Dr. Robert Malone: The New Battlefield Is Your Mind—Twitter Files, Fifth Generation Warfare
Updated: Feb 8
“Is it 10 billion or 13 billion, in the United States alone, that was employed in this—what else can you call it—psyops campaign?… The government felt that it was acceptable to deploy these military-grade technologies against all of us to coerce, compel, and mandate that we accept an unlicensed product that turns out to not be safe nor effective,” says mRNA vaccine pioneer Dr. Robert Malone, author of the new book, “Lies My Gov’t Told Me: And the Better Future Coming.”
In this episode, we dive into the Twitter Files, information warfare, psychological operations, and how we can make sense of the bewildering series of events we’ve witnessed in the last three years.
“We’re now seeing the documentation on a daily basis released to us by Twitter of this intense collusion between the US government, tech, and corporate media,” says Dr. Malone.
Some describe it as fifth-generation warfare, “or fifth-generation warfare gradient is a better way to think about it,” says Dr. Malone. “This new battleground in which your mind and your thoughts, your very emotions are the battleground. It is not about territory. It’s about what you believe. It’s what you think.”
*** FOLLOWING the premiere of this episode, our senior editor Jan Jekielek hosted Dr. Robert Malone in a Twitter Space, doing a live Q&A with several other esteemed doctors and scientists. 👉 You can catch the LIVE STREAM of the Twitter Space (viewable on EpochTV!) here 👈
Interview trailer:
Watch the full interview:https://www.theepochtimes.com/dr-robert-malone-the-new-battlefield-is-your-mind-twitter-files-fifth-generation-warfare-and-the-covid-vaccine-psyops-campaign_4947256.html
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Dr. Robert Malone, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Dr. Robert Malone:
Jan, it’s been my enduring pleasure to have these chats with you from time to time. It always forces me to think more about things before I walk into your studio.
Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk about something that seems to be on everybody’s mind right now, which is Twitter, of course. You’ve said that Twitter isn’t a business, it’s a weapon. What does that mean?
Dr. Malone:
This is an essay we put out a couple of months ago, before Elon transformed the company in the way that he has. Twitter is one embodiment, as we all know now, of multiple social media platforms, in which ostensibly what you interact with, you believe to be free. As has been pointed out repeatedly, if you don’t know who’s paying for it, you’re the product, and the information that you provide is the value that’s being extracted.
All of these social media platforms are actively employed by the intelligence community to shape opinion, to truly shape thought, and to shape emotion. And Twitter, it’s clear now, has become the premium platform for shaping emerging global consensus about the topics of the day. In the case of Twitter, what triggered me to write this article was an analysis that had been done where the author speculated that Twitter was deployed during Arab Spring.
As I was reading that section, it triggered me because I knew that Twitter had been deployed during Arab Spring as a weapon. It’s often the case in our military industrial intelligence complex world, here in the United States, that we have a history of piloting weapons platforms during peripheral skirmishes that are occurring in our imperial world that we operate here out of Washington DC. In the case of Arab Spring, you’ll recall that we had a lot of young crowds moving and acting in ways that were very disruptive.
We’ll just say disruptive, then we’re not placing value on this person versus that person, they were just disruptive. I knew that Twitter was deployed then because I had a client at the time that was deeply, deeply involved in both non-classified and classified research into being able to map the emotional content of language being used by individuals on social media platforms.
It’s a multilingual program that analyzes the emotional content of language. It’s a form of language processing, based on well-established psychological parameters. So, it’s all statistically grounded. I was also working for a company, TASC, as a beltway bandit here, in a senior position having to do with business development. They had their own platforms that also were being developed for defense and intelligence communities to perform similar functions.
What I’m referring to here is that with modern social media platforms one is able to extensively map relationship clouds and also to map the consensus within a relationship cloud about a given topic—where that consensus is moving, who’s driving it, and who’s at the fringes of that cloud, meaning the influencers dragging it in this direction or that direction. With the social media platforms, the technology that we’re all familiar with as individuals, we use this language like, “I’ve been shadowbanned, I’ve been deplatformed, I can’t get the reach that I thought I could get.”
Or, “Oh, suddenly that tweet went really viral and a whole bunch of people saw it and oh, that’s so great, they all agree with me.” It is grossly naive to think that way. The way that these tools, these weapons, information warfare weapons work is that those controlling them can modulate the messaging that’s occurring within these influencer clouds that can be readily mapped.
In fact, all the members of that influencer cloud can be physically mapped in space, particularly if they’re using a cellular device in an urban center, because you have multiple cell towers that can triangulate them. And then, that maps into what’s called Gorgon Stare, which is this incredible high resolution imaging capability that we now have in spy satellites. Your current state of mind, based on the language that you’re using and the topics that you’re talking about can be mapped very precisely psychologically.
It can be tied into a web of influence relationships, it can be identified in geospatial environments, it can be tied to physical images, so that can then be tied the vehicle you’re driving, who do you get into that vehicle with, who are you traveling with, and who are you associating with. All these things can now be totally integrated and mapped.
By using these tools of manipulating what information, what tweets you put out, what messages you put out to your influencer cloud, they can modulate how those people behave. You can actually very actively control what individuals are thinking, the information that they’re gathering, and what they’re being influenced to do. A crowd that is in a plaza protesting against some action that’s happened during Arab Spring, can very readily be modulated to go to this or that direction physically or intellectually or psychologically, using these tools.
Mr. Jekielek:
I’ll just jump in, without realizing that there’s any manipulation actually happening.
Dr. Malone:
Precisely. And that is the essence of this information warfare, this psychological operation. One word that’s coming, one phrase that’s coming to fore and more and more is fifth generation warfare. Actually, fifth generation warfare gradient, is a better way to think about it. It’s a new battleground in which your mind, your thoughts, and your very emotions are the battleground. It’s not about territory, it’s about what you believe and what you think.
It’s done with these tools, that can be actively crafted, modified, manipulated in a very sophisticated way, and then propagated within the domain of those that you are influencing. Which is why there’s so much importance in targeting those that are hyper-influential within a cloud of connectivity.
Mr. Jekielek:
In your mind, what is the significance of Elon Musk taking over Twitter, given everything you’ve just told me?
Dr. Malone:
Early on before the acquisition, when there was still all this discussion about how many of the Twitter users were actually bots or synthetic users, not true individuals, there was much discussion about the business model that was driving the acquisition. This relates to the envisioned Company X, a name that apparently Elon has bought back from PayPal.
To illustrate an angle to this, you recall that Elon recently discussed in some of his tweets—I don’t know how his board is letting him get away with it, by the way, he must have total control— that they’re building a new alternative to PayPal. What he indicated early on was the intended business model was more akin to WeChat, in which Twitter or whatever Twitter becomes, let’s call it X for the sake of argument, becomes one ring to rule them all, the universal application.
It’s a universal application through which you’ll do your banking, your commercial transactions, buy your groceries, have your social media transactions, everything. Purportedly, that’s the logic that was underlying the acquisition. So from that, the importance of understanding the true user base becomes crucial, because that is something that is a commodity. You or me being on Twitter represents a potential node that has commercial transactions that could be monetized.
So, what do we have here? I’m not sure, and I think a lot of people are on the fence. Certainly, we can all celebrate Elon’s willingness to be transparent and demonstrate integrity in disclosing the intense, almost casual routine interaction with the intelligence community, particularly the FBI and Twitter. In these recent Twitter files that have come out, that clearly demonstrates how closely integrated Twitter was as a weapon for forming public opinion and manipulating public opinion and reinforcing the intended public opinion and consensus.
But what’s behind that and where is he really going with this, this gentleman that is one of the major defense contractors to the United States with SpaceX, among other platforms, and is advancing this clearly transhumanist technology that we call Neuralink. What is really behind Elon Musk’s business decisions?
A lot of people get caught up in the enthusiasm of Elon Musk being a savior of democracy and free speech, and that may be one of his motivations. I can’t get in his head, and I don’t know what he’s thinking, but I do know that he is a business person. I do know that he’s been a very successful business person, as well as a very successful technologist. It’s hard for me to imagine that he could have invested, what’s the number, 40 billion?
Mr. Jekielek:
44, yes.
Dr. Malone:
Yes, 44 billion, of which a substantial fraction is clearly not his capital. Somebody out there has decided to deploy a major chunk of change, and invest a lot of treasure in acquiring this thing. Intentionally or not, this puts Elon in a position where he’s functionally able to blackmail the United States government.
Now, that’s a big word, and it has a lot of impact. But I’m reminded of J. Edgar Hoover, who used to keep his little black book where he had dirt on a lot of people here in DC. And then of course, we had this honey trap operation that we call Jeffrey Epstein and Maxwell, that was clearly an intelligence honey trap operation to compromise people.
And now Elon is in the position where he has access to incredibly damaging information about the willingness of the U.S. government to collude with industry and compromise the First Amendment. Remember, this is a court case being brought by the two attorneys general, and they have just been given a huge gift, it basically makes their case.
I found it fascinating that Janet Yellen, a few weeks ago, was talking about the need to evaluate the potential antitrust implications of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Elon doesn’t have any other social media platforms, so Janet Yellen basically starts saber rattling. A week later, Elon Musk starts deploying intelligence about collusion between the U.S. government and Twitter to censor people on a routine basis.
I’m trying to make the point that there are wheels within wheels within wheels here. I can’t ferret them out, and I don’t think you can either. We’re left here on the sidelines observing the passion play, observing the Kabuki theater and trying to discern meaning out of these little fragments of information which are being selectively released and deployed. We also know now that a major democratic operative lawyer was busy filtering all that information until fairly recently, unbeknownst to Elon Musk.
Like I’m saying, there are wheels within wheels within wheels on this, and Elon doesn’t call me up. He contacted Jay Bhattacharya two Sundays ago, to go into Twitter HQ and start reviewing COVID files. I’m not talking to him, nobody in my close circle has direct personal communication on a routine basis with him, and I don’t know what he’s thinking. But I do know that he is a very intelligent individual, and I know that he is very strategic.
If he’s doing things in this space to advance free speech and essentially to protect democracy or protect the integrity of the American experiment, I applaud that. I thank him for it from the bottom of my heart. Whatever his intentions are, if that’s one of the outcomes, it’s a win. But I don’t think any of us should be so naive as to assume that that is his only objective.
Mr. Jekielek:
One of the things that struck me, and I’ve written about this, is the gift that Elon has given everyone is that he has a substantial following. There’s a lot of people that love Elon.
Dr. Malone:
And a bunch of haters.
Mr. Jekielek:
And certainly a bunch of haters. But here’s the thing, this corporate media ecosystem has all of a sudden started hating Elon, when before they were either neutral or very positive to him for the majority of the time.
Dr. Malone:
Tesla stock tanked.
Mr. Jekielek:
Tesla stock tanked. My point is that all these people are now watching how this whole ecosystem has shifted on this guy and wondering to themselves, “Wait a second, maybe this has happened before.” It’s like this giant red pill, that’s what I think.
Dr. Malone:
I have a friend that corresponds with me that makes a case. It’s actually Alex Marinos, a key opinion leader in this social media space, and just a shout-out. I’m grateful because he endorsed that the data do support my thesis that I was the original inciting event inventor for this technology platform.
That aside, Alex makes the case that Elon goes through these love-hate cycles about every two to three years and has been doing so for quite a long time. And his thesis, among others, is that he repeatedly battered and bruised Bill Gates, and basically outmaneuvered him on Tesla stock and also with SpaceX and beat the expectations.
There is this long history of him going through these hero-villain cycles in corporate media. That appears to reflect underlying tensions within this cast that I like to call the overlords, this tiny, tiny fraction of elites that we can increasingly see that control a lot of global events. What we may be really observing are the artifacts of competition, technological and financial, between these heavy, heavy hitters that are so far above the world that you and I exist in, that we only have a vague kind of cloud awareness that they’re up there doing something.
Mr. Jekielek:
But you’re not entirely a stranger to this whole defense space here in Washington DC. You’ve got secret clearance, and you’ve worked with all sorts of contractors. We talked about this a little bit earlier. You’ve sat on a number of these boards in these three letter health agencies. Why don’t we start with how you got from doing the work that you did 3, 4, 5 years ago, into what you’re talking about today?
Dr. Malone:
To comprehend my world, it’s important to go back to the root of those events, that cascade of events that happened when I was 28 and 29. I was working for this leader in American biotechnology who was trained by David Baltimore, characterized reverse transcriptase for him, for which he got the Nobel Prize, David Baltimore being one of the most influential molecular biologists in the history of the world. I’m referring to Inder Verma, who eventually got run out of the Salk Institute because of me too.
Basically, he finally got outed after decades of sexual harassment. Inder gave me an ultimatum, if I left his lab. You’ll recall from my personal story, I left it at a time when I’d had a nervous breakdown and was diagnosed by physicians at UC San Diego, as having post-traumatic stress disorder based on what I had experienced at the Salk Institute.
But Inder told me that I would never get an NIH grant if I left. And by God, he was right. I was forced to find another way to proceed. Then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, I destroyed my career as a gene therapist by being a whistleblower about the Jesse Gelsinger death, this UPenn adenoviral vector overdosing situation that Jim Wilson got into, that collapsed the entire gene therapy industry. At the time, I was taking training with the bioethicist at U Maryland, who is also Jill’s PhD mentor by the way.
I told him what I knew about what had taken place, and he said, “Robert, you have an ethical obligation to disclose what you know to the press.” The press at that time included Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and that became the basis for an article that really catapulted her career in the New York Times. It eventually resulted in the collapse of the entire gene therapy enterprise really, as funded by NIH.
So, I was persona non grata times two, and I had to find a way forward. This is 1991, is that right? Yes, it’s like ’91, ’92, I had literally obtained a million dollar contract award by having good connections and knowing that there was an opportunity. It was actually when Bob Redfield got in trouble for ethics with the AIDS vaccine. Suddenly, a bunch of money became available for AIDS vaccine development. I had the connections and I managed to capture little over a million dollars to build a DNA vaccine for AIDS, which was a radical idea at the time.
This was a Navy operation. I knew the DOD system, and I knew that it operated in parallel autonomously from the NIH system. So basically, I sought refuge within the DOD space and have a long history of working closely with those people, both being funded, and as a facilitator and problem solver.
Over time, because of my connections and who I’d grown up with, people that had grown up within the Defense Threat Reduction Agency came to me again and again for advice and assistance in building teams to solve complicated problems. A notable example was when I basically spearheaded the development of the Ebola vaccine and got Merck to buy it.
The Merck Ebola vaccine was a project that I took on in this surreptitious, at the fringes space between DOD and business. I have long operated in this gray zone between beltway bandits and service providers, contractors and Department of Defense, of necessity, because I couldn’t really operate within the traditional NIH academic space.
And yet, NIH would come to me because I had this deep, deep experience in taking products all the way through from discovery, through licensure, regulatory affairs, clinical development, project management, all this stuff I’d had to master over decades.
And so, NIH would come to me and ask me to serve as study section chair, particularly for these very large contracts, 80 million, 100 million, 150 million. I grew to specialize in assembling teams to solve complicated problems and capturing the money to get them funded to do this stuff that the govies wanted to have done. So, that’s been my business.
And again, of necessity, I was forced into this space. The way that works for me as a consultant just trying to pay my bills, is that these clients want to take credit for what gets done. To operate a business like what I was doing, as essentially a small consulting shop, you have to operate behind the scenes. You have to keep quiet, let the client take the win—enable them, facilitate them, coach them.
And that’s how I’ve gone along in my career now for decades, until this cascade of events, which is unlike any other. I’ve been doing this through multiple, multiple outbreaks. I mentioned Ebola, Zika, many rounds of flu. I’m a bonafide expert in flu vaccine development, used to be clinical head of Salve for their $330 million influenza vaccine, cell-based influenza vaccine contract. I know all of this area really well.
But when this thing broke, this COVID crisis, it was unlike anything I or my peers had ever experienced. And as usual, I get this phone call from this character, Michael Callahan, that I was under the impression was at Wuhan at the time. He says that he wasn’t. He went to Wuhan shortly thereafter and then left with the quarantine is his story. And then he went to the Diamond Princess and managed that.
But when I got this call, as I usually do, I made a threat assessment and I said, “What’s it going to take to build a vaccine? What’s the timeline? What’s the timeline for new drugs? What’s the timeline for repurposed drugs?” And with my team I threw myself into identifying repurposed drugs back in January of 2020.
And once again, that’s a whole area and block of time that I really can’t disclose what happened. I was working as a government contractor for Defense Threat Reduction Agency. There was a period of time when we were interacting closely with Johnson & Johnson, because of some of the drugs that we had identified and wanted to move forward clinically. I was working under contract for Leidos. I worked for a long time on a big contract that I helped facilitate getting the money for, that we ran through the MIT Lincoln Lab, and this is all semi-classified government space.
I’m not at liberty to discuss what I did then and what we did, if I had been able to. You can see the artifacts in some of the publications, both published and submitted to preprint servers. But we could never get published the interaction of Celecoxib and Famotidine or the interaction of Celecoxib, Famotidine and Ivermectin that we tried to get through the FDA to do clinical trials on. None of that stuff is really transparent to the average person. So, there’s this block of time where I was working my can off seven days a week, trying to advance repurposed drugs. And then, this cascade of events happens where I get to the point where I face a dilemma.
Do I break my longstanding strategy that many here in DC use, “Keep your head down, if they can’t see you, that they can’t shoot you,” or do I come out and speak publicly and say, “This is not right.” And of course, history shows what my decision was. Yet now I’m being attacked by many because of this long history of deep connectivity within the government, that people are inferring that somehow I’m compromised because I have this long history.
I can assure you and the viewers, I stopped receiving any capital from Leidos, I think it was January of last year, at the time when I resigned from the Active Drug Development Committee and disclosed some of the things that were going on there, and they were pretty insistent that I resign at that time. The problem with this whole thesis of j’accuse that’s been deployed against so many people, that we accuse you of being controlled opposition, is that it’s very difficult to refute this thesis.
Because as a colleague of mine put it, it’s akin to a witch trial. Anything that you say is interpreted as confirming that you are in fact a witch. In terms of this whole thesis of how did I get from here to there, and to the wonderful woke journalist from the Atlantic Monthly who put out his hit piece, “How come you’re doing this? You must have some financial angle. You must have some conflict of interest,” my response to him was, “No, it was the right thing to do.”
And he just couldn’t process that, that somebody would do something because it was the right and ethical thing to do, as opposed to having some ulterior motive or financial angle or conflict of interest. I’ve been through,I don’t know how many cycles now of people hypothesizing this, that, or the other conflict of interest.
But I have the benefit of basically having an open heart, and when I get hit with these things, I know in my soul that I have been very conscious of potential conflicts of interest all the way through this. I’ve been trained on COI for years and years and years, and I’m very aware of what it is, and how insidious it can be.
My wife, Dr. Jill Glasspool Malone, and I have supported each other by talking on a daily basis, “What about this, and what about that.” One can take this level of social influence that I now have been given and exploit it to extract wealth in some way. There’s a whole lot of different ways you can do it. We have tried really, really hard to avoid any of those things, knowing that if we did that there would be blowback.
Hence, the substack is all free. Jill and I made a conscious decision when we launched that substack after Steve Kirsch had advocated for it, due to the fact we could make so much money, that we would make it all entirely free. The only restriction is that we would restrict comments within the substack comment section to people that are subscribers. This has the lovely side effect that it keeps most of the trolls out because they don’t want to spend five bucks a month. But in terms of the content and the information, which was our intention to get out, it’s all free. That’s because in large part, we have been very, very wary of the trap of, as biblical scholars would call it, the trap of mammon, the trap of money that can distort things so readily.
Having been in the consulting business for decades, I’m very aware that the influence of a major client paying me on a routine basis will distort how I view the world. I’m human, as are we all. Jill and I have tried super, super hard to maintain a stance that protects us from the pressures that would cause us to bias our opinions and our actions. That said, we do have a bias. Our bias is to the truth, to data, to facts, and trying really hard to avoid going into the speculative realms of what is Tony Fauci thinking?
I don’t know what Tony Fauci is thinking, I can’t get into Tony Fauci’s head. I don’t know what Klaus Schwab is thinking. I don’t know what Harari is thinking. I only know what they say and what they write. We can evaluate those things objectively, and so that’s why I’ve tried so hard to stay on the side of the line of documentable fact-based information.
As you know, because you’ve experienced it here at Epoch Times, and NTD News, consequent to some of the things that I’ve said that were out on the edge, yet still fact-based, but were far from the accepted consensus of the time. I still took plenty of hits from that, as did both the Epoch Times and you personally. But by forcing this rigor of not allowing ourselves to cross that line and speculate about intent, speculate about somebody’s strategy, it’s allowed both of us to come through these three years with our integrity intact, and to a significant extent, with our reputations intact.
Mr. Jekielek:
There’s so many things to bounce off of here. There’s one specific thing coming to mind from your book, Lies My Government Told Me, which has been incredible for me to read. Let start with this. My first thought is truth seeking is a very difficult business, I’ve come to learn over the last 20 years, and especially when you try to tackle things that are very, very difficult for people to accept. For example, having done some of the original reporting on this murder for organs industry in China back in 2006, so many people just simply won’t accept this as a concept.
It took me a while to grasp the evidence that was presented. I feel like in this space right now, we’re faced with these kinds of unbelievable realities. I’m very concerned in part that actually given this fifth generation warfare, 5GW architecture that you’ve been describing, that this could actually itself be intentional. You don’t know what’s up, what’s down, what’s real, what’s not. And so the only thing that I know is to try to get at the truth as much as possible and hope that that will act as the North star, and that will get us through to the other side.