Fourth Reich Archaeology - Fourth Reich Geopolitik 1

Episode Date: April 6, 2025

Join us this week in the first installment of what will be a periodic series focused on current events within our Reich, and the historical precedents in Reichs past.  We’re calling it “Fourth Reich Geopolitik.” After a little catch-up on some of the latest expressions of fascism in American politics, we go back to basics and wipe off our patented Fourth Reich lenses.  Recall that when we say “Fourth Reich,” what we refer to is a regime with the same capacity for cruelty and destruction as the high watermark of those qualities: the Third Reich.  To put a finer point on it, our modern US-led global capitalist world order–with the Trump administration at the helm–represents a continuation of the Nazi quest for world domination and the consolidation of capital that dates back to well before the industrial revolution.  We illustrate this continuity by a quick recounting of the “science” of Geopolitics, from the British Lord Halford Mackinder to the Nazi Karl Haushofer, to Haushofer’s American Jesuit acolyte, Edmund A. Walsh, the namesake of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.With our lenses polished, we turn to the real focus of this episode: making sense of the latest developments in the Trump administration’s foreign and domestic policy. As to foreign policy, we look at the war in Ukraine and see the imperial maneuvering of US foreign police reduced to tabloid-level spectacle.  While some might see Trump “sidling up to dictators” or “abandoning our allies,” we see him pulling a reverse-Nixon: Rather than opening up to China to push back on Russia’s global influence, the Trump team is teaming up with Russia to help it knock down the dominoes on the way to Beijing.We then turn inward, looking at domestic policy, and dissect how it is exactly that the Republican party went from the country club party of rich old white men to counting among its ranks the young tech crowd.  For this, we need not look further than Elon Musk.  With Musk, Trump gets not only a jester with a devout silicon valley following but also a vehicle to the growing concern his voter base has with fraud and corruption.  But while Trump and Musk claim they have a mandate from the people to hack away at the federal government to eliminate fraud and waste, their cuts reveal that they are focused largely on agencies–like the Dept. of Education and the CFPB–that have been on Donald Trump’s shit list since the early days of his campaign. We also look at the rhetorical ruse of the Populist Front of the Republican Party led by the likes of Steve Bannon, dissecting their ability to speak several truths only to lull people into a false sense of security and bait-and-switch into fascist eugenics.We try to maintain a positive attitude throughout it all, though admittedly, it is getting harder with every day. The time is nigh to make moves and organize strategically to build power, and if we are to make any progress in the right direction, we need to unfetter ourselves from the corrupt genocidal Democrat Party. Dig in and enjoy! And if you like what you are hearing please drop us a line, give us some support on Patreon, and spread the word! Fourth Reich Archaeology email: [e-mail] Reich Archaeology Patreon: patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology

Colonialism or imperialism as the slave system of the West is called is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us. are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources.

We found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America ever. I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information, which showed that there were two wars going on. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one.

For example, we're the CIA. Now, he has a mile. He's so long as I'm afraid of we never be secure. It usually takes the national. racism. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? This is a guy. I'm not going. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Dick. And I'm Don. Now, in this week's episode, we're going to take a step away from our ongoing series within a series,

the Warren Commission decided, and we're going to revisit the present day and do a little bit of a pulse check, what we're calling a Fourth Reich pulse check on the current state of affairs. And let me assure you, the Fourth Reich is alive and well. Oh, yeah. Before we kick things off, I want to first thank everyone for their continued support. Thank you for listening. Thank you for reviewing and sharing. Especially want to thank our Patreon supporters, our patrons.

We adore you. And we would love it if more of you joined the ranks of our Patreon. We are actively seeking donations. We are also always looking forward to receiving mail from all of you. We have an email, 4th Reichpod at gmail.com. And we're on social media, on Twitter and Instagram, at 4th Reich Pod. It feels great to be back, Dawn, got to say. I don't know what happened.

know, I found myself, I woke in a ditch out in the suburbs of D.C. out in northern Virginia. And I just got in a car and I took a ride into town to do the, to do this episode. Feel refreshed. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I can't tell, you know, why, what happened. I'm sorry, I missed last week's episode. Couldn't tell you what happened. but ever since I've sort of had this strange craving for strawberries nothing a few pop-tarts won't cure I'm sure

or maybe some galaxy gas strawberry flavored well if the listener didn't know already we are recording this on the night of Trump's I guess it's his first address to Congress right it's the first address in his second term yes his first address as subordinate to the tech overlords whereas in his first term you know he was just there on his own behalf or maybe on behalf of my pillow uh this was his first appearance as Elon Musk's agent. But we're not going to talk about that listener because I haven't watched it yet.

If not, had the time or the fortitude to subject myself to that torture, I don't know if you have yet, Dick. No, well, a little bit, right? What's weird about this one is it's not like a state of the union. I think he just called the joint chambers of Congress and wanted to address them. kind of seems more than anything else, just like a publicity play. And, yeah, the reason I mention it is that it sort of prompted us to get on the line and do this pulse check.

Yeah. Because so much has happened since the last time we did one of these episodes. Yeah, and it doesn't even seem like it was that long ago, honestly. But when the government itself and all of the people in charge of it, are governing by spectacle, right? I think we can all agree that on both sides of the aisle, whether it's Trump's sort of excessive rhetorical commitment to the bit or whether it's the Dems putting forward this pathetic,

measly, spectacular opposition without any real substance behind it. I think we are firmly, firmly seeing why Guy Debord, one of our favorite theorists here in the Fourth Reich archaeology, why he hanged himself when he was proven right so many times but we're not going to follow suit i think let's do a quick uh wellness check mental wellness check dick and don i am feeling great about my life in the future happy to be here with you dick and if if i turn up on the side of the road and the car is on top of me um that that won't have been of my own doing no of course not we have a little more intervention in the spectacle left to do that's right and i can commit to you here today don if that were to

happen to you not only would i make it my life's mission to find the perpetrators but i would carry the mantle of this little project that's what's up uh right Right back at you. Okay, but as far as things are going over here for me, I am also doing well, feeling blessed, feeling grateful for my sense of self and awareness and my ability to see through the bullshit. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of people are not doing so well, you know?

Yeah, right. Because, you know, exactly, because, you know, I'll be at work or maybe at the bus stop. or in the library at the bookstore, whatever. And someone will say, you know, I'll ask someone how you doing, and they'll say, ah, well, things are looking pretty grim these days. And I laugh because I think to myself, things have been looking pretty grim for a while, buddy. Not much has changed.

one thing that's changed which you helpfully brought to my attention dick is the meaning of maha speaking of health oh yeah let's do a round round the table on all our different we've got all these different alerts set on the fourth rike ticker and the and the first one you bring it up it's uh it's maha watch RFK Jr. has clarified, you know, make America healthy, that includes making America have healthy thoughts. Insane shit. I mean, far beyond the worst fears that anybody would have had for Candidate Brain and Worms, RFK. What did he mean by Healthy Thoughts? You know, Healthy Thoughts is sort of my spin on it, but the alert here, folks, is that RFK, Jr. is now calling for a means to essentially sanction or punish college students who are

protesting the genocide. And he's called, I think it was through Twitter, that he's called upon all universities to take this matter seriously and that ensuring that America's youth is healthy means that they also have a healthy state of mind. Yeah, it's not lost on me, the irony, too, that, if you recall, RFK Jr., while he was a Nepo legacy admit at Harvard way back in the day, he has confessed to have been a drug dealer. So the guy who's literally committing crimes and selling companies. cocaine to college students, now wants to criminalize college students for expressing their moral repulsion at a genocide.

Once again, folks, it's the time for crime, and RFK Jr., he's on team crime. He's part of the club now. Oh, yeah. He's blood in He's trying to get blood in Into the gang Next up on our ticker here Next up on our ticker here

I see we've got Sig Heil watch as we know everyone's favorite hand gesture is really making a comeback these days our latest uh our latest is coming out of i think a CPAC convention and it's our favorite guy Steve Bannon who was caught making a straight arm gesture during a talk he was giving Yeah, it's so infuriating to hear the apologists for the straight-arm gesture, pretend like they don't know what it's about, and pointing out that, oh, in this freeze frame of a wave, like Kamala Harris did it, or Justin Trudeau, listener, don't get me wrong. You know that we believe both of those people are also a part of the broader right-hand, left-hand, fascist movement wherein both hands combine to strangle the throat of the people.

however with all these people especially ever since Elon did it it's a fucking Nazi salute could we not yeah it's it's remarkable how these special interest groups remarkably you know usually associated with Israel or the Israel lobby how they'll be the first to come forth and say oh, well, this was not an anti-Semitic gesture. This is being taken out of context and essentially bless the gesture. And it's pretty wild. Oh, yeah.

I mean, they are just paving the way to openly embrace this Naziism, Zionism, synthesis. Glory! The number one enemy to the people in Israel are American Jews that do not support Israel and do not support Macca. Okay, Maga and the evangelical Christians and the traditional Catholics in this country have Israel's back.

They have the Jews back. The biggest single enemy to the Jewish. Jewish people are not the Islamic supremacists. The biggest enemy you have is inside the wire. Progressive Jewish billionaires that are funding all this stuff. You see it all over the world, whether it's from the longtime association of far-right and anti-Semitic government figures like Orban in Hungary or the Volks party in Spain. or the Front Nacional in France, or Georgia Maloney in Italy. I mean, across the European continent, certainly, and now in America as well,

there's a concentrated effort to really what you said, bless or sanitize the outward expressions. of fascism, policies, such as a crackdown on free speech or dissent, mass deportations, or whatever the case may be, and to invert the perceived meaning of those policies such that they are somehow associated with the very foundation of freedom. and they're having some success, although I've yet to encounter anyone in real life who's not willing to concede that clearly they're doing Nazi shit and they're rubbing it in our faces. That's exactly right. And I think it's a good point now to just sort of say, like, the purpose of this episode,

I think we've got established enough in the record in this new Trump presidency to revisit this point we've been making all along, which is that what makes the MAGA movement, the current state of the Republican Party, what makes it so effective, is that they've been able to, put their finger on the things that have made so many people upset with the government, with the state of affairs, with their lives, and they're able to point to concrete troubles, right? Can't afford groceries, right? That kind of stuff. And they're able to tie that into their abstract evil agenda. They're able to use the concrete sort of to reach their goals And we're seeing, and we're seeing that happened at a rapid, an alarmingly rapid rate in this second term. And once again, the absence of a properly sharpened lens, of a properly honed perspective on these unfolding events really does have harmful consequences, not only psychic consequences on the matter.

masses of people who have to deal with this barrage of bullshit every day. But consequences in disturbing and preventing any sort of a cogent oppositional force from coming together. And, you know, friend of the pod and former guest, Max Good, I thought, put it really well when he tweeted that you trying to figure out what's going on has become a key part of their arsenal against you. And that's exactly what we're trying to address in this episode. And I think we'll make this a recurring feature here on Fourth Reich Archaeology

to just level set to check in. and to try and make a little bit of sense of what's going on in light of some of the broader historical forces that we've been excavating for the last, now, seven months. And so with that, Dick, I'd say we order... Well, hold on. One more. Just one more, just to really put a really fun.

point on it and bring in another good friend of the pod, Jeff Kay, who has also pointed out something that we've discussed here in his tweet, where he says, The world seems chaotic and senseless, but if you adopt a class-conscious Marxist viewpoint, the shenanigans all make sense. we witness the inter-imperialist conflicts, the colonial slaughters, the wars of conquest, the dictatorship of capital, and the suffering of the tolling masses. We sure do have some incisive guests in our roster here, and with those words of wisdom, Dick, I suppose we ought to get digging.

Let's do it. So, like, I mean, sort of the left wanted to make comedy illegal, you know? You can't make fun of anything. So there's like comedy sucks. It's like nothing's funny. You can't make fun of anything. It's like legalized comedy. She's asking what if Russia breaks the ceasefire?

What if they, what if anything? What if a bomb drops on your head right now? Okay. What have they broke it? They broke it with bites. Because Biden, they didn't respect him. They didn't respect Obama. Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me.

He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him in Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia. You ever hear of that deal? That was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden scam. Hillary Clinton, Schiffy Adam Schiff, it was a Democrat scam. And he had to go through that. And he did go through it. We didn't end up in a war. Everybody has problems.

Even you, but you have nice ocean, and don't feel now. But you will feel it in the future. God bless. You don't know that. God bless. You don't have to work. Don't tell us what we're going to feel. It came out of Hunter Biden's bathroom.

It came out of Hunter Biden's bedroom. It was disgusting. And then they said, oh, oh, the laptop from hell was made by Russia. The 51 agents. The whole thing was a scam. And he had to put up with that. He was being accused of all that stuff. All I can say is this.

He might have broken deals with Obama and Bush, and he might have broken him with Biden. He did, maybe. Maybe he didn't. I don't know what happened. But he didn't break him with me. But you're either going to make a deal or we're out. And if we're out, you'll fight it out.

I don't think it's going to be pretty, but you'll fight it out. But you don't have the cards. But once we sign that deal, you're in a much better position. But you're not acting at all thankful, and that's not a nice thing. I'll be honest, that's not a nice thing. All right, I think we've seen it enough. What do you think? This is going to be great television, I will say that.

So what we really want to dig into today is an overarching picture of the state of the state of Fourth Reich geopolitics. So first to level set, once again, when we say that we're living in the Fourth Reich, what we're talking about is a regime with the same capacity for cruelty and mass destruction as the high watermark of those qualities, right? The Third Reich of Adolf Hitler with its paraphernalia of the death camps, the crematoria, the Blitzkrieg, etc. And as we've laid out in our historical exegesis throughout the podcast, this does not mean to imply that the Third Reich and its transition into the Fourth Reich is

somehow a beginning and then an intermediate step. forward, right? What we're really saying here is that there's a global complex or combine as Malcolm X once again says in the intro music that spans the globe and what it has in common is that it consists of the owners of capital and it represents the interests of capital accumulation and the search for profit and for value wherever it can be found. Now, for a long time, the mantle of that project was carried forth by the British Empire, upon which the sun never set, as I'm sure our listener is well aware. To a lesser extent, of course, you have the other imperial powers,

but I mentioned the British Empire because it had its own geopolitician. In fact, a guy who's almost credited with inventing geopolitics, or at least taking it into the modern age, talking, of course, about Sir Halford McKinder. This is the fella who developed the idea of the geographic pivot of history, and you'll see why this becomes relevant in a few moments. The theory of the pivot is, and this is McKinder, I'm quoting, who rules East Europe commands the heartland.

Who rules the heartland, commands the world island, who commands the world island commands the world and mckinder passed the torch in some respects to the great german geopolitician a guy who my buddy marcus on the return of the repressed podcast which i think it's our first shout out to marcus but seriously if you've not you've got to check out his stuff. He's really one of the greatest love Marcus. And he has expanded upon McHinder's acolyte talking, of course, about Karl Hauschofa. And Hauschofa, in turn, taught geopolitics to Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess. He even took time out of his busy geopolitical schedule to visit them while they were in prison and give them private lessons.

What a nice guy. He did that pro bono. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. He did it for the love of the game. And you know who else did some pro bono work for the love of the game in 1945? It actually, I think it was in 47 that he made the trip. But I'm talking about father, Edmund.

Aloysius, Walsh, a Jesuit, and the namesake founder of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, he weaseled his way right there on to the U.S. Nuremberg delegation during the war crimes investigations, and he spent endless hours with Herr Haushofer. not so much interrogating him as picking his brain and of course he went on to take those lessons home and the rest as they say is history of course there's a lot more to it than that

but this is a mere paraphrase to set the stage because we are once again at a geopolitical pivot point And I think right now there's a shift in geopolitics underway that at least the mainstream media and most of its consumers are missing like the blind man with the elephant's tail. So, Dick, maybe that's a good place to pass the mic, and you can kind of pick up. I think by now everybody knows what we are talking about and who the victims of these problem really are. Right. The use case, the example that we're going to walk through today,

is, of course, Ukraine. And what we're seeing now in the last couple of days in last week or so is really what we expected with the Trump presidency, but the beginning of the end of the United States' involvement in Ukraine. Not if Victoria Newland has anything to say about it, to be fair. I think we should start, because Ukraine really does. have all of the marks of what you would see in the situation, right? Because it is a resource-rich, um, geographically significant country, uh, region that, uh, Russia has wanted for hundreds of years. Um, the bread basket of Europe. And, you know, it, we're seeing now in this modern day,

like everybody wants a taste, right? Well, to be fair, though, right? The, the, you Or rather, the Euro-Mydon movement that was promoted, sponsored, and led in many respects by the likes of our friend Victoria Newland, by the U.S. State Department, remember the WikiLeaks released phone calls and cables detailing piece by piece, how. the ouster of the pro-Russian president was orchestrated and how the U.S. sought to install an anti-Russian regime to keep Russia out, right? pre-2014 that access was not a problem for Russia but then it becomes a problem when under the guise of your bog standard color revolution the pro-Russian forces are ousted from the government and there's a huge move to close the country off and basically make it a part of Europe and thereby bring it into the NATO sphere of influence, even without officially suggesting that Ukraine join NATO?

I think Yats is the guy who's got the economic experience, the governing experience. He's the guy, you know, what he needs is Cleach and Tony Book on the outside. He needs to be talking to them four times a week, you know. I just think Cleach going in, he's going to be at that level. Working for Yotsnuk, it's just not going to work. Yeah, no, I think that's right. Okay. So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and have the UN help glue it.

And, you know, fuck the EU. No, exactly. And I think we've got to do something to make it stick together because you can be pretty sure that if it does start to gain altitude, the Russians will be working behind the scenes to try to torpedo it. So on that piece, Jeff, when I wrote the note, Sullivan's come back to me, VFR. saying you need Biden, and I said probably tomorrow for an add-a-boy and get the deeds to stick. So Biden's willing. Okay, great. Thanks. And of course, behind the scenes of all of this is playing itself out just a classic drama of corruption. Remember, back before the

first Trump administration, that's when Hunter Biden gets named to the board of of directors of Ukrainian gas company Burisma getting massive amounts of compensation every month for a no-show job on the promise, which we've gleaned from Hunter Biden's text messages and other leaked communications that he left at the computer shop, that he was promising that the big guy would help out his bosses and was engaging in some of the greatest examples that we have documented of nepotistic corrupt gameplay and it couldn't really have been done by a better guy than Hunter Biden. Exactly.

No, that's exactly what I was sort of getting to. No, that's exactly right. You know, this whole thing is, we saw it this last week, right? Like, the only reason Ukraine became even a thing was the funding and support it was getting from the United States. Right. And they were falling right into the rhetorical trap, at least, that had been laid by Putin, and the pro-Russian forces, where Ukrainian politics became more and more restrictive. They're banning political parties eventually.

They are clamping down on Russian language use, which is interesting to keep in mind today that another Trump executive order sought to make English the official language of the United States. there's a whole toolbox that a country could use. Right. That's a classic toolbox. It's a historical sort of trope at this point, right? Make it illegal to speak any other language than the majority, you know, the native language of the country, so to speak, make it illegal to get a translator or speak that language in official

proceedings you could see how this would play out in a core proceeding and to the you know to the detriment of anyone who's not speaking the status quo the language of the status quo yeah it's totally like right out of the playbooks but so my point is just to get us back on track now we're in the Biden administration and things really ratchet up right because Biden obviously Obama part two or whatever you want to call him he's just going off of the obama playbook of diplomacy and he wants that foothold and it's a pretty easy message for him to play off of right because what do you have you have this classic situation of a country fighting a democratic country fighting the reds right and so he just plays that tune to the media and people buy it and with that and with that the money

and the support comes a running down right like the Ukrainian military is getting the like highest level tech is able to sort of fight this rich man's war basically and do some serious damage to the Russian to the Russians. Right. Everybody's trying to rack up body count. Everybody is experimenting with that tech. It's been said many times, but the military industries are some of the most emblematic of capitalism

because the assets themselves, the goods that are produced, immediately destruct themselves. So you have to keep making more and more and more. And the profits that you're able to reap on top of that are incredible. And that's why, like, the whole, when we, I mean, I don't think people really understand that, We're talking about military aid to Ukraine in orders of magnitude greater quantities than what Israel was even getting at the same time.

Hundreds of billions, billions with a bee. And, you know, what was not greatly reported in the U.S., of course, was that within about a month of the Russian invasion in February 2022, there's a proposal to end the conflict with some territorial concessions in these disputed regions. And, you know, it's not that it would go to Russia per se, but would be sort of independent, Balkanized mini-republics.

And of course, the U.S. and the U.K., Boris Johnson at the time, were instrumental in scuttling that deal and in egging the Ukrainians on to fight their war, that they could win it, that they could push the Russians all the way out,

and that they were making promises, promising the world, really, to Ukraine. And, of course, they had a very willing interlocutor in Zelensky, an actor, who played the part. I mean, that's really what he did. Like, everybody wanted their picture taken with him. Fucking Annie Leibowitz, Vogue, did the whole photo spread of him. back to our theme of politics as spectacle, this was war as spectacle, glamorizing the entire resistance of Ukraine in a way that obscured the reality and completely distorted the image in most people's minds.

And I was actually, I have been surprised, I'll say it, in the last week or so, by how effective that actually has been on people that thought were otherwise intelligent or discerning? Yeah, so this was sort of bringing me to the ultimate point, right? Where it's like you have this war, you have this essentially proxy war with U.S. Western interests on one side and let's say Russian interest on the other. being played out in this third country it's an awful lot like Vietnam except for this time the warmongers are the Democrats

and the folks that are seeking to end the thing are the Republicans well hey now Dick I resent that you're not giving enough credit to the Democrat war mongers who pushed the war in Vietnam. I guess I should be a little, I should put a finer point on it. The people that you see that put the flags out on their houses, right, the Ukraine flag. Yeah. I'm sure they come from the same cut of cloth of people who protested the Vietnam War, right?

Totally. That's sort of what I'm getting at, is that this mind play that the media and the messaging that is so successful is that they're able to sort of let these people who otherwise have Western sort of liberal ideas, they're able to accept the notion of going to war. Totally. Yeah, I mean, fuck, Neil Young, I just read today, is going to play a special concert in Ukraine because of sympathy with their abandonment by the Trump administration. Fuck. Keep on the free world. And it's like sort of the heart of everything we're talking about, right? It's like the ability of the Fourth Reich to just twist it all on top of itself, right?

Like when Neil Young is going to do this concert, what's the, like, what is the protest here? test here. Is it that Putin bad, he's a dictator? Like, is it that the Russians are communists? Like, I don't understand, I don't understand the basis for saying, you know, we're siding with these guys and not the others. Other than sort of this historical, being steeped in this historical culture of fearing the Reds. I mean, in part of it, I think there's this concept, which I'm sure you're familiar with, and probably most of our listeners are familiar with, the sunk cost fallacy, right? Once you've dumped all of this capital, both physical capital and political capital into the conflict, you want to go all in. You want to keep going. It's like a gambling

addiction, so to speak. And in propaganda, it's even stronger because the United States and the United States media apparatus from its very crib, its very infancy. I'm talking about the year 1945 after the U.S. broke up with its World War II ally, the Soviet Union. turned against the Soviet Union and deployed its entire propaganda and media apparatus, both private and public sector here, against communism, but communism embodied by the Russians most pertinently, later as well, the Chinese. Like I talked about with Jeff Kay last week, you know, the orientalist image that was perpetuated of the devious Chinese, the yellow scare, eventually becomes as strong as the red scare, but you have this ingrained rusophobia in the

American psyche that would be a shame to waste if you are a warmongering propagandist. Right? You don't want to just... Right, right, right, right. Yeah. It's like, we bought all this russophobia. We might as well do something with it. Right, exactly. I'll let it go to waste. Exactly.

And so they're drawing a lot on that. And then abstracting yourself from the propaganda, you see what the bigger geopolitical pivot is that's at work. And so one event that I don't think we mention that I think is absolutely pivotal, no pun intended, is the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline that brought Russian gas to the European continent, right? To the European Union. Yes. And it's pretty well established at this point. I don't think that we will set off.

the D-Bunker alarms when we say that Nord Stream was bombed by sabotage conducted by Ukraine with almost definitely assistance, whether intel assistance or operational assistance, from the U.S. it would be nonsensical for Russia to conduct such a massive self-inflicted economic wound as to essentially cut off its biggest buyer of one of its biggest exports. It would be insanity for Russia to do it. And yet we were told just because they'll do anything these Russian citizens. they'll do anything.

They have no morals. They have no logic. Okay, well. And to be clear, listener, we're not here carrying a brief for Putin or for his government or anything like that, right? We're just calling it like we seize it.

But after Nord Stream, there was a massive geopolitical coup whereby, one, European energy prices get on the up ramp and start to soar. All of the inflationary pressures in Europe are largely secondary effects of massive increase in energy prices due to the elimination of cheaper Russian energy from the market. and where is Europe getting that energy now from the US of A and so it really tightens the tie between EU countries and the US economically and turns the politics of the EU against Russia that's one but I think that there's even bigger ones going on too i maybe i'll just bring us back on track but the so the money is flowing for zalinski during the biden administration to the point where i think at a certain point it was sort of on autopilot we weren't getting much news about what was going on in ukraine and it was just

essentially just a refresh replenishment of funds every so often to keep the war going. And then, of course, our man, Trump wins the 2024 election. And Zelensky sees that the music is about to stop. And what I was just getting at is like this is where the rubber hits the road, right? is this trip that Zelensky takes to the states, and I'm pretty sure it was to sort of ratify this mineral deal that they had, and had really nothing to do with, directly to do with sort of the war in Ukraine.

And the press that they're doing on it is just about this sort of this deal. And while at a press conference with a sort of a, photo opportunity where Zelensky is in the Oval Office with Trump and Jady Vance you could see it on his face like Zelensky couldn't help himself and makes the stray remark about how he hopes that the Trump presidency will continue supporting Ukraine

and it's like man this guy is desperate right the writing's on the wall for him probably not the smartest move for him to do that in hindsight but what it does is it gives Trump and Vance the perfect opportunity to just bring that front and center

and they do it in the most humiliating way and to be fair I mean the guy had well for one I think anybody who's ever been around anybody who's high on cocaine would concede that Zelensky is typically pretty keyed out at any given time. And I don't think that that's unrelated to the political instincts that he's shown. Like, when one thing that stuck out to me in watching the humiliation ritual that he underwent was that Trump pointed out that Zelensky came and campaigned for Democrats back in fall of last year.

Yeah, totally. Like, how, one thing is for Netanyahu to come. and campaign for Trump or to suggest that he sides with Trump. Why? Because he controls, I mean, he's got like every member of Congress on the payroll. Yeah. And so he just doesn't give a shit. But like, Zelensky, he really got out over his skis when he tried to pick sides in a

domestic election, especially when, like, I mean, it was Joe Biden for all the reasons that we talked about. Like, it's been clear to us for years that Trump 2.0 was coming into office in January 25, yes or yes. Yeah. Yeah. To me, the sort of. press conference shaming was this amazing display, first of all, of this new era of diplomacy

that we have where it's no longer about sort of this gentleman's game or like this sort of this high level thinking things through. You essentially have it's reduced to Trump saying three or four things, right? You don't hold the cards. We hold the cards. We hold the cards. Right. You should be grateful. You should be thankful. You haven't thanked us. And that this isn't going to work with this attitude and we want peace. And I mean, it's wild. Like, you know, at the conference, one thing that Trump said that was true, I think, was when he, you know, he turned to J.D. Vance and he says, you know, this is actually good. it's good for the American people to see this. And, you know, frankly, I agree.

I think it is good for everyone to see this because it shows you exactly where we are in political discourse, in, you know, the state of diplomacy in this world. Yeah, absolutely. I agree with you totally. I mean, and behind the curtain, right, so there's a greater level of transparency,

to this approach than there was to the Biden-Obama approach of pretending and forcing everybody else to pretend as a condition of participating in discourse that were the good guys, our allies are the good guys and our enemies are the bad guys and sure there's still a good deal of that i don't mean to give trump that much credit that he has taken the mask all the way off but it's slipping when like you said he boils it down to power which is what he's really doing exactly And his associates, like somebody that I know we had planned to talk about in this episode, Steve Bannon, for example, are actually speaking quite transparently about the broader geopolitical pivot. So it's not just the European gambit of blocking Russia.

from getting any closer to Europe. Indeed, the larger picture that guys like Bannon are supporting is geared towards ultimately attacking China, right? And the way that I've been thinking about this, and you and I have discussed this off mic a bit, is it's kind of like a reverse domino theory where instead of trying to prevent dominoes from falling, as was the case during the Cold War, where you have this stated concern that if Vietnam falls to the communists, then Thailand will fall and Laos and Cambodia and on and on

until the entirety of Southeast Asia is part of the communist bloc. Now, it's a deliberate effort for the U.S. to knock down dominoes on its own path to China. And Russia is the lowest hanging fruit here because, well, I guess Russia and with, it Europe because you can give Russia a few carrots, you know, and you can get some deals in return from Russia. I mean, the deal-making aspect of Trump's personality makes him the perfect foil for this whole charade that's going on on a global scale where... He's working with Russia.

He, I think, and I have no proof for this, but it just seems too obvious to not be true, that there was some backroom dealings with Russia with respect to Syria, right? The departure of Assad from Syria. Right. Right. Like a trade-type deal, right? Syria for Ukraine. Is that what you're kidding?

100% Yeah Yeah And so you've got Russia onside Now The latest Is that

Trump has enlisted Russia To work with the US To denuclearize Iran And Iran Iran, I think, is the next domino

or certainly an important domino that whether through regime change or through some kind of a major regime shift, the U.S. will seek to neutralize Iran as the spearhead of the so-called axis of resistance, right? The, and all of this is back to McKinder. old Eastern European heartland, right, the pivot, the geographic pivot of history, taking control over that whole region there in between Europe and Asia with the ultimate goal of backing China down as a great power. And, of course, it's a ridiculous gambit.

Yeah. yeah like is a hundred percent not going to happen i mean it's totally plausible but it's totally plausible that they try oh yeah and i think they sincerely believe it too and they are infected with the same mental disease as the cold warriors and in fact one of trump's appointees who is up for senate confirmation to serve in a key role as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy is a guy by the name of Elbridge Colby and if that name's not familiar to listeners

the surname Colby you may recognize from William Colby who was of course the director of the CIA prior to George H.W. Bush's appointment. He bridged the gap between Dick Helms and George Bush at the helm of CIA. And of course, William Colby, before he took the reins at CIA, was the mastermind behind the Phoenix program, the murderous military technology surveillance and assassinations program that Douglas Valentine has covered so extensively in his indispensable book on the subject,

titled The Phoenix Program, and this passage from one generation to another shows that although there are shifts, there is also continuity. Just as there's shifts, from the Third Reich to the 4th Reich, there's shifts from the Cold War to whatever the fuck this moment is called. I don't know if we're still using Obama's preferred phrasing the China pivot or whatever, the Pacific pivot. But, you know, it's basically pulling a Nixon, except this time, instead of allying with China to weaken Russia, it's allying with Russia to weaken China. And that's the state of sort of the new diplomacy, right?

The new landscape of international affairs for the United States in this Trump administration. I was going to say maybe we could talk a little bit about how the Trump administration is selling all of this to the public when, you know, I would hope that the takeaway to sum up that our listener will get from the preceding discussion is that, in fact, there's nothing peace-loving about Trump's policy, there's nothing pro-working class about Trump's policy. I mean, of course, at the end of the day, all of the cheap shit that allows us to keep our daily expenses more or less under control is thanks to Chinese manufacturing, right?

And of course, the whittling away of civil liberties, of free speech, of the ability to dissent is a harbinger of crackdowns to come when the inevitable happens and economic hardship turns into economic crisis. And I don't have any doubt that that will happen. One fine morning, I woke up early, Bella chow, Bella chow, one fine morning, I woke up early to find the fashions and my door and my door. And to prepare for that, and this is the next thing that I think we can briefly discuss before getting into our provocations or incitations to the listening audience to get your head out of the Democrat Party's trap. But first, I think it's worth just mentioning this populist rhetoric. coming out of the republican camp and the way in which the republicans are selling their snake oil

to young people to libertarians not just to fascists right but to a broader spectrum than your traditional sort of boomer fox news voter there's no competition for boom There's no competition in Facebook. There's no competition Amazon. Amazon destroyed half the small business in this country, flood in the zone with Chinese Communist Party product. There's no competition to really competition to X or to Twitter because we let them go.

And there's no Justice Department. That's what I'm a Neo-Brandtisian when it comes to the Justice Department. I'm a Lena Khan fan. You're a Lena Con fan. A break, come on. When Steve Bannon talks about, a con 10 times more than Biden and particularly Kamala Harris that tells you it's a fix in the Democratic Party is controlled by all these corporatists you have to watch out for

private concentrations of power that would then partner with government if you wanted to get to a totalitarian government right you would have major concentrations of private power built around monopolistic they often called the corporate state corporate state yeah exactly Well, we have a capitalist system with no capitalists. Think about it. 70% of the people in this country don't own financial or real assets, right? You have to, they have to have a piece of the action. If you have everybody the peace of the action, and this is not socialism.

They're not, these people never ask for a fairness. It's also practical. President Trump keeps saying it's a revolution of common sense. Common sense means let's get everybody be a capitalist. Let's get everybody be an owner of something. They're going to say this guy was a billionaire that came and basically formed a populist nationalist movement that gave the country its sovereignty back and gave the country its freedom back. And that's why I think he's not only one of the greatest presidents we've ever had, he's one of the two or three guys, greatest Americans we've ever had. And this is why I'm a huge proponent of trying to see if he can't stick around as long as possible.

Because at least for another term after this, because that requires bended in the Constitution. We'll see about that. We'll see about that. We'll see about that. I think a good way in, and just stick with me here, okay? A good way into this is... I'm with you, dog. How'd you know I was going to talk about dog?

Dog e, that is. Doggy, doggy, doge. The way in is... Okay, so, you know, At this point, it's no secret that MAGA has taken under its tent the American sort of working class, or at least wants to make itself out as the people's party, the populist party. And one of the sort of mandates, one of the ways that Elon Musk is able to get in there with Doge. and sort of wreak havoc, he's doing this through this mandate to come in and get rid of fraud, get rid of corruption, get rid of waste.

And these are things that everyday Americans, they really want out of their, they want rooted out of their government, right? Americans are tired of, you know, spending their tax dollars going on needless expenses in the government. Americans are tired of hearing about the corruption of politicians, of government, you know, bureaucrats. They're tired of hearing about all of this fraud. And using that as their sort of starting point, Doge is coming in and saying, okay, well, we're going to do an audit and we're going to trim the fat for you, American people.

because the American people deserve better, right? Just stay away from the Pentagon. Right, exactly. But then when you look at what they're actually doing, it's not really tied to any misconduct or fraud, right? They're just targeting certain agencies and avoiding others, right? Yep. So it's like this is this idea of like using, weaponizing what they're able to exploit

out of like the fears of the American people, the desires of the American people and then just doing whatever the fuck they want when they get their foot in the door, right? It's like, okay, we're going in to address fraud and corruption and make sure the American tax dollars being well spent.

And to do that, we're going to cut the CFPB. Right. And not only that, but we're going to send in guys whose pubes haven't come in yet who don't no shit about shit. You know, half of them are like nepo babies of former Iran-Contra financiers or some shit. That just belies the authenticity of the mission in the first place.

Sending incompetence in to do this job is what you do if you're essentially. wielding a sledgehammer, and that's what they're doing. Doge is a great case study for this, just as Ukraine was for our sort of diplomacy angle. But Doge is a great one because there are all these different transactions that have happened, these events that, to me, like, are all the hallmarks of, you know, a fascist government. For example, so, you know, at this point, Musk has been questioned in public. by the media many times like what the fuck are you doing you're cutting this you know you're cutting the cfpb you're cutting the department of education what the hell is going on and his response

usually is some variation of look the trump president the trump presidency this administration we got a mandate from the people right we won the popular vote based on this promise that we're going to come in and do this the people have spoken so it's not up to you media to question me anymore right like you you have no credibility to question me

because you don't see that this is what the people want right first one second thing he's meanwhile he uses his ownership of Twitter to throttle accounts that are critical to boost of these accounts that are

sycophants And at the same time, Trump has done that in the press briefing room by decredentialing critical journalists and bringing in more and more of these quote unquote new media, fascist, bottle blonde spokespeople. Yeah, totally. One of them who asked Zelensky, why doesn't he wear a suit? shout out to that guy if you remember listener I pointed that out obviously as a joke I'm waiting for when they

ask Federman the same thing but back to this sort of my points about Musk and how this is just such a great sort of use case for how fascism is truly playing out so you have that point about how he's sort of not open to being questioned by the media and then tied to that

I think maybe even it happened once in the same sort of press conference, but someone asks him, like, hey, Musk, you actually, you said something that wasn't true, right? That statement about this department or whatever, that's wrong. And his whole response is essentially like, look, I might be wrong sometimes. Sometimes I will say things that are not true, right? And that's okay. And then the third point on Musk, and I'll get off Musk, but it's like at the very first cabinet meeting that Trump has,

he brings Musk. Now, I don't think Musk is a cabinet level officer, right? he's not a he's not a secretary of any means but he's there and what does trump do in front of all of his cabinet members he says you know with the cameras rolling he says does anybody have a problem with what elin's been doing and obviously no one speaks up and no one says anything but that message of just like the silent cabinet room um ask, like, is there any problem with what this guy's doing? That, to me, is another hallmark of where you have this strong man dictator who essentially

is using his subordinates to ratify the thing that he wants to do, essentially by, like, public shaming or whatever it is that he's doing when he's asking this question to the open group yeah yeah i mean it's it's the embodiment of the classic musilini framing of fascism as the merger between corporate and state power and i think it's important to bear in mind you know we covered this a bit in my interview with jacobs silverman as well and if you haven't checked that out because Jacob's all over this stuff. But what we are seeing in Elon Musk is not this Tony Stark genius that his persona implies. And if anybody really truly believes that, like that's just sad because he is another kind of like Zelensky another actor playing a role

and that role is scripted if you will by much bigger forces like in Zelensky's case he's got his own economic backers, including the, you know, massive media tycoon in Ukraine, who's a dual Israeli Ukrainian citizen, Ijor Kolomoisky, and with Musk, he should really wear one of those like NASCAR suits. It's got the corporate logos all over it. Because every big bank, like, every institutional investor they're all somehow have skin in the game of inflating the musk bubble and it's the size of a hot air balloon yeah it's interesting you point that out i i wonder how this is going to play out for his i mean obviously his big ongoing business concern is tesla as far as i can tell many people who are in that bracket to buy teslas who tend to be democratic voters the folks that are buying electric

cars they're not buying teslas anymore right they're actually given up their teslas and i'm wondering how long is this tesla charade going to last once the numbers start showing up on the balance sheets right that's that's a great point you've got to think that as long as he continues to play the role of tony stark genius that there will be a way and for example just to give one stopgap measure I saw the other day that there had been an order for Tesla vehicles by the State Department and that was not fraud, that was not abuse. Oh, hell yeah. There you go.

That's the answer. The way it's going to work is he's just going to become a government contract, like an even bigger government contract. There you go. That's the answer. Right. And same goes for the SpaceX, right? Like those satellites are falling out of orbit all the time.

And they're shooting more and more up of this essentially space junk into the sky doing who knows what to the ozone layer, to the atmosphere, to the stratosphere, whatever. who cares like it's again the more margin that capitalists can extract from a form of production the more resources we put into that form of destruction and what seems to be the case whether it's military straight up military technology or military adjacent technology like starlink which, by the way, was a massive economic beneficiary of the war in Ukraine because it was providing satellite communications paid for by the U.S. taxpayer to Ukrainian military use purposes. So the whole thing is such a massive circle jerk.

And I think this brings us a little bit back to this point about the transparency being not so much authentic transparency, but a mere spectacle of transparency for the sake of the spectacle. And Musk, of course, is emblematic of that, right? His whole admission that you aptly brought up of, I'm not going to say the truth all the time, okay? I'm going to make mistakes. it's this Silicon Valley move fast and break things ethos that somehow they think applies to the government because not having any actual reliance on the government their kids don't go to public schools right they're not on Medicaid, they think old people are gross. Well, aside from getting the subsidies and the contracts, they're not, they're not on the

government. Exactly. Exactly. And therein lies the difference. I guess that's okay. Right. And I do want to mention, I think his name has come up, Steve Bannon one more time. Yes.

Well, let's talk about Bannon. I mean, if Musk is the, if Musk is like your Alfie Krupp of the Fourth Reich right now, Bannon is your Strasser, right? He's the left-wing fascist, the populist, the populist, wing of fascism. And he puts the socialist in national socialist, right? He's talking about reigning in corporate greed. It's utter horseshit. Everything that comes out of his mouth is just lies. I mean, we're talking about a guy who nursed at the teat of Roger Stone,

who cut his teeth at Goldman Sachs. intimate friends with Jeffrey Epstein for fuck's sake. He personally owns Epstein videos, like hours and hours of interviews with Epstein. And meanwhile, you have this ridiculous charade of the quote-unquote Epstein files bandied about as red meat to the masses that's like, and then it's plastic and they bite into it. And like, this is not the red meat that we were promised. And that's really what Bannon is selling, but he does so in such a convincing way. I hate to admit it, but it's true. Yeah, credit where credit is due.

Bannon, he does this thing in a recent interview where it's sort of this thing you've talked about before on this pod, certainly in our conversations off the air where, you know, Tucker Carlson does this too and did this recently about China, but it's this idea that sort of these criticisms of the Democratic Party, of the other side of the political discourse, these criticisms of how they're operating, right? like Bannon will straight up say like you know Bernie had a shot he was the closest thing to actually doing um you know getting getting to a point where he would actually make change for people the problem is is Bernie is gutless and and he's not able to sort of step away from the Democratic Party that is 100% a valid criticism of Bernie right um

you know, Bannon will say that the phenomenon, the Trump phenomenon, is based on his ability to tap into the working class, but that's only because the Democrats abandoned the working class eight years ago or ten years ago. That's a valid criticism of the Democrats, right? Like, he will say the reason MAGA had such an easy time is because the Democrats essentially seated that ground for the working class of America. America. And that's a fair criticism, I think. Yeah, his economic populist rhetoric. And, you know, as much as I'd hate for anybody to boost the stats of such a vile puppet of Peter Thiel as Tim Dillon, the recent interview that Bannon did on the Tim Dillon podcast is actually pretty

interesting to listen to because it does just that it goes through this whole economic populist spiel that sounded and right that's exactly what I'm talking about right and as you know I'd call myself a Marxist but as a Marxist when you're listening to that you're hearing what you're hearing is a lot of like kind of valid Marxist critiques but then there's the shift of course at the end right when it comes to the conclusions. Exactly, exactly. And that's where, you know, for one, he's deeply influenced by the likes of Julius Evela, right? The Italian fascist who essentially envisioned this national socialist, Aryan racial paradise of sorts,

that found its utopia based on a genocide. war against the invading masses and hordes from the third world that that's like the next stage in capitalist development is this kind of eugenic purge of the body politic and it funnels his his narrative funnels towards that end, in his case, with your anti-China stuff, with your anti-immigrant stuff, whatever the case may be. And his actual analysis is infantile when he comes to talking about socialism versus capitalism. I'm like, in that interview at some point, he's like, now I like Lena Khan, I think we should break up the monopolies.

I think we should make sure that, you know, working people aren't taxed too much and that to the extent that we do have government programs, they should be paid for their fair share by the rich. And I think that we need to take the spending cuts all the way to the Pentagon and reduce military spending and blah, blah, blah, blah. and all these wish list of left people, right? But then he comes to this point where he's like, but it's not socialism when I'm advocating. I think that everybody should own a little piece of something. It's like, think that one through a little bit more, and it stops making so much sense.

And to draw on the lessons of history, that's exactly what we see with the likes of Strasser, with the likes of Ramiro Ledesma, the left wing of the Spanish phalanche under Franco, right? All these guys end up getting purged and usually murdered, but they are useful and they serve a purpose to sort of sheepdog people into the far-right mentality, into the fascist ethos, and whether it's Bannon that's doing that, whether it's the likes of Tim Dillon that's doing that, or your favorite Peter Thiel-funded podcast Red Scare that's doing that,

there's a massive, massive amount of investment, largely covert and not on the books, because in order for it to be effective, the message has to appear authentic and not manufactured or coordinated. But that's what it is. And this idea of right-wing populism, like you really can't even give credit to Trump for almost anything because doing so risks giving an inch down that slippery slope to finding common cause with fascists something that is to be avoided. And I don't know, Dick, did you have anything else on the Doge stuff?

Because I think we could get to our sort of closing thoughts. No, I think we're good. Yeah, I think we're about an hour and a half in. I think it's time to sort of wrap things up. And we want to end on a positive note because as we started out saying there is a lot to be hopeful about notwithstanding the apparent state of affairs, depressing as it is, on the one hand, one could find. reason to grieve or reason to despair that there's no apparent organized opposition to this overt form of fascist takeover. But we're not despairing here on Fourth Reich archaeology and it's not just because we like being right

about things for the sake of feeling vindicated, although there's a certain schadenfreude value to that. But really what we're talking about here, folks, is a massive, a widening lane in the political discourse that is getting paved over, it's getting steam rolled and you know it's there to drive on down and that lane represents this movement of the politically disinclined or the as we as i think a phrase that you've used a lot dick that i like the disgusted spectator and ultimately

there's so much to offer not by pulling out your hair and screaming about the orange man but by actually capturing with some appreciation for nuance what steps that the current administration is taking could lead us towards a more equitable distribution of wealth and power in this country and in the world than the tendency towards concentration. And again, you know, don't want to sound too optimistic or rosy-eyed here, but there is a certain unity of interest in taking a flamethrower to some swathes of the administrative state, not only the administrative state, but to things like USAID,

which has functioned as an arm of the CIA. Remember, it was USAID that nominally employed Dan Mitreone, right? The friend of Jim Jones, who was captured in Uduay, after a lucrative and long career training South American police in the methodology of torture. And so what we urge our listeners to do is to think about how to articulate ways in which a left political formation, one with the real interests of the people in mind, the interests of the people at the expense of the interests of the oligarchs. what could that movement look like and I truly do believe that

I'm not saying that there's anything inevitable about this but there's a better chance on a sort of clean slate to build something like that up from the ground than to try and work something like that into the totally hegemonic Democrat Party, for example, the Republican Party, obviously a lost cause, obviously a corporate party. But so is the Democrat Party. Right. I mean, we just look to recent history, and we can see that, right? With the Bernie movement,

that was completely sort of infiltrated by the Democratic establishment and distinctions. dismantled from the inside right the call was coming from the inside on that one and there's your example of why it could not work under the democratic tent but I'm with you yeah I mean with Bernie it's like fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me and fool me three times to paraphrase George W. Bush and we won't get fooled again but think about it I mean just think about it. Think about it in your life. I've been having a lot of these conversations because, you know, you propose the provocative idea that we are living in the Fourth Reich and that it did not commence on January 20th, 2025, or on November 4th, 2024, or anything like that.

remember the previous administration all belongs in the hague every member of it for the crime of genocide this is not a joke when we say that the democrat party is evil corrupt and irredeemable we are talking about a party that stood behind a slew of individuals who all bear guilt for the crime of genocide, the mass murder of innocent men, women, and children, the dispossession of their land and property, and the utter intentional destruction of their entire way of life, trying to wipe their history from the face of the earth and the memory of the human community. it's despicable to defend and now all that we see from the institutional democrat party in response to Trump's overt fascism and corporate takeover of the United States government

and selling it for scrap to not even the highest bidder but at a basement bargain fire sale price is an appeal to nationalist base instincts for more war, more military spending, more imperialism, and going back to the way things were for the sake of an non-existent nostalgia for some feeling of peace and calm like it's deranged deranged just to bring the point home next time listener next time someone says something offhand about how there's no longer a free press because trump is in office i think you could shoot right back to them and say well didn't tony Lincoln kick journalists out of his press conferences. So it's not the playbook.

They're playing by different sort of tools in the toolbox, but the playbook is sort of the same. That's right. That's right. It's time to think creatively because the end game for, the oligarch class could not be more crystal clear they want to distract us all with dreams of going to mars or with virtual realities that will make our dreams come true in an utter artificial means of existence while sucking the life force out of us,

putting us essentially into pods. And, you know, if and when the climate catastrophe necessitates the purge of millions, tens of millions, or even billions of people to reduce the surplus population, they will do so without batting an eye. And there's a good chance at the moment to fight back is already come and gone. But, you know, we are alive. And I think part of the reason why we're doing this podcast, It little as it may be and limited in its reach is to spend some of our reserves of life energy to try and swell the ranks of those people willing to give it a shot on this, our only journey through the planet Earth.

I think that's a great place to end this episode. I am so grateful for you, Don, for our listeners, and for this opportunity to speak out and speak up. Yeah, we went a little full rush limbaugh mode. Just pulled out the rants on this one. But, you know, let us know what you think, because it's fun to do. And I think, you know, it's nice to have these discussions and try to hit the vein of truth. I'm Don.

And I'm Dick. Saying farewell. And keep doing. world you're on the ride you're going to ride you're going to go.