Welcome to Keith Knight, Don't tread on Anyone in the
Libertarian Institute Today I'm joined by James Corbett,
independent journalist, founder of The Corbett Report, to
discuss his new book, reportage Essays on the New World order.
James, where is the best place for people to get a copy of this
book? The place to go is
reportagebook.com spelt like it sounds REPORTAGE book.com.
That is the website where you can find the buy the paperback
and buy the e-book links at the top.
But if those particular links aren't working for you or you
don't like that that way, there's a bunch at the very
bottom of the page, a bunch of different links to all sorts of
booksellers. But the important thing, of
course, this is a real deal book, so you can get it from any
bookseller anywhere. You all you need is the ISBN
number and that is on that page. Awesome, you mention.
I want to get into a little of your background before
proceeding. How long were you an English
teacher in Japan? All right.
So I got here in 2004 and I went full time with the website in
2011. So I guess it was about seven
years. OK, in those seven years, what
were the biggest lessons you extracted when it comes to the
concept of being a teacher? Someone communicating knowledge
to someone else where you're more of an expert.
Biggest lessons from being a teacher for seven years.
You know, it was one of my first and earliest and simplest but
most humbling lessons was that I had to learn that just because I
knew something and was didn't find it challenging, was bored
by it does not mean the student is going to find it equally
boring or easy to comprehend. And that for I don't.
Of course that is the case. You are the teacher.
You were teaching someone something they presumably don't
know. So, but my initial, when I first
started teaching, my first reaction, it was always to try
to make things, make things more interesting, make them more
complicated because they'll get too bored too easily.
But then I realized, no, the way to set people up for success is
at a very base level to firmly establish a foundation of, of
baseline knowledge and then build from there.
And the students who excel at that point will can, you can
start making it more complicated and challenging.
But it was always about establishing that baseline of
knowledge, I think is an important part of that.
And that's something that I don't consciously keep in mind
with my work at the Corbett Report.
But I'd like to think it informs my work with the Corbett Report
because I'm talking to not just a classroom, I'm talking to 10s
of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people all around
the world, and different levels of comprehension and
understanding and waking up different paths of life,
different countries, different backgrounds.
So I can't possibly gauge where the students in my virtual
classroom are, but I can hopefully establish that
baseline that we can use to build and get more detailed with
our analysis. The subtitle of the book is
Essays on the New World Order. What is the New World Order?
Well, I purposefully did not define that in the book itself
because I wanted this book, in a sense, to inform people's
understanding of that topic, to meet the New World Order.
In a sense, it's very simple. You could boil it down to a very
simple definition. Essentially, when you hear a
politician talking about the New World Order, they are talking
about the fact that in any given time period there is a world
order that governs international relations and that might be
informed or delimited by various geopolitical events, historical
events, economic ties, etcetera. All inform the concept of a
world order. And the last time we saw a new
world order really firmly established was in the post
World War 2 era. After literally Europe riot,
lying in ruins, smoke holes and craters and just totally
obliterated, it was time to build a new world order.
And the world order that was built on top of that was
essentially the era of Pax Americana that we've been living
through based on the Bretton Woods institution, United
Nations. The concept of an international
world reserve currency tied to the dollar, which was originally
pegged to gold, which we know is no longer pegged to gold,
etcetera, etcetera. That was the world order.
Clearly we are transitioning into a new world order and we
hear politicians talking about this a lot.
But, but I think it's deeper than that because I think
ultimately what what these politicians are alluding to is
the concept of a world order under a world governance system,
not necessarily a world government.
But clearly we are taking steps towards world governance of some
sort. And I would liken that to post
World War One. We saw the creation of the
League of Nations and the that early attempt at trying to form
some sort of parliament of the world.
After World War 2, we saw the creation of the United Nations
and again some attempt to try to bring some sort of world
governing system into place. So I imagine after World War
Three we will see what the new new World Order really looks
like. But it will probably not be
pleasant for the average person because more and more of their
power will be seated to a far distant authority.
And I think that is the crux of the New World order that I see
coming into view that I I do not want to come into view, which is
the centralization of more and more power in fewer and fewer
hands in the hands of an oligarchy essentially.
So in a sense, you could make the old observation that the new
world order is just the old world order.
It's it's the same quest for world order that has been on the
table since the very earliest tyrants tried to basically bring
the world under their under their rule.
We're still seeing the same thing in our current day and
age. Anyway, so this book of essays,
which I am pointing to off screen, so I'll bring it on
screen so people can see it. This book of essays hopefully
shows various facets of how this new World order is being
constructed, and also hopefully what we can do about that to
stop it from coming coming about.
So I can immediately see people, if you explain to them the
concept of like a federal government, that you're seating
a great deal of power to a very small number of people.
Some people might respond and say, well, actually it's very
beneficial that we have a federal government that allows
us to cooperate. It sort of keeps the peace.
I could see that being some sort of justification for supporting
the new world order, however people think that may come to
fruition. But the metric you're using to
determine good world order from bad world order is the amount of
centralization of power and people's inability to act
independently from it. Or am I putting incorrect?
Words in your well, I think that's that's one aspect of it.
Another aspect that I would highlight and did highlight in
the essays is the the difference between voluntary order and
order that's being imposed from top down.
And I addressed that specifically in one of the
essays on A brief Introduction to Spontaneous Order.
Because certainly we have since our earliest childhood been
instilled with the sense that law and order is the way to have
a properly functioning society. You can't have a properly
functioning society without law and order, and those concepts
have always been linked together.
And unfortunately, in the popular imagination here in the
21st century, in our lightened Liberal Democratic era, law
means whatever is written down on a piece of paper by someone
installed in a position of power.
As opposed to that concept of how law and order comes about in
a society, there is a completely different conception called
spontaneous order, which is to say that you do not need to
govern from talk down in order for people to come together in
community and start supporting and helping each other and
adjudicating their own problems through, for example, common law
systems. I know this is a difficult
concept for people to wrap their head around because they have
been indoctrinated since the time they were born that the
only way order can come about is from the top down South.
In my brief introduction to spontaneous order essay, I try
to show that there is another concept of order.
In fact, yes, in a sense you could say the New world order
could be the order that we bring about from bottom up, the
spontaneous order of a real true people's revolution.
But I guess that's just a different way of of looking at
the issue. What would you say are the best
examples, the best empirical examples of spontaneous order
taking place in the world around us, as opposed to some
hypothetical that could potentially exist in the future?
Right. Well, I I like to bring it down
to the absolute most basic level.
For me, it's just so obvious that we do not need a government
to tell us to how to speak English.
We learn English because we are human beings embodied in this
world who want to communicate with other human beings.
And as a natural result of that, we start babbling and then
emulating our parents and then we start to learn how to speak
English. And if we say something silly or
grammatically incorrect, people will correct us.
There is no, there is no police that's going to blow the whistle
and take you to jail if you don't speak in a, a certain way.
The entire, the entirety of linguistic communication arose
without government. I think that's one pretty
important example that we kind of just gloss over.
Oh yeah, whatever. And there's, I think there's a
million examples like that. And more recently and more to
the point, I suppose we could point to things like the
development of standards for for operating systems or what have
you on your computer. There again, there's no
government that had to come in and regulate.
Every computer has to be built with this type of operating
system on this programming language that can run this type
of software. No, those types of standards
arise because people realize it would be a lot better if we had
a common standard that we're working towards so that we can
all just start creating software in that paradigm, right?
Wouldn't that be easier? Wouldn't that be better?
You could look at that with railroad gauges and all sorts of
the million other things that are not not governed by some
sort of body that's going to come in and regulate that down
to the letter of the law. It's just that business works
and community works and people understand that it's better if
we all agree on shared standards on certain things.
Why can't we continue to expand that idea out into more and more
of our life and at the very, very, very least claw back some
some of our power from the government bodies that try to
regulate every aspect of our existence?
I want to get through a few intellectual hurdles someone
might be coming forth with if they are faced with a book like
this with such a title. Here is a meme that I came
across. It's a gentleman.
This is for the audible only audience.
So a guy is sitting at his desk facing One Direction, and the
opposite direction is a door that a woman is walking away
from him just in clear disgust. He's trying to get her
attention. He's in his socks, obviously.
He says, honey, come look, I found some information all the
world's top scientists and doctors missed.
So when you come across someone with the idea that, look, if
there's such valuable information in this new book you
have that the first thousand books that I've been introduced
to didn't have, how is it that you're able to get all this
information that all the top scientists and doctors and
experts missed? It's a, it's a very funny joke,
isn't it? And it works well in that comic
format. But of course, it doesn't really
address reality because first of all, I mean, I could go into the
articulation of, for example, when I talk about, although I
don't really talk about it much in the book itself.
But when I talk about issues like, for example, the scam
demic and what have you, how do I address that sort of thing?
How, where does some English teacher in Japan get off
addressing, you know, these things that these top scientists
have not talked about or as I do address in the book, the
environmental movement and the global warming hypothesis,
etcetera. You know, how does, how does he
talk about things like this? And I could address it by
saying, well, of course, if we're looking for example,
specifically at the concept of anthropogenic global warming, we
could talk about the equilibrium climate sensitivity that is an
admitted factor in the IPCC calculations that they admit has
a wide range of uncertainty that is in fact greater than the
actual observed temperature average increase, etcetera.
We could get into those weeds. But I think that actually in a
sense is giving too much credit to the other side of the
argument. Because I think the bigger
problem is the the fact that sort of any information that is
not being told to you on the nightly news is all gathered
together and all lumped into this category called conspiracy
theory. And if I haven't heard it from
some expert on the Evening News, then it then then it is this
other category of thing that deserves to be lumped in with
literally everything else. So I would say I can't really
address the sort of general blanket claim like how do you
say you have information other people don't?
What specific piece of information are you talking
about? And we can talk about the
details of that specific piece of information.
I can't, I can't possibly address all information in the
world that isn't on the on the nightly news.
You have a thesis titled I believe you titled it The News
is a Social Construct. Can you walk us through a brief
explanation of what that means? Well, it's again one of those
things that's so simple and basic that we don't spend time
actually thinking about it, but we probably should.
And that question is what is the news?
Which seems, again, like a stupidly simple question, but
becomes more complex when you start to think about it.
OK, the news is, well, OK, let me go get the newspaper and I'll
check or let me turn on the TV and I'll check what the news is
today. But of course, that really just
pushes the question. But off onto some other outside
agency. These, these people, these
editors in this office in New York or Washington or Tokyo or
whatever have decided this is the news for you to consume
today. OK.
How did they decide that? What, what have they put in
here? What have they left out And then
be even beyond that. The question is, how is that
information being related? Is it being related as an
isolated piece of information or is it being connected into a
greater context? How is this information being
contextualized for me, etcetera, etcetera.
So the news is not some objective thing that is written
in the heavens. It is something that is created,
constructed and necessarily so. I'm not saying that there is
some sort of process by which we can scientifically determine the
news, but they're keeping it from you, man.
No, it is. It is just a collection of
stories and observations about things that are happening in the
world that are contextualized in a way that either explain the
world to you or don't explain the world to you.
And I think once we become aware and conscious of that fact, we
can take greater agency in constructing our own news feed,
as it were, whether literally or metaphorically and literally, if
people are interested in that. I often talk about RSS and other
ways that you can stop being algorithmically controlled by
Twitter's suggestions or what what have you for your news
feed. And you can start constructing a
news feed based on sources that you're interested in following.
But the question is, what is news to you?
Keith Knight sitting there, for example, in Arizona, you
probably have a different set of issues and things that you're
thinking about and dealing with on a daily basis than someone
like me in Japan, etcetera, etcetera.
There's a just different contexts and different ways of
looking at the world that make certain stories important and
certain stories not important. And that is what I mean by the
news is a social construct. Of course, following that out,
the question then becomes, OK, so these editors in this
particular editorial room have decided that this is today's
news and this is the information they're presenting it to me and
this is the form they're presenting it to me.
And this is how they're contextualizing that
information. The question becomes why?
Why have they decided that this news is important?
And from that we can start expanding it out into the
question of, well, OK, who sits on the board of the corporation
that owns this organization, etcetera, and what affiliations
do those people have and are they tied into the Council on
Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg Group, etcetera,
etcetera? What are the outside influences
that are determining and shaping the way that they formulate and
and then present the news? Excellent answer.
I always try to like look at the incentives because you could
take the same source and based on the incentives they have, it
really matters. So the old example that's
frequently used is if OJ Simpson came out and said I didn't
commit murder, that wouldn't be newsworthy.
But what if he came out and said I did commit murder?
Well, hold on, You just said he was an unreliable source a
second ago. Now he's reliable.
It's like, well, no, it's in his incentive to say the first
thing, not in the second thing, so.
There is a legal term for that that's going to escape my mind.
Admission against interest, is that it?
Anyway, yes. Statement against interest, I
think, and the reason that the news is a social construct was
so important for me because to hear that the news, not just
people on Twitter, but the news, big buildings, $1,000,000
corporations, that they're lying or bias was really hard to
believe. And then I realized I thought,
you know, most heads of most religions were experts in
something that was false. And hearing the concept that
it's not about actively lying, telling you false versions of
reality, but the concept of selective reporting, you get
this all the time, especially with the rush Ukraine situation.
Very seldom do they explicitly lie.
Sometimes they do Hillary Clinton said 17 agencies
confirmed that Putin hacked her emails.
OK, explicit lies. So often it's just them
selecting to report on some things and not others.
So few people knew until Trump tweeted it out that Vladimir
Zielinski just cancelled his last selection that that wasn't
too important. Not because the media ever came
out and said no, no, that there were elections.
They just didn't report on it. It's like the war for democracy
is for unelected Zelensky and also Churchill wasn't elected
that war for democracy. Stalin wasn't elected in his war
for what is going on here. It's just the selective
reporting aspect. Anything else on the news being
a social construct? I would just say that one thing
that comes to mind is, yeah, the the question when people are
looking at a big story, like for example, Russia, Ukraine is
always where does the news start the clock?
And generally speaking, the news will start the clock in 2014.
Absolutely no history before 2014 exists or is worthy of your
time or attention. It's in 2014 that Russia invaded
Crimea and that is what started the Russia Ukraine conflict,
according to most news, mainstream news sources.
Again, I I think we have to follow that back to the question
of who is presenting this news to us and why are they
presenting it in that way? Excellent point, Psychology
Today says. Now really get humbled before
you answer this because this is from Psychology Today.
At times like these, conspiracy theories are more appealing than
the truth because they offer the possibility of control.
Professor says we can thwart an evil problem, at least
hypothetically, but we can't thwart the unseen forces of
nature. Conspiracy theories make a very
tempting promise. Just stop the villain and you
get your life back. That's what we all want.
He says it's a charming narrative that's very easy to
buy into. Just stop Bill Gates from
polluting the airwaves with 5G and we can go out again and our
kids can go back to school. Anything stand out to you if you
were to do a propaganda analysis of this worldview?
Yes, once again, I would say I can't address the blanket term
conspiracy theories because there's a billion conspiracy
theories. Which one are you specifically
addressing? So OK, if it has something to do
with Bill Gates and 5G and school lockdowns, all right, we
can at least start addressing that.
And why don't we start by taking a look at Bill Gates, who he is,
his business influences, his family and upbringing, etcetera,
and how they inform who he is and ultimately what role he was
playing over the past few years as some seemingly medical expert
that the media kept turning to for advice.
Why were they doing that? He is not a medical expert of
any sort. Why were they turning to Bill
Gates? Oh, does it have something to do
with the funding that Bill Gates and his eponymous institution
we're sending to various media outlets to basically bankroll
their entire coverage of the World Health space?
Does that have something to do with it?
And then we could start looking into specifics.
So I would direct people to corporatereport.com/gates and
ask them to tell me what is factually untrue about anything
that I report in that documentary.
I'm interested to hear that. And when they stumble and
stutter and don't even want to address it and start talking
vaguely about conspiracy theories, you will know that
they do not have an actual argument because they're not
looking at facts in the real world.
They're trying to simply package everything up into a nice neat
little package called conspiracy theories that they can then
throw out and then tell you, well, whatever.
Whatever is not a conspiracy theory must be real and true.
And if you see it on the nightly news, it must be real and true.
So Bill Gates must be a medical expert.
That is how we can start addressing a vague non argument
like that. I will make this the last
general question, but I'm curious about how we go about
determining truth from falsehood when there's so many potential
sources we could have there. So many angles there, so many
different points in the timeline we could start.
The thing that comes to mind is if you look at the news in
general, they're like a bunch of conspiracy theorists always
telling us Putin's going to take over the world, China's going to
take over the world, Iran's going to take over the world.
We got to watch out for the robber barons.
There's racism everywhere, there's sexism everywhere.
Islam is going to kill us all. If they take Saigon, they're
going to take America next. I mean, they are big conspiracy
theorists. So if we really see it not as
only one of us are conspiracy theorists, we just believe in
different conspiracies. If we have that worldview, how
can we go about specifically determining I?
I get that I would need to mention a specific one, but are
there any general checklist? Any good rules of thumb you can
give us to determine true from false conspiracies or stories in
general? Yeah, you, you make a point that
I often like to make, which is, for example, the official story
of 911 is a conspiracy theory. It is.
So you are simply choosing between conspiracy theories.
You just don't label the one that you like as a conspiracy
theory. It is a theory about a
conspiracy that was committed by 19 MMM of box cutters directed
by a man on dialysis in a cave halfway around the world.
Sure. OK, that's a story.
Now, where do you get the details of that story?
Well, you get it from things like the 9/11 Commission Report,
which is sitting on the bookshelf behind me that I have
read, that most people who talk about about 911 have not read.
And I know that the vast, I won't say the vast majority, but
something like 1/3 of the sources and footnotes that were
used in the creation of that report was derived from torture
testimony, which is inadmissible under any court, any reasonable
court in the world, shall we say.
And I know that there are flat out contradictions and lies in
that story that I've documented before.
So yes, it is frustrating to be called some sort of conspiracy
theorist when of course you are talking to people who are
absolutely conspiracy theorists themselves.
They just don't even want to admit that.
Having said that, yes, how do you then go about actually
finding real, true, verifiable information?
Well, there are a number of methods you can use.
One that I think is important is triangulation.
If you hear something from one source and only one source, then
it could be true. But how do you how do you really
know? Can you gauge that if you can
find it from a number of independent sources, preferably
from sources that aren't necessarily ideologically
related or they're not necessarily on the same team?
As you say, statements against interest can be incredibly
important pieces of information. So if we can triangulate
information from different sources and it's more likely
that we can rely on that, although of course it's no
guarantee that of the veracity of, of what is being said
another. But perhaps, I guess the this is
going to be the less satisfying answer because it will be open
to interpretation and does sort of write a blank check for
people to already confirm what they already believe.
But does the information that you are discovering, does it
actually, A, really makes sense of the world to you?
Does it really have explanatory power?
And then B, does it have predictive power?
Can you actually use that information to help shape your
life in a better direction? And I would say, again, that's
going to be very nebulous and open to interpretation, but I
would say that truth really does correspond with reality in a way
that helps situate yourself in the world in a way that you're
more prepared for. And I'll give a specific example
of that. For example, back in 2020, I was
not at all surprised by the the way in which the scandemic
unfolded, precisely because I had a more accurate map of
reality than the vast majority of the public.
Not because I'm a special human being, but simply because I
actually bothered to look at the setup for the infrastructure for
medical martial law that had taken place at the very least
since the time of the anthrax scare in 2001.
Remember that that most people don't.
But since that point, I I followed the the construction of
the medical Marshall law complex and infrastructure, the the
judicial and legislative framework for it, the
international agreements like the International Health
Regulations and the public Health Emergency of
International concern AKA fake that they brought into existence
in the under the World Health Organization.
I saw the swine flu scam scam demic develop and I followed
that and I looked at the Council of Europe's subsequent follow up
report reporting that the Advisory Council that had
advised The Who Director General Margaret Chan to declare that
swine flu pandemic were themselves sitting on boards of
big pharma corporations or otherwise tied to the pharma
industry. That then directly benefited
from the millions upon millions upon billions of dollars in
vaccine contracts and other such pharmaceutical interventions
that took place as a result of the swine flu.
I saw the development of the Zika and Ebola scares.
I saw people like Bill Gates writing in the New England
Journal of Medicine talking about the the new sorts of
techniques that we're going to need to confront pandemics in
the future, etcetera, etcetera. So when all of this happened in
2020, I wasn't surprised in the least.
The only thing I was surprised at really was how quickly the
public got on board with the agenda and two weeks to flatten
the curve and policing each other into the lockdown state
that that was disappointing. But the fact that they did it
was not disappointing to me because I had a more accurate
map of reality than most people who were just casually following
the news through the news what was being told to them on the
nightly news. So that is one way to to really
gauge whether or not the information that you were
getting truly actually is real or not.
Can you actually form a map of reality that corresponds to what
you're seeing and then helps you understand things as they are
unfolding, or even before they start to unfold?
Were you surprised that 20 years after the War on Terror against
Islamic extremism, the US and Israel were celebrating Al Qaeda
taking over Damascus like earlier this year?
I gotta say, I try to not have too high or too low standards.
I try to find myself in between. I couldn't believe that when Al
Jilani just started calling the shots, they were like, oh good,
Assad is gone. Then again, Obama basically
called for Assad and Gaddafi to be removed.
So I guess I shouldn't have, but I just couldn't believe that was
the guy. I continue to go back to that
article that was written in, I want to say 2012 by a CFR fellow
that was talking about, well, we need Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda are the good guys. Accepting al Qaeda.
Yeah, accepting Al Qaeda exactly right.
So, yeah. So no, it wasn't surprising.
But again, it is, it is galling. It is just galling how the
reality inversion takes place and how the public is just
expected to swallow it. And if they don't, well, let's
bring out the editorials from Psychology Today about how
you're a conspiracy theorist. When it comes to things that
first started opening your mind to seeing the world in a
potentially different light, the creature from Jekyll Island and
Operation Northwoods, those were the two that stood out to me,
that you and I had a great deal of overlap and some of these I
was not familiar with. When it comes to either of
those. What was it about the Creature
from Jekyll Island or reading about Operation Northwoods that
really caught your attention? And how did you begin to go down
a rabbit hole after hearing about pick either one of those
to expand on well. I will, I will take them in the
order in which they, they occurred to me, or that they
that I found them, at any rate. Operation Northwoods was really
one of those Nuggets that really lodged in my brain as I was
starting to inquire into 911 a little bit and starting to find
information that seemed to go against what I'd been told about
it. But still, I don't, you know,
OK, what? I don't know, it sounds like
there's a lot of hooey in here as well about floating orbs and
things and whatever. What, what's this?
It was Operation Northwoods that really started me looking into
the actual deep history of the structure of what what Peter
Dale Scott would call deep political events, false flag
events, etcetera. Staging attacks to blame on
enemies. To actually read the actual
documents themselves that demonstrate that that was in
fact, yes, a plan that was tabled by the Joint Chiefs of
Staff and was sitting there waiting to be approved by
President Kennedy is, is an eye opening moment.
And so I think that's what sent me down the 9/11 rabbit hole
specifically. And I started to cover more and
more information that questioned the official 9/11 conspiracy
theory. But then there was a point at
which I thought, OK, I'm clearly at at at a certain point, I was
clear that that we had been lied to about 911.
And that was absolutely not as presented to us.
But still, I mean, a big overarching conspiracy in back
rooms with guys smoking cigars over a, you know, a map of the
world, carving up the world. Oh, that seemed a bit
cartoonish. How does that really function?
How does this really work? And in fact, it was something
that I didn't mention. You're, you're referencing the
first essay in here, Reportage Adventures in the New Medium,
which I talk about my experience of falling down the rabbit hole.
But something that I didn't specifically reference in here,
which was I think another penny drop moment, was the Money
Masters documentary, which I encountered in that crazy time
in 2006 when I was finding all this information.
I saw the Money Masters documentary and it was the first
time I, well, not necessarily the first time, but one of the
first times I'd ever seriously considered the concept of the
underlying structure of the monetary system.
Not finance, not economics, but literally the monetary base.
What is money? How is it created?
By whom? Who has that power?
From where did they, where did they get that authority from?
And how do how do they use that? That was a documentary that
really started me thinking along those lines.
And of course, the Creature from Jekyll Island informed that
study of mine. And once I started to learn
about the Federal Reserve and its history, where it came from,
how it was literally conceived as is baseline economic history
at this point, literally conceived into conspiracy on
Jekyll Island. Yes.
I mean, it's a crazy story and fascinating and obviously drew
me in towards the bigger understanding because 911 is one
specific Ave. of research that I was on.
But once you start to realize, oh, the entire monetary paradigm
is being controlled by certain forces for certain reasons,
that's that becomes an explanatory factor that helps to
make sense of more and more of the other deep political events
that we see unfolding around us. In the notes section, I believe
it's in the first essay, you also mentioned Carol Quigley and
Edward Bernays. Do you want to go into those,
please and let me know what were either things that really stood
out to you and humbled you when you came across their research,
or why you think Edward Bernays and Carol Quigley are important
sources to use in this research? Well, I think in both cases it's
because they are so frank about what I had been told all my life
and still continue to hear to this very day from Psychology
Today and other such wonderful sources, is conspiracy theory.
No, this was admission by people who, yes, were 100%
knowledgeable of and approving of the conspiracy that exists.
And I think that was the startling thing.
So with Bernice in particular, I found him through Adam Curtis's
documentary The Century of the Self.
Part 1, I think was a particularly interesting piece
of documentary film making. And it introduced me to Edward
Bernays, who I had never learnt about in school, never heard
about him. But oh, you know, he's the guy
who came up with that campaign. Oh, and that campaign and the
torches for liberty and oh, you know, you know, invading South
American countries and etcetera, etcetera, all coordinated by the
same guy who was the nephew of Sigmund Freud.
What, what is this? And oh, by the way, he's related
to the guy who started Netflix. What?
That's crazy. Anyway, so once I I found that
and then I followed that line back to Edward Bernese's 1928
book on propaganda called Propaganda.
And as I always, always cite the opening, just the opening
paragraphs of that book. And I really, really, I really
need to commit those words to memory because they are so
powerful. But I will allow people to on
their own time. Go and go and research it for
yourself. Just go read the opening page of
Propaganda. The conscious and intelligent
manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the
masses is an important element in democratic society.
Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute
an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our
country. We are governed, our minds are
molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men
we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the
way in which our democratic society is organized.
Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if
they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
Our invisible governors are in many cases unaware of the
identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.
In which he talks about the hidden forces that control
society by manipulating people's habits and opinions.
That is the real controlling force of our society.
Wow, that's a pretty amazing admission that again, if you
said that, if I said that, I would be crazy conspiracy
theorizing. But here's Edward Bernays, who
was in a position to know a thing or two about that, talking
about it. Similarly with Carol Quigley,
again as I think has become conspiracy lore that is often
passed around in the conspiracy space, broad broadly speaking,
etcetera. The tragedy and hope for
example, and contains a number of admissions that are
startling. For example, the Bank for
International Settlements and its creation as the apex of the
the banking powers specifically to create a system of
international financial capital controlled by a very few people
in a Byzantine system that very few people can understand.
Let alone the other historical aspects that that Quigley was
bringing to light. That there is a conspiracy that
has that at least at that time that he was writing in the mid
20th century was responsible for much of the preceding 50 years
of history. And it was a an acknowledged
secret society started by Cecil Rhodes, but expanded out from
his death and that was controlling world events and
manipulating things like World War 2 and World War One and
other such things. Again, a startling admission
that if any anyone else were to make it would be crazy
conspiracy theorizing. But this is Carol Quigley,
Georgetown professor who was the admitted name checked mentor of
Bill Clinton. So it's a lot harder to dismiss
Carol Quigley as some wide eyed conspiracy theorist, which is
why I think it's important to reference reference things like
that at once. Again, coming back to that idea
of statements against interest. One of the earliest times I was
really surprised looking into alternative research guy named
Michael Collins. Piper was just sort of like
ranting and it wasn't a great look.
He's looking into the sun, the news reporting on him.
It's trying to make him look like a complete buffoon.
He goes, why is it that three of the, you know, Kardashians can't
get together without tons of media reports going on about it?
Yet here we are at the Bilderberg conference and the
media could not be less interested if you put a gun to
their head. And I said, I don't know what
the Bilderberg conference is. What is he talking about?
I'm curious what you think are the big groups, who the big
groups are to focus on? Is it CFR Bilderberg who are the
ones that come to mind that really piqued your interest?
As far as seems like there's a quite a great deal of power in
these organizations and they don't get a lot of media
attention. What groups come to mind?
CFR Bilderberg and Trilateral organization are the three first
that would spring to mind for me, but I would hesitate to
simply limit it to to that. In fact, I think anytime you put
your finger on a particular group, the center of power has
probably already slipped somewhere else.
The fact that Bilderberg is now an openly not only openly
acknowledged, but they even have their own website.
They they publish their guest list, however accurate it may
not, may or may not be. And you know, they're, they're
meeting agenda items. They it's openly published on
the on the Internet these days. So it clearly isn't what it was
even just a couple of decades ago when it was still literally
you're a crazy, wild, wide, wide eyed conspiracy.
There is if you so much believe the Bilderberg Group exists, you
crazy weirdo. Well, OK, they exist.
We've established that. And Oh yeah, they really have
been meeting since every year since 1950 for whatever it was.
However, having said that, at this point, what is the function
of a Bilderberg Group meeting? I have made the point before.
Yes, OK, we may, we may even have an accurate list of all the
attendees who were physically there at the latest Bilderberg
meeting. But does that mean that was
everyone who attended? I mean, we do live in an age
where you and I are not in the same room, Keith, but we're
talking imagine that. So how do we know who is really
talking to who in what context in what Fora?
And does is it as important that they they literally convene
together in a physical space in a meeting room?
Or are there all sorts of things happening that we don't even
have a twinkling of a clue that they're happening because
they're not happening in the physical world?
They're happening in virtual online spaces or what have you.
So it's, it's really difficult to I, I think, identify things
like that. And I would also caution against
the idea that there is a certain group or even just a a few
cliques of groups that really truly control all events in the
world. I think that is the sort of
cartoon version of conspiracy theorizing that they Psychology
Today's and Harpers magazines and whatever would love to
denigrate and laugh at because it is too simplistic a
worldview. I think that there are there are
individuals who are coming to the grander conspiracy to the
extent that that exists as an identifiable thing for different
reasons. And they have their own
motivations and they have their own interests and they have
their own associations and they may form cliques and groups, but
they may those groups may be amorphous.
And someone, as has often been pointed out, just because
someone, for example, is ACFR member does not mean that they
are part of the global conspiracy controlling world
events. As the rings with Rings within
Rings concept identified by Carol Quigley and expanded on by
G Edward Griffin talks about, yes, you can have inner members
of organizations that are directing that organization
towards a certain goal that the outer members of the
organization don't even know exists.
They have no idea that that inner organization even exists,
the rings within rings idea, etcetera, etcetera.
And it isn't necessarily that there is a singular organization
or a singular group. There are different groups that
may have interests converge. And it is my theory, I don't
know if I can really articulate this in a scientific way, but it
is my theory that when we see the grand, deep political events
like JFK assassination and 9/11, these truly spectacular events
generally I think happened because there is a convergence
of interests among many different factions of the
oligarchical governing bodies, the powers that shouldn't be.
There are many different people who have an interest in that
particular event taking place, which is why that event happens
and is so easily covered up, because there are a lot of
people who have some sort of skin in that game.
But perhaps that also explains why I don't think everything
that happens in the world is part of some sort of grand
conspiracy. The real, the real power that I
identify is not the power of someone literally controlling or
writing the script of world events, but writing the
narrative through which people understand those events so that
anything that happens can be used towards the furtherance of
a certain goal. For example, some sort of
spectacular intelligence failure like a 9/11, a huge shot in the
arm for the the NSA and other intelligence agencies.
They need more funding. They need more power.
You see how horrible it was? It's because was they didn't
have enough funding or power. So there's really no conceivable
circumstance in which you could from that framework argue that
no, actually we need to reduce the size of the NSA, we need to
get rid of the NSA. We don't need this intelligence
agency apparatus over everything.
No, they've already set the narrative so that anything that
happens, good or bad, is justification for an expansion
of those powers. So I think the real power is the
narrative framing. And that goes back to that
question that we started out with really about the news, who
is constructing the news and for what purpose.
Clearly, I think the news, to the extent that it is a
construction that is being deliberately constructed in
boardrooms and editorial rooms, etcetera, is being constructed
to frame those types of narratives.
So that, for example, a 9/11 will be a giant gigantic boost
in the arms of the the surveillance state.
Or so that we never, ever, ever talk about the cancel elections
in Ukraine. We will just never talk about it
because this is a fight for democracy.
We that is the narrative. So anything that questions that
narrative line just won't get reported on etcetera.
Excellent answer. The 9/11 1 is very good because
you could have totally seen a scenario where the government's
number one job is just keep you safe and they failed to do that
in a spectacular way. So what happens?
Bush's approval rating goes to 91% and they get more money and
power than they ever could have imagined.
Same thing of course happened after December 7th of 1941.
It's like, how could the biggest failure?
It's like my business got robbed and the security guards were
just off to lunch that day. I need to start paying them
triple. Why wouldn't you fire them?
How could they're not? Why didn't that movement happen?
So controlling the narrative is so great.
The preface to this book is written by Whitney Webb.
Why did you choose her to work with on this project?
What do you think are some of her greatest contributions to
this field? Whitney Webb, I don't.
I don't. Well, I was going to say, I
don't imagine I have to explain to people, but I I should
anyway. Whitney Webb is an incredible
researcher and I think anyone who has listened to her speak,
let alone read her writing knows that she has an encyclopedic
knowledge of people and places and connections and events that
is truly, I would say second to none in the independent media
space. So I was absolutely happy and
honored that she would write the the forward to this book.
I think it's, it's a testament to the fact that she truly is
one of those people who I, I don't want to put words out
there that people can read the forward for result.
But the fact that she credits me as someone that she has looked
up to is truly really some of the the greatest feedback that I
can ever receive. Because what I am trying to do
with this information is simply get other people energized to
start working on it. I know I am not the world's
smartest man or the world's greatest person and I'm not
going to solve all the world's problems.
I don't believe that's how this works, but I know there are 10s
of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people
out there who if they had some of this information, would be
able to use their own skills, experience their own world view
to construct something different out of it and to move it forward
down the field. And that is really why I do what
I do. I, I know that once we get
people energized and thinking along the right lines, set the
right narrative so that for example, in the event of the
next 911 people don't give more power and approval to the
government, but instead say, no, you just broke the social
contract, we're not going to listen to you anymore.
If we can start setting narratives along those lines,
great. So when I hear from someone like
a Whitney Webb that I helped inspire them or in any way and
contributed to their development, that that's amazing
and that's wonderful. And so anyway, for people who
don't know Whitney Webb, please check out unlimited hangout.com.
She has talked about so many different things.
And yes, for example, she is, she was talking about Peter
Thiel and Palantir and their connection to the the CIA and,
and nefarious activities at DARPA etcetera.
Years ago. She was talking, she did a
series on the Dark Winter and the various players around that
and how they contributed and hung around and then contributed
to the scam demic of the past few years, etcetera, etcetera.
She's done such incredibly pioneering work on issues like
that and she has the receipts. Anything you read of hers is
incredibly thoroughly documented.
And as people might notice, I like to document my, my work as
well. So again, if I can contribute
absolutely nothing else to the entire world other than the fact
that people expect documentation and citation of sources in their
work, I would say that's, that would be a, a, a win.
That's a huge one. Like, it so often doesn't even
occur to you. You hear Barack Obama say there
was an attack at the Pulse nightclub.
This man was out because of his hatred of homosexuals and that's
why he killed people. It took years before I ever
stopped to say, can you cite your source?
I mean, that's what would be expected of me if I was in 6th
grade and I made a falsifiable claim like that.
What is your evidence? You just gave me a very big
falsifiable claim. What's your source, Mr. Harvard
graduate, president of America? Certainly, Certainly.
It's going to be so impressive. Let me strap myself in.
So good documentation. That is very important.
What is the real meaning of independence?
I think people will need to read the essay to appreciate that in
its full context. But essentially independence,
Yes, there are a number of documents or flowery language
that we can point to that has been made in the past about
freedom, about independence. We can celebrate Independence
Day by eating hot dogs and fireworks.
I don't do that in Japan, but anyway, I understand that that
happens in America. But real independence, the
actual independence is something that is innate to you.
You are born a free, sovereign human being, a an individual who
can and presumably will work with other people in community.
But you are a free and sovereign individual.
And no, no pen of any would be authoritarian.
A ruler can ever take that away from you.
They can direct their thugs and enforcers to come and put you in
a cage if you don't do what they say, etcetera, etcetera.
And that has and can and will and happen.
But they cannot take away your true independent nature.
And until people really reclaim that sovereignty, not
necessarily by making some grandiose statement or signing
some document, but simply create claim their own cognitive
sovereignty and individuality. Well then they won't truly
understand that the freedom that they already possess and that
that it isn't it isn't some sort of thing.
Yeah, OK. We can celebrate it in some way
with some platitudes, but no independence on in this most
real state is something that in here's to you simply by the fact
that you are a free human being. You are and you were born into
this world that way and that is who you are.
And when you claim that in your mind, in your soul, when you go
forward in the world that way, that will affect who you are and
what you do in the world. Final question, thank you so
much for your time. You and I had a conversation
about this topic like I think 7 years ago.
I want to ask you about it one once again to see, you know
what's changed because I know we've been, we've both been
through a lot. What is the most important take
away from the documentary Children Full of Life?
Yeah, it's been several years since I've seen it, so let me
think, what is my perspective on it these days?
I I remember at the time. So for people who don't know,
this is a documentary film that I believe was put together in
Japan. It was a Japanese documentary,
but then it was taken. The 5th estate of the CBC takes
foreign documentaries and will essentially put their own
speaker on top of it. And that that's the way that it
is been propagated in English. And I made a video back in 2012,
something like that, where I was just out at the park having a
picnic with my wife at that day. And I thought, you know what?
I just saw this great documentary.
I'll make a little video just telling people to watch this
documentary. It was a little literally too in
the video, just saying, hey, here's a really good
documentary. I'll put the link in the
description. Please go watch it.
And for whatever reason, this was back when YouTube had a
homepage that everybody in the world would see.
And for whatever reason, that particular video of all the
videos I've done, that particular video landed on the
YouTube homepage and got hundreds of thousands of views
overnight. And most of the comments were
like, why am I getting this on the homepage?
But anyway, I was delighted to see that that that documentary
got hundreds of thousands of views as a result of that.
And I'm glad because it was a profoundly affecting a
documentary. And if you can watch that
without tearing up a little, you're probably not human
inside. It's, it's just a profoundly
moving document of what is possible when we are talking
about the development of, see, the development of children's
minds and the development of their hearts and souls and who
they are and shaping them for the world that they're growing
up into is such a foundationally important part of our
civilization. But most people don't even give
it a second thought for them. For most people, school is just
at best, it's a place where you go to learn, you know, 2 + 2 =
4. But even more cynically, it's
just, well, it's kind of babysitting, you know, let let
the state take care of it while I go out to work.
However, that that documentary presents a different conception
of what education is and how it can work and what kind of effect
it can have on people's lives. And I have no doubt that every
single member of that class remembers that teacher.
Mr. Kanamuri, if I remember correctly, remembers his
teaching and remembers what they learnt from that class.
Not the 2 + 2 = 4 stuff, but the stuff about human connection and
what it means and why it's important.
It's just a profoundly moving experience.
And it's, it's probably the best way to talk about different
conceptions of education. Because you can talk about that
in this high, highfalutin kind of way in abstract terms and
talk about the importance of education.
But when you see when you see how a classroom can be run or
not even run in the traditional sense, but the way that
children's can can learn how to interact with each other in a
completely different way. When you see it happening, it is
a profoundly different and moving experience.
So I think it teaches us something about the the real
true path forward for us as a species, as a civilization.
It is, you know, there's a lot of jockeying and wrestling back
and forth about political ideas and what have you.
But I think foundationally it comes to the way that we raise
our children. What kind of children are we
raising and in what way? And are we raising them to be
caring, responsible, thoughtful, engaging and engaged human
beings? Or are we simply using school as
a babysitting sort of center that we can offload our children
and our responsibility for developing children's minds
onto? And if it's the latter, then
that's that's the reason why if you feel that society is
collapsing and civilization is going to hell in a handbasket,
that's the reason more so than anything else.
It's not about woke transgender bathrooms or what have you.
It's about the way that we raise our children.
And anyway, I think people should watch that documentary
and cogitate on that. I love that answer, The
importance of human connection, because that is not obvious.
If you look at curriculum in general, they will.
I just remember being bashed over the head with the the vital
importance of homework and homework, by the way, you're
either doing it in isolation or you're cheating.
So necessarily for constantly getting people isolated.
Did you just talk in class? That's not allowed.
It's like really? No wonder every kid says, oh,
recess is the best part of the day.
What do you? Of course, that's what you would
expect. So it's not an obvious answer
that people don't appreciate. But this documentary gets across
the importance of human connection.
I even meet adults who are just obsessed with, they're like on
the sort of hedonic treadmill. I'll, I'll really be happy once
I buy this next thing. I'm like, I swear to God, you've
said that about like 30 things in the past.
Do you think having a wider range of people in your social
circles might improve your life a little bit more?
And so that is really something that changed in my world view.
And I think this documentary perfectly illustrates the
importance of human connection and how so often it's overseen
in place of, you know, people being isolated, people being
alone or finding happiness through material products and
services. James Corbett, Any final words
before we end? Nothing other than to say thank
you for having me on you. You always have the most
interesting questions and you always take things from a
different angle, so I appreciate that.
And yes, anytime you want me on just let me know.
I appreciate it very much, James.
The book is reportage essays on the New World Order.
Thanks to everyone for watching Keith Knight.
Don't tread on anyone in the Libertarian Institute.
James Corbett, thank you for your time.
Thank you for having me on.