 Welcome to WRECT, the Michael Rectonwalt podcast. My guest today is Ron Unz. Mr. Unz is the publisher of the Unz Review, an alternative media selection. Unz is a theoretical physicist by training with undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University, Cambridge University, and Stanford University. In the late 1980s, he entered the financial services software industry and soon founded Wall Street Analytics, a small but successful company in that field. A few years later, he became strongly involved in politics and public policy writing and has subsequently oscillated between software and public policy activities. Unz also served as a publisher of the American Conservative, a small opinion magazine from 2006 to 2013. Most recently in the late 2013 tens, I'm sorry, he launched an initiative campaign to raise the minimum wage to $12 per hour in California and the rest of the country based on ideas he had previously published on the subject. Although the campaign was unsuccessful, it played a major role in promoting the issue in both state, in the state, and nationally, leading to the sweeping victories there and elsewhere in the years that followed. In 2016, Unz organized the free Harvard slash fair Harvard slate of candidates for the Harvard Board of Overseers, headlined by Ralph Nader and running on a platform of abolishing undergraduate tuition. I'm also joined today by a guest host, Benjamin Adoudt. Benjamin is a friend of the Mises Institute who introduced me to Ron or Unz's work a few years ago. Hello, Ron. Welcome to Wrecked. Hey, great to be here. It's great to have you. And we're going to just jump right in because we've got a lot to talk about with you. So recently, you've written a number of articles on RFK Junior. The latest, which was released just today, is entitled RFK Junior versus I.F. Stone on the Kennedy assassinations, which I've only just had a chance to scan briefly as it just came out. Can you tell us what's the gist of these articles? What are you after here? Well, I mean, the whole thing about it is RFK Junior, obviously, Robert F. Kennedy Junior, has now entered the presidential race. And obviously, it's a tremendous uphill struggle for him to actually win the nomination against an incumbent president of his own party, never having held public office before. But a presidential campaign, if it's reasonably successful, even if it ultimately falls short, can serve as a tremendously powerful focal point for concentrating media attention on issues that the media normally avoids. And in the case of Kennedy, I think one of those issues is very relevant to his personal background, and that's the assassinations of his father and his uncle roughly 60 years ago. And the fact that those assassinations played such a tremendous role in the course of American history over more than the last half century, but have really the truth of those assassinations have received so little attention over the years that I think Kennedy's campaign might have a very good chance of opening a lot of people's minds on that. For example, just last year, Tucker Carlson broadcast a segment on his top-rated Fox News show describing the very clear evidence that a conspiracy was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This segment was probably watched by his three million regular viewers, and it was also watched by 1.6 million people on YouTube. So we're talking about millions of people seeing those facts. And I think it's very possible more people got that information than at any time in the last 30 years since Oliver Stone's movie JFK was playing in the theaters, you know, more than 30 years ago. In the same way, Robert RFK Jr. was just interviewed on the Bill Maher show. And that segment on YouTube got 1.5 million views. And he basically described the overwhelming ironclad evidence that his own father, the senator who was running for president in 1968, had died in a conspiracy. In other words, I mean, the facts there are so clear cut. Powder burns. The autopsy showed that Robert F. Kennedy was shot from behind at point blank range. And that was the verdict of the coroner. Well, Sir Hans Sirhan, the alleged gunman, was standing seven or eight feet in front of him when he fired his gun. Furthermore, acoustic evidence has demonstrated that at least a dozen shots were fired. And Sir Hans' gun only held eight rounds. In other words, all this stuff is so clear cut. You can even find it on Wikipedia, which is normally very reluctant to promote any sort of, you know, so-called conspiracy theory, but it's very straightforward. So in other words, it's absolutely undeniable that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in 1968 was killed not by Sir Hans Sirhan, but as part of a conspiracy. And that, I think, if that's the only thing that RFK Jr. gets out to the American people during his campaign, the campaign will certainly have been worth it. But there are many other issues as well. Obviously, that he'll be pressing forward. Yes, I mean, yeah, one of the things that he that you've written about is they also was challenging the COVID narrative and some of the COVID issues so that, for example, he recently said, and he's been lambasted for this, that the COVID differentially affected blacks and whites as opposed to Oskan Ossie, Jews and Asians. And for this, he's been destroyed. But as you pointed out in your writing, they really aren't picking him up. On the question of these assassinations, why do you suppose that is? Well, it's interesting. You know, again, when you look at Kennedy in the last year and a half or two years since he really published his book, Attacking Fauci, has been ferociously attacked by the media. In other words, there have been a lot of media stories back a year and a half, two years ago, attacking them on almost every possible ground. And that certainly is continued now. But when you look at the media, obviously, is very hostile to Kennedy, the establishment media is very hostile. When you look at the things they focus on and the things that they ignore, I think that provides a very useful roadmap to what the establishment and the media fears. And the fact that, for example, virtually none of them have, I mean, basically about a year and a half ago, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. published a very long op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle, one of California's largest newspapers, saying that Sir Han, Sir Han was innocent of his father's death and should be released from prison. He went over these statistics. He went over these facts. And about a week later, two weeks later, there were a series of vicious attacks by him on him in the media. None of those attacks mentioned the fact that Robert F. Kennedy had clearly declared himself to be a quote conspiracy theorist. I mean, normally the media attacks somebody for being a conspiracy theorist is their number one issue. But I mean, I should make up that they because they basically have such a strong case, if they attacked him on those grounds, the result would basically be that they'd lose all credibility. People would investigate the facts and they'd see that Kennedy was right and they were wrong. In the same way, for example, the recent attack on Kennedy over some of the statements he made regarding the differential lethality of COVID. And, you know, as far as I can tell, based on all the evidence, the statements were incorrect. In other words, Kennedy should have been more careful. He should have been looking at the facts. And we have the data, for example, of what the mortality rates are in the state of California across different ethnic and racial groups. And they don't match what that original journal article said. So, you know, Kennedy was mistaken on that, but they focused incredibly on that while ignoring many of the other statements he'd made about COVID that in many ways are even more controversial. In other words, Kennedy in his book, in his Fauci book, the number one Amazon bestseller clearly showed that COVID, the COVID virus was linked to America's bio warfare program. In other words, he was careful in how he phrased it, and he certainly didn't go quite as far as I've gone in some of my writing. But he had an entire chapter on America's massive, longstanding bio warfare program. And the connection was very clear. In fact, when he was being interviewed by Tucker Carlson later on, he said, if there's one chapter of his book that people should read, it's the chapter on America's bio warfare program, which by some estimates, has absorbed a hundred billion dollars of funding over the last 70 years. It's the world's longest running bio warfare program. And when we look at, for example, the results of that program, I mean, the fact that, for example, the only hard evidence we have of anybody having died as a result of America's bio warfare program was when the anthrax spores were released right after the 9-11 attacks. And it was later found by the FBI in their investigation that they came from America's own bio warfare stockpile. Now, whether the individual, the FBI finger, who allegedly then committed suicide, was the guilty party or not, is something that can very quickly, very heavily be debated. But it's undeniable that the people who died as a result of the anthrax attacks died as a consequence of America's own bio warfare program. And there's some very interesting evidence that came out later on regarding some of the financial beneficiaries of the massive increase in bio defense that followed those anthrax attacks. And in fact, there were some companies that were in the verge of going under that government contractors that then were rescued because of the ocean of American funding from the government that arrived because of those bio warfare attacks, because of the anthrax attacks. So I mean, there are a lot of very strange and suspicious circumstances of America's bio warfare program in that regard. And that's the thing that really Kennedy has been talking about quite a lot, that, for example, the government is simply not willing to touch. And the media, which follows government influence, also totally avoids another example. And this is something a little bit off to one side. But when I had heard that Kennedy published a book on the COVID and vaccination issues. Now, you know, I'm somebody who's generally been quite skeptical of many of the anti vaccination arguments. But, you know, Kennedy was somebody whose book was recommended to me by people that, you know, I had a lot of opinion for. And so when I ended up reading his book, one thing that utterly shocked me when I read his book, and most of the arguments he made about vaccinations, I thought were very reasonable and plausible arguments. In other words, he's really much more of a moderate on that issue. And, you know, certainly impressed by some of his arguments there. But the thing that utterly shocked me about his book was that nearly half of it, 200 pages was devoted to amazingly shocking overturning of everything that I'd ever heard about the AIDS disease, which for 40 years had been one of the most high profile diseases in the world. I mean, what Kennedy sent in his book, and we're talking about the number one Amazon bestseller. It was up on the charts for weeks. It's all, I think, well over a million copies. And more, almost half of it, 200 pages made the case that AIDS was essentially a medical media hoax, which was utterly astonishing. And I mean, he documented. I mean, basically, you know, when you're looking, for example, at the evidence from Peter Duisburg, really one of America's leading by a virologist University of Berkeley, or several four separate science Nobel laureates endorsed that position, including the science Nobel Laureate who'd won his prize for discovering the HIV virus. And I mean, if you can't accept the views of the man who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the HIV virus and who endorsed Kennedy's book in the strongest possible way and denounced, you know, the decades of lies that Fauci had promoted on that. I mean, that's simply astonishing. Now, you know, again, the notion of AIDS having been essentially a hoax, which is just, you know, astonishing. I mean, again, whether Kennedy's arguments were true enough. I can't really say. I mean, I did a lot of reading afterwards. A tremendous amount of I read all the articles from the 1990s when the issue was much more up there. I read some of the scientific documentation. And I mean, Kennedy and the people Kennedy was quoting made a very strong case. But whether or not you agree with Kennedy on it, it's clear that was by far the most shocking declaration as book. I mean, for a number one Amazon bestseller to declare that AIDS was essentially hoax and that people who died allegedly of AIDS died because of the AIDS treatments. Right. That's Fauci, which Fauci promoted. And it's just astonishing and made a term and, you know, which was incredibly lucrative for the corporations involved. I mean, if the media wanted to try to destroy Kennedy to say that Kennedy had written a book in which 200 pages was devoted to the notion that AIDS was a hoax would annihilate Kennedy, not a single one of the articles attacking Kennedy ever mentioned a word of it. And one of them, for example, is written by a New York Times journalist who had been very active in gay rights. He'd written a book about the gay rights history. And I mean, obviously, he knows perfectly well, you know, the issue of AIDS. And in his he wrote a 2000 word vicious attack on Kennedy and never mentioned a word of the main subject of Kennedy's number one bestseller. And that shows to me that's the strongest possible evidence that the American media, the establishment American media think that there's a very good chance, at least a lot of what Kennedy's saying about AIDS is true because the media has more to fear on the subject than Kennedy. I mean, they could basically bring it up. But if they brought it up, people then would read Kennedy's book. People would read the other articles involved. They would see some of the documentaries. They would find out that four separate Nobel laureates, science Nobel laureates, had endorsed that position. And that astonishing story might suddenly come out there. So I can't think of any reason why the media attacks on Kennedy would have avoided that subject other than many of the editors and journalists believing that there's a very good chance Kennedy might be right about that. And then this would again show what how murderous the regime really is. I mean, they it the two the commonality between these two things, the assassinations and these bio weapons is, of course, a murderous state. So this is this is something they don't want to get to give any traction to whatsoever. Let's turn out this turn a little bit toward a little bit broader in terms of your website, Unstot.com. Now, you've said in your own writing that you don't agree with a lot of what you publish on Unstot.com. So I got I got to ask the question. Why do you publish it? I mean, as some would put it, your platforming, as they say, some controversial material, including some by white nationalists, leftists and others. Now, I don't impugn you for this. I just like to know what you think. What why do you think it is important to publish a wide alternative media selection? Are you trying to establish what Karl Popper, for example, called an agonistic field where different propositions compete in an open form? That's interesting. I never heard of that particular quote by him, but I mean, that's probably a fairly good description. Rising in. Yeah. That's really fairly good description. I mean, the whole thing about it is the domain of lit of allowed speech in America over the last few decades and especially the last few years has been narrowing steadily to the point where, for example, you know, if you think 20 or 30 years ago, what the op-ed pages of the New York Times allowed is very different than allows right now. And you have people, for example, being purged for making statements for simply making statements on a Twitter post that would have been conventional wisdom five or ten years ago. I mean, it's really a ridiculous situation. So I mean, when I launched my website, in a sense, the main reason I set it up originally was with the idea of providing a convenient venue for my own writings that I intended to produce. And when you're setting up a website, obviously, you know, one of the issues involved is how to get people to occasionally visit it. Now, you know, typically the articles I wrote, especially back then tended to be much more long and detailed and infrequent. So, for example, I might write something every couple of months. And it seemed to me, you know, obviously, if you set up a website, especially 10, 15 years ago, where something is only released once every month or once every two months, you'll, you know, get very little traffic. So in other words, it seemed to me that it would be useful to attract a certain number of other writers or bloggers who could then provide daily content that would, you know, create an audience, a built-in audience for when I occasionally released some of my own articles. And so it seemed to me at the time, you know, I'd been noticing, you know, was a very strong opponent of the Iraq war. And one thing I noticed as the Iraq war was moving forward and, you know, as the war began, was that you had really a range of alternative media outlets from very different ideological perspectives that all were contradicting the establishment view, the dominant mainstream neocon view on Iraq at that time, even though they might totally disagree on other things. They would all sometimes then be publishing the same individuals who question that, like, for example, someone like Bill Lind, you know, who was very much of a conservative, but he was actually regularly published on Counterpunch, Alexander Coburn's website. Or, for example, you had Paul Craig Roberts, who was being published on V-Dare, sort of a racialist website, anti-immigration website, but also published on Lurakwa and antiwar.com. So in other words, you have a situation where sometimes, you know, the ideological dimensions are sometimes presented as a left, right mono direction. But it's actually much more multidimensional than that. And you many times have people, for example, who might be very strongly disagreeing about certain things, but also in agreement on other things. And one of the interesting things I learned is, you know, as I basically made arrangements with some of these websites to republish their stuff, I mean, probably about half or two-thirds of the material published on our website is simply republished from other sources, you know, left wing, right wing, racialist, libertarian, I mean, just basically every sort of direction. And the motto of the website I set up was basically to provide a convenient forum for important, controversial ideas that are generally excluded from the mainstream media. So in other words, we specialize in the sort of things that you would not find, typically, on the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times or The Washington Post. And in fact, one of the interesting things is as those publications have narrowed and narrowed their scope, their scope of anything they publish, you know, some of those individuals then have, you know, moved over to our website or other websites, you know, or sub-stack or something like that. So, you know, the idea is basically just to provide a very wide range of different perspectives that are important, controversial and typically not found in the mainstream media. And it's sometimes interesting, you know, it's the same thing with the Iraq War, that you have individuals who might vehemently disagree on most typical ideological issues, left-right type issues, but they might strongly agree, on the other hand, with regard to, for example, the Ukraine war, that the proxy war, we're now fighting with Russia and Russia's own border or policies towards China or a COVID policies or all sorts of issues like that. And, you know, in fact, I mean, obviously the strongest example of the fact that an awful lot of what I publish is not necessarily aligned with my own views came during the vaccination controversy, because, you know, my views, to be honest, on vaccination, on the whole COVID vaccination issue really were never all that different from what you would find in the New York Times or the Economist or the mainstream media. While on the other hand, most of the columnists that I publish were very strongly opposed to the vaccination campaign. I mean, they were some of the leading anti-vaxxers. In fact, because of the website software I've developed, it makes it relatively easy for very extended discussions to take place, sometimes involving many hundreds or even a thousand or two thousand comments. So it turns out at one point, you know, there was a lot of interest in having a sort of free, open standing discussion because there had been so much negative reaction to some of my pro-vaccination pieces that I published. You know, I think I ended up getting 2,000 comments on that, probably 99 percent of them hostile that, you know, once, you know, I mean, basically the 2,000 comments became too large to really continue. There was then, you know, demand to set up a few open threads where people could then debate the vaccination issue. And I think I ended up having three successive open threads that ended up totaling plus a few of the articles we had. I think two million words of comments on the vaccination issue. So in other words, some of the commenters, most of almost all of whom were very anti-vaxx, ended up saying that our website constituted the single largest repository of written commentary against the vaccines found anywhere on the Internet because, you know, a couple of million words is a lot. And, you know, it was ironic for me because I was basically on the other side of the issue. But, you know, I had no problem with that. And there are a lot of other issues that I also feel, you know, having an open discussion is much more important than, you know, imposing any sort of single view on the website that I happened to run. Yeah, like the science so-called, right. I'm going to turn it over to Ben, who's going to ask a couple of questions, I think. Thank you. Thank you, Michael. Great to have you on run. You know, you don't you don't shy away from controversial topics. And, you know, the material on uns is so controversial and some of your own writings. How has this affected your own kind of your personal life? I mean, you're up in San Francisco. It's Palo Alto. I'm sorry, I apologize. So but yeah, either way. Yeah, how has that affected your your personal life? Well, I mean, to be honest, it really depends. In other words, a certain number of people I've been friendly with for many years really were, you know, utterly shocked by some of the items I wrote in my American Providence series. Now, it's interesting because, for example, in some cases, they were initially shocked, but then gradually when they sort of absorb the material, looked at the references, you know, sort of, I mean, some cases took a little bit of time for them to sort of absorb such shocking, you know, statements or shocking declarations. You know, then they sort of came around to it and it's not necessarily clear that they would accept what I've written or necessarily agree with it. But they do agree that, for example, I made a strong case on many of those points. And, you know, the other thing about it, I should say, is one approach I took when I was starting really the current round of my American Providence series almost exactly six, five years ago, just over five years ago. I ended up really thinking to myself that, you know, many times there are websites or individuals that have published very controversial views of certain issues in a very narrow focus, but have, you know, probably deliberately ignored lots of other controversial issues. And I actually took exactly the opposite approach. I decided to try to put out as many of these ultra-controversial ideas as quickly as possible so that they would all be out together in a burst of basically four or five months. And it was an exhausting burst. I mean, it would have been much easier for me personally, you know, just in terms of human wear and terror. If I'd spread it out over two years, I think I ended up writing about one hundred and fifty thousand words of new articles over a period of basically four or five months, which is an awful lot. You know, even though a lot of it was based on readings that previously done, you know, I had to collect it all together, in many cases, rereading the books. The reason for that was actually sort of a strategic thought in my mind. First of all, if some if you've come across an article by somebody and it makes statements about historical events or other important issues that are utterly shocking to you, totally divergent from everything you've always heard from other sources, you sort of say to yourself logically, well, you know, he's made some good points. He has some logic to his case. He cited some reasonable sources. But you say to yourself, is it really possible that all of these people I've been reading for 10 or 20 or 30 years, all of these media sources, none of them have ever mentioned that one thing. In other words, everything else they've said is entirely correct. You know, it's everybody knows all that other stuff. But how could they have left out this one dramatic thing? Say the JFK assassination? In other words, you know, I've been reading The New York Times for 30 years. How in the world could they have left out the truth about the JFK assassination if they were so careful about everything else? But when you bring up so many of those other issues together, all at the same time, you're really knocking so many separate holes in the established narrative of reality that most people have accepted that it obviously takes a tremendous amount of, you know, effort for somebody to digest all those shocking things. But once you see that it's not just one thing that the media left out, but it was many, many things that the media has been dishonest, not about one item, but on so many other items in a sense, the credibility reinforces each other. Another factor is that many individual people might have who, you know, sort of been interested in areas of alternative views might have one item that they themselves have investigated very careful and their outrage that the media never covers it, that the media is dishonest about the one item, but they've never invested, investigated other items. So when you bring up their issue in conjunction with all these others, the fact that you're basically presenting what they knew to be true about something that the media never covered enhances your credibility about all these other issues that they've never investigated themselves. And it's the sort of thing, you know, then they start looking into some of these other issues and they say to themselves, well, if this website is finally out there telling the truth about the JFK assassination where so few other websites on the Internet, even so few alternative websites get into those sorts of controversial details, then maybe I should at least give some consideration to all these other controversial issues they're raising. And, you know, again, I mean, we publish a very wide range of views. And I think that overwhelming majority of views we publish are views I do not agree with. I think they're probably factually incorrect. Oh, you know, I'd probably stand behind 99 percent of everything I've written over the years, but, you know, not necessarily the views of these other people, but to put it out there, I think it's important to get it out there. And in some cases over the last few years, many of these issues that I've written about myself first came to my intention when I read them in articles by people who I, you know, had a lot of skepticism towards or even, for example, some of the commenters on our website. I mean, our website is very lightly moderated. So we probably attract more extreme and outrageous commenters than almost any other website anywhere on the Internet. And, you know, many of those people have very strange ideas about certain things. Ideas that I'm almost sure are completely wrong. But every now and then they bring up an idea or site of reference that I then investigate and find out is probably correct. And that's actually been one of the main sources of sort of the raw material in my American Providers series. In other words, basically just reading the common threads on my own articles and sometimes the ones on my own website. So the whole thing about it is when you're talking about basically, you know, in a sense, flooding the zone of critics, bringing up so many different controversial issues all next to each other. It also makes it much less likely. The other fact I should raise is that, you know, when I first started raising some of these controversial issues, I was a little bit concerned, you know, would we be blasted by, for example, the ADL would be blasted by, for example, many of the organizations that police the Internet. And by putting so much of this controversial material out there so quickly, I think I raised the stakes and made it much less likely that they would try to attack us because, you know, if they attacked us and if they then caused people to discover the website and start reading so much of this different material. I mean, the results might, you know, be very negative for them. And in fact, one thing I did with regard to the ADL was I then quickly wrote an article on the true history of the ADL, which is very, very different than most people really know about. And, you know, it's basically it just passed its 100 year anniversary. And, you know, it's a very powerful, influential organization. But when you read the document, a true history of where it began and why it began and some of the things that had been doing over the last few years, I wasn't at all surprised that the ADL then stayed very far away from the website. And after publishing one short, anonymous blog post criticizing us, it basically stayed very far away from us since then, because, you know, the only thing they could do is basically keep silence about us and try to make sure that nobody found out about the material that we published. You know, you know, Ron, I was going to just ask you that question, but you answered it and I was going to ask you why do you think someone like Kennedy is being, you know, just kind of a dog like he is being and you're being let off scot-free, you know, and, you know, I mean, you know, it's like why do you think you're being let off the hook given the given the articles you host in your series, including the article, the oddities of the Jewish religion. I mean, you wrote an article called the oddities of the Jewish religion. And so and then, of course, you know, another one on the Holocaust that I think that one had 3,000 comments or something very and then you had to stop it at some point, you have to stop the comment section. So and they've totally let you off. But going back to Kennedy really quickly, there is a really good article on your site called, did Israel kill the Kennedys written by Lauren Guyonot and in it, you know, he points to some evidence that it was actually the Israeli Mossad. So I'm wondering and I agree with you when you say that if if all Kennedy, if all RFK Junior does is basically raise awareness to the fact that his father's assassination and his uncle's assassination was a conspiracy. And he has said it's the, you know, he said it's the he thinks it was the CIA. So if that if that's all that he does, then he's done a lot. I'm wondering what you think about the idea that it was the Mossad. And I'm also wondering, will he how much will he will he be open to this idea and will he be open to talking about it? Because I think it's just, you know, kind of the irony of all ironies. It is, you know, he is right now being blasted as being an anti-Semite. And there's a it looks like there's a strong evidence to suggest that the Jewish state killed his father and he will not. Meanwhile, he's going on an apology tour as well. Exactly. And he's gone on an apology. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, I've actually written quite a lot on that subject myself. In fact, my pieces came out. John has written, he wrote a book, I think, a year or two earlier in that, which was actually one of the sources for my writing, but on the Kennedy assassination. But the key thing is the the notion of the Mossad playing a central role in the Kennedy assassination really goes back to Michael Collins Piper about 32, actually, no, it was just about 30 years ago. I think it was 1994 when he published a sort of landmark seminal work on that. And, you know, since then, a lot of additional evidence has come out. And I think there's a very strong case that the Israeli Mossad played a central role. I also think, for example, LBJ was almost certainly involved in the assassination as well. And those are the sorts of aspects of the JFK assassination that are almost never discussed by 90, 95, 98 percent of JFK researchers. In other words, those are considered too hot for most people to cover. And I think the evidence is really very strong. In fact, some of it, you know, I actually presented in my own articles for the first time, but I mean, a lot of it goes back to Michael Collins, Piper, other researchers in the last 20 or 30 years on that subject. Now, Kennedy himself has obviously been very careful to focus on sort of the starting point, in other words, that and which is exactly appropriate. In other words, you can't get to any of these other issues of the JFK assassination until you finally break open the cover up that for 60 years has been keeping the American public, most of the American public, especially American elites, mainstream American elites, ignorant of the fact that it was a conspiracy, that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the man who killed JFK, just like Sir Han Sirhan was not the man who killed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., his brother, six years later. So the whole thing about it is what Robert Kennedy right now is doing in his campaign is exactly right. He's focusing on the basic question of was there a conspiracy involved in the Kennedy assassinations? And once you open that door, I think then people can start asking themselves, well, who was involved in the conspiracy? Who might have been involved? What's the evidence? And so, you know, I think basically until you open that door, in fact, you know, as he tweeted out when Tucker Carlson had that segment on the JFK assassination last year, Robert F. Kennedy tweeted out the fact that it was the most courageous segment aired on television in 60 years. I think it might very well been the first time anyone in mainstream broadcast television in 60 years had explicitly said that John F. Kennedy was killed in a conspiracy. I mean, it certainly would be the most recent time in 30 or 40 years on that. I mean, we're talking about, you know, the highest rated cable news show, Tucker Carlson's show. And it was watched probably five or six or seven million people probably got that idea. And Robert F. Kennedy's segment on the Bill Mayer show picked up another million and a half views. Who's stuck in the mirror? Let me just jump in. Do you think that this, in fact, having RFK Jr. on and allowing him to say what he said on his show had something to do with Tucker Carlson's eventual losing that show from Fox News? It wouldn't surprise me. I mean, again, Tucker Carlson, you know, was willing to cover so many different explosive topics, you know, obviously the Ukraine war being something we've been covering very heavily, that there clearly were an awful lot of different groups gunning for him. And, you know, whether it was all of them together who finally kicked them off or, you know, one of them more than the others, it's very hard to say. But it would not surprise me at all if that JFK segment was certainly part of it. I mean, again, nobody in 30 years since, you know, Oliver Stone's movie JFK was in the theaters had said something like that to as many millions of people. And, you know, when the American people. Gradually decide that they've been lied to about the Kennedy, I mean, the John F. Kennedy assassination was probably arguably the most famous single event in the 20th century. You know, Pearl Harbor, maybe one or two other things. But, you know, as a single event, I think thousands of books have been written on the Kennedy assassination. I mean, it all the course of American history. And then his brother was assassinated a few years later. If people conclude that the American government and the American media. Lied about it for 60 years. I mean, they would then be much more open to so many other things that the media has been covering. I mean, it's once you knock a hole in the wall. Of the once you knock a hole in the dam, all the water starts rushing through. And I mean, to take, for example, my case, I consider myself a well educated, knowledgeable individual. You know, I've been very interested in public policy for decades. I mean, since I was in high school or college. And until about a dozen years ago, I never once suspected there was anything suspicious in the JFK assassination, not not the slightest suspicion or the Robert Kennedy assassination. In other words, you know, I certainly knew from reading the newspapers that there are all these assassination conspiracy books, all of these theories floating around. But I just dismissed them all as total nonsense because that's how every media source I absorbed handled them. In other words, whether it was the New Republic or whether it was the New York Times or whether it was the Wall Street Journal, every media source seemed to dismiss them as total nonsense. And so I just, you know, naturally reasoned it was ridiculous. And then when I suddenly, you know, came across, it was actually when I watched the JFK movie by Oliver Stone. I just, you know, it seemed like a very strange movie. All those crazy things in it. None I assumed it was entirely fictional, but one or two items in the movie just made me a little bit suspicious. And when I started browsing in the Internet, I suddenly discovered that was part of the official narrative. And it seemed ridiculous. So, you know, at that point, I started reading a couple of books and became more interested in it. But what really shocked me then was, you know, I know a few people who, you know, I would consider sort of members of the elite media establishment or the elite academic establishment. And I just very gingerly raised the issue with some of them of whether there was anything suspicious about the JFK assassination, whether it might have been a conspiracy. And they privately told me flat out, absolutely. They'd been convinced for decades it was a conspiracy. But they never said a word because they didn't want to lose their standing. They didn't want to lose their credibility. They didn't want to lose their influence. So I really wonder what fraction of the elite media or the elite academic community privately, quietly, has all of these beliefs, but none of them will say publicly. And that's the sort of thing, you know, you have a situation where, you know, nobody is willing to admit what they privately believe about something. Because they assume none of their friends believe it. And instead, you have a heart for them. This is how the regime keeps people in line, too. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, it's exactly what happened in Eastern Europe. I mean, then, you know, we'll look at the Soviet regime in Eastern Europe, the Warsaw Pact countries. Finally, at the end, it came out that nobody in those countries believed in communism and the whole thing utterly collapsed. I mean, so much more quickly than anybody thought because it had no supporters in the regime. Nobody believed in it. And I wanted to I wanted to turn to something I noticed in your writing. I have to pick you up on this and just ask about this. And, you know, one of the tendencies in your writing, which I totally support, which is to speculate about various events and what in what we might broadly, and we've been talking about this phrase called conspiracy theories. Now, I want to make it clear. I don't see anything wrong with conspiracy theories, per se, at all. A theory is not wrong for being a theory about a conspiracy. Theory is insupportable if it lacks evidence or if it doesn't account for data like or in Thomas Kuhn's language, if it fails to account for what he called anomalies. But you sometimes seem to depreciate some writing of others for conspiratorial thinking. For example, I noticed you make light of concerns about the so-called Great Reset Project. Now, I've written an entire book on the Great Reset, and I can tell you that it is an explicit open and avowed plan. And I just wonder why you dismiss these concerns or are you only dismissing it in connection with COVID-19? I, for one, don't say that the global elite released the coronavirus, but they but rather that they merely seized on this to accelerate the reset that they had already planned that they already had been working on, in fact, for some time. So I just wondered if you wanted to comment about that. Why? And I've never really looked into that issue in any great depth. In other words, for example, the way I'd sort of come across it again was there on the Internet, there seemed to be a very heavy profusion of commenters and writers making the case that you just made that, for example, the World Economic Forum or Kosh Schwab or Bill Gates or something like that had released the COVID virus to sort of promote a great reset of, you know, economic reset around the world. And it just seemed very doubtful to me. And, you know, when I then looked at some of the evidence they had, it seemed very sort of sketchy evidence. In other words, you know, I personally think that the COVID virus probably was intentionally released, but, you know, in a very different way, which we could sort of get to. And, you know, that's basically, I mean, Bill Gates doesn't have a bio warfare lab and Kosh Schwab seems sort of, you know, sort of a self-promoting international public figure. Right. So, you know, I mean, they didn't seem like the sort of people who would be doing something like that, especially if the evidence that they'd done it came from some of their public comments. In other words, if you did something like that, you probably wouldn't go boasting about it or anything like that. And some say pretty bizarre things. For example, in one of the annual meetings, Kosh Schwab said, and I'm paraphrasing, he said, we had this virus and it was the worst in 100 years, but we may have another one on the agenda. So they kind of lend the they actually, I think they seed conspiratorial thinking on purpose in order to deflect legitimate criticism from the campaign that they are undertaking. That's perfectly possible. And, you know, the whole thing about it, though, is, you know, from my perspective, I really view, you know, many of the countries around the world as being independent operatives. In other words, for example, you know, you could very well say that the United States today runs most of NATO, the NATO countries or Japan, almost as vassal states. In other words, basically, we control their politics much more so today than we did say 10 or 20 years ago. We dominate what they do. And really, they pretty much have very little independent agency, especially with regard to, for example, the Ukraine war. So I mean, you know, if there were a question of, for example, the American elites controlling those countries and implementing a policy in the way that they wanted those policies to follow, you know, that would be quite plausible. But then when you look at countries like Russia, countries like China, countries like India, countries like Iran, I view them as totally independent of American control. In other words, you know, clearly they cooperate with America in some areas. They are conflict in conflict with America in other areas. And there's simply the notion of, for example, a global economic policy being implemented by somebody like Klaus Schwab and the American elites, for example, in America or Europe, might be remotely possible. Yes. In Western Europe, I think it is. That's what they would have no possibility of being implemented in China or Russia or Iran or so many of these other countries around the world. And so, for example, you know, if Klaus Schwab wanted to create what you were calling a great reset, but it only included a small fraction of the world. In other words, the West right now, I think that would lose a lot of its potential value or the point. And so, for example, you know, if you're talking about, I mean, right, right now, one of the things that I just discovered a few months ago, which really was quite shocking, is that if you're talking about the real industrial economy, you know, in industrial economy in real terms, China's real industrial economy is already three times larger than that of the United States. China's real industrial economy is larger than the US, Japan and all of the EU combined. And then when you add in Russia, when you add in all these other countries around the world, I mean, in other words, you know, if somebody were planning a sort of great economic reset, yeah, but they only included a fraction of the countries around the world, it would lose potentially, I think, a lot of its value. They're doing it with this ESG, with the Environmental, Social and Governance Index. Now, they have China pretending to buy into that, I think. OK, so China pretends to buy into it. Meanwhile, the whole ESG, the whole ESG regime actually benefits China because you have the West effectively deindustrializing, passing off all this production to China, who doesn't really care about this ESG thing at all. Exactly. But on the other hand, I think China is actually the model that they're trying to set up in the West in terms of the economy. And that is a kind of, you know, they have the approved, state-approved producers on top and effectively a kind of actually existing or like a totalitarian socialism on the ground. That seems to be like the project that they have in mind. And they've said this in many cases, that China is the model for the West that they have in mind. So they think they're using China to establish a great reset. China thinks they're using them, these Western globalists, to benefit economically. And both are true at this point, except that probably these Western elites will be will be proven to be the useful idiots in the wager. Well, I certainly agree with you. I mean, you know, again, a lot of what the West has been doing in economic terms is just crazy. And, you know, to be honest, I'm really, I've never researched in detail, but I'm very skeptical of a lot of the global warming claims, the climate. Yes, me too. And, you know, when you have, for example, the massive, the massive changes in energy policy in Western Europe, I mean, shutting down all the nuclear actors, stopping coal. I mean, basically, they've severely damaged their own economy. And, you know, for example, the crazy political correctness policies in the United States with all these corporations following, you know, ridiculous policies. I mean, you could say very well that the West, to some extent, is almost committing economic suicide in that West. You know, but I don't think that would be the intent of the secret of elites in the West to destroy themselves. I think they're just stupid or crazy or something like that. In other words, I think a lot of it sounds very funny. But I think a lot of these ruling elites get their view of the world by reading the same biased newspapers and media sources that we're endlessly criticizing. In other words, I think it's a sort of self-reflective process. So it's ideology, you think. Exactly. It's basically just a sort of mistaken ideological direction. In other words, you have the journalists writing it because they'll be fired if they don't write it. And then you have the corporate executives reading what the journalists have written and believing it. Yeah. And so, you know, the whole, I mean, I just thought some sort of nefarious, you know, evil plot. They actually buy into this nonsense. You know, I mean, certain elements of it, I think, are opportunistic. For example, you know, in the aftermath of the COVID epidemic, you know, I certainly think a lot of corporations jumped on the bandwagon and used it, for example, as a means of extracting, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars, trillions of dollars and loan guarantees from the government or putting the rivals out of business or something like that. Yes. I mean, there are all these complicated ways. But, you know, I mean, those are opportunistic means of taking advantage of policies that are irrational. And so, you know, if Klaus Schwab or some of those people were the sort of original movers of these policies, I think they were doing it for self-destructive reasons that, you know, maybe they don't admit. But I mean, the result has been a disaster. I mean, when you say, for example, Germany de-industrializing yourself, I mean, some people think, for example, some plausible people argue that America's Ukraine policy, the Ukraine war policy, was partly aimed at weakening Western Europe and Germany as potentially economic competitors. Yeah, Rand Corporation said that. Exactly, yeah. Exactly. I mean, that's certainly plausible. But, you know, on the other hand, you know, it means that America's share of the world economy, the share of the world economy that's controlled by America, which includes the West, which includes Japan, is smaller than it otherwise would have been. So in other words, we're getting a larger fraction of the West under our direct economic control in America. But I mean, by severely damaging the economies of our most important allies in the long run, I think we're losing out to Russia and China. I mean, the whole thing about it, look at, for example, our totally irrational policy against Russia with regard to Ukraine. I mean, the whole thing about it is you've probably heard of the Thucydides trap. In other words, for the last few years, people have made the point that America and China were inevitably going to become rivals because a rising China and a reigning America were inevitably going to move into a conflict with each other, possibly even a military conflict. Now, under, you know, that obviously is a historical pattern and obviously a lot of, you know, very knowledgeable people looked at the pattern of the last 500 years and seen that that was quite likely to occur. Now, the logical approach for ruthless American leaders to take under those circumstances is for America to establish a balancing alliance of other major countries around the world, a coalition against China, a coalition that would include Japan that would include, for example, Western Europe and NATO, but would also include Russia, India and most of these other countries. Because together they would be even though China has a much larger population industrial base to the United States. If America had Japan, the NATO countries and Russia and India in a coalition, we would probably have the advantage over an international rivalry with China. But instead, America basically provoked the Ukraine war against Russia and has driven Russia into the arms of China. Russia has the world's largest storehouse of natural resources. China has the world's largest industrial base. They're bordering each other and are naturally complementary in economic terms taken together. Russia and China are far stronger than America and all of its Western allies combined. And you've seen, for example, Saudi Arabia has now shifted towards the Russia-China alliance for exactly that reason. India has moved in that direction. Brazil and the other BRIC countries have moved in that direction. So what America has done because of its irrational hatred of Russia and its irrational arrogance is to create a global coalition that is far stronger than what we and our allies control. And so we basically destroyed ourselves on the international stage and I mean done so for absolutely no logical reason. And for that reason, I think it's wrong to, you know, you could say, for example, there are very evil people in the world. But I think it's very wrong to assume that those evil people are smart, evil people. Many times they're stupid, evil people and engage in behavior that simply is utterly irrational from the point of view of simple geopolitical self-interest. It's amazing that these elites seem to fail upward, too. You know, it's like the worst they do in any particular position, they get promoted for it. The worse they do, the more they're promoted. Exactly. I mean, for example, the Iraq war, which, I mean, you know, it was one of the worst geopolitical disasters in American national history. Right. All the people who supported the Iraq, a few of them, you know, ended up losing the job. But the vast majority of the people supported the Iraq war, both within journalism, the media and government are still running journalism media and the government today. In other words, they were promoted upwards. While the handful of critics who were brave enough to say it was disaster, they were purged because of it and they stayed purged. In other words, look at, for example, Victoria Nuland, the neocons, the same neocons who were behind the Iraq war are the ones still running the American government today. And in fact, as I pointed out in one of my articles, one reason you don't hear much about neocons these days, is the neocons over the last 10 years have been so successful in taking over both the Democratic and the Republican Party establishments that everyone in foreign policy is a neocon. Yeah. They're no non-neocons. And so since they've driven out all the non-neocons, they don't even call themselves neocons anymore. Yeah, there's nobody to contrast them with. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'm going to let Ben jump in here. Oh, yeah. Thank you. There's so much from what geopolitics to political theory, perhaps, right? Yeah, for sure. Well, there's so much I want to ask you, but I think given that we are on the Mises podcast and, you know, Misesians and Rothbardians, I'm sure all the Rothbardians out there want to know why you are not a Rothbardian. Meaning it seems that, for example, in one of your articles that I read, actually, the one about the Holocaust, you mentioned that you don't, you aren't a libertarian. And I was just wondering why I find it to be the most logically consistent political theory as far as, you know, the the state is concerned. You know, Rothbardianism says that the state is inherently illegitimate. It's based on taxation. It's a monopoly on the use of force. And so it seems that that is kind of the root of all of our problems is this monopoly on the use of force, the monopoly to tax, the monopoly to create laws. I don't know how much thought you've given this stuff, but if and I'm sure you're aware of Murray Rothbard, I'm wondering what your thoughts are. Well, I've never really been that ideological in that way. In other words, you know, I sort of look at things on a case by case basis. And, you know, clearly, for example, there have been some geopolitical entities over the years that have followed very much of a libertarian perspective. I'm probably best example would be a place like Hong Kong, which had tremendous economic development with extremely, you know, open-ended free market principles until, you know, relatively recently. But I mean, there are many other countries that have done very well in a very different way. Let me take, for example, you know, Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore. I mean, it achieved amazing results following policies almost exactly at the opposite end of the spectrum. I mean, very, you know, it was a tiny postage scamp of a country, but I mean, very centrally run, very tight government controls. And, you know, there are pluses and minuses to those different approaches. And, you know, for example, when you look at countries of the last few decades, I mean, China, obviously, is not a libertarian country by, you know, any possible or most structure of the imagination, even though, you know, I've actually heard from people that on a low-level economic basis, probably China is actually more free market than the United States. In other words, it has fewer regulations, fewer... Yes, I've seen this argument, too, yes, from Austrian economists in China. But still, I mean, you know, the commanding heights of the economy are obviously run by, you know, the Communist Party and the government. And China has achieved tremendous economic results. I mean, they lifted 700 million people out of poverty. I mean, no country in the history of the human species has had economic growth rates as rapid as that of China in such a short period of time, over a period of 35 or 40 years. Now, you know, those growth rates followed Deng Xiaoping's shift towards the free market. In other words, under Maoism, you know, China had some successes, but much, much less. And then in the late 70s, when Deng decided, you know, to shift in a more free market direction, I mean, China simply took off and they had tremendous results. So, I mean, you know, the Chinese economic development system certainly is not an argument necessarily against the free market. But it does make the case that something that's very far removed from absolutely free market libertarian policies can be extremely successful. Absolutely, they have a market like the West to tap into. If it weren't for the Western markets, they wouldn't have been able to accomplish. Right. Yeah. So the source, you know, the source of the prosperity, the source of the wealth is, you know, is the market. And so there would be no market for that. Yeah, it would have taken longer. In other words, basically, and obviously without Western technology, it would have taken much, much longer. But I mean, in some sense, China was simply fitting into the Western market. In other words, basically, they simply set up companies that produce goods and mostly goods, but also sometimes services at a more efficient and cheaper basis than was produced in the West. And so and, you know, then they encourage Western corporations to move to China and set up their production facilities there. So, you know, certainly, it would have taken China much, much longer without the support of the Western corporations and the support of the American market and the support of Western technologies. But I think China probably would have gotten there, you know, anyway, but over a much longer period of time. And in fact, one of the things about it is I've actually been quite interested in China for very long, really going back to the middle 1970s. And I really had expected China to do very well once dung, then shifted towards the free market simply because I Hong Kong, I looked at Taiwan, I looked at Singapore, I looked at the other East Asian countries like, you know, South Korea. And, you know, you could see that they had done very well under those circumstances. So China, with so many cultural similarities to that part of the world, you'd expect to do very well as well. Though, you know, China, I mean, did even better. I never would have expected that in 40 years, China would have ended up really moving to the point where it had, you know, three times the American, the size of the American real industrialized economy. Yeah. Let's move to our our last or next to last question, I think, and that is censorship. It's something that you have experienced and should know quite a bit about in terms of your website. I've talked about this in my book, Google or a Capellago and, you know, I know that, for example, Facebook will not allow links to run to on.com. And that Google certainly down, down ranks, if not, disappears many of your links and so forth. So what do you think has has been the effect of such an information and opinion control regime over the past 10 to 20 years? And how can we break this regime's grip over discourse? Oh, it's a huge problem. I mean, obviously, if you go back 30 or 40 years ago, we had three television networks. We had a few major newspapers. We had a few major magazines in centralized control of the distribution of information was tremendously great at that point. And, you know, that's why, for example, with something like the Kennedy assassination, very few people found out about it. And it was just chance circumstances that almost anybody found out about the details of what really happened. Once the Internet came along and you had basically the notion of anybody being able to set up a website and get their information out there, suddenly there was a perception that all of that would be permanently ended, that we would suddenly have a free for all free market information. And for quite a few years, it really was that way to some extent. You know, I think a turning point was the growth of the, you know, the major Internet gatekeepers. I mean, the social media gatekeepers, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, Google, the search engine gatekeeper, Google and to a lesser extent Bing. And once basically they became so tremendously dominant, again, a handful of companies, they could then begin to impose their will on the Internet. So, you know, most websites still can write what they want. You know, there have been actually a few cases where websites like, for example, Andrew Anglin's Daily Stormer was actually kicked off the entire Internet, you know, which is really it's I think only one or two websites anywhere have suffered that sort of blow where they've basically been completely eliminated from the Internet. But in most cases, it's simply access to the website that is removed. For example, in our case, and I must say, it's interesting story because we've been publishing incredibly controversial material on a website for several years now, really going back about 10 years, and we never had any problems with either Facebook or Google or the other gatekeepers. You know, we published a lot of controversial material, but published it, you know, most cases are fairly sober or documented manner. So in other words, you know, I sort of was telling people, well, all the censorship stuff is a lot worse than people claim. In other words, you get kicked off the Internet, but, you know, it's because you're saying you're advocating violence or something like that. And, you know, we've never had any problem. Or, you know, it might be that some enough of the material on the website was sufficiently considered sufficiently valuable that, you know, there was reluctance to kick us off for, you know, the parts that we had that were more controversial. And then suddenly, three years ago, almost exactly three years ago, everything changed and it was all because of COVID. It's really an amazing story. You know, I and that actually gets into one topic that I really should address. You know, from very early on in the COVID epidemic, I became quite suspicious of the circumstances of it. And it seemed to me, you know, when you had something like this breaking out, you know, a mysterious disease suddenly breaking out in China, at a point when America was in an international confrontation over trade and other issues with China. It just seemed, you know, odd and suspicious to me. And then as I, you know, was reading about the circumstances in the New York Times and other mainstream publications, I started becoming more and more suspicious. And then, you know, as I gradually investigated the topic more, I really began to believe that there was a very substantial, even a high likelihood that the COVID epidemic, the global COVID epidemic that has now killed probably 20 million people, more than 20 million people around the world, including a million Americans, that caused three years of lockdowns in the United States. I think it can make a case. It's the greatest disaster America's experienced since the Great Depression. I mean, when you consider the deaths, the economic devastation, the tremendous inconvenience that was imposed on our lives. We've never had lockdowns like that in our entire life, in our entire history. I think there's a tremendous amount of evidence that the COVID epidemic was the unintentional blowback of a botched American bio warfare attack against China, which, you know, it's just something like that is just too much for most people to even consider. And there have been virtually no other people anywhere on the Internet that have made that claim. A few people sometimes hinted at it, but nobody ended up saying anything about it. And I ended up publishing an article in April, late April, two thousand twenty, making that case. And it ended up taking off on taking off on a Facebook, taking off on the Internet so that it got more early readership than anything I published for years. And within days, we were suddenly banned by Facebook. And all of the pages of our website were entirely deranged by Google. So, for example, one of my articles on Hispanic crime had spent. If you Google Hispanic crime on the Internet, you get something like one hundred and fifty million web pages. My article in Hispanic crime had spent ten years as the number two or number three result of a Google search on Hispanic crime or Latino crime. And suddenly disappeared off the Internet. And so, you know, again, all the articles on our website basically vanished in search engine results so that, you know, obviously had a huge impact on us. And all of that occurred within days of my publishing that article, arguing that COVID was an American bio warfare attack. And, you know, maybe it was entirely coincidence. But, you know, for example, we'd written all those articles about the JFK assassination, about all those other controversial things, a lot of controversial articles on racial issues, controversial issues on World War Two, controversial articles on the Holocaust, controversial articles on everything you can possibly mention. And we had no problems from either Google or Facebook. And within days of my publishing that article, making the first and only case that the COVID epidemic was the result of an American bio warfare attack. We were suddenly basically vaporized by the two leading gatekeepers of the Internet. So, you know, again, censorship is really, I mean, at that point suddenly I decided that all the complaints other people making about censorship really had much more, you know, grounds to them than I'd ever realized before. And, you know, it's sort of when you get hit, it's the old thing. When your friend loses your job, it's a recession. When you lose your job, it's a depression. Those sorts of issues are the sort of things that make an impression on you. And I mean, it was just the other thing that really shocked me as I started doubling the issue a little bit more. One reason I thought COVID probably had been an American bio warfare attack and it was never covered in the American media. But after the virus broke out in the city of Wuhan, probably in late October, early November 2019, as was later reconstructed, it gradually spread around to other parts of China. And obviously, China only found out about its existence right at the end of that year. And it was only in early to mid January that it suddenly made the pages of the world's newspapers, almost immediately. A second outbreak occurred in the holy city of Guom. Among Iran's political and religious elites. In other words, the second epicenter of the global outbreak of COVID was with the Iranians and not only any Iranians, but the Iranian political and religious elites with 10 percent of the Iranian parliament being infected. So I mean, when you think about it, we ended up the American government ended up sassan a Iran's top military commander. I think it was January 2nd of 2020. Within three weeks of that, the Iranians top political and religious elites had been infected by a mysterious, dangerous virus. And many of them died from it. They're the only political elites anywhere in the world that have suffered insignificant numbers from COVID. And they were infected before the virus had even noticeably appeared in Italy, which was the third country in the world. Furthermore, Iran has a very small Chinese population. In other words, when you look at countries around the world like Italy, for example, had a major COVID outbreak right afterwards. But 300,000 Chinese live and work in northern Italy, exactly the place where the outbreak occurred. There was an outbreak in Spain, 150,000 Chinese live and work in Spain. Many of them had come back from the holidays, from the Lunar New Year travels. So, you know, it's very logical that some of them would have brought the virus back. Iran has a total of five thousand Chinese living there. It has one of the smallest Chinese populations anywhere in the world. And it's spread there, first of all. When you look at some of the other factors involved, and, you know, again, the American media never even reported that the Iranian government specifically accused America of having launched a bio warfare attack against it. The Iranian, the former president of Iran, even complained to the United Nations that America had launched an illegal bio warfare attack against Iran. Now, just because the Iranian government makes that accusation doesn't mean necessarily it's true. And even if I read it at the time, I might have disregarded it, but it never got into the American media. It was covered very briefly in some European media. And it took me a year to find out that the Iranian government had publicly accused America of launching a bio warfare attack. And some of the other facts, again, that were in my original article, that, you know, was quickly cut off, you know, I ended up getting actually, I think, about a hundred thousand views before it was cut off. But we've gotten so much more if Google and Facebook hadn't blocked us. Take, for example, the Crimson Contagion exercise. America, America is taught by a warfare advocate, Robert Cadlock, in the Trump administration. Beginning in January 2019 had spent eight months running something called the Crimson Contagion exercise to prepare America's state and federal authorities for defense against the possible leakage of a dangerous COVID-like virus if it suddenly appeared in China. Eight months of exercise on that. And a virus of exactly those characteristics suddenly appeared in China a few weeks after the end of that exercise. Yes, the same thing happened with the Claydex exercise as well. Claydex, which was conducted at Johns Hopkins. Oh, exactly. Yeah, the whole thing, you know, here's the issue involved. And, you know, obviously, at the time, there was a lot of focus on the world economic forum. Is that the one you're talking about? Yeah, they actually held a simulation as well with John Hopkins. And this was just prior to COVID as well. But, you know, I'm not saying that, again, I'm not going back to that theory that the world economic forum did this. I'm just saying, isn't it interesting that we have these two? At least there's also another one, which was Event 201. That's even more than one. That was the one I was thinking. Yeah, the event 201 is even closer to the COVID scenario altogether. It's the exact same scenario. It's a lethal coronavirus. And they also predicted all of the eventualities of the COVID crisis, including lockdowns, riots, unemployment, inflation, everything. Predictive programming. Exactly. The only thing there is you have to really, when you're looking at something like, you know, potential coincidences like that, you have to sort of step back and take a restrained view. For example, there was a movie. What was the movie that came out about 10, 15 years ago? Exactly. On a worldwide disease outbreak. There's a couple of them. A couple of them have been made. I was thinking of it came out about 12, 13 years ago and covered exactly. In other words, when I saw the movie just about a year ago, it was amazing how accurately predicted all of these things around the world. In other words, you know, lockdowns, a disease spreading actually from a bat, supposedly battles over vaccines, vaccine controversies. I mean, all of those sorts of things. So, you know, in other words, it's easier to imagine that, you know, public health authorities or Hollywood film directors would have looked at the realities of a global outbreak and, you know, sketched out, for example, the things that could possibly happen and, you know, would have basically incorporated that into their planning sessions. So, you know, that's why, for example, you know, both crimson contagion, event two on all of these other things have to sort of be viewed in a restrained light. And also, for example, there have been these exercises going on for, you know, probably 10, 15 years since the original SARS epidemic in China about 15 or 20 years ago. So, you know, again, I think the timing is really quite critical. The reason I focus on the crimson contagion exercise is it was an exercise run by America's top bio warfare advocate. In other words, the person responsible for bio warfare in the Trump administration. It ran for eight months and the virus appeared probably seven or eight weeks after the end of that exercise. And again, it was exactly it was talking about a virus suddenly appearing in China, spreading around the world of dangerous respiratory virus. So it doesn't prove anything. But you have America's top bio warfare advocate running an exercise for eight months that ends right before the appearance of a virus very similar to what is exercise is meant to defend America against. It raises all sorts of issues. Now, my personal reconstruction of the covid outbreak is I don't think there's any evidence that either Robert Cadlock or any of the people involved in that exercise were aware of what was about to happen or any of the people involved in event two one or that other exercise you talked about my scenario, which I think is the most possible one is it was the release of the virus, the covid virus was a rogue operation by elements of the Trump administration. In other words, Trump, I don't know if you followed some of the things that went on in the Trump administration, but Trump was not in his control of his own administration, for example, when when Bolton ended up ordering the arrest of that top Chinese executive, what was her name, you know, the number two person at Huawei, apparently he did it without even forming Donald Trump. In other words, he ordered the arrest when Donald Trump was having a friendly dinner with the president of China. And I was basically stopped racing and Trump told me afterwards, didn't you realize who we're arresting? I mean, what's going on there? And basically he did it probably partly to torpedo our relations with China, which, you know, is a tremendous international incident. So elements of the Trump administration, they would sometimes hide his executive orders from his desk that he would forget about them and wouldn't issue them. Yeah. Or his military commanders would not. Yeah. Yeah. They would not bring home troops like he asked. Exactly. I wasn't in control of his own administration. So it seems to me if one or two senior people with probably Mike Pompeo, former CIA director and Secretary of State or John Bolton, National Security Advisor, who were leaders of sort of the anti-China faction, if they decided to basically strike a blow to severely damage the Chinese economy and America was in a confrontation with China, China was universally regarded as our chief geopolitical rival. It would have been relatively easy for them, for one of them, to put together a small group of conspirators and basically take advantage of America's infrastructure by a war for infrastructure. In other words, all of the lower level people involved in the operation would have assumed it was completely, fully authorized black operation. In other words, we were striking a China, which everybody knew was our most dangerous international rival. And we would be releasing virus that potentially would severely damage the Chinese economy. Now, the whole thing about covid is its fatality rate was quite low, probably 0.5% roughly, maybe 1% somewhere in that range, but it was extremely contagious. And individuals who've had a lot of experience in bio warfare, including the American bio warfare infrastructure development in our decades of bio warfare, say that the agreed that the best way to damage an economy is to release a virus that's only moderately lethal, but extremely contagious because it forces the country then to react with lockdowns, with other measures that will severely damage the economy and it spreads rapidly. And so it was really amazing that China was lucky enough to discover the existence of the virus before it's spread throughout the entire country. In other words, the idea was that China would have suffered exactly the sort of three years of lockdowns and economic devastation that America suffered. I mean, that was basically the target. And as it happened, China imposed the greatest, the largest single lockdown, not only in the history of the world, but a lockdown that to some extent involved, I believe it was 700 million people, basically all of the cities and towns around China who were locked down or at least under some restrictions. I think something like 150 million people were locked down for at least a period of a couple of months. So this would require that the that the plotters had believed that this could be contained in China. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, the whole thing about it, it clearly was an utter disaster. It spread then the Chinese basically were able to stamp it out. But then it starts spreading around the rest of the world. It's spread to obviously Iran might have been a secondary target. In other words, they might have a virus in Iran. But then it's Italy. It's spread to Spain. It's spread to our other allies and it's spread to the United States. Now, the whole thing about is a few months before the public health crisis erupted around the world, the World Health Organization had done a study on which countries around the world were best capable, best prepared for an epidemic, any sort of epidemic would occur. And you know what country was ranked number one, the best prepared country in the world for an epidemic? No, I don't. The United States, far and away. According to those international studies, we were ranked number one. Britain was ranked number two. China was all the way down towards the middle of the ranks. So in other words, you know, if people had simply looked at these international studies of who was best prepared to cope with an epidemic, they would have said, well, you know, even if it leaks back to the United States, we'd be fine. The other factor is when the original SARS epidemic occurred in China, you know, it was natural. And I think it was 2002, 2003. You know, much it wasn't as contagious, but it was much, much more deadly. I think it had a 20 or 30 percent fatality rate. There was tremendous fear in the rest of the world that it would spread around the world fear in the United States. It never I don't think it killed a single American. In other words, it got to the United States. But in such a minor way that I think a few people suffered a little bit of illness. Nobody died. It killed almost no Western handful of people. I think mostly actually Chinese in Europe died from a handful of people here and there. So in other words, and same thing with MERS, the MERS epidemic, another coronavirus, it started in the Middle East. I think it was around 2007, 2008, something like that. Very high fatality rate. I think 30, 40 percent fatality rate. Again, people got worried around the world. It never really spread outside the Middle East and not a single American died of MERS. So in other words, if we're talking about a rogue operation, not something that goes through a hundred Pentagon planning stages and endless meetings in the United States, but something basically run by a small handful of conspirators in the Trump administration, they basically would have said, well, you know, America, according to all these international reports, is best prepared for any sort of disease epidemic that might occur. In addition, we know that SARS never hit the United States. MERS never hit the United States. So, you know, it's very unlikely that this virus that we're potentially releasing in Wuhan, China will hit the United States either. And if it does, I mean, we're basically prepared for it. The other thing that you mentioned, and that's one of the what I regard as the closest thing to a smoking gun on the scenario I'm talking about, it was actually what finally came out and would prompt me to write my article in April. It turns out once the virus starts spreading to the United States, you know, tens of thousands of people were becoming ill, thousands of people were dying, the American intelligence agencies became very interested in arguing that they were not the ones responsible for the gigantic disaster. In other words, they had not been asleep at the switch. ABC News ran a segment with their, you know, basically their top people pointing to four separate intelligence sources saying that the Defense Intelligence Agency had published a secret report describing a potentially cataclysmic disease outbreak taking place in Wuhan, China and distributor to White House, distributor to all our top leaders. And it was ignored. And in other words, if the Defense Intelligence Agency report, they were saying, if the Trump administration people had paid attention to it, we certainly would have reacted in time. We would have taken the appropriate measures and we wouldn't be suffering. The disaster we're taking that we're suffering right now. So, you know, it was a big story in ABC News. I think there are probably millions of people watching. It was on widespread. It was tweeted out tremendous labor bills talking about. And, you know, basically they got no response from the Pentagon. But then suddenly somebody noticed the date of the report. The date the report had been produced in November. Back in November, nobody anywhere in the world, including in China, was aware of the viral outbreak in the city of Wuhan. Probably at most maybe 10 or 15 people in the city of Wuhan were starting to feel a little bit sick at the height of flu season. So there's no way anyone in the world could have been aware of that. So the Pentagon then immediately came out and said the report never existed. I don't care whether there are four separate intelligence sources on that secret report, the report never existed. But then a week later, a week later, Israeli TV confirmed the fact that the report had existed and they had been distributed to NATO and our NATO allies in Israel. So in other words, there was independent confirmation of the existence of that secret report, which had been produced in the second week of November, which was exactly the point when the virus was first infecting the earliest number of people in the city of Wuhan and nobody else in the world would have been aware of it. So in other words, what probably happened in the case of the conspirators, they decided to be to play it even safer for America. And they probably leaked intelligence information to the Defense Intelligence Agency, basically saying we've heard that there's some sort of epidemic going on in the city of Wuhan, which we're causing. Yeah, right. That's part they left out. All they would have to say, well, we have an intelligence source in China that's reported the fact that there's some sort of epidemic breaking out and you should write a report, send it to the White House, send it to everybody. So, you know, with all of that, with all of those, you know, reinforcing factors, I think there's just a tremendous amount of evidence. Oh, and one other point I should make. Well, it's the article that you would point people to to to read this. You want to, you wrote a pretty lengthy article or two about this. Actually, the whole series, I've written an entire long series of articles over the last three years, probably the place they should go because there's a section on the website called a Covid by a warfare section. It's on the right hand column and includes all those articles, as well as the key excerpts from the articles, because I mean, these articles are long and there's an e-book. In other words, it comes to probably total of about 100,000 words across all of those different articles. Yes. But, you know, the key elements of it can be summarized in just a few paragraphs. I've also done quite a few video interviews on it. Yes. I've seen the e-book. In fact, I downloaded it and did parts of it. Yeah. One other interesting coincidence I should point to, which, again, got some traction on the internet, but not as much as it deserved. The city of Wuhan, I'd never even heard of the city of Wuhan, China, even though it's a big city, 11 million people, China has a lot of big cities. It turns out right after the epidemic started breaking out, a couple of people pointed out that in late October, right at the end of October, Wuhan had been the site for the world military games and 300 American servicemen participated, along with 11,000 military participants from all over the world. That was exactly the point in time that later reconstruction argues, patient zero was infected. So in other words, the first infection in the city of Wuhan probably occurred right around the time 300 American military servicemen were in that city. Now, China's a closed society. If you were trying to smuggle a dangerous virus into a country like China, it might be a difficult thing to do. But if 11,000 military servicemen from all of these different countries around the world were visiting China or visiting Wuhan for the games, including 300 American military servicemen, it would be an ideal opportunity to slip in one or two agents in that group of 300 and have them just release the virus. In other words, it would be a very easy thing to release the virus somewhere in the city of Wuhan and then assume it would spread as rapidly as didn't. But yeah, it is kind of discounts. The lab leak theory, in a sense, they said, you know, that Wuhan, the Wuhan lab that was producing viruses. And so there's the question about that. How would that play into it? Or were they just using the Wuhan lab as a as a limited hangout type theory so that it would deflect from this particular, you know, reality, this particular incidence of the virus being planted in effect? That's exactly it. I mean, the Wuhan lab is basically a limited hangout. In fact, the interesting thing about it is the notion of the virus leaking from the Wuhan lab was first promoted by American radio propaganda, Radio Free Asia, before the first Chinese person had even died from the virus. So in other words, nobody in the world was paying any attention to this virus, not a single Chinese person had even died from the virus in early January. An American propaganda affiliated with the CIA was already promoting the story of the virus having leaked from the Wuhan lab. The whole resistance to the leap lab leak theory was all part of a complete charade. That actually here's my reconstruction. Again, there are many different possibilities. I mean, first of all, the interesting thing about is the people who advocate the lab leak theory focus overwhelmingly on the tremendously strong evidence that the virus was artificial, that it was bioengineered. There's a tremendous amount of evidence. There's actually very little evidence of any leak at the Wuhan lab. In other words, there's even, for example, a single Best Eye witness. There was an there was an Australian virologist, Danielle Anderson, who was working at the lab at the time. And she was later interviewed by Bloomberg and said, you know, as far as she knows, I mean, she'd seen no rumors, no evidence that the Wuhan lab was working on that sort of virus. There was no gossip going around. There was no evidence, no rumors of any sort of lab leak at the time she was there. And there was no sign of anybody there being sick in a suspicious sort of way. So in other words, if the virus had leaked out, it would have leaked out probably in late October, early November, based on the genetic reconstruction of mutations. And they're simply, you know, the Chinese government did not react for two or three more months. So in other words, if there had been a lab leak, they were not aware of the lab leak because they did not. I mean, they had spread out and almost spread out throughout the entire country. So you have a situation where basically the advocates of the lab leak theory. Yeah. Focus on the fact that the virus is artificial and largely ignore the fact that there's little evidence of a lab leak. Meanwhile, the opponents of the lab leak theory, who have generally been the dominant element of the media, they tend to ignore the evidence that the virus is artificial. They sort of just brush that aside and they focus on the fact that there's no evidence of a lab leak and they've done all this reconstruction, showing that the the initial infection were all wrong in a way. Yeah, they were all around the wildlife market, which is on the other side of Wuhan. So in other words, if there were a lab leak at the Wuhan lab, it would be strange if all the early infections were on the other side of the city. We're talking about a city almost as large as New York City. Eleven million people was on the other side of the river. So you have a situation where they're both half right and half wrong. In other words, they never raised the third possibility, which is basically that the virus was artificial, but it did not leak from the lab. And that I think all the evidence behind it. Yeah, I'd like to, you know, wrap it up with the final question. And it does kind of tie in a bit to what we were talking about earlier with censorship and and big digital and all of that. And that is what do you see? Where do you see this going? What do you what do you think the what do you think the future? What is the future of freedom in this country? Censorship and where does Ron go from here? Because, you know, people are being obviously censored. I don't know if you follow a gentleman by the name of Nick Fuentes. He literally had five hundred thousand dollars of his money. Oh, I heard the shocking story. Yes. So are you afraid that that could ever happen to you, given the nature of the topics and articles you write and host? And yeah, I mean, where do you see us going from here? Well, I mean, to be honest, I think things are getting so bad and so crazy in so many different areas. I think at some point, the whole system will collapse. I mean, in other words, not collapse in terms of a breakdown of civilization, but the American regime will collapse. I mean, you know, again, things have happened in the last few years that would have been unimaginable even five or ten years ago. I mean, again, people I mean, I take, for example, all of the protesters at the inauguration. I mean, what is it? A thousand people now have been prosecuted. Hundreds of them in jail. Some of them are in jail now for a week or for, you know, more than a year or two years without even being, you know, tried yet. I mean, basically the fact that the American government, the American really can almost call it the American regime right now, is so decrepit and doing so great, doing so many crazy things in so many ways. I mean, picking a fight with both Russia and China simultaneously. I mean, it's just insane. I mean, you could say, for example, in fact, I just saw, you know, a few people have really been more and more pointing the fact that we're almost, I think, in the equivalent of like the last stages of the old Soviet Union. When you had a very elderly, decrepit leadership, when you had an ideology that almost nobody believed anymore, when you had more and more things breaking down in society, I mean, to take, for example, the tremendous. I mean, we had just a year and a half ago. We had probably the worst rate of riots, looting and protests since the 1960s. So, you know, we've had the highest inflation rate in 40 years. The worst wave of riots, protests and looting since the 1960s. Crime rates, the homicide rate spiked up, I think, at the highest rate in recorded history, it's gone back down a little bit, so much, much higher than it was before. I mean, we have, and we're basically on a foreign policy level. We're basically forcing almost all the other independent countries in the world to form an alliance against us. Yeah. And I think it looks like basically our whole Ukraine effort may be collapsing fairly soon. So, you know, at some point, basically, and look at the debt we've taken on, I mean, we've basically increased our national debt, I think, by a factor of 10 in the last 10 or 12 years. If the regime collapses, which you're saying it could very well, would this be better for personal liberty of the American citizen or worse? It'll be dramatic. I mean, again, you know, it depends what sort of collapse we're talking about, how it collapses, what picks up the pieces afterwards. I mean, obviously, people lived in the Soviet Union suffered tremendously in the decade after the collapse occurred. And perhaps something as bad as that would happen in the United States. It's very difficult for me to try to predict what direction the collapse would take place. It's sort of a doddering building. And you don't know which direction it will fall. But I mean, so many incredibly outrageous things are going to take, for example, the fact that people are getting kicked off social media in some cases for basically making the outrageous statement that only men that only women can give birth. I mean, we're in the looking glass here. This is insane. I mean, you know, even the Soviet Union was never that crazy. So when so many crazy things, so many disastrously crazy things are all happening at the same time, it just seems very unlikely things will continue going into this direction much longer. And again, you know, whether there's more freedom afterwards or less freedom, whether there's there's anarchy or dictatorship. I mean, it's very difficult to predict what would happen. It could even be a global, you know, world war and that sort of thing. I mean, you know, when we're talking, when we're talking about basically fighting a proxy war with Russia on Russia's own border, I mean, that's something insane that nobody during the height of the Cold War would have ever done in the United States. Never would have even considered it. Never would have even considered the idea. And here we are. One final one final one final question. What is the traffic to your website now? Because I know in the past you would write articles about that. And what is it now currently? I haven't really checked recently, but I think we basically in terms of some similar cast, a similar view, which monitors that. I think we're getting probably about six million page views a month, five million, six million, seven million, something like that. I haven't checked probably in last month or two, but that was sort of roughly the figure the last time I checked, which, you know, again, considering the fact that we're basically banned from Facebook and all our web pages are de-ranked by Google, I mean, that's pretty sad. The power of word of mouth. Exactly. You're doing very well. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Ron. It's been great, great pleasure and quite informative. I'm sure our audience, our listeners, our viewers will be extremely informed by what you've had to say. I think you have incredible depth and research and your writing is excellent. So I'd recommend people to follow your writing. I find it to be very well done. So once again, it's been a great pleasure. Thanks for coming on. Well, thanks so much for having me. You're listening to Wrecked with Michael Recton-Wald. Find more episodes wherever you get your podcasts and get more content like this on Mises.org.