HS 164 - Reality Check with Ben Swann

Welcome to the Holistic Survival show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary to survive and prosper? The Holistic Survival show is your family's insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, to understand threats, and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst scenario, you'll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.

Welcome to the Holistic Survival Show. This is your host, Jason Hartman, where we talk about protecting the people, places and profits you care about in these uncertain times. We have a great interview for you today and we will be back with that in less than 60 seconds on the Holistic Survival Show. And by the way, be sure to visit our website@holisticsurvival.com you can subscribe to. Our blog, which is totally free, has loads of great information and there's just a lot of good content for you on the site. So make sure you take advantage of that@holisticsurvival.com we'll be right back. It's my pleasure to welcome Ben Swan to the show. He's a PrimeTime anchor with WXIX Fox 19 in Cincinnati, as well as a writer, host and producer of Reality Check with Ben Swan. Ben, welcome. How are you?

I'm great. How are you?

Good, good. Fantastic to have you on the show. And let's cover a couple of current events. One that is in the news that just every time I see coverage, it just makes my blood boil. And that is this Benghazi disaster that fortunately Darrell Issa is not letting go away and many other people aren't either. Your thoughts?

One of the most interesting pieces kind of that's come to light in the last few weeks are these reports that Fox News has been doing that reportedly there are a couple of whistleblowers who work with the State Department and the CIA who say that they were passed over essentially by the official investigation into what happened there. They were not allowed to testify the first time around. And so they're asking not only that they be allowed to testify, but that they be allowed to clarify some of what happened in terms of US Response as well as the situation with security around Benghazi. And so they've asked to do that for some time. The administration has said that there were no whistleblowers and there's no repercussion for anyone who might be trying to come forward. And yet they say they also not aware of anyone who's trying to come forward. Well, these folks say they've been trying to. They've now secured attorneys to represent them, and they may be coming forward as early as next week to actually come forward and share some of what they claim is the bigger story as to what happened in Benghazi. So not knowing what their testimony is. It is interesting because as we all know, what we know on the record in terms of this administration and their record of essentially targeting whistleblowers and going after whistleblowers is really unprecedented, really, by any administration and certainly for an administration that came into power claiming that they would be transparent in, you know, so many different ways.

Yeah, sure they did. I mean, it was just unbelievable. You know, it is amazing to me, Ben, that the prior Obama supporters are still supporters. I just can't believe that they must be wearing blinders with what's gone on compared to the promises made originally, you know, five years ago. But be that as it is, these whistleblowers, I mean, I really fear for them. I wonder if they have to worry about becoming the next Vince Foster or Ron Brown or any of the people who knew a lot about the Kennedy situation many years ago.

Well, it's hard to say, you know, in terms of the danger. I would say just from what I've seen in the past, the safest thing you can do in any situation is to get your name out there and be known on the record for what you're claiming because obviously that helps you. The person who has lots of information but never comes forward is probably in more danger than the person who does come forward.

Yeah, that's an interesting concept because then they publicize it to the media. So they almost have the protection, if you will, and I say protection in quotes, of the court of public opinion and the media.

Yeah, you almost become too big to touch at a certain point. And you know, and that's not to say that even if they have a bombshell in terms of the information that they're going to provide, that most of America will even listen or care. I think you touched on this a minute ago when you said folks who are still Obama supporters who listened to the promises he made and then they watched the record. Well, the truth is, many of those people were very anti George W. Bush, very pro President Obama. But the fact is, if you like the policies of President Bush, you probably like the policies of President Obama, because.

The policies, they're about the Same. They are. They are.

They're virtually the same. And yet we're such a polarized country in terms of this left right paradigm. The people on the right would never acknowledge that President Obama's anything like George W. Bush, and people on the left vice versa. And yet, for those of us who are in the middle of that and looking, you know, breaking through that left right paradigm and saying, oh, the facts are, they're pretty much toting the same.

Line, I would certainly agree with you. One of the funniest Facebook posts I've seen recently was that kind of funny, smirking picture of George W. Bush on the billboard where he's kind of waving and it says, miss me yet? And so it's a picture of that billboard that I think appeared somewhere in the South, I can't remember. And that was a couple of years ago. But the first one said, miss me yet? And then below it, the caption was, nope, we can hardly even tell you left.

I think there's a lot of truth to that.

Yeah, there sure is. There sure is. Tell us your thoughts on Benghazi and anything there, and then we'll move on to another topic.

Well, you know, with Benghazi, what's important, and media has just ignored this. We've been covering this story pretty extensively for eight months now. And, you know, one of my beliefs is that you can learn a lot about the future by looking at the past. And certainly in the case of Benghazi, I think for those of us who are watching what's happening in Syria right now, if you watch what happened in Libya, then you'll know how Syria will likely play out. Not just in terms of the US who will ultimately, I believe, arm the Syrian rebels. And it looks like we're much closer today than we were even before doing that. Overtly arming them, I should say, because we are covertly funding them and funding the Free Syrian Army. But on top of that, I think if you look at the end result after Libya was handed over to, quote, unquote, freedom fighters, within just a few months of that happening, you know, we had this attack on the US Compound in Benghazi, and we see the ambassador, Chris Stevens killed and three other Americans killed, we find out that the group that was hired by our government to secure that compound was actually Al Qaeda sympathizers. Al Qaeda fighters, Ansar al Sharia, who are closely associated with Al Qaeda, carried out the attack. Well, the fact is this, Jason, we're in a situation in Syria where we are funding and supporting the, quote, unquote Free Syrian army, which is really just Al Qaeda fighters, many of them foreign fighters who are coming from other parts of the Middle east and even Europe in some cases now, fighting alongside Al Qaeda in Syria to overthrow the government there. That's not to say that the government in Syria is without problems or without their own sets of evils. But the fact is, it's not who we claim that it is. It's not a bunch of freedom fighters in Syria. The people who are fighting in Syria are led by Al Qaeda fighters. I did a Skype interview with a guy who's in Damascus who talked a lot about this and says the majority of the people, two years into this so called civil war, the majority of the Syrian people are siding with the government now. Not because they agree with Bashar Al Assad. In fact, many of them have had strong disagreements with him in the past, including this guy. But he says the problem is that we have to choose now. Do we continue to support the government here or turn now to support the government, or do we support Al Qaeda taking over our country? And they're watching. Al Qaeda is beheading people, Syrian civilians. They're killing anyone who is not, you know, their particular brand of Sunni Muslim. And so what we're seeing happening in Syria right now is anyone who is in Syria is anyone who's Christian, anyone who is an orthodox Christian, anyone who's a Jew, anyone who is not really sided with Al Qaeda in this fight is being targeted. And so what US Media is saying about what's happening in Syria is not at all what's actually happening on the ground. Just as what the US Media was saying about Libya was not at what was happening on the ground. We did not create an ally in Libya. We created another state being run by terrorists. And that's what we will end up doing in Syria as well.

That sounds pretty typical of our track record. You know, the problem is when we engage so much and become so involved in these other conflicts and try to get our way and support the puppet we want to support, it seems like they always turn out to be our enemy 20 years later anyway. And now it seems like it's happening faster and faster. You know, it's two years later. So they're just such a bunch of strange bedfellows and incredibly complex situations. It just makes me think more and more that Ron Paul's idea of just staying out of it is possibly the best idea of all.

Well, what's interesting about that is you'll hear people refer to that policy as an Isolationist policy.

Sure.

But the indication when someone says that is that what they're advocating is not to be an isolationist, but is to help kind of police other nations. But we're not policing other nations. We have, as you know, and I think the majority of Americans know, we simply prop up dictators around the world, and we watch those regimes really be terribly cruel to people and dominate them and oppress them until finally some other group rises up and tries to kind of push out that dictator. And then we pretend that we never sided with the dictator in the beginning, and we just keep trading these folks to be in control. And it's a foreign policy that does not work. What Dr. Paul talked about during the election, that term blowback is something that Americans need to learn that term, and they need to learn the meaning of it, because that's exactly what we're dealing with, certainly what we dealt with in Libya and what we will end up dealing with in Syria.

Yeah, no, I definitely agree. And the argument on the other side, and it strikes a chord with me, is that in today's complex, interconnected world, you can't be an isolationist. I think it was maybe. I think it was George Washington who said on his farewell address, avoid foreign entanglements. Maybe it wasn't Washington. I could be misquoting, forgive me, but the people on the other side of that say, you know, you just can't do that nowadays. And, I mean, that strikes me as true on its face, conceptually. But, gosh, you know, you just look at this, the way these things work out, and they never seem to work out. Right.

Well, they don't. And part of the problem for that, again, is because it creates, and I'll get in trouble for using this term, but it creates imperialism throughout the world. And that's what we're seeing right now is you have nations that become too heavily leveraged war and creating these situations where we're funding and propping up governments around the world. It's a very expensive prospect. Our nation does not have the finances to continue that. We've proven through Iraq and Afghanistan that we are funding wars through debt. And so we find ourselves spread way too thin. And for all of the billions of dollars, nearly trillions of dollars that we have spent on these foreign wars, along with the incredible amount of sacrifice from military families and the lives that have been lost as a result of this, we are no better off today in terms of having friends around the world than we were before we started the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, before we became involved in Those. In fact, if anything, you can look around the Middle east and say, we actually have more enemies now than we did before. So at what point do we sit back and assess that and say, you know what? This isn't working. The strategy. And certainly as we go from that to the evolution even beyond that, to where President Obama has taken us into this strategy of drone strikes throughout the Middle east, in Pakistan and Somalia and Yemen, where we are now committing these drone strikes of villages in order to take out Al Qaeda fighters. And in the meantime, less than 2% of the time, the intended target is actually killed. And instead, we're killing thousands of civilians who are not radicalized. What we're essentially doing is radicalizing much of the Middle east in those areas where they hadn't been radicalized before.

It just makes you wonder if that's intentional to keep the central banks rich and profiting from war and keep the military industrial complex going. I mean, it seems like a stupid strategy, of course, but, I mean, I just always fall back to that great old saying from Michael LeBeau's book a long time ago, the greatest management principle in the world. You know, what gets rewarded gets repeated. And Deep Throat from Watergate, you know, follow the money. It's just. It's just all about that. I mean, I don't know if anybody really wants peace. It's too profitable to not have peace. Unfortunately, yes.

War is a very profitable industry. I mean, it certainly is. And we understand that. We know that. We see that the incredible amount of money that has gone into, even in this country, when we're talking about sequester and the tiny, tiny little fraction of defense spending that was going to be affected by the sequester, and there were the wringing of hands of people saying, we can't possibly do this because so many people will be laid off and so many people will lose their jobs, and it's bad for our economy. Well, when our economy is built upon war, and it's not entirely, obviously, but even in the cases where it is, and the amount of taxpayer money that's going just to keep people creating weapons, it's not a positive thing, certainly for the economy and certainly for the nation.

Yeah, well, no question about it. I would just be remiss if I just didn't at least get some quick thoughts from you on North Korea and Iran.

Yeah, you know, North Korea, certainly this is an interesting case because you have a situation there where the US has helped to supply that nuclear technology to the North Koreans. That's a fact. And as we continue to do this again throughout the world. What's most fascinating about that is because North Koreans do have that nuclear technology, our response to them is always to impose these UN sanctions. And the sanctions never harm the people on top. It never causes the people with the finger on the button, the device, to be controlled. Instead it just creates suffering for the people in their regimes. And the idea is, oh well, eventually those people will overthrow their leaders. Well, that never happens. So it's amazing to me again that the same talking points always come back out in these discussions. Sure they do. And nothing changes and people go along with it. Iran's a little bit different situation because the claim there is we've got to prevent them from having a nuclear weapon. Well, the fact is this, again, the rhetoric that's used when we talk about Iran, you can go back and word for word, cut and paste it from the statements that were being made about Iraq before the invasion and the build up to the invasion, including the claims that Saddam Hussein was looking for enriched uranium and that Saddam Hussein was pursuing a nuclear weapon. And they claim that he would have one within the date was given five years. And so there were a lot of that same terminology was used prior to the build up to the war in Iraq. We go into Iraq, of course, find out not only was that not true, we didn't have any of the WMDs that our government had claimed that he had. So we see kind of a repeat there, a very similar type of thing. But you know, as often as we talk about how we must, we must, we must intervene, quite frankly, just from a fiscal standpoint, how do you do it? How do you go into another war in the Middle Middle east with another nation? It just doesn't make any sense.

Yeah, it's just, it's beyond the beyond. I mean, who would have ever thought it would have worked out like this years ago? It's just one war after another. You know, you can see the next ones in the pipeline. You can just see them in advance and you know they're coming. And it really makes you wonder what the motivations are. Any more thoughts on Syria?

Well, I think certainly with Syria, we have a situation there where eventually Al Qaeda fighters are going to overthrow the Assad regime, not on their own accord, not by their own abilities, but because the US will intervene and help it to happen, just as we did in Libya. Remember, the Al Qaeda fighters who were in Libya to overthrow Gaddafi could not do it. First of all, they were not Libyans in many cases. And in the cases where they were a lot of these guys were Libyan born who were fighting our troops in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. And they had actually left those countries and gone back to Libya to fight in this fight. We knew that Italian newspapers were interviewing Al Hassidi, the head of the Libyan rebel army. And he was an Al Qaeda fighter from Pakistan who had fought us in Afghanistan. And we had allowed him to go back to fighting over there. We had already captured this guy and we turned him loose. And so he spoke very openly about it, because, remember, when we use the term Al Qaeda, it's so heinous. And yet when they use the term Al Qaeda, it's a call to action. They're the jihadists. They're the ones who are fighting the holy war. And so we saw it happening. We watched it happen. The US Created this no fly zone in order to prevent Qaddafi from having the upper hand there. And we eventually were the ones who helped with the attacked the convoy where Qaddafi was pulled out and killed. So the US along with NATO allies, really took the lead in that, made sure that Libya fell. We ensured that it happened. We're doing the same thing in Syria.

Yeah. And you know, the question is, though, what will be the net result of this ultimately? You know, look at Egypt. I mean, are we getting a good net result there? It appears that probably it's not going to go so well.

Well, I can tell you, certainly as a journalist, I can tell you what what Al Qaeda is saying is going to be the net result of it, which is they want to create a super state that would be a unified Iraq and Syria together as a super Al Qaeda state. That's what they're looking to do with it. And they've spoken openly about this. So it's not something that's conspiratorial or hidden away. Al Qaeda is very clear about what they want. They want to create a super state. And our government continues to fund and continues to push. And Chuck Hagel coming out, Defense Secretary Hagel coming out and saying just yesterday that they're now rethinking the agreements they've made to not arm Syrian rebels, saying, well, maybe they'll do it now. You know, you can go to YouTube, any of your viewers can go to YouTube and you can Google the Free Syrian army, and you can see videos where these guys are talking openly about being Al Qaeda fighters, where they're carrying black flags, where they're singing songs about killing anyone who is of another religion. Than they are talking about the fact that they're going to kill anyone who stands against them. There are videos of them beheading people, the Free Syrian army beheading people and in Syria. So it's not that. It's not really hard to find. You know, if you just open your eyes to it, it's happening very clearly in front of us. But because mainstream media will not talk about those that part of the narrative, they just won't talk about it. You know, if you watch Anderson Cooper360, what you're going to hear is how the Syrian revolution is happening. Assad is a monster with chemical weapons. The people are pushing against him because they're tired of his regime and they want to stop it. That's what you're going to hear and that's all you're going to hear. You're not going to hear that.

Nope.

It's Al Qaeda fighters. The same guys who we have spent so many billions of dollars and countless American lives fighting in Afghanistan are the guys that we are funding to take over Syria. They're never going to tell you that story.

You know, let's talk about that for a moment. I mean, you're in the media business. I don't know how much of this you can or are willing to discuss, but the media is so corporatized. The mainstream media, you know, whether it be Fox or CNN or any other outlet, the big giant companies that own many, many different outlets, you know, whether they be newspapers, cable networks, television stations, you know, whatever, clear channel radio, etc. But at least on radio you have what I call radio and the blogosphere you have the dialogue media as I call it. And with the more traditional mainstream media, it's the monologue media as I call it. And I'll be happy to elaborate on what I mean by that, but just wanted to get your thoughts of why we don't get the real news and how in the world there can only be six things going on on the planet every day. Because if you're in a hotel room and this happens when I'm traveling, you know, and you turn on headline news, the CNN headline news, it's like the same six stories. It's mind boggling that there must be nothing else going on in the world that must have covered the entire globe.

Well, you know, you're absolutely right. There are some people who certainly think there's a kind of a nefarious reason for that. And there may be. I'm not aware of it if there is. I think more than anything, at least on the lower levels of journalism where I Live in the local broadcast media, even on the low end of network news, maybe not in the brain trust, but among reporters and journalists and producers. I don't think it's so much that they're conspiring to keep information out. I think it's more of an issue that it's groupthink. So they're all in this kind of groupthink of what constitutes news and what constitutes a story. And to be quite frank with you, they don't think they're very clever about expanding their own minds as to what out there might be interesting to viewers or might be important information. And so you see this kind of regurgitation every day because no one really wants to take any chances with what they're sharing. Or maybe, you know, someone else will look at you and say, well, that's not a legitimate story, or that's not true. The other problem is you almost have a mentality where unless the networks say it, unless, you know, the big guys will go out there and cover the story and say it, it's not a story. And so everyone's kind of waiting on everyone else to break a lot of these stories. Now, you talk to Amber Lyon or somebody like that, and she'll tell you that flat out, you know, over at cnn, it's. It's not so much that. It's that the guys at CNN do not want certain stories out, and they're paid to not put certain stories out. And that's been her experience, my experience, you know, But I haven't. I haven't worked with the same folks that she has. So I think there are maybe a lot of different factors to it. But I think the thing that change changes everything, Jason, is alternative media. It's changing everything. Internet radio and blogs and Internet News sites and YouTube and even now streaming sites that are popping up everywhere. It's changing the model where people don't have to wait for some producer or news director to decide that this is a legitimate story. The stories are breaking all the time, all around us. And what I'm finding are that people are no longer listening. They're just tuning out those network voices and those news voices, and they're seeking out information on their own.

Well, I mean, I agree, but still, those old voices are pretty powerful, you must admit. They're very entrenched. And, well, I do believe their power is waning, at least relative to the other sources. They still wield a lot of influence.

No, they certainly do. They certainly do. And that's not to take that away generationally. Though I think if you look at the generations of Americans, I think they wield much less influence over younger generations than older ones. And I think that's where it's really going to change. Between the next five to 15 years in this country, I think you're going to see a dramatic shift in how that all comes together because people have the ability to fact check things on their own and to find information on their own. That's, of course, depending on what happens with CISPA and some of these Internet bills, we'll see what happens with those and what's actually done to restrict what people can put out there. But if that doesn't happen, if it remains kind of free and open, I think you're going to see a big shift.

Right, right. And of course we've got to be concerned about the monitoring of the Internet and the new center in Utah that the government has. And all of this stuff is really, really scary. And then we're looking at the very real possibility of having massive invasions of our privacy with drones flying around us in US airspace. Wow, that's.

And huge invasions of privacy via Internet. When you have, you know, bills like CISPA that come along and they claim this is to prevent hacking. But the bill allows for things like. Now, CISPA is obviously dead in the Senate, but the original CISPA bill that just was passed by the House included two very important. Many of your listeners may be aware that CISPA allowed for Internet service providers and email providers to simply distribute your information, personal information, including content of emails and all that, to either for profit agencies, non for profit agencies, government agencies, they could give it to anyone they wanted to. And signing off on privacy, they could break their own privacy agreements, first of all. But secondly, it even included things like allowing employers to require you to hand over personal passwords. That's right. Social network accounts like Twitter and Facebook. Imagine having to hand over your personal Facebook account to an employer who then has the ability not only to get into your accounts but to post things as you. And the idea is, well, no, they wouldn't do that. Of course they would. We're going to believe for one moment that people wouldn't do that. Surely would. So you know, when you hear the claims that this is about stopping China from being able to hack us, CISPA would do nothing to prevent the Chinese from hacking us. Do absolutely nothing. It does everything to take away your privacy.

Yeah, all of that is just par for the course. That's the typical government false flag scenario. It's been done throughout history and you're Absolutely right. I mean, that's, that's the way they operate. And the sooner people in the masses learn that, the better off we'll all be because maybe it'll create a lot more activists. Any tips on what people should do? Ben, just before you go, what are some of the action steps people can do to preserve freedom, create more peace, potentially limit the size of government? Just any of your thoughts there?

Yeah, no, that's, that's, you know, one of the things that I'm working on. Let me just kind of give you a little bit of a teaser. A lot of your listeners who are familiar with me may know that I've announced I'm leaving the station that I'm at right now here at WXIX in Cincinnati. I'm actually going to be launching a new project coming up in June. I can't tell you a lot about it. We'll be breaking out those details in the next few weeks. But one of the things that we're going to do is we're actually putting together a platform by which people really can affect some change and can do some things, not just talk about problems and not just be aware of them. It's one part education, but it's also one part activism, actually getting people involved and creating a platform, steps that people can take in order to really engage lawmakers, engage students, engage people in a variety of different areas throughout society and ultimately kind of trying to give the voice back to the people and action back to the people. But I would say in the meantime, one of the things that people can really do is begin to share just in their own circle of influence, begin to share concepts with family members, with, with co workers, with neighbors that speak to kind of restoring sanity to the culture. But be careful of how you do it. Be careful of the fact that there's a lot of disinformation out there. And there's an attempt now that if you use terms like the Constitution, they immediately want to kind of tag you, label you as being a nut job. And the fact is that we're in an information war at this time, but we're also in a war of trying to kind of educate and teach people, not just preach at them, not just tell them why, oh, you're saying this wrong, or you don't understand how government really works, or you can't see what they're doing to you. You have to be careful about that because there's a lot of disinformation out there that's designed to make you seem strange or out of touch. And so I would really encourage people to practice how they share concepts with people and how they share information about what's happening around the world and what's happening in our country and what's happening really just all across the board. And to do that without using terms that are becoming terms that are almost buzz words, if you will, like false flag. I would avoid terms like that when talking to people who are on the outside of your sphere of understanding and instead use terms to help them understand that things aren't always as they seem, for instance, and then give them some facts, but just be gentle with them. I guess what I'm trying to say because I feel like right now we're at a time where people are really butting heads on these issues and I just want to see people wake up. I want to see them open their eyes and realize what's happening and kind of the wool that's been pulled over it. And the only way to do that is to educate people.

Yep, that's definitely true. Do you want to talk at all about your project or project I'm familiar with or is that off limits for a couple of weeks?

We will be announcing some great stuff in the next few weeks, which I'm really excited about. But one of the ways that you can get information on that be one of the first people to get it is right now if you go to our website bittenswan.com that's b e n s w a n n dot com there you can fill out a form to be on our mailing list and we will send you as one of the very first you will receive an announcement about exactly what we're doing and how you can be involved in it. And that will be happening within the next three weeks.

Fantastic. Well, Ben Swan, thank you so much for joining us today and keep up the good work and keep getting the word out there.

Jason, I appreciate it. Thank you, buddy.

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