The Duran Podcast - Biden Faces Conflict At Home And Abroad w/ Robert Barnes (Live)

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

Biden Faces Conflict At Home And Abroad w/ Robert Barnes (Live)

Okay, we are live with Alexander McCurris in London and the great Robert Barnes. Mr. Barnes, where can people find you? They can find all of our content at the second best locals page right behind the durand. dot locals.com at vivabarnslaw.com. We have debates, conversations. All the things you get durand.com. You can also get at Viva Barneslaw.orgals.com. So, and if you want to troll, you just have to pay a bit of a toll.

But other than that, you can even troll as long as you're reasonably decent about it. But yeah, that's where they can get all of the content from both me and Viva Fry. Awesome. Awesome. I will have a link for that Locals channel as a pinned comment. I also have it right now in the description box as well. Gentlemen, let's get started. We have a lot to talk about.

A quick hello to everyone that is watching us on locals, I'm Rockfin, Odyssey, Rumble, and YouTube, and a big shout out to our amazing moderators. Thank you very much to all our moderators. Valias, Zaraiel, Gab, and who else? Reckless abandon. A full house of moderators. Thank you, everybody.

I hope I didn't miss anybody. So, Robert, Alexander, before we get started on the political and geopolitical topics, you do have a super chat, which would like both of your gentleman's recommendations on history books and geopolitical books that you recommend, that especially can be shared with the next generation. I think there's books that are used to, like, templates of power. So I always recommend John La Corre's novels. You know, if you want to understand what's going on with big pharma in Africa, Constant Gardner is a nice little introduction.

If you want to understand rendition, do you want to understand? I mean, he hasn't always been the best on understanding new Russia, but putting that aside, the Russia House is great. All the Cold War era stuff was great. His indictment of spies as a group of people, starting with, you know, coming in from the cold. All of that is brilliant. So a lot of the films or other books really good. My favorite happens to be Russia House as a movie.

But yeah, it's John Connery. So hard not to like him. And he's got a cool flat in Portugal. But in the film. But so John Lockeurray for sure. American author, I call him often a temp, you know, the best, you know, as Faulkner said, sometimes the best fact is found in fiction. The, you know, Elroy describes the American deep state very well in his American.

and is a American tabloid trilogy, a book's American tabloid, the Cold 6,000. And I'm blanking on the third one, but all of them excellent, describing how the shadow world works in terms of a... You could have understood Russia Gate if you had read both Jill and John LaCarray

and James O'Roy before anybody in the institutional media in the West understood it for the fake, phony fraud that it was. Trump would have benefited from reading some of it. So those I think are good. You know, if you want it sort of independent left historical perspective, people like Noam Chomsky has written very voluminously. If you want some old American, almost independent populist perspective, questioning, skeptical of empire, people like William Appelman Williams.

You can't go wrong. You know, looking at a lot of what Ron Paul has written in contemporary times because it has broader and bigger application. But my favorite are really the great fiction writers because they often describe greater truth than anybody else can get access to. If you, I mean, that's an astonishing list, Robert. And I just go to add a few names. I mean, if you want to understand the absurdity and comic opera quality of a lot of what you

see in the British deep state and civil service, I would recommend Graham Greens are man in Havana, actually, which, I mean, gets, you know, the pomposity, the, stupidity, the self-importance, and the sheer bungling incompetence of the whole thing. And there's not a bad film, but the book is an awful lot better, actually. Now, I'm Greek, and, you know, anybody who is interested in geopolitics and is Greek, well, this is a really heavy, deep read with Eucydides' book on the Peloponnesian War. Still the best, I think, about great power politics and the way they work. A lot of the books, again, I'm talking now, you know, somebody who studied history,

AJP Taylor wrote very well about historical topics. He wrote lots about, one of his famous books, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, for example, which explains an awful lot about European history and how it evolved and how it developed. And in the way in which the United States got sucked into it, because the US wanted to stay out and it eventually got drawn in and the way in which European power politics were. And I recently been reading and I think they're really remarkable books actually, a whole series of books written by a man called David Gantz, who has been, who wrote about the Second World War and the Eastern Front. And he did this on above the Pentagon, oddly enough. He brought a huge team together, and they looked at the way in which there's what really happened on the Eastern Front.

And he goes a lot into the politics and the mechanics of politics at that time. But he also has completely revolutionized understanding of that particular war. And it's important because it frames so much of the military conflicts of today. Now, there's lots and lots of books on politics and foreign policy. see. If you want some very good books about specifically on Italy, but the British write well about Italy, by the way, they got long tradition of writing books on Italy. But Italy during the Second World War, and that sounds limited, but in fact, Italy was important. So it relates to other things. So there's a book called The Brutal Friendship by a man called Deakin, which is all about

the relationship. It charts the foreign policy relationship between Germany and Italy, between 1943 and 1945. It is an absolutely brilliant diplomatic history, and it teaches you how diplomatic history should be written and understood. He was again an intelligence agent, so he put all this together. And there's another brilliant book, Who Defends Rome, which is about the political crisis in Italy in 1943 connected with the fall of Mussolini. And again it sounds limited, but it

shows how great power politics work, how regime change works, because what happened in Rome in 1943 was to some extent of regime change. And again, how the Americans

got sucked in. Because, you know, in a good cause, by the way, next other dispute this. But again, you see all of these various people who are trying to use the Americans to advance their own interests in Europe at that particular time. So there's just a few names. Yeah. Graham, great, definitely. Those are all excellent recommendations. People often ask me about populist books, one, from a sort of global historical populist perspective, recently written fixing the system by Adrian Kisminski.

For America, the populist moment by Lawrence Goodwin, describing sort of the origin of the term in American terminology that then became globally adopted. From a independent economic, realist perspective or populist perspective of the American Constitution itself, you can't go wrong, reading a lot of what Charles Beard wrote, economic interpretation of the Constitution and the like. And if you want more contemporary, it takes, almost anything written by Kevin Phillips, including a book that might be have a misleading title. It's called the Emerging Republican Majority, published in 1968. However, what the book really is, is an entire history of American

politics and why every little tiny constituency, like the difference between German Lutherans from Bavaria versus German Lutherans from a different part of the country, in say Eastern Missouri versus Western Ohio. It's in Kevin Phillips book, The Emerging Republican Majority. I often call it the Bible of understanding American politics. So, and last but not least, a little book behind me is the door rebellion from Rhode Island. You're interested in just a little history. But it turns out it got a little Alexander McCorris legacy in my family history. Turns out like everybody in here, a lot of men are arrested for treason.

They try to hang and hang up on top of them. But it's a grandfather. It's like that grandfather on that side, grandfather on the other side, grandfather on the other side. It's like, all right. So it's in the blood to cause a little trouble. All right. Fantastic. Thank you to Dirty Dangles for that question. That was a great open. And let's not talk geopolitics and politics in the United States. Alexander, Robert. Let's get the show going. Well, I think we will need to talk about these because Robert may not know this, but there is a spectre haunting Europe at the moment. And that specter is the possibility of Donald Trump returning to the White House in November. the media here and the political class are absolutely terrified about this,

or at least they're telling us that they are. And every single day I see article after article churning out and talking about this. In Britain, you know, you couldn't imagine how much scaremongering there is about this particular issue. And the reason for that is two things have happened. The British, not just the British, the entire European political class, were convinced that over the primaries, Donald Trump would somehow crash and burn. I don't know why they thought that, but they did. And the two primaries we've had, Iowa and New Hampshire, have come as a shock.

Perhaps, and this may surprise you, Iowa, more a bigger shock here in Britain than New Hampshire. I think they just couldn't get their minds round the sheer size of Trump's majority there. And the other thing that's shocking them and really scaring them is the fact that these cases, which we've discussed so many times, firstly, politically, they are strengthening him, which is, by the way, exactly what you said they would do well. But I remember you saying that all of these people, many of them who had not been particularly supportive of Donald Trump, who, in fact, been many cases opposed to him, people at the lower end of the demographics, suddenly when they see all these cases being brought

against them, they understand that, they relate to that, they understand that this is the big guys picking on someone, and that's what happens to them and to people they know, and that has influenced them to side with Trump. So again, the Europeans completely didn't get that, and they're also starting to worry that the cases are unraveling one after another. They're looking less and less convincing all the time. And I think the combination of all of this is making Europeans worry about the way in which the election is going, because of course they're looking at the other side of the picture. They're looking at the man. They would probably optimally still wants to see as president, who incredibly is Joe Biden, and they're sensing that

the entire administration is losing control. It's losing control of foreign policy. It's losing control of domestic policy. It is on the back foot on every conceivable issue. The war in Ukraine is failing, and I think nobody now any longer doubts that. They're concerned about the way in which the United States is handling the Middle East crisis. They're horrified by the failures of the Red Sea. And they are starting finally to understand what I think many Americans figured out long ago, which is that Joe Biden is not fit for purpose. He is not up to the job. In fact, he's dangerous and reckless and unreliable. So altogether, a, say, a. sense of nausea and fear in Europe. It's like they, you know, they suddenly sense that, you know,

they got vertigo ahead of them because also, despite all the bragging and all the talk in Europe, you know, we don't need the Americans, we can do it all ourselves, they've done their inventories, they've done the bean counting, they realized suddenly that they got no industrial base, and that without the Americans, they are nothing at all. So, Tell us, Robert, are these European fears? Are they well-founded? Are we indeed now heading for an election in which Donald Trump is beginning to look like a real force? And, you know, is he indeed putting these cases behind him? Why? Maybe we can start with this. Why were the results in Iowa and New Hampshire as strong as they were? I mean, in Iowa, perhaps people, I think, that's more understandable. But many people said New Hampshire, lots of independence and Democrats

will vote against Trump, and it didn't make any difference. So why is this the movement behind Donald Trump? And is this a tide that is going to continue? Yeah. So, I mean, for the last year, as we've discussed, I've been recommending people

in the political betting markets in Europe and around the world bet on Trump, because you could see it in the underlying foundation of American politics and where things were currently, which is that the Republican Party has become the home to the populist wing of American politics. The Democratic Party, people can read a left-leaning Democratic pollster, the liberal patriot of Roy Tuxera, comes from a labor background. I knew him from his AFL-CIO. days. And he's been documented. He goes, the 2024 election is the people versus the Brahman's.

And he goes, the Brahms are the Democrats, you know, the running as the party of, by and for the professional managerial class that is increasingly discredited in United States political power, whether it's at the state department, Treasury Department, Health Department. Doesn't matter which department it's in. They've been abominable failures. The, so the, The populist environment has only grown and the demand for populist options has only increased since Trump's loss. That's issue one. Issue two, the Republican Party has been taken over by this, in terms of its voter base, not its representative base, not its donor base, not its media base, but it's voter base by a overwhelming populist majority. And it was about 20 years ago, if you did Iowa in 1980, when Poppy Bush did well there, it's very different than the Iowa Republican elector today. It got taken over originally by evangelicals and religious conservatives, church-going folks.

But then under Trump, it got massive influx of old school populist voters, working class voters, a lot of them historically labor Democratic voters in certain parts of the state. And Trump, I mean, is the UAW president recently said, yeah, I just endorsed Biden. Most of my members are not voting for him. So this is the reality is that Trump won over working class middle America in mass. And then as we noted, the second factor, and there was no competition on the popular side, not from the Democrats. I mean, there could have been with Robert Kennedy, but they ran him out of the primary. So he's having to run as an independent. and there's no competition within the Republican process for a populist alternative.

And you look at someone like Vivek, you know, who's really kind of a smart entrepreneurial businessman who doesn't have any populist history until a year ago. He just read the tea leaves. He was the best marketer. He was like, oh, this is what people want. Okay, this is what I'm going to run on. And I think he's adopted some of these positions sincerely. I don't fully trust him.

I mean, biopharmist. So I always put it in a little asterisk by those guys. But that fact revealed, all you had to do was read the room and you sound like Vivek. And that's a populist, Trumpish voice. And yet he was the only one doing it. You know, the old establishment wing of the Republican Party, the donors that got scammed and they're given all this money for a completely foolish endeavor of challenging Trump. So just misread the room from the beginning because their room isn't the Republican Party anymore. Their room isn't America anymore.

If it ever was. You know, it's not the Hampton. It's not the D.C. Georgetown folks having dinner with Woodward and whatnot. The other factors, as we noted from the get-go, they were turning a billionaire TV celebrity who went from being a sort of cartoonish oligarchic figure to millennials, as an example, and other groups in America to the ultimate beaten down, attacked, assaulted underdog. they really made Donald Trump the every man in ways that he never you know the guy with his own plane and the gold-plated toilets was now the guy that the entire machine was trying to break and that made him relatable in ways he had never been before and for his core audience they sought for what it was an attempt to weaponize the legal system of the United States to take out their political opposition and it was enraging them and they were going to you know walk through whatever brutal winter like it was at the coldest caucus day in the history of Iowa didn't matter people that normally never voted were by golly going to vote uh despite the weather despite the elements because they understood what was happening to trump uh was deeply wrong

and offensive to them and they understood what it was and no matter of media lies or judicial lies could change that the uh and then it expanded his broader reach into constituencies that otherwise were indifferent to them. And so that's about half of the story is the story of American populism and its reaction to the attempts to politically take out Trump. The other half is the complete failure of the Biden administration on every front. We have a border that is an open sieve that looks like, you know, all the problems that Europe had when there was massive waves of immigration going through. And we're having the same thing at the worst levels. And when the states try to do anything about it, the Biden administration tries to prohibit the states from even enforcing immigration law and is letting them get overrun.

You know, when Elon Musk and Robert Kennedy are citing with the governor of Texas, that gives you an idea for how anybody with any observational skill can realize this is not a manageable phenomenon. The, and can see the Sorrow style agenda for what it is to undermine the nationalism, to undermine America, undermine national identity, and damage. communities and the communities that bear the brunt of illegal immigration are overwhelmingly working class communities, often themselves, Latino or African American, in terms of lost employment opportunities, burden on the tax base, infrastructure, housing, schools, healthcare, you name it, and crime that comes with it. And then economically, utter failure of the Biden administration. And they still live in denial. You know, Paul Krugman just thinks working class people don't know how to rebe their own bank accounts.

That, you know, the, you know, people are paying more for less than they did under Trump. Their economic prospects are weaker. All the, I mean, here's one of the best facts out there and how the immigrant immigration relates to everything. There has been no net job gains for native-born Americans under Biden. None. They have all gone to immigrants. You know, that, that doesn't spell well in middle America.

then you add in both the inflationary spike and the fact that wages did not keep up with the inflationary spike for the essential items of ordinary everyday people combined with the stimulus politics ultimately either what they're you couldn't do stimmies for forever and as those faded as the student loan debts had to get repaid again as all of those burdens we've seen record setting rates and increases in credit in credit costs and default rates. rates across a broad spectrum of items, whether it's auto loans, credit cards, or increasingly in the housing market. Housing's utterly unaffordable. Most unaffordable it's ever been in American history. Ordinary young families cannot afford to purchase due to both the combination of the spike in rates and the spike in prices. So the ordinary person can't pay their, you know, on average, when you add in their food costs, the student loans coming back in, they're increasing housing costs, increasing transportation cost, and decreasing wages, they're getting hammered. And they've been upset now for a year. And the Biden administration's answers tell them,

you're just, you're doing fine. These people are delusional. And then you have, as you note, the foreign policy debacles that are so bad, even Joy Reed is like, not another effing war. You know, she got caught on a hot mic. But, you know, the, I mean, Biden turned out to be the worst of the bunch. I mean, he's more like Lyndon, Johnson and Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton or even Barack Obama in terms of, hey, let's see if we can get a war here, war here. I mean, the favorite meme where you're sweating between different choices. And now it's like he's got four or five war choices. Okay, war with China, war with Iran, war in Yemen, war with Russia.

Oh, war with Texas. I mean, this is not good. And the ordinary working class community can see it. So it's a combination of like Trump right now has the best favorability ratings. he has ever had since entering politics in 2012. So he had higher favorable way back before he was in politics. But since 2012, he's been underwater and often as low as negative 20 in terms of personal likability.

Trump always took the trade off. I want the brand identity as strong and tough at the sacrifice of people liking me personally or thinking they do. But right now that number is even. Biden is the one with the worst numbers. We're worse numbers than Trump ever had. worse numbers than Jimmy Carter had in terms of competency and capability. And their solution is maybe we put more U.S. troops at more places.

It's like when they see U.S. troops died in some Jordan. And your average American is like, we have troops in Jordan. What? And now we're going to someplace called Yemen? What's Yemen? Hooties? Who are the hoodies? You know, these are not conversations you want ordinary everyday people to have.

You definitely don't want families having them about why their loved one is dead. So the, oh, well, you know, we needed this little base and this little random place of the world for what again? Defending what? So, and then, of course, there's been the utter debacle of Ukraine. Everything about it has been a debacle. None of it, you know, those of us who are saying all the way along, the U.S. government is lying to you. The West is lying to you about what is happening. Now all being proven true.

We identify from day one. This was one big, massive money laundering operas. Well, now they're having to indict random generals who are pocketing all the cash. So it's all being exposed and it's being exposed at scale. So you have a degree of both incompetency and disconnectedness that a lot of millennials only had sort of the hagiographic view of Obama. But that was their only definition of Democrats. I mean, they didn't even really know Clinton much. They never knew the Lyndon Baines Johnson version of the Democratic Party.

the war-horring, war-mongering, individually, institutionally corrupt, open-for-sale version of the Democratic Party. And that's who Joe Biden is. He's LBJ's mentally slow version of the little brother. I use some other phrase, but it's politically incorrect these days, so I can't say. But the people always get the idea. That's what we have, the dementia candidate in the White House, with all the baggage of an LBJ-style administration without even any of the benefits. So I think so the fundamentals massively favored Trump.

The dynamics in the Republican Party massively favored Trump. The dynamics of what's happening in working class America favor Trump. They are all aligned so that Biden has almost no chance in an honest election. And that's why the goal has been, well, let's see if we can make it in a dishonest election. by let's see if we can put him in prison, bankrupt him, humiliate him, shame them, get a bunch of corrupt judges to issue crazy verdicts that, well, they're convinced that,

though that's what will finally convince America as we just can't take Donald Trump. When Americans are seen through it for exactly what it is, open, weaponized lawfare, that what it's really doing is indicting the American legal system and making us look like an ongoing laughing stock to the rest of the world. I don't know who we're going to be able to

lecture in the future. You can't use your system. I mean, every now and then you see Blinken make some statement. You know, how dare they treat Navoni this way in Russia? So are you part of the Biden administration? You're trying to lock up your opponent. You're trying to bankrupt your opponent. You're trying to be bringing allegations for nut cases who are getting $83 million jury verdicts out of New York who everybody can see is bad shit insane. I mean, these are just, these are bad cases that more facts get exposed. People like, that's what's going on. That's the allegation. You've got to be kidding.

And they can all see through it. And so as the world falls apart, thanks to the actions of the Biden administration, and as populism resurfaces and resurges, and Trump is its most effective vehicle, the European elites have every reason to be terrified because it's time for a real change. And, you know, Trump said we should be out of NATO in 2016, thought about it while he was there. John Bolton said if he had been reelected,

he was definitely going to do it. Well, now he's definitely going to do it. There's a lot of things that Trump might not have done that they might have backed him off of doing that he's going to be far less disinclined. When you try to bankrupt him, destroy his business, destroy his legacy, and put him in prison for life on bogus charges, a guy like Donald Trump

doesn't wilt and walk away into gently into the good night. And he will indeed fight against the dying of the life. So European elites should be scared. They have a good cause for it. They have very good cause for it. Because there's another thing, by the way, which is implicit in everything you've said. But I just wanted to point it out, which is what you're describing, Robert, is actually politics. It's real politics.

It's people organizing, people voting, people talking to each other, people deciding whom they want to vote for. We don't do that in Europe anymore. We absolutely hate that in Europe. If you look at the politics here in Britain, if you look at politics in Germany, the whole point there is to try to prevent real politics of the kind happening like that with us. And we see this in the United States, and it spooks us.

When I say us, I want to make it very clear, I'm in the political class here. The political class in Europe, which is, to be clear, And Europe has never had that depth of commitment to democracy that the United States is. I mean, you know, I think this is an essential thing to understand. The United States, I say this all the time. I know that I'm repeating myself, but I want to say it still.

The United States has a history of democracy going all the way back to the American Revolution, to the 18th century. It is implicit in the Constitution of the United States. In Europe. Well, we only started really looking at democracy in any serious way from about the middle of the 20th century. So we don't have that depth of commitment. And the people who run things in Europe are to a great extent and to extent that people don't understand still the old elites. So they want a controlled politics.

That's always what they've been striving before. They've created institutions to control politics. And now they see the Americans, those people across the ocean. And they're actually engaging in real politics. And this is unnerving. It's frightening. It makes them worry that, you know, well, first of all, how do you control this thing? How do you control the United States?

And beyond that, what if people are? people in our own countries start looking at this and start saying, well, you know, we want more of that ourselves. Never underestimate that. Now, a few things that you said, first of all, I noticed what you said about housing prices being very, very high. They're very high in Britain. I don't know whether it's the same in the United States. In Britain, government policy is always to increase housing prices. It's an absolute central plank of especially conservative governments. governments to great extent to. I was listening to a Nebula at the central bank chair in Russia and she did a speech today. And of course her policies to reduce housing prices. She actually

wants to make them lower, which, as I said, is so completely upside down in terms of the way we do things in Britain that, I mean, I was just stunned by it. But anyway, I wanted to talk about a number of things. Firstly, what about Robert Kennedy? He is standing as an independent. I've seen opinion polls from the United States, which whenever people are reminded of him, suddenly his vote leaps up. He gets something like 20% of the vote. Trump falls, Biden falls even more. But Robert Kennedy, the moment people remember him, remember people are aware of him, he surges upwards. What is going to happen with his campaign is because he's still there. He's still, you know, campaigning.

He's still running for the election. Is he still potentially a player in this election? No doubt. I've described him as both valid insurance and life insurance for Trump at a minimum to a degree. secondly, he's awakening and organizing an independent populist movement in the country that comes more from the left of the Democratic side of the aisle traditionally. But putting those people together in an organized way that I think will survive his actual candidacy, independent of any success of the campaign. And then third, if something actually does happen to Trump for sure,

but even potentially independent of that, if he gets into that, if he gets into the, the debates, he's a very viable candidate for the presidency. So on the first part, there's really no constitutional basis under American law to exclude a candidate from the ballot who's constitutionally qualified. And secondly, the constitutional qualifications have historically been a question for Congress where they're in controversy. So people challenge John McCain, he was born in Panama, law, whether he was a natural born citizen under that provision of the clause as a condition of the presidency, challenged Barack Obama, alleging that Obama had not been born in the United States, was not a natural born American due to the fact that his father was not American. At the time,

domestic American law did not recognize someone born of an American woman under a certain age outside the country is necessarily a U.S. citizen. As an example, in those challenges, the courts ruled that is not the power of the courts to determine. is for Congress, that, you know, Congress, when it certifies the election, can decide whether or not someone is constitutionally qualified or not. So the novel and quite frankly ludicrous interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which is a civil war provision that was meant to just disqualify those sitting elected officials who abandoned the government for the Confederacy, were not going to be immediately reinstated to power outside of a pardon by Congress. That provision was considered dead by the time after multiple pardons were issued by Congress by the 1890s. And yet that provision is now being resuscitated to mean we'll just call you an insurrectionist

and magically ban you from the ballot like the lunatics from the Colorado Supreme Court did. And so that doesn't have any legal foundation. Highly likely the Supreme Court reverses it and ultimately puts in motion the fact they're not going to be able to keep Trump off the ballot anywhere. But part of the reason underneath that politically is if you look at the dynamics, if Trump is for some reason removed from any of these ballots, you look at places like Maine, places like Colorado, places like California. the potential beneficiary is not necessarily Biden. Some of these states are states that lean so heavily Democratic could be very hard for Trump to win. But if you added Trump's vote to Robert Kennedy's vote,

because Trump isn't an option on the ballot in those states, suddenly Robert Kennedy can win those states. And all of a sudden, you might even have an election thrown to Congress with Robert Kennedy having all kinds of leverage because he's won multiple states. And he could use that. leverage to assure almost like, you know, parliamentary politics, you know, put this person in charge of the USDA, put this person in charge of the FDA, but this person in charge of the CIA. You know, Bobby Kennedy has some old family business to deal with some of those agencies.

And that the, so that can happen. And some of the Democrats are tone deaf and are not paying attention to what you mentioned, Alexander. You dig into the data. Robert Kennedy is the most liked candidate of anybody. Robert Kennedy is still very well liked, very well respected. That's part one. Part two, when given him as an option, he gets as much as 20% of the vote already. And that's not, and that's with voters who haven't been exposed to him in great detail. When he is exposed to people in long form formats, he's running a fascinating campaign using podcast formatting, alternative media as its primary media. You knew the institutional media was going to cut him out, but also he's tapping into it because what he is that the people that watch him in that long format, his willingness to answer any question, his willingness to acknowledge his change of positions on issues. It's like, hey, I used to think this, I changed, here's why, here's how, I'm open to changing on other things if I'm wrong. His sincerity of engagement, his honesty and authenticity just comes fully through. You don't get, like, somebody by this sort of character of the Kennedys as arrogant or

condescending, you don't get any of that with Robert Kennedy. And so the more they're exposed to him, the only rises. And particularly with that populist independent voter group like millennials and zoomers who aren't super comfortable at all with Trump, but are utterly disappointed by Biden, to give an example, the Pew poll found millennials and zoomers hate Biden more than anybody. They had the lowest approval rating with that voter group. That used to be the foundation of the modern Obama Democratic Party going back to 08. And so they've totally turned on them. that independent working class voter group would love someone like Bobby Kennedy. So Bobby Kennedy's a live dog, as they say in the sports betting world.

He provides also, let's say they take out Trump, you know, one of the chats asked, what if they take Trump out the Kennedy, the older Kennedy way? Well, you know, what's going to happen? Those voters aren't voting for Nikki Haley. So if they do something to Trump, that vote will go to Robert Kennedy. And Robert Kennedy will be elected president. United States. And it's one of the key things deterring too aggressive deep state actions. And I think you're even seeing some courts say, well, maybe we shouldn't rush through the criminal

cases. Maybe let's hold off on this because do we really want Robert Kennedy to be in power? I can tell you that within the intelligence and national security apparatus, they're much more terrified of Robert Kennedy than they are of Donald Trump. That, you know, they know what they're getting with Trump, they don't like it. As the Blackstone guy said, yeah, Biden's an idiot, but he's a controllable one. Donald Trump, the problem is he's uncontrollable. But Robert Kennedy's not only uncontrollable. He's uncontrollable with some, with, with, with knowing how to take apart some of these agencies that have been such a problem. The CIA would, I mean, he's already said it. I'm going to fulfill my uncle's promise. We're going to spread it a thousand, a thousand

feet into the wind. I mean, that that kind of assurances. So Bobby Kennedy is definitely someone to continue to pay attention to. He will impact what happens to Trump. He will impact the public dialogue and debate and discussion. He will be shifting the over into window in a substantial way. And he's someone who can be elected president. And it would be awesome if Bobby Kennedy, frankly, was president. Donald Trump or Bobby Kennedy, great by my book for a lot of the things that matter to me, and it matter to a lot of the populist cause and the deep state. I mean, for example, as a good transition to one of the next topics coming up, you know, Julian Assange has his final hearing coming up.

Bobby Kennedy said, you won't have any doubt about who I am, because on day one, I'm going to be pardoning Julian Assange and I'm going to be pardoning Edward Stowe. I mean, so he knows how to translate this into real policy. So Bobby Kennedy is for real. also a likable man and he speaks very clearly. I mean, this is, this is an important thing. I mean, I find it impossible to listen to Biden because, again, he's language. I mean, I don't mean, you know, the fact that he used to be very articulate.

Remember him in the 90s and said, I mean, he used to be the Irish chatty guy. And now he's literally like the worst case scenario of your dementia uncle. Absolutely. Absolutely. He's likable. And, you know, he's got. got business with the security services, which we can well, we can understand fully why. He's got reasons to be. But I think beyond that, even if that wasn't, even that history wasn't there, I still think he would be taking the positions that he is, because that's the sort of, that's

where he's coming from. That's what he actually thinks. This is my own person of view. Let's talk about this 14th amendment business, because this is the one that's one of the things of the Europeans completely failed to understand. They thought that this would be a nice piece of wire pulling. You could just pull the wires here. You could do something with the 14th Amendment. Poof, the problem of Trump goes. They're now starting to realize it's not really quite that simple.

Now, I happen to know quite a bit about the 14th Amendment, or at least correction. I used to know quite a bit about the 14th Amendment, because as part of my first degree, all those years ago, I think I've said to people, I studied the American Civil War. the you know that period of american history very closely and i remember the politics of the 14th amendment and you're absolutely correct it was intended to deal with a specific problem i think it was

the vice president of the confederacy came and tried to take his seat in congress and the shocked people that they said we can't possibly allow this after the civil war and so they put together the 14th amendment. And the idea that this old relic can be resuscitated and brought back to life and made use of in this way in politics is completely incredible to me. But we did get that decision in Colorado. I understand that other states are coming down strongly against this idea, even Massachusetts, for example, has now decided that it's gone against it. And I believe in Maine, where the Secretary of State made a very bizarre decision, she said she'd really thought very hard about it.

And when you read what she'd written, you'd think that she hadn't. Anyway, apparently even there they're having cold feet. I mean, is there any possible way that the Supreme Court of the United States can allow this absurdity from Colorado to stand? and what if Donald Trump is convicted of something, even if it is not insurrection? Because Alex and I did a program with Jim Jatteras, former secretary, former official in the State Department.

He said, you know, they'll do it, they'll use it, that if he gets convicted of something, they'll use the 14th Amendment to stop him. I mean, can this happen? extremely unlikely so the i think the supreme court's going to step in constitutionally the presidential qualifications the congress has said it's not their courts have said it's not within their power i think the supreme courts are likely to say that they're likely to say that it's nor is it within the power of any state executive agency that they'll they'll come in and say

the question if a person otherwise qualifies for the ballot you know a number of petitions signed or they're on a certain party designation, etc. That a state has no right to add to that any other provision. There was a term limits case years ago where they tried to pass term limits. And the way they did it is they just said, we're not going to put you on the ballot if you exceed it, even though term limits are not in the Constitution. Supreme Court said, no, you can't do that. That's a ballot. That's a, the qualifications are listed.

You can only require those qualifications. You can require no more. And the second part is that that who decides what's qualified unless it's admitted or conceded. I've actually litigated that case before where somebody admitted it. And had they not admitted it, the court recognized that unless it's an agreed, undisputed fact that the person isn't qualified, like in my case, the person said they were 34, not yet 35. They said that, that too is a decision for Congress, that Congress determines that the certification, stage rather than trying to control ballot access. You know, the Eugene v. Debs was a convicted felon for sedition, and he was on the ballot

wherever he wanted to be in the United States in the 1920 presidential election. So there's historical precedent for that as well. So given the Supreme Court realizing how disastrous this has been, how embarrassing these cases are to democracy in America, trying to tell people the candidate they want to be elected president can't be on the ballot, they're going to come in and clean it all up. And they're going to say they can also do it substantively on separate grounds, which is the 14th Amendment simply doesn't apply. So the 14th Amendment's own language, you could argue it only applies as Alan Dershowitz

has argued, Professor Dershowitz, to the Confederacy circumstances. and it just doesn't apply outside of that. You could start there. Secondly, you could argue it doesn't apply to qualifications for office, because if that was the intentions, they would have then put it as an additional qualification rather than as grounds for congressional expulsion, for example, as the appropriate remedy given it explicitly gives Congress the power to determine also the 14th Amendment's application and enforcement. And so there's a third argument that the 14th Amendment's not enforceable in court under these circumstances. It's only enforceable in Congress. It's only enforceable in Congress when it concerns qualifications for office. But the presidency was specifically excluded.

So they list a bunch of offices, and it's every office except the presidency and the vice presidency. And that's not a coincidence. They did not intend for it to apply to the president whatsoever. So they could simply say, as even the trial court did, the lefty district court in Colorado said, this doesn't apply to the president by its own explicit language. And so they have so many legal outs and we'll see which ones they adopt. But the Supreme Court's going to come in and say, no, this can't be applied. Probably will try to shut this down in the future of discouraging courts getting involved in this, saying this is a question of presidential qualification belong to Congress, not the courts. And it's not a duty or a prerogative of state legislators or state executive

agencies to do so. And simply reinforce the same decisions they issued in both the McCain cases because he was challenged, Obama cases, because he was challenged, that they did, when they said, oh, this is not justiciable within the court system. There's a decision dedicated to the legislative branch, in this case, Congress, not the states. I think that's highly likely where they're going to go. Now, I think, again, Kennedy provides some deterrence for them going elsewhere, because if they take them off some of these Democratic state ballots, the most likely outcome is they actually jeopardize Biden more rather than less.

Colorado, Biden's not going to lose Colorado. It's a huge Democratic training state because of the Denver Aspen. massive professional class managerial movement there over the past years. So despite some Latino and rural movement towards Trump in Colorado, the Denver-Aspen Boulder problem completely counteracts that. But Bobby Kennedy could win, right? So it's a state where Biden might not get over 50. So Biden might get 45% of the vote.

And that makes him an easy winner with Trump on the ballot. But without Trump on the ballot, maybe Kennedy gets 47. and wins. So it even encourages an alignment between Kennedy and Biden, between Kennedy and Trump, rather, against Biden in some of these jurisdictions. But there's no constitutional basis for the cases that are being pursued against Trump. Supreme Court, I think, highly likely will cover that same conclusion. I completely agree. I mean, can I just say if it is just issuable only by Congress, which is consistent with my memory of, you know, the debates that took place in the 1860s.

It's important to remember that Congress has already examined Donald Trump's actions. They tried to impeach him over what happened, you know, on the 6th of January. And he was acquitted. So, I mean, it's, it's, in a sense, if you're going to doubt, if that's, if that's the argument, which I think probably could be, then Congress, Congress has already decided. And you can't just come back to this again and again. To my mind, this whole idea of trying to disqualify Trump is not only ridiculous, it also is incredibly dangerous. Do people within the Democratic Party understand what they're doing? He's the most popular politician at this moment of time, as I understand it in the United States. He is looking a certainty to become the Republican Party's nominee for the presidency.

And then in an election year, you disqualify him? I mean, that would be an awesome event. And in the United States, I mean, how would people respond to something like that? I mean, there would be, surely there would be a huge outcry. At the very least, you get a worse crisis of legitimacy in the political system and the political class than the already very profound crisis. That exists now. Those are my thoughts. Now, I just do want to return to these cases.

Now, I have to say that we've got sort of verdicts in two of them now. Now, Robert, I want you to explain these cases to me a little bit more detail. Firstly, the defamation case, which we just had. Am I getting this right? Is this an allegation about some kind of sexual assault that was made in the 1970s, which has never been prosecuted, never been reported to the police by the claimant? And Trump has denied it, as is he's right. And he's called the person who is making this claim a liar.

which follows from the fact that he's denying it. And she, on that basis, has been defamed by him in some way and has been awarded $83 million in compensation. Because if that is the what's happened, as it seems to me it is, that that is absolutely, that's nuts. I mean, that is, that is the legal system, again, completely turned on its head. And the other case, which is the fraud case,

which is that, you know, he said that the value of certain buildings was higher than some people think it was, but he did that after apparently consulting experts. He obtained loans from banks on the strength of that. The banks were perfectly happy to lend him their money. They weren't too concerned about the value of the buildings, and he paid them back,

and you pay them back with interest. And that is fraud. I mean, I am completely unable. I really am to understand the reasoning behind these decisions. I mean, surely, if there is an appeal system here, they must collapse under the weight of their own absurdity. Yeah, I mean, I think it's such obvious, open, overt, politicized lawfare. It's why that it's diminishing credibility and increasing backlash amongst the American public to these cases.

It's exposing our legal system in ways our legal system has rarely been witnessed. I mean, the American legal system has often wrongfully targeted and abused its power, but it has done so against the politically marginalized. Never someone that is the leading candidate and former president and likely future. president of the United States. And so what they've done is they've put a massive spotlight on who they are. And it's why both courts, why all the courts have to try to impose gag orders on Trump, prohibit him from talking, prohibit his lawyers from talking, prohibit others from talking, exposing how fraudulent this is, because they wanted the show trial verdict without the

show part of it being exposed. And the show part of it has been exposed. And they, are when people look at the facts, preposterous cases. So in the case of this nutty lady, I think she used to call herself the bat lady. I mean, she's totally nuts. It's obvious she's nuts. Anderson Cooper realized she was nuts, had to go to a break as quickly as possible. She was on with Rachel Maddow last night defining women's rights as them shopping with Trump's money. I mean, this is an embarrassment that this lunatic can get $83 million. dollars while hardworking people are struggling just to get reimbursed their basic expenses in your ordinary everyday run-of-the-mill civil case in america so the uh if the damage award is

ridiculous it's particularly preposterous because historically an exculpatory no was allowed you make an accusation against someone you're allowed to say no it didn't happen without being sued for liable for it um the the most of his statements were opinion statements anyway and of course, even a New York jury in a corrupt case managed by a politically tainted corrupt court concluded he didn't rape her at all. It had this vague definition of sexual abuse that, you know, they said no to rape, but yes, it's sexual abuse. It's like, that didn't even make sense. Reality was, it was a jury that hated Trump, recognized how insane she was, so that Trump never really did this. And yet then the judge goes and lies to a second jury and says he was found

guilty of right. Totally false. Just lies to the jury because he's, this particular judge has abused his power the entire time he's been on the bench. You can find it in a wide range of cases. The, I'd forget how connected he was to the Donzinger case, but there was some part of that he was connected to. The everything that happened involving Chevron in Ecuador and Stephen Dunsing of the lawyer. The, if I mispronounced his name, well, he's one of many. So, you know, but, you know, a good guy who was wrongfully targeted by the system in my opinion. He's that kind of judge. He's a rogue judge, Bill Clinton judge. He's the judge who tried to dismiss everything against Prince Andrew related to Epstein allegations. That's who this guy is. He was the mentor to the lawyer prosecuting the case for the lunatic here.

It just, it was levels of insanity threatened Trump repeatedly throughout the proceedings directly. There's so many errors, though, beyond the laughable absurdity of the verdict. itself is they excluded all the judge excluded almost all evidence that was damaging to her case included a bunch of evidence that was not relevant or pertinent or material to the case and and falsely instructed the jury if you know again it's almost like I think this judge knows this verdict has no chance to get upheld by any competent honest appeals court but didn't care because the goal was to hurt Trump during the upcoming election and you know the false he's been found guilty of what's not really true the and that's all this is these are

show trials to get a result and what is is america's judges are so used to doing it that they don't realize they got away with it in the past because of who they were doing it to not because the american people had any clue they were doing it uh the same is true of the embarrassment of a judge uh judge the uh in the civil proceedings the associated press no bad no no Trump backer there. He just did a massive study and said they could find no case in the history of New York or the entire

country like what was happening. That nobody's business had ever been shut down without any allegation of a single victim. It says never happened. Literally never. And that's what this judge is threatening to do in New York. Based on a

made up fabricated case. Again with gag orders, again with denial of jury, trial rights, again, with improperly included evidence, improperly excluded evidence, by a partial prejudicial judge who should have assigned the case to the commercial division from the inception. So it's another case that has almost no chance of getting affirmed. The Court of Appeals already enjoined various aspects of it by any competent ethical court.

So why do it when you know there's a very high chance the New York Court's Appeals said to the side? Again, PR. So the goal is to say, Trump, convicted fraudster, Trumpa, convicted rapist, Trump, yeah, that's the goal is they hope that the accumulation, because it normally works. When they do it to Joe Schmo, when they do it to some little independent person, the smear works. And so they're not accustomed to people seeing through their scam, not accustomed to people saying, we know exactly what you're doing here.

Now, if they'd studied American populace, they wouldn't have been surprised. the because you know whether it came from sort of the black urban tradition with Marion berry and how he was in trap other black mayors were targeted in a similar way and how did the black community respond in those cities rallied to the candidate because they didn't trust what the system was doing and why it was doing it the same is true you know hewie long they try to impeach him uh tried to indict him uh edwin edwards they i think indicted four or five times, the famous Raging Cajun of Louisiana, Big Jim Folsom in Alabama, my hometown, Bucky Turner, Chattanooga. They indicted him right during the middle of a runoff,

thought it would get him defeated. It actually, he used it to get reelected. So if you knew the Jimmy Curley, constantly targeted in Boston, so there's a long history of populist figures, labor leaders, civil rights leaders. Remember, they locked up MLK. They thought that would rally people against MLK. That's just the opposite. Hoover frequently made that miscalculation when it came to Martin Luther King. So they, the system thought this legal, using weaponizing the legal system would smear Trump enough that the ridiculousness of their cases, the legal absurdity of what they did, violating rules of evidence, violating statute of limitations rules, violating rights related to motions to dismiss and motions for summary adjudication, violating rights to jury trials, violating rights as to evidence, what was included, what was excluded, misstating the law, misapplying the law, ignoring the selective prosecution of all these cases.

They know that there should be consequence somewhere on appeal, don't care because they're hoping it does enough to keep Trump from winning in 2024 and sends a deterrent message to any other outsider down the road. But the interesting thing is all of the Supreme Court cares about the integrity and the impartiality. of the American judicial system and respect for it globally, then they can use one doctrine to erase all of the case, both civil cases, both criminal cases, because all of them concerned statements and conduct President Trump made while he was president at some level. The most, the least immunity oriented case is the Florida federal one. But all the rest, all it, but even that one has immunity implications. If they come in and say, you know what, we shouldn't allow local governments, politically motivated governments, to target their political

opponent using the legal system. They could use selective prosecution under the First Amendment to get rid of all these cases. Or they could say presidential immunity applies to anything he did while he was president, the exclusive remedy. This is already going up to the Supreme Court to the D.C. case in all likelihood. The remedy is impeachment and conviction. And then you can do those thing civilly or criminally, but the president cannot be subject to random extortion by any local prosecutor anywhere in the world, or you have a handicapped president, a presidency that's effectively unable to implement the people's will. And I'm hoping the court recognizes that this should never happen again and more fully embraces what the Constitution anticipates,

which is if you've got a rogue president, the remedy is impeachment. The remedy is not. Brando indictment, rando, lawsuit, rando bankrupting, all the rest. So because so far, the American justice system has been on trial in these cases, and the verdict has been damning indeed. Indeed. Can I ask you about Georgia? Because this is another case that you know quite well. And from what I can understand, we are now getting a very, very interesting light cast on the prosecutors there.

They seem to have been brought that prosecution in the most remarkable way and be very interesting people. Can you tell us a little bit more about this? Because, again, that case, which by the way, in Britain, for some reason, they thought that was the most dangerous case against Trump. That was the one that was going to really sink in. Tell us about what's gone wrong with that one. Yeah, it was fascinating how the interpretation, I mean, there was core legal problems with that case from day one. again, the presidential immunity issues implicated, but also a ludicrous application of the RICO laws to suggest contesting and questioning or challenging an election. And then the factual issues they

raised because I represented President Trump for a period of time in those Georgia election cases is that he has a very robust factual defense in those cases, and they don't have the same quite corrupt jury pool or judicial pool that they have in New York and the District of Columbia, always raised questions. But as you've pointed out, It turns out the prosecutor in Atlanta went to the Zelensky School of Public Administration and decided to use and weaponize their office to basically enrich themselves in their loved ones, quite literally. So I give them credit for the grift. It's like people get like African governments that borrow from the way Western governments operated,

but they're just a little more open and overt with the criminality or the corruption or the bribery. library. And then they get accused of being more corrupt than their Western colonial predecessors. Well, that's who they learned it from. They've just taken it to a more brazen level. You know, to get millions of dollars out of the taxpayer dollars to give to your sugar baby, in this case, him being the sugar baby, so that they could collectively go on private vacations and spend ludicrous amounts of taxpayer dollars. It's a massive crime. is what she did. That was the behavior. It was laundering funds from taxpayer purposes for personal use, and it was all done under the pretext of, in justification of, I'm going to get Donald Trump.

And that will somehow excuse this massive criminality. It was a case that was never going to do well under the hood, because New York has, you know, they've made expert their efforts at corruption of a justice system. The feds are as good at it as anybody. The Atlanta prosecutors are more half-ass at it and that they were more likely to get exposed in the process, aside from that trial being unlikely to ever get anywhere near a verdict prior to election day. And so the D.C. case was always their best case there because they got corrupt judge, judicial pool, corrupted jury pool, combined the two,

and you can get a lynching verdict with ease about anything concerned. learning Trump prior to election day, but that's where the immunity issues probably are going to delay that to where the trial doesn't occur before election day. But you see what the American legal system really operates. You're getting a sneak peek at it at every level, the partisan nature of it, the politicized nature of it, the weaponized nature of it, the selectivity of it. But you're also seeing the corruption behind the scenes. And the Atlanta Exposé just takes it to a new level.

usually the corruption is a little more hidden. It's not as bold and brazen as as theirs was. And it all got exposed because the dude was married. So it turned out his wife objected. Maybe she wouldn't have if she'd gone on some cruises too. But it's kind of like the world wrestling guy probably went a little too far there. But, you know, she would have never exposed his abusive behavior if he wouldn't have stopped paying the payout, the hush money payouts. So, yeah, the fraud looks exactly like what it likely is, and it's a further embarrassment.

Much as sanctuary city policies have backfired on Democrats, going after Trump constantly backfires on Democrats. And I think we're going to see another example of it in what happens to that prosecutor at the end of the road in Georgia. Yeah. Let's pivot now to Biden, you know, the way in which he's handling things in the United States. Now, you were making, I absolutely valid comparison between Biden and LBJ. I mean, LBJ, I remember Elbechow, by the way. I mean, I'm just old enough to remember LBJ. And yes, he was all the things that you say, he was absolutely corrupt, he was warmongering, he was brutal, he was gorse. He was also, I have to say this, a force of. nature. He was a very, very powerful person. I cannot believe that LBJ would ever have got himself into the mess that Biden has got himself into over Texas. I mean, am I right in thinking

that the very first thing they did when, you know, this happened with Texas? I mean, they didn't really negotiate. They didn't discuss this with the people of Texas. They didn't look at the opinion polls. They didn't assess what most people think about immigration. They went to the United States Supreme Court. And they got an order from the United States Supreme Court. And I'm not going to talk about the rights and wrongs of that. You can if you can, like Robert, because I don't know. I mean, I really don't know here. You can discuss this if you wish. But they got an order, which they thought was a grenade they could throw at Texas. And it was a grenade that's blown up in their face because they should never have done that. They should never have resorted to that kind

of thing. It was obvious that the governor of Texas, that the state government in Texas is taking the popular decision about something that Americans, the vast majority of Americans, really care about. As I say, a real politician like LVJ, somebody like him, would never have got into this mess. It's Biden all over. Over to you, Robert. No doubt. And this stems to the Obama administration and the challenge with Arizona and Sheriff Joe. So the Arizona during the Obama administration was trying to deal with its wave of illegal immigration,

pass certain state laws to help allow the state government to enforce it. Sheriff Joe, whatever you think of them was controversial, but he was big on cracking down on illegal immigration in the state, that case went up to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court said feds have carte blanche. Because it impacts foreign affairs, that that means that the state governments can't protect themselves from trespass. And the state governments can't basically enforce federal law about illegal behavior. People are not legally present there. And that's what put all of this in emotion. I think that was it was a split. decision, and I thought it was a problematic decision because when it gets to the point that

you're making the feds the exclusive means of enforcing immigration law, you're subjecting states to undue risk, in my opinion, and that politically it would backfire at some point. And now we're seeing it in Texas. And you're right, the politically sage move of the Biden administration would not have been to highlight how bad their immigration policy has been by suing the Texas to try to stop them from prohibiting illegal immigration. Because most people are like, well, why are you doing that? You claim to be against illegal immigration, but you're preventing a state from helping prevent illegal immigration.

And especially as the problem has got way out of hand. But to escalate it to the point now to where, you know, you could have a, we haven't had a feds versus state like law enforcement lined up against one another in a long time in America. People think of, you know, the schoolhouse doors and the integration orders in the 60s and the 50s in America. But the, there were no soldiers or police standing in the door. You know, George Wallace did his little five-second speech and how's that? Here they're talking about literally confronting each other in violent terms between two armed forces of two different forms, one state government, one federal government. And that's a very bad idea.

And the question is, and there's a bad idea for two. reasons. One, I mean, you're talking about civil war effectively there. I mean, maybe it's not fully informally declared, but you have a version of it. And then secondly, you're highlighting the issue because it puts a big spotlight on why is this happening? Oh, it's about illegal immigration. And the Biden administration is so committed to more of it that they're willing to shoot at National Guard of Texas or domestic police of Texas. The Border Guard police have already said they're not getting involved in this. Because the border, the border union, police union supports Trump and thinks that basically

Biden has made them escorts to illegals rather than deterrence to illegals as an agency, for which there's a lot of substantial evidence for which it may become part of a future Biden impeachment, depending on, we'll see how that progresses over the course of the year. But yeah, I mean, constitutionally, it all stems from the Supreme Court's, Arizona decision making it difficult for state governments to enforce immigration laws and protect their own rights. There is a constitutional exception, which is if you're being invaded, and then you have the right to defend yourself, however necessary. The one interpretation of the word invasion is that it's limited to a actual foreign state doing it, not any random

foreign actor. Well, it's like, what if it was a tribe? Well, you know, you think of the old gangist con days. No foreign state. state, but the cartel decided to invade as a group. Would we really say that's not an invasion? So I'm not convinced that it has to be a foreign state actor. And then the only quite, I mean, there's quite literally people coming across the border legally don't belong here, causing all kinds of problems here to the ordinary American kind of sounds like an invasion. If 20 people showed up in my house deciding they're going to eat all the food and stay in the house and use everything, feels like my house has been invaded. Doesn't matter if they got a government badge on.

or not. So I think the immigration issue also continues to hurt Biden badly. So highlighting it was a mistake. Part of it, though, is the Supreme Court often making these kind of mistakes in these kind of cases. I mean, why risk this kind of conflict? They could have just said, no, the Biden administration doesn't have this power for the time being and allow an injunction to prevent the Biden administration from doing anything while Texas enforces the law for, say, six months to see what works out. Instead, they're escalating the conflict by their constant cowardice. And unfortunately, that's a long history of the United States and the Supreme Court. You know, the Dred Scott decision helped birth the first American Civil War.

So what they decide on the Trump cases is going to dictate, you know, a lot of things going forward. People's confidence in our system of governance, et cetera. But nothing hurts. Almost the only thing hurts is like super hyperinflation. But otherwise, nothing hurts a sense of national identity and confidence in a government, than its ability to at least control its borders. Would you trust the head of household if they couldn't control who came into your house? Same principle.

Absolutely. I mean, if you talk about the very first democracy, the one in Athens, the very first thing they did was they established very, very tough citizen rules and did not allow people from outside to come in and simply obtain citizenship. I mean, that was seen by,

by the way, as essential to democracy. For reasons, I don't think one needs to explain, actually. But, I mean, it is this extraordinary mixture of, you know, aggressiveness and incompetence and what you said before, disassociation, which is so characteristic of this administration. I mean, they lurched into this thing. I mean, you know, I recall Arizona. But I mean, now immigration has become such an issue in the United States. What's happened to Kamala Harris?

The immigration side. I mean, nobody ever sees or hears anything about it. There doesn't seem to be any real control or any visible control on what is going on in the border at all. You said earlier, and by the way, I should say I've seen that statistic commented upon in many places. Now, there's no doubt it's true. that all the jobs generated under Biden have not gone to Native-born Americans. So given that this is so, it takes a particular combination of arrogance, blindness, aggressiveness, insecurity to fall into this kind of political trap.

But this, I would suggest, is what Biden and his team do all the time. Absolutely. And I think that, you know, and it keeps getting compounded by additional levels and layers of incompetency and intrusiveness. So to give an example, I mean, right now the, so you have the political weaponized lawfare against Trump, you have all the meddling in globally, you have what's happening in domestic economic realm, you have the failure of any real, of the professional managerial class to manage much of anything. But you have another example of this that's now happening globally is what they're trying to do to farmers in food. So, you know, we have the global farmer revolts happening all across Europe and more parts around the world. I mean, the French still have the best. They're still the best at it. They're like, find somebody to put our manure on.

Find somebody's house. Somebody's building. Somebody's police car. I mean, the French are great that way. But, like, Americans would like to eat the way the French do, where you can go and, in and you can pick, you know, you know, exactly which farm that meat came from and, you know, local produce made in the traditional local way, you know, there's a reason why French wine is as good as it is.

The reason why French cheese is as good as it is, French brandy and cognac and champagne and all the rest. The, well, in America, the best example of that traditional mechanism of farming is the Amish communities. It will be the Pennsylvania Dutch, as they're sometimes called. you know, a group of religious folks that fled the German-Swiss border because of persecution. They're non-violent. They don't join in war or other such conflicts.

But they're some of the nicest, sweetest, ordinary people you meet. And their way of life is completely counter to the modern industrialized system we have. They don't participate in big technology. There's no social media accounts. Nobody's checking out grandma's YouTube page or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. talk video. They don't involve themselves in big education. They privately educate their children through the eighth grade using traditional methods and mechanisms. They don't participate very much in big pharma. They, you know, their vaccination rates are, you know, more reasonable

than the levels at which were, you know, I think there's 93 vaccines now recommended for your three-year-old in America. It's kind of nuts. And then they're also outside. the big food spectrum. They grow their own food, grow their own cattle, make their own dairy, make their own meat, make their own poultry, make their own vegetables. I mean, I've eaten in some great restaurants, including the fat duck. They're outside of London. The, you know, Joe Rubishon, which has a great branch here in Vegas, Guise Savois, there in Paris, some of the best steak and sushi in the world in Kobe steak in Tokyo. Best meal I ever had was at Amos Miller's dinner table. Amos Miller. Amos Miller.

is an old school Amish farmer, multi-generational, employs a lot of other Amish farmers, and people are able to buy his food directly by being part of his private membership association. They can get his milk, they can get his cheese, his yogurt, his honey, his jam, his little pumpkin pies, his bread, his beef, and his poultry. But in the last, you know, the U.S. government has been harassing him on and off now for several years. And now the Pennsylvania Department of agriculture has come in. They illegally searched his property based on an affidavit that was procured by fraud by lying to the court with by material omission and commission in a way that the statute did even authorize them to do. Then they took everything in all of his freezers and said he

couldn't do anything with it, couldn't sell it, couldn't eat it, couldn't feed his own family. Then they filed a lawsuit and got an ex parte injunction. They knew I was present in the state. They knew I was there, didn't tell me about the ex parte injunction, didn't ask me to give me an opportunity to present my argument to the court and got the order based on, again, false information given to the judge. So that right now he's not able to sell any of his raw milk products, even for companies he's invested in other states that he doesn't even own in control. They are attempting to shut him down completely and prohibit him and assert the authority to not only prohibit a farmer from selling to us directly, but prohibit us from being able to buy it

directly. They're demanding his customer list and his client list and anybody who's ever contributed to them because they want to be able to invade those individuals' privacy, because they want a complete monopoly for the corporatized, industrialized, monopolized system already. You know, people should have seen why during a pandemic do we have a meat problem in America, America, which is, you know, some of the biggest cattle grazing in the world. Because four companies control over 90% of our meat supply. Of, you know, four companies control or even less, our pork supply, our poultry supply, our core food supply, our milk supply. So, you know, the raw milk, I call it natural milk. The natural milk is made in ways that many people find not only healthier for them, better for them, but often medically necessary for them due to their conditions.

That right now in America, less than 2% of all of our food, it comes from small independent farmers that directly purchased by consumers. The rest is controlled by just a few big corporations. And it's with all the chemicals and preservatives and additives and synthetic crap, whatever, that lunate stuff that Bill Gates is making that gives him mantis, who wants to look like that guy? That's what's happening out there. And now they're trying to crush Amos Miller, bankrupt him by taking away his ability. He's going to have to dump out his own milk. He's going to have to dump out and throw out hundreds of thousands of dollars of food and influence. under the orders of the state of Pennsylvania.

And it goes to food freedom. Do you have a right? Does a farmer have a right to farm the way they know how to farm? Does a person, do you as a person anywhere in the world, is a universal human right, have the right to determine your own diet, what goes in your own belly, what goes in your own fridge? The government is asserting,

because in this case, they seize things that he could feed his own family with. They're asserting that they have the right to go into your house and seize whatever is there unless they've pre-approved it with a stamp of, okay, this is okay for you to eat. That's how extreme the Amos Miller case is. So the core foundation of food freedom is going to be decided in his case. There's a hearing for those interested February 29th, 1.30 p.m. Lancaster Court of Common Pleas where we'll be doing the full hearing about,

do you have a constitutional right to determine what goes into your own body? Do you have a matter of liberty? do you have a constitutional property right for those people that were co-owners or members or had their own food located in those freezers from it being seized and stolen by the Pennsylvania government? Or can the state government and federal government now control everything? And as Thomas Jefferson said, a person who doesn't control their own diet is just a chattel slave of the state. If you don't control what goes into your own body, you don't even own your own body, you don't have real freedom or liberty or property in the world.

So, and so his case is emblematic in America that we, too, are experiencing our own farm and food rebellion, much as people are seeing demonstrated across Europe. This is an astonished. I, I am stunned. I'm stunned in Nepal. Can I just say, I mean, we, you know, you may, you don't know this, Robert, but I actually, I only buy farmed foods. There are, there are farmers markets. There's a farmer's market close to me. And I know the farmers, and that's where I buy my food. food. So apparently this would be illegal, though, in the United States. I mean, that is pretty incredible, I have to say. I mean, it amazes me in the United States. I mean,

this is the country where, what, they had the Homestead Act. I mean, if it's all of, wasn't that how America was built? People going out and setting up their own farms and, you know, building up their own agriculture? Wasn't this the way that America became,

you know, prosperous? Because There were all those farmers making all that food. And, you know, in the 19th century and the early 20th century, well, in the back well into the middle of the 20th century, Americans were so much stronger and bigger than everybody else because they were eating so much better. And now the government is apparently not going to allow a farmer to grow his own food. I find this amazing.

I find this incredible. Can I just say, even in the Soviet Union, this may come as a shop for people, but they had private farmers markets. I mean, you go to Russia, you still see them. But, you know, farmers there were allowed to sell their own food. Of course, they had to work all the rest of the time in collective farms and state farms and all of that. But they were allowed their own plots and they're able to sell their own food.

Apparently, in the United States, this is impossible anymore. And this, an Amish farmer, I've heard about the, I mean, everybody knows about the Everybody knows about food. And I mean, as you correctly said, a peaceful, law-abiding, I believe, incredibly, exceptionally, law-abiding community.

All they'd ask is to be left alone. And the entire weight of the United States government comes down upon them. The whole point again about America was the people like that would be able to go there and live their lives and build their lives peacefully and lawfully, and apparently that's no longer possible anymore.

Well, no wonder people are angry and are looking for change from this particular political system. Well, keep me informed about this case, please, Bob, because this is something that really is of interest to me, because, as I said, food issues are something that really astonished me and as you're absolutely rightly safe are important to me and food freedom no question about it it is absolutely essential it is as much a part of freedom as anything else i mean it is the air we breathe we breathe the food we eat it's part of our freedom as well and of course our freedom the freedom to till one's own land to grow one's own things on it well there we go um as i'm I'm just stunned.

And perhaps this is the point to ask, I mean, who exactly in the administration of Pennsylvania is taking these bizarre decisions? If you can explain this to me, because again, I don't understand it. I presume this is a local government thing, is that they've got some kind of regulation, food regulation that they're objecting to. I mean, I don't know, because, as I said, this doesn't make any sense at all. it's the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture and sort of the Democratic political machine that runs the state that's running the show and then the Pennsylvania Attorney General's office is held prosecuting it and pursuing it and the and then occasionally the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture jumps in to help them out depending on the circumstances and part of it comes from a regulatory statist model of operation that they think you know it's like the old IRS statement you know you should be glad what we don't tax when the IRS and the IRS and the 1930s proposed taxing people for cooking their own food. They said, you know, that's labor. You know, that's labor value. We should call that a tax and imputed income. It's that same mindset. It's a statist professional managerial class. You shouldn't be allowed to do anything that we

don't tell you you have a permission slip for first. And the, and that's the sort of foundation of it. Then you have the corruption aspect, which is that these agencies are captured agencies in bed with and doing the business of big corporate institutions, whether it's big pharma in the case of the FDA, big ag in the case of the USDA or the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. For example, you take Amos Miller, they have four listed complaints, none from customers in his entire history. So you're talking about millions of product food put out there to tens of thousands of customers. And then you dig in and you find out not a single one of those customers supported any one of those so-called complaints.

It's about zero complaints. I mean, it's got to be the best record of any food farmer at that scale in modern history. Whereas by contrast, your big corporate farms, they're doing food recalls for poisoning people every other week. And Pennsylvania's never sought this kind of remedial or injunctive action against any of them. So that's the second part of it. And I think it's the corruption of statism and incompetence of statism that we're seeing reflected and represented in the health world too. It was put on massive blast during everything that went crazy during COVID. But look at what's happening on the vaccine context.

Like all efforts, our efforts to try to sue the Food and Drug Administration, the courts won't allow us to do it. They won't allow any American to say, hey, look, the FDA is lying, the CDC is lying about something related to the COVID-19 vaccine, that it's not really safe, not really effective, not even really a vaccine, doesn't prevent the transmission or infection of COVID-19. In some cases, its side effects are worse for certain demographics than any benefit it could possibly have, even as a therapeutic, especially given the lighter version of later variants of COVID-19. But not only the courts are willing to allow anybody to challenge or question what the government is doing. And that's why you look at, you know, Texas Attorney General is trying to take action. He's suing Pfizer. Florida Surgeon General has said it should be withdrawn.

So you're seeing, again, local state governments try to do something. And it was interesting that I think it was it, the prime minister of Slovakia, the new prime minister of Slovakia, where Melania Trump is from and her mother recently passed away and was she what was from, that he's saying he's going to investigate everything connected to COVID-19. It's somewhere somebody's going to break through the dam because this was such a global corruption. I think the greatest public health scandal in the history, a modern history of the world, that somebody somewhere is going to really unveil what happened. and it's going to take some dissonant populace somewhere. And some local and state governments are doing it here. And we'll see if they're able to get relief or the courts block them. I'm pursuing a case for Brooke Jackson, the biggest whistleblower in the country against the Pfizer related to the COVID-19 vaccine.

We'll see if the federal judge there allows us to get to discovery. But it may be the case that our best remedy will come from the newly populist enshrined prime minister of a small country, happens to be the home of the probably the past and future First Lady Melania Trump, to get to the bottom of this real scandal that was the COVID-19 so-called vaccine and the excess deaths that seem to follow wherever it's put into mass introduction. I mean, it's very connected to what we were saying about the corruption in the political system and the corruption that we now starting to see in parts of the judicial.

system that they also all of these corruptions function together because corruption works like that if you don't have you know corruption in the judicial and police and administrative regulatory and political system then in the end you won't be corrupt you won't get corruption at all because if all of these are doing their jobs honestly and properly especially the courts then it's impossible for it to be concealed and if it's not concealable and it's exposed then of course the system essentially corrects it and that's why corruption tends to spread i mean in greece where i used to live well i mean when i come from i mean i we are very very familiar with this process now can i ask you some about something else because there's been a huge amount of discussion and debate in the West, in Europe, rather,

about this battle in Congress, about financial aid for Ukraine. Now, this comes directly back to the topic we've just been discussing because I got a very interesting email from someone, and I don't know whether this is true or not, but I just like your views. He said, one of the reasons Republicans are not willing to fund send another $61 billion. dollars to Ukraine is because they know perfectly well that all of that money will go back as kickbacks to the Democrats and will be used in the election becoming elections against the general election against the Republicans. Is there any truth of that at all, do you think? Yes. Yes. I think it's several things. One, that the populist momentum that we identified from the

get-go of skepticism towards Ukraine was only going to grow, that the Ukraine war was not a war that would wear well in the American public, not when they really had much connection to or much concern with, and that all as they saw, and that the political angle to attack it was the money being spent in support of it. That was the, other than us not getting directly involved, even though, you know, by our definition of Iranian direct involvement, we've been directly involved in the Russian conflict, if, you know, tactical and strategic support, things like that, as Russians with attitude, comedically pointed out, sortarily put it, pointed out on Twitter, or X, as it's now called.

But it was never popular. And more and more, as Americans economically struggle, and they see these massive checks being written to a complete waste of a war, there isn't good answers anybody has when they come home. And they know that. And so they know that this is a deep, so this is just a deep state payoff. And are they more intimidated by the deep state of their own voters? And as it gets closer to election day and as the as war fatigue grows, they have less, and as the economy struggles,

they have less and less political window of operation to keep funding these ludicrous conflicts and the money that's just a total utter waste of cash. Like I think some of the, the deep state crowd on the Republicans side really believed that there was a deep Bushite base in the Republican Party. Reality is Bushism was a departure from Republican tradition. Republican tradition, most people, a lot of people don't know it, was anti-war. The Republican administrations kept us out of war. You watched the old 1976 debate, the vice presidential debate to Walter Mondale and then Kansas

Senator Bob Dole. and he said, well, if I could count up all the dead from all the Democrat wars, that was your Middle American Prairie Republicanism. Democrats were the ones always Democrats World War I, Democrats World War II, Democrats Korean War, Democrats, Vietnam War. You know, Eisenhower keeping us out of war was the popular public perception. Nixon ending the Vietnam War was the popular public perception. Reagan keeping us out of war. I get all the arguments out there about what was going underneath. But the general public electorate, while they were very strong defense, they were not pro-war.

Those two things didn't equal each other until the Bushes came along. And Poppy Bush propagated war after war, ped them on Iraq. Then W, of course, right back to Iraq, but let's throw in Afghanistan for kicks and giggles. And then the old neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party that goes back to the war-horing days of its origin, back in business under a case sporadically with Clinton and then taken off a little more with Obama and then Biden's just taking it to its logical culmination. But this, you know, this eagerness for war is not a Republican tradition. And I think the deep state apparatus really thought it was and thought Nikki Haley would do well.

Go back to one of those early Republican debates where they're all cheering more war for Ukraine. We must all support Ukraine. And then look at the one guy on the stage who understands what the Republican is. electorate actually wants. And that's the marketing guy, Vivek. And he's the one saying, why? Why? He doesn't make any sense.

That's the dumbest thing in the world to do. So 100 reasons why it's idiotic. And he starts calling him out. He's like, you know, Nikki Haley, you sit on Boeing. You know, the Boeing board, they paid you off not only for South Carolina, but really for your presidential campaign. It's obvious what you're doing. So, and then calling out the others.

And what happened? All of them, Mike Pence had to drop out. Tim Scott had to drop out. These candidates running on these issues got absolutely nowhere. And I think they were truly shocked by it. They didn't realize, you know, Chris Christie, same dynamic. There is no appetite for this. That was never really there.

The Bushers had to use it by hook or by crook to establish it temporarily. And it was gone by 06. Once we had another failed war, I mean, it was really kind of gone in 92. Ross Perot was an anti-war candidate. People forget about that. He goes, can we all agree on one thing? no blood for oil. That was Ross Perra's slogan on war.

And then George W used 9-11 to temporarily rally support for what he was doing. It was gone by 06. Americans were done with it. It would nothing do with Bushism or Bushitism or anything else. And what the Democratic Party forgot is their Democrats were done with it since LBJ and independent voters. Like no moss on all the conflicts. And they just went full scale. And so they know the Ukraine aid is deeply unpopular.

We had a direct referendum. It would fail by 80 to 20 margins. So the only question for Republicans in the House and the Senate is how do they rationalize continuing to pimp out their position to the deep state? So that some have come up with, well, I'll require immigration reform. I'll require this, I'll require, et cetera. Whereas J.D. Vance, Rand Paul, are like, enough is enough. This is embarrassing. This is ludicrous. Paul said, look, we need an audit. Now we know why we need an audit. Look at everybody's being indicted related to obvious money laundering. That everybody, even New York Times and other places are now writing in the West, Ukraine's actually not going to gain back any property. Maybe it's time for some sort of resolution. And they'll probably continue to squeeze people with some. I mean, I think these criminal indictments are targeted to squeeze certain people. That's what I don't I don't suddenly care about all the money laundering that this whole thing was

what they won. But politically, never popular, now intensely unpopular, it's election cycle. Trump keeps saying, as soon as I'm elected, I'll solve Ukraine a day, a day. Two phone call, boom, boom, boom, day. And some people, that sounds arrogant. He just knows that he tells Zelensky no more money and no other support. And you don't sign a deal, you're done. the deal gets done.

I mean, we'll see what Zelensky is really all about. I mean, I think it'll be on this, on its first private charter plane to Miami or Hollywood. And back in the reality TV world, about the great, you know, Churchillian hero, Zelensky. But that war will finally end and maybe Ukraine will still have some male population left. But if we would just cut off a spigot now, it will accelerate the timetable for some deal. and frankly the Biden administration would be better off with a deal than with this continuing embarrassment of this continuous conflict and money pouring out of a sieve to a money laundering operation

to he and his Democratic pals. You are completely correct about that. Now, why don't they do it? I mean, it's a thing that baffles me. I mean, you've been following my programs, you know, our programs. You know, there was a period in the summer and the autumn where, you know, we thought that they were inching towards that point. There was a lot of talk about a freeze of the conflict.

There was no way the Russians would ever agree to that. But anyway, there was talk about that. The Russians probably at that time, less so now, I think, would have, if the US had approached them, they'd have said, all right, look, what are you offering? What are your ideas? And a deal could have been done, which would have been done, which would have reserved Ukraine and saved face for Biden and the administration. Why did they not do it? Is it because

there's, you know, the deep state has such a hold on them? Or is it because they're, you know, they're neocons there? Or is it because there's an angry old man in the Oval Office who just won't agree to anything? Because to be frank, that's what I sometimes wonder. Well, I think, you know, I also think that we're increasingly seeing, like to your question earlier about, you know, why don't the courts wake up? Why don't some other people wake up about how bad this looks? You have people like Bill Barr saying don't try to keep Trump off the ballot. He's the more Kissinger-ish element of the deep state apparatus domestically here. I think so, okay, you should go this far, but not that far. That's why you really cleaned up Mueller because he understood Mueller was kind of an embarrassment to things that he was trying to protect the deep state. not actually expose it in shutting down Mueller. But that Kissinger-esque intelligence that's missing from our deep state apparatus,

because Biden is so much a robot and puppet that it's hard for me to imagine him being the primary source of resistance. My assumption is key actors in the deep state still believe in it. You know, still believe it. I remember the way they described towards the end. of Vietnam, where this guy's running around trying to get all the CIA guys, and they're all busy getting massages in various salons in Vietnam. And he was like, this is how disconnected it is. I mean, it was like Graham Green's idea for our man in Ivana was based on his own lived experience.

I think in Germany, not Germany, but somewhere in Africa, witnessing British intelligence. And he's like, this is all kind of a scam. This is like Jean-La Carre is Taylor of Panama. which is like his version of our man in Havana about how scan that these are semi-competent people who report just kind of bogus stuff it's very much end of empire stuff right like you read like the very last stages of a colonial operation particularly you know like parts of africa with either the the British the Germans the French or or the Belgians and you see just incompetence like not just malevolence not just the lack of a moral confidence but just decisions that were counterproductive, decisions that were going to backfire on people.

A friend of mine is a history professor on Cameroon. And, you know, describes how when they went after certain tribal chieftains, that's what led to the political revolution that overturned him. And it was a very predictable thing. And yet they did it anyway because they, again, they lack both intelligence and a moral competence. And that's when you get World War I. right i mean that's what first like how did these great empires think this was going to turn out so good and in the end of it the ottoman empire around for centuries gone in a decade austrian empire

around for centuries and the hapsburgs gone i mean through every version of faceline after every uncle banged every niece known to man you know finally is gone uh russian empire there for centuries gone within a decade uh and the german empire not the same and the british empire has never been the same the empire where the sun never slept is now a place that's a marginal player in the political world, all because of tactical mistakes they made going into World War I. But the problem of that is some of the tactical mistakes they made gave us the rise of fascism, gave us the rise of communism, gave us World War II, gave us some of the most horrific events that have happened in human

history because of what it led to. But I get the same sense. I get that the Biden administration is a wayward compass misdirected areas. I mean, remember we were talking about way back, you know, just a was a year and a half ago, a year ago, where they were, you know, Jake was over there talking about how the Middle East has never been safer. You know, and that was like three, a couple of weeks before everything.

It's like you say that. And now we're looking at conflict in with maybe we go to war with Iran. Maybe we're going to war in Yemen. Maybe we're still in Jordan for whatever reason. We got troops all over the place still in Syria, still in other place. Like, why are they there? Nobody can really explain it. The, in any place, the Middle East, I mean, it's just a disaster.

The, and yet people don't seem to have restraint. And I think it's partially that Biden has this LBJ diminished mindset, but LBJ mentality. I mean, LBJ also, LBJ should have got out of Vietnam. I mean, it was, you know, it was obvious, you know, he should have got a peace. in the spring of 68, not try to wait for the summer of 68 or the fall of 68 when Nixon's people could probably help sabotage it to make sure Nixon could get elected. You know, that that's all on him. But it's like, how did he not see that? You know, people chaining at every day, LBJ, LBJ, how many babies did you kill today? Still, you know, marching onward. Yeah, you could

assassinate Robert Kennedy Sr. But you didn't resolve the problem. I mean, the problem was the issue that helped motivate his candidacy, which was primarily at that time the Vietnam War. And yet the Biden administration is just blind. Blind on Ukraine, blind on Iran, blind on the, I mean, Biden himself says, man, I got to get elected because Donald Trump will go to war with Iran. Well, who's going to war with Iran? Trump said no thank you to Millie's lunatic plans to go into Iran. And for which, by the way, he's now being indicted in a federal court in Florida for telling

somebody, he said no to evading Iran. Oh, that was disclosing national security information. What a bunch of hogwash? And it's like, why? It's like when you can totally politically disagree with just like not, you know, support the Iranian regime and not think war is a good idea in the Middle East. What does it ever work out? I mean, has it literally ever worked out for the West? I mean, you could argue World War I won parts of it beating the Ottomans.

Okay. I mean, but otherwise never. It's never worked. That's all fails. And yet there we are again. Afghanistan, a place where it never works. Vietnam, my God, Vietnam beat Genghis Khan twice. I mean, they beat the Mongols twice.

I mean, you're going to go. But we keep making this mistakes again and again and again and again. And we're just seeing it at scale. And this is what happens when dangerously incompetent people are in control of the levers of power. It is exactly true. I mean, we've been talking again about this on the Duran. We've been saying we've been talking about the Middle East. The thing about this crisis, the one we're in now, is it,

was completely foreseeable. Everybody could see that it would come. If it's something is foreseeable, it can be prevented. But of course, they did all the wrong things. It's almost as if they wanted to do the wrong things. I mean, they said something like a quarter of the American fleet, floating around the Middle East doing what exactly, escorting a few ships, merchant ships.

But of course, that's not what the American? fleet is designed to do and it can't really protect merchant ships from uh huffy missiles because as i said that's not what it's designed for so i mean what were they thinking how did they think it could turn out otherwise and now we're on the in the brink of another war another war in the in the Middle East, even as we've got this war in Ukraine, which, because it's a proxy war, remember, we are losing. And they say we, we in Britain, bear an immense share of responsibility for that. And you're absolutely right. We are a marginal player. And the sooner we understand that in Britain, the better for us and the world it will be. Because what we're doing by trying to ride on America

and manipulate the Americans in order to get into these new quarrels, which are really concerned the United States. And why does the United States care about crime? You know, re-fighting the Crimean War of 1854, all over again, getting the Americans to get involved with us on that. Well, the sooner we stop doing these things, and the sooner the Americans tell us, go away. We're not listening to you anymore.

better for us it will be. We can then start to concentrate in Britain on our very real, very pressing and urgent domestic problems, which are going unresolved. Anyway, there we go. This is all I'm going to stop. Robert. It's a brilliant program. I'm going to hand over to Alex. He's probably got some questions. And, well, we'll see where we go. I think we have five minutes for some questions, Robert, right? Sounds good. You have five minutes? Yeah, yeah.

All right. Let's do a couple of questions, which only you can answer. So let's start with Rumble. Please ask Barnes. Can Texas use the invasion as a reason to secede from the U.S.? I don't think they would secede. The ability to succeed kind of resolved by the Civil War, however one interprets it. There was the old constitutional argument for it.

But effectively now, I think that's moot. And then Texas is so integrated into the national economy, I think legal secession is very unlikely. Now, you might have simply Texas doing its own thing when it comes to immigration. So you might have what someone called de facto secession on immigration policy. But I don't think you'll see any legal secession effort at this time. Sageva asks, Robert, do you think Michelle Obama replacing Biden will change the equation?

I don't think there's any, the reason why Biden is still the choice, despite his unpopularity, is every other alternative is more unpopular. So the, and Michelle Obama hates people. There's no way to put it. And she didn't work this hard to cash in. She likes this nice life. The homes on the beach in Manhattan and, I mean, in New York and in Massachusetts. and in Hawaii and wherever their next new one is, you know, hanging out at Richard Branson's

island, you know, getting to do book tours. She gets lots of praise. You need to do a little fake TV movie series. She's the great Michelle Obama cashing in big time. She's not going to give up any of that for dealing with the ordinary plebs of America. So she hated politics in general. She has a kind of a contempt for ordinary people. And so it's, it's like, it's, like, lot of people see her as some sort of savior. She's kind of like when they kept saying, would Oprah run? There's really very little to no chance of either one of them. And they're stuck with Biden because everybody else is the Biden has some appeal amongst older blue-collar Democrats in the north, in the middle, middle of the country. Those voters don't like anyone

but him. So that's why they're kind of stuck with Biden. All right. We'll do a couple of more and wrap it up from Didapong. Robert, can you explain the concept of nullification and how it relates to what is transpiring in Texas. So the sanctuary city policies a little bit differently because there it's commandering and so you can't be required as the state government to participate. Some of that's mislabeled nullification. But what that really is is you cannot be required to do the federal government's business. Preemption is the opposite side of that.

That's where the federal government can preempt and prohibit the state from doing the federal government's business as has been interpreted. And thus, and so nullification is. In those contexts, the state can effectively negate the law by not enforcing it themselves under anti-commandering principles, but they can't negate the administration's priorities by getting involved in an area that courts have decided the feds have preemption. All right. Let's see here. How can the president federalize the National Guard if they are constitutionally state and federal,

already on duty for their state. Wouldn't that be a power grab of the military? Yeah, there's a lot of legal problems with any effort to, in this context, for Biden to try to assert control over the National Guard in Texas concerning immigration. And so he could try. And then the question is, what would the National Guard do? What would otherwise be ordered? Because of the National Guard just chooses not to obey Biden,

believe he doesn't have their legal authority. What exactly does Biden do? So I don't know if he'll even test that. We'll see how much he's willing to escalate. But that is, his legal authority there is not as clear as his people have tried to suggest it is. But the practical limitations are the big ones. All right. And from Soapie Ork, question for Duran and Robert Barnes, is there any real hope that a new Trump presidency can excise the belignant U.S. neocon wolf, Bitz doctrine, which is eroding the U.S. position globally. I would hope so. I mean, there I would follow if you want some direction of where Trump is heading, follow

where Donald Trump Jr. is. So Donald Trump Jr. has been more aggressive about criticizing deep state, neocon efforts, war-mongering efforts. You know, Nikki Haley's candidacy has been a useful foil in that sense. It's reminded Trump of who his opponents really are and that it is that operation. So I think his first term, he tried to keep. tried to work within the deep state, tried to work with the Republican establishment. And all they did was screw them over.

You know, the everybody, you know, the, almost all of his cabinet appointees backfired and backstabbed them. The, clearly the case with Bolton, the case with many others. I think it is highly unlikely you will see those people in positions of power in a second Trump administration. How good will he get to? That's an open question. You know, the hope is that Trump will go much further than he did in the first term. He'll go further at defanging the deep state. Whether he goes far enough is yet to be determined, but they keep educating him by how they're trying to destroy him.

And one last question. Robert, what's your opinion of Alina Abba? Do you think she's good for Trump's legal team? You know, pretty good PR. I would say that it reflects a certain preference Trump has. Trump has a look, you know, the old lookism bias that he always has. It's like the thing that stopped him for a long time for letting Bolton get anywhere near positions of power was not Bolton's general insanity, but he didn't like his mustache. So, you know, that's just Trump still has that.

And Lena Haba, Trump thinks, ah, you know, someone that looks good, looks good for me. analogic. I think she's a solid lawyer. I think he's done a solid job for him in the court of public opinion. I think there are some cases where some of his other lawyers could do better, but I'm not sure that's why he picked her to be blunt. One more. Are the elites worried about populist revolts? That's what Davos was all about. They even invited Milley, seeing, you know, maybe calm down, Milley. You know, you don't have to keep talking about how central bankers bad. Let's reconsider all of this now. And he goes

there and gives his Putin-esque speech. I mean, I recommend people go back to the Putin speech where he basically told him, I'm not going your way, by the way. That might have been the beginning. And he knew that was the beginning of the throwdown, but they're absolutely paranoid. That's

why they're trying to ban the AFD in Germany. That's why they're trying to suppress any form of organic democracy in Europe. That's why they're trying to dengate the effects of Brexit in the UK. That's why they've co-opted both parties in the UK, so where Brits have no choice, no real choices. That's why they're harassing Orban again when he's like no more deal with Hungary. They're not going to like the Slovakian prime minister doing his farming inquiry.

I'm sure that the EU is trying to hush, hush, given some other payments might have been involved there. So, yeah, they are terrified of the, and then you have populist rebellions in Latin America, African Asia of different varieties. left or right, whether it's El Salvador, Argentina, what is probably going to come back to form in Brazil. You know, the populism is here to stay and that they're doing everything to keep it at bay. But I don't think ultimately their efforts will succeed. I think ordinary people's efforts will break through and will have a more peaceful, more prosperous, more humane world. That may be, you know, Bobby Kennedy whispering in my ear, saying that this is, possible, but the only way it ever happens is to believe it is possible.

Viva Barneslaw.locals.com. The best locals channel out there. The link is in the description box down below. I will also have it as a pin comment. The great Robert Barnes, thank you very much. Alexander, Robert, any final thoughts? And we are signing out for the morning, depending on where you are. What enormous ground we've covered, actually.

This has been a fantastic show. Apologies for my slightly croaky voice, but Robert absolutely scintillating as always brilliant to have you on, Robert, and thanks. Thanks again. Always a privilege. Take care, everybody.