Welcome to Inside My Canoe Head, a podcast about the art of living an awesome life. We talk about preparedness, self-reliance, and learning to be unapologetically you in this chaotic and incredible world we live in today. My name is Jeff, your host. I am a veteran, an academic, an emergency preparedness guru, and we issue weekly episodes, usually on Mondays, about various different topics.
Join us. Hang out with us. It's a lot of fun. Come visit us on the web at www.preparednesslabs.ca, and let's get to it.
All right, thanks for joining us this week on Inside My Canoe Head. We are talking about what if Trump is right, conspiracy theories, why they matter, and what might really be going on in this background idea and this thing called the deep state. So last week on Inside My Canoe Head, we talked about the conspiracy theories and why they prove a big problem for modern societies, especially when they're laughed off or they're dismissed as ridiculous by either the mainstream media or government officials and not given a bit of attention. And I don't mean let's take some time and give some audience to some wingnuts or COVIDiots or something along that line that you've heard phrases.
It's all about whether we, somebody, we challenge a challenge to the organization and the conduct of our state and our affairs as a nation or as a state, a province, a town, a city, municipality, county, whatever we're talking about at the time, when somebody challenges a normal organizational setup of what we do in our societies, it behooves us to address that. Because as I said last week, if you fail to address a point that is raised about what is going on, especially something as fundamental as elections, what you have is you gain space, you give it oxygen. When you just dismiss something and you laugh at it, you just provide information and you inform these people. Because most of the time, the individuals who bring up conspiracy theories or who champion conspiracy theories have a viewpoint on the government.
They have a viewpoint on the systems. We call them, in theoretical analysis, the public institutions that support this thing we call democracy. And when people have a belief, I don't want to use the word bias because everybody's biased. Whether you're against the current institutions that we have in society or you're for the current institutions, that's a bias.
That's your viewpoint. In academia, we call it your theoretical framework, your lens, how you look at something, how you view something. If you look at a public health agency with a bit of distrust, then the messages they're producing are going to not resonate with you. And you may even go as far as to make something that counters that.
However, if you have a strong belief in support in the public health agency as an institution, then when the message comes out, you're going to at least believe that that is based in some form of scientific endeavor. And the reason this is important today is what we have, and I want to preface all of my comments here today to understand that I'm a Canadian citizen. I'm not an American citizen. I have visited the U.S.
throughout my life and spent some time as a veteran. I've spent many, many, many, many months overseas working alongside American soldiers. So I have a certain viewpoint of America, but I'm not an American. I don't vote in American elections, and therefore I don't have support for one party or another.
I'm not a Trump supporter. I'm not a Biden supporter. But when I see Donald Trump, the current U.S. president, challenging the very efficacy of a U.S.
election, stating that the election was somehow stolen, somehow rigged to ensure that he lost and some other grand agenda is given the opportunity to go forward, that is currently being dismissed. That is currently being rejected as unevidence. It's something without any justification to it. And that is almost completely across the mainstream media, in the print media, on social media.
And I follow Donald Trump on Twitter, not because I think he's a great orator and speaker, but because he is very important as to what he has to say from his viewpoint. Every single tweet that mentions the U.S. general election is given a qualifier about. Every single tweet that Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden produce about election results do not have a qualifier on it.
And I follow them all on social media. So right from the get-go, you see that it looks like, from the outset, that there is a firm, fixed belief on the validity of anything that Donald Trump might say. The fact that he's the U.S. president and almost 70 or approximately 70 million people in the United States of America have allegedly voted for the man, it behooves the people in power to investigate and thoroughly and deeply investigate all of these things that are being brought forward as potential fraud and fixing along those lines.
Because if a nation, and I'll take any nation, does not have free and fair elections in the mind of the people, if the electors on election day feel that there is a rig on and there is a fix, it's part of disenfranchise, but it's much worse than that. It means the outcome of the election is now predetermined or ordained by some other organization, and therefore they no longer live in a democracy. And if they no longer live in a democracy, then they're not going to partake in the democratic institutions that purportedly are there to provide their voice, to have them a say in the future of their own governance. And when people fail to do that, they start disenfranchising from the institutions of governments and not just the politicians, and you start to see a democratic lack of trust in governments and government institutions.
Now, you don't have to look much further than many, many states in Africa, where the rigging of elections is so bloody, crazily overt, that some parts don't even, a large parts of the society don't even vote. It just happened in the runoff, or sorry, the elections that just happened in Venezuela this week, that Nicolas Maduro won over 70% of the votes. And whether you think that's right or not, the opposition just figured it was rigged, they announced it was rigged, and they told all of their supporters, don't bother, don't bother going to vote because the election is already rigged and it's finalized. So people, a large portion of that population within the country of Venezuela, a failed state, believes that it was rigged.
Look at the Belarusian, or Belarus election that just happened earlier this year, that this dictator since 1994, the fall of the U.S., 93, 94, the fall of the Soviet Union has ruled, this country somehow is still getting 80% of the votes for authoritarian Russian-directed rule, and nobody believes that. And the opposition politicians who protest against it are arrested, and police brutality, et cetera, et cetera, against protest against that. You start to see around the world that there are elections that are rigged. They are happening.
There are elections in, quote-unquote, democracies that are rigged regularly, overtly, and it happens, and it happens all around the world in dozens and dozens of countries that are far less sophisticated, potentially, than the United States of America. But to dismiss voter fraud as something that doesn't exist is to dismiss the fact that it does exist. It exists around the world. So then to say to the President of the United States that everything he is saying is not possible because the Election Commission came out and said that this was the most secure election on record.
However, the Democratic Party has come out and said repeatedly for four years that Russian collusion and Russian influence over the election brought Donald Trump in, and it wasn't the people. But the second their individual wins, they won't say anything about foreign collusion because it was a rock-solid election. And they won't investigate the fact that the social media companies might very well, through their selective publication of material or their search engines, may have influenced the election. Now, these are all conspiracy theories that are out there.
The reason why these are important is because, for the most part, they're not being actually investigated by anybody, so they're getting air. People are, for some reason, falling in line and believing. So what we're going to look at today is a couple of examples. We're going to look at something called the Great Reset.
We're going to look at Bilderberg Group, and we're going to talk a bit about a specific example in the U.S. and Antrim County in Michigan, just to talk about an example of why this may be something that needs further investigation. So, just an example. Canada's 43rd election that ran back in 2019.
We have subsidies to political parties. We provide auditors to political parties and subsidize that to make sure everything is fair and transparent. It cost the Canadian federal government $508 million to run our last election, or approximately $18.58 per elector. Now, in Canada, we vote by paper.
There is only one way to do it. You can ask for a mail-in ballot. There's a whole bunch of procedures for that. We have a whole bunch of advanced voting, but you can only and must only vote in paper.
There are no machines to press buttons. There are no selector switches. There are no big arms to pull down, etc. We must fill out an X in a box on a piece of paper with a pencil.
Now, it is fed into a machine that tabulates it, but the original ballots are retained, and everything is done from that point forward. And Canada does not use the Canadian company Dominion Voting, which has been the center of a lot of the conspiracy theories and shots that have been brought forward by the Trump and the Trump supporters. In the United States of America, Canada does not use that company to tabulate our voting machines. All that the voting machines do is they bring together local results, and those local results are then forwarded via secure systems, too.
There is not one large linked system. And in Canada, the federal election is run by Elections Canada. It is not run by the provincial election organizations. They run the same.
So the difference is, in comparison to the United States of America, where they run, the states run all of the elections. In Canada, our federal election is run by the federal government and the federal government alone. And we have a completely different set of federal electors as you do provincially. So it would be you have a state list of electors.
Well, for a U.S. presidency election, if it was the Canadian model, you would have a federal government list of electors that is different than the state list of electors in determining who has the right to vote in a federal election. So minor differences, et cetera, but everybody does it differently. So I'm going to delve into a couple of conspiracy theories that are big.
One of them is a Bilderberg group. It's not all that long. They actually started in 1954 as a group of very concerned, notable high-ranking individuals in society in North America and Europe. And then they just didn't see a lot of great cooperation between the two systems.
And this was the early onset of the Cold War. So they decided to get together for an annual meeting to go over a big group of issues that are facing the world. Now, the invitees, you have to be invited. And it's based upon academia, your work in society, your position of power, and your value in the discussion as the future of humanity on this earth.
They get together once a year under incredibly tight security, but they publish the list of invitees every year who show up. The location is pre-announced. They have no press conferences. There are no journalists allowed, even though every once in a while a prominent journalist is invited into it.
They use Chatham House rules, which means everything that is said in the meeting stays in the meeting and that no person may quote another person's point of view or state within it. Now, this group of individuals and elites of the world have been accused in the past of setting the conditions and setting the future of the world, what will happen in international markets, what wars will be fought, what won't, what society will do, and where we will move next. Now, no actual list of what was discussed, who said what, what decisions were made, anything like that. It never comes out of it.
There's no presser. There is a press release afterwards. Everybody knows who goes under exceptionally tight security, and there has long been a thought that these are the elite of the world who are planning the future of humanity, and therefore, you will see some link between these people. A conspiracy theorist who believes that there is something called a deep state, which is a small group of individuals who have extraordinarily level of control over societal machinations.
So what happens in society, big picture levers, moving capitalism, socialism, and all those different levers that you would think of, that there is some ambiguously hard-to-nail-down group of individuals that have this extraordinarily control. And the important part of why we address why Trump, what if Trump is right, because then, if Trump is right, and there are groups such as the Bilderberg, that are controlling the future of the world, then democracy is nothing but a sham. Then our choices in the big picture of our leaders are nothing than picking the puppets who will execute the deep state's wishes. Just think how structurally destructive that is to the fundamental belief of our power of members of a collective society to influence change and to build a better society, if we're not part of a participatory exercise that shapes the future of the country and the relationships we have with each other and around the world, but in fact, it's controlled by a bunch of small actors squirreled away somewhere in the world who are moving the principal and main levers of power and determining the future and the existence of the human race.
And sometimes these groups are accused of living in the shadows. Bilderberg Group has a website called the BilderbergMeetings.org, where all the participants since 1954 are listed. The topics that were discussed are listed, and the press releases are there. So sometimes deep state may actually be hiding in plain sight, but that's if you believe in the deep state.
But how many people have addressed these concerns? Very few to this point, which is why we move on to the next one, which is enormously popular right now, which is The Great Reset. And it has been kicked around in an extraordinarily number of conspiracy-related theories and conspiracy websites that I follow just for fun, online YouTube channels, and they're worried about The Great Reset as to how we're going to bring in this nationalist agenda and change humanity perfectly. The problem is that most people don't realize that The Great Reset is actually a book.
It's a book that's readily available for you to purchase. It is written by Klaus Schwab, the former head of the World Economic Forum. And if you don't know who those people are, they are those elite who get together in Davos, Switzerland, once a year, to rail on society's destruction of the world. And they're basically the big economic side of the decision-makers in the world.
So you see all the world bankers. You see pretty much the leader of every Western democracy goes there. You see a lot of climate activists will show up as well. They're not in a lot of protests because you can't get into Davos.
The Swiss locked that down pretty tight. It's a small mountainous community. And anyhow, they get together every year, and they talk about where we need to take the world economy, how we make it better for human existence. Now, the head of the World Economic Forum wrote the book called The Great Reset.
This is no secret. It is wide open. And I'm going to read you a great quote here. To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions.
Every country, from the U.S. to China, must participate. And every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a great reset of capitalism.
Now, that comes as a recent quote as a result of the Great Reset theory focusing on COVID-19 as giving what they refer to as an exceptional but narrow opportunity to correct the fact that COVID-19 is going to leave the world less sustainable, less equal, and far more fragile. And the Great Reset theory calls for no ad hoc. It's not about twisting around the edges. It's about an entirely new foundation of our economic systems.
And they call for stronger and more effective governments, not bigger governments, and they claim to want private sector engagement throughout. Now, like I said before, this is available on a website. There is a formal website for the Great Reset on the World Economic Forum, and they have their own separate microsite where you can go to read all of the quotes and all the statements and the exact intent of the Great Reset. This is not a grand conspiracy theory.
This is an actual theory put out by one of the principal leading organizations in the structure of our society. Now, the Great Reset talks about three components and what they want to do. The first is to steer the market towards fairer outcomes. I think we can agree around the world that there is an inequity between outcomes, that we always hear that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
And for the most part, that is proven by statistics. This is just true. That's exactly what's happening. So the Great Reset talks about massive changes in taxation, regulatory frameworks, bringing in wealth taxes on the rich, and eliminating subsidies for the oil and gas sector and putting subsidies on other new and emerging successful technologies that improve the human condition.
The second one... is they want investments to advance the share goals of society. So this equality and sustainability of the human condition and the world. For example, only investing in green infrastructure, only looking for incentives for progress on environmental, social and governance issues.
This is important. They call it the ESG. So this is the focus of saying that we're going to take all of the massive amount of spending that governments are now willing to do to help society through a pandemic. Let's take that level of funding and zero it towards shared human goals that can improve the human condition.
And the third one is to harness the innovation of the fourth industrial revolution, which is artificial intelligence and robotics mechanization for the public good, to use all of that power and the technology that's being researched, found and employed at this time for health and social changes. That's what the Great Reset is talking about. Now they say it's not socialism, it's the relooking of capitalism and they look at free market capitalism. Now this, I'm going to throw something out there you may not agree with me or not, but here we go.
The Great Reset is taking the Norway model. It is taking the model that says we will take all of the money that we generate and we will use it for human good. Norway as a country does not have a public debt. The nation is debt free and has a massive trillions of dollars of money in the bank to spend.
But that is called a future fund that they get from all of their oil and gas. They are moving away from oil and gas and they are removing, taking all of that knowledge skill in drilling for deep sea wells and putting deep sea wind farms, deep sea technology that helps with generating sustainable green, et cetera. And then they take it and they bring in things like equality in schools, free meals in schools, no question to ask. Every kid, irrespective of their economic background, has a free breakfast and lunch at school.
Daycare is obviously free for families. Then we have free education if your student or your child is intelligent enough to meet the minimum possible cutoffs to get into school, then they will get in. Norway has exceptionally strong environmental regulations to protect the pristine environment and the nature of the country. But what Norway doesn't have is strong government regulation and red tape.
It's a very, very efficient capitalist environment. Free market capitalism is alive and well in the Nordic countries and it is that free market capitalism that allows the generation of the money that is used for social and economic reasons. So how does this relate to Donald Trump? It relates to Donald Trump because the Great Reset Theory is being linked to the Green New Deal that was authored by a number of individuals who are considered to be on the far left extreme of United States politics.
The champion of the tribe, they call them the four statistical outliers in the U.S. Congress. AOC is one of them. But the point here is not to bash it.
It's the point that people are nailing conspiracy theories and calling them ridiculous when in fact, most of the theories they're talking about are actual written documents that have very specific guides and outcomes. Now, it's not about you agreeing with these things. It's about you doing the necessary research to say, hey, is there a deep state who at this time right now is planning to reorganize the levels of society and is using COVID-19 as a case? So here's where conspiracy theories go.
They take the fact that the Great Reset written by Klaus Schwab at the World Economic Forum talks about how COVID-19 gives us a narrow but great opportunity to make the structural changes necessary. Conspiracy theorists will then link the fact that because of those statements, Klaus is saying that COVID-19 was released on the world intentionally so that we could build the conditions and make the case for the Great Reset. So then we go back to the old argument almost a year ago of the biolab intentional leakage of the virus into the Chinese population as a test that went awry in China and all of these different ideas that, listen, nobody will ever know what happened in the nation of China. That nation, by its own governance choice from the Communist Party, is not free.
They will not tell the truth. And if whatever they say, you don't know if it is the truth or not and you have no way of doing an independent investigation inside that country to determine what exactly did happen. We know the virus started in Wuhan province and went out to the rest of the world. Now, if you believe in conspiracy theories and you look at the Great Reset, you may try to say that because of the words quoted in the website and by Klaus Schwab himself, you may say that, okay, now I understand why COVID-19 was created and released.
Now you see conspiracy theories are starting to challenge the very basic of scientific information that says this is essentially a coronavirus that transferred from animals to human across species and is spread through humans because of the consumption of wild meat through a wet market or in the case of Ebola, you have it through bushmeat in Africa and these will continue and continue and continue. We go on and on and on about all of these things that say, but if you look at something like the Great Reset and you look at the documentation that's out there, you look at the group, the Bilderberg group that coincidentally didn't meet in 2020 because of COVID-19 and they did not meet virtually, they just simply did not meet. You see these groups that are out there and they're viewed as this thing called the deep state and when you just take a small little tiny quick dive into the theoretical research on conspiracy theories and how they work, you start to see that individuals hold on to something that is inexplicable because if I can explain away your reason for your argument, then it is, it's inconsequential that there's nothing there but if you can choose something like a deep state as an actor that is manipulating your life, you number one, take away responsibility for your outcomes because you're a victim of the deep state or some external organization but you make it near impossible for anybody to disprove what you're saying because you are quoting the existence of a organization that is completely impossible to prove whether this organization does exist in the world or does not exist in the world and why this is important is because now we see with conspiracy theories being thrown around, we're now in a position where we have a deep state that is allegedly in control of society and has chosen Donald Trump shall lose the next election and has fixed the results through various different devices to ensure that he's not and just a prime example that I'll use is that one county in Michigan that I talked about Antrim County they're doing an examination this week of 22 tabulation machines because this is a hard Republican county in Michigan except the results came out for Joe Biden and then oops they found a software update that wasn't done to recognize variables related to the identification and definition of an election which sounds wonderful to me and now they're going to do a forensic examination by a third party even though the results were updated and put properly as the government said in the order for Donald Trump to have a sizable but not massive lead over Joe Biden in this one but it's a forensic examination by a third party now the funny part about that and this is where conspiracy theories continue to go and the distrust of the mainstream media is the mainstream media has already come out this is an article from the Washington Post came out and said that the individual who is part of this third party firm is allegedly already guilty of putting out a whole bunch of false statements and made poor conclusions about previous election related material and therefore what the media is trying to do is leading the narratives that whatever comes out of it is likely just fuel for more catastrophic thinking and fuel for more theories and therefore not really the actual result so the media is setting the narrative in advance of the finding of that just this is one county is not going to change the election of the president of the United States but it's a fine example of how the media gets out in front and says hey listen look at what's happening here this company is really really bad these people are really really bad so let's distrust what they say in advance of even knowing what they say and again it's about controlling the narrative and if you look overall at the U.S. I mean okay Donald Trump is a divisive individual but if every swing congressional swing election for Congress went to the Republicans every single one that CNN called as a potential swing seat went to the Republicans 36 of the 50 U.S.
states are run by Republican Congresses and out of those Republican Congresses approximately 30 of the 36 turned in super majorities as a result of this election yet all of a sudden the one election for president of the United States was so fundamentally different from the election of Congress at large again feeds the conspiracy theory so what if Trump is right what if the whole United States of America believes in the Republican message is leaning Republican and wants a strong Republican view on both the Supreme Court in their legislatures and in the governance of their laws but they just don't want that guy running the Republican Party and maybe that's why the people of America openly voted for Republican administrations at all levels of government except for the presidential government because the option was Donald Trump that's a theoretical and logical analysis of what happened but because the election for the president of the United States was so fundamentally different than the results of the majority of other elections that were held at the same time at the state and local level where Republicans won the day hands down everywhere what if Trump is right what if the whole system was about getting rid of Donald Trump but keeping Republican conservatives in let this old guy Joe Biden hang in there for a couple of years and then the next election we will bring in that hard Republican that you are looking for who is not Donald Trump so that all thieves that I don't know what the answer to it is but I think that the public agencies owe the people of the United States of America and arguably the world because this is the superpower a far more robust and a far more in-depth investigation and hearings into the allegations that are being made about what is fundamentally the most important event in a free and fair society which is a democratic election of the government nothing is more important as a right and a privilege within a country is to vote for your own government and therefore because it is so consequential to everyone it is exceptionally important that this be viewed as a fair election the results are valid and this is the expression of the desire of the people of the United States of America any result short of that belief as being publicly held there will always be statistical outliers who are wingnuts and you can do nothing about that but when you look at the statistical vast majority of the American population need to understand and believe that this was a free and fair election and so long as a majority of Trump supporters which is a majority of over 70 million Americans believe that there is some deep state actor or some underbelly organization that is rigging the election to ensure Donald Trump doesn't come back you have a fundamental flaw in society which is so egregiously damaging to the future organization of society just think about what is the midterm elections going to look like in 2022 if there remains say the majority of 70 million so 40 million American electors believe that the U.S. president is not a valid president that he did not legally and fairly win the election and therefore he is not my government think of the civil disobedience I don't mean civil war and any ridiculous thing like that I mean civil disobedience and distrust in the federal government at the same time the federal government is going to try to roll out a COVID-19 vaccine that is already the subject of massive disinformation campaign by those who continue to believe in conspiracy theories so I hope you enjoyed today's episode where the whole idea behind it was what if Trump is right what if there really is this deep state actor so that is such a fundamental challenge to the very structure of a democracy that we need to spend far more time and effort investigating these and not dismissing them because if we continue to dismiss conspiracy theories as baseless and wantless and don't give them the attention and investigation to disprove them then they will continue to get air they will continue to fester and they will continue to undermine democracy so whether you believe the Great Reset is something that is coming whether you believe the Bilderberg Group is actually controlling society whether you believe Dominion Voting fixed to actually change the outlier it does not matter if these get air and if they're not addressed they will fundamentally and permanently undermine the functioning of democracy and the world's greatest superpower which affects every single one of us on earth so we need to address this and we need to give it we need to understand as the quote says is there a narrative that needs to be fit does everything which indicates an irregularity mean it's fabricated that's a good question think about that thanks again for joining us this week on Inside My Canoe Head we're back next week with another great episode if you have any points suggestions or otherwise drop me a line at Jeff at preparednesslabs.ca visit us at www.preparednesslabs.ca I'm on Instagram and Twitter at Inside My Canoe Head follow me come join us for the conversation have yourself an awesome week