American Thought Leaders - What Is Psywar? Dr. Robert Malone Explains

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

In this episode, I sit down with scientist and physician Dr. Robert Malone to discuss his latest book, “PsyWar,” co-authored with his wife, Dr. Jill Malone.“Someone is making a decision about how people should think, what they should think, how they should feel, how they should behave in the world without consulting them, and you’re using a technology that is so powerful and effective that you’re literally reprogramming their mind without their consent,” says Dr. Malone. “The battleground is your mind.”How are powerful forces using technology to propagandize and shape behavior? And what effect is it having on society?“We used to have salons, we used to read books, we used to discuss things with each other, and now we just kind of sit by the sidelines and shoot spitballs,” says Dr. Malone. “Everybody agrees that we’ve become more and more splintered and fragmented, and that’s not a good thing, and it mostly benefits our adversaries.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The battleground is your mind. This kind of tech is being deployed against you by multiple actors simultaneously, all seeking to shape how you think, feel, believe. In this episode, I sit down with scientist and physician Dr. Robert Malone to discuss his latest book, Psywar, co-authored with his wife, Dr. Jill Malone. We used to have salons. We used to read books. We used to discuss things with each other. And now we just kind of sit by the sidelines and shoot spitballs. What methods are powerful forces using to propagandize and shape behavior?

And what effect is this having on society? Everybody agrees that we become more and more splintered and fragmented. That's not a good thing. And it mostly benefits our adversaries. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Dr. Robert Malone, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. It's been a while, and I'm always grateful for the chance to talk to you and learn from you. In past episodes, we've talked quite a bit about all sorts of things related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, I want to focus really on trying to explain some of the basic approaches of the psychological warfare and also some of your proposed solutions to dealing with this because it comes off as being deeply frightening, frankly.

Let's talk about Cywar. What is it? Cywar is a term I didn't invent. It's actually used by the brigade down in Fort Bragg that call themselves the Psywar Soldier. It's an abbreviation of psychological warfare, which has become increasingly a core function, a core capability in militaries all over the world, but absolutely in the West, and in particular the United States and Great Britain have really pioneered the use of psychological warfare or fifth-generation warfare. Militaries have encountered the challenges, let's say gently, of the modern insurgencies such as Al Qaeda and the Taliban, in which those movements have very effectively exploited religion

and other social, dynamic, kind of psychological aspects as part of their overall battle strategy. And so the Western militaries have found it necessary to try to develop capabilities that would be able to match or exceed those of these kind of indigenous insurgencies that have been so effective going back to the Vietnam War. Something that struck me not too long ago is that we actually really live in a society where it's become kind of normal for people to try to manipulate you. I mean, a lot of advertising functions this way, and especially with the advent of social media, and then especially with juiced up with AI to, you know, study your, well, the entirety of your profile, I guess that it's called,

and feed you exactly what will impact your buying choices best. That's just one example of many. But that's just how things work today, isn't it? Increasingly so. That's very much the norm in marketing, for sure. In psychological warfare is an adjacency to marketing. Propaganda is an adjacency to marketing. It has a lot of the same forces, the same technologies, the same approaches, the same

underlying psychological and social science underpinnings that drive it. Earlier earlier on we were talking about Edward Bernays and in one of the early chapters in the book we talk about the modern history of psychological warfare as very much derived from the academic and practical discipline of marketing and propaganda. And we all recognize that in marketing. For instance, the use of sex to sell us foods or hamburgers or cars or whatever. At some level, a large fraction of society is beginning to really become increasingly uncomfortable with that. And yet it is incredibly powerful. The thing about this whole suite of technologies is that they're grounded in modern psychology, really

advanced psychological understanding of the nature of the mind and how we form a structure of reality and how we process information. And a lot of these technologies and strategies are designed to access our subconscious rather than our conscious mind. And I think that's a problem. Well, it's interesting because it kind of, I think, crept up on us. I realized myself that I never thought about it. You just kind of assume that you're just swimming in it. It's the way things are. That's right. And I didn't think about the moral valence of it. Nor did I. The truth is, nor did I. Until I encountered this seminal event where our initial book on how

to just prepare and protect yourself from the novel coronavirus was deplatformed by Amazon. Essentially, we could no longer publish it or circulate it. And we'd worked really hard to get it out in the beginning of 2020. And we just did it mostly as a community service based on our knowledge of biodefense and proper public health measures. And to have it deplatformed and then asking again and again and again, why have you done this to us? Why have you taken off our work, our mental contribution? And then finally getting the answer because it violated community standards, and then reviewing what the community standards were, finding out that there was nothing that related to anything in the book. It

was just a euphemism. And now of course we're used to this euphemism of violation of community standards. That's become a widespread justification for all kinds of censorship and Facebook and everything else. But back then, it was a shock for me. And that was kind of the moment when I realized that with what was deployed during the COVID crisis, we had moved into a whole new era and phase of the use of methods to manipulate human opinion that exceeded anything that I'd been aware of in the past. It was so overt that for many of us, it was something that couldn't be overlooked. Tell me a little bit more about your background. I do come from very rock-solid, conservative parents. My mother was a teacher that was really upset with the rise of unionism in

the teaching profession. Both my parents were fans of John Birch, strong supporters of Richard Nixon, and of course I rebelled against all of that and wanted nothing to do with it. And raised in the central coast of California, I was raised as what we would now call a progressive liberal. That was kind of my worldview. It's what was surrounding me growing up in Santa Barbara and also being educated at UC Davis and in Northern California. So that was the reality that I had come from and had

largely rejected the conservative frame of reference of my parents, as young people do typically. And it's been a strange journey that's brought me back to this more libertarian frame of reference. Looking back, I think I always, Jill and I always, Jill and I, my wife and co-author Dr. Jill Glaspell Malone, have always been fundamentally libertarian in many ways. We have lived a more rural life, but also one of the things that my parents pounded into me, and Jill's parents also on her side, was some fundamental ethics.

And that was reinforced from having been trained as a clinical researcher, where in order to be allowed to do clinical research and authorized to do so, you have to take quite a bit of training in bioethics. There is a right and wrong. There's a proper way to do things, it's important to respect human beings and their autonomy and their right to free choice, it's important to provide informed consent, etc. And then in terms of my willingness to be a whistleblower or speak out or be willing to contradict the norm or the dominant narrative at any one time. A key moment happened for me in my academic career when I was a gene therapy researcher. That was my core competency as well as gene therapy-based

vaccines and gene delivery, polynucleotide delivery technology. And in that space, this attracted, this gene therapy area attracted really high-profile, very aggressive, competitive scientists. And one of them and his team at UPenn took things too far. They really believed in their technology, the use of adenoviruses for gene therapy, the same tech basically that was used in the J&J vaccine product that people are familiar with, with the COVID crisis. But that was being done for gene therapy purposes. And in this case, it was being done to treat a young man

who had a liver disorder. And the team and the leader, Jim Wilson, believed very strongly in their technology. It had shown great promise in animal models. And so when they had this patient, this young man with this liver disorder that they had developed a gene therapy for involving adenovirus, they had a clinical trial, an open protocol. They enrolled the young man and they provided him according to the clinical trial protocol some initial dosing at levels that were approved. And then they increased that dosing because he didn't respond clinically

to the maximum level that was allowed in the protocol, but that still didn't result in his clinical improvement. So they went off protocol without authorization. They decided, well, this absolutely has to work. We know, we believe this technology. We know it has to work. It's worked in the animal models. I don't know why it isn't working with Jesse Gelsinger, but let's just give him more drug." And what that did was triggered diffuse intravascular

coagulation, DIC, and the young man died. And that was a bit of an issue in the press initially, but really downplayed it first. But I knew the back story. I had the contacts. I had followed this carefully. And I went to my mentor at the time. I was taking training in bioethics at the University of Maryland from Adol Shamu. And I told him what I knew about the situation. And he said, Robert, you have a moral obligation to disclose these nuances that you understand about this to the public. And I spoke to members of the press, including the New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who was, she made a series of articles, very high profile. I don't know if she got a Pulitzer for it, but she certainly became well known for that reporting. And it pretty much ended my academic career

as a gene therapy researcher. And that was okay because I'd acted with integrity. I was recognized for having done so. And people that were my colleagues, associates, the people surrounding me, kind of caught me and supported me and helped me transition to the next phase of my career, which turned out to be focusing on biodefense. Tell me more about these different sorts of tactics that are used in this cycle of cyber or psychological warfare. So there's a whole range of tactics that are used that span from the nitty-gritties of digital manipulation of information and targeting of specific individuals with manipulated information. And that includes selective withholding of information or alternative points of view,

as well as promotion of other information or points of view that might be more aligned with the interests of whoever's doing the information management. But one of the simplest to kind of serve as an entry level for understanding the nature of this and the logic is nudge technology. Nudge technology is largely emerged from academics in the United Kingdom. And the example we always use when we talk about nudge is we talk about a practice that was implemented

in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam where there was a problem with the urinals and cleaning of the bathrooms and men not being careful. Let's put it that way. And it was found that if you put a picture of a fly as a sticker inside the urinal, suddenly the cost of cleaning the bathrooms went way down.

The bathrooms became a lot more clean for obvious reasons. It would distract the person and they would aim at the fly and they wouldn't end up contaminating the other space. So this is really one of the simplest examples of nudge technology. But nudge has evolved into a large suite of logic and capabilities to gently direct individuals and populations towards various agendas that those that are doing the social engineering think are beneficial. So for instance, we generally, most of us now believe that smoking causes cancer, it causes emphysema, it causes all kinds of problems, both direct smoking and secondary smoke. So we can all agree it's a time to get rid of smoking. So what are we going to do for the people that are

still smoking even after all of the information has been shared? Well we can start doing things in which we provide subtle cues in a variety of different formats, including in all the programming. Remember, there was a long time when you weren't allowed to see anyone smoke a cigarette on television. That was forbidden, and it largely was forbidden in the movies. If somebody was smoking a cigarette, the movie ratings would shift because that was akin to porn. Showing somebody smoking was a bad thing and we needed to stop that so we were no longer to show people smoking. We don't want to romanticize it, presumably, right?

Absolutely, right? For the greater good. We can all agree on that. It's a public health thing. And so there were all these subtle cues. And in the UK, if you buy a pack of cigarettes, you find images of diseased lungs and things like that on the cigarettes. And with any advertising. In Canada as well. Yeah, you encounter these horrible images all the time. So we can all say that that's probably a good thing. And then another example of nudge is that we now live in a diverse

culture. It's ethnically diverse, it's religiously diverse, and there's this history of bias against people who are different. And so what can we do to reduce that bias? Well, we can make it so that media content shows ethnic diversity and shows things like interracial marriages and represents our religious diversity. And if it's necessary in order to make the point that we over represent certain groups compared to their representation of the population. Well, that's a good thing because we want to get to the point where we are able to eliminate these kinds of biases in the general population. So I can sort of see where this is going, but this is all what you would call nudge.

That's very interesting. And nudge now extends down into all kinds of policies. Sure. And this is very deliberately and systematically being deployed in all sorts of sectors. In particular by public health. There's something about public health and it has to do with the way that masters in public health people are trained. The focus is on the population not on the individual. And when you think about nudge technology and this being deployed by governments and non-governmental organizations and transnational organizations like say the United Nations or the World Health Organization,

you end up in a situation in which somebody is making a decision that this is the way the world should be and this is the way you should think. And so we're going to take this very powerful, subtle ability to provide cues to manipulate how you're thinking, what your emotions are, what your beliefs are, and we're going to deploy it for this topic or that topic or the other topic, and maybe it has to do with things that are controversial, that there isn't broad cultural cultural consensus on, then you're in a position where you are making a unilateral decision. You could say an authoritarian decision. Someone is making a decision about how people should think, what they should think, how they should feel, how they should behave in the world, without consulting them.

And you're using a technology that is so powerful and effective that you're literally reprogramming their mind without their consent. You do a really remarkable job actually in Cywar documenting sort of the various different types of methods, this being, I guess, kind of like a basic example. Yeah, it's the easiest. Nudge is the easiest. The one that bothers me the most, frankly, because of who I am as a physician, is what I call psychological bioterrorism. My awareness of this as a process was relatively recent. Basically, you're creating a fear narrative, fear of infectious disease in this case, but it can be many different

things. It can be fear of climate change. So you promote this existential fear, this fear of death, one of the most powerful fears we have. You promote this fear through this series of steps, to then capture whatever the benefit was that they were seeking, whether it was profit, because I believe this is now being done routinely as a marketing ploy by the pharmaceutical industries. One of the advantages of psychological bioterrorism, it's propagated through media. It's propagated through the Internet in a global fashion, in a harmonized way,

with almost no cost. It's amazingly effective. And this is another example of how this kind of psychological warfare can be deployed, and it's the one that I find most concerning. Because fear is such a powerful motivator, and all sorts of people, I mean this is what's coming to my mind with the absolute best

intentions, will want to share that information. This is very serious. I used to refer to this as fear porn, but I think that's a gross oversimplification. The logic behind the term fear porn, like we have food porn or other things that, you know, people love to see certain types of imaging and certain types of messaging, and they'll obsess over it. They'll seek these things out. And certainly fear is a great stimulus. We could see this. We're about to come up to Halloween and people love to be frightened. They love to go to these roadside attractions and they love to watch scary movies. It's a great dopamine hit. Veer is really effective, but this is far more powerful and more insidious.

This is considered to be standard spycraft. For me, as somebody who considered himself an expert in biodefense and an active participant in what we would now call the biodefense industrial complex, this is part of what I did for a living since I left academia, to learn that I was just a cog in a wheel that was using this approach to advance other interests and purposes. Of course, this has a socket with another one of the things that I talk about, which is disaster cronyism. To give a recent example, there was the promoted narrative about, well, lately it's Marburg, but it was about the second round of monkeypox.

Remember, we had the Canary Islands monkeypox outbreak that the WHO considered to be a global emergency and turned out to pretty much be a nothing murder. And then we had another round of that being promoted more recently. And if you tracked the news pieces that were coming out when that narrative was being promoted by the World Health Organization and others. And it became a narrative, a common narrative in CNN and most of the mainstream corporate media outlets. You could also track that narrative in the literature about the stock market and about investing.

And you had multiple articles being run simultaneously about who you should invest in this company or that. They gave the ticker numbers and what their technology was and how it related to the potential threat of monkeypox and what the potential upside was. was, and this has this direct socket connection with something that I've long railed against, which is this pump and dump strategy that occurs in my industry all the time, in which naive investors are manipulated to make investments in emerging technologies that are not yet mature, we can all see it with the promotion of narratives about cancer treatments. And some new biotech will come up with what they assert to be a breakthrough cancer treatment. It

has great potential. It could cure cancer. And we're all afraid of cancer. They just need another $100 million or $500 million or fill in the blank to finally prove this technology. And so there's a rush to invest. And the way that ecosystem works is that once those investments are made, if that technology never matures, or if it takes longer to mature than was projected, or if it doesn't really meet expectations, the company goes down. The valuation of the stock, all those people that put money into that stock have lost money. But the managers, the people that are deriving their salaries, that find it necessary to continue to have that pool of money,

they keep all that cash. And they can continue to spend it however they want. This pump and dump strategy. So this whole ecosystem flows from psychological bioterrorism to disaster cronyism, or what Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism, to pump-and-dump investments on Wall Street, to fuel emerging technologies and startup companies. When people encounter this, or when I show the videos from the Cy War Brigade down in Fort Bragg, the recruitment videos, people come away dumbfounded and shocked and frightened. I think most people have a sense that there's a cloud of this

around them, but it's very jarring to be forced into recognizing that it's happening. And often they come back to me after I've laid this out and the first question, what can I do about it? What can I do when this is happening to me? And it's really interesting that you mentioned recruitment videos for the Fort Bragg PSYOPs group. Yeah, they call themselves PSYWAR soldiers. Right. Because the reality is that none of this

is really happening in a vacuum. I mean, in your book, you cover the deployment of these extensive technologies in Western liberal democracies and the U.S. in particular. But the reality is there's numerous bad actors. Of course, Russia is one that's brought up and most notably communist China that spend huge amounts of money at deploying these types of technologies, perhaps most notably with the use of the TikTok app here in the U.S. TikTok is a great example. They are masters of that. We are in an environment in which advancement and deployment of this tech is an arms race. And it's justified, just like the development of robotic soldiers, for example, or genetically manipulated warfighters. This is all rationalized based on the thesis that our opponents are doing it. And if we don't do it, then we will fall behind in the arms race.

Well, and if I may, it kind of gets worse because our opponents truly have no moral boundaries, right? You talk a lot about the moral questions. Absolutely. Right? Absolutely. The moral questions. And so we're forced into a situation in which the battleground is your mind. You as an individual, you as a group, you as a nation state, you as a race of people, or however you want to define as a religion. And this kind of tech is being deployed against you by multiple actors simultaneously, all seeking to shape how you think, feel, believe.

As soon as you engage in any access to mass media or social media, you are being manipulated. And whether you are aware of it or not, and you are being shaped and controlled. The opponent is grounded in the utilitarian logic that the ends justify the means. And so therefore we must also, because we can't fight that opponent unless we accept something akin to that same moral structure. So if they're doing it to us, we should be able to do it to them and

we should be able to do it to the same people that they're doing it to in order to counterbalance the effects. And the problem with that is that as soon as you go down that path, you become your opponent and it changes you. Like all of these things, as soon as you touch them, as soon as you engage in what I call a surrealistic battleground where nothing, nothing is true. Everything is spun. You can't differentiate friend from foe. You can't easily tell what's real and what's fake. It's all being manipulated all the time everywhere around you. And it's being manipulated by multiple actors everywhere around you and it's being

manipulated by multiple actors that have different agendas and often those agendas are are in opposition to each other. One of the things that upsets me the most about this is you may recall that I was an early proponent of the logic of Matthias Desmet and his mass formation thesis. If you go back and I kind of provide a brief summary in the book about that, Jill and I do, about the underpinning preconditions that Matthias lays out

that he believes based on the work of Hanna-Arndt and Sigmund Freud and so many others, one of the key foundational principles is the fragmentation of society, the splitting of the individual away from society. And you can't deny that we have a broad range of things, many of them being actively deployed, which seek to isolate or separate the individual from the group, from society. And a case can be made there are those that are actively seeking wedge issues to drive that splintering and fragmentation even further. Absolutely. And indeed, if you listen to the lectures of Yuri Bezmenov, for example, from a time ago, this was a kind of a key aspect of active measures of this type of psychological operations on Americans was to demoralize them to make them not believe in their state not

believe in what they were doing believe that there somehow there was there was there serious moral issues right and this is what I find really interesting of course this is what the the Chinese regime is fostering exactly this sort of what the Stasi now so he was was very effective. A hundred percent. But I can't help but notice, right, that when we look at, of course, you portray all sorts of very serious societal issues here and include particularly the deployment, all these methods where you don't even know

sometimes what's up or down or where it's coming from, like you're describing. At the same time, these liberal democracies remain by any objective measure by far the freest country, places where people have an unimaginable level of freedom, even comparing to a few generations ago, especially compared to these other regimes, which are deploying precisely these types of active measures today, right? So it's like we don't have the perspective. Maybe they are just further along in the timeline than we are.

That may well be, right? But the point is that if we believe, right, that we're all these fallen things, right, when in comparison, we're certainly not. In fact, we're, these fallen things right when in comparison we're certainly not in fact we're i don't know so the question is the question is are are we have we gone over the event horizon have we crossed a threshold in which the progression of these totalitarian measures because that's what they are uh has proceeded to such a point that the underlying structure of society cannot be recovered. And I think you argue very convincingly in your book, for example, that citizen journalism is perhaps the most disruptive technology in

recent history. And in fact, it's flourishing at the moment. Yes. Right. That's why the censorship industrial complex, that's why all this discussion about jailing Elon Musk, for example, is proceeding in Brazil and in the European Union. And increasingly, voices are saying it here in the United States, that the First Amendment is something that has to be renegotiated and reconsidered. We are in a position in which we still retain diversity of opinion and discussion, which I argue is absolutely required for innovation. And if I might add, an unimaginable level of freedom compared to most people in the world. So getting to the what can you do about it part,

the underpinning issue is the splitting of the individual and the fragmentation of society. That is the root cause that enables a lot of this darkness to creep in, is the isolation of the individual away from society. People have a fundamental drive, a desire to be associated with something larger than themselves. It's just a core aspect of human psychology. They can resolve that by the release that comes from a central authoritarian structure that says that we will solve your pain and here's the solution. You just need to ally yourselves with our movement. But you can also resolve that by recommitting to family, to community, to if you're a person of faith, to your religious community.

I think the way out of the woods here to overcome the preconditions that feed the susceptibility to these kinds of technologies is not only to understand what they are, but remember that the thing that enables them to be powerful is when we become isolated from other humans, from the human condition, from human society. There are so many forces that are isolating us, particularly in the urban areas, and it's going to be with us for the rest of our lives. The question is, can we find ways to coexist with it and not allow it to compromise our thoughts, which is what the goal is of this tech. And the way

that we can beat that is, you mentioned citizen journalism, seeking out alternative sources of information, alternative opinions, sharing in your community, talking to other people. The polarization and fragmentation of society that's occurring right now, that on both sides, all sides, it's really more that it's not just left and right. Everybody agrees that we become more and more splintered and fragmented, and that's not a good thing. And it mostly benefits our adversaries. It certainly doesn't benefit us as a society. And how do we get over that?

We start talking to each other. You've been talking about the importance of kind of giving the benefit of the doubt in one-on-one conversations, having empathy for the other, and trying to see their point of view. That happens at the level of one-on-one dialogue, of sitting down, having dinner together with your family, participating in active transactional discussions with people. We used to have salons, we used to read books, we used to discuss things with each other, and now we just kind of sit by the sidelines and shoot spitballs. This is what the great promise of social media seems to have come we just kind of sit by the sidelines and shoot spitballs. This is what the great promise of social media seems to have come down to,

is various levels and stages of trollery. There are very few communities on social media that actively participate in open discussion with each other and share different points of view. There are always situations in which our current solutions are inadequate. They don't allow us to overcome some major technical or other obstacle. In other words, we can't evolve beyond certain solution sets unless we have diversity of opinion because often the insights that are transformational that allow us to overcome whatever the blockage is are coming from people that

are outside of the in community of the people that are the academics or politicians or bureaucrats or whoever that are thinking about that problem, often they get so locked into their point of view and their models and their opinions that they can't think, the term outside of the box, they can't imagine another solution. And then

somebody has got to come in from the outside often and say, hey guys you're missing this, or did you think about that? And then suddenly that whatever that barrier was gets overcome and we can move to in the next level of where we encounter yet another problem. But we can't have an active discussion if there's censorship and all these other technologies and alternative points of view are basically disallowed. And so if we can't have a discussion, we can't bring in alternative points of view, then we can never come up with alternative solutions to the problem. Really what you're talking about is innovation.

And this is what America has always been known for, the engine of innovation. This is why communist China is basically parasitic on the U.S. because it's unable to create that because it functions in such a repressive way. Completely agree. We don't think about it, but that's why we exist as a society with the characteristics we have, is because we have written into this ancient document

this fundamental right as a matter of law. Not that ancient. Compared, I mean, there's a lot of folks that say it's outdated and it needs to be jettisoned, right? It needs to be rewritten. It's obsolete. We have to control discussion. We have to control misinformation. That's something we haven't talked about. What is this misinformation thing that I'm accused of so frequently by corporate media and Wikipedia, Robert Malone can't be relied upon because he was a spreader of misinformation. What that word means is that misinformation is any information which differs from the

approved narrative. And so if I say something that differs from what the WHO or in public health or the CDC or HHS are saying at a given point in time because they've changed their story and they do it all the time, but if I say something that differs from what they're saying because, for instance, I might be at the cutting edge of some new technology or I might be looking at the latest data coming out of South Africa and they haven't yet really thought about that. So I'm saying things that differ from what they're saying. Then I'm guilty of spreading misinformation. That cuts across everything. That logic that somebody can say something that

differs from the government's approved narrative or a large transnational company or organization's approved narrative, then they're guilty of a sin. And if they do it for political purposes, they're guilty of the sin of disinformation. And based on that, they have to be excluded from any future dialogue. That's the logic. And it's profoundly twisted. If we want to be able to adapt to a changing future,

I've come to the conclusion that I would rather err on the side of being permissive about speech, then in knowing that that means that I have to deal with trollery and hate, weaponization of my reputation and delegitimization and all that ugly stuff. It's the price I'm willing to pay for allowing free speech. I think it's the price we all have to pay in this modern era. So I think we have to recommit to community. I think we have to recommit to the family. And I think that we have to have this kind of active salon dialogue, like

happens here on American Thought Leaders, and which Epoch Times is committed to. And we have to share a diversity of opinion, and then we have to allow ourselves to come to consensus, but it's going to take time. That's one of the other things that's happened here. Everything is moving so fast, like the movie, Everything All at Once. Everything's happening so fast that we feel that we have to respond right now. This new threat that's been identified has to be addressed right now,

and this bureaucrat and that agency has the solution, and they're going to implement it by God. And that is the logic. And at some level the electorate, so to speak, you know, drives that a bit, doesn't it? The expectation of a, you know. So this is the corrupt deal here. And this is another one of the more insidious things that has been revealed over the last five years. This technology can be used to sway blocks of people, the electorate, the citizenry, towards one objective or another. This gets to Cosimov's point about spycraft. You can use this kind of approach to drive from the outside. This is the fear of the Russian bot farm, right? Russian

interference in American elections. If you look at the subtext of that, it's that we fear that they, our opponent, has such a powerful technology that it can influence the electorate here domestically to behave in ways and take decisions that are not in the best interests of that electorate, because that's what the government is supposed to represent, right? Consent of the governed. But rather in the interests of the opponent, whether it's the CCP or whomever, right? That's the fear. And so in the face of that, we then justify that it's acceptable to deploy the same thing against our people as a countermeasure. And we end up in this situation that we're in right now where you don't know what is true and

what is false. You can't say what is real and you can't discern because there are so many false actors out there. You can't discern who's friend and who's foe. You can't discern anything. And then society just fragments. And who benefits from that? The opponent. That's where we're at right now. And this kind of knee-jerk, oh, the solution is that we have to implement the censorship industrial complex, and we have to shut down misinformation, and we only allow the narratives that, I'm going to say it, Big Brother wants us to have. And we have to love Big Brother. Remember, that was another key point of 1984. Remember the tension between Orwell and Huxley.

Huxley's position was that totalitarianism is something not that's going to be forced on us, but that we're going to willingly accept. Orwell is in the position that this is going to be imposed on us basically through violent means. That's 1984. Brave New World is, we're just going to embrace it because, you know, the infamous, well, it'll make us happy. I'll just say it that way without citing a particular meme. We can live in a new optimized nirvana where we'll all be happy if we accept this this outside authority and what it tells us we need to do. I'm not... So this is a fundamental philosophical difference. I'm all in for freedom. I'm with Javier Millie, as I said in the allusion in the closing chapter of the book. I want freedom, damn it. And I think most of us that are thinking people do.

Now there's a substantial cohort of people that are very happy to just be told what to do and to go along from day to day, but there is a core group of folks that often are the ones that drive innovation and societal adaptation that aren't okay with that, that don't want to be told what to do. And I guess I'm one of those. And for those people, for the good of society, I think we need to back off on trying to control what those people are saying and thinking. The concept of the Overton Window applies with everything. I think we need to open the window of allowable discourse as wide as we can. That's my personal philosophical position,

and that can be argued otherwise. Well, we have a lot to figure out as Canadians, as Americans, you know, members of these free societies. Dr. Robert Malone, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thanks for having me and for sharing your opinions and perspective also. I always learn from you. Thank you all for joining Dr. Robert Malone and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellek.