July 10, 2024 • 50 mins
How far would you go to maintain control of the world? It's a question militaries across the planet ask themselves, every single day. In the first part of this special two-part episode, Ben, Matt and Noel explore a genuine conspiracy by the US Department of Defense -- at the same time they were urging people to get vaccinated, they were running a huge information war across the Pacific, convincing folks not to receive vaccinations... and almost certainly leading to the deaths of innocent people.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
A production of iHeart Radio.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Paul. Mission control decads. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't
want you to know. You know, thinking about this evening's exploration, gentlemen,
we're kind of on a mission of preservation because we're
(00:48):
talking about a story that might fall away from the headlights.
It's no secret here in the US things have been
kind of embarrassing. You know, there's a political circus, doesn't
matter what side you're on. You know, everybody appears clownish.
They're bizarre rulings from the US Supreme Court. And in
(01:10):
all of this, there's a proven conspiracy that just went
public a few days ago, as we record.
Speaker 4 (01:17):
That's right, the Pentagon ran a completely terrifying propaganda campaign
that actually killed innocent people.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Well well, hey, now, hey, now hello, that's a it's
a weird thing to say but it's true. But it's
it is right.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
It's like we don't know. We know that it is
statistically likely, if but not certain to that point, not certain,
that innocent people died as a direct result. It is
overwhelmingly statistically likely that that is the case. It is
also impossible to prove right in terms of naming deathle
(02:00):
and individuals one by one. But the thing is, this
propaganda campaign was not intended to kill people. The idea
of killing people wasn't really part of the equation. It
was all the score points in the dirtiest and greatest
games controlling the world. And how far would you go
(02:24):
to accomplish that greater good?
Speaker 5 (02:26):
What would you do for a Klondike bar?
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Especially the Klondike bar was hegemony? Careful, fellow conspiracy realist,
We're going into the deep water tonight. Here are the facts.
All right, this might sound elementary, but I believe these
(02:50):
statistics are still mind boggling to the four of us, right,
and hopefully do you playing along at home? The US
Department of Defense, by any conceivable metric, is huge. It's
a kaiju. It's gargantuan. It is uh, just my invisible
mel Brooks tie too.
Speaker 5 (03:11):
Big to fail. Absolutely true, and I believe it was.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
At one point the had the dubious the honorific of
being the world's largest office building, which sounds like the
dullest you know, accolade one could bestow. But even that's
not true anymore because I think there's one in India
now that that's bigger.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
The Surat Diamond Borse took the prize in twenty twenty
three up until from nineteen forty three up until last year,
as we record, You're absolutely right, the Department of Defense
was the world's largest office building. Such a is that
one of the most boring Guinness World records.
Speaker 4 (03:54):
I mean, you know, I think i've I've I've made
my case or at least drawn my line in the
sand there.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
It is kind of weird. And most office buildings the
people inside are making money for a corporation in the Pentagon,
They are just spending it.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
That's a great point.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
But to the ultimate end, to your point, Ben, of
that great klonduc bar in the sky or you know,
the argument politically speaking rhetorically is they're protecting us. They're
doing God's work in there, making sure that we as
American citizens are safe from those who would do us harm.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Every powerful group I have ever interacted with, at least
in my experience, has always said, or always maintained, the
world is chaotic and evil and dangerous, and the only
way for it to be safer is for someone to
be in charge. And surprise, the people who say that
(04:54):
always picture themselves as the person in charge or the entity.
So this place, you know, we often hear news about
the Pentagon, and when people are saying that, they're really
talking about the Department of Defense, it's called mentotomy. It's
the same way, you know, the reporters will say the
White House when they're talking about president.
Speaker 5 (05:16):
Or xerox as a stand in for photo copy, you know.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Similar, Yeah, like an epnonymous, apotymous trademark. It's so it's
so stupid, cartoonishly big. It's like such an American idea.
And I don't say that as an insult. It's seven
story behemoth. It takes up more than six point six
million square feet just of office space just to people
(05:43):
walking around, as you said, Matt, spending a lot of
taxpayer money. And it has a new stat I found
it has sixty seven acres of just parking lots Wow,
how still not enough? How long would that take just to.
Speaker 4 (05:58):
Traverse by foot? It's a lot of football fields. I
always find it interesting that the pentagon is in fact
shaped like a pentagon, you know, and the idea that
they're protecting us the pentacle or the pentagram you know,
is often lumped in with being like an image of
satanic demonic worship or whatever, but really, in WICCA and
(06:21):
various other belief systems, it is a protective sigil.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Yeah, and this protective sigil has its human circulatory system
is somewhere north of twenty six thousand people in that
building on any given day, where there permanently on a
long term basis, twenty three thousand military and civilian employees
(06:47):
and then three thousand what they would call support personnel.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
And that balance or at least in terms of like
how you know, safe they are in their jobs could
change if that program that we discussed in a recent
episode goes through and no longer are there these long
term bureaucratic positions that are you know, have stasis through
different administrations. There could be a whole new regime anytime
someone new comes into power that could flip flop and
(07:13):
no longer are we dealing with long term experts, but
we're dealing with people who are affiliated with political ideologies
filling those roles.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Yeah, yeah, probably just scary. I'm sorry, scary, Yeah, I agree.
I mean, the Pentagon as an idea is both awe
inspiring and terrifying. The DoD is an idea. This number,
this twenty six thousand dish also doesn't count the many,
many visitors who pass through on a daily basis, or
(07:42):
a weekly basis or quarterly basis. And look, if you
are a long time conspiracy realist, folks, you know well
that the Department of Defense has been accused of all
sorts of for being careful, let's say, unethical activities over
the years. Not necessarily illegal all the time, but definitely shenanigans, right,
(08:06):
And a lot of those accusations that were treated as
wild conspiracy theories were later proving correct when different things
got declassified, when journalists dug in, and when you know,
enough time it passed for individuals to not get in trouble.
Speaker 4 (08:24):
Well, and with the bureaucracy of that size and all
of the secret programs various levels of classification, you have
programs within programs and ones that certain personnel aren't even
aware of, you know, up to the highest levels. So
many like wheels within wheels taking place within this building.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
Yeah, when you think about the combination of different military
branches and operations that are kind of joint in nature,
and then if you imagine like the spaghetti that is
all of those special access programs that's been you need
a seven story building that's you know.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Giant, right, and uh it is. It is, no fooling folks,
And we checked right before we recorded this. Uh, the
Department of Defense is the largest single employer in the world,
which if we played with statistics, I guess technically that
would mean that if you picked a random person right
(09:25):
then they would most likely be working for the Department
of Defense.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
That's crazy. Now, that doesn't include like, if you are
a member of let's say the Army, you are not
a part of the Department of Defense. That's a whole
separate thing.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Or there you're you're under it.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
Yeah, wow, okay, okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
It's weird. It's like it's like how f x X
is part of FX, which is part of Fox.
Speaker 5 (09:53):
Or HBO, Max Now Squared.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Oh my gosh, I still don't know I'm subscribed.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
It is almost a parent company type flow chart situation
in an interesting way. And so as the commander in
chief is the president technically the big big boss over
the DoD or.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Yeah, yeah, because DoD is, DoD coordinates. It's an executive department,
so it's under the executive branch. It coordinates all the
agencies and functions of the US government related to national
security and the armed forces. That means over one point
three four million active duty service members, and that also
(10:37):
means almost a million, almost eight hundred thousand National Guard
and reservists, and then seven hundred and forty seven something
thousand civilians. So the total is over two point eighty
seven million employees.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Need we need a lot of tax dollars for all
those salaries.
Speaker 4 (10:58):
And I'm sure there's a ton of folks that work
remotely as well, right like the Yeah.
Speaker 5 (11:03):
Can you even imagine that outside of it?
Speaker 3 (11:05):
I mean, you know, I'm trying to imagine the Department
of Defenses work from home policies.
Speaker 5 (11:10):
Yeah, I mean they're very well.
Speaker 4 (11:12):
We did we did talk about how you know there
they had to I guess loosen their regulations on drug
policies because they couldn't get good enough hackers because they
wanted to be able to stay home and drink their
diet mountain dew and smoke their weed. So they had
to to some degree compromise with that.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Mm. Yeah, I mean that that is That is a
true story, folks, if you haven't heard it before. Most
of the good hackers are kind of fig.
Speaker 5 (11:44):
They're in that floating you know.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Yeah, yeah, they're microdosing for America.
Speaker 5 (11:48):
I love dude.
Speaker 4 (11:49):
That's a T shirt right there. Microdosing for America.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Officer. You have to look at the bigger picture here.
Speaker 5 (11:56):
Uh so I'm not on drugs. I'm doing my page
periodic duty. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
We could keep throwing around statistics like this all evening.
We love bizarre statistics, but we're bringing all this up
to establish one key point. The size of the Department
of Defense or the Pentagon can be as much a
weakness as it is a strength. With so many things
(12:24):
happening all at once, everything everywhere, all at once, it
is normalized and expected that not everyone will know what
everyone else is doing. The right hand doesn't know the
actions of the left in a very real sense here,
and so the DoD literally cannot be a monolith. It
fights itself constantly, classification, like you said, secrecy, separated budgets,
(12:50):
the endless turf wars, the endless wars over budgets, and
just the size of the overall operation. It's not a
unified set of actors. It is not like two point
eighty seven million people all get in some big room
and then steeple their fingers and come up with a
super villain scheme.
Speaker 4 (13:11):
I mean that may happen from time to time, but
it's usually a little more, you know, one of these
subgroups kind of situation. You did mention that they're the
largest employer.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
In the world, right, Yes, that's it.
Speaker 5 (13:23):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
That is mind boggling. And to your point, Ben, seems
a little more like a weakness than a strength. How
much siloed stuff goes on and how you know, maybe
it's just spy movies and stuff, but how so often
this stuff seems to have the potential to go off
the rails without oversight.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Yeah, we see this also, Not to pick on the
DoD just yet, but we see this in any large organization.
You know, there's an organization that has a unified goal.
In the case of the Department of Defense. The goal
is the projection of power to protect the United States
(14:03):
and the interest of the US overall. But the issue
is people disagree on how best to achieve that goal,
and they don't always talk through their strategies. We work
in a large media company, and you see similar things
in large media companies. Large any company, right who is
(14:24):
the number one manufacturer of sunglasses, for example, Luxotica. They
fight all the time, you know what I mean. There's
some guy who's coming home and he's just like punching
the wall or something about some ray band policy that
he disagrees with. The issue is in our sort of
(14:47):
echelon of companies, mission creep and contradictory strategies and mission fracture.
For us that leads to things like unnecessary zoom calls,
you know what I mean. But for the departm Defense,
this means people can die.
Speaker 4 (15:02):
Serious collateral damage, you know, no no question about it.
And to your point, Ben, you know, the larger the organization,
the more kind of broad the unilateral.
Speaker 5 (15:12):
Sort of philosophy ends up being.
Speaker 4 (15:14):
And then they're sort of within those subgroups we're talking
about different you know, philosophies and ideologies, and sometimes they
don't jibe with the big one, you know, it's it
gets real crazy, real quick.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
What a beautiful point. You know what I'm thinking of
guys with that idea of like the larger the organization,
the simpler and more vague the philosophy. Google, he'll be evil,
he'll be evil, whatever that means to you.
Speaker 4 (15:42):
And and and whether or not you think they've succeeded it,
you know or not?
Speaker 5 (15:46):
Right?
Speaker 2 (15:47):
I think they ditched that one, didn't they They ditched
that one.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
It was a little too buzzy. It felt like it
was making too much news.
Speaker 5 (15:54):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Maybe maybe they did well. There's a world of difference,
as we said, between not being and being good.
Speaker 5 (16:01):
Oh my goodness, very good point.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Well tonight, as we set this up, we want everybody
to travel into the past with us. It's twenty twenty.
The COVID pandemic is still in full swing. Spoiler, it's
still happening now. China and the United States are just
as beefed up then as they are today, maybe even
(16:24):
more so, because in twenty twenty, China is waging a
heavy information war to deny the origin of COVID, and
the US and China are going back and forth, trying
to discredit one another, trying to curry favor with other nations.
They're trying to scapegoat each other to win the race
for the most effective vaccine. So how far would factions
(16:48):
of the Pentagon go to accomplish these goals. We'll tell
you after a word from our sponsor. Here's where it
gets crazy. They went far. They went pretty far. I'll
be honest. They went much further than I thought they
(17:10):
would go.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
Yeah, and this comes to us via Reuters, a very
large investigation that they've been putting together for quite a while.
Two journalists Chris Bing and Joel Scheckman s ch E
C T M A N. They posted on June fourteenth
of this year, just a bombshell that I think is
rocking everybody. And they have been reaching out to the
(17:32):
DoD according to them, So it's not like they took
them by surprise when they wrote it or when they
published it.
Speaker 5 (17:39):
At least.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
There are probably a lot of people in that Pentagon
getting calls and they're going, guys, guys, guys, they know
about the thing, which thing though the thing is a
thing thing too?
Speaker 5 (17:52):
What are we talking about a thing? Four?
Speaker 2 (17:55):
I don't know four point they're read on to thing four.
Speaker 5 (17:59):
Yes, we're screwed, evacuate.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
This is a part of as Ben said right before
we went to break, there a huge back and forth
between China and the US about who made COVID, how
did COVID get out, what's the origins of it, who
is to blame basically, and then who has the answer
to COVID? Right, So, this was a clandestine program by
(18:23):
the United States military parts of the DoD to discredit
China's vaccine that they were trying to roll out that
was actually available to a wider public way before any
of the US made vaccines.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
Well, and to your point then about this seeming to
not be top line news right now. Maybe that's because
of all the election stuff or whatever, But I think
we're all pretty keyed into this stuff, and I haven't
really seen much of this back and forth at all.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
We can get into it, but I think a lot
of the back and forth ended up happening in these
small ways, Like from the US side, it was often
when then President d Trump would get up and make
a statement.
Speaker 5 (19:02):
China the China flu or.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
The flu, calling it the China virus. At least according
to a lot of sources was a move because there
were there were disinformation campaigns aimed at the United States.
Speaker 4 (19:18):
And think about historical pandemics like the Spanish flu, like
that's what history ends up calling it.
Speaker 5 (19:26):
There is at some point a war that get an
information war that.
Speaker 4 (19:29):
Gets waged, and at some point one of those things
wins out and it doesn't just happen in a vacuum.
So I think this is a really interesting case of
seeing how that historical sausage is made. M hm.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
The US just got caught running an anti vaccination campaign.
Oh geez, yeah, whose idea in particular? This is, you know,
while all the fauci stuff is going on, this is
happening while they're telling everybody in America to get vaccinated. Oh,
we'll get into it. It's spooky, spooky stuff. We don't
know who, which particular individuals, not to sound too idiocracy
(20:06):
about it, We don't know which particular individuals came up
with this idea. We do know that the majority of
active officials speaking to these journalists Matt mentioned, they remained anonymous.
We do know that this program, which has not been
publicly named, did appear weirdly bipartisan. It began under the
(20:31):
Donald Trump administration. It continued for months into the Biden administration,
even after social media executives some of the suits from
Facebook came to the government and said, Hey.
Speaker 4 (20:49):
Some of the disinformation we're flagging this, We're pulling this
stuff from our platforms right as you.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Guys told us we should do that, and we shouldn't
encourage the spread of aganda like this. And they said,
I think the military fire back, and they were like, oh, yeah, totally, dog,
We'll get you. And you know, thanks for you know,
thanks for coming to us with it, you know, mono amano.
And then they just did they they continued to do it.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
Can can you imagine being one of the lower level
employees at one of these social media companies looking at
you like you're filtering through messages some of them are
clearly anti vaccination campaigns that you've been warned against, just
like they're saying you you try and track down these users. Basically,
I guess you track down the users. I would think
you would just block the user or nerve their account somehow.
(21:38):
But they're tracking down these users and realizing, oh, hold on.
Speaker 5 (21:44):
Hold up, well wouldn't they cover their tracks?
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Though?
Speaker 5 (21:46):
In a way right.
Speaker 4 (21:47):
It would be harder for them to like peg it
directly to a government account quote unquote, these are like
lot accounts, right.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Yes, However, if you are, if you're working for the
organization for the platform, get a little working for the Twitter,
the Facebook, or the.
Speaker 5 (22:04):
Little more analytics that I suppose.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
It's a little there are breadcrumbs that you will have
that the average civilian user does not possess. Uh, it's
more difficult to hide the providence of things. But yeah,
they came forward and they got ignored, just like a
it's this old country anecdote. Right, the teacher tells a
kid to stop chewing gum in class. You don't say no,
(22:32):
you don't spit out the gum, and just say yes,
and then keep doing what you are doing, to chew a.
Speaker 5 (22:36):
Little less aggressively, right right, for a little bit, and
then tell you back.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
So Reuters, these two journalists, they interviewed dozens and dozens
of US officials, contractors, social media oftens, professors. They also
looked at social media post within depth analysis, they gained
access to technical data like metadata you know, again, the
(23:08):
bread crumbs, and they found documents that proved there was
a bevy of fake social media accounts being used by
the US military. We also know not everybody again to
the model this point, not everybody's on board. The diplomatic
class in the Southeast Asian theater was super pissed. They
(23:29):
knew it was a bad idea.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
Let's go into just state. This is on Facebook, then
it was called Twitter and Instagram. That's where this is
largely occurring, and that's the that's the information they got, right,
the metadata.
Speaker 4 (23:41):
So if I were a user, how would these posts
be showing up? Would it look like it was coming
from an individual espousing an opinion? Would it be fake
news articles that were reposted.
Speaker 5 (23:52):
Like a combination, Like what would it look like to me?
Speaker 2 (23:56):
It would look like a civilian user and you would
and then maybe later a news agency. But the big
differentiator in the beginning is that you would have been
identified as Filipido.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
Mm hmm, what I don't know, Well, this is occurring
in the Philippines or on mostly in the Philippines, right
on the servers that are there. Yeah, And the understanding
that we have is that some of these accounts, while
they would look like individuals because these are varied, they
look like individuals, but they would have thousands, if not
(24:27):
tens of thousands of like at least it would look
like they have that many followers right.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Right, which helps them in the algorithm.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
Exactly, So they're showing up in feeds the way if
you're scrolling through now you're just getting random stuff sometimes.
Speaker 4 (24:41):
Would they have to like click farm to get those followers?
How are they legitimate followers? Are they getting a leg
up from the platforms to like literally you know, fake
falsify those numbers, Like I have so many questions.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
I guarantee you they just use one of those services
that was part of the budget to get accounts with
several thousands.
Speaker 5 (25:03):
Click click farming kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
And then they had a budget argument where they said,
why don't we start our own thing like this at home?
And then someone said, or we could just buy that company.
You know, these conversations happen.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
Let's get a let's get a bought farm in the
Philippines to get us a bunch of followers in the Philippines.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Exactly, Let's hide the hand. We don't want people to
know that this originates in Tampa, Florida. That part's true.
Speaker 4 (25:31):
God shout out to Tampa and maybe some of this
stuff is you know, click baity type stuff. But I
have seen video and images of what some of these,
like Southeast Asia click farms look like, and it's literally
individuals with fifty iPads or like fifty computers just like yeah,
or on a rack, like a wooden rack, you know.
Speaker 5 (25:50):
Is that accurate?
Speaker 4 (25:51):
I think that's the way that that's the only way
to do it, unless you're packing the system, so I
think you have to kind of physically do it. Well,
they're far more, I'm sure there are, but those do exist.
Those are those do those are in fact, I would
say the norm, uh, if you're a non state actor.
But the the United States military apparatus is not perfect,
(26:15):
but it's it's weirdly smart at something sour yeah, yeah,
and it's uh. We do know that they did contract
out despite wanting to keep their circle close, which is
always obviously ideal. Uh, they partnered with a company we're
going to talk a little bit about later. We mentioned
it in Strange News. General Dynamics Information Technology or get
(26:39):
it to.
Speaker 5 (26:41):
Get it, y'all.
Speaker 4 (26:42):
And once again, the more innocuous the name, the more
nefarious the activities. It's just General Dynamics, you know, it's
just general.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
What kind of dynamics, you know, just like the general
dynamics you know. And Reuters and also these journalists did
such an awesome job. I can't say enough good stuff
about them, and I hope if you guys are hearing this,
you're staying safe. Reuter's got a lot of confirmation, and
they got an official statement from the Pentagon, which doesn't
(27:15):
always happen. They said, hey, what's going on with this?
And the US military, through the spokesperson said, quote Uncle
well said Uncle Sam basically quote uses a variety of platforms,
including social media to counter those malign influence attacks aimed
at the US allies or partners. So again, Department of Defense,
(27:39):
we're doing this, but we're doing this in a protective
capacity because the.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
Bad guys are like doing it. So therefore we got
to get in the mud with the bad guys. I
love that word malign because that is such a perspective,
like that is so clearly the you know, a signifier
of an agenda where it's like you're, yeah, these are
this is the bad information that we are countering. But
if you really dig down, is it you know what
(28:05):
I mean? Or are we actually spreading misinformation. That's just
as dangerous. But it's not about protecting our reputation, you
know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
Look, man, there's no Department of Offense in here.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Okay mm hmm, Yeah, this is not the war you're
looking for. Yeah, it's true. And there's also a little
bit of like burned ex lover energy in this statement
from the Pentagon because they had some tip for tat.
The spokesperson also added that China is doing similar things
(28:39):
well them too. They said, China is waging a quote
disinformation campaign to falsely blame the United States for the
spread of COVID nineteen.
Speaker 5 (28:50):
But like it's.
Speaker 4 (28:51):
Almost irrelevant where it came from, you know, at a
certain point, and it becomes more about what did you
do about it? And I think a lot of this
is covering the butts of officials who maybe didn't take
it seriously enough quickly enough, right, And then it's like
about like pivoting the blame from that to well, you
(29:13):
guys put it out there in the first place, and
it was your fault. Therefore anything that we did after
the fact is irrelevant. It just seems to be a
way of trying to control the narrative. In a very
disingenuous way.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
I would agree with disingenuous, you know, or like an
enforced cherry picked perspective. But they do have very valid
points because the fancy term for what's going on in
this weird digital ping pong war is asymmetric information warfare.
The street name for it is propaganda, very first episode
(29:47):
stuff they don't want you to know. Ever, did the
end result of this whatever you want to call it
is again the deaths of innocent people. We cannot prove it,
but you'll see. Let's see, you know what, Let's see
who agrees with us or disagrees at the close of
this exploration.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
The thought is that these disinformation posts led individuals to
not take the vaccine, which we'll get into, a very
specific vaccine from China, which then led either them or
their loved ones to contract COVID nineteen, which then led
to their death. So, just to spell it out there,
it's not it's not folks from the DoD killing people.
(30:31):
It is them using this asymmetrical warfare you're talking about
to eventually kill people.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Yeah, it's mousetrappy. It's like Ruben Goldberg esk. That's why
they weren't planning on killing people exactly. They just didn't
really think that. They didn't think it through. It was
an irrelevant thing.
Speaker 3 (30:49):
Or they didn't care because there was a bigger picture
at play.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Yeah, yeah, that's the point, you know, Like, look, it's
not as though they would click on a link and
then a stipe drone popped them in the back of
the head. It wasn't that direct to your points there,
Matt and Noll. Particularly, it's about motivation. We mentioned that
this is we talked about a little bit on Strange News.
(31:15):
The United States has long considered, perhaps hypocritically, the Chinese
government to be an expansionist power, and they think of
China as an expansionist power because that is factually accurate,
that is correct.
Speaker 5 (31:30):
But we also need.
Speaker 4 (31:32):
The hell out of them for so many aspects of
our economy and our infrastructure and our you know, like
supply chain and all of that. So it's always been
this delicate dance and a lot of these sort of snipy,
you know, spurned lover kind of vibes that you're talking
about kind of have to happen underneath all of that, right.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
Well, yeah, and in the end, it's all about who
does the world look to when there's a crisis. Who
is the figure that's going to come in and give
you the solution to the big problem that your country
is having or your people are facing.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Right, who is trustworthy enough that previous grievances could be
set aside for one moment, right to solve a global
problem together. That is a very powerful position to attain.
And when throughout human history, when institutions attain that level
of power, it'll hold it very long. There's a reason
(32:31):
King of the Hill is a kid's game and an
awesome cartoon.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
Yeah, but they will grasp it as hard as they
possibly can until the moment their hands slips off.
Speaker 4 (32:43):
Then, would you say a good example of that, like
in history, would be America intervening, You know, when the
Nazis proved to be exactly as real and horrible as
people thought, and then they jumped in and made a
big show of where coming in here to save the world.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Up with the Up with the Financial Decisions of nineteen thirteen.
The actions of the United States and privilege of its
geography are the are the two biggest origin points in
the story of this country becoming the number one superpower.
Speaker 5 (33:18):
For a time.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
But again, King of the Hill, there's always someone grasping,
there's always someone pushing, right, And this is the larger
context we're talking about. Uncle Sam way before the pandemic
had been super beefed up about Chinese territorial claims in
the South China Sea. If you look at the Chinese
map of maritime borders and you look at the maps
(33:43):
of any other country in the region, they don't agree
at all. Other every other country in the area is like,
pump your brakes, guys.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
Yeah. And with that, we're going to take a quick break. Here,
a word from the sponsors, and we'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
And we've returned.
Speaker 3 (34:05):
Well, and hey, Ben, just out of curiosity, why would
the Philippines be interested in those borders in the South
China Sea? And why would the United States have such
an interest in the Philippines interest in those borders? Wow,
I feel like we just talked about this on another
episode a little while ago, about the strategic interest the
(34:27):
United States has specifically in the Philippines.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Control control the rules of the game, right,
the control the bounds of the playing field the US.
If you look at the way US projects force in
Eastern Asia for most of human history, it would make
no sense, like why would a country so far away
(34:52):
get give a tinkersdam? You know what I mean? Great expression,
it's it's probably not a politically correct expression, but the
very British Churchill would have said, I'm sure.
Speaker 5 (35:05):
He did right.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
But you know, there's a reason why it's such a
that we have these common tropes in English, like the
price of tea in China means something irrelevant, but this
is very much relevant because to your point that the
US has a heavy practice of attempting to contain the
growth of China by partnering with other nations in the
(35:31):
area South Korea, right, Japan, the Philippines establishing military footholds
there so that they can have their own supply chains
that are not necessarily bound to the long passage through.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
The paces at large, presences of lots of personnel, lots
of equipment, of several actually dozens and dozens of bases.
We're talking a lot of strategic interest on on the ground.
Speaker 4 (36:02):
So I think I understand that I just want to
put this out there, maybe as a devil's advocate thing.
There was another sort of rhetorical kind of or campaign
where it was like we see you suffering, We've got
your back. We're going to fast track this vaccine. We're
gonna like make sure that the you know, the FDA
allows this to go through so that we can get
(36:22):
the most people, the most access as quickly as possible.
And all of this is being spearheaded by Fauci. But
you're saying that that while that was happening on one layer,
this other thing is happening on another layer that is
seemingly coming from somewhere else, but it's actually us presenting.
Speaker 5 (36:40):
Both of these campaigns at the same time.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
Different tentacles, differents, Like one technacle doesn't know the other
ones doing that, but we do know that China was
offering up its vaccine way before the United States was
offering its vaccine.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
Right, yeah, that is true, and that this goes this
goes to this larger chess game. So you probably we've
probably all heard the idea of carrot and stick negotiation. Right,
You offer an incentive, right, you entice with one hand
and you threaten punishment with the other. And China is
very big, well, all states are very big on carrot
(37:19):
and stick. For example, would be sure the stick, right,
and the US actually has kind of a bad international
reputation for leaning a little too hard on the stick.
But this these strategies, what we're saying is they have
similarities in structure, and China essentially leveraged an opportunity because
(37:40):
when the pandemic hit, or when it went public in
twenty nineteen, the US enacted something called Operation Warp Speed.
This was very talking about, right, yeah, it's very much
American first. So they said, no holds barred. Uncle Sam
is panicking. The wallet is open, pharmaceutical company, just get
(38:03):
stuff out there, and we are prioritizing not the world's
largest populations, not the ones most endangered by a pandemic,
but the American population first. And hey, pharmaceutical companies, if
there are leftover vaccines, you can sell them for whatever
price you wish to someone else. And so other countries
(38:26):
for a time literally could not afford the proven vaccines
made by the United States pharma companies.
Speaker 4 (38:33):
Which is true for other remedies as well. You know
a lot of times I mean big time, right, But.
Speaker 3 (38:38):
In this case, it was a global pandemic and the
US was basically doing get they were operating in some
really bad pr areas and levels doing this kind of
thing when their theoretically ideological rivals in China are doing
the exact opposite. Oh, no, we can be the ones
(38:59):
that will give you vaccines. We just need you to
help us a little bit.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
And the US said, we might be the world's police,
but we're not the world's doctors. So good luck. And
China comes in, you know, China swoops in. Let's keep
going with the rom com thing. China swoops in and says, hey,
that guy, what your guy's doing, Philippines, he's just not cool.
(39:24):
You're in a toxic relationship. Let me help you. They
called this, they said to the Philippines, they said, look,
we are just going to give you the vaccines the
Americans refuse to distribute. This is a new highlight in
our bilateral relations Let's put this South China Sea stuff
to the side for one second. Though it is ours
(39:47):
to be clear, Let's put it aside to one second.
We'll revisit that after we address this global crisis. The
United States could have done the same thing very much.
Operation Warp Speed not have to play out the way
it did. But instead of prioritizing or distributing vaccines, to
the Philippines. At this time, Uncle Sam looked into his
(40:10):
handy star spangled top hat and pulled out real nasty trick.
What the folks at Reuters found was at least three
hundred accounts on Twitter that matched the descriptions they gleaned
from former US military officials familiar with the Philippines operation.
(40:33):
So again, one week point in this article, and it
has to be this way one week point is that
all of the officials speaking on record to confirm this,
whether they're active or former, they're speaking on the condition
of anonymity. But again, I kind of always assume that
(40:54):
when someone's speaking anonymously that they've been given a green
light somewhere in the chain.
Speaker 5 (41:01):
Oh you think so.
Speaker 4 (41:02):
I don't usually think that, which is very interesting that
you say that.
Speaker 5 (41:06):
I mean, I usually.
Speaker 4 (41:07):
Think that it sometimes makes me suspicious of what they're saying.
But I usually do think that they are covering their
butt and that they are speaking out of school because
they have a moral a feeling of a moral obligation.
Speaker 5 (41:20):
But maybe I'm being naive. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
I don't know if you're being naive. I think that's
one way to look at it, and another way to
look at it is exactly. I feel very similarly, Ben,
where it's like it's.
Speaker 5 (41:29):
A pr MOVI.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
This is a special secret program and not that many
people knew about it, and if somebody's speaking, it'd be
easy to identify.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
Them, right, That's the thing. It's a limited number of operators.
It's kind of like it's kind of like when we
see those hilarious laws coming out of Russia. Let's say,
any Russian president, whomever that might be. This is just
any Russian president in.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
General could run for six consecutive terms if they wanted to.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
Just again, a general dynamics any of them. Well.
Speaker 4 (42:08):
So, the majority of those body accounts that we're talking
about were created and deployed in the summer of twenty
twenty and often featured a hashtag China ong virus.
Speaker 5 (42:19):
What is the on, Ben, I don't think I'm what
are they referring.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
To Tagalag language in the Philippines, The translation is China
is the virus.
Speaker 4 (42:28):
So they're trying to really reach people where they live
in that part of the world in terms of like
let's start the campaign of hearts and minds here and then,
and the hopes that it will spread and benefit us
down the line.
Speaker 3 (42:41):
Yes, because China stepping in being you know, at least
the good guy for the people who want the vaccine,
need the vaccine.
Speaker 4 (42:48):
This is so tricksy. This is some freaking gullum ass
stuff right here.
Speaker 3 (42:53):
But this isn't the first time there were vaccine sphears
right in the Philippines. There was a campaign previously that
led up to a lot of the fears, and it's
this campaign was just playing on the preview.
Speaker 4 (43:05):
Saying certainly someone I said, oh, remember that other thing,
let's jump on it.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
Let's like we've already got a little knife to twist here,
you know, right, that's the best way to do it.
You take some you don't invent a new thing, and
try to get people on board familiar identify a thing
yes that is already familiar, and if it's not, if
it's something people don't fully believe in, but they're familiar
(43:29):
with it, then you have a much higher success rate
as you simply radicalize those beliefs or extend them, right weaponize.
Speaker 4 (43:37):
Though.
Speaker 5 (43:37):
Gross, it's so edward, it's so marketing all of this stuff.
Speaker 4 (43:40):
That's why I think it's so interesting that one of
our earliest podcast episodes was about Edward Burnetz because he
like took this kind of stuff and did it in
the service of something sort of frivolous, like selling stuff.
But it's a perfect look into this weaponization of psychology.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Yeah, he went from getting women to smoke and inventing
bacon for breakfast to overthrowing Guatemala. He's got quite a
career trajectory and it can't help. But Myra, there's one
thing we can't miss before we move on. You're absolutely right, Noel.
The majority of these body accounts in this as of
(44:21):
yet unnamed operation were created and deployed in summer of
twenty twenty. Yet some of these accounts were active for
more than five years, like.
Speaker 4 (44:32):
Dormed, like ready to be deployed, like sleeper accounts.
Speaker 3 (44:36):
Almost Yeah, and they were playing on everybody's fears. Man,
did we already talk about the pork yet?
Speaker 2 (44:43):
That's what we should talk about now. They amplified concerns
in the Islamic demographic of the.
Speaker 3 (44:49):
Films, and it wasn't just aimed at the Philippines either.
It was aimed at several other countries outside of Southeast Asia,
specifically harping on that point that the vaccines from China
contained pork gelatin, which would mean you cannot take these
vaccines at all if you are Muslim.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
Yeah. Here, there are plenty of examples. Yeah, it started
in the Philippine. Well, it started in Tampa, Florida. Yeah, yes,
it started in Pentagon. It started in Tampa, Florida, and
then it went to the Philippines and later expanded through
Eurasia and the Middle East, targeting largely Muslim populations, leveraging
(45:31):
the already pre existing distrust amid the Muslims of the
world for the Chinese government.
Speaker 4 (45:37):
Wigers right due to their treatment of the week, absolutely abominable.
Speaker 3 (45:41):
Treatment, but pretty much any country that was going to
accept China's aid, basically China's help in this major global catastrophe.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Yeah, and here's an example. You can see a lot
of these translated tweets in Scientific American and Reuters. But
when the expanded to Eurasia, they were targeting Russian speaking
Muslims or countries with Russian speaking Muslims, and you can
you'll scroll down. It's like a cool little infographic that's disturbing.
(46:15):
It shows someone who is a Chinese official handing out
syringes to mainly women right wearing jab and then he's
standing next to her. This official is standing next to
a curtain, a barrier like a theater curtain, and behind
that curtain there's a bunch of very sick looking swine
(46:37):
with a bunch of syringes stuck in them. The translation
from Russia is can China be trusted if it tries
to hide that its vaccine contains pork gelatine and distributes
it in Central Asia and other Muslim countries where many
people consider such a drug hara.
Speaker 4 (46:54):
It's like a political cartoon, like a really aggressive political cartoon,
with the one that made people realize Boss Tweed was
a bad guy, because they.
Speaker 5 (47:04):
Just simplify visual.
Speaker 4 (47:06):
You know, boom that is it is smart, smart, diabolical guys.
Speaker 3 (47:12):
It's very close to South Park animation style.
Speaker 4 (47:15):
Well, I haven't even seen it, but the way you're
describing it that that's what makes that's what it makes
me think of.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
Yeah, it's again. You know. One of the easiest ways
to hack communication and conversation with people is not necessarily
to give them a caption, is they show them an
image because different parts of the brain process it. This
is the real Sith Lord's stuff, we're telling you folks.
Speaker 5 (47:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (47:38):
But well, and that that image, I would argue, doesn't
need a caption. If you look at that image, you
are going to understand what it's trying to say.
Speaker 4 (47:45):
Well, that's the point of infographics like that, so that
it's for maximum intelligibility no matter what language you speak,
you know.
Speaker 2 (47:53):
And this campaign was, you know, as we said, it
found fertile soil in the mind of many Muslim Filipinos
and then people in the Filipino diaspora as well, And
it was built on the back of the ghoulish accusations
surrounding the treatment of the wigers. The campaign appears to
have been successful because originally Filipinos were largely unwilling to
(48:18):
trust China's vaccine Sinovak, and it first became available in
the country in the Philippines March of twenty twenty one.
Speaker 5 (48:26):
What was ours called? Do you guys even remember?
Speaker 4 (48:29):
Was there? There was JJ, there was Maderna, Yeah, but
those are the companies didn't have a clever name like
Cinovak or was Sinevac the Chinese pharmaceutical company, like the actual.
Speaker 5 (48:41):
Vaccine didn't have some clever name. I don't know.
Speaker 4 (48:45):
I think Cinovac is it must be the pharmaceutical company
out of China.
Speaker 2 (48:49):
Maybe they just needed a snappier name for the American versions,
you know what I mean.
Speaker 5 (48:53):
I don't think they associated a name with it. It
was there was the Maderna one.
Speaker 4 (48:57):
They were like, they always just named it based on
the company that was putting it out.
Speaker 2 (49:02):
Take your shot at freedom, Yeah, freedom, fellow conspiracy realist.
This doesn't always happen. But we are publishing a rare
two parter. There's so much more to get to and
we can't wait for you to join us. Check out
Part two of the Pentagon's anti VAXX program in the
near future. In the meantime, we want to hear your thoughts.
(49:24):
We try to be easy to find online.
Speaker 4 (49:26):
Find us on the Internet of the handlic conspiracy stuff
where we exist, on Facebook, where you can join our
Facebook group Here's where it gets crazy, on YouTube, where
we have video content rolling at you on the regular,
and on x FKA Twitter.
Speaker 3 (49:40):
Do you like to use your phone to call people?
Why not call us? Put this number in your phones
as a contact. Call it whatever you want, Just note
it might call you back after you call it. One
eight three three st d wytk. When you call in,
give yourself a cool nickname, and you know, let us
know if we can use your name in mess on
(50:00):
the air. If you've got more to say than can
fit in that three minutes, maybe you've got attachments, maybe links.
Why not send us a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 2 (50:07):
We are the things out there in the dark that
read every email we receive. We can't wait for you
to join us and be well aware of folks. Sometimes
the void writes back. In fact, the Void's writing to
several of you this evening conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (50:41):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
A production of iHeart Radio.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Paul. Mission control decads. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't
want you to know. You know, thinking about this evening's exploration, gentlemen,
we're kind of on a mission of preservation because we're
(00:48):
talking about a story that might fall away from the headlights.
It's no secret here in the US things have been
kind of embarrassing. You know, there's a political circus, doesn't
matter what side you're on. You know, everybody appears clownish.
They're bizarre rulings from the US Supreme Court. And in
(01:10):
all of this, there's a proven conspiracy that just went
public a few days ago, as we record.
Speaker 4 (01:17):
That's right, the Pentagon ran a completely terrifying propaganda campaign
that actually killed innocent people.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Well well, hey, now, hey, now hello, that's a it's
a weird thing to say but it's true. But it's
it is right.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
It's like we don't know. We know that it is
statistically likely, if but not certain to that point, not certain,
that innocent people died as a direct result. It is
overwhelmingly statistically likely that that is the case. It is
also impossible to prove right in terms of naming deathle
(02:00):
and individuals one by one. But the thing is, this
propaganda campaign was not intended to kill people. The idea
of killing people wasn't really part of the equation. It
was all the score points in the dirtiest and greatest
games controlling the world. And how far would you go
(02:24):
to accomplish that greater good?
Speaker 5 (02:26):
What would you do for a Klondike bar?
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Especially the Klondike bar was hegemony? Careful, fellow conspiracy realist,
We're going into the deep water tonight. Here are the facts.
All right, this might sound elementary, but I believe these
(02:50):
statistics are still mind boggling to the four of us, right,
and hopefully do you playing along at home? The US
Department of Defense, by any conceivable metric, is huge. It's
a kaiju. It's gargantuan. It is uh, just my invisible
mel Brooks tie too.
Speaker 5 (03:11):
Big to fail. Absolutely true, and I believe it was.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
At one point the had the dubious the honorific of
being the world's largest office building, which sounds like the
dullest you know, accolade one could bestow. But even that's
not true anymore because I think there's one in India
now that that's bigger.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
The Surat Diamond Borse took the prize in twenty twenty
three up until from nineteen forty three up until last year,
as we record, You're absolutely right, the Department of Defense
was the world's largest office building. Such a is that
one of the most boring Guinness World records.
Speaker 4 (03:54):
I mean, you know, I think i've I've I've made
my case or at least drawn my line in the
sand there.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
It is kind of weird. And most office buildings the
people inside are making money for a corporation in the Pentagon,
They are just spending it.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
That's a great point.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
But to the ultimate end, to your point, Ben, of
that great klonduc bar in the sky or you know,
the argument politically speaking rhetorically is they're protecting us. They're
doing God's work in there, making sure that we as
American citizens are safe from those who would do us harm.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Every powerful group I have ever interacted with, at least
in my experience, has always said, or always maintained, the
world is chaotic and evil and dangerous, and the only
way for it to be safer is for someone to
be in charge. And surprise, the people who say that
(04:54):
always picture themselves as the person in charge or the entity.
So this place, you know, we often hear news about
the Pentagon, and when people are saying that, they're really
talking about the Department of Defense, it's called mentotomy. It's
the same way, you know, the reporters will say the
White House when they're talking about president.
Speaker 5 (05:16):
Or xerox as a stand in for photo copy, you know.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Similar, Yeah, like an epnonymous, apotymous trademark. It's so it's
so stupid, cartoonishly big. It's like such an American idea.
And I don't say that as an insult. It's seven
story behemoth. It takes up more than six point six
million square feet just of office space just to people
(05:43):
walking around, as you said, Matt, spending a lot of
taxpayer money. And it has a new stat I found
it has sixty seven acres of just parking lots Wow,
how still not enough? How long would that take just to.
Speaker 4 (05:58):
Traverse by foot? It's a lot of football fields. I
always find it interesting that the pentagon is in fact
shaped like a pentagon, you know, and the idea that
they're protecting us the pentacle or the pentagram you know,
is often lumped in with being like an image of
satanic demonic worship or whatever, but really, in WICCA and
(06:21):
various other belief systems, it is a protective sigil.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Yeah, and this protective sigil has its human circulatory system
is somewhere north of twenty six thousand people in that
building on any given day, where there permanently on a
long term basis, twenty three thousand military and civilian employees
(06:47):
and then three thousand what they would call support personnel.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
And that balance or at least in terms of like
how you know, safe they are in their jobs could
change if that program that we discussed in a recent
episode goes through and no longer are there these long
term bureaucratic positions that are you know, have stasis through
different administrations. There could be a whole new regime anytime
someone new comes into power that could flip flop and
(07:13):
no longer are we dealing with long term experts, but
we're dealing with people who are affiliated with political ideologies
filling those roles.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Yeah, yeah, probably just scary. I'm sorry, scary, Yeah, I agree.
I mean, the Pentagon as an idea is both awe
inspiring and terrifying. The DoD is an idea. This number,
this twenty six thousand dish also doesn't count the many,
many visitors who pass through on a daily basis, or
(07:42):
a weekly basis or quarterly basis. And look, if you
are a long time conspiracy realist, folks, you know well
that the Department of Defense has been accused of all
sorts of for being careful, let's say, unethical activities over
the years. Not necessarily illegal all the time, but definitely shenanigans, right,
(08:06):
And a lot of those accusations that were treated as
wild conspiracy theories were later proving correct when different things
got declassified, when journalists dug in, and when you know,
enough time it passed for individuals to not get in trouble.
Speaker 4 (08:24):
Well, and with the bureaucracy of that size and all
of the secret programs various levels of classification, you have
programs within programs and ones that certain personnel aren't even
aware of, you know, up to the highest levels. So
many like wheels within wheels taking place within this building.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
Yeah, when you think about the combination of different military
branches and operations that are kind of joint in nature,
and then if you imagine like the spaghetti that is
all of those special access programs that's been you need
a seven story building that's you know.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Giant, right, and uh it is. It is, no fooling folks,
And we checked right before we recorded this. Uh, the
Department of Defense is the largest single employer in the world,
which if we played with statistics, I guess technically that
would mean that if you picked a random person right
(09:25):
then they would most likely be working for the Department
of Defense.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
That's crazy. Now, that doesn't include like, if you are
a member of let's say the Army, you are not
a part of the Department of Defense. That's a whole
separate thing.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Or there you're you're under it.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
Yeah, wow, okay, okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
It's weird. It's like it's like how f x X
is part of FX, which is part of Fox.
Speaker 5 (09:53):
Or HBO, Max Now Squared.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Oh my gosh, I still don't know I'm subscribed.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
It is almost a parent company type flow chart situation
in an interesting way. And so as the commander in
chief is the president technically the big big boss over
the DoD or.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Yeah, yeah, because DoD is, DoD coordinates. It's an executive department,
so it's under the executive branch. It coordinates all the
agencies and functions of the US government related to national
security and the armed forces. That means over one point
three four million active duty service members, and that also
(10:37):
means almost a million, almost eight hundred thousand National Guard
and reservists, and then seven hundred and forty seven something
thousand civilians. So the total is over two point eighty
seven million employees.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Need we need a lot of tax dollars for all
those salaries.
Speaker 4 (10:58):
And I'm sure there's a ton of folks that work
remotely as well, right like the Yeah.
Speaker 5 (11:03):
Can you even imagine that outside of it?
Speaker 3 (11:05):
I mean, you know, I'm trying to imagine the Department
of Defenses work from home policies.
Speaker 5 (11:10):
Yeah, I mean they're very well.
Speaker 4 (11:12):
We did we did talk about how you know there
they had to I guess loosen their regulations on drug
policies because they couldn't get good enough hackers because they
wanted to be able to stay home and drink their
diet mountain dew and smoke their weed. So they had
to to some degree compromise with that.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Mm. Yeah, I mean that that is That is a
true story, folks, if you haven't heard it before. Most
of the good hackers are kind of fig.
Speaker 5 (11:44):
They're in that floating you know.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Yeah, yeah, they're microdosing for America.
Speaker 5 (11:48):
I love dude.
Speaker 4 (11:49):
That's a T shirt right there. Microdosing for America.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Officer. You have to look at the bigger picture here.
Speaker 5 (11:56):
Uh so I'm not on drugs. I'm doing my page
periodic duty. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
We could keep throwing around statistics like this all evening.
We love bizarre statistics, but we're bringing all this up
to establish one key point. The size of the Department
of Defense or the Pentagon can be as much a
weakness as it is a strength. With so many things
(12:24):
happening all at once, everything everywhere, all at once, it
is normalized and expected that not everyone will know what
everyone else is doing. The right hand doesn't know the
actions of the left in a very real sense here,
and so the DoD literally cannot be a monolith. It
fights itself constantly, classification, like you said, secrecy, separated budgets,
(12:50):
the endless turf wars, the endless wars over budgets, and
just the size of the overall operation. It's not a
unified set of actors. It is not like two point
eighty seven million people all get in some big room
and then steeple their fingers and come up with a
super villain scheme.
Speaker 4 (13:11):
I mean that may happen from time to time, but
it's usually a little more, you know, one of these
subgroups kind of situation. You did mention that they're the
largest employer.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
In the world, right, Yes, that's it.
Speaker 5 (13:23):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
That is mind boggling. And to your point, Ben, seems
a little more like a weakness than a strength. How
much siloed stuff goes on and how you know, maybe
it's just spy movies and stuff, but how so often
this stuff seems to have the potential to go off
the rails without oversight.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Yeah, we see this also, Not to pick on the
DoD just yet, but we see this in any large organization.
You know, there's an organization that has a unified goal.
In the case of the Department of Defense. The goal
is the projection of power to protect the United States
(14:03):
and the interest of the US overall. But the issue
is people disagree on how best to achieve that goal,
and they don't always talk through their strategies. We work
in a large media company, and you see similar things
in large media companies. Large any company, right who is
(14:24):
the number one manufacturer of sunglasses, for example, Luxotica. They
fight all the time, you know what I mean. There's
some guy who's coming home and he's just like punching
the wall or something about some ray band policy that
he disagrees with. The issue is in our sort of
(14:47):
echelon of companies, mission creep and contradictory strategies and mission fracture.
For us that leads to things like unnecessary zoom calls,
you know what I mean. But for the departm Defense,
this means people can die.
Speaker 4 (15:02):
Serious collateral damage, you know, no no question about it.
And to your point, Ben, you know, the larger the organization,
the more kind of broad the unilateral.
Speaker 5 (15:12):
Sort of philosophy ends up being.
Speaker 4 (15:14):
And then they're sort of within those subgroups we're talking
about different you know, philosophies and ideologies, and sometimes they
don't jibe with the big one, you know, it's it
gets real crazy, real quick.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
What a beautiful point. You know what I'm thinking of
guys with that idea of like the larger the organization,
the simpler and more vague the philosophy. Google, he'll be evil,
he'll be evil, whatever that means to you.
Speaker 4 (15:42):
And and and whether or not you think they've succeeded it,
you know or not?
Speaker 5 (15:46):
Right?
Speaker 2 (15:47):
I think they ditched that one, didn't they They ditched
that one.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
It was a little too buzzy. It felt like it
was making too much news.
Speaker 5 (15:54):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Maybe maybe they did well. There's a world of difference,
as we said, between not being and being good.
Speaker 5 (16:01):
Oh my goodness, very good point.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Well tonight, as we set this up, we want everybody
to travel into the past with us. It's twenty twenty.
The COVID pandemic is still in full swing. Spoiler, it's
still happening now. China and the United States are just
as beefed up then as they are today, maybe even
(16:24):
more so, because in twenty twenty, China is waging a
heavy information war to deny the origin of COVID, and
the US and China are going back and forth, trying
to discredit one another, trying to curry favor with other nations.
They're trying to scapegoat each other to win the race
for the most effective vaccine. So how far would factions
(16:48):
of the Pentagon go to accomplish these goals. We'll tell
you after a word from our sponsor. Here's where it
gets crazy. They went far. They went pretty far. I'll
be honest. They went much further than I thought they
(17:10):
would go.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
Yeah, and this comes to us via Reuters, a very
large investigation that they've been putting together for quite a while.
Two journalists Chris Bing and Joel Scheckman s ch E
C T M A N. They posted on June fourteenth
of this year, just a bombshell that I think is
rocking everybody. And they have been reaching out to the
(17:32):
DoD according to them, So it's not like they took
them by surprise when they wrote it or when they
published it.
Speaker 5 (17:39):
At least.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
There are probably a lot of people in that Pentagon
getting calls and they're going, guys, guys, guys, they know
about the thing, which thing though the thing is a
thing thing too?
Speaker 5 (17:52):
What are we talking about a thing? Four?
Speaker 2 (17:55):
I don't know four point they're read on to thing four.
Speaker 5 (17:59):
Yes, we're screwed, evacuate.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
This is a part of as Ben said right before
we went to break, there a huge back and forth
between China and the US about who made COVID, how
did COVID get out, what's the origins of it, who
is to blame basically, and then who has the answer
to COVID? Right, So, this was a clandestine program by
(18:23):
the United States military parts of the DoD to discredit
China's vaccine that they were trying to roll out that
was actually available to a wider public way before any
of the US made vaccines.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
Well, and to your point then about this seeming to
not be top line news right now. Maybe that's because
of all the election stuff or whatever, But I think
we're all pretty keyed into this stuff, and I haven't
really seen much of this back and forth at all.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
We can get into it, but I think a lot
of the back and forth ended up happening in these
small ways, Like from the US side, it was often
when then President d Trump would get up and make
a statement.
Speaker 5 (19:02):
China the China flu or.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
The flu, calling it the China virus. At least according
to a lot of sources was a move because there
were there were disinformation campaigns aimed at the United States.
Speaker 4 (19:18):
And think about historical pandemics like the Spanish flu, like
that's what history ends up calling it.
Speaker 5 (19:26):
There is at some point a war that get an
information war that.
Speaker 4 (19:29):
Gets waged, and at some point one of those things
wins out and it doesn't just happen in a vacuum.
So I think this is a really interesting case of
seeing how that historical sausage is made. M hm.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
The US just got caught running an anti vaccination campaign.
Oh geez, yeah, whose idea in particular? This is, you know,
while all the fauci stuff is going on, this is
happening while they're telling everybody in America to get vaccinated. Oh,
we'll get into it. It's spooky, spooky stuff. We don't
know who, which particular individuals, not to sound too idiocracy
(20:06):
about it, We don't know which particular individuals came up
with this idea. We do know that the majority of
active officials speaking to these journalists Matt mentioned, they remained anonymous.
We do know that this program, which has not been
publicly named, did appear weirdly bipartisan. It began under the
(20:31):
Donald Trump administration. It continued for months into the Biden administration,
even after social media executives some of the suits from
Facebook came to the government and said, Hey.
Speaker 4 (20:49):
Some of the disinformation we're flagging this, We're pulling this
stuff from our platforms right as you.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Guys told us we should do that, and we shouldn't
encourage the spread of aganda like this. And they said,
I think the military fire back, and they were like, oh, yeah, totally, dog,
We'll get you. And you know, thanks for you know,
thanks for coming to us with it, you know, mono amano.
And then they just did they they continued to do it.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
Can can you imagine being one of the lower level
employees at one of these social media companies looking at
you like you're filtering through messages some of them are
clearly anti vaccination campaigns that you've been warned against, just
like they're saying you you try and track down these users. Basically,
I guess you track down the users. I would think
you would just block the user or nerve their account somehow.
(21:38):
But they're tracking down these users and realizing, oh, hold on.
Speaker 5 (21:44):
Hold up, well wouldn't they cover their tracks?
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Though?
Speaker 5 (21:46):
In a way right.
Speaker 4 (21:47):
It would be harder for them to like peg it
directly to a government account quote unquote, these are like
lot accounts, right.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Yes, However, if you are, if you're working for the
organization for the platform, get a little working for the Twitter,
the Facebook, or the.
Speaker 5 (22:04):
Little more analytics that I suppose.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
It's a little there are breadcrumbs that you will have
that the average civilian user does not possess. Uh, it's
more difficult to hide the providence of things. But yeah,
they came forward and they got ignored, just like a
it's this old country anecdote. Right, the teacher tells a
kid to stop chewing gum in class. You don't say no,
(22:32):
you don't spit out the gum, and just say yes,
and then keep doing what you are doing, to chew a.
Speaker 5 (22:36):
Little less aggressively, right right, for a little bit, and
then tell you back.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
So Reuters, these two journalists, they interviewed dozens and dozens
of US officials, contractors, social media oftens, professors. They also
looked at social media post within depth analysis, they gained
access to technical data like metadata you know, again, the
(23:08):
bread crumbs, and they found documents that proved there was
a bevy of fake social media accounts being used by
the US military. We also know not everybody again to
the model this point, not everybody's on board. The diplomatic
class in the Southeast Asian theater was super pissed. They
(23:29):
knew it was a bad idea.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
Let's go into just state. This is on Facebook, then
it was called Twitter and Instagram. That's where this is
largely occurring, and that's the that's the information they got, right,
the metadata.
Speaker 4 (23:41):
So if I were a user, how would these posts
be showing up? Would it look like it was coming
from an individual espousing an opinion? Would it be fake
news articles that were reposted.
Speaker 5 (23:52):
Like a combination, Like what would it look like to me?
Speaker 2 (23:56):
It would look like a civilian user and you would
and then maybe later a news agency. But the big
differentiator in the beginning is that you would have been
identified as Filipido.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
Mm hmm, what I don't know, Well, this is occurring
in the Philippines or on mostly in the Philippines, right
on the servers that are there. Yeah, And the understanding
that we have is that some of these accounts, while
they would look like individuals because these are varied, they
look like individuals, but they would have thousands, if not
(24:27):
tens of thousands of like at least it would look
like they have that many followers right.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Right, which helps them in the algorithm.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
Exactly, So they're showing up in feeds the way if
you're scrolling through now you're just getting random stuff sometimes.
Speaker 4 (24:41):
Would they have to like click farm to get those followers?
How are they legitimate followers? Are they getting a leg
up from the platforms to like literally you know, fake
falsify those numbers, Like I have so many questions.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
I guarantee you they just use one of those services
that was part of the budget to get accounts with
several thousands.
Speaker 5 (25:03):
Click click farming kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
And then they had a budget argument where they said,
why don't we start our own thing like this at home?
And then someone said, or we could just buy that company.
You know, these conversations happen.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
Let's get a let's get a bought farm in the
Philippines to get us a bunch of followers in the Philippines.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Exactly, Let's hide the hand. We don't want people to
know that this originates in Tampa, Florida. That part's true.
Speaker 4 (25:31):
God shout out to Tampa and maybe some of this
stuff is you know, click baity type stuff. But I
have seen video and images of what some of these,
like Southeast Asia click farms look like, and it's literally
individuals with fifty iPads or like fifty computers just like yeah,
or on a rack, like a wooden rack, you know.
Speaker 5 (25:50):
Is that accurate?
Speaker 4 (25:51):
I think that's the way that that's the only way
to do it, unless you're packing the system, so I
think you have to kind of physically do it. Well,
they're far more, I'm sure there are, but those do exist.
Those are those do those are in fact, I would
say the norm, uh, if you're a non state actor.
But the the United States military apparatus is not perfect,
(26:15):
but it's it's weirdly smart at something sour yeah, yeah,
and it's uh. We do know that they did contract
out despite wanting to keep their circle close, which is
always obviously ideal. Uh, they partnered with a company we're
going to talk a little bit about later. We mentioned
it in Strange News. General Dynamics Information Technology or get
(26:39):
it to.
Speaker 5 (26:41):
Get it, y'all.
Speaker 4 (26:42):
And once again, the more innocuous the name, the more
nefarious the activities. It's just General Dynamics, you know, it's
just general.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
What kind of dynamics, you know, just like the general
dynamics you know. And Reuters and also these journalists did
such an awesome job. I can't say enough good stuff
about them, and I hope if you guys are hearing this,
you're staying safe. Reuter's got a lot of confirmation, and
they got an official statement from the Pentagon, which doesn't
(27:15):
always happen. They said, hey, what's going on with this?
And the US military, through the spokesperson said, quote Uncle
well said Uncle Sam basically quote uses a variety of platforms,
including social media to counter those malign influence attacks aimed
at the US allies or partners. So again, Department of Defense,
(27:39):
we're doing this, but we're doing this in a protective
capacity because the.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
Bad guys are like doing it. So therefore we got
to get in the mud with the bad guys. I
love that word malign because that is such a perspective,
like that is so clearly the you know, a signifier
of an agenda where it's like you're, yeah, these are
this is the bad information that we are countering. But
if you really dig down, is it you know what
(28:05):
I mean? Or are we actually spreading misinformation. That's just
as dangerous. But it's not about protecting our reputation, you
know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
Look, man, there's no Department of Offense in here.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Okay mm hmm, Yeah, this is not the war you're
looking for. Yeah, it's true. And there's also a little
bit of like burned ex lover energy in this statement
from the Pentagon because they had some tip for tat.
The spokesperson also added that China is doing similar things
(28:39):
well them too. They said, China is waging a quote
disinformation campaign to falsely blame the United States for the
spread of COVID nineteen.
Speaker 5 (28:50):
But like it's.
Speaker 4 (28:51):
Almost irrelevant where it came from, you know, at a
certain point, and it becomes more about what did you
do about it? And I think a lot of this
is covering the butts of officials who maybe didn't take
it seriously enough quickly enough, right, And then it's like
about like pivoting the blame from that to well, you
(29:13):
guys put it out there in the first place, and
it was your fault. Therefore anything that we did after
the fact is irrelevant. It just seems to be a
way of trying to control the narrative. In a very
disingenuous way.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
I would agree with disingenuous, you know, or like an
enforced cherry picked perspective. But they do have very valid
points because the fancy term for what's going on in
this weird digital ping pong war is asymmetric information warfare.
The street name for it is propaganda, very first episode
(29:47):
stuff they don't want you to know. Ever, did the
end result of this whatever you want to call it
is again the deaths of innocent people. We cannot prove it,
but you'll see. Let's see, you know what, Let's see
who agrees with us or disagrees at the close of
this exploration.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
The thought is that these disinformation posts led individuals to
not take the vaccine, which we'll get into, a very
specific vaccine from China, which then led either them or
their loved ones to contract COVID nineteen, which then led
to their death. So, just to spell it out there,
it's not it's not folks from the DoD killing people.
(30:31):
It is them using this asymmetrical warfare you're talking about
to eventually kill people.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Yeah, it's mousetrappy. It's like Ruben Goldberg esk. That's why
they weren't planning on killing people exactly. They just didn't
really think that. They didn't think it through. It was
an irrelevant thing.
Speaker 3 (30:49):
Or they didn't care because there was a bigger picture
at play.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Yeah, yeah, that's the point, you know, Like, look, it's
not as though they would click on a link and
then a stipe drone popped them in the back of
the head. It wasn't that direct to your points there,
Matt and Noll. Particularly, it's about motivation. We mentioned that
this is we talked about a little bit on Strange News.
(31:15):
The United States has long considered, perhaps hypocritically, the Chinese
government to be an expansionist power, and they think of
China as an expansionist power because that is factually accurate,
that is correct.
Speaker 5 (31:30):
But we also need.
Speaker 4 (31:32):
The hell out of them for so many aspects of
our economy and our infrastructure and our you know, like
supply chain and all of that. So it's always been
this delicate dance and a lot of these sort of snipy,
you know, spurned lover kind of vibes that you're talking
about kind of have to happen underneath all of that, right.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
Well, yeah, and in the end, it's all about who
does the world look to when there's a crisis. Who
is the figure that's going to come in and give
you the solution to the big problem that your country
is having or your people are facing.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Right, who is trustworthy enough that previous grievances could be
set aside for one moment, right to solve a global
problem together. That is a very powerful position to attain.
And when throughout human history, when institutions attain that level
of power, it'll hold it very long. There's a reason
(32:31):
King of the Hill is a kid's game and an
awesome cartoon.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
Yeah, but they will grasp it as hard as they
possibly can until the moment their hands slips off.
Speaker 4 (32:43):
Then, would you say a good example of that, like
in history, would be America intervening, You know, when the
Nazis proved to be exactly as real and horrible as
people thought, and then they jumped in and made a
big show of where coming in here to save the world.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Up with the Up with the Financial Decisions of nineteen thirteen.
The actions of the United States and privilege of its
geography are the are the two biggest origin points in
the story of this country becoming the number one superpower.
Speaker 5 (33:18):
For a time.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
But again, King of the Hill, there's always someone grasping,
there's always someone pushing, right, And this is the larger
context we're talking about. Uncle Sam way before the pandemic
had been super beefed up about Chinese territorial claims in
the South China Sea. If you look at the Chinese
map of maritime borders and you look at the maps
(33:43):
of any other country in the region, they don't agree
at all. Other every other country in the area is like,
pump your brakes, guys.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
Yeah. And with that, we're going to take a quick break. Here,
a word from the sponsors, and we'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
And we've returned.
Speaker 3 (34:05):
Well, and hey, Ben, just out of curiosity, why would
the Philippines be interested in those borders in the South
China Sea? And why would the United States have such
an interest in the Philippines interest in those borders? Wow,
I feel like we just talked about this on another
episode a little while ago, about the strategic interest the
(34:27):
United States has specifically in the Philippines.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Control control the rules of the game, right,
the control the bounds of the playing field the US.
If you look at the way US projects force in
Eastern Asia for most of human history, it would make
no sense, like why would a country so far away
(34:52):
get give a tinkersdam? You know what I mean? Great expression,
it's it's probably not a politically correct expression, but the
very British Churchill would have said, I'm sure.
Speaker 5 (35:05):
He did right.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
But you know, there's a reason why it's such a
that we have these common tropes in English, like the
price of tea in China means something irrelevant, but this
is very much relevant because to your point that the
US has a heavy practice of attempting to contain the
growth of China by partnering with other nations in the
(35:31):
area South Korea, right, Japan, the Philippines establishing military footholds
there so that they can have their own supply chains
that are not necessarily bound to the long passage through.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
The paces at large, presences of lots of personnel, lots
of equipment, of several actually dozens and dozens of bases.
We're talking a lot of strategic interest on on the ground.
Speaker 4 (36:02):
So I think I understand that I just want to
put this out there, maybe as a devil's advocate thing.
There was another sort of rhetorical kind of or campaign
where it was like we see you suffering, We've got
your back. We're going to fast track this vaccine. We're
gonna like make sure that the you know, the FDA
allows this to go through so that we can get
(36:22):
the most people, the most access as quickly as possible.
And all of this is being spearheaded by Fauci. But
you're saying that that while that was happening on one layer,
this other thing is happening on another layer that is
seemingly coming from somewhere else, but it's actually us presenting.
Speaker 5 (36:40):
Both of these campaigns at the same time.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
Different tentacles, differents, Like one technacle doesn't know the other
ones doing that, but we do know that China was
offering up its vaccine way before the United States was
offering its vaccine.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
Right, yeah, that is true, and that this goes this
goes to this larger chess game. So you probably we've
probably all heard the idea of carrot and stick negotiation. Right,
You offer an incentive, right, you entice with one hand
and you threaten punishment with the other. And China is
very big, well, all states are very big on carrot
(37:19):
and stick. For example, would be sure the stick, right,
and the US actually has kind of a bad international
reputation for leaning a little too hard on the stick.
But this these strategies, what we're saying is they have
similarities in structure, and China essentially leveraged an opportunity because
(37:40):
when the pandemic hit, or when it went public in
twenty nineteen, the US enacted something called Operation Warp Speed.
This was very talking about, right, yeah, it's very much
American first. So they said, no holds barred. Uncle Sam
is panicking. The wallet is open, pharmaceutical company, just get
(38:03):
stuff out there, and we are prioritizing not the world's
largest populations, not the ones most endangered by a pandemic,
but the American population first. And hey, pharmaceutical companies, if
there are leftover vaccines, you can sell them for whatever
price you wish to someone else. And so other countries
(38:26):
for a time literally could not afford the proven vaccines
made by the United States pharma companies.
Speaker 4 (38:33):
Which is true for other remedies as well. You know
a lot of times I mean big time, right, But.
Speaker 3 (38:38):
In this case, it was a global pandemic and the
US was basically doing get they were operating in some
really bad pr areas and levels doing this kind of
thing when their theoretically ideological rivals in China are doing
the exact opposite. Oh, no, we can be the ones
(38:59):
that will give you vaccines. We just need you to
help us a little bit.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
And the US said, we might be the world's police,
but we're not the world's doctors. So good luck. And
China comes in, you know, China swoops in. Let's keep
going with the rom com thing. China swoops in and says, hey,
that guy, what your guy's doing, Philippines, he's just not cool.
(39:24):
You're in a toxic relationship. Let me help you. They
called this, they said to the Philippines, they said, look,
we are just going to give you the vaccines the
Americans refuse to distribute. This is a new highlight in
our bilateral relations Let's put this South China Sea stuff
to the side for one second. Though it is ours
(39:47):
to be clear, Let's put it aside to one second.
We'll revisit that after we address this global crisis. The
United States could have done the same thing very much.
Operation Warp Speed not have to play out the way
it did. But instead of prioritizing or distributing vaccines, to
the Philippines. At this time, Uncle Sam looked into his
(40:10):
handy star spangled top hat and pulled out real nasty trick.
What the folks at Reuters found was at least three
hundred accounts on Twitter that matched the descriptions they gleaned
from former US military officials familiar with the Philippines operation.
(40:33):
So again, one week point in this article, and it
has to be this way one week point is that
all of the officials speaking on record to confirm this,
whether they're active or former, they're speaking on the condition
of anonymity. But again, I kind of always assume that
(40:54):
when someone's speaking anonymously that they've been given a green
light somewhere in the chain.
Speaker 5 (41:01):
Oh you think so.
Speaker 4 (41:02):
I don't usually think that, which is very interesting that
you say that.
Speaker 5 (41:06):
I mean, I usually.
Speaker 4 (41:07):
Think that it sometimes makes me suspicious of what they're saying.
But I usually do think that they are covering their
butt and that they are speaking out of school because
they have a moral a feeling of a moral obligation.
Speaker 5 (41:20):
But maybe I'm being naive. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
I don't know if you're being naive. I think that's
one way to look at it, and another way to
look at it is exactly. I feel very similarly, Ben,
where it's like it's.
Speaker 5 (41:29):
A pr MOVI.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
This is a special secret program and not that many
people knew about it, and if somebody's speaking, it'd be
easy to identify.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
Them, right, That's the thing. It's a limited number of operators.
It's kind of like it's kind of like when we
see those hilarious laws coming out of Russia. Let's say,
any Russian president, whomever that might be. This is just
any Russian president in.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
General could run for six consecutive terms if they wanted to.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
Just again, a general dynamics any of them. Well.
Speaker 4 (42:08):
So, the majority of those body accounts that we're talking
about were created and deployed in the summer of twenty
twenty and often featured a hashtag China ong virus.
Speaker 5 (42:19):
What is the on, Ben, I don't think I'm what
are they referring.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
To Tagalag language in the Philippines, The translation is China
is the virus.
Speaker 4 (42:28):
So they're trying to really reach people where they live
in that part of the world in terms of like
let's start the campaign of hearts and minds here and then,
and the hopes that it will spread and benefit us
down the line.
Speaker 3 (42:41):
Yes, because China stepping in being you know, at least
the good guy for the people who want the vaccine,
need the vaccine.
Speaker 4 (42:48):
This is so tricksy. This is some freaking gullum ass
stuff right here.
Speaker 3 (42:53):
But this isn't the first time there were vaccine sphears
right in the Philippines. There was a campaign previously that
led up to a lot of the fears, and it's
this campaign was just playing on the preview.
Speaker 4 (43:05):
Saying certainly someone I said, oh, remember that other thing,
let's jump on it.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
Let's like we've already got a little knife to twist here,
you know, right, that's the best way to do it.
You take some you don't invent a new thing, and
try to get people on board familiar identify a thing
yes that is already familiar, and if it's not, if
it's something people don't fully believe in, but they're familiar
(43:29):
with it, then you have a much higher success rate
as you simply radicalize those beliefs or extend them, right weaponize.
Speaker 4 (43:37):
Though.
Speaker 5 (43:37):
Gross, it's so edward, it's so marketing all of this stuff.
Speaker 4 (43:40):
That's why I think it's so interesting that one of
our earliest podcast episodes was about Edward Burnetz because he
like took this kind of stuff and did it in
the service of something sort of frivolous, like selling stuff.
But it's a perfect look into this weaponization of psychology.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Yeah, he went from getting women to smoke and inventing
bacon for breakfast to overthrowing Guatemala. He's got quite a
career trajectory and it can't help. But Myra, there's one
thing we can't miss before we move on. You're absolutely right, Noel.
The majority of these body accounts in this as of
(44:21):
yet unnamed operation were created and deployed in summer of
twenty twenty. Yet some of these accounts were active for
more than five years, like.
Speaker 4 (44:32):
Dormed, like ready to be deployed, like sleeper accounts.
Speaker 3 (44:36):
Almost Yeah, and they were playing on everybody's fears. Man,
did we already talk about the pork yet?
Speaker 2 (44:43):
That's what we should talk about now. They amplified concerns
in the Islamic demographic of the.
Speaker 3 (44:49):
Films, and it wasn't just aimed at the Philippines either.
It was aimed at several other countries outside of Southeast Asia,
specifically harping on that point that the vaccines from China
contained pork gelatin, which would mean you cannot take these
vaccines at all if you are Muslim.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
Yeah. Here, there are plenty of examples. Yeah, it started
in the Philippine. Well, it started in Tampa, Florida. Yeah, yes,
it started in Pentagon. It started in Tampa, Florida, and
then it went to the Philippines and later expanded through
Eurasia and the Middle East, targeting largely Muslim populations, leveraging
(45:31):
the already pre existing distrust amid the Muslims of the
world for the Chinese government.
Speaker 4 (45:37):
Wigers right due to their treatment of the week, absolutely abominable.
Speaker 3 (45:41):
Treatment, but pretty much any country that was going to
accept China's aid, basically China's help in this major global catastrophe.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Yeah, and here's an example. You can see a lot
of these translated tweets in Scientific American and Reuters. But
when the expanded to Eurasia, they were targeting Russian speaking
Muslims or countries with Russian speaking Muslims, and you can
you'll scroll down. It's like a cool little infographic that's disturbing.
(46:15):
It shows someone who is a Chinese official handing out
syringes to mainly women right wearing jab and then he's
standing next to her. This official is standing next to
a curtain, a barrier like a theater curtain, and behind
that curtain there's a bunch of very sick looking swine
(46:37):
with a bunch of syringes stuck in them. The translation
from Russia is can China be trusted if it tries
to hide that its vaccine contains pork gelatine and distributes
it in Central Asia and other Muslim countries where many
people consider such a drug hara.
Speaker 4 (46:54):
It's like a political cartoon, like a really aggressive political cartoon,
with the one that made people realize Boss Tweed was
a bad guy, because they.
Speaker 5 (47:04):
Just simplify visual.
Speaker 4 (47:06):
You know, boom that is it is smart, smart, diabolical guys.
Speaker 3 (47:12):
It's very close to South Park animation style.
Speaker 4 (47:15):
Well, I haven't even seen it, but the way you're
describing it that that's what makes that's what it makes
me think of.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
Yeah, it's again. You know. One of the easiest ways
to hack communication and conversation with people is not necessarily
to give them a caption, is they show them an
image because different parts of the brain process it. This
is the real Sith Lord's stuff, we're telling you folks.
Speaker 5 (47:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (47:38):
But well, and that that image, I would argue, doesn't
need a caption. If you look at that image, you
are going to understand what it's trying to say.
Speaker 4 (47:45):
Well, that's the point of infographics like that, so that
it's for maximum intelligibility no matter what language you speak,
you know.
Speaker 2 (47:53):
And this campaign was, you know, as we said, it
found fertile soil in the mind of many Muslim Filipinos
and then people in the Filipino diaspora as well, And
it was built on the back of the ghoulish accusations
surrounding the treatment of the wigers. The campaign appears to
have been successful because originally Filipinos were largely unwilling to
(48:18):
trust China's vaccine Sinovak, and it first became available in
the country in the Philippines March of twenty twenty one.
Speaker 5 (48:26):
What was ours called? Do you guys even remember?
Speaker 4 (48:29):
Was there? There was JJ, there was Maderna, Yeah, but
those are the companies didn't have a clever name like
Cinovak or was Sinevac the Chinese pharmaceutical company, like the actual.
Speaker 5 (48:41):
Vaccine didn't have some clever name. I don't know.
Speaker 4 (48:45):
I think Cinovac is it must be the pharmaceutical company
out of China.
Speaker 2 (48:49):
Maybe they just needed a snappier name for the American versions,
you know what I mean.
Speaker 5 (48:53):
I don't think they associated a name with it. It
was there was the Maderna one.
Speaker 4 (48:57):
They were like, they always just named it based on
the company that was putting it out.
Speaker 2 (49:02):
Take your shot at freedom, Yeah, freedom, fellow conspiracy realist.
This doesn't always happen. But we are publishing a rare
two parter. There's so much more to get to and
we can't wait for you to join us. Check out
Part two of the Pentagon's anti VAXX program in the
near future. In the meantime, we want to hear your thoughts.
(49:24):
We try to be easy to find online.
Speaker 4 (49:26):
Find us on the Internet of the handlic conspiracy stuff
where we exist, on Facebook, where you can join our
Facebook group Here's where it gets crazy, on YouTube, where
we have video content rolling at you on the regular,
and on x FKA Twitter.
Speaker 3 (49:40):
Do you like to use your phone to call people?
Why not call us? Put this number in your phones
as a contact. Call it whatever you want, Just note
it might call you back after you call it. One
eight three three st d wytk. When you call in,
give yourself a cool nickname, and you know, let us
know if we can use your name in mess on
(50:00):
the air. If you've got more to say than can
fit in that three minutes, maybe you've got attachments, maybe links.
Why not send us a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 2 (50:07):
We are the things out there in the dark that
read every email we receive. We can't wait for you
to join us and be well aware of folks. Sometimes
the void writes back. In fact, the Void's writing to
several of you this evening conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (50:41):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Show Links
RSSStoreAboutLive ShowsPopular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com