In the halls of modern government the info-wizard is king. Media consultants, political strategists, whatever title they assume they always promise the same thing: magic worked through information control; spells cast by incantation.
In the first week of March 2022, only a few days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a slew of articles came out in Western publications announcing the advent of the anti-Russian infowar.
To say that this infowar was launched with much fanfare would be an understatement - within days of the Russo-Ukraine war beginning various Western publications were already suggesting that victory was on the horizon.
The effect was eerie, with multiple outlets running the exact same headline. "Ukraine is winning the information war against Russia", proclaimed different writers at CNBC, Slate, and The Financial Times.
No doubt this proclamation of victory was itself part of the infowar that the various authors purported to analyse - a self-licking ice cream cone if there ever was one.
Yet as time went on it became clear that the anti-Russian infowar was not targeted at the Russian people, much less the Russian military - rather it was targeted at a Western domestic audience.
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once declared that The Gulf War Did Not Take Place - it was merely broadcast as a sort of simulation on television screens across the world. If only Baudrillard had lived to see the anti-Russian infowar launched in early-2022.
Partisan politics in the United States had long been drowned in a bathtub of propaganda by the time the anti-Russian infowar came along.
As the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal raged in 1998, the American public asked themselves whether the President did or did not have sexual relations with that woman. The question was a factual one: did he or didn't he. Today such a reference to reality seems quaint.
The factuality of various political attacks barely matters anymore as everything is treated as being part of some partisan "narrative" or "talking point".
And so, when some people raised the possibility that President Joe Biden might be completely incapable of doing his job due to severe cognitive impairment, the factuality of this claim was never really addressed - it was simply dismissed as an obvious partisan attack, a "right-wing talking point".
Last week we saw reality climb back in through the window: the President tried to debate his opponent on television and the world saw that America is being led by a man who is clearly not in command of his faculties.
In this week's episode of Multipolarity, we are joined by Malcolm Kyeyune to discuss the saturation of the information space with propaganda of various forms.
Are these really the savvy tricks that consultants and strategists claim them to be? Or are they a symptom of a political system experiencing deep decline - a system that can no longer deal with reality and finds itself instead retreating into fantasy?
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[Music] We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations. A new world order. [Music] His presidential campaign came to an end tonight whether he knows it or not. Listen, first of all, what we saw tonight is the President making a very clear contrast with Donald Trump on all of the issues that matter to the American people. Yes, there was a slow start, but it was a strong finish and what became very clear through the course of the night is that Joe Biden is fighting on behalf of the American people. Who can't even sit there and look normal. This thing's a bloodbath. He's going to get annihilated. The two, I think, in addition to the two major trips, he was also doing, continued to do his presidential duties. He worked late in doing that and he also prepared for the debate. And on top of that, that was obviously the jet lag as you just asked about, and also he had a cold. This is so much worse than my worst nightmare support it could be like in every way. And by the way, he looks great. The Vice President is great, and they are ready to continue working on behalf of the American people. In the halls of modern government, the info wizard is king. Media consultants, political strategists, whatever title they assume, they always promise the same thing. Magic worked through information control, spells cast by incantation. In the first week of March 2022, only a few days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a slew of articles came out in Western publications announcing the advent of the anti-Russian info war. To say that this info war was launched with much fanfare would be an understatement. Within days of the Russo-Ukraine war beginning, various Western publications were already suggesting the victory was on the horizon. For example, this posed from the security service of Ukraine on February 27, claiming that this pilot ghost shot down 10 enemy planes. The effect was eerie, with multiple outlets running the exact same headline. Ukraine is winning the information war against Russia, proclaimed different writers at CNBC, Slate, Financial Times and multiple other publications. No date, this proclamation of success was itself part of the info war that the various authors purported to analyze a self-licking ice cream cone if there ever was one. Yet as time went on, it became clear that the anti-Russian info war was not targeted at the Russian people, much less the Russian military. Rather, it was targeted at a Western domestic audience. The French philosopher Jean-Baudrillard once declared that the Gulf war did not take place. It was merely broadcast as a sort of simulation on television screens across the world. That's right, Peter. I think it would be good for those of us in Baghdad to turn off our microphone for just a moment. Some of our colleagues in other locations around the world may be able to tell us as much about what they know about this potential attack as we can tell, looking out our window. If only Baudrillard had lived to see the anti-Russian info war launched in early 2022, partisan politics in the United States had long been drowned in a bathtub of propaganda by the time the anti-Russian info war came along. As the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal raged in 1998, the American public asked themselves whether the president did or did not have sexual relations with that woman. The question was a factual one. Did he or didn't he? Indeed, I did have a relationship with Mr. Winsky that was not appropriate. Today is such a reference to reality seems quaint. The factuality of various political attacks barely matters anymore, as everything is treated as being part of some partisan narrative or talking point. And so, when some people raised the possibility that President Joe Biden might be completely incapable of doing his job due to severe cognitive impairment, the factuality of this claim was never really addressed. It was simply dismissed as an obvious partisan attack, a right-wing talking point. And Jake, your question is a Republican talking point. It's fine, the Republican talking point, the Republican talking point. Last week, we saw reality climb back through the window. The president tried to debate his opponent on television, and the world saw that America is being led by a man who is clearly not in command of his faculties. On the choice, the idea that they're going to, I'm not even proposing that. Everybody, they pay, the millionaires pay 1%. In this week's episode of Multi-Polarity, we are joined by Malcolm Cheyenne to discuss the saturation of the information space with propaganda of various forms. Are these really the savvy tricks the consultants and strategists claim them to be? Or are they a symptom of a political system experiencing deep decline, a system that can no longer deal with reality and finds itself instead retreating into fantasy? So, Malcolm, welcome back to the show. As alluded to on the intro, we are obviously going off the back of the hideous performance by President Joe Biden in the debate last week. But as alluded to, these dynamics seem to have much, much deeper roots in the way that Western audiences, in effect, have become used to portraying and even communicating with each other in the information space. So, perhaps we could start with the rest of Ukraine war because I think that was a very good example of a very coherent and targeted attempt to effectively pump propaganda into our societies. Yeah, that's, as you alluded to in the intro, very early on, people in the West said, "We're winning this information war." Like the Russians are losing, like the raiding, the spare computerships or whatever, they're running out of ammo, they're running out of ammo, like they're running out of men. And just recently, I saw Selenskimer, advisor, Aristovich, who I don't know if he's stealing Ukraine or if he's left for his health to greener pastures. But he was commenting on just this exact thing, where for the longest time, Ukraine said, like, forever Ukraine and that's dying, we're killing 10, 15, 20 Russians. Like, they're just throwing their own soldiers into this meat grinder, we've lost, you know, 40,000 people over this war, which is too many, but, you know, the Russians have lost a million soldiers or something. And so Aristovich was commenting that, just a week ago, two weeks ago, Selenskik came out and said, because, you know, Jan Stoltenberg, the outgoing NATO Secretary, was again talking about how the war in Ukraine is going to last for as long as it takes to defeat Russia, we're ready to fight, you know, for decades, 20, 40, 50 years, we're going to keep up this war. And Selenskik came out and said, we can't keep this war going anymore, like, there's too many dead, there's too many wounded, we're running out of people, we need peace as soon as possible, because it can't go on like this. And to Aristovich's mind, he was kind of expressive of, I wouldn't say shock, but almost a sense of surprise that, like, we did this complete 180, where we said we're winning, we're winning, we're winning, oh sorry, we basically lost the war. And his sense was that, like, this entire era of what was essentially like very, like, lying about reality. Like, the conditions of this sort of ik-king area, like the distance, the car needs to activate the brakes and go from full speed to, you know, standing still, would be much, much longer as a result of this long campaign of, you know, in full warfare. I think that's right, but it kind of speaks to something else, which is that this info warfare is not necessarily a top-down phenomenon in the West. Like, we like to think about the propaganda in China, whatever, where it's the shadowy ministry of official truth or whatever, pushing out the approved narrative. And if you don't agree with what the ministry of official truth says, your social credit points are deducted and you get sent to a black site in, you know, the Shenzhen or whatever. But this is not how it actually works in the West. We have something that's far more interesting and in some ways far more damaging to society, where the, the, the putative sort of victims of propaganda themselves are engaged in producing and spreading it. And we can get into this a bit further down the road, like NAFO and so on. But we in the West, as we've lost the ability to, you know, manufacture artillery shells, what we do is we try to manufacture reality by consensus. And that has not turned out very well in Ukraine. Yeah, one of the things I found most interesting about the failed Ukrainian counterattack last year was when it became clear that the counterattack was failing. And the Ukrainians were just throwing scores of Bradley armored personnel carriers and or infantry fighting vehicles and leopard tanks and men and other material into these extremely strong Russian fortifications. The media at first report reported on this late, but it eventually did catch up to the, to the fact that this was happening. But then there was a sudden surge in the media of stories about how Ukraine had to recapture the narrative that I think this was kind of about a year ago, or maybe August last year. And there was a real focus that they needed to regain the narrative of what they were doing, that they were having successes and that it was good, almost as if it was an election campaign. There weren't calls to reassess Ukraine tactics for the counter offensive. There weren't calls to reconsider the whole strategy of what they and the West were doing in Ukraine. No, the main call was that they were going to have to reclaim the narrative. And I've found this extremely bizarre at the time because what does narrative matter reality is what counts, you know, if they're losing, you know, scores and scores of men or, you know, maybe hundreds of men on some days, pouring into Russian defenses and being impaled on them, so to speak. And huge amounts of Western material, which was very clear even then wasn't going to be replaced in full anytime soon. Surely the question should be to reassess what they were doing to redefine the theory of victory, to think of the least worst solution, maybe, or think of a better solution, but no, it was to reclaim the narrative. And it was about that time that I really started to realize, I mean, I think we've all felt that something is wrong with the West and the way that the West has run. For some time now you could hardly ignore it given what's happening in our societies, but I think that was the first time I realized that everything was running this way, everything was about narrative. Everything was about bending reality to fit the way that you saw the world rather than, you know, seeing the world as it is and trying to build a framework of sense making based on that. Yeah, and if I can add to that, I mean, not to get too personal here, but I used to write a lot for the Swedish market, like nowadays I mostly write for no English publications. But for a while, that became pretty impossible due to being outed as a Putin spy or whatever, like I became a person on on grada in some sense for pointing out that these sanctions against Russia, like the economic sanctions, they weren't going to work. And what you saw there with people was they started by saying like the ruble is going to become rubble in a week and then a week passes and they're like oh yeah like it's it's going to take two weeks and then two weeks pass. It's a month and then a month passes and then three months passes and then you sort of return to what they're saying and they're saying oh I don't believe in statistics like I have an epistemological position on the nature of knowledge where we can't know anything about reality. Because the graph show that the ruble hasn't collapsed so that means we can't know anything. And this is the way that people manage like these breaks where the narrative framing the info warfare doesn't work like what they will try to do is simply to move on and ignore it. But sometimes like reality intrudes for too much for that to be possible and the counter offensive was one such occasion I think where it's like you can't just move on from this because this is such a military disaster. But regarding the counter offensive additionally one has to say that the way in which the West has structured itself like mentally psychologically almost means that the war that Ukraine had to fight was in some way quite twisted like it was deformed almost from from a purely military logic because these newspapers saying well you know we have to reclaim the narrative. They're not just being cynical or stupid like on the surface level they are both of those things. But like the war that Ukraine had to fight was always one that took place primarily inside the imagination of the West. Because if you lost that war inside of the brains of you know some wine mom in the Hamptons with the Ukraine flag on the lawn like the money would stop flowing. So a lot of these like the defense of back mood for example and there's been a lot of I think pretty credible criticism of that decision in terms of like it didn't really make a lot of military sense for the Ukrainians to pour in all of this effort into holding back and doing all of these counter attacks these attempts to envelop the Russian position from the flanks that produced a lot of casualties like there wasn't a military logic behind that. And I tend to agree with those criticisms but also like the military logic never really mattered because Ukraine was forced into a situation by the sort of mental deficiencies in the West where they have to wage a war that made very little sense militarily in order to keep the narrative going. Yeah I think we should distinguish here between what is relatively normal in wartime and what has happened this time. So first of all it's not terribly unusual for decision makers especially politicians to undertake sacrifices shall we say in order to say keep the war going. You could think maybe of the so-called phony war period when Britain is at war with Nazi Germany and the Americans haven't entered yet and it is now kind of coming out it wasn't talked about much but Churchill was basically sending a bunch of British pilots to their death in bombing campaigns against Germany and effectively they were doing it to keep the momentum going while they were trying to get the Americans more and more involved. And once there is that there is a clear strategic end goal. Now I'm not making a judgment on what Churchill did I think it will be reevaluated in the coming years but there is at least a strategic end goal there there is it's a means to an end controlling the narrative a little bit which I guess is what Churchill was doing he was probably quite good at that back in the day. It was always a means to a strategic end and in fact the gamble paid off it was a gamble though. It's also very different from even a politician utilizing a war in order to maintain their own grasp on power that sometimes happens to some people are saying that is currently happening in Israel for example especially given the completely nonsensical nature of Israel going to war with Hezbollah. So those are pretty normal events in human history they're not particularly attractive but they're pretty normal. What's happening now is completely different because Malcolm as you say Andrew as you say these are like it is a completely simulated war absolutely everything is done for effect on the Ukrainian side of course on the Russian side it's completely different the whole thing is run as a war of attrition as a military campaign but on the Ukrainian side absolutely everything is being geared toward this and so you know they'll have to do a counter offensive even if it makes absolutely no sense because as you say they have to portray something on television but why not in Napa or whatever otherwise totally support otherwise support for the war will dry up and what's amazing is that you've got a fairly militarized state over in Ukraine at the moment led by people who've been through a lot let's be honest there's probably some of the toughest people on earth at this point and yet they're buying into this like pomo post-modern mush that like a bit narrative control and spin and et cetera et cetera I think you see this really strongly this kind of military info overlap with these like these like I think they're British directed they're like they're like these heroic attacks they'll like try and take like a river or an island or something and like they'll be like a crazy gung ho plan it's like something out of a movie in a sense and it feels like the entire operation has no strategic value whatsoever but it's being done because it'll get a good headline and maybe the guys who are engaged in it you know are having a bit of fun I mean unfortunately that's how war is people who like war have fun at war so I think the situation here is completely like completely different to any war we've seen in history I mean I said I talked about Jean Baudrillard's the Gulf War did not take place in the intro I mean Baudrillard was talking about basically a war that was fought strategically the first Gulf War was fought on both sides really strategically and then the images were broadcast to give this kind of full sense of it and emboldened American technology and so on well we're very far from that now we're not just taking photographs of a war that's been strategically fought and stitching them together to build up the profile of the American Empire or whatever we're at the point now where we are engaged in warfare that is that is actually geared to produce the cinema it's almost like it's completely directed like a film or something like that and it's all to produce the images and as you say Malcolm and we'll talk about it more I think when we get to the political aspects of this but I think we'd be wrong to say that there are these cynical manipulators behind the scenes that are crafting the script and everything like that I think you have this group of people which seems to go certainly the western political elite maybe even the western military elite at this stage who are probably kind of raised on I don't want to blame everything I'm post modernism okay this isn't the Jordan Peterson show you know it were the that are kind of imbued with this idea that everything is everything's an illusion and everything's narrative and everything like that and they seem to have glummed on to a heavily militarized state and be able to turn the entire Ukraine into kind of a movie set it's one of the most bizarre things I think historians will look back on it I'd say and think it was very strange moment in history yeah and what you should also keep in mind here is that as you described it like the Ukrainians have been infected with this sort of western sickness but like in the west that's the only thing on the menu this kind of ties into what I talked about on my lost appearance but the American military is just completely bogged down in this like Potemkin village virtual warfare narrative construction swamp and again I can for for readers interested or listening interested in this the New York Times if you go to Google and you type in New York Times military suicide you will get like their long form essay on what's happening to sort of the armored components of the US army but just to give a very quick rundown of that the armor components have a suicide rate at this point that's like three times higher than the average in the army and it's not a mystery why that is because especially after this war started between Russian and Ukraine American politicians want the US military to display project strength and so that means a lot of training rotations to Romania or Poland or South Korea or whatever so that so that the US can project an image of strength but all of these like armored vehicles like the Bradley and the Abrams they were normally designed like the Abrams was designed in the late 70s it had a production run between the 80s and like the mid 90s I think after that they've not produced any new halls meaning that like these are really old pieces of equipment and when you are dealing with something like a tank like metal fatigue and so on gets worse as the platform gets older meaning more maintenance meaning more breakdowns and so on and the more you operate an Abrams tank especially one that's you know 40 years old the faster the new breakdowns and sort of mechanical troubles will come so what's happening is essentially the US armor components are being destroyed like their actual strength is being destroyed because the equipment keeps breaking and breaking and breaking and every time it breaks it gets it gets a bit harder to repair it keeps breaking and people keep committing suicide or quitting the army because the workload load is so high but all of these exercises are intended to project the idea that America is strong but I think they're successful in the West but the exercise in projecting American imaginary strength is quite literally destroying the armored vehicles that are supposed to be the bedrock of that strength and they're driving their mechanics and drivers and operators to suicide so both the human and mechanical components of the US army are being like they're basically being cannibalized just to keep the illusion of strength going but this comes out of a vacuum obviously we've talked about the war I think the war has been a really really good example of a lot of this stuff maybe some of us have seen it up close for the first time and how how explicit and how strange it can be but really we're talking about an entire political system that operates like this that's why you know we're talking about Biden this week that everybody's been shocked at the state of the president despite the fact that most people are not most people I know anyway have known the presidents and very poor out for some time so I mean Malcolm maybe you can give us an intro on how does this kind of weird info were warped reality play into the current American political system and then by extension I suppose the European and British systems but I think it is probably that it's purified form near DC yeah and for those people who have been living under a rock for the last week Joe Biden and Donald Trump had their first presidential debate and during this it's been less than a week since the debate between Trump and Biden and during that debate Joe Biden was clearly not lucid like he again most people should notice but like he had all of these gaffes and so on that are very consistent with an old person going through you know like whatever Alzheimer's dementia like all of these things that happen at the end of most people's lives were their mental faculties decay and what's happened afterwards is that you have a lot of conspiracy theories in a sense where people say oh well they put Biden up in front of you know in front of the cameras because they knew he was senile and they wanted to get rid of him and they being some sort of I don't know shadowy cabal of the people who really hold power inside the Democratic Party but in actuality as like the days have passed and the leaks have gotten gone from you know a trickle to a flood the picture that emerges is actually one that's that's really fascinating and actually like deeply scary in a sense because sure as you pointed out Philip there's been a lot of there's been a lot of signs going back to even 2019 and in 2019 and 2020 there was an actual debate on whether Joe Biden should even run for this because he was getting older and he was getting slower but in 2019 Joe Biden kind of had some pretty good days like he did well in the debate against Trump and so people said well it can't be that bad but over time those signs have multiplied and the media has played a very active role in suppressing all of these stories and they've echoed you know White House statement saying that like the video of him stumbling or walking around lost and confused at the recent G7 meeting that was just fake news like it was a faked AI video or something and so you know the New York Times do the fully reported that this is fake and now it's been like a preference cascade like after the fall of the Soviet fall of the Berlin Wall where everyone is suddenly waking up and saying no this guy is actually senile and everyone in the media is waking up and saying no this guy is actually senile how did this happen and what's so interesting here is that there's no trace of cynicism to be found in the reaction at having a quote unquote discovered that Joe Biden is not all that he was. The journalists who do totally you know suppressed and ignore that kind of new story now seems genuinely shocked amazed and sort of dismayed at seeing Biden like this but that that and that genuine shock actually is genuine in a sense where the political dynamic here is one where Biden was surrounded by you know a very small cadre of loyalists that had been with him for 30, 40 years and his family which you know come with a lot of baggage and these people kept telling the Democrats no no no we just need your support in this like we've got this just trust us just give us the backup here and we'll get through this and I think people actually really thought that if you had a skilled enough information wizard a narrative controller costing those spells by incantation as you alluded to in the intro phillip that like the problem would not be a problem and now they're discovering that like narrative magic actually can't affect reality and they're freaking out about it. Yeah I was struck by the way that people appeared as you say genuinely shocked as listeners to this podcast will know I try to avoid American politics as much as possible but like all imperfect human beings I will slow down to watch a car crash and when I saw some of the clips on Twitter of Joe just drifting off into space in the middle of sentences during a presidential debate I kind of slowed down and paid attention what amazed me was the shock people seemed genuinely shocked these kind of big media figures and commentators and columnists and even political figures abroad in Europe were saying just how shocked they were at this when it was something that anybody any adult human with two eyes has known for years like we see these moments play out in front of us where he'll be at a rally and he'll start trying to shake hands with a microphone or he'll be at some conference and he'll just walk off stage in the wrong direction and have to be escorted in the correct direction he will be making a speech and just drift off completely and start talking a finish a completely different sentence and anybody could see this and these things were happening on essentially a weekly basis and the frequency that they had which they were happening was accelerating as he was forced to go into campaign mode after the walk over primaries that he was given as sitting president and yet people who should know more than anybody because they were political insiders because they were these senior columnists and news presenters and talking heads and you know the sort of people who in theory have really good access and I believe do have as good access as possible somehow missed all of this and it's almost like being a member of the political elite means that you're less able to see things as they are than just an ordinary person watching the TV, it's very strange and getting back to Philip's initial point about a self looking ice cream cone, again it seems that they've propagandized themselves in trying so hard to refute the fairly obvious accusation I think that President Biden is not cognitively at his best that would be kind to say and almost certainly not fit to be head of state and an executive head of state at that, in trying to refute this and trying to dismiss it as a cruel partisan attack, it's almost like they've persuaded themselves and suddenly reality just buttered them on the bridge of the nose and now their nose is bleeding and they're angry and upset and emotional and don't understand it, it's really very creepy to watch it happening in real time yeah I think it's kind of in the nature of the way that the propaganda works itself and using the term propaganda even is a little bit difficult, I mean it is propaganda, let's call it for what it is but it's as both of you said itself propaganda, it's like way creepier than normal propaganda it's propaganda created by people who actually kind of believe the propaganda so I guess at like you have the wizard level who believes the incantations actually work and they change reality and then you have all the kind of like idiots watching the magic show who like I guess buy into it too and like actually think that the trick's real and I guess at a certain point the wizard actually thinks he has magical powers and so like it's not actually clear that anybody doesn't believe it except for the person kind of cynically looking on the distance and going why are those people watching a silly magic show, they're adults but I think it's in the nature of the way it works, I think the real trick to covering over the very obvious mental decline of Joe Biden covering it over as you said Andrew not just to the punters watching TV but to the people who were interacting with him in the political class donors that would meet him at fundraising dinners and so on, the trick to that is kind of the old classic outgrouping group thing, very powerful, well known kind of powerful sociological trick among people and so what you did is and they've been doing it with stuff for a long time, Malcolm you just talked about your own experience and the Swedish press were rather than dealing with the criticism that the sanctions aren't working you just say well you're obviously working for Putin or you're a Putin studio, so you're outgrouped then and so the outgroup person doesn't matter anymore same thing happened here basically so the talking point that went around I'm using their language now so we're going really deep down the rabbit hole the talking point that went around was that anybody saying Joe Biden was mentally seen all or whatever we're passing around a right wing talking point and so that was the idea that anytime anyone said that to you if you were kind of in the in group you immediately your brain triggered and you said well I know that's a right wing talking point and of course your brain has already kind of been turned into a machine of seeing talking points everywhere which is actually if you actually think about it it's a conspiratorial way of looking at the world it's actually kind of interesting but you've been trained to do that because well in part because you've been trained to do that but also in part because there are a lot of talking points quote unquote going past one another and when everything's hyper political it's very easy to see absolutely everything as just being not a point of information but a point of information that's being twisted and used by an nefarious character to try and trick you into something or to try and make a point that they want to make and so I think this was pretty much the trick it was it was deemed a right wing talking point and anything that's deemed a right wing talking point is also deemed well we hear the term a lot and a misinformation disinformation all this kind of thing these are the kind of tools of kind of kind of high tier like propaganda I think of the type that we probably haven't seen outside of the totalitarian regimes actually I mean Goebbels used to talk about the big lie and so on this is very kind of similar to that in that you have to have to look at the at the at the at everything through this conspiratorial lands and you can put these various information pieces and various baskets and so on and I think that's pretty much what what drives the show but I think what both of you are saying is absolutely true I think the people in DC the people are probably rambied and probably biding themselves they all stood there and they were believing it they said well of course none of this is reality it's it's just some thing that Fox News has come up with to try and damage my political campaign and I think the the melting the melting of that is what you're describing that's a very very painful thing because that's real kind of cognitive dissonance you know that's like that's like finding it you're you're a fifteen year old son isn't your son or something you know I mean that's really like scrambles with your brain so yeah I think that's kind of kind of what happened what's actually going on here is is I think it's really big and I don't think it's just happened with Biden I don't just think of Biden's debate performance I don't just think it happened with the Ukrainian counter attack last year I think there's a much bigger story going on here I my mind goes back to the Adam Curtis documentary hyper normalization which I think was 2015 2016 but anyway he took that name hyper normalization from a book by Alex a year check who eventually became an academic at Berkeley in California and he wrote a book about his experience living through the 1980s in the Soviet Union called everything was forever until was not until it was no more and in that book he explained the weird state of reality in which Soviet citizens and leaders lived in in the 1980s because by that stage they had come to the realization they knew in the heart that the Soviet system didn't work anymore and nothing was working and they were never going to reach the socialist utopia but they had come up through that system they had they had been educated in that system they had gained promotions you know through their belief and a commitment to that system it was all that they knew and they were so wedded to it and it was because it comprised the entire universe of the reality they either couldn't think of a better way to run the country or they couldn't bring themselves to change the way that the country was run because it was too embedded within their sense of self-worth but at the same time the citizenry citizenry also knew the same thing so when the leaders just continued lying to their citizens the citizens understood that they were lying but the citizens had kind of the same problem they had also grown up in the system they also didn't know anything better or anything different so the citizens just kind of lied to themselves about their lying leaders essentially and a new chat called this state hyper-normalization and I actually wonder whether something pretty similar is happening in I can't talk too much about Europe but certainly the UK and the US at the moment where you have a kind of an elite class who has grown up and spent at least their entire professional lives in a very specific state of the world and they all have extremely you know whether you go to SW1 in London the postcode in London that contains Westminster or whether you go inside the Beltway in Washington or certain places like you know the Manhattan Charity Auction Set and so on and so forth they all have very similar views of the world very similar views of you know how economic policy should be run how trade policy should be run how foreign policy should be run what what is good social policy similar views of morality and what's happened since you know certainly the mid 2000s when it became very clear that the Iraq war was a horrible failure and a true calamity and then shortly after that you had the global financial crisis where the world economy almost went over the brink you've had a series of crises that have been slamming into the elites with an increasing frequency and the elite have built this kind of like this cocoon this this kind of reality of their own making that blocks them off from reality itself from from real reality if you like and every time one of these crisis you know comes around it kind of slams into this cocoon and pierces it and it forces the elites to kind of grasp with reality but they don't instead they kind of double down and in fact quite often they react with kind of classical cognitive dissonance and they choose their own version of reality rather than what's actually happening so I think just in the same way that there was genuine shock when Joe Biden performed as he did at the debate there was also real outrage and shock that Russia had invaded Ukraine despite really serious people saying you know serious academics in the US like former former national security advisers former secretaries of state former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in America was saying that this is what's going to have former heads of the CIA was saying this is this is what's going to happen if we pursue this policy they did pursue the policy and when exactly what was warned about did actually happen they were shocked and outraged and they doubled down on it it's the same with the rise of China they argued that by opening China up to trade by making it rich it would inevitably become a liberal democracy and it would inevitably fall under America's wing and everyone would live happily ever after when this didn't happen again there's this sense of shock and outrage that hasn't happened and they're almost going out of their way now now that China's arrival to kind of antagonize them and show no no no no we're right it's like they're trying to you know with Ukraine with Biden with Brexit with Trump before like Trump is a great example I'm sorry to go on a bit but Trump is a great song when he was elected they refused to look at the election campaign of Hillary Clinton at Hillary Clinton herself and the way that she's viewed in the country no it was all about Russian interference that's what cost Hillary the election they refused to look at reality and say it was Russian interference and racists and they kind of doubled down each time and I think it's not only a weird thing to look at happening but it's actually quite dangerous I mean how you know eventually they're going to keep doubling down and they're going to lose aren't they they're going to continue hitting black on the roulette wheel there is one very central theme here in what you said that I really want to highlight here which is the concept of hyper normalization like the normalization of that which seems absurd or insane or you know crazy unhinged in more normal times and again like there's been similar arguments made from western thinkers I'm thinking of Jacks Persun who wrote this really big opus call I think like from dawn to decadence like a millionaire of western civilization something like that but his point is essentially that you can classify a culture as decadent when the absurd or the like crazy becomes accepted as normal and again decadence is not a slur it's not a it's not a reproach it's just to him a sort of analytical tool it's like a diagnosis and to sort of further buttrest at point regarding Joe Biden you really see which people are still trapped in this sort of hyper normalized like way of looking at the world because especially the first days this is getting less and less common now as people sort of start slowly realizing that this is a real huge deal but you had all of these people who presented themselves as like the serious people in the room the people who weren't susceptible to flights of fancy or dreaming dangerously or whatever and from them the analysis of the current political crisis regarding Biden's you know presidential campaign was like it's it's no big deal man like the democrats can just put a senile guy into the office yeah the cat is out of the bag the guy is a vegetable so what like it's only like minus two points in the polls they can have the media massage it like they'll find a way to tie this act together again and if you said 15 years ago that you would have a electoral campaign between a guy who's you know might be president while inside a state prison the guy who is openly admitted to be a vegetable like people would lock you up in a mental asylum 15 years ago they would say like no this is crazy what the hell are you talking about man but today the serious analyst position or at least the position that the pretends to be serious is one saying like just put the senile man into the office what's the big deal but the shape of the crisis right now is that you have this preference cascade where you know tens hundreds of millions of people are just waking up going now this is absolutely insane we can't have a senile guy in charge of the nuclear codes we can't say let's put a senile guy in charge of the nuclear codes we have four and a half more years at a point where you know these degenerative diseases if there's one thing that doesn't help it's more time like they get they get worse with time they don't get better everyone's just saying no no like whatever logic produced this result is insane and we need to reject this again that's kind of the driving force between everything being the same forever until it just isn't anymore objectively speaking putting a senile guy into the office of the like most important job on the planet as the Americans like to say in a presidential system where the president has an incredibly important function as the guy who is the decider who tells the various bureaucracies this is what we're doing and who is the only guy who has the authority to give orders to these heads of bureaucracies like Janet Yellen can't give orders to you know Lloyd Austin Lloyd Austin can't give orders to Tony Blinken if you have a quote unquote Regency Council the American system is not set up for having a Regency Council because again there's no authority at the top the only way that the American founders or the creators of the political system envisioned solving a crisis with an absent president is putting in a new president like they didn't give the idea of having like a vegetable at the top the time of the day because they would correctly point out that this is not a system built for that kind of thing and so everyone is realizing like this is a regime level disaster this could break the entire country especially now in a time with like a budding financial sort of banking crisis economic crisis a geopolitical disaster zone and so all of these quote unquote serious people who are stuck inside a matrix going oh no like look at the polling here look at the presidential polling he's only lost like 0.5 points in the race or whatever this is recoverable according to this political consultancy like these people only think in terms of the sort of hyper normalized structure but these hyper normalized structures they become so rigid that eventually they break apart and that's what's going on right now like people are looking at the structure that produces this kind of logic and they're saying it can't go like this like it just can't well that leads to the really scary question which is we're going to find the curtain and we pull back the curtain and we see the man right so that's kind of the system that we're living under clearly I think we've described it pretty well I think we've avoided the you know big other narratives of like there is actually some guy pulling the strings and there's a puppet master and there's a plan because you know that's a that's actually kind of comforting because if there's a guy pulling the strings and there's a Regency Council and there's this and there's that like then there's a plan if we're correct that this is kind of a I wouldn't say bottom up propaganda phenomenon but it's an integrated propaganda phenomenon where everybody believes everything and it's really strange and then what is the what is at the core of it what is at the hollow core I think that's what people are beginning to ask a question about because when they looked at the television the other day or internet probably for our listeners they didn't they didn't just see a guy running for president who probably can't eyes and shoes they also saw a president that can't eyes and shoes and of course maybe we can discuss it a little bit more detail the way that the US system is set up is effectively as an elected monarchy the president is really powerful it's not an illusion yes of course there is a deep state that can you know make sure that he can't get too much done and oppose Trump and all this but at the end of the day when you have kind of binary or like three way tertiary decisions you have to bring them to the president and he has to make a call on those things should Ukraine be a war should they have a ceasefire should we go to war over Taiwan should we not this kind of thing so I think people are starting to wake up for that so Malcolm I think you have some thoughts on what the what's behind the curtain here it's become incredibly clear because at this point the American system is leaking like a sieve the the White House for example had a sort of all staff call to do crisis management I think it was today like eight hours off before we recorded this something like that and the call was being leaked to people at like Axios and other venues as it was happening which is really crazy like usually at least they take an hour or two to leak details like stuffers in the White House now they were live streaming their own leaking to the press which tells you how serious the situation is but in this sort of deluge of inside information now that we have weird American perestroika and glass nost a picture emerges of like the two factions inside the democrat party here being like team Biden on the one hand and this is increasingly being described as the Biden bunker by other democrats and team Biden is quite small it's Biden his own family particularly Jill Biden his wife and Hunter Biden his son who has a hobby of recording himself smoking crack I don't really know where this urge to document that comes from but he's quite famous in America for just being a crackhead primarily so it's Hunter and Jill Biden it's his sister I think Valerie Biden and then it's a couple of staffers that have been with him for like 30 years or whatever that are usually as old as him and who know that you can't say no to the big man and the funny thing here is is that the rest of the democratic party is actually really sidelined details have emerged and they were always kind of lurking in the background there were stories done about this in 2021 where the normal sort of customary relations between the White House and the democratic party were being upended like Biden was much more isolated like an emperor in the Forbidden City compared to any sort of previous democratic candidate and Jill Biden was the one controlling access to the president together with like one or two other staffers and so it's it was always really really hard for democrats to arrange a meeting with Biden usually they would if they asked they would just get told no sorry Biden won't meet you for whatever reason so that was in itself kind of a source of consternation like there was never any discussion between Biden and the rest of the democratic party about whether he should run again for example, this was a decision made entirely by by Biden without consulting anyone else and presented almost as a fighter complete to the rest of the democratic party everyone gets the sense that even the democratic party which people accuse of being these ruthless you know, string pullers like living in smokey backrooms making deals about the future of humanity like these people were in a sense also victims of the propaganda like they really naively assumed that well okay there's got to be someone in the White House who has a plan so I mean if they tell us they're going to run again if they tell us it's not senile if they tell us they have this under control and they're going to fix this yeah I guess that's true even in the in the period of crisis management after the debate and this is kind of the the sticking point here like the debate was bad in and of itself but now when you read Axios when you read the hill when you read all of these sort of internal like bulletin boards for the DC the belt weight loss everyone is now saying that it's actually the crisis management face that has really sunk Biden's campaign because he's not actually been on the phone with like the most powerful Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries like Chuck Schumer like Nancy Pelosi Nancy Pelosi went on live TV on like Tuesday I think and said no I haven't talked to Biden since the debate which is completely insane so again people need to understand the very basic political dynamic here which is a very isolated sort of a court around the emperor and they're ensconced in the forbidden city in Washington DC and nobody gets to meet them and everyone else outside inside the bureaucracy inside the congressional Democratic Party they're just going well I mean there's got to be like someone in charge right like they can't just be telling us everything's okay when it's not okay right even even sort of the Democratic Party operators even elected officials even Democratic governors of states are waking up seeing like the man behind the curtain for the first time or maybe that there's no man behind the curtain it's all just kind of like nobody has any clue what to do nobody has of course then there's the international dimension as well because look the world's falling apart we cover it on the show all the time well the West is falling apart it's not clear the world's falling apart the West is falling apart and the assumption in all the capitals in Europe and in Britain and so on is that there's a plan in DC you know I think it's been obvious for some time that there's no plan in DC at all when it comes to foreign policy GA strategy or anything like that maybe there isn't being a blind and blazed for two decades or a decade or I don't know I don't think there's been strategies since the end of the Cold War but certainly since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 it's become increasingly clear that the world's unraveling in a way that's completely uncontrolled completely uncontrolled it's incomplete free for and for some reason that I mean I guess it's part of the same kind of propaganda network nexus and so on people especially leadership in countries that aren't America have been telling themselves no there's somebody in charge it must be the National Security Council it must be Jake Sullivan Jake Sullivan's a genius he's a strategic genius the National Security Council is in control of things it's just an advisory council that's all it is the CIA maybe the CIA is in control of things no Bill Burns is currently in a government post as far as I understand it which is unusual for a CIA director and he may be very smart but he doesn't control anything he just conveys information to the president gives him advice maybe there's some clandestine operations we don't talk about that that's all they do but it's all at the it's all at the order of the president so I think maybe I don't know I haven't seen it yet but at a certain point people in the capitals all over the western world especially have to ask themselves to question was it really a right-wing talking point that Biden was seen out and was it really a multi-polarity podcast talking point I guess that'll be the next thing that the world is actually collapsing there's no plan in DC and most of the people at least at the White House level and probably at senior state department levels and so on haven't even come to terms what's happening they haven't even come to terms with it yeah I just want to make a point before Malcolm jumps in this is really important for the point that you just raised and I'll try to explain why when Biden first came to power he withdrew from Afghanistan in what appeared anyway to be quite a chaotic withdrawal that wasn't announced to America's allies and as we withdrew from Afghanistan there was a debate in parliament and several conservative MPs some of whom had actually served in Afghanistan as servicemen or in the reserves stood up and made very emotional speeches imploring Britain to stay in Afghanistan to provide some kind of presence then some kind of protection for those people who were being left behind now this was really remarkable because Britain has no ability zero non no ability to remain in Afghanistan if the Americans aren't there it's just impossible it's not there but they were they were very emotional and important and at first I just thought it was because they had served because it was important to them and they felt emotional about it but then when the Ukrainian war came you had people like to buy a cell would saying at first that we should enforce a no fly zone over Ukraine which essentially is a declaration of war on Russia because to enforce no fly zone you have to attack anti aircraft and I area denial sites and the other argued that we should take a fleet into the Black Sea to protect Black Sea shipping which likewise would lead to conflict with the Russian Navy and the Russian Air Force over the Black Sea Britain has zero ability to actually do this and at first you know I thought they were off their rocker but then it kind of dawned on me that what they were doing is they were writing checks from America's bank account their assumption was well the Americans will come and join us the Americans will come and help us because there is a plan in America and they just need a little kind of rhetorical help to get over the edge here and there's not a plan in America it's just as you know it looks of it unraveling just as much as Britain is unraveling and Germany is unraveling and France at the moment is unraveling and so I think you make an incredibly important point here that Western leaders in Europe and probably in the United States as well engage in policies or rhetorically support policies based on the idea that there is a plan that there is organization that there is will that there is a single man who can marshal the resources of the United States if there's not and if people continue acting as though there is there not a problem it's a real problem yeah and I'd like to make two points here maybe to close this out which is the first one here is a sort of almost like a historical like political taxonomical point in a sense a lot of people when they sort of grab try to grapple with okay what's actually going on with America they're imagining that there's some sort of regency council there's a group of people who really are running the show from behind the scenes they're using Biden as a prop but you have this council of unelected bureaucrats whatever they're really calling the shots this is to misunderstand on a very basic level how the how political systems work and by that I mean that the as Philip pointed out like the US is kind of an electoral monarchy and the ultimate authority rests with the monarch and so when that guy is permanently sort of disabled you can't really you don't really have the foundation for a for political authority because again it's vested in the guy that's incapable and so what you get is a situation like Austria in 1848 and so 1848 is like this springtime of nations there are revolutions in half a dozen a dozen European countries you have an explosion of nationalism in Germany you have a war of independence in Italy you have another revolution in France you even have like riots and stuff as foreign warfare Sweden and Austria is at the center of this because they're not just facing the Italians trying to declare independence they're also facing the Hungarians having declared independence and a lot of croats and checks and so on trying to break free of the empire at that point the emperor is further than the first who is he has some sort of mental disability so he can't actually do the job kind of like you know Biden being senile and not really lucid what happens in a is that this almost destroys the Austrian Empire at that point because all of Ferdinand's advisors none of them have the authority to give the other one orders meaning that policy becomes like completely freewheeling particularly around like the two big guys in the administration the prince Metternich who is quite famous and the Count Colorat and these people hate each other like they despise each other and have completely different ideas about how to solve this massive crisis the Austrian Empire is facing and so what happens Metternich gives a bunch of orders like we're gonna do this we're gonna handle the demonstrators this way we're gonna tell this to the Hungarians and we're gonna put the foot down against the Italians and then he leaves the room and then Count Colorat says okay ignore everything Metternich said this is the new plan we're gonna do what I think is right and then Colorat leaves Metternich come back and he says okay all of this that Colorat said what are you doing listening to him you should listen to me the problem is that neither of these guys can fire each other the guy hiring and firing Metternich and Colorat is the emperor and without like this sort of singular political will at the top of the system the system cannot work like the Metternich and Colorat are both useful bureaucrats as long as they have a minder and the system is set up that the emperor is the minder remove that and it just spins out of control when people are sort of grasping with reality in the US today what they're coming to realize is that there is no secret cabal again the system is not set up like that structurally so that's the structural point but the second point here is far more for shorter and far more depressing we have the leaks at this point like we have people coming out and telling what the real situation inside the White House has been for the last two years at least and what has actually happened here is that Biden is senile his sundowning and as people get older they become more of who they really were and Biden was always a guy who didn't really tolerate people count demanding him or saying that's wrong and you know people who are suffering from dementia tend to get much angrier and have like these obstinate episodes and so on just from the dementia so the reality of the White House was that you had a guy who was the emperor the guy in charge surrounded by a small court of people like 10-15 people who were deftly afraid of ever telling Biden things he didn't want to hear or that he was senile he should step down so not only did you not have a regency council because the US system is not set up to have that you had a guy making the shots who was senile who was barely there and who still was the guy given the job of deciding how the US should relate to the attack on Gaza or the war in Ukraine that's that's a disaster that's a complete disaster but again it's it's the reality of the situation and this is what people are waking up to like they had a senile guy running the show a guy who was no longer mentally capable but again who nobody dared to tell no that's been the man behind the court and all of this time in the strongest post-accomplished presidently had in my lifetime my lifetime my lifetime I'm a driver I'm a winner thanks are going to change I can feel it
