An Interview with James Corbett
An Interview with James Corbett
I got to interview James Corbett on Monday 28th February in my capacity as a member of Holding The Line – Journalists Against Covid Censorship.
Here is a link to the video on The Corbett Report and also on HTL’s Odysee channel.
You can check out who James Corbett is on his about page here.
The Corbett Report has been churning out analysis since 2007 and, in my opinion, James has developed a lucid grasp of the meaning of world events and the threat posed to democracy and freedom by powerful actors and ideologies. I had 50 minutes in which to explore with James the bigger picture behind the Covid driven lurch into global authoritarianism. The springboard for this discussion was a recent Corbett report titled States of Emergency in which James shone a light on a paradigm of governance that is sweeping the globe – the State of Emergency.
We reviewed the potential for a perpetual state of emergency in four areas, starting with a review of the obvious one from which we are still reeling, Covid containment policies. We moved on to a discussion of war in the Ukraine, climate change and Central Bank Digital Currencies.
Covid containment
The official Covid containment narrative is now a smouldering pile of ashes. In two years, virtually the entire planet has moved through a range of measures purported to halt the spread of the virus at all costs. The scale of those costs did not seem to matter to governments the world over and the measures were by turns traumatic, non-evidenced, downright stupid, cruel, experimental and wildly ineffective. For those reasons, all of them have brought us to an acknowledgment best characterised by the Icelandic health authority’s recent statement that “widespread societal resistance to COVID-19 is the main route out of the epidemic", and "to achieve this, as many people as possible need to be infected with the virus as the vaccines are not enough”.
In other words, natural herd immunity, the guiding principle of humanity’s dance with respiratory pathogens since we crawled out of the primordial sludge, is what the doctor should have ordered but didn’t. To be clear, it didn’t have to be ordered because, as Alex Berenson succinctly puts it, ‘virus gonna virus’ no matter what the bloviating, interfering public health ‘experts’ think, say or do.
We did not discuss Iceland specifically in the interview but the crucial point to emphasise is that the Covid containment calamity was not some kind of forgivable miscalculation by national health authorities. Covid’s heavy age and co-morbidity risk dependency was known prior to lockdown – the government downgraded its assessment of the Covid threat on the eve of lockdown citing “more information … about mortality rates (low overall)” – and the pandemic preparedness plans of countries in the West forbade the use of lockdowns because they had no evidence base and were understood to be all cost for no gain.
So, from day one there was a seemingly irrational policy commitment to lockdowns and mass vaccination as the route out of a manufactured “health crisis”. Thereafter, we were forced to endure what amounted to modern-day witchcraft, satirically branded ‘The Science™’, made up on the hoof and retrofitted to the policy.
This is what James had to say about recent developments in Canada regarding the crushing of a democratic blue-collar workers’ protest against vaccine mandates and the real meaning of brutal Covid containment policy under the emergency governance paradigm:
“I think we can best understand this paradigm of governance by emergency that is being used and employed under the fig leaf of this supposed pandemic emergency, we can best see that being exposed for what it is in the recent Canadian freedom convoy movement and the Canadian government's response to it, because it is important to note that in the entirety of this response to this grassroots movement of blue collar workers, who were there to resist and protest the vaccine mandates in Canada, not once did any MP or the prime minister or anyone else involved in this come out to say that, no no, we are doing this [the government crackdown] because of this medical emergency and that once such and such criteria are met, then we will ease these restrictions. Not once was it ever about that. It was only ever about the supposed threat to national security, that is from an insurgency that is occupying Ottawa, of Canadian citizens protesting their own government.
“This is an obvious power grab, and I don't think there was even an attempt to put any spin on it in any other way...
“Now, I think the other important part of this to keep in mind is the recent awareness of a trend that has taken place over the course of decades. But there has been recent awareness of the fact that so many of the Cabinet members in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet are World Economic Forum related, in one way or another. For example, most obviously the Deputy Prime Minister / finance minister Chrystia Freeland, being an actual Board of Trustees [member] of the World Economic Forum. And this is not some sort of incidental thing. This is something that was bragged about by none other than World Economic Forum Executive Director, Klaus Schwab himself quite recently, in an infamous statement that has made the rounds online that ‘we have penetrated the cabinets of all these countries around the globe, including, of course, Justin Trudeau in Canada.'
“And here, I think we start to see that there is a broader agenda at work. That is not to do with public health…And I think that is made most evident to the average person by asking them to consider whether they actually believe that the infrastructure for this new Covid containment biosecurity state that is being erected… is going to disappear when the pandemic is declared over. I tend to believe that the billions of dollars that are being invested in companies around the globe to create the QR code, digital ID vaccine passport infrastructure, is now an industry that is not going to disappear overnight simply because they declare a pandemic over. And I tend to believe that governments are going to continue to use this as the excuse for the further clampdown of their citizens rights for the foreseeable future.”
The driving force behind states of emergency
James has hinted strongly in recent episodes of The Corbett Report about the driving force behind states of emergency, referring to it as ‘the machine’. I asked him to explain what this meant – does the machine have a brain and, if so, can we locate it?
My distillation of James’ answer is that the software behind the machine is a guiding ideology that has, in James’ words, “pervaded human society and civilization for all of recorded history”. It’s the pernicious idea that “there is an inherent ruling class that [believes it] deserves to rule over other human beings, and that they are best situated to guide humanity.”
The iterations of this ideology can be traced back to kings and pharaohs who were worshipped as literal gods on Earth. This morphed into the Divine Right of Kings and, more recently, eugenics which is the co-opting of science to underpin the patently specious idea that there are certain people who are genetically more suited to rule over others and that those less fortunate in the gene lottery are dispensable. This ideology is of course perpetuated by ruling elites who stand to benefit most from it. These elites together with the institutions and systems over which they have enormous influence, especially governments and their agencies, could be seen as the machine’s hardware.
James points out that the World Economic Forum (WEF), a powerful institution backed by over 1000 of the world’s most powerful corporations, is just one manifestation of the workings of the machine. While James emphasises that he does not believe that the WEF controls the world and that they are the controllers of reality, it is nevertheless “a convenient hub from which we can see the spokes of this agenda.”
The logical end-point of the ideology of an innate right to rule by a privileged elite is the hyper concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few institutions and individuals. I provided a narrative and supporting facts for how this has panned out over the last 40 years in my last essay. The pyramidal economic system we live under rewards those who display a preternatural ability to acquire wealth and leverage human and capital resources by pushing them to the top of the pyramid. ‘Ability’ often means an acquired head-start from inherited family wealth and connections.
Occupying this position at the top of the pyramid feeds the delusion of a ‘proven’ ability to herd the planet and provides them with the resources and influence to manipulate politics, society and the economy towards further concentration of power and wealth. Trapped in a delusional feedback loop in which more wealth and power feeds and confirms a ‘right’ to more control, these elites cannot and will not stop until either we stop them or until all of humanity is completely under their control.
James adds:
“And there are absolutely wars that I believe do take place among that elitist, upper echelon, in terms of who's going to have the best seat at the table. But they all want the table. They want global government of some sort to be erected. And I think that explains so much of what we're seeing that otherwise would seem inexplicable. If we're still thinking of things as individual nations, state leaders, working in the best interests of their nation…, that clearly does not explain the coordinated moves that we're seeing, most obviously, in our era, in for example, the approach to biosecurity which has been instituted in virtually every nation around the world.”
What’s ‘wrong’ with Japan?
Japan seems to me one of the very few countries that has explicitly reiterated the right to bodily autonomy and has made unequivocal statements in support of the right of its citizens to freely choose whether they want to have an experimental injection. So, in today’s perverse world in which most Western leaders have trashed the Nuremberg Code principle of voluntary informed consent, the very same principle over which Nazi doctors were hung in 1946, I find myself puzzling over why Japan has not gone with the fascist flow and caved into the same barbarity that has resurfaced in the West.
However, James, who lives in Japan, explained that despite the Japanese government’s statements that there will be no discrimination based on vaccination status and corporations should not be pressuring their employees to get vaccinated, it is nevertheless happening in most Japanese corporations:
“Japan is very much a feudal society still. It's just that the old feudal shoguns transitioned into the corporate behemoths. The Mitsubishis and what have you are just the remnants of the old feudal era here in Japan, and it is still a very top-down society. So, when a corporation says ‘okay guys, we've scheduled all your vaccines and whatever’, people will just do it even if there is no explicit order to do so and no explicit threat that you will be fired if you do not do so. Most people here have been conditioned under that feudal conditioning for so many centuries that it is simply taken for granted and I can definitely speak to that from my experience. Most people just would not think to put up a fight against something like that. So, to a certain extent, I think the pliability of the population makes it such that the heavy handedness of the biosecurity state doesn't have to be presented.”
This confirms my suspicion that the bonfire of civil liberties around the globe is being lit from place to place in a culturally specific way. The age-old maxim of political analysis applies: pay attention to what politicians and corporations are doing and not what they are saying.
War in Ukraine – the background and its ultimate meaning
In a 24th February Corbett report episode titled What's happening in Ukraine, James provided important background facts that should assist in understanding but not condoning Russia’s illegal invasion – facts that the mainstream media is, in its time-honoured fashion, completely ignoring.
The geopolitical tensions, fuelled largely by NATO and its allies in the lead-up to the war, start with broken promises made in the 1990s when representative after representative of different nation states in the NATO organisation guaranteed Russia that NATO would not expand eastwards, that it would not incorporate Poland, and so on. Promises of NATO membership were then made to Georgia and Ukraine in 2008. This was followed by the 2013/14 Euromaidan regime change operation in Ukraine. James points out that in late 2013:
“Relations between Ukraine and Russia were becoming problematized… because of the Yanukovych government at that time trying to straddle that line between relations with the EU and relations with Russia and receiving pressure from both sides. [Yanukovych refused to sign an agreement to forge closer ties with the EU.] And it was being framed in Europe and in the Western media as Yanukovych [was] essentially a Russian sympathiser, and he's not representing the people of Ukraine. And so you started to see more demonstrations and people rising up against what was perceived as this pro-Russian leader. And that was not just passively but explicitly supported by people like …Victoria Nuland [State Department official in the Obama administration], who showed up on November 12, of 2013… in Kiev, literally handing out food to protesters on the streets in a photo op…
“But the I think the operative moment in the real turning point happened in February, during the Maidan Square massacre … where snipers started opening fire on the crowds, resulting in 60 deaths, including both protesters and police officers. And as evidence started to emerge later on, this was not Ukrainian government forces. This was outside operatives that were firing on both sides in order to gin up the crisis, which then led to the dramatic events of 2014 that we saw, including the unconstitutional … ouster of Yanukovych in a vote that again, had no constitutional authority. But at any rate, he was ousted and the new government was placed in so I think that is important, it's vitally important information to understand why Russia might be doing what it is doing right now. That is not to justify war, or the dropping of bombs or anything of that sort. But it is at least to understand what is happening, which I think is the base level that you would expect the media would want an informed citizenry to know about. But for some reason, we are not told about these events.”
James goes on to remind us about the infamous leaked conversation which evidenced the role of Victoria Nuland, a high-ranking State Department official in the Obama administration (and now Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in the Biden administration), in the Ukrainian regime change. The National Interest reported that she was “intimately involved in ongoing US efforts to curate and install a new government in Ukraine.” This evidence for US/EU support for regime change in a country bordering Russia is instructive.
Acknowledging the geopolitical tensions fuelling the conflict is not picking sides. It is an essential part of understanding the motivation of all parties involved and being able to see the bigger picture. When you have a better understanding of the motivation of all parties, when you take a longer view of events and look for patterns and systemic themes, you ought to realise that cheering for any side in this particular war is to cheer for The System that brought us: wars, most recently in Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria; the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and; the manufactured Covid ‘health crisis’. And cheering for The System that so dependably delivers crises and calamities is to dutifully play the role handed to you by The System – that of a turkey voting for Christmas. Unless of course you are part of the system’s elite ruling class, in which case crises are the route to more control.
It’s clear that Moscow, from a strategic defence perspective, cannot allow further NATO encroachment through a NATO absorption of Ukraine and that its mistrust of NATO, going back to the 1990s, is well founded. It is also clear to most sensible commentators that NATO has no real strategic geopolitical interest to be served by further encroachment on Russia’s periphery, particularly when those moves threaten nuclear conflagration. So why are we moving towards a point of outright brinksmanship between global nuclear superpowers over Ukraine which is not part of NATO and doesn’t have to be? Equally puzzling is why would powerful ruling elites idly sit by while such a potentially devastating conflict threatens to destabilise the wealth concentration pyramid they sit atop and jeopardise their efforts towards a more centralised world? James’ answer to this is:
“I think we have to understand this in terms of that old canard that you've heard many times – the New World Order that was announced on the fall of the Soviet Union…The New World Order was announced as… this chance to create…new global relations in which it's not the law of the jungle. Well, that's the global vision for the World Economic Forum cronies … a global order that's presided over by a handful of ruling elite, and this [i.e.war] seems to destabilize that. But actually, I see it [the war] as part of an operation towards the creation of a new world order. You cannot create a new world order without smashing the old-world order. And this is the smashing of the old world order.
“And it's actually being done in such a way as to present the dialectic from which we can choose to be on team NATO or we can choose to be on team BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa], shall we say, however we want to frame that other side of what is being demonized right now. And these are our two options. And you can choose to yay NATO or you can choose to yay Putin, but you can't actually be sceptical of both sides and where they are leading us. And I want to stress that isn't it interesting that in that exact same clip that is making the rounds right now of Klaus Schwab bragging about how he penetrated the cabinets around the world and in Canada, who is the first name he mentions as one of his World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders who is on board with the World Economic Forum agenda? Vladimir Putin. Yes, of course, Putin himself a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.”
It's a replay of George Bush’s ultimatum - you’re either with us or against us. Refusing to play this childish game should not cast you as pro-Russia or pro-China. I am perfectly capable of being highly sceptical of the latest iteration of mass formation psychosis (this time driven by war) while at the same time being able to see the brutal treatment of Russia’s and China’s populations by their own governments for what it is. I am under no delusion that a New World Order led by the BRICS would be sunshine and rainbows. But nor do I want a NWO led by Europe and the five eyes nations who have all burnished their psychopath credentials in the Covid furnace.
And what are we to make of the apparent contradiction in the assertion that Putin is, on the one hand, a chummy globalist spoken of in warm terms by one of its high priests, Klaus Schwab, but is also embarking on a dangerous course of action that, on the face of it, seems inimical to globalist aspirations? At the very least, this suggests the globalist camp is quite fractured. James’ response to this was that conflict is part of a dialectic towards a ‘solution’ that will inevitably be presented as the saving grace out of the mess of war and whatever other storms we encounter.
The System’s imperative towards power concentration and authoritarian rule by a privileged clique will inevitably put a narrative spin on events that demands greater centralisation of power. But it needs these crises to accelerate the debate and the more traumatic and emotionally charged the event, the easier it is to manipulate beliefs and behaviours en masse.
So, the narrative spin that might be put on this misadventure is that the UN isn’t working, and we need a bigger body with stronger teeth to keep the peace among nations. Hence more centralisation and the vesting of greater powers in unelected supranational bodies.
This is a system-led process and not all actors are necessarily consciously working towards this state of affairs but the dialectic baked into the software of The Machine is that crises, real or manufactured, lead to proposed ‘solutions’ which inevitably entail further concentrations of elite power and a loss of freedom for the vast majority of us lower down the pyramid.
Climate change
How do you introduce someone who's not aware of dissenting climate science to the idea that climate science may not be as settled as the halls of orthodoxy would have us believe? The simple answer to that is to reflect on how every single pillar of the official Covid science narrative has crumbled under the weight of suppressed dissent, politicisation, corruption, censorship and propaganda and to then ask yourself how you can be so sure that even a small measure of that ‘narrative management’ is not being applied to climate science.
We have been fooled into thinking that the climate change debate has been framed as a scientific question when, in reality, it has been framed in political and financial terms since its very inception. The first international treaty on anthropogenic climate change was established under the UNFCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) in 1992 at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Conference organized and led by Morris Strong. The UNFCC was founded under the auspices of the UN Environment Programme whose founding executive director was Morris Strong. And who was Morris Strong? The UNEP website page dedicated to him provides an understated reference to his “expansive career in the private sector, where he led some of Canada’s most prestigious energy companies”.
He was in fact a very prominent Canadian oil industry executive with ties to the Rockefeller family and a co-founder of the World Economic Forum. His Jekyll-and-Hyde act as an environmentalist-cum-oiligarch embroiled him in a UN Oil-for-Food Programme scandal in which he allegedly profited from starvation in Iraq. It also required him to navigate controversial conflicts of interest such as his development of a luxury hotel in the midst of a Costa Rican wildlife refuge. This brief sketch of a former leading light of the environmentalist movement should permit some scepticism of climate change politics and the motivations of certain actors within the movement.
James described in a little more detail how IPCC science is moulded to retrofit predetermined policy and how the underlying science is not as scientific as most people perceive it to be. The bottom line for James is that “this is a political process that is identifiably being led for financial reasons. And we saw that… most obviously at that last Conference of the Parties in Glasgow, where the Glasgow Financial Alliance on Net Zero was formed to steward over the $130 trillion in investments that have now been earmarked for this transition to the green economy, that is now going to be presided over by the good folks at BlackRock and Bloomberg and Vanguard and places like this.”
Between the Net Zero “swindle” and the frighteningly extremist prospect of ‘absolute zero’ carbon emissions, we are hurtling towards a dystopian future in which all individual activity and consumption is subjected to some form of carbon and/or energy consumption rationing, with the possibility of energy credits being issued as a type of universal basic income.
This segued into a discussion of Central Bank Digital Currencies as a way in which this might be achieved.
The future just happened in Canada
Under the Emergencies Act invoked to suppress the democratic freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa, the Canadian government set about freezing the bank accounts of anyone involved in the protest movement, including citizens who had donated to that cause.
In the future, such a brazen act of economic terrorism will not require the cover of cumbersome emergency powers if the planned roll-out of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) around the world succeeds. Programmable CBDCs will make economic enslavement as easy as an overnight software update because the currency issuer, in this case the government’s Central Bank, can institute controls on individual spending such as blocks or caps on spending on specific goods and services. This would be linked to online Digital IDs, which are very much in the advanced stages of development. Your online digital ID would track your online activity and serve as a complete record of your social, political and economic activity that would then inform limits to be set on your CBDC spending.
Curbs on how far you travel from your house – think carbon footprint, very literally – could be programmed into your CBDC usage. Your phone would track your location and block spending if you are outside a prescribed radius from your home. James wrapped up with this warning:
“That is the type of granular control over the human population that we're looking at in the very near future. And in fact, yes, this does nexus into everything that we are talking about today because it is all, as I say, part of the same agenda to control the human population by a very few people. And that manifests itself in any number of different things, not just the digital money but also, of course, the digital identification which will be tied into the vaccine passports, which will also be tied into a social credit type system. You've protested the wrong way. You gave money to those truckers…”
In addition to the countless genies already let out of the Covid bottle, the Canadian government’s deployment of economic terrorism to crush democratic protest is just one more large and ugly one. Whether it can be put back inside will depend on the public's reaction to this abuse of power.