The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, welcome, welcome. Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Great to be with you today.
We’ve got to talk again about the narrative machine, the narrative machine. I need to tell you what I’m thinking, what I’m seeing, what is going on. And it’s important.
We’ll also talk today with Stephen Baskerville. Stephen Baskerville is a wonderful man. For a long time, he was a professor out at Patrick Henry University. Patrick Henry College, maybe, in Western Virginia. Purcellville, I think it was, which is a school that’s pretty extraordinary, has catered heavily to homeschoolers.
And anyway, now he’s teaching amazingly, at a University in Warsaw. And he’s a great conservative. He writes a lot about how American philosophy, history, politics has moved regarding sexuality and what’s happening with language and all. He’s a great guy. We’ll be talking with him.
We’ll also talk today with Heidi St. John. Heidi St. John is running for the U.S. Congress out in Oregon, and she’s a pretty amazing lady, too. We’ll talk with her. Coming up, we’re gonna start talking to more candidates who are running for office.
Okay, let me let me touch base, though. Let me focus for a minute on this reality. I was speaking earlier to a friend of mine, Terry Giles. Now you may remember Terry Giles, he wrote a book. I guess it was last year probably now, time flies.
And Terry Giles’s book is called The Fifteen Percent: Overcoming Hardships and Achieving Lasting Success. Overcoming Hardships and Achieving Lasting Success. His life story is extraordinary. He’s been a hot shot, top notch lawyer, then he was big business man. He’s been at the top levels of politics and philanthropy. He’s just a really interesting man. His book is very interesting, too.
Anyway, I called him up, as I’m apt to do, and said, Terry, seems like the last couple of days, I just feel like a lot of things are going wrong. What do you think? And so we started talking about what’s going on.
He knows a lot about the economy, the world economy. We talked about that. He talked about business, but we ultimately talked about how uneasy we both are with what we’re seeing out of the White House, who’s really in charge and all that.
But Terry honed in, again Terry Giles’s book is The Fifteen Percent, and he honed in on what we’ve talked about. He said the press, the press is so dishonest and so unfocused on what’s really happening that the country, it doesn’t understand, doesn’t know what’s going on. And we went into this long discussion and I told him my theory and we talked about it.
And one example, by the way, was Biden. We got Biden elected because the media wouldn’t cover it seriously. They didn’t cover – not just Hunter Biden’s corruption or looks like corruption, but also just Joe Biden’s… He’s not up to that job.
We actually expect to elect, you know, excellent, extraordinary people to be present. You have to be extraordinary. You have to be unbelievably talented and serious and an adult. And that’s not Joe Biden. And the media didn’t cover that because they so desperately want to be against Trump.
But I was telling Terry Giles about my theory of this, and I wanted to go back to it with you all because I want to hammer it home. I want you if you see what’s happening, if you name what’s happening, you have a chance. You have a fighting chance to understand what’s going on and try to break out of it.
And that is this. We are right now in the world, but especially in America. We are in a situation where there is a narrative machine that is forcing upon us what the machine wants us to believe is the truth.
So let me say it’s simpler. There’s a narrative machine that tells us what the truth is. It doesn’t matter what the truth is, it just tells us what the truth is. And Americans are compelled to believe it.
Now, what is the narrative machine you say? Well, here’s what I’d say. The narrative machine is big tech, big media, and big government. Big tech uses all of the incredible speed and power and cutting edge technology in the social media accounts, in the Internet, all across it. Big tech uses…that’s all big tech.
I’m not just talking about Twitter. I’m talking about big tech. Amazon, Google, Twitter, Facebook. They’re using cutting edge technology, artificial intelligence. They’re testing everything, and they’re mostly using neuroscience to change our brains, to change our physical brains, not just our habits, not just our psychology.
They’re doing that, too, by the way, the behavioral psychology of this is all over the charts, but it’s actually neuroscience, and they know it. They get you to click on a like or to fight over something on Facebook or make a comment. It’s all dopamine. It’s all science, neuroscience.
And they’re using it to shape what we look at, what we see, what we therefore know, and therefore what we do. We’ll come back to that. Big media, in part, I think, because of Donald Trump, I don’t know because Donald Trump shattered them. I don’t know why that happened under Trump.
It seems like it could have happened, they hated Bush, too, but it’s happened in the last five years. Big media gave up, even pretending to be impartial or honest or trying to get to the bottom of it. And they’re just using brainwashing techniques.
And over on CNN and MSNBC, they actually bring out CIA agents, John Brennan, James Clapper, the guys that were trained one after another. Trained in this. Again, not trained in Mad Men sloganeering of the 1950s. No. Trained in brainwashing techniques and the use of images and the use of messages that make people feel a certain way to elicit a response.
I call it agitate and return. Like call and response, agitate and return. They agitate people, and they return after they usually sit through a pharma commercial. And let me be clear, Fox News is not exempt. They’re in on it, too. It’s now the business model.
So you take big tech using neuroscience, big media using brainwashing. And then you add in a mix of big government that’s enforcing all of this with.. And when I use big government, I mean, broadly, big government. Sometimes it’s the federal government, sometimes it’s local government, sometimes it’s lawfare. Bbut the power of the governing forces to enforce this.
And you see, sometimes it’s stand up and stand down. In the case of Antifa stand down on the riots, don’t actually arrest anybody. Certainly don’t prosecute anybody. Do you know how many people were arrested for burning cars and knocking out windows when Donald Trump was inaugurated? I think it was something like 300, 500.
And all of the cases were dismissed by the prosecutor in Washington, DC. Why? Because they’re directionally in the favor… the regime favors them. So now the narrative machine is big tech, big media, and big government.
And what do they do? They work together, they work in tandem. And what they do is they deliver to us what we are actually able to see. I made this point.
You know, it may have been true in the 19, I don’t know, 70s that Walter Cronkite was biased, but you didn’t feel like you knew it, right? And it may have been true that there was direct mail coming from different entities that were persuading you in the 70s and 80s, but it wasn’t as ubiquitous as email and social media and big tech.
So the power that, the dynamism has shifted… You know the example I gave Terry Giles was I’m sure that if Teddy Roosevelt could come back now, he complain about this newspaper in this city or that newspaper in that place. And there certainly was a dynamic in history where if you were favored by a certain powerful press entity, they could make you. Imagine if you were the favorite of the Los Angeles Times owner, he could make that person famous. That’s true.
But never with the power we’re seeing now. And it’s not so much that they’re favoring one – they did with Biden – as who are they un-favoring? How are they un-favoring it, right? How are they skewing. An example Terry Giles and I were talking about is I think it’s eight out of ten African Americans do not trust the vaccines.
That’s a part of that community. No one’s covering that. All they cover is saying that there’s, you know, knuckle-dragging, heavy breathing, mouth breathing Republicans who won’t get vaccinated. That most of those people I think in the communities we’re talking about are low income and likely Democrats.
But the narrative machine, big tech, big media, and big government goes together. So what we are actually able to see on the TV, on the big tech, on social media, on the Internet, what you see, you can only see one side. They’re going to skew what you see. That’s going to shape what you know, and that’s going to ultimately inform what you do.
That’s what we’re living through. So we have a border where millions, not hundreds of thousands anymore. Millions are projected to come into this country. Millions up to 2 million this year. Do you understand what’s happening? I mean, could it be clearer it’s an invasion?
We have that happening.
We have the COVID situation where you can’t get a straight answer. You get run in circles by the different powers that be when there’s real threats to some people. It’s a real illness to some people. You got to be smart about it.
And then Afghanistan, we’re watching. Do you know? I mean, we go through all the websites right now. Go look right now. There’s thousands of Americans pinned behind the Taliban lines. I don’t know why they’re not called hostages pretty soon, but the media won’t cover it. Big tech won’t cover it. Big government’s not going to do anything, not to reveal it. So when we finished the conversation, my friend Terry Giles and I, we didn’t have any solutions.
We both have great faith. And so we think the Lord can do a lot of things that we can’t see coming. But He does rely on we the people. You know, the late Phyllis Schlafly used to say the Lord’s got a lot of other things to do. He’s not gonna stuff the ballot box for us. We got to go earn the votes and get things done.
But it’s a challenging time. And that narrative machine is shaping what we’re seeing and what’s happening in a way that is very, very daunting. And now that you know it, I don’t want you to doubt everything.
I’m not sitting here saying you don’t have to doubt everything. I don’t want you to believe that it’s a hopeless thing. But I want you to understand that if you are aware of what’s happening and the power of the narrative machine, then I’m not like the Descartes. I think it was Descartes – I don’t want you to doubt everything – I think, therefore, I am. Yeah, I mean, it’s not up to us to only define reality. There is reality.
But you have to understand what they’re, what they’re doing to us, what the narrative machine is doing to us. And if you know it, you can see it. And you can at least start to fight through it and figure out ways to get to the truth you need. And get better about this show other shows, more local and more granular.
Alright, we better take a break. We’re going to have Stephen Baskerville, Dr. Baskerville, and Heidi St. John, a candidate, in a moment. Ed Martin, here in the Pro America Report, talk to you in a moment.