FALLOUT With Robert Malone: Are You Being Manipulated?

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] The Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu once wrote: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

We live in an age of fifth-generation information warfare. Battles are not solely fought with guns and bombs. The new battlefield is in the minds of every citizen.

There are covert psychological operations at play to control what you see, what you hear, and what you’re allowed to think.

In this first episode of FALLOUT, our new EpochTV show co-hosted by Dr. Robert Malone and Epoch Times senior editor Jan Jekielek, we’ll be diving into some of the key tactics of disinformation.

After that, we’ll take a break—and head to Dr. Malone’s farm to get a glimpse into the magic of horse riding.

Follow us on X. 

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the hosts, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Robert Malone:
The author of The Art of War, Sun Tzu, once wrote, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” We live in an age of fifth-generation information warfare. Battles are not fought solely with guns and bombs. The new battlefield is controlling the thoughts in the mind of every citizen. There are covert psychological operations at play to control what you see, what you hear, and what you’re allowed to think.

Here on Fallout, our new Epoch TV show co-hosted by myself and my good friend Jan Jekielek, we’ll be looking at radical policies that have transformed western societies and the multifaceted consequences of these policies. We’ll also examine lifestyle choices that can help you to opt out of the system.

Jan, when you think about it, advertising and propaganda are really the same thing. As folks that have grown up in the West over the last few decades, we’ve seen the growth and increasing sophistication of advertising technology to sell us boxes of soap and loaves of bread. But as it’s been deployed and evolved, we’ve all learned to recognize it and see through it. We’ve become more immune to this technology. We need to learn to do the same thing with fifth-generation warfare.

Jan Jekielek:
How do you define fifth-generation warfare?

Dr. Malone:
Neither of us are experts in fifth-generation warfare. But we have both been subjected to it for years now, and have learned on the job as we’ve been on the receiving end of it. This is a phrase that describes the most modern, highly developed aspect of warfare that starts with sticks and stones, goes through battle lines and tank warfare, then on to asymmetric warfare where you have a non-state actor essentially being a guerrilla force against a state. The modern embodiment is fifth-generation warfare, where propaganda, psychological operations, and the deployment of psychological technology is used on people to convince them of a narrative. This has increasingly become the mainstay of modern warfare.

Mr. Jekielek:
It is disturbing that people have decided it’s moral to do this in the first place.

Dr. Malone:
We are now in a world where governments are justifying the active use of this technology against their own citizens. This is tech that was developed for offshore combat, but is now being deployed against the citizenry. These people often try to redirect blame for what’s going on to other parties. This gets to another key characteristic of fifth-generation warfare. When it’s properly performed, you are unable to see who is behind it. The receiver of the information, essentially the subject of the warfare who is being manipulated, is completely unaware of who is doing it to them.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is truly one of the defining issues of our times, this ability to manufacture the perception of consensus. It is very powerful for affecting people’s behavior and believing what is true and what isn’t. In this first episode, let’s talk about some of the tools that are being employed, looking at the toolkit of the U.S. military.

Dr. Malone:
Recently, there was a fascinating report from the House Committee on Weaponization of Government and the Judiciary in which staffers reported on CISA [Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] and its activities. During the Covid crisis and even before and since then with agendas like climate change, the government has deployed the same exact technologies that they have been claiming other individual or state actors have been deploying against the U.S. government to manipulate information.
What CISA has done on their website, CISA.gov, is to lay out a series of examples of how information warfare or mis and dis and malinformation are used by third parties to craft and manipulate what people are thinking and feeling. To my eye, these things that CSIA is listing are actually what are being used against us by the government. It’s not just the U.S. government, but virtually all of the Five Eyes governments; U.S., UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. These same techniques are being actively deployed against citizens.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s define this term malinformation, because a lot of people don’t understand the concept. It is information that is actually true which goes against the prescribed narrative that the government is putting out. That’s a bizarre term to me.

Dr. Malone:
Yes, it is totally Orwellian. Misinformation is information which is inconsistent with the approved narrative of the United States or some designated third party like the World Health Organization. But it isn’t being spread for political purposes, it just is different from the approved narrative. Disinformation is misinformation which is being deployed for political purposes.

If I’m spreading a different narrative than the approved one, and I’m doing it because I want to get somebody elected or advance some political agenda, then that’s disinformation. As you mentioned, malinformation is completely Orwellian. That is information that someone is spreading which might cause discomfort or problems to the government. It’s contrary to their approved narrative, but it’s actually true.

According to the government, misinformation and disinformation are false information. According to the government, malinformation can be true information, but the government doesn’t want it shared. One example of this technology that CISA lists are people who cultivate fake or misleading personas and websites. We see this all the time, and we call them bots, trolls, and bot armies. We can see fake information intentionally being placed on websites. This is one of the reasons why Russia Times is often suspect, and there’s similar activity associated with the CCP.

Mr. Jekielek:
A lot of people are familiar with the 50 Cent Army, tens of thousands of people pushing CCP narratives who are paid a tiny amount per post.

Dr. Malone:
In the UK we have the 77th Brigade that is paid and is loosely affiliated with their military. These are common people sitting in their apartments getting their ration from the government to post stuff on the internet in the UK that serves government interests. This is really true. It has been documented that we’ve had this kind of activity with most of these governments now.

Because of the Freedom of Information Act, the Epoch Times did a great piece where they documented this approach of using surrogate armies. It is essentially gang-stalking funded through the CDC Foundation, from public good projects to shots heard around the world. They would notify an army of influencers on social media to attack this person or that person or try to defeat this or that narrative. There are lots of these examples.

Mr. Jekielek:
Gang-stalking is when a whole bunch of people pile on a particular person. It is extreme bullying from a large group of people.

Dr. Malone:
Yes. There’s another particularly intriguing one now, which is synthetic media that has come to the fore. We’re going to see a lot of it in this next election cycle. Here we are in 2024, where we have this artificial intelligence technology. There are also old school deep fakes and synthetic media where people just use Adobe Photoshop and edit things on past tweets. I’ve experienced this where people create synthetic tweets and then circulate it in an effort to delegitimize me.

Mr. Jekielek:
Synthetic media is something that really looks like, for example, an official Epoch Times post. Someone has taken a screenshot, but modified it to tell a false story, but it appears credible.

Dr. Malone:
The first time I encountered a deep fake was an advertising campaign that a company in the UK performed in which they cloned my voice. Then they edited a video that I had cut with GB News so that it was modifying the movement of my lips to comport with the false narrative they put out. They were using my voice where I was advertising for a medical device that I’d never even heard of before. It was still fairly crude and you could see through it.

I know of a rapper who is getting great traction creating rap songs for Donald Trump in which Donald Trump is singing the song. He’s doing the rapping, and it’s entirely fake and synthetic through use of artificial intelligence. This is just the very front edge of what’s coming .

Mr. Jekielek:
With one caveat, he’s not pretending, that’s actually Donald Trump doing the singing.

Dr. Malone:
True.

Mr. Jekielek:
These deep fakes can have a profound impact on us. When you see someone saying something, even if you know it’s fake, you get this cognitive dissonance. Someone will tell you, “This is a deep fake. This isn’t real.” You think, “But hey, I just saw that person say it.”

Dr. Malone:
Yes. It’s really powerful and it gets straight into your brain. Another example involves the development and amplification of conspiracy theories. This gets really twisted because it is the weaponization of conspiracy theories in order to divide communities and delegitimize bonafide resistance movements. You may have a resistance movement that is focused on what the government is doing at the time, or whatever their agenda is, be it globalism or climate change or.

Within that, actors can come in and either create synthetic media or promote conspiracy theories within that area. Often they’ll gather followers because it confirms the conspiracy beliefs that that general community may have and then drive them towards a position that is absolutely not credible.

Mr. Jekielek:
This conspiracy theory term has been getting so much traction to the point where it’s not even clear. People say yesterday’s conspiracy theory is today’s conspiracy fact.

Dr. Malone:
What is the time log on conspiracy theories being validated?

Mr. Jekielek:
Conspiracy theory is in itself an Orwellian term, because actually, there really are plenty of conspiracies. But the implication is that every conspiracy theory is somehow tainted with misinformation.

Dr. Malone:
The injecting of that term into the national dialogue was actually promoted by the CIA after the Kennedy assassination. Before then, you don’t see that term used in common discourse or in journalism. It was intentionally inserted as part of this Operation Mockingbird activity that the CIA has been involved in since its founding mid-20th century.

Mr. Jekielek:
Operation Mockingbird was disclosed in the Church Committee report from the U.S. Senate in the 1970’s. Basically, it was about CIA operatives working in the news media. In some cases, the media owners knew about these agents, in other cases they did not.

Dr. Malone:
There’s a famous quote that was used in this context that it’s cheaper to buy a journalist than it is to buy a prostitute. The CIA employed a huge range of mainstream journalists. By the way, they also employed a lot of academics, but that was kind of downplayed in the Church report. There is a long-standing integration of the CIA into corporate media to influence the reporting of the news. As I said, it goes back to mid-century. It goes back to the founding of the CIA, and it still continues to this day.

People think that it was stopped after the Church Committee, but that’s not what actually happened. Colby was the director at the time, and then Bush. They didn’t actually prohibit it. They said, “We’re no longer going to support the main journalists.” Bernstein documented over 200 mainstream journalists working for the New York Times that were masthead people, and they stopped supporting them. But they continued to support the stringers that write the articles that then get placed, who don’t always have their name on the masthead.

The CIA has absolutely continued this activity. Now, it’s not just the CIA, but also the FBI. You really have to think about the intelligence ecosystem in the United States. It’s not just one agency.

Mr. Jekielek:
There’s another confounding element here, looking back to the Obama administration manufacturing the perceived consensus around the Iran deal. Ben Rhodes actually disclosed in great detail how he did that. But the journalists were willing participants because they were ideologically on board. This has been a theme for multiple events since that time, including Russiagate.

Dr. Malone:
Another method is astroturfing and flooding the information environment. This is another way to control the narrative and control what people are thinking. Here’s a great example that you’ll see again and again. Someone within mainstream media will decide that they’re going to attack somebody or some organization or some topic area, and then you’ll see a pile-on effect, where suddenly you’ll see derivative articles come out in a flood that are all coordinated through corporate media.

This is called flooding the zone. It also happens in social media where these bot and troll armies and other activities will come in when there has been a new disclosure or a new bit of information that is not in the interest of the current approved narrative. Then you’ll often see a whole lot of commentators suddenly come in.

They usually are low complexity, and they’re often new accounts. They have few connections and few followers. But they’ll flood the zone with alternative versions of whatever the narrative is that has just been disclosed, so that people are completely confused. They don’t know what to believe. Examples are the, “Safe and effective,” and “Don’t kill grandma,” narratives that we heard associated with the Covid crisis.

Another one is this messaging about Trump being an authoritarian and that he’s going to become a dictator. When that was first pulled out, you suddenly saw a flood of articles in corporate media all talking about Trump as a potential dictator and authoritarian.

Mr. Jekielek:
When that is done in an extreme way for a long period of time, you get what we call Trump derangement syndrome. Some people are just kind of broken this way. They’ve just come to believe that this is true.

Dr. Malone:
This is partially neuro-linguistic programming, which is a key component of how this cyber propaganda operates. When you repeat something again and again, it gets into your brain. In a fundamental way, you assimilate it and you no longer question it, because you’re hearing it from what appears to be independent voices, but often they are coordinated.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is a powerful tool, the combination of this corporate media narrative being seeded and then all these independent small accounts amplifying and validating it, which manufactures this perceived consensus. Three years ago, I had no idea this was possible. We’ve seen it now with Trump, Covid, and multiple other scenarios. BLM [Black Lives Matter] is another great example.

Dr. Malone:
Another one of the technologies that is used in this fifth-gen warfare that’s laid out by CISA, but also apparently deployed by CISA, is the abuse of alternative platforms. This is really problematic because we’re all in favor of free speech. You want free speech, and I want free speech. The Epoch Times is all about free speech. It’s about getting to the truth and speaking the truth. Now, X is endorsing free speech, even though they have an underlying policy of freedom of speech, but not of reach.

But there are platforms that are completely open and committed to free speech, and some of them have biases. One of those is Gab and another one is Substack. Gab has a complete tolerance of anti-Semitism. What you see on Gab is the abuse of that platform, and a lot of it is directed. One of the strategies that is deployed on Gab is false voices, these artificial accounts that promote really rabid anti-Semitism statements. It kind of normalizes anti-Semitism within that platform.

Mr. Jekielek:
If you tolerate it and don’t quickly get rid of them, then the bad actor can say, “You’re responsible. You endorse this and you support it.”

Dr. Malone:
You can be accused of endorsing it just because you don’t delete it or don’t speak out against it. That’s a great example, and it illustrates the problem. We’re all in favor of free speech, and yet these really ugly narratives can be aggressively injected and weaponized in ways to delegitimize people intentionally. In this bizarre, twisting landscape of fifth-generation warfare, you never really know what’s real. You never really know who is acting and why and what their real agenda is. Of course, that’s all by intention.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is one of the reasons why at the Epoch Times, we take longer to figure things out, because it’s really hard to sift through what is true, what is false, and what has been planted.

Dr. Malone:
Precisely. One of the most amazing examples was the New York Times headline when that hospital got hit with a rocket attack in Gaza. First, they were blaming the Israelis, then the narrative changed. They were so quick to jump into the approved narrative that they got the facts wrong. Then they had to flip their headlines when they found out what the true information was.

Sometimes going a little bit slower, particularly in true journalism, is important. When we get locked into this nanosecond news cycle on X and these other platforms, often the narrative can develop and run away before it’s actually been validated. But that can also be used and weaponized.

Another example that CISA points out is the spreading of targeted content by third parties. If you can find somebody who has a fairly large following on the social media platform and get them to retweet your content or repost it, then it goes out to a much larger audience than you yourself might have had access to.

Mr. Jekielek:
Obviously, it would have to be something very enticing and attractive.

Dr. Malone:
I once got caught up in this myself. If you recall, there was a video called “Died Suddenly,” that was very compelling back when everybody was talking about the sudden death events associated often with young men in sporting events. There was a compilation about this that was quite compelling, showing all these video clips of young men dying on sports fields.

When I saw it, I thought that it was bonafide and was a great example illustrating the point. I reposted it and then that got amplified. I thought nothing more of it until two months later when I got a cease and desist letter from the parents of one of the young men portrayed in this video who it turns out had died suddenly on the field before Covid ever happened, before 2019.

I had inadvertently caused pain to these parents without even realizing it. I had no idea that that particular clip was even in the montage. It was just one of many. But that’s a great example of when if you’re not careful about what you’re reposting, you can inadvertently be used to spread false content, and then that in turn can be weaponized against you.

Mr. Jekielek:
Absolutely. I have a much smaller following, and I’ve also learned to be very careful about this. This is just scratching the surface, because these are just the official tools that we are being pointed at. As we speak, this is a robust, growing, academic discipline, with huge amounts of money being thrown at it.

Dr. Malone:
It is rapidly evolving. All these techniques are evolving in real time on social media. We’re both watching it happen as it’s being deployed against us. It’s being deployed against me, against the Epoch Times, and against my physician colleagues. At the same time, we are learning that those deploying these kinds of mis and disinformation strategies are learning about how to do it better, and how to better manipulate the public.

Mr. Jekielek:
Robert, as we finish up, I remember the “Ghosts in the Machine” recruiting video. That was a bonafide military recruitment video that recounts what we’ve been talking about today.

Dr. Malone:
Yes. I first found that clip over a year ago now, and I’ve used it in a lot of my fifth-generation warfare lectures. It really shocks people when they watch it because often they’re not aware that it’s a recruiting video. This is coming from the Fort Bragg Ghost Army Group, which is the main information warfare group within the U.S. army. There are also a whole bunch of them in army reserves spread across the United States.

This is a group that was overseen by the current Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, when he was a Lieutenant General, and which put out the current official U.S. military psywar manual which was signed off by now Secretary of Defense back when he was in command of that base. It authorizes the military to deploy this psywar technology on American citizens in the event of a national emergency, which is clearly what we’ve experienced over the last three years.

Because of FOIAs and journalistic work, we see that the militaries of Great Britain, United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia have likewise deployed their own psywar or fifth-generation warfare technologies against their own citizens. I love that particular video. It shocks people when they watch it, and they have no idea what they’re walking into. It’s trying to recruit young members into the military to join this particular operation. Again, the Secretary of Defense has said in recent statements that this is the future of warfare.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.