Council of the Canceled with Eric Weinstein, Jay Bhattacharya and Mike Benz (X Content): Difference between revisions

But they are laundering, in the same way that during the Russiagate affair, you had U.S. intelligence laundering things out to Christopher Steele and the MI6 networks out there. You have the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security laundering out to a British lab whose ultimate goal is to create a psychological vaccine against back, against fake news.

This is something like NATO. And the idea is that the people in that permanent class inside of Washington DC and in Brussels say, look, there's certain things that are so important to the functioning of the world that they cannot be, endangered when you take a pulse every four years of a country like the United States and say, well, where are where are we at the moment? Because what they call a populist is somebody who has not been pre-vetted by the two vetting organizations. The old model of democracy, from Millard Fillmore and to the present is that there are two parties. Those two parties are supposed to nominate people who are broadly acceptable to the institutions. And then all of us get a binary vote, which is supposed to express our hearts, dreams, and hope for the future. That model is in the process of crashing. Now you have three candidates who are leading the field, two of whom do not appear to be signed up for the institutional consensus at the level that, let's say the Atlantic Council, wants them to be. So their perspective is, is is kind of funny. It's like, look, we're all for democracy as long as it doesn't actually threaten the brittle limb on which the Western world sits. And that means that what you're supposed to be doing is explaining NATO as you see it, explaining NAFTA as you see it, explaining, you know, trade rounds as you see them or the W.H.O. And then you have to put it in front of the people. And the people may say, yeah, I didn't follow that NAFTA reasoning. I understand the NATO reasoning, but I'm not up for the NAFTA thing. And the W.H.O. seems to be under control that I don't trust. Then you have to go back and say, look, we're losing the people on some of these key institutions. What do we do? That is not happening. And I think that, you know, in large measure, what we have to say if we want to solve this is to talk to the thing that doesn't even want to show itself, the thing that doesn't want to show itself is sitting there saying that these people go on and on about democracy, and they don't even understand how dangerous the world is. Just let us do our job. We have just seen in the Democratic Party a process that is not explained on Schoolhouse Rock, where a person suffering from dementia, clearly visible to people who have televisions or, and who can get YouTube, that those that this person has walked away from, from the race, leaving us with the vice president that nobody seemed to want, dropped out super early because she couldn't raise money. That's what she said. There was also that Tulsi Gabbard thing that suddenly nobody can remember. And whatever that process is, is being told to us that democracy is on the ballot. Well, what happens if it's actually democracy and oligarchy that are both on the ballot at the moment? Right.

Totally. Yeah. But there's so many unanswered questions about the role of the Pentagon, which administrated the Covid epidemic, which which subsidizes, as Jay was discussing, the gain-of-function research because these are you are super juicing viruses in order to create a vaccine on it. But that's a military dominion. But you had the military doing the censorship response of anyone who questioned whether the military may have been responsible for the virus, but we're supposed to have a civilian run government, we're supposed to have a civilian run media. But it's so who answers to who here? But but that is I think that sort of education is what elevates people on social media. People who do public speaking to. This is a process that happened with the New Left in the 1960s and 70s. This is how we got reform from the Church Committee. We have a Senate Intelligence Committee now only because it took the intelligence agencies operating domestically, infiltrating left wing student movement groups who were opposed to Vietnam.

But do we even know in a certain sense, whether this was a workaround to get around the Biological Weapons Convention of the 1970s and the Geneva Convention? In other words? Yeah. My concern about this is, we're talking about a phenomenon that I, I call Jessupization. If you think about the interchange between Colonel Jessup and Lieutenant Kaffee in A Few Good Men, it's not the way we remember it. These are two perspectives. The NatSec perspective and the democracy perspective. And Jack Nicholson has a much stronger point, until he occasionally veers into this thing where he says, I provide the freedom, right, which is Moses's sin, that he points to himself rather than realizing that he's part of a greater structure. And I believe that in some sense, what we're seeing is a group of people were saying, that deep down at a place that we don't like to talk about at parties, we're glad that they're there. And I'm actually not sure. And I'd like to get to the part of, “You're under arrest, you son of a bitch.” And it's not necessarily just—I don't want to punish anybody. I want this stuff to appear in a forum where I can trust that if I can't see the data because it's too dangerous, let's say the weaponization of anthrax or something like that. I want to know that somebody who holds my general concerns, who is highly competent, feels that they 100% were part of it. The consensus building before we got to how do we push it out and that those people are representing the interests where I cannot like I'm not a virologist. I'm not an epidemiologist. I need to have an expert, and the great danger about this is, is that if you don't want to play with the dissenting experts, just wait a decade and you're going to be taking this from internet figures who were, you know, until recently, gamers who were streaming on Twitch.

Can I make one more one. Know this, because I always refer to the field of disinformation studies as being censorship gain-of-function, because it's basically the same sort of, you know, mad science that could destroy the world, you know, on the on this sort of, you know, free speech and democratic society side that could literally, you know, physically destroy the world on, on this sort of, virus side where, what they, what they do is they are they're juicing up censorship techniques and they do this in this sort of OneHealth style way. And this is what the Convergence Accelerator Track F program is at the National Science Foundation, which is for, for trust, you know, in online news. And you know, so it's a convergence accelerator. It, it converges all these different disciplines who don't normally talk together and interact, you know, the, the, the linguistics people, the psychology people, the sociology people, the, the computational data science people, so that they're all working together to build this psychological vaccine. And so they're sort of taking that approach. But then the whole field itself is also cloistered in the same sort of intelligence, national security cloak that gain of health gain, gain of function work is, you know, these people always have someone from the CIA or someone from the military, you know, on their side. Now, oftentimes it won't be CIA operations. It'll be a CIA analyst in the CIA on the on the on the analyst side, will often recruit professors who are specialists in a particular language or region or cultural group when they are doing an operation in that, in that, or they'll have it basically bookworm types and they'll, they'll then when they leave the CIA, they now have a new track career to be an academic at the University of Stanford or MIT or Cambridge. And then they themselves will have partnerships with DARPA. They themselves are partnerships with NATO. And they they will effectively have a little bit of a public facing light, like you might read in The New York Times that there was funding to this gain-of-function thing, but you're not going to really look behind the hood. You may read on the National Science Foundation grant page that this university got a disinformation grant to study, you know, anti-NATO narratives circulating in NATO countries. But there's this whole cloistered national security underworld iceberg that they effectively, you know, do that Jack Nicholson thing where it's it's listen to the native because one of the funniest moments in my journey in learning all of this was, you know, there was this German Marshall Fund meeting and it was like 2019. And it was I think it was General John Allen who was, I think the Supreme Allied commander of NATO, or he ran the Afghanistan forces, and he had just become the head of Brookings, Brookings Institution with the largest think tanks. And he was asked to give, you know, he gave a talk at one of the panels at the top three geopolitical threats to the world order. And the third one was online hate speech. It was very—it's not like Russian aggression. And what he said is, you know, you have this situation where, you know, hate speech gives rise to ethnocentrism, which gives rise to nationalism, which gives rise to opposition to the rules based international world order. This is what gave rise to Brexit. It'll give rise to Frexit and Italexit and Spaigsit and Grexit and and so then the EU will come undone. And then that means NATO will come undone. That means the IMF and the World Bank will come undone. So the whole rules based international order will collapse if we allow the civilian class—and this is a four star general—if we allow the civilian class to speak freely online.

I'm so glad we're doing this. So different version of this is in my work in economics with my wife, Pia Melaney. We solved a problem called the “Changing Preference Problem”, that you couldn't allow people's tastes to change over time or all the models stopped functioning. And unfortunately, we found out that there was a structural paper written by Gary Becker and George Stigler, two Nobel laureates in economics, that states and baldly, “we believe that you don't argue over tastes because tastes are the same to all men and don't change over time”. Now, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen in an academic journal, but it's they go in great detail as to how this works. And I'm sitting there fighting this thing. You know, we we have a mathematical solution to this problem, but this paper solves it by fiat, by just positing something that we know isn't true, that humans never change their tastes and we all have the same tastes. And I get this email saying, “I can't stand to watch you fighting this. You have to understand that when we set up the university of Chicago economics department, the reason it's so powerful and so famous is in part, that it was a bulwark against totalitarian communism, funded from inside, the intelligence world.” And then the person says to me, well, so I say, “I don't understand how how can anybody believe that all tastes are constant?” And what comes back is “we forgot to tell our descendants that this was being set up as a bulwark against totalitarian communism, so that when the end of the Cold War came, the grandchildren intellectually of this period have no idea that they're actually carrying out a long dead intelligence program so that the field can't progress.” And I was just flabbergasted by this, that—

It’s funny, cause the Chicago School of Economics was used as the justification for the the, you know, the military takeover and international redevelopment of countries in Latin America. This is part of fighting Marxist Liberation Theology, was this idea that we're bringing market capitalism to them. And we're so the Chicago School of Economics—

This was a piece of Kryptonite. In other words, the changing preference problem gave anyone the opportunity to say, I appreciate all this work in neoclassical economics that you've pushed out to the planet, but are you telling me the whole thing collapses if we have tastes that change over time? So, in other words, they just they shoved in a fix with paperclips and masking tape and then, you know, and 50 years later, I think it was a 1977 paper called De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum. We're still living in a world in which you can't innovate in economics mathematically because we're still fighting the Cold War.

So did you see your neighbor Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s podcast where they talked about going to the white House and the issue of AI, and they said, these visitors say, well, you can't bound math. And the White House says, oh, yes, we can. We had to do it. We had to do it for theoretical physics. In theoretical physics, you've got something called “Restricted Data”, which sounds completely innocuous, which means that there are it's the only category of intellectual property that is “Born Secret”. That means that if you're working at a cafe, you have no job with the federal government—you're not under any restrictions—if you write down something that can potentially impinge upon nuclear weaponry, it is already Q-classified just at the table—no government agency has to come in. Then we have another concept called the Deemed Export, which is intellectual, like, ideas that you can't share with foreign nationals. You don't understand how much NatSec infrastructure lives inside of these places. And Jay, you know, one of the most meaningful things you ever said to me was something like, “I've been at Stanford for 30+ years, and I had no idea how the place even worked!”

The one of the strangest things is that you can talk to 100 randomly chosen professors at the top research universities in the country, and none of them know the history of peer review. So you have a very interesting situation that the people who are responsible for peer review do not know where it came from, do not know what happened in 1972 in medicine, and what happened in 1975 to stop something called the Bauman Amendment. One of the things that we find is, is that people are living in a world that they have no idea how it actually works. So, I got into a very public fight—

Brilliant, hearings, the Church and Pike hearings. I think Gary Hart is still alive, who was on the Church Committee? People have to—why don't we reach out to Gary Hart and say, well, what actually happened when we had to look at what the intelligence community was, that we found out there was something called Section A of the Reserve Index, which was people to be rounded up in times of national emergency. And who are these people? Are they criminals? Are they gang leaders? No, they're the independently wealthy, TV newscasters, labor leaders, professors, anyone who could sway hearts and minds. We don't even know that there's a secret history of the McCarran Act, which sought to take the success as it was understood by the NatSec complex of the Japanese incarceration and set up prospective camps for communists that then they were disallowed when Daniel Inouye led a fight against this because he was in a position to do so. That reoccurs under FEMA, you have this entire history of the United States. Think about Howard Zinn on lots and lots of steroids. There is a NatSec history of the United States that to know about it means that you're a crazy person. And I think that this—

When you believe in individuals like Dean Boyer or President—who was it—Bob Zimmer, you know, these are pivotal individuals. And just picking up on Francis Oldham Kelsey, we need to get back to the point where one person standing up is sufficient to turn back a tide of tens of thousands.