Hearts of Oak Podcast

The Week According To . . . Leilani Dowding

Dive into this week's episode of our weekly news review where we're joined by the audacious Leilani Dowding, whose X account has become a beacon for candid commentary on today's hottest issues. Today, we're peeling back the layers on some of the most contentious topics straight from Leilani's recent posts. From the spiralling costs of asylum seeker accommodations in the UK to the controversial use of Ozempic for weight loss, Leilani doesn't shy away from the tough questions. We'll also find out if Alex Jones was right, as we venture into the eerie world of genetic engineering with "spider goats" and tackle the shifting sands of UK politics under Two Tier Keir's Labour. Don't miss out on Leilani's sharp insights and our deep dive into the stories that are setting X abuzz. Join us for a session that promises to enlighten, provoke, and challenge your views on the news that shapes our world.
Half-Filipina, half-English, Leilani Dowding is a former Page Three Girl and was crowned Miss Great Britain in 1998, going on to represent her country in the Miss Universe pageant.Leilani had a starring role in The Real Housewives of Cheshire and has appeared on The Big Breakfast, This Morning, Celebrity Wrestling and in numerous national newspapers.She is a proud 'Freedom Fighting Refusnik' and an unmissable commentator on world affairs, with her stance against tyranny and wokeness, Leilani has found a whole new army of fans.
Follow Leilani on 𝕏   x.com/LeilaniDowding @LeilaniDowding
Interview recorded  27.9.24
Connect with Hearts of Oak...𝕏                         x.com/HeartsofOakUKWEBSITE            heartsofoak.org/PODCASTS        heartsofoak.podbean.com/SOCIAL MEDIA  heartsofoak.org/connect/SHOP                  heartsofoak.org/shop/
Links to topics...Cost of housing asylum seekers in Britainhttps://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1839421052470083809I’m a Celeb get me Ozempic in here https://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1839417103197352284Ozempic https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2024/09/24/novo-nordisk-ceo-defends-ozempic-price-in-senate-testimony/Baroness Warsi https://metro.co.uk/2024/09/26/baroness-warsi-quits-tories-claiming-party-too-far-right-21681202/Alex Jones Spider Goats https://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1839115242237771872  VIDEO https://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1839195561427096043Phillip Scholfield  https://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1838960561389801842Migrant hiding in van https://web.archive.org/web/20240927131613/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/25/bbc-antiques-bidding-room-migrant-fined-border-force/#Echobox=1727273247-1 The state will take back control https://web.archive.org/web/20240924201332/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/09/24/state-will-take-back-control-of-peoples-lives-says-starmer/ Alexis (Lexi) Lorenzehttps://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1838648944462827955The old days when Labourhttps://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1839359182317003039https://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1838908706999636387Return of the sausages https://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1838597112595972241

Tom Nelson - Carbon Conundrum: Rethinking CO2 in the Climate Debate

Shownotes and Transcript
Join us as we sit down with Tom Nelson, the provocative force behind "Climate: The Movie." This episode explores Tom's unique journey from a career in electronics to becoming a vocal sceptic of mainstream climate narratives. Discover how a simple hoax about an ivory-billed woodpecker ignited his passion for truth in media, leading him down the path of climate discourse.Tom shares the challenges and triumphs of producing his documentary, revealing how technology has democratized filmmaking. He explains why releasing his film online for free was a choice of impact over income, and delves into the complexities of gathering credible voices in climate science.In our conversation, Tom critiques the portrayal of CO2, questions the use of young activists in climate debates, and examines the discrepancies in climate data. We'll also tackle the broader implications of renewable energy and electric vehicles on our environment and economy.This episode isn't just about climate; it's about questioning what we're told, understanding the science, and discussing the future of environmental policy. Tune in now for an enlightening discussion that might just change how you see the world.
Watch "Climate: The Movie"      climatethemovie.net
Tom Nelson has an MS degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering.He was involved in tech and software for many years. In 2005, as an avid bird-watcher, Tom became heavily involved in debunking a high-profile, but bogus “Ivory-billed Woodpecker” rediscovery that opened his eyes to the problems with blindly trusting “peer-reviewed science”.Jack Hitt of the New York Times then went on to write about Tom's ivory-billed woodpecker work in his book “A Bunch of Amateurs”.A meteorologist pointed out lots of parallels between that woodpecker debate and the climate change debate to him, and Tom has been debunking climate change/energy claims almost daily since 2007. 
Connect with Tom...𝕏                       x.com/TomANelson @TomANelsonSUBSTACK       tomn.substack.comPODCAST         podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thomas-nelson8
Interview recorded  24.9.24
Connect with Hearts of Oak...𝕏                         x.com/HeartsofOakUKWEBSITE            heartsofoak.org/PODCASTS        heartsofoak.podbean.com/SOCIAL MEDIA  heartsofoak.org/connect/SHOP                  heartsofoak.org/shop/⁩
*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.
Check out his art theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com and follow him on 𝕏 x.com/TheBoschFawstin
Transcript
(Hearts of Oak)
And hello, Hearts of Oak.
I'm delighted to have a brand new guest with us today, and that is Tom Nelson, the producer of Climate, the movie.
Tom, thank you so much for your time today.
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
I appreciate it.
Not at all.
I've thoroughly enjoyed the film, and after I got past Greta Thunberg at the beginning, that was the hurdle.
I got past Greta, which I'm sure you've heard many times.
But you can follow, there is Tom's handle on X on Twitter and climatethemovie.net and all that. You can find all the links to everywhere where the film is if you haven't already watched it.
It's been, what, a couple of months just beginning of the summer?
When was it, Tom?
It came out?
Came out at the end of March.
End of March.
It's been a few months.
It's been a few months.
Now, can I ask you how you went from a master's in electronics, all the way to producing a climate change sceptic film.
Just give us that journey to let people know a little bit about you.
Yeah, so the whole journey started in about 20 years ago or so that I considered myself a normie and kind of fat and happy and believing what the media said.
And then in the US over here, there was this release of this ivory-billed woodpecker story.
There was a peer-reviewed paper, 17 authors.
They had rediscovered this huge woodpecker, just a huge deal.
When it came on on public radio, people got so overcome with emotion that they pulled off the side of the road and cried.
There was a lot of stories like that.
But as a bird watcher, I checked into it and the whole thing was a complete crock that they did not discover this woodpecker. And their evidence was just incredibly flimsy.
They heard a few sounds in the woods.
And then they had this picture of this woodpecker that was six pixels.
It was two blacks, two whites, two blacks.
That was supposed to be six pixels. That was their proof. So it blew my mind.
So I did a blog on that. And a lot of people read the blog.
And eventually, Jack Hitt of the New York Times wrote a book called A Bunch of Amateurs.
And he did a whole chapter on this, on how amateurs kind of ripped apart this data and showed that what this alleged science wasn't true.
Then at that time, somebody emailed me and said, you know, you should check out the climate change thing because it's the same deal.
If you look at the evidence for yourself, you're going to find out that that's totally a crock too.
So I did.
And within just a day of looking at that, I could see that the data in so many cases, crop yields, et cetera, just did not back up any of this alarmism.
So then I started blogging about that.
And for close to 20 years now, I've spent most of my time on an average day, like hours, looking at these stories and debunking them and just digging into it.
And I've really, really enjoyed it.
I went from Blogspot to Twitter.
Then I went and I started a podcast about two years ago.
One of my first guests on that podcast was Martin Durkin, who did the great Global Warming Swindle in 2007.
And on that podcast, he said, you know, given what I know now and given more time, I'd like to remake that movie.
I could make a better movie. So that kicked off this whole process where I worked with Martin.
And Martin did almost all of the work from my perspective.
Martin and his team. He did all the interviews.
He did the narration.
He wrote the script of Climate, the movie.
He just did a great job.
He's been involved in maybe 100 documentaries, so he really knows how to make a good documentary.
This is the first one I've been involved in. So anyway, it took about a year to make the movie.
It came out in March of this year, and it's up online for free in over 100 locations.
Lots of copies on YouTube, Bitchute, Rumble, Humble, Substack, Telegram, lots of copies on X, lots of clips everywhere.
And a lot of people have downloaded their own copy of it, and then they put it up on their own social media.
So just loving how it's spread virally.
And it's got way over 10 million views at this point.
And we're very happy with the reception.
And I guess that's how I got to this point.
Well, I certainly had a lot of friends message me and give me details of it.
And I watched it. It was hugely impressed.
How do you, maybe from just, well, jump into it, but you kind of think about getting information out.
You think of putting a film out, you can put it behind a pay wall.
It then doesn't get as much exposure.
The way you've done it has gone far and wide.
How do you think about that?
Making sure you have the finance to make the product well, but also making sure it gets out to the public as wide as possible.
Yeah, it's a great combination of the way that technology has worked, the things have become so cheap to make the movie.
It didn't really cost that much.
We had to spend some money on travel, etc. et cetera.
But with modern technology, it just doesn't take that much, way less expense than the people in the movie.
Of course, when we interviewed Steve Coonan, et cetera, those people didn't charge us. So the talent didn't cost us.
So overall, it was inexpensive to make and then to roll it out.
In the past, you had to convince a TV, whatever, a channel to put it on their channel.
But nowadays, you can just put it up.
So, I don't think we could have done this even a few years ago as successfully as we did now. So, I'm really happy with the way this technology allowed us to do this so cheaply.
And you have a lot of great individuals on it, giving their understanding from a lifetime of expertise and experience in that area.
What was it like?
Maybe it's easier now than it would have been back 20 years ago, but how difficult was it to find the people actually to be on because it is career suicide.
Yeah.
Actually, in this case it was easy and that was one of my major roles as a producer in that just about everybody in the movie has already been on my podcast like I already knew him like Will Happer for example, he's in the movie for a few minutes but he's on my podcast for maybe a couple hours.
He's been on a couple times so that's one thing you can do if you like any particular person what they said in the movie, you can go to my podcast and you can hear them in a long form.
So, I really had the contacts for most of the people.
So that part was easy.
And then most of the people in the movie, they realize how important this whole pushback is.
They realize that this whole climate change thing is being used for so many other purposes to restrict our freedom and power and money and kind of take us over.
So, it was very easy.
These people are motivated to tell the truth.
And that's the thing.
It's so easy to get behind it, because you're on the side of truth. Truth is going to win out.
And the truth is for sure on the side of the people pushing back here.
And I want to point out a lot of the people in the movie are past retirement age.
Will Happer talks about in the movie that if he was 30, it's kind of career suicide if you're 30 right now to speak out against this scam.
So even Will, he's a guy of huge integrity. He was saying even he might not speak out if his career was on the line, if you're paying a mortgage and you have a family.
And it's a pretty big deal if you get cancelled and you lose your job, which you can still to this day if you speak out against it.
So, a lot of the scientists, they wait until they're retired, then they're free to speak out.
That's kind of the same thing with the COVID narrative, that those who are speaking out are free to speak, because they don't have the constraints of needing to work. And that's one way the system, I think, keeps many people quiet.
Can I just, your Substack, so tomn.substack.com, also tomn.substack.com, there are so many places to see your work, Tom.
But you start with Greta.
How is it that we have got to the point where children are the experts?
Because you start with her preaching to us and telling us how dumb we were and how we're destroying the world.
And you're thinking, you're a child.
And this child has become a superstar, the voice of wisdom.
It's a weird way that we find ourselves in these current times, that those who don't know about anything are the ones that do know.
Yeah, you know, I can't get into people's mind, but I think there was a deliberate effort to use a child as a kind of a shield that you could be the face of this movement.
And if you push back against Greta, you're being mean to a kid.
And I think that was a, it sounds crazy, but I think that really was part of the reason why Greta was chosen.
I don't think this was just a grassroots thing that just happened organically.
It sounds like the book that her mom had, it was ready to go like Greta did her.
Her organic thing in 2018. And supposedly someone just happened like a camera crew happened to be there that day.
And then the book was ready to go by that Saturday, like a few days later.
So yeah, I think this was planned in advance.
And I do think that Greta has kind of run her course.
It seems like that now that she's into her twenties, she's can't really sell her as a kid anymore.
And Greta herself seems like she's not into the climate thing as much anymore.
She's diverged into other stuff.
And she was doing this climate strike every Friday, putting up a picture on Twitter, but now she went for eight weeks without putting a picture of herself up on a Friday by a climate sign, because even she might be tiring and the whole thing.
I don't, it's a really odd cult by the way, in that even the believers can't be bothered to behave as if they believe.
I think it's very interesting that there's these people who think that they're trying to sell the idea that CO2 might kill our kids, but almost nobody can be bothered to believe as if they had to live as if they actually believe that.
It's pretty weird.
Well the the CO2 thing and that's something.
I love the film in a way that you've you divide up into chunks without realizing it, that you move from kind of chunk to chunk to chunk and cover so many of the the lies that are part of the the climate alarmism.
And one of them is CO2 and you've got one of the speakers saying well CO2 is literally life.
I mean the plants the world exists this because of CO2.
It is not this evil.
And that's a fascinating concept.
The whole thing talking about CO2 famine and how that can damage us.
And that's a great concept that I think many of us may were not aware of.
Yeah, it's just so odd that we're sold this narrative that CO2 is the demon molecule.
And whatever happened that was bad, the demon molecule caused it. Especially when it is, like you say, it's the gas of life.
It is absolutely critical to life on Earth.
For photosynthesis, you've got to have CO2.
So I think the fight against CO2 is like fighting oxygen or water. It's just completely crazy.
And then, as we point out in the movie, even the CO2 level in the air right now, in the course of the last 600 million years, we've had way more CO2 in the air naturally most of that whole time.
Way more.
Over 5,000 parts per million, where now today we might have maybe 423 parts per million or something.
So we're way closer to not having enough CO2.
Way closer than having too much. And then it's interesting that you may have seen some videos and maybe in the U.S. Congress or something where they're asking people, how much CO2 do you think is in the air?
People who have based their lives on the idea there's too much and they're guessing maybe 5%.
It blows my mind that they're basing their lives on fighting this thing and they have no idea how much is out there.
People think the atmosphere is filling up with CO2. Anyway, it's really 0.04% about.
And if humans caused the CO2 increase since maybe 1850, we added maybe one extra CO2 molecule for every 10,000 atmospheric molecules.
So, getting this excited about one extra for every 10,000 is really off the charts crazy.
Another thing that I came across watching it was the simple way that data is presented and not simple as in not covering the information, but you realize that individuals are overwhelmed with information, especially in today's world.
And I think the climate change alarmists have used that to their advantage to basically say, well, this is so complicated and we'll show you these charts and graphs that you don't understand, but we will tell you what they mean.
And in this film, it was fantastic the way some of the charts that came up and it just explained things so simply in a way that you want the audience to understand, not in a way the other side seems to confuse the audience.
Yeah, that is a great point that the whole thing is based on trusting the experts.
And don't bother your own pretty little head thinking about it yourself because you don't understand atmospheric chemistry.
So, you got to just trust the experts.
And what makes me happy is so many people in recent years have told me that they did trust the experts until COVID.
And then they realized that now we better start thinking for ourselves and sanity check things.
So many people have said that.
And I think that's a big part of why, from my perspective, this whole scare is starting to crumble.
Because it's a mass thing across the world that people are not trusting the experts.
And that's the thing with this whole climate deal. You don't have to trust experts at all.
It's really easy to sanity check these claims over and over.
You're an ordinary person.
You have Google.
You can look at crop yields.
They're trying to scare us.
Oh, no, wheat yields are going to go down.
You can go to Our World and Data.
You can look at wheat yields anywhere you want, and they're just going up and to the right. And it's the same with everything.
You can look at cyclones and floods and droughts.
You can look at the data.
You can look at the temperature records in your local city.
They're constantly saying, oh, it hits 95 in Minnesota.
That must mean that the earth is getting too warm.
But I can look here at the data for Minnesota. It hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit 38 times in two decades back in the 30s and 40s.
And since 1988, it hits that temperature eight times.
It just, for whatever reason, it's not getting anywhere near as warm as often now as it was in the 30s and 40s.
Nobody knows why but the narrative is it's got to be getting way hotter here for sure than it was 80 years ago not happening it's totally not happening.
What was it like looking for the data, because one of the ones you put up is looking at central England temperatures over 400 years.
I think it was 40 years which which is a very long period and quite phenomenal that we have that data and that is fairly unique but can you maybe let us know the the the difficulty of getting data and how you kind of how you presented that?
Yeah, I think Will Happer might call that a treasure.
I think that central England temperature record is a treasure, because we don't have that. You can look at where we have the data.
And even as of 1900, if you look at the map of where we had temperature stations in 1900, it's mostly in the U.S. I think there's some in Australia, but in huge areas of the world for just enormous parts of the world, we got nothing.
No official temperature records for 1900.
So whenever we look, whenever we show data from where we have the temperature records, people say, oh, look, that's just a small portion of the Earth.
The climate crisis must have happened elsewhere where we don't have the data.
And that's definitely the narrative. Patrick Moore talks about this in his book, Fake Invisible Catastrophes, that the catastrophe is always somewhere else.
It's not where you are. It's somewhere else where you can't easily check the data.
So, they're trying to sell us this deal that the catastrophe is at the Great Barrier Reef for those people who don't live near there.
But then I have had Peter Ridd on my podcast a couple of times who does live there and he's an expert on the Great Barrier Reef. He says it's doing fine.
The whole idea that CO2 is bad for the reef is total nonsense.
And also they're trying to sell.
Because we're told it's disappeared.
It's nearly destroyed.
It's gone.
It's history.
Yeah.
And you can believe that maybe if you live 5,000 miles away.
Oh, no, it's going away. way, but it's not.
Again, it is a fake invisible catastrophe.
Another one, polar bears live far away from where most of us are.
So maybe we can believe, oh no, the CO2 is killing them, but it's absolutely not.
I've had Susan Crockford on my podcast a couple of times.
She's an expert in the whole idea that if it gets warmer, polar bears are going to die out.
In the 1970s, when it was cold, it really was a slightly cold period then that we had maybe one fourth as many any polar bears as we have now.
So, it's warmed in those decades and the polar bears have gone up a lot, but it's because CO2 is not the polar bear control knob at all.
There's other factors at work.
And part of it is we don't hunt them as much now as we did, but we're still killing, maybe they're telling us 900 plus polar bears per year still legally.
And if we really want, if we should be that worried about how many polar bears there are, let's stop hunting them first.
Anyway, they're doing fine.
The whole idea that more ice means more polar bears, That's not true either.
They can't hunt seals as easily if there's 10 feet of ice as if there's broken up ice and water.
Susan Crockford does a great job of showing us that some ice is way better than too much ice for them in terms of reproducing and feeding.
But it's true.
The media tell us stuff and we believe because we can't see it.
I mean, I haven't seen any polar bears in my life here in the UK.
So, I don't think they exist anymore. And it kind of you think, oh, yeah, that sounds true.
And the media are experts at playing this game.
Yeah.
Another thing about modern technology is that there's something horrible happening weather-wise everywhere all the time.
And we've got people with cell phone cameras everywhere.
It's a big world.
So if you want to tell people every single day, look how bad the weather was, and look at these buildings blew down and everything, that's available every day.
 
But in 1700, if there was a storm that killed 10% of the people on the other side of the world somewhere, you wouldn't even find out about it ever, or maybe it would take six months or something.
So it's a real-time thing. But the narrative is that bad weather is evidence that CO2 causes bad weather, but that's not how it works.
And I want to give a plug to Tony Heller.
He's at Tony Climate on X. He just does a great job of going through historical data and looking at old newspaper clippings and stuff.
And his message constantly is, look how bad the weather was in the past.
If you realize how bad the weather was in the past and how often there's been just terrible events then you're not going to get all shook every single day when it happens again.
It is always going to happen the whole, I see this on X a lot that vote democratic because otherwise these rainstorms it's going to rain too much still in 2050, but anyway no matter who you vote for it's still going to rain too much it's, and and too little, in the same places.
All this stuff is going to happen and we can't stop it.
At tonyclimate.
Check it out.
I haven't, so I will check it out thanks for that, Tom.
The other thing in the film was about weather stations temperature stations collecting the data and talks about those being built and those are often built just outside towns in more rural areas, because it's a better gauge on temperature.
And a lot of those temperature sensors are now surrounded by urban areas as you get urban urban spread, cities growing.
And again, it talked about looking at these temperature stations that are still in rural areas and aren't in urban areas.
And again, that's something that actually the media don't tell us, but yeah, you've urban sprawl.
And of course, things which are in the country are now in the centre of a city and will give very different readings.
Yeah.
Yeah, that is a huge, this urban heat island effect, or UHI, that is a big effect.
And as Willie Soon says in the movie, in a place like Paris, it might be five degrees centigrade warmer in the middle of the city than it is on the outskirts of the city.
And people are saying that as they're driving around, they have their thermometer in their car.
You can see this as you drive in towards the city, you can see it getting warmer.
And we're supposed to panic over maybe one degree centigrade warming in 150 years or something.
But if you just drive into the center of the city, it might be five degrees warmer.
And Willie Soon has done some papers on this.
And maybe half of the warming that we have seen since 1850 has been caused by this effect.
So it's a big deal. And another person who's done great work on this is Anthony Watts with his surface station project.
He's looked in the U.S. in detail at the stations.
And I don't know what the numbers are. It might be 80% of them are situated in places where this is a big problem.
He's got lots of pictures of official temperature sensors that are right by a Weber grill or by an AC outlet or by hot tarmac or where you can park a car with a hot engine right near there.
And it's very interesting. He was just on my podcast and he was saying our modern temperature stations, some of them are taking the temperature every minute.
Or if there's just a little breeze of hot air just for a minute, bam, that's recorded.
A little spike of temperature is recorded.
This actually happened in the UK in a high profile thing in recent years, that the UK hit 40 degrees centigrade, and that got tons of publicity.
But then Chris Morrison, I believe, filed a FOIA and found out that that temperature was measured by an airport tarmac when fighter jets were landing right by it, and the temperature record lasted for one minute.
It was cooler, and then there was a spike for one minute, and it dropped like 0.6 just in the next minute.
So we're supposed to think that our behaviour in Topeka caused this to happen and CO2 caused it.
But no, it was just a spike of warm air, probably from a jet engine, probably influenced it for that one minute.
It's pretty amazing.
But you don't find out about this from the legacy media won't tell you this, but other reporters, other people that are digging into it are telling us this.
So I'm loving this type of story makes me very interested in coming in every day and looking at it again.
Yeah, I see some temperature readings that we get from heat through and you're thinking if you go to one of the busiest airports in the world it's going to be fairly warm with the amount of people, with the amount of cars, and planes funny enough, so but it's funny around heat through, we now have a 60 mile an hour speed limit and it's for air quality and you're thinking, well you've and I'm a plane buff but then you've got jets landing or taking off every 45 seconds, but hey it's the car going from 70 to 60 that will save the world.
Yeah, I don't know if they have any data that proves this works or not.
I don't know.
I thought there was just some data saying that some of these restrictions in some cities, they took the before and after data and it didn't improve.
I'm not buying it at all.
We used to have this deal in Minnesota where you had to take your car in every year and get it tested.
And it was a huge pain in the butt.
And they eventually took that away.
And I don't think, I think it was all pain and no gain as so many of these environmental things are.
A hundred percent.
There's actually a talking about temperature rises.
Is there was someone in the film talking about then using satellites to measure temperatures, which is something that we can now do that maybe wasn't available even 20 years ago, the amount of satellites there are in orbit.
And that's fascinating, seeing how you can use technology to look at data in a new way or collect data in a new way.
Yeah, I think that is our best recent temperature record, best overall temperature record that we have since 1979 is this satellite data.
It's the Alabama UAH data. Roy Spencer is a guy who blogs about that every month.
He gives us an update on his blog about what the current monthly temperature was.
But yeah, a huge advantage of that is the Weber grills and the tarmac and all that other stuff does not affect the satellite temperatures.
But a disadvantage is it doesn't go back 400 years like central England temperature.
It goes back only to 1979.
And that is kind of good for the people selling warmism because in the 70s, there really was this global cooling scare. And that's when we started measuring.
So, we do have warming since the seventies, but the whole idea that we can just to continue that out and assume it's going to go at the same rate for the next 200 years, it's like, it's like a sine wave.
And if you start measuring at the bottom of a sine wave, you can get all scared that things are going to increase from the bottom to the top forever.
But, I don't know what's going to happen next temperature wise, but, throughout human history, it's always fluctuated up and down.
And after every every upwards fluctuation, it has fluctuated back down.
And I wouldn't doubt that's going to happen again also.
Another one on actually was on CO2 when you overlay maps of temperature change onto events.
So, the Industrial Revolution, the huge rise in CO2 from that progression, you would expect to see maybe three, four or five times the temperature.
And yet we talk about a one degree change over a period of time.
And it's fascinating which the film did to put those graphs on top of one another and realize, hey, there's no correlation here.
Yeah, that's a huge point that even since 1850, even just that short period of geological time, the correlation hasn't been there.
There has been a narrative that we know humans must have caused it, because right when we started emitting CO2 with the Industrial Revolution, that's when temperatures spiked up.
I've heard people say they spiked up then, but they didn't.
I just saw a warmest graph on X a couple of days ago showing that the temperature on that graph from 1850 to 1910, it went down.
So with the Industrial Revolution, it cooled on that graph.
And then, OK, it worked for a while from 1910 to 1940.
Then CO2 went up and warming the earth warm.
So there was a correlation there.
But then from the 1940s, 1970s, again, we emitted enormous amounts of CO2, but the temperature went down and there was a whole scare.
And so then that didn't work.
Also, there was a hiatus after that from maybe 97 to 2014 or so, where we emitted lots of CO2 and temperatures didn't go up.
So the whole idea that CO2 is the climate control knob and that we should see that in the temperature, we don't.
At these timescales, at short ones and at long ones, over 600 million years, we have proxies where we can kind of figure out how warm it was. Doesn't work then either.
One other thing I wanted to mention here is that we have records of where the tree lines were up in the Arctic, maybe 4,000 years ago versus now.
And the tree line was further up north 4,000 years ago.
So, that's an indicator that it was warmer even just 4,000 years ago.
And of course, people were around, the pyramids had already been built 4,000 years ago.
In terms of human history, it wasn't that long ago, but it was warm back then.
And we're told that CO2 was lower, maybe maybe 280 parts per million back then.
So it was warmer, but CO2 was lower.
So again, CO2, a lot of people think CO2 is a result of warming because as the oceans warm, then they CO2 out gases from the ocean.
So, this whole scare might be a confusing cause and effect that CO2 does go up after it warms because the oceans out gas.
There was another part of the film that made me think, I've never heard that before, but that makes absolute sense.
And it is talking about this huge flaming ball of gas in the sky called the sun.
And you refer to it as solar winds.
And you make the point that the sun could actually have an impact in the temperature changes on the earth.
And it's actually not, I'd never kind of thought of solar winds in the sun.
I think that's kind of common sense.
Why haven't I thought of that?
And it's fascinating that those little bits of information that come out, you think that's absolutely on the ball.
And no climate change alarmist has ever talked about the sun providing temperature changes, but you refer to it in the film.
Yeah, again, there's this narrative that the sun is just a constant thing.
It's up there as a constant to any changes we see here couldn't be caused by the sun because the sun is constant, but not true at all.
The sun is going through different cycles.
It's very complicated.
And it's not just like it's getting brighter and dimmer and that's it.
There's other subtle things that are happening, changes in magnetism, extremely complicated.
But Nir Shaviv in the movie does a good job of talking about one theory about how changes in the sun through a complicated mechanism can cause changes in cloudiness on Earth.
And definitely cloudiness is fluctuating and it's incredibly hard to model.
And there's quite a bit of data saying that cloudiness, for whatever reason, has gone down in recent decades.
So it's been brighter and it's been easier for the earth to heat up.
As you can see yourself on a cloudy day, it's not as warm usually.
So, but that's just one of so many things that are affecting the climate there's changes in volcanoes and geologic heat that's coming up and heating the ocean and causing changes in ocean currents so the heat's moving around in the ocean and some you can leave everything else constant but if that changes in heat transport in the ocean bring warm water to the surface we could see a global change just through currents changing.
So it's incredibly complicated and I don't think I don't think we can model it even 50 years from now.
I don't think we're going to be able to fully understand it because it's so complicated.
Even trying to model a roulette wheel probably in Las Vegas, where's that ball going to go? Even that is hard to model.
And so, yeah, the whole idea that we understand climate and grade school kids get it, they understand it, and that's how simple it is.
More CO2 means hotter.
Totally not true.
It could not be farther from the truth.
I think I got how complicated, confusing weather and climate can be since we studied air aerospace, and then you look at weather in link to aviation, and you realize this is not an exact science.
And that phrase, exact science, is used all the time on climate change.
And yet in weather, we are utterly bewildered.
We assume it's going to go this way and that way, but it does the opposite you have the weather for the day for aviation and then that changes in a moment and you realize actually we are we are small parts of this huge world and we are trying to observe and make sense, but yet there's a lot we don't understand and that we don't understand never comes in to this climate debate.
It's assured it's settled accept it and this film provides divides that other side too.
Yeah. One thing that really opened my eyes is this whole climate gate thing that happened 10 plus years ago.
When these emails were released, there's like 200,000 emails from the inside of climate science came out.
I spent enormous amounts of time looking through them and blogging.
I did hundreds of blog posts about them and it showed how different the whole climate science thing is from the inside than from the outside.
From the outside, everybody agrees and science is settled and we know what we're talking about on the inside.
They're scratching their heads and saying, what, why is it cooling?
We, we don't know why it's cooling.
And it's very interesting to see that completely different on the inside than on the outside.
And that, that, that was a huge eye opener for me. And, let's see, I don't know what the second part of your question was.
No, it was just the science being settled. But that's often what it takes.
In effect, whistle-blowers to come out. And if it's a leak of data, whistle-blowers, same difference.
And then you get to see the inside story.
And you realize what we're being told as the public is not what is happening behind the scenes.
Yeah, and actually another big part of this is this whole 97% consensus.
That's the thing that a lot of people lean on is that this must be true because worldwide, wide, 97% of the scientists, they might even be shouting from the rooftops that there's a climate crisis.
Earth is too hot right now, caused by CO2.
And yeah, that's the narrative. But no part of that narrative is true at all, that nobody has even done any survey of all the scientists to find out what they think.
And almost none of them, again, are behaving as if they believe that.
And I personally know that there's tons of scepticism in the science community. John Clouser, he's in our movie.
He was the 2022 Nobel Prize winner in physics.
And he has told me personally that he knows a lot of scientists that privately they're saying we're not buying this.
But again, there's so much of a cost coming out and saying it that a lot of scientists, they know privately it's a crock, but they're not saying it because too much cost.
Yeah.
So that whole consensus there, there is not the consensus that the public thinks there is.
Is is Al Gore the the person that sparked this off because if you're vice president and you put out information then people will follow that.
Has he been the catalyst to spreading this misinformation by the film and then government grants from there?
He has been a major catalyst but it's interesting you bring him up because I just interviewed a guy on my podcast who did a whole almost two-hour movie about Al Gore.
It's coming out in December.
His name is Joel Gilbert.
And I learned a lot about the whole Al Gore thing there.
It's super interesting to me.
There were people before that.
There was Maurice Strong that was pushing this before Al Gore came into the picture.
There's this whole narrative that Al Gore, he was a student of Roger Revelle in maybe the 60s or 70s.
And that's how he learned that CO2 was the demon molecule.
But that part isn't true either.
It sounds like it was kind of a political calculation that Al Gore needed a cause to attach himself to.
And that's when he started pushing the CO2 thing. He had plenty of chances in the 80s to push it, and he barely talked about it at all.
But yes, I do think he was a major catalyst with his movie, Inconvenient Truth.
I think a lot of people I've talked to said that is what first caused me to believe in this thing. So he was treated, they kept saying he's treated like a rock star.
He'd go to these cop meetings back around 2007 or so, and he was a rock star.
He got all this publicity.
The movie got won awards and everything. So that was a major part of this whole thing.
He has kind of faded away in terms of publicity.
You don't hear as much about him anymore.
And then Greta was the icon.
She was a red hot icon.
She was, if you've seen pictures of her with cameras everywhere, I don't know, 40 cameras or something following her every move. So for a while she was the rock star.
And, uh, I don't know if there's going to be a, it seems like no one right now is the rock star of the movement.
Michael Mann still is getting a lot of publicity, climate scientist, Michael Mann, and he has gone heavily political on X talking about, Trump supporters of being like Nazis, et cetera.
So, I don't know if they want him as the face of the movement, but anyway, Anyway, for maybe 10 plus years, Al Gore, he was very successful in pushing this whole thing.
And he had investments in carbon credits.
There was this Chicago Climate Exchange where you could buy and sell these carbon credits.
And for a while, they were selling for real money.
But the whole thing crumbled.
And at the end, they were selling for a nickel a ton.
You could buy.
And that was at the end. And then it just crumbled to dust.
And now it's gone.
But there still is carbon credit trading going on to this day.
Michelle Sterling calls it, what is it, trading of an invisible substance, non-delivery of an invisible substance to no one.
That's what it is. Carbon credit trading.
Yeah.
And, I mean, people are being paid to not cut down trees and they might be selling their promise to not cut down their trees more than once.
It's just amazing.
So even people on the other side are saying this thing is a complete farce.
But again, huge money has been changing hands based on this non-delivery of an invisible substance to no one.
Pretty amazing.
It sounds like you're suggesting this all could be a money thing, making money.
And I guess that starts back from Al Gore, because if you've got a leader, a political leader of that level, issuing government grants and recommending that money goes to people who are pushing this agenda, And you talk about it in the film, then everyone is hands up.
Well, I'll do the paper on that.
I'll be your consultant if you pay me. And money seemed to generate an industry.
Absolutely.
Yeah, there's so much money on the line in so many different ways.
Like you mentioned, if you're doing research on butterflies and you might not get funded, but if you do research on the effect of climate change on butterflies, you might get some funding.
And that's a huge deal that I think enormous amounts of scientific funding has been done on that basis.
And again, we have to fund it because CO2 is the number one thing.
There's a crisis.
So, the money really sucks in the money for sure there.
And then in terms of products that like electric cars and solar panels and wind turbines and so many things are sold on the basis of if you buy this thing, it's going to help prevent this climate crisis.
And maybe a substitute meat by fake meat prevents hurricanes.
And it's just amazing that how many things are sold on this basis.
Again, this thing is starting to crumble, but so much money and then so much power.
There's this whole central bank digital currency thing that some of the parasitic elites want to put on us.
I don't know if you've heard about it.
There's a guy named Simon Goddek that is living in Brazil, and he got a call from his either bank or credit card company saying, you've exceeded your carbon allowance and you want to pay additional money, so you can continue to spend this month because you've gone over your allowance.
It's voluntary for now.
Now, but that's the whole thing.
I think they would like to make this not voluntary and they would on an individual basis, keep track of how much meat you bought and how much dairy and how many times you've flown.
And if you do too many of those things, buy too many of those things, you have to pay additional money.
The thing is a scam.
It is a straight up scam, but that could happen unless we push back on this.
And again, the whole reason they might be able to get by with this is that if they sell it to enough people that we have to do all this crazy stuff.
Otherwise, our kids die from CO2-induced heat or something.
I mean, CBDCs are the biggest element of control that maybe any of us have seen in our lifetime, controlling not just spending.
That's a side part of controlling thinking.
You talked about part of the industry has been developed, and you mentioned solar panels.
And then that connects in with China, because most of these are built in China.
China aren't buying it either.
You refer in the film about them building, what, two coal-fired power stations a week that they know are equal to the rest of the world in actually coal usage.
They're not buying it.
They just seem to be laughing at the West for their utter stupidity as they are powering their way to growth. Right.
I agree.
I think they are laughing at us.
Yeah, they are making a lot of money off of this.
And again, they're not trying to, we're hearing they're putting up some solar panels in China, but they're not trying to power their economy that way.
There are people selling the idea we should power the whole U.S. Economy on wind and sun. Wouldn't that be great?
And it would be great if it worked, but it 100% doesn't work.
But we got crazy things going on here again in my home state where there's dreams of powering Minnesota with wind and sun.
But if we actually did that for a year, a lot of people would straight up die for sure. It gets so cold here.
There's no way we can stay warm enough.
So what's keeping us alive right now is real energy.
And nuclear power could keep us alive because that's baseload energy.
But if we try to use these intermittent sources based on the low angle of a sun and based on wind that might not blow for a week or two, it can kill people for sure.
One other thing I wanted to mention before I forget in terms of this control thing is this whole C40 cities document.
I don't know if you've seen that, but I just looked it up again.
It's still online and it's one of the craziest things I've seen in that I think 99 mayors have signed on to this thing now and it's out there.
It says that their goal for 2030 is we each get an allowance of three new pieces of clothing per year.
That's it.
Three pieces of clothing.
You can't buy number four, because you got to wait until next year and it's to prevent bad weather. And then also in there, it says their goal is no meat, no dairy for all of us.
We're just going to get rid of those.
2030 is coming right up here. It's not that far away.
And they're just going to cut out those two industries. And the bonus is we get less bad weather in 2050.
That's why we're doing it.
So yeah, again, it's amazing that things got, went this far off the rails.
I think people in the future aren't going to think about this a lot, but when they do think about this time and they look back at what's happening right now, climate-wise, they're just going to laugh, and they will not be able to believe how stupid it got.
Well, to think that eating less meat, less cows will save the world, or less cow farts will save the world, it'll be ludicrous.
But, I mean, even if part of this was about industry, building industry, I could see some kind of argument for it.
But I know in the UK, we buy all our windmills from the Netherlands.
I think they're a huge supplier of it.
We buy solar, as you do, in the States from China. It's not even helping the industry in the country.
So that argument isn't there.
They seem to be absolutely against any form of industrial change or any form of progression.
Yeah, I mean, part of the movement is anti-capitalism.
You see them walking around with signs, anti-capitalist signs.
So, yeah, for sure, that is part of the movement. And part of it is such a weird thing, the war on farmers, the war on cows and the war on farmers is so crazy.
But I think there's sinister motives behind that.
Maybe it's a land grab where they're trying to, maybe in the Netherlands, force farmers off their land so that they can take the land.
Again, that sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory.
But the whole idea, I mean, those Netherland farmers, they're so productive.
It's so important that they're producing the food that they are.
The idea that we have to force them to stop doing that.
Again, it's so counterproductive and it's against human flourishing completely.
So we have to fight this hard.
And I hope the bad guys don't win on this one or on any of this stuff.
I mean, it is all about money.
And we've seen that during COVID with the pharmaceutical advertising on TV and media.
It meant you had to agree to that because that's where your money's coming from.
On the climate change agenda, it seems money comes from producing results that fit in with the government.
And if you don't, you will lose funding. You will lose your position.
You kind of see often through history how finance is used to push an agenda which is against any normal thinking.
Yeah, that makes me think of this whole nuclear power thing that one of my guests said the the whole reason that nobody advocates for it, because there's so many less opportunities for grift in the nuclear power industry.
Because in wind and sun, it's kind of like a forever war that they're not going to work.
And then the answer is when they don't work, we just need more of them.
I'm hearing that all the time, that, of course, we don't have enough wind and wind turbines, solar panels up.
And, of course, they didn't work.
We're getting blackouts.
And the answer is let's just put more of them up. So it is a forever war.
Or the money just, the spigot could continue forever until we just turn it off.
Because no matter how many we put up, it's not going to work.
So, yeah, it's important.
I hope rationality comes back.
I think it is coming back, though.
I'm seeing a lot of signs of that really right now.
I think some of it's falling apart.
People not buying into the cost.
I mean, buying electric cars, there is a cost of double the price of anything else.
And sales are collapsing big time.
And it does seem as though people are not willing to actually pay the financial price, even though they may believe it's a good idea.
It seems that it will run out of steam because people are simply not going to pay the cost of it.
Yeah, I mean, I'm hearing people say that I bought an electric car because there were so many subsidies that.
But so basically, the other people are subsidizing your purchase.
And there was this time where electric cars really they had the majority of the market back a long time ago, maybe around 1900 or something.
And then gas powered cars beat them out because there's so many advantages.
The energy density, that's such a huge thing of hydrocarbons that one gallon of gas has so much energy.
And I think the battery on a Tesla can weigh 1,200 pounds, way over 1,000 pounds.
And so then you're hauling this huge battery around everywhere you go.
You've got to haul this battery around.
And the energy density is not there at all. So there's so many advantages for real cars. So I would say, I mean, some people do want an electric car.
I think we should just take off all the subsidies and let them compete in the free market. And whoever wins, wins.
And I think we are going to get back to that.
But so far, all these subsidies, especially in a place like the U.S. where we have such a huge debt anyway, the whole idea that we need to subsidize toys for rich people.
Because generally, these Tesla’s are not bought by the working class people who has their number one car.
They're bought very often as a second car for people who shouldn't be subsidized by the working class.
So one of the recent side effects is the weight, as you talked about, the damage to roads.
But also I think they talk about multi-story car parks whenever they're built in the 60s they were like what 700 kilo cars now it's well some of them are 2.2 tons.
So you fill a multi-story car park with electric vehicles and oh the thing collapses and there are all these issues that are suddenly coming these engineering problems
There's that. And there's the fire danger that some, I think, apartment buildings don't want to park their cars under the building because if your car goes up, it's so hard to put it out.
The whole building can go up. There's been a lot of cases of that.
There's supposed to be these special protocols to fight a fire if it's an electric car, because you might fight it for a while and it might flare up repeatedly after you think it's been out.
So that's a major problem.
And just now you're seeing that even the lithium batteries are in the cars, I believe.
And they're saying that you got to be really careful when you're flying because they don't want your lithium small battery causing a fire on the plane.
So the whole fire danger thing is a big deal.
I think there was a case with a container ship or a ship that had a unbelievable fire caused by one of these batteries.
So people say, oh, well, you can have a battery on a gas powered, you have a fire on a gas powered car, but the fires are easier to put out and it's not as big a danger as it is with these batteries.
We had a huge fire in London Luton Airport in one of the car parks that was shut down with a hybrid and it looks like the fire started in the battery.
But of course, they didn't say it was an electric car.
They said, oh, it's a hybrid petrol car and therefore, oh, it's a petrol vehicle.
You could see the media manipulating the data.
So much of that.
and just final thing. I want to ask you about the how the film has been accepted.
You've talked about some of the numbers.
I certainly saw what just after it came out and was sent a link to say, you need to watch this, and I did.
But what is the reception being like to this at a time where the narrative does seem to be collapsing amongst many people.
What is your experience the last four months?
What has it been like?
Yeah, we're very pleased with their reception that the whole viral thing that it hasn't been a course pushed by the legacy media.
But we thought that the Washington Post and New York Times, the legacy media would push back because in 2007, when the great global warming swindle came out, there was major pushback from the legacy media.
But mostly they haven't talked about it at all.
And it might be that they're hoping if they ignore it, it'll go away.
But yeah, it has not been attacked much at all. And I think it's way easier to speak out against it now than it was in 2007.
I think there's a snowball effect that as more and more people speak out, that more and more people feel free to speak out.
I'm seeing that for sure on social media.
Back in 10 plus years ago, I kind of felt more alone.
There were a few sceptics out there, but not very many.
But now you see it all the time that when there's an article about climate, it very often.
It makes me happy.
I look into the comment section and very often it's like 90% of the people are saying, this is a crock.
It's wrong.
Here's why it's wrong.
It makes me happy.
I'm seeing so much of that.
So people are feeling free to speak out on social media.
People are trying to share the link to the movie on Facebook and Instagram, and you might get a strike or a warning because the movie is supposed to be misinformation still.
So on those platforms still, whatever, they're still trying to defend the narrative.
But on X, et cetera, I think the floodgates are starting to open up, and I think it makes me happy that this thing, it is crumbling right now, even as we speak.
This is what it looks like as it crumbles.
And you've got the Freedom on X, the Freedom on Rumble, on Bitchute, on GETTR, on Truth and other social media platforms that you can share it.
Tom, I really appreciate your time.
It's great that we connected whenever you responded to our interview with Efrat Fenigson and I enjoyed that interviewing.
And it was wonderful that you reached out.
So, really good talking to you really enjoyed the film.
And I know if our audience haven't yet seen it, by the end of this, they will have watched it, and can share it, too.
Thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much, Peter. Really appreciate it.

Claudio Lessa - Twitter vs. Tyranny: Elon Musk and Brazil's Information War

In this compelling episode of Hearts of Oak, we sit down with Claudio Lessa, a journalist with over four decades of experience, to explore the complex landscape of Brazilian politics and media freedom. Claudio shares his journey from Brazil to the U.S. and his return, only to face political persecution. He discusses the temporary freedom during Bolsonaro's presidency, the contentious handling of the pandemic, and the alleged election irregularities leading to Lula's controversial return to power. Dive into the discussion on severe media censorship, the role of social platforms like X in resisting government overreach, and the ongoing struggle for democracy in Brazil. This is an essential listen for insights into the fight for truth in a climate of suppression.
Claudio Lessa, a multifaceted personality with a rich tapestry of experiences, was born in 1955 in the vibrant city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His life, split evenly between Brazil and the United States, has been a journey marked by a relentless pursuit of diverse passions and professional endeavours.Lessa's career in journalism spans several decades, where he has made significant contributions across various media platforms. He has worked with multiple television networks, bringing stories to life with his distinctive flair. His writing, featured in numerous newspapers, magazines, and online platforms, showcases his insightful commentary and provocative style. Lessa's work as a blogger further highlights his commitment to engaging with contemporary issues, often stirring the pot with his observations and analyses.Beyond journalism, Claudio Lessa is an accomplished singer-songwriter. His musical talents led to the creation of a recorded CD, reflecting his deep connection with Brazilian music and culture, while also exploring universal themes through his songs.His adventurous spirit also led him into the high-speed world of auto racing. As a member of the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA), Lessa indulged his love for speed and competition, adding another layer to his already diverse persona.Described as a provocateur and a sometimes "pain-in-the-ass," Lessa is known for his candidness and his ability to find humour in almost any situation, which has endeared him to many while challenging the status quo. This characteristic has made him not just a journalist or a musician, but a cultural figure who provokes thought, discussion, and often, laughter.Claudio Lessa's life story is one of crossing boundaries, both literal and metaphorical, between countries, careers, and personal interests. His ability to excel in journalism, music, and racing, while maintaining a sharp wit and a critical eye, makes him a unique figure in both the Brazilian and American cultural landscapes.
Connect with Claudio...𝕏                         @ClaudioLessa   x.com/ClaudioLessaGETTR               @CLNews   gettr.com/user/clnewsYOUTUBE           @ACLNews8   youtube.com/@ACLNews8
Interview recorded  20.9.24
Connect with Hearts of Oak...𝕏                         @HeartsofOakUK  x.com/HeartsofOakUKWEBSITE            heartsofoak.org/PODCASTS        heartsofoak.podbean.com/SOCIAL MEDIA  heartsofoak.org/connect/SHOP                  heartsofoak.org/shop/
*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.
Check out his art theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com and follow him on 𝕏 x.com/TheBoschFawstin
Transcript
(Hearts of Oak)
And hello, Hearts of Oak.
I'm delighted to have a brand new guest with us today, going to discuss all things Brazil, regarding censorship and politics there, and it's Claudio Lessa.
Claudio, thank you so much for your time today.
Well, thank you, Peter.
Thank you for having me.
I'm delighted to join this live session here, and I'd like to tell you that I'm a journalist since 1976.
I've been working in Brazil for quite a while and then I moved to the United States in 1982 to work for the Voice of America and then I became a freelance journalist.
I worked for CBS.
I worked for many newspapers in Brazil and magazines and stuff.
And then I decided to go back to Brazil because I had some, you know, family problems to take care of there and I decided to you know try to spread the the everything that I had learned here in the United States about democracy and the importance of dialogue and discussion about everything openly.
But unfortunately, things didn't work out for me very well.
And I decided to come back, because I started being severely persecuted politically because when I started my own broadcast about three years ago.
All hell broke loose and I was you know, I suffered all sorts of Intimidations and threats and stuff.
I'm basically now I don't know if the the listeners and the viewers are familiar with the the so-called end of the world inquiry, It's the Brazilian Supreme Court under this proto-dictator that they have there, this bald guy that I don't pronounce his name, you know, because it's kind of contagious, you know.
But anyway, he decided to start this inquiry there that has been lasting for five years.
And I was included in there.
I was forced to go to the federal police and give explanations about my opinions, basically what I was writing on my newscast.
I have a newscast that goes on the air from Monday through Friday, every evening.
And I, you know, mix the news with a little bit of humour and a little bit of the comments and stuff.
But I'm just a newsman. You know, I'm just telling people what's happening and showing them what I think about it sometimes. And they didn't like it.
So, I was persecuted heavily.
And I said, well, it's enough.
Well let's get into all of that and for when you look at Brazil and anyone who's worked for Voice of America, fantastic.
So I can pigeonhole you kind of straight away.
That great and fantastic organization, but I mean in Brazil politically, do you want to to just explain because when Bolsonaro got in and he came in on a huge wave of popularity, was only there four years and then Lula was back in again after being president; what for two terms back 10, 12, years ago?
You had Dilma Rousseff, she was thrown out for whatever activities and then you had other people in for a short period of time.
But what what was that like from your point of view seeing Jair Bolsonaro coming in and being so vocal for common sense and on the right and for freedoms.
What were those four years like for you looking at it as a journalist?
Well Peter it was a a breath of fresh air basically, you know, After living there,
I got the whole Lula period and the bank robber period, too.
Dilma, she's a bank robber, a terrorist.
And I'm serious.
And when Bolsonaro came in, you know, it was a breath of fresh air.
You know, there was no more censorship. professorship.
He didn't prosecute any journalist whatsoever for whatever they, you know, if people told whatever they wanted to tell about him.
He didn't care.
You know, it's a free country.
Go ahead and whatever.
When it came to the issue of inoculations, it was right, you know, during that that presidency, that he got smacked with the inoculation fraud.
He said, well, he was kind of very candid.
He said, listen, I'm not taking it.
I don't want it. I don't think it's right.
But I'm importing this huge amount of vaccines here.
Whoever wants to take it, feel free to do it.
But the left was intent because they were joined by an international syndicate or whatever to force everything and create all sorts of trouble and all those masks and physical separation and whatever, you know, all that fraudulent aspect of the genocidal, you know, intent that they had.
And he just took on the same wave.
There were economic problems.
Brazil was under heavy pressure.
He had the best economy minister of the whole Republican Brazilian history.
His name is Paulo Guedes.
He was considered the best minister in the world. Sometimes, you know, he was awarded some, you know, thing about it.
And he rode that wave of pressure and made Brazil grow and produced surpluses after surpluses every time, economically speaking.
And what do you see now?
Well, what do you see now is, first of all, this man who is in charge right now of the government, you know, it was a fraudulent election.
It was rigged, completely rigged.
You know, proof is starting to appear, you know, little by little on social media with telephone calls and messages and stuff that's being unearthed, you know, about this whole thing.
What happened now?
We have a dictatorship.
The guy is a drunk man who doesn't, you know, he's not able to do anything.
Some people say he's already dead he was killed in November 5th, 2022 and there have been these people these look-alikes who've been filling in for him which is we cannot prove that but that's what they say.
What happened?
We have a judicial dictatorship.
The judicial ever since Bolsonaro was in power.
Well, they did two things.
First of all, they went to the military secretly and they said, can we smash this guy?
The military, well, no, no problem.
Go ahead.
So the military distanced themselves.
So what happened?
It's statistically proven.
Every week or 10 days, at least two instances where the Brazilian Supreme Court would create some sort of trouble regarding Bolsonaro's decisions or actions or whatever.
So, his life was a nightmare.
You know, his government, as far as being an executive, it was a nightmare. So, this happened for the four years.
And then they had the fraudulent elections.
Several things happened in front of everyone.
And I don't know.
Brazil is, for me, it's very disturbing, I think.
Because I don't like to live in a place where everybody pretends that nothing is happening, you know?
And that's what I felt. Because things were happening in front of our eyes.
You know, one of the so-called justice ministers, you know, a man, I mean, I'm not a man, but his name is Barroso, Luis Barroso.
He went to Congress once, and they were on the verge of voting the printed voting machines.
There's going to be a printer right next to the ballot, the electronic ballot box there that would do the following.
Following, you chose a number 28, and then the face of the candidate would appear on the screen.
And you said, well, yes, this is the candidate I want.
Well, before you press the confirm button to finish your choice, a piece of paper would come from a printer, isolated from you.
You could not touch it.
You could not get the paper or anything.
Right?
And you'd say, well, yeah, that's number 28 printed there.
So, I confirm that's 28.
Then you confirm and you leave and you voted for number 28.
Right now, what's happening is there's no printer.
There's no nothing.
So you go there, you choose 28.
The guy, the candidate 28 appears and you say, well, yeah, confirm.
Confirm, the machine will select 33 for you.
And nobody knows.
Nobody will ever know.
There's no way of auditing this thing.
So, this vote was crucial to make sure that the elections would be clean.
This guy crosses the street from the Supreme Court, goes to Congress, and forces the political leaders to change representatives who were voting for the audited vote like this with the printer system and stuff, to change the congressman to people who would vote against it. And then he killed it. This is a crime.
It's written on the Constitution.
And it's written since 1950.
It's a crime of responsibility. He had to be impeached because he committed a crime.
Nothing happened, you know, and so on and so forth.
And then comes along this bald guy, Mr. Alexandre de Moraes.
This guy is a disgrace. grace.
I mean, I've been, ever since August 2022, way before the elections, I used to do some commentary for some people, and I would say, listen, I am not a psychologist.
I'm not a doctor.
I'm not nothing like that. But from my observations, I believe this guy is a psychopath. You know, his actions are completely, you know.
Contrary to common sense or or reasonability or whatever you know the he just, he just, throws it and and everybody gets really afraid and stuff I can tell you right now, because I'm writing my my my newscast for today and I just got the news that says he decided to find X, which is suspended in Brazil right now under his censorship thing, he decided to find them five million Reais because, you know, a few days ago, X was suspended and they changed the provider.
They started using Cloudflare.
And for some reason, X came back on the air again for Brazilians.
And this guy was, you know, really, really mad.
And I'd like to know what kind of scale, what kind of table for fines he has.
You know, he just throws, you know, $5 million, $100,000, $10,000 every day, every 24 hours.
You have two hours to do this.
It's kind of crazy.
And nobody says anything.
Well, I want to delve into that.
But one thing I want to say is, for me, as a Brit, for a lot of our U.S. viewers who may be thinking Brazil, I mean, who cares?
But Brazil is 50% of the population of South America.
And when you look at actually the country that has a good leader, you're looking at Argentina. But that's like a quarter the size.
And Brazil is not a Paraguay or Uruguay or Bolivia.
It is a huge country in size and in population, and therefore it affects things massively.
Sol, I think that's why what's happening in Brazil is really concerning.
But, I mean, was it Bolsonaro?
Was it because, I mean, his bravery, his boldness on going up against the pharmaceutical industry and saying, I'm not having this jab, no way.
That set him apart from nearly every other world leader.
Was that the main reason why he was so targeted and why they couldn't let him?
Because if you've got a president that is against Big Pharma, then there's a problem because Big Pharma want to make a lot of money.
And he was being a bulwark, a stop to that.
But was that the reason why he basically couldn't be allowed to stay because of that?
Or was it other issues also?
Peter, this was one big chunk of the problem.
But that was not the entire problem.
That was not the basic problem.
Bolsonaro, first of all, he comes from the military ranks.
The military have been discredited in Brazil ever since the end of the the you know the the authoritarian period that ended in 1985 I guess or whatever when they had the amnesty and they decided to leave all these crooks come back allow these crooks to come back to Brazil and these communism, all that stuff, and they were assured by the amnesty, was a general and unrestricted amnesty, as it was called at that time, they would not ever be touched.
And what I mean is, during the military regime that lasted from 64 until 85, there were instances where both sides practiced, you know, bad things in terms of violence and killing and everything.
They killed people.
The military also killed people.
The military also tortured people just like the leftists did.
And there's ample proof of that on both sides.
But then when they came back, they said, no, we're not going to be touched anymore.
So, we can do whatever you want, because nobody's going to touch us.
And that's what happened.
And the military got totally discredited.
They went back and, you know, they reaffirmed their lack of credit when the electoral fraud in 2022 happened.
Millions of Literally millions of Brazilians went to the gates of all the military installations all over Brazil, asking them, please do something, you know, have these people sit down and do something about it.
You know, we cannot accept something like this.
Nothing happened.
What was the media?
And people went to jail because of that, you know.
And that is totally unacceptable, totally unacceptable.
How did the media play into it?
Are the media fully controlled? Is there free media?
Obviously, that's why they fear Elon Musk.
No, exactly.
Exactly.
No, no.
The media in Brazil is totally controlled by the left.
Totally, totally, totally controlled by the left.
So, you had this 24 hours, seven days a week, 30 days per month, 365 days a year of people writing and saying and broadcasting, you know, things that were untrue about Bolsonaro and forcing and creating this narrative of lies and lies and lies.
You know, but Bolsonaro allowed them to do this.
He kept telling them his side and they kept telling him their side.
It was a very bad situation in terms of the attempt of controlling the situation. Nobody knew who was going to control the situation.
Bolsonaro, on one hand, I believe, you know, although I am convinced that he was the best president that we had in our Republican history ever since Mr. Fonseca started it way, way back.
But I believe he...
You know, as a human being, was, you know, prone to make mistakes or to overlook whatever.
So, one of the things that I really, you know, miss that he should have done is every, you know, every couple of weeks or every week, basically, he went to the gates of the Alvorada Palace, and he met with the supporters there and stuff.
It was very friendly.
And then he said, well, I'm playing within the four lines, just like he was in a field, you know?
But if my adversaries want to play everything, you know, the go for all or whatever, I'm able to do the same thing too.
He never did.
And it was very clear that these people were not playing or observing the four lines or they were just, you know, screwing everything that they could in order to, you know, to demolish his presidency.
And on top of that, there was the rigged election, the fraudulent process that was horrible, and nobody did anything.
You know, the military were requested to supervise the, you know, part of the election when they were talking about computers, the ballot boxes, the electronic ballot boxes, they had, you know, to insert this, you know, program or whatever is in the software in there.
The military was very, very much capable of doing it and catching all the malign things that were being done to the software.
They were there. They didn't do anything.
They didn't complain.
There was a request later to get the, there's a term in computing that's called for the, it's the basic data that's in a computer.
They requested that thing.
Mr. Alexandre de Moraes said, no, I'm not going to give it.
And that was it.
That was it.
And the dance followed.
Everybody kept watching, you know, football and the soap operas and going to the beach and singing songs and whatever.
That's it.
This is what bothers me very deeply about Brazil.
You know, nobody takes action on something. And now even Bolsonaro is a little bit disappointing because he was the most hurt in all this process.
He was guaranteed a re-election because everybody is with him up to this date.
What does he say now?
You know, a few months ago, I listened to this. Oh, no.
2022 is a turn page.
We don't have to worry about it anymore.
What?
I mean, what does that mean if millions of people were in front of military installations?
Everybody is suffering from the economy.
You know, the economy in Brazil is melting right now.
Deficits on top of deficits you know all sorts of wrong-doings are being made all over the place and it's turned page, you don't get some people and decide why are you afraid of being called a dictator because the international media are going to call: oh, you see, he went and and he crushed the the the democratically elected government blah blah blah blah.
I don't know.
I mean, or is it because his wife is an evangelical woman and decided, oh, we have to turn the other face and, you know, not do anything.
These people, you know, God will punish them, but we will have to.
I don't know what's going on in his head, but Brazil is melting, you know, minute by minute, and nobody does anything.
Well, I'll end discussing kind of the other side effects of having Lulu in charge, but on the issue of censorship, and especially that Elon Musk and Twitter X are in the crosshairs of the government, how did that come about?
Why is Elon Musk suddenly the enemy of the Brazilian government?
Well, Peter, Elon Musk became an enemy of the Brazilian government because he bought X.
While X was under the other, you know, ownership, he was acting just like Facebook and Instagram and everything.
I was cut from Instagram overnight.
I was cut from Vimeo overnight.
I was caught from, there was one in France that I forgot the name, overnight.
And just because, why?
Because Mr. Alexandre de Moraes secretly decided to censor everybody who he does not like. And he issued these orders to these cronies that were totally afraid of saying anything or going against whatever he said.
And I'll give you a good example.
In 2022, I guess, Telegram was suspended in Brazil for several days, and then it returned afterwards.
Well, this Mr. de Moraes, this bald guy, this psychopath, he issued an order and published it everywhere.
All the newspapers saying, well, I'm suspending Telegram because of these nine reasons.
Well, six of the reasons had to do with a guy named Alan dos Santos, who lives here in the United States.
He's an exiled Brazilian journalist, too.
He was severely persecuted by, you know, the gang.
And...
Two other reasons were Bolsonaro, because Bolsonaro said this or that or whatever.
And the ninth reason was yours truly.
I didn't even know what was going on.
I was never told, not by the Supreme Court, not by Telegram, not by anybody.
There was a reason there.
I told Telegram to close Claudio Lessa's channel, and they didn't care about it.
Well, this was one of the reasons.
This is okay.
I mean, as far as censorship goes, that's how it works.
But the funny thing that I want to talk to you about is this.
On the six reasons about Alan DeSantis, he enumerated things there.
And one of the reasons was, I have ordered Telegram several times to talk to me about monetization of his channel, and Telegram never answered.
Well, I believe that a third-grade kid would know that Telegram does not monetize anyone.
So the thing is, why one of the cronies or the guys who are doing whatever they are doing there say, hey, Mr. Justice, please, you know, this one, it shouldn't be on the list because Telegram doesn't do it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
No, nobody said anything.
So, he showed everyone that he's arrogant, stupid, ignorant.
He doesn't know what he's talking about.
He just wants to be the big bully in front of the school, in the schoolyard.
That's what he's doing.
And to my amazement nobody does anything to stop this guy.
I mean I don't know.
Tell me the the this the individual who no one outside Brazil had heard of this that Elon Musk is basically going toe to toe with is he the head of the judicial system in Brazil?
This this guy this this bald head guy no he's not, his one of the 11 justices or so-called just nobody, no one there has been a justice before.
That's to make things worse.
But he's one of the 11, but since he's a bully, and he acts like a pseudo dictator or whatever.
Others are accomplices, others are timid, or they're afraid of going against them.
I don't know.
So he takes the front of the scene, and everybody stays looking.
For example, the situation there, Peter, is so bad. When there was the election, and, you know, these people are all together in the same bag.
They're all criminals. You know, one thing that happened, it was Mr. Barroso, who was the head of the electoral tribunal there, the electoral court, which is completely useless, very expensive.
And he was the guy in charge of that, but he's also a guy from the Supreme Court.
I have this recording with me, because I carried it for my own safety, you know.
He is in a Zoom meeting with the other 10.
He is in the middle of the screen, on the larger screen, and the other 10 are, you know, spread around him.
And he's saying the following lie. Listen, he is the president of the, you know, the utmost tribunal of, you know, taking care about elections in Brazil.
He says, you know, we cannot have at all this, you know, audited elections, this piece of paper coming from the printer because the voter will get this paper and take it to the drug dealer or to the militia, whatever, to show him that he voted for whom the militia guy told him to do, whatever.
Peter, the printer is going to be isolated from the voter.
He has just visual contact with a piece of paper that's coming out of the thing.
Now, you imagine this guy in this level saying this kind of lie.
And the other 10 never, ever uttered a word. Never said, hey, Barroso, hold on.
Things don't work like that.
No, this is not correct.
No, no, just people stay there looking and looking and looking and listening.
So this is the way things are happening in Brazil.
I'm not happy with it, so I left.
Well, how difficult is it for journalists?
You've got Elon Musk, and of course, that is the alternative media.
But yet you've got journalists like yourself.
It's bread and butter, more legacy.
That's your life.
What is it like?
You, I'm sure, talk to colleagues, friends, family back in Brazil.
How difficult is it to be a journalist that seeks truth and seeks to expose lies?
Well, Peter, it's basically an impossible task.
That's why I left Brazil, you know, after a while, after being persecuted in my work at the House of Representatives and outside my work, I came to the conclusion, my family, listen, one of these days, federal police is going to come here at six in the morning, going to arrest me.
I'm going to lose my job. I'm going to be killed, maybe.
I don't know.
So before that kind of thing, you know, happens, I might as well, you know, look for some other way of living and being able to live in peace and, you know, be able to say whatever I want to say without the risk of being punished so stupidly by these people, you know.
But the others who are there, they are all accomplices of this gang that's in power right now, this criminal gang that's in power right now, or they're totally afraid.
They're totally scared.
They don't say anything.
They just, you know, keep to themselves and do whatever, you know, and survive silently, you know.
Tell me what it's like. What else has happened under Lula?
Bolsonaro would seem to be he was more free market, Marcus wanted to encourage people to actually grow the economy, less state subsidies, more incentives to work.
The normal kind of what you have on the right that now Miele is trying to do in Argentina, which really has suffered economic decimation, I think, over decades.
But what's the economic situation like under Lula?
The economic situation under Lula is a tragedy.
We have, after Paulo Guedes, who was the best, as I said, the best minister of the economy in the whole Republican area, we have a basically illiterate man.
His name is Haddad, and I called him an Alfadad, like he was an illiterate man, you know, because in Brazil, the name illiterate, you say an alfabeto.
You don't, you know, so I changed the names and did this.
So this guy, he said it on television one day that he didn't understand diddly about economy.
And he took a three month course about the subject with his friends. And he was cheating on the test that was given, getting answers from his friends to fill the things there.
And that's the guy who is in charge of the economy.
So from there, you can see what's going on.
Now, let's go back a little bit.
Bolsonaro, well, way, way back.
Lula, a long time ago, said, well, I'm going to do the transposition of the San Francisco River to get water to the Northeast and da, da, da.
Good.
Everybody was hopeful that that thing would happen because the dry situation and the drought situation in the Northeast of Brazil is historical, terrible, and everything.
Nothing happened.
When Bolsonaro came in, Bolsonaro said, well, we're going to do the transposition. And he did it. Indeed, he did it.
The water went to the Northeast, to all the states in there and everything, all the ramifications and stuff.
Everything was working just fine.
The Northeasians were happy with that.
Then this guy came back and you can see videos on on maybe YouTube or whatever I got many from social media and stuff trucks full of dirt you know putting that dirt on the channels to stop the water.
They closed all the.
You know.
The valves and stuff.
And the water ended.
Why?
Because there is a mafia in the northeast.
Of trucks that carry water.
You know.
And distribute this water.
And these trucks are paid.
You know, dearly for this water.
And this is controlled by politicians of, you know, the the group of this of this guy.
So he killed everything a bridge in in in the north in the northern region of Brazil and, They made this huge bridge because what was happening at that time, every time you had a car or a truck and you had to go to the other side of the river, you had to pay like, you know, 200 Reais or 300 Reais and wait hours and hours for the, you know.
Well, the then minister Tarcisio Freitas, you know, built a huge bridge, ended up the problem.
The bridge is not working.
Now the ship, you know, you have to take the boat to cross the river again.
And the bridge is right there.
You can see it.
You can see this on social media that the videos are there.
I'm not making this up.
So this is how it is working now in Brazil.
That's what's happening.
This is a tragedy.
And, you know, nobody knows what to do because, because everybody's more concerned with, you know, soap operas, soccer. I don't know.
It's the same the world over.
Where does Lula's support come from?
You mentioned about Bolsonaro's wife being an evangelical Christian.
And you kind of, as a Christian and being to Brazil before to visit churches, and you hear about the large churches in Brazil, as you do in Colombia, be other parts of Almeria, but Brazil is known for having a large evangelical population.
How does kind of the voter breakdown work?
And how did, apart from fraudulent, yes, and I'm, except as I accept on the 2020 election, fraudulent also, but where does the kind of support base for Lula come?
Well, Peter, that's a very, very good question.
That's a $6 million question like they had in those days.
Because you see today, if Lula goes on the street by himself, he's going to be killed.
I'm not wishing that.
I'm just saying, stating as a fact, people hate him, despise him.
You know, he cannot go anywhere.
And if he tries any political whatever he wants to do, nobody shows up.
And this is also on social media everywhere.
Now, if you have Bolsonaro, oh, Bolsonaro landed here and he's going to eat a pizza at whatever.
The whole city goes there to see Bolsonaro and take pictures with him and stuff.
What does that mean?
It means that Bolsonaro has the support and the preference of the people.
So, what happened was a fraudulent process, a rigged election, and the support came from several sides interested in making Brazil a leftist country.
And then you can think of, you know, there is a guy who worked with the Venezuelan government.
He was arrested in Spain, and I believe he was sent to the United States.
His nickname was El Polio, a general there. He said that he has all the paperwork proving that he sent millions and millions and millions of Dollars to the Workers' Party, which is the criminal gang, you know, using a fantasy of a political party.
And that's where this Lula guy is in bed with.
This is a federal crime.
And if that is proven, if that is shown, this Workers' Party has to be cancelled and everything has to be voided and nullified.
I don't know.
I mean, there's this George Soros here in the United States.
I mean, these people, they are all connected.
You know, these people are all together working in the shadows and stuff.
Stuff and but in the practical terms what you can see is this guy as a president does not exist even no was when when you talk about executive decisions who are taking the executive decisions?
The judiciary, by this bald guy who decides to fine people to do this And they decide, oh, we have to work about the drought and the fire.
You know, the guy who was supposed to be doing this is not doing anything.
He's dead. I don't drunk or fooling around with this caretaker or going around visiting other countries or whatever.
I don't know what he's doing.
It is uncanny how Brazil resembles the U.S. in terms of what has happened. Exactly.
Can I finish off by, again, ending with the censorship side?
I think I'd read, well, Elon Musk said they had to close their office in Brazil.
Then there was talk of a daily fine. If you used Twitter, then that seemed to be removed. People obviously can use VPNs.
You can access Twitter or X just on X.com. It doesn't have to be the app.
But kind of there is a game being played here, a very dangerous game, and that's to do with people's access to information.
But what's the current situation?
Are there fines that people use it?
And how do people get around that?
Well, Peter, the thing is, this psychopath, he decided that there would be a 50,000 Reais fine, a daily fine for anyone who was caught using VPN to reach X, the platform.
The problem is this amount, which is equivalent to about $8,000.
The problem is people who understand about computers much more than I do say that it's impossible for you to be caught using VPN because the very basic philosophy and nature of the VPN is exactly to make you invisible.
You know, you start to being, for example, when I wanted, I was living in Brazil sometime, you know, a few years ago, I wanted to try to get a Mac Pro, and I wanted to know more about it.
So I tried getting into Apple and chatting with the lady.
No, no, you cannot do that because you're outside the United States, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Oh, yeah?
Right.
I got into VPN.
I chatted with the lady.
I got all the information that I needed.
Thank you very much.
Period.
Same thing here.
You know, you cannot be caught using that.
So, that's the very bully, you know, proposition that this guy has.
He's always threatening.
He's always intimidating.
He's always, you know, that's how he works.
So, this is what's going on.
Now, the X was suspended. It's not working right now.
For a brief, maybe 24-hour period, it came back because they changed the Cloudflare thing came back, but they already, Cloudflare already isolated their IPs or whatever, and X is already off the air in Brazil again.
Even so, as I told you in the beginning, this guy, the psychopath, he decided to fine X for 5 million Reais because of these 24 hours where X was briefly on the waves again and who decides what kind of money, what kind of fine, how is it done?
Why is it done?
Nobody knows.
The guy just wakes up in the morning, I'm gonna fine and that's it.
There must anger sorry just facial there must be anger in Brazil because, I mean in most countries X is the number one downloaded app and people rely on that to connect with each other exactly what's happening so there must be a lot of anger.
I mean if you ban it's like banning the most popular soap opera or TV program in a country that's going to come back and in a similar way.
I can't imagine this is going to gain Lula the much support.
No, the thing is, Peter, going back to the same thing that I told you, if in Brazil you have a soccer game, Flamengo and Corinthians, you know, two very popular teams in Brazil, and something happened there, the referee was, you know, stealing from one side or whatever, well, there's going to be trouble all over the place.
People are going to be wrecking whatever they find in front of them, Metro buses and attacking people and stuff.
Because anger is genuine.
Now, if this psychopath does something like that, people get angry.
They don't say anything.
They don't.
It's very weird.
I can't understand why, you know.
And these things bother me very, very much.
So I said, well, I have to live my life somewhere else.
Although I care deeply for Brazil, I want to help fix that situation.
I have my own ideas, and many of them I should not be disclosing them here.
But, you know, live like this, you know, swallowing frogs every day.
I don't think that's the way to live, you know.
You're 100%.
Claudio, I really do appreciate you coming on. Obviously, people can follow you on X-Twitter at Claudio Lessa. It's there on the screen.
The links are all below.
And I know the world watched Brazil closely during Bolsonaro's time.
And the focus has been back on Brazil because of this censorship.
So it is an issue which massively concerns all of us, especially because of the size and influence of Brazil. But thank you so much for giving us your time and explaining a little bit of what's happening in Brazil.
Okay, Peter, thank you so much. And if I may, I would like to suggest the viewers to look for me on YouTube, which is @A-C-L-N, oh wait a minute it's @ACLN8 That's basically it.
Okay.
I will put that link in the description so people can just click on that.
ACLN, which is News 8.
The N followed by EWS. ACLN EWS 8. I'm sorry for the confusion, but that's a new channel that I started.
And the other one that I had, like 300,000 people has been cut off from monetization.
So I had to try something else.
As we all try and get around that, but make sure the links will be in the description, as we always put in the description, whether you're watching or listening, a list of all the links for all our guests.
I appreciate that.
You can always find it there.
But Claudio, appreciate your time. It's always good to have someone on brand new.
Get to meet them for the first time.
So, thanks for give us your time today.
Thank you so much, it was an honour, it was a pleasure.
And I appreciate people will get to know a little bit more about Brazil by watching this
Thank you

The Week According To . . . Karli Bonne'

Join us on today's "The Week According To," where we dive headfirst into the political maelstrom surrounding the 2024 elections and President Trump's recent public engagements. From the vibrant hat collection of our guest Karli Bonne to the serious discussions on security threats against Trump, we're covering it all. Expect insights into Trump's media interactions, the shifting political landscapes, and why grassroots support might surprise you. We'll also analyse Kamala Harris's public persona, union worker support shifts, and how this election might resonate globally. Tune in for a blend of analysis, humour, and calls to action. So, buckle up, 'Midnight Riders.' This isn't just news; it's a movement. 
Karli Bonne' is a retired model, dancer and a Rockstar wanna be.Now she is a full blown MAGA maniac video clipper with three phones running, arguably the biggest Trump, MAGA, America First social media account.She is a proud New Yorker and Patriot, continuously laughing at the establishment because it’s like holy water on a demon, and these demons must be eradicated.
Follow Karli on these links... 𝕏                          x.com/KarluskaPTELEGRAM          t.me/realKarliBonne (Midnight Rider Channel)TRUTH                 truthsocial.com/@KarliBonneGETTR                  gettr.com/user/karlibonne
Interview recorded  20.9.24
Connect with Hearts of Oak...𝕏                         x.com/HeartsofOakUKWEBSITE            heartsofoak.org/PODCASTS        heartsofoak.podbean.com/SOCIAL MEDIA  heartsofoak.org/connect/SHOP                  heartsofoak.org/shop/
*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.
Check out his art theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com and follow him on 𝕏 x.com/TheBoschFawstin
Links to topics...A lot of brothers are supporting Trump  https://x.com/KarluskaP/status/1836596084568698987TRUMP: "I just work really hard"https://x.com/MAGAIncWarRoom/status/1836599157382865192Trump jokes https://x.com/KarluskaP/status/1836542988735873475HAPPENING NOW ON LONG ISLANDhttps://x.com/DanScavino/status/1836557135955546362Harry get your fat ass out of the couchhttps://x.com/KarluskaP/status/1836559229433323660electoral college modelhttps://x.com/LeadingReport/status/1835817374450168219Kamala explaining something https://x.com/KarluskaP/status/1836947249168896139Gun owners Kamala https://x.com/KarluskaP/status/1836944075314057397Secret Service sued https://x.com/KarluskaP/status/1836913040890970238Diddy https://x.com/KarluskaP/status/1836571416017195053Teamsters poll  https://x.com/JasonMillerinDC/status/1836469896776929527Lady Gaga‘s dad endorses Trump  https://x.com/KarluskaP/status/1836752803844227457Why are they hiding https://x.com/KarluskaP/status/1836726023863378073Beep Beep Boom https://x.com/KarluskaP/status/1836330895520739804Biden wearing Trump hat  https://x.com/RealGsPatton007/status/1834934166502195694Babylon Bee Newsom https://x.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1836518555648692570

Christopher Ruddy - Newsmax's Next Frontier: IPO and the Conservative Media Landscap

Shownotes and Transcript⁨
In this episode of Hearts of Oak Podcast, we sit down with Christopher Ruddy, the CEO of Newsmax, as he delves into the inception and growth of his media empire, culminating in the announcement of Newsmax's upcoming IPO. Christopher shares his journey from covering the Clinton White House to founding Newsmax with a vision to counter the mainstream media's perceived bias. He discusses the challenges of maintaining a conservative voice in media, the surge in Newsmax's popularity during the 2020 election, and the strategic move towards an IPO. Listeners will gain insights into how they can invest in Newsmax's future, as Chris outlines the IPO process and its significance in broadening the platform's reach. This episode not only explores Newsmax's past and present but also looks forward to its role in shaping a more balanced media landscape.
Invest in Newsmax  invest.newsmax.com
Christopher Ruddy, is CEO of Newsmax Media, Inc., the parent company of NEWSMAX, America’s fastest-growing cable news channel. He is a noted journalist and entrepreneur, is CEO and president of Newsmax Media Inc., one of the nation's leading news media companies. In 1998, Ruddy founded Newsmax, a multimedia publishing company that publishes online and offline content in the fields of news, politics, health and finance. Newsmax.com ranks consistently as one of the country's most trafficked news Web sites.As a journalist, Ruddy previously worked at the New York Post and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review.A Newsweek cover story named him as one of America's top 20 most influential news media personalities. He also studied as a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.Ruddy sits on the Board of Directors of the Financial Publishers Association, the industry organization representing investment publications that reach 25 million Americans monthly.He holds a B.A. summa cum laude in history from St. John's University in New York and a master's in Public Policy from the London School of Economics.
Connect with Christopher and Newsmax...𝕏                        x.com/ChrisRuddyNMX                           x.com/NEWSMAXWEBSITES         newsmax.com
Interview recorded  12.9.24
Connect with Hearts of Oak...𝕏                         x.com/HeartsofOakUKWEBSITE            heartsofoak.org/PODCASTS        heartsofoak.podbean.com/SOCIAL MEDIA  heartsofoak.org/connect/SHOP                  heartsofoak.org/shop/⁩
*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.
Check out his art theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com and follow him on 𝕏 x.com/TheBoschFawstin
Transcript
Hearts of Oak:
And I'm delighted to have Christopher Ruddy with us, CEO of Newsmax. Christopher, thank you so much for your time today.
Christopher Ruddy:
Well, very nice to be on with you. Very excited, Peter, to do the show. And I know you're developing an international following, so it'll be fun to see the impacts we have. Maybe Newsmax will be well beyond the borders of the United States when we're done.
Well, it is. And I've enjoyed Newsmax on Roku in the UK. On the app, online, on Freeview. It's available on terrestrial TV in the UK. So it is everywhere, and I've thoroughly enjoyed it. But you started Newsmax 25 years ago. Maybe let us know, before we touch on the IPO, which is coming up in months, let us know what was behind that, your idea of launching a new media venture. What was your vision for it?
Well, it goes back a little bit of ways. 25 years ago, you know, I was covering the Clinton White House at the time in the 90s, and I saw them that the media was pretty one-sided. I remember there was a study of the White House press corps in the 90s that showed that 89% of the White House press corps had voted for Bill Clinton. I mean, how do these people claim that they're balanced or they talk about diversity, but they're not for diversity of opinion? And remember, Clinton only got in the 92 election about 42%, I think, of the vote. He didn't get a majority because it was – Ross Perot was in the race. So, I mean, they're so lopsided it wasn't funny. As bad as it was then, Peter, it's worse today because not only are people – are they leaning left like they were in the 90s. Now they're polarized and weaponized. I've been very disappointed. We subscribe to the Associated Press. I've been very disappointed how just weaponized and woke that organization has become. and, I'm sorry, if you cross the border of the United States illegally, it's a crime, and you're an illegal alien into the United States. To say that Newsmax is a racist organization, because we use that term, I just think it's unbelievable.
That said, I believe that illegal aliens should be treated with dignity and that we should – they are human beings. And they have certain rights that the Constitution provides of anybody that's in the country, whether they're a citizen or not. But I think you've got to be honest with the language you use. Anyway, that's just like a small portion of why I sort of – I'm a contrarian when it comes to the mainstream media.
Newsmax has taken the view we should give public both sides and the other side of the story. And we have done that. And I think it's been a big success for us digitally and now television.
Vision no certainly and I mean it started just with a few tens of thousands of dollars that probably couldn't even buy you an advert now on most tv channels and you've grown Newsmax from those humble beginnings, to taking it to an IPO through launching on TV in 2014, I mean it has been quite a ride. What has that been like for you yourself whenever you look back at that rise?
Well, I don't do a lot of looking back. I'm so busy dealing with the issues that I face today. And, you know, it's not really that easy running a conservative media operation in the United States. There's a lot of constant flack and attacks and efforts against us. Despite all of that, we've continued to rise. And what I think gratifying, if you look back on what the current situation is, I feel like the American people really do support us, that we've had tremendous amount of support and you know, Reuters came out with a study. Reuters is not like conservative, they did a study in June that found that there are 12 top news brands in the United States and Newsmax was one of those 12. Now I didn't ask to be on the list, they just did their survey, they were honest and you know I have to tell you I almost fell off my seat because we were the only ones that was like, not backed by a billion dollar corporation, it was ABC, MBC, Fox was on it, but we were the only real conservative leaning one on the channel. Fox you know is changing so I thought it was like areal affirmation that the American public's waking up and we're breaking through. We now have a cable channel that's number four in the United States but we're really close to overtaking CNN, we would have done it had we been on an equal basis and the number of cable homes. So that's happening. We were number seven in July for all of cable. So there's a couple of hundred cable channels. And again, this was not, you know, I come from a middle-class, humble beginnings. My dad was a New York police lieutenant. I grew up, and you mentioned I started with a $25,000 investment. But over time, people have supported us, the American people. They're voting with their remote controls and their apps. And downloads, and it's actually wonderful and gratifying to see.
I mean, for me, it was 2020, that election.
Newsmax was put on my radar, and I think you took up the baton from Fox News that had got a bit of Trump Derangement Syndrome, and you stuck with Trump. But you seem to have taken that baton for conservatives, certainly in the TV space and wider, and that is a responsibility to take, isn't it?
Yeah. No, I mean, Fox has been good for a long time. I actually have a very high opinion of Rupert Murdoch. I think the guy is an American hero, should have won the American Medal of Freedom. If Trump gave the American Medal of Freedom to one man, it should have been Rupert Murdoch because, and I have no benefit saying it, he's a competitor now. But I did work for him in the 90s and I have a tremendous amount of respect. What he's done in Britain, in the United States and think aboutall of these billionaires. We hear a lot of them complain about the American media and the woke left, but it took an Australian who became an American to actually do something about it and I think Fox News was a game changer. And it was for a long time. I think his son, Lachlan, is a good conservative from what I can see. But I also think he's not so much caught into the whole desire to make America great and all of that other stuff and maybe likes the entertainment part of the business more. I mean, he's a pretty savvy business guy. He launched the major real estate thing in Australia that was huge for his companies. So, but, I think Fox is changing. I think that's the best way to put it. People are leaving and they're going to Newsmax and that's good for us and it's good for competition.
No, I remember being in a hotel room in the States and watching, turning on to Fox and they had an LGBT advert or a pride festival. And I thought, wow, it has changed. It's no longer for their base. And Newsmax certainly has picked it up. But you must be in a constant battle between entities like the Soros Foundation that want to see you gone because you seem to be the mouthpiece for conservative thinking and the weaponization of the institutions in the States. And you've managed to walk that, I'm sure it's been a very difficult line for you to walk, that regulation and attacks. And yet, despite that, you've grown and grown year by year.
I think it's important work, and it's nice to think somebody else might do it, but they're not, so we're doing it. And if Fox goes, and it does seem like it will eventually go, right, when Rupert passes, he's 93, there's a battle in courts going on. But I'm not so sure, no matter what happens there, that it's going to really be consistent to his vision, initial vision. And Newsmax is really the only thing left standing now. So through the years, I've had offers for people to buy Newsmax and we've turned them down or did not pursue them. And I think it's important that we keep doing it. It's one of the reasons we decided to go public because we felt like we could have remained a private company. We've been successful. And we think that by joining with hundreds of thousands of investors as we go public, if we're approved, that we will have an army of supporters that will help push us over CNN and to market dominance. And we saw the success of President Trump's, Trump Media, which we think indicates there's a significant demand for conservative media out there. So we announced it, and we've gotten a tremendous response to it.
So what does that, because some of the viewers, I know our viewership is half and half U.S, U.K and many of them will be watching thinking, actually I'd like to play a part, I've enjoyed, I benefited from watching Newsmax. I mean how do they play a part in this IPO to actually support Newsmax, to make sure you go to the next level?
Well, we have a website that we created, and a lot of it's being done online with this very innovative investment bank that's been around for over a decade. And the website is NewsmaxInvest.com, which is one word, NewsmaxInvest.com. And on it, we talk about not only the plan, we just filed last week to go public with the SEC. So there is an approval process. But we are allowed under this particular offering to seek early share investments if people want preferred shares. They can buy shares. They can even do it with a credit card. And by the way, if they fit the eligibility standards, whether they're in the US or in England or anywhere in the world, they investors can buy shares. The eligibility standards are based on income and net worth and they're determined not by us, but by the SEC for this preferred share offering, but basically we're selling shares where you can get a seven percent dividend until we go public and then you get the shares are valued at 25 % discount to the IPO price. So you're basically locking in a potential profit. And we think it's a great deal. And certainly, we're seeking to raise $150 million. So far, we've raised about half of that amount, which is tremendous. And we're expecting to close pretty soon because we just have so many, over 45,000 investors have said they plan on investing in either this or the IPO. So we're really excited about the potential there.
And so it's important to read all the material in the memorandum. You go to Newsmaxinvest.com and there's, I think, a lot of information. But I think what's really going to happen is the way this regulation is organized, it's an expedited IPO process under Regulation A. You can only raise 75 million when you go public which is a small amount, but by doing the early raise now we're essentially raising the shares that will be in the marketplace. These shares will be registered to be trading soon after the IPO happened, so I think the shareholders will do pretty well, I can't guarantee it and obviously you should talk to your investment advisor about it.
Well, all those links will be in the description for people to click on it and look at that and take part if you so wish.
And the response to that call for investment shows the surge of conservative media. People are hungry for truth. They're hungry for something different from the established media. And Newsmax seems to bridge that alternative media, which you started at, moving into TV. And you seem to have crossed over that from alternative to established. And sometimes I guess that must be a hard path to follow, keeping all those from being hugely successful from 2014 and TV.
Well, I think we just, you know, we follow sort of whether you say alternative or establishment. We just do it the old-fashioned way. We just report the news. And, you know, people say, oh, it's nice to say that. But, you know, like I have people on that are liberal, all day long. And then we have people that are very critical of Trump. We have people on that are Republicans that are critical of Trump. John Bolton comes on Newsmax all the time. And we're considered very supportive of Trump. I think it largely comes because we actually cover him. And President Trump has spoken very highly of us, says it's his favorite network and he's tuning in and all that's great. But at the end of the day, we're going to still put criticisms on because people should be informed of both sides. And I don't think ultimately he has a problem with that, where Fox was basically freezing him out for a long period of time, wouldn't put him on, wouldn't cover his events. And I think that's wrong. You know, when the primary happened, we didn't say, and I've known Donald Trump for 25 years. I'm a friend of his, but I didn't say, you know what, we're supporting him over the other candidates. We had DeSantis on all the time, Nikki Haley, et cetera.
And we let people decide. And I think Fox is like, well, we don't want Trump. We're going to back DeSantis. And then he wasn't working. And then they were going to back Nikki. And then she wasn't working. And they did this in 2016, where they opposed Trump in every candidate. To me, I think this is just unbelievable. You wouldn't think CNN and MSNBC said in the 2020 election, And you know, we're going to endorse Biden. We're going to give him favorable coverage because we want him. I think it would have been a revolt to the Democratic Party and they would have lost a lot of credibility, but Fox, I think it comes from, you know, frankly, Rupert Murdoch came where he was a major, the major dominant figure in media in Australia and then certainly in England for a long period and he is a king made gurney was more used to that. I think in the U.S market it really doesn't work and I don't think it's a good business approach and so I let the people decide.
Oh, well, I'm glad that I can enjoy Newsmax here in the UK and get that perspective. So Christopher Ruddy, thank you so much for giving us your time and talking about the upcoming IPO and letting us know how the viewers and listeners can be a part of that. 60 days to go to the election, it's going to be a wild ride. So thank you so much for your time today.
Well, thank you. And my only two things, one is check out newsmaxinvest.com if you're interested in the IPO or the planned IPO or buying shares now and number two there's a rumor you're going to Chicago next week and I want you to know that,
if you need to buy body armor, we could recommend some places, extra security?
I’m a Catholic so maybe we could get some novena's said for you.
I mean, God love what you are doing, it's so important and keep up your good work Peter.

Lou Engle - Women Warriors of Faith: The Upcoming 'A Million Women' Gathering in D.C

Welcome to "Hearts of Oak," where today we delve into a profound discussion on spiritual revival and cultural transformation. Our guest, a pivotal figure in the American Christian movement, shares insights on the upcoming "A Million Women" event set for October 12. This gathering isn't just an event; it's a call to action for women across America to unite in prayer and fasting, mirroring the biblical Esther's stand against injustice. We explore the event's significance in addressing critical issues like abortion and the erosion of family values, and how it aims to be a catalyst for national repentance and revival. Our conversation also touches on the power of collective prayer, the impact of recent cultural shifts, and the urgent need for a unified Christian response to contemporary challenges. Join us as we discuss the role of faith in public life and how this movement might just be the spark needed for a sweeping moral restoration in America.
Lou Engle is an intercessor for revival, and the visionary co-founder of TheCall, a prayer and fasting movement responsible for gathering hundreds of thousands around the globe.He has been involved in church planting, establishing prayer movements and strategic houses of prayer. Lou is the founder of the pro-life ministry Bound4Life. Now residing in Colorado Springs, he is married to his beautiful wife Therese and blessed with 7 wonderful children. He is the president of Lou Engle Ministries, recently launched to mobilize fasting and contending prayer, and to envision and empower stadium Christianity, and to ignite reformation prayer into the nations of the earth.For the past twenty-two years, Lou has been an international voice calling a generation to Nazirite consecration, fasting and prayer, and the pursuit of God’s dreams for their lives through the ministry of TheCall.Lou has raised up prayer movements, has been a voice for the shifting of the supreme court for ending abortion, and has encouraged a movement of adoption to be the answer for the great injustice.Now, Lou is prophetically declaring that we are on the verge of the 3rd great awakening, and Jesus the evangelist will be manifested in great salvation and deliverance power. A mighty Jesus movement is coming to America, Billy Graham’s mantle is falling on a new generation of evangelists, and streets and stadiums will be filled with a new song of God’s salvation. 
A Million Women: Day of Atonement Solemn Assembly  amillionwomen.orgOctober 12, 2024 The National Mall, Washington D.C. 
Connect with Lou...𝕏                         x.com/LouEngleWEBSITE            louengle.comINSTAGRAM       instagram.com/lou.engle
Interview recorded  2.9.24
Connect with Hearts of Oak...𝕏                         x.com/HeartsofOakUKWEBSITE            heartsofoak.org/PODCASTS        heartsofoak.podbean.com/SOCIAL MEDIA  heartsofoak.org/connect/SHOP                  heartsofoak.org/shop/
*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.
Check out his art theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com and follow him on 𝕏 x.com/TheBoschFawstin
Transcript
Hearts of Oak:
Absolutely honoured to have Lou Engle with us today. Lou, thank you for joining us today.
Lou Engle:
What a pleasure, Peter. I look forward to connecting and getting to know you. I don't know what Hearts of Oak is, but I'd love to hear about that. But thank you for bringing me on.
Not at all. For the 20 years I've known your name in the background for the phenomenal work you're doing. Just to the before we delve into what's coming up in DC with a million women which is on the screen amillionwomen.org everyone needs to go and check out the website find out what's happening in DC I will discuss all of that @LouEngle on X on Twitter and make sure and the website is there make sure and delve into that but for maybe our audience just a little sidestep before I jump in with Lou. I mean, I am honoured to have someone on who has called America and the nations to repentance over decades, has called individuals to take the responsibility as Christians, has called the church to actually stand in the gap for the nations whenever there weren't many other voices. And it is a delight to have someone who actually,
For 20 years, I've certainly known your name, Lewis, someone who actually is bold and is taking the word of God to the nation and to the nations and calling them back to a position where they put God where he should be, the honour he should be. So I'm absolutely delighted. But even before I get into Million Women, before I get into the call, I want to ask you personally, what's your story? How did you end up being used by God to fill stadiums up with tens of thousands of Christians calling out to God? What led you to that point and starting such events like that?
Yeah. Well, I can go back. Thank you, Peter, for asking. I can go back 40 years to a book I read by Derek Prince, an Englishman, a statesman who loved Israel, loved America, and he wrote a book called Shaping History Through Prayer and Fasting. Basically, the premise of that book is this, that nations are shaped by fasting and prayer. Governments, leaders are shaped by the prayers of God's people. And then in the book, he talks about that in the days of the crisis of nations, the answer will be collective, united, massive fasting and prayer, like Joel chapter two, like Esther's fast.
Those gatherings actually shifted history. And his premise is that those gatherings will shift history even in our day. I was gripped by this book. It's been my textbook book for 40 years. I've done long fasts for 40 years because of an Englishman who gave me my marching orders. In fact, before the first call, I had never met him, but the first gathering 24 years ago, 24 years ago, where 450,000 primarily young people gathered to fast and pray in D.C. I heard he was in Fort Lauderdale I called his people and said Can I have a half an hour I just want to thank a father Who gave me my calling And I ended up meeting with him In Fort Lauderdale He was like 84 years old.
Not well. And there in that hotel room I said as a son, I want to thank you. As a father, that you gave me a calling. He laid down on his bed and began wailing.
And weeping. And I knew that God had given me a father's blessing to carry united fasting and prayer. So it goes really back to Derek Prince, an Englishman, statesman, who loved Israel and who called for fasting and prayer. Then in 19, I led fasting and prayer movements in the 90s with a group called Rock the Nations. And I won't go into the whole story, but promise keepers put a million men on the mall in 1997.
A week later, I held up the front page of the USA Today, which shows the picture of that gathering. And the spirit of prophecy came upon me. And I said, the hearts of the fathers are turning to the children, but the hearts of the children return to their fathers. And there's coming a corresponding movement of young people who will go to the mall in D.C. To fast and pray that America would turn back to God. I didn't know how to pull that off. We actually held three gatherings, 1997, 1998, 1999, where up to 4,500 kids gathered for three days to fast and pray that stadiums would be filled, that massive gatherings would take place to turn America back to God. And then the brief version is in 1999, Peter, I prayed a prayer that has defined everything that I've done since that point. And that prayer was this, God, how can I turn America back to God? It seemed crazy, but I knew my heart had reached up into heaven. Couple of weeks later, a woman came to me and she said, you don't know who I am, but the Lord told me to pay your salary this year because you're going to start something with the Youth of America in prayer that will change the destiny of the nation. She paid my salary for 15 years.
And she came to me and she said, have you ever thought about putting promise keepers on the mall in D.C.? I mean, kids on the mall like promise keepers. She said, I'll give you $100,000 to start. And I said, I'd prophesied it. So 24 years ago, September 2nd, in a week, it will be the 24th anniversary. They came to a sound and the sound was this. We're not speaking. We're not telling anybody who the speakers are or the worship teams are. We've had enough personality-driven religion. When there's no hope for a nation, when there is no remedy, blow the trumpet in Zion. Call a fast, Joel 2. And they came to a sound. We've taught our children to feast and play. The times demand they fast and pray. And that launched the movement of the call 24 years ago. And since then, we've done stadiums and arenas all across America. The lady who paid my salary is 100 years old. I just visited her. I didn't know if she knows who I am, but as a son, I said, thank you for giving me the calling of God in my life. And that's how the journey began. And I believe we're in a divine narrative, though, even though we're in such a crisis in America, I still believe the promise. America, something stronger than the the rebellion can be poured out in America. That's the story.
Can I ask you through stadium, because I've only ever been once, coming from a small Baptist background, ending up, as Esteban knows, in a charismatic church in London. But it was 2003, I went to Bogota with MCI and actually saw a stadium full of Christians calling out to God. And I'd never experienced something like that before or after, you were doing this on a rolling basis. Maybe give the viewers an insight and the listeners an insight who may not have any concept of what that is to have a stadium not calling for a football team, but calling out to God.
Yes. Well, really, our gatherings were 12-hour gatherings, which you've come here not for a festival, but for a fast. Because we had festivals, but we have not had a fast. And so those 12 hours is like lots of presence worship. If God's not there.
It's not worth to call a gathering. And literally, really, in many ways, I believe these solemn assemblies are like court cases, that God holds a court case for a nation or a city, and basically he calls for repentance to remove the enemy's accusations before the very throne, own the courtroom of God. And so we go through repentance. We go through repentance and personal encounter. A lot of it is literally people praying in small groups on the grounds. It's not just stage driven. It's people calling on God, praying for revival. And then even recently more so that that these will be massive gatherings of communion, lifting the blood that is really our only answer, the mercies of God. So this is what it would look like. And then releasing sounds of authoritative decree, declaring the victory of God over our nations. I don't know if that answers your question, but that's what it looks like. Ten hours, this one will be a fasting and prayer.
And Yeah, so that's Peter, that's kind of what we do.
Can I before we jump into what's happening in DC and I think even for the WarRoom posse, I am sure that Steve Bannon if he wasn't in jail, would be talking about this and Mo Bannon or someone else can correct me but I'm sure he would be here seeing this a nation calling out to God and he understands the importance of that. But can I ask you personally, what's your salvation experience? Because I think it's important. We've only ever had two or three people on, I think, in like 700 interviews who have mentioned their salvation experience, how they came to Christ. But I think what you're doing, it's important to hear your personal side. So how did you actually come to Christ?
Well, actually, I grew up in church and prayed a million times to get saved. You know, when I went to Christian college, I played basketball for four years and I was lost. I believed in Jesus. I yearned for him. I would go down by the river and cry to God, but I never felt had an assurance of salvation. And I hated the gospel team, the Christian group on the Christian campus. I hated them. They bothered me, but they put me on a hit list, most wanted, least likely to be saved. And they prayed for me for three years. I graduated from college unsaved. And I went back to California in the midst of the Jesus movement where thousands were being saved all over, not not even in the churches, in the streets. And I was invited to an Afterglow meeting where they're in the charismatic movement. And my parents invited me. I went into this living room and there was singing in tongues.
And all I know, the whole room seemed to be lit up. I could say I was saved by a sound of the presence of the Holy Spirit. And I invited the, I get so hungry to know Jesus. I invited the leader of that gathering to come to my house and I said to him, I've got to get saved. And he said, well, you just pray to receive Christ. And I said, I've done it a hundred times, but I've never felt it. He said, you may never feel it, but God's word is true. You believe his word. You take a stand and he that comes to me will no wise be cast out.
I prayed a prayer and felt nothing. And for 13 days, a war went on in my mind. The devil would say, you're not saved. You don't feel it. I said, I'm saved. I'm saved. And I went into a 13-day battle. On the 13th day, I was in the White House. That's where I lived, in the White House. In an upper room, my bedroom, I remember kneeling down, and suddenly the love of God was shed abroad in my heart to the Holy Spirit. Instantaneously, I knew I had passed from life into death. I ran down the stairs screaming, I'm saved. I'm saved. I went and bought all the gospels of John. They kicked me out of the mall. I preached in movie theaters. Something happened that this religious kid encountered Jesus and turned me into a journey and a hunger for revival that marked me, and that was 49 years ago.
This is October 9th will be my year, the jubilee, going into the 50th year, and I believe it's time for another Jesus movement.
Tell us about this gathering you've called it would have been easier for it to call maybe a thousand women or ten thousand, I'm wondering, tell us about that that boldness calling for a million women to gather in DC.
That boldness really I mean it's all scary but that boldness comes because when you get the word of the Lord, I remember years ago saying that what happens with me is dreams come and it's sovereign supernatural confirmations to the point that I simply talk about those things and bones rattle and movements occur. And I said to my friend 40, 30 years ago, I think my calling is to just tell dreams and prophetic confirmations, and that my calling is to bring forth movements. And that's how it's worked for me. So it began 24 years ago, and then we've done these gatherings that I believe every one that we have done is a part of the divine narrative. This gathering that we're entering into is not an isolated event. I don't want to do events, I want a breakthrough that is connected to 25 years, 25 years of believing God, and this one was supernatural.
2014, I was in a prophetic gathering, and an explosion took place in the spirit, and a word came for two hours, and it was this. Like promise keepers, again, a million women will go to the mall in D.C. It will be the last stand for America. I believe America in many ways with the ideologies that are coming into this nation. I believe it could be our last stand. Once a nation adopts transgenderism, that nation literally collapses in the times of that adoption.
We're losing the school system, the education system. There's coming a point where the church has got to take a stand and can't be silent anymore. more. So this word came forth, a million women will come to the mall and it will be a last stand for America. And they will come in the spirit of Jeremiah chapter nine. Death has climbed through our windows. The fentanyl, the death culture that is rolling. Death has climbed through. Call your daughters, teach them to mourn. And they'll come and they'll give birth to a revival that will save a nation. And so since 2014, I've lived under the shadow of that dominating prophecy waiting for the moment. Then in 2017, witches rose up worldwide to curse President Trump.
Now, you've got to ask the question, and I started to ask, why would witches worldwide rise up to curse President Trump, a man that's not necessarily moral, a man that, you know, character is suspect, even though who could stand the barrage of witchcraft coming against him? And oh, my goodness. Anyway, so I asked that question. I wondered if the witches understood more than the pulpits of America, that this man was a threat to the blood altar of Roe v. Wade, that the bloodshed of the unborn 62 million babies. Listen, the Bible, the two things, the hills that we must stand on, in the image of God, he made man male and female, and the other images, it's in Genesis, you shall not shed innocent blood. When a nation changes the laws of God like that, that nation is under judgment.
I think that they understood this man was a threat to Roe v. Wade. He gave us three judges. Peter, we started a movement, 18 years, five days a week, pleading the blood of Jesus in front of the Supreme Court, 18 years. Jesus, I plead your blood over my sins and the sins of my nation, God, end abortion, send revival to America. That was our assignment. Roe v. Wade was brought down partially by the blood of Jesus. So I went up into the mountains. The Lord led me. He said, to go up into Esther's Park in Colorado. Some people call it Esther's Park, to fast and pray. I was fasting and praying on the third night I had a dream. And as far as I could see, I saw women coming from everywhere, young and old. And they were all coming to hear the book of Esther be taught. I'm looking at this women's revival.
And this Esther movement, I'm stunned by what I'm looking at in the dream. And I'm the only man there with an ancient Bible, which now I understand was an ancient call of Mordecai to mobilize what I'm looking at in this dream. And then the woman stands up in the book of Esther. I mean, it's teaching the book of Esther in the dream. And she says, and these two words in the book of Esther actually mean Nazgul, N-A-Z-G-U-L. I explode out of the dream instantly knowing what it means because I watched the third part of the movie, The Lord of the Rings, where the Nazgul witch king is destroying the armies of men and says, no man can kill me. But the king's daughter takes off her helmet, lets her hair down and says, I am no man. And she pierces the Nazgul. I explode out of the dream knowing there is coming a righteous women's movement that are going to take a stand like Esther, to stand in fasting and prayer, to challenge the ideologies of this nation, to fight for their children, but not just that, go public into the governmental places.
Go public into the education systems. She must fast and pray to break Haman's divination. When Haman was releasing divination in the casting of lots, he was the avatar. He was a governmental host carrying the ideologies that were going to destroy the Jews.
Today, we have governmental leaders that are avatars, that are literally the ones that are being possessed. Maybe not demon possessed, but they're carrying the ideologies that are fueled by the spirit realm. That's why Esther knows, I think she knows, that she calls for a jolt-to-kind of fast. Because you can't deal with spirit powers, witchcraft, that are fuelling ideologies. By politics alone, you must break those through united fasting and prayer. Then it's not enough to pray and fast. She's got to go public into the governmental realm. And I believe the nations of the West are going to find the discovery of what Derrick Prince actually preached. United Mass, a fastening prayer, challenging the powers in the heavens, and then raising up leaders like you're doing.
Raising up voices that will take a stand for righteousness. If I die, I die. Out of that movement, that was 2017, we have launched this movement that is now going to the mall on October 12th, the Day of Atonement. My Jewish friends literally have said to me, Peter, that the Day of Atonement is a court case. To see if a nation will get a verdict of mercy or judgment. And on that day, where there is repentance, then that blood is applied. And I'm believing that God is going to give a verdict of mercy to America. But I don't think it's just America.
I think we're in a worldwide Esther movement. When we started mobilizing this, we had no idea that October 7th would take place. And worldwide anti-Semitism. We're going to stand on that day and we're going to declare our covenant with the Jewish peoples and we're going to declare your people will be my people. We're believing that America doesn't have to divide Israel. And I have a word for Great Britain.
I'm just going to deliver it right now. My friend had a dream several years ago. He was in Wembley Stadium and I was on the stage of Wembley Stadium and we were singing that song. Hey Jude, don't make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better. Remember to let Jerusalem into your heart and it will start to make it better. This is the interpretation. Hey Jude, it's the word for juice.
Don't make it bad. Don't make that name bad. Take a sad song, your history in Great Britain, that in 1948, you rose up and did everything almost to stop Israel from becoming a nation. Take a sad song, your history, and make it better. Remember to bring Jerusalem into your heart, and you will start to make it better. My wife had a dream last night that in my backyard, there was a massive gathering of people People from England celebrating and lines of people were being baptized among the English. Why would she dream that the night before I talked to you?
I believe there's coming a massive gathering, and Peter, I said it today. I'm sorry about prophesying, but I wonder if we're being connected for a massive movement of righteousness, maybe a solemn assembly in Wembley Stadium, where we would repent on behalf of England, who divides the nation. Joel 2, I will gather the nations, and I will judge them on how they scattered and divided my people. Joel 3 is a massive word for the world right now. I believe this gathering on October 12th, the blood of Jesus will be applied. But I believe nations are going to be looking on online. Many are coming from the nations to stand and repent for their own nations, like Esther, to break the anti-Semitism and to pray that God would pour out his revival on all nations, America, because we are beginning to understand that God is saying, I'm going to raise up a movement to end, to stand against anti-Semitism. Sorry, I just went into, I hope that's okay, Peter, but...
No, and for UK viewers who are Christians, please do pray into that, because I'll take that dream your wife had, that word of prophecy, because we need revival in the UK so much. So I'll certainly take that and I encourage the viewers, if you're a Christian watching, and then you pray into that and pray that God sees that fulfilled and pray that you have a part to play in this. But can I... In the U.S.. We are 80 days from election. You talked about the Roe versus Wade. That was the 24th of June, I think, 2022. So just over two years ago, that was overturned. And this gathering in October, it fits into actually where some things are being pushed back. That change, I remember that day vividly, whenever that result from the Supreme Court came, him as like, no, it can happen. And then you begin to believe that God can change the institutions that we maybe accept or have come to accept as evil and destructive. God can, if he so chooses, push those back and change them. So tell me how this gathering of million women fit into that current situation, I think, in the US, where a lot of people are beginning to question how far the pendulum has swung, certainly on the issue of life, on abortion, and the whole transgender issue that people are becoming very concerned about, especially how children are being sexualized. So how does the gathering fit into that current climate in the U.S.?
Huge. 2004, I gathered 70 young people to fast and pray for 50 days and 50 nights continuously is he praying for the ending of abortion and a pro-life president, Derek Prince's stuff. We had a dream of two tornadoes coming to destroy America. The tornadoes had the letters H-A-H-A, abortion and the homosexual agenda. Not people, the agenda. In the dream, our company was called to restrain that. When Roe v. Wade fell, which was our assignment in intercession 18 years later, by the blood, the Lord said, now the next tornado. A prophet gave me a word 20 years ago that he had a transvision of 100,000 LGBTQ being saved and transformed. I've been praying this for 20 years, our team has been. We had a dream of a Wailing Wall with names that said 100,000 LGBT saved and transformed. And people on this Wailing Wall were names, and they were weeping over their names, and their names would leap off the Wailing Wall board to the testimony board. I believe this is what we're believing, even on that day. I don't think you're going to shift this in politics, the issue of the LGBTQ. It's going to be shifted by a massive Jesus movement, an awakening, that they're going to put it on Time magazine. What is going on? This is what this gathering to me is.
I literally had a dream, Peter, after a 40-day fast last year. I had a dream. I had this dream. I said to the Lord, Lord, you showed us how to reach the Supreme Court by the blood of Jesus, by dreams. If I'm your friend, give me a dream tonight. Show me how I can reach 100,000 LGBTQ. I go to sleep. I have a dream. And in the dream, it is Delta Factor. I wake up and I said, Lord, I know that's you, but I have no idea what Delta Factor is. So Lord, I'm going back to sleep. Give give me a dream and tell me what a delta factor is. I go back to sleep and I have a dream. I see a tall, strong military officer. And I said, excuse me, sir, what's a delta factor? He said, it's the leader of a million. I woke up and I knew the groans.
Of mothers that are losing their kids to the transgender, to the counter-cultural movement. God is going to hear their groans. I believe when Roe fell, it closed something and opened the womb of America. I am believing the womb of America is going to be open. We're going to see a Jesus move, but Delta means change factor.
And so on that day, we're going to cry out to God. We're going to have testimonies. We're going to have a testimony of a transgender woman who literally is a firebrand and is going to war against transgenderism. There's got to be a stand. It's going to be costly. There's a movement called Don't Mess With Our Kids coming out of this gathering. Jenny Donnelly, who I'm running with, is raising up a movement that we're going to believe in the days ahead. Millions will go to the streets, maybe in the next 10 years. Millions of women will go to the streets and they'll say, and men, don't mess with our kids. We will not go with your pronouns.
When you say you can't ever, we'll go to jail if we need to, but we're not giving you our kids. I think once you start pushing the button on children, mama bears will arise and say no more. And we're believing that, I mean, it's controversial, But we're believing for a stand that day that actually could set things in motion to challenge the spirits that are behind this whole agenda.
Can I tell you how it fits with the church? Because your agenda is radical, yet you take your marching orders from God and not from denomination or from cultural agenda. And churches have probably believed up to a certain point, you know, we'll just be left alone. We'll get on to our church business behind closed doors. We'll meet for a Sunday service and we'll be good. But I think some churches are wakening up to the reality, especially during COVID, that actually the government won't leave us alone. We will not have the right. We are moving towards times where Christians are having their freedoms restricted. So how does your radical approach of God says this, let's do it, fit into a church has maybe been lulled into a false sense of security?
Well, I've been saying this for some time. I said, Esther, do not think that you can hide in your palace, and have self-preservation, I'm saying, hey, this stuff about the grooming of your kids in public schools isn't stopping there. They're coming for your home-schooling. You can't hide in the palace of your home-schools. The spirit of Jezebel, however you want to say it, begins by simply raising up a culture of sexual immorality and the likes. She doesn't stop there by putting the prophets in prison, hiding in prisons, she actually slaughters them. That spirit hates Christianity, and it's being manifested in our governments. And I just want to say, the preachers that are saying, don't get involved in politics, is like saying, it's like Like the guys of Mount Carmel. How...
He says, how long will you hold between two opinions? And they were all silent. You cannot divorce the political realm from the protection, the view that you think you can protect your children. No, that spirit of Athali is looking for all the offspring. And I'm telling you, I'm fighting for my grandkids. And actually, people don't like because of my stand, Christian nationalism. I don't even know what that means. It has nothing to do with nationalism. It has everything to do with fighting for my grandkids. That's my answer.
100%, 100%. Can I, men might be watching thinking, this is a million women, so do I not have a part to play? Is this only a call for women?
Well, the main assignment was, I think, like Esther, She took a place of leadership when God called her. I'm not saying this big question, you know, men, women in ministry, all of this. All I know, there are moments of time in history, biblical history, where God raised up a woman, put his hand on them to actually lead great wars, I mean, cultural wars. And I believe that right now, even with the story of Israel right now and rising up, God is laying his hands on a new Esther moment all over the world to take a stand against false ideologies. There's something about women and when it affects children.
God put Esther in place. Mordecai needed to understand that.
But Mordecai was a man that cared for his adopted daughter. She was sex trafficked, Peter. She was in a harem. Her name is Esther, named after the spirit of Eshtar, the goddess of transgenderism, homosexuality, and pornography. That spirit. She's living in that culture. And God uses a woman under the culture of Ishtar, named Ishtar, to actually overthrow the various powers.
But it was never to be disconnected from the Mordecai movement. I want to call men. Call your women to this movement. Call your women and men on the Day of Atonement. Tune in with a millionwomen.org. Tune in online. Maybe many would want to come from England and actually join the battle, and so we're saying every man a Mordecai, every woman an Esther. We don't want to have like a women's movement that's separated from men. It's families. This is the only way it makes. In the image of God, he created men, male and female, and he gives them dominion. Together they take dominion, but we're recognizing now there is a hand of the Lord being pointed on the Esther movement worldwide, and that's my answer to that.
This, I mean, there may be people watching, you know, people are busy, they've got a lot of responsibilities, and I've been challenged recently with that verse, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from in the mouth of God. And I think Christians have forgotten what it means to feed on and exist on the word of God, the word of God who spoke the universe into existence, who is the creator. I think people are often caught up in their lives and think, actually, I'm serving God by doing this. And they forget that actually it is the Word of God that brings life. And this type of event speaks into, we need to hear God speak. And that is what it is about.
Peter, you're asking a great question. Sometimes I appeal to people. On the basis of a narrative, a prophetic storyline, where a woman paid my salary for 15 years to do solemn assemblies. I wasn't looking for this Esther thing, but I was interrupted by the word of the Lord. I think we've lost something that the scriptures are very clear, even in the book of Nehemiah. Let the trumpet player be next to me, Nehemiah says. When you hear the sound of the trumpet, gather to me there, there the Lord will fight for us. There are times when God will not fight for people unless they're willing to drop their denominational differences, their gender differences, their race differences. Brothers and sisters, the church is being massacred in some way, and she still wants to fight one another. Father, I believe how often I would have gathered you under my wings, but you would not have. God says there are times when you must gather. And Joel chapter 2, blow the trumpet in Zion, call a fast, gather the people, consecrate a solemn assembly, and afterwards I'll pour out my spirit. There is this sense that we become used to the prophetic, but a casual approach to the prophetic brings casualties. I believe we're in a last stand for America. And a dream was given in 1998. I was kneeling down and my friend was flying over me and he heard the voice of the Lord reading Psalm 50, The Lord, the mighty one, God, he comes to judge the earth. Gather to me my consecrated ones who have made a covenant by sacrifice, and let them call upon me in the day of trouble. Even in 1998, the Lord was speaking through this. And in the dream is Psalm 50, verse 15, all the way to verse 15. And it was this, there's still a window of mercy when God comes to judge his people. But the answer is gather. God put a gathering anointing on my life. I don't understand it. Stadiums, arenas, thousands, you know, I don't know, millions.
Anyway, Peter, I think the Ninevites, who had heard only one prophet, immediately repented. Yet with Judah, they had prophet after prophet after prophet. They became dull of hearing. And so they're judged when Nineveh, an unrighteous, ungodly nation, actually gets mercy because they respond to the urgency of the moment. I'm saying there's a last stand for America. And I believe those who hear will respond. Gather the consecrated ones. You don't need everyone. You needed the ones that have heard the fire in their bones and move. Move. We're doing 20 on September 22nd, Peter.
We received phone call from a man from Egypt, so concerned. He's in a network of 110 million intercessors worldwide. They called us and said, we are all concerned about your elections. We want to call 110 million people to fast and pray for you. Pray for America on September 22nd. Maybe the world understands more than even the church in America understands. Then we're calling 21 days of fasting right up to October 12th, because I mean, I love it. I never wanted to do an event. I only wanted a breakthrough. I'd like to call England. Fight for your, even though we were a rebellious son or daughter, fight for America Derek Prince said that years ago a great revival will come to America and sweep into England and we dream it last night I'm wondering out of my it's bizarre I think our two nations, I've been prepared for a great revival.
Amen. And can I say that it's not up to us to understand the call of God. It's up to us to respond in obedience. And often that's in confusion and not understanding. And I'm sure there are people watching and listening, Lou, who say, I want to be there. I know they can go to the website at millionwomen.org. They can click on that tab and register. They're coming. They can also register to volunteer because this event takes people. And I think there'll be people watching and listening that say, I want to go not only participate, but I want to go and be part of making sure this event happens. So just tell the viewers why being part of a volunteer team is so important for events like this.
Well, it's so interesting. 24 years ago, I think it was 500 Australians came a week before that gathering because they had this ancient calling of the Light Horsemen. The ones that went before and fought for Jerusalem. There's an army of people coming from Australia. We're talking to those from China and Korea, Brazil. There is a sense that they come as representatives. And some of them have said, we are coming to pay back. What America said for missionaries to our nation. I think there is something about representing a nation. In a sense, we're all coming to stand before God. As representative priests. But it's really for the whole world. There are 70 elections coming this year worldwide. The whole world, we're looking at world war possibilities. And many people believe that even the elections in America will determine the future of world wars. I think there's something about coming and representing your people and standing there, not just for America, but for the nations of the earth and for Israel. And so, yeah, absolutely. We're just believing for thousands to come from the nations.
Lou, I want to let you go because I know your time is precious, but I just wanted to finish just for you to take just a minute to pray for this because the time we are living in is uncertain. The elections are critical in America in the 5th of November. This event in October is also essential into that. So maybe could I just ask you just to finish and just take a moment to pray into those two situations?
Yes. Well, years ago, a guy said to Derek Prince, what do you want your legacy to be? Something to that effect. And he said, have you ever heard of the call, which was the name of the gatherings we held? And when I heard that, I said, Lord, if you'll allow me, I'll carry Derek Prince's seat to the nations. I want to pray for the grace of fasting worldwide. England, this is our roots. This is where we all came from. So, Father, right now, in the time of crisis of nations, Joel chapter 2, Lord, I pray that you would loose a trumpet sound, not by men, not by, you know, just because of podcasts or phones, but because you yourself are sounding an alarm worldwide. Lord, I loose your trumpet sound over Great Britain. Lord, I loose your trumpet sound over the nations of the earth. Lord, we pray that in the name of Jesus, the God you would restrain worldwide war.
Because in the days of world wars, the gospel is hindered. I pray, give us a shot with one more massive missions movement from Great Britain, from England. Lord, I pray, Father, that you would shift elections. You raise up kings and you bring them down. Lord, I pray for America, that you would preside. You would preside over this great assembly. You would preside over the shifting’s of governments. Again, in the name of Jesus.
I'm just taking my headphones off in my ear. Father, in the name of Jesus, I pray that those who are hearing this, you would stir them to fasting’s and prayer in these days. I pray for Israel. I pray that you would restrain Hezbollah. You would restrain the spirit of Haman in Hamas. That God, you would release, Lord, Lord, Lord, a movement worldwide of the roots, the Gentile church that said your people will be my people. I don't know how to pray. All these things coming down. I pray that you would restrain China and the Taiwanese. But think, you would restrain the Prince of Persia. Lord, in these days, let a massive shift. Father, I pray that you would do a miracle, even in this gathering, to release hostages. You're the unrestrained, unchallenged sovereign of the universe. Arise, O God. Arise with worldwide revival. The promise of Joel 2. After the fast, I will pour out my spirit on all flesh. And so I pray these things. And I bless Peter. I bless Hearts of Oak. I pray you'd put a trumpet to his mouth like never before. That his podcast will explode. and Lord, it'll come a sound of revival and reformation. And I pray for all those, Lord, listen, stir hunger.
Call them from the north, south, and east and west. Gather to me my consecrated ones who have made a covenant by sacrifice. And may your blood be exalted over all ideologies, over all demonic powers, that when you went to the cross, you said, Father, forgive them. And you dislodge principalities and powers. Do it in these days. Let the blood of Jesus be exalted. Amen.
Amen. Lou, thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. 12th of October.
Everyone make sure if you're there, you can go to millionwomen.org and be part of that. So thank you.

Matt Schlapp - A CPAC Perspective: Conservatism's Global Footprint and the Importance of the US Election

Welcome to Hearts of Oak, where we explore the essence of conservative thought. Today, we're privileged to have Matt Schlapp, the chair of CPAC, join us for a discussion that spans from the lively atmosphere of Mexico City to the critical landscape of American politics. We'll delve into CPAC's international expansion, the global conservative movement's fight against leftist ideologies, and the stark differences in political climates between the U.S. and Europe. Additionally, we'll tackle social issues, the upcoming U.S. elections, and the pivotal role of media in shaping our political discourse.Join us for an insightful conversation that promises to enlighten and engage, offering a deep dive into the heart of modern conservatism.
On June 19, 2014 the board of the American Conservative Union unanimously voted to elect Matt Schlapp as the ninth Chairman of the nation’s oldest and largest conservative grassroots organization. From 2001 to 2005, he served as President Bush’s political director during the re-election and previously as his deputy political director. During the 2000 presidential campaign he was a Regional Political Director with oversight of Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, and Oklahoma.Matt left the White House to run the Washington, DC offices of Koch Industries, a company headquartered in his hometown and known for their philanthropy to free market causes. Matt's Congressional experience began during the historic Republican wave of 1994 where he served Representative Todd Tiahrt (R-KS) as Chief of Staff for 5 years. During his tenure, Tiahrt averaged an ACU rating of 98%.Matt’s political activism first took root at the University of Notre Dame, where he started a conservative student magazine. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame (B.A.) and Wichita State University (M.P.A.)Matt and his wife Mercedes have five daughters.
Founded in 1974, CPAC is the nation’s oldest conservative grassroots organization and seeks to preserve and protect the values of life, liberty, and property for every American.
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Interview recorded 10.9.24
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*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.
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Petr Bystron - Immigration, Sovereignty and the Future of EU: An AfD Perspective

Join us for another episode of Hearts of Oak Podcast, where we're honoured to have the return of Petr Bystron, a Member of the European Parliament representing the Alternative for Germany (AfD), as our guest. In this insightful conversation, Petr delves into the transformative currents sweeping through European politics, sparked by the AfD's significant electoral achievements. We'll explore how the AfD's strategic alliances are influencing European policy, the media's portrayal of populist movements, and the party's dedication to tackling critical issues like immigration and national sovereignty head-on. Petr provides a unique perspective on the shifting dynamics within the EU, where traditional political alignments are giving way to a resurgence of nationalist sentiments.Expect a candid discussion that goes beyond the headlines, examining the core values and political philosophies at play in today's Europe. Tune in as we navigate these complex waters with one of the key figures shaping the continent's future.
Petr Bystron is the highest-ranking foreign politician of the AfD: He has been Chairman of the AfD in the Foreign Committee of the German Bundestag since 2017. Since 2021 he has been the foreign policy spokesman for his party and its representative in the Council of Europe and the Interparliamentary Union (IPU).He was the first AfD politician to be officially received by an incumbent president (Milos Zeman) and the first European to receive the „Eagle Award “ from the conservative US Phyllis Schlafly Foundation.He was born in the CSSR, from which he fled to Germany at the age of 16, where he received political asylum.Thirty years later, he faced similar persecution in Bavaria: during the 2017 election campaign, he was subjected to an illegal house search and it was announced that he was being monitored by the Bavarian secret service.In addition to these state reprisals, he is always the target of attacks by left-wing extremists.Bystron is actively committed to supporting politically persecuted people. In 2018, with the help of Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, he was able to free journalist Billy Six from Venezuelan detention.Petr Bystron is one of the founding members of the AfD. From 2015 to 2017 he was the state leader of the party in Bavaria. He took over the party in a crisis and led it from 3.5% of the vote to the best election result of all western federal states in the 2017 federal election with 12.7%.He founded and headed his party's National Committee for European and Foreign Policy (2013-2015).Bystron studied political science at the University of Politics and the Ludwig Maximillian University in Munich and has been working as a journalist for years. His articles on business and politics have been published in renowned daily newspapers and magazines in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and Switzerland.He has won several creative competitions, including an EU essay competition on the future of Europe.His current book 'MEGA – Make Europe Great Again' contains portraits of leading conservative politicians such as Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Penn and Nigel Farage.Petr is married, has two children and has lived in his constituency of Munich North for more than 30 years. He has been an entrepreneur for over thirty years.
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Interview recorded  6.9.24
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*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.
Check out his art theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com and follow him on 𝕏 x.com/TheBoschFawstin
Transcript
And hello, Hearts of Oak.
I'm delighted to have Petr Bystron joining us once again, this time not as a member of the Bundestag, but as a member of the European Parliament.
Petr, thank you so much for giving us your time today.
Hello, Peter.
Welcome and nice regards to everybody who is watching this podcast.
No, thank you. And you were, what, seven years in the Bundestag with AfD Alternative for Deutschland, and you have just taken up the position there in Brussels, the elections obviously a few months ago, and you're now there in Brussels.
Tell, maybe ask you about the European elections because AfD came second. It was at 16 percent of the vote and actually you came first in five of the 14 regions in Germany and that seems to be just going up and up and up.
Thee vote share that AfD are getting, but maybe Let us know your thoughts as an AfD politician in Europe, as an MEP.
What are your thoughts for the year ahead? And obviously, you'll be there for five years.
Yeah, well, firstly, yes, it was a win.
It was a big success for AfD, but this is just a part of all European movement.
As you can see, in all European countries, the populistic movements, the right-wing, the conservatives, they won.
We are much stronger than in the former European Parliament.
What is the result?
The result is that now there are three right-wing conservative groups.
Viktor Orban established one big group.
They are the third biggest group in the European parliament the ECR is there and we as AfD we established a new group; Europe of Sovereign Nation in addition to that there is the old EPP.
Which contains parties which officially are claiming that they are conservative, like the German CDU, and you are laughing too, because that's the problem.
They are big, they are the biggest group, in fact.
Ursula von der Leyen is from this group, and she was elected for president. But what is happening?
They are working together with communists, socialists, greens.
They are collecting their majorities on the left part of the spectrum in spite of they have the majority with us, with the right-wing conservatives.
So, those guys, they are the betrayals of their voters, and this is what will I think determine, the next five years in the European parliament.
How will behave this EPP group?
Will they still liaise with the left extremists or will they remain themselves what is the origin of their parties what their voters really want and will they do a right-wing conservative politics again.
It's going to be interesting and I'm assuming that some of the Conservatives stay within the EPP, because it gives them position, maybe voting rights in certain areas, committees.
The European Parliament set up is a curious set up.
So, that's why I'm assuming Conservatives has stayed in that group and not joined, not joined Viktor Orban's group or not joined the ECR or not joined the Europe of Sovereign Nations.
Well, this is a really good point.
It was showed, displayed even in the first voting.
The EPP members together with the left and socialism greens, they kind of avoided that that members of Orbán's new group were elected for chairs they should receive in many committees, you know, in spite of that this group is the third biggest.
So, it will be difficult, yeah.
Tell me what I remember back in the UKIP days and the difficulties that UKIP had in the European Parliament.
They were rejected, ignored. And it's kind of a similar position to where the AfD find themselves as a party that is maligned and attacked and ridiculed and et cetera, et cetera.
UKIP exactly was the same for UKIP.
And then they had a grouping that came together and obviously UKIP were extremely successful in terms of actually getting a Brexit vote.
Give us an idea for our UK or US viewers, the warring posse that may not understand kind of where the AfD will fit into a European parliament.
What can you do and will you be allowed actually to be a proper political party there?
Well, for first, yeah, this is a good comparison with UKIP.
It's really the same treatment we are receiving here.
And also what is different is maybe the treatment at home.
We got a heavy, really heavy fire from all the state-owned media in Germany before the election, from the Secret Service, which is led by the government and is used to oppress all opposition, not only opposition parties, but also the opposition on the streets.
You know, they put the leader of the opposition, Michael Baalbeck, for nine months in the jail, a week of the trial.
And after the nine months, they said, OK, we don't have anything against you.
You can go.
But the guy was nine months in jail.
You know, it's incredible.
And they also did a really insane campaign against us, against my friend Max Kau, who was the number one on the list for the European Parliament, against me.
I was the number two on the list.
They said we are agents of China, of Russia.
I was confronted with the same accusations like Donald Trump.
You know, Donald Trump was hearing for two years that he has a Russian collusion, Russian collusion.
They did the same with me.
They said I was paid by Russians for my behavior in the German Bundestag, which is quite stupid.
You know, you must just imagine why should somebody pay an MP to behave as he would behave anyway?
Because this was our party program. program, you know.
All our ATA deputies were against the war in Ukraine, against weapons, and so on and so on.
So, if you want to pay somebody, you have to pay him, to behave in a different way, but not the same.
But it was a campaign.
They wanted to make this Russian narrative.
They played this scenario, and even in other countries, it happened the same to our friends in Austria.
They were accused also to be Russian spies and all.
So, this narrative was the same, and what is really terrible, after the election, the state-owned public television, they displayed the graphics which was saying, well, our campaigns did work. Look, we pushed the AfD down from 21% to 16%, and they named the campaigns.
They named the Wannsee campaign, the Potsdam campaign, then Max Krad, the China campaign, Peter Weiss from the Russian campaign.
So, they showed how they produce fake news, how they push the biggest opposition party from 21% down to 16%.
In spite of it, we were very successful, but we could be more successful. So this is how it works.
Now, in the European Parliament, a new game starts.
Many parties from other countries join us as AfD.
They said, okay, we would like to be with you in the group.
So, we have now a true AfD group together with six or seven partners from other countries.
And let's see how things will develop.
I'm watching closely, certainly.
Yeah, it would be nice if the result would be as successful as UKIP, but this was a really historical success.
Nigel Farage is a big guy, a great guy.
So, not big, not big one, a great guy.
And so, let's see.
We will go in his footsteps.
Well nothing in politics happens quickly and Nigel worked 25 years to actually get that Brexit vote.
Can I ask you about regional elections because we've just had regional elections there into the the areas in Germany AfD won the most seats and this is just going back a week and a half ago AfD won the most seats in the election in and I can't even say it right Thuringian you can correct me a third of the parliament.
So, 32 33 percent of the vote chair and you very nearly came first in Saxony with 30 huge results and I've seen some of the headlines in the media they're panicking they are so scared of this AfD rise tell us about that because you're having success in different areas, European parliamentary elections, very well in that second place.
And these local, these regional elections, that happened just a week and a half ago.
Tell us about that result and what that means for the rise of AfD in Germany.
Yeah, well, you name it, Thuringia, we are the number one.
And the funny situation is we have so many seats that the others must stick all together.
From the left extreme communists, who work together with the spin-off of the communists, together with the CDU, so-called conservative.
And if they all together, if they stick all together, they have exactly so much, so many seats as we.
So, they don't have a majority.
Sorry, then they would have a majority then, but only then. It would be very difficult to make a coalition with the communists and CDU, because there are members of the CDU in Western Germany.
Germany, they are protesting against it because they say, we cannot make a coalition with former communists.
You know, those people were in the GDR. They were those who shoot on the border on their own people if they wanted to escape to the West.
So, this is the current situation there.
In Saxony, it's similar. We nearly won the election.
We are very, very close to the number one.
The difference is just 1%, and it's a really historical success.
What connects it to the European election?
All those successes have the same reason.
The people are sick.
The people are sick of the current government.
It doesn't matter who rules, who from the other parties, from the old parties is on power, because they are all globalistic parties.
And this is the difference. We are the only true populistic power.
We are the only party which really wants to do what the people need.
And what is it?
You know, the people want to have good schools for their kids.
They want to have safe ways.
They don't want their wife or their daughters being raped in the evening if they go out of their homes.
They want to have a good infrastructure.
They don't want to be involved in some wars somewhere, you know, thousands of kilometers away of Germany.
They don't want to be enforced to believe that there are 58 sexes.
They want a policy which is based on support of normal families and the family should contain a mother, father and kids.
Kids that's the normal family you know and this is what the norm ordinary normal people wants and we are the only party which is offering this all other parties are promising to do such things, and immediately after election they start to do sometimes even opposite of it, you know.
And people are sick of it and therefore they are they are voting more and more for the AfD they are voting for us and this trend will continue in the next election for sure, because the old parties they don't change their policies you know you see what they are doing now they really thinking about to creating those coalitions as as I described it before they are really now talking make a coalition with the Christians social union Christian democratic union together with communists, with former communists from the GDR.
It's a similar situation in France with Marine Le Pen, in that all the parties are coming together.
It's a stop Marine Le Pen ticket. In Germany, it seems to be a stop AfD ticket.
These parties, the ruling parties, whether it's the coalition in Germany, whether it's Macron in France, they're not standing for anything.
All they are is against this rise of populism.
Is that how you see it in Germany?
Exactly.
They're standing only for their wish to stay on power, on any price, and standing to be against the populistic parties.
But it says, in fact, they are against the people.
This is the main news.
They are against the people.
They are against their own voters.
Look at the last two elections in Thuringia and Saxony.
I mean, what do you think the people want, which elected the CDU? They wanted a strong coalition between AfD and CDU.
They want conservative politics. They want exactly everything I named just two minutes ago. And what will they get?
They will get a coalition of CDU with the communists.
They will get exactly the opposite of what they wanted.
This is creating immense tensions in the society.
And this is really not good for the future.
Tell us how immigration fits into it, because there's a huge backlash against mass immigration here in the UK.
And that's why Nigel Farage's new party reform did well in the European Parliament.
That's why populist parties are doing well.
It fits into President Trump in November.
And that's why huge support for him.
What is the kind of situation in Germany?
Because it was Angela Merkel that said, come, come, and tried to open the borders of Europe.
What is the current situation, the feeling towards how mass immigration is affecting Germany?
Well, one of the former Innenminister said migration is the mother of all our problems.
And he was even not from the AfD.
But in this sentence and this one, he was absolutely right.
Our society is facing enormous problems. I will just shortly name it, because you know everything the same is happening in UK even on the broader scale you know we have, rapes we have killings by knives we have a huge problem in the social sector you know, it's really incredible and those things happened didn't happen before.
This is something our Western European society doesn't know in this quality.
And again, the old parties are not willing to change it.
Why are they not willing?
Because they established a system which is profiting from migration.
We call it the asylum industry.
This is an industry which is taking more than 50 billion euro per year from taxpayers money and spending it on migrants.
And you have just imagine the dimensions, you know, I guess who is the biggest private employer in Germany?
And just imagine, we have companies who are on the stock exchange like Allianz, BMW, BASF, you name it.
And the biggest employer is the Catholic Caritas.
The biggest owner of real estate is the Catholic Church.
You know, and this is going so on.
We have, of course, it's not just Catholics, but Protestants, and there is Arbaid Avolfat, which is connected to the socialists.
So they all have their organizations.
They are earning so much money.
This is a really huge business.
So in their interest is more migrants and possibly as complicated as possible.
So, they don't want the motivated, good educated migrants, which would quickly, start to work and be part of our society.
They need cases, they can give them tutorials, you know, teach them how to speak German, how to work, and so on, and so on.
And this is the true reason why they are not changing anything.
Tell me, the European Conservative had a great headline that you may have sent it to me earlier saying the Germans say, 'enough'.
And that's to do with immigration.
What are the other, as you have talked to voters during the many elections you've been involved in, immigration certainly is there.
You touched on some of the other areas.
What are the other concerns and what do AfD offer apart from closing borders and stopping the mass immigration?
What else do you offer to the voters as AfD when you're kind of knocking doors at rallies and talking to the public?
It's similar what, for example, Viktor Orban offered to the people of Hungary.
Viktor Orban is the most successful politician in the whole Europe.
He was elected three times after each other. and every time he got 5% more. It's the opposite of Angela Merkel.
She was elected also three times after each other, but I think she got every time 4-5% less.
And what Orban said, he just said, I put the Hungarian people in the focus of my politics.
And again, this is really very easy.
Just take care for the families, support people to have kids, make their life easy.
That's the key message.
Don't take care mainly for minorities, you know, for people with physical problems, Muslims, men who are thinking they are women, and women they are thinking they are men, You know, focus on the 98% of population and try to make their life, better.
That's, that's the message.
Exactly. It's a simple message, which we're seeing across nearly every European country.
And then, then you can say, lower taxation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Inner security, higher inner security, better schools, more money for schools, and so on and so on.
Not a key message.
In The Guardian, the far left paper that we have on the left, although most of them are on the left, we have AfD success in German elections piles pressure on a fragmented EU. And they talk about the European project facing a rocky few years if the AfD's ascent continues.
How does...
Europe has kind of been driven for decades by a French-German axis and now you've got that void with Merkel stepping down, this strange coalition.
We've got Macron, little Macron, not being able to do anything and being neutered by Marine Le Pen.
What does that mean for Europe going forward?
Because there doesn't seem to be a drive, a direction that there used to be whenever there was a strong French government and actually a strong leader in Germany.
That's gone.
So what are your thoughts, kind of the future for Europe, especially now you're in the European Parliament?
Well, this is an interesting question because there is a change of paradigm within the European politics.
At the beginning, the whole project of European Union was, of course, industrial cooperation, the coal and steel union.
Union, and on the political level, it was a kind of, well, they wanted to abandon the possibility of a new war.
So therefore, the friendship between France and Germany was so heavily in focus.
To be honest, I think it was never a friendship, a true friendship.
The French, they don't like the Germans still today.
They don't like anyone, the French.
Well, the British as well, I know.
Yeah, well, but it was enforced and cultivated, let's name it as you want.
But this was the nucleus of the European Union, like a peace project, yes?
And it was successful in this matter.
It was successful.
But now we have a change of paradigm because the EU is turning into a tool of.
How to say just get through some globalist agenda it has nothing to do anymore with with peace and with with a friendship between France and Germany or any other country now.
It's about about regulations about trying to transform this European union into a kind of state you know to take a lot of rights from the national states to this supranational organization.
And this is, again, creating a lot of tension. Just look at what is happening, how the European Union is behaving towards independent states.
They were trying to punish the sovereign state of Poland for years, as long as they had a conservative government under PiS.
They immediately stopped all the punishments when the government changed.
So, it is showing that they had nothing, nothing to do with the reasons they named.
It was just, they just tried to get one specific government down.
And the same is happening to Hungary under Viktor Orban.
And it will be similar with Slovakia.
And also, this is really a big danger.
We as AfD, of course, we are trying to strengthen the rights of the sovereign national states.
This is our main task.
And this is also the reason why our group is called Europe of Sovereign Nations.
Tell me, finishing off, Ursula von der Leyen is a name that any citizen of Europe knows, obviously, as President of the Parliament, or the European Commission.
We'll not even get into the complexities, but, yeah, President, and the most well-known figure. And obviously, she was part of the EPP they voted her in.
Is her role, her position on the European project, Is it going to have a rougher ride?
Is she going to get more pushback, more scrutiny because of the new parties and the larger parties in the European Parliament?
Because for the five years she's done what she wanted to do.
This seems to be pulling her back a little bit.
What are your thoughts on kind of how the five years will move forward?
Sure, she will, because the structure of the plenum of the parliament changed.
You cannot deny that the majorities changed, simply.
Suddenly it will move towards more back to normality I would say, but sadly the process is slow this is what you said on the beginning.
Nigel Farage had to fight more than 20 years and the processes are really slow, slow, slow, and this is what Max Weber wrote already, I think, 100 years ago, politics, it's drilling of a hard piece of wood and slow drilling.
Yeah, that's our job.
In spite of all of us would wish, it goes quickly.
Well see how it develops.
Peter I do appreciate your time.
I know you've got a lot on your plate there in the European parliament trying to bring common sense to that chamber so I appreciate your time today.
Peter, you're always welcome thank you very much for your job you are doing a tremendous job and one more time nice regards to everybody who is watching this, support this blog, support all independent media.
This will be for sure one of the biggest fights in the European Union to save the freedom of speech, the freedom of expression.
The globalist circles are trying to oppress it.
You see it everywhere. Where they are trying to censor X.
They're trying to censor all the social media. They're trying to censor independent media.
So, this will be the fight for the next five years.
And I'm looking forward to many good speeches from you.
We had Rob Bruce on two months ago when he gave some great speeches in the Parliament.
So, we're looking forward to watching those clips of you, speaking in the European Parliament and causing frustration and anger amongst the establishment.
So, thank you.
Thank you very much.
Bye, bye.