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This is the second instalment of UK Column’s firsthand coverage of the 8th Red Pill Expo put on by G. Edward Griffin's Freedom Force International in July 2022 in Indiana. Part I is here.
Dr. David Martin, a patent researcher and educator, gave perhaps the most sobering remarks at the recent Red Pill Expo at Hotel Wyndham in Indianapolis, setting out that—from the very beginning—what would become the United States and its wealth were proactively hijacked by well-positioned, highly ambitious financial interests with long-range designs. Thus, in Dr. Martin’s view, the US never really got started on a firm footing of true freedom, contrary to popular beliefs about America’s founding that many consider sacred.
“This was never about ‘we, the people’”, Dr. Martin said at the Expo, covered by UK Column on 9–10 July. Leveling with an America-first, pro-US Constitution audience that likely would question parts of his perspective, he boldly noted: “There can’t be a ‘Make America Great Again’”, referring to Donald J. Trump’s well-known slogan; rather, he continued, “We need to ‘Make America Great’—period!”
According to Dr. Martin, it was Dutch financial interests that largely financed the American Revolution—contrary, he said, to widely-held assumptions that the Rothschilds and other powerful Jewish families and individuals have been the main drivers of many a national transformation or crisis.
On that note, when asked later about Polish-born Jewish businessman Haym Soloman’s key role assisting English-born Robert Morris as the assumed “prime financier” of the rebel side in the American revolution, Dr. Martin said those men, while notable, were lower-level players. He named Stephen Girard and John Jacob Astor (born Johann Jakob Astor) as the leading financiers of the time who, he said, issued “all the debt for the Revolutionary War in 1775”—a year before the Declaration of Independence was issued and the war formally commenced on 4 July 1776.
Astor—listed as a “German-American” merchant, real estate mogul and investor—made his fortune in a fur trade monopoly, as well as by smuggling opium into China (where its use was generally prohibited). “In proportion to GDP, he was one of the richest people in modern history”, Wikipedia notes.
Girard, referred to as “a banker of French origin” by Wikipedia, was thought to have been the “fourth richest American of all time”.
Thus, the record, at least at a glance, appears to bear out Dr. Martin’s main claims, since Girard, after the charter of the First Bank of the United States expired in 1811, purchased most of its stock. This bank became the principal credit source for the colonial government during the War of 1812, in which British troops burned down Washington, DC; and toward the end of the war, Girard underwrote up to 95% of the war-loan issue. After the war he became a large stockholder and one of the directors of the Second Bank of the United States. Moreover, according to Dr. Martin, Astor provided capital for the Second Bank.
Dr. Martin told the Expo audience that the First Bank of the United States, as well as the Second Bank—two entities that represented early attempts at central banking, roughly a century before the 1913 founding of the Federal Reserve System which commandeers the U.S. economy today—were utilized, via interest charges upon the public, to pay off the financiers behind “Dutch and Spanish” debts. By 1832, according to Dr. Martin, Revolutionary War bonds were retired after nearly sixty years.
Regarding the powerful trade corporations known as the Dutch and British East India Companies, a compelling detail is that the Revolutionary War, as Dr. Martin told UK Column during a separate interview right after his Indianapolis speech, was largely a clash of East India trading interests competing for control of a vast land brimming with natural wealth—not so much a rebellion of colonists against the Crown—in order to determine which financial powers would control America during its formative years. The Netherlands also hosted a West India Company, trading in the Caribbean.
Drug trade dominance
Summarizing the “takeaway” parts of his Red Pill Expo speech, Dr. Martin told UK Column:
I think the highlight is we’ve been duped into believing that this is an economic system that’s relatively modern in its weaknesses and its failings and [that] it’s been taken over by various special interests. That’s really a wrong-headed view.
Since the Holy Roman Empire, and go back to Austria in the ninth and tenth centuries [AD], and all the way forward—certainly by the time we get to the seventeenth century [and] the British East India Company [and] the Dutch [East and West] India Companies—we realize that the economy of the world as we know it, which includes the birth of the ‘military-industrial complex’ and the British and American navies, what were they for? They were for the drug trade [. . .] Every single bit of this was built around the drug trade.
Dr. Martin added: “When we were warned [in the mid-twentieth century] ‘beware of the military-industrial complex,’ that was a foil for ‘don’t be aware’ of what’s really being [done]”.
The UK Column reporter noted: “I’ve heard that before—that was a diversion [President Eisenhower’s January 1961 warning in nationally televised remarks to ‘beware of the military-industrial complex’].”
Dr. Martin replied:
Of course, it was. Because it was the pharmaceutical industry—the chemical industry—that was behind it. Remember that every single thing we’ve ever seen in our economic system is built on the avoidance of death through drugs and the betting on death through insurance. Those two structures are the reason why the City of London exists. The City of London exists because of that; the banking system of America exists because of this; Blackrock exists because of the 14 trillion dollars of assets held by these companies [banks, insurers, re-insurers and pension managers] that have to be invested [. . .].
Dr. Martin went on to say:
If you look at Vanguard’s most recent statements [. . .] what you realize is [their clients] have been taking money out of the U.S. economy over the last two years [. . .] [Vanguard’s] clients—life insurers, banks, pensions, everybody else—[are] taking money out because they know that the change is already upon us, so they’re de-leveraging their risk on the United States and taking their risk elsewhere [. . .].
For the record, BlackRock had $10 trillion in assets under management as of January 2022, Vanguard had $7.5 trillion in assets under management as of 2021, and State Street had $3.9 trillion under management but also has a whopping “$43.3 trillion under custody and administration”, Wikipedia notes. “Their combined $22 trillion in managed assets is the equivalent of more than half of the combined value of all shares for companies in the S&P 500; their power is expected to grow”, according to the New York Times.
Such tectonic financial shifts, as Dr. Martin later said at a 23 July Arlington Institute speech in West Virginia, could pose an existential threat to the very fabric of the American economic support structure: Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, pensions and more, according to a summary of his remarks at the Arlington Institute’s website.
Dr. Martin later told the UK Column via phone (after the Red Pill Expo and the West Virginia speech) that BlackRock and State Street, as well as Vanguard—which together are the Big Three index fund managers that dominate corporate America—are doing this “because they know the market is collapsing and that the dollar’s real value has plummeted [. . .]”.
Asked at the Expo if anything else is in the controlling mix besides drugs, he replied that there are corollary issues, but emphasized:
The head of the dragon is singular; the head of the dragon is the drug trade. The drug trade is how we leverage and ultimately arbitrate when people live and when people die, because it is through the drug trade that we mitigate life [. . .] The drug trade has always driven the modern economy; it’s driven it since the 1500s, and nothing about that has changed to this day.
Dr. Martin’s remarks essentially boiled down to the observation that yesteryear’s dominant drugs, such as heroin and opium—the latter of which was a factor in the two Opium Wars waged against the Qing Dynasty by Western powers in China in the mid-nineteenth Century—have become today’s coercive drug behemoth known as Big Pharma.
Notably, the first Opium War, fought from 1839 to 1842, involving Qing China against both the British military and the private British East India Company, was triggered by the dynasty’s campaign to enforce its opium prohibition against British and American merchants who sold opium produced in India and Turkey and sought to force their opium into the Chinese market. The second war (1856–1860) saw the UK and France arrayed against Qing China, with the advanced military technology of the European powers quickly defeating the Qing forces. As a result, China ceded sovereignty over Hong Kong to the British, among other notable outcomes.
Summing up “the big picture”, Dr. Martin, like the other Red Pill Expo speakers, supplemented his remarks with a PowerPoint presentation. One image on it read: “The Dirty (not so very) Secret [. . .] it’s always been about drugs, war and slavery.” Below those words were images of the Bank of England (1694 to the present), Lloyds of London (1686 to the present), the Berenberg Bank (1590 to the present), along with, among others, the First Bank (1791–1811) and Second Bank (1816–1836) of the United States.
Alex Newman: Another angle on China
Another Red Pill Expo speaker was consultant and author Alex Newman, who is senior editor of The New American (TNA) magazine and a contributor to the Epoch Times and various other news outlets.
Asked to encapsulate his message to this year’s Expo, he said that China, in the century and a half since the Opium Wars, has been artificially built up by Western élites who, decades before the present, looked to the East and played a key role in overthrowing the pre-Mao Republic of China, led by nationalist Chang Kai-shek, in order to establish Chinese communism (starting under Mao Tse-tung) and gradually install a system of cheap (slave) industrial labor as well as a surveillance and social-scoring grid that would become the world’s social-control model. This would complement and reinforce the economic and political control models already in full swing in Western nations.
Meanwhile, vital American industrial processes and technical know-how were outsourced to China over the decades, giving China a huge trade surplus with which the Communist Party was able to build its military power and reach. The resulting forfeiture of wealth on the US side of the ledger, reflected by massive trade deficits with China year after year, helped create the American “rustbelt” amid large losses of well-paid jobs.
UK Column asked: “Alex, you talked about this Chinese model being the model of the world [. . .] What’s your central takeaway point from today’s presentation?”
Newman replied:
There are a couple critical takeaways. One is that if you want to see what the New World Order is going to look like if these maniacs get their way, Communist China really gives you some good insight into where they’re going with it.
And perhaps a more important point is that communist China is not the enemy, per se, as is so often discussed by our foreign policy élite. And the bobble-heads in the media are finally catching on to the danger [. . .]
[T]he real danger is the people who put them [the Communist Chinese government] into power and built up their régime, turning them into a global superpower that now threatens freedom around the world. We’re not going to be able to fight Communist China by just fighting Communist China; you have to fight the globalist deep-state cabal that created them and empowered them [. . .].
China, like the old USSR, brought in Western investment and capital, supposedly to “liberate” the economy and give communism a patina of freedom, in what was really a “parasitic relationship”—because those communist states’ unproductive, unworkable economies would cave in upon themselves with being put on Western life support, as Newman explained the matter.
Newman added that young, impressionable followers of socialism-communism are deceived by “brain candy”— the ideology of communism that seems to give it a palatable rationale—which dupes such followers into providing support for communistic schemes and “selling” them to a largely misinformed public, when, in reality, communism is simply “a criminal conspiracy”, in Newman’s assessment.
Furthermore, communism is played off against monopoly capitalism in a dialectic process that gives the public a false dichotomy wherein two systems that, in varying degrees, share the design features of servitude and enslavement are passed of as vastly different choices—which explains the seemingly contradictory support that super-capitalists like the Rockefellers have given communist régimes over the years.
UK Column asked whether exposing the current plans for creating central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) might be a good first step—a practical way to slow this juggernaut of East-West collaboration toward a “Great Reset” such as that suggested by the World Economic Forum, wherein the peoples of the world have been told with comic villainy, via WEF pooh-bah Klaus Schwab, that they’d be deprived of property under such a Covid-occasioned reset and learn to like it.
To the question of whether calling out the CBDC scheme would be a practical way of challenging these trends, Newman replied:
I think so. And I think part of it is just getting a deeper understanding of who these people are, what they’re up to [. . .]
As a Christian, I think none of this can truly be properly resisted just in the physical sense—in the political sense. What we’re dealing with here, at its core, is a spiritual battle; this is evil. This is satanic; this is diabolical.
He added that that world manipulators like George Soros and Schwab, while highly influential, evidently are just “cutouts” who put a public face on such meddlesome machinations but who actually work for yet deeper forces.
So, while Newman thinks that, ultimately, these globalist designs will come crashing down under their own dead weight, guided by the sovereign hand of God, he recommends that people protect themselves in various ways in the meantime.
“Start with yourself and your own family. Start with getting your kids out of the public schools and make sure they’re getting a decent education instead of being weaponized against you [via anti-family school propaganda],” Newman summarized.
To this, UK Column suggested the addition of eclipsing the mass-media cartel and working to institute a new truthful media infrastructure to compliment vastly improved education—with which Newman agreed.
Prof. Rectenwald: Social credit for compliance
Speaking of the WEF, Professor Michael Rectenwald’s remarks at the Red Pill Expo included his view that the Great Reset—a social, political and economic reorientation which the WEF announced in tandem with the 2020 Covid “pandemic” that seemingly justified virtually worldwide crackdowns on freedom of association and travel—is designed to usher in an apparent “controlled demolition” of the economy and the overall social order.
A former Marxist, Rectenwald, who has authored 11 books, including Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom, as well as Beyond Woke and Thought Criminal, is a former professor of liberal studies at New York University (2008–2019). He is now an independent researcher who has renounced Marxism and opposes all other formers of totalitarianism and political authoritarianism.
Relentless efforts to “green” the economy, amid soaring energy costs, spiking inflation, supply-chain disruptions, looming food shortages, increasing consumer debts and the tanking of the stock market—this, and more, Prof. Rectenwald sees as “arguably, all part of the Great Reset project because it all follows from the very plans that have been laid out by the World Economic Forum”, as he stated in a news interview posted on his website, largely reflecting his remarks to the Expo.
He added in the video, that beyond the economic effects of the Great Reset, there are social effects:
Great Reset-connected policies can be blamed for the open American southern border, the flood of illegal immigrants [and] even critical race theory and LGBTQTIA+ ideology in the schools—it all follows and fits right into this project.
At the Expo, he recalled that Canadian business professor Richard Florida’s 2010 book, The Great Reset, which looked at past “shocks” and “resets” and how they affected economic development, apparently was the first major work to focus on the concept of a “great reset”, and that Klaus Schwab simply picked up on the idea and steered it toward reorienting the world to comply with the stringent Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations under the former Agenda 21—which became Agenda 2030.
The SDGs, set up in 2015 by the UN General Assembly, are a collection of 17 interlinked global goals designed to be “the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all”, as the UN itself describes them. While seemingly laudable SDGs such as “no poverty” and “zero hunger” are listed, unrealistic though they may sound in the current debt-based money system in which humankind precariously lives, other SDGs—such as “gender equality” and “affordable and clean energy”—carry considerable “baggage” in terms of their undefined adjectives, corrosive ideologies, internal contradictions and potentially disastrous outcomes.
At the Expo, Prof. Rectenwald mentioned Event 201—a high-level October 2019 “pandemic simulation” hypothetically taking place in New York City, put on by the WEF, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Johns Hopkins-Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Health Security, that magically dovetailed into a “real pandemic” just a couple months later. But as Rectenwald noted, a largely forgotten but eerily similar pandemic exercise was conducted on 15 May 2018 in Washington DC’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel, a noted Bilderberg Meeting (2022) and Trilateral Commission (2014) haunt. This lends more credence to the view that the Covid “pandemic” indeed was, and is, a “plandemic”.
Known as Clade X: A Pandemic Exercise, this event was, like Event 201, a “tabletop exercise” based on a “fictional scenario” (sic) to teach and train government and public health officials. The participants portrayed other characters. For instance, Julie Gerberding, the executive vice-president and chief patent officer for the pharma giant Merck & Co. (and a former CDC director in real life), played the role of CDC director; the role of CIA director was played by Jeffrey Smith, who in the flesh is a former general legal counsel for the CIA. Moreover, Tara O’Toole played the Secretary of Homeland Security while in real life she was executive vice-president and senior fellow at In-Q-Tel—which is a CIA-chartered technology investment arm. “It invests in high-tech companies to keep the [CIA], and other intelligence agencies, equipped with the latest information technology”, Wikipedia notes.
The Clade X official website noted that there were pandemic practice sessions even before Clade X:
Faced with a rapidly evolving biological threat landscape, government leaders in the United States and abroad are eager to identify long-term policy commitments that will strengthen preparedness and mitigate risk. Clade X illustrated high-level strategic decisions and policies needed to prevent a severe pandemic or diminish its consequences should prevention fail.
Similar to findings from the Center's two previous exercises, Dark Winter and Atlantic Storm, key takeaways from Clade X will educate senior leaders at the highest level of the US government, as well as members of the global policy and preparedness community and the general public. This is distinct from many other forms of tabletop exercises that test protocols or technical policies of a specific organization.
Corroborating what Alex Newman explained above, Prof. Rectenwald said the “capitalist” West appears to be looking east, while the “communist” East appears to be looking west, so they’ll dialectically meet somewhere in the middle, with the West likely adopting a Chinese reward-and-punishment system predicated upon one’s obedience to the central state. “Go woke or go broke” is how Rectenwald summed it up, while asking a pressing question: Does this big picture of a pending major reset involve the “privatization of government”—or is it the “governmentalization of corporations”?
He said that, especially if it’s the latter, what’s generally referred to as the “deep state” could simply “become global” through its ties with mega-corporations, regardless of whether or not an official global government is formally instituted. He said that unless there is a turning-away from such a stark scenario, the resulting “metaverse” likely would use existing and budding technology to “link brains directly to the Cloud, while mining thoughts and destroying free will—an inescapable prison of body and mind”.
