By Michael Welch and James Corbett

“I personally have learned more about the worldand our current predicament from James than from any-one else. If you are like me and seek to arm yourself with the facts of what we are facing and then use that knowledge to chart a new course for the next generation, there is no better resource than the mind and the work of James Corbett.” – Whitney Webb, Author, One Nation Under Blackmail [1]

 

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

 Click to download the audio (MP3 format) 

In 2006, Time Magazine announced that the Person of the Year was … YOU! [2]

A mirror showed on the cover of the December edition with the title, “You. Yes, you. You control the information age. Welcome to your world.”

Granted, the ability to influence our society may not have been quite as dramatic as this headline sounds, but it seems to strike at the fading ability of our high priests of journalistic thinking to command all that is worthy of being called the news of the day. With the debut of the world wide web as an accessory point to the world around us, there was cause for us to no longer accept the nightly news as the sole keyhole through which we see the world around us.

In the 1970s, two-thirds of Americans trusted “a great deal” or a “fair amount” what they read in the newspaper, saw on TV or heard on the radio. Today this number has dropped to 31 percent. Meanwhile, 36 percent of Americans say they have no trust at all in it. [3]

It seems that at least part of this trend is related to the fact that alternative viewpoints are much more accessible than they were 50 years ago. It seems that ANYONE can get themselves a channel on YouTube, or set up a substack, post a dynamic Facebook voice, or even set up an internet site, and suddenly you have the audience of all those who want more information about a subject that got your attention but was typically dismissed by the mainstream for some reason.

One man familiar to many readers of this site had the trajectory of his entire life altered in this way just about 20 years ago, as he started to wander down the path less taken. He wandered into new terrain of the mind, and he decided to devote himself to putting out the information that crossed his path and triggered his enthusiasm in video form.

Thus a podcaster was born. His name was James Corbett. And his show was called the Corbett Report.

Starting off with questioning the official 9/11 Truth narrative, James has gone on to examine false flag terror, the Big Brother police state, central banking fraud, eugenics, geopolitics, history, media and propaganda analysis, and more – all brought to you with an authoritative, easy to follow narration and clearing away the misrepresentation of the distorting lens of the mainstream media. [4]

But now, in 2025, James is releasing his very first written work. It is called Reportage: Essays on the New World Order, and follows most of his journey through the world that we thought we knew. Here for you are his 15 years of investigation summarized in 20 sharp, acerbic and literate chapters.

James Corbett discusses the book in more detail in this epic episode of the Global Research News Hour.

James Corbett started The Corbett Report website in 2007 as an outlet for independent critical analysis of politics, society, history, and economics. An award-winning investigative journalist, he has lectured on geopolitics at the University of Groningen’s Studium Generale, and delivered presentations on open source journalism at The French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation’s fOSSa conference, at TedXGroningen and at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto.

(Global Research News Hour episode 479)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

 Click to download the audio (MP3 format) 

Transcript of Conversation with James Corbett, June 24, 2025

Global Research: Your book has been available for a little over a month now, James. What kind of a reaction have you had so far from the public?

James Corbett: Well, actually, slight correction, my book has been available for about four or five months now, but I did have the official book launch about a month and a half ago. So far, I have received a lot of positive feedback on this, in fact, perhaps more than I was expecting.

It turns out that after doing my podcast for 18 years and accruing an international audience, there were a lot of people that were hungry for a literary form of my expression, and I’m glad that they were because I have always considered myself a writer first and never really thought I would ever be a podcaster. So perhaps this is a more natural format for me.

Global Research: Well, that’s one thing that did strike me.

I mean, you’re a writer. Writing was your original calling back in the 1990s, even though you’re better known today as a podcaster. I mean, you trained in literature, then you got a master’s degree in Irish literature, I think, and then you went off to Japan in 2006, and then you found a new calling, you know, following your investigations into 9-11.

Why don’t you give our listeners just the brief story behind your trip down the rabbit hole?

JC: Well, this is all explained in my first opening essay of this book on adventures in the new media, but long story short, this was a rather mundane experience for me here in Japan, moving into a new apartment that happened to come with an internet connection, and it was the first time in years that I’d had an internet connection in my home. So instead of going to the internet cafe to connect once a week to download emails and maybe a podcast or two, suddenly I had the world at my fingertips. And it wasn’t long before I started using that ability to essentially, well, I started by looking at just sort of basic political content along the lines of what I’d always grown up with and been accustomed to, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report and things along those lines.

But it wasn’t long before I started encountering information that I had not encountered either in my education, in the Canadian education system, or in any of my travels and travails in in the wider world and in media and what have you. And it wasn’t just information that was new and interesting, it was information that had obviously been occluded from my attention. One example that I can think of of many were the documentaries of Adam Curtis, a BBC documentary filmmaker, but obviously growing up in Canada, I hadn’t been exposed to his documentaries before.

So encountering, for example, The Century of the Self or documentaries along those lines, The Power of Nightmares, certainly gave me a different perspective on world events. And it wasn’t long before I started finding a radically different perspective, looking into things like 9-11 Truth or the origins of the Federal Reserve or central banking, things along those lines. And once I started tumbling down that rabbit hole, it was really the process, not just of discovering the information, not just sort of passively accepting information, but starting to dig through archives and materials online to look for source documents.

Once I started that search, I think that was really the snowball rolling downhill that led to the creation of the Corbett Report.

GR: Yeah, I mean, sounds like you’re in a way, I mean, my path has been similar. I mean, I found out about 9-11 and then some of the holes there and that weren’t reflected anywhere else.

I went down my own journey and I ended up doing podcasts and doing community radio, which is something that I’d never even thought of when I was a much younger person. But you do journalistic work, essentially. I mean, you are a journalist.

And I was wondering, did you get any special training as a journalist? Or has it been all self-taught?

JC: Not only that, I mean, literally everything that I do is self-taught, including being a webmaster and all of the technical aspects of what I do. And of course, the journalistic side of it as well. Although over the years, I really have wondered what it is exactly I am and what I do, because the word podcaster did not even exist when I was back in high school thinking, what am I going to do with my life? So it still seems strange to describe myself as a professional podcaster.

And over the years of sort of casting about for the right terminology to try to describe what I do, I think I eventually landed on the idea of teacher, because of course, that was why I originally came to Japan, to be an English teacher. And so if there is something to the work that I’m doing, I think it’s an educational enterprise. And I think of it in those terms.

I am a teacher that is simply teaching information that I have encountered along the way that I think is important and hopefully contextualizing it for people in a way that they can understand. And to the extent that the best journalists are able to do that, take and synthesize and then order and present information in an understandable and hopefully interesting way, then I guess that’s what I’m aiming for and that’s what I’m attempting to do.

GR: Well, yeah, I also note that you source everything that you write.

Everything, even the videos, have a good range of sources that you get out there. So that’s something that’s, I think even in podcasting, that’s a rare trait. But getting at the book, your book covers, well, many different essays on 9-11, but they’re also covering the flaws of following politics and then expecting you can vote your way out of tyranny or something like that.

Or the billionaire plans and controls, billionaire control over science, the environment, politicians, entertainment, and otherwise, utilizing all of their resources to secure control, okay, and this technocratic control. I mean, is that essentially what you mean by the New World Order? Is that the thread that connects the essays together?

JC: I think so. And yes, I very consciously did not specifically define that term, New World Order, although it is the subtitle of the book, Repertage, Essays on the New World Order.

Nowhere in the book do you get a single definition of that phrase because it means a lot of different things. There are a lot of different aspects to that. But in some ways, it is a very simple idea.

It’s the same as the old world order. It’s the same idea that has persisted throughout the millennia of recorded human civilization, which is that a small group of people, an oligarchy, seeks to consolidate and centralize its power over as many people as possible. And I think we’re seeing the 21st century manifestation of that in the oligarchical networks that so clearly control and direct the political stage show that is wielded, put out in front of us, mostly to distract us from the fact that there is a very different way that society is being ordered and also to distract us from the fact that ultimately the entire system, everything that exists really does exist on the back of our labor, on the back of the average worker and the average person who is creating this world really from the ground up.

But we are taught our entire lives that all of this could not possibly exist without some sort of ruling government to rule over us and to steward this economy. And I think that is really the wool that’s been pulled over our eyes and something that I’m hoping to try to remove in various different ways with these essays.

GR: Yeah.

Well, looking at a couple of the essays, I mean, on 9-11, for instance, you had a really good essay. I thought I knew a lot about 9-11 already. But I mean, one interesting chapter is on P-TECH, P-T-E-C-H, talking about cyber warfare that was involved in this being waged.

There was someone named F. N. Deera Singh who was basically spilling the beans about the software being used actually by terrorist backgrounds and the government looking the other way and media getting away with it. I mean, can you just give our listeners a preview of that essay, if you could?

JC: Absolutely. Indira Singh was a very interesting whistleblower who seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth, which is interesting in and of itself.

But this essay in particular concerns itself with the story that she was relating in the early 2000s of her experience as a risk management officer at JPMorgan Chase, obviously a huge banking institution that takes risk management very seriously and has to look for all sorts of things and threats and money laundering and insider dealings and all sorts of potential threats to the banking business. So they take that very seriously. And in the late 1990s, she was looking for enterprise architecture software to help with risk management.

And this is the type of software that essentially provides the God’s eye view of an enterprise. Everything from employees and operations and project management, etc. Literally every aspect and every detail of what any sort of large scale enterprise like JPMorgan are doing.

And it would be able to not only detect threats and problems within that system, but even predict them given enough data about what’s going on in that system. So she was looking at this one company called P-TECH that seemed to come with the exact right pedigree because it was, I mean, in addition to serving some very large corporations, it served many different branches of the US government, the FAA and NORAD and the FBI and IRS and etc, etc. Its list of clients were such as it definitely commended itself to Singh’s attention.

But once she met with these people, she started to get a very different impression of what this company was. And she started digging into the company and its background and found some of its very questionable links to people who were, for example, globally designated terrorists in the wake of 9-11. It turns out one of them happened to be one of the angel investors in this company.

And it started to get into deeper and weirder waters as she continued this investigation to the point where she, of course, started to raise some of the issues that she found with P-TECH to the FBI, at which point an FBI agent told her that she was in a better position to investigate this company than they were at the FBI because of restrictions that were being placed on them in terms of their operations. So I will let people read the essay to find out how that plays out. But essentially, it ends up with what Michael Ruppert, one of the original 9-11 truth researchers, talked about was the possibility that it was Cheney running some version of P-TECH in the bowels of the Pentagon on 9-11, in the PEOC specifically, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, because P-TECH, as it turns out, had these systems that were coordinating and looking into the interoperability of FAA and NORAD systems right there in 2001.

And those are the very systems that are implicated in the war games that were happening on 9-11 that just happened to be injecting fake radar blips onto screens that the NORAD tapes show were confusing FAA operators all morning. So there were some crazy things happening on 9-11 that still many, many people do not know anything about.

GR: Yeah, you also mentioned about the 9-11 whistleblowers, and there’s been commentary that, no, it wasn’t a conspiracy because somebody would have blabbed about it, right? But as you expertly demonstrate, I mean, people did blab, but they just went unnoticed.

And I think that’s principally, including the 9-11 commissioners themselves, that’s principally the fault of the mainstream media, though, isn’t it?

JC: I would say so, but I think there’s a good degree of blame to go around on that front. And I look at specifically the professional skeptics of the skeptic class, people like Michael Shermer, who I quote in the essay, who do dismiss and poo-poo any suggestion of conspiracy, because it couldn’t possibly be true, because no one could keep a secret. Someone would have blabbed.

But as I go on to say in the essay, there are many, many people who had different aspects of the 9-11 story that they were attempting to ring the alarm bell about, like Barry Jennings, the deputy director of emergency services for the New York City Housing Authority, who was there in World Trade Center, Building 7, in the emergency management office, around the time that the second plane was slamming into the World Trade Center. He was in Building 7, which, as I hope you’re informed listeners know, was the third building to go down on 9-11, not hit by any plane, but it went down. He was in the building as the other buildings were being attacked, and he testified to explosions that were happening in WTC 7, and stepping over dead bodies to get out of there, etc., etc.

He has a remarkable story, but he just happened to die literally just days before NIST released their draft report on what happened in WTC 7. So that was interesting. I talk about J. Michael Springman, who was a U.S. consulate officer in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in the late 1980s, where he was unwittingly part of a visa for terrorists scheme that was being run by the CIA through that U.S. consulate, and they were running essentially terrorists from Afghanistan into America for training on behalf of the CIA’s golden boy at that time, Osama bin Laden, who of course was this valiant warrior against the Soviets back during the Afghan war, and on the U.S. side. I talk about Richard Grove, who was working for SilverStream Software at that time, and working with Marsh & McLennan, which was of course a WTC client or a tenant, on an incredibly large project, the biggest in SilverStream’s history, to provide financial services linking up computer systems.

He was attempting to blow the whistle on essentially the fact that Marsh seemed to be overbilling SilverStream to the tune of—or SilverStream was overbilling Marsh to the tune of several million dollars. He attempted to blow the whistle on it and was eventually forced out of his position for attempting to blow the whistle on that. He was called to a meeting on 9-11-2001 that was to be held on—I can’t remember which floor, the 90th floor or whatever it was—of the World Trade Center, and luckily he was late that day, because if he had not been late for that meeting that day, he would be dead, along with every other single person who was called to that meeting.

The person who actually called the meeting, the CEO or the executive who called the meeting, happened to not be in the building that day. I talk about Kevin Ryan, who worked for Underwriters Laboratories, which bragged about having certified the steel in the World Trade Center buildings, and then saying that they actually performed extremely well. The steel held up more than you could expect, considering all of that fireproofing was knocked off by the plane impact.

When Kevin Ryan started asking questions and questioning his own company about this, he, of course, was summarily fired. As you say, I also, of course, talk about the 9-11 commissioners themselves, because, as people may or may not know, over half of the commission, in one way or another, called out the 9-11 commission as a cover-up, including, of course, the commission chairs, the co-chairs, K and Hamilton. They said, we were set up to fail.

Yes, exactly right. There’s a lot of people who have attempted to bring information about 9-11 that goes against the official story, let’s say.

GR: It’s not all just about 9-11, of course.

There’s a really good chapter about the biotech billionaires. They control the science, essentially, and demonstrate in a nutshell how they get the results that they want, like the topic of glyphosate that’s being used by the Bayer/Monsanto, GMO people. That’s a classic example of how the industry just paid the scientists to do a bit of a flip and actually defeat some of the independent scientists.

Can you talk about that? I think it has implications for all sorts of fields in an age where people keep saying, follow the science, follow the science, but there’s this other element that interferes with it.

JC: There certainly is. Yes, that’s explicitly the point of that essay.

What I open up the essay with is pointing out that the people who say that those who reject genetically modified organism technology for foods and other such things are there the anti-science kooks, because they have these weird anti-scientific arguments. No, the science says that GM is safe. But when you look into the science, you find out it is bought and paid for by a handful of biotech corporations.

And I bring some receipts to that statement, talking, for example, about the experiments of Gilles-Éric Séralini, who is a French scientist at the University of Kean, who was publishing on the long-term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize, which was a peer-reviewed published scientific article showing that rats that were fed glyphosate or glyphosate in combination with GM or just GM foods, all of them developed tumors at a drastically higher rate than rats that were not fed the glyphosate or GM food. And that was a pretty bedrock study that was immediately, after its publication, was immediately retracted through this incredibly bizarre process that I go into in the book about the editor being essentially on the payroll of various biotech companies, etc. And there was a lot of shenanigans that went on to undermine that study.

And that’s just one example of how this science has been shaped and engineered by these biotech corporations for the benefit of the biotech billionaires and in service of a much, much potentially darker agenda. As I go on to talk about the Svalbard seed vault in the Arctic, cut out of the frozen tundra of the Arctic, there is this seed vault in which they are storing all of the genetic material for heirloom seeds and all of these things in the event of, oh, I don’t know, some kind of complete planetary disaster that ends all life on Earth. At least there will be this fail-safe seed vault that we’ll be able to repopulate the Earth with.

What exactly are they planning on? Oh, don’t worry about it too much. But by the way, this is funded by the likes of the Gates and the Rockefellers and all of the usual eugenicists who were behind so many of these schemes.

GR: Yeah.

I just hope they don’t put it to the test. But in another chapter, there’s an interesting scenario. This is a more humorous one.

The story of a time traveler from the 1950s who meets a resident of the 2020s. And then you use that to back up arguments about how, I mean, with the use of the cell phones today, they’re essentially cementing the loss of freedoms that back in my day was cemented as one of the evils of communism or something like that. I mean, this is about surveillance and how it’s become, at least by my read of it, it’s becoming, you know, carrying big brother in her cell phones and so it’s becoming accessible, you know.

We don’t think about it anymore.

JC: Yes.

GR: I mean, yeah, essentially, this is the essay, I guess, or, you know, part of the system of surveillance working its wonders and, you know, making us sort of immune, numb, comfortably numb, to quote Pink Floyd, to what’s going on around us.

JC: I think so. And yes, I’m sure we’ve all had that thought of thinking, wow, you know, if this thing that’s happening today had happened 20 years ago or 30 years ago or 50 years ago, people would not have stood for it. But for some reason, people have been just led along by the nose bit by bit until things that were unthinkable become thinkable.

And so that was sort of the genesis of this idea. So what if we brought someone from the 1950s into today and they saw all of the, for example, the way that we carry around these smartphone fondle slab devices everywhere we go, that is tracking everywhere we go and recording us in all sorts of different ways and sending this information to companies and governments and what have you, and everyone is so completely blase about it, it seems like it doesn’t even matter. Whereas if you would introduce that concept to someone in the 1950s, well, of course, that’s what the commies do.

We wouldn’t do that here in the land of the free. So that was sort of the genesis. And it’s hopefully a sort of fun way of framing the idea, but it’s, of course, a very serious idea.

And I get into the concept of Orwell and the boot on the face forever 1984 Big Brother tyranny versus Huxley and the Soma of the Brave New World and how people can actually be made to enjoy their servitude as Aldous Huxley was warning about or salivating about. I’ll let you decide for yourself in his 1962 lecture on the ultimate revolution.

GR: There’s the recognition of mainstream media’s complicity in the subversion of humanity. I mean, not just not telling certain stories, but the repetitions of labels, conspiracy theory, and even scientists and doctors who speak out, you know, who are speaking on a distant level, speaking out on issues of a technical nature or whatever, faced with the same sort of treatment and even, you know, losing appeal in that direction. But what do you think is the most outrageous example that you can think of the way media and the billionaire class work hand in hand, hand in glove to deal with dissident thinking?

JC: You know, I suppose since I have been covering this in one form or another for the entirety of the Corporate Report’s 18 years of existence, it’s hard for me to narrow it down to one or two examples.

But I would say the one that should be freshest in all of our minds is the craziness that we’ve seen over the past five years. I don’t write a great deal about it in the book, but I certainly have talked about it at length on my podcast, about the way that we were expected to, of course, follow the science in 2020, 2021, 2022. Failure to follow the science would result in such things as, oh, I don’t know, having your YouTube channel of nearly 600,000 subscribers completely deleted off the face of the internet.

Although I will parenthetically note that the Corbett Report was mysteriously and weirdly put back on YouTube just a month ago. So anyway, I’m back on YouTube, everybody. I wouldn’t expect to be there very long, but I’m here for the moment.

Anyway, that to me was the most insidious example and the most blatant example of this amalgamation of not just governmental censorship, not just media censorship, not just institutional, but this amalgamation of all of these things working together in concert, in lockstep, as it were. And of course, I use that word advisedly for those who know about the Rockefeller Foundation report on lockstep and their prediction of various events like a potential pandemic that will shut down the world that they were writing about in 2010. But yes, we saw the lockstep of the WHO and the CDC and the US government and the UK government and every government around the world and all of these institutions essentially conspiring to shut down any scientific dissent.

We’re not just talking about wild-eyed, crazy conspiracy loonies like myself. We’re talking about actual real deal doctors and scientists who had very, very real and valid and now legitimated concerns about various aspects of what took place, including, of course, the vaccines and everything else. Now it is okay to talk about such things.

And now it seems like, oh, okay, there is some degree of free speech that is being restored or allowed at this time. But for the last few years, it was, of course, verboten to talk about these subjects. That, to me, should be a bright clarion call for anyone who is concerned about, for example, science.

If you actually care about science, you should be very, very concerned about the fact that they attempted to completely shut down all scientific debate in the name of science. It’s absolutely ridiculous and completely contradictory, but it happened. And I think until we have a real reckoning of that and why and how that happened, we will not be able to actually stop it from happening again.

GR: Well, the thing is, you’re pointing to something that actually, in a way, I was kind of disappointed a little in terms of your book, because there was a general lack of discussion about the COVID situation, actually. I mean, with all the lockdowns, the masking, and the embrace of the vaccine or the so-called vaccine based on Emergency Use Authorization and all of that, and attempts to normalize it all. I mean, to many of us, your podcasts were on the same place where all the facts are laid out and that comforted a lot of folks and where there’s a difference of opinion, who are called unscientific conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers and all the rest of it.

I mean, your show drove up the popularity of your podcast, I believe. I mean, more people were getting a lot of hits, but you also got, until now, yanked off of YouTube and perhaps other platforms as well. Maybe you got a little

JC: Patreon specifically.

GR: But I mean, we’re seeing the full weight of this violation of liberties globally, and that’s what you’ve been arguing for, essentially. It’s that up-down thing, authoritarianism versus libertarianism. And yet your book doesn’t really mention it.

I mean, the word COVID is only mentioned six times in the whole book as asides, really, and once only in a footnote. So I’m just wondering why you would choose to leave us, leave out any essays dealing specifically with COVID-19 and biosecurity and the Pandemic Treaty and other matters. Why it’s still, it didn’t make it to print?

JC: Well, the only essay that specifically deals with it is A Letter to the Future, which was written in April of 2020 and specifically about the events as they were unfolding and where they were heading towards.

And so I think that that does serve as a testament to those dark times and what they meant. But this is a reflection of the fact that this book, I’m not joking when I say this book was started in 2009. Literally, the first essays in this were started in 2009, and I’ve been working on it in various forms over that 15-year span from 2009 to 2024.

And so in a way, it would have been perhaps a lie of sorts if I suddenly in 2020, 21, two, three, suddenly made the entire book about COVID. It would have been easy to do that. Maybe I should do an entire book about the events of that.

But this is not that book. This is a book that is meant to be the scope and breadth of everything that I cover and think about, including philosophy and politics and globalism and history and science and economics and all of the things in between. So I like to think it’s reflective of that broad span of things that I talk about.

But also, I think in a way, perhaps rather than hitting the nail directly on the head like that in that very obvious way, maybe it’s more important that we have the groundwork of things like, for example, my essay on the real meaning of independence or on up-down politics or on the biotech billionaire’s essay so that people understand the philosophical groundwork from which I’m coming from, talking about human freedom and why it’s important. I think that is the base that we need in order to protect ourselves from COVID-like events in the future. If people were informed about issues like that, were thinking about philosophical and political issues in that way, I think it would be a lot harder to trick the population into simply locking themselves down and doing whatever the authorities say in the name of the science.

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg.

The programme is also broadcast weekly (Monday, 1-2pm ET) by the Progressive Radio Network in the US.

The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca

Notes:

1. James Corbett (2025), p. V, “Reportage: Essay on the New World Order”,  Diversified Graphic LLC
2. Time Magazine, December 25, 2006-Janary 1, 2007; https://time.com/6258607/you-time-person-of-the-year-2006/
3. https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/657239/five-key-insights-americans-views-news-media.aspx
4. https://corbettreport.com/about/

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Michael Welch and James Corbett, Global Research, 2025