 I'm happy to see everybody. This is the Vermont Institute of Community and International Involvement. And tonight we're talking about the very controversial subject of Elon Musk versus, I guess, censorship or the new Ministry of Truth that appears to have been appointed by President Biden. It's really called the Board of Governance of Disinformation. And we have with us tonight to talk about this, Pete Garitano and hopefully other members of the community might chime in, including an old colleague of mine, Mark Estrin. And so this will be recorded. And so let's start with a few words from Pete if we can get him to unmute. Okay, so take it away. Pete will be talking about the recent controversy around Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter, whatever that is. Okay, Pete. Whatever that is, right? I am not currently on Twitter or have, I have not been on Twitter, but I did, you can look on Twitter briefly just by punching in somebody's name like Elon Musk and Twitter. And I read probably, what? Nothing, go ahead. I read many, many, many tweets back and forth between Elon Musk and other people. I guess anybody can get on there. There's just a character limit of I think 150 characters. Mark, are you a, are you a Twitter? You're muted, Mark, Mark. That's okay. So yeah. And so that's really what makes it unique compared to some of the other social media platforms. But I mean, what happened was allegedly, I mean, what Elon Musk is saying is he wants to turn it back into a free speech platform. And a lot of the uproar obviously has been because, which I don't really understand is this billionaire has bought Twitter. But what I pointed out to some people that were kind of upset about this is that almost all the media is controlled by some billionaire right now. I mean, Rupert Murdoch runs Fox and I think some big newspapers in England and Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. And so they're all, they're all in some kind of control of probably wealthy people or powerful people. But so the big outrage supposedly was because of all the censorship in the last year and most of it has been directed at, I would say the right, you know, and people that are opposed to government policies which the past year has been COVID, but now we have it possibly the next topic could be Roe versus Wade, who knows. And so... Well, the next topic appears to be the war in Ukraine, right? That's why I said the war in Ukraine, you know, to go against whatever the current narrative is, is bad. And I haven't seen any censorship yet, but there might be some rules like, yeah, I mean, I don't know how many people knew that there were COVID rules for publishing even in our local papers that were passed down from somebody in the government. I don't know who I tried to find out many times. So seven days in Vermont and Vermont Digger were not allowed to publish certain things that they violated the COVID publishing rules. So this is one of the things, and it turns out many of these things that were restricted the past two years turned out to be facts, not really false statements. And that's the big question is, what does this information mean? And so far, what it has meant is if you're going against whatever the narrative is that the government chooses at that time, which brings up 1984 and many other things with censorship. And so it can continue after this, certainly when the COVID, if we're moving into the war thing, and this could be something that goes on. So the whole idea was to make Twitter once again, if I don't mean must have once been pretty much censorship-free, they're gonna change the algorithms supposedly that do this, I mean, time will tell what will really happen with it, but that's what's going on right now. Mainly the Democrats and the left, the liberals. You're frozen again. Could be prevalent. And once again, I was never on it, so I don't know what kind of stuff went back and forth, but obviously there will have to be some kind of rules on it, but- Why? Well, because we, I mean, people don't, I mean, there's certain things. There was an article about some mass murderer that was pointing, had YouTube videos on, they had this guy off of there, right? So maybe we'll see what the limits are, but so that's the fear. What are the limits gonna be? What? Sandy, I think your question is a little naive. Oh, I'm very naive. We all know that, right, Mark? No, what I mean is the answer is somewhat predictable. It's often summed up with the wisdom that shit rises to the top. And I think that's easy to understand because as soon as shit comes up, people address the shit and then they address the addressing of the shit. And it takes over far more quickly than any substantive argumentation and especially argumentation that's built on clearly annotated and respected references or not respected whether, at least you know where the information is coming from. So I would expect if nothing, it happens and the must goes ahead with complete openness that we will see the disintegration of that platform according to the rules of shit rises to the top. Okay, well, could I say something first before we ask Pete to respond to that? The United States for all of its faults does have a bill of rights and the bill of rights, the very first amendment is freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press. And those bills of rights, those rights, as we all know, I know I'm speaking to a very sophisticated bunch, but those bill of rights were put into place as restrictions against government tyranny, okay? So I do have a couple of problems with what you've said and what Pete has said and even what Elon Musk has done. Censorship cannot be done by the government, period. That is the rule in the constitution. A private company like Elon Musk can say, can do whatever it wants with a speech, with anything, because it's a private company, it's not the government. And so a private company can decide what speech is allowed on its private platforms and what speech is not allowed. So in a sense what you're saying, I mean, in a sense when Elon Musk announces that he's gonna take over this company, it's no guarantee of free speech for sure, because he's gonna own that company and he can decide. The difference is between Elon Musk and what's happening at the federal level is that Elon Musk says that he's gonna devote Twitter now to free speech. And he's saying that because the prior Twitter was engaged in heavy duty censorship. And maybe the private thing called Twitter had the right to do that. However, the censorship was encouraged by the federal government and by President Biden. And so the disinformation got defined by the government. And then it communicated to Twitter. And so they were removing stuff that was unfavorable to the Biden administration and the Democratic Party. Just as an example, they removed the president of the United States, Donald Trump. How does a Twitter company have more power than the president of the United States? I mean, a lot of us don't like a lot of stuff that Trump said, but you really think that the president of the United States should be simply taken off Twitter. And that's what happened. That's I think that kind of action is what led Elon Musk to say, well, I'm gonna take over Twitter because I'm gonna have free speech. I don't know if I trust him. However, that's apparently what happened. And censorship can only be prevented by the exercise of free speech, but that is against government censorship. When you're a private company, you can do whatever you want. But anyway, so I don't know, Pete, do you have a response to Mark about shit rising to the top? Well, no, I mean, I kind of agree with both of you, but I mean, what was going on? Many people didn't realize, I mean, even if these companies were private companies, the government was forcing their hand in one way, right? And so they were putting out these directives, whether they were legal or not, if they're threatening enough, just like they did with doctors who were trying to promote early treatment for COVID, they would send the message to the doctor, you're gonna lose your license. So whatever they did, maybe Zuckberg and the owner of Twitter, they were okay with this, maybe they weren't, but if they were threatened with whatever they were, you know, I mean, right before all this started, they were in big trouble with antitrust thing. So who knows what threats were made to have them censor all this material or change their algorithms. And I mean, he says he's gonna have an open source algorithms where everything's gonna be out in the open as to what the algorithm is filtering exactly. I tried to look up some of the stuff I wasn't really, he's gonna get rid of spam bots. So in other words, apparently tens of thousands or even millions of people are not have fake Twitter accounts and they throw stuff out there that's doesn't, so I think he's gonna try to make it more like, I wanna say Facebook marketplace, where you have to have an identity with your Twitter or something. And once again, I mean, this all seems pretty crazy, how's he gonna do it? But I mean, on the surface, he says he's gonna try to clean it up and make it more of a free speech platform, but we'll see. But I mean, this is also a guy. Now, even though I drive a Tesla, I'm not a tremendous Elon Musk fan because this is a guy who's in the transhumanism. And, you know. Yeah, but what is transhumanism? A lot of people don't know that. People have to blend in with machines. Machines have to become part of people or we will be eliminated. So we have to, you know, there's two schools of thoughts that basically that AIs are gonna take over and that's what he says he's trying to fight, because when the AIs get smarter than us, they're just gonna kill us all or that we need to blend in with the machines and become one organism. Now, how do you know that? Do you, this guy really pushes that? Yeah, no, it's a big topic among the wealthy science people is this transhumanism. And in fact, that's part of the great reset agenda, which is another thing that's been out there for the last couple of years. And, you know, they've announced that humans are hackable and it's time to do something to make human race, you know, their ideas, they want to make it a better human race, but there's a lot for what to be said for what their ideas are about this too, you know. Okay, I wanna give an example though from Burlington history about this idea of censorship and Mark, maybe you were involved in this, I don't know. A number of years ago, Burlington Telecom was a public government municipally owned utility, right? Do we all remember when Burlington telecom before it got sold that Burlington Telecom was a municipally owned internet, right? And Burlington then had the exceptional ability to show Al Jazeera English on its Burlington Telecom network. You remember that Mark? Yes. Okay, it was called Al Jazeera English. And there was a group in this town who wanted to eliminate Al Jazeera English because they said it was a terrorist network and that it was anti-Israel and that it was anti-U.S. And I got involved, I don't even know how, I began to learn that there was a group here connected with one of the temples in town in South Burlington, Temple Sinai, that had formed a group to pressure to take Al Jazeera English off the air. Al Jazeera English was only available in two cities in the whole United States, Burlington, Vermont and Buckeye, Ohio. Did you all know that? And Buckeye, Ohio I think had Al Jazeera English because it has a large Arabic speaking network. All right, so I got involved and we were successfully able to keep Al Jazeera English on the air because we said if the government takes it off, that's government censorship and that's a violation of free speech. And that was true, we could have sued to keep it on the air. And we did, we didn't have to sue because we had so many public hearings in which we said this is a constitutional violation if the city does this. And we won that and Al Jazeera English remained on the air. Subsequently though, when Mayor Merle Weinberger came into power in Burlington, he sold Burlington Telecom as we all know to a private company, which now they can do whatever they want. They can do whatever they want. And one of the things that I understand that they did was to remove the Canadian stations. Isn't that true? They removed the Canadian stations and there are none that are shown now, which they can censor. Private companies can censor and determine what's on their networks or platforms where the government, that would be a constitutional violation. And in fact, probably when the government was pressing Twitter, that was probably a constitutional violation on the part of the government. But the government right now in my mind is so out of control with a need for power that nobody even cares anymore, but I do. And so when Elon Musk did this, even though I don't love billionaires, few of us do, I thought, gee, that's interesting. And maybe his promises will mean something. I'm not certain they will though, but you still, your points are correct. When it's a private company, Elon Musk now can do whatever he wants, right? You remember that struggle though, Bark about Al Jazeera? Yes. Yeah. Okay, so go ahead. What were you gonna say as well? Anybody? No? Okay, cause so why don't we then comment? So Pete, you made the description of what Musk is doing. Two days later, the president announced a new department, right? What is that called? And does anybody, do you have a comment about that? Yeah, I forgot the name of it. Something disinformation. Now it's the Board of Disinformation Governance or the Board of the Governance of Disinformation. And it is within the Department of Homeland Security. Right. So what is it? Well, yeah, it's basically to do what's been done the last couple of years anyway, but now to have somebody in charge of it. So instead of going behind people's back, I guess they're gonna tell us right up front, this is what's happening, I don't know. But everybody at this point has read about the lady they put in charge who was responsible for a lot of disinformation aimed at once again, at Trump. And Russia. What? And Russia. Yeah. And Russia, right. Well, correct. The whole Russia gate thing that they pounded for four years which never happened really. And then the Hunter Biden laptop, this lady was in on both of these basically disinformation campaigns by the government too, which many people felt probably helped sway the election towards Biden. And the only thing that I could find that she's worked on is this quote, disinformation putatively coming from Russia. Nothing else as a topic. Right. Say a little bit more about that. William Mark, what do you mean coming from Russia? Because I think she, what was the deal with the Russia as the critics call it? What was the deal with the Russia hoax, for instance? All I'm saying that is that everything that she has worked on has had as its objective to accuse Russia of trying to take over information in the United States with disinformation. It's not that she's been talking about Israel or anything else, right? She's a Russia disinformation expert. Well, expert or monotone. I mean, that's what she does is Russia. Okay, so her name is, I think Nina Jankiewicz, by the way, Jankiewicz is her last name, yeah. So what you're saying is what about Russia? She puts out disinformation about Russia? She, her objective, professional objective seems to be limited to putting Russian information under the magnifying glass of disinformation. That's what she looks at. She doesn't look at disinformation in general, at least according to her record, is that all she looks at is Russia and whether what they're saying is disinformation or not, that's all. You could call her a Russian specialist or you could call her an anti-Russian propagandist. Well, she describes herself as a disinformation expert. That's what she describes herself as. And only one dimension, right? Well, I don't know, she disputed. She was the one who said that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, right? Right. Okay, so why don't you say what that was, the Hunter Biden thing? I think Pete's frozen again, right? Hunter Biden's laptop apparently included lots of damning information about him and the whole Biden family. It exposed connections between, I'm saying allegedly, because it has not been proven in court. It created the idea that Hunter Biden, the president's son had lots of financial benefits from dealing actually in Ukraine and in China, maybe in Russia as well. She, Janka, was put out this idea that that was Russian disinformation and that it was not to be believed. And based on a lot of that, the major newspapers did not cover that story. And there are a lot of people saying that if that story had been covered, we might have had a different result in the elections, which I don't know. Well, the only newspaper that covered that at all was the New York Post, right? Right, everybody else was told not to cover it. But right now, what she would be doing, which has been done for the last couple of months with the war is to make sure that... You're gone again. Make sure what? Maybe, Mark, what is... I'm gonna stop my video. Maybe that'll clear things up if you can't look at me. Oh, but we like to look at you. Too bad. Okay, all right, thank you. No, you're not. It's not my name. Okay. All right, so do you know what Pete was gonna say about that, I guess the... What's happening in terms of the war and disinformation, or is it... I mean, is anything happening in terms of censorship about this war in Ukraine and Russia? No? Well, it's hard to speak for everything that's out there because we only see what we see, but I can say that in general, there's very little historical political background to it. I mean, it's been reduced to the monster of Putin, and that he's somehow without any cause out to take over whatever he's out to take over, et cetera, et cetera. So, the any kind of understanding of this conflict in the context of NATO or post-1917 anti-communism is invisible. So to that degree, I consider it censored, but it's not, I don't think it's censored as much, it's at a normal level of speaking to American historical ignorance. And in a sense, also historical, who cares? It's history. Right. So... I mean, I think at this point, I'm not certain that it's disinformation that's being put out. What I see in the press right now is propaganda. 24 hours a day from all of the cable networks is propaganda, propaganda, propaganda. Putin, the madman, the resistant Ukrainians, and the humanitarian crisis. It seems to me no analysis of the history of this war at all. But that's slightly different. I'm not certain that there's disinformation out there about the war. Disinformation can also be lack of information. Right, of course, yeah. Well, can everybody hear me? Yes. So, one of the things that's already been a disinformation camp. Pete, you're frozen again. I think you should, you know, forget about this video and then be on video. Yeah. Can you just get yourself on audio only, Pete? No, okay. What were you gonna say? Anybody, Mark, about the lack of information? Well, that the intentional lack of information is a very effective technique of disinformation. So, that's all. And, you know, that intentionality is possibly rational. In other words, if you go into a, you know, a German speaking country or, you know, any kind of quote, foreign language country, then you try to deal with that language, with its situation and understanding and using its vocabulary and all of that. But, so in, if you are putting out information in current American society, part of the language of current American society is illiteracy and a historical consciousness and all of that. So, to do something a historically is really not much more than speaking the language, which involves not talking about stuff that wouldn't be understood anyway. But do you think that that is deliberate on the part of the government and the media to erase history? Or do you just think that people don't know anything about history? No, I think it's gonna become a broadcaster in the foreign language culture. You've got to speak that language. And they're speaking the language that they think is of broad understanding and broad not understanding in American, contemporary American culture. Well, Eric, why don't you, you are, we were a CNN reporter for a while, correct? Yes, sir. You're muted. Can you hear me? No, because you're muted. Yeah, but the problem is if I speak, if you don't mute it, then I won't be able to, so you have to mute yourself before I, I mean, I'm able to mute yourself. Mm-hmm. I don't see, okay. Yes, I'm fine. All right, so I just wanna point out that the US, there's a problem. So, can, oh, okay. Come out here, Eric. I just wanted to let you guys know that, you know, the US is ranked 42 by reporters without border when it comes to freedom of press. And, you know, and way behind Burkina Faso and Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica. Cuba? No. But here, what I've seen is that people, I mean, they are journalists. They are, you know, news outlets, but is it really information? Because I watched a documentary that shows that, for example, CNN won't cover a story if there's no way for them to make money out of the story. So, we have that illusion of having freedom of press because people can say whatever they want, for example, on their channel and we take that for freedom of speech. I mean, freedom of press. Quality of press also is very much important when we have to measure, you know, how much a country is free when it comes to freedom of press. I don't know if the fact that you have Twitter and you were able to say whatever you want on Twitter means that you have also freedom of press or freedom of speech. But to me, it's important, even though there is availability of news outlet, there needs to be quality when it comes to, you know, to what is on TVs or radios or, you know, being carried by the newspapers. Okay, thank you. Okay, I also want to talk a little bit tonight about this new so-called Ministry of Disinformation or the Board of Governance of Misinformation. So, what do you make of that? Sandy, before you move on, Nancy has her hand up. Okay, great. So, how do I do that? Jenna. She just needs to unmute herself and speak. Okay, okay, Nancy, is that Nancy Rice? Yes. Okay, what's up, Nancy? Good evening. Good evening. To me, if you don't have a complete picture of things, you don't have the complete information, then you're, I mean, it seems simple, you're uninformed. And so then you're more easily influenced by propaganda, which I agree, that's 24 hours a day. And... Relentless, it's relentless. Yes, and so people think Russia's totally bad and the US is okay, I guess, and Ukraine is good, and it's good that people have empathy for the people, but I worry about weapons, nuclear weapons. If you have too much of this gung-ho, well, it's propaganda and I think it's really dangerous. Well, I note that from the beginning, the war in the Ukraine was positive, posited as a war against a madman. And I called it the madman theory of history and it was perceived as a war against a monster. And what else could you do except try to strike him down and get rid of him, given that narrative? But I am at least an amateur historian. I looked at other sources and you quickly could discover that Putin for maybe all his faults was following kind of traditional Russian foreign policy, which is one to build buffer states in Eastern Europe that would buffer Russia against aggressive powers in the West like Germany and even France under Napoleon and also to seek warm water ports. And if you think about what Putin was doing, is that what he was doing? And that was a traditional foreign policy of Russia. The traditional foreign policy of the US, also I examined in that traditional foreign policy since 1917 has been really against Russia. As Mark would point out probably since 1905 in the first revolution in Russia, which was to exploit Russia, to destroy Russia by powers of the West and gain Russia's resources. So in a sense, what I always saw this war as is a proxy war fought in the Ukraine between Russia and the United States to the death of every single Ukrainian, unfortunately. But that was never ever in any press coverage of this war that I saw, except sometimes among some of the pundits, frankly on Fox, but most of the networks, most of cable were portrayed this war as a war between the good guys here in the United States and NATO versus the monstrous war criminal Putin, which has only led to increased war. And so what Nancy is saying, I think, and Eric, both is that we might have something approaching a varied press, but the press, it appears to me is very uninformed. But before we continue, I really want to explore the whole notion that what the government is trying, maybe, what the government, what is the government trying to do with this governance of disinformation? Who's gonna control misinformation? And is this more or less like the totalitarian efforts of the 30s, actually? So Mark, you're gonna, I hope, say a few words about, or maybe Pete, about George Orwell's work in the 30s. Is that right? Well, yeah, I mean, I'm no expert on Orwell. He wrote 1984 in 1948. So post World War II, it was published in 49, but it was called 1984 exactly because it was written in 48. He wanted to... Oh, I didn't know that. The parallels. And I think there's a lot of that book that is, and I don't know how familiar people are with the details, but there are a lot of details that are quite interesting. And also where it differs from what's going on now. So, for instance, there are four ministries in the book, and there's a Ministry of Truth. And that's, of course, now paralleled by this Ministry of Disinformation. Presumably disinformation is the opposite of truth, but in the sense of how ironic the titles are, it's the same thing. The Ministry of Truth is the Ministry of Laws or the Ministry of Disinformation. There's a Ministry of Peace. And of course we have the Defense Department, which uses this Newspeak where our Ministry of War is called the Ministry of Peace. And that's exactly what Orwell's criticism about Newspeak is. And then he has a Ministry of Plenty, which is our economic departments. But what's interesting, why I bring this up, is that Orwell talked about the Ministry of Love. And we have nothing in America. We have nothing that pretends to be that, either ironically or straightforwardly, that that concept is entirely out of the range of our vocabulary and thought. And- What love is, are you talking about? Are you saying? Yes, as a government ministry. He talked, Orwell talked about the Ministry of Love. And what was the Ministry of Love was the operation of Room 101, right? Which is what? Room 101 is great. Oh yeah? If you haven't read the 19th, Room 101 is the room in which the worst thing you fear happens to you. And there's enough information about you and your inner life that the government can choose, what exactly it is if you are arrested and sent to Room 101, what exactly your experience would be. And in 1984, it's a little bit silly, but Winston Smith, the main character, has this great fear of rats eating his face. So naturally, that's what the torture is to get him to speak out against his beloved and then there's a little love plot. And at the end, they both, he and I think Julia, her name is, turn against their beloved and equip the government to torture them. So they both, what do you call it? I've just lost the word when you- Aquias? Not Aquias, but they turn, anyway, they turn each other in. So the Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Love, we don't have that. And that always struck me as really interesting about Orwell, he's, he got it right three out of four and does he have it right in the sense of we really have that and I haven't understood what's going on in US reality well enough to understand their Ministry of Love or was he just, did he just get that one wrong? And of course, it's the Ministry of Love is the operator of Room 101 and the tortures and having people, what are they trying to do is to get people to believe in Big Brother and really give up their all beliefs and turn around. And that's what happens in the book is both Julia and Winston become acolytes of Big Brother because of Room 101. And so when people describe particularly, there are people that are very opposed to this new Board of Governance. And so when they just described that as Orwellian. Orwell was a socialist and he was writing kind of standard socialist literature in the 30s and he was on the right side of all this stuff and he is tagged entirely by this, his last work. So there's a lot Orwellian and then it sounds like Orwellian is bad and in fact, what Orwellian is about is exposing the structures of evil in society. So it's an unfortunate diminution of his work. And if for people who are entirely ignorant, it might sound like it's a hitlerian or some terrible thing when he was really on the other side of stuff. Right, but you describe him as a socialist. He was very much involved in the Spanish Civil War in the 30s, wasn't he? Yes. Yeah, right. And he was a reporter at that time? Yes, a reporter. Yeah, right. And what I think he was describing was totalitarianism, right? And in the 30s being a socialist, he probably thought that that kind of totalitarianism was, as you say, hitlerian or from the Nazis. Was he also describing something you think that arose in Russia with the USSR, do you suppose? Because that was at that time under Joseph Stalin. Or was he merely commenting on the Germans and the German Nazis? I think he was an anti-fascist. That was the major thing he was doing and publishing right after the war and also having all of these references to ministries. We don't really have ministries in the United States. I mean, we don't call them ministries. So I think he was basically an anti-fascist, writing anti-fascist material in that time when that was very, very important to understand and had he stayed alive. You know, he would be, and it is as we're looking at him now. I mean, here we are, what is it? 60 years later, trying to interpret these literary gestures that he made in terms of contemporary American society. And the fact that they work 75% of the time is very interesting that we have continued although calling it the opposite. We have continued all these trends of fascism that he was pointing out in the 30s. Okay, Pete, I have a different question. What is, who gets to within current American with this new board, who gets to decide what is information and what is disinformation? Pete, have you gone somewhere? Okay, well, Mark, anyone else have an opinion on that? Who gets to define the disinformation? It's pretty clear that it's basically an average, over averaging over the normal sort of ignorance and prejudice of contemporary America. And anything that's on the bad side is disinformation and that's what we, if Putin says anything, for instance, no matter what he says, it's disinformation. So we've discouraged any possibility of looking for truth on sides of arguments that we don't make on other side. Everything on the other side is disinformation and fraud. Right. And we don't look at ourselves. All right, what do you mean by that? So I'll give you an example though. Today from an old friend of mine, I told her there was a very interesting article on Counterpunch today by one of our neighbors, Ron Jacobs, who's at the, who works at the Burlington library. And he was contending that when, first there's no anti-war movement at all anymore. And second, that if there was an anti-war movement and what it would be doing is calling, of course, for truce fire, truce in this war in Ukraine and a negotiated settlement. And that that's what people who are interested in ending the war should be doing versus the argument that the war will never be stopped because we have to get rid of this madman Putin. Those are the two sides. And he was remarking in this article that there basically is no anti-war movement. And I believe that that's true. And that I think it's true because it has been perceived to be a war against one person rather than an examination of all the facts. Now, is that deliberate misinformation or is that propaganda or a little bit of both? Anybody have a thought on that? And I guess we lost Pete, right? Pete's gone somehow? Yes. All right, so Nancy, anybody else have any thoughts about that? Is that, and the last thing I wanted to say about that. So I suggested to some of my friends who are usually anti-war, that they should look up the Ron Jacobi article, Ron Jacobs, excuse me, in Counterpunch. And she said, well, you should read the other article that describes Putin as a war criminal. So that's the narrative that seems to have been accepted. Putin is the war criminal, which I think means that the war continues and will escalate. Anyway, anybody have any other questions or thoughts on this? Well, the war is being won by the defense industries, by the war industries. And keeping the war going is partially has to do with ideologies, but as most other military activities has to do with how many weapons we can sell to how many places. And so we don't want it to stop or we, the we, I don't know who we is, the controlling aspects of the economy. If I may, I also have a question. The question is how the American people become so much, easy to fool by the media or by, I don't know, maybe it has to do with mass media. Hollywood and cinema also shape the way a country think about what's going on abroad. I've seen recently some series on the internet that have some kind of party pre when it comes to other places of the world, the way that depict Arab, I mean, Arabs, the way a French citizen will be depicted on a movie. Sometimes those cliches shape also the way the people react to world actualities. And I also looked at the schools. I have hardly seen in the schools here when I went to the university here to all my papers, I was spelling my papers because I was into thesis, antithesis and synthesis. That's Marxism. I was always told, no Eric, you have to take a stand. And here, the more you are aggressive, the more you can, you know, you know, I mean, you have to find a way maybe with guns to make your arguments, you know, the winner of a discussion. And there's more, there's no debate. I had the chance to travel recently with a young guy who was on the debate team, but I had the feeling that his team was going to war, you know, because a debate here in our, I mean, the culture here in the US is something that you have to win, no matter the quality of your arguments. I mean, so all this is also cultural. So in shaping the opinions here, mass media and all these are important. And we know how much some movie directors or the industry has been close to the government. Will it still be, will it be, I mean, will there be an independent movie, a real independent movie industry? All these questions have to be, you know, tackled when we talk about freedom of speech and quality of information and how we shape opinions here. Okay, anyone else? I'm wondering if I can ask Eric a question. So in your country, which is Ivy Coast or in other countries of the world, are there the traditions of the Bill of Rights? Do they exist, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, or is that unique to the US world? No, but today, if you look at what is going on, even Ivy Coast is leading the US when it comes to freedom of speech. Why? I mean, what do you mean? Because other countries do their homework. Maybe I remember when I was a journalist in Ivy Coast who were all getting our classes, lessons and all these trainings by the US Embassy. The US are always been also regarded as a beacon of freedom of speech. But I came to the US and I realized it's just like a cacophony. Freedom of press or quality of press is reduced to who's the loudest person in the room. In these countries, they are evolving because it was imposed by the international community as a rule. So every day, every year, Human Rights Watch reporter without border, they insist that this country abide by these rules. And especially the US is always giving the lessons, the lessons in Africa, but the reality here is, how can the US still give lessons out there when here there's no real freedom of speech? If you say that Putin is not a war criminal, not only you have the press against you, but you have the whole citizens that can lynch you. I know. So I don't know. The countries in the third world, I think also are making progress because with freedom of speech or freedom of press, is freedom of press is also linked to the fight for democracy. You know, the moral countries involved in that fight and keeping the democracy a light alive, you have some kind of freedom of speech. But when the people give up, like it is the case here, because I haven't seen even among the liberals or the progressives here, a sense of, you know, listen, we can have gray zones, we can have thesis, and synthesis is no, but this guy listened to Fox News, I don't talk to him. Or this guy is like a Democrat, I don't talk to him, you know? So there's a problem. I think the downfall of freedom of press here is equal to that of democracy. It's because there's an erosion of democracy that all this is happening so much so that the government can come and say we're gonna have, you know, the ministry of the truth. I know. I'm sorry, Mark. Yeah, the question shows really how radical Marx was, and before Marx-Hagel, I mean, Hagel and the whole question of dialectic is, was a very important and radical response to the kind of languages that were being enforced in feudal society, even up to the 18th century. And then Hagel comes along with this idea of dialectic and Marx interprets it in terms of dialectical materialism. And the power of that to change thought and language was so much that it had to be destroyed because if you're going to admit the truth of thesis, okay, and then antithesis, all right, and then what do you do between the two of them? Okay, you have another, and then this evolution of theses and synthesis that that really provides opportunity for people to critique the power as it stands. And it had to be in norm, it had to be fiercely both recognized as such as very powerful and stamped out because we cannot have that kind of or power cannot have admit that kind of dialectic. That kind of even dialogue either or as our debate or a debate or fact-finding. But dialogue is not the same thing as dialogue. I know, I know. I mean, not just technically. We've always had dialogue. Sort of, I don't think we do that much nowadays. We don't even have real conversations. I was yelling at one another and you have people calling each other names and you have people going on television like this, going on video, and it's dialogue. You can write all that stuff down, but it isn't formally related in terms of arguments that are given legitimacy and in their structures. So anyway, I think we need to understand the decay of language as being supportive of the decay of thought and culture. One of the things, and I think maybe we should converse about this again next week, but one of the things that is important is that I believe critical thinking is no longer even being taught or valued in the present educational system. And one of the things that I've been anxious to do and as a person is to kind of reinvent debate and argument. And that's one of the reasons that we do these Wednesday night series. And I'm certainly hoping that they can continue and that people like yourselves can chime in again. But does anybody have any final thoughts or comments about the whole idea of what's happening in the media and with freedom of speech or any of that? Anybody, or should we call it a day and then meet again next week? Okay, so does somebody have, Nancy again, Nancy? Well, you mentioned earlier not having good understanding of history. I think that's quite a bit of the reason that people all for this propaganda. And I mean, they're empathetic toward Ukraine, but not thinking about maybe Russians are suffering even though it doesn't look like that on the surface. But if you have this propaganda against Russia, it just influences people not to empathize generally. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And how can you empathize? Okay, so to me, this war has been put forth as a war against a monster, Vladimir Putin. How can you really even debate that subject? Is somebody gonna really say, well, no, he's not a monster? I mean, as Eric was stating, you can't do that in present day parlance at all. You can't even suggest that the guy might be sane. So in this particular case, there's been no attempt at reason, no attempt at a knowledge of history. It is complete 100% blockage of any kind of understanding of this war. And so the war I think will continue until people start demanding, well, demanding some kind of truth. I don't know if it's the ministry of truth, but some kind of truth, but anyway. So next week, I think we'll be back and we're gonna be discussing, which is a subject also of some of the stuff we've been talking tonight. We're gonna be talking about what's happening at the Burlington Airport with the F-35s, the big fighters, planes that are in Germany. I wanna ask what is going on? Why are they there? And what does that mean for the state of Vermont? So please join us at that time. And thank you so much for being here tonight. Thank you.