www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/08/10/ghosts-of-iron-mountain-episode-18-on-the-trail-of-delusion/
JFK assassination expert Fred Litwin (www.onthetrailofdelusion.com/) and Author Phil Tinline discuss his new book “Ghosts of Iron Mountain“
TRANSCRIPT:
Well, welcome to another edition of On the Trail of Delusion,
where I try to separate fact from fiction and try to offer some something substantial, typically on the JFK assassination
More substantial than what you’ll find on the internet, find on YouTube,
And try to get away from some of the conspiracy nonsense that is all over the place.
So, I’m delighted today to have as my guest Mr. Phil Tinline who is from the United Kingdom, who has just written this absolutely amazing book basically called
Ghost of Iron Mountain.
Now, you may not know what Iron Mountain is, and you’re going to find out,
But this is a very important book. And let me tell you a bit about Phil before we get into this. So,
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Phil is a a freelance writer and documentarian.
He’s the author of The Death of Consensus, which was chosen as the Times, as London’s politics book of the year.
He’s produced documentaries for the BBC, and he’s written for the Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The New Statesman, and a variety of other publications.
And he’s a graduate of Oxford University. And so, welcome to On the Trail of Delusion.
Thank you. Great to be here. So, um, Phil, if you just want to tell us a bit about how you got interested in in this topic, what what drove you to write this book.
Well, I had a a much
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more grandiose idea for a book. Um, which I was researching. Uwhat that was going to be about,
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I may still get to write it maybe one day. uh it was about the kind of uh moments of crisis that
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had produced various sort of shocks and fears that I thought um and I still think make up the
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building blocks of conspiracy theory. So why do we think of of crowds as infinitely manipulable sheeple? Well, I think it has something to do with the the reaction on the right of the
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Paris Commune. Why do we have this idea of false consciousness? Partly the far less reaction in
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Germany to the failure of the Spartist revolt in 1919. Anyway, I was looking at this kind of thing. I was looking particularly at the idea of the another element of the kind of standard conspiracy
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theory movie we all have in our heads as well as the sheeple and the plucky maverick. You obviously have to have the dark cabal. So where does this idea come from? So I was spent sitting
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one Saturday afternoon looking uh at uh political science books from the 1960s as you do on a sunny
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day uh looking for the phrase military industrial complex. And I found plenty of course, but I also
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found three books that mentioned pretty much in in immediate succession uh this thing called Report
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from Iron Mountain. I thought, what’s this? Uh was particularly curious and intriguing because one seemed to suggest it was real, one seemed to suggest it was fake and one wasn’t sure. So
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that’s I looked it up. There’s a few paragraphs on Wikipedia and I I basically just wrote at the top of my notes, this is a really good story. It was kind of thing I’ve been looking for for
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a very long time because I’ve been, you know, making documentaries, as you said, writing in this sort of post-war territory for a long time. But you’re always looking for a story that’s got
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the the sort of the compelling sort of narrative drive that you want to keep the reader going,
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but there’s a strong enough structure you can hang some serious ideas on it. It’s not just a lucky anecdote. So, I was very lucky to come across it. Yeah. No, absolutely. So, so why don’t you tell
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us a bit about what is you know Iron Mountain the book and you know who wrote it and and why
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did they write it? Okay. So, uh this goes back to the Vietnam War. Uh and we need to go to a little
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office of a satire magazine called Monle. nothing to do with the current much smarter Monle magazine
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at the bottom of Fifth Avenue just near Greenwich Village and these three young satists led by Vixon Naski later of the nation magazine uh sitting there looking at the papers and at this point the
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Vietnam War is just really beginning to hot up but it looks briefly like there might be an outbreak
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of peace and these three young guys are rather startled to see in the papers that the reaction on Wall Street to this has not been as you might expect uh joy it’s actually been basically fear
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there’s been a so-called peace scare and so shares have dipped and they think firstly this is a bit
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strange and then pretty quickly ah this gives us an idea because they’re always got their satirical
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eye looking for ideas so they think what if we came up with the story of the suppression of a
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top secret government report which has been supposedly commissioned by Robert McNamara uh during the Kennedy administration to scope out with a team of of uh top experts what would happen
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to America if permanent global peace broke out. The joke being it would destroy the economy and
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wreck society and you’d have to have all sorts of horrific things to replace the beneficial effects of war. You might have to have sophisticated form of slavery to keep young men under control and
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maybe get them to play blood games. Uh you might have to reintroduce eugenics, poison the rivers to unite people around the threat to the environments and all these sort of you know comically horrific
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things. But they publish it uh with the help of of a very enterprising 60s publisher, the Dial Press,
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uh where the editor, by the way, is Eel Doro, soon to be famous. Um as a novelist in his own right,
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um they publish it as as though it’s real on their non-fiction list and the D press don’t tell their sales staff that it’s not real. So this is published uh and of course the New York Times
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phone up phones up the White House and says, “Is this real?” And of course the White House have to say, “Well, we don’t know. We better check.” And there’s a series of of checks in the White House,
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in the Pentagon, and the Arms Control and Disarmment Agency where people kind of have to work out whether this extraordinary outrageous document is real or not. And and people begin to
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think like this can’t be real. And eventually the the White House report, I’ve got the memo going up to President Johnson says, “No, we’re pretty sure this is a hoax.” But officials are
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still whispering to journalists, this is kind of how people think in here. So, you know, there’s a kind of a an ambiguity, which is exactly what they wanted because the the thing that I’ve
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missed out from that story is they didn’t just come up with the story of the uh the suppression of this report. They commissioned a writer called Leonard Leuen, who was a bit older than Victor
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Naski and his uh his comrades uh who was a satist as well. Uh and he said, well, if I’m going to
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write this the story of the suppression of this report, I need to write the actual report. That’s why there’s all this this detail. And that’s the book that’s published as report from Iron Mountain
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on the possibility and desiraability of peace. Anyway, um Leuen says later when he eventually
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confesses after the Pentagon papers are published in 1972, I think and he he basically says reality
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has has trumped uh for one of a better verb, reality has trumped satire. Uh that what we were
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looking for is just this moment of uncertainty where people would ask themselves, could this possibly be true? Because once they’re asking that question, they’ll ask it about other things,
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too. And so that’s the first moment. And we can perhaps go on to talk about its later surprise ramifications, but that’s that’s where it comes from from this uh this moment at the end of the
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60s which is simultaneously very deeply political and still kind of lacky. So So and and so Leonard
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Leuen actually admitted back early early days that it was a hoax. Absolutely. Wrote an article in the
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New York Times book review which I was very pleased to uh see reviewing my book kindly um many years later. But yeah, I read a piece in the New York Times book review saying that uh that it
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was a hoax and this is why. So, so there it is. You know, he’s he says that and yet and yet all
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of a sudden, you know, this gets picked up by all sorts of people. Um including so, you know, uh Fletcher Prrowy. Um you know, I’ve I’ve written a lot about Fletcher Prrowy and and uh I mean,
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what a what a character in so many ways. And um and I wrote about Iron Mountain, the fact
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that he was fooled by this um despite the fact it was quite openly a hoax. Yes. And what’s so
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extraordinary is that he knows that Luen has said that he made it up, but he’s his belief that this
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is the evidence of the the dark cabal uh is so strong the confirmation bias I think is so strong
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that he interprets Lein saying that as basically well he he has to say that it’s a cover story or
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he had to present it as a novel. His evidence and this is the huge sort of inescapable irony of it.
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His evidence is that having worked in the Pentagon because we should say you know prudy is a serious guy you know works in at least initially you know he works in the air force he works in the Pentagon
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he’s the liaison with the CIA eventually retires around the time of the Kennedy assassination and
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then becomes a conspiracy theorist later but um but no he he is um so kind of convinced that there
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is this dark cabal that he he convinces himself that Louis is saying this as a cover story because
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partly he remembers he says how people used to talk in the Pentagon and he says, “Well, this is exactly how these guys taught, so therefore it must be real.” So the the acuity and accuracy of
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Louisian’s satire becomes evidence somehow that it’s not. And and even even I mean I I I mean
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later on I think uh Proud would actually deny it. I never really believed it was real, you know. I
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think he actually denied it later on even though if you read his books it’s pretty clear he thought
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it was he thought it was real or really accepted it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there’s a there’s a point where um uh yeah, he he does an interview in 1991 at the National Press Club and so on. Yeah.
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No, he um he he for a long time he certainly said that it was he he thought it was real. It
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couldn’t not be because it spoke so clearly to what he heard in the Yeah. You know, I I found
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uh I found a letter that he wrote to the uh the um the IHR the the Willis Cardo’s uh Holocaust denial
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review where he basically said, “I love I love your journal, you know, and and uh it’s really you’re doing some very very important work and yeah, it’s and because I don’t I mean, you tell
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me you’ll have a better view on this than me, but I I don’t think that he was an anti-semite,
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at least front and center and overtly. I think he was just somebody who was very became very very
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focused on trying to understand what this sort of strange sort of national security world that he’d been part of for a very long time really consisted of and I think he was also frankly
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uh as a lot of I think conspiracy theorists have he had a sort of curious respect for the pattern
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of authority so the fact that the IHR was called the institute for historical review rather than
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holocaust denial grand central you know somehow was enough to convince him that it was proper just as with the thought, you know, the tone of it and the title of it and convince them was real,
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too. Well, I’m amazed at how easy it is to convince him of stuff. But one thing I I did find, I found a letter that he wrote. Um I found this at the archives. Um he wrote a letter, I think it
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was to Richard Sprag or something else, but he basically was talking about uh some of the the arms um some of the control elements of of of the arms that the Pentagon was using. And uh remember
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they had the Awax and it was controlled um it was a it was a control system controlled from the ground or something and he was he actually wrote a letter and he said he says in the letter he what
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if the person on the ground is a Jewish sergeant and it was one of the only because I think he was
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very careful about if he was an anti-semit he was very careful about not being very overt about his
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anti-semitism and this is the only time I think I caught him in something that was very very um
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overt I couldn’t believe this It’s on my website. It’s quite a quite an amazing letter. Yeah. No,
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no, absolutely. I mean, whereas the people that he was talking to, Willis Caro, who you mentioned, who’s the sort of um Emil’s Gre hovering behind the IHR and Spotlight magazine and all these other
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uh noai press and and so on and so on. Um is, you know, not a man who is afraid of um putting his uh
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due hatred front and center. I mean, apparent you supposedly had four bust of Hitler in his office, so you know, fairly unamiguous. So before we get on to to the uh to Willis Cardo which is
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a fascinating story uh perhaps you could tell us a bit about Cight Mills who basically some of the
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some of the philosophy that sort of goes into the book or that they the fact that Luen draws
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a lot on crit mills for what’s in the book. Maybe you could talk a bit about that. Sure.
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I mean I I I want to be careful about how much I can uh say for certain about how the direct
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lines of inputs are often hard to to to prove and I cannot prove that I don’t think we need to but I I can’t prove that that Luren had read C right mills I asked his children about it they had no
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recollection of that I think I spoke to Richard Lingerman one of the the one of the three sat young satists who was still around as I was doing my interviews uh and I think he said he had a if I
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recall correctly he had a vague recollection of looking at CR Mills but you know he’s in 90s and asking someone to remember exactly what they read half a century ago is a tough call,
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right? So I think what we can say though is that Cight Mills was the single figure who more than
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anybody uh kind of pioneered and encapsulated uh the ideas that you know uh the report certainly
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speaks to and is certainly a big influence on the new left which was one of the constituencies which found the report quite compelling. So Cide Mills is an extraordinary guy. I mean,
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he’s born in Texas and doesn’t leave Texas until I think he’s 23 years old. He’s, you know, by default he’s heading towards a career possibly in the military as a kind of military academy and so
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on. But he’s a very I mean, I’m not in a position to say really, but my impression is he’s a very
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Texan guy. He’s a very he’s a very big physical guy. He’s uh not afraid to be violent. He’s very
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proud of having kicked a racist in the face with both feet as a teenager. uh and he eventually
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through his sort of you know rebelliousness and his his insistence on personal autonomy and and
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self-exression really he ends up in a very different place. He ends up as a sociologist at Columbia University. Now most sociologists at Colombia and elsewhere in the 1950s are for
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perfectly good reasons very careful very cautious very empirical kind of figures. Mills is a very
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different character. Mills is very focused on the idea of power. uh he writes a book called White Color earlier in the 50s and then he writes this book in the mid1 1950s called the power elite
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uh which is all about how uh a combination of the military and business and politicians in this new
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national security world the sort of cold war world created by the uh like the dropping of the atomic
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bomb in 1945 uh that this has become a very kind of tight uh centralized nexus of power. This cuts
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absolutely against the sort of much more gentle pluralistic ideas of some of his colleagues who think American politics and democracy is pretty nicely balanced. And so this sense that there
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is this kind of um not cabal but there is this nexus uh at the heart of power is a very powerful
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one particularly in terms of understanding what becomes the military-industrial complex. Indeed that idea the military-industrial complex which was certainly known to nasi and luren and so on
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uh I think we can show was influenced by the power release. is written that speech is partly written by a very interesting figure a guy called Malcolm Moose who’s a political
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journalist a scientist excuse me he’s a political scientist and a journalist who was Eisenhower’s
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speech writer and was reading mills we know he was reading mills and so you can see that idea appear
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in the mouth of President Eisenhower and and the left to the great excitement of of you know the small American left in 1961 but anyway you have this idea of the power elite But Mills is also
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friends and colleagues with Richard Hofstatter. He does of course the paranoid style in American politics speech coincidentally the night before Kennedy shot in Oxford. And so he’s talking to
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Hofata and he’s being very careful not to be a conspiracy theorist. But once you go through those shocks in the in the 60s first of course the JFK assassination and then the advent then
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the Gulf of Tonken and the advent of the Vietnam war in its full horrific flower. you start to get
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people sliding across that line and thinking that actually the military-industrial complex is not this perfectly, you know, evidence-based analysis that Mills has talked about, but this,
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you know, as you’re very familiar with, you know, from some of the conspiracy stuff, you know, this numminous dark cabal hovering omnipotently uh and invisibly behind everything. And so that’s where
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where he fits in. But he’s dead by early 1962. He dies of a heart attack. So, you know, he doesn’t
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even see the missile crisis, you know. So, he’s a kind of forefather. But I use him at the beginning of the book to try and set up some of the ground so that when I tell the story of the report, it’s
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not just a kind of a a quirky anecdote. It sits in a political frame. So, so Iron Mountain, I mean,
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the these these were leftists who really wrote or responsible for Iron Mountain, but what what
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were they trying to accomplish? What were they hoping to accomplish with this with this book?
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Well, what they were hoping to accomplish, as I say, as Leuen explains in his in his uh sort of sort of confessional article in 1972. I mean, it’s more ry than than, you know, fraud. Um,
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but what he’s trying to achieve is a moment of uncertainty in people’s minds where they would ask themselves if this could possibly be true. And he goes to great lengths to write it in really kind
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of convincingly dry Herman Khan think tank pros. you know, there’s a whole bunch of footnotes,
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almost all of which are to real documents. He he sweated blood over this thing that by doing so, he
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can make you think, if this is possibly real, what else do I need to question about the output of
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the, you know, the military-industrial complex, of the Pentagon, of the the Johnston administration. So, it’s it’s trying to get he’s trying to get a moment of what you might call defamiliarization.
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is trying to kind of stop the the the slow progress further and further into the sort
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of depths of the Vietnam War and and indeed also into, you know, the nuclear deterrent as well. Uh
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and try and get people to just step back and ask themselves, hang on, could this actually be mad.
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So, so I you know I I understand the the book from from their particular viewpoint of how
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um they could write that and think that you know there’s a lot of stuff that they they believe in. But how did this book get to be sort of a uh so important on the right? Well,
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there’s a long period where it’s more or less forgotten. Um, you know, part of the thing that they’re satarizing is is the way that it appears at least that the Johnson administration is is
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fighting war partly to sort of burn off excess surplus capital because America’s economy is
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going gang busters for year after year after year through the 50s and 60s. Now you jump forward not very long after 1967 and having too much you know money having the government having too
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much money sounds like a pretty good problem to have once you’ve gone through you know the the the bloodshed and horrors of 1968-69 you know the assassination of Martin Luther King Robert
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Kennedy and the massacre of Mi and the news of that breaking then the massacre at Kent State the killing of Fred Hampton the you know the black panthers the weather underground this whole kind
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of you know rupture in American life which follows very quickly after this then into the world of Watergate then into the world of stagflation and the energy crisis. All of this seems like
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a very good problem to have. So the idea that this satire is something that’s still current and sort of fades away and by 1980 it’s gone out of print. Lumen tries to get it republished in the 80s. G
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JK Galraith who’d also been involved is ready to help but publishers are not interested. This is
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a relic from the past. But then in 1990 he gets told by two different acquaintances that actually
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it has been republished. It’s just as we’ve been discussing. It’s been republished by basically fascists who think it’s real. Now the reason for that is significantly down to Fletcher priority.
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You know he had discovered it. He thought that it was real. Uh and you know he was ready to to pass
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it on to these guys. It seems like 19 there was you can see a tiny bit of interest before this.
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I think there’s a you know proto militia type group in Arkansas that contacts Luen in the late 80s. But it seems like it’s the end of the Cold War that does this. Now at one level this makes
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no sense at all because if this committee is all about how we must never have peace it seems a bit
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of a leap to suggest that the end of the cold war is encried by the same people right that doesn’t matter in prud’s head at all because uh what he’s interested in fundamentally I think this is
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the best kind of coherence I can find in it is in evidence of this dark cabal and it kind of doesn’t
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matter whether they’re pro peace or antipace the point is that they’re there and when you have this surprising jarring you know almost shock rupture of the end of the cold war where suddenly
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the Soviet Union becomes an American ally after 40 years of the direct opposite. You know Saddam
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Hussein in a smaller scale way goes from being an ally to being an enemy. you know, if you’re going
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for a conspiracist mindset like Prudy is, you you you make sense of it, you know, on the basis that
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this is all pre-planned and he has a complicated theory about David Rockefeller, which we don’t need to get into, but that’s basically the spur. I think is 1989. There’s a guy at the noonai press
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who contacts Prud at least it looks like that from the letters. It’s not absolutely certain. It’s an ambiguity. But anyway, Prudy sends them a copy of the um of the book and because you know products
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of the American government are non-copyright, they’re public domain, they think, well, okay, we can just publish this. They literally tear off the cover, you know, photocopy it, print it, put a
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new copy on it, a new cover on it, which says, you know, is this brilliant satire or new protocols?
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Um rather giving away their their, you know, their slant on these things. And it’s republished. Um,
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and that’s when Luen finds out about it cuz they’re advertising in Spotlight magazine and he has to spend four years trying to get them to stop. So this is where, you know, the public the
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publish it comes out and this is where Mark Lane comes into the picture, you know, and I’ve written
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I’ve written a lot about Mark Lane, right? And so there there he is in the middle of this sort of
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uh I guess defending the publication of of uh Iron Mountain by uh by Willis Cardo’s group. Yes. Well,
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so Lane and also the the the you know very brave uh black comedian civil rights campaigner Dick
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Gregory are the two guys who in a way literally embody the political shift we’re talking about.
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you know, they go from being, you know, left-wing uh or in in Lane’s case at least liberal left
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uh you know, campaigners in the 1960s and effectively partly at least through the vector
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of JFK conspiracy theory slide. I mean, I’m not saying that Gregory actually becomes rightwing,
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but he’s certainly in with these people. Lane, I think effectively does to all intents and purposes, you know, through the course of the 1970s. you know, he’s involved with Jim Jones.
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He’s involved with Martin Luther King, conspiracy theory and all sorts. Uh he in due time becomes
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the lawyer for Willis Cartau’s very far-right group. His office is in the same building just
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behind the Library of Congress. Um and so when the lawyers for Leonard Lewin start writing to these
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people basically saying cease and desist, this is not your property. You’re not to publish it. uh the first lawyer to emerge and to write back is none other than you know 60s liberal hero
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Mark Lane which is you know I think as I say a great embodiment of of this weird slippage
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and and in fact uh I think it was Chip Berlet who wrote an article about Fletcher Prrowy for the progressive saying this guy is a con Fletcher Prrowy was a conspiracy theorist of the right so
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to speak. Yeah. No, exactly. And and I think Bas also pointed out that that there is an article I
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I haven’t read it, I will confess about it, that that the John Burch Society was sort of fastening on to JFK conspiracy theory pretty much at the end of the 60s. You know, it’s it’s it has
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quite a long sort of history because and this is again where Mills is interesting, I think,
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because I think, you know, I don’t want to say that the left and right are precisely equivalent. You can get very sort of fasile on that very quickly. But I do think it is fair to say that
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uh that sort of centralized nexus of power that Mills describes is something that to to sort
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of maverick leftists like him is very alienating and very much to be something to be treated with
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suspicion and weariness. There is a very similar or at least analogist feeling on the right that
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the the centralization of power in Washington is not what the republic was founded to be. You know, the whole states rights thing is very much against that. The whole idea of of you know the freedom of
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the businessman is very much against that. And frankly the freedom to be racist is you know is
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against that. You you know you obviously through all those battles in the early 60s you have this strange thing where the federal government is siding with the most disempowered people in the
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country against the state governments in places like Alabama and Mississippi and Arkansas. And
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so you have this curious kind of triangulation. But no I think there is something logical about it. I mean, it’s not a view that I share at all, but there is something logical about the way that
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centralized power looks pretty scary to both the right and the left. Yeah. And and and of course,
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you see it right now in the JFK assassination where you have uh the right is going on about the deep state killed Kennedy. And in fact, they’ll even tell you that the deep state killed Robert
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Kennedy and and uh and say you you’ve got people like, you know, Jefferson Mley going on Steve
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Bannon show um and they’re in complete agreement about a whole variety of things. Yeah. And and
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and you and it extends beyond conspiracy theory as well. If you look at I don’t know if you’ve read um Cash Patel’s uh noted volume government gangsters uh but that talks about you know
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the FBI bugging of Martin Luther King in outraged terms you know that sense to say from the right
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as well as from the left that that the state you know and it’s not based on nothing you know the state did do some pretty tough stuff in bad stuff in the 60s and 70s but yeah exactly and I think it
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is very very interesting the way that the sort of Trumpian writers embrace conspiracy theory I wrote a piece a couple of years ago off the back of my trip to Dallas for my research for the for the
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book. Um talked to a young journalist um Michael Williams who reported on extraordinary events
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that had taken place literally on the grassy null where people were expecting Kennedy to come back or possibly Jon Kennedy Jr. to come back or you know maybe Trump was Jon Kennedy Jr. and there’s
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a woman who was who was dressed in sort of Captain America costume who was there who I believe was
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also uh present at Jan 6 uh in in the capital. say, “No, there’s a very strong read across. It’s
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rather striking.” Yeah. Yeah. I was in Daily Plaza a couple years ago and and I was talking to some of the QAnon people um on the Grassy Null and and uh it was very very weird and strange, you know,
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to see them there. I mean, what a collection of people on the Grassy Null. Um yeah, but anyways,
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so you know, I’m I’m I’m fascinated by Willis Cardo and and his stuff and and so where does
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it go from there? I mean he he republishes it and uh and embraces Iron Mountain and
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then it where does it go from there? Well, so there’s a couple of different places it goes. One place is a movie that I believe you may be familiar with uh Olive as JFK
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um Prudi is the um is the central figure in the I would argue is the central scene in the movie.
27:09
the the scene where Donald Sutherland absolutely brilliant performance and a brilliant piece of montaging at the editing level by Stone Oliver Stone explains not just the how Mr. Garrison but
27:20
the why. Why did Kennedy have to be killed and it’s it’s you know its climax is basically not
27:26
forbaiting but is pretty close to articles that Stone had seen uh by in the mid1 1980s
27:34
explaining the Kennedy assassination through report from my mountain. this whole idea that war is the basic social system, you know, the the the the organizing principle of society,
27:43
Mr. Garrison, is for war, you know, and that’s why the president has to be killed because the Vietnam war is is necessary to the milit industrial complex and to the CIA, you know,
27:52
so that feeds directly into the movie. Now, that is not to say I should stress that that makes the film a far-right film. It is not a far-right film. It is a conspiracist film. I mean, you know,
28:00
as much as anything is of the left, but it’s it’s certainly the reporter is certainly present there and, you know, proves he was somebody that that stained sort of triumphantly, you know,
28:08
almost revealed not quite up from under a cloth, but, you know, on a day at I think the National Press Club on C-SPAN not long afterwards amid all the halaloo about the film and its use of evidence
28:17
and so on. That’s not the only place it goes. It also finds its way into the militia movement. This comes out uh which is obviously developing around this time and it’s h it comes out after
28:28
a journalist who I spoke to through Wall Street Journal journalist uh called Robert Tomshow who
28:33
was based in Dallas went up to Oklahoma after the the bombing of Oklahoma the the the Mura building
28:39
in Oklahoma City on April 19th, 1995 and he starts asking around and he goes out to see a couple of
28:46
militia guys in the woods in Euphora in the east of the state And uh they say you know have you
28:53
read report from Iron Mountain? Have you read report from I mountain? This is the explanation. So you know and not not the explanation for the bombing I should say but the explanation for our
29:00
our deep profound suspicion and hostility towards Washington to the point of you know being ready to to fight to defend ourselves against the the onslaught of the new world order and the one world
29:09
government uh which they’re expecting any day. Um so it’s it becomes one of the the founding
29:14
texts of certainly strong elements in the militia movement. But there’s a whole other and I could go on all day about this so I shall try and be succinct. There’s a whole other hoax which is
29:24
written which is partly inspired by a report from my mountain called silent weapons for quiet wars
29:30
which is proletized by Milton William Cooper one of the great sort of uh gurus of conspiracy theory
29:36
in the 80s and 90s and he publishes this book in he sorry he publishes both extracts from my
29:41
mountain and the whole of silent weapons for quiet wars which is a supposed sort of manual for the elite to manipulate the sheeple uh in his book behold a pale horse which I understand is the
29:50
most shoplifted book in America. Uh, also has big influence on the X-Files. It influences rappers. There’s even a rapper who calls himself William Cooper. You can see traces of it in Qanon and so
29:59
on and so on. It sort of what happens is it sort of ramifies and dilutes and spreads through the culture and you can see signs of it today. Yeah. Uh, by the way, just on on going back to Oliver
30:09
Stone, I have a I have a memo uh that was I mean there was a bruha about Fletcher Prrowy and his
30:15
association with Willis Cardo back when the movie came out, but I have a memo um that I got um at
30:22
Baylor University from Jane Rusone who was Oliver Stone’s research person saying we have a problem
30:29
here with um with with Fletcher and and and his association with Willis Cardo and the fact that
30:36
there. This anti-semitism is real and I’ve closed this article from the Guardian and we we we’ve
30:41
got to deal with this. This is a big problem. And I have I I’ve quoted the memo. I I have
30:46
not published the actual memo because I’m worried about copyright because it’s an Oliver Stone memo.
30:52
But there it was from his own research assistant saying we have a big problem here with Fletcher.
30:57
Yeah. Well, exactly. And and you you have this extraordinary um part of the whole story with
31:02
Harold, forgive me, I’m going to hopefully get the name right. Harold Weisberg. Hierro Weisberg. Yes. Yeah. So, he was one of the Let me just take that again. Um, and you have this extraordinary
31:11
thing where one of the the founders really of JFK conspiracism in the 1960s, a guy who, you know,
31:18
like a quite a few of those people had been a sort of persecuted leftist in the 1950s. Uh, and so
31:24
very suspicious of, you know, of the centralized state. you know, this guy Harold Weisberg, who
31:29
is a very prolific conspiracist, publishes lots of books and writes more that weren’t published, you know, sees what what’s going on and and is is a ghast at it. I mean, he’s one of the people
31:38
who’s whose archive I drew on in the book and, you know, he he as an absolutely paid up conspir
31:44
with an eye on evidence, however much he may have been misreading it, is is a gasast at what Stone is doing. So I think yeah the combination of of conspiracy theories you know in a sort of
31:54
um omni omni theory in the film uh did upset people who were much closer to those beliefs than
32:01
you or I are. Yeah. In fact Harold Weisberg I I publish on my website a couple of massive letters
32:07
he wrote to Oliver Stone about Garrison and when and his involvement with the whole investigation
32:14
um etc etc. And he he actually in um Weisberg wanted to write a book with George Lardner who is
32:19
a Washington Post col journalist. They I actually have their outline for a book that they write about Garrison and Oliver Stone. U but of course Weisberg was hard to get along with and so they uh
32:31
as soon as they agreed on the outline they started fighting and and and Lardner said I just can’t I
32:36
can’t work with you. You know we we just can’t unfortunately do it. Right. Right. Because wasn’t didn’t Weisberg uh effectively leaked the script that he got hold of. Yeah, he leaked the script
32:46
to to to Lardner and and then of course Stone was all upset. Oh my god, you’re you’re criticizing
32:51
the movie before it even comes out. I mean this is just how how how insane you know and yes I mean
32:56
which one at one level I can understand but um but I mean why’s papers were very useful because one of the people who uh who contacts um Leuen and says you know you need to know that your book is
33:08
being advertised by basically fascists uh is a guy called L Arens uh who has a kind of exchange with
33:15
Weissberg and it’s it’s back to the you know the whole JFK thing about you know supposedly these various people who knew something about the assassination all mysteriously die and it can’t
33:23
be a coincidence and it’s what ends up as the parallax view effectively and Weissber is saying no no no no she really did just die she had a heart attack sack or whatever you know she wasn’t
33:31
sort of taken out so no Arens was was I think more more conspiracist than Weisber the gradations are
33:37
rather striking absolutely so just you know you go you talked about Bill Cooper I mean he’s a
33:44
very interesting character and and uh uh can you tell us a bit more about him in his book um what’s
33:49
what’s it called again his they hold a pale Yeah. So that that that book is uh I guess you can buy
33:54
it secondhand or whatever. There’s multiple editions of that book of sort of a collection of of a variety of articles and stuff. Yes. I mean including horrifically the protocols of the elves
34:05
of Zion where he says oh when it says Jews it means Illuminati which doesn’t really make it okay publishing the protocols at all obviously but um no Cooper is an interesting figure. I
34:15
think there’s actually a rhyme with Prowity in that I mean they’re different ages but you know Prowy is a veteran of the Second World War and Cooper is a veteran of the Vietnam War. You know
34:25
he was actually sailing a boat not far from the Gulf of Tonken you not at the time of the instant but you know he then works for an admiral uh in intelligence and he starts seeing a kind of gets
34:33
real cognitive dissonance from seeing you know Nixon saying one thing and he what the papers he’s seeing are saying something else but he’s also a guy who he’d grown up on military bases. I think
34:42
he’d had a pretty tough time with his dad. Uh, and his dad was was particularly loving father. Um,
34:49
and he had become, you know, once he leaves the military particularly, he became an alcoholic. It
34:54
sounds like he was pretty violent himself. I don’t know the detail of that, but um, there’s a great book by I think Mark Jacobson on on Cooper called Pale Horse Rider, which has much
35:03
more on it. Anyway, Cooper is somebody who is I think like uh Prrowy trying to make sense of their
35:11
time in the national security state and trying to make sense of what the national security state is in to but he he has a again rather like he has a rather sort of um self-creating relationship with
35:24
the truth let’s say so he will talk about how he was on a military base in I think Texas at the time of the Kennedy assassination and saw the assassination on TV and was really shocked. Well,
35:32
the assassination wasn’t the assassination itself wasn’t on TV until the Zabbr was on TV 12 years
35:38
later, right? Obviously, you have Kronhite on his phone saying what’s happened, but the footage was
35:43
not. So, you know, the the sense of the sort of the convenient story just taking precedence over
35:49
the messy truth is is a big part of his thinking. The other thing about him though is that he was a big promoter of UFO theories until he decided that actually that was all a ruse by the state to uh
36:01
pull the wool over the eyes of the sheeple. Uh and so he start and I think possibly he may have got that from looking at report from Iron Mountain which you know jokingly suggests UFO scares as
36:10
a way to unite people in the absence of war. So that I think if I recall correctly that’s one of the bits of Iron Mountain he puts in his report. So he’s a he’s a he’s a very problematic guy. time
36:20
and he ends up dying in a shootout with uh I think federal marshals over his refusal to pay his taxes
36:25
and he’s he’s sort of assaulted a local doctor in Arizona. He has a sort of little house on top
36:30
of a hill in a place called Eager and you know he broadcasts this extraordinary uh radio show
36:35
called the hour of the time which starts with the sound of basically the sound of a of a military
36:41
clampdown. You know dogs barking and children screaming and marching and so on. He he lived very
36:46
much in the world of, you know, imminent tyranny the whole time. I think I think I think I think
36:52
he believed I think Cooper believed that Greer, the Secret Service agent, shot JFK. Um, you know,
36:59
he had that belief in from watching the Zaprruder film. I mean, it was really bizarre belief. Yeah,
37:05
he had I think it was the the Yeah, an alien had sort of shot Kennedy or something. I mean, yes. I
37:11
mean, it’s it’s sort of and and I’ll tell you a funny story about UFOs. I mean, you have Sylvia Maher, who was one of the the major uh critics of the Warren Report, uh back in in early 1965,
37:23
she had a meeting in her uh apartment in New York of other people who were interested in criticizing
37:28
the Warren Report. And uh so there like 10 12 people and Edward J. Epstein comes to that
37:35
meeting and he’s walking around her apartment and he looks in at her bookshelf and there’s all these
37:40
books on UFOs and and his heart just sunk when he when he realized, oh my god, who am I really
37:48
dealing with here? Well, right and I think he is a really impressive and interesting figure in this
37:53
story because, you know, he along with Lane is one of the two people who first goes to print, right?
38:00
They’re pretty arguably pretty much the two people who launch, you know, booklength JFK uh conspiracy
38:06
theory. But I think Epstein takes the idea of theory a little bit more seriously than most
38:11
so-called conspiracy theorists, right? And that he keeps testing it and he eventually, as far as I can tell, comes to the conclusion that actually, you know, it doesn’t really hold up after spending
38:20
enormous amounts of of time on it to the rather sort of the constonation of some of the people concerned. And it’s striking that um Epstein is one of the people who calls out Stone’s use of
38:30
Report for Iron Mountain at the time of the film coming out. There’s an article in the Atlantic if I remember rightly. And there’s this this um round this sort of panel discussion at town hall
38:40
uh just off Broadway this theater which is chaired by Victor Nvaski who’d come up with report from
38:46
my mountain which has Epstein on stage has Christopher Hitchens on stage has Stone himself has Norman Maylor has Norah Efron and so on where they’re discussing you know fact fiction and and
38:55
JFK and and they don’t actually talk about report from Iron Mountain but so many of the people on the panel sort of know something about it that it’s sort of hovering around it and Epstein again
39:03
is the person there who’s saying Look, there’s no harm in fiction. You know, the quiet, he says, The quiet American by Graeme Green in many respects told more truth about the Vietnam War than many
39:12
government press releases. But we have to hang on to the border between fiction and evidence. By the
39:19
way, at that at that meeting at that at that town hall, uh sitting next to Stone or right behind him
39:24
was Jane Rone, who was his research person. And every time he was asked a specific something about
39:30
the specifics in the film, he would defer to her. he really didn’t know this. So, she would sort of
39:36
answer the question and I’ve always been amazed. He really doesn’t know the case that well. He’s relies on other people. Um, well, it was very it’s always very striking to me because I spent a long
39:45
time as a producer at the BBC sometimes doing more of the work on a program, shall we say, than the presenter who then was front and center and took all the credit. So, I rather kind of empathize
39:54
with Jen Moscone. That’s right. So, so you know, Bill Cooper embraces this and this is the part
40:00
of the story which is very important because as I keep on saying, you know, it’s it’s not just
40:06
people believe in their basement believing in a in a silly conspiracy theory, you know, Bigfoot or something and it’s harmless and doesn’t hurt anybody. In fact, sometimes conspiracy theories
40:16
have real life ramifications and do hurt people. Yeah. Exactly. And I think it’s because it’s such
40:23
a p it can be such a powerful explanation of what has gone wrong. What we know from
40:29
political science that one of the main things that makes people more susceptible obviously people’s characters are various and not doesn’t always go the same way. But one of the things that makes
40:38
people more susceptible to conspiracy theory is a shock defeat. Now, often shock defeats happen
40:44
to the left or to the right, but we’ve seen more recently, I would argue, both in America and with Brexit in Britain, that certain people in the very dead political center when experiencing a shock
40:53
defeat will will attribute, you know, the whole thing to the Russians, you know, in a way that, you know, they might not have expected themselves to have done, you know. So, no,
41:01
I think I think that is really important. And when you marry that with somebody like Cooper who is capable with great passion and authority of assert and you know great sort of you know constitutional
41:12
sort of you know density of reference to assert that this is fundamentally a kind of betrayal of
41:18
the republic and to call on you know all which we don’t do here in quite the same way Cromwell’s a bit further back you know call on all the sort of the the spirit of 1776 and the the need for
41:28
ordinary people to take up arms to defend the the country against tyranny. I mean, you know, that’s
41:33
a pretty fiery place to to get to psychologically. You can definitely see that in his reaction to,
41:39
you know, Oklahoma City and and also to Waco. Waco was a huge part of that uh in the early 90s. And,
41:45
you know, what happened at Waco was pretty, you know, pretty suboptimal. But, you know, the the reading of that by people like Cooper, you know, was really, you know, incendurary. Yeah. And so,
41:55
you know, this this book, The Iron Mountain, has just been embraced by so many people. I mean, it’s unbelievable that people are still writing about and accepting Iron Mountain u to support
42:05
their their theories. Yeah. I mean, what one thing I was struck by was relatively speaking,
42:10
it doesn’t seem to play much of a role around the Iraq war. I had a good old dig and I couldn’t see very much. I mean, there may be things that were online at the time that sort of, you know, um
42:19
the websites have died or whatever, but you know, without the evidence, I I can’t assert that that was the case. Um, but you can see it come back and you can see silent weapons come back after
42:29
another series of shocks. You know, you have the combination at the end of the uh the the naughties
42:35
as we have to call them. You have the sort of the slowb burn shock of the Iraq war disaster and the kind of the the deep damage that does to people’s sense of the kind of reliability of the government
42:44
and you know the the kind of goodwill of the of defense companies plus the physical damage to a
42:50
lot of people you know as a result of service. But then you have the crash in 2008 which wrecks
42:57
people’s a lot of people’s lives. it upends their economic life and then you have Obama a black
43:03
president you know and so this is another series of shocks and you see round about that time you know David Newer the journalist who’s done so much work on this you know says the militia movement
43:11
basically doubles in size around 2007208 you get the foundation of the oathkeepers the oathkeepers
43:17
uh not not now but for a long time the oathkeepers sort of chief ideologue as it were was a guy who was a Vietnam vet who would invoke report from Iron Mountain you get uh a guy called Edward
43:27
Griffin who writes a book about um uh the creature from Jackal Island about the Federal Reserve and
43:33
he’s going to meetings with groups on the on the the far right and you know you look at it his book which was in I think if I recall correctly endorsed by Rand Paul and others you know this
43:42
this book has great detail in report from Iron Mountain has one of the funniest mistakes in it uh the whole thing about how he says that um you know uh Iron Mountain is very basically right next
43:53
to Croten on Hudson where the the Hudson Institute is based it’s 80 miles distant you know not
43:58
doesn’t take a long time to check, but because the sort of force of, you know, fictional neatness,
44:03
uh, he he I suppose he says that’s the case. So, yeah, he really starts to revive, as I say,
44:09
after the crash, Obama and and and and did did the people of January 6th also site Iron
44:15
Mountain? I mean, I I can’t give you examples of people citing it on the day, but certainly the Oathkeepers were involved and the Oathkeepers, as I say, have it in the background. The other
44:24
place you can see it or another place you can see it um more through Silent Weapons for Quiet
44:29
Wars is here just here and there in QAnon which obviously had a presence at Jan 6 as well which is
44:37
um which is you know the point where Q says you know in one of the Q drops says the silent war continues and I was watching this morning actually I was watching uh again interview with Austrian TV
44:48
that Jacob Angelie you know the noted guy with the horns and the face paint you know who plays such a
44:53
kind symbolically central role in that. He gave an interview I’m pretty certain it was before Jan 6
44:59
uh where he was talking about his whole grand thesis. He also has a big thesis about why
45:04
Trump is actually a whistleblower against Epstein which is why I was watching it again. But part of
45:10
his whole thesis about you know why the the world state you know the the kind of central banks this
45:16
kind of whole kind of mass of tangled conspiracy he’s got in his head why that’s happening is all to do with underground bunkers. It’s all to do with secret scientific experiments on cloning
45:25
and stuff which is being funded by central banks to enslave the public through debt blah blah blah. And so the idea of the, you know, the the secret underground bunker, which is of course what Iron
45:33
Mountain was in 1967 and why Leonard Leuen used the name because it was so evocative that’s still
45:40
sitting in people’s minds as well. So I wouldn’t be surprised if if that was that was a connection they’d made. Do do you think that maybe maybe Congressman Paulina Luna will have hearings on
45:50
on on trying to find the source of Iron Mountain? Well, I mean, I wouldn’t put it past her. I mean,
45:56
I think her her um it was very striking, wasn’t it, when she was put in charge of the task force
46:01
on the Kennedy uh assassination, the first Kennedy assassination, that that her the equation that
46:08
seemed apparent from what she was saying publicly was, I believe there was more than one shooter. The files are about to come out. erggo, the files will show that there was more than one
46:16
shooter. And again, this sort of the the logic is is internally coherent in its own way, but doesn’t
46:23
make any sense either, you know. So, yeah, I mean, goodness knows, we shall see what she uh what she does next. But, um yeah, I can certainly see it landing uh in those quarters. I mean, it’s just
46:33
I’m just flabbergasted by some of the stuff that she says and clear. She clearly doesn’t doesn’t understand the JFK assassination at all and she just says all these ridiculous things and God help
46:43
us if if there’s more hearings on the JFK. The last two you said of hearings were just were just
46:48
awful. Um look, I’d like to get into this whole idea of truth. I mean at the crux of your book is
46:55
this whole idea of what is true and the the fact that we’ve sort of lost sight. We’re all in these
47:01
we’re all in our own little silos and we all have our own individual truths and and uh we’re losing
47:06
sight of objective truth. Yeah. And I think it brings together a bunch of different things in a
47:12
way that that is rather dispiriting, but I think we have to sort of pay attention to. You know, you have um the whole sort of process in the 1960s and ‘7s of uh in, you know, my degree
47:24
is in English and in in in the English literature schools, but also in other academic disciplines, you know, the advent of of critical theory and what then was called postmodernism. Now,
47:35
there are some real utilities to that way of looking at things. It is a useful way to kind of,
47:40
you know, problematize, defamiliarize things and then and rethink. But the idea that all meaning
47:46
is fundamentally subjective and that any meaning is basically imposed by a sort of dark authority,
47:51
you can see how that could, you know, start to slide into something rather more difficult. Um
47:57
at the same time you know you have the rise of you know political figures like your current president
48:03
but you know certain people in Russia and people in various points across the world you don’t need me to list whose whole way of doing politics functions you know by effectively saying that
48:15
things are true because I’m saying that they’re true. And this this plays into something that I think is often is a useful way to look at conspiracy theory that conspiracy theory is
48:24
kind of an escaped form of fiction. You know, the kind of unity of narrative that you can achieve
48:29
with greater hard work as a fiction writer, you shouldn’t try and achieve as a journalist or a historian or a politician, but that’s sort of what they’re doing. So no there is a there is a kind of
48:38
I mean I think about Trump you know I think Trump it’s almost like somebody was saying to me this morning I was doing an interview and they were saying you know he’s saying that Jay Pal was a you
48:46
know the Fed was a a B a Biden appointee there’s literally footage of Trump appointing him himself but as he’s saying that it’s a Biden appointee it sort of becomes true in his own head I think
48:56
there’s that kind of of of logic about truth and we have to be honest that you know there are other
49:02
people who use phrases like you know my truth if I recall correctly Carl Harris issues that you know
49:07
I think we have to be very very careful. There’s a there’s a book that I mentioned briefly at the end of of my book uh great book by a philosopher called Harry Frankfurt called on [ __ ] where he
49:16
he says we’ve moved from a kind of reverence for correctness and accuracy uh to a reverence for
49:22
sincerity which you know when Trump says these things you know there’s an argument that he is
49:27
being in the moment is being sincere well that doesn’t help us very much we need to get back to a sense that even if it’s really awkward and difficult you know we need to stick to
49:37
the evidence yeah no absolutely I mean, I in my book, I was a teenage JFK conspiracy freak. Um,
49:43
I I bring up uh just as an example of uh uh did Assad use chemical weapons in Syria? and and
49:51
and which he did and and but you have people who immediately well that’s not part of my narrative and and so what’s amazing is all of a sudden websites will pop up you know which no he didn’t
50:02
use chemical weapons and here and citing all sorts of people and and then other people who say that
50:08
point to those websites and and then it becomes part of this well you know you say your thing
50:13
I have my thing and I you know and we’ll have to sort of agree to disagree but the truth the
50:19
truth becomes secondary No, exactly. And I think one of the real kind of moral tests of of a very
50:24
pompous phrase, but let’s go with it. Moral tests of of of journalists and and historians and so on
50:30
is whether they’re prepared to do it about their own most sacred or not quite their own most sacred
50:35
beliefs, their own sides sacred beliefs. There’s a journalist friend of mine here who’s written a book on Qnanon uh called James B um who you know he is the political editor of our only kind of you
50:47
know a newspaper which used to be called the new European it’s now called the new world but it was literally founded as an anti-rexit newspaper he is the political editor thereof but because he’s
50:58
also an investigative journalist he has done uh sterling work unpicking the kind of coagulation of
51:04
disperate theories into a effectively a conspiracy theory around on the idea that the reason that Brexit happened was manipulation by Cambridge Analytica, this kind of, you know, company that
51:13
was scraping Facebook for, you know, data and then doing personality types plus the Russians plus,
51:18
you know, aggregate IQ plus, etc., you know, uh, and and that had been kind of assembled
51:24
by remainers who thought less critically into an explanation of Brexit, which was very consoling.
51:31
Uh James did the the the the work of unpicking it. And he said to me when I interviewed him about it,
51:36
that what people think investigative journalists do is make connections between things. That’s not
51:42
what you do at all. Anyone can make connections between things. Your job is to kick the connections you really want to be true as hard as you possibly can and see which ones really stand
51:51
up. I think if we had more of that, we’d be in a better place. Yeah, absolutely. And that’s why, you know, one of the the researchers I really like most on the JFK assassination is Paul Hul. Paul
52:00
Hook, who’s a conspiracy theorist in the uh in the sick, believed in a conspiracy, but over the years
52:06
he’s had to admit, look, I I follow the evidence, and the evidence is leading me in the direction of no conspiracy. What can I do? You know, it’s just I have to I have to admit it. And that’s,
52:16
you know, and of course now, you know, people really really hate him for for what he’s uh what he’s saying. Yeah. Edward Epstein, another example of that. Yeah. Exactly. Edward, you know,
52:27
Edward J. Epstein realized right up front there’s something wrong with Jim Garrison. You know, it’s really really this is this is horrible. And but other people say, “Well, he’s on our side.
52:36
You know, he that’s what’s most important. He’s one of us, you know, and Exactly. Exactly.” And
52:41
so anyway, so where do we go from here? And how do we fix some of this? Do you have any ideas on what we should do? Because you’ve you’ve your book is important and and and uh there are
52:53
real life ramifications to some of this. Well, I mean, I went to uh a presentation of some polling
53:00
after the US presidential election at the end of last year, which was conducted by an organization
53:06
called PPI um which has roots in the kind of Clinton Democrat period, but it was conducted by
53:12
um two uh British um people I you know conducted by conducted by British pollster effectively. But
53:20
what it was saying um was that when Democrats said during the election and I saw signs of this when
53:27
I was in Pennsylvania in the week before the vote when Democrats said you have to vote Democrat to
53:33
save democracy, right? And meant it sincerely and there was a good case for it and very impassioned
53:39
and all the rest of it but said what voters often heard was you have to vote Democrat to
53:44
save save my job and the status quo. Now I think if you got to the point where that’s the case you
53:52
I mean as was indeed what unfolded you have lost. You have to go back upstream from that. I mean the
53:57
way I think about conspiracy theories is that they’re a kind of red flashing warning like on the light on the dashboard of democracy. They’re they’re an indication that people feel you know
54:07
uh painfully disempowered. I mean some people are obviously in a very particular sort of psychic place and and that’s another matter but in the general swing of things given the amount of belief
54:16
in this stuff people feel very disempowered and it’s not hard to understand why I mean you know you look at people’s sort of flatlining incomes since the financial crash you look at all sorts
54:24
of insecurity particularly in the states around healthcare for example look at the explosion of rage and pain after you know the assassination of the the guy from United Health and and you know
54:34
people said some stuff that was very wrong but but you know the the stories that were coming out stories of of humiliation and disempowerment. Now, that is the sort of stuff that leads to
54:44
conspiracy theory. So, I think what we have to do is go significantly back upstream. I mean, I absolutely believe you have to try and distinguish between fact and fiction, but you can’t just do
54:52
that. You’ve got to make people’s lives better. You got to make people’s lives in good enough,
54:58
you know, cushioned enough, comfortable enough, just that they’re not constantly looking for an
55:04
explanation of why they’ve been wronged. And you know, some of what drives people is is going to be straight up racist. And we can’t we can’t solve that that way. But economically, we can. And I
55:14
think that’s that’s where this points me to. And I I’ve found my view of economic politics becoming
55:20
a little bit more radical as a result of going through this process because I cannot see another solution. Yeah. And I I you know, I have to from my perspective, I’m I’m sort of a I’m actually a
55:30
Canadian conservative. Um, but but I what really bothers me is when I find people who whether
55:37
you’re a conservative or not would will not ever challenge or criticize their own side. So,
55:43
you know, somebody on the conservative side says something ridiculous. Well, you know, I can’t we
55:49
can’t we can’t say anything because he’s one of us. And and I think it’s really really dangerous. We have to have the freedom. Um and and Canada is a really bad example. I mean um our parliamentary
56:01
system, we have very rigid party rules about what you can say in parliament and so backbenches of
56:08
a ruling party, conservative or liberal um will never criticize um their own party. If they do,
56:15
there’s severe ramifications um of what will happen to you. And so you have mouthpieces.
56:21
They just they just they just will say whatever the party tells them to say. And I think it’s
56:27
very very very dangerous and and uh makes me very very upset. No, I can see that. And I
56:33
should say that you know I think some of the most interesting economic radicalism that I have seen in response to this sort of thing has come from small C conservatives both in this country and
56:42
in the US. I will confess my knowledge of Canadian politics is not good enough to comment. Certainly not talking to somebody who’s a scholar and present therein. But, you know, I mean, you know,
56:51
in some ways he’s a very problematic figure. If you think about the whole sort of, you know, fist on January the 6th, Josh Hol, Senator Josh Hol, you know, I I would not side with politically,
57:00
you know, on all of his positions, but it has been very striking to me the um the sort of righteous
57:07
fury that he took into, for instance, his exchange with Mark Zuckerberg or his exchange with
57:14
uh the the then CEO of Boeing. um you know the way that this person who in their organization
57:19
and with their customer base had immense power and Holy saw it as his role to to call that out in in
57:26
remarkably aggressive terms. You’ve seen you know some very creative thinking uh in this country
57:33
from from Tories sometimes actually more creative people on the left because they’ve got a stronger
57:38
sense of having worked in business of what business where business is pushing it a little bit and it is you know disempowering people. So I mean when I say that I’m not taking a particularly
57:46
partisan view. I do absolutely. I mean some creative things. I really appreciate journalism
57:51
and one of my favorite journalists in the UK is uh Nick Cohen. Uh I really really like Nick because
57:58
he’s been very honest here. There’s I’m I’m on the left but there’s some problems um with the left but I’m I’m still on the left and and and uh and so he he becomes interesting because uh
58:09
I can believe what he’s writing. That’s a perfect example. Yes. and a sense of authenticity. Well,
58:15
look, thank you very much for uh for talking with me. I everybody go out and buy this book,
58:21
Ghosts of Iron Mountain. Buy it for yourself, buy one for your friends, or you know, it makes a great
58:26
gift. And this book is very important, deserves to be widely read, widely distributed, and um Phil,
58:33
thank you very much for appearing with us. That’s very kind. Thanks. I’ve really enjoyed it. Okay.
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