Welcome. Welcome. I’m Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. And as usual, we’ve got to cover some important ground of what you need to know. Today’s edition has to do with the information we’re learning. And it’s not good. Really. It’s not good. It’s a little worrying. But we will talk about that in a moment.
And we will also have two great interviews, two interesting interviews. One is Michael Volpe, who is an investigative journalist. He’s really more of an investigative like a researcher who happened to realize a few years ago that what he was investigating, mostly about the family courts and about how difficult people had it in the family courts. He decided to start writing about it. So he’s now a cross between a journalist and investigator, kind of a researcher and a very good guy. Michael Volpe, we’ll talk with him, and then John Schlafly will give us an update. John Schlafly’s column this week. The Schlafly Report is about the rot in Washington, DC, in the swamp. Okay.
Two bits of information will shape what you need to know today. Okay.
First, it has been reported widely that the Biden White House met with a number of popular Tiktokers, popular personalities on TikTok, mostly very young, and they met with him to talk about Ukraine. And they wanted to give them the messaging and specifically actually about how the rise in gas prices was not Joe Biden’s fault, but was Putin’s fault because of the war. And they met with these folks in the White House, it was reported, a few days ago. And then the TikTokers duly went off and they went and they did their thing. And as I said in an interview today, some of the Tiktokers, they’re so young, it’s crazy that they’re of age, but I guess they are. But they look if it were a different area, you would say they look like hookers, they look like women of leisure, as we say. They dress scantily, and they look, to me in my mind, fairly terrifying and exploitative that they’re doing this on video, but they’re talking about Putin and gas prices. Why? Because the narrative machine, big government is coaching them on it. And big tech, which is social media like TikTok, is happy to play along. And big media is reporting what is said.
So you say to yourself, wow, the narrative machine, big tech, big media, big government working together to push a narrative.
Is it really true? Is it really true?
At the same time news came out, reports came out, I think, from one of the transparency requests through the Freedom of Information Act or others that it was close to a billion dollars. That’s billion with a B spent over the COVID by the government, COVID period, the pandemic period spent by the government with the media, television, cable television, I think probably radio also to purchase ads to put their viewpoint out. Now, at this point, we know that at least the people who were in government were lost or worse, right? At the best, they were lost, confused, didn’t know what for sure what was happening. At worst, they were misleading us.
It’s one of the two.
Again, if you prefer to be generous, you say, well, they were doing the best they could. They just didn’t know what they were doing. They lied about masks. They told the truth about masks. They lied about this. They lied about that.
If you’re cynical and you see the worst in this and you see it a lot, you say they were just lying and they were lying to the advantage of big Pharma. They were lying to the advantage of more power for government. All those directions, it’s pretty clear.
But we know that the federal government paid at least a billion, probably many hundreds of millions more than that for advertisements. So the government’s paying big government’s paying for ads, big government’s bringing in TikTokers to persuade them. Big media, big tech playing along. What is it that’s true, right?
At this point, all of the forces of the establishment in Washington, of the media on all sides and of big tech is that there’s only one set of people who are on the right side in this thing, and that’s the Ukrainians, they’re the freedom fighters and everything else in Russia’s side is wrong.
NATO is right. Soros is right. Ukraine is right and Russia is wrong.
Now, let me be clear. I don’t know if Russia is right. I don’t really know. I just don’t know what’s true. And at a certain point, you start to say the fingerprints on the information that is being fed to us look and feel more and more like pros, like the professionals, like the intelligence community that is feeding us a message that is to the advantage of what they want to have happen.
Now close your eyes for a second and go back in time, right? Go back in time to World War II and say to yourself what was happening when the great American heroes and British heroes and some Belgian and Germans excuse me, not Germans. Belgians and French were part of the Jedburghs, the earliest special ops, the earliest special service OSS, they were dropping in behind enemy lines in France. And part of what they were doing in a rudimentary way was propaganda that they could win, that the French underground could organize and win. And what I mean, propaganda, they just talked about how they could do it and they did it. If you talk about how you can do it and what you can do, you can do it. And they did. Many were executed because they were caught, but many more lead and resistance and made clear and made it difficult for the Germans as they tried to advance across France and prepare to go into England.
So if you can go back to a time and it’s easier for all of us to sort of sentimentalize and think of World War II. Well, we were all on the side of the good guys, right? In history. Now, there’s no doubt of the good guys. It’s the good guys is us. The bad guys was Germany. The good guys at that time were US and Russia and France and England. And the bad guys were Germany and Japan, and they were really bad. Germany was gassing millions of Jewish people. Right now that it’s history, there’s no doubt about it. But at the time, what would you have done to try to make people understand what was happening or more importantly, make people stay motivated to fight in the direction you needed them? Would you have lied? Would you have misled? Would you have used propaganda? That’s kind of what the question is, right? That’s kind of what you hear from the military types.
They say, well, you may not like it, but when it’s a time of war, you got to stop what’s happening. And therefore, you got to take the corruption in the Ukraine or Zelensky. I think Zelensky was listed among the Panama Papers, which was a leak that showed how many leaders in the world were hiding money overseas in bank accounts and all that. Be that as it may, back to my point, if you could galvanize forces, galvanize communities, galvanize citizens, galvanize the world to fight against what at the time felt like the overwhelming strength of the Germans in World War II. You did it.
And so I think the justification of what you’re seeing in the Ukraine situation is similar to that. The question is, do we have the same situation? Do we have the same parties? And at this point, we really don’t know. I really don’t know. I don’t know who to trust. Part of me says Zelensky is a Western Liberal appointed by, managed by, supported by the EU and the left. He’s Liberal on all the issues that I think are making hollowing out the parts of the European and parts of Europe and the west. On the other hand, he’s fighting for his country. And the Russians came into his land. They invaded. Putin, albeit a dictator or albeit whatever you call it, a democracy with lots of questions about how their democracy works. Christian, anti some of the far left woke stuff. It’s not simple, but more importantly, we just don’t know.
And I feel like now, after Russia, Russia, Russia, after the hoaxes, the two impeachment hoaxes, after the January 6 hoax, what we’ve seen the media do, I feel like we can’t trust them so much that everything’s in doubt. And the question becomes, just to go back, I’ll go all the way back.
What you need to know, go back to what you need to know. The data points. If the government’s paying a billion dollars to tell the American people what’s the truth of Covid, do you believe them? And do you believe that the news organizations that accepted a billion dollars in ads could really stay independent? Do you, really?
And if the White House will bring in TikTokers and the Tiktokers will go out and they will persuade people that the problem with gas prices is the war in the Ukraine and Putin and the White House did that, do you trust the message?
What message do you trust?
How do you do it? What you need to know is we’re in a very strange time and back to my final point. The narrative machine, big tech, big media, big government is so strong now. It’s not just guessing. They’re not guessing what works. They’re using neuroscience and they’re using real time analysis to persuade people what the truth is. And I don’t know if we know what the truth is. That’s what you need to know.
Let’s take a break. We’ll be back. We got a lot more. Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report back in a moment.
#NarrativeMachine
