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

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Health OneHealth]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon Pentagon]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_Carlson Tucker Carlson]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Congress Congress]

Sure. I mean, one of the things that I think I was most moved by was your concern that, by creating consensus in this new way of taking the dissenting portion of the expert community and deciding that they suffer from some strange psychological malady, or incompetence, or that they're bizarrely self-serving, the institutions have been running their own credibility into the ground. And you can see this across different disciplines, in different fields through the polling data. How much confidence do you have in medicine, in journalism, etc., even science in particular, with disastrous Public Health under Covid. I think that what you're trying to do is you're trying to say, "each time you buy a consensus by doing character assassination against dissenters, you're actually destroying the long-term respect in that institution". How many people still feel the same way about UPenn, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University Harvard] and MIT, my three universities, after those disastrous testimonies before Congress? So what you what you're seeing, I think, is—I think this is your plan—your plan seems to be to offer the institutions a way back by saying, "here's how we would come up with a protocol for figuring out who are the stakeholders and the representatives of the public in the expert community that are being silenced, or being maligned or prebunked" or whatever crazy terminology we'll get?

But this labeling has a self-fulfilling prophecy aspect about it. You know, there's a there's a technique in markets where if a hedge fund wants to you know, short a stock, you know, they'll work with PR companies to create bad press about it, which will drive down the stock price, and then everyone will see the volume moving into shorts. And so other people will start to, you know, think the company is bad or they will start to short it themselves because everybody else is shorting it. And so it becomes a short where the company because everyone's shorting it. And I think there's the same thing with terms like fringe or even the nature of cancellation itself is people who are not yet deemed fringe or not yet canceled by being by the public record, saying that they are canceled. They are fringe. They sort of become fringe because they were called fringe, not because they were at the start of it. And, you know, frankly, I think that's that's part of the framing of saying that someone is a disgraced scientist or something, and it's like they weren't disgraced until you called them disgrace. And then everybody looked around and said, oh, they're disgraced. They're probably disgraced. And then by virtue of that, now you're disgraced. And so I think, though, there is this collective immune system response that's starting to happen, when those labels are thrown around, because it's they've abused that so much. And every time they do, they lose institutional trust because some new disaffected group says, well, that's not really true in this case. And then they look around and they say, actually, I don't I don't trust the National Science Foundation anymore. I don't trust the National Academy of Sciences, I don't trust Tony Fauci. And and this idea on expertise. I mean, I think it's embodied almost in this sort of [https://gbdeclaration.org Great Barrington Declaration] versus Tony Fauci type thing, where Fauci publicly declared that he was the science, you know, that it was not a collection of experts. It was not people represented from all these different beliefs. It was all like all the energies were just poured, you know, from this one Sun Ra god who's come down to us in Egypt and is in there saying, “I am the science. And any scientist around me who opposes this is anti-science.” And that works to pull off an emergency operation to, to to ram through something in the short term, but almost like a, like cancer, like the tumor cells spread from there in the institutions and people. It rules through fear and resentment. But that resentment builds and and and it starts to crack institutions. And I think we have an exciting moment in history now where the opportunity to change that course is, is here.

You know, was this this thing with an [[Adjective, Occupation, Name Formula|adjective, a profession and then a proper name]]. So like [https://www.google.com/search?q=“fringe+epidemiologist+Jay+Bhattacharya” “fringe epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya”], you had [https://www.google.com/search?q=%22controversial+professor+jordan+peterson%22 “controversial Professor Jordan Peterson”]. And when I figured out that this was, a formula because everyone who reads the New York Times knows the formula, I then did a search on "controversial professor Paul Krugman". There was not a single hit on all of Google, because even though he was a professor and he had been controversial, that formula is never applied to people who aren't in the crosshairs of the thing. So yeah, we are dealing with this much more developed, eco, architecture to take out dissidents.

They use those words they have they have glitzy ten minute promo videos. They have. They have you can go on their website and you can see the, you know, hundreds of studies they've done. They just put out one. They call it the Misinformation Susceptibility Test, which in two minutes you can you can deduce how prone an individual is psychologically to believing false headlines. And it's the most ridiculous, politically rigged. You know, it would be a great joke if it, you know, it'd be a comedy movie if it wasn't a horror, you know, slasher horror to our democracy. But then they launder this as a scientific finding, saying certain groups of people are more prone to believe false headlines. Well, that means the government now needs to swarm around them with a Truman Show of different grant of, you know, grant programs to influence the news. They believe they can then use this to put pressure on the tech companies to say these are more psychologically vulnerable groups. And so we need to put harder trust and safety filters on them. But but this is like a this is the sort of thing that we used to call intelligence work. You know, when we're trying to go into a region and psychologically primed people to believe news narratives coming out of the Voice of America or Radio Free Europe, we would pump money into the university system. We'd get researchers to sort of validate something scientifically. That would be picked up by CIA proprietary media like Voice of America, and then that would create this surround sound ecosystem within the country, and people would believe that, and it would redound the U.S. interest. But now it's our own government doing it to ourselves. And that's also preventing experts from even publishing in the field, because the moment you cross that tripwire, you're now interfering with a government operation.

Well, and it's preventing it. And we've talked about the collusion as well. It would be one thing if it was just the government acting alone, but the speed at which the government and institutional partnership is moving right now, it truly blows me away. And I'll just share my story with with Stanford Law School. a few weeks after I announced publicly I was running for Vice president with Bobby Kennedy, I get an email from from sweet Charlie Munger from Stanford Law School, who has a big conference center dedicated to him because he's such a lovely, wonderful guy. I've sat in multiple meetings with him. We talked about, you know, how are we going to use, the law school to work with all of these innovative new technologies in energy and ecology? Very excited. And I get this mystery email from him saying, I think you should sit out your conference this year. This is a conference that I helped design. I built, I built from nothing called Future Law. And, it's it has sold out the last many years. it's a legal AI conference that has is now like the gold standard. And, and I have the same role every year, where I go in and I help host a segment called the Lex Talks. but, you know, just very casually, out of nowhere, you should just sit this one out. And I said, no, I'm not sitting at my conference. That's silly, Mr. Munger. I will be there. And he's like, well, no, no, you can't. And and then he offers me a few alternatives. He says, well, we'll take you off the agenda. You are not to tell any members of the press you were to be here. You know, we don't want anything political. I don't keep in mind this is Stanford University who has Obama, you know, Condoleezza Rice regularly on campus. So, the speed at which that message gets down into actionable form, it makes me wonder if this preemptive cognitive vaccine is already been at play, because how else would you move that quickly?

Yeah, well, I'm fascinated at that interplay between the government and institutional favors for favors relationship. We were we were talking earlier about this bizarre set of twin programs at the National Science Foundation. One of them is called the Convergence Accelerator Track F program. The other one is called the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Program. And, you know, in the charter documents for these programs, which distribute $100 million to to this web of universities. Stanford, for example, got again.

But they'll also tell you that, like in my case, we're going to do origin stories. I at some point got the phone call, “you should—your research is correct. But if you don't lay off of that, you will never have a career in academics again.” And it's just it's remarkable when the soft indications that you should stop aren't working because the person is convinced. Oh, no. No, I'm. It's good. I'm a scientist. I was trained to think critically. I'm allowed to consider all possibilities and all hypotheses. And then when you're told, well, actually, science doesn't work that way at all. And strangely, you're told and it's just sort of almost in pain listening to this. But the National Science Foundation misinformation, democracy. Am I right that at some level, the people are the greatest threat to democracy? The official misinformation, disinformation and malinformation is what is being protected, because that's what goes around consensus. That subset of the science that supports certain conclusions is labeled “The Science” and everything else is not. So you have this language problem, which is we've got to protect democracy from the electorate. We've got to protect, what we're calling “The Science” from science. We have to protect, free speech from people who want to share their opinions. And the language is now so completely crazy that we don't know how to have a discussion. I don't know, like, I did not know until recently, that malinformation was the technical term for information that doesn't go in the direction of the institutional consensus. And I known about debunked but prebunked. I mean, that was instantaneous because I've been debunked 18 times because that's what I do. I thought I was getting into a game to do dissenting, responsible, analytic work with these fancy degrees. And the fact is, is that that used to be something you could do. We used to have Serge Lang at Yale, who was one of these great dissenters. We had Noam Chomsky, William F Buckley from the conservative side. We had all of these great dissenting voices that gave America power through cowboy intellectualism. And now that's gone.

You know what I've seen firsthand? The mechanisms, at least within science, how this works. Right. So, the NIH, is responsive for funding, a huge amount of biomedical research in the United States and around the world. But it's not even the money that they confer. What they confer is social status. All right. So I have a I'm a professor with full tenure Stanford University in the School of Medicine. One of the main reasons I was able to get that position is because I was successful getting NIH grants. Right. It's a social marker. And the, the what they do is they send out the heads of these institutes, Tony Fauci will send out request for proposals with like essentially telling you what they want from you. that's, that's the normal way.

But and you know, that case still has a lot of life in it in the sense that, who knows? After full marriage discovery, I could see it very easily going back up into the Supreme Court, although it might take two years. but for my part, you know, we've been talking about institutions and receding institutions and the role of trust in that. And I do think that institutions actually sort of naturally reform, as trust breaks down and the, the reformation of the institutions is part of the trust. Re you know, re re infusion process, but that is being stopped right now because the government has capacity, built this coterie of thousands of different outside organizations to artificially preserve that what's left of their trust by cancellation tactics and censorship tactics of anyone who amplifies so-called distrust. And so what we were just talking about with the National Science Foundation, with these two programs that they had there, you know, they defined democratic institutions as government agencies and the media. The media is actually listed as a democratic institution that misinformation endangers, which means anyone who questions official media narratives is, you know, is in the crosshairs of $100 million in taxpayer spending to the Stanford University of Stanford, to the University of Washington, to the University of Cambridge for these psychological vaccines. And I do think if you were to get rid of the government's gargoyles, that that defend the artificial remnant of trust and the state of play would just be how people feel about these institutions, there would be an organic, you know, social media wave. There would be an organic response by elected representatives being responsive to seeing that. I've seen this personally, dozens of times where, you know, change doesn't start in Congress. Congress never doesn't take action until it's already on the tip of everyone's tongues, and they know they will be made a hero by sponsoring this bill or by by forming this investigation committee, which means the onus is on the people to to put it on the tip of everyone's tongues. But that can't be done while you have, you know, a North Korea style mercenary censorship army being capacity built, subsidized by the US federal government to do this. And so I do think if you were to tear down those gargoyle firms, you know, these institutions like Newsguard and these university centers that we're talking about in these in this, this NGO soft power swarm army, that, that those institutions would, would naturally receive, you know, receipt in a much more organic way. So that's what my area of focus.

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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Council 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.

Well actually I went back to schoolhouse Rock. And they say that the two parties choose the candidates. So you have to be very, very careful, because a lot of the sense that we have of democracy is actually post, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Democratic_National_Convention Democratic Convention in 1968].

Yeah. That's right. Let's update the episode. You know, of the obvious lack of that. But, you know, it's funny that you mention that. So, for example, with NATO, you know, we're talking about public health and, you know, the government's role in funding these censorship awards. So about a month ago, Doctor Peter Hotez was giving an interview where he called on NATO to intervene online and to and to censor vaccine skeptics, all in on all the different NATO countries and a lot of people were saying, how is this possible? What the heck? Why? Might as well invoke, you know, with, you know, Martians or some alien horde to come in from another galaxy. But the fact is, is NATO is part of this, this, this coterie of rules based international institutions, you know, democratic institutions that uphold the, you know, the rules based international order. But people part of this change process, in this reforming process that we're talking about, like legal solutions, like what Jay is involved in and I'm talking about sort of like civil society and government reform institutions and, and part of reforming from government and getting a coalition within government involves making the public aware of it. So the public talks about it, so the government actors feel motivated to do it. And that involves educating actually people about the institutions that they've heard of, but they don't fully under understand. And so these are institutions like NATO. A lot of people think that this is the western world's transatlantic military alliance, but they don't appreciate that that institution has gone horribly awry in interfering in domestic civilian politics, which they view as a domain of war, because the opinion of the population impacts their war funding, it impacts all sorts of policies. And they played a very, very nasty role in Covid censorship. NATO Stratcom Center of Excellence, based in Latvia. It was a it was a group set up after the the Ukraine coup in 2014 and the counter coup that involved the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimea Crimea] annexation. They set up this this NATO office to control the, you know, to censor disinformation in East Europe. That was capacity. But you can understand you can say, okay, that's a war 5000, 7000 miles away. We have this institution that the American People fund here, and we don't really care what the institution is doing, you know, on the on the front of that war to influence the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winning_hearts_and_minds hearts and minds] of people's news distribution there. Maybe you do, but that institution, that center of excellence, ended up doing a partnership with a company called [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphika Graphika], which is a which got $7 million from the U.S. Pentagon. It was a part of the Minerva Initiative, which is our psychological warfare research center of of the Pentagon to do a, trans NATO study. As soon as Covid broke out in January 2020, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphika Graphika] and NATO's Stratcom Center of Excellence surveyed all of social media to to catalog mis- and disinformation about the origin of the virus. They broke down political groups in the U.S, in the UK in.

That that's what they were studying because anybody who thought it might involve the Wuhan Institute of Virology was sort of engaging in what was being claimed to be mis-, or dis-.

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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee 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.

And it took this whole collective consciousness raising. It took 60, I'm sorry, 15 years, for a coalition to form around the Noam Chomsky types that ended up making its way into Congress, and that's what ended up establishing a whole new structure of oversight now that we now need new oversight. But that is a process of

And I think that we have to be like, for example, I think the average American doesn't know that. They know about spousal privilege, and they know about, attorney client privilege and, physician patient privilege. Do they know about State Secrets Privilege, which came from the U.K.? They probably don't. There's an entire parallel architecture in the intelligence community and in the NatSec world, which the average American doesn't know. And so part of the problem that we're having here is, is that we're having a one-sided conversation where one group says, we are so important that we can't talk about things in an open society, and that by allowing that idea to progress unchecked—You said originally this, it's like almost somebody said it was almost like an intelligence operation. This is an intelligence operation against our own people. We had the Smith-Mundt Act that was supposed to keep us from being propagandized.

But if you believe in a secret architecture, you also have to believe in civilian oversight. And if none of us are permissioned, to look into your dark corners and dark places, if effectively you can't let us in because it's too dangerous, then you've developed a second government. It is a shadow government at that point. Now, I don't know whether we have a shadow government, but I definitely know that the world's smartest people in the areas that I care about have essentially zero comprehension, what the national security people are doing in the areas that are relevant.

Sorry, Nicole, can I can I give you an example of this? Because what you said is so important that it's the people's interests need to be represented in these decisions, right? So let me just get a very concrete example. Right. It's very likely that this pandemic was caused by, a kind of research that essentially turned viruses that were they went out into the wild places, got viruses that would never have seen the light of day, brought them into labs. And the civilian excuse was, well, we need to study these viruses to see if they might make the leap and then develop countermeasures vaccines, before they make the leap. Right. and so they're doing these dangerous experiments. And a very small number of people signed off on them. Tony Fauci signed off on these experiments; in 2012 he wrote a paper where he explicitly wrote that even if these experiments result in a worldwide pandemic, it'll be worth it because of the the knowledge gained. Right? Well, who is he to make that decision of such a risky activity that impacts every single person on the face of the earth, by himself or with it, with a small group of people? The expertise, that would have represented those people needed to be at the table when those decisions were made.

I yeah, if you think about what Jay is saying, the the idea behind the, what was being done at the EcoHealth Alliance in its partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was this theory that to this day, nobody is discussing called “OneHealth” and OneHealth was this idea that you can't work on human health alone. We're all part of this. Like, you know, Gaia ecosystem is very hippie dippy and what does it mean? It means you have to go out into all of the world's most dangerous, Virus reservoirs and bring this stuff back to labs and populated places and work on them and see whether you can humanize these things.

I don't know, I think it's now shut down. But like with, you know, like 22, I think it was 2011, there was the H1n1 virus that was essentially weaponized by in the, in the Netherlands, and funded by U.S taxpayers, the Rocky Mountain Lab, too, in Montana and has a lot of. So I just I mean, again, these the work being done at these places may or may not be worthwhile, may or may not be scientifically interesting. So on. But I think we should have at the table representatives of the people to say, look you you think you scientists think that this is worth the risk to the entire world? Well, you know, I don't I don't I don't think that's true. Like, maybe we shouldn't we shouldn't invest in you, right? Instead, what we have is the scientists themselves regulating whether those risks take

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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Marshall_Fund German Marshall Fund] meeting and it was like 2019. And it was I think it was [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_John_Allen 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookings_Institution 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brexit Brexit]. It'll give rise to Frexit and Italexit and Spaixit and Grexit and and so then the EU will come undone. And then that means NATO will come undone. That means the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Monetary_Fund IMF] and the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Bank 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Becker Gary Becker] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Stigler 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—

And it coincided with other things that happened to the Smith-Mundt Act. That was the changing of the domestic dissemination ban. They lifted it. They said now the US AGM, which is a massive, massive media agency owned by the government, which used to disseminate this information just overseas, could now be allowed to disseminate to the American public effectively U.S. propaganda. There was—there's still a restriction on targeting individuals, but we've found, [https://www.sagersmith.com/weston-sager-attorney/ Weston Sager], a young, independent attorney, filed a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Information_Act_(United_States) FOIA] request and found that they had, in fact, used social media to target. So there's many of these underpinnings that are required. They're prerequisites for the slippage that has amounted to where we are in 2024 today. You talk about it a lot, Mike, and, you know, I think that there's plenty of evidence. But I want to make sure we get back to solutions because we're a little bit on our back foot, all of us right now, and we're fighting from our back foot. We've got to figure out how to get on our front foot. What are—congressional legislation, you know, vote for individuals that are talking about free speech. It's just really simple. These are constitutional defenders. If anyone is anti-free-speech, or has spoken about misinformation, they're likely bought into this regime. So that's one solution. But we've got to get on our front foot somehow, and I think we've got to get on our front foot quickly. So, you know, we're not disclosing like our master plan by any measure. But, you know, what are some of the things that we should be thinking about to get on our front foot? Obviously, X has been a blessing to many of us. Being re platformed has been a blessing to many of us. we still have hope in our institutions. Jay, you have a conference on the [https://gbdeclaration.org Great Barrington Declaration] at Stanford, which I think is wonderful. Kudos to Stanford for doing that. Any anything else we should be?

That's it. That's a great job. If you can get it, you know, to be in control, you've invested in a product and you can control every and how everyone thinks about the product. I mean, that's a that's a dream. But you know, you see this now with entities like NewsGuard two who who will, you know, work with certain companies. And then it just so happens the things that they censor happen to be anything that opposes that particular, you know, company or ad agency who's got these portfolio companies who are benefiting from the rigged searches or the suppression of anyone who criticizes this. I mean, but, I do think that there is this issue with, you know, Eric, you mentioned this this term, you know, “[[Credentialed Expert]]” and, you know, talking about, you know, the science in the financial economy of of doing science work is so much about grants. Most secondary research—the National Science Foundation is the single largest funder of grants in secondary education. It's not really even a private, you know, university research ecosystem. The government grants dwarf it, and know I almost think of it like the McKinsey analogy, where, you know, companies will want to fire, you know, lay people off, but they don't want to get sued over doing it. So what they need is an outside validator, an independent consultant company like McKinsey. And they will hire McKinsey not to get, you know, a dispassionate third-party opinion about whether or not they should go through with the restructuring. But they give the wink wink, nudge nudge/informal, you know, golf course conversation with their liaison at McKinsey, “we need this report to say that we need to fire these people, because we're going to hold that up so that we don't get, you know, hit with laws; that'll make it go down easier.” And that is the role of this sort of mercenary science in a lot of places. And I think it's hard to change that simply on the basis of ideology, because you have the financial interests, right? Like people do not want to lose their livelihoods. Well, where else am I going to get the money from if I decline to do this research? And now I'm a pariah in Tony Fauci's eyes or whatnot. And I think this gets to this kind of whole society framework that I think is necessary on this, which is, you know, and again, I'm also hopeful, like Jay is even you look at the, you know, the Murthy-Missouri, you know, decision where Jay is a, you know, a plaintiff with these great lower court rulings, Supreme Court, you know, made, in my view, a disastrous blunder. But the very next day, in I think it was Washington Post, but it may have been another, you know, sort of comparable no less than Nina Jankovic, the disinformation czar, you know, the head of the disinformation governance board who sued Fox News for defamation for calling her a censor. And then the court just last week said, actually, we're dismissing the lawsuit because you were a censor. But she wrote an article the very next day or two days after the decision, saying that she was not optimistic about the ruling. And I think that the title of it was something like, you know, “The Murthy Scotus decision cannot undo the damage wrought against disinformation studies”. And I think that's true. but that is because everyone activated from all of the different areas. You had multiple different congressional committees, you know, from, from judiciary to house to house. You have you had you had state attorney generals taking action. You had private sector lawyers taking action. You had media and tons of media on it. And you had civil society watchdog organizations and nonprofits all. So you you had this sort of whole society freedom alliance, which everybody sort of was able to do their part. That is how they actually established the censorship apparatus was through a whole site. So I think that whole-society-eye view is, is the way to look at solutions on it. And it's already racked up a lot of and

Okay, but in terms of what you're saying, solutions. One of the things that I think that you, Nicole, can do given your multiple hats, right. So you're wearing a science philanthropy hat, a law hat, and a candidate hat. I think that the idea that we were talking about earlier, about releasing the glossary of terms that, like Mike has uncovered when he says “rules-based international order”, people have no idea that that's like a set phrase and that you have to really understand what it actually means.

Brilliant, hearings, the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee Church] and Pike hearings. I think [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Hart Gary Hart] is still alive, who was on the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winning_hearts_and_minds 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Inouye 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn 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—

Hallucinogenics. And, you know, the interesting thing is, is that most people don't know what the CIA does. They think it's Central Intelligence Agency, but it's also the covert operations. Some people say, oh, covert that just means silent or quiet. No, it means deniable. It means we have a plan for gaslighting you if you trip over this, which is called “[https://ncirc.bja.ojp.gov/event-deconfliction Deconfliction]”. So one of the things we can do is we can get all of the terminology. Like, how many Americans understand that there are three separate [https://ncirc.bja.ojp.gov/event-deconfliction Deconfliction] systems to prevent blue-on-blue, two teams of good guys running into each other. You've got an undercover guy pretending to be a Mexican drug lord, and he's going to be busted, by local police. And they have a system for figuring this out. We don't understand our own lives, our own government, until we understand the National Security complex. But to take an interest in the national security complex is to court this term Conspiracy Theorist, which is a fascinating term. We all know the conspiracies exist. We have Rico Acts, after all. But to posit a conspiracy in front of the government or in front of one of the political parties before they get to it—if you're reading ahead in the script, that's one of the worst crimes you can commit.

Yeah. One of the individuals that I think inspired this conversation, I wasn't actually previously aware of her until you shared prior to us going live is, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Oldham_Kelsey Frances Kelsey], who was the scientist that prevented thalidomide from coming to the United States, which was prescribed to pregnant women to help offset morning sickness. Later Frances, alone, rang the alarm bells that this was responsible for horrible birth defects. She came to the United States, worked very, very hard to prevent it from coming into the United States, thus saving many, many children here from the fate that hundreds of thousands of children suffered in Europe.

Can I say one point about her? She's an absolute hero to me, right? So she worked for the FDA and she wasn't like the top of it, but she was just an honest scientist inside the FDA bureaucracy. And she just, she looked at the data and said, “look, there's not enough information here to guarantee the safety of this drug, show me more”. And in the meantime, the FDA equivalent in Europe had already signed off on it. And all these moms took this drug with the assurance it was safe, based on what their version of the FDA was telling them. And it wasn't safe. It led to their babies, many of their babies being born with no limbs. It was it was just absolutely heartbreaking. A huge—and so for her to stand up as a as a scientist in favor of the truth, and then to have the institution so that that it would listen to this dissenting voice. That protected all these moms and dads and babies in the United States, when in Europe, they'd failed, they let thalidomide into the public with a promise it would stop you from getting morning sickness. But it just makes your baby have no limbs, or have these major birth defects. That's a model for how our institutions need to be. It's not that we don't need institutions. We need people inside the institutions that speak for the people.

And think about how many of the people who have these characteristics passed through the University of Chicago. So one thing in terms of positive things to do, is to hold a conference at the University of Chicago, which I think has gotten somewhat beaten up during this time, but it's gotten a lot less beaten up than everywhere else. And we need to realize that we have to repopulate from the places that did the best job of standing up. I believe that if you go to the University of Chicago, you learn very quickly, it's in your blood, it's in the ethos, it's in the DNA—this is a place of scholarship.

Who is that? Oh, Coase! This is one of the great stories of all time. And, you know, in, in understanding which of our institutions have fared better, we have we have to recognize that, you know, okay, I'm sure there are times when it's been Princeton or Stanford or Berkeley, but right now, I think we need to look to the University of Chicago and ask, what did these tiny numbers of individuals do?

So you have this structure, which has grown and subsumed all these divisions. Jay, you didn't want anything to do with the Pentagon, I bet. I bet you didn't, like, it’s the farthest thing from your practice. But yet you saw it descend over your field.

They've set themselves up as the God figure in that anecdote. And that's not the way it was supposed to be. This in a civilian run government, the civilians, you know, are the spirit, the, you know, the Holy Spirit of it, if you will. It is, you know, they this the military, the national security state, the intelligence agencies and all of their proxies in the NGO world, in the university world are supposed to be answerable to the civilians. And I think one thing that's actionable in all of this is we understand that there's military work and national security intelligence work, you know, for things in foreign countries and, you know, where the troops are moving, the secret military bases, whatnot. But the fact is, there's so much of it. And, Eric, you know, hit on this phrase, it’s [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winning_hearts_and_minds "Hearts and Minds"] work. And the issue is, is that hearts and minds work is effectively classified. And we become casualties of a proxy war playing on, playing out above our heads. Because with the end of the Smith-Mundt Act, now hearts and minds work that's done by the U.S. State Department's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Engagement_Center Global Engagement Center (GEC)] can now come back, because that Global Engagement Center now is a partnership with the University of Cambridge for their psychological vaccine to stop Fake News, which is designed to prevent—