TRANSCRIPT

Geopolitics & Empire:

The Geopolitics And Empire podcast is joined by James Corbett. The man, the myth, the legend. Señor Santiago or Jaime, as we would call you here in México. How is the Great Reset going in Japan?

James Corbett:

As well as can be expected. In fact, actually, given what’s happening in other parts of the world, it’s going extremely well here in Japan, which is not something I would’ve predicted beforehand.

But before we start, let me just give a little plug for your podcast. I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit recently. I appreciate the fact that you’re bringing in a lot of different people from a lot of different perspectives, some of whom I agree with, some of whom I slightly agree with, some of whom I violently disagree with. But I do appreciate that you do get a broad range of opinions on.

Geopolitics & Empire:

Yeah, thanks for that. You know, I was just going to say, it’s kind of funny that here we are—two, I guess, former English teachers-turned-podcasters, content creators, whatever you want to call it. And the Geopolitics & Empire can’t hold a candle to the prolific work of The Corbett Report.

It’s funny: I had you, actually, on my future guest list, and then the friend of mind pointed out that recently you had actually mentioned me in your Kazakhstan episode, which I thought was flattering. And I thought it was a good time now than to shoot you a mail.

But you’ve had quite the ride over the past decade-plus, putting out a huge library of important work and meeting so many interesting people. I’m just curious now: How has the ride been for you? How does it feel? Has your work ethic changed much? How have you changed or stayed the same through all of these years?

James Corbett:

Well, I guess on the personal level or on the work level, I don’t think that my work ethic has changed. I have just always been particularly self-motivated, which is a good thing when you’re basically doing this for yourself and by yourself and with yourself.

Just talking to a screen most days. If you’re not self motivated to get out of bed and start doing things, it’s probably going to be a problem. But, luckily, that’s never been a problem for me. So in that sense, I don’t think anything’s changed.

In fact, the one thing that has changed is when I started, of course, I was just doing this, as you say, kind of as a hobby. But it was essentially a second full-time job after my full-time job of teaching.

But luckily after four years, I was able to amass enough of an audience and support in order to start doing it full-time. So now I don’t have that burden. But now I also have a family, which is obviously a demand on my time as a stay-at-home father. So I juggle a lot of balls, but luckily I’m able to do that.

However, in terms of the way I’ve changed in my operation or the way I think about things or the way I approach things, I think I’ve been consistent in some of my core principles, but I have certainly changed on certain topics and certain ideas.

And obviously, I’d like to think that as I’ve done more research, I’ve come to a more nuanced understanding of various things. Probably the biggest demonstrable change that has occurred from the time I started to now would be my conversion from statism to some flavor of anarchism. I think that’s a pretty big change to make, politically speaking.

Geopolitics & Empire:

Yeah, speaking of anarchism, I was just going to ask you, by the way, have you been to Mexico for Anarchapulco?

James Corbett:

I’ve been there twice, yeah.

Geopolitics & Empire:

How did you enjoy Mexico? A lot of people are fleeing to Mexico. Is it a place you’d recommend?

James Corbett:

“Recommend?” Actually, I have a Questions For Corbett on this specifically. I think it’s called, “Where Should We Run To?” I think it was #074, but don’t hold me to that [*CORRECTION: Where Can We Run To? — Questions For Corbett #072]. Anyway, you can find it on my site where I address that question. Because I get that question a lot from people—at least a couple of people a week, every single week: “I want to move. What country should I move to?” I cannot and will not answer that question for anyone, because it’s such a personal question, dependent on a thousand different personal, context sort of things.

So, for some people, I’m sure Mexico is a great place to go. For others, I’m sure it is not. And I wouldn’t presume to say either way. For me, personally, what is the secret stew that made it so that when I got to Japan and was planning to stay here for one year, I’ve stayed here for 18 years? What is it about Japan that drew me to it and I felt comfortable? At this point, I feel more at home in Japan than I would in Canada. So why is that? I don’t know. There’s a million different personal things that go into that.

But people always ask me: “Why did you go to Japan?” Like, as if it was some sort of big political decision that I made or some sort of calculation or strategic thing. No, I was young, dumb, single, carefree, and was just looking for a way to kill a year and make some money. So, “I’ll go teach English in Asia!” And it turns out I really liked it in Japan. That’s the long and short of it.

As it turns out, that was actually, I think, very beneficial for me in a number of ways, one of which is that because I was not a fluent Japanese speaker in Japan in early 2000s, my lifeline—the sort of the thing that I was getting information and news and things from—was online.

And so I was a very early adopter of podcasts, because it was just a very easy way for me to stay in touch with what was going on back home in Canada. And, as a result of that, I think I was early on the wave of things like podcasting, which helped me out in the long run.

And, also, I think it is easier to do this work that I do from a remove. I talk a lot about Canada and the US and other places. But it’s good to have that actual distance, so I can see things from afar and get a different perspective on them.

Geopolitics & Empire:

Yeah, my story is the same. I thought I’d go to Mexico just for a year or two. I became a Mexican. I’ve been here for 10 years, and even Mexicans ask me, Why’d you come here? And I’m like, “I’m still trying to figure out the answer to that question.” So that’s just life. You know, life happens.

And, as you say, I agree. When people ask me, “Should I go to Russia or Mexico or Latin America?” I often tell them, “It might be better just to stay put where you are.” 

I wanted to get your thoughts on what’s most pressing you at the moment?

There’s a lot of questions I could ask you. And often I ask my guests, “What’s on your mind right now?” I cover a lot of hot topics, but I’ve kind of gotten tired of the geopolitical war talk with this US–Russia cycle at the moment. And I kind of view it as a bit of a diversion from COVID-1984.

The Great Reset and all that it entails is my number one worry at the moment. That includes the cyber pandemic and all of this stuff that you and I and listeners know about. 

I’m kind of disregarding all of this talk of the restrictions being canceled. Many of the articles that I’m reading, in fact they say, “Oh, we’re getting rid of the restrictions,” but they still outline that the COVID passports are here to stay. And here in Mexico, they’re already operating, they’re already talk about expanding them.

So now they’re attempting to install this global social credit system, which, when in place, will basically turn off my ability to do anything. I don’t think I’m exaggerating that it will literally starve me and my family to death. That’s my worry, that’s on my radar. What are some of the things on your radar at the moment?

James Corbett:

Well, I think my thoughts are very much in line with that. COVID-1984 has as much to do with a virus as Watergate had to do with a hotel—which is to say: nothing. It’s not about that. And so whatever happens in terms of this “pandemic” that we’re living through right now, it doesn’t matter.

The infrastructure for the biosecurity state is being laid, has already, to some extent, been laid, and will not be pried out without some major revolutionary times to come. So that’s definitely forefront in my mind, at least for this particular moment and what we’re living through right now.

And I have always, and will always, cite one of the writers and thinkers who helped me to not understand this, but to articulate it. It was Giorgio Agamben who was the one from whom I got that term “biosecurity.” He formulated it very simply, very precisely, in a very articulate way, very early on.

And I think he definitely saw where this was going, from a very early stage. For people who don’t know about Giorgio Agamben, he’s an Italian philosopher. He’s written about states of emergency and how they are used to override constitutions and other things, which basically, I think, shows that the governance paradigm that we live under is not really what we think it is and can change at a moment’s notice, as we have seen.

And he’s really articulated what this is and where it’s going, and the fact that this is a new governance paradigm for the planet. For example, he did an interview in May of 2020—so, very early on—called Polemos Epidemios, where he said:

“An epidemic, as is suggested by its etymological roots in the Greek term demos (which designates the people as a political body), is first and foremost a political concept. In Homer, polemos epidemios is the civil war. What we see today is that the epidemic is becoming the new terrain of politics, the battleground of a global civil war — because a civil war is a war against an internal enemy, one which lives inside of ourselves.”

And it goes on to say:

“It is important to understand that biosecurity, both in its efficacy and in its pervasiveness, outdoes every form of governance that we have hitherto known. As we have been able to see in Italy — but not only here — as soon as a threat to health is declared, people unresistingly consent to limitations on their freedom that they would never have accepted in the past.”

Well, that’s a pretty good articulation of what’s happened over the past couple of years.

And, as I say, this has nothing to do with the particularities of this particular moment. People who have followed my work for any length of time hopefully know by now, I was talking about Medical Martial Law over a decade ago, precisely because the legislative institutional groundwork for this has been laid over the past couple of decades, at the very least.

So this particular thing is being used as the moment: “OK, let’s pull the trigger on this.” But the gun was already loaded and ready to go. And it didn’t take a crystal ball to see where this was going. This is the new governance paradigm for the planet—at least until the next one comes along.

We went from the Homeland Security state of the early 2000s into the biosecurity state without missing a beat. And there are a number of parallels there. I did a piece in 2020. On September 11th I released COVID-911, where I specifically drew those parallels between Homeland Security and biosecurity.

You can look at some very specific examples. I believe it was the CLEAR Health Pass that was started in 2002, 2003—something like that—as part of this screening process at airports for the Homeland Security state and screening for terrorism.

And that company has effortlessly switched over to—well, now they’re going to be providing the health check screening passport that won’t just be at the airports. Now it’s moving out into your everyday life. And exactly as you say, it’s creating the infrastructure for a state where they can turn your ability to participate in society on or off with a flick of a switch.

So I guess what I see coming is, in the very near term, yes, all of this vaccine health passport is just the fig leaf for the implementation of the digital ID system, which will then be used and forwarded through social credit scores and the central bank digital currency, which is what I see as the mid-term. In the next five years, we are going to start seeing the implementations of CBDCs in various countries, which will be directly controlled by central banks. 

They will be able to algorithmically control money itself, so that if they want, [they can] impose limits. For example, “We need to quarantine this city, your CBDC wallet will no longer work if you leave the city and we have your GPS, because it’s on your smartphone. So we know where you are. We know who you’re transacting with. We know what you’re buying at every moment that you’re buying it, we can allow or disallow that transaction.”

That is the nightmare in the mid-term. And then long term, unfortunately, within the next decade, I do see hot war—geopolitical war—as a very real possibility.

Geopolitics & Empire:

Yeah. I have a similar view. Actually, I had Agamben’s book on my wish list. I’m going to get it, now that you mention it. And about a year ago, I think I was one of the first to interview Robin Monotti, the Italian architect, and he was mentioning Agamben.

But I think what we’re seeing goes back even way further—like a century. I interviewed the Jewish historian Edwin Black, where he talks about the “algorithm ghetto.” And on his show just two weeks ago, the topic was how, in 1938, the Governor of Connecticut, a eugenicist, had drawn up plans to actually take people they deemed as undesirables and send them to extermination camps in the Ozarks. We’re talking about Connecticut in the United States in 1938. He lost reelection, so that plan never came to fruition, but he was influenced by the Nazis, who were in turn influenced earlier by the American eugenicists.

So it seems like what they’re trying to do now, they’ve been trying to do for a century. It’s insane, and, as you say. A lot of people say I’m too pessimistic or cynical. But I don’t see this going away. We’re in it.

They’re laying the infrastructure. There’s a lot of hopium going around, but I’m just kind of like battening down the hatches and kind of preparing for the worst. It’s just . . . I mean, what are your thoughts going forward?

James Corbett:

Yes, I agree. We should not be taking this lightly. As we’re recording this, I wrote an editorial just the past weekend called “Do NOT Go Back to Sleep! This is NOT the End!” because I see the same sort of rhetoric going around. People celebrating: “Yay, they’re rolling back the restrictions!” Yes, OK, let’s be happy about the steps that are being taken in the right direction. But [while] we may be winning certain battles, we are not winning this war—not by a long shot. Not yet. There’s a lot more work to be done.

On that note that you mentioned—about the historical context for this and stepping back and looking at the bigger, bigger picture of where this is coming from and the ideology behind it—I think that’s extremely important to be able to understand that this is not just happenstance. [This is not just] incompetent boobs bumbling their way through a response to this thing that came up, [saying,] “Oh, what are we going to do?”

No, this is part and parcel of a plan that is in line with an ideology that has been pervasive—at the very least, demonstrably, for over a century now. And I tried to tie that history together in my How & Why Big Oil Conquered the World documentary, where, essentially, what I see is the early iteration of this philosophy/ideology/guiding principles of the oligarchs was framed around the concept of eugenics—the pseudoscience of eugenics—that developed in the late 19th century in England but quickly spread to the United States and then to Germany, etc. But, of course, after World War II, when all of that . . . “Well, we can’t really claim to be eugenicist anymore. It’s kind of got a dark. . . . We don’t want to have those connotations. So we have to take it underground.” 

The American Eugenics Society and others explicitly said, “We need start crypto-eugenics.” You had Julian Huxley, the founder of UNESCO, writing in the founding document of UNESCO, “We need to make eugenic policies thinkable again.” All of this.

Well, how do we do that? You have people like Julian Huxley and others who come together in organizations like the World Wildlife Federation. What a wonderful thing? Yay! All these very rich, very powerful people coming together in conservatorship kind of organizations, [like] World Wildlife Federation—these sorts of things that are just about protecting nature.

And then we get the next iteration of the eugenics ideas, which was reformulated as population control to save the planet. Population control in every sense. Not just in terms of numbers and controlling fertility and sterility, but also controlling the population and what they’re allowed to do.

That starts to go into the burgeoning environmental movement, which becomes a way of restricting people’s ability to access various parts of nature and eventually, of course, who can own nature, and what will we do with this nature? All that is culminating, as I was reporting late last year, in this Global Financial Alliance for Net Zero, which came about at the COP26 in Scotland, where they’re talking about, “Oh, we’re going to form these new natural asset classes, which will then be traded by the trustworthy people of BlackRock and other such investment companies! And we’re going to have these billionaires stewarding over the world’s natural resources in the name of saving Mother Earth, of course.”

Where I see this going long-term is into the next iteration of the same idea, the fundamental idea of eugenics, which, for people who don’t know, look it up, is essentially the idea that there are certain people who are genetically fit to rule over others—they are genetically superior and their genes deserve to be propagated into the future.

The genes of the poor and the criminals and the mentally defective need to be removed from the gene pool. That’s essentially what we’re talking about. It’s just a justification for ruling class ideology. But the next stage of that is going to be transhumanism. That sounds absolutely crazy to the average person, as it should. 

But don’t talk to me or to the average person. Talk to Klaus Schwab. And the World Economic Forum, the Fourth Industrial Revolution—[all] talking about the merging of our digital, biological and physical identities, the brain chips, and all these crazy ideas that . . . Again, it’s not James Corbett who’s talking about it. It’s Klaus Schwab and his cronies talking about these ideas that are coming that will be tied into the central bank digital currencies and the digital IDs and the social credit scores and the vaccine passports, which, for some reason, they’re calling “green passes” in country after country. 

I wonder if there’s some carbon credits that are coming in the future. You’ll have a carbon allowance that you’ll be allowed to spend each month, which ties into technocracy—an entire other idea that ties very nicely into the eugenic story that I’m painting here. Technocracy [is], literally, a plan to structure the economy, not around dollars and cents or pesos or yen, but around joules of energy.

You will be allotted a credit of energy each month by the technocratic rulers, or the technate, who rule over you. They will allow you to spend a certain amount of energy each month. So products and services that you buy will be priced in units of energy. And this will all be balanced by the scientists and engineers who know best for you. 

Again, all of this fits together. And to anyone who doesn’t understand or doesn’t know any part of what I just talked about, that sounds like I just verbally diarrhea-ed all over the place for the last couple of minutes.

But when you start to know all of the pieces of that puzzle and how they fit together, it is absolutely breathtaking. And that is the reason why people like you know that whatever little rollbacks we’re getting on this or that mandate here and there is not the end of this battle.

Geopolitics & Empire:

Yeah. I just saw recently someone I interviewed some months ago, the Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts. He’s going all out, and he’s just been weekly now talking about this Australian Digital Identity Bill, basically using the same language as you. He’s saying that they want to make all aspects of our lives a subscription service to them.

As you laid out, every single aspect of our lives. I don’t know how important this is. How would you qualify this system? For me, it’s not that important. It’s ultimately a totalitarian system that’s going to have total control of the financial aspect—money and power. But you mentioned biosecurity states, technocracies—some people call this Marxist—monopoly, capitalist, transhumanist. It seems to be like this beast that’s got flavors of each. How would you kind of qualify it?

James Corbett:

Yes, in a sense, perhaps trying to put the definitive single label on it is self-defeating, precisely because it can morph and change shape to suit whatever the ideology of the moment is. I always point out that hundreds or thousands of years ago, people believed that their rulers were either literally gods or appointed by God to rule over them.

That doesn’t fly in the modern, enlightened, scientific era. So they needed to come up with a new story. Okay, it’s genes. Actually, when eugenics started, they didn’t even know about genetics per se. Mengele was still doing his pea pod experiments.

So they didn’t really have any actual scientific basis for it. They just called it germplasm and said, “Well, our germplasm, our goo, is better than your goo. And this is the scientific way of doing this.” So they will morph and change the narrative to suit whatever time frame they happen to be in.

And I think the one for the coming decades is going to be technocracy. It’s going to be, “Don’t worry, guys, the scientists trust the science. They know what’s best. These people in the white lab coats know everything.”

Where do the people in the white lab coats get their funding and resources? No, never ever think about that question. No, it’s just, they’re floating on clouds and they will tell you what to do. And I think that’s going to be the fig leaf of justification for this in the coming years.

So I think, for example, Patrick Wood has it nailed. I think this is technocracy as the governance paradigm they’re going to go with for the coming decades. And that’s going to dictate the way this unfolds. It’s a nightmare, unless we are aware of this and consciously working towards . . . I wouldn’t even say “fighting against” the implementation of the system so much as “building up” the actual alternative to this system.

Because their entire system is going to be predicated on being able to control and monitor and disallow any interaction or any transaction with any person in real time through their technological control. We have to build up the alternative infrastructure for an alternative economy now.

We should have been doing it 20, 50, 100 years ago. But, hey, might as well start today. And if we don’t have that in place by the time this CBDC and all of these things are in place, it will be game over for free humanity.

Geopolitics & Empire:

Yeah, I talked to Patrick about a month ago. And on this podcast, we often talk about parallel structures, parallel economies, to talk about a bit about Mr. Global. There are a lot of smart people I interview. And, as you said earlier, when you listen to my podcast, people have to get it through their head that I don’t necessarily agree with my guests, but you’ve got to hear different points of views. A comment a listener was telling me was, “Everyone’s got a little piece of the puzzle that maybe you didn’t think about before.”

Recently I had on Ron Unz, who thinks that COVID was a US bioweapon launched against China. Right before that, I spoke to Jeff Nyquist, who thinks it’s a Chinese-Russian bioweapon launched against the US and the West.

And then, before that, I had the Dutch academic Kees Van Der Pijl, who wrote the fantastic book States of Emergency. And I agree with him where we’re seeing . . . Other people I’ve talked to, like Michael Rectenwald, point out the same—that we’re seeing factions of ruling elites or ruling elites in all nations.

They have some sort of a global network where they’re working together, because how else can you explain all nations from Mexico to Kazakhstan, where I used to live, to everywhere, applying the same measures? And so, what do you think is going on? Is there this one global power structure that’s infiltrated all nations?

James Corbett:

Yes, essentially yes. To a certain extent. Let me clarify that. But let me say, I have listened to all three of those conversations, and although I disagree to some extent with all of them, I certainly agree the most with Van Der Pijl—was that his name?

Geopolitics & Empire:

Yeah.

James Corbett:

Yeah. He was more in line with the way I’m thinking about this, although I tend to disagree with his economic framing. But, yes, clearly this is more than a nation-state 2D chess game that’s being played right now.

And so for people who are interested in this, I have talked at length a number of times about the concept of 3D chess, geopolitically. I’m sure this is not a new concept to people by this point in 2022. But essentially, no, I do not think that the nation-states warring against each other is the entirety of the game, so to speak.

I think it is part of the game. But I think there are forces and bodies that clearly and demonstrably over the past couple of years are enacting an agenda across nation-state borders. And a clear example of this [is Russia]—whether you think Russia are the good guys in some fight against evil NATO or whether you think they’re the bad guys that we should be trying to contain.

In any sense, just look at [Russia’s] COVID policies and vaccine passports and vaccines rolling out, and, wow, it’s almost identical to what’s happening in the west. Wow, I thought these were archrivals. What’s going on here? And then you start to look at the actual specific people, like the CEO of SberBank. Gref? I forget his name.

Geopolitics & Empire:

Yeah. 

James Corbett:

People like this who are clearly connected into the World Economic Forum, explicitly, and organizations like it. And I always try to stress that I don’t think the World Economic Forum is running the world. But I think it’s a good example that you can put your finger on.

Oh, here’s an organization with all these spokes that tend to go out into all of these different places that connect all of these players and all of these different supposedly warring countries. What’s going on here?

I’ve talked about this many, many times. I will point, once again—and I will always make the caveat that I’m not promoting this person, but I think it’s a good one to use to point out to people who are skeptical—that in 2008, the mini-Kissinger . . . what’s his name? He was the head of Kissinger and Associates for some time. He ran foreignpolicy.com. He’s a beltway insider in Washington. . .

Geopolitics & Empire:

Is that Rothkopf or something?

James Corbett:

David Rothkopf, right? Right. Yeah. He wrote The Superclass, which was a book talking explicitly about this: The fact that there are actors who are not necessarily politicians, they are not in national governments—there’s about 6,000 of them who are a “superclass,” who are able to enact agendas across national borders.

And, of course, every time Rothkopf was giving a speech about this or an interview in that time period, when the book came out, he was like, “Oh, I’m not a conspiracy theorist. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. I’m not. Don’t tell me anything.” But everything he’s saying is exactly what the crazy conspiracy theorists are alleging—that, yes, there is a superclass, that is, an oligarchical elite that is able to enact an international agenda through various bodies, like the World Economic Forum or like the Bilderberg Group or these other places of power and influence, where clearly there is an international agenda being set and implemented. Again, as we have seen over the past couple of years. So, yes, clearly there is some much, much bigger thing happening right now than merely a nation-state 2D chess war. 

Geopolitics & Empire:

I’m going to show my Putin coffee cup. I’m not a Putin fanboy. I have it for fun. I picked it up when I was in St. Petersburg few years ago. But I think people have to think: Imagine how you—whatever citizen you are of whatever country—how you feel with your own government, right?

As you said, you left statism and you became sort of an anarchist. And I think a lot of us understand that our governments are evil. You read R. J. Rummel, who I think came up with the term “democide” [in his book] Death by Government. In the 20th century, government killed the most people—was the cause of most deaths.

Now, imagine if you’re a Russian living in Russia. You’re going to feel the same way [against your own government] as an American feels against this corrupt American government. There’s no reason for us to think the Russians are any better or the Chinese or whatever other country. 

And in fact, Riley Waggaman, whom I’ve interviewed, who was formerly at RT, who is in Russia. He lays out . . . his substack articles are amazing. He’s showing you how Russia’s going full Great Reset. And, actually, he’s going to be contributing original material articles for Geopolitics & Empires.

James Corbett:

Awesome. Good. Yeah. He’s doing good work. Let me put in a plug for him. I agree, it’s incredibly important to see it from that perspective, because it can be easy for someone in America or somewhere else to look at [Russia and say], “Oh, well, Putin such great leader.” It’s easy to say that when you are not actually in Russia, beholden to the Russian system. “Oh, the Russian vaccine passports are just so much better than the American version.” Like, what? What’s going on? No, clearly, yeah, it’s important to keep that perspective in mind—that we should not be idealizing [any government]. The flip side of that, of course, is that I’m not saying, “Oh, you know, we should go in and invade Russia to free them from Putin.” Again, that’s the wrong way of thinking about it.

Geopolitics & Empire:

I’m trying to bring up . . . these are some of the big questions for me, as we’ve been discussing. And war also, which you mentioned that you think [is] coming—where are we now? 2022. Towards 2030, you see war. I see the same, and a number of my guests have said the same.

I’ve talked to the [former] Australian Special Forces [now] Australia One politician Riccardo Bosi, who thinks . . . He’s like, “The default in history is war. Peace is the anomaly. We’re going to have war again.”

The question is: What’s it going to look like? Between who? Where? The consequences? Many other guests have also said the same—that they see war from between now and 2025, closer to 2030. But it’s just that kind of interesting dynamic that you laid out. We’ve got these snakes that have infiltrated our national governments.

So they’re working for this global kind of power, yet at the same time, we’ve got this overt rivalry we’re seeing now between the US, Russia, China, and other states and that will eventually go to war. So how do you explain the logic behind that? One past guest also discussed that war allows them to transform the entirety of society as well. So they can use that very much to their advantage. So what are your thoughts about war in the future?

James Corbett:

Alright. I sometimes tend to just say that I’m not a “cartoon conspiracy theorist,” where I think there’s one group that controls everything and they all meet in a smoky room. But let’s lay that out in detail. It’s not like there is a thing called “the elite” and you get your membership card to the elite.

And along with that you get a plan, and here is the plan—here’s what’s going to happen, and here’s what you have to do with this. Does anyone think that’s how it works? I certainly don’t. There are different players involved in this game who are at different layers of “eliteness,” whether they’re on the inner side of the inner circle or the outer side of the inner circle or the outer side of the outer circle. And [each have] different levels of understanding who are, their own motivations, their individual psychology—let alone what they believe they’re doing and what part they’re playing.

So I don’t think there is a singular plan that everyone is working towards. There is a 2D chess game. That is part of what is happening right now. And there are nation-states that do have militaries, and I have no doubt that a lot of people in the militaries of their respective nation-states are on board with the idea of the 2D chess war.

And they really do see it in that those terms. They really are working towards containing, if not eradicating, the enemy, in the simplistic terms, etc. There are certain people above them who may be giving orders or funding certain things into existence, or what have you, that are at a different level of the game, who might understand things a bit differently and might have different allegiances.

They might have some allegiance to their nation-state of origin, but they might have allegiance to some sort of broad category of economic interest or to their fellows in various organizations, etc. Again, a lot of people have different understandings and levels that they’re playing at.

So, one way that hot war can actually eventuate is the hothead on the wrong day, pulling the trigger. Once there are enough pieces in place on the chess board, it just takes one wrong move at one wrong time to put the clockwork machinery into motion.

And that’s one way of looking at World War I. Yes, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand started World War I. Why? How did that motivate all these different people? Well, because the clockwork machinery for all of this war was already in place. All it needed was a trigger event. Did it matter what the particular trigger event was? Well, not necessarily. No, it was a trigger event, and it set everything into motion. Everything had already been set up.

In the same way, again, like I’ve been trying to stress with the biosecurity state, all of the pieces were in place. Everything was there; all it needed was a trigger event. Does it really matter what particular trigger event it is? No. It’s already set up.

I think all of the pieces are being put into place right now for a hot-war scenario. So will it matter necessarily what the particular trigger event is? Well, yeah, it’ll be interesting to see, but does it matter in terms of whether or not war originates? No, not necessarily.

People say, “Well, okay, both sides are controlled by the same people.” I think that might be a bit too simplistic a way of putting it. But why would they need war at all if they control everything?

Well, again, I don’t think they control everything. And, besides, the point of war has always been to get land and resources. I mean, these are the geopolitical imperatives throughout history, right? But at this stage, war is not against Russians or Chinese or Iranians or what have you. It is against the free people of the world.

That is what we’re talking about. In this ideological battle that we’re talking about—eugenics or transhumanism or whatever way it’s being framed in our current time frame—the real war is against the people. It’s governing structures that want to consolidate power over more and more people.

How can they best do that? War might be a way to do that—to consolidate control. Because one of the automatic effects of any wartime is that everyone rallies around the flag and supports, “Okay, we’ll do what you say.” 

Obedience becomes immediate and almost universal, which is certainly helpful, especially during times of incredible geopolitical, economic, societal chaos, uncertainty, [when] a lot of things can happen. 

Clearly, there are some real revolutionary forces that are happening right now, and it’s starting to manifest as, for example, the Freedom Convoy in Canada, whatever you make of that. That is an expression of people calling out, “No, this has to change. Something is really wrong here.”

And what’s a good way to get people in line? “Uh-oh, look at what Russia is doing! Okay. Now, everybody, we have to go [to war].” So that’s one way of framing this.

But that’s why I did a piece on “How Will World War III Be Fought?” a year or two ago, in which I answered that question. I was talking about some of the technology for warfare that has really changed what warfare will look like in the future. In the same way, World War I looked nothing like war of the 19th century, World War II looked nothing like World War I. World War III will not look anything like World War II.

But the actual answer is that World War III is already happening. It is a war of the governments of the world against their own populations. And in that war, that’s the game for all the marbles. So one way of envisioning a 2D chess war taking place in this 3D chess universe, is 1984. 

You have Oceania, you have Eurasia, you have East Asia, and they’re always at war. Or at least we’re told we’re at war with Eurasia. No. East Asia? Oh, I’ve got to check the newspaper. Oh, it says Eurasia. Okay. I guess we’re at war with them today.

And there’s bombs dropping down, and we’re being told it’s . . . well, I guess it’s Eurasia. We’re at war with Eurasia now. Okay. It must be them, I guess. I don’t know. Anyway, we’re at war. So we have to just do what the government tells us.

That’s one way of thinking about this. Obviously, I don’t mean it in that literal sense. There will be real bombs dropping in the event of real hot war, and they will really kill people. But the idea that this is being waged simply at that 2D level and that it’s about a nation-state versus a nation-state rather than control of the general population—I think we have to get out of that mindset of thinking of it at that nation-state level.

Geopolitics & Empire:

And speaking of mindset, I wanted to bring this up. Someone in my Geopolitics & Empire Telegram channel chat was saying, “Oh, the Canada trucker convoy is a psyop by the elites to take down the supply chain.” And I just wanted to address this issue where, there’s a lot of people on . . . I’m sure your listeners, my listeners and other folks have very partisan views. I’ve got my own view, but I’m not banging it over the head of anyone.

And, as you said, you listened to my last three episodes. And obviously you don’t disagree with these people. You just sit there and just listen. I don’t think there’s a lot of folks that are going about things in a way that I think is very healthy. They’ll comment, “Oh, no, there’s no virus. Stop talking about germ theory.” Others going to say, “No, it’s gain of function.” 

Or Kazakhstan, for example, they say, “No, it’s a color revolution.” And you saw my take, where I gave a very nuanced view: “And today it was reported in Kazakhstan that there were Kazakh citizens trying to tell Kazakh authorities that they’re seeing terrorists and armed groups months before what was happening. That lends credence to the idea that maybe it was a false flag or an internal coup.” 

And so, what would you say? I think it’s like, “Bro, chill.” We have to be a bit more respectful and nuanced, and there’s a lot of people that are just angry, hateful. And what are your thoughts on what needs to happen?

James Corbett:

I know what you’re saying. There’s a couple of different things I’d like to say about that. One is: Never, ever, ever take at face value interactions that you have online with avatars that you don’t see and don’t know.

Because we know, 100% we know, that there are armies of social media bots that are being run by militaries and intelligence agencies around the world. Documented. On the record. I did a podcast on that a couple of years ago, The Weaponization of Social Media. People can check into for the documented . . . we know country after country—Canada, America, Israel, all of them—have botnets that they employ. So don’t ever take interactions online as authentic expressions of real human beings. We don’t know that, necessarily.

But secondarily, there are people, I think, who are genuinely acting in and interacting the way that you say. And here’s the way I would frame this. So think about . . . Alright, so I play a bit of guitar. Imagine you’re learning guitar and you know three or four chords and someone teaches you a new chord.

“Oh, here’s a B7. Woo! B7. Awesome!” So what do you do? You’re trying to figure out how to play and what to do. And so now you’ve got this new chord. So now you try to put B7 in every song you play. “Hey, I’m going to use this B7 chord. Wow! Look at this chord.” I understand. It’s a natural part of growing.

Unfortunately, as we know, not everyone is intellectually firing on all cylinders. And not everyone’s a deep researcher, a deep thinker, or what have you. And a lot of people who are the mainstream masses, who would consume CNN 20 years ago, now realize, at the very least, “OK, CNN’s wrong.” And so they start to learn about false flag operations and psyops and these kinds of things.

It’s like teaching someone the B7 chord. Okay, B7. So now they’re going to play that chord every single time: “It’s a psyop! It’s a pysop! It’s a false flag!” Because it’s the one thing that they know how to do.

Let’s particularize this to the Freedom Convoy. If people go read that editorial I talked about—”Do NOT Go Back to Sleep! This is NOT the End“—of course, I acknowledge [in it that,] absolutely, this can go wrong in a lot of different ways. But it always can. You can’t think of any freedom movement or protest or anything that could not be co-opted, could not be corrupted, could not be used for an ulterior agenda.

So let’s think: truckers. And now, suddenly, truckers have become synonymous with this freedom movement, and it’s all the truckers. And now we’re starting to see people in America and Australia and other places talking about truckers and saying, “We’ll have a trucker freedom convoy!” It’s all about trucker, trucker, trucker, which is a weird way of particularizing this. No, it’s actually about the broader question of mandates and freedom and what have you.

Why is it being particularized to truckers? Well, one way that it could play out [is]: What do we know has already been tested and is already being implemented in various ways? Autonomous self-driving trucks, specifically. In fact, the first cross-country American autonomous vehicle that I ever heard about actually being tested and used was a truck, specifically for trucking.

I mean, long term, if we’re going to demonize a certain class of people in order to facilitate the removal of their industry, essentially, wouldn’t that be a convenient tool? Sure. That’s one way that could play out, at least in the long term. Or, at the very least, if we all associate it with the truckers and what the truckers are doing, then it can become only about that particular—that class or that person or that thing. And that could be spun in various ways by the people who are controlling the narrative: the mass media.

So, yes, could it be a psyop? A false flag? “We’re going to implant some protestors with Nazi flags and Confederate flags. As people of Canada, of course, they’re always marching with Confederate flags, right? That’s so natural!” Of course! They’ll plant provocateurs and all sorts of things, as we know they have done: 2007 SPP Summit protests in Montebello, Quebec. They were caught. The Quebec provincial police—the Sûreté du Québec—put in agents provocateurs to go in there, threatening the police line with rocks in their hands, in order to promote a police response. They got called out. But it happens, absolutely. And it can happen and presumably will happen in any movement of any size and importance.

So, what’s the point of this? There are clearly, genuinely, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in Canada energized and talking about the freedom mandates. Not every one of them is an agent provocateur. I’m sure there are many people—Canadians in the crowd listening to this—who know genuine people or they themselves genuinely support what is happening here and the idea and “Freedom! Mandate freedom. Yay, I’m behind this idea.”

So it’s up to us to put that message out there and to expose the false flags and psyops and the way that they will try to spin it into some other narrative. It is not up to us to sit there and wait for the CBC and the CTV and other mainstream outlets to “please report this in the way we want you to report it.” That’s not their job. At the end of the day, you’re not their boss. So we have to be that.

And for this brief sliver of time—think of the vast expanse of human history for the last 20 or so years, it has been genuinely feasible for some no-name in Japan, sitting in his living room, to reach tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, occasionally millions of people with a message, so that we can put our own spin on things and say, “No, no, it isn’t that. It is this.” We can actually direct this narrative. It is, in some ways, the most exciting time in all of human history. 

We are not spectators to what’s happening. We are not on the sidelines, analyzing and just saying, “Oh, B7, B7, B7. False flag, psyop, psyop, false flag.” No! We are actually people who can make a difference to this world-changing historical narrative that is playing out right now. And we can tell that story for ourselves. We don’t have to wait for them to do it. It’s an exciting time to be alive. It’s an incredibly dangerous time. There’s all sorts of things that can happen. But, at any rate, we have a part to play in this.

Geopolitics & Empire:

Yeah, I would agree. It’s exciting. And what we’re doing is fun. As I’ve mentioned before, I feel like it’s the 1930s again. It’s incredibly dangerous as well. And you started a great #SolutionsWatch series. 

I often end my interviews by asking my guests, “So what do we do now?” And the most frequent answers I get from many of my guests are: “Decentralize. Move from urban to rural. Grow food. Have your own water. Form a community—very important. Invest in physical assets. Become less dependent and more independent.”

I’m also worried about the cyber pandemic that’s in the pipe. And censorship. I didn’t have time to ask you about that, but it seems like we’re going to have to be dealing with it. They’re discussing taking down podcasts now and even the platforming websites. These are our last lines of defense.

I think our podcasts and websites [are in danger of being censored]—that’s why I moved to Epic hosting. But I think part of this Joe Rogan scandal now is that the establishment has been signaling for the last few years that they can’t control podcasts. So, in general, what do we do going forward?

James Corbett:

Yeah. Thank you for picking up on that, because I talked about the mid-term agenda of CBDCs and the long-term agenda of some sort of hot war. I think the short term is actually cyber-related—cyber pandemic or cyber false flag or something along those lines to lead us towards greater control of the internet.

So yes, the question, as always: “OK, great, lots of problems. We know about the problems, James. What do you do about them?” So that is why I did start the #SolutionsWatch series, where every week, week in and week out, I’m looking at specific things that people can do or apply in their lives to make their lives better.

I do not believe there’s a silver bullet. I think there are thousands of bullets. Not every bullet works for every person, because they have different guns—to extend that analogy way too far. But, at any rate, use whatever you can to improve your life in whatever ways you can. And hopefully, people who are consciously setting their intent on getting out of the systems and strictures of control can find ways to do so. And so I look at various ways.

For example, on the cyber pandemic and the threats to the internet, as we’ve known it, and the very real threat to podcasting in the future, I’ve seen that, absolutely, for the past couple of years: “Oh, no, podcasts! People can say whatever they want! Oh, please, someone censor!”

Well, there are different ways that that can happen. And one of them is that the easiest censorship point will be the Spotifys, the Apple podcasts, the Google podcasts. Of course, all the centralized hubs where people go to get podcasts will be censored, first of all. 

But that isn’t actually, really, at base, how podcasting even works. At base, podcasting is based on RSS, Really Simple Syndication. You do not need to go through the Apple store or Spotify or whatever to get a podcast. You can go directly to a website. As long as you have that RSS feed, you can plug that into any number of different applications, and you will be able to get that podcast delivered to you.

So that’s a basic fallback step that we can take. It’s not the solution, but it’s a step away from that centralization of control. Learn about RSS and what it is and how it works. And suddenly, even if they take The Corbett Report or Geopolitics & Empire off of Apple podcasts or whatever, you’ll still be able to get the podcast! Wouldn’t that be nice?

So, steps like that. And then you build up from there. OK, well, they’re going to come after domains. The domain name system is like the telephone book for the internet. If they take away the telephone book, I won’t be able to call corbettreport.com, right?

Well, OK. So what can we do about that? There are decentralized domain ideas, the dot crypto addresses and others that do not rely on the DNS system and thus cannot be just scrubbed at the whim of a nation-state. Things like that. 

But then they’re going to come for the infrastructure of the worldwide web itself. They’re going to make you scan to get on the web. OK, so can we bypass the ISPs? Do we need the worldwide web? What about IPFS or some of these other ways of connecting peer-to-peer? Like the internet is supposed to be used, but we’ve all just been conditioned into thinking Facebook and TikTok is the internet, right? No, no, that is not the internet. So we have to start learning about that. 

If you’re talking about vaccine mandates, I’ve done an entire post about different ways to protest or fight against or work around vaccine mandates. If you are talking about the CBDC agenda and digital currency and all of this, I’ve talked about Cash Fridays or Black Market Fridays—different ways to start decreasing your reliance on digital forms of exchange and increasing your reliance on things like cash, which still exists for the time being and we can still use while we still have it. Etc., etc.

For everything that we have talked about today, there are things that are being done, there are people who are working on ideas, there are things that you can start implementing in your life today. The only question is: Are you interested in that? If you are, then go out there and start finding. And let me know about it, too, because I’m always looking for ideas for #SolutionsWatch.

Geopolitics & Empire:

Yeah. No. You also did an episode on RSS, which I remember looking at. Alright, apart from Corbettreport.com, is there any other website or project you’re working on that we should know about?

James Corbett:

I think that’s the place to go. And from there, you can find all of my Minds and Odysee and all my channels. But just go to Corbettreport.com. For the time being, that is the place to go. But also, on the sidebar, at the very bottom, there’s a Corbett Report on IPFS, where you can click and you can get the IPFS backup of The Corbett Report site. All of the audio and video is backed up. I believe it hasn’t backed up since last April, because my site map broke and I haven’t had time to fix it. I’m going to do that. And when it works, it’ll update again. At any rate, if The Corbett Report suddenly disappeared overnight, well, at least all of the audio and video is backed up on IPFS.

Geopolitics & Empire:

Alright, everyone, again: Bookmark Corbettreport.com. Sign up for the free newsletter. I get it. And also consider supporting James for as low as $1 a month. For us podcasters and content creators, every single digital peso counts. Thank you for being at Geopolitics & Empire, Señor Corbett.

James Corbett:

Thank you for having me on, and good luck for the podcast. I’m glad to see you growing and expanding what you do. I appreciate it.

Geopolitics & Empire:

I hope you enjoyed this Geopolitics & Empire podcast. The website is geopoliticsandempire.com, and I encourage you to sign up for the free email list that goes out with each podcast and every weekend with a collection of news headlines.

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About James Corbett

The Corbett Report is edited, webmastered, written, produced and hosted by James Corbett.

An award-winning investigative journalist, James Corbett has lectured on geopolitics at the University of Groningen’s Studium Generale and delivered presentations on open source journalism at The French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation’s fOSSa conference, at TedXGroningen and at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto.

He started The Corbett Report website in 2007 as an outlet for independent critical analysis of politics, society, history, and economics. Since then he has written, recorded and edited thousands of hours of audio and video media for the website, including a podcast and several regular online video series.