War Reporter Explains 'White Helmets' Conspiracy Theory | Joe Rogan and Ben Anderson

I feel like we're at this cusp of something very strange happening. Like we're in the middle of it right now, but we're at the cusp of something very strange. Where all it would take is one massive world event. One map to completely remap how we view each other and how we view things. It's very disconcerting to me. And it feels like without that one big world event, we're not that far away from that right now. There are parallel universes right now that exist. On things that you would have thought everyone can accept as a basic fact. Like what? You know. I mean Syria, you know, the white helmets. There are some fairly serious people saying the white helmets are, you know, some kind of media front for Al-Qaeda or al-Nusra. Would you explain the white helmets for people? So when there's a bombing and a building collapses, they go in and drag people out and get their medical attention as quick as possible. And people think that there's somehow or another involved in it? There a front? Yeah, and the footage is faked in order to drum up sympathy for the rebel held areas. I mean, I've heard serious people say that. Serious people. Yeah, not loons on Facebook. I've heard, you know. Like journalists or? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean Seymour Hirsch I think has walked it back a little bit since, but he said that in the early days. Why do you think he believed it? I read a really interesting article about him just a few days ago. Where was it? I forget what... It was, you know, the expose, but a really good look at him. And I think he's just spent his career believing rightly that the government lies about all kinds of things. And that's got him into a point where he thinks, well, they always lie no matter what. So it's happened to a lot of journalists, Robert Fisk, Seymour Hirsch, Martha Gellhorn, I mean, one of my favorite war correspondents of all time. I reread some of her stuff recently. And the first batch of war reporting she did, I think is the best war reporting I've ever read. Spanish Civil War, Vietnam. And then she spent 25 years writing novels. And then later on wrote about, I believe it was the Yom Kippur War. And was denying that massacres had happened and saying, you know, Arabs lie, they always lie, there was no massacre. And we now know there was a massacre. Or there were massacres in the aftermath of these wars. So I don't know what happens. I mean, maybe if you just do this for too long, you just become so cynical. That you're open to these things. But it's, yeah, I'm amazed that Seymour Hirsch is open to that idea. When the very people that are calling it, the very people that have boots on the ground, and that are in these war zones, are calling these things, when they become cynical, and they become jaded, that's when it gets really, really sketchy. And we rely so heavily on people like you. Like there's, I'm not going over there. You know, Jamie's not going over there. Look at him. You know what I'm saying? I mean, and you wouldn't be able to really get like, I know people that have gone to Venezuela and they come back and they go, I don't know what the fuck is going on over there. I don't know who to believe. I don't understand it. Venezuela is a very strange one. And I get messages all the time. And, you know, I've had Abby Martin who goes over there and she has one take on it. And I have other people that I talked to that have a different take on it. And I do not know. I don't know who to believe. And I think you'd have to go over there and do. You'd have to spend a lot of time to try to figure this out. And it would have to be the entire focus of your life to really try to parse it out. I think that's true of a lot of conflicts. I mean, one of the drawbacks of doing what I do is I'm covering seven or eight things at once. So I feel like I'm not expert enough in even Afghanistan where I've covered that more than any other. But Venezuela is an interesting one because there's such a left right divide on that. And if you support the opposition, then you find yourself alongside John Bolton and Donald Trump, which means that a lot of people are going to automatically attack you. Right. Right automatically. Yeah. Even if it's correct. And I think it's, you know, we can say without a doubt that Maduro has destroyed the economy there. Maduro has imprisoned, beaten, killed journalists. There is a movement there that do want genuine elections. But some people will say, well, just because George Bush in another area or John Bolton in this era support the opposition, therefore, the opposition must be illegitimate and the information coming out must be false. And I wish people did rely on people who actually went there, but it doesn't feel like that. It feels like they rely on the, you know, the guy behind the glass desk on the news. They rely on that. They rely on opinion rather than the people who are actually there. Well, we still have this idea in our head that the person who's reading the news is the authority, you know, that Don Lemon has the inside scoop or whoever it is, you know. And I think it used to be that those guys would spend 20 or 30 years traveling, and then they'd get the cushy job behind the glass desk in the studio. Now it seems like you can go straight to the cushy job behind the glass desk. Well, we just need someone who's relatable, who can read a teleprompter, you know, who fits the profile they're looking for, whether it's Fox News or CNN, you know. And also the information is there, you know, there are fantastic documentaries, articles being written about all of these conflicts. Right. People aren't reading them. Well, with something like Venezuela, the real problem is you have two sides. You have two different versions of what's happening. And if you're not educated in that country and you don't understand their politics, it's very difficult to figure out who's telling the truth. Yeah. Same with Syria. Yeah. Yeah.