Original subtitles

-Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden

is projected to win the state of Pennsylvania

and will become the 46th president of the United States.

-This is a fraud on the American public.

This is an embarrassment to our country.

We were getting ready to win this election.

Frankly, we did win this election.

-How did we get here...

-It's legal for them to count votes in Pennsylvania

two days after the election on November 3rd?

- Yes. - You're wrong. Go.

I don't even want to talk to you.

- where counting ballots as a battle between good and evil...

-This is now our greatest fight since the civil war,

the battle of righteousness versus Satan.

-The Wuhan outbreak... Bill Gates did this.

- where science is met with righteous ignorance...

-You literally cannot mandate somebody to wear a mask

knowing that that mask is killing people.

It literally is killing people.

- where Americans are so divided,

we can't agree on fundamental truths?

This is a legacy of decades of lies by the richest

and most powerful members of our society,

lies to mask the real threats...

-[ Crying ] Put your masks on.

Don't go out if you don't have to.

- lies to justify putting Americans in harm's way,

lies designed to enrich and protect those in power

while the rest of us die.

[ Cheers and applause ]

For over 70 years, our leaders have told us

one thing under the bright lights.

-The protection of the lives and property of Americans

is the responsibility of all public officials.

-I care. We're trying.

-And it is my first duty as president

to protect the American people.

-We have it so well under control.

-But America's shadow government has spent trillions of dollars

on secret plans that serve one premise...

When the shit really hits the fan, we're on our own.

-I have nothing. Nothing.

-And while the government sold us lie after lie,

now truth itself is under attack.

-We will not cower down to evil! We're Americans!

♪♪

♪♪

[ Alarm blaring ]

-That signal means to stop whatever you are doing

and get to the nearest safe place fast.

-During the Cuban Missile Crisis,

my high school had an air-raid drill,

and only the headmaster knew it was a drill,

so it was pretty dramatic.

I could tell the teachers were scared.

There had just been a speech by the president

saying we might go to war.

-It shall be the policy of this nation

to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba

against any nation in the Western Hemisphere

as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States,

requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.

-And so we did what we were supposed to do.

We went into the basement of the high school,

turned away from any windows any glass,

and prepared for the blast to occur.

I thought there's a chance it's real,

and I don't really want to die in my high-school basement.

So can I make it if I bolt?

Can I make it to the subway, and can I make it home in time?

And I did the math and I couldn't.

And there was no way I could get home

on the subway in half an hour.

So at 12 years old, I was deciding

where I wanted to die during a nuclear war.

-Your survival chances against dangerous fallout are excellent

if you take suitable shelter.

-As the Cold War reaches a boiling point

in the Cuban Missile Crisis,

Richard Clarke and his classmates are fed a double dose

of terror and deception...

-An attack could come without warning.

- sold on the fear of an imminent Soviet attack

and the lie that citizens in American cities

could survive a direct hit.

By the early '60s,

the advent of thermonuclear warheads up to 1,000 times

more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima

means civil defense drills

are becoming increasingly meaningless.

-This was a massive, massive propaganda effort

that bore almost no relationship to reality whatsoever.

-In a pinch, dig a foxhole

and make a cover of branches or board.

Don't let radioactive dust talk to your skin.

-There was something called Operation Alert

that would happen every year.

Everyone would have to find shelter

and it was all done to persuade people

there was something they could do,

that they could be active,

they would be okay, they would be safe.

-And while Americans are distracted

by civil-defense drills,

the government and military contractors

get busy acquiring the real power and wealth

that comes from manufacturing

tens of thousands of nuclear weapons

and the missiles, submarines and bombers to deliver them.

-And all these civil defense programs

were really a form of emotional management.

It was to maintain support

for our nuclear-weapon strategy and programs.

-The deception goes deeper

into the secret massive underground complexes

built to actually withstand a nuclear apocalypse,

facilities meant only for America's most powerful,

those at the highest reaches of government.

The workers who maintain the bunkers are told their families

will be safe back home in their basement shelters,

so they'll follow orders even though their loved ones

will be left out on their own when the bombs drop.

-One of the things that bothered me about this whole process

was that we had planned out what you'd need at the facility...

It had to have water,

it had their beds, it had to have food.

But at some point, someone needed to have thought through,

"Are these people going to be fully attentive

to the very trying jobs they're going to be asked to do

if their families are under the fallout cloud?"

-Even President Eisenhower came to believe that,

if there were ever a nuclear war,

millions would die, even with civil-defense planning.

-But President Eisenhower knew privately

that this was all bullshit.

In the Eisenhower era,

there was a phrase that was used to describe

what would be after a nuclear attack,

and the phrase was "a smoking, radiating ruin."

-But for Eisenhower, it wasn't just nuclear war.

It was the arms race itself that was leading to the rise

of something that could threaten American democracy.

So in his farewell address... - We have been compelled

to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.

- Ike says the quiet part out loud,

that Cold War planning is secretly transferring

previously unimaginable power into a very few hands,

all unaccountable to the people.

-We must guard against the acquisition

of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought,

by the military industrial complex.

The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists

and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination

endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

-But we do.

The newly formed Central Intelligence Agency is tasked

with containing and rolling back communist expansion.

But despite Eisenhower's warnings,

the CIA will often act as the secret army

of the military industrial complex

using any means necessary.

This top-secret CIA report lays out the plan...

Commence aggressive covert operations across the globe

in which the rules of normal human conduct don't apply.

War would now be fought in the shadows.

The CIA teams up with drug traffickers,

torturers, murderers.

Often their operations end up serving

America's corporate interests and undermining democracy.

The CIA orchestrated coups and assassinations in Guatemala

to protect the United Fruit Company

and in defense of big oil in Iran and Indonesia.

♪♪

While Norman Rockwell paints

Boy Scouts as the essence of America's decency and democracy,

America's shadow warriors leave the streets

of the so-called Third World red with blood.

-It corroded the soul of America in totality.

It led to a situation

where the idea of freedom and liberty and human dignity

was cast aside in the pursuit of power and influence.

-And yet, for the elite to maintain control,

it's crucial Americans are considered the good guys.

So deception is essential.

Cold War strategist Hans Morgenthau

calls this schizophrenic reality the dual state,

a democratic state that operates in the open

and an amoral security state which exercises secret control

and a veto over democracy itself.

-We know that the American government has engaged

in the covert overthrow

of democratically elected leaders across the world.

We know that the government has engaged

in the forced sterilization of prisoners,

medical experimentation on children in state care,

CIA agents setting up brothels in San Francisco

to test the effects of acid

and other drugs on unsuspecting Johns.

-The CIA tries to bury the dirty tricks under a blanket of lies

and engages in a massive project to influence popular culture.

The agency places editors at major newspapers

across Western Europe

and secretly funds prominent literary magazines

in Europe and Latin America.

Gabriel Garcia Márquez,

Ernest Hemingway, and even James Baldwin

are unwittingly writing

on behalf of America's shadow government.

Major European exhibitions of America's most famous artists

are secretly funded by American spies.

The world's arts and culture

becomes a psyops battleground.

Back home, it's the FBI's mission

to preserve the rigid social order

that protects America's ruling class.

The bureau spies not only on communists,

but on activists of all kinds and even rock stars,

sometimes they're blackmailed and even killed by police.

-COINTELPRO, started by the FBI in 1956,

its first targets are American communists,

the American Communist Party,

and then very quickly added into that are African-American

civil rights organizations.

J. Edgar Hoover picks out Martin Luther King

to infiltrate and disrupt

the efforts of the civil rights movement.

-The Vietnam War is the military industrial elite's

most extensive project,

and it's built upon two fictions...

That Southeast Asia is essential to American security

and that we're defending the Vietnamese people.

-After almost three weeks

of some of the war's toughest fighting, the end is in sight.

-The war has been raging for years

when a top-secret Pentagon report is leaked,

revealing perhaps the biggest

and certainly the deadliest lie...

Few of the military planners actually believe

the war can be won,

but the war won't end for four more years,

and when it does, the U.S. will have lost.

♪♪

-We paid the price of 58,000 dead American servicemen

and women with hundreds of thousands wounded

and with PTSD, with nations in Southeast Asia destroyed.

-And along with the many dead, many Americans'

confidence in their government begins to die, as well.

The loss of trust leads to a flourishing

of conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination,

Area 51, even the moon landing.

-A plane has crashed into one of the towers

of the World Trade Center.

These remain fringe ideas.

But a quarter of a century after the Vietnam War ends,

there'll be a chance to unify the country

and win back the trust of the American people.

-For whatever reason, and there are lots of theories about why,

the Bush administration was intent on invading

and occupying Iraq,

even though it had nothing to do with the war on terrorism.

♪♪

-I was at a shooting range in San Diego,

and I was at one end of the range

and these two Saudis were at the other end of the range,

and they had a .22 caliber silver pistol.

And I'm shooting my gun with aimed fire slowly.

I hear this pistol go, "Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang,

bang, bang, bang, bang, bang."

I thought, "Who's down there?

Who's the idiot who's just shooting that pistol

like a machine gun?"

After the 9/11 hijackings,

I looked at the images, and I realized

they were the hijackers from the San Diego cell.

-Former intelligence officer Malcolm Nance

believes the 9/11 hijackers

were able to infiltrate America so easily

because of where they came from.

-It showed that they could come to the United States,

operate like the Saudis,

and that green passport would give us an elite blind spot,

because when we think of Saudi Arabians,

we think of money... Very, very large,

vast amounts of Gulf state oil money.

And that is the blind spot

that allows people to exploit our system.

♪♪

[ Sirens wailing ]

-10 months after Nance's citing,

Americans are united in their horror and grief

and quickly realize that, despite the trillions

invested in protecting the nation,

those defenses have failed,

notably in the months leading up to the 9/11 attack.

-We began to receive lots of intelligence indications

that there was going to be a major terrorist strike

by Al-Qaeda, by bin Laden's organization

against the United States/

-On 9/11, Richard Clarke is working in the White House.

His job... advise the president about terrorist threats.

-The Bush administration did very little in response

to that intelligence.

Despite the CIA director telling him repeatedly

that there was a major attack coming,

despite my warnings,

the Bush administration didn't try to find Al-Qaeda people

in the United States, didn't ask all the agencies

to do their maximum,

didn't try to preempt the attack

by going after bin Laden in Afghanistan.

-Why Clarke's warnings to Bush were ignored

has never fully been explained,

but some believe it had to do with the fact

that 15 of the 19 hijackers came from one country,

America's oil-rich ally, Saudi Arabia.

For years, the Saudi royals had been playing a dangerous game,

funding a strain of radical Islam

that inspired the son of one

of the country's richest construction tycoons

to become a terrorist leader while cozying up

to powerful American political dynasties like the Bushes,

an oil family that produced two presidents.

-The Saudis have always wanted a president

who could play by their rules.

"Let's just keep pumping oil. Let's get things stable."

-By some estimates over the decades,

the Saudis move over a billion dollars to the Bush family

and its allied companies and institutions.

-These people essentially are Bond villains

who are running countries.

They don't believe in democracy,

and bin Laden knew Saudi Arabians

were treated well in the United States

and they could just walk right into the country

and learn whatever they wanted

and the Americans would worship them.

-After 9/11, rather than allow an open investigation,

the Bush White House demands the congressional committees

redact 28 pages of their 9/11 report

related to the question of whether the Saudi government

was involved in the attacks.

When the pages are finally released in 2012,

they detailed extensive links between men

the FBI thinks could be Saudi intelligence officers

and the hijackers, including the two men Nance saw in San Diego.

But the report stopped short of finding conclusive proof

of a connection between the Saudi government and 9/11.

And rather than own up to the immense intelligence failure

that allowed 9/11 to happen.

The Bush administration executes what is perhaps

the 21st century's greatest feat of misdirection.

They shift blame from the actual perpetrator

to a completely unrelated target,

Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein.

-George W. Bush was guided by George Herbert Walker Bush's

defense secretary, Dick Cheney.

They wanted to liberate Iraq for the sake of liberating the oil,

which would assist the Saudis,

not liberate Iraq for the sake of liberating Iraqis.

-And just as it had with Vietnam,

the government creates the illusion

that vital American interests are at stake and goes further,

suggesting that Iraq is a dire threat to the United States.

One of the most trusted figures in American society

is rolled out to level the accusation

that Iraq has been hiding weapons of mass destruction

and is prepared to use them.

-The facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein

and his regime are concealing their efforts

to produce more weapons of mass destruction.

-And in addition to the threat, Americans are told

that the Iraqi people

want us to invade their country.

-Do you think the American people are prepared for a long,

costly, and bloody battle?

-I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim,

because I really do believe we will be

greeted as liberators.

-But these are lies on a massive scale

and will lead to countless deaths

and kill faith in government

for a new generation of Americans.

-Iraq had nothing to do with the attack on 9/11,

but for whatever reason, and there are lots of theories

about why, the Bush administration

was intent on invading and occupying Iraq,

even though it had nothing to do with the war on terrorism.

-As the U.S. rolls into Iraq, weapons of mass destruction

are never found and another false promise is exposed.

[ All chanting in native language ]

Instead of being greeted as liberators,

American soldiers are seen as an occupying army.

- Go away! Go away! - Go away! Go away!

-We moved hundreds of thousands of American targets

closer to people with guns and bombs

who could have terrorist attacks against them,

and that's what happened in Iraq.

[ Gunfire ] - Watch out!

[ Indistinct shouting ]

-You had a political leadership

that was largely dominated by chicken hawks,

people who had never served themselves.

They're sending other people's kids off to war.

They're not sending their own kids.

[ Gunfire ]

-The Saudi oil ties, the intelligence failure,

the inability to find weapons of mass destruction,

some take these strands and weave

a wild conspiracy theory that Bush and his cronies

orchestrated 9/11 to justify the Iraq invasion.

-September 11th was not just a terrible tragedy

that took the lives of thousands of innocent people.

It was a violent and aggressive seizure of power

and a transformation of both foreign and domestic policy.

It was an American coup.

-Despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary,

the 9/11 conspiracy theorists make the bizarre claim

that no planes were actually hijacked,

and it was planted bombs

that destroyed the Pentagon and Trade Center.

Not seeing the irony, they would call themselves 9/11 truthers.

-[ Speaks indistinctly ]

-What had been only on the fringes

is now a new kind of movement, people who believe

everything they're being told by authority is a lie.

-It was the head of CIA! FBI! Homeland Security!

-Their views are amplified

by the Internet and seep into the mainstream.

-The Tower 7 one is the weirdest one of all,

'cause if that... if it's... [stammering]

when you watch that one, I was like,

"Why does that collapse like that?"

Like, it's just strange.

-And I'm sure you've seen the BBC reporter

who was speaking on camera

and World Trade Center 7 is behind her,

and she says, "World Trade Center 7 has just fallen.

It has fallen.

It is the third building..." and it's still standing.

-The truth is, delusion paints the attack as a false flag,

a covert government op

designed to look like the work of someone else.

And suddenly false flags are seen everywhere.

-Can you imagine being a parent of a little child

who saw this scene that you're looking at right now?

-In a grotesque twist, even school shootings

are labeled hoaxes perpetrated by the government to justify

taking away Americans' guns.

-This is not just the 17 poor, dead young people

that had their lives taken from them.

This is the globalist crime syndicate

that has funded the radical Islamic takeover of North Africa

and much of the Middle East.

-The price is high.

Instead of trying to figure out how to avoid future tragedies,

we're drawn into a debate over paranoid fantasies.

-Do you see the "666" right here?

Do you see all of the subliminal messages?

-Now anything is possible.

Like the racist falsehood

that the Hawaiian-born African-American president

was really born in Kenya.

-Barack Obama has usurped the presidency, and in so doing

is now on the fast track to destroy America.

-Into the sea of suspicion and doubt,

fueled in part by decades of government lies

wades a real-estate mogul and reality-TV star

who becomes the champion of the Obama birther movement.

-I think it's a terrible pale that's hanging over him.

He should show his birth certificate.

-And, again, Americans are distracted

from real political debates

about real problems, like growing economic inequality

as the country struggles to recover from the 2008 recession.

And when Donald Trump runs for president himself,

he leverages the mistrust accrued from the falsehoods

of Democrats and Republicans alike.

-They lie. They said there were weapons of mass destruction.

There were none, and they knew there were none.

-Trump goes further, enrobing himself in aggrievement

the sense not only that American greatness has been lost,

but that it's been stolen.

-The establishment protected itself

but not the citizens of our country.

-And shortly after Trump becomes president,

in a dark corner of the Internet,

another online conspiracy erupts with Trump at the center,

they savior battling a cabal inside government.

The dual state is rebranded the deep state,

and Trump discovers that decades of lies and mistrust

can be very useful indeed.

-It's not that surprising, because if you actually believe

the theories that are espoused by QAnon as reality,

they would probably warrant some pretty dramatic responses.

-I want to tell you that this marks the start

of the second American Revolution.

[ People cheer, chant "freedom" ]

-Decades of Cold War, living on a constant war footing,

under the looming cloud

of seemingly imminent nuclear annihilation,

all of it has a profound effect on the American mind.

-America is going under leftist martial law,

and if the communist Chinese agent Joe Biden

is able to get in there,

he will put America under permanent lock-down,

siege until we're brought to our knees.

-In the last 50 years, we've pretty much always existed

at the brink of some kind of existential threat,

usually a self-made one,

you know, often a military aggression,

and so in those times, people develop belief systems

that help them cope, help them maintain,

and one of those is to tell yourself that, you know,

you are part of a battle between good and evil

and that, ultimately, good will prevail.

-One communist on the faculty of one university

is one communist too many.

[ People cheer ]

-During the Cold War, the government masters

the art of misdirection.

The damage control when official lies come to light...

Blame the Soviets and other internal enemies.

-Every war that we've ever lost,

every pandemic that we have failed to fight,

it is somehow or another the result of traitors.

-In the '80s, Rambo embodies the country's rage over the lies

and the loss of Vietnam,

but he transfers blame from the government

that orchestrated the war to the protesters who opposed it.

-But somebody wouldn't let us win.

And I come back to the world,

and I see all those maggots at the airport,

protesting me, spitting, calling me "baby killer"

and all kinds of vile crap.

-It's a result of columns within the country

who are obsessed with destroying America.

They are themselves evil.

And so when you start believing in these conspiracy theories,

you come to believe that America itself has been infected

with corruption and traitors and evil

so much that democracy is untenable.

♪♪

-Fueled partly by the mistrust

that comes with decades of government lies,

conspiracy movements proliferate after 9/11

and in Donald Trump, they have found their champion.

Even a Fox News ally wonders if he's gone off the rails.

-Who do you think is pulling Biden's strings?

Is it former Obama officials?

-People that you've never heard of,

people that are in the dark shadows, people that...

-What does that mean? That sounds like conspiracy theory.

Dark shadows? What is that?

-No, people that you haven't heard of.

They're people that are on the streets.

They're people that are controlling the streets.

-The most extreme conspiracy movement,

which gains by far the most followers, is called QAnon.

It begins with a series of posts on an Internet bulletin board

starting in October 2017.

-This mysterious person who called themselves Q

was claiming that Donald Trump was engaged in a secret war

against a variety of enemies,

mostly members of the so-called deep state,

and that soon Donald Trump's enemies would be arrested

or put to death.

-Are you kidding me?! We will not cower down to evil!

We're Americans!

-QAnon is a far-right conspiracy based on blood libel,

which is an ancient anti-Semitic concept

that Jewish people are eating Christian babies.

In this case, they've changed that a little bit.

-QAnon's version of the blood libel has Donald Trump at war

with a deep-state cabal that's abducting children

and drinking their blood.

The satanic group is vast and includes Hillary Clinton,

Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden,

billionaires George Soros and Bill Gates

and even entertainers like Tom Hanks, Ellen, and Oprah Winfrey.

-The first event predicted by Q...

Claiming that Hillary Clinton was going to be arrested

within 48 hours of the post.

That was obviously false,

but this did not stop QAnon in any way.

-People who believe the disinformation,

misinformation that they are promulgating,

we've seen, will do some pretty extreme things.

And it's not that surprising because if you actually believe

the theories that are espoused by QAnon as reality,

they would probably warrant some pretty dramatic responses

-Since that first post in 2017,

purveyors of the patently false QAnon conspiracy theory

have attracted millions of new adherents

with online videos full of quasi-religious prophecies

about a coming storm and a great awakening.

-What if I told you it was done on purpose?

What if I told you that those who were corrupting the world,

poisoning our food, and igniting conflict were themselves about

to be permanently eradicated from the Earth?

-As the conspiracy cult grows,

its narrative expands with increasingly outlandish claims.

-One person claims that there are 20,000 children

being kept beneath the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Another claims instead that these "mole children"

are being held beneath Central Park.

QAnon believers take typos

and even the act of the president

drinking a bottle of FIJI Water as messages that are coded

and being sent to them across the airwaves for them

to figure out on their own time.

-The QAnon lie about a deep state cabal

is the legacy of decades of official lies.

At the same time, QAnon serves the purposes

of the current government elite.

If you paint your opponents

as Satan-worshiping drinkers of children's blood,

any action against them is justified.

-Then we end up in an "every man for himself,"

"survival of the fittest"

kind of prepper jungle, right?

It's a way of bringing about the apocalypse now.

That's why they call it the Great Awakening.

They want to bring it on. Let's get there.

[ Cheers and applause ]

-Even when Trump is no longer president,

the post-truth world may be his legacy,

thanks in part to decades of lies by leaders before him.

And without a set of truths to unite us,

we may remain divided and find that stamping out

hateful conspiracies is like fighting shadows.

-The Cold War was the first time

that the American intelligence state

launched into a full-scale psychological operation

designed to modify human behavior and human reaction

to American power.

The result of this large-scale psychological operation

is QAnon.

In a way, we developed an A.I.

that we thought would fight our enemy,

but it came back home and consumed us.

[ Both shouting indistinctly ]

-We have forgotten what to expect from a president,

especially in moments of disaster,

and we are neck deep in it.

-2020.

How do I characterize 2020?

-A horror story. Plain and simple.

-It seems like everything just keeps getting worse,

just worse and worse all the time.

-2020 is the year disaster struck and threatens Americans

in every part of the country,

and not only have the nation's defenses proved inadequate,

the president hasn't even pretended to protect us.

-It's going to disappear one day.

It's like a miracle. It will disappear.

-A stress test for the system, and we have largely failed it.

-We really reached

a kind of maximum brittleness as a society.

-The lie that the government is there

to defend us is laid bare.

Other falsehoods designed

to reinforce the president's power accelerate.

-2020 is bad.

The only question is, will 2021 be worse?

♪♪

-The way that Donald Trump has faced the pandemic

or failed to face the pandemic

is the greatest national security blunder

we've ever seen in American history.

It dwarfs Vietnam.

It dwarfs the Iraq war.

It's killing our citizens.

It's occupying our military. It's eroding our economy.

The pandemic is hurting America

in ways that Osama bin Laden could have only dreamed of.

-As the pandemic first bears down on the country...

-The Democrats want us to fail so badly...

-...Donald Trump sees the virus

as a political ploy by Democrats...

-...and this is their new hoax.

- and when COVID spread is impossible to ignore,

Trump attempts to gaslight the nation with false optimism.

-Now, the virus that we're talking about having to do,

you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April

with the heat as the heat comes in.

Typically, that will go away in April.

We're in great shape, though.

-But the U.S. is in the worst shape.

Could a reason we make up only 4% of the world's population

but account for over 20% of the deaths

be that so many Americans don't trust authority,

the legacy of decades of government lies?

-All Trump's assurances about the coronavirus going away

and that it's just going to disappear

and we're all going to be just fine,

I think those efforts are propaganda.

They're very similar to the Eisenhower-era propaganda

that, you know, we can survive a nuclear war,

you know, if you just get in your basement.

If you just have detergent down there,

you can scrub off the radioactive fallout,

and your family could be okay.

-Behind closed doors in conversations

with author Bob Woodward,

as the virus first begins to spread,

Trump shows he understands how deadly the threat is.

Meanwhile, misinformation creeps into the mainstream.

QAnon followers claim the pandemic is an elaborate ruse

to increase authoritarian control over their lives

and to undermine their fearless leader.

-The COVID hoax was in the works

years before the election of Donald Trump,

but they started fast-tracking it.

-As Trump pretends that America has turned a corner,

he holds large in-person rallies...

-I hear from your two great senators and your governor

that we're doing very well in Oklahoma. That's the word.

-...superspreader events that a Stanford study

finds have led, at the time,

to more than 30,000 infections and over 700 deaths.

-President Trump was ridiculing the notion

of people wearing masks,

you see, is a pathological,

almost sociopathic lack of compassion for other people,

not just the American people as a whole,

but for the people he works with in his own administration.

-When Trump contracts COVID himself,

he receives care unavailable to virtually any other American,

yet he takes his recovery as proof

that taking steps to avoid COVID is somehow a moral failure.

-Don't let it dominate you. Don't be afraid of it.

-We have forgotten what to expect from a president,

especially in moments of disaster,

and we are neck deep in it. - We're on our own...

-Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, uh,

whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light.

-...but there's this illusion

that there's someone in charge...

-And then I see the disinfectant.

- and that's the worst of both worlds.

-And is there a way we can do something like that

by injection inside or... Or almost a cleaning?

♪♪

-The coronavirus crisis is exposing failures

even deeper than a president refusing to protect us.

-That's assault, ma'am.

-It reveals a mistrust of authority so profound

that many won't wear the masks necessary to curb the outbreak,

and it lays bare the government's inability

to protect the vulnerable.

As the country teeters on the abyss,

we're witnessing a loss of faith in America itself.

-I was in the Soviet Union when it collapsed back in 1992,

and when I came back to the West,

I was shocked by how complacent people were with

this presumption that history only went in one direction,

because I've seen that history can go into reverse.

And, unfortunately, when that happens, it can be brutal.

-Americans are starting to realize more and more

that they don't have to be powerless,

and we can start to build something real and true

and human and reject this militarism of the Cold War.

-The RAND Corporation, Palo Alto, 1950s.

A psychological experiment is being conducted that will shape

the shadow government's dark view of human nature.

The experiment, which would guide

America's Cold War military strategy,

takes the form of a game. - Well, we got to win.

-Game theory was a burgeoning study

that started with this game, prisoner's dilemma,

in which two opponents took each other on

with their moves hidden behind a structure.

-Each prisoner has to decide whether to rat out the other guy

in exchange for a lighter sentence.

The way the game is structured, the safe thing to do

is betray your fellow prisoner because they may betray you.

-The strategy was to always act in your own interests,

to always act in bad faith.

You had to always assume that your opponent

was seeking to destroy you and was going to lie

and not communicate or negotiate.

-For the doomsday planners,

game theory is embodied in the doctrine

called "mutually assured destruction," or MAD.

-If the Russians try to nuke us,

we're going to nuke them right back.

Our bombs are on autopilot.

♪♪

-The 1964 film "Dr. Strangelove" parodies

the insanity of mutual destruction

with a so-called doomsday machine...

- Doomsday machine. - That can't be stopped

once it's triggered. - Doomsday machine?

What is that? - A device which will destroy

all human and animal life on Earth.

-All human and animal?

-Those guys, the opposites of us, the ideology that we hate,

those guys are coming for us.

The threat is out there. It's external.

-But what if that threat isn't out there,

but within our own society,

in official lies and misinformation, in division,

in the failure of our own leaders to protect us?

-The opposite of mutually assured destruction

is self-destruction.

That's the path we're on now.

-We are in the middle of something that I am not sure

that we're going to get out of.

We are probably more divided

than we've ever been in the United States.

We're in the grip of a pretty devastating set of circumstances

that are going to probably affect us

for [sighs] generations.

-We're scared, and it's very difficult not to be.

But what we can do is exercise our agency.

We have to make our choices.

We have to not only vote, but we also have to be active.

We have to work essentially in the spirit of, you know,

the late and great John Lewis, to go out

and make good and necessary trouble.

-As America mourns and tears at itself,

maybe there's one upside to the horrors of 2020.

We're finally facing the legacy of lies that got us here.

-As these things start to collapse,

Americans are starting to realize more and more

that they don't have to be powerless.

They do not have to accept a world

in which they have to sacrifice for the good of a state,

particularly when the state

doesn't hold up its end of the bargain.

Americans are starting to wake up from this mythology

that they have been taught and realized that power can come

from grassroots organization and solidarity,

and we can start to build something real and true

and human and reject this militarism of the Cold War.

-So what would real security look like?

It would look like embracing

the general welfare of the American people

and the general welfare of the species.

-This is what democracy looks like!

-That would involve cutting all of the spending on warfare

and surveillance and policing

and redirecting it towards meeting human needs,

and we need to be thinking about all fantasies

of individual survival

in the face of some sort of atomic apocalypse

or environmental apocalypse are just that.

They're fantasies, and they have no basis in reality.

I mean, we are... from our days as hunter gatherers to today,

we are a group species.

We're all totally dependent on each other.

And if we can't see that, that's our greatest peril.

♪♪

-America thought... "thought" it won the Cold War,

when, in fact, nobody did. And as it thought that it then

began to build history's most perfect killing machine.

But while America was building, it neglected itself,

it didn't build any kinds of public institutions,

no public health care and pensions,

child care, decent jobs, incomes, savings,

stability, nothing.

Communism was a disaster,

and 20 years later, 30 years later,

we have capitalism collapsing America.

You know, some people used to joke

that there were bread lines in the Soviet Union.

Okay. There's lines for basics in the states, too.

-Being poor and Black in America

is a lot like living in a collapsed economy.

Being young in America is a lot like living

in a collapsed economy. You're getting paid, you know,

some ridiculously low minimum wage,

you have to work two jobs to afford a house,

and you can't afford health insurance.

To all intents and purposes, America has collapsed already.

The apocalypse is here.

It's just not evenly distributed.

-This is what happens when there is a shadow agenda,

a shadow America that benefits one group of people

at the expense of the greater good.

All they need is for you not to pay attention,

all they need is for you not to know

where America's sons and daughters are dying

or how much money they spend on a weapons system

or where they're deploying troops.

They hope you don't pay attention.

If you don't pay attention, that's how this happens,

that's how billions of dollars are spent,

that's how cities are left vulnerable,

that's how pandemics spread.

♪♪

-QAnon is the most advanced

form of interactive fiction I've seen.

It's kind of like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" novel,

where what they do is leave this hint,

that hint, this hint and that hint,

and then you as the audience member

have to find ways of connecting these different things.

So it's like child abuse and a government thing and COVID

and 5G cellular technology.

Go. Right?

So it's like an improv show where you give them four things,

and they have to try to connect them on stage at once.

And the great, beautiful thing that the QAnon culture

has adopted is the improv artists',

"Yes, and..." technique.

The whole idea in improv is one person says something

and then you say, "Yes, and..."

-In the '60s, anti-government fervor flourishes

on the counterculture left.

The right backs the military and the anti-communist state.

But in this decade, much of this has been turned upside down.

And a new right wing mysticism summons

monsters from the last century that we thought we defeated

the belief in a secret cabal of Jews

and communists inside government,

invisibly manipulating society,

preying on children for their blood,

the invention of an indispensable leader

to save the world from the cabal.

-QAnon is the mystic fringe of fascism,

the festering at the edge where ideas become sublimated

into something more ethereal or even cosmic.

Donald Trump is a kind of beacon

for those hoping for a pure future,

for a sort of fascist utopia, a return to values of the past

and a cleaning of the country's undesirable elements.