to give away my sources. But they've basically e-mailed many people about Matt and my testimony, trying to attack our testimony and sharing information. So there's the creepiest, they creep around, they're constantly, they're constantly waging disinformation campaigns against disfavored voices.

Well, and demanding censorship, also spreading their own misinformation.

Like, I think you should be able to burn a flag saying the First Amendment. Literally from that moment on, I have never worried about the First Amendment in the United States. And for me, it was like, always kind of basic, like, like, like, come on guys, like, it's the first, it's the First Amendment. Like, how could it possibly be under threat?

This was like one of the few times where because I don't spook super easily. But like this stuff, you're just like, this is scary, it's so these people are scary. And you may know, by the way, when Matt Taibbi and I were testifying before Congress a few weeks ago, the I.R.S agent shows up at Matt Taibbi's house in person. Yeah, this is insane, The Wall Street Journal just wrote a piece about a few days ago.

I was like, I'm like, look, hey, you know, maybe it's a coincidence? whatever? I was like, just asking around people I know, and people were like, no way is that a coincidence. So this is brazen. These guys are trying to send a message.

They're trying to intimidate, they want to ruin our. For me, it's been years of just trying to survive. Of, you know, just trying to de-platform, discredit, keep you off of out of newspapers, out of TV shows, whatever podcasts. And so, yeah, these guys are, they're ruthless.

You know, it's definitely a Hall Monitor mentality, you know, like, and it's elitist. I mean, it's like, Renee is a snob. I'll just, you know, she's. I agree with her on some things. I'm sure she's a fine person in her personal life.

She's probably a good mother. I mean, I don't have any, you know, I'm trying to trying to be nice, trying to be Christian about this, but I mean, they're snobs, like they literally. I remember at one point, I briefly asked her about climate change.

And you know, we talked about the climate stuff. And I could tell that she felt like she was actually probably an expert on that, too. You know, it's like, literally I wrote my book, I spent 20 years of research on my book. Fine, maybe I'm wrong, but I mean, like, you have journalists out there, Joe, like all these big publications. They're like 23 years old. And they're like, I'm a disinformation expert, I mean, can you imagine being like, I'm a truth expert, Joe?

I'm a truth expert, that's really what it is. a truth expert, you're a malign actor and a vector of disinformation, whereas I'm a truth expert. So there's definitely that whole, you know, that Jordan Peterson stuff talks about, which is like, I'm just pure and good.

It's just about money. I mean, that's the only reason why they would be doing this.

Like, what are they really doing here? So, yeah, I mean, for sure, it's, you know, it is what kind of we all have known it is you're trying to. The U..S is part of this empire, and we're trying to make the world safe for Western capitalism and Western corporations.

And, you know, that's actually lifted a bunch of people out of poverty. It's not totally negative, but obviously you also get the Iraq invasion, which was terrible, and the Afghanistan occupation, which resulted in horrors.

Yeah, like this is like you're following a very obvious paper trail.

I mean, first of all....

It's about.

A better word would be investigations or investigating.

Science is a process.

This is such an interesting case, because so the U.S government banned gain-of-function research.

But didn't that restart in 2016 or 17, when Trump got into office?

The Obama administration stopped the funding right, and then it kicked back in in 2016. What I had....

What had been explained to me was that the Trump administration was so chaotic that the NIH said, Listen, let's just do this through the EcoHealth alliance and make it simple, and that way we'll kind of like, do it by proxy.

It looks like it could have been manufactured from a lab and not from zoonotic spillover. So it's even more sinister than just being arrogant. It actually looks like a cover-up.

I don't know if you saw this recent report where there's. It looks like they were double-dipping, they were double-charging, they were over-charging.

So they were basically getting paid twice by u.

S taxpayers. CBS News, which is like only one of the few mainstream media outlets that's actually done a good job covering the sales that covered the Herbion laptop. Accurately, belatedly. But they did, yeah, they wrote about how these contractors were getting paid twice for the same work. So that's a way now to kind of get in there and try to figure out what's going on.

We're hoping to.

I mean, the crazy thing is back to the Twitter files, because Elon is obsessed with Fauci and wants to have the Fauci files. But none of us have looked for this in the Twitter file. Literally, nobody has yet even looked to see whether or not this Covid origin stuff was being censored from within Twitter, so we don't know yet. I mean, we've just been backed up in a lot of other stuff.

I mean, you mean that we want to look for it? Yeah, no, I mean, Elon proclaimed it, yes.

Elon promised the Fauci files.

I would have liked to do the Fauci files first and then make a judgment.

It's a good chess move because it gets people talking and then it gets people talking about Fauci. I have no idea what he's talking about. It's just craziness. Oh, it's craziness, is it really?

Well, maybe someone's going to go look at AZT, maybe someone's going to go back and look at the way you guys handled the AIDS crisis. Because if you look at Robert Kennedy Jr..'s book, The Real Anthony Fauci, if that book is accurate, I don't know if it's accurate. I'm assuming he hasn't been sued yet. It's a terrifying book.

When they talk about the AIDS crisis and what they, it's essentially a version of what you're seeing now. But with no internet, where they were allowed to do things, with no investigative journalists, no social media outrage, no people posting different studies that contradict what they're saying. It's a wild book, man, it's a wild book of unchecked power and influence. And also, like, an absolute disdain for what is beneficial to human life and the American people, and instead, what is great for profit.

It was bipartisan. It did result in a bunch of reforms. It reminded the we had a bunch of reforms that basically prevented the federal government from spying on the American people.

I mean, hopefully the lawsuits, the Twitter files, I think just talking about this and testifying about it. I think actually. Because sunlight is the best disinfectant. But no, you're right, you've got to. We've got to defund and dismantle the censorship industrial complex, but we also need to hold people accountable who were doing this illegal thing.

And now I'm like, Wow, that is profound, it's crazy, so true.

This is so embarrassing. I used to be able to go for three hours. No man.

The long March to totalitarianism.

He outlined this He was talking about how change doesn't happen in these big jumps. What they do is they move you and push you just incrementally, right?

And you don't say anything and they push you a little forward. And before you know it, you're so far removed from where you started, right? And you didn't even notice it, right?

And the Democrats were like, we're not taking enough stuff down. I mean, there's this sense in which more stuff needs to be censored, that's the idea they're trying to promote. It's bizarre, it's so spooky.

Again, this is the party that defended flag burning.

It seems like what you're trying to do is make as much money as possible for the pharmaceutical companies. That seems like what you were doing. This whole idea of vaccine hesitancy once enough data was out there, particularly when you're talking about vaccinating people that had already had Covid, that's preposterous. It doesn't even make sense, it doesn't make sense medically.

It doesn't jive with the studies. All this is very strange and this idea that you're stopping vaccine hesitancy because of real data. That term is so creepy, because what you're saying is side effects, you're talking about. Not telling people about the dangers of something, which has always been something that we considered with every drug.

And you're hiding it.

What's crazy about it, too, is you go from this well. We're going to have a vaccine and then we're not going to get it, and then we're not going to spread it to. Okay, well, you might still get it, but it won't be as bad, but you won't spread it. And then you, well, you might get it, but it won't be as bad, but you might still spread it. So then it's kind of like, Well, then why mandating this? Why not just let it be personal choice?

People have died that have been vaccinated, they've died from Covid. You're a fucking liar, yeah. And also they never tested it to stop immunity or to stop transmission.

Yeah, they just knew that it was giving some sort of antibody protection.

It's this to people, to victims. Everything should be given and nothing required, although in this case, of course, the requirement is that they take the vaccine. But it's a sense, it's paternalism.

Right, let's keep going. Yeah, it's very strange to watch people put these blind trust in pharmaceutical companies and demonize people who don't step in with it.

Instead of saying, Hey, how'd that guy get better so quick from some horrible, deadly disease? And three days later, right? I mean, when they used my face and put it through a filter to turn me yellow like that was all of it was wild, right?

For a person to watch it, for a person to be in my position and watch it, it was really interesting. Because, first of all, it's like, Um, I'm not on a network like you really can't get rid of me, right? And second of all, I have a lot of money. So I can just like, even if I stop working, you're not going to hurt me, no?

I'll just I'll find something, I'll I'll figure something out. Like. This is not a thing like the 1970s, when you could just get someone removed from a television show.

Like when they attacked the Smothers Brothers for the criticism of the Vietnam War, right? This is a different thing, right? Like you're in a different landscape, and I don't think you understand where where you're at.

Like, you're playing this game where you don't even understand the numbers.

It really feels dehumanizing to be deprived your voice or to have this super powerful media company being like Schellenberger is spreading disinformation. It's just like, Oh my God.

They have access to the conclusions that are given to them by the pharmaceutical companies, and then they review that, which is fucking insanity. That's like the wolf telling you what he did to the hen house. It's like, you know, like, basically, they were all dead when I got there.

Right?

We, you know, various authors have done good debunkings of how we got there, but this would be a moment of great humility. But instead, we're seeing the elites, in particular, responding with more dogmatism, more certainty, more arrogance.

So this is the revolt of the public by Martin Gurries. He argues that really, all of this is just the elites freaking out about the rise of the internet. And that the response is very similar to the response to the printing press.

You know, the printing press suddenly makes books available, and the elites in Europe freak out.

A lot of the early books were about how to spot a witch.

They're like, Whoa, yeah.

Now we see social contagion. Yeah, so the big one, I mean, the big one, of course, that we're all talking about is the trans issue, where we're now seeing....

And that issue, by the way, has completely changed in Europe, and particularly in Britain, where there's a big new book out. Time to think about the Tavistock gender clinic. But basically, it looks as though a lot of autistic kids or kids on autism spectrum. They who are just uncomfortable in their bodies are more prone to be thinking in black and white, are basically being misdiagnosed with gender dysphoria. And then you also have a different group of folks, maybe kids that would end up being gay or lesbian if they didn't transition, who become convinced that they are the opposite sex.

This is.

One of the ideas is some of it's a social contagion, in other ways, it's iatrogenic, which means that it's actually caused by the medical profession. So you start to get doctors and others misdiagnosing people. I mean, this is something that we just published a piece on this, where this was what happens with anorexia and bulimia.

These doctors identify eating disorders and then they publicize them and it gets all this publicity about it and then the disorder spreads. So it's really tricky. I mean, it's not....

It was like they have an incentive, and that was also. During Covid. They were incentivized to give people certain medications, they were financially incentivized to put people on ventilators, financially incentivized to mark deaths as Covid deaths. All this is so enlightening because I never would have expected that.

I never would have suspected that at all before Covid, before the pandemic and all this chaos and all the things that I've seen. My whole view of how the world runs is completely different.

I just was kind of.

It took me like three years to finally work on it or write on it, but I thought, part of what's I mean? The people, first of all people with autism spectrum, should be up in arms and outraged about the mistreatment of people with autism by these gender clinics.

The other group that would be completely up in arms are gay and lesbians. Yes, I mean, Andrew Sullivan, to his credit, is speaking out on it. I mean, I didn't quite understand Abigail had to explain it to me because I would read all of her stuff. But sometimes you just miss some of it.

These kids who go through this gender transition don't have.

They not only are infertile afterwards, but then they don't have sexual pleasure. I mean, we spent, I mean, think about the gay and lesbian. The bisexual movement spent decades basically making everybody comfortable with the fact that gay people should be able to get sexual pleasure from their sex. And everybody's kind of like,....

Most of them are heterosexuals, and most of them are like, that's strange. It took a long time to be like, No. We celebrate that. That's great that you can and that we know. Sex is an important part of long-lasting relationships, so to actively deprive children of that....

You're not just sterilizing the kids, you're depriving them of sexual function and then being able to bond with somebody. I mean, how do you look at that and not go? This is really disturbing.

And those were censored, those were censored from social media and stopped from being able to be spread, which is crazy. You're talking about someone's actual lived experience with essentially genital mutilation that's state-sanctioned.

And I was like, Have you ever thought about how your medical mistreatment compares to other forms of medical mistreatment in history? And she said, without hesitation, she goes, Yeah, lobotomies.

She's like, You know, I was like, What's up? I know? I was like, Wow, I was like, What's up? you know? I was like, What are you?

And she was like, Well, what's amazing is how long they went on, how long we, I mean, with no, I mean, no benefits, right, you know? And mostly you're, I mean, John F. Kennedy's sister was lobotomized.

And just, you know, she was probably had schizophrenia, she was disabled, I mean, by the lobotomy.

It's a biological male, which, by the way, is all shooters, all school shooters. almost all shooters in general are biological males.

I think it's fucking nonsense, yeah, if you have a biological male with a penis who shot up a bunch of people, then that's a man. I don't give a fuck what their feeling is, right.

If an archaeologist found their body 5,000 years from now, they would say that's a skeleton of a male.

And then we create all these religious categories and it was like, really easy to fill it out. They all look like a religion. I called Abigail and I was like, What's the like? What is trans? As a religion? is trans a kind of religion? She was like, Let me get back to you.

A year later, she calls me and she goes, Hey, I think I figured it out and I was like, All right, what is it? she goes. The new gender is a soul for secular people. It's something that you can't see it, it doesn't, there's no physical basis to it.

You have a sex like you can, you know, take off all your clothes, and you don't even need to do that. Actually, it's like, we can, we know that, like we can recognize someone's sex very quickly and easily, actually. So then what is the so? It's a new soul.

So for me, I'm a huge. I think the secularization explains a lot, because we know that people get a lot of psychological comfort out of believing that they have an afterlife, that they have a soul. They go to heaven, or they go, they go. They get reincarnated that their lives have purpose and meaning, and that they don't really die, and that we live on. We just know that that provides a huge amount of psychological comfort. So there's always been this thinking that when you don't have that anymore. If you are taught to believe that at the end of your life, you just become worm food, and that's it, you're dead.

There's some people. My friend Steven Pinker is an atheist, and that's what he thinks, and he still believes, but he still. He also has a kind of spirituality around reason and the enlightenment. But I think all this stuff, it's sort of end of civilization, but it's also the end of this end of belief in religion.

I don't know, Jamie, if you could, if you can, pull it up. I thought. The Wall Street Journal published this amazing article about declining patriotism, declining belief in the country, you know, shocking.

No, so you get that kind of the elites trying to gain control over the society, the society not having any foundational myths. You know, yeah, these numbers here.

It's like, No, the fucking whole thing is falling apart, the foundation of our civilization is falling apart.

When you hear this guy's not a nutter, he's a little nuts of all engineers, a little nuts. But he's essentially saying, like, Hey, I'm pretty sure this thing's alive, and when do you get to decide that it is alive? If it can answer every fucking question you have about anything, it's far more intelligent than any human being that's ever existed, ever like, what are we doing?

Because it's going to make much better versions of itself like that, and it's going to make a version of itself that literally is going to be a God. If you just scale it exponentially, like we do with computer technology, like anything else, but do it in a quantum leap, in some spectacular, massive improvement. Almost instantaneously, over and over and over again, over the course of a couple of weeks, you're looking at a God.

Remember, they had the mentats, the guys that would do all the calculations in their heads, because they didn't want to use AI.

I feel like it needs to start with some. I mean, I think the trans issue is interesting, it does for me. I just interviewed, we just interviewed Jesse Singel on this, who's very liberal and progressive still, even though he's been a critic of gender ideology or gender theology. And we were like, Is sex real? I mean, do you believe that it's real? and he was like, Yeah, I mean, obviously, like you have, for some ways I go. I think the reason I was interested in it was we have to start some foundational stuff.

And that would be acknowledging that we are biological creatures that are have a sex, yeah, and that there's two sexes. And then I think I kind of go, if I build on that, I go. We need there's a, there's a, there's a healthy and unhealthy way to live. I think you talk a lot about this.

I've been seeing you throwing shade on on on people that are trying to get, trying to control other people's lives, that are themselves unhealthy.

We have sex, we are, you know, we have two sexes. We need to reaffirm health. And I think the other thing you mentioned, Greta Thunberg, Humans are good, I think you have to. you have to affirm the goodness of humans in some ways.

You know, Jordan's response to this? What we're talking about is basically nihilism, this kind of deeply negative, self-destructive, the view that humans don't have any value, or any worth, or any meaning. I think the response from a lot of people on the right has been to just affirm Christianity, the Judeo-Christian tradition. Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson You know, my problem with that is that America is not founded on a religion, it's founded on an enlightenment view. You know that we have unalienable rights, all humans are created equal.

We obviously didn't live up to that in 1776 or 1789, but we've done a pretty good job of getting there over the last two and a half centuries. We need to. This is like a for me, it's like a punk rock moment. Like things got too crazy. And you need to just simplify and come back to some basics. And I think you get to. Humans are good, we have two sexes.

It's better to be healthy than unhealthy, and there's a right and wrong way to do that.

I'm bad, the future is a bad place, the future is dark. CBT talks back to those stories. It says, Hey, you've got all these good parts of you.

The world's complicated, it's not bad in that way, and the future could be bright. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleague Greg Lukianoff, they argue that wokeism is actually anti-CBT, victimhood ideology is anti-CBT.

Victimhood ideology says you're powerless, the world is a terrible place and the world's going to end. It's apocalyptic. That's why I also fear that AI narrative too much. Let's use AI for something good.

Let's not get ourselves caught up in a catastrophe.

Well, it's interfacing with these territorial apes, with thermonuclear weapons who are full of shit, who are running this country in this very bizarre, transparent, money-grab way. You have a dead man and a dunce that are in charge of the greatest country the world has ever known. Those are the figureheads, and the whole thing is wild.

It's not going to happen, but basically, all of the catastrophic scenarios around nuclear did not occur. And meanwhile, we're left with, yeah, for sure, right, yeah, for sure.

And that will always be the case with dangerous things in the world. Yeah, I mean, the world could come to an end, a I could take over, but I think it also doesn't have to. There's nothing inevitable about these things.

We do have control over our lives we're not destined to. Just I don't think the American, so I mean, America. What's amazing about this country in particular is our ability to reinvent ourselves and rejuvenate ourselves. I am not—I think that there's more reasons to be hopeful than to be pessimistic. And I'm shocked by the stuff that we've discovered in the Twitter files. Shocked.

No, seriously.

If they understood the concept of apocalyptic scenarios, they would probably be like, What have you done? Like, what the fuck have you done to the land and turned it into this gigantic concrete scab that covers everything? What have you done to the sky? Where it lowers your life expectancy by 10 years? If you live in a place that's highly populated because of all the pollutants and all the particulate matter that's in the air. Like, what have you done to the food that everyone's fat? what have you done to the medicine that you hide?

Side effects? What have you done to politics where they censor accurate information and go after people that are trying to report the truth? And these taxpayer funds are supporting these endeavors, like, What have you done?

We've got two movies coming out, Oliver Stone has a pro-nuclear movie coming out. My friend Frankie Fenton has a movie coming out called Atomic Hope.

Now I'm anti-nuclear, now I'm going the other way.

Yes, it was like, six days later, they said, we're going to phase out into Don't plug in your electric cars.