Ep 337 | The Deep State Is a Deadly Virus | Guest: Debbie Lerman

Summary

Podcast Summary: Kibbe on Liberty – Ep 337 | The Deep State Is a Deadly Virus ft. Debbie Lerman

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Introduction

In Episode 337 of "Kibbe on Liberty," hosted by Matt Kibbe from the Blaze Podcast Network, libertarian author and economist Matt Kibbe engages in a profound conversation with Debbie Lerman, the author of “The Deep State Goes Viral.” Released on June 18, 2025, this episode delves into the intricate collusion between big government and big business, the emergence of a censorship industrial complex, and the utilization of emergencies as tools to solidify deep state control.

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Debbie Lerman’s Thesis: COVID-19 as a National Security Event

Debbie Lerman presents a compelling thesis that challenges the mainstream narrative surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Lerman, “The COVID event was not a public health event. It was a national security event run on a global scale by a global conglomerate,” which she terms the Global Biodefense Public-Private Partnership (Lerman, [03:44]). This conglomerate encompasses military and intelligence agencies from NATO and allied nations, major pharmaceutical and consulting firms, Silicon Valley, and both traditional and digital media outlets. Lerman argues that this alliance aims to amass unparalleled power, control, and wealth.

Key Quote:

“The COVID event was not a public health event. It was a national security event run on a global scale by a global conglomerate.” – Debbie Lerman [03:44]

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Red Pill Moments: Awakening to Institutional Perversions

Both Matt Kibbe and Debbie Lerman recount their "red pill" moments—realizations that exposed the deep-seated corruption and collusion within powerful institutions. Kibbe shares his early skepticism about lockdowns and their economic repercussions, noting, “I thought there was no public health benefit to that. It was all harm, no good” ([02:48]). Lerman describes her critical turning point upon recognizing mainstream liberal voices, like Paul Krugman, opposing lockdown measures ([08:26]).

Key Quote:

“If everybody's lying, everybody I trust... then something is really, really, really wrong.” – Debbie Lerman [08:00]

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Historical Context: From Operation Paperclip to Modern Biodefense

The conversation traces the origins of biodefense research post-World War II, highlighting Operation Paperclip, where Nazi scientists were integrated into U.S. biodefense programs ([13:12]). Lerman emphasizes the ongoing use of bioweapons across various conflicts, despite international moratoriums, pointing out the persistent loopholes that allow continued development and deployment ([13:47]).

Key Quote:

“We imported a bunch of Nazi scientists... Who were working on what could go wrong.” – Matt Kibbe [13:47]

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The Five Eyes Alliance and Global Coordination

One of the pivotal topics is the Five Eyes intelligence alliance comprising the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Lerman explains how this alliance facilitates synchronized global responses to biothreats, as evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic ([31:25]). This coordination extends to censorship efforts and the suppression of dissenting medical opinions, such as the promotion of vaccines over treatments like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

Key Quote:

“Why would Australia and the United States be doing the exact same thing at the same time?” – Debbie Lerman [31:25]

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Censorship Industrial Complex: A Non-Partisan Threat

Lerman and Kibbe discuss how the censorship industrial complex, originally intended to combat misinformation related to terrorism, has been repurposed to suppress a wide range of dissenting voices under the guise of public health ([44:48]). They argue that this machinery operates beyond partisan politics, maintaining a continuous state of control irrespective of the administration in power.

Key Quote:

“It's a machine. So. And I'm not trying to be critical or anything. [...] it's a continuum running through.” – Debbie Lerman [36:46]

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Legal Mechanisms of Control: PREP Act and States of Emergency

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on the PREP Act and the strategic use of states of emergency to bypass legal and regulatory frameworks. Lerman details how the PREP Act allows for the unregulated distribution of medical countermeasures, labeling them as military operations rather than public health initiatives ([85:45]).

Key Quote:

“So what's the alternative? First understanding what is happening.” – Matt Kibbe [39:51]

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Vaccine Passports and Surveillance: The Next Frontier

Lerman identifies vaccine passports as a critical tool for global surveillance and control, orchestrated by entities like the WHO and tech companies. She warns that these measures are precursors to more invasive control mechanisms, aligning with the broader goals of the global biodefense conglomerate ([63:16]).

Key Quote:

“Vaccine passports for me is where it's at. And that's a much better entryway into what's happening now.” – Debbie Lerman [65:11]

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Technological Control vs. Libertarian Optimism

The dialogue touches upon the dual nature of technology as both a liberating force and a means of authoritarian control. While acknowledging the potential of decentralized technologies like blockchain, Lerman remains skeptical about their effectiveness against the deeply entrenched surveillance systems ([77:50]).

Key Quote:

“It's all the money is laundered again and again and again.” – Matt Kibbe [18:48]

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Brownstone and Independent Journalism: Building a Resistance Narrative

Debbie Lerman shares her journey with Brownstone, an independent media platform that became instrumental in amplifying her research and writings. Her collaboration with Jeffrey Tucker at Brownstone facilitated the publication of her critical analyses, including her first exposure to institutional propaganda through Deborah Birx's “Silent Invasion” ([88:39]).

Key Quote:

“I knew that Deborah Birx was not a public health operator, that she had come from someplace else, which I then realized was the National Security Council.” – Debbie Lerman [91:36]

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Conclusion: Embracing the Black Pill to Ignite Change

Both hosts acknowledge the daunting nature of the challenges posed by the deep state and the censorship industrial complex. Lerman advocates for a collective awakening—what she terms the "black pill"—to resist and dismantle the intertwined powers of government and corporations. They emphasize the necessity of transcending partisan divisions to address the systemic threats to liberty and autonomy.

Final Quote:

“We cannot vote our way out of this.” – Matt Kibbe [39:51]

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Additional Resources

• Book Mentioned: The Deep State Goes Viral by Debbie Lerman
• Organizations: freethepeople.org
• Related Works:
  • Wuhan Cover Up by Bobby Kennedy
  • Silent Invasion by Deborah Birx

Connect with Debbie Lerman:

• Substack: Debbie Lerman’s Substack (Insert actual link)
• Amazon: The Deep State Goes Viral on Amazon (Insert actual link)

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Note: This summary encapsulates the key discussions, insights, and conclusions from Episode 337 of "Kibbe on Liberty." For a comprehensive understanding, listeners are encouraged to tune into the full episode.

Transcript

[Kibbe]

Welcome to Keep Beyond Liberty. This week I'm talking with Debbie Lehrman.

[Debbie Lehrman]

About her new book, the Deep State Goes Viral.

[Kibbe]

We're going to talk about the collusion of big government and big business, the censorship industrial complex, and how emergencies are.

[Debbie Lehrman]

A blank check that will not protect.

[Kibbe]

Us from the deep state. Check it out. Welcome to Kibby on Liberty. Debbie, how's it going?

[Debbie Lehrman]

Good, thank you.

[Kibbe]

I'm so excited that you're here that we finally get to have this conversation. And ostensibly, we're going to talk about your newish book, the Deep State Goes Pandemic Planning and the COVID Coup. Such a provocative title. But I hope we go deeper down the rabbit hole. And I have to say to everyone, people on this show know that I've been obsessing about this since March of 2020. And I took an economist's perspective early on, just when they said, remember the hashtag that said stay the fuck home. And as an economist, I'm thinking to myself, what would happen if we actually all stayed home? People would die, particularly at the margins, within weeks of that. And I took it literally. And then quite quickly, I realized they didn't really mean that because certain people needed Uber eats to still deliver the food to their door, as Jay Bhattacharya calls them, the laptop class. The haves and the have nots of the pandemic. But this, for anybody that's sort of followed me on this journey, I think your book is the most important book that I've read on the pandemic.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Wow.

[Kibbe]

And that's not hyperbole. I really believe that because it gets at a lot of the institutional perversions, the. The public choice incentives that have created what I consider the biggest assault on liberty in my lifetime. So with that advertisement, you have to convince people that what I just said is true.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Thank you. I really appreciate that. Advertisement wow.

[Kibbe]

First, give us a thesis, and then I want to get into your background, and then we'll dig into the details. What's the thesis of the book?

[Debbie Lehrman]

The thesis of the book is that the COVID event was not a public health event. It was a national security event run on a global scale by a global conglomerate that I call the Global Biodefense Public Private partnership. It includes military and intelligence agencies of NATO and other US Allies and huge pharmaceutical companies, huge consulting companies. It includes Silicon Valley. It includes the media, both on and offline. So it's just an enormous conglomerate of very powerful interests operating on a global level to accrue as much power, control, and wealth as they can and as they naturally would.

[Kibbe]

Yeah, yeah. I try to explain it to people. It's own economy or it's its own ecosystem, and you have these different elements feeding off of each other. I think, as the libertarian part of me thinks, very much empowered by the course of power of the state because they can enforce these things. They're the ones that can mandate that you take the vaccine. They're the ones that can actually mandate lockdowns. But this all goes back to. Back to your red pill moment. We've all had one.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Yeah.

[Kibbe]

And I've been eating red pills by the bucket since the beginning of this pandemic. But tell us you had a different reaction when they first suggested we should lock down.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Yeah, my red pill moment was the moment. I think it was March 13, or whenever they made the announcement about lockdowns or that they were even thinking about it, because I had investigated the new outbreak in China in February of 2020. I used to be a medical writer, so I wrote for consulting companies and ad companies and online marketing companies, and I worked for pharmaceutical companies. I also worked for government agencies and for nonprofits. So I was very comfortable with medical and, and scientific information. I just looked up the numbers. I looked up what was happening in China. It just seemed like one of those SARS outbreaks or MERS or Ebola. You know, you recognize clusters of cases and you take care of them, you move on. And nobody actually knows that it's going on. So my husband's the doctor. We both looked it up. We both said, okay, well, it doesn't look like much. Let's move on. And we assumed everybody else would move on. So when everybody else didn't move on, that was my red pill moment. When they said, uh, oh, now we have to lock down the entire country and. And we all have to start doing really weird, crazy things that have nothing to do with public health. So I knew that masks were not a public health measure against a virus. Everybody learns that in their first year of epidemiology at medical school doesn't stop viruses. I knew that social distancing was absolutely ridiculous because viruses travel more than six feet. I knew that locking down the whole society, as you said, would be enormously harmful. And I couldn't understand what the benefit might be. Certainly there was no public health benefit to that. It was all harm, no good. And then I think when I really freaked out, which is strange because I'm not an economist like you, and I don't usually focus on the economy, but like, I think on the 17th or whenever they announced, like, the $2 trillion package. I think I absolutely. I just flipped out because I said that's. There's no way that they think they can put $2 trillion into the economy, to not have an economy that doesn't make any sense at all. People are gonna die and they're gonna. There's gonna be depression and there's gonna be suicide and the children, and, you know, society is gonna fall apart. All the things that were very, very obvious, really, right from the beginning. And so that really freaked me out. And the other reason it freaked me out is because, unlike you, I'm not from a Libertarian perspective. I come more from a social Democrat perspective. And all I could think to myself was, if they have $2 trillion to put into shutting the economy down, why don't they have $2 trillion to do stuff, to help, to fix things, to have a good society, to have a good medical system, to have a good educational system, to do something good? None of it made sense. And when the New York Times and npr, which were my liberal Democrat news sources, started promoting these things and not criticizing them, then I actually kind of had a nervous breakdown. Because then I thought, well, everybody's lying. If everybody's lying, everybody I trust, the government, the public health agencies, the media, then something is really, really, really wrong. That was my huge red pill.

[Kibbe]

I mean, obviously your book answers this question, but the. One of the fascinating aspects of that echo chamber was the spectacle of progressive institutions and progressive Democrats. To a person siding with Big Pharma, I know. At the expense of everything else, I'm like, that's a hat trick. I got to figure out how that's going on.

[Debbie Lehrman]

So, Paul Krugman, let's just take an example. So somebody who I used to think was smart and had things to say that I cared about no longer. But at the time, I thought, welcome. I know. I mean, you've been there for a while. I just got there with the pandemic. But I said, he's too smart for this. He's going to see this ridiculous plan of shutting down and then injecting trillions of dollars into a shutdown economy, and he's going to say no. And all the smart people at the New York Times are going to say no. And then we're going to get out of this. Right? We're also going to realize that the virus isn't very dangerous to most people. And so everybody's just going to. They lost their mind for a minute. They're going to get back. I think on like March 26th is when Paul Krugman published an editorial saying the Republicans are trying to kill people because they want to keep the economy open. And I think I cried. I cried because that was it. I was like, okay, so that's the end for me of being able to listen to any of these people. Not that I want to listen to the Republicans either, but at least, you know, somebody needs to be objecting to this.

[Kibbe]

Have you met Richard Ebright?

[Debbie Lehrman]

No. I know who he is, but I haven't met him.

[Kibbe]

He has a story quite similar to yours. He was, was a liberal Democrat, always voted Democrat. And if you go back enough in time, the New York Times treated him as a hero because he was a critic of the Republican funded mad science experiments operated by Tony Fauci during the.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Right. The biodefense.

[Kibbe]

Yeah, the biodefense thing. And you can find all of these articles in the New York Times sort of lionizing him as this dis, this brave dissident. And then a flip, a switch just flipped and he became one of the baddies. And it's fascinating.

[Debbie Lehrman]

It's fascinating or scary and scary. That's what I was going to say. So fascinating and scary for someone who trusts institutions, which I no longer do, but when you do. And this is why I understand why people can't really embrace necessarily what I have to say in the book. Although I hope that I say it in a way that's not too threatening. It's very, very, very hard, I know because I went through it to realize that you can't trust institutions, you can't trust the media, you can't trust academia, you can't trust medicine, you can't trust so called science, you can't trust the government. And as a good libertarian, you probably never did, but I did. And learning that you can only trust yourself and your community is a big, big, very difficult lesson, especially for people who have invested all their lives in being part of those institutions and their careers and their income and their prestige and their self worth. It's almost impossible to abandon those things even when the institutions turn on you.

[Kibbe]

Yeah. So I will say, I will admit also to being red pilled as I thought I was a cynical libertarian and I actually worked as a young economist at the U.S. chamber of Commerce and their logo says the Spirit of Enterprise. But within six months I realized that big corporate interests controlled the Chamber's agenda. And it wasn't the small guys, it wasn't mom and pop businesses, it was the big guys that bought the seat at the chairman of the subcommittees for the policies. So I should have been awake early on, but what the pandemic taught me was just how interwoven government power and corporate power is. Corporatism, you can call it cronyism. There's an F word that you can use for it that we won't use. We don't scare anybody. But my red pill is. And perhaps my naivete as a libertarian is not realizing just how toxic corporate power was. I like to say that the left always worried about corporate power, and the right, when they were good, worried about government power. Libertarians worry about the collusion of those two things. And that's really the narrative of your book, is that this has become this big monster that is just feeding off of power and money and. And global coordination. I want to go back to the beginning of biodefense research, which you give a nice overview. And it starts after World War II.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Yeah. So I'm not a huge expert on the World War II to 911 segment of it, but everything I know came from Bobby Kennedy's book, which is called the Wuhan Cover Up. So I would recommend that as a. There's about four resources that I recommend in my book that have pretty much all the information and all the references that you need to understand what happened. And Bobby's book, the Wuhan Cover up, is one of them. And he talks about how after World War II, what they did was they just imported all the scientists from Germany.

[Kibbe]

Operation Paperclip.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Operation Paperclip, exactly. Who were working on.

[Kibbe]

People don't believe this. Like this.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Well, it's not a secret.

[Kibbe]

Yeah, it's not a secret.

[Debbie Lehrman]

No. It's in the public record.

[Kibbe]

We imported a bunch of Nazi scientists.

[Debbie Lehrman]

We did.

[Kibbe]

Yeah.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Who were working on what could go wrong. Yeah, right. And put them in charge of the bioweapons and chemical weapons programs because they were pretty advanced, as we know, in those things. And so that started up the program. And then at various times in history, there are rumors that bioweapons were used. I can't say that I know because I haven't done enough of a deep research into each one of those incidents. But in different times, in different wars and in different places, it is pretty much known that we did try to use, or in fact used bioweapons on various civilian populations and military in military situations. So that happened, you know, the whole time, no matter what. Even they said there was a moratorium. That came later, of course, with Obama. But even when they said. Even when they had international Agreements. There was always. There's always a loophole.

Thank you for joining me today on Kibbe on Liberty and for being part of our fiercely independent audience. Every week, my organization, Free the People, partners with BlazeTV to bring you this show. My guests bring smart perspectives on everything from current events to timeless philosophical debates. If you like what you hear, go to freethepeople.org kol and support Kibbe on Liberty so we can continue to produce these honest conversations with interesting people. Now, let's get back to it.

[Kibbe]

The, the thing that I one of the things I learned from Dr. Ebright that helps piece it all together is that one of the reasons that Dick Cheney tapped Anthony Fauci was because Richard Nixon had signed a bioterrorism treaty and basically said, we're not going to do this anymore. It's too dangerous. It's insane. And the Department of Defense and the other intelligence and defense agencies had a compliance office. You know, who didn't? Nih.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Exactly.

[Kibbe]

Niaid. So it was a loophole. That explains where Anthony Fauci accrued all of this power, because otherwise the typical agencies would have been doing it.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Yes.

[Kibbe]

And that's like, this is what. Well, I first probably learned this from Jay Bhattacharya when he sort of casually said I was having a conversation with him here maybe four years ago now, and he just casually mentioned the explosion of funding after 9 11.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Yes.

[Kibbe]

And I immediately started to understand things that I didn't understand before. Right, but you're the first person to fully document this process of the military industrial complex corrupting public health.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Yes. And that's what. Exactly. I was going to follow up on what you were saying. So what people have to understand is that public health, even after World War II already there was some kind of a little bit of overlap because what happens is if you have funding, and this is in all areas of research, scientific research and technological research, as I think we know, you can see it in Silicon Valley, you can see it in all kinds of research. That is dual purpose. So it has civilian purposes and it has military purposes. In the military, I've been told they use the term dual purpose to mean both defensive and offensive. So there's two meanings to the term dual purpose. I'm going to use it now as both civilian and military purposes. And so that's how a lot of scientists, a lot of scientific institutions, a lot of medical institutions get roped in or brought into the military industrial complex, even though we don't notice it as civilians. All their funding, or a majority of Their funding is coming from those sources because. Because that's, as we know, where we put most of our money. If the biodefense industrial complex decides that it wants to research gain of function or different kinds of biological weapons and that's where they want the money to go, many, many scientists and many, many programs are going to be converted into that. And so the public private partnership that you described so well, which is the government and the companies, the corporatism happening, also includes and envelops all of academia, scientific institutions. And then we also get the journals, and then we also get the accrediting institutions. And so everybody's in it, but nobody knows that everybody's in it until something like Covid happens.

[Kibbe]

It's all the money is laundered again and again and again.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Exactly.

[Kibbe]

All the way to the non government entities that are funded by the government.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Exactly. So those are very interesting. So we do have the ones that are like Bill and Munley Gates foundation, which are funded both by Bill Gates, but also get money from the government. But then there's things like the CDC foundation, which I don't know if you've heard of.

[Kibbe]

No.

[Debbie Lehrman]

And the NIH foundation, which I hope Jay knows about. And those are.

[Kibbe]

We're telling him right now, we're telling.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Him, okay, those are entities that were created by Congress. So unfortunately I don't think that they can just be canceled, but they were created as a way for nonprofits, you know, non government money to aid and assist the government agencies in their, and in this case public health pursuits. And they're mostly funded by the government. So the CDC foundation, which was very active during COVID in censorship and in pursuing doctors and other people who spoke up about the measures, they're funded mostly by the government. So basically just direct laundering of money from the government to a so called nonprofit that actually has the name of the same entity as the government. It's the CDC foundation, put the money over there, then move it back and do whatever the government is trying to do. So that's really a really good example of the public private partnership, which is really just a way for private money to control, as you said, the legislative and regulatory functions. So once private money controls the legislative and regulatory functions, nobody's acting on behalf of the voters anymore.

[Kibbe]

Yeah, RFK calls it corporate capture. I might call it government capture, but it's sort of a chicken and an egg thing. It's some point because you don't know who's actually making the calls because again, it's an ecosystem. All of Their incentives are aligned. What was I going to ask you? So I groked your book and it was, I think, a very fair analysis of your book. And then when it goes, it always says, what are the criticisms? And one of the criticisms was that maybe the title itself sounded a little conspiratorial. You know, the Deep State goes viral. But you defined a deep state. Yes. Tell us where that term came from.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Okay. It's before Trump. I don't grok, so I don't use AI at all. I think AI is the devil. But I'm glad you did. That's really interesting.

[Kibbe]

Some of the members of my team will agree with you.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Thank you for doing that. I'm going to do that. That's super interesting. Interesting, yes. The deep state is a term. I don't know where the original use of it is, but in the public record it looks like in 2014 it was popularized in the media by a left wing government functionary who said, what's happening now in the government is that there is an alliance between the military industrial complex, Wall street and Silicon Valley. And what they are doing is they are operating in an extra constitutional space where there's no oversight and where there's no law preventing them from doing basically whatever they want. That was the definition. And that definition from 2014 I think is extremely applicable to what happening now. So when I say deep state, I don't mean like a bunch of spies sitting around a table and plotting. I actually mean a very structural entity that has been around forever, I would say, at least since World War II. A lot of people would tell you for a long time, which is that marriage of the military industrial complex with the banking and financial interests and with the media, which now is mostly digital media altogether, pursuing whatever aims that conglomerate wants to pursue. And in the pandemic, it was a biodefense agenda because it also had to do with, you know, disease. And pharmaceutical companies were the majority of the corporate side of the alliance. But there are many other corporations that are always involved in these things and they're always glad global at this point. So we have to think of these things not just on a national scale, but also on a global scale. Because the way that I describe it in the book is you can look at all of the government entities and the corporate entities that kind of came together in the United States, and then you can see that that exact same thing happened everywhere, the way that the pandemic was run, but also those alliances between the military, intelligence, corporate and media interests happened everywhere. So it's really not just extra constitutional, but it's kind of extra governmental in terms of sovereignty, national sovereignty, countries running their own economies, countries running their own regulations, countries having their own laws. It's a little bit like we don't really have that anymore.

[Kibbe]

Yeah. And that again, is something that I would claim, as cynical as I have always been, I would claim some naivete about just how unfree the press is and how unsoverign the United States is and the other aspects of this. Because I want to go back to when I was a young economist at the Chamber. I wasn't allowed to use my Chamber affiliation for obvious reasons, but I was writing all of these, these anti war screeds, as the Republican president does Operation Desert Storm.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Wow.

[Kibbe]

And at the time, it was just a typical libertarian thing. And I was shocked at how few people agreed with me at the time except for anti war leftists. I tried to publish an article in Reason, which they solicited and they rejected it because. Because it was anti getting involved in Kuwait. But at the same time. So I'm a budget analyst at the Chamber and we're talking about the peace dividend. The Soviet Union is collapsing before our eyes and there's going to be this huge budget surplus that in my mind should be used to balance the budget, get rid of the deficit. It's almost cute, the deficits that we were worried about back then compared to today. But we were supposed to have a peace dividend. And simultaneously, the President finds a reason to get involved in a proxy war against Saddam Hussein. And as you lay out in the book, this clamoring for a biodefense strategy, it doesn't start with Kuwait, but it's happening throughout the Clinton administration. And obviously it's turbocharged after 9, 11, the attacks on the Twin Towers, the anthrax attacks, and all of a sudden they're good to go. Like, here we go, we're rolling.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Here we go. And now the big money's coming in. And now we also have.

[Kibbe]

Under George W. Bush.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Under George W. Bush. So 2005 was a huge year for this because they were kind of gearing up and revving up the panic about bioweapons. Saddam has bioweapons. The reason we have to go into Iraq is bioweapons. And I'm going to name a name. I don't usually name a lot of names because I don't think that this is about Fauci or about any particular person. But there are certain people who have been involved in the biodefense industrial complex since the beginning or for many, many decades. And one of them is Robert Kadlec. Robert Kadlec back then was one of the inspectors, or whatever they call themselves, who went into Iraq to look for weapons of mass destruction and pretend that there were weapons of mass destruction in order to get the green light to do all the things that they did and to ramp up the fear, both for the biodefense industry industrial complex and also for the surveillance and control industrial complex, which they're very intertwined. But that's what the whole Patriot act and everything that happened after 911 in terms of, again, the Constitution kind of just kind of goes as this stuff is going up. So our constitutional rights rights are just like kind of getting chipped away at. Chipped away at. Chipped away at. And there's always another emergency that requires that to happen. I think with COVID they might have just gone a little bit too far because a lot of people noticed.

[Kibbe]

Yeah.

[Debbie Lehrman]

But it shows the legal system.

[Kibbe]

I hope they never played their hand. I hope. And I think I believe they did, but we'll see.

[Debbie Lehrman]

I hope so too. I hope. I hope so too. And that's my hope with the book. But yeah, so what happened was people like Robert Kadleck and what happened was then what he did was he said, okay, it's terrible. And bioterrorism is the biggest threat now. So they had the war on communism, they had the war on terror. Now they have the war on bioterror. And the war on bioterror is better because the war on bioterror is more specific. And it doesn't involve just like kind of shady groups hiding out in Afghanistan. It involves work that you can do in labs. It involves scientists, it involves academia, it involves giant budgets. And he also helped to pass the laws in 2005 that were used in Covid in order to circumvent every legal and regulatory normal path that you would need in order to bring medical products out to the civilian population. And that was introduced. That was the Emergency Use Authorization and the PREP Act. Another thing that Robert Kadleck did was he created aspr, which is the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness Response. That was one of those things that you mentioned, which is a public health agency that's. I mean, a biodefense agency that's inserted into the public health apparatus. So they put it into HHS in order to do what you said before, which is launder the money from the biodefense. The money and the programs which they might not have been able to do or they didn't want to admit that they were doing and do it sort of under the auspices of public health. And ASPR is where Robert Kadleck actually became the secretary decades later or a decade and a half later in the office that he himself created. And during COVID he was actually one of the people who was in charge of Operation Warp Speed. So these people have done this for many, many decades and they've prepared the legal and regulatory structures and they've gotten all the budgets and they've brought in all of the kind of players, the scientists and everybody to do the work.

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[Kibbe]

One thing I learned from your book, I had never heard this phrase before, the five eyes. And this, this is fascinating to me. Explain what that is and how you believe it came to sort of weaponize lockdowns and have that global. Everybody's doing the same thing at the same time.

[Debbie Lehrman]

So the five Eyes is an intelligence alliance between all of the English speaking countries, well five of them, the US, uk, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. And they have a lot of understandings, memorandi of understandings they call it, and all kinds of other not treaty like extra treaty agreements, which means just secret so nobody knows. And not diplomatic, but military and intelligence. So military intelligence agreements where they are going to share information and they're going to share the structures and the plans in case of a terrorist attack and in this case, in the case of COVID in case of a bioterror attack. So all these things are in place place for these countries to cooperate and coordinate their response. And I want to add that the five Eyes is very obvious to us because as English speakers it was very, very obvious from the beginning that all the English speaking countries were getting the exact same messaging at the same time. It was so eerie and creepy. And they were also censoring the same things. They were suppressing hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Why? Why would Australia and the United States be doing the exact same thing at the exact same time? And also completely outside of the realm of public health. It just is incredible, the level of coordination. Those alliances are very powerful in terms of when it's triggered. When one country says, okay, we're triggering the biodefense response, it gets triggered everywhere. Then everybody does the same thing. But I would say that even more shocking than the five eyes. And I learned about the five eyes first from Robert Malone. So Robert Malone talks a lot about the five eyes. And the more scary thing, I think, is NATO. So NATO, which is all of Western Europe, and the United States have all of the same kinds of agreements. It's not just, oh, we're going to fight Russia or whatever. It's. It's also we're going to do. If one of us gets attacked, we're all going to respond. And so if they decide that there is a national security threat that has to do with biodefense, they all are going to respond the same way. And all the NATO countries, not just the countries that I just mentioned, but all of Europe, also responded in an identical fashion. And through my research, which is actually the book, led me to research the response in all these different countries. And so I published a thing called the COVID Dossier with another researcher named Sasha Latapova. And we document how the military and intelligence agencies were in charge in every NATO country. The emergency declarations that were made were made at the same time in the same manner in every single country. And the censorship and propaganda worked exactly the same way through the military and intelligence apparatus now, not through the regular public health channels in every single country.

[Kibbe]

Yeah, I was thinking about. And yes, it would apply to Western Europe, NATO countries as well. But I was thinking about those first five countries. The five is the U.S. the U.K. australia, New Zealand and Canada. The most, save for Communist China, the most extreme authoritarian responses to Covid. And it also struck me, it's interesting because they were so extreme. The economic and political fallout first resulted in the defeat of Boris Johnson. He went down pretty quickly, but every one of those, Trump and Johnson actually went down first, but they all went down eventually because. Because the economic collateral damage, unfortunately, I think more than the authoritarianism, just destroyed their political prospects. But the fact, it's so creepy to think about what the Biden administration was cooking up on the censorship side and labeling people terrorists for misinformation, disinformation and malinformation. That's precisely what these other countries got away with because there were fewer constitutional limits to what they could do. But they're coming for us next. Right.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Well, I'm going to correct you because I really dislike it when we say the Biden administration did this or that. The Biden administration did nothing. It was the biodefense public private partnership that did it. And it was operating continually without interruption from the beginning of the pandemic under Trump through Biden, and it continues to operate now. It is a continuum. It has never stopped. It never changed. The Biden administration was not in charge of it. When I say the Biden administration, we all know Biden wasn't in charge.

[Kibbe]

Right.

[Debbie Lehrman]

So whoever was running the Biden administration is running the Trump administration, but the.

[Kibbe]

People writing the memos and developing the policies were not political appointees of either Trump or Biden.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Exactly.

[Kibbe]

Yes, I stand corrected, because you are correct. And I've been very tough on Trump for sort of platforming Fauci and Birx and all of that. But your argument is that. And we're hoping that guys like RFK and Jay and others can do something about this, but it's. It's a machine.

[Debbie Lehrman]

It's a machine. So. And I'm not trying to be critical or anything. I'm just saying that you're coming at it more from political perspective. And I think the political perspective, my book, is completely apolitical for a reason, because it's not a political issue. And when we make it a political issue, we actually allow the system to continue operating because we think that, oh, now we don't. Now we have Trump. Now we're okay. We're not okay.

[Kibbe]

Yeah.

[Debbie Lehrman]

And, oh, Biden was the bad guy. Fauci was the bad guy. Burke's was the bad guy. Whatever. No, they were just representing the system. They were the public facing people that were put in front of us in order to say, yes, these are the people who are running it. They were not running it at all. Trump, when you say that he platformed Fauci and Berks, he was completely subordinate to Berks. Fauci straddles both the public health and the biodefense worlds. So he was completely subordinate to them, as was whatever you want to call Biden or the political appointees under Biden, as are Trump and the political appointees under Trump. It's the same thing. And it's very dangerous to point fingers, I think, at one administration or the other, because then we are not on our guard and we miss the big picture of what's happening. Who's really in control. What are these global conglomerates doing through the Biden administration, and what are they doing through the Trump administration. And they're doing the same thing. They're trying to get more control. The surveillance companies are really increasing right now in their ability to gather data on all of us and to control what's going on. And it's the same companies that were in control during COVID and it's the same companies that were in control in the Trump, first Trump administration. So there's really a continuum running through. And so I think the main, main, if there's one thing that I could hope that people take away from my book, it's that it is not political. No political party is coming to save us because the political parties, as we both mentioned, are completely owned at this point. So we might have had some semblance of democracy at some point in the past, but that corporate takeover is so all encompassing right now that there's very little wiggle room for anybody who wants to oppose it.

[Kibbe]

So we can't vote our way out of this.

[Debbie Lehrman]

We cannot vote our way out of this.

[Kibbe]

What is the alternative? First understanding what is happening.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Yeah, so this is why people call me black pilled. And I actually own that. And I am proud of it because I think that black pilled is the new red pilled. There's only two pills in the matrix. You're either in the matrix and your body is being used for its energy while your mind is being told that you're doing other things, or you're outside the matrix and you're struggling and fighting and it sucks being outside of the matrix that's being red pilled. There's no in between. And so right now being black pilled is being outside the matrix and saying it's not going to help. If you go back and lie in that warm bath and give your body and your energy to the system, you're losing the narrative. And so as a black pilled person who I think is just the new red pilled, I would say the first thing is we have to know what's happening, which is what hopefully my book, in a nonpartisan way, in a non confrontational way. I don't, I don't have political arguments with people because I just don't think that that's where the real power and where the real control lies. And so it's getting together and saying, okay, we are all libertarians now, right? Because the libertarians kind of lost it during COVID We're all libertarians now and we all think that the corporate control and the government control when they get together are bad. And that's what's happened regardless of the party. And so when we recognize that, we can say, okay, first of all, we're not going to participate in the sense that yes, sure, we can vote. It's going to change some superficial things which we may or may not like, depending on whatever leanings we have. But let's try to first of all know what's happening and resist. So my concern is that during COVID the left, because of Trump, couldn't see what was going on. And right now I think the right has a tendency to not see what's going on because when companies like Palantir, which is, I think you probably know, a giant military surveillance company, takes over all of the government records and sort of centralizes the them. And so they can combine our tax and our medical and our voting and our media social credit in one lovely social credit database that's no longer a Democrat or Republican thing. And so that's. So then I think if people have that awareness, then we can do something about it.

[Kibbe]

Yeah, yeah. Do you have optimism that the collapse of the exposure talk about the censorship industrial complex? So Matt Taibbi is the next guest on the forthcoming episode of the COVID Up. And we talked a lot about this and about the, you know, the censorship apparatus that specifically came out of the war on terror and how it was originally supposed to go after terrorists. And, and then they're like, oh, well, let's turn that back on Americans. Which is precisely what happened. And thanks to Elon Musk, we discovered that there was a censorship industrial complex and that it did originate. Not from, it originated from Homeland Security, DoD, CIA, FBI, not something else. And people saw that. And we've seen that there's this almost ham fisted effort by gray suited bureaucrats in these Alphabet agencies to tell Uncle Bob that that joke about Biden is not appropriate or that that joke about masks is forbidden because it's, it's mal information. Did they overplay their hand? And had they unleashed an ability for one, people's skepticism of any official narrative and two, alternative platforms. You mentioned Robert Malone, but we could mention thousands of people, almost everyone at Brownstone, where you've done a lot of your work, people have alternatives to the mainstream narrative. Is that part of the solution? Are you blackpilled about that too?

[Debbie Lehrman]

I have a lot to say. First of all, I wanted to go back to what you said because you had said about how the Biden administration labeled mal and mis and disinformation as terrorism. So instead of saying the Biden administration, I think it's correct to say that the military industrial complex labeled it.

[Kibbe]

I forget what it's called, but I'm specifically referenced. Tulsi Gabbard released a memo that was drafted during the Biden administration.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Right.

[Kibbe]

That was insanely Orwellian. And that's what I'm referring to.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Yes, there were, but we knew in 2022 that the DHS actually had put out on their website that from now on disinformation can be considered terrorism. So that's something that they announced.

[Kibbe]

Let people chew on that just for a second.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Right.

[Kibbe]

Disinformation can be labeled terrorism. That's the US Government saying that.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Yes.

[Kibbe]

And they, okay, now I'm black pilled.

[Debbie Lehrman]

I mean, so that was just declared, and we know from, also from what we've been talking about, that whenever the sort of corporate government partnership wants to overcome or subvert or go around the legal framework, all they have to do is declare that something is terrorism or that something is a state of emergency.

[Kibbe]

Emergency.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Now Trump has declared eight states of emergency. I don't know if you know that more than any other president. So states of emergency are now, it's.

[Kibbe]

The go to loophole now.

[Debbie Lehrman]

States of emergency are now the way to create bubbles where legal and regulatory oversight no longer occurs. So that's happening now. And again, I'm not saying Trump, it could be Mickey Mouse, but that's what this particular administration is doing. But to go back to the censorship industrial complex, I'm very black pilled. And the reason is that I think it has been turned into a partisan issue again. And Matt Taibi, who I adore and respect, I think has fallen into that trap to some degree because what he focused on was all the things that the censorship industrial complex was truly going after, which was Russiagate, Hunter, Biden laptop, January 6th. So those were some things that were being heavily censored and heavily propagandized, and those were the things that Matt was researching and that he was focused on. Those are all Republican issues. So it's very easy to say it was the Democrats who did it, but it wasn't. Because what Matt completely missed, and I have tried, and maybe you can tell him this, I have tried repeatedly and continually to no avail, to try to focus his attention on the fact that the exact same forces that, that were working against him and other independent journalists like him on those issues were operating during COVID as part of the military intelligence operation, which he understands in the Russia context, he understands that those are military intelligence counterinsurgency operations that are directed at our own people. But during COVID for some reason, he was absolutely 100% unwilling to look at the military intelligence aspects of it, which were the only aspects that really mattered. There's a break in the continuum of the narrative about the censorship industrial complex that's being told. That break in the narrative is. It happened during Biden. It was about censoring Republicans. Now Elon has rescued us, has exposed it, has told us everything, and now he's with Trump, and now we're fine, and they're closing down usaid. And that is a false narrative. That is a false narrative, and it's dangerous because it is lulling people like Matt Taibbi and other awesome journalists who really were on the ball about certain issues into not being on the ball about the issues that are happening now and also not being on the ball at all during COVID And I don't want to even just name Matt, because I really love Matt, but Michael Shellenberger, even Glenn Greenwald, who is one of my best sources now, when I like, I sort of cobble together my news sources now. Even Glenn Greenwald wouldn't go there. And so there's a total gap. The in narrative about how the military industrial complex and the censorship industrial complex were working about. They were working in the sort of Russia sphere, in the Democrats versus Republican sphere. But they don't see that it's actually operating on a much bigger global, nonpartisan sphere. And I think that's the sphere that we should be focusing on, and we should stop focusing on how, oh, it was the Biden administration and now Elon to the rescue. And I'll say another thing about the Twitter files when they came out. So I knew that there was this horrible censorship and propaganda going on just because I was watching it happen. And I knew that everything they were saying was a lie.

[Kibbe]

You could obviously see it.

[Debbie Lehrman]

I could see that it was coordinated. I was absolutely thrilled when the Twitter files came out because finally people didn't think I was a conspiracy theory. However, they barely said the COVID part of the Twitter files was severely curtailed. I was very sensitive to that because, I mean, even though I was very happy that all of the Russiagate and all of that stuff came out, they really didn't do much with COVID And it got shut down before any real information or any classified information could come out. And the problem with the COVID narrative that's in my book and that we're talking about is that in order to prove it, we need access to lots and lots of classified documents. And I've been foiaing. The government for two years now to get some classified documents. I'm not going to get them because everything about COVID went through the National Security Council. The National Security Council is not foiable. And that is actually true in all the five eyes countries and in all the NATO countries. And some really good work has been done in some countries by citizen journalists to get the documents. But people like Matt Taibbi. Please, Matt. If they could turn their gaze to those classified issues that they kind of skipped over, that would be an enormous help.

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[Kibbe]

So I gotta. I will send you right after we finish talking. I'm gonna send you the not yet released issue because not knowing which you just told me, I went to the same place. So this episode that I did with Matt Taibbi does turn that corner and gets him to focus on that. And he actually went into Twitter files and. And pulled specific examples of mal information that were flagged about COVID And I think it was. I think it was this specific issue was vaccine damage. And it was true, but it was malinformation because they wanted to force everybody to comply with the vaccine. So, anyway, like, I think he's there now, but I will also connect you guys, and I would love for you to browbeat him on this because I'm agreeing with everything you're saying and accepting the sloppiness of putting it in administration terms or Republican versus Democrat.

[Debbie Lehrman]

So I'm glad.

[Kibbe]

Yes, Done. Mission accomplished.

[Debbie Lehrman]

All right.

[Kibbe]

And I'm gonna leave this episode very sad about the size of the threat that we face.

[Debbie Lehrman]

And I'm just gonna say something about that because I think, yes, very sad about the size of the threat that we face. And also very hard to conceptualize it and hard to think about what we're going to do against it. Which is why people like to say black pill, because it makes it sound like, oh, you're just saying there's nothing we can do. Nobody's going to help us. All I'm saying is that no individual politician or person, however much I love them, and Jay Bhattacharya is one of my favorite people on Earth, has the power to turn around this massive, massive machine. And so it's absolutely fine and great and necessary to support Jay and all the people who are trying to do the work from the inside. But just because they're there doing that work doesn't mean the thrust threat is any less. The threat isn't any less. We just have some people who are like Don Quixote trying to fight against it on the inside and they're tilting at windmills and we're cheering and supporting them. But we also need to be very, very cognizant of the chances of success of those efforts if we don't also make the effort to get more people on board from both sides of politics with the idea that it's not about politics and that we have to stop hating each other. And my Democrat friends who still can't talk about Trump and Republican people who are constantly talking about the Biden administration and I, everybody hates talking to me because I say, well, I dislike Trump tremendously and I hated the Biden administration. And so, you know, that's not what it's about. But if you're in that position, it's really hard because people who love Trump don't like you and people who love the Democrats don't like you. Nobody wants to hear it.

[Kibbe]

This has always been a dilemma for libertarians because we, there's, there's some sort of cycle where we, we become aware of the bipartisan nature of the problems or the non partisan, you would say non partisan nature, nature of the problems. But the closer we get to an election, we join a team and we forget about fixing problems and just hope that our guy solves the problem. Just said it's always been a problem for libertarians. And you know, we, when, when like I used to go, we were talking about Fox News before this and I used to go on Fox News quite a bit when I was a Tea Party organizer. And I noticed a really interesting pattern when I started criticizing Republicans. I didn't get invited on when I was criticizing Democrats. I was a star on Fox News and it was, it was comical and it sort of culminated. One of the last times I went on Fox News was Greta Van Susteren wanted to take me down because I was trying to take out a very powerful Republican. And I'm like, okay, this is a partisan puppet show, right?

[Debbie Lehrman]

It starts to be just a team red, team blue, you know, cheering for one team or another, which I think is very satisfying. It's much more satisfying to do that than to sit here with, you know, and have this conversation and say, oh my God, what are we facing?

[Kibbe]

You had told me privately, I'm going to, I'm going to, going to quote you, sort of, and that you had disagreements with me because I was being too optimistic about certain aspects of the Trump administration. And Logan's over there laughing because he agrees with you. And my point is I want to support the good guys until I have reason to criticize them. And then I'm still optimistic, particularly about the Maha wing of this movement and Tulsi Gabbard's willingness to work with Jay Bhattacharya to finally officially document the origins of COVID We already know, but it'd be nice for the government to acknowledge what it was. But that doesn't mean, I hope that we won't be clear eyed and critical when they come short.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Well, come short of what? Because I'll tell you another thing that people aren't gonna like. The origins of the virus is a non issue. Mmm. Why is it a non issue? And this is actually in the book and that's an extreme statement and I'll dial it back. But we'll have our attention just for the sake of drama and for the sake of the point. The virus did not kill the world. The response killed the world. The virus could have been a natural virus from a pangolin or a raccoon dog or a bat or mite ass, right? Could have been from anywhere. It could have been a bioweapon from a biolab in Wuhan. It could have been from a biolab in the United States that was taken over to China in order to make it seem like it was a Chinese bioweapon. It could have been any of those things or it could have been nothing. In all of those cases, the virus that we faced was Non lethal to 99.9% of the population, which we knew very early on. It spread really fast. It didn't kill anyone. What killed the world was lockdowns and vaccines. And therefore my point is what we should be looking at is what is the origin of the lockdown until vaccine response. Looking for the origin of the virus is actually a distraction from looking for the origin of the response. And so we can spend all our time talking about whether it was from a biolab and I think it was, and it was involved in bioweapons research. But there's all kinds of different ideas of what exactly they were researching. It could be that they were researching like a self replicating vaccine, in which case the vaccine would have been a vaccine against a vaccine. That's a theory that I actually think has Some merit, and there's other theories that I think have merit, but it really, really doesn't matter. You can also say that you're shutting down all NIH and HHS funding for biodefense research and gain of function research. They don't fund gain of function research. All the funding for gain of function research comes from military and intelligence budgets. So it's a huge distraction. People who want to say that they're going to expose what really happened always go there because they don't want to look at the origin of the response. The origin of the response is the coordinated public private global partnerships that include all the pharmaceutical companies, all the military industrial complexes in all these countries, NATO, the Five Eyes, and nobody wants to look at that. So I'll dial it back and say it's interesting. And the reason that it's particularly interesting is because the response was a response to a bioweapon. So as far as the response, the lockdown until vaccine response goes, that was for sure a response to a bioweapon. So they had to say in legal terms that SARS CoV2 was a bioweapon in order to activate emergency use Authorization for countermeasures. So the vaccines are not medical products. They're military countermeasures. All the contracts that they signed with pharmaceutical companies were signed by the military. Military. The military in all countries was in charge of distributing and centralizing the operations and the surveillance around the vaccines. And so, yes, it's interesting in the sense that if we all agree now, finally, that it came from some kind of bioweapons research, the next step, which I think we need to jump to right now without worrying about that too much, is, is okay. If the response was a response to a bioweapon, why were we told that it was a public health event? And that gets us right back to the thesis of the book.

[Kibbe]

I love it. And I'm gonna push back in a way that I think you'll agree with me, because I think the gain of function experiments that Fauci was financing both.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Through nia, he was not financing them. He just wasn't.

[Kibbe]

Where did the money come from?

[Debbie Lehrman]

So if you look at EcoHealth alliance, and this is one that I know because it's been published in various in. I forget which. It's in the book. Which alternative publications published.

[Kibbe]

Just nice tease for the book there. Got to read the book.

[Debbie Lehrman]

They published the budget for EcoHealth Alliance. Where did the money come from? So public health money, 10% ish around there almost all the money came from the Department of Defense. $50 million. So out of like, let's say, $100 million that they got over directly or laundered through directly. DOD.

[Kibbe]

Not USAID.

[Debbie Lehrman]

USAID. Both.

[Kibbe]

Okay.

[Debbie Lehrman]

USAID, 50 million. DOD, another 30 million. HHS, 10 million, something like that. And then a few other. And Bill and Melinda Gates and all of that.

[Kibbe]

So when I say Fauci funded it, I'm assuming that he is the puppet master of all of those, because I view him as a military operative, not as a public health official. Okay, so it's a. It's a lazy shorthand for this entire machine that you're describing. So, and, and I, I appreciate you being more specific about it. So the reason that I think it's important, important is it's the first breadcrumb along the trail to this entire machine that you're talking about. And there's. You must have read this in all of your research. There's this article that I love to quote that Anthony Fauci and David Morens, the now infamous Thrown under the Bus David Morens, co authored in 21 maybe. And it's a huge thing about pandemic response, and it sort of lays out this grandiose vision for reorganizing society in a way that's just very Orwellian. But at the end, they talk about we're going to have to change everything we do, how we gather, how we live, how we work. And they use the phrase bending modernity. Do you remember this piece?

[Debbie Lehrman]

Yeah. Jeffrey Tucker at Brownstone. That's one of his favorite.

[Kibbe]

Yeah. And to me, that's. It's some sort of techno authoritarian thing that is hard to imagine. But again, it's like the only way you're going to do things like that is through military, not going to do this through civil society. You're not going to do it through hhs. So I think understanding what Fauci's MAD experiments were, and I'm using Fauci, again, as a proxy for this entire machine, gets us to start asking these bigger questions that you're asking.

[Debbie Lehrman]

So I would say it really, actually, I think, makes us feel like we can somehow control it, when in fact we can do the exact same thing by looking at vaccine passports. If we just look at vaccine passports, who wanted them, who coordinated them, who provided them. So who wanted them was the pharmaceutical companies and the regulatory agencies who coordinated them. The who, the un, the international governing bodies, which were the bureaucratic coordinating bodies for. For the pandemic. They didn't run the pandemic. They didn't make the policy decisions, but they coordinated them because that's where you can coordinate international efforts. And who ran them was the tech companies. Okay, so vaccine passports for me is where it's at. And that's a much better entryway into what's happening now because what that was was just a trial run of the kind of techno control grid that we talked about. And it was a very obvious one and it was one that they now are explicitly saying they want to expand. The UN and the WHO are working on plans for vaccine for passports, health passports. So you can't travel unless you have certain things. Who's administering that, who's getting paid for it. So those are all things that I think are very fruitful avenues. Whereas if we look at who was doing gain of function research in China, everyone was doing gain of function research in China. It's not China, it's not Fauci, it's everyone. It's the military industrial complex of all these countries working together with China and the United States and NATO and all of those countries. But what is the purpose of it is more important than, you know, what exactly what the research was and exactly who was funding it. And it is a false sense of security to say now that we have our friends and people that we trust in HHS and in the public health agencies, that they have any control over it because they have literally zero control over gain of function research. And I don't think that's an exaggeration. It's funneled, as you said, as in budgetary authority. As a budgetary. Which is the only authority that they claim. Right? They claim the way we're going to shut it down is defunded.

[Kibbe]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So going down the China rabbit hole during the early months of vaccine passports, I went and took a look at the Chinese social credit system. And the interesting thing about it, you know, communist China, which I think is a misnomer because they of course talk communist ideology, but they're really a techno authoritarian culture. And I'm sure you already know this, but Chinese social credit systems are not, it's not a government run system, it is a corporate run system. And of course these corporations serve the needs of, of the government and they probably only exist because they have the favor of the government. But it's quite similar if not identical to the system that we're experimenting with here.

[Debbie Lehrman]

I would agree with you completely and I think that that's where we need to be focused. So I think I've talked to people about how the system in China is different or the same as ours because. Because it seems like there's more of a nationalist government there that is in charge and then the corporations are serving the government, whereas here it feels more like the government is serving the corporations. I don't know if I would make that distinction. I don't know if it's as clear as that. But I do think that the model of technocratic kind of surveillance and control is definitely the model that we're looking at here. And I think that if there the hope that we have is that Covid, like you said, went too far, blew the lid off the plans so that we can now look at China and say that's what they're trying to do. What can we do to stop them? Is defunding gain of function, research. What's going to stop them is putting all of our efforts and I say this to many of the alternative journalists who are very distracted by the origins of the virus story and don't ever look at the origins of the response story. If we put all of our energy and our efforts into trying to figure out which lab and which scientists and which experiment and which funding, are we missing the bigger picture?

[Kibbe]

So Dwight D. Eisenhower in that space speech about the military industrial complex also warned us about this. He didn't say this, but it was a science industrial complex.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Yes.

[Kibbe]

And it's the same thing.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Same thing.

[Kibbe]

If you have a Venn diagram, the way I like to say it, like say it's a military industrial complex and the pandemic industrial complex and the censorship industrial complex. Same circle.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Same circle. Same circle, exactly. That's beautiful. That's a beautiful way of describing what I'm trying to describe in the book, which is the, on a, on a global level, the global overlap of all of those things and of political, military and corporate power. So if we go back to the original definition of the deep state, which is just, it's just everything powerful in society, the government, the corporations, whoever has the most, most political power and the most money power and now we also have the most surveillance power when all those things naturally are going to want to come together. Right. Because it's in their benefit. That's not a conspiracy theory. I don't even feel like anything that I'm saying is a conspiracy theory because it's kind of just how systems work.

[Kibbe]

I think it's, as an economist, I think it's fairly standard public choice, self serving interest, gaming the system to accrue money and power. I mean that's all it is, right? It's just reaching a point of no return.

[Debbie Lehrman]

So, yeah. And so we have to also look historically at the fact that the 20th century after World War II was kind of an anomaly in Western societies. Because it allowed a lot more people, a lot more what I like to call coercion, free living. We weren't coerced into anything. We thought that we could do whatever we wanted. We had enough wealth. We didn't have to work all day just to feed ourselves. We could seek enlightenment, we could seek fulfillment. We could seek all kinds of things beyond just our survival. And we didn't have the feudal system, basically, that had existed throughout most of the human history on our heads. And so I feel like when I have philosophical conversations about this with people who are more social scientists or historians, that anomalous period feels like it's coming to an end. It feels like the power and money are now just being sucked so fast into the very upper stratum of society that it kind of replicates what used to be the normal structure of society, which is a very small layer of society, has most of the wealth and power and everybody else doesn't. And we tried different political systems and economic systems to prevent that from happening. And we could kind of succeeded a little bit, maybe in the 20th century in certain bubbles, in certain very small bubbles. But I think when you look at, like, what you were saying with power and wealth, it can never be if there's just little anomalies in the surface, right? It's always going to start accumulating more and more around those little nodules of power. And as more and more get sucked into. Into those nodules of power, those nodules of power get bigger and bigger and everything else just falls away. And it feels to me like that's what's happening and that we're kind of just witnessing the end of a particular kind of structuring of society. And what's scary to a lot of people. And I'm actually not as scared as some people are of the technological aspects of this because I'm scared of the censorship, the propaganda. That was probably the most shocking thing during COVID that, like, whole populations could get propagandized. I didn't think that was possible. I thought we were past that. But I guess that's human nature. And it's always going to be the powerful can always control the narrative. And only a certain percentage of the population doesn't get sort of controlled by that. But the other thing is the surveillance and kind of like the Chinese system. Yeah, I'm afraid of that. I think that's bad. Some people will tell you that like actually what the technocracy wants to do is like in Covid they want to do bio surveillance. So they want to have chips in your brain and they want to have chips in your body. I don't believe any of that is possible. So in that sense I'm a huge optimist. I also don't think that AI is anything more than just a huge computing probability computing machine. It computes probabilities of symbols that come after other symbols that humans might interpret as being meaningful. But it doesn't understand the meaning. It doesn't have any consciousness. It's not going to take over. There's no how. But so it's less scary if you think about the people and the corporations and the control mechanisms. They do believe, I think, that they can use technology in ways to control us or to control populations that I think are not feasible. And that's another thing that we can use to our advantage because once we realize that these structures are happening and are trying to gain control, I think it makes it easier to resist or oppose. If you know that they can't put a chip in your, your brain and control you remotely with a computer. Not going to happen.

[Kibbe]

Yeah. So I'm going to quote one of my favorite techno optimists, a guy named John Perry Barlow. Do you know this name? He was the lyricist for the Grateful Dead.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Oh yeah.

[Kibbe]

Who became sort of a techno futurist in the late 1990s early.

[Debbie Lehrman]

And he wrote the Internet Manifesto.

[Kibbe]

Yes, yes. And I love going back and watching his TED talks.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Yes.

[Kibbe]

And he talked about on the one hand, the Internet and technology is this tremendously liberating thing and it levels the playing field and radically democratizes our access to knowing things. He called it the right to know. On the other hand, he said these are incredibly dangerous and granular tools that governments and authoritarians can use against us. And that clash. I mean, I think we've been struggling with this since the invention of the Internet and surely you can go back because obviously there are ways to know things long before the Internet. But we're in this sort of radically democratized place that is very chaotic and even the censorship industrial complex I view as a very ham fisted way to deal with the democratization of knowledge. How do we stop that guy from telling that joke about masks that's ridiculous and almost comical in a sense. So I can be optimistic that we can win this fight. Fight. And I know enough blockchain guys that I'm wondering if blockchain is not the solution to these top down monstrous tech platforms that can in fact control what we know?

[Debbie Lehrman]

Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know enough about blockchain. I'm a complete ignoramus when it comes to crypto and all of that, so I don't even like to spend speak about that. I think what I understand is that things like Bitcoin and stuff have been kind of incorporated into the system. But I think that the solution would be for technologists to find ways around the centralized system. And that is definitely a point of optimism if there's enough people who want to do that. Because right now I see people wanting to get rich off of crypto because it's now become like an investment vehicle and it hasn't been used really as that kind of freedom mode of exchange or medium of exchange that I think people wanted it to be. But maybe there are alternatives and I don't understand it and I don't know about it. I also don't like any mode of exchange that relies on electricity because. Because if there's no electricity, it doesn't exist. So it's not really anything. It doesn't really refer to any value in the real world.

[Kibbe]

Yeah. By the way, the grid is not only completely centralized, but incredibly archaic too. So. Yeah, the electricity grid, yes.

[Debbie Lehrman]

So that could be a point of optimism. I mean, one point of optimism for me is actually the whole technology just climbing, collapsing. I know that sounds weird, but that could actually disrupt a lot of centralized plans because. Because the plans are so global and so centralized, it is almost like a desire for them to fail.

[Kibbe]

Yeah. So what are the other hot headlines that we want to provoke people with so that they immediately go buy your book?

[Debbie Lehrman]

Oh, wow. We didn't have enough.

[Kibbe]

It's pretty spicy.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Did we forget? What have we not covered? I think the part that we haven't covered that sounds like a conspiracy but isn't is the part that is about how declaring emergencies and declaring national security threats is a way outside of the Constitution and it's a way outside of law. I would actually say that that's maybe the most important takeaway or one of the most important takeaways of the book. There's a whole chapter about just how the vaccines, and I'm going to call them military countermeasures because that's what they are, were able to be produced and distributed and mandated all through military frameworks, legal frameworks and. And regulatory frameworks that are not supposed to apply at all to anything that has to do with civilians. But we're living in a world where in order to achieve things, this conglomerate of private public, the private public partnerships, the military industrial complex, they have a really easy way now to get around laws and to get around regulations and. And they know it. And the way to get around laws and regulations is just declare a state of emergency. So I'm going to give an example of a state of emergency that we're in now. We're in a state of emergency for energy. I don't know if you know that on Trump's first day in office, I did not know that he declared a state of emergency for energy. What does that mean? Do we not have enough energy? Are we, do we have high gas prices? I don't think anybody you asked on the street would say we were in any kind of energy emergency. What it means is that now, because of all of the energy demands of AI and the high tech industry, they need to build lots and lots of probably nuclear plants. And Bill Gates has actually taken over Three Mile Island, I don't know if you know that, and refired it up. So they need lots and lots of energy to power these enormous surveillance and control tech grids and AI, which they think is going to allow them to upload their consciousness to a computer. But whatever the goal is, they need a lot of power and so they now want to construct. And Trump, after he declared the state of emergency he wants, went to the World Economic Forum and he said, nobody thought we could do it, but we did. We declared a state of emergency and now we can just build it wherever we want. So now they can build nuclear power plants wherever they want without any regulation, without any oversight. Kind of like the vaccines, something dangerous that we would want to have regulation and we would want to have oversight. Site Also, interestingly, I just read that in the recent budget that just got passed, they inserted a 10 year moratorium on states being able to object to any energy projects in their state. So, so the state rights in the energy sphere now for 10 years are preempted. If they want to come to your state or my state or anywhere and build a nuclear power plant in your backyard, you can't say anything, your community can't say anything, your state can't say anything. So that's like one little example that's happening now. Nobody knows this. Nobody knows it. It happened. Trump did it. The Trump administration is doing it. Mickey Mouse, whatever, whoever is in charge now is doing the same thing in the Same way. And it's so interesting because the PREP act, which is the legal indemnity that allows anyone who has anything to do with medical countermeasures to not be sued ever for anything, was passed in a budget. It was inserted the night before the budget was going to be passed. There was never any debate or discussion about it. And when the senators found out about it, it happened to be during a Republican administration. When the Democratic senators found out about him, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, and a few others stood up and said, this is criminal. We are allowing. Basically, the PREP act says that if you manufacture, administer transportation advertised to have anything to do with medical countermeasures. And a medical countermeasure is determined as anything the HHS Secretary says that we need for a perceived existing or potential public health emergency. That's how it's defined. There's no legal definition. The courts in this law cannot have no. You have no legal recourse. The courts cannot recommend rule on it. They can't rule on the state of emergency. The states have no rights. And so all of these Democratic. It happened to be senators stood up and said, this is crazy. We're giving pharmaceutical companies a license to kill. The Secretary of Health and Human Services can say, there's now a asthma epidemic or pandemic and we need countermeasures. Now the pharmaceutical companies can go and produce whatever they want and say that it's a countermeasure to asthma without any regulatory oversight and without any oversight over the good manufacturing practices, which is exactly what happened with the COVID countermeasures. And then we can force it on everybody because it's a state of emergency.

[Kibbe]

And now, by the way, now those same senators, to the extent they're still alive or new senators like them, have completely flipped and have like. Bernie Sanders is fascinating to me because he is Mr. Farma now. And I know why, but I still am confused. Like, how do you do that pivot? Yeah, it's amazing.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Again, that's why I always say Mickey Mouse. It doesn't matter. They're all bought. And I'm just going to say the last thing about the PREP act is that the Secretary of Health and Human Services has the sole authority to stop end the state of emergency for the PREP Act. Javier Becerra, who was the previous HHS secretary, extended the state of emergency for Covid until 2029. So nobody knows this, but we're still in a state of emergency for Covid, which protects anyone who has anything to do with the countermeasures which are still being administered and on the schedule, even though they're playing around with the margins of that. But it still exists. The HHS secretary who now is Bobby Kennedy, the day after he went in office and today and tomorrow, and any day that he chooses can go in and say that state of emergency is over. If he says it's over now, nobody will ever administer another MRNA shot again. So we know that he's not able. And he knows that because he's talked to various people about it and because we've contacted him and circulated all kinds of petitions and things about it. People in our space don't want to talk about this because what it means is that Bobby Kennedy is also not in charge. That's the. I think that's the biggest shock or kind of.

[Kibbe]

It's a black pill.

[Debbie Lehrman]

It's a black pill. Yeah, it's a black pill. So if that makes you want to buy the book or don't want to buy the book, I don't talk about any specific people in the book, but I do talk about. About how these forces are greater than any individual politician. No matter how much we love that politician, no matter how much we put into getting that politician elected or put into this position of power, we also have to acknowledge and recognize the limits on that person's power.

[Kibbe]

Yeah. So let's talk. Let's get out of this. Let's talk a little bit about Brownstone. I love Brownstone. You love Brownstone. I don't know how you got associated with them, but tell me a little bit about how you guys found each other.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Oh, that's a good. That's a good question. I like that. Well, so after my big sort of red pill at the beginning of. At the middle of March 2020, I went crazy because I was living in Philadelphia in a very liberal. And I put it in quotes because I don't really use those words anymore, but a performative liberal neighborhood, and everybody there was just completely petrified and masks and distancing and all this stuff that I knew was just nonsense. But if I tried to bring it up and I tried to say things like, you know, that masks, medically and scientifically don't work against viruses. That's just a medical fact that's always been known. It's not new. And they would say, well, are you a Trumpist? And I would say, what? Like I just told you something scientific and medical. And then you came back at me with something political. So you can see where my aversion to the politicization of this came from. Because you can't have real conversations about science or medicine or facts. If you're talking about that makes you. You a Trumpist or that makes you a Biden supporter or whatever. So, okay, so I couldn't talk to anybody about it. So I started fighting ridiculous battles against the school district. I would write letters to newspapers. I was an artist at the time. I was not a writer at the time. So I was involved in all these arts institutions, and I was fighting all the arts institutions. Then I was fighting my kids, colleges, because my kids collect. College education was getting more ruined than it already was. And so to no avail. To great frustration. I like to tell the story that this one art institution that I was heavily involved with had mask and vaccine mandates. And this was in 2021. And so I was fighting them against that because I knew everybody, the board and the director and everything. And I wrote letters and I said, listen, vaccine mandates are actually racist. And why are they racist? Because in Philadelphia, the highest percentage of unvaccinated people is among people of color. So the black community, you know, the Hispanic community, they're not having any of the government telling them to take a medical, you know, medical intervention. No, they're not having it. And so basically, for some good reasons, perhaps they might have a good reason. And so I said, so basically what you're doing is you're actually excluding the populations that you claim you are trying to serve. And they immediately stopped the vaccine mandate. So that was a huge win because I knew how to play on the liberal guilt.

[Kibbe]

You knew the language.

[Debbie Lehrman]

I knew the language. And so I sent that letter to Brownstone. Now, I hadn't discovered brownstone until 2022, because I don't. I'm not on social media. Just like I think AI is the devil, I think social media is anti human. And so all I was doing was like reading scientific articles. In March 2020, March 17, John Ioannidis came out with an article that said, what are we doing? You know, we're overreacting. And so I followed him because I knew he was a voice of reason. And then I saw him on Vinay Prasad, who we now know. And I followed him onto Vinay Prasad's substack at the time. And then Vinay Prasad published something on Brownstone. So basically, I was following the real science, if you could call it that, or the actual doctors and scientists who were saying things that made sense. And I followed them all the way to Brownstone. And when I found Brownstone, it was like, I don't know, like I could breathe because people were actually able to tell the truth. And I sent the letter that I had sent to that art institution about the vaccine mandates and the mask mandates. And I sent it in and like a few minutes later, I got a one word email from Jeffrey Tucker. And it said, okay. And I always say that okay changed my life because that okay was okay. You have a platform. And so they published the letter. And then what I was doing at the time is I was just talking about how crazy everything was. I didn't really go into. I wasn't an investigator journalist. I had no idea what was going on. So I sent articles about what I thought was happening in terms of, like, why was public health so crazy? What were the things that they were doing that were wrong? Trying to guess why they were doing them. And then Jeffrey asked the writers whether somebody could review Deborah Birx's book, which is called Silent Invasion. And I said, you know, anything? Jeffrey asked, I would always do. And I never read nonfiction at the time. So I'm an English major. I don't read nonfiction. I'm very strange. Like, no social media, no nonfiction books. And this is a huge, awful book. So I started reading it. And like I always say, it ended up seeming to me like it was all fiction. It was all fiction. Like, I could tell that she was lying. She was lying about how she got the job as the coordinator of the United States government's COVID 19 task force. She was lying about the science. She was like, knowingly, like, I could tell that she was covering stuff up. And that was just very shocking because I had not been exposed to, to the idea that there was propaganda out there, not just overt propaganda, but lots of COVID propaganda like that actual authors were doing propaganda. Then I found out that Michael Lewis is like a CIA propagandist. All of these authors that we think of as independent are actually writing propaganda. So this was my first exposure to that. And the New York Times is propaganda and NPR's propaganda. I mean, this, this was like my discovery of everything. But with Deborah Birx, that was very, very shocking to me. And so I did a series of articles about how she was obviously lying about how she got the job. She was lying about the science. She was lying about her relationship with Fauci and everybody else on the task force because she made it sound like they were colleagues, but she was actually in charge her relationship with Trump. And apparently I went to a supper club in Connecticut, which is one of the in person gatherings that Brownstone has. And just in passing, I think Jeffrey said, oh, this is Debbie Lerman. Her articles about Deborah Birx are going viral. And, like, nothing I ever did ever went viral, because I'm not anywhere that that happens. So I said, really? I didn't think anybody was reading it. And so that was exciting to me. Like, somebody was paying attention. So I had a platform, I was doing interesting work, and people were paying attention. And so that's when I really started digging in. So when I realized that Deborah Birx was not a public health operator, that she had come from someplace else, which I then realized was the National Security Council, that's when I started really digging in. So then I started digging into the government's plans for pandemics and epidemics and the government's plans for biodefense, response to biowarfare and bioterrorism. And then I started doing all the analysis and work that led up to the book. And then I became a fellow at Brownstone and regular contributor at Brownstone. So really, Brownstone has been. Just really changed my life and the hugest supporter of my work. And Jeffrey also kept saying, you have to write a book. And it's very hard because when you're working on stuff on an ongoing basis, you don't want to have to stop and go back and try to, like, take all the stuff you've already written and edit it and turn it into, like, some kind of coherent manuscript. And so I didn't want to do it. I mean, I wanted to do it, but I didn't really feel like I had time. And so Jeffrey at one point just sent me a Google Doc with, like, links to all the articles that I had written. And he said, there's your book. Go for it. And so I just. I give him credit for that even happening because then I could go through and I could edit, choose the articles that I wanted and put in the framework and all of that.

[Kibbe]

And this book is published by Brownstone?

[Debbie Lehrman]

By Brownstone, Yep. And it's. Right now it's available on Amazon, but I am told and promised, because I've had a lot of people ask me because they don't want to buy from Amazon, even though I think it ultimately goes to the same place. Anyway, if you don't want to get it on Amazon, it will be available on other platforms. Platforms very soon, I hope.

[Kibbe]

And you're on Substack as well?

[Debbie Lehrman]

Yes.

[Kibbe]

Okay. So that's not social media.

[Debbie Lehrman]

So interestingly. So you can do it without. You can do the notes on substack, which they're really trying to push hard now, which is like kind of like a Twitter like kind of thing where people just put short stuff and then they respond to it. Or you can just publish articles and if you publish articles, you can have people respond or not. You can respond to people's responses or not. So you have a lot of control and it doesn't devolve into this kind of who can be more sensational and who can say the more provocative thing that I feel like happens on social media?

[Kibbe]

I understand that criticism, but we need some sane people on social media too, to lead by example. But I'm not going to convince you, I suspect.

[Debbie Lehrman]

I think the medium is the message. I don't think you can be sane on social media.

[Kibbe]

All right, well, this, I have loved this conversation and I'm glad that we finally got together.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Me too.

[Kibbe]

And I am going to try to convince you to help me after we're finished with our series, the COVID Up. I want to turn that into a full length documentary and I would love for a little bit of your help on this because I think the points you're making are precisely the story that I want to help tell.

[Debbie Lehrman]

I would really love that. Thank you so much. I appreciate this a lot. This is a great conversation. Thank you.

[Kibbe]

Thank you.

[Debbie Lehrman]

Thanks for watching. If you liked the conversation, make sure to like the video, subscribe and also ring the bell for notifications. And if you want to know more about free the people, go to freethepeople.org.