One of the most important strategies to prepare yourself against government-endorsed weaponized narratives lies with community, with meeting like-minded people that share your views and complement your skills, according to investigative journalist James Corbett.
Story at a glance:
- Rather than squabbling about controlled opposition, we would be better served by spending our time productively engaged in research, verifying and triangulating information to discern what is true and what is false.
- “Divide and conquer” is the primary way the control network maintains control, and all that’s needed to divide a previously unified front is insinuation and the seeding of doubt.
- As artificial intelligence-equipped chatbots are getting more sophisticated and start to monopolize online searches and virtual assistants, state-endorsed propaganda may become the only information available.
- Narrative is the ultimate weapon; with a convincing-enough narrative, you can motivate entire populations to go to war or anything else that you want them to do.
- One of the most important strategies you can implement to prepare yourself for the likelihood of what they plan on throwing at us next lies with community, meeting like-minded people that share your views and complement your skills. It will also be wise to relocate from high-density urban areas.
In the video below, I interview investigative journalist James Corbett about false narratives, the global takeover by technocracy, controlled opposition and the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI), as well as the solutions to these and other challenges.
Corbett’s journalism career began in the aftermath of 9/11 when he became “overwhelmed to discover that we are constantly lied to through the mainstream media.” 9/11 was his “red pill” moment, and he hasn’t stopped digging for the truth since.
“The discrepancy between the things that I was finding online versus what was being reported on the evening news just started getting wider and wider,” he says, “to the point where I felt that … I had to insert myself in that conversation. So that’s the reason we’re talking today.”
In 2007, Corbett launched his website, The Corbett Report. One of his hallmarks, both in his documentaries and regular reports, is impeccable citations of sources.
He says:
“I always put up the transcript with the hyperlinks to the source documents for every single quotation, every video clip, everything that I’m playing. I want to direct people back to the source material so that they can research it for themselves.
“I know, as a researcher myself who does this for a living, that’s incredibly valuable. I very much appreciate it when other people do it, so I’m trying to set that example in the alternative media.”
Can the global takeover be derailed?
Corbett is also featured with Dr. Meryl Nass once a month on “Good Morning CHD,” an online news show by Children’s Health Defense.
“It’s a valuable way, for both of us, to continue keeping our eye on the ball of the WHO [World Health Organization] and its latest machinations … of the global pandemic treaty and the International Health Regulations [IHR] amendments that they’re working on right now, which really could be the hardwiring of the biosurveillance infrastructure,” Corbett says.
When asked whether he believes the pandemic treaty and/or the IHR amendments can be stopped, Corbett replies:
“Well, they are planning on unleashing the global pandemic treaty on the world at the World Health Assembly next year, May of 2024. And preparatory to that, they’re going to be holding a World Health Assembly this month, at which they’ll be talking about the draft of the treaty and the draft of the IHR amendments and other such developments.
“So, we’re looking at about a one-year timeline before whatever it is they’re cooking up will be foisted upon the world, unless there is some dramatic movement to stop that.
“In the short run, it seems unlikely that the incredible institutional momentum is going to be derailed, but having said that, we could look at things that have happened in the past that have completely derailed agendas that seemed inevitable, including the 2009 edition of the UNFCCC, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
“In 2009, the UNFCCC was being promoted and hyped — even by the then-president of the EU [European Union] — as the potential for world government through a new climate accord that would completely rewrite the international rule books.
“That was completely derailed by a couple of interesting incidents, one of which was Climategate … Squabbles between some of the developing nations versus the developed world … [also] helped to derail that 2009 conference.
“There’s potentially a similar thing happening [now] with the WHO trying to foist regulations and restrictions on developing countries that can’t afford them. As we saw over the course of the past few years, it was the African countries that held out against the biosecurity state agenda, to a large degree.
“And I think people who are interested in invoking a global biosecurity surveillance net probably are most concerned about how developing countries will or will not participate in this.
“So, there may be a similar sort of geo-economic squabbling or something else that might derail this, so I don’t think we should simply consign ourselves to the inevitability of it before it happens.”
Is Elon Musk controlled opposition?
Determining the trustworthiness of people within the alternative news space is a challenge everyone is faced with these days. Accusations of people being controlled opposition are common. The same goes for high-profile individuals in general.
For example, some people, including Corbett and investigative journalist Whitney Webb, believe Elon Musk is likely controlled opposition. What led them to that conclusion?
“It’s a question that a lot of people have, so let’s dig into it,” Corbett says. On the one side, you have people who believe Musk is exposing and undermining the military-industrial intelligence complex.
On the other are those who think he’s just playing a “good guy” role while surreptitiously furthering Deep State goals. As noted by Corbett, it’s hard to overlook the massive support Musk has received from the military-industrial intelligence complex over the course of his career.
Corbett says:
“We don’t have to speculate about that … That is a matter of public record.
“We can point to the half a billion dollars or so that the Department of Defense has awarded SpaceX in a series of contracts over the past few years to send satellites up into orbit of classified nature on unregistered, unreported missions that presumably have something to do with the Department of Defense’s declared intention to make space into a war-fighting domain.
“There’s the $3 billion in NASA contracts that SpaceX was awarded in 2021 to develop the human lander for the Artemis Mission, and the never-going-to-happen constantly delayed moon trip that the public is being promised. There’s the $750 million that was awarded to Solar City in 2016 by the state of New York to build a solar cell production facility.
“This, again, is another aspect of the business opportunities that Musk is involved in that I think shrieks of grift — a boondoggle at the very least, constantly promising a technology that not only doesn’t deliver but actually is actively harmful to the environment. I think that’s something that needs to be stressed.
“Then, there’s the $1.3 billion that Tesla got from the State of Nevada in 2014 to build the Gigafactory, etc., etc., etc. We could go through the list of such help, but perhaps more to the point was the fact that before Elon Musk got to launch SpaceX, he was part of a trip to Russia … to purchase old Soviet ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles]. That trip ultimately resulted in the starting of SpaceX.
“Who was accompanying Elon Musk on that trip? Someone named Mike Griffin, who just happened to be the chief operating officer of In-Q-Tel, which is the CIA’s investment capital arm …
“Griffin went on to become the administrator of NASA, who then chose SpaceX as the one company out of the 20 that was applying for it at the time, for this $400 million contract to start development of the new ISS resupply rocket in 2005, which basically launched SpaceX … and again awarded SpaceX $3.5 Billion in 2008 with a contract that Musk himself credits with saving the company.
“So, there you go, the literal deep state connections couldn’t get much clearer. At every stage of Musk’s business career, he has been saved as need be with the deus ex machina of deep state agents like Mike Griffin swooping in with billions of dollars of contracts at just the right time.”
That’s why Musk’s Twitter takeover and the release of the “Twitter Files” may seem to be a move against the military-industrial complex, but given Musk’s documentable ties to that very same military-industrial complex, we must be wary of placing faith in these developments.
After all, Twitter is a centralized platform that lends itself to censorship, algorithmic manipulation and information suppression, and Musk has openly stated that he wants to create a “WeChat”-like app capable of handling every aspect of its users’ digital life.
Why did Musk release the ‘Twitter Files’?
Corbett suggests that the best way to evaluate Musk’s ideas and contributions is to assess their outcomes.
Corbett says:
“Is what Elon Musk advocating good or bad? Do we agree with it or do we disagree with it? Is it right or wrong? And why do we think so? That has to be the heart that we keep coming back to. So, we have to evaluate Musk’s ideas on that basis.
“For example, there are ideas that Musk promotes that I am 100% onboard with. He has talked about the overpopulation myth and the under-population crisis that humanity is facing. I very much agree with him on that assessment. When he talks about the ill effects of lockdowns … absolutely, I think he’s right about that.
“However, when he talks about the imposition of a carbon tax in line with Bill Gates and Mark Carney and the like, I think he’s pushing a bad idea that is part of a plan for centralization of control in globalist hands.
“When he gets on the stage of the World Government Summit and argues for universal basic income, again in line with any number of globalist operatives, I think he is promoting an idea that will be used for centralization of economic control in fewer hands.
“When he talks about the … Neuralink brain chip … [he’s] exactly in line with what [World Economic Forum founder] Klaus Schwab has been arguing … I think that is a bad idea that is going to be used for control of the masses by a technocratic elite.”
As for Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and subsequent release of the “Twitter Files,” Corbett doesn’t think it’s a great surprise to find that the military-industrial intelligence complex has been using it to monitor and manipulate people.
He believes Musk’s job may well be to make the platform trustworthy again so that government agencies can continue using it for surveillance and control.
There’s other evidence pointing in this direction as well. Musk has said he wants Twitter to become the WeChat app of America. And what is WeChat? It’s a Chinese government-controlled app that monitors every aspect citizens’ lives, including their financial transactions, social transactions, communications, whereabouts and more.
It’s basically the foundation for the communist social credit system. So, while Musk claims to be a defender of free speech, he’s also talking about turning Twitter into THE central hub for the technocratic surveillance and control network.
Stop looking for a savior
As noted by Corbett, what we need to do is “take responsibility for our own lives rather than looking for saviors like Elon Musk to swoop in and save the day.” We can’t lay that burden on any given individual or group of individuals. We must all do our part.
Corbett says:
“I think the conversation can get stuck on stupid because even though I tend to believe that Musk is some form of collaborator with the deep state that he pretends to oppose, I don’t have proof of that and I do not know that for a fact, in the same way that his defenders do not know for a fact that he is not part of that controlled opposition.
“We can spend all our time and energy talking about this person and what we think their part is in all of this, or we could spend that time productively engaged in research, actually verifying, triangulating information, discerning what is true and what is not true.
“When we take information down to that level, then it does not matter who is the person out there conveying that information to us. The important part is the information.”
It’s also important to understand that “divide and conquer” is the primary way the control network maintains control, and all that’s needed to divide a previously unified front is insinuation and the seeding of doubt.
In the short term, the globalist takeover seems to have an unstoppable momentum behind it, but seemingly inevitable moves toward tyranny have been derailed at the last minute in the past and we must not give up hope or stop resisting.
As explained by Corbett:
“The term cognitive infiltration goes back to Cass Sunstein, the person who became Obama’s information czar … He co-wrote a paper about cognitive infiltration in which he openly stated:
“‘The government maybe should send people into conspiracy spaces, conspiracy groups, with cognitive infiltrators who will go in there and conceal their identity as being affiliated with the government, but will try to insert facts that will break the narrative of the conspiracy theorists.’
“And what was the result of that paper? Rather than anyone having been exposed as being that cognitive infiltrator on the payroll of the U.S. government, what it effectively did was give people ammunition to speculate endlessly.
“‘This person is a cognitive infiltrator, that person is a cognitive infiltrator,’ to the point where, ultimately, I think Sunstein wins without even necessarily having to implement that system at all, because … the group fractures once the idea of pointing fingers at everyone becomes the norm …
“That is, in fact, precisely how the FBI’s COINTELPRO program worked back in the 1950s and ’60s … One of the tactics they used was to put people into meetings in various spaces, the Black Panthers and others, in order to start spreading rumors and calling other people government agents.
“The government agents were generally the ones that we’re calling other people government agents in order to disrupt the groups, so I think we have to keep that in mind and keep our eye on the real prize here, which is discerning fact from fiction, truth from falsity, productive ways forward from unproductive ways forward.”
ChatGPT and the future of propaganda
I’ve often marveled at the effectiveness of modern propaganda. Part of what makes it so effective is the availability of technology, from social media and search engines to large language model AI.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT has taken the world by storm and companies across a range of industries are already talking about replacing large numbers of white-collar workers with AI.
This, even though there are serious problems with this technology. For example, we’re finding chatbots have a tendency to lie and fantasize. Researchers are calling these instances “hallucinations.”
Basically, AI is concocting a fantasy based on the information available and reciting it as fact. And that’s in addition to the bias that can be built in by programmers. So, while it’s an incredibly exciting technology, we cannot be naïve about its risks.
One obvious risk is that state-endorsed propaganda can become the only information available to people, as this technology starts monopolizing online searches and virtual assistants.
There won’t be a multitude of answers anymore. There will only be one, and he who controls the AI will have the power to control the beliefs of the entire world. Of course, yet another risk is that no one will be able to control it and the AI will control itself. I don’t know which might be worse.
Corbett comments:
“You introduced this topic with the concept of propaganda and potential uses of large language models for propagandistic purposes. We should go back to the man who wrote the book on propaganda called ‘Propaganda,’ Edward Bernays, who [said]:
“‘The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country.’
“That was Edward Bernays in 1928. His words are as true today as they were then, perhaps even more so. And the true ruling power of the country, of the world at this point perhaps, are those who can most effectively, consciously and intelligently manipulate the organized habits and opinions of the masses.
“And I don’t think enough people have really stopped to cogitate on the fact that these large language models already starting to produce material that really cannot be distinguished from human-written material …
“You don’t have to be a crystal ball prognosticator to see how this will extend out in the foreseeable future … [to] the point where you can have entire conversations, entire fields of interest and study that will be completely populated by artificial-created conversation …
“A large language model that is able to accurately and without much prompting be able to populate botnets to flood social media and other places will essentially be able to dominate that conversation, [and] will consciously and intelligently manipulate the habits and opinions of the masses. At that point, you are talking about the ultimate weapon.
“The ultimate weapon is narrative, because with a convincing-enough narrative, you can get entire populations motivated to war or to anything else that you seek to get them to do, like say lock down the entire productive global economy on the back of a scare that was absolutely not warranted.
“So, I think once we start getting these completely synthetically-generated narratives, that will start creating these entire events that are not happening in the real world. [These events] will be deep-faked through video and audio and everything else, to convince you of an entire reality that doesn’t exist.
“We are really moving into some truly world historical changing times and I don’t know if enough people are really cognizant of … how this technology could be used for good or for ill …
“I think there is a real threat, and it is probably underappreciated by a large section of the public that are not keeping abreast of the daily torrent of information on this subject …
“Some of the testing notes for ChatGPT-4 that were released showed there was a team that was tasking the chatbot with a certain task that would require it to do things that it was not programmed to do, or even authorized to do, including solving a CAPTCHA …
“[The chatbot] actually went on Fiverr or one of those types of platforms and recruited a human being to do it for it, to the point where the human said, ‘Why are you recruiting me to do a CAPTCHA? How do I know you’re not a bot? Ha-ha-ha.’
“To which it responded, ‘I’m blind, I’m visually impaired, I can’t do it myself.’ Ultimately, it ended up getting that CAPTCHA solved.
“It does not take a great degree of imagination to see where that can go. I don’t know what kind of safeguards you can program into a technology like that, other than to completely keep it firewalled off from the internet and from any other computer system that it may be able to commandeer.”
Solutions watch
On his website, Corbett has a section called The Solutions Watch, where he proposes action steps that you can take to address a given problem, both big and small. For example, on a smaller scale, he’s discussed the importance of filtering your water and testing your water to ensure it’s being filtered properly.
Corbett says:
“One thing that I think is sort of the foundation upon which we will have to build any thoroughgoing answer to the problems we’re facing is creating conscious community with others.
“Of course, that can take the form of online and virtual community. I’m not going to pooh-pooh or disdain that. I think it is important to know like-minded people online. But increasingly, how can we trust what we are reading, seeing or interacting with online?
“I think the real point is to try to build real community with real people in the real world. That could take the form of intentional communities that are created from the ground up as a physical location that people will relocate to … but I think it is extremely difficult to do that.
“But at the very least, people can and should be finding like-minded people within their geographical proximity that they can meet up with, who will be there in emergencies, hopefully. But also that they can start forming small groups, that they can start teaching each other about various things that they may know and bringing solutions to the table.
“I think that can be the core basis upon which we start erecting other things, because one thing that I’ve looked at over the years are some of these big, huge issues that seem utterly overwhelming and completely impenetrable to the average person, like the fundamental fraud that underlies the economy itself is the monetary system, which for people who haven’t looked into it, the money supply itself is very much controlled, and the creation of money is a tool that is used for enslavement.
“It could be used for human flourishing, but is not in our current economy. How do we possibly combat a problem as thoroughgoing as that? [Many people] I encounter online have ideas about the perfect alternative currency … but [they] haven’t convinced anyone to use it. To me, that speaks to the fundamental problem.”
Build community and get out of metropolitan areas
At the top of Corbett’s solutions list is building parallel communities. That’s really a foundational strategy because without it, many other solutions can’t work. To that, I would add the recommendation to move out of crime-ridden urban and metropolitan areas and into areas where this kind of community-building is more likely to succeed.
As noted by Corbett:
“Until you have a community of people who are going to be working together on projects like an alternative or supplemental currency system, how are you going to launch something like that in a thoroughgoing manner?
“I think the core of the solutions that we’re looking for lies with community, meeting like-minded people … I’m not into this Pollyanna thinking that it’s all going to be easy.
“It’s an incredibly, incredibly difficult task to start creating an alternate currency, an alternate power grid and the alternate society that we need to protect ourselves, to buffer ourselves from this encroaching biosecurity, technocratic enslavement grid.
“That’s a pretty tall order, and I can’t offer any assurances that it’s going to turn out all right. But I do know that if we just lay down and continue on the course that we’re on, we are hurtling towards a brick wall of extinction, essentially.
“I really see this as a fundamental existential question that we are facing not just on the artificial intelligence front, but also on the genomic manipulation front, on the manipulation of the food supply.
“If you are what you eat, then what does it mean that they’re going to start feeding us insects and other such unpalatable items?
“It is absolutely a war that is taking place on every front, all at once, and we’re not going to get through this by ourselves. Unless you are the type of person that can go out in the woods and live by yourself for decades …
“I don’t think you’re going to escape this all by yourself, so I think creating community is sort of the core of all solutions.”