Patrick Henningsen - Misinformation, BBC Truth Checkers and how the Media are Stoking up the Ukraine Conflict
Mainstream Media is now the biggest source of misinformation. We have witnessed three years of controlled cooperation by the worlds media to convince and coerce us into accepting a Covid narrative that all seems to of been a lie.
Patrick Henningsen joins Hearts of Oak to share his nearly two decades of experience as a journalist to lift the lid on this media machine of manipulation.
Why has this level of deceit been accepted and tolerated and for what purpose?
How is the BBC now the governments gatekeeper of truth for the UK?
And why are the media determined to escalate the Ukraine conflict into what is dangerously approaching a full on European War?
Join us this episode as Patrick unpacks all of these questions and shows us why the alternative media is needed now more than ever before.
Patrick Henningsen has helped to inform and educate audiences internationally on some of the most important geopolitical and cultural issues facing the world today. As an effective independent voice and outspoken media critic, he has consistently challenged the mainstream line on western military adventurism and deep state geopolitics, as well as being an vocal advocate for freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Patrick has done extensive on-the-ground reporting and research in the US, Europe and the Middle East including work in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Iran. As an independent analyst he's known for his candid commentary and timely predictions on breaking trends and events in global affairs, and as a public speaker he's been recognized for his dynamic but down-to-earth presentation style and media workshops. He is also the founder and managing editor of the successful independent news and media analysis website 21st Century Wire.com and host of popular weekly SUNDAY WIRE radio show which broadcasts live weekly on the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR), and host of the Patrick Henningsen Show on TNT Radio International, as well as co-host of the UK Column News. Back in November 2016, he also a weekly show 'Patrick Henningsen LIVE' on terrestrial AM radio with Independent Talk 1100 KFNX broadcasting to one of America's top talk radio markets in Greater Phoenix. He has also appeared in a number of international publications including Consortium News, Ron Paul Institute, The Guardian, Global Research, New Dawn Magazine (Australia), and on a number of major global news networks including RT News International, Al Jazeera, ITN (UK), CGTN (China), Indus News (PK), Edge Media (SKY 200 UK) and US syndicated radio show Coast to Coast AM.
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Interview recorded 25.5.23
*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.
Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and Twitter https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20
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Transcript(Hearts of Oak)
Hello, Hearts of Oak, and welcome to another interview. Come up in a moment with Patrick Henningsen, 21st Century Wire, TNT Radio, UK column.
For nearly 20 years, Patrick has brought his journalistic insider analysis into a range of issues.
And he joins us to talk about his starting 21st Century Wire back in 2009, and how we are seeing a change in censorship and media.
And has that been over the last three years? Have we seen off the edge a cliff edge or has it been over a period of time? So we discussed that. Then we go on to the BBC. The BBC, the arbitrators of truth, they tell us what to think and they've just launched the Verify team. 60 journalists who will tell us what is right and what is not. The BBC obviously being an arm of the state, bringing us state news. Should we be concerned about this and what that means?
And then we move on to what's happening in Ukraine and Russia, the war there and the media desiring more and more conflict, more and more aggression, completely different from 2003, the big demonstrations against the war in Iraq where the media were opposed to war. Now they seem to be marching step by step into more war and aggression. Then we end up talking about politics.
Robert Kennedy Jr. standing for the presidential candidacy of the Democratic Party in America, very vocal against the war. What does that mean for the whole debate and will that change the narrative? Lots to discuss. I know you love listening and watching and hearing from Patrick from UK Column and more recently on TNT Radio and I know you'll love our conversation.
And hello Hearts of Oak. Today is wonderful to have a writer, a credited journalist, Global Affairs Analyst and Co-Founder and Executive Editor of 21st Century Wire, and that is Patrick Henningsen. Patrick, thank you for your time today.
(Patrick Henningsen)
Great to be with you, Peter. My pleasure.
Good to have you. And of course, you can catch Patrick. It's at 21wire, there is his Twitter handle, 21stCenturyWire.com is the website. You can catch him on the Sunday Wire every Sunday, five to eight UK time, which is probably around midday eastern time, and TNT radio every weekday from five o'clock to seven o'clock. And if you want to see him you can see him on UK column where he is regularly. So I think those are the main places to find you, are they Patrick?
That's right. I've also started a new Twitter space forum series every Wednesday. We usually do big picture geopolitical debates with special invitees for panel speakers.
It would be great to have you on that space at some point as well, Peter.
Yeah, definitely. I haven't got into Twitter spaces yet, but that's a whole new area.
A lot to discuss and possibly, I know Patrick, you launched 21st Century Wire back 2009.
Maybe just want to start with that. What led you to starting that organization?
Well, it was really out of necessity, Peter. So like I sort of took the vow of poverty in 2005 and decided I was going to make myself into a useful member of society by becoming a journalist and learning how to write. So I was hustling and doing three or four jobs and then blogging. But I was always blogging on other platforms and that's blogging was sort of coming into its own around 2004, 2005, 2006. So I was kind of jumping on that wave on some other big websites and then submitting articles. I was very lucky to be, you know, invited to a couple of conferences. One on It's the Climate Sceptics Conference in 2007 in New York.
Where I met a lot of the top sceptics.
I was very interested in that climate change issue and finding out what the real truth was at that time.
Plus the anti-war activism, which I was very involved in in 2003, four, five, and six.
That was also informing my writing.
And I just got tired of having to submit pieces to different editors, and I thought, at some point, I gotta start my own blog. So I just launched a WordPress site, and I had some help with that, obviously, at the time.
Because I'm a good tech person, but there's some things I just have a blind spot with.
One of them is HTML coding, which now I understand all these years later, and now you don't need it anymore. So there you go.
So then when the Copenhagen Climate Summit was coming, I knew this was going to be a major event in Copenhagen, COP 21.
And so I booked my ticket. I hired a cameraman to come with me, and then was able to sell some of my reporting to some big alternative media outlets at the time, like InfoWars was one of them, and then be able to actually be there on the ground doing journalism at a big event.
And it turned out to be amazing because the whole thing collapsed at the end, because it was exposed to be a complete fraud, and the developing world countries realized they were getting taken to the cleaners by the G7 lords of the galaxy.
And then that's when I launched 21st Century Wire. It was for that event.
I wanted to make sure I had an outlet to publish in real time because I wouldn't be able to depend on another outlet.
So it all kind of converged in late 2009.
And I still wrote for other sites and published in other really good websites.
I even got published in the Guardian back when they were still allowing some journalism.
Amazing actually because they had turned around and did a hit piece on me a couple years ago for our exposing the truth about what was happening in Syria.
But they were upset obviously by that as are most of the mainstream media anytime anybody in the alternative media exposes anything or exposes the truth and it undermines the official state narrative.
There's this reflexive reaction that they have to go and attack you.
And this is what the Huffington Post, UK does routinely.
The Times are pretty guilty of this. Local papers do it as well.
Owned by Reach, you know, all these sort of conglomerates that own the entire of the local press in the UK.
And also NPR, BBC, I don't know, pretty much everybody's had a crack at us and the colleagues that I work with.
But the main thing, Peter, is that I just decided that I wanted to own my own website and have my own media and not depend on somebody else.
And we've developed it into a good independent media platform, I think, and we've done some great journalism.
Our journalists have been recognized with awards and nominations for major awards for the work they've done on our site.
We've had stuff republished. We've been linked in mainstream media.
Some of our journalists also featured in mainstream media, serious programs as well, a few of them overseas in Europe, in the US.
So I think overall, we've done a good job with very little in terms of resources, just a lot of sweat and a lot of hard work and
a lot of late nights and reinvesting back into 21st century wire.
It's tough with the ad-pocalypse, with being delisted for organic searches on Google, which happened in 2017 after Trump was elected.
Us and a few hundred other major alternative websites got basically bumped from Google in terms of organic searches.
We were dominating before that. That drove our ad revenue, which was the main business model.
That was really tough. It took many years to get back to breaking even after that.
And then also kicked off of YouTube periodically, not allowed to monetize anything there.
Kicked off of Twitter, let back recently because of the Elon, the merciful, the new monarch in charge in San Francisco.
And thank you to Elon Musk, of course, eternal thanks for letting me and others back this past December, but much to the chagrin of the mainstream hatchet people.
But that's that. Yeah. And I've been on the ground covering wars in Syria.
I've been covering the defeat of ISIS in Iraq in 2017 and also throughout the Middle East as well, doing journalism there for a number of years and working for a number of outlets, just providing live commentary.
I did quite a lot of live segments for RT International from the Libyan conflict. I did that remotely.
I wasn't on the ground in Libya, but I did commentary and analysis to 200 or 300 live segments for RT, and I wasn't paid for those television segments.
So, and I did that because I didn't want to be accused of being a Russian agent, but they accused me anyway, so I should have just done whatever the other journalists did and like, you know, get paid for that.
I would have been able to buy a Range Rover if I did, but I didn't, I was too, too, too much of a, um.
Trying to retain my independence, even though it wasn't necessary, just because of the anti-Russian rhetoric and all the sort of drive-by attacks in the media that were going on, and politically as well.
And it's a serious thing in America, that since Trump got elected, that the whole Russian narrative, Russia-gate, Russian collusion, Russian disinformation, Russian stooge, Russian propaganda, it's just endless in America.
It's like the ultimate scapegoat that keeps giving in America. They can blame everything on Russia or some foreign actor rather than the corruption that's actually happening inside the US and Washington. And I dare say probably the same thing is happening in the UK as well and in EU.
Now we'll certainly get on to the war side, the Russia side, but actually as someone who's new to media, we find ourselves doing this just as lockdown hit. And I've seen a big change in the last three years, an increase in censorship, accepted new-speak, collaboration between media, big tech and governments, but, For you, as someone who's been a journalist for a decade prior to the chaos of the last three years, has that change been a cliff edge or has it been more gradual and hidden?
Oh, it's been an absolute cliff edge, but the conditions that led to that cliff edge and this total collapse in any sort of morals, ethics, anything that was remaining in the mainstream media, or any independence that the media had away from government, that completely was eviscerated with COVID and lockdown. But it's important to understand, this is a good question you've raised, Peter, because the framework for that, for the absolute Orwellian onslaught of COVID, lockdown, and attacking anti-vaxxers and all this stuff.
The framework for that was built on the back of the Russian disinformation hoax.
Okay, and all of the collusion with big tech and government on both sides of the Atlantic and in Brussels was really built on the back of that idea that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections. Ergo, you know, our social media platforms were then deemed to be a critical infrastructure, critical election infrastructure by the US agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and all these sub departments that they erected on the back of the Mueller report and all these sort of failed investigations the funding was just still flowing and then you had this backdoor into Twitter Google YouTube LinkedIn Facebook where government agencies have direct control can even read your DMs and Twitter Okay, that was exposed in the Twitter files as well as many other incredible violations of the First Amendment. Same thing happening in Britain, probably, although we don't have all the details for it. It would be great if there was a major inquiry or something like that on this, so certainly the public would, I think, benefit from that.
In a democracy, in Brussels too. So there's this direct, complete fusion of government, big tech to censor and to de-platform. And then also the mainstream media plays an important role in this as well because they act as the attack dog to offer additional intimidation to the big tech firms. In other words, there's a designated person at every mainstream media outlet that would call the heads of big tech and say, how can you allow this, this far right or rhetoric or these, these accounts, these anti-vaxxer accounts on your platform?
Aren't you realizing the harm that's being done here? And are you going, what are you going to do about it? We're going to run a story on Monday. Can we get a comment? Are, you going to allow those, those accounts on your platform? And of course, what does big tech do every time they cave in and they'll go and, you know, delete these accounts, shadow ban them, delete the tweets, delete the posts.
And so this was all, again, exposed in the Twitter files. And so the mainstream media is rolling this as a sort of side-line agitator to make sure this process of censorship is efficient.
So they act as a kind of incendiary element in this collusion here.
So this is completely Orwellian.
And again, the framework of this was exposed during the whole, the Russia scare, the initial, the integrity initiative leaks in the UK are a good example of that.
You could see the lists of journalists that were being briefed by government agencies in the UK and Europe, and then creating fake stories, and then planting stories, and all of this sort of thing.
It's really about narrative control, and it's definitely a top-down system.
There's invisible components to this that the public can't see.
In the UK, you have D notices as well. These are off limits topics the mainstream media won't touch.
Plus you have Ofcom as a sort of speech regulator.
They say their media regulator their press regulator, but really they're becoming or they want to become a full speech regulator of the Internet, so I mean this is really historic in that sense people need to kind of really realize the gravity of this, did the digital world with all of its benefits
to us the public to get more information to get the truth is also being used by the state and its corporate, adjuncts for systematic censorship, so it's a it's a two-sided coin and which way this this equation leans is gonna really be up to us and I always tell people, you know if you have free speech and you have a voice use it, use it because the minute you start, controlling your own thoughts and things like that. That's when you know, we become a self-policing, non free speech society at that point.
Before we get on to BBC, and you mentioned some of those restrictions, and of course we've had the online safety bill coming in in the UK, we've got the EU proposing a very similar one, we've seen what's happened in Ireland with their new restrictions on saying anything which is outside the government narrative.
To me, that's the most concerning development of the clampdown, and it's, I guess, progression from YouTube making its own rules now to the government agreeing to those rules.
Yeah, so what they've done is they've introduced various new concepts.
One of them is harms.
Harmful.
Offensive. So, no longer what is criminal in terms of, you know, a violation of the law.
Elon Musk made this point really well. He said, you know, any speech on Twitter that is in violation of the law or in terms of a court order can be shown to be actually putting someone in danger. We're talking about death threats. Uh, we're talking about, uh, doxing, sensitive, uh, personal material for somebody who's at risk, et cetera. Child grooming and all these sort sort of legal activities going on, that obviously should be prohibited and policed and would be in the terms and conditions of any of these companies, reasonable terms and conditions.
What the government wants to do is extend the terms and conditions in order to make the companies liable.
And if the government believes that there's harmful speech online, they will fine that company and into oblivion with millions of into percentage of turnover not just like profit but percentage of turnover like ridiculous fines and the reason they're doing that is they want to, they want these social media companies to come back in line with this self-policing like Twitter used to be but maybe even without the government interference but getting them to build up these huge moderation boiler rooms and using AI to regulate speech so it's all based on this online harm.
So much of this insidious legislation will use the issue of harm to children.
And no one's downplaying the fact that's a serious issue.
However, there's many, many laws in the books. Police have whole departments.
They have a great investigative pedigree to look into such cases and then enforce the law in all countries.
Most developed countries have those legal facilities.
And so, you know, it's already there. The checks and balances are already there.
What they want to do, obviously, with the vague arbitrary terms like harms and offensive and potentially dangerous, they want to extend this kind of definition to where it's completely flexible where you can just use a word and it can have multiple interpretations, a bit like the way anti-Semitism has been weaponized in the British political system, where they've used it to remove the Labour leader, the former Labour leader, plus former Labour MPs like Jeremy Corbyn, Chris Williamson, and removing Conservative MPs as well as they did with Andrew Bridgen. So then it becomes a meaningless term at that point and it's just bandied about to, you know, as a kind of political weapon and if it's not that word it'll be another word.
It'll be, you know, the term far-right. In America they're using white supremacy very loosely.
The press and the political machine, the Democrat political machine, the Biden White House using that term, it doesn't mean anything. It's like I was born and raised in America. I've never really met a white supremacist my whole life and I've moved all around the country. And so, yeah, they just want to demonize anything that's basically right of Karl Marx.
That's basically where we're heading.
And I think it's the, what, Candice Owens and the Hodge twins, they're probably white supremacy now as well, according to their definitions.
Oh, you can be black and be a white supremacist now. I mean, Larry Elder, who ran for governor in California, he got called a white supremacist. He's obviously an African-American.
So, Candace Owens has been called a white supremacist. So, you got all these African American pundits that are white supremacists.
So, it just shows how ridiculous it is, but just because it's ridiculous doesn't mean they're going to give up.
This machine is really relentless.
You know, they'll retool and they reconfigure. The propaganda that we are marinated in right now, is just so thick and vast, like never before.
And people will say things that do not adhere to the truth. The biggest source of quote, disinformation, 110%, and actually throughout history, is two sources, mainstream media and government.
The lies, mistruths, propaganda, all these things that the BBC use.
They don't use, the BBC doesn't like to use the word propaganda, if you notice.
They like disinformation, they like misinformation.
The new one's mistruths.
This is a new word invented by the BBC. They don't use the word propaganda very much, obviously, because as soon as they start saying that, then the camera gets pointed on them at that point.
So it's interesting how these new words are very convenient.
They've been invented and introduced in order to, and for the moment, they're fashionable, but they'll eventually become redundant and people will laugh at them.
Many already are laughing at these words like misinformation, mal-information.
It's either true or it's false. It's either a lie.
It's either propaganda or it's accurate.
And if you don't like accurate facts and you're calling those Russian propaganda, I got called a Russian...
I said, I was talking about the issue in Ukraine, maybe we'll talk about that later, but...
And I would say, someone said to me on a panel discussion from another country, I forgot what country he's from, he said, oh, that's the Russian narrative.
I'm like, no, it's not. I'm reading off of the UN charter and I'm reading international law and that's not the Russian narrative. But that's the environment we're in right now.
It's hyper-politicized on so many different domestic and international levels.
And the mainstream media are the worst, the worst, by far the worst offender.
And when they get it wrong, wars start.
When they get it wrong, accidental fighting breaks out between countries.
So what they put out, when they get it wrong, it has actual real-world consequences on all of us.
When they don't report on the Nord Stream pipeline being blown up and ask the question of who actually did it and meanwhile our gas and electric bills are skyrocketing.
People in Europe are being forced into fuel poverty and the mainstream media have no questions at all. They black out the story.
The biggest attack on a European infrastructure since World War II and they're silent, they're shtum on this. So they have, I mean.
They have so much to answer for and they're not doing, they're not even remotely trying to fill the role of a fourth estate. In fact they piled on Julian Assange who is a award-winning journalist who's in supermax prison, languishing away award-winning journalist and not a word of protest from the BBC or you know, just recently you'll probably find a few pieces on the Guardian, only recently saying oh maybe this is unfair you know they let him waste away in Belmarsh prison for two or three years before they even raised that issue.
Well I want to bring on the BBC because you just had a poll and the BBC is the perfect mix I guess of media and government and it was this poll survey do you consider the BBC to be unbiased objective and a credible media outlet. And there were 5.8% of people said yes, 94% said no, it had over 16,000 votes.
It's interesting because we are moving away from that trust in our institutions, across many areas of society, where there's now a growing and growing concern and suspicion and anger, I guess. I think this survey shows us that.
There's 16,000 votes on that, Peter, by the way.
So some of the people that voted yes actually messaged me afterwards saying they accidentally hit the wrong button, It might be slightly lower. No. Look I didn't ask anyone to retweet that I asked if you, I did ask a few people to retweet it, but.
In in general, I think it's an interesting barometer.
The BBC obviously have launched their new Verify service. This is only in the last few days those abroad may not know.
We've had fact checking for a long time, but it's a verified team consists of 60 journalists, seems to be pulling together their disinformation units, world service monitoring, their reality check team.
And these are going to basically tell us the BBC can be trusted and anything which UK column may put out or others, will be there to critique that. I mean it's, they call it transparency in action.
It's interesting the BBC need to have a service to fact-check. I mean it just is really confusing but this is, I guess, the government and the BBC putting their stamp of authority on the mainstream media the public can't trust.
BBC Verify, I think this is this new program. Marianna Spring is their disinformation expert.
She's very young. I'm not sure if she has a lot of experience in the field doing actual journalism.
This is the other point, Peter, there's people who are fact checkers who are basically rating people's work online on these sort of internet guides, like completely fraudulent websites like NewsGuard is one of them.
Headed by the former head of the CIA. I mean it's kind of ridiculous if you think about it, but they hire these young people and they've created a new tier of journalism because the mainstream media no longer does actual investigative journalism. They still have to sort of employ people and then somehow validate the top-line propaganda and the top-line propaganda which is directly from government, literally copied and pasted, they're then verified and protected by this new lair called the fact checker or the disinformation expert and these are not real journalists. These are people who if they had a substack blog nobody would read it. Okay, let's be honest. So they have no aspirations other than being on staff as a bureaucrat at the Ministry of Truth because isn't that what this is? This is like chapter and verse out of Orwell's 1984.
And so they're saying, oh, we're tracking conspiracy theories online, and they have like these fancy heat maps, and we're tracking disinformation.
And look at these accounts that retweet this.
We have a cluster of potentially far-right-linked or foreign-linked accounts who are amplifying this disinformation.
What they're doing is completely bogus. They raise money, and they tell each other this.
This is how the funding gets approved.
They have academic departments and universities that study the spread of disinformation, how to counter online hate and all this stuff. What they're doing is tracking online dissenting opinion.
That's what they're doing. They're tracking any counter narratives that potentially threaten or undermine what the state and the corporate media narrative is.
That's all they're doing. Then they're using that to demonize independent journalists, bloggers, to get them censored, de-platformed, demonetized, all of that, to basically create a sort of pariah, a group of pariahs in society.
And they don't care the damage which they do. And I've been libelled by these people multiple times.
I can't afford to hire an expensive city solicitor firm to defend myself.
I'm not someone like Piers Morgan or these people can attack and smear and do whatever they want.
They can also afford the best lawyers in the world, but the people that the mainstream media are attacking and smearing, they can't afford to take everybody to court.
So it's not a level playing field.
And when the state broadcaster mobilizes its resources to attack bloggers, Twitter users, members of the public, they feel that threatened.
This is absolute 100% pure fascism.
There's no other way to describe it. I mean, honestly, they have billions in their budget.
They could easily be outperforming all of the alternative media in terms of content.
They could take all of the audience if their content was actually engaging, interesting, non-biased, objective, and fact-based.
But it's not.
They're a propaganda arm of the government, of the establishment, of the security services.
This is what they become, and they don't do real investigative journalism.
The best investigative journalism on the BBC is probably Tony Robinson and Time Team, or these programs, and they're breaking news. Four hundred years ago, we just discovered Watt-Tyler's rebellion or whatever.
They're good at those sort of investigations, breaking news 400 years later, but in terms of what's happening today and doing it in an unbiased way, no, they're there to protect the state and whatever the agenda is of NATO, uh, whatever the agenda is of the Anglo-American establishment in Syria, for instance, I mean, look at they, the BBC, I mean, they've never come clean on the fact that they reported building seven on nine 11.
They said it was, it was building seven collapsed. They did it live on TV while it was still standing behind them on the screen.
I mean, so just on that, that's a, that should be a brand killer at that point.
Then the cover-up of Jimmy Savile, I mean that's never been fully explained or no one's ever really come clean on that.
And then they did a propaganda piece right before the parliamentary vote in August of 2013.
You remember? There was a vote to go to war with Syria. David Cameron was prime minister and Ed Miliband, by the grace of God, but somehow, the vote failed by the slightest of margins.
And Cameron put his head down in defeat and walked off. And there were temper tantrums on the floor of Commons.
I remember very well watching that. The BBC did a propaganda piece called Saving Syria's Children, which was released on that day and clearly was meant to influence the vote in the public.
And it was the worst piece of staged propaganda. It's been thoroughly exposed by multiple independent journalists, media outlets, and it is one of the worst things ever.
A fake chemical weapon scene at a stage scenes at this hospital, and it was all done in the edit.
Some of it was staged live. We find out that their drivers were Al-Qaeda affiliates.
Literally they're working alongside terrorists.
They've never come clean on that. I mean, that's just one example, two, three, four examples.
I mean, how much do people need? When they come clean on their egregious violations and fake news and weapons of mass destruction and all the lies they've told, saying Jeremy Corbyn was a Russian agent and an al-Qaeda sympathizer, they did all that.
And by the way, I'm not a labour supporter.
It's not a partisan defence of Corbyn. I'll defend anybody who's being unjustly attacked by this egregious state propaganda arm, you know, in the defamation machine, which they run regularly against any potential threats to the establishment order, okay?
Whether it's labour, Lib Dem, conservative, whatever.
So you know, they need to come clean on this stuff. And the Corbyn anti-Semitism, the Bridgen anti-Semitism, I mean, these are damaging to politics.
This is causing people to lose trust in the democratic system because there's all of this sort of, you know, these malicious politicized attacks were being facilitated by the mainstream media.
So, they have no credibility. And this war in Ukraine, they have been reporting absolute lies from the beginning.
They've been telling us the exact opposite of what's actually happening and there needs to be some kind of an inquiry over the mainstream media's coverage of this and it's provided the backing for the politicians to carry on with this proxy war, which is really dangerous in the sense that, you know, we're poking against another UN Security Council, a nuclear armed country in a proxy war, Ukraine is getting devastated as a result.
And it will never come back to its normal shape. They'll be, the longer that they push this, the less, the smaller Ukraine will be in a year's time and more people will be dead.
Well, can I jump in because part of your journey started with questioning wars back in that March 2003 and it kind of seemed as though the media were united in concern about what was happening, there was not a rush to marching to war, it did seem to be holding the government to account, a lot of suspicion about the dossier that came out and a lot of questioning. Fast forward 20 years and it seems as though the media are desperate for this war to continue, they're desperate for it to escalate. I mean is that how you're seeing it as well?
Oh, I honestly, I don't think, I think there's a level of delusionality that has set in.
Right right through the establishment I think the problem with people in the mainstream media and government is and in Britain It's even worse because they banned Russian media outlets here. Literally the RT.com URL is banned so if you're, imagine this you're on a committee here on its National Security Committee, you're an MP, you can't even read the statements of Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister. How can you possibly know how to act diplomatically or geo-strategically if you don't even know what the Russian position is? And you're not reading the data from the Russian Ministry of Defence to compare it against your battlefield reports to actually gauge how the actual combat situation is actually going. So our Our people in the West are marinated in just their own mainstream media propaganda.
They cannot make informed policy decisions based on potentially skewed propaganda where by, you know, nobody in the defence industry is going to tell the truth to any politician.
There might be a few that know the truth, but the rank and file MPs know, mainstream media is not there to do that. They're there to sell the war to us.
They're there to sell the war to the public. So the public are still behind this kind of, you know, let's liberate Ukraine from the evil dictator Vladimir Putin, who woke up one day and decided to rekindle the glory of the Soviet Union on February 26th, 2022.
Obviously that's a ridiculous narrative because there's a whole chain of events which happened prior to that, which led to Russia's military intervention in Donbass.
But even saying that, Peter, in Germany, as we mentioned before the show, I think someone was arrested
recently for defending Russian aggression.
Yes, I mean, but that is those three years for supporting or publicly supporting or defending Russian aggression. But actually it says, so the Hamburg court indictment revealed that the defendant had used social media to justify Russia's aggressive action against Ukraine, referring to Ukraine as a terrorist state.
I didn't know that was wrong. And moreover, the defendant employed the the Russian symbol of military propaganda known as the Z, which is prohibited under German law. And that just blew me away, because Z is now banned in Germany.
It's unbelievable. You know, so if you state the facts, if you state the facts, they'll say, well, Russia has violated the territory integrity of Ukraine.
That's an egregious violation of the UN Charter, Article 51.
Ukraine can invoke the right to self-defence, OK?
So that's the basic narrative. So all of a sudden, the Europeans, Britain, and America are interested in international law when it comes to military interventions, which they've completely ignored for the last 50 years.
So now they're interested in it. So if I'd say that no, actually no, according to UN Charter Article 1, the other side to this coin in this argument is the right to self-determination.
The republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in eastern Ukraine were basically victims of their own government raising the military, a NATO-backed armed military, against their own people in the east.
So they defended their borders, raised a militia. They weren't given representation either in Kiev, in the Rada.
So the illustration was the policy of Kiev, backed by Washington, backed by EU, saying don't recognize these people, they get no voice.
They cut off utilities, they cut off, They're not paying the civil servant salaries, whatever.
At that point, Kiev relinquishes its governance over Eastern Ukraine.
So according to the UN Charter of Self-Determination, if you're attacked by your own government on the basis of being discriminated against, for instance, on your language or your ethnicity, or after a coup, and the oblasts in the east of Ukraine don't recognize the US-backed coup putsch, Beer Hall Putsch government, and then they're being attacked by the Ukrainian military, who's being armed and trained by NATO, foreign powers, funded as well, okay, they defend their borders, they raise a militia, they're taking civilian casualties in the Donbass, indiscriminate shelling from the Ukrainian army against civilians, Ukrainian civilians, because you have to remember, the West recognizes Donbass as Ukraine, so that means any civilians being hit by the Ukrainian military indiscriminately, they're killing their own people by definition. So you can't have it both ways, but they want to have it both ways. So they have a right under UN charter article one.
Of self-determination, and then you have to declare autonomy, which they did.
Then you have to be recognized by one of your neighbours in standing, which they did.
And then they were then absorbed, had a referendum, and became part of the Russian Federation.
So by international law, I could walk into court as an international lawyer and make a stronger case for the Donbass republics under international law for their independence than can be made for for Kosovo in Yugoslavia, you see.
And this is up for argument, and this is what international lawyers do.
And I've interviewed many of them, I've taken statements from them, I'm investigating, for instance, the International Criminal Court indictment in The Hague against Vladimir Putin and another Russian official for mass kidnapping Russian children.
That's The Hague.
And that's partly a British effort to issue that arrest warrant.
The first white person ever indicted by the ICC, by the way, normally you just go after African leaders that the U.S. doesn't like.
So it turns out this charge of mass kidnapping Ukrainian children and whisk them off to Russia, to camps or whatever, it's a total fraud, total lie.
Investigative journalists have exposed this already. We'll probably, I'm going to interview one of them later this week.
It's, they took families wanted their kids out of the war zone so they had special facilities almost like summer camps for the children of families who were in sensitive areas of the Donbass I mean, how is that a war crime?
But that's how desperate they are so if I argue this in Germany, if I'm a German citizen, I could I could be a prosecuted for what, defending Russian aggression So defending aggression, so not even genocide anymore. It's not war crime. It's not, I don't want to say the H word, but you can't even use genocide.
So now it's just aggression. So aggression is like a new, another arbitrary, phony international term for the establishment.
You know, so they don't, what they're doing is, and this is what the BBC and everyone do, they frame your reference of any issue or situation, they narrow the framing of it, very, very narrow, and within that they can dominate. As soon as you have an intellectual logical, rational conversation with historical context, and taking cause and effect into account, which the mainstream media do not like doing, then you have a different debate. Then, if things are really open for argument and you can see that actually their case is not very black and white, it's not open and shut. They're using the brute force of media and government to make it an open and shut case, but it's not. And I think the international community in the West are realizing that most of the world's population don't buy it and that's where we're heading into an interesting point in history right now.
Can I just end up looking at the political side and as much as I would like to see President Trump back in the Oval Office, I'm intrigued by Robert Kennedy Jr.
And he seems to be one of the few, maybe the only presidential candidate who are against this war and want peace. And I guess it's all part to do with the military system.
I think the US has spent over 100 billion. No wonder they're hitting their debt ceiling. But it's Robert Kennedy seems to be a voice of reason in this. And I'm kind of wondering what your thoughts are and whether that will actually get out to the people at large.
Yes, and look, I wouldn't generally vote Democrat, but I would consider voting for RFK in this election. I would because he is competent and has a grasp of the big issues.
And that's really important. And we're at a very critical time in American history and in world history as well.
What's happening in Ukraine and what NATO is attempting to do, which is to drop a new Iron Curtain right along the Polish border, right down to Romania, to the Black Sea, and then militarizing that Iron Curtain in a way that we haven't seen since the post-World War II period.
This is serious. So any president who doesn't have a grip on this, so RFK is incredibly adept, intelligent, and I like what he's saying.
Donald Trump cuts right through everything and basically says, I'm going to end the war in 24 hours, typical Trump style.
And do I doubt him? Absolutely not.
Can he do that? You bet he can. Donald Trump can do it.
Any political leader that has got the balls and doesn't care what the press are going to say or the foreign policy blob.
And all the intelligence Machiavellian agents that are working to extend the war, to extend the profits for all these military contractors, and extend the killing, okay?
All of these people, Donald Trump will, he's one of the only people as a populist who could achieve that.
And I would say, therefore, and I think you brought up a good point, Peter, you know, a left-wing populist or a right-wing populist, you know, when it comes to those big existential issues, you know, I'm willing to sacrifice on some domestic issues for the greater of humanity, knowing that the leader that we have is going to make sure that this does not happen.
There's not going to be a nuclear war or a thermonuclear exchange, and that we are not going to be permanently at war with a major UN Security Council member. Like, that means something to me, enough that I would back Robert F. Kennedy or Donald Trump. So, like, I don't see that from any other candidate, not that definitive clarity.
This brings us to the other important question, Peter.
Is Donald Trump working in the interests of the people of the United States, the national interest, the national security interest, or is he working for the globalists or the other sort of international transnational establishment?
Clearly he's acting and speaking in the interests of the people, the national interest.
Okay, what about Vladimir Putin? Is he acting in his national interest?
Or is he acting in the interest of some amorphous Russian elite?
It looks like an existential threat to the Russian Federation.
So whatever, you might not like how things are playing out, but he's absolutely acting in his national interest.
And Donald Trump would probably do the same if there was a Chinese expeditionary force in Baja, Mexico, that were persecuting and shelling American English speaking citizens in Northern Mexico.
And then threatening to position nuclear missiles along the Texas border.
The US would act and it would be done. It would be done in 24 hours. They'd bomb Mexico City.
I'm telling you, the thing would be over. So Russia is taking it very slowly. Donald Trump recognized this. He knows that he could probably stop it. Jeremy Corbyn or Robert F. Kennedy, they would probably make the same pledge, although they don't have the strength.
RFK would have the strength and the fortitude.
Corbyn, maybe not.
Um, but, uh, but so, so that's, that's my position on that.
Yeah. And, uh, what about the British prime minister? I don't know.
I don't even know who's in charge.
Uh, who does? We do change quite a bit of this musical roundabouts or pass the parcel.
Um, but of course, uh, you saw the, the big hug that Rishi Sunak gave to, uh, to Zelensky whenever he landed, best buddies, beautiful bro-mance. So I think it's just more and more money for Zelensky from there.
Yeah, I feel bad. He's the bigger they are, the harder they fall and they've built this guy up to be this international saint stroke war hero stroke.
And I'm afraid, is it going to be a martyr as well to the cause?
I don't know, but it's, um, yeah, uh, clearly a propaganda construct, the whole, the outfit, the green t-shirt showing up at the Arab league, wearing the green outfit, I mean, disrespectful to the leaders there.
Uh, that didn't go well again to the G7, again, the green outfit is like constantly at war.
It's like Manuel Noriega all over again.
You know, it's just, it's, it's, it's ridiculous at this point.
And anybody who thinks that Vladimir Zelensky is in charge of anything in Ukraine, there's nobody in Ukraine that's in charge of anything.
On the global sovereignty index, they're at the very bottom.
We're paying, the United States is subsidizing in Europe, the civil service salaries, they're paying soldiers salaries, they're paying their utilities, they're paying for their army, they're subsidizing their economy, what's left of it.
They handpicked their government, the United States did, that's proven.
So, they're dictating to them what their foreign policy is going to be, et cetera.
Whether they can or can't negotiate a peace settlement, they have zero sovereignty.
So whoever's at the moment who's in charge in Kiev, they have no real decision making.
The US could end it in a minute.
Just one phone call saying, it's over, Monday, get ready for peace negotiations. And it's over.
We're not giving you any more weapons, so you're on your own.
And if they say they're on their own, they're like, well, this isn't going to work out with Russia.
So we better call for, sue for peace at this point.
That's not happening. That's very disturbing.
And what's more disturbing is the craven attitude of European politicians that believe this is a cost-effective arms length war, that somehow it's economical.
We're going to wear the Russians down and you know, we're going to, we're going to break the Russian economy.
I think the European economy has suffered more arguably than the Russian economy has as a result of this historic embargo of a major global power.
It's backfired badly.
And it's leading to all sorts of, it's cascading in all sorts of bad outcomes for the US dollar as a world reserve currency, the energy markets as well, all sorts of negative outcomes. And the worst would be a military exchange between NATO and Russia. I mean, we don't know where that's going to end. But we do know in history, you know, it's, when you look back, you know, when we we studied World War I and World War II, especially World War I, the lesson at the end was always with the teacher, I remember saying, this was just madness and we've never seen anything like this and hopefully we'll never see it again.
We've hopefully learned our lessons and warfare isn't done like this anymore, et cetera.
And we're all scratching our heads thinking as students, how could the people, leaders of Europe have been that stupid to allow this carnage.
That could have been totally avoidable.
But there was this idea that it was inevitable, that war was inevitable.
And you're hearing this from politicians on both sides of the Atlantic that war is inevitable and war with China as well is inevitable.
Okay, so from that I realized now I finally, after all these years, I figured it out that yes, we are stupid enough to do it again.
Our leaders are dumb enough and naïve and short-sighted and corrupt.
Yes, history can repeat itself, even in the modern technological age.
And that's the big realization that we need to start taking home and stop taking for granted that these things can't happen.
Yes, they can happen, and they will happen, and they are happening as well.
And so people, I think, need to get a lot more engaged in Europe, especially, and in the UK as well, and in America.
They really need to get more engaged on this issue because we don't know how,
everything, Bilderberg's a good example. At the Bilderberg, the whole agenda predicated on crisis. So one crisis to the next and which companies and which transnational powers intelligence agencies, how they're going to marshal the crisis in order to implement new policies and more control and a new agenda. So if that's the underlying motivation, what could be a bigger crisis than, you know, an escalation of a major war in Europe? So what does that mean? What does the post-war society in order look like? More surveillance, less freedoms, less civil liberties, less travel, closed borders.
A lot of the things that we saw during COVID, Peter, and lockdown, that was the war without the war. And we got a taste of it.
That's nothing. In some ways, that's nothing compared to what a post-war order will look like in the West.
Not in the East, but in the West.
So people need to think long and hard about some of these issues.
Patrick, I appreciate you coming on and sharing your two decades of journalism and experience and analysing some of those. So thank you so much for your time today.
Thank you, Peter. I appreciate it.
And just remind people where they can find you on TNT Radio.
Oh yeah, yeah. So you can see our work at 21stcenturywire.com, as you mentioned.
TNT Radio, five till seven UK time, Monday to Friday, UK column, and we're usually on Fridays, 1pm, ukcolumn.org, amazing media outlet, great news program, of course. And also Twitter, on Twitter live, Twitter spaces Wednesday evenings usually we do a major roundtable discussion, we just did one last night a recent on the on the Bilderberg, G7 and the WEF, like where is the power lie with these globalist institutions, we had a great panel assembled for that including Tony Gosling is a great independent journalist out of Bristol who covers Bilderberg as well so we're getting some of these great guests on to handle these big topics and then we invite, is free to join and you just jump into the room on Twitter and we do audience Q&A's, so that's the other, the new live show that we've added to the mix.
Okay, well that's all available for all our viewers and listeners, but thank you Patrick and thank you to our viewers for listening or if you're downloaded on any of the podcasting apps on Podbean or elsewhere, thank you for joining us and thank you for, we just had 200,000 downloads, so thank you for helping us hit that and on to the next milestone, but I wish our viewers and listeners a wonderful rest of your day. I will be back with you very soon. So thank you and goodbye.
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